“No, wit’ the MO from the RCR. He challenged me at a medical seminar yesterday, so I told him I will bring some men to play a group of their officers led by him.”
“Count me in.” Barrett is adamant. “Damn those RCRs lording their bloody record over us, just because we’re new around here. We oughta show them.”
“May I step in here, gentlemen?” It is Captain Bly, holding a mess tin full of breakfast and a steaming cup of tea.
“Well that depends, sir,” Barrett stipulates. “Will you help stand for the honour of the Canadian Irish Rifles tonight in a card game against a vain group of officers from the RCR about to have their sorry arses handed to them on a plate?”
“Well, I do suppose that could be arranged.” Bly looms with mock menace over the perpetual smartass Barrett, moving his face closer as though he were a stern headmaster at a school noted for its iron discipline. “After you do shit detail for your insolence, Barrett, I’ll do anything to celebrate your humiliation!” There is laughter, and Bly joins them, lowering his wide-framed bulk beside Leprenniere. As soon as he sits down he tucks into his scrambled eggs.
“Damn, the eggs are really off today, aren’t they?” he complains in mid-chew. “We should stuff them in shells and fire them at Jerry, for Chri—for You-know-who’s sake.” He winks at Jim and Barrett and Leprenniere, and nods toward the padre nearby. The four of them chortle over their beverages.
“I think the decision on eggs around here this morning is damned bloody unanimous.” Barrett has taken on the persona of a union boss leading a meeting to strike.
“Agreed. That’s why you have to get yourself a good batman to scrounge up your own meals around here,” Jim advises. “Though if it weren’t for these sorts of issues, we’d have little to bitch and joke about, now would we?”
“Pardon, sir?” Jim looks into the uncomprehending eyes of Lieutenant Muller, innocent in his misunderstanding.
“Nothing, really. I said, ‘a good batman could’ve coughed up better eggs than these.’ Just once again giving Cooley his due.”
“Agreed. They’re always terrible, aren’t they?” Muller returns to his own conversation with Olczyk and Lieutenant Flaherty, about a game of poker today with the MO from the battalion and officers from the Lucky Sevens before the move to the start line. Bly and Leprenniere and Barrett. Dead, dead, and invalided out, respectively. He has fallen into reimagining old conversations anew.
Riley takes a seat beside him, having arrived to breakfast late.
“Good morning,” Jim croaks.
“Hello, Jim. How are you today?”
“Oh, been better. Yourself?”
“The same. Woke up late and caught hell from Gordon. Say, what happened to you last night after you left our game?”
“Not sure. Ended up with a sore knuckle, though.” He then resumes eating, uninterested in any further conversation with anyone, and Riley takes this cue and eats his breakfast in silence.
After his third cup of grainy and bitter black coffee and a mountainous helping of breakfast, the highlights of which were the unctuous shrivels of chewy bacon and the crispy cakes of hash browns, the lowlight of which, as always, was the eggs, he feels sufficiently awakened to meet the day’s challenge, neurons lighting up one by one like the lights on a telephone switchboard at the start of a business day, relaying calls from the disconnected departments of his mind, building the coherence with which he can face the demands of the day, and more particularly, the demands of the night. He listens to Gordon dispense the orders of the day, which until dinner amount to not much other than company and battalion inspections in the late afternoon. A highlight of the day is his announcement that Father Maitland is organizing a swim parade at the nearby coast precisely an hour and a half after breakfast, and that interested men are to report to the trucks at the maintenance area. Upon dismissal he makes his way to his headquarters down the road.
Hmm. He shuffles papers in his hands, fidgets with his fountain pen, turning it in his hands, twisting and untwisting the segments of its cylinder. Careful with that or you’ll leak it all over yourself like you bloody well did in Caiazzo. There are now fifteen sodden and swollen cigarette butts in the wine bottle on his desk, the green glass of which is now smoked dark and murky. A gun rumbles in the distance. Or was it thunder? The hard wood of the church pew against his back, the flicker of the bottle candle as he turned the pen in his hand, the shells erupting on the roof and outside in the ruins, all over the ridge. Can’t get much sleep with all this gunder. Said something like that to Cooley up there, didn’t I. Barrett’s wit rubbed off on me. Still have to address those greenhorns. They’re in your hands now. The minutes pass.
He walks about, into the streets, alongside big blocky slant-roofed houses with colourful shutters and window boxes, along palisades of cypress trees like folded green umbrellas, along winding cobble streets of pastel townhouses and little shops, a pleasing warren of dollhouse domesticity pressed into service as a collective barracks for yet another invading army in Italy. The shadow of the arch under which he marched two nights ago falls under him. Laundry flaps out of windows, mostly of a military nature—boxer shorts, white undershirts, green wool socks, khaki overshirts, wool khaki pants. Soldiers mill about, many displaying a breezy informality in the form of wedge caps or berets cocked at funny angles on their heads. He checks out the sights—a sergeant from the Lucky Sevens tank battalion getting his boots shined by a local boy while chatting to him and a couple of his comrades, a rude and rudimentary exchange of English and Italian with the boy, lots of laughter. The boy, scrawny, underfed, with a long, narrow nose, tousled dark brown hair and sunken eyes, who cannot be older than twelve, smokes cigarettes along with them. “Pietro, how d’ya say fuck?” Along a narrow street canyoned with the façades of ancient townhouses, he half expects to have the contents of a chamber pot dumped on his head, or for a newlywed husband to hang a bed sheet out the window decorated with the florid proof of his wife’s previous virginity while all those about him whoop and holler and beat on pots and pans with merry approval, as he witnessed once near Caiazzo in the summer while the battalion was on training manoeuvres.
He makes his way to a small stone bridge over a creek and looks down, his view garlanded by the drooping leafy branches of gnarled oaks and the droopy curtains of willows. He stares out over the water awhile, at the houses and sheds along the leafy bank. He recalls having marched over this bridge, too, upon entering town by way of a weaving weary march in the rain from the front, the shells streaking over, the clouds galvanized from within by sheet lightning and bruised in the flare of the guns—the weather of war, the spirit of the age, or as the Germans say, the Zeitgeist. And the knowledge that he will be part of it again tonight, exemplified by the distant guns he hears now.
19
The padre forms up the swim parade and about a hundred men head off to the seaside to nearby Cattolica in trucks provided by the transport officer, Lieutenant Phipps, who himself declines the opportunity out of busyness. Jim avails himself of this opportunity and enjoys the brief drive with Cooley in his jeep. They follow trucks packed with men, the canvas canopies removed, the sun melting through a milky haze of overcast, the wind blowing through their hair as they drive in the procession to the seaside over a road lined with vineyards and willows and the coned minarets of cypress trees. Lush grapes, nearly bursting with juice, cluster on untended vines, powdered with dust. A withered willow weeps over the road and brushes the ribbed backs of the trucks, and is whipped by the radio antennas of a troop of tanks from the 2nd New Zealand Division passing the other way, their turrets shaded with stolen beach umbrellas, and the antennas bend and snap back from under branches. A mule brays bucktoothed annoyance at them from across the roadside gully in a tangled thicket of untended roadside weeds, its sandy honk of discontent ringing familiar to Jim as he and Cooley approach it, their jeep crawling behind the lumbering army trucks. H
e salutes the mule in passing. Another soldier chucks a half-eaten apple as a gift in its general direction from the truck in front of Jim and Cooley, and the mule bends over to claim its prize.
“Just trying to win the favour of the locals, sir!”
“Damned stubborn they are!”
From beside him in the driver’s seat Cooley asks, “Hey Captain, how’s your hand?”
“Huh?” Jim asks, bewildered.
“Your hand. Do you remember last night when I found you?”
“Uh, no. What happened?”
“You hit a soldier. Hard, I might add. I had to smooth things over with the MPs to get you out of shit, and then I got you back to barracks. Sir.”
“My God,” Jim reflects. “Thank you for that.”
“No problem. Just doing my job, sir.” For a moment both are silent as Jim is at a loss for what to say. Perhaps this is best forgotten?
“Hey, by the way,” he says in order to change the subject. “How’s Briggs faring?”
“Nice of you to ask,” Cooley says, glancing at him as he drives, a kind look of acknowledgement on his face. “He’s gonna make it, Father Maitland said. I’m going to visit him before we move out in the evening. Father Maitland is taking some soldiers to visit our wounded.”
“Good to hear. Give him my regards.”
They pass the crumpled, twisted mass of a wrecked jeep beside a hole in a side road at a ‘T’ junction to the side near a whitewashed stucco farmhouse. Two engineers stalk ahead of the wreckage and slowly sweep the poles of their metal detectors left to right and right to left again, and attempt to divine from the earth wellsprings of death that screech and scratch from below the surface and into their headphones, fighting a war of concentration and nerves, of sweat beading on brows, of careful, balletic movement and pause around unseen and sudden sources of death, around the calculated consummation of murderous wills since moved on.
They make their way through the partially ruined southern reaches of the town of Cattolica nearby, seeing their reflections in the shopfronts and hotels and bistros, under red and white striped dirty awnings, behind wrought-iron railings, and they drive along the desolate rows of townhouses and businesses, and, heralded by the shrill honky cries of circling greedy gulls, on to the beach, the seemingly endless expanse of white sand beach, drifting with dunes and tufted here and there with weeds; and they bask in the sun in front of abandoned hotels and beach resorts while sappers de-mine the cordoned off perimeters, and they swim and watch as northward in the distance, far up the sandy and shifting border of land and sea, out in the water near the misty haze of horizon, a lone British destroyer lobs desultory shells at unseen German coastal defences further north in Rimini, weaving about, here and there obscured by smokescreens fired from its guns. A fresh sea breeze blows in from the rippled turquoise surface of the Adriatic, and up above parts the milky clouds as though it were curdling them in its sharp solution. Waves roll lazily ashore and break into foam as they lap the beach, sssshhhhhhh sssshhhhhhh, retreating outward and exposing in their lathery wake seashells and bits of seaweed and slick and newly sifted sand, to be replaced again by another wave in the patient and ageless massaging of the water, the erosion of the land.
“Captain, you coming swimming?” It is Cooley.
“Yes, of course, Cooley, I’ll be right there.”
The two of them make for the water, splashing ankle, knee, waist deep, diving into and parting the concave, rolling surface tension of an incoming wave. The water is cool and refreshing, its incoming, outgoing currents washing over and under and about him in his near weightless suspension. He dives in headfirst into another wave and opens his eyes into the brackish murk, the salty water scouring his body. As he bobs in the waves, he contemplates wordlessly for a few moments the ephemeral nature of human movements—migrations and invasions mocked and mirrored above by the clouds that swirl, storm, crash and dissipate in a constant current and eddy and boil of vapourous thunder and rain. Like the sea on the emetic voyage to England, the ship nosing into and upward upon the gently rolling mountains of water, stomach juices and inner ear fluid sloshing within, his head oft hanging over the rail, returning unto the sea that which came from the sea. Yet, the sight of the bucking, rolling sea in its rises and falls, the folding of mountains that then crashed back into the sea. The sight of it! Rough Andean foothills, surf-crested Himalayan peaks, deep Grand Canyons between the mighty ripples of unseen properties driving through and playing with sublime force and supercilious indifference the medium of water; the rippling, torsioned musculature of the changing world under a tensile skin of water, heaving and pushing endlessly at the land, shaping it through the ebb and flow of its inscrutable and tempestuous will. Borne aloft on another wave and the wave of his own exhilaration, being dashed back to the beach in gleeful surrender to the power of physics, the broken wave washing over him, the grit and pelt of disturbed sand. Ah, water, run over me, baptize me anew, wash off the ravages of experience … The waves break over him as he lies on the beach, and he is soothed by the slow and rhythmic strokes of water that wash over and gently push and pull at his body, the grit and grate of the sand underneath.
Later, back on the beach, he feels ready to head back to await the inevitable battle, but in need of distraction until departure time, he joins listlessly in a card game with Riley, Muller, the padre, and Sergeant Kerr from the anti-tank platoon, making small card talk in an atavism of earlier games.
“I’m feeling the luck this afternoon, gentlemen,” says the pockmarked Muller, whistling through his teeth as he deftly parts and shuffles the cards together with hands well practised in games of chance such as craps, blackjack, poker and warfare. Poker it is, this time, five card stud. “Here’s to victory.” Jim always did like cards; perhaps it was his love of chance that got him into this mess. He wins the first round with a full house, getting twenty army-issue lire in banknotes in the bargain.
“Ooh whee, the luck favours Captain McFarlane today, does it not!” Muller laughs as Jim claims his winnings.
“More than last night, eh, Jim?” Riley grins and nudges Jim with his shoulder.
“Indeed.” Smell of smoke on the wind as the breeze changes direction, the industrial reek of paint and rubber and fuel, the smell of the industrial world aflame. The carrier is still burning from the mine that blew it up twenty minutes ago, the mine that killed Cedarville and Trebb. They look up from their card game at the trail of black smoke dissolving on the breeze, kitted up and awaiting movement, the breeze blowing the acrid smell of metal burning in their faces as they sit clustered about a stone wall separating farmers’ fields. Behind them, about them, are dead turrets of the Adolph Hitler Line, pierced by the Eighth Army, tank turrets and concrete gun emplacements embedded in the ground, many of which have been destroyed, all of which are now abandoned. From the valley beyond echo the sounds of battle, the distant crump of shells. A squad of sappers stalk along the road for further mines with their metal detectors. Two are busily and very carefully dismantling a disc-shaped Teller anti-tank mine that they have unearthed from the chalky white fine road dust, gingerly sweeping and blowing the dirt off it as though it were some ancient artifact. The resting soldiers are semi-covered by trees and the wall, and therefore the forward companies of the battalion, waiting in reserve and held up by mines in their approach to the front, have largely eschewed the order to dig in, abandoning their half-dug shellscrapes to the more immediate problem of killing time. Other parties of men sit and lie about in their gaggles, sleeping, joking, chatting, reading, writing letters, gambling.
“Christ, get a load of that smell.” He chokes as he says this, as if for emphasis. “It’s your deal, Barrett.”
“My deal it is.” Barrett wrinkles his nose and shuffles and hands out the allotted number of cards to all involved—Jim, Bly, Davis, himself. The wind changes direction and relieves them of the reek of the smoldering hull of th
e nearby carrier. There is a throbbing drone above as a squadron of Hurricane fighter-bombers buzzes ahead in the sunny sky that belies the carnage underneath, heading into enemy territory presumably to deal death to any advancing reinforcements. Captain Bly looks up over the wall, cards in hand, looking at the horizon, undulating with hills and framed by the mountains of Lazio, and veiled in the smoke of battle.
“I wouldn’t mind moving soon,” he says to no one in particular. No one responds. Jim replaces two cards, comes up lucky in the exchange. He draws heavily on his cigarette and puts down his hand.
“Two aces, you bastard!” Barrett throws down his hand of cards in disgust. They fan out in the weeds. Jim rakes in his allotted lire and cigarettes.
“What can I say, I’m a lucky fellow,” Jim grins. By now they have started to draw a crowd, a handful of soldiers from nearby.
“I’ll follow the luckiest officer into battle,” says Private Cook, a signalman currently attached to Barrett’s platoon. “If you keep losing sir, can I transfer to Lieutenant McFarlane’s platoon?” There is scattered laughter.
“That depends on the outcome of the court martial I’m about to bring out on you due to lack of confidence in your commanding officer, Private,” Barrett sneers with just enough humour to show that he is joking. “Another hand, shall we?”
“I think that’s in order,” concurs Davis. “Your deal, Jim.” Cigarette set in mouth, bluish wisps of smoke dissolving in the warm breeze, dappled in sunlight dripping from between the shuttering leaves of the oak tree above, Jim begins dispensing his cards. There is a commotion, and he looks over at the wall. The engineers have moved aside, having removed the Teller mine. A long line of soldiers are marching up the road toward them, kicking up a cloud of white chalky road dust, about fifty German prisoners with their hands on their heads, sullen, shuffling listlessly, driven onward by a handful of Canadian soldiers wielding their bayonet-spiked rifles like medieval pikes. Jim and the others get a good look at the parade of passing faces, the Germans looking out at them, some old, some young, some thin, some strong-looking, faces wan, their grey-green Wehrmacht uniforms tattered, some with their badges ripped off, dusty, some wearing long-brimmed sun caps, few if any looking anything like the Aryan ideals painted on propaganda posters and touted in the blustery speeches of the Führer that Jim had seen in countless newsreels. A few of them help wounded Canadian soldiers walk, or carry stretchers, pressed into service as medical aides. A soldier yells out from the sidelines, “Not lookin’ so tough now, eh, Fritzy?” Another bellows out the German anthem with mock beerhall brio—“Deutschland, Deutschland, über alles, über alles in der Welt!” A few others accompany him by singing or by humming loudly and raggedly along. But most just watch the sad spectacle, put off slightly by the sight of men shorn of their fighting pride, official enemy or not. If the winds of fortune change, that could be us, says this scrolling display of bedraggled defeat on exhausted, shuffling, dusty feet.
Beckoning War Page 16