Flanders (27 page)

“Goodbye, sir.”

I watched him leave, then I went on my way, too—through the gloom of the narrow trench.

That night Foy was in the graveyard. His yellow blisters were healed. His round baby-face was peaceful. He was in his grave, and there were blood-red flowers and ferns tucked all around him. He was smiling a little, even though his eyes were closed.

I kneeled down at the edge of the grave and put the flat of my hand on the glass. I called to him, but he didn’t stir. The glass was cool to the touch, the roses around him pimpled and wet with dew. I rested my palm over where I thought his heart would be.

“When you wake up, why don’t you stick around for a while, Foy?”

The rest of the platoon had all left. I couldn’t bear to lose Foy, too.

I got up and started away, but stopped when something told me his eyes had opened. I went back. He was still sleeping. I didn’t see the calico girl around, but I left him, anyway. When I woke up this morning I thought of him lying down there, hands crossed over his chest, his eyes blank and open. What’s he seeing, do you think?

Travis Lee

SEPTEMBER 14, A POSTCARD FROM THE ROAD

Dear Bobby,

They’ve moved us out. We’re heading north, I hear. Maybe I’ll
get to see the ocean.

Thank Ma for the angora underwear. I’m the envy of the platoon. Tell her next time, though, she don’t have to dye the wool. Believe me, up here with this bunch, plain goat-tan’s best.

Travis Lee

* * *

SEPTEMBER 14, ON THE MARCH

Dear Bobby,

They pulled us back and sent us north, away from the best trenches we’d ever had. Nobody wanted to go. That place had been home for a while—a little damp, maybe. Certainly stinky. Still, there was elbow room in all the dugouts and most of the walls were strong—decent Boche digs. Then one morning, as the Brits would say, Bob’s your uncle. Another battalion was coming to take our place. We don’t know why. They tell us to go, and we march. They tell us to fight, and for some unknown reason we do.

The land here is even flatter. We march past black dirt farmland plowed by combat. Plants grow—mustard and turnips and kale—but everything’s growing in the fallow. Here, war shoulders up to the road. It encroaches on the towns, Bobby. You can see it in the roadside trash, in the odd shell holes, in the forsaken, dismal little villages. This afternoon, we passed our only hints of life: a woman poling along in a flat bottom boat and an old man scavenging through a weedy garden.

Teatime, we stopped by the burned trunk of what had been an enormous tree. It must have lived centuries, that tree. Must have spread its branches near fifty feet across. Around the bare trunk was piled trash: rusting tins with labels in English, in French; a broken Boche belt buckle.

Pickering leaned his back against the charred bole. He lit up a smoke. I asked him if I could have one, but he flat-out ignored me.

Marrs caught on pretty quick to the reason for his mood. “New place won’t be so bad, maybe,” he said.

Without a glance in Marrs’s direction, Pickering muttered, “Sod off.”

Pickering’s scared, Bobby. He’d had to leave his cross on the sandbag, that sun-faded T that he took as some sort of sign. I remember the day we got to our old place, he’d seen it. He just had to have that cubbyhole, always had to sleep with his head toward that particular sandbag. Marrs’s private salvation is the letter from his sweetheart promising she’d marry him, the one he keeps over his heart. With me, it’s nothing I can touch particularly, but Emily Dickinson’s poem of grief my mind can’t help playing with:
This is the Hour of Lead
—
/Remembered, if outlived,/As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow.

Thinking on that, I went quiet, too. I was disoriented. I’d packed up that morning and left home. Pickering had walked away without his sun-bleached cross and now he watched the sky, afraid a shell would kill him.

Marrs kept trying to get Pickering to talk, but I knew how heavy those lead hours could be, so I didn’t bother anymore. Across the way I saw O’Shaughnessy praying with a soldier, LeBlanc staring at them both. Having those bad thoughts again? Was he wanting O’Shaughnessy to help him? Wish he
could
help us. It’ll be a new No Man’s Land I’ll be facing. I’ll have to find new shooting spots, new resting spots, new places to snipe from. War’s so goddamned tiring.

At sunset we bivouacked in a fieldstone farmhouse with shattered walls. Rain started falling faster. Our charcoal fires went out, and we drank lukewarm tea with our cold dinner. When we were finished eating, we settled into our sleeping bags and watched the world fill up with night.

From the dark next to me came Pickering’s quiet voice. “Bleeding luck.”

“What?”

He was no more than two feet away. We’ve slept beside each other so long, I knew his smell. Out of all the snorers, I could pick out his breathing. “Should have cut it out with my penknife, Stanhope, that cross of mine. Would have too, if they’d warned us ahead of time that we were leaving.”

Pickering leaving his cross. Riddell, his gramophone and Elgar. Miller and Dunston-Smith their straw-warm hut. There wasn’t anything I wanted to go back for. I took a deep breath. The air was perfumed with rain.

“Might have carried it, you know. Just the T part. The rest of the sandbag might have stayed.”

“Yeah,” I whispered back. “It’s a shame.”

“Bleeding British luck,” he said, a man resigned to fate.

I couldn’t sleep. Every time I closed my eyes it felt like I was tumbling into the graveyard’s dark. Before dawn I got up and crawled around the sleepers. I went outside. In the yard of the farmhouse I found an old lean-to. There, I lit a candle and read a little Shelley. I wrote you a postcard, then I wrote you this letter.

When I get to the new trenches, Blackhall will send me into the No Man’s Land there. I have the strange feeling that I’ll recognize it, every nook and hole and cranny. What’s worse is, I understand why: When it comes right down to it, Bobby, all darkness is the same.

Travis Lee

* * *

SEPTEMBER 19, NEW RESERVE TRENCHES

Dear Bobby,

The trenches here are crumbling. The mud’s ankle-deep. Dig a hole anywheres, it fills up with water. The soil is full of stinking bodies and white, knobby bones. The earth spews up death. It’s built into the walls. Down the trench a Frenchie, last season’s casualty, is sticking halfway out the bags: one horizon-blue leg; a bloated arm with two fingers off, another rotted to bone. The boys who were here before us said they’d miss him.

Hearing that, Riddell did a double take. “Whyn’t take ’im with you?”

They didn’t, but before they left every damned boy in both platoons shook that Frenchie’s gray hand. They bid him adieu. Then they marched away, leaving us with their piss-poor trenches and their dead Frenchman.

The dugouts here stink of piss and rot. They’re dripping wet. They’re so small that the four of us have to take turns sleeping with our feet stuck in the aisle. Goddamned sentry’s always tripping over us.

When the Boche shell, we huddle up real tight together, shoulder to shoulder, knee to knee, and wait for the walls to fall on us. We hunker shivering under the elephant sheet. There’s not even the comfort of hot tea. We light up the brazier, but the charcoal stinks so bad it chases even the rats out.

I woke up the other night to hear Marrs crying. He went on for hours, sobbing quiet so as not to wake us. I don’t know if the others knew. Nobody spoke. Thinking on it, I should have said something, but I was too afraid of embarrassing him. Besides, what could I say? Everything’ll be all right? Jesus. Even Marrs is smart enough not to believe that.

And Pickering’s in a funk. It’s that goddamned cross of his. He’s convinced himself that he’s going to die here. The second night, when everyone else was asleep, he punched me. “Stanhope? Do me a favor.”

“Yeah?” The dugout was dark and too close, with the four of us crowded together. Calvert was snoring; Marrs was so quiet that he might have been dead. Even the rats had settled down for the evening.

“When I die, bury me proper, will you?”

“Better not die on me, Pickering. Else I’ll have to go to London, look up your wife, and fuck her.”

“No,” he said. “Truly. You must promise me, Stanhope. I’m not joking.”

I rolled away from him, disturbing a rat, sending it scampering over my legs.

“Please.” The whispered plea behind me, nothing of Pickering’s banter in it. “You must bury me, Stanhope. There’s only you to ask. I’m afraid Marrs might muck it up. He has a soft enough heart, but he’s always a bit muddled, isn’t he. Like a fart in a colander. I know you’d see it through.”

I squeezed my eyes shut and wished he’d go to sleep. “Yeah, okay. I’ll bury you.”

Just like Pickering to get an agreement, then glue caveats on. “Not in the parados, mind. I’d bloody fall out into the trench eventually.”

“Not in the parados,” I promised.

“And I wouldn’t care to be sticking out of a wall someplace. You must promise me
that.
Bloody awful to be rotting where everyone can see. Good God. And I know it would be my luck to be hanging out the bags with my trousers about my ankles.”

I started laughing. Calvert stirred in his sleep. I bunched my sleeping bag up to my mouth to stifle the noise.

“Not funny, Stanhope. I have a horror of being left out with the flies and the maggots. I have nightmares about it, if you must know. Don’t you?”

The conversation was macabre, considering the darkness, the reek. I wanted to tell him about the graveyard, but I knew he’d either make a joke or he’d tell me to prove it. Pickering’s a rock solid boy, the sort who doesn’t hold to visions.

“Best you don’t go thinking about things like that, Pickering. You go crazy that way.”

“Well, we’re here, aren’t we? Proof we’re bleeding bonkers. Also, if you don’t mind, Stanhope, I’d rather not be left someplace where rats could eat me.” His last sentence ended in a tired whisper.

He must have been exhausted. We all were. “Yeah. Okay. I’ll see what I can do.”

Something fell on me. I flinched and nearly cried out. Only Pickering’s hand. He squeezed my shoulder tight, tried to speak, but choked up instead.

We were originals. I knew what he meant to say. “Oh, shit, Pickering. You’re welcome.”

I couldn’t sleep, not when he was crying. I hated the sound of that. I was so damned tired, Bobby—too tired to even try giving him any ghostie and graveyard hope. He was too tired to hear it. Maybe that’s why he boo-hooed, why Marrs did. Life here beats you down. It’s exhausting, being helpless. Every day we rebuild walls and put up revetments. It doesn’t matter. At night, the sandbags fail. If whizzbangs don’t burst them, damp does. Walls tumble. They bury people. The trenches. What great goddamned shelter.

Yesterday O’Shaughnessy came on me where I was taking a breather from filling sandbags. My arms were trembling, my back ached. I’d been thinking longingly of Dickinson’s description of freezing:
Chill
—
then Stupor
—
then the letting go.
I started thinking how death and grief must be the kinfolk of exhaustion.