A great hole smoking like a pit in hell, and naked and half-naked bodies and bits of bodies, blood and guts everywhere, all mixed together with burst sandbags and bits of splintered wood. They got out the boys who had only been wounded, but the dead were all still there when Akers arrived with his crew. And when he came around the corner of the traverse and saw the bodies, he stopped dead in his tracks and stared at them as if all of a sudden there was no one else there but just him and them.
Once somewhere behind the lines in some village with most of its houses blown up, some Frenchman had a girl show. No music or anything like that. Just these women who came out and flounced around on the stage and pulled their dresses up with nothing underneath but their black-haired crotches. And the soldiers, their eyes glued to those white bellies and fat, white legs above black stockings, and those black-haired crotches, had a stunned, stupid look as if all of a sudden they had been deprived of their wits.
That was the look on Akers’ face that day as he stood looking at those naked and half-naked dead men.
One of his crew was a boy who couldn’t have been more than eighteen, and when he saw the bodies, he went as white as a sheet and started to shake. One of the bodies was lying face down across a pile of dirt with all its clothes blown off, and Akers said to the boy, ‘Don’t that remind you of your girlfriend?’ The boy turned around and puked until it looked as if he was going to die. That was when one of the boys went after Akers with his rifle butt. They got hold of him before he did any damage, but Akers reported him anyway, and he got three days’ pack drill.
“‘Ash-cans’ was what we used to call them mortar bombs,” Maclean said to Leveret.
“That’s right,” Leveret said. “You got a better memory than I have. You even used to be able to talk to them Frenchmen a little, didn’t you? They was sumpin’, wasn’t they? Them and the god-damned English. Wasn’t they just sumpin’ too. And their god-damned officers with their fuckin’ airs. Wonder somebody didn’t shoot ‘em.”
You men, you men there, what are you doing here? Get out where you belong. Lieutenant! Lieutenant whatever-your name is! You there! These men of yours have mud on their boots! Try to make them look a little more like soldiers. You Canadians are a disgrace to His Majesty’s uniform.
Once somewhere near Festubert, they sent them an English lieutenant. They’d been marched half the night in full pack, first this way and then that, listening to shell fire and machine guns off ahead, all of them hoping to Christ it would be over before they got there. A mile or more behind the line, their lieutenant and five of the boys were killed by shrapnel, and soldiers were scattered all over the place. Floundering around in the dark, cursing and falling over each other, they got themselves back together again, more or less, and settled down in one of the rear support trenches and went to sleep.
When they woke up, they found they now had this English lieutenant. He didn’t look more than twenty years old, and he was as smooth-faced as a girl. But he was all dressed up in a spanking, new officer’s uniform out of a London tailor shop, and he was carrying a cane and a fucking great revolver that he probably didn’t know one end of from the other. It was as plain as death that he’d never been in the line before that morning. He had been dug out of some headquarters somewhere probably, and here was his chance to show what he was made of and do his bit for King and Country. Except that he was scared out of his mind. You could tell the minute you looked at him that he was going to get himself killed and that he knew it. He was like a man walking in his sleep. Or a man about to be put in front of a firing squad.
That day was one of the worst he could remember. Attacks. Counter attacks. Torrents of shells coming down from every direction. Machine guns firing from every direction. And them sitting there in that trench, getting peppered with shrapnel and having the shit scared out of them by high explosives, no one knowing where they were or what the hell was going on.
Half way through the morning, they were ordered up through a maze of communication trenches to the main support trench. The Germans, it turned out, had just taken the forward trench, and the boys who had been in it and weren’t already dead were holding out in shell holes and back along the communication trenches. It was their job to join up with them and re-take the forward trench before the Germans had time to consolidate it.
The English general who had come to inspect them, whoever he was—they all looked and talked the same—stood on a little platform with a swagger stick under his arm and shouted at them in a high-pitched voice, “If you lose a trench, there is to be no hesitation, no waiting for orders. The standing order is that it is to be re-taken immediately at the point of the bayonet. The point of the bayonet, you understand.” And he stood up on tiptoes on his little platform and stabbed at the air with his swagger stick.
Captain Bolton gave the order, and over they went, not standing up or any of that craziness, but over and into the first shell hole and then the next one and some of them working along the communication trenches throwing mills bombs. Everybody except the English lieutenant. When the order was given to go over, he gave a shout and climbed over the parapet and went charging ahead waving the cane and the revolver. The Germans were so surprised by this fit of suicidal lunacy that they let him run fifty yards or more before they turned a machine gun on him. The blood flew, and he went ass over teakettle down into a shell hole.
They lost a third of the company, dead and wounded, in the attack. But somewhere down the line, one of the other companies got back into the forward trench, and the Germans in front of their company started trying to get back to their own line before they got cut off. A lot of them were picked off as they tried to make it from shell hole to shell hole, and some of them were hit by their own machine gun fire.
When the boys got back into the forward trench, there weren’t any Canadians left alive. Some of the dead men who had been badly wounded had been bayoneted too, and the boys figured that the only way that could have happened was that the Germans had gone around and bayoneted wounded men who couldn’t resist. There were three wounded Germans left in the trench, and the boys shot them. One of them, Maclean remembered, had been shot in both legs, and he was half-sitting against one of the angles of a traverse. He had lost his helmet, and you could see that he wasn’t more than twenty years old, blond-haired, blue-eyed, as smooth faced and innocent-looking as the English lieutenant back in the shell hole.
“Bitte. Bitte. Bitte,” he kept saying.
Some of the boys felt sorry for him and were for letting him off, but there was a big man named Nelson who had lost one of his pals in the attack, and he said, “Bitte, yourself, you little son of a whore, you bayoneted our boys.”
And he shot him between the eyes and blew the whole back of his head off.
When Captain Bolton came along and asked what the shooting was about, Nelson said, “They resisted, sir.”
Bolton knew well enough what had happened, but he had seen the bayoneted men too, and he said, “All right, but no more.”
Sometimes, if no one was attacking anyone else, the Germans and Canadians let each other get in their wounded, but everyone was too mad this time to do that, so a lot of the wounded in the open had to lie there until dark. Then the boys managed to get in all the ones who were still alive without losing anybody doing it. Their dead men, including the English lieutenant, they shoveled some dirt over and marked with a piece of board in case they wanted to try to get them later. The dead Germans they left. They were going to stink, but there was no sense getting killed over a stink.
Everyone expected another artillery barrage the next morning and another attack. But the next morning nothing happened except a lot of random rifle and machine-gun fire. The day after that they were pulled back for their three days out. In fact, they were out for over a week while they were brought back up to strength. When they got back, the trenches had been fixed up, but the bodies, half-b
uried Canadians and what the rats had left of the unburied Germans, were still out there between the support trench and the forward trench.
Then one afternoon, a few days after they got back into the line, two English majors and a lieutenant arrived in the support trench along with Captain Bolton and their new lieutenant, named Archie Macleod, one of the best while they had him.
One of the majors was the father of the English lieutenant who had got himself killed in the counter-attack, and he had come to get his son’s body. He was a fat little man who didn’t look any more like a soldier than Miss Audrey Sweet, and he must have had some kind of staff job somewhere to have enough pull to get permission to do what he was doing. It wasn’t a healthy time to be chasing around out there looking for bodies, but Bolton was only a captain and Macleod was only a lieutenant, and they were two majors and English besides.
You wouldn’t have lasted ten seconds out there in daylight, so they sat around in Bolton’s dugout until it got dark, and it was arranged that Macleod and a couple of the boys who had buried the English lieutenant would go out for him. The English lieutenant who had come along with the father and who looked as if he had never seen a trench before either, wanted to go too, to demonstrate his bravery no doubt, but Bolton refused that at least, saying he didn’t know the ground and would be a danger to his men.
So Macleod and the two boys sneaked out of the communication trench through one of the holes that had been blown in it. They took a little lantern covered over with a ground sheet that they could use to make sure they had the right body without showing any light the Germans might see. But the Germans saw something anyway, and ten minutes later there was a great rattle of machine gun fire.
“Them fuckin’ pongos are gonna get us all killed,” somebody muttered.
But there wasn’t any mortaring, just the machine gun fire, and after a while that let up, and just when it was beginning to look as if Macleod and the others had been caught by the machine guns, the word went along the trench that they were back.
He had been there himself in the little crowd that had gathered just where the communication trench came into the support trench. The two boys came in dragging the body on the ground sheet followed by Macleod. The body had been out there for a week and half by then, and the face was getting rotten, but you could tell who it was all right if you knew him. The Englishmen had never seen any of this before, nor even imagined it—the dirt, the slime, the rubbish, the stink, let alone what a week-and-a-half-old body looked like that had been machine-gunned and left to rot in the mud.
The three of them stood there looking down at it. The lieutenant, the stupid bastard, saluted it. The father just looked. Then he dropped down on his knees on the duckboards and started to cry. “My son, my son, my son.” As a staff officer, he had probably filled the boy full of bullshit about King and Country and the charge of the god-damned Light Brigade. Still you couldn’t help feeling sorry for him. It went on and on. He just collapsed. After a while, the other major got him to his feet, and they got the body onto a stretcher, and a couple of the boys went off down the trench with it with the Englishmen shuffling along behind like drunk men. Crazy.
He’d never had the faintest idea what that battle was about, and neither had anybody else he’d ever talked to. When histories of the war began to come out, he found one in the Legion and looked through it, but all he could find out about what was going on around Festubert at the time was a reference to some “brisk” skirmishes. Whatever all the killing had been about that day, it evidently hadn’t qualified as history. Maybe somebody had delivered orders to the wrong people, and it only got noticed after a couple of days. Maybe some general on one side or the other had decided that things had been too quiet and that soldiers would lose their edge if more of them weren’t getting killed.
He found a bottle, their third bottle, once again in his hand. It had been going back and forth, and he had been drinking without noticing. Now there was left in it only one small swig. He tipped it, and rolled the warm, sweet wine around in his mouth before swallowing it.
All that stuff was a long time ago, and long gone, and he had survived when there had been many times he never thought he would, when he saw himself lying dead out there, no different from the mud he was lying in his mud-coloured uniform.
He lay back against the bank and put his hands under his head and closed his eyes. The waxwings that Buster had scared off blowing up the paper bag had come back to the chokecherry bushes and were fluttering and chirruping behind him. From far away, he could hear the sound of the traffic on the bridge, a mere whisper, like the rustle of leaves, in the intervals of the lazy talk beside him, Bill explaining to Jimmy how to use some old shingles he had found thrown away somewhere to roof his woodshed, Leveret huffing and snuffling like an old dog, now and then treating Ginger to some profundity that had risen to his mind. (“Now this here, Ginger, is Saturday, and tomorrow’s going to be Sunday.”) Ginger silent, moving his boots around now and then on the rock, thinking maybe about his wine bottle on its way to the sunlit islands where he would go and never have to load another barrel of potatoes.
With the sunlight falling through the leaves on his face, Maclean drifted into a dreamless sleep.
6
IT WAS THE birds that woke him, a storm of wings over his head, like the sound of a sudden rain among leaves, followed at once by the rattle and crunch of boots on the clinkers at the top of the path near the tracks.
Leveret whipped the last bottle of port up from the grass behind him and put it inside his coat and lay back against the bank, tucking the bottle between his right arm and his body and putting his good hand in the pocket of his coat to hold the bottle in place in case he had to get up.
They saw the legs first, two pairs of them sliding down the steep path, then from between the bushes and out onto the rock, the two men entire: Willie Campbell and, close behind, Junior Tedley, who in his brainless way had shouted after Maclean on Main Street that morning when he was trying to make it back to his dinner.
Willie Campbell was short, thick-set, big-muscled. Black hair, thick black eyebrows, a three- or four-day growth of black beard, hairy black arms, black everything, including a black heart. He had a little farm across the river, and a skinny, sickly, little wife who was pregnant all the time, and a brood of dirty kids. After he had been drinking for a while, he had a way of turning ugly, and once he started drinking, he never stopped until he ran out or drank himself insensible. It was when he was still on his feet and had nothing left to drink that he was at his ugliest.
Junior Tedley was a clown—tall, thin, except for a little beer-belly and a fat ass, with bug eyes and a great, foolish, turned-down moustache that he kept stroking one side of, the way he had seen some gun-fighter do in a cowboy movie.
They came down so fast that nobody had time to get up, and they were all still half-sitting, half-lying against the bank when Willie emerged from the path to confront them, his eyes going everywhere, looking for a bottle, and also probably sizing up what he might be in for if he made trouble.
“Well,” he said in a voice which always had a snarl at the edge of it. “Looks like quite a little party goin’ on here.”
“No, no,” Jimmy said. “Nothin’ like that. We just been settin’ here soakin’ up a little sun and talkin’ about the world.”
“Are you makin’ fun of me?” Willie said, turning on him.
“No,” Jimmy said, scrambling to his feet. “Just tellin’ ya the kind of time we been havin’.”
“Bullshit,” Willie said.
He turned on Leveret.
“I hear ya just about bought out the liquor store down there this afternoon,” he said.
“I don’t know about that,” Leveret said. “We got three bottles of port for the five of us here, and we drunk ‘em all up.”
“I don’t see no empty bottles,” W
illie said.
“One there in the bushes,” Leveret said. “We threw the other two in the river.”
“We put a note in one with my name on it,” Ginger said. “And if somebody finds it, they’re maybe gonna write me a letter.”
Willie paid no attention to him and turned on Maclean.
“I hear you insulted my cousin here this mornin’,” he said. “Right there on Main Street where everybody could hear.”
He gestured at Junior, who stood beside him stroking his moustache and looking foolish, then made a move towards Maclean.
Maclean got to his feet to stay clear of any boots that might come flying his way, and Leveret and Bill got up too. Only Ginger went on sitting, still thinking about the bottle with the note in it.
“I didn’t know Junior was your cousin,” Jimmy said.
“Well, you know it now,” Willie said without looking at him.
“So what have ya got to say?” he asked Maclean.
“Willie,” Maclean said, “don’t talk such horseshit. Junior isn’t any more your cousin than I am.”
“Are you callin’ me a liar?” Willie shouted at him. “Or my cousin here?”
“I said ‘hello’ and you told me to fuck off,” Junior said.
“I was in hurry,” Maclean said. “I didn’t even look to see who it was.”
“You lyin’ bastard,” Willie said.
He put his fists up and shuffled towards Maclean like a boxer moving in for the kill.
Time was when Maclean could have beaten the shit out of Willie Campbell, but that time was long gone. He put one arm up to protect himself and backed away, but there wasn’t much space to back to. Watching Willie, not where he was going, he slipped on the damp moss at the edge of the rock, and before he could catch himself fell half sideways down through the bushes. The branches scraped his face as he went down, and he hit the side of his head against something, an old stump or a rock.
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