He nodded and left.
One man and now another—drunk with revelation, converted by God’s own D.T.’s. I took a deep breath. The air stank and was heavy with damp. I stood, hoping the walls would sparkle. They didn’t, so I waded back to my party.
It’s leaving Pickering that’s the hardest. At lights out, I packed my things; and he tried to give me money for my share of the primus. I refused to take it.
He’d had a couple of drinks too many. He started tossing gear around the dugout until Calvert told him to stop. When the sentry passed, we crawled into our sleeping bags. Calvert blew out the candle. In the silence I heard the patter of rain.
“If you planned to duck duty,” Pickering said, “you might have done it smart.”
“Wasn’t planning for this to happen, Pickering.”
“That’s balls!” he said so loud that Calvert went to shushing him.
Mean-voiced, Pickering went on. “No one in the battalion believes you lost your nerve. They say you wanted out and are simply pretending to be bonkers. Goodson as much as said, ‘Surprised Stanhope didn’t go shouting that he seen the three bloody blue lights, and peace was here, and it was no more use dawdling about in the trenches.’ Me, I think you cocked up for the final time. We go through litter carriers like tea packets. You’re a derby duck now, Stanhope. I hope you realize.”
Maybe I was crazy. I looked around at the darkness. Nothing shone. It made me lonely, that dark. Tomorrow there would be a new dugout. Deadly duty. Unfamiliar faces.
“A derby duck,” Pickering said.
The next day he had a bad head from drinking, but Pickering walked me down the trench to the place where I’d climb the bags. He hugged me, then shoved me arm’s length away. We stood there in the trench, under the glowering sky.
“You do not have my permission to die, Stanhope. I hope you realize.”
Down the traverse I could hear the curses of men, the gritty scrapes of shovels. “Hey. I’m still part of the company. We’ll be seeing each other around.”
“Not on a bloody litter,” he said. “Have no intentions of that.”
I promised. “Not on a bloody litter.” He started to wade away. I grabbed his arm. “Need to ask you something. You won’t be mad?”
He went serious, the way you don’t often see Pickering look.
“Did you ever grab Marrs’s hand?”
That still face. The hurt in him. Then he snorted, pulled my helmet down over my eyes. “Bonkers,” he said.
I guess it’s the last I’ll see of him for a while.
Travis Lee
NOVEMBER 23, THE RESERVE TRENCHES AID POST
Dear Bobby,
Under the barrage of artillery, the barrage of the rain, the earth goes slope-shouldered and surrenders in exhaustion. When shells fall, me and the three other carriers take up the litter and go looking for the wounded. We follow the shrieks and the moans. We find men with arms yanked off them, with bellies erupting intestines. We watch while the buried are exhumed. If the boys come up alive, we take them and slog up the trench, bumping the litter around the narrow bends. We lug them through the gluey mud to the aid post; and we don’t have the strength to be gentle. Broken bones gnash. Stumps spurt. Life spills out of field dressings. The wounded scream every time the litter jolts.
Four litter bearers for two hundred and forty men. A stern taskmaster, that vision. Easier to sharpshoot No Man’s Land. Still, the thought of extinguishing that fire numbs me. It makes me break out in a sweat clammier than the sight of the dying. Strange how murder wasn’t a sin until I knew.
The new boys and me haven’t visited much. While we’re working we’re too busy to talk; we’re too tired for conversation when we’re not. Turnhill. A boy they call Mugs. One they call Uncle Tim. The things we see.
Yesterday we carried one of the corporals up from behind the parados. The field telegraph had gone dis, and he’d been running a message from Command when a daisy-cutter got him. His only luck was that the concussion had knocked him out cold. He’d been hit in the side, too. Not much blood, but his belly had started to swell.
“Won’t make it,” Uncle Tim said. He was all for putting down the litter. It was pouring rain. Mud was to our thighs. Hard enough to get out of that muck without dragging that dying corporal. Daisy-cutters kept dropping on us, too. I didn’t bother turning to look back, but I could hear the sharp cracks as they hit.
“Put a bung in it,” Turnhill said. “I knows the lad.”
Mugs said, “Know him or not, he’s done for. Filling up with blood like a flaming balloon.”
“If he’s going to die,” I said, “somebody grab that message.”
Mugs pried it out of his rigid fingers, handed it to me. I opened the paper. It was addressed to Miller and was signed by Major Dunn.
Your field telegraph is out, the message read. Please attend to it. I stuffed the message in my pocket, and we picked up the litter and floundered on.
It was a long way to the aid station. Once in a while Turnhill or Mugs or Uncle Tim would call out to “Let up for a tick. Can’t let up?” and we’d put the corporal down. In the thigh-deep embrace of the mud, my eyes would close. Gradually, relentlessly, the wet earth would start dragging me under like a slow current of the sea. Then somebody would call, “Ready!” and we’d cuss, lift the litter, and struggle on.
By the time we climbed over the sandbags that day, we were so covered in mud that we looked like rough clay statues, and the corporal was dead.
Turnhill stared down at the litter, his face moronic with exhaustion. The corporal’s belly wasn’t swollen anymore. A crimson trickle ran down his side, had congealed in a black jelly around him.
“Oh, well,” Turnhill said. “Bugger it.”
We try the best we can, Bobby, but the battle’s lost. It’s been lost for nearly forever. When the earth falls around us, it vomits out corpses: black-faced Boche, skin loose and scummy with rot, their bright hair falling out in patches, rats nesting in their bellies. At night I roll that spine bone in my hand, round as the world, prickly as danger.
It’s still sunset in the graveyard. Dunleavy’s gone again, and except for me and the sleepers, the twilight most of the time is empty. But even though it’s lonely, I relish being there. The air’s so sweet for the breathing. I suck it down deep—all cool crystal. It’s the way that I remember air used to be.
Two nights ago I saw someone skipping beyond the monuments and the trees—the little girl that LeBlanc had murdered. She was laughing. Her white wedding dress swirled. I walked toward her, but she dashed away giggling, grave to grave. Her laughter danced with her up the steps and fell down on me like confetti.
I’m so tired and the graveyard’s so peaceful that I ache to stretch out on one of the marble slabs. I wonder if I would die there, sleeping. I wonder if I’d dream of Heaven.
Travis Lee
* * *
NOVEMBER 24, THE RESERVE TRENCHES AID POST
Dear Bobby,
Just when I thought I couldn’t take no more, the shelling let up. The nights are quiet now. I go to sleep hearing the fading calls of “Lights out!” down the trench.
Last night long after lights-out I was curled in my tiny cubbyhole near the aid station. Feet woke me, splashing and thumping up the duckboards.
“Bloody idiot,” Miller said under his breath.
For a minute I thought he was talking to me. The footsteps halted. Outside my narrow door a match flared yellow. I caught the smell of cigarette smoke.
Then I heard a tsk and a “Really” from Dunston-Smith. “Mustn’t let on, Richard. Best not to stir things up.”
A mutter of “but it’s murder” from Miller, and then the clear bright words, “keep silent any longer.”
A hissed “Shut up.”
Somewhere out there in the dark the two were discussing LeBlanc.
They walked closer. Dunston-Smith spoke again, his tone reasonable. “Look. One does what one is ordered, Richard. Good God. You
can’t afford to be awkward about it.”
Miller said, “Don’t touch me.”
“Sorry.” Dunston-Smith was breezy-toned.
My shoulder was cramping. I wanted to turn over, but I was afraid they’d hear me.
“You’re much too careless with your affections, Colin. Someone might see.”
“And it’s not careless of you to go carrying tales?”
“But Dunn refuses to do anything.”
“You’re bang on, Richard. And you mustn’t speak up either. You haven’t the bloody pull.”
The two of them smoked for a while, there in the concealing dark. Then Miller said, “You know why he’s chosen me again.”
Not really a question. There was no answer, either.
“It’s my success. It irks him. He feels he cannot afford to have me in the army, Colin. He especially cannot have me outperforming his other officers. The bastard will kill half my company simply because I am a Jew.”
So this wasn’t about one man and a handful of battered girls. It was a bigger and uglier crime than that.
Another tsk from Dunston-Smith. “You see anti-Semitism under every rock, Richard. It’s becoming tiresome.”
A cigarette butt hit the water with a hiss. Another match blazed. Miller said, “He speaks of bloody surprise. Does anyone believe we can surprise the Boche in this weather? The colonel should visit the trenches. He should see the state of these men. He should try to walk in this blasted mud.”
Dunston-Smith let his breath out in a sigh. “Will you lead them?”
“Otherwise it’s mutiny, isn’t it?”
“But will you lead them?”
Miller was quiet for so long that I was sure he wasn’t going to answer. Then a mutter, “Of course I’ll bloody lead them.”
Pray for us, Bobby. Pray that Turnhill and Uncle Tim and Mugs and me have the strength to carry all the wounded.
Travis Lee
* * *
NOVEMBER 25, THE RESERVE TRENCHES
Dear Bobby,
I thought they’d move us forward, but we stayed. Around us, shells fall thicker. We catch sleep when we can; eat when we have the time. Did Miller win us this reprieve? I’m tired of it, the slow endless shelling. I’m ready to push onward. Sometimes I think that if we go forward far enough, we’ll push through the Boche trenches and on the other side the graveyard will be waiting. I’ll see Dunleavy again and the calico girl. I can lie down on that marble slab I’ve had my eye on. God, Bobby. I’ll sleep through Judgment Day.
Today we fought our way down the trench, water to our knees, and saw a soldier brought up from his mud tomb, cussing. Cries for help sent us clawing our way over the bags. There, in the pockmarked waste between the trenches, a threesome had been filling sandbags. The daisy-cutter hit them bang on as the Brits would say. Bang on. There was a kid whose head had exploded: brains dripping down his chin like oatmeal, cherry jam splatters on his lips. Another, his thick-walled heart neatly sliced open and lying atop his chest like a medical illustration. There the aorta. There the ventricles. There the empty chamber that had once held his family. I remembered a spring afternoon and Miller quoting: Mother, whose heart hung humble as a button. We left the dead to rot.
One boy had been left alive, and he was the worse for it. A piece of shrapnel had struck between his legs. There was only a small rip in his pants. He kept reaching down, reaching down, his palm smeared with blood. His pecker and balls were gone.
Mugs saw. He went to shaking so bad that he had to drop the litter. Turnhill looked away.
“I still there?” the boy asked.
“Yeah,” I told him. Then I told him to stay quiet so we could get him on the stretcher. He kept touching himself, his hands coming away empty. “Can’t feel nothing. I still there?”
We got him on the litter and started wading toward the trench, when I heard a low thrum. A shell was coming, and it was close. I could feel its vibration in the bones of my forehead, in my teeth. Mud trapped me, kept me from running. I remember looking up.
The wind pushed and I went flying. There was no pain. No sound either, but my ears would ring for hours after. I hit the mud face-first, struggled to my feet, surprised to be alive, saw Turnhill rising, saw Uncle Tim sitting up. Mugs was standing gape-mouthed, his fingers curled as if he still carried the litter.
The blast had torn the wounded boy apart. Mugs was painted scarlet with him. The mud for yards around glistened like garnet.
Uncle Tim looked down at the ruins. “All for the best,” he said.
We wholeheartedly agreed.
I kept touching myself the rest of the day. That night I went to sleep with my hand between my legs, wondering how it would be to reach down and touch emptiness.
Travis Lee
* * *
NOVEMBER 28, THE REST AREA
Dear Bobby,
Just when I thought the world would end, just when I wanted it to, they pulled us back. We marched, and by the time we reached billets, the mud had left us exhausted. There were showers and fresh uniforms waiting, and our first decent meal in weeks. I slept deep and didn’t dream, and the next day after inspection Riddell and Blackhall asked me to dinner.
“Captain’s order,” Blackhall said, not sounding happy.
Riddell seemed shy, like he was going on a date. “We’ll go to the place that makes the fish and chips, Stanhope, if you’ve a taste for that.”
And so that’s how I came to be the only enlisted man in the company to go to town that rest period.
It was almost a splendid walk, nearly like I remembered. There was the castle, there the quiet canal. But war had passed by, too. Trash lined the roadside: rusted food tins, discarded wrapping papers, burst and leaking casks. I peered hard into the grove of trees, wondering if the owl was still alive.
The town was barren but untouched—still a gingerbread confection. The bakery shop was open, an old man and woman behind the counter now. The sidewalk in front of the bakeshop smelled of cinnamon, and rounds of potato bread were piled in the window, soft as pillows. I slowed my steps so, Blackhall barked at me to “Come along wif you, Private! Come along!”
The restaurant was empty except for a handful of officers. We ordered Riddell’s fish and chips, and since Miller was paying, the two of them shared a bottle of good French wine. For dessert they ordered expensive cheeses. We enjoyed a couple of rounds each of thick, sweet coffee.
When we were finally finished, Blackhall pushed his chair back, belched. He called for a brandy, asked if I wanted one. I said no. He told the waiter to pour me one, anyway. I looked down into the brandy’s topaz depths, said I thought we ought to be getting back.
Blackhall sent Riddell back to billets. I pushed the brandy glass a safe distance away. After three more drinks, the lieutenant finally got to his feet and told me to come with him. Together, we walked into the gathering dark.
He didn’t look drunk. Didn’t walk drunk, either. Still, I remembered what Crumb had said about Blackhall’s kind of justice. I’d felt it once, and was too tired to take it again. I’d die first. I’d just let my spirit go walking out of my body, and I’d wander No Man’s Land until I found that graveyard.
We headed back to camp, not speaking. I heard the owl hoot, then saw the bird’s lumbering flight, enormous wings beating slow through the dusk.
The last of the twilight slipped away. Near the billets, on an isolated bend in the corduroy road, Blackhall paused to light his pipe. It was misting rain. Faint and far in the distance I could hear shelling—a low, mean rumble, like a growl deep in the throat of a dog.
“ ’E doesn’t think you done it,” Blackhall said.
I knew who he meant. “Harold Crumb’s a good cop.”
“You knows more than you’re telling, though, Stanhope.” His pipe went out. He struck a match to light it again.
“Yes, sir, I do.”
The flare of the match caught his surprise.
“I’ll never tell you all of it, either. It�
�s just too goddamned shameful. But it has to do with not stopping him, even after I knew what he was doing. It has to do with me being drunk.”
The tobacco in the bowl blazed red. He dropped the match. It hit the damp logs and hissed out. The night crowded about us.
“Men involved in something like that, best to keep ’em off the streets.”
It was so dark on that bend of the corduroy road, the mist falling. I wondered when the sentry was due, if they’d find me dead on the logs in the morning.
“Funny thing: justice. Can’t teach blokes like that. Get ’em about women, they’ll do it again.”
I didn’t dare move, not even to step away.
He sucked on his pipe. The cinders in the bowl flamed. Through the dank air came the smell of pipe tobacco, in it a surprise hint of vanilla. “Thing of it is, Stanhope, soldiers die in raids, don’t they? Most is shot by enemy, some by their own chums. Mistakes ’appen. Nothing to be done.”
He knew about the coming raid. He was planning on killing me. Nothing to be done.
I thought he’d leave, but he only shifted his weight. We stood for a long time, me watching the plug of his tobacco wax and wane with the steady slow rhythm of his breath. “Sometimes men’re left to die on the field,” he said. “Can’t carry them all, can you. Leave the badly wounded. Sometimes leave ones who can be saved. Like I says, mistakes ’appen. If it comes to it, that’s the best way, Stanhope. Your ’ands is clean. Any way you decide, wants you to know I won’t be going after you for it.”
So Bobby, that night in the rest area, Blackhall gave me permission to murder, and then he walked away.
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