But now as a solo cello he could only make a threnody; some Greek word for lament, he remembered from a somewhat arrogant teacher.
He stopped and slowly turned his ear to listening. Slowly, as if in reply to the playing, the crying came again, on the night breeze. Or was it his imagination? Was it music from the earth to overlay the things that had happened here? To calm this broken piece of the world so that it might recover from the devastations of humans, who knew no better.
Except they knew music. He knew music.
He lifted his body, as if helped by an unseen hand.
The sound had been all around, but he had to go further out and explore the folds and craters that could not be seen through a periscope.
His uniform felt cold and unfamiliar. His equipment hung heavy. It was on a tired body and perhaps he needed sleep, though he had nothing to bring a shred of comfort; no covering, nothing on which to lay the head; only the cold earth to lie on. He had to become a friend of this earth.
He moved across the crater threshold and began to wander towards the guns, towards the German side. After a while he suddenly dropped into a small dyke or ditch. It held no water but he was amazed to find some long grass growing in the bottom. He lay down and within a very few minutes was asleep.
He awoke when it was almost dawn. He was shivering and hungry. The night had given a sort of cloak for the world under which his imagination could flourish with silent music. Now reality came with the grey light, with questions to be answered and decisions to be made.
The casualty Jack had shot; was he real? Had he really been alive? Cello thought about going back to check on him in daylight. But moving would be difficult. This ditch could save his life or preserve it for a few more hours until he could find the real casualty, which had become his casualty. Perhaps when dusk came again. He needed to stay very still. His section of soldiers would be standing too, looking out for him. Looking through periscopes to spot him. His .303 would have already been handed in and checked against his name. Each rifle was numbered and the holder’s number recorded by the Company Quartermaster Sergeant. Word may have even reached the RSM that he had thrown away his rifle and deserted. News of misdemeanours always travelled fast. Good news did not travel. Wheels were being put in place to get him Court Martialled, if he returned; if he returned alive. As a casualty the only reason he would be kept alive would be to face his Court Martial.
Remembering a packet of biscuits in his ammo pouch he rolled slowly, stiffly, to try to retrieve it. It was on the same side as the water bottle. He got both out.
Breakfast was taken as the dawn broke, wedged into his ditch, which was in some ways almost more comfortable than the trenches. He could remain lying, didn’t have to stand too, or clean his rifle ready for inspection.
He thought of his purpose. The real casualty might also be awake. Though he may not be alive. He might have had biscuits and water two days ago; not any more. Or perhaps, mortally wounded he could not reach them. Cello would need to save something for him, perhaps one biscuit and a mouthful of water might be enough to keep him alive.
But where was he?
The sun did not warm as there was a chill undercutting it. Perhaps the sun would win later. Early April was always an unknown. Here, as in England, it could be winter, spring and summer in the same day.
The rain would come, the April showers. They might come, not as showers, something heavier, reaching back to winter, not forward.
He dozed as the sun rose.
A boom awoke him.
God, gas! It must be. How would he survive? Chlorine and mustard crept into the trenches staying at ground level because it was heavier than air. How would he survive in this trench? He fumbled and yanked at the gas mask pouch. He got it out. Helmet had to come off to get the mask on with its snout, sticking out like a pig’s nose. By now he was sweating and his arms had been flailing about above the ditch like a mad man. They would have seen him surely.
There is a point beyond caring. Walls of belief break and then you are in a new territory. A man does not know how many territories he can inhabit, short of death or complete madness.
Cello lay in the ditch with his chest rising and receding, breathing into a rubber space, smelling the rubber and old musty canvas like something dragged from a suitcase of clothing that had fallen into the ocean. His eye pieces rapidly fogged up. He would see nothing. He heard the booming continue. But no shrieking of the shells coming down close. There was no indication of where they were landing. Perhaps the gas would not come. The gas usually kept close to where the shells did burst, moving sluggishly from there. Unless there was a wind in which case it was driven along. Cello’s vision was nothing. He could only go on sound. He looked up. He was lying on his back. Was it time to give up? How many casualties did give up? Without bothering to call out for help, to cry for their mothers. Without doing anything. Just close your eyes and breath your last, deep breaths, deeeep… His chest rose. It was nothing, his chest. It did not stick out, the medics who examined him when he first joined, commented on his apparent lack of strength.
They did not know the strength in his hands to carve music.
The booming seemed to lessen. Or was it his imagining. Still nothing shook the ground nearby. Perhaps he would be spared. Could he remove the mask? He raised his hand carefully to see if it had any traces of gas. How would he see traces of gas? Were there any on the grass?
Not being able to see made men frustrated and wanting to remove the masks, perhaps prematurely. Cello did so carefully. Without its horrible stale smell the fresh air was almost a delight. Though as always the air was tinged with the ever present smell of war; of death and earth mixed with the broken things driven into it. So he breathed and did not choke.
Suddenly he heard, perhaps very close, the real casualty, his casualty, the one he was going to find and take care of. He heard not a cry or a call for help, but more of a talking, perhaps to himself. Something like; “Oh god I’m going to die here.”
“No you will not,” Cello replied from his trench in a hoarse loud whisper where the sound of his voice surprised him.
Then came silence.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Minds in the mud
The earth was battered and bruised. Once there had been rolling green fields with small streams bubbling from little indented pockets in the ground, feeding farmers’ fields; providing drink for cattle and water for farms and their inhabitants. They gently meandered down towards larger waterways and thence to rivers and through towns. A stream would have fed the ditch in which Cello now lay, taking water, essential life; to other land, livestock and human activity.
Streams couldn’t move now. Their source was blasted to mud puddles. Their tender spouts forced down into oblivion and filth. If the water was able to emerge at all it became instantly vile; mixed with the residue of gas, the remains of bodies and the poisonous gun powder of war. Even the rats would get ill from it and pass disease around.
As Cello turned towards the certainty of the sound of the voice, he had a sense of a small re-entrant ahead, towards the enemy, but across the lie of the ground. On the map it would have been probably only one contour of ten feet in height, going in a tight U shape, almost a V. The water source, if it had one, would be to his right front. Beyond that the ground rose above the first ten-foot contour towards the enemy.
The question he had to ask himself was; could the enemy see into the bottom of the re-entrant?
The day was as clear now as it would get. The sun as high as it would get, just behind him. He could not risk a move now and if he called to the casualty he might be heard from his own trenches, only maybe two or three hundred yards away, as the casualty had been heard. He would need to attract his attention in another way, or wait until dusk and move then.
It should be wait, but his impatience might get the better of him.
He looked at the wall of his ditch, inches away from his face. They used crawl trenches to move between sec
tion positions and when there was no proper trench system. This ditch would probably contour round towards the head of the re-entrant. He could use it as a crawl trench to get near the casualty. He had to turn around first though. He couldn’t crawl feet first.
He managed to carefully set a screen of grass clods, gouged from the ditch bottom, on top of the wall towards the enemy. When it was done he twisted without breathing, delving deeper into the soil and sides of the ditch and eventually was lying the other way around. He breathed again, lying still for many moments, waiting perhaps for a shout of recognition or a stream of machinegun fire; from either side. He was now the enemy of both.
Nothing came.
He started to move along the ditch. It was a canal, manmade, a very small canal. Or he had suddenly become a huge giant. But the sides gave him no room to move. In some places the sides were of stone and he could claw his way along knowing that he could stay under the top and not be seen. In some places the sides were destroyed.
The line of the ditch might be visible to the German trenches. It would have stood out as a solid line on the landscape where nothing else was intact and unbroken.
Cello breathed heavily with the effort, or more with nerves. He stopped every few yards, his chest heaving. The noise he made seemed to bark like a dog in a lonely street of empty houses, except it was more of a scraping. But when he stopped he could hear no other sound. So he wondered if the war had stopped for him. He almost wanted a sign to tell him what was occurring instead of this unwarlike silence which made all things possible in his imagination. It even made music possible. Music floating over No Man’s Land, guilty music; rendered by soldiers who had laid down their weapons together and taken up… cellos, trombones, trumpets. Maybe the dead would rise up to the sound and march towards each other. On meeting they would sit together in No Man’s Land and raise a glass, a glass of dark brown beer. Laughter would be heard drifting with the music in and out of time.
That was the joy that music making brought. Could it ever be brought again? Could people from different cultures ever again share the same music; make the same music together?
He was sweating. It dripped into his eyes. Perhaps he was crying. But he knew the strong salt taste of sweat, over that of tears. He wanted to cry, but his work was too hard to allow that luxury. His helmet needed separating from his forehead where it had become welded.
He rested and dozed.
The sun had been warm but dulled in intensity eventually as the early spring day was drawing towards late afternoon. He was very hungry and thirsty. Another nibble at a biscuit and sip of water was called for. It would be a tiny ritual to break the madness of that day.
He scraped on desperately. There was a rhythm now about his movement. He had become well practiced at doing it. And he must have made… He had no idea. It seemed like hundreds of yards. Probably about seventy. Just a few more yards before…
Then he did stop for water and biscuits… half a biscuit. He also urinated, turning to try to get into a position to do it without soaking his uniform. Not that he was in a position to care.
He looked forward towards perhaps the last ten or twenty yards to take him to where the casualty might be. The way was blocked he saw. He knew it was a decomposing body. He hadn’t seen many so far in the ditch, which he had decided was a leat, rather than a ditch. He had been smelling the body for some time. He knew this was not his casualty. The smell indicated some time since death.
He had to turn the body to get past which released an overpowering smell and a mass of maggots. Crawling through them he comforted himself with the thought that they had come to live because of this man’s death. They represented life, however loathsome. He could even eat them as well.
He thought of the two or three biscuits left in his pouch, then he looked at the mass of white squirming life that he was now moving through. But somehow their movement, a sort of wriggly celebration of death and their food from the rotten stomach and bowels of this man, repulsed him too much. He decided to look for worms instead. So he quickly brushed the maggots off as he worked his way past the body, trying to smell earth instead of death.
Suddenly he dug both his hands into the soft floor of the ditch where it was a little cleaner beyond the body. He bent his face close to the earth and dripped into it. Now these must be tears. He wanted its comfort, its closeness, just a clean piece of earth.
He had not forgotten about his casualty but suddenly a voice brought him nearer. “I can hear you, oh god I can hear you.”
Cello’s face suddenly burned with shock. The voice was very close. It was not a loud voice. It was almost a voice comforting him, in his loneliness. He didn’t breathe or move. His helmet suddenly tipped forward into the soil. The back of his head, now naked, his blonde, boyish, hair that usually seemed to stay clean, pricked and scalded with anticipation. Perhaps something loomed over him, ready to bring down a terminating blow on him. “Yes, I am here,” he heard himself murmur. Then a little louder, “I’m here!” There was now a strength in his voice.
That strength was perhaps his last gasp. In the night he had felt energy. Now he felt a terrible weight upon him, as if death if it came now was better than sleep. He had found his casualty. But like a runner who collapses feet from the tape after the race of his life, he could not cross the finishing line.
He had found his clean bit of earth and he breathed a wholesome breath, one cool breath told him what had made him; not dust as in a funeral elegy; ‘We are dust and unto dust we shall return’; but the clays that gave life from the earth, the earth that fed all life. Our mother’s mother’s mother, going back and back, down through ages. Was this a tiny speck in the earth, this war? Could not he Cello, Marcus; to whom the earth had given a gift, the gift of music making; not be stronger than this tiny speck on the earth that was this war.
He didn’t know what to do now. Darkness was falling. He had spent hours in this trench or ditch or leat, whatever it was. Now it was time to go and meet his fate.
The bricks in the wall had given way to mostly solid earth, some stone and some gaps. He struggled with new energy towards the next gap and without thinking or worrying, breached it and rolled out of the ditch. He came to rest in a mud pool. There, looking at him was his casualty.
“I knew you would come,” gasped the man.
“I would come.”
“Someone! You are someone.” He spoke with shallow breaths.
“Yes.” Cello had never walked into a public house to meet someone, that he could recall. But suddenly absurdly he thought of that. A friend had been waiting for him.
The man was lying in the mud with his legs spread apart. They were immobile. Immediately that much was obvious to Cello. He was not covered in mud, but blood, even though he had been lying in mud for at least two days. He must be so cold, with trench-foot setting in, frozen! Immediately Cello noticed on his arm a set of sergeant’s stripes. They had been almost pulled off and were hanging in tatters. On his collar were the regimental badges of the regiment Cello had joined. This man was part of the same battalion.
Cello wanted to drag him out of the mud. That was his first thought. Get him out of the mud!
“I need to get you out of there. Get you dry.”
“My legs’ll never work again,” he said. He was crying.
“I’ll get you out… Sarge,” said Cello.
“Not much good to me, they’ll probably Court Martial me now.”
“Well actually that’s what they are going to do to me as well. But let me try to get you out of this mud hole.” He moved towards the Sergeant, still conscious of the possibility of being seen, so he crouched and sort of stumbled like a baby learning to walk but only on one leg.
But it was now getting dark so movement was safer. The Sergeant’s stripes ripped as they were, seemed to shine, with light from the white coloured braiding. That was the intention, so that all junior ranks could see them. It was not thought that the enemy could also see them and snipers p
ick them off, as well as officers and others with rank.
“Do you think we can be seen from the Hun trenches?” Cello heard himself asking.
“There’s quite a lip over there and a bunker on top, so I think we are in a blind spot here,” he said, adding; “Are you a medic then?”
“Why do you ask?”
“No weapon.”
Cello had arrived at the side of the Sergeant and even in the gathering gloom he could see some terrible wounds. The right foot was almost torn off and around the lower leg and hanging boot was blackened tissue and a protruding bone. There were fractures in both legs which rested at twisted angles. They had many other holes in them as well. He had tried to apply a kind of tourniquet to the right leg with one of his puttees twisted with a bayonet scabbard.
“I’m not a medic. I just threw away my rifle.”
“Oh well, I’ve got one you could use if you need to defend us.” He gestured into the mud and Cello noticed that his hand was also completely lacerated. “Not much good to me anymore.” He lay back again. He spoke in a hollow whisper, breathing a lot behind the words. Getting them out was an effort. “Number 13216 Sergeant John Thomas Wall at your service.”
“My service, you’re the sergeant I should be serving you, rescuing you. You’re the important one! Now let me help you.”
“Well you see my stripes hanging in there but I don’t have anything else to prove who I am. They made us leave everything behind including the ID discs.”
Cello had got his hands under the sergeant’s shoulders. He hated the thought that he had been lying in the mud for… nearly three days perhaps. He began to drag. Then stopped. “Why did that happen, we were told always to wear your ID discs at all times?”
A Cellist Soldier Page 7