by Don Gillmor
His battlefield heroics were interspersed with manufacturing the perfect girl to leave. He began with her sympathetic eyes, which were brown, and filled with a sorrow and pain (and muted desire) at his leaving, at the possibility of his not returning. She was beautiful and dark haired, and talked to him of war and its injustice. Michael comforted her, and during their long walks she whispered that she couldn’t live without him. When he tired of going over the same territory and couldn’t think of anything to refine (her face already like a goddess, her breasts perfection), he threw in arbitrary traits; she could ride, she made him a blueberry pie, she taught him how to waltz. Occasionally they had a baby who looked just like her.
When he got home, his mother said, “Go and change. We have company for dinner.”
“Who?”
“Change.” She returned to the kitchen.
Michael went up to his room and checked his map. Stanford went from Armentières to Ypres and then toward St. Eloi with the Alberta 31st, which was being used as a feeder battalion to replace casualties. Gas had been unleashed at Ypres, the drifting greenish yellow cloud hugging the ground, invading the French trenches, leaving grotesque corpses behind. One hundred and sixty tons of chlorine gas a half mile deep. The English hospitals were filled with men who had blood blisters the size of walnuts, their skin darkened, breath poisoned. This new style of warfare had caught them by surprise, and outside the post office in Cochrane Michael got uninformed versions of this horror from whoever was loitering there.
Company could only mean O’Connell. Who else? Michael put on his dark wool pants and the white collarless shirt with pale charcoal stripes. How did this come about, he wondered. He sat on his bed staring at the map and gathering his dread, then went downstairs.
When the knock at the door came, Catherine opened it and there was O’Connell, his hair slicked with something, dressed for church, a melancholy salmon come to dash himself against the rocks. In one hand were a bunch of wildflowers.
Catherine invited him in and took the flowers and disappeared. O’Connell joined Michael on the couch and they talked about the war.
At dinner, O’Connell said, “I think poison gas is about the lowest thing a man can do in war.” He realized that he had articulated the danger their respective sons were in and a silence slowly filled the room. As he struggled soundlessly with the roast chicken, Michael imagined this silence expanding out to the foothills, where it would eventually quieten the coyotes, the cattle, the birds, the West. He knew his mother’s epic capacity for stillness.
After what seemed like an hour, O’Connell looked up from his plate and said evenly, “I have my own property and I have never mistreated another human being and have never voted Liberal and I don’t think I deserve this.”
Catherine looked at him and for the first time, it seemed, noticed he was there.
Michael stood up and took the plates to the safety of the kitchen. He did the dishes and swept the floor and could hear talking. Whether this was a good or bad thing he couldn’t decide.
The parade down Eighth Avenue was led by a piper, a man with wild hair and a kilt, his face liver coloured, eyes mad with effort as he piped them along. Michael was on a chestnut mare that he broke at O’Connell’s, trotting slowly past the grateful city, the stenographers waving shyly, the men applauding.
At the train station, Catherine held him for three full minutes, clutching him tightly, then turned to go. On the way home in O’Connell’s car, she took out the photograph he had given her, taken in a Calgary studio in full uniform. Michael had reached his full height, more than six feet, slimmer and taller than Stanford, and with his mother’s dark eyes. The backdrop in the photograph was a painted clouded sky, a Roman scene with broken pillars and pedestals, the pageantry of war. Michael’s face had an unpractised grimness that the photographer had coaxed out of him, the boy inhabiting a foreign landscape that he had no claim to. Catherine examined it all the way back to Cochrane.
Three days later, a letter arrived. It was from Stanford, addressed to Michael, and Catherine waited a week before opening it.
July, 1916
The Ross rifles don’t work. I picked up a Lee Enfield from a dead Brit and at least I can shoot. I walk on the dead, a carpet of dead men. There are pieces everywhere. No one should see this. No one should be here.
2
FRANCE, 1916
In the chalk hills that run southeast from Thiepval, in a cave dug into the earth, two German officers played chess on a large board with heroically sized military pieces. An oiled machine gun sat by the window covered with a piece of canvas. The morning sun came in through the narrow slit and landed on one of the Germans, bisecting him with a brilliant vertical stripe that bleached his sculpted head and turned his blond hair white. They’d spent months digging in, and now the hills were a honeycomb of caves and tunnels that bristled with weapons.
In September the Australians took Pozières and the Canadians were sent in to help take Mouquet Farm, north of Pozières.
Michael sat in the trench with the rest of his battalion, lined up in crooked, nervous miles. He had been shocked when he first saw this landscape, its barrenness, an abstraction of land, the prize itself a ruin. The horizon on all sides revealed not a tree or house or sign of life. A colourless world.
The artillery barrage began before dawn. Michael sat for an hour listening to the heavy explosions. The soldier across from him was half asleep, a slumped pile. He opened his eyes and looked at Michael. He was maybe nineteen.
“Those our guns or theirs?” he asked.
“Ours.”
“That’s a comfort.”
It wasn’t. Regiments had been wiped out by their own guns. That was the rumour.
“This doesn’t look like any country I’ve ever seen,” the soldier said. “I guess I imagined something different. Looks like hell after a rainstorm.” He lit a cigarette, cupping it carefully. “I heard they’re about ready to call her quits. I hope they pick tonight.”
They stared at the sky, heavy grey clouds that were low.
“We go over the top this morning,” the soldier said.
“That’s the order,” Michael said.
“First one has surprise on his side. Second man has a chance. Everyone after that is a target, I figure. I’m going first.”
Maybe the first man was the target, Michael thought. The Germans had their rifles trained on the trench and the first thing that presented itself drew twenty bullets.
The sergeant, a heavy-set man named Cross, crouched along the trench, mustering them, motioning the men up the ladders. The first wave was torn apart by sniper fire and machine guns. Michael crawled over the lip and flattened against the earth, which was without any natural smell, a sponge for blood, lead, and gas. His hearing was deadened by the big guns and he could see Cross’s mouth twisting out orders but couldn’t hear anything. Machine-gun fire stitched Cross in a diagonal that began at his jaw, the words disappearing into his crumpled face, and he fell dead, ten yards away.
Michael ran in erratic lines, low to the ground, stepping over the dead. He slid into a crater and leaned against its shallow side. A minute later, he saw a figure rushing toward him, and then heard the sound of machine-gun fire; the man pitched forward and landed beside Michael, splayed in an awkward pose. His guts were exposed, leaking over the wool of his tunic. It was the corporal from Millarville. Michael couldn’t remember his name. He looked for his papers. Lance Evans, a boy who worked his parents’ ranch. He might have been fifteen.
After an hour Michael realized that no one was coming forward. The offensive had failed. He might be the soldier closest to the German position. He eased his head upward and a bullet hit a foot away, spraying dirt into his eye, and he slid back down. He lay against the crater and stared upward. The early-autumn weather was pleasant, the clouds had broken, the sun revealed. He was grateful for its heat on his face. Michael looked at Evans’s tunic, the bloodstains turning a dull brown.
&nb
sp; The sun continued its slow arc toward a pocket of cumulus clouds that floated in the west. Michael ate the only rations he had, a can of bully beef and some dry biscuits, and took a sip from Evans’s canteen, his own lost somewhere.
Would the Germans try to advance? If they moved at all, they would overrun this crater within minutes. He could feign death, lying next to Evans, borrow some of his blood before it hardened completely. He could take his knife and cut a section of Evans’s intestines and thread them into his own tunic and lie in an angled, unnatural pose beside the irrefutable evidence of Evans. It was the strategy of certain snakes to pretend they were dead. Michael had seen one once, lying in the grass, belly up. A hawk came down and took it. A risk. What if a German shot him, just to be sure? Or came up close enough to check his pockets, looking for a gold watch, and sensed breathing or a pulse. Would he rather be a prisoner or a casualty? Indians died in prison, Stanford had told him, simply languished. They were found in the morning cold and stiff without a mark on them.
Darkness brought relief. Michael felt less exposed and he whispered the story of Orion to Evans. His mother had told it to him years earlier, lying in the grass together, staring up at the sky. Orion was the hunter. You can see his belt and sword and his two dogs, Canis Major and Canis Minor, fighting Taurus, the bull. Artemis was the goddess of the hunt as well as of the moon. When she fell in love with Orion, the moon no longer shone. She neglected her duties, thinking only of Orion. Artemis had a twin brother, Apollo, and he was jealous and had a mean streak, and when he saw Orion swimming far out to sea, he said to his sister, who was a great shot, that she couldn’t hit that tiny spot out in the waves. She took up the challenge, pulled back her bow and let an arrow go and it hit Orion and killed him. When Artemis found she had killed her lover, she was overcome with grief. And that’s why the moon has so much sadness in it.
Michael closed the boy’s eyes with his fingers, leaving dark smudges on his eyelids. He slept fitfully for short periods, dream-filled naps that he awoke from suddenly, his boots slipping down into the three inches of water at the bottom of the crater that smelled like putrefying flesh. The sky lightened and Michael was cold. Evans’s face was reddened by the sun and he looked, briefly, like an infant.
Another hour went by. Michael felt vibrations that ran along his back. Were they tunnelling beneath him? He had heard rumours that the Allies were going to tunnel under the German lines and blow them to hell. Maybe it was the Germans tunnelling, and he would be blown to hell. Military information arrived almost exclusively in the form of rumour and kept everyone in a state of hope and anguish.
The vibrations increased, accompanied by noise and then a torrent of enemy fire. Into his sightline came the surprising geometry of a Mark I tank, first the long barrel, a slender snout that preceded its impressive bulk, the tracks grinding up dirt, moving forward at the speed of a man walking, a claw dragging away the wire the Germans had laid. Its gun fired and the percussion felt like a slap. It was passing to the left and Michael grabbed his helmet and rifle and scrambled up behind it.
He had heard of this tank, a mythic weapon that would end the war. General Haig had ordered a thousand of them, or ten thousand, and they were being assembled in a secret plant below the St. Lawrence River, or in the British Midlands, or the sewers of Paris.
Michael stayed low, crouched behind one track, which stopped suddenly, the other still moving as it made a tight turn and immediately let out another big round. The enemy fire was less noticeable, the machine guns quiet. It began to rain, softly at first and then harder and the ground softened into bog. The tanks were mired in the mud or slid into craters but the troops continued their advance.
There were corpses rotting in the mud, men lying in bloated sprawl, the gas swelling within them and straining their wool tunics. A horse lay almost cut in half, its intestines spilling out. The smell was a physical presence, an element like fire or water, and Michael held a handkerchief to his face.
Allied artillery began their barrage and the shells exploded in the distance. Machine-gun bullets whined. Michael wondered if his fate had been decided already, if the fate of every man was fixed. He had found himself searching men’s faces for clues to their fate. An aura surrounded them, a flickering light. Stanford was alive, he felt. He was one of those who could ride through a blizzard of bullets unscathed. What of Michael’s own aura? It was impossible to know. You couldn’t see your own.
The stench came in waves, the heavy, damp smell of decaying flesh. Michael could feel the distant vibration of guns to the east, as if the earth had a pulse. He moved across the mud with difficulty and took out two Mills grenades and calculated the distance to the German trench. A head appeared and if he didn’t throw them now he would likely be shot. He heaved them both and a guttural scream floated out of the trench. Michael gathered his gun and jumped into the trench to see a middle-aged man with shorn blond hair and blood splashed across his grey tunic in the pattern of a comet. His eyes were starkly blue, mad with historic pride and military destiny. A warrior, his mouth a hard slash, his head a muscle, clenched and bare. He stared at Michael and raised his pistol. Michael fired his Ross rifle and the man’s face bloomed darkly and his perfect head sprayed as he fell. The other German face was that of a frightened child, maybe fifteen. There was no purpose in this face, no appetite, only incomprehension, and Michael’s bullet hit his chest like a benediction. He fell immediately and looked like a young girl lying there. The four others in the trench were injured or stunned and Michael looked around quickly and nervously for weapons, his rifle trained on them.
Two men from his unit, Bristoe and Wesley, came into the trench and examined the carnage. They motioned with their rifles toward the prisoners and barked out commands. The Germans look bewildered, and hoarsely responded in German. Michael ordered them to be silent and finally said. “We have to take them back.”
“To where?” Wesley asked.
“To our line.”
Wesley pondered the logistics of herding four Germans back through no man’s land. One of the them was an officer, perhaps forty-five years old. It occurred to Michael that those left here to defend the line were deemed expendable; the youngest and the oldest. The officer had a pleasant face and smiled at Michael as his hand emerged from a pocket. For an instant Michael thought he was going to offer him a cigarette. Instead he held a pistol and fired it at Michael, his smile unchanged. Bristoe saw the revolver come up and plunged his bayonet through the man’s neck, which erupted in blood.
Michael fell backwards and slumped against the hard wall of the trench, his helmet off. The last thing he saw was Wesley shooting the other three Germans, who turned away, as if against a headwind. Wesley emptied his gun into all of them and stood over them, breathing heavily.
Michael woke up and saw a vertical swath of sky that was defined by the walls of the trench. He was lying on duckboards, his head resting on a folded tunic. There were bandages below his shoulder, stained red. A medic hovered.
“It’s not too serious,” the medic said. “A few weeks in hospital. You lost some blood. The bullet had a clean exit.”
Michael looked up at the man’s exhausted face.
“They’ll take you to England,” the man said. “A hospital there.” He left a package of cigarettes beside Michael and moved along the trench.
3
ENGLAND, 1917
The whiteness of the English hospital was a shock, its brilliant antiseptic gleam. It had been a school dormitory, a three-storey building with a slate roof and large washrooms on each floor. There were ten beds in Michael’s room. In the bed beside him was a man who had been gassed, and dark blisters hung like clusters of dead insects along his body. The skin of his face was rough, as if it had been lightly sandpapered. On the other side, a man with trench foot. Michael watched as the nurse came in and dressed one of the man’s feet in whale oil and the other in something else. One foot was almost black and all the toes were gone, as if eaten by rats. It
looked like the foot died years ago, a separate death, but was still somehow clinging to its host. Michael watched the man receive an injection of morphine, then lie dreamily, staring slackly at the ceiling. Gas and Trench, he began to call them in his head.
On the second morning, the nurse took Michael’s bandages off and cleaned his wound with warm water and sharp-smelling soap. The wound was painful, but her touch was so comforting—her hand lightly dabbing, her face lost in concentration—that he wished it would go on longer. He stared at her, a wide mouth, imperfect and slightly skewed, a sensual mouth. She had brown eyes and dark hair held up in a bun.
He expected her to say something, but she didn’t. “Have you been here long?” he asked, unable to think of anything else.
“Not so long,” she said.
“What’s your name?”
“Nicole.”
“I’m Michael. Michael Mountain Horse.”
“It sounds like a name you’d make up. Boys playing a game.”
“I suppose someone did make it up.”
Nicole looked at the gas victim, who was asleep.
“It’s bad. The gas,” Michael said.
“There are worse things,” she said.
Her face was only a foot or so from his. She smelled like soap, not hospital soap, something gentler.
His experience with girls was limited. His first memory was of going with his mother to a house in the foothills, visiting on a Sunday, one of the few times they ever did. His mother a widow who was invited out of Christian charity and curiosity; the Indian who seduced Lord Gin. The house had a dark piano against one wall and someone was playing. He might have been six. There was a girl there, a few years older than him, and she led Michael out to the backyard and asked him to drink a glass of water. She offered him another and then another. Five glasses in a row, until he couldn’t drink any more. He had never gone visiting before, and he assumed that this was what happened when you did. He and the girl stood behind the house, looking at the hills that gathered height as they rolled west. There was a garden in the back, flowers and a few hardy vegetables. The girl stared at him, waiting. When he said he needed to go to the bathroom, she unbuttoned his fly, pulled out his penis, and waited. For a minute, Michael was too surprised to urinate, despite his urgent need. Then he let go, a broad happy stream that the girl waved across the flowers, holding his penis as if it were a hose. She gripped him and directed the stream over the peonies and violets, and when he was finished she tucked him back in and buttoned his pants. They went inside and listened to the woman who was playing the piano and Michael ate a piece of dry cake. This memory came to him as Nicole bandaged the hole below his shoulder.