by John Wilson
Sommerfield stepped round to block my way. “Who’s Bob?” he asked. “Is he in the woods here too?”
“No,” I said. “He’s back in the trench at Arras. There was a big attack and he was buried. I have to go home and get help for him.”
“Home’s a long way,” Sommerfield said. “It’ll take a long time to get there and get back with help. Wouldn’t it be better for Bob if I helped?”
I nodded slowly. It made sense. I had been focused on going home for help and never thought of help being closer at hand.
“Why don’t you go and rest while I get some things together to help Bob. When I’m ready, I’ll wake you up and we can go and help him. You must be tired.”
I felt a huge sense of relief. Someone else was going to help, and I didn’t have to do everything on my own. It was as if Sommerfield had lifted a vast weight from my shoulders. Suddenly I felt utterly spent.
“I would like that,” I said, gratefully.
“Excellent.” Sommerfield took my arm and led me over to a nearby tent. “You climb in there and have a rest. I’ll organize everything.”
“Thank you.”
I ducked into the tent, spotted a pile of blankets and curled up in a ball in the middle of them. It was like a nest and I felt safe for the first time in ages. Maybe Sommerfield wasn’t so bad after all.
I just had time to hear Sommerfield say to someone, “Keep an eye on him,” before blackness overwhelmed me.
When I came to, Sommerfield was sitting in the tent doorway looking at me. “Good morning,” he said with a smile.
For a moment I had no idea where I was, but I felt strangely calm and, for the first time I could remember, I didn’t feel exhausted. Then gradually things began to come back to me. There was something I had to do. I sat up.
“How long was I asleep?” I asked, rubbing my eyes.
“Almost three days,” Sommerfield said.
“Three days!”
“I think you were sick. You had a fever.”
“You should have woken me.”
“I tried, but a howitzer going off in your ear wouldn’t have brought you back. Besides, you needed the rest.”
“But there’s something I have to do. I’m going to Canada to get help for Bob.” Even as I said it, I knew it was crazy. An image of Bob’s blue, dead face, half buried in dirt, flashed into my mind. “He’s dead,” I said.
Sommerfield nodded. “And this isn’t Ontario.”
I suddenly saw myself hitting Bob and him falling onto the duckboards on the bottom of the trench. “I killed him.” My guilt returned to weigh me down. “I hit him. I was scared and running away. He tried to stop me and I hit him. I knocked him down. Then the shell exploded. He was buried and I couldn’t dig him out in time. If he hadn’t been on the ground — ”
I couldn’t stop the tears. They flooded out as I collapsed back onto the blankets. I wept for Bob suffocating in the collapsed trench; for MacTaggart, decapitated by the shell; for Ken trying to kill himself because he couldn’t face it all anymore; and for myself, destined to always be alone and see my friends killed around me. Eventually I cried myself out and fell back asleep.
When I woke it was dark. I could hear voices outside the tent and see the flicker of campfires. I lay for a long time thinking about my situation. It looked bleak. My past was gone. Dead with Ken, MacTaggart and Bob. My present and future were a mystery.
At last the smell of food cooking made me realize how hungry I was and drew me out of the tent. Sommerfield and the two men who had found me were sitting on logs round a small fire, where a black cast iron pot hung.
“Come on over and get something to eat,” Sommerfield said when he saw me. “You must be hungry.”
I edged over to the fire and sat down, not wanting to talk to anyone but salivating madly at the smell. Sommerfield took a tin plate, a spoon and a large hunk of French bread, ladled out some stew and passed it over to me. I can’t remember what the stew tasted like, only that it was the best thing I had ever eaten. I finished three platefuls, wiped the last of the bread around the plate and looked up. Sommerfield was sitting across the fire, smiling. No one had spoken while I was eating.
Physically I felt better than I had in a long time, but my mind was cluttered with contradictions. On the one hand, I was rested, fed and apparently dream free. I had got over the insane idea of walking to Canada and realized that there was nothing I could do for Bob. I almost felt relaxed.
On the other hand, I was bewildered by what had happened, scared by my madness and worried about what was going to happen next. I also felt appallingly alone and had to fight to hold back tears whenever any of my dead friends and colleagues popped into my mind.
“What day is it?” I asked Sommerfield.
“Monday,” he replied.
“It can’t be. The attack was on March twenty-first, which was a Thursday. If this is Monday, it doesn’t leave enough time for me to get here, wherever here is.”
Sommerfield and the other men exchanged glances. “Today is Easter Monday, April first. Pete and Marcel here — ” Sommerfield indicated the other two men “ — found you wandering in the woods three days ago.”
I stared at Sommerfield, struggling to comprehend. Could the attack that had killed MacTaggart and Bob and driven me to mad flight really have been eleven days ago? That meant that there was a gap in my life of more than a week when I had wandered aimlessly and could remember only fragmentary images.
“You were shell-shocked,” Sommerfield said, gently. “It’s not uncommon to lose track of time. What’s more remarkable is that you wandered around for so long without being picked up, but then I suppose the army’s got more on its mind right now than a solitary lost soldier.”
“What’s happened?” I asked.
“Nous sommes finis,” the soldier I assumed was Marcel grunted.
“My French companion is correct,” Sommerfield said. “The attack on the twenty-first broke through almost everywhere and the Germans have been moving forward ever since. From what I’ve heard, they’ve advanced more than forty miles and stand at the gates of Amiens. If Amiens falls, the British and French armies will be split apart and the British will have to retreat to the coast. It’s chaos south of here. The Germans have taken thousands of prisoners and entire regiments have disappeared. The roads are packed with refugees, the remnants of defeated units and more than a few lost souls like yourself. It’s the end of the war.”
Marcel stood up, spat loudly and walked away.
“Marcel is not taking the defeat of his country very well,” Sommerfield said, “but it’s the only way we’ll have peace.”
I sat and stared into the flames. Was the war really almost over? I was devastated that the Germans were going to win, but a part of me was elated — I was going to survive.
I stood up and looked over at the surrounding woods. “I have to get back to my unit … ” I said uncertainly. The camp looked warm and inviting, the trees dark and threatening.
The soldier called Pete barked a short laugh. “Stupid bloody fool,” he said. “’E survives the Germans trying to kill ’im and now ’e wants ’is own side to do the job for ’im.”
“The point that Pete is rather crudely making,” Sommerfield explained, “is that, like the rest of us here, you’re a deserter now. You deserted your unit in the middle of a battle. You’ve only been lightly wounded, but you’ve been absent for almost two weeks while your army has been beaten senseless and lost the war. What do you think they’ll do when you waltz in and say, ‘Sorry I left my post, gents, but I’m back now.’?”
“I didn’t know what I was doing. I was confused. I was sick. You said yourself I had a fever.”
Pete snorted. “On the contrary, mate. You did know what you were doin’ then. It’s now you’re confused.”
“Look,” Sommerfield said calmly, “whatever reasons you had for doing what you did, the army will only look at it one way: You deserted in the face of the enemy. For
that they will court martial you, find you guilty, tie you to a post and shoot you. Believe me, they’ve done it before and they’ll do it again, in all probability a matter of days after you give yourself up. They even shoot officers for doing what you did. What chance does a private have?”
What Sommerfield was saying stunned me. I knew that you could be shot for desertion, but it was not something that would ever happen to me. Only cowards deserted and they deserved to be shot. I hadn’t deserted. I hadn’t known what I was doing. But Sommerfield was right — that’s not the way the army would see it. To them I was a deserter.
“What can I do?” I asked, sitting back down. I could barely get the words out.
“Only one choice as far as I can see,” Sommerfield said. “Nothing’s going to stop the Germans. As soon as they reach the coast, Britain and France are going to have to make peace.
“Oh, there’ll be lots of shouting and a big peace conference. Some money and some land will change hands and everyone will try and claim that they did well out of it. There’ll be a few years for everyone to lick their wounds and build up their armies.” He spat into the fire. “And then it’ll all happen again.”
“But that means that we’ll have fought for four years for nothing.”
“For the average man it always was for nothing. What did you or I ever stand to gain from this war? If we were lucky, we’d stay alive. The only people who profit from war are the businessmen who make the guns, shells, bombs, uniforms and all the rest of the paraphernalia an army needs. They’re making fortunes and you don’t see a single one of them risking his life in the mud. The worker — whether he’s British, French, Canadian, German or, now, American — is fighting to put money in some fat slug’s pocket in London, Paris, Toronto or Berlin.”
“Like the bloody Ross rifle,” Pete muttered.
Sommerfield caught my questioning look and said, “You weren’t out here at the beginning, but the Canadians in 1915 and ’16 were given Ross rifles instead of the British Enfields. The government wanted the contract to go to a Canadian company so their cronies could profit. Trouble was, the rifle didn’t work. It jammed when the least bit of dirt got in it, the bayonet tended to fall off and, if you weren’t really careful assembling it, the bolt flew back and took the side of your head off when you fired it. Everyone hated it. At Ypres in 1915, the first thing you did when you got out of the trench was find a dead Brit and take his rifle.
“Canadian boys died because of the Ross rifle, but would the government stop issuing it? No. Good old Sir Charles Ross was making a packet and he had friends in high places. What did it matter if the rifle was killing a few young soldiers? Eventually, General Haig had to order the Canadians to issue us with Enfields.”
If Sommerfield had told me this story last summer, I’d have shouted him down as a liar. Now I was angry, but my anger was at Ross and the others, not Sommerfield.
“Anyway,” he went on, “you stick here with us. In a few weeks it’ll all be over and we can find a way to go home.”
I stared into the flames. What should I do? In my mind I wasn’t a deserter, but if I chose to stay here, I would be. If I didn’t stay here I would have to give myself up, and I would probably be shot for being the thing I was giving myself up to prove I wasn’t. It was an impossible choice.
“How long have you been here?” I asked.
“Here,” Sommerfield said, “only a few weeks. We have to keep moving around. If we stay in one place too long, the Red Caps find us. But if you mean how long since we left the army, it varies. I’ve been on the run for near eighteen months now, Marcel since the French mutinies last summer and Pete came with me from Etaples. But a couple of boys, like yourself, have drifted in over the past few days.”
“I saw a German uniform.”
“That would be Horst. Before the war he was a waiter in some fancy restaurant in London. Speaks better English than Pete here. He was captured over the winter but managed to escape when he was being taken back. Luckily he ran into us.”
“How do you survive? Doesn’t the army hunt you down?”
“They try, but it’s not easy. This is a big country, there are a lot of woods and the army’s got other things for its soldiers to do. On top of that, they can’t officially admit that we exist. Can you imagine what the papers back home would make of groups — we’re not the only one, by the way — of disaffected soldiers who have simply walked away from the war, living free in the countryside. It wouldn’t look good, and the more men they involve in hunting us, the more chance there is that the story will get out. As long as we don’t make too much trouble, it’s better for them to leave us be.
“We have to be careful. Occasionally, if we stay in one place too long, they’ll send a squad of Red Caps to sweep the area, but never very many and they’re fairly easy to avoid.”
“Where do you get food, clothes, tents?”
“That’s the easy part,” Sommerfield smiled. “You see, we don’t exist, so if an officer — ” he ran his hand down his major’s uniform “ — walks into a supply depot with a convincing piece of paper requisitioning a dozen tents and rations for a company on a training exercise, no one questions it. And we get quite a bit of help from the French. Almost every family has lost someone — a son, brother or father — at Verdun, and many of them are sympathetic to us. There’s even some Australians hiding out where no man’s land is wide enough.”
The sheer nerve of what Sommerfield said they were doing left me speechless. What he was telling me was that there were scores, perhaps hundreds, of deserters living behind and between the lines, stealing and scrounging what they needed and taking no part in the war.
“So, young Allan McBride,” Sommerfield went on, “as I see it, you’ve got two choices. Give yourself up and let them shoot you, or stay with us and wait out the few weeks until the war ends and we can all go home.”
I understood all the words Sommerfield said, but putting them together into a coherent whole seemed beyond my grasp. I felt emotionally drained and incapable of making a rational decision. What should I do?
On top of everything else, I felt unbearably lonely. Ken, someone in my life as important as my father, and the only person who understood what I was going through and could give me advice, was gone. Probably dead. My hands began to shake at the prospect of having to make my mind up on my own.
I looked up and met Sommerfield’s eyes. A smile was playing around the corners. His face was open, relaxed and friendly. I felt a surge of gratitude for this man who was prepared to help me. He would take the burden of responsibility off my shoulders. I wasn’t alone.
“I’ll stay,” I said.
Chapter 11
A Plan
North of Amiens, August 10, 1918
“Per’aps there’ll be a good-lookin’ daughter.”
I wasn’t looking at Pete but I could hear the leer in his voice. We were lying at the edge of a wood, gazing down at a cluster of stone farm buildings, waiting for dusk.
“We’re here to buy some food,” I said. The man disgusted me. I would have had nothing to do with him except that Sommerfield had sent us both out to a farm to try and get some fresh food for the camp.
I had been with Sommerfield’s group long enough that there was no way I could ever claim I wasn’t a deserter now. The war hadn’t ended in the weeks after the March attack. The German advance had ground to a halt outside Amiens. They had launched other offensives, in the south against the French — who hadn’t collapsed as Sommerfield had predicted — and near Ypres. All had been successful at first, but petered out as the attackers outran their heavy artillery and suffered from exhaustion. The war was sinking back into the hopeless, bloody stalemate of the past four years.
Physically, I felt better than when I had arrived at Sommerfield’s camp, and the uncontrollable shaking in my hands had eased. However, I was utterly worn out and miserable. I awoke screaming in the dark less frequently now and the nightmares were less hideous, but I
hadn’t rested a complete night in months. Sudden fits of paralyzing anxiety would overwhelm me, leaving me incapable of making the simplest decision, and feeling as weak as a kitten.
I felt trapped. My choices were limited by my decision in April — or was it Sommerfield’s decision? — to stay with the deserters. I couldn’t escape and I had no control over what happened to me. At times I tried to figure out how I might rejoin my unit, but every attempt I could imagine to return to the world I had known, led to one thing — execution as a deserter. There were times when anxiety and depression overwhelmed me and execution seemed like a tempting option, but mostly I just kept on surviving from day to day.
Life on the run with Sommerfield and the others had been straightforward enough. We moved frequently and far, and we had even been back up to the coast by Etaples, where Sommerfield had been living when I first met him. Attempts to capture us had been half-hearted, and food and supplies were easy to get, either by stealing or bartering.
The membership of the group had changed over the months. Marcel and the other Frenchman had become fed up with so many English and gone off to try and make it home, and Horst, the solitary German, had been killed when he ran into a party of British soldiers after we had split up for a move. Sommerfield’s only comment was that it served him right for insisting that he stay in his German uniform. Apart from them, a few others had drifted away, but they had been replaced by occasional newcomers. Our numbers stayed constant at around a dozen. At the moment, Sommerfield and I were the only Canadians. The rest were a mixture of Irish, Scots, Australians and English. They were a rough bunch for the most part and I had nothing in common with their crude humour and violent ways. Fights were frequent in the camp on the nights when someone managed to steal some liquor.
The only person I could talk to was Sommerfield. I think he saw me as someone he could mould to his ideas, unlike the rest of the men, who seemed only interested in drinking and fighting. In any case, Sommerfield took me under his wing and always had a sympathetic word when I went to him with one of my worries. In a strange way, in this outlandish world I was not a part of, he had taken the place of Ken, and I needed him. The mere thought of leaving the group, being on my own and having to make my own decisions, frightened me almost as much as the possibility of being shot as a deserter.