by Dennis Bock
I remember on our left flank we had the French 87th Territorial and the 45th Algerian Division. On our right we had the Brits. They looked as if they’d suffered ordeals a thousand times worse than our basic training. There were already ghosts in their eyes. It was quiet the first night I arrived, though, and I had occasion to pretend the worst was over. I was racked with fear and excitement, quietly hunched in a ball in an underground bunker with forty or fifty men. Its dirt walls were supported by thick lumber. A cloaked man brushed past me, looked down, and my eyes met his. It was as if he couldn’t see me, not with those haunted eyes. But he had seen something he would never forget, I thought. Perhaps now he saw only cadavers in the uniforms around him. He had seen and smelled the unimaginable, and it would not let him go. The eyes offered a story but it was a coded, silent mystery I could make no sense of. He scurried off in the dark. To help me pass the hours that first night I recalled my father’s stories of France in her glory days and our family’s life there before they migrated to Scotland. On that cold first night in Belgium, the family legends provided a curious mixture of strength of purpose and impermanence. On the transport ship over, I had been buoyed by thoughts of genealogy as destiny, but as the black night deepened these family histories no longer held me in such thrall. I felt more akin to Robert the farmer than to any distant nobility.
*
It is late September. We have arrived without incident to the base of the Wu-t’ai Mountains at Sung-yen K’ou. How many villages have I slept in since arriving, how many abandoned huts have hosted my restless sleep? I am told this area of Shansi Province holds some significant religious aura. You will not be surprised that I cannot myself attest to its spiritual power, but I can tell you that it is a remarkably beautiful place. There are Buddhist temples on every hill and cliff here, it seems. I suppose I can imagine some god smiling down upon this landscape in some previous century. But be that as it may, the Eighth Route Army can use as many solid structures as they can find, and these temples of stone and mortar were built to serve the most eternal of spirits.
We have found a hospital here in thorough disarray but are whipping it into shape. I take it you know by now that in north China “hospital” signifies nothing more than a ramshackle and incomplete assortment of medical supplies and poorly trained doctors gathered together under the nearest roof. This is what we have here, of course. I have taken to giving daily lectures on sanitation and other basics as well as tending to the wounded. I expect to stay here through the month before moving on. Twenty men of my training here would still not be enough. I have been provided a hut not far from the hospital, and Ho is hard at work turning it into something that resembles a home. He’s even found a desk for the Remington. More than I can ask, really, considering.
*
The truth is that Robert Pearce was just one man among the mass of brown-uniformed men moving through snaking gorges cut into the mud and earth. I sought him out and spent time with him when I could. We met at chow on the narrow stretch between the trenches and the Regimental Aid Station. He was not a man given to words, though his eyes told me he was thinking all the time. He had impressed me with his gracious acceptance of defeat, so I tried to engage him. He was a familiar face, I suppose. Initially that is what drew me to him. I took pity on him, too, as perhaps he did on me. He was as lost as the rest of us and maybe more so, but he made no secret of it.
“I can’t say I’m having a good time here, Beth,” he said one day, when I saw him standing off by himself.
We all went by nicknames. Beth was the one I answered to.
“Farmer,” I said, “it’s not what they told us to expect, is it?”
“I believe you like it here, Beth. You’re that type. It’s not a world I care for.”
“I like it here less than you,” I said. “Do you read the Bible?” He shook his head. “Good,” I said. “What do you think about?”
“I think about home. I think about trees. Here it’s only mud.”
“Trees,” I said.
“Climbing. Sitting under. Building with. Pissing against. Blooming. Falling. Colourful leaves. Trees in all their shapes and uses. I dream of a roof of leaves over my head.”
Three days later, in the evening, the Germans released poison gas from their positions. It crawled toward us like slow-moving green worms, hugging every pore of earth, cowardly in its advance. Heavier than the air we breathed, it sought low ground and was pushed forward by obliging winds.
The Algerians and Moroccans got the worst of it. When they rose in choking desperation from the gas, the artillery began—a tactic no one had seen before. If they stayed low, the poison got them; if they ran, the shells or bullets did. It was a brilliant and merciless attack. Equipped with respirators, the enemy walked among the dead and blind and breathless as an army of exterminators. This was like nothing we knew. Our communications were down but news spread along the line for miles that the Hun had changed the rules of war. Runners brought word that we were to contain the salient at all costs, despite this new weapon.
We were ordered to prepare a counter-attack. As dark fell, fifteen hundred men collected in a nearby field. It was a grim sea of mud-splattered faces. These men would move against the enemy in eight waves. We would follow behind, the members of my Field Ambulance Unit, tending to the fallen, then carrying them back to safety. It was a night of terrible anticipation. Silence was the rule, and in this silent gloom each man attempted to master his fear in his own way, and accept his coming death. Just before midnight the whistle blew and the first wave went over, then the next and the next, like a pulsing, raging heartbeat running down to its last, until No Man’s Land was overrun by the living and the dead.
We began our work then, searching in teams of six in the darkness and listening for calls, groans or weeping, the organic noises of the fallen. It was not possible to run in mud as deep as that, and the shells and screaming and gunfire deafened anyone who tried, leaving him disoriented and useless to those whom he had come out in search of. Sometimes you stumbled over one of your men even before you knew what he was, not just a stump. That first night we went out more times than I could count. It was by far the dirtiest day my life had yet seen. All night long I saw things I had never imagined possible. In the ghostly green lightning of bursting shells men glowed and flickered as their flesh dropped away from them in pieces. Those men you could not help and their screams faded as the burning grew brighter.
I listened for the cries of the living, not the dying. These led down into dark holes, like a string pulling you by the guts to your own death, in hopes that you might load a man on a stretcher, all six of you committed to this one simple, near-impossible task. It felt nothing less than superhuman. Back and forth we trudged, often more than an hour for every man. We worked like machines in the mud with no time to think or feel pity. There were occasions of nausea at the sight of exploded bodies. Again and again the night lit up with cannon and flares to illuminate the sight of one of our men doubled over retching. We moved forward, avoiding a single building in the distance that was said to house a machine-gun nest. We’d advanced and taken the forward trench of the enemy with bayonet and hand-to-hand fighting, and following the capture of that ditch we stretcher-bearers descended into the pure dark to find what we could. We ignored the enemy’s pleas to staunch the flow of their wounds. There was much leg- and boot-work on the dying. This was how we’d been taught to dislodge a stuck bayonet—the full force of the body, foot against shoulder to pull mightily if the blade had wedged into the chest plate or single rib. If it was stuck deep into the spinal column there was no hope for the boy, and sometimes a man came out of nowhere, without a word, and helped him die quickly, but I was not forced to do so, not yet, though I had already heard the necessity for it in inhuman groans closer to death than to life.
Through the night the fighting continued, horror upon horror. The Germans counter-attacked, having previou
sly buttressed their forward lines with reinforcements. Waves of them came at us, and in our turn we advanced against them, and my comrades and I picked over the deep fields for the wounded who awaited us. A disembodied voice was always imploring from the darkness beyond, but too often a search party was denied permission if the position was too exposed. And so the night proceeded. Our spotters informed us as to the approximate position of a man located through sightings or his cries, then off we went like spelunkers down a dark cave.
Just days into it, we were as experienced as the French Colonials to our left and the British to our right. Distant explosions and sniper fire never let up during the lulls in fighting. Catching a moment’s rest, I leaned against a wall of earth and timber and conjured thoughts of the sacrifices and the ancient battlefields of my forebears. It was my desperate attempt to find heroism in my blood. But by now I knew that it was all—the gallantry, the romance, the glory—a great deception.
*
On the seventh day we consolidated our line with the help of British reinforcements who’d arrived at the small town of St. Julien. The day broke sunny and clear. It was a great relief to feel the natural warmth on my face, but a dread, too, as the enemy’s spirit would be similarly improved. Waiting for instructions to move, we played cards, wrote letters, thought about home. I wrote to my family reporting that I was alive and well, the war was proceeding apace and with luck I should be home before the end of summer. Belgium was not what I had imagined and neither was the human spirit, in fact, more noble than anything I had ever known. The common man here—the farmers and bricklayers and factory workers so in abundance along the front—possessed such dignity in these least of humane conditions that I felt honoured to be associated with them. It was horrible to witness the true horrors of war, but we all were committed to the certain victory ahead and in good spirits, our morale undaunted.
I felt obliged to include these lies for the sake of my mother and sister, whose worry preoccupied me as much as my own fate in those days. I attempted to keep my letters optimistic and descriptive in nature, highlighting my daily rituals and observations, along with a telling anecdote, such as the time one of the boys, named Bud MacFarlane, had stood a stretcher on its hand-grips and danced a waltz under a full moon. There were twenty men in the Number Two Field Ambulance, myself included—numbers enough to find characters of Bud’s sort. I wrote home about some of those boys, and about a soft-spoken lad named Robert I’d met over here from my teaching days, explaining that he had no greater ambition than to return to his people back home, find a wife and raise children. As I wrote this I felt a momentary desire to claim those plain desires as my own, suspecting that my mother would find peace in such wholesome simplicity, given my perilous situation, but knowing, too, that fabricating such sentimental nonsense would do no one any good in the long run.
The Regimental Aid Station was located only three miles behind the front line. When not writing letters, we spent our time preparing for an assault, either offensive or from the enemy, organizing and stocking and making sure all was in order, from generators and surgical equipment to operating tables. Idle time was best filled with labour, an occupied mind finding fewer opportunities to dwell on the madness around us.
In fact, the solemn anticipation felt among the men before they jumped the bags and until the stretcher-bearers came forth to fetch the wounded was, in its way, less terrifying than the idle waiting. In those last moments the mind races and the body, powered by adrenalin and fear, becomes a coiled spring. Just moments behind the forward rush, the stretcher-bearers poured from the trenches into the fighting to collect the wounded and hurry them back to the Aid Post, where the surgeons worked on the boys who needed it most while many others waited. We returned again and again to No Man’s Land to bring back those who could be stabilized then loaded onto horse-drawn carts and transported by lorry or tram to the Field Ambulance, where they were further cared for and eventually shipped in the space of a day or two to the clearing hospitals near the French ports, or maybe as far away as Merry Old England, if they were lucky enough to find themselves wounded out of the war.
As I say, I attempted to maintain an optimistic tone in these letters regarding my own situation, on occasion hinting at the fear and anxiety and harsh conditions, hoping that the censors would not interfere; but for the most part I wrote of my longings for home and study and the company of my family and the north woods. These letters gave me great respite and were a forum for my dreams to run free, a release from the tedium and filth and death all around me. As if from a well I drew memories of camping and fishing trips and clear air and even the confines of Edgely, Ontario, where I’d learned a thing or two about the strength of will and learning to fight with your fists. I always signed my letters “Yours with love,” and those I received with such anticipation began in my mother’s hand “Our dear son” or my father’s “Dear Norman.” Those words alone often provoked tears and I felt an impossible distance separate me from my family. It was like reading a book from a century past, with every paragraph registering the irrecoverable years and miles. Upon opening a letter, I sometimes found a man hiding behind his cloth. “Dear Norman,” he would write, “It will do you good to remember the Lord’s words in times like these. Every day I pray for your safe return:
Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night;
nor for the arrow that flieth by day;
Nor for the pestilence that walketh in darkness;
nor for the destruction that wasteth at noonday.”
And with a definitive Amen, your grandfather would hurriedly sign off like a man late for his own sermon.
Of course, I preferred your grandmother’s letters, filled with news of my brother, Malcolm, and sister, Janet, and of the precocious children in her Sunday School class and talk of neighbours and their pride that I was here in the fight as all good boys must be. Some letters I saved while others were lost in the chaos of those days. I remember clearly one in which your grandmother wrote that they were pinning white feathers onto the lapels of able-bodied men back home. “A league of women who make it their business to meddle,” she said, and went on to describe rallies in Toronto. Though my mother was no warmonger—nor was my father, certainly—their letters were predictably patriotic. Such thinking had become almost like breathing, I supposed. I did not think badly of this, only saddened on occasion that people should have such strong opinions of things which they knew so little about. Here we saw the fighting through a different lens. We did not see “war” but only a few hundred yards of nothing, beyond which were men who wanted to kill us. It was nothing like this present war in China, since we had no ideals other than to avoid death.
In an attempt to entertain ourselves, we sometimes read aloud our letters from home—the funny or pleasant bits, in any case. When I read my mother’s account of the women and their white feathers, a young French literature major from the University of Toronto made a smart remark about those old biddies taking after the decadent scatologist Rabelais and employing their white feathers in a more useful manner.
The same day I saw Robert, who’d been sent to the Aid Station after cutting his hand while sharpening a bayonet. I wrapped him up, it was not serious, and sat talking with him afterwards. He seemed peaceful and said, “Does this mean I’m going home?”
“It’s not up to me, Farmer,” I said, “but it’s not likely. You have to be hurt worse than that.”
He nodded. “That’s all right, Beth. I feel it. I’m going home soon. Look at this stretch of weather.”
“Good things to come,” I said.
“I got a letter the other day. It was from my brother, the one you walloped in school that time. He can’t wait to come over and fight the Kaiser with me. He’s just turned eighteen and my mother can’t keep him from coming no more. Jimmy’s not a violent boy, and I don’t think he’d like it here. I have a letter for him in my breast pocket that I’ll send tomorr
ow. I’m asking him to wait on the enlisting, and promise I’ll be back soon. I told him I can feel it coming.”
The fighting started again the following day. It never went away but levelled off with constant ongoing skirmishes. There was always the crack of rifle fire or an exploding shell in the distance, but these seemed like waves from a distant shore. On April 29 it came as a tidal wave.
The attack began that morning at eleven o’clock. The inevitable counter-attack followed, and shortly after that we went over. Each man that day took an average two hours for the mere three hundred yards we had to travel. The mud was often past our knees. We were still going out at sunset, and the sky had a purple tinge to it when we went up for our last man, just then spotted by one of the snipers. He was lying wedged against a post, tangled in barbed wire, on a slight rise in the terrain. We followed the ears of a boy named McGraw, from Calgary, Alberta, who claimed he could hear the Kaiser sneeze in Berlin on a quiet day. It took close to an hour to locate and approach the man. The closer we came the more sure I was that he was dead and this dangerous attempt would end in futility, but from twenty yards off we saw the lump flinch. An arm wiggled, almost waving us on. “It’s Farmer, I think,” one of the boys said. We came closer, and it was Robert.