by P. S. Duffy
“Royal Vic,” the man said in an almost inaudible whisper.
“What?” Angus balled up the man’s coat and pressed on the wound. The officer whispered, “Royal Vic.” He looked at Angus intently until life faded from his eyes. Angus forced himself to go through his pockets and found a map, which he held in his shaking hand. And a picture postcard of the Royal Victoria Hospital in Montreal with German words on the other side. The sheath for the Bowie was snapped to the officer’s belt. He must have had the knife up his sleeve. Angus pocketed the map and the pistol and stood.
Keegan and Kearns rounded the traverse. “Here’s the owner of the pearl-handled Luger,” Angus told them. “And this.” He unfolded the map.
The blade of the knife glinted up at him. A Bowie, known as the German’s favorite weapon for slicing throats of the wounded left in No Man’s Land. Soundless death. He picked up the knife. “Sheffield” was imprinted on the outsized blade. It could have sliced a throat, alright. And gone through his groin like butter. He looked down at the dead officer, sorrow turning bitter in his mouth. “You could have surrendered,” he said again as he unfastened the sheath and slid the knife into it. The postcard fluttered away.
WITHIN THE HOUR, they’d angled partway down the steeper eastern side of the ridge and caught up to the troops Angus had seen through his binoculars, but who, it turned out, were a remnant of B Company from the 91st. Angus reported to the officer in charge, a bandy-legged captain with a curling mustache, who said he thought the 17th had joined the 45th somewhere toward La Chaudière.
Angus looked at the map. “You sure they’re headed toward La Chaudière?” he asked.
“Look, Lieutenant,” the captain snapped. “I’m not sure of anything. It’s one day after the battle. You can’t find your own company. I think our rations party is lost. We’ve passed any number of lost bands of men roaming about. We were supposed to hold the line. Then I get word the line is moving by the hour as the Germans retreat. We need to pursue. Fine. All for it. Then I hear from a runner that we’re supposed to halt. Then, no, that’s wrong. I’ve got this map here . . .”
They compared maps, but the captain refused to take corrections from Angus. “I’ll trust my Allied map over your Kraut one,” he said. “And anyway, what good is that map if you don’t know where you’re headed. I’m going to stop at that abandoned breastworks up ahead and send scouts back to find that blasted rations party. You’re welcome to hook up with us temporarily.”
Angus declined.
“Should we maybe stick with them, sir, for now? You know, strength in numbers?” Keegan eyed the open terrain.
“They’re not headed for the 17th. We’ll find our way. Trust me,” Angus said. “I know where I’m going.” He tucked the map in his pocket and felt the knife hitched now to his belt. He’d shot that German before he’d even seen it. But the man did have a knife. And had faked a wound. “Royal Vic.” Maybe he’d been a doctor there once. Or a patient. Left Montreal and went back to the homeland. Forced into the war . . . or had volunteered. What did it matter? Angus flung the Luger as far as he could and moved on.
Sleet dulled sound and obliterated the landscape, except for the shadow of the ridge behind them. The ground was slick and, oddly, they were moving through tall grass. Angus had it in mind to find a point beyond the Lens–Arras Road that lined up between La Chaudière and La Coulotte. From there he’d find the 17th on their way or already encamped. He was certain of it. His platoon struggled on behind him.
As they drew near the point where Angus planned to site their position, they came across a silver-haired man leading a small party. Colonel Stokes! Thank God. Or maybe not. There was a vacant look in his eye. He didn’t salute. He was disheveled and alone, save for a corporal and two privates. His uniform was blackened.
Angus asked him about the camp. Stokes looked to the east, to the west, and behind to the south. “Have you seen my horse?”
“No sir,” Angus replied.
“Right then. Form your men up,” Stokes said.
“Form up?”
“Can’t afford to have discipline break down. Lead on.”
“Sir, do you know where the camp is? Your staff . . . ?”
“Had to see to these boys here from the 102nd.”
“101st,” the corporal whispered.
Angus pulled the corporal aside and asked him what was going on. “We got separated from our company, when we . . . came upon the colonel.” The corporal glanced back nervously.
“Alone? Was he alone?”
“Yes sir. Sitting in the grass.”
Angus left it at that. How Stokes had become detached from his staff and possibly from reality was something Angus had no time to find out.
The Lens–Arras Road was hidden from view by mist or by a rise in the landscape, he couldn’t tell. The slope was almost imperceptible, but yes—a gentle swell, and another just beyond it. The camp was probably in the hollow between the two. There were enough trees left of the “wald” on the German map to indicate a wood. Where else could the 17th be? It was the only possible place if the officer from the 91st had been right, and if the German map in his hand was accurate, and if they were where he thought they were.
They moved on. Stokes stood to the side and watched the group file by as if on his stallion reviewing the troops. Angus sent Keegan back to fetch him, to no avail. To get him moving, Angus asked for orders, which he supplied with military demeanor and dignity of rank. All he was missing was context.
AN HOUR LATER they were threading their way through a group of men shoveling in bully beef at the edge of the camp. Biscuits, too. Angus nearly grabbed one off a soldier’s plate. He saw a private weeping on the ground in the arms of his pal. His breath quickened at the sight of the men from the 45th. But he kept on, Stokes stumbling beside him. A few of the men registered astonishment at the sight of Stokes, his ribbons dangling at an angle, cap missing. Angus told Keegan to see that the men got fed, and turned to lead Stokes on to Rushford, when he stopped dead in his tracks. Not ten yards away, crouched on the ground, tin plate in hand, was Ebbin. Not dead. Not wounded. Not missing.
“Know him, sir?” he heard Keegan say. Angus ignored him but couldn’t move. Keegan squinted suspiciously at Ebbin and back again at Angus. Angus kept his eyes on Ebbin, who set his plate down and looked up. They stared at each other, and time stretched out between them to the innocence of boyhood and back again to the blackened corpses on the hill. There was in that moment a thread of connection to home and each other. But in that raised chin and sober face, Angus saw Havers as well. Havers who had taken Ebbin Hant through Thiepval and now through Vimy without a scratch on him. It was with a prayer thanking God that Angus left him there as Lance Corporal Havers.
WHEN HE USHERED Stokes in, Rushford saluted and said, “Sir! Thank God,” but whatever relief Rushford may have felt vanished as Stokes saluted absently and lowered himself into a camp chair, where he sat fingering a button on his tunic, unresponsive to Rushford’s questions. Aghast, Rushford pulled Angus aside. Angus told him how he’d found the colonel. Stokes had been given up for dead, Rushford whispered. His party had unaccountably gotten caught in the actual battle, and the colonel’s horse had charged off. An explosion. Perhaps the horse threw him, Rushford said. Miraculous he was still alive, all the more that he’d been found. His immediate aides had not been so lucky. He told Angus to make a full report but cautioned him against mentioning the colonel’s condition. “Amazing you found the camp,” he said. “Good instincts. Well done.” Angus handed him the German map. Rushford took it gratefully, then sniffed several times. “Fritz is out there, you know,” he said, running his knuckles under his mustache. “Bringing in fresh recruits, preparing a counterattack. We’re sitting ducks until we can build a road and get our heavy artillery over that ridge.”
“LOOK WHO’S COME in from the cold,” Conlon said when Angus found him. The shoulder of his tunic was in tatters. He got up off the crate he was sitting on and s
miled that slow smile of his, and they exchanged a rough embrace.
“You look like hell,” Conlon said.
“As do you. Hell and back. Were you wounded?”
Conlon shrugged. “Nope. Lucky break. Bullet through the sleeve.”
Publicover rounded the tent. A dirty field dressing dangled from his earlobe; a thin row of stitches held the top of his ear together. He clapped a hand on Angus’s shoulder and said not a word. In the silence of their circle, Angus felt the fragments of the past twenty-four hours begin to gather and fall into place.
“Any accounting of the battalion?” he asked.
“Not yet. The numbers are coming in.” Conlon paused, then added, “Stokes is missing.”
“Was lost and now he’s found,” Angus said.
“Really. And you the one who found him?” Conlon asked.
“Now, that’s a story I want to hear.” Publicover ripped the bandage off his ear.
“All in good time. Got something for you.” Angus was about to hand him the horn-handled Bowie, but remembered the old wives tale that handing someone a knife cuts the friendship. He placed it on the crate. “Might come in handy for your future kills,” he said with a smile.
“A Bowie.” Publicover whistled as he slid the knife from its sheath and slowly turned it over. He looked up from under a shock of matted blond hair. “Let me guess, found it on some dead Imperial. Or took it off a Kraut officer you killed with your bare hands.”
“You figure it out,” Angus said.
Publicover gave a short laugh and said, “Welcome home, MacGrath.”
SIXTEEN
April 14th, 1917
Vimy Ridge
Arras Sector, France
“ Damn it!” Publicover said four days later on hearing Conlon’s news. He stomped around in a tight circle, shoving at the dirt with his boot. “Goddamn it. We had our fucking orders. March back to Château de Villers. Today.”
Orders had changed, Conlon said, and now they wouldn’t be replaced for another day. He had other news. Early numbers were coming in for the 17th. Some 51 killed, 280 wounded. No telling how many of them survived. But their losses were much lighter than other regiments, some of which had a 70 percent casualty rate. A road was being built and small-gauge track laid. Supplies had begun to arrive. A new front was being established all along the eastern side of the ridge. Their sector had been quiet, but a working party, sent out to put barbed wire forward of the line, had not returned. Worse, it was rumored there was a howitzer hiding in the brush near where the party had fallen, ready for the Allied advance. Rushford had ordered Conlon to take a patrol out and bring back information.
“What information?” Angus asked.
“Find the heavy gun that HQ thinks is out there and, if possible, take out the machine gun that’s worrying our working parties. Seems you did such a good job of finding the colonel that Rushford wants you onboard. ‘Get that Lieutenant MacGrath. Good with maps. Uncanny sense of direction’ were his exact words.” Conlon gave Angus a nod and said, “Strangely, he wants me in it as well. Maybe wants to get rid of me, but that’s another story. Our dapper Rushford seems to be managing field command without Stokes. Our major problem is further up the chain of command—no plan for pursuit. It’s as if no one thought we’d actually take that ridge.” He shrugged. “Ah well. So the plan is we go out, gather what information we can on artillery. Find our way back and report in. And they’ll send out a larger patrol based on our intelligence. You in, Sam?”
Publicover spat on the ground. “Yeah. I’m in. Course I’m in.”
“Right. Now, help me scratch up a few men. Four will do.” He glanced at Angus’s leg wound.
“I’m fine,” Angus said. “I’m in.”
LATE THAT NIGHT at the edge of the camp, Angus felt the exhilaration and exhaustion of surviving a gale at sea. He thought about Ebbin and “the grand sweep of history.” He was part of it. They both were. He was one with the company of men who had survived—the sheer luck of it. The blessing. The burden. He whispered a prayer for the men he’d lost, and for Roddy. He could hear Roddy’s booming laugh, felt the strength of his presence beside him. The grasses glittered with a thin coat of ice in the moonlight across the long unbroken plain before him. Just short days ago, the ridge behind him had been the point of existence, the alpha and the omega. Soon it would be but a memory. For time had not ceased. The war had not ended. Like the icy plain before him, the war stretched out to a never-ending, unknown end. This he also considered, before heading back to his men.
AT NINE O’CLOCK the following evening, under a brilliant night sky, Angus and Keegan waited for the others at the rendezvous point on the edge of the camp. Conlon appeared from the shadows with Publicover and two others, introduced as Corporal Burwell, who spoke German, and Private Voles, a sniper. Behind them came another.
“Lance Corporal Havers,” Conlon said.
“Havers?” Angus stammered.
“Yes, Havers. The secret weapon. Remember? What’s the problem?” Publicover shot a look at Havers, who joined them and glanced at Angus with cool detachment and looked away.
“Surprised is all,” Angus whispered.
Publicover, agitated to start with, was even more so now. “Yeah, right. What’s going on here?” He looked from Angus to Havers.
Keegan knit his brows and did the same. “Sir, is this the—”
Angus flashed a look that silenced him.
Conlon pulled Angus out of earshot of the others. “You know something I don’t? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
“No. It’s just . . . is he up to it?”
“What do you mean, is he up to it? This is Havers, the guy with no fear in him. Invincible. Survived Ypres, Courcelette, the massacre on that ridge three days ago. That’s why I took him.”
“Yeah, but maybe he’s got something to prove.”
“How’s that?”
“He’s got that reputation to live up to or a death wish or . . .”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“Nothing. Never mind.”
“What’s going on, MacGrath?” Conlon’s words came out slowly. He put his head down, hands on his hips. “You see something I don’t?”
“No. It’s just— He makes me nervous. I mean, can we trust all that’s been said about him?”
“I have no reason not to trust it.” Conlon looked up. “Do I?”
“No sir.” Angus strapped on his helmet. There was no alternative except the truth, and it was far too late for that. He glanced back at Ebbin, standing erect, patiently waiting. He’d have to trust it was Havers they had with them. And trust that he himself would be able to believe it well enough to function.
“Do I?” Conlon repeated.
Angus shook his head.
“No reason. None that you know of . . .”
“No, damn it. None that I know of.”
“Okay then.” Conlon signaled the men, and they moved silently out into the still night beyond the camp.
LOW TO THE ground, they crept through the tall grasses, sometimes on their stomachs, and froze every time a flare shot up, waiting for it to fade so they could breathe again and inch forward. After a while there were no more flares, which could mean the enemy had their own patrols out. Out where? was the question.
Angus brought up the rear, Ebbin right ahead of him. Ebbin or Havers, and he prayed it was the invincible Havers. He welcomed the fear that sliced thought to ribbons and forced him to focus on the ground—this stub of a tree to the left, this hillock to the right—each landmark catalogued in relation to the others in this, the new No Man’s Land. He prayed he would remember.
An hour and forty-five minutes later, they stole up to a rise, topped by a tangled thicket and a few spare trees and one thick-trunked oak that gave them fairly good cover. To the right in a gully below lay what appeared to be the dead Canadians from the working party, two leaning up against each other, one folded over at the waist, one staring u
p at the sky, his gloved hand on a tightly wound bolt of barbed wire.
In the field beyond the gully was a barn with a high stone foundation. Another massive oak stood guard beside it. In the quiet moonlight, everything was sharply defined in black and white. They could see the loft, doors open, facing them. The great barn doors below it were bolted shut. There was a low stone wall about four feet high some ten yards to the left, running parallel. Woods beside it wrapped around the open field behind the barn.
Angus took out his pad. In the light of the moon, he sketched the ground, made notes and put them away.
A German soldier came around from the back of the barn, looked up at the sky, arched his back and went back behind the barn. Far to the southeast, they could hear machine guns chattering. Then they heard voices.
Behind them.
Two enemy soldiers were coming up the very rise they were on. It was clear from their easy movement that they were unafraid, knew protection was nearby. Obviously in the barn, though maybe also in the woods. Conlon nodded at Publicover, who silently withdrew the Bowie. As if on cue, the moon slid behind a cloud. In seconds Publicover was on them, slitting the throat of the first and walking the other back up the rise with the knife to his neck. He forced the man down on his knees behind the thicket.
The soldier’s eyes were wide with horror, as were Burwell’s. Keegan took the man’s helmet off.
“Kamerad,” the terrified man whispered. Conlon told him to shut up, and told Burwell to tell the man he could save himself by telling them where the machine gun was, how many men were in the barn, the location of the howitzer—and, by the way, they were not his comrades. Burwell, panicky and breathing hard, smoothed his black mustache and glanced at Publicover. Publicover arched an eyebrow. Burwell knelt before the prisoner and did as he was told, whispering in halting German. The prisoner, a tall man, was shaking violently, the features of his long face gripped with fear. Publicover pulled the knife closer and straightened him up. The prisoner began to blurt something out.