Flanders (30 page)

From the howling chorus of burning men came one familiar high, keening voice: Pickering’s. I searched for my target. One shot, that’s all I had time for, then the barrel flash would give my position away. By the time I caught a glimpse of a coal shuttle helmet, I was panting too hard to aim right. My hands shook. I sucked in a breath, let it out slow, counted to eight. Christ almighty. How Pickering shrieked.

I squeezed the trigger slow. Recoil pushed the rifle butt solidly into my shoulder. It was a sweet shot. The dragon died, hemorrhaging flame. Its blood spilled over the sandbags in a dazzling waterfall. It splashed high, and rained brilliance over the trench. Wails drifted down from above, like a disaster had occurred in Heaven.

I ducked and reloaded. Miller’s shout brought my head up again. Emma Gee had gone quiet, too. Tommies were already sprinting upward to the bags, lobbing grenades as they ran. The barbed wire was torn, its edges gaped. I readied my gun and ran with them.

Ahead, the pop of rifles, the deafening crack of Battye bombs, of jam-pots, the boom of cricket ball grenades. Shouts of alarm in English, in guttural German. I slipped in the mud, caught my uniform on the crossbar of the German wire, pulled free, and clambered high, higher until the ground ended.

I was looking down into the trench, a Boche looking up. I shot him in the face, killed another coming out of a dugout, killed a poor wounded bastard before I could stop myself. Not fury, Bobby. Not hate. What I felt had gone beyond fear, too. It was a bleak need, like something that would make you step across the border at the cypress.

I jumped over the bags into the Boche trench and stumbled. The walls were rough and too close. Down the way, British grenades thumped like drums. They beat like a heart in my ears. The flares were dying, but a Very light went up. I saw Jerry Winters beside me, grinning like a maniac. Harvey Bowes was there, too; and Calvert.

Winters said, “Bastards ’ve gone phut now. Went out like an Asquith.”

I wasn’t detached anymore. I was edgy and excited. “I shot that damned flamethrower. Fire and shit went everywhere. You see that? Huh? One shot. You see that?”

“Where’s the others?” Calvert asked. “Where are they?” He wandered, stepping on duckboard, treading on dead Boche.

I heard Miller far down the trench to my right, calling for a charge. I ran, the others at my heels, around the corner and into a deserted traverse. Then farther, past dark mouths of communication trenches, past rude ditches to the forward saps, wondering if a shot from one of those side paths would kill me. I ran through the artery of that trench until a clot of fallen sandbags and corpses slowed me down.

Then clawing over broken bodies and into the next traverse, through the sharp smell of cordite, the sick-sweet smell of blood. A Boche popped out of a dugout, firing. Ahead, Winters grunted and went down. Calvert tossed a Battye bomb. It went off in our faces—blinding light, deafening sound, a spray of mud and meat. It stunned me so, I believed for a minute I’d been killed. And it wasn’t a bad death, considering. All in all, quick and without pain. Still, the pretty graveyard and the calico girl weren’t there. The dim, stinking trench was. And the sandbags where the Boche had been standing were avalanched down.

“Go!” Calvert shouted. “Go!”

We left Winters behind and climbed the hill of mud. In the next traverse Riddell stood with his Very pistol. Beyond, Miller and a group of men were furiously shoring up a cave-in.

“Shot the flamethrower, sir!”

Miller turned. “Stanhope! That you? Bloody hell! Secure our flank, man! Lead them, Sergeant! Sergeant Riddell!” Riddell snapped to attention as if he’d been torn from a dream. “Are you deaf? I said, go secure our blasted flank!”

Riddell told us to fix bayonets. We charged back down the muddy, corpse-littered trench and climbed the mud hill that Calvert had made. On the other side Winters was sitting, bleeding from the thigh.

He waved cheerfully as we passed. “Got me a Blighty!”

We stumbled along in the gloom of the trench, coming across nervous, confused knots of Tommies. We went, bayonets pointed, past Boche bodies chewed by grenades and burned by flaming kerosene, past the blackened, roast-pork and burned-rubber-smelling mess that had been the flamethrower. Just beyond the fire bay a fallen wall stopped us.

Pickering was there, sitting in a wide spot of the traverse. LeBlanc was there, too. And Tommy Deighton and Eugene Humphreys.

Pickering. For a minute I was sure that we had advanced until we’d reached Heaven. Only Heaven should have been a wider, prettier place. And the air should have been sweet.

Pickering was sitting on the German firestep. He looked up at me. His face was stark and hopeless; still blackened from the burnt cork but for pink stripes down his cheeks. “Marrs,” he said.

“Hey, Stanhope.” LeBlanc was laughing. “You just crawl up from some funk hole? Welcome to the battle, Mama’s boy.”

“I got the flamethrower,” I said loud, my voice twitchy. I wanted everyone to hear what I had done. I was ready to run some more. To shoot. To watch Boche fall. “One shot. That’s all. Burning fucking kerosene went every which-a way.”

Tommy Deighton rocked back and forth, his head cradled in his hands. “God have mercy, Christ have mercy,” he kept saying.

Humphreys, agitated, told us, “Brought more grenades? I’m out, and the Boche has been tossing potato mashers.”

As if he had called for one, a potato masher came sailing up from the other side, black against the green sky. It landed with a bright, sudden crack, wide of the trench, between us and the wire.

“Not that they have any aim, mind.” Humphreys shrugged.

We pitched a couple of Battye bombs over the fallen wall of bags. They went off with twin thuds, leaving silence in their wake.

Truce settled. We waited, but the Boche lobbed no more grenades. We didn’t throw any more either. Without a word said, without another shot, the battle was over.

We looked at each other. Deighton rocked. Pickering sat rigid with grief.
Marrs,
he’d said. Not Pickering, but Marrs. Marrs lying out there in No Man’s Land.

I sat down beside him. He smelled like kerosene and smoke. “I need to go help Marrs?”

“No.” His body was stiff. If I touched him—if I said another word—he’d break.

Calvert asked, “What’s to do now?”

Bowes, fidgeting and nervous, kept looking up at the cave-in, the one between us and the Boche.

Calvert said, “Well, the effing Boche is on bof sides of us, ain’t they. An’ us sandwiched in between like a bleeding slice of ’am. You gentlemen thought of ’ow we’re effing supposed to get out of ’ere?”

The flares were faint now. In the dying light, Riddell looked about, blinking slowly. “Best find shovels.”

Well, we shoveled ourselves out, Bobby, digging shell hole to shell hole. Before the sun came up, Miller sent James Hickey across with a message to Dunn. Our ditches and Dunston-Smith’s met someplace in the middle.

I don’t know how the Boche feel about us being here, rubbing shoulders and asses with them. I don’t know if they can sleep at night. We have a problem with it. No more grenades, though. They were probably as relieved as we were to stop that part. They plink a few haphazard shots our way. We fire their own Emma Gee back.

For we found the two Boche machine gunners, Bobby. Them and their reloaders were dead. It was LeBlanc, not sneaking up on them with his knife this time, but running full tilt with jam-pots in both hands. LeBlanc’s been mentioned in Miller’s field reports. He’ll be decorated again.

I hear the other men talk about him, men who don’t know what LeBlanc’s made of. “Should get Dunn to pin him on a medal.” And “Needs Dunn’s bloody job, ask me.” And “Deserves at least a V.C. for that one.”

Me, I just shot behind cover, and not soon enough to be a hero. Not even soon enough for Marrs.

Despite potshots from our Boche neighbors, I crawled out to find him. Marrs and the six others in the shell hole had shriveled to the size of little kids. Their heads were charred skulls. Their eyes had melted, the sockets emptied; jaws were stretched wide in a last grinning bony scream. Their legs were drawn up and their arms were cocked like they had been fighting the dragon, but lost.

I sorted through identity disks until I found him. Marrs’s body wasn’t peaceful like the things you see lying in caskets. It wasn’t even sad, like when you see a boy with his head cracked open or one with his guts hanging out, like Smoot. Marrs was disgusting. Maybe the worst thing was the smell. Sure, there was the stink of burned rubber in that shell hole, and kerosene, too; but it was the odor of cooked meat that got me.

I held my breath as best I could. I left Marrs the green disk for a time when someone could rebury him right. I took the red disk so Miller and the army could inform the family. Then Pickering and Calvert crawled out and helped me bury him. It was our job, you know. It was us who had slept with him, ate with him, put up with his whining; us who made him the butt of our jokes. And all the time I was keeping my head down, digging his grave, I thought of Sunday pork roasts and crusty barbecued brisket. Such a goddamned pitiful shame. For all of Marrs’s sweet-natured kindness, what I’ll remember most about his death is my hunger.

O’Shaughnessy and the rain got there just as we were finishing up. On his knees, O’Shaughnessy sprinkled holy water and said some words. We put up a field cross and crawled back to the trench.

The next day we marched off and left Marrs in the company of strangers. I poked my head above the trench to tell him goodbye, and saw that rain had knocked his grave marker down.

I want to tell you I saw Marrs in the graveyard right after, but I didn’t. I thought about him a lot. The night after we were relieved, I closed my eyes and, while I was still awake, imagined myself walking out across No Man’s Land. I thought hard, pictured the new ditch we’d made and the place where the Boche wire had been breached. Nearby I found Marrs and another soldier sitting on the edge of a shell hole, waiting.

He looked happy to see me.

“Need to come with me, Marrs,” I told him, and put a hand down to help.

He was grinning that muddle-headed grin of his. “Can’t, Stanhope. Lost me letter.”

I said, “It’s bad out here. You need to come on.”

I tried hard, but I couldn’t make him get up. You’d think you could control daydreams, right? I must have fallen asleep about then, for the next thing I knew, I woke up to a gray dawn. Pickering had set our kettle on for tea, and he was looking out the door into the rain.

I didn’t talk to him. We had revetment duty that day, and worked side by side. He didn’t talk to me, either.

Travis Lee

OCTOBER 1, THE RESERVE TRENCHES

Dear Bobby,

Well, it’s a disappointment. The weather went from hot to cold with not much in between, just like it does in Texas. Spring was long and pretty, but fall doesn’t have much to show for itself but rain.

They issued us goatskin vests. Warm and cheap. For good reason, we call them “stinkies.” The hair’s still on them, lumpy, raggedy hair, nothing like our goats at home. I got a black-and-tan one. We fought over the white-hair vests. Pickering won.

The other day the wall where the Frenchie was sticking out collapsed, and we had to build it up again. Still, we lost our mascot. Just as well. We scraped up what was left of him with our shovels and buried him farther on. O’Shaughnessy sprinkled water, said a little Latin. We all went back to the dugouts for a wake.

It’s like Marrs’s death has changed things for the better somehow. Jesus. I hate to think that. Maybe it was that damned raid that woke everybody up; or maybe we’ve all got used to this slimy hole we’re living in. Whatever happened, Pickering’s out of his sulk.

A few days after Marrs’s death we were sitting around in the dugout just enjoying a smoke, and out of the blue, he said, “It was me who was supposed to drop off the hooks, Stanhope. I mean, all the signs pointed to me, didn’t they. And when your time has come, no getting out of it. That’s for dead cert. You’re phut, and that’s that. I think whatever powers might be—God or what—cocked it up, didn’t He. Took Marrs in error.”