By the time I got to Bert, the sound of the shelling was sharp and clear in my ears. Someone was having an artillery duel down in the direction of Montauban. There were still some French units there, and it was close to the Somme, where trenches were damp and tempers short. I had heard it start when I was back in Amiens, lying in a bed at Madame Berthier’s, but there it hadn’t seemed to matter, coming as it did through a set of lace curtains.
The light of the declining sun shined the wrong way through the windows of the roofless houses. Before the War, people had lived in the town, then called Albert, but no one remembered those days. There was no one here now but the soldiers, and to them the place was called Bert, with a hard English t. Everyone knew Bert. French poilus shivering in the ruins of Fort Douaumont, at Verdun, pressed their crosses to their lips and thought of it. Russian conscripts drowning in shell holes at Aubers died whispering its name. German regulars on garrison duty along the Piave sang songs about it. For it was from this spot that the Golden Virgin tormented us.
Before the War, a huge gilded statue of the Virgin had stood atop the Basilica of Albert. She had proved a natural target for the German long-range guns located back toward Bapaume, though for a long time the tower suffered no damage. Finally one day a shell exploded just at the Virgin’s feet. She toppled forward, slowly at first, then accelerating as she swung downward toward the earth... and stopped. And so she had hung there ever since, feet above her head, angled just past the horizontal, dangling precariously yet never falling. No amount of shelling had ever managed to get her to budge another inch. She was a miracle.
All of us, all the men of the War, were concerned about her, and about what she was trying to tell us. Theories abounded. Some held that she was throwing the infant Jesus down to the street, sacrificing Him before His time as an expiation to end the slaughter. Others thought that she was bent over in grief, for from her vantage point she could examine at her leisure the vast meat grinder of Somme sector. Or was she just trying to dodge the shells that flew past? To me it had always seemed that He had strayed somehow, and she had just leaned forward and gathered Him back up in her arms. His expression indicated that He wasn’t sure whether to be pleased.
One thing was known by everyone, from the Channel, across Switzerland, and to the Adriatic: when she ceased to balance there on her tower and at last fell, the War would end. It was obvious that she would never fall. It was rumored that she was wired in place, with cables running down into the ruined basilica, holding her up, that German gunners were under strictest orders never to fire upon the tower, that she had indeed already fallen twice, but each time had been replaced by an identical replica, for High Command, which in the soldiers’ mythology ruled both sides, had fattened on the nearly two decades of war that had ludicrously followed the assassination of a pompous Austrian archduke and had no desire to ever see it end.
Two American soldiers were guarding the front of the basilica, ostensibly because it was used as an artillery spotting post. They shared a cigarette, and I could smell its aroma out where I stood in the street. I considered my chances of hitting them up for some. Rather small, I thought. Nonexistent. There was still hostility between British and American expeditionary troops, lingering from the riots and mutinies of’26 and ’27. Besides, I wore pressed cardboard boots with soles made from the treads of old tires, and my uniform was patched with bits of cloth that almost—but not quite—matched, while they looked like real soldiers, with polished leather boots and visored caps.
So I took a deep breath to catch the traces of tobacco smoke, glanced a last time up at the serene face of the Golden Virgin as she hovered over me, and made my way through the rubble to the far edge of town to join my company as it mustered after our liberty. The place was a dusty quadrangle that had once been a football field.
The quad was crowded with men, soberly lying to each other about the achievements of their liberties, but I saw my company standing at its usual spot, just at the corner of the military brothel, which stood where the goalposts had once been. The brothel had no name, only a number, although it was called a number of things, of course, by the men who sought release there. It was built of poured concrete, and its windows were narrow slits. Near the door was a sign detailing venereal disease symptoms in eleven languages. The main advantage of this was that it gave one the ability to say “painful discharge” in Czech.
It had been a long time since I’d lain on one of its rough stained pallets. I arched my back slightly as I walked, feeling the clean linen of Mme. Berthier’s establishment on my bare skin, remembering....
❖
Toby had stayed out all night again. He’d been locked in the cellar the evening before to tend to his task, which was catching mice, but he’d thought of more important matters and I found him on the roof, smoothing his whiskers in male satisfaction, when I opened the shutters in the morning. He looked up at me and meowed.
“Toby,” I hissed. “Get the hell—”
It was too late. Lisette froze in the middle of that charming childlike stretch and squeak with which she wakes herself, and looked out at the cat with her wide cornflower-blue eyes. She tossed her golden hair back and flounced over to the window.
“Toby!” she said, reaching out her hand. The cat rubbed against it and purred. “You know not to stay out like that. For that, you will stay out.” She flicked him off the steeply pitched roof to the yard below, where Barbarossa, Mme. Berthier’s mastiff, was waiting. I saw a yellow yowling streak go across the yard and over the fence. He never learned. That damn stupid roving cat never learned.
Lisette smiled at me, and kissed my earlobe. “Poor kitty,” she said. “Poor kitty.” She pirouetted joyfully. I took hold of her, and she giggled. I always wanted Lisette above the others, for she was so beautiful, and simple, in both her pleasures and her cruelties.
My hand explored inside her robe. “Bad boy,” she said. “Bad.”
“No, no. Good. Very good.”
The door opened with a squeak of hinges. I turned. Standing in the doorway was a stout woman with dark dyed hair and a trace of a moustache, which she made no attempt to conceal. She slapped her hands together. The fingers were loaded with rings, which glittered in the morning light.
“Time to go, Mr. Beeman,” she said. Her voice was deep, yet oddly unresonant. “Please release my Lisette, as she has other duties. We have a major of a Highlander regiment downstairs who wishes to see her.” So, demurely, eyes downcast, Lisette walked past her mother and down the stairs, knotting her robe.
Mme. Berthier had several times described to me the event of Lisette’s conception. It had happened when she was newly married, her husband at the front. She was walking home from church one day in autumn, the leaves turning, drifting down, and crunching beneath her feet, when she met her Fate in the form of a young Canadian officer who raped her. She remembered him vaguely, but with—as had gathered over the years—some measure of affection. He’d had golden hair like the sun, which Lisette had inherited. After hearing the enumeration of his physical virtues, I saw him as the sort of handsome lad that schoolboys get their first crush on. I was sure that the men in his unit had loved him to distraction. Her husband, whose name I never learned, was killed at the front shortly thereafter, and with a child to support, she took up a new profession. So Lisette had grown up on the edge of the War, eventually to work in her mother’s establishment, which by the time I came there consisted of five girls in a large well-appointed house on a quiet avenue lined with plane trees. Aristocracy, in those times. They served good English breakfasts there. I went downstairs to eat one before I left.
❖
“Welcome home, Dick. I knew you wouldn’t be able to stay away. I’d kill a fatted calf, but I have a better burnt offering.” The speaker was Frank Harris, who stood with our fellow NCO, Larry Pogue, leaning against the wall of the brothel. He was a tall, broad man, with the look of a hero, although of course being alive, he wasn’t one. He reached into a pock
et and pulled out a cigarette, which he waved at me. “American,” he said. “From Virginia. At least that’s what the sailor told me. Don’t ask what I had to do to get it.” I didn’t have to.
“Take a puff, Dick.” Pogue was shorter than either Harris or me, with sharp features and dark mystic eyes.
Although my body cried out for it, I tried to give the appearance of considering the offer judiciously, as if I didn’t care. My act fooled no one, and I finally grabbed it. I felt better immediately.
Captain Totenham’s ADC, Perkins, at last after much swearing got us all formed up for the march back to the main trench, where we would spend five days before moving back to the reserve trenches. The spot where we stood was already in front of some of our fortifications. The depth of our lines was nearly five miles. The military brothel itself, in obedience to regulations, had a Vickers .303 emplacement on its roof. The captain leaned sourly against the concrete wall, watching Perkins take roll. He had spent liberty in Paris, but it didn’t seem to have made him any happier. The tap of his cane against his prosthetic left foot indicated impatience, and everyone was glad when Perkins got us lined up and the tapping stopped.
We marched down the Roman Road, which stretched from Bert to Bapaume, on the other side of the front. Nearly two thousand years old, it arrowed across the countryside but had been shelled so heavily that it was only suitable for foot traffic. We reached the end of the communication trench, which burrowed gradually into the earth, and turned into it.
As we marched, the level of the ground rising above our heads, I thought of Lisette. This liberty, in response to some idle questions of hers, I had spent a great deal of time telling her about my boyhood, of the times before, as the recruiting posters had it, the King had called me to war, while she lay back on the bed, whistling at the budgie to make it sing.
I told her about my mother, and the toy soldiers. I still remember the wooden box that held them and the splendid weight it had when they had all been carefully stacked inside. They were fragments of many of the family’s boyhoods, and were all mismatched, all different colors, like meadow flowers. French cuirassiers, Russian uhlans, American bluecoats from their Civil War, red pantalooned Zouaves, long-coated foot soldiers from the army of Frederick the Great, roundhead cavalry, even one lonely Babylonian in skirt and headdress, carrying spear and shield. What pleasure those soldiers brought me! I would lose myself in arranging them, marching them in columns, charging them up the valley at Balaclava, holding Hougoumont against the French at Waterloo, pounding the insolent Swedes at Poltava, and saving Vienna from the Turk. My men were dashing and disciplined, even if some of them, particularly the soft lead ones, were missing arms, legs, and even heads. And my mother would call me in for supper, and I would not hear.
My mother made a mistake here, for she interpreted this boyish disinclination to quit a game as insolence, which was the one thing she could not bear. My scoldings were severe. One day she finally shouted in exasperation, “Stay then, with your soldiers!” and latched the door. I suppose if I had begged her forgiveness, she would soon have relented and let me inside to eat, but little boys can be more stubborn than mothers, and are seldom inclined to be wise. With forced gaiety, I picked up my men and went back to war. We fought battles beneath the kitchen window, made long retreats through rough country, then attacked again on the plain. War began to drag, the Seven Years’ War stretching to eighteen, the Thirty Years’ War to eighty. When one was over, another began. This went on, as the moon rose in the sky, illuminating the now ghostly soldiers, until the little boy’s eyes grew weary and he fell asleep on the grass. Some unknown friend knocked on the door, and my mother came out and carried me inside.
We finally arrived at the main firing trench, the eight-foot-deep hole in the ground that was home. In front was a three-foot parapet of heaped earth, in back was a one-foot parados. The walls were supported by sandbags, corrugated iron, bundles of sticks, bricks, and stones. Repairs had to be continuous, else the sides of the trench would collapse.
Wire repair crews were sent out, and one group of men was set to extending a sap. We were going to build a new machine-gun post at the end. Those who were not thus employed retired, despite their weariness, to their gardens, which filled the area between the parados and the mortar emplacements with a tangle of bean poles and trellises. The various regiments that occupied the trenches in turn shared these gardens through a complex set of arrangements that had grown up over the years, and by now seemed eternal. I leaned back against the parapet, crossed my arms, and watched them. I could hear two soldiers chaffing each other, obscenely comparing the sizes of their cucumbers.
“Give it up, Dick. Plant a row of peas.” Pogue stood next to me, mattock in hand. “A small thing, surely.”
“I’m a soldier, not a farmer, damn you,” I said sharply, startled by my own vehemence.
Pogue turned away, a slight smile on his lips. “Just a suggestion, Dick, just a suggestion.” He clambered over the parados and headed toward his cabbages.
“Corporal Beeman?” said a timid voice. It was Private Willoughby. He was young, not more than fifteen, and had somehow blurred features, as if built hurriedly before the holidays. His watery blue eyes darted about in the light that escaped the entrance to the officers’ dugout, and he seemed ready to bolt.
“Yes, Willoughby?”
“It’s... it’s....” He struggled to get the words out. “It’s... I just saw the Yellow Man!”
Inwardly, I groaned. “Indeed? And where did you see this, ah, apparition?”
“Catfish Row. He was walking toward me with that face, all bloated, and the gas was pouring out of his mouth, just pouring out, Corporal, like smoke from a chimney. I could smell it! New mown hay. That means a German gas attack, doesn’t it? Shouldn’t we warn everybody?”
I sighed. “That won’t be necessary. I’ll go take a look. Catfish Row, you said?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Don’t talk about this to anyone else. Just stay here.”
Trenches traverse to contain explosions and to prevent enfilade firing should the enemy gain control of any part of them. I headed down past Times Square and the Embarcadero. The trenches had previously been occupied by American troops, and none of us had found the energy to take down the neatly lettered signs that named the various traverses of the main trench. My universe was limited to the distance to the next bend.
The Yellow Man had made his appearance in the soldiers’ mythology back in the twenties. He was someone who had been caught in a combined gas attack with no protection, but had somehow, by the dark of the moon, been transformed rather than killed. His skin was covered with blisters and open sores, his eyes were red and hemorrhaged, his flesh was rotting, his lips were a bright blue. He no longer breathed oxygen, but needed to inhale the poison gases for his survival. Thus, he was supposed to appear whenever a gas attack was imminent, so that he could breathe.
I turned the corner to Catfish Row. My eyes burned, and I smelled the faint odor of new mown hay. Phosgene, or diphosgene. I drew back, fingering the gas mask that hung on my hip. The moon had risen, and its light shined full into the trench. A few rats scurried about, but no Yellow Man was visible. The concentration did not seem serious, so I clipped on a simple nasopharyngeal filter rather than putting on the uncomfortable mask, and went forward. After searching around a bit, I climbed over the parapet into no-man’s-land. Up and down the line I could hear desultory gunfire and see, here and there, the eye hurting, hanging glare of Very flares. The artillery I had heard earlier had fallen silent, their crews for the moment weary of war. I found it just beneath a clump of barbed wire. A gas cylinder. It wasn’t rusted, although it must have been there awhile, and upon closer examination I found that it was made out of aluminium. Damn clever, these Americans, I thought, and twisted the stopcock shut.
I jumped back into the trench. In much of the same way as men see faces in rocks and tree stumps, and hear the approach of a beloved in ever
y rustle of autumn leaves, so Willoughby had smelled the Yellow Man in the phosgene. I found someone to carry the thing off to a Field Ordnance Park, and headed back toward my home traverse.
Like a summer thunderstorm, a gunfight suddenly tore across no-man’s-land. Everyone along the line joined in, shooting at nothing in particular, but making a great racket. Above me, human figures were silhouetted above the parapet, and I heard the thump of something being dumped into the trench, something about the size and shape of a human body. Another thump, softer this time, and a groan.
“Who’s there?” hissed a voice. I made it out as Lieutenant Wallace’s.
“Beeman.”
“Good. Come give us some help while Jeremy goes to get a medic.”
Jeremy King ran off into the darkness. Wallace had taken out a patrol, to investigate what the Germans were building a few hundred yards down the line. It looked to be a forward gun emplacement.
Hopkins was dead, a clean hole through his forehead. Smith and Calloway stood nearby, gasping, grateful to be back in the security of the trench. I heard moaning. Bending over, I saw Private Ackerman. His right leg was missing at the knee. The blood looked like black syrup as it spilled out in the moonlight.
I pulled off my belt, which was still real leather, and looped it around the stump of his leg as a tourniquet. I pulled it tight, and the bleeding stopped. After a moment, a Medical Officer and two stretcher bearers came and picked Ackerman up, to take him to the Casualty Clearing Station and thence to a Base Hospital, perhaps one in England. He’d be back in six months, with an artificial leg like Captain Totenham’s. I looked in the direction they’d taken him and hoped he’d have enough sense to bring back my belt.
Pogue was waiting for me when I returned, whistling idly to himself as he cleaned the head of his mattock. The task absorbed him, and it did not seem that he noticed me.
The Breath of Suspension Page 30