Winnie's Great War

by Lindsay Mattick

  “Is that Winnie?” whispered Brodie in the bottom bunk.

  It’s me! Winnie wanted to roar.

  “I brought you a visitor, Harry,” whispered Dixon, setting the sack down on the thin mattress of the top bunk.

  The sack fell open, and Winnie poked her head out, and there was Harry, blearily grinning at her with chalky white lips.

  “Oh, Winnie!” Harry said. “Your breath is foul!”

  In the night, Winnie lay her head on Harry’s chest, and when he turned on his side, she rested her chin on his arm, and when he pulled his arm away, she draped herself over his legs, and when he kicked her off and turned onto his stomach, she climbed onto his back, and when he turned over suddenly and began wrestling the sheets from her, a swift kick from below jogged their bunk. “What are you doing up there, dancing?” Brodie whispered loudly. “I’m trying to sleep down here!”

  Harry sighed and sat up. “Winnie,” he said very softly. “We have to find a way to share the bed. I’m too hot, I don’t feel well, and I need some room.”

  Winnie rubbed her head against his hand. “I just want to be cozy.”

  “I know you like to be close,” whispered Harry.

  She and Harry moved around, trying to find the best arrangement. In the end, he lay on his side, with Winnie curled up in the hollow at the back of his knees—close enough to be cozy but contained enough not to crowd him.

  And as both of them were drifting off, comfortable at last, something like an idea flittered across the night sky of your Bear’s mind.

  Winnie snuck from Harry’s cot before dawn the next morning, crawling beneath the lower bunks and pressing the swinging door with her paws to open it. When she heard voices around one corner, she skittered up the wall, letting three soldiers pass just underneath her, before she continued on her way. She stopped in the Valley of Fallen Peas to pick up a few fat green ones, climbed down two ladders, crept past the corridor where, even at that hour, men were feeding the furnaces, and found the storeroom where Tatters made his nest.

  “Go away!” Tatters squeaked, turning his back to her and tearing some shreds of cloth with his teeth.

  Winnie rolled the peas in his direction. “Hungry?”

  Tatters grabbed them quickly before hunching down to eat. Over his shoulder, he said, “Are you really a bear? I thought bears were imaginary.”

  “I am,” admitted Winnie. “Will you come with me?”

  “I’m not going anywhere with you!” Tatters snapped. But then he scuttled a few steps backward to be closer to her. “Where are you off to?”

  “I’m going to see the horses.”

  “Hah!” wheezed Tatters. “Why would I do that? Horses and rats have been enemies for as long as anyone can remember!”

  “Maybe they don’t need to be.”

  “No rat could trust a horse!”

  “Just like no rat could be friends with a bear?”

  Tatters scratched his whiskers. “Fine. But only because you brought me peas.” And he followed Winnie up through a crack near the ceiling.

  “What is your proposal?” asked Sir Reginald in the hold once Winnie had convinced the mounts to listen in spite of Black Knight’s objections. The horses shuffled impatiently.

  Tatters crept forward, trembling, and raised his whiskers. “Horses have to stop killing rats. A horse stepped on my cousin Bobo and she died.”

  Sir Reginald took this in. “It is unfortunate about your cousin, but we horses must protect ourselves.”

  “From what!?” squeaked Tatters. He ran back and forth in front of the mounts. “Rats are tiny compared to you!”

  Black Knight stamped his hooves. “Can’t you see how ill you’ve made us!”

  “We are sick from your filth,” Victoria whinnied weakly.

  “What do you mean?” Tatters curled one of his whiskers. “All we do is forage for food.”

  “It is your droppings in our feed that make us sick,” explained Sir Reginald.

  The little rat’s ears twitched and he scratched the back of his head. “I didn’t know that.” He wriggled his nose. “The only reason horses go wild around us is because they’re worried about getting sick?”

  The horses bobbed their heads.

  Victoria hiccupped in a baffled way. “So rats are just looking for food?”

  Her sister, Alberta, blinked in wonder. “They’re not trying to kill us, after all.”

  Tatters and the mounts communed for a long time. They had never understood one another before, horses and rats. They talked about food, that thing that all animals worry over. Tatters was sorry they were sick.

  “Is our feed the only food you can eat?” asked Sir Reginald.

  Tatters shook her head. “We rats will eat anything. We’re not picky. The ship has lots to eat.”

  Inspired by what Harry had done in the night, Winnie gave a little cough and opened her mouth. “Maybe there’s a way for you both to get what you need.”

  The horses and Tatters looked at Winnie, then at one another.

  Tatters sniffed the air thoughtfully. “Maybe I could stop eating in the hold?” Then he raised his eyes and stood up tall, as if he had made a decision. “I promise not to forage in the hold.”

  A skeptical snort erupted from Black Knight. “One rat won’t make a difference.”

  “It’s true.” Tatters turned to Winnie. “There’s hundreds more besides me.”

  “Then you’ll have to remind them to eat somewhere else when you see them,” Winnie told both the horses and Tatters. “Now that you know.”

  “We will not harm you,” Sir Reginald told Tatters. Black Knight nodded.

  Sir Reginald flicked his white tail twice, and Tatters gave four tugs on one whisker, and that was how the Truce between Horses and Rats on the SS Manitou came to pass.

  Cole shifted beside me in bed so he and his Bear were both looking up at me. “Do you think there will ever be a time when there’s no more war?”

  I sighed. “I don’t know. As long as animals have roamed the earth, they’ve fought—over food, over land, over everything. But maybe if we were better at understanding each other, there would be less fighting.”

  Cole pressed the top of his Bear’s head down in a nodding way. “That’s what we think too.”

  That was the day Harry finally started to feel better. When he got out of the hospital, he found your Bear sniffing around the door to the ship’s butcher and brought her to stay in his cabin once more.

  A few nights later, he took Winnie to play on the deck, as she liked to do.

  She ran from him and sat right on the prow of the ship, letting her ears flap in the wind.

  Something scurried up beside her, and Winnie lifted a paw to let Tatters creep in front of her so her body shielded him from the full force of the wind, and together they sat looking out.

  Winnie invited him to join her on the next part of her journey, but Tatters just twitched his whiskers. “This ship is my home. Besides, I have to be ready for the next batch of horses. It’s up to me to keep the peace.”

  “You are a very brave rat,” Winnie told him.

  “So are you.”

  “Except I’m a bear.”

  “Whatever you say.” Tatters shrugged. “You’ll always be my Rat.”

  Winnie licked Tatters’s sea-salty head.

  “Do you see that?” squeaked Tatters.

  That’s when Winnie noticed a blacker strip of sky on the horizon, dotted by clusters of lights. She had thought they were just more stars in the sky.

  “It’s land,” Tatters told her.

  The coast of England was finally in sight.

  From the Woods, to the cabin, to White River, to the train, to Valcartier, to the ship, to this moment: Your Bear had made it all the way across the ocean.

  October 15, 1914

  Arrived in England.

  When they got off the ship, Winnie found that the whole port of Plymouth had turned up to celebrate her going As Far As Any Bear Had Ever G
one! The gates of the dockyard were thronged with people cheering her arrival.

  A white banner with hand-painted red letters hung from the gates: WELCOME CANADIAN TROOPS!

  Harry, Brodie, Dixon, Edgett, and Winnie marched together in the long parade of soldiers and horses that wound its way through the cobblestone streets from the seaside to the train station in the center of town.

  “We’ll take the train to Salisbury Plain,” Harry told the boys over the shouts of the crowd. “And continue our preparations there.”

  “How long until we go where the action is?” yelled Dixon.

  “It shouldn’t be long now,” Harry shouted.

  The way was lined with people, voices raised, arms outstretched, waving newspapers and holding out gifts to the soldiers. A bald man with an apron forced a pair of oranges into Dixon’s hands. A stooped old woman with a kerchief on her head reached up, pulled down Harry’s face by the cheeks, and kissed him wetly on each one. “Bless you for coming to our aid!” she cried.

  Brodie paused to strike up a conversation with a smiling young woman in a pale blue coat. He made a trade with her: his pin, pewter and shaped like a maple leaf, for her button, brass and etched with an image of the King. She held Brodie’s pin to her lips as Edgett pulled him away.

  “I told you the Canadians were fierce,” someone said, elbowing his neighbor. “Look what they brought with them! A bear!”

  A little boy with a teddy bear ran into the street. He pumped it out at Winnie. “That’s a real bear, isn’t it?!”

  Harry stooped down. “It is! A real North American black bear.”

  The boy backed away. “Is it friendly?”

  When Winnie brushed her nose against the boy’s hand, he shrieked with delight and hopped up and down before carefully patting her head.

  Once the citizens of Plymouth saw that Winnie could be approached, they held out all kinds of things to her: grapes and hard candies, which she ate with the wrappers still on, and even a few cigarettes, which Harry snatched from her mouth not a moment too soon.

  Winnie noticed a monkey with a long tail and a tiny top hat sitting on the shoulder of a man who had one eye opened much wider than the other, which was nearly squinted shut. The monkey gave a cheeky tip of his hat to your Bear as the man struck up singing in a strong, quavering voice. Within moments, the troops and the crowd all joined in.

  It’s a long way to Tipperary,

  It’s a long way to go.

  It’s a long way to Tipperary

  To the sweetest girl I know!

  Everyone knew the song. It made Winnie bounce as she walked.

  October 18, 1914

  Arrived at Salisbury 10 AM.

  Your Bear loved the water, so rain was her favorite sort of weather. But among all the different kinds of rain—from the waterfall-like torrents that made ferns shine greener in the Woods to the early-morning mistings of Valcartier—the kind of hard-driving rain that drenched Salisbury Plain was her favorite kind of all.

  For weeks on end, bulging drops of water pelted from the gray sky, striking up muddy blasts that turned the ground to mush. It rained and it rained and it rained. While the men trudged along with their heads down, Winnie raced and romped, slid and sloshed, so that brown mud covered her black fur like a second coat.

  “At least Winnie likes this weather,” said Brodie as they waded after her across camp one morning.

  “She might be the only one in the whole army,” said Dixon. “My toes feel like they’re swimming in ice.”

  “I like to imagine I’m walking on piles of wet sandwiches,” said Brodie, pulling his coat tightly around him to protect against the bitter wind.

  Edgett said, “Soldiers at the Front have been having problems with their feet in the damp and the cold. Trench foot, they call it.”

  “I’m already out of dry socks,” noted Dixon.

  “Trench foot?” said Harry. “We’d better check the horses.”

  He led Winnie and the others to the edge of camp, where the mounts stood shivering halfway up to their bony knees in mud. They had been forced to move every few days, farther and farther from the center of camp, because there was no shelter for them, and whenever they took a step, their hooves churned in the mire and sunk deeper down, creating a soupy sea.

  “Sir Reginald,” Harry said.

  “Captain.” Sir Reginald gave a solemn bob of his head, the rain streaming down his muzzle. “Mascot Winnie.” Harry patted him firmly all along his body with a gloved hand before moving along to Black Knight.

  “I like the rain,” Winnie had to admit. “Do you like the rain?”

  “Oh,” Black Knight said with a grim flick of his eyes. “If only we could all be bears.”

  Harry bent and plucked one of Black Knight’s hooves from the muck. He wiped the back of it with his gloved hand, trying to gain a clear look.

  Winnie glimpsed an oozing red sore on the back of Black Knight’s ankle.

  Harry winced. “We’ve left them standing around in the wet too long.”

  “Does it hurt?” Winnie wondered.

  “It does.” Black Knight nodded. “But we are headed to war. This is nothing compared to what’s to come.”

  Winnie watched warily as a pair of officers plodded past, their rifles slung over their shoulders.

  Harry and the boys spent the whole day wrapping the horses’ legs in bandages to keep them dry. The mounts who were shivering got blankets, which were immediately soaked but better than nothing.

  Outside their tent, Winnie gave herself a blissful shake that splattered Harry’s uniform. He yelled at her before grabbing a filthy towel and roughly rubbing the rest of the mud from her body.

  Inside, he threw the towel on the floor and didn’t take off his big boots because everything was already slick and grimy. When he noticed water streaming from a seam in the wall he had already mended, he sat on the edge of the bed and hung his head.

  Carefully, Harry unfolded the piece of oilskin he wrapped his diary in to keep it dry. He licked the end of his pencil and was about to touch it to the page when a howl of wind shook the canvas wall and the lantern flame flickered out.

  Harry cursed! He flung the pencil to the floor, then spent a long time feeling around with his boot in the dark looking for it, twice kicking Winnie out of the way.

  Finally, he gave up and turned in, facing the wall, without scratching your Bear once. Winnie could hear Harry shivering under his thin, damp blanket. When he started making sounds, she poked her head up to check on him. Winnie touched his shoulder with her nose, and Harry turned and pulled her into him, gasping between sobs.

  Words ran out of his mouth. “I was so sick on the ship, and I don’t know what I’m doing in charge of all these men, and it’s one thing after another with the horses, and instead of taking care of them, I’ve already let so many die.” He hiccupped. “I’ve never felt so cold and wet in my life, and I came here from Winnipeg, one of the coldest places on earth.”

  His voice dropped to a frightened whisper. “If I can’t get by now, what will happen at the Front?”

  Winnie knew what it was like to be scared. Calmly, she licked the tears from his face and laid her head on his side.

  The storm of Harry’s breathing slowly cleared. He wiped his nose on your Bear. “Chin up, Colebourn,” he said to himself in a strong voice. “Do your duty.”

  Winnie put her paw on top of his hand, and he pulled his hand away and laid it on top of hers, then she thumped hers down again, trying to catch his before he pulled it away, and they played like that until finally Harry laughed.

  “Oh, silly bear!” he said, scratching her neck in that special place. “How I do love you!”

  Winnie took her duty very seriously.

  Wherever she went in Salisbury, she brightened men’s spirits, no matter how soggy their spirits were. She added Stand guard! and Roll over! to Attention!, Salute!, Forward!, and Double march! She was always careful to obey a commander’s orders before sniffin
g his hands or pockets looking for a little something.

  She became known as a fierce competitor at tug-of-war, and her skills at hide-and-seek gave rise to a small gambling ring. Brodie made out handsomely.

  She was honored when a British officer taught her to peel and eat an orange after she’d retrieved his riding crop from the mud.

  But her finest hour may have been when Edgett and Dixon drove a log into the ground outside Harry’s tent. “There you go, Winnipeg,” said Dixon. “Now you have your very own Post in the army.”

  She rubbed her scent on it and made scratch marks so there could be no mistaking whose it was. Several times a day, Winnie climbed her Post to stand watch over camp.

  Your Bear was Mascot of the Second Canadian Infantry Brigade, and she proudly attended her Post.

  One evening, Harry and Dixon tied Winnie up outside the YMCA tent while they went inside, and she found herself tethered beside a four-legged creature who had a scrawny white beard and a pair of curved horns that rose like a split trunk from his head. His back was draped in a coat of scarlet flannel with an army patch sewn on it.

  “I’m Winnie,” said Winnie with her nose in the air. “Second Infantry Brigade. Bear.”

  The animal showed its teeth. “Bill, Fifth Infantry Battalion. Goat.”

  “I didn’t know there were any other animals here besides horses,” said Winnie.

  “Aye, we are a rare bunch,” the goat said proudly. “Have you not met the carrier pigeons? They’re fearless, they are. They’ve already started flying missions across the Channel.”

  Winnie had been wondering about those fast gray fliers she’d seen over camp.

  “How did you get in the army?” she asked.

  “The troop train came through Saskatchewan, and the Curwain family saw fit to enlist me.”

  “I started on the train too!” Winnie cocked her head. “Did you come over on one of the big ships?”