Flanders

by Anthony, Patricia

  Travis Lee

  * * *

  NOVEMBER 29, THE REST AREA

  Dear Bobby,

  Yesterday I went to see Pickering. He looked the same, sounded the same, but there was a distance between us, like I was looking at him though glass. In the sprinkling rain, him and me and Calvert sat on crates. We smoked and talked about the old times.

  “Always thought you were a bit of an arse,” Pickering confessed to me.

  “Always knew you was.”

  “Funny old you.” He laughed. “Miss having you about,” he said, and he wasn’t laughing anymore.

  I thought about the raid. There was no use telling them what was coming. “Miss you boys.”

  Calvert took a drag, studied the end of his Woodbine. “Ain’t the same, Stanhope. Blandish moved in wif us, you know.”

  It hurt, knowing someone had taken my place.

  “Bit of a stick, actually,” Pickering said.

  “Doesn’t know ’is way around a kettle, and you the Yank. Shame on ’im, I says.”

  Pickering agreed. “You always made good tea. No idea why. Only talent. Can’t tell a decent joke or make a jam and biscuit mash, handicapped by your Yankness as you are.”

  “Bloody ’andicapped.”

  They tried, but bad-mouthing Blandish didn’t make me feel any better.

  “Bit of an emptiness, if you want to know,” Pickering admitted. “The way you feel when your bloody pet dies. All these months I’ve felt of you as my dog, Stanhope, I must tell you.”

  With my thumb and middle finger, I thunked him on his cropped head, hit him hard, caught him totally by surprise. He dropped his cigarette, tried to thunk me back. I dodged, shoved his shoulder. He slipped off his crate into the mud, caught my arm, and tried to pull me down with him. There in the cold and the rain we laughed until we were out of breath and everything was like it was again.

  The three of us went together to the battalion show, heard Dunston-Smith play an ill-tuned upright piano while Miller and Wilson danced a heavy-footed chorus line. Colonel Caraway’s aide stepped forward across the stage, chirped his cheery, “Oh, nurse!”

  Rich folks’ silliness. The audience of poor men laughed and sang along. I watched Miller close. There were circles under his eyes. Beneath his plastered-on smile lay fatigue. I watched LeBlanc, sitting near the door, on the edge of his seat, a man on the verge of escape.

  When the show was over we ate dinner. Afterwards, Pickering wanted to find a card game, and I walked out alone into the drizzle. I kept to the corduroy road, went past a quiet knot of sentries gathered to their fire. I passed the officers’ billets and the raucous noise, the party continuing. Miller would be inside in the warm bath of light beyond the windows, soaking up the last of camaraderie before they sent him to die.

  I walked a while and pondered dying. I knew I was ready, Bobby. Miller was tired enough; and when the time came, he’d be ready, too. He’d be an inquisitive ghost, never satisfied with the “just because” answers. I pictured him standing in the mausoleum’s watery light, and the image was so vivid that it was like he was dead already. This corduroy road I was traveling would be the gravel path after an autumn rain. I’d be walking up the trail to meet him, no rank between us, no wealth, no danger of scandal, no heritage. I’d just pass through the wrought-iron gates and he’d be waiting.

  At the end of my log path, a paddock, a lamp hanging on the wall. The paddock was empty, the horses gathered, like their officer riders, inside the warm. Because nothing’s better for loneliness than horses, I opened the stable door. There, in the scent of manure and sweated leather, an officer was sitting on a hay bale, his head in his hands, a bottle of brandy by him.

  Miller looked up, swaying. “Stanhope? That you?”

  “Sir.”

  “What time s’it?” His syllables were mushy with drink.

  “Just past nine, sir.”

  He didn’t believe me. A wristwatch officer, the sort of gentleman captain that Blackhall disliked. He shoved his sleeve up, stared stupidly at his bare wrist.

  “It’s a little past nine, sir. Coming on toward lights out.”

  He upended the bottle, took a drink of brandy. Then he must have remembered his mama’s lessons. He tried his clumsy best to hand the bottle to me. “Stanhope. Private Travis ... Travis,” he managed before his tongue twisted. “Oh, bugger it. Too bloody difficult to say all at once. Still, have a go. Private. Travis Lee. Stanhope. Ah. Well done. Good show. Yes. Do join me in a drink.”

  “Not drinking anymore, sir.”

  “Ah.” He sat blinking, the brandy bottle in his lap.

  “Should get back to billets,” I said.

  Dunston-Smith’s little bay mare lifted her head over her stall door and stood watching. Lamplight ran down her silken muzzle like fire.

  “Sir?” I asked. “Need a hand?”

  He was horror-struck. “Good God, no! Bloody hell!”

  His reaction scared me. Bewildered me, too. I didn’t mean anything, I started to say, but then he was muttering. “Damned severed hand right there in the trench. Loathe that. Can’t simply vomit, can one? Not with other officers and enlisted about. Still. Must see it all the time now. Don’t understand how you can manage. Forgot.” He frowned for a while at his bottle.

  “Forgot what, sir?”

  Somewhere to the back of the stables, a horse whuffled. Such a warm sound. A nice sound, like the cooing of pigeons, like the homey cluck of a nesting hen.

  Miller waved in exasperation. “Don’t know, for God’s sake. If I bloody knew, I shouldn’t have forgotten.”

  A funny drunk, but full of a strange tense melancholy, too. He squinted up at me again. His expression went cheery. “Of course! Stupid of me. Haven’t asked.”

  “Asked?”

  “Asked,” he said. “Begged,” he amended, stretching the word carefully over his brandy slur. “Begged me. Have you. Shan’t allow it.” He gave me an arch smile, waggled a finger. “Shan’t, Private—bloody hell. Private Travis—and the blasted rest of it. Not if I don’t want. I am your bloody commanding officer. Tell you to get your rifle, you shall. Keep your head down, that’s the trick. Have you keeping your head down.”

  “I can’t shoot, sir. The stuffing’s all run out of me.”

  “You are shit, Stanhope.” His S’s were muddy. He stabbed his index finger downward in awkward jabs, making his point. A spiteful tone, one that surprised me. “A complete and utter shit. Means nothing. No. Not to you. Have the power, and won’t allow me to save you.” He started crying. Not sobbing or nothing. Just leaking tears. He wiped them angrily away with the heel of his hand, then looked down at his damp wrist. “My,” he said in quiet dismay. “Aren’t I the pathetic old poof.”

  Damn. The admission was so embarrassing that it hurt all the way up and down my chest. I hoped he’d be drunk enough not to remember it in the morning. Down the aisle of horses, Dunston-Smith’s bay mare let out a long, contented sigh.

  “You know? One tries to be the best,” he said.

  Gently, I told him, “I know that, sir.”

  “Like bloody hell you do. Best one can be. Don’t know how Christians can live with themselves, frankly.” Troubled politeness swept him. “Oh! But one religion’s every bit as good, and all that.”

  I studied the lamp flame: steady sturdy base, the top a thin and nervous waver.

  “Every bit as good. Still, confession, what? Do over everyone, go be forgiven. Well, that’s a lark. Everlasting flames of a stick. Streets of gold of a carrot. Balderdash of a theology. Complained to bloody O’Shaughnessy. Living honorably.” He swung his arms wide, nearly fell backwards off his hay bale. “Is the thing. What God expects, you know. A just and moral life without any expectation of reward. Damned simplistic sort of belief: confession and Heaven and all that. My father.”

  “Your father,” I said when it looked like he wasn’t going to go on.

  “My father?” He peered at me.

  “You were talking
about Heaven and confession and all, sir, and then you said your father.”

  He gazed into the shadows of the stall across the way. “Is a just and moral man. Do you understand, Stanhope?” He searched my face.

  “Yes, sir. I understand, sir. We need to be getting on.”

  He scrubbed his mouth as if the drink had burned him. “A man came before Raba and said, ‘The chief of my village has ordered me to kill someone.’ Well. I muddle the story. On pain of death, you see.” Miller’s eyes started leaking. This time he let the tears go. I wasn’t even sure he knew he was crying. “Pain of death. And so Raba answered and said, ‘Let yourself be put to death before you kill another’ or some such—but you see my point, Stanhope?-Raba reminded him, ‘for it is unlawful to kill.’”

  I took his arm.

  He pulled away. “You do see.”

  “Yes, sir. It’s time to go now.”

  A poignant entreaty. “But you do see?”

  “Yes, sir. I do.”

  I pulled him up, but his knees didn’t have any starch. He started sinking and I grabbed him. His eyes closed. His head buried itself in my shoulder.

  “Sorry,” he whispered.

  Not just sorry for his drunk, but for the coming raid, for the way he felt about me. He knew we were too close. He tried to pull back. I wrapped both my arms around him. He was heavy. His breath tickled my cheek, lured me with the smell of brandy.

  “Hold onto me, sir.”

  A heavy drunken arm. A needy hand clutching my coat. He opened his eyes, but our faces were so close it scared him. He squeezed them shut again. I saw the brandy bottle forgotten in the straw. Both of us, a half-step from temptation.

  “Sorry,” he said.

  I grabbed his hand, pulled his arm around my shoulder. With my other hand, I grabbed his belt. “Come on. Let’s walk a little. Get you sober.”

  He walked—well, at least he tried his best. Miller will always try. Weak-kneed, he shuffled, bumped against me. We walked back and forth down the aisle of the stables, the horses watching. We struggled, holding onto each other. When I knew that lights-out was near and that we couldn’t afford to be away from barracks any longer, I took him out of the stables and into the rain.

  Down the way at the officers’ billets, the party had broken up. Three captains were sitting under a lean-to, gossiping. When we neared the light of their lamp, Dunston-Smith got to his feet.

  “Dear God, Richard,” he said, fussing over him like a mother.

  Dunston-Smith took him from me. Miller fit perfectly in his arms. He was yawning, already half-asleep. The two other captains shook their heads and, amused, helped themselves to another tot of brandy.

  Dunston-Smith, the drowsy Miller cradled against him. “Best have yourself in barracks before lights-out, Private.” His voice was hushed, the way voices are around sleepers.

  My voice was hushed, too. “Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.”

  I walked back to the barracks, but my shoulder missed Miller’s weight. My nostrils still held the smell of his brandy. He was near me all night. Even now, early the next morning, I can feel him, smell him, clinging. It’s not a bad sensation; not like I might have thought once. Him loving me just is. It’s a small quiet thing, as without risk as the mew of a kitten. You know, Bobby, he never expected me to love him back.

  Travis Lee

  * * *

  DECEMBER 1, THE RESERVE TRENCHES

  Dear Bobby,

  This morning we woke to ice. Frost bloomed in crystal fronds across elephant sheets, across canteens. The air was sharp as cut glass. Icicles hung from sandbags. Cold had stiffened everything. Voices rang in the brittle air. The walls had frozen too hard to collapse.

  The Boche artillery was quiet. The morning broke chill and blue, the sun tiny and incredibly bright. The rime at the edges of the shell holes glared so intense that it made my eyes water. In that cold, hard, blinding world, Mugs and Uncle Tim made tea. About noon, high clouds rolled in and I watched the sun’s dazzle filter and go hazy. By dinner, it had started to sleet-angry pellets that stung faces, that rattled against frozen ground.

  We lit the brazier and set it in the door of the aid station. Turnhill piled more blankets on our only patient—a boy fighting trench-foot. I dozed sitting up, my angora vest, my greatcoat, and a couple of blankets around me.

  The graveyard was empty and the sun was inching lower. In the cobalt shadows the edges of leaves were starting to sparkle. They winked slow and calm, the way lights shimmer far across the prairie or a long ways across the ocean. In the pink last of the sunlight, leaves dropped from the trees, slow as blossoms.

  All up and down the steps, the graves were empty and waiting, the flowers in them piled soft and deep. At the end of the path, the calico girl was standing sentry. And right then I knew that nothing, not even the cold, would stop the coming raid. And I knew that the raid would kill us.

  I regretted that I had pissed my life away. That I’d hurt Ma, hurt you. That I’d been cruel to people. That I’d cheated and lied.

  “It’s love,” she said, and she took my hand. Her power felt like velvet, as easy to fall into as those graves—drowsy and safe.

  I woke when a medical officer bustled into the aid station, shaking the sleet from his coat. He asked if we were keeping warm enough. The question was just for polite’s sake, for he didn’t listen to our answers. He went to the boy’s bed and flipped back the blankets.

  “Needs amputating.” He ignored the boy’s appalled wail. “Yes. And quickly. Best take him along to hospital. There’s the good chaps. Do get back as soon as you can. We’ll have need of you.”

  The medical officer never explained why we would be needed. I didn’t tell my litter chums, either. We put the boy on the litter, wrapped him in three goatskins, his greatcoat, and four blankets. We struggled through the sleet and the knee-deep muck to the rear hospital. The four of us were too cold and exhausted to talk to each other, too tired to comfort the soldier. The boy cried the whole way there.

  Travis Lee

  * * *

  DECEMBER 1, POSTCARD FROM THE RESERVE TRENCHES

  Dear Bobby,

  This morning I was thinking of you and Ma and that Nativity scene she always puts up, the one where she made the straw dolls of Joseph and Mary, and Pa carved the camels. They were good camels. Too bad he never was no good at people.

  Well, merry early Christmas. If anyone asks after me, tell them I’m happy enough. Whatever happens, Bobby, always remember this: I was happy enough.

  Travis Lee

  * * *

  DECEMBER 4, THE RESERVE TRENCHES

  Dear Bobby,

  They shouldn’t have ordered us forward in December. In England, families are getting ready for Christmas. They’re buying presents, wrapping them, hiding them away. Mothers and wives will send gifts soon. No way to stop it. No way to get the word back quick enough. Gifts will arrive here to this desolate place, all wrapped in pretty paper.

  Mugs and Turnhill and Uncle Tim and me made it back in time to move up with the company to the front lines. The sleet had ended. Granular drifts of it shone in the morning like snow. It nestled in the crannies of shell holes. It smoothed the angular scars of the soil.

  Wading our way to the front, over our puttees in mud, a Boche Aviatik buzzed us. The bastard strafed us, too. It was more a scare and a nuisance, for the gunner had poor aim. But every time he came thundering along our line, a cry went up: “Have a bloody care!” and “Not cricket!” Finally, to the cheers of the company, a trio of BEs came flying out of the clouds and chased the Aviatik away.

  We slogged on. At dusk we reached the front trenches. The Boche had put up an observation balloon, but the BEs returned to shoot it down. I saw them darting like bright wasps around a bulbous gray mushroom, saw the balloon shudder with the shots, watched it collapse in on itself and fall slow.

  All the rest of that day the officers went up and down the trenches, ordering men to blacken their faces, ordering jangling met
al to be taken off uniforms. Shocked complaint raced down the trench like water down a flash-flooded creek. “Raid, is it? Senseless command!” and “They’ll bloody kill us!”

  We were going, anyway. The British artillery started pounding the Boche around dinner time. Mugs and me loaded up with extra field dressings. When the medical officer wasn’t looking, Turnhill packed a scalpel. Uncle Tim rounded up sutures just in case we’d need to leave part of the soldier behind.

  The sleet had started again by the time our company went over the top. The four of us watched them slip away. When we climbed the bags after them, we saw that the night was dark but for mortar flashes. They lit No Man’s Land in pulses of light. Scenes were arrested in snap photographs: the tightness of Mug’s jaw; Turnhill’s slack exhaustion; a crowd of soldiers moving far ahead.

  We went, the four of us sinking through the thin crust of ice and into the soft ground below. We slipped. We fell. Sleet blinded me. It rattled against my helmet. The dark horizon came alive in a sparkle of machine-gun fire-a loud and deadly chatter. Ahead of us, soldiers started to scream.

  Near me, a loud grunt. The litter lurched. A mortar flashed, and I saw Turnhill on the ground.

  “Take him!” Uncle Tim cried.

  Mugs was already bending over. “Done for!” he shouted back.

  I knelt. Shells ripped the air over our heads. The ground quaked. Flares burst, lit No Man’s Land in lime-green light. I looked up, saw three bright stars above me illuminating the powdery fall of sleet. Below me, Turnhill was dying, his chest seeping darkness, his lips bubbling black.

  “Bloody hell! Take him!” Uncle Tim shouted.