by Don Gillmor
In the morning he dressed carefully and walked the grounds, smoking a cigarette, a habit he was toying with, unsure of its pleasures. The grounds were large and had a wide path of pea-sized stones with plane trees on each side forming a canopy. The sun was interrupted by long patches of cloud. Along the path men sat on benches, smoking, talking in pairs, or sitting alone staring with milky eyes.
In the field to the west there were horses. They reminded Michael of Stanford playing polo in Cochrane. The pitch was as smooth as a table, beautifully groomed. They had been playing in a tournament against teams from Fish Creek, Millarville, and Cowley, and the Cochrane team was short a man, their regular player laid up with a broken leg. Stanford was asked to take his place. He was a good horseman and probably the area’s best athlete, and he had played a loose, Indian version of the game on occasion. He was seventeen. Fifty carloads of people had come from Calgary to see the match. They ate picnic lunches and drank lemonade and cheered. Michael stood on the sidelines and watched his brother race up and down the pitch, finding his swing with the mallet. Patterns formed and dissolved as they raced to the ball. Stanford was a muscular rider who attacked at every opportunity. A player from the other team rubbed Stanford, looking to take him off his horse, and Stanford chased him down and swung his mallet and knocked him out of his saddle. He lay on the field bleeding and there was that brief instant where the crowd thought the man was dead. He was helped off the field finally but it was the end of Stanford’s polo career.
Michael walked to a bench and sat down and was joined by an Australian with crutches, a big man with a creased face who introduced himself as Crewson.
“Mountain Horse.”
“You’re an Indian,” Crewson said, offering Michael a cigarette. “What kind?”
“Blood,” Michael said, taking the cigarette.
The man smiled. “How appropriate.”
They smoked for a minute. “There’s another Blood over here. He was at Vimy.”
Michael felt suddenly dry. “Left his battalion apparently,” Crewson said. “Killed one of his own officers, cut off his ears apparently. You’re not going to cut off my ears, are you, mate?” Crewson smiled.
Michael asked him if he knew where this Blood was last seen.
Crewson shrugged. “He’ll be shot if your lot ever find him. If Fritz doesn’t get him first.”
Michael asked Crewson where his own battalion was headed.
“Wherever it’s worst, I imagine. They use us colonials as cannon fodder.”
They sat smoking in the pleasant late-autumn weather. There was a slight chill, a welcome freshness.
Michael was unable to sleep that night, thinking about Stanford out in no man’s land, its lone living citizen, a nation of one. How did he survive? Rations taken from the dead. Perhaps he made forays back behind Allied lines to kill rabbits or steal a goose from one of the farms that still stood. What had happened? Some madness that settles on so many over here. He had already seen some of its guises: men who retreated to a primitive state, who liked this work, who killed with appetite and a sense of purpose. And those who were terrorized by the violence, by the fifteen-inch shells that landed and blew limbs away without effort. Stanford had brought his own demons to set loose in this hell; perhaps they flourished.
The war was a subject that disappeared for days at the hospital, then it would rise to the surface like a drowned body, bloated, impossible to ignore. At mess, a man named Dobbins said the Kaiser was a madman and madmen had to be stopped.
“Is that what they told you?” Crewson asked. “A madman that has to be stopped? What do you think the Germans are telling their boys? That the Canadians shoot prisoners. That the French eat them. That the English have no God. Let me tell you something.” Crewson leaned forward, his menacing bulk aimed at Dobbins’s soft surprised face. “The Kaiser is mad. So is Haig. Mad as a rabid dog. The same for Foch and Nivelle. They’re all mad. The boys who are out there in the mud listening to a million tons of gunpowder explode every night, they’re mad as well. The sixteen-year-old who stuck his bayonet through a man’s eye. Madder still. He’ll go home to Sydney and work as a bank clerk until he’s found hanging in his basement. There are a million madmen in those fucking trenches.” Crewson’s face was red and he strained toward Dobbins. “Look at you, you fucking pasty-faced ponce. You’re mad. You think there’s a design out there, a plan? There isn’t. God is off the job.” He took a breath and reached for his crutches. “The Somme is the nightmare of a blind man chained to the wall of a madhouse.” Crewson rose heavily and moved quickly away, his arms propelling him.
In the afternoon, Michael sought out Nicole, simply to watch her, trying to imprint her on his mind, a photograph that he could take out and examine when he was back at the front. That night, as she checked the men, walking past Trench and his morphine noises, ephemeral stories that escaped as sighs, she stopped and saw Michael, awake and staring at her. She sat on the edge of his cot and held one of his hands and placed the other on his forehead briefly, as if she was checking to see if he had a fever. She was older than he first thought. Perhaps thirty. He watched her mouth move as she explained the nature of his injury, the way bullets move through flesh, the damage they did, low foreign sounds that soothed him.
“Where are you from, Michael Mountain Horse?” she asked.
“Alberta.”
She stared politely.
“Canada. The West, out by the Rocky Mountains.”
“I would think the mountains would be comforting. To look up and see them there.”
“I suppose. You’re English?”
“London.”
“What’s it like?”
“Lots of history, lots of rain.”
She wore a ring and Michael wondered if this was simply protection against the patients or if she had a husband.
“Your husband is in France?”
Nicole hesitated. “No. Not now, no.”
There was a short, familiar silence that implied he was a casualty. “He was killed.”
“Yes.”
“I’m sorry.”
“We all are.”
They were quiet for a while and Michael touched her hand. There was no reproach, and she responded by caressing his. She leaned down and kissed him on the mouth. Beside them Gas and Trench moaned lightly. The room and its sleeping, happily drugged men, four empty beds that would be filled tomorrow. He touched her hair and they kissed again and Michael was caught up in her. After a few minutes, she pulled back.
“I have to go,” she whispered, and stood up, straightening her uniform. She walked away, looking at the sleeping men as she left.
An hour later, he was still awake, in love. She seemed like a dream. Beside him Trench let out a muted whine, some new horror in his head.
The sun broke mournfully through low clouds the next morning and a man with a moustache came and stood at the foot of his bed. “You’ll be leaving tomorrow, Mountain Horse. Back to your outfit.”
Michael nodded and the man walked away. He heard that the Allies were planning some new offensive to break the stalemate, building to something grand and final. The next day he crossed the Channel in a crowded boat, listing in the waves, thinking of Nicole.
4
FRANCE, 1917
The winter passed in occasional snow, small raids, and rumours that rose out of the yellow mud like vapours. Michael heard that the French army had mutinied, hundreds of thousands of men. Two hundred and fifty mutineers were rounded up and tied to one another in a field and shelled with their own artillery, executed for treason. Men with carts hauled away the pieces and fed them to the hogs. This was the rumour.
Michael went to a makeshift pub set up behind the lines with Stubley and Griesbach, aptly nicknamed Grievance, who outlined how he would initiate a pincer movement that would bring the Germans to their knees.
“Look, it’s simple,” Grievance said. “You take fifty thousand men. You land them up the coast. They come down on
Fritz. We go up. Then we move along the front like a broom and sweep them back to Fritzland.” Grievance had thin blond hair, and his eyes were perpetually red. He was born with sensitive eyes, as he continually explained, and always looked tearful or tired.
There was a long mahogany bar and the windows were blacked out. Small tables were clustered in the room. A few women lounged, and Michael wasn’t sure if they were prostitutes and thought they might not be sure either.
Michael had a glass of beer and listened reluctantly to Grievance.
“I intend to come out of this war an officer,” he said.
Michael stared at him. He was precisely the kind of man you wouldn’t follow, whose judgment you’d instinctively distrust, the kind of man who would become an officer.
“You’re officer material, no question,” Stubley said. He was a short, dark-haired man from the East, a city man. “Who wouldn’t follow you and your teary eyes into the gates of hell?”
“I have a condition, Stubley.”
“You’ve got a condition, all right.”
“It isn’t your flaws that define your character. It’s character that overcomes flaws.”
“Oh, you’re a character.”
“Stubley, have you given a thought to your future? You haven’t, I’ll wager.”
“Future? Jesus, man, the world is ending.”
“Fritz is tired. I have it on good authority.”
“Kaiser send you a note, did he. ‘Dear Weepy …’”
“Stubley …”
Michael’s head felt like it was filled with damp wool. “I need some air,” he said and got up. He could hear Grievance talking as he left.
He walked down the street and saw a brown rabbit dart out of a tiny garden. The sky was overcast, and the moon appeared briefly as stony clouds blew east. He stood near a window and watched an old woman sitting at a wooden table, writing by dim candlelight. She had a quill pen that she dipped into a bottle of ink and rubbed her thigh with one hand as she wrote. In the distance Michael heard the whine of a shell. The long-range shells could travel a fair distance but Michael assumed they must be out of range this far behind the lines. He hadn’t heard a plane. The sound was suddenly closer and he ran down the street, not knowing if he was running toward danger or away from it. The shell whistled and he pressed himself into a doorway. The explosion shook the ground. A fountain of dirt and stone and splinters rained down. Michael looked out from the doorway and saw that the shell had hit the chateau that housed the pub. Men lay on the streets, numb from the blast, just arriving at the horror of what remained of themselves. Grievance was sitting against the wall of a house like a doll on a shelf, his head down. One leg was gone at the hip and blood flowed out onto the street and he suddenly raised his head, letting out loud gulping screams. Michael looked for something to stop the bleeding. He rushed over and used his tunic, holding it to the exposed meat. There wasn’t enough leg left to apply a tourniquet.
“It’s going to be fine, Grievance. We’ll get a medic. It’s fine now, fine fine.”
The street filled with people, some of them bringing sheets to tend the wounded.
Five yards from Grievance was the naked body of a young woman. She had been working upstairs as a private hovered over her, clenched and grateful. Her customer was nowhere to be seen. She appeared unharmed, save for a scrape along her side that ran to her small breasts. She had short blond hair and looked almost luminous under a moon that found a break in the clouds. Michael stared at her and took one of Grievance’s hands and pressed it against the wool tunic on his leg and went to the girl and put his ear to her heart to see if there was any sign of life. Her skin was warm but there was no heartbeat. She was the first naked woman he had seen. A woman covered the girl with a blanket and looked up sharply at Michael. He noticed dimly that Grievance had stopped screaming.
To the north of Arras was Flanders, reclaimed from the sea through cleverly engineered dikes and drainage ditches and now on its way to being returned to the sea through constant shelling. It was a country of swampland that extended to the horizon, a stinking waste with a few charred timbers that stretched out like hands from a grave.
A move was on. Michael heard about it in snatches of conversation, pieces that came together and formed an unlikely quilt. General Haig’s final madness, an offensive that would break the German will. They’ll abandon their weapons and run all the way back to Berlin, to their mother’s milk, he said. Michael’s battalion took a train to the coast and then marched back, a diversionary tactic that had the officers cursing the stupidity of the commanders.
At 5:40 A.M. on October 31, they entered the fog, creeping behind the barrage of Allied fire. Michael went over the ramparts, and could see thousands of others emerging along the trench line. There was a percussive symphony from the Howitzers, railway shells, machine guns, rifles, and the odd bomb that dropped from the cumbersome German Gothas that flew over like carrion birds. Hissing, whistling, a roar or a pop, the sound of a wet sandbag landing.
The mud seemed bottomless. He slid off the duckboards that were laid in preparation and his coat was caked in it, weighing him down. He swam through the slime, a primeval crawl, struggling to breathe.
The objective was a French village that had become General Haig’s private lunacy. German machine-gun fire raked over Michael’s head and the concussion of the heavy shells made him think he was being ripped apart, his ribs separated and his jellied organs spilling into the mud. Packhorses lay dead, half-submerged. Michael continued on for two hours, tortured heavy movements through the mud. When the shell landed, Michael rose up briefly, and then slapped down into the ooze, unconscious.
He woke up coughing mud out of his mouth. Was it still daylight? How long had he been out? There was smoke, fog, and low clouds that looked like coal smudges, a contiguous grey. Could it be dusk? He felt hollow and nauseous. His head rang and his mouth was still clotted with mud. There were no stars to orient him. He crawled instinctively, wondering if he would find Stanford in this overcast charnel house. The mud stuck to his coat, and to the mud that covered his coat. He was indistinguishable from the land.
When they were children he and Stanford used to wrestle in the mud near Jumping Pound Creek and then jump into the clear water, cold even in August, the water coming down from the mountains. Afterwards they lay on the rock that faced south and slanted into the water. The sun warmed them slowly. They shivered at first, then felt pleasantly warm, and finally hot, thankful for the western breeze. What he wouldn’t give for that feeling now. To be clean and slowly warming, the air moving softly over his naked body.
Once they were warm they would walk downstream through the shallow water looking for buffalo bones and arrowheads. On the southern bank a hundred-foot cliff rose up, topped with pine. It was where the Blood had driven the buffalo, and Michael and Stanford found ancient vertebrae on the creek bed, white discs polished smooth by the current.
In late summer, a priest named Heeney came to their door, dressed in black, like a crow. He and their mother talked in the parlour for some time. She didn’t offer him tea or lemonade. He sat there in his black robe, his large blue eyes, his hands moving when he spoke. A week later he returned and Stanford left with him, gone with the crow, stealing something shiny and precious. He was going to the residential school on the Blood Reserve to be taught by the Catholics. His mother was quieter than usual for two months. After Stanford went away, Michael went down to the creek on his own, but it wasn’t the same. A year went by and he pined for Stanford every day.
A boy named Albert Lone Thorn jumped from the cliff in late autumn, as the poplar leaves dried to paper on the ground. He landed on the stones covered by moving water and lay there for three days. There wasn’t enough water in the creek to carry him down to the Bow River. Two deer hunters found him, face down, crushed by the landing. He was naked and his clothes were at the top of the cliff, neatly folded. The hunters left him there and went to the Royal North-West Mounted Police of
fice and two constables rode out and took Albert away.
It wasn’t long after that that Stanford came back from the residential school, surrounded by silence. Michael was overjoyed at having him back, but when they went to the creek to fish there was no wrestling. They fished in silence and Stanford was quiet for months. That winter they walked the spine that jutted a hundred feet above the creek where it formed a horseshoe, a narrow spit of land. Stanford picked up a large rock and held it over his head and threw it down. They watched it fall and when it hit the ice a crack echoed in the cold air. The rock left a hole but still skittered across the ice. They scrambled down to see how thick the ice was and at the hole there was a trout, stunned. Michael pulled it out, laughing. What were the chances, he asked, a trout hit by a rock thrown from a hundred feet up, from the heavens. The rockfish, he called it. The unluckiest fish in the stream. Michael suggested building a fire and roasting it and eating it, but Stanford threw it away. “We don’t want its luck inside us,” he said.
And now Stanford was here, somewhere, crawling in the same mud. Michael realized suddenly how hungry he was and struggled to find some rations. Every movement was an effort now, the act of raising his heavy, mud-coated arms a struggle. He had some beef left and as he was eating it the sky turned a strange, almost beautiful green, lit by German flares. Its light was otherworldly, and as it dimmed, the land looked gangrenous. He saw rats scurrying over the remains of a packhorse.