He looks at Riley, tapping his foot, and at Gibson, tapping his hand; and he remains in the moment, swaying his body and tapping his hand to the beat until the dinner is adjourned, until it is time to go, to quit waiting, to go back into the fray, back across the Stygian Conca into the land of the dead beyond, helped along by an extra tot of rum on the colonel: “Gentlemen, bottoms up! You are dismissed!”
At this, the officers promptly exit the mess and make their way through the streets in the evening darkness to their companies now assembling in a field.
“Hello, sir,” Witchewski says to Jim at his arrival. Able Company stands milling about in the field, kitted up in helmets and battledress and webbing and boots, smoking and kidding and ribbing one another. Witchewski looks at Jim, his usually hard eyes sparkling with relief and unalloyed joy. “It’s good to see you again sir, whatever the hell happened to you today?”
“I’ll tell you about it later sometime,” assures Jim, “But not now.” Not now indeed.
“Shall I call roll?”
“Indeed, whenever you’re ready.”
“I’m ready.” Witchewski steps up in front of the company gaggled about and barks: “Able Company, by platoons, in three ranks, fall—IN!” The soldiers fall into their ranks and stamp their right feet in unison and stand rigid.
“Calling roll.” He looks at a clipboard he is carrying and calls out the names one by one, answered with an exclamatory “Here!” for all. “At ease! Stand easy, relax!” At this, the soldiers physically relax, standing comfortably with their legs far apart. “All right, we’re moving! We’ll be going into battle again. You all know your parts to play, and you will be briefed once again by your platoon commanders before we move into the staging area. Expect anything and everything. When we move into the valley, expect bombardments, mines, you name it. When we move through the Sydneys’ positions into the town, it’s anybody’s damn guess. Expect more of the same, plus snipers, machine guns, hand-to-hand combat, ambushes, you name it! Many of you are vets now, you know what to do when the shit hits! If you’re new, watch what the old-timers are doing, and do what they do! Let me say this once, and let me say it clearly: WATCH AND LEARN FROM THE MEN AROUND YOU. LISTEN TO THEM. I don’t want any goddamn greenhorn mistakes. I don’t want anyone blowing themselves and their comrades up with their own grenades. I don’t want anyone firing on their own side. And I don’t want any goddamn insubordination of any kind. I feel I can trust you, and together we will defeat the enemy, we will carry out our orders. Watch each other’s backs, help each other out, do what it is you are supposed to do. And remember, if you run out of bullets and grenades, you can always offer Jerry your rations! Fior go bas!”
“Fior go bas!” they yell in unison.
“Alright, gentlemen, here is Captain McFarlane.” He moves off to the side as Jim steps up to the ranks of men standing in front of him. Ninety-four pairs of eyes are fixed on him in the deepening gloom, ninety-four pairs of eyes of ninety-four men expecting an inspiring address of some kind, at least some kind of assurance that they will not be led into battle by a coward who shirks his parade duties. If he shirks his parade duties, how will he be in combat?
“Good evening, gentlemen,” he begins, voice hesitant, uncertain. He feels awkward and ashamed to be addressing his company on this evening; his head aches, it is as though pins are poking into the backs of his eyes, and his mouth is dry, his tongue hardened into a slab of cured ham from all the smoking and drinking these last couple days. He cannot find the right words. He scans from one side to the other, the men looking right back at him, and he feels much the same way as he did in the orchard behind San Matteo days ago, his lieutenants looking up at him awaiting orders, awaiting orders that he’d momentarily forgotten. “Welcome to all the new members of our company. Welcome back to all others. Tonight we go back into action, to take the Coriano Ridge. For four nights we were shelled by their gunners up there; in the early hours tomorrow we will go into that village and silence those guns once and for all. I have faith in all of you that we will meet our objectives. To the reinforcement soldiers among you: follow Warrant Officer Witchewski’s advice, and watch your more experienced comrades. Listen to them. Listen to your section and platoon leaders. They have experience that you do not yet have. Keep your heads down and your fists up. By doing so, man by man, section by section, platoon by platoon, company by company, we can once again demonstrate that the Irish are the best damn battalion in this Corps, if not in the whole Eighth Army!”
“Hurrah!”
“Be alert to any dangers, and listen for any commands or changes in orders from myself if I’m near you, or your platoon commanders, or anyone above you. When we get to the forming up point, you are to dig in; many of you were up at San Matteo, you know what to expect. The enemy will likely not spare us his shells. Remember, once we move, the battle is on. Don’t take any unnecessary risks. We relieve the Sydneys in their trenches up on the ridge top once they attack, after midnight. We occupy those trenches until we get moving ourselves before dawn. Your platoon commanders will brief you on the particulars if they have not already. I’m terribly sorry, gentlemen, but we’re not getting a lift this time—we’re on foot. We move in precisely five minutes.” Bolstered by his own improvised speech, he reviews the ranks with a sweeping glance to the right, and to the left and right again, a slow, emphatically held gaze; and then after this dramatic pause, dismisses them with a perfunctory, “Able Company, you are hereby dismissed.”
“Not bad,” says Witchewski from beside him, having approached just as Jim was concluding. “For someone who reeks like old whiskey.”
“Thank you, Witchewski.”
“You’re welcome.” Witchewski turns to the assembled men and shouts, “Get ready to move, check your equipment one last time, you have one minute to make sure you have what you need!” The platoon commanders emerge from off to the side, where they have been waiting, and call out, “No. 7 Platoon, with me over here!” “8 Platoon, with me!” “No. 9 Platoon, follow me!”
Each assembled with his platoon and briefed by his commander, the platoons assemble into a full company once again and are marshalled into place with the rest of the battalion. From near the head of the column of men standing single file in the charged and awaiting night, Lieutenant Colonel Hobson shouts: “Battalion, by the left, quick … MARCH!”
24
“Left ... Left ... Left, Right, Left!”
And they march into the night, kitted, spades clanking against packs, rifles slung over shoulders, shallow helmets strapped to chins and sliding askew, left right left right down the road, the stomping boots of soldiers kicking up dust as white as the puttees that cover them. Whump, whump, whump, whump, whump, the rhythmic march of hundreds of feet in single file compacting the dirt of the road, a spectacle to all who witness it, men arrayed into fighting formation, a concentration of will passed down rank to rank, unit to unit; a regimented, organized force of human nature, a concentrated column of will.
They pass scenes of desolation chalked into the night. Dead cows, lying bloated in their fields. A farmer, wearing a black fedora and with a weed in his mouth, waves at the passing troops by the roadside, keen to see what is the nature of the commotion passing his house. He has no shoes on. Jim waves back. The farmer’s house has no roof. Overhead, the buzzing propeller drone of bombers. Alongside, on the road, the grumbling, trundling column of the battalion’s support troops, carriers and trucks and jeeps towing or laden with heavy support weapons, ammunition, water, food, equipment, medical supplies. And they sing:
If you want to find the sergeant,
I know where he is, I know where he is, I know where he is.
If you want to find the sergeant, I know where he is,
He’s hangin’ on the old barbed wire,
I’ve seen him, I’ve seen him, he’s hangin’ on the ol’ barbed wire,
I’ve seen hi
m, I’ve seen him, he’s hangin’ on the ol’ barbed wire!
Through the Toronto streets they marched, from the horse stables and field at the Canadian National Exhibition out into the streets, sporrans flapping, a breeze up under the orange and black pleats of their kilts, oh my. The novice piper piped out the laboured, piercing strains of “Garryowen,” and people lined the sidewalks: men, women, children in their Sunday best, in hats and caps and long coats, in dresses and suits and sweaters and bloomers, the children in knickers and breeches—
“Left, right, left, right, left, right, left!”
Across the parade square at Borden they marched in celebration of an eagerly awaited change in command, the possibility that they would move out finally, and under cover of night and without any senior officer supervising them, they sang an ode to an outgoing and unloved commander:
I am the very model of anti-productivity,
For malingering avoidance I have quite a great proclivity.
For parade ground pomp and orders shrill there is no other officer,
I like to snooze and sip and tipple in this little office, sir.
Regarding matters martial I am really uninformative,
And this is something at my rank that not at all is normative.
Still, I’m very well-acquainted with matters real and corporeal:
There’s a rumour that I buggered a very young lance corporal.
There’s a rumour that he buggered a very young lance corporal
There’s a rumour that he buggered a very young lance corporal
There’s a rumour that he buggered a very young lance corporal …
Through the empty streets of a town in Quebec on a recruiting march, faces staring out sullenly, voices calling out, “Maudits Anglais!” The pool hall scuffles between soldier and lumberjack, Englishman and Habitant.
And on to the streets of Halifax, the harbour teeming with a hundred ships: freighters and tankers with stack-topped white superstructures perched amidships, framed by masts at either end of the raised bows and sterns; and destroyers and corvettes weaving between them, preparing to lead them out into the Atlantic, to be haunted by unseen submarines like dark and dangerous thoughts lurking in the subconscious. And they boarded the troopship, a great liner stripped of its finery, sauntering up the gangplanks and cheering and waving, hundreds of men waving from the decks, caps in hand, waving from the promenades, from every bollard and davit and vent and porthole and window, waving to the cheering crowd; and they left in a paper flurry of ticker tape out into the storm-whipped spray of the North Atlantic, iron grey skies leering down on iron grey seas, where ticker tape turned to blowing swirls of snow, and subconscious fears to submarine threats, until they made landfall in England, and the snow turned back to ticker tape, the wind moaning between the ice-encrusted wires to cheering crowds again. And they marched—
“ Left ... Left ... Left, Right, Left!”
Through winding lanes along ivied stone walls, layers of green upon green, moist velvety verdure exhaling mist; along rows of old houses and cottages, the wooden signs of pubs hanging overhead with homey, inviting names: The Fox and Pheasant, The Old Spotted Dog, The Huntsman’s Hearth. And they marched along country roads, alongside the undulating patchwork of farmers’ fields, and over little stone bridges over burbling creaks, while farmers in brown suits and grey caps and green Wellington boots up to the knees waved at them from their fields, from the seats of high tractors, from haystacked wagons pulled by teams of mighty Clydesdale horses—nostrils snorting mist, heads bobbing, bells jingling, mighty knobby-kneed legs bent at the ankles and condensing into a chorus of clopping hooves, tails sweeping haughtily from side to side as they deposited cairns of steamy, grassy round turds in their wake.
And they marched aboard ships once again, out into the sea, a great armed convoy, troopships and transports and warships, through the Straits of Gibraltar, into the Mediterranean, the coast of Africa off to starboard, fabled Deepest Darkest Africa; they crowded the rail and looked at the ghostly sliver of land between sea and sky rising into a greyish hill here and there, reaching upward from one abyss into another; and they steamed on in the knowledge that they would arrive in some zone of contention, perhaps Africa, perhaps Italy, perhaps Greece and the Balkans.
And they disembarked at Naples and marched through the streets, and they marched along country roads choked with tired and bedraggled refugees, the refugees hauling their possessions on foot, or in limbers and wagons pulled by mules or sick, skeletal horses; and they moved day by day, week by week to their first combat posting.
And now marching back along this road, alongside which is strewn ruin and destruction, he feels like he did that first time he marched to the front. As they marched through the shattered ruins of Ortona, marching upward to the front for the first time, their nostrils were greeted to a ripe wet smell of char, the rains having extinguished the last of the fires of the great battle and left in their wake a match-stink of old burning, the scorched and bitter essence of incendiary decay. Along the ghostly streets of the port city, rubble bulldozed aside, were the gutted shells of shops, the tottering façades of blasted townhouses, the chinked and chipped and pitted edifice and shattered basilica of the medieval San Tommaso Cathedral, the city’s centerpiece; the broken beams and piles of brick and stone, the advertising signs, the marquees, the morbid little details—a ruined ladies’ wear store, wooden mannequins lying heaped in the street like artists’ studies for bodies, one of them missing a head, having been heaved out of the display window by an explosion or by the vandalism of soldiers, the store bereft of goods—there were likely men from the 1st Canadian Infantry Division who had fought the battle with trophy brassieres, skirts, dresses, stockings and elegant hats for comic mementoes.
Moving ahead to where war had moved its season, to the front, at night into position, digging in while awaiting the exposure of a flare, the sweep of a machine gun or the crash of artillery and mortars. Observing from his position on the eve of his first patrol, looking out over the sandbags, preparing to step out into the darkness. Distant crackle of machine-gun fire followed by the thud of a mortar, a conversation of weaponry. A staccato sentence of lead, of death, punctuated with an exclamatory explosion. The knife edge, the sharp end, the front.
“Left, Right, Left, Right, Left, Right, Left! Left! Left, Right, Left!”
And now, here and now, marching back into battle under the cloak of the fallen night, he finds himself unable to march of his own free will, bonded to his officers’ oaths, beckoned by the voices of General Hoffman, Colonel Hobson, and even Gordon, that fusspot; moving ahead if only to prove his mettle to his fellow officers and men; pushed ahead by the expectations of others and the pride of the regiment; urged onward by a grumble of tanks from behind.
To the side, as they march, he sees Lance Corporal Fitzpatrick lying on the ground clutching his stomach, the blood flowering out from between his fingers; Fitzpatrick looks at him and meets his eye in passing, and nearby are Blake and Schneider and Kelly and Leprenniere and Bly and Big John, Big John clutching his bleeding gut, the dead tank crewman hung slack over his shoulder, for Christ’s sake; and all are looking at him with their pale revenant faces as if awaiting him to join their ranks, as if in death they see the future and are seen only by those who will soon join them. What the hell are they doing here, they’re dead, they’re gone, they stand guard at the gates of eternity, now they’re in white robes in the meadows of heaven with Grandma and Grandpa or so you conjure as you cry into your pillow and muse on eternity forever and evering its way into the vortex of itself—there is thunder and his mother is nowhere near, he cannot dash into her bed or slide under a church pew. The images of the dead soldiers, so vivid for a moment, so real, are now gone. Get it together, man! You’re an officer! Smarten up, for Christ’s sake and straighten up by God you have a job yes you have a job here a commission—
“Battalion—HALT! By the right, break—OFF!” The soldiers break ranks and are marshalled in the ensuing commotion by their company commanders.
“Able Company, dig in!” shouts Jim as the soldiers disperse from the road. They chip away in the darkness at the earth with their spades by the roadside, obscured by trees, hacking, digging, grunting, sweating. Witchewski barks at them, as do all their section leaders, encouraging them, bantering with them, digging along with them, nearly a hundred men in a small glade digging into the earth for what protection it can offer. Here and there, shells fall, mostly in the distance.
His scalp itches. The stress of awaiting action has brought on dandruff. He removes his helmet and scratches the top of his head to the accompaniment of a cathartic sigh. The scratching triggers a snowfall of yellowy white flakes. Too much living, lived too quickly, and another layer of life is shed, now food for microbes. The earth is content with shed hair and skin in the knowledge that after these dainty hors d’œuvres, these appetizers, will indeed come the main course.
25
In the roomy cinderblock barn now serving as his headquarters, he ticks down the minutes till the attack, cigarette by cigarette, the burning fuse of time. Twenty minutes. Ten minutes. Soldiers come and go.
“Tea or coffee, sir?” He looks up to see Cooley.
“Coffee, please. Or tea. Actually I don’t care which, whichever you can serve me the quickest.”
“Yes, sir.” Awaiting his beverage, Jim opens his cylindrical map case and produces his copy of the battle area map and his typewritten orders, now dog-eared and oiled by the nervous thumbing of his fingers. Time to look like an officer again. There is a poke on his shoulder. Jim looks up and sees Cooley hovering over him: “Tea, sir?”
Beckoning War Page 20