Flanders (4 page)

Damn those Brit officers. Those soft faces, those softer hands. They remind me of those Harvard Congregationalists. I’d rather kill me some limey officers, frankly, than any poor helpless Germans.

I’ll keep this letter until I see you again, because—for poor Captain Miller’s sake—I daren’t send it through the censors.

I remain yours in outrage,

Travis Lee

* * *

APRIL 20, FRANCE, ON THE ROAD

Dear Bobby,

Granddaddy de Vrees should have told me about the marching. Understand, Bobby, that to secure some glory you have to get from Point A, where battle isn’t, to Point B, where things are going on. I never imagined the tedium.

I’d been off my feed the day before, and achy like I was coming down with an ague. The ague never hit. The next day started off well enough: everybody finally marching to war, each platoon singing, me having to learn the ditties in a hurry: “Oh, Landlord, Have You a Daughter?” and “Mandalay.” Then the pack gained some weight, and the straps started to bite into my shoulders, and the hobnail boots, which never fit me worth a damn, rubbed blisters onto my feet.

We marched on and on, not singing anymore. We stopped for lunch, and afterwards, just to break in my boots, we marched some more. Everyone looked tired. One of the battalion’s supply wagons lost a wheel, and our company was ordered to stay behind and guard it. The rest of the companies marched on.

It wasn’t just the wheel that had gone bad. It was the axle, and it took three hours to mend. We hurried to make up the time. LeBlanc, who isn’t a big man to begin with, looked to be collapsing in on himself, pressured by fatigue and fury.

How many picturesque churches can you pass without them looking the same? Miller rode up and down the line of our bent-backed shuffling company, throwing out a sympathetic word here, a joke there—a cutting horse watchful of the herd. He would not meet my eye.

When the sun began to lower, the wheel failed again. We bivouacked that night where the wagon broke down, deep in a dripping forest; and some of us slept in a charcoal shed and some slept in a smokehouse. It rained, and the damp brought the fragrance of long-eaten hams from the smokehouse’s walls. I dreamed of food and thought I heard thunder. The next day we found the bridge five miles up had been blasted. Despite our songs, war had gone on and men had died. We passed a dray mare with her two back legs blown off and a mercy bullet between her ears. Then we marched by two Frenchies, one with a splendid handlebar mustache, his eyes glassy with surprise. His horizon-blue uniform was stiff and so maroon with blood that for the life of me, I couldn’t tell which part of him had been wounded.

Nobody talked much. We looked over our shoulders for the next several miles. Except for that capricious death, there was no other sign of battle. We stopped to eat in a woody copse by masses of white flowers—so many blossoms that it seemed like we’d stopped in snowdrifts. My stuffy head and aching muscles had turned into a full-fledged cold. I couldn’t smell the flowers. I couldn’t smell my rations. I sneezed.

Miller put guards at the perimeters, told us to keep our talk down and to set no cookfires. The dappled woods spooked me. I could see the others’ eyes dart here and there. My boots had not turned comfortable and the pack was just as heavy; still I was ready to leave that place. The missing bridge took us five hours out of our way.

Poplar-bordered lanes. Churchyards with their dead sleeping under tapestries of pink winecups. Bluebottle flies buzzed us like enemy aeroplanes. By the time the sun sank, I sank, too. I couldn’t breathe. My feet hurt.

Lieutenant told me to “Gi’ up, mon. Can ye not gi’ up?” Me grumbling and pretending not to understand. “Up! We ma’ meet w’the battalion,” he says.

“Let the Boche shoot me. Save them and me both the trouble of marching.”

Little baby-faced Abner Foy laughed. “Captain’s sent Sergeant ahead to find us billets, hasn’t he. And maybe there’s a barn with warm straw waiting, and a farmer’s daughter for the cuddling. So off yer bum.”

I got up and we went on. Sergeant had found us an abandoned farmhouse, half its roof caved in from a shell. I dropped my pack in the kitchen and lay down on the tiles. Above me, the ceiling gaped open to twilight. That evening when I closed my eyes, I saw Ma’s face before me as plain as if she had been standing there. I could smell her, too: that mix of camphor and rosewater soap.

Something punched me in the side.

Miller’s toe. “Up! Up, damn you! Get those boots off at once, Private! Sergeant Riddell!” The bellow brought Riddell on the double. “See that this soldier washes his feet and dries them thoroughly. Tomorrow, Private Stanhope, make certain that you put on a pair of clean socks, two pair if need be. If that does not solve your problem, speak to Sergeant Riddell here, and he will arrange for another pair of boots.”

There were quick salutes and “Yes, sir”s all around, and then Miller was gone, leaving Riddell looking at me helplessly.

There weren’t any goddamn extra boots.

Still, Riddell helped me get my boots and socks off. He clucked at the bleeding and oozing blisters. “ ’E’s right, the captain is. Ain’t a man in this platoon what ain’t got sores from double timing, but you takes the prize, Yank. ’Ooever requisitioned these boots for you did you no favor.”

He washed my feet and then salved them. I was too tired to eat. Riddell, who knew his way around weeds, went out and picked me some.

“Look what I found, Yank!” Riddell held up fistfuls of yard greens, and he was beaming ear to ear. “Ribwort and agrimony. ’Course you can always find ribwort. No luck to that. But the agrimony’s a trick, ain’t it.”

He wrapped the ribwort around my blisters. For my cold, he made me chew the agrimony stalks. I fell asleep where I was, the bitter taste of that agrimony in my mouth, the night sky above, the murmurs and snores of men all around.

The next day my cold was better, but I couldn’t put my boots on. Riddell looked worried.

“Hell,” I told him, “I didn’t know what a shoe was till I was fifteen. I can go barefoot. Let me go barefoot, all right?”

He stuffed bunches of agrimony into my pack until I ended up looking like a hay wagon. He shook his head. “All right, then. But best you don’t let me see you marching wifout your shoes. Mind the captain and Lieutenant don’t see you, either.”

I tied my laces together and slung the boots over my shoulder. The bare dirt between my toes was a frolic, something like playing hooky. I’d come out the door and was hiding behind Riddell, keeping my head low, when Major Dunn rode up, his ass bouncing in the saddle and him pulling every which way on the reins and yelling, “Damn him for a nag! Whoa! Whoa!” The horse stopped so quick that he nearly sent Dunn over his head, a sight I would have paid American dollars for. And then he wasn’t yelling at the horse. He was screaming at Miller.

“Your orders were to meet us at Conty! Did you not understand that? If I give a junior officer some responsibility, I expect in return a bit of self-reliance. Need I wipe your bloody arse for you? Need I? Why, when I arrive at Conty, do I find everyone billeted but you? Colonel Caraway asked, and not very politely, where I had mislaid you. Can you not read a blasted map, Captain?”

Poor Miller, ramrod-straight astride his sorrel gelding, his face as emotionless as an Indian’s. Dunn shouting him down in front of his own men; the major’s fury accompanied by Miller’s soft “Yes, sir”s and “No, sir”s and “Sorry, sir”s.

“Sorry will not do, Captain. ‘Sorry’ leaves dead men in the field. ‘Sorry’ leaves battles lost.”

“Yes, sir. But the wagon broke down again.”

“Damn you! I will not have excuses. You may well have a problem on the road. Many of us do. But you are expected—no, you are required—to carry on. If your wish is to be a British officer, Miller, then kindly begin to act like one.”

“Yes, sir. Right you are, sir.”

Then those glacial eyes swung around the unit, and Dunn pointed right at me. “Captain! What is that man doing barefooted? Barefooted!” he screamed. “Is that the sort of army you will give us?”

Everybody in the unit was turning. Miller was frowning tight-lipped. And then right quick he was explaining, “An American, sir. From Texas. He was having a spot of trouble with his boots ...”

Dunn’s cheeks went brick-red. “Order him to put on his boots at once! You people may put up with such slovenly habits, but I will not have it.”

Quietly and urgently, Miller was saying to me, “Your boots, Private. Please.”

“Not
please
!” Dunn shrieked so loud that his mount flinched. “Not ‘If you would be so kind’! Order him, Captain. If you cannot control your men, I shall see you stripped of your commission.”

I went to it quick as I could, with Miller calling out, “On the double, Private!” By the time I got my boots on, I was fair panting from the pain.

Dunn said, “See that it does not happen again.” And then off he rides, one hand on his pommel, the other grasping reins and a handful of horse.

“What an asshole,” I said under my breath.

Sergeant Riddell turned, frowning. “None of that,” he said, but his lips were trying to curl up at the corners. “Needs a bit of respect. Well, ’e’s the major, isn’t ’e. Nothing’s to be done about it, Yank. You’ll have to keep the boots on.”

Riddell helped me up; then he walked beside me, toting my rifle. As we marched, he picked weeds from the roadside.

“Meadowsweet,” he said, holding up a bunch of white flowers that smelled good as Heaven. “For your grippe, if it comes back. Best thing for fever, meadowsweet. That, or white willow bark. There’s them that swears by white willow, but me? I likes the taste of meadowsweet best. Me mum’s a healer, ain’t she. Got her own medicine garden, like. Got to know me way around plants, I did. Your feet, Yank?”

I had stopped because I couldn’t make my feet move anymore. A few of the company had halted to look back. My boots were leaking blood out the laces.

Then LeBlanc was there. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. Sit down! Sit for Christ’s sake
down
! Take the boots off.”

Riddell’s voice was cautious. “Orders are—”

“You can shove the goddamned orders up this shitting army’s ass!” LeBlanc jerked the bayonet off his rifle. Riddell and the others stepped back, round-eyed.

LeBlanc knelt by me and, gentle-gestured as Miller, pulled the blood-soaked boots and socks from my feet. He used his bayonet to cut holes in the sides of the leather, then handed them back. “Think you can you put them on?”

I managed to lace them. LeBlanc helped me up. My bloody toes stuck out to either side; my torn heels protruded from the backs.

“Take a few steps,” LeBlanc said.

The half-boots were as ugly as Aunt Alice, but they felt good. Hearing the slow plod of hoofbeats, I looked up. Captain Miller was contemplating us.

“Well,” he said, fighting a smile. “Carry on.”

When Miller had ridden out of earshot, LeBlanc said sourly, “Carry on. Jesus. D’ja hear that? Carry the
merde
on. That’s the only order they know in this turd of an army.” He shoved his bayonet into its housing and marched down the road, never looking back to see if the rest of us were following.

APRIL 25, THE TRENCHES

Dear Bobby,

Three days ago we arrived at the place we’re supposed to get “hardened.” It was late twilight and we were marching in file when Miller and another officer came galloping by, barking, “Off the road. Keep moving.”

When the horses had passed and it got quiet again, I could hear it: a low, far-off rumble—as full of threat as a coming Texas thunderstorm.