Good Hope Road: A Novel (35 page)

Veterans streamed panic-stricken from the camp. Still, they weren’t moving quickly enough, it seemed. The small group on the bluff watched, sick to their stomachs, as the soldiers began once more to use tear gas, flinging canisters into the fleeing crowd.

‘The same officers we fought for,’ Connor said, ‘those very same men. It was General MacArthur, wasn’t it, who directed the operations in France? How did he forget the bullets we took for him?’

‘They’re not all bad,’ Angelo said haltingly. ‘You know how it works in the army, orders come from higher up, and . . .’ his voice trailed away.

Clouds of smoke began to drift up from the burning camp.

‘Never did find Rooster Curtis,’ Connor said abruptly. His brow furrowed slightly as he stared at the camp. ‘Must have landed in someone’s cooking pot.’ He laughed, a short, sharp bark. ‘Tough old bird, right to the very end.’ He picked up his suitcase. ‘I’ve seen enough. Jim,’ he held out a hand.

Jim shook it, unwillingly. ‘Where are you going to go?’ he asked.

Connor shrugged, trying to force a grin. ‘Something will come up. It always does.’

‘If you ever find yourself headed our way—’ the Major began.

‘Thank you, Major, that’s awful kind and I’ll surely keep it in mind.’ He snapped his heels together and, standing to attention, Connor saluted the Major, who returned it, leaning on his cane.

‘You coming?’ Connor asked Angelo.

Angelo hesitated. ‘Think I’ll wait a while, till morning.’

Connor was walking away, when he stopped, struck by a thought.

‘Hey, Jim,’ he called. ‘Remember when I told you that the camp lay on Good Hope Road? I didn’t tell you the whole story, y’know. It lay at the intersection of
two
roads. One is Good Hope. Want to know the name of the other? The other road . . .’ The camp was burning fiercely now. The glow from the flames fell across Connor’s face, revealing the rotted stumps of his teeth as he began to laugh humourlessly. ‘The other road is Asylum.
Asylum
!’

Jim and the Major left for Raydon as soon as it was daybreak, after dropping Madeleine with her mother. The road was thick with veterans. When they offered rides, just as they had only two weeks earlier, few of the men seemed to know where they were headed. Some asked to be dropped off a couple of towns ahead, some for a ride as far as they themselves were going. They barely spoke, neither the men in the back, nor the two in the cab, all lost in their thoughts as they stared at the road.

The Hoover administration had severely miscalculated the reaction of the public to the rout at Anacostia. Newspapers across the nation were filled the next morning with pictures of the ravaged camp and the aftermath of the evacuation. A soldier bearing a lit torch setting a shack aflame. Families sitting shocked and destitute along the roads leading from the nation’s capital, wet rags over the eyes of the children to soothe the burning from the gas. Troops, posing for a picture around a large piano, cracked nearly in half. The same camp piano around which the veterans had gathered, so filled with hope and song.

The nation erupted in outrage.
US veterans herded out of Washington, like so many unwanted strays
. Newsreels of the evacuation began to play over and over in cinema theatres, and audiences gasped in shock.

Amidst all the furore, one story gained particular attention. The morning after the camp at Anacostia was razed, the
New York Times
reported, a group of cavalry officers was gathered on the Flats, discussing the events of the previous night. Perched on the bales of hay that had been brought in for the horses, they were drinking the coffee issued by the makeshift field mess when a sergeant from the 12th Infantry approached Major Patton, a small, concave-chested man in tow.

The veteran with him had been part of the camp, the sergeant explained. Saying he was an old friend of Major Patton’s, he’d asked to see him.

‘Sergeant, I do not know this man. Take him away and under no circumstances permit him to return.’

The sergeant led the veteran away. Major Patton turned to the watching officers. ‘That man was my orderly during the war. When I was wounded, he dragged me into a shell hole while under fire. I got him a DSC for it. Since the war, the family has more than supported him. We’ve given him money. We’ve set him up in business. Several times. Can you imagine the headlines if the papers got wind of our meeting here this morning?’ He shook his head. ‘Of course, we’ll take care of him anyway.’

The veteran made his way haltingly through the remains of the camp. Joe Angelo stopped for a moment, at what had been the entrance. He looked back, at the soldiers and the horses, at the blackened, stillsmouldering stumps of the shacks. A few veterans were shuffling among the ruins. Hats in hand, they pleaded for permission from the soldiers to sift through the ashes and salvage what belongings they could find.

Joe Angelo looked at all of this, but with unseeing eyes. He saw instead the camp as it once had been. A chimera built from broken glass and tipped metal, aflutter with a thousand flags. Housing within its rundown heart the fragile resurgence of a dream. Granting the men who had thronged here a brief respite from the hell they found themselves in, allowing them to relive old, half-forgotten lives, when they’d still been young, when they’d still stood whole. The mess calls, the army discipline, the
brotherhood
. The magical carving out of identity, from little more than mud and the pickings from a rubbish heap.

He saw all that the camp had stood for during the few months of its existence. A haven of purpose, of self-worth reclaimed. An asylum, filled with hope.

Turning around, Angelo trudged haltingly away.

ARTOIS AND CHAMPAGNE

France • 1915

FROM THE JOURNAL OF

I lie on my back in the mud, taking in the night sky filled with Verey lights. Pick one, make a wish upon a shooting star. I follow its trajectory: the burning fuse, the tapering light, the halo that lingers in its wake.

It fills my mind again, the feel of the knife. Yet another lesson learned, from the May offensive. The Boche have tunnelled deep into this sector. Their trenches extend hundreds of feet below ground, far below those of the Allies. It was in these tunnels that they took cover in May, waiting for the first wave of the assault to pass before emerging in a lethal ambush from behind. This time, however, the Legion is prepared. Two men from each unit were assigned an extra cache of grenades this morning, and special, long-handled knives.

Grenades lobbed down slat holes, a dexterity with the blades. The roar of the beast in my ears.

I can feel it even now, as I lie here staring at the stars, the fit of the handle. The heft and thrust of the knife, the sickening, involuntary jerk at the other end, sometimes a panicked thrashing.

My mind drifts in circles, lapping at old memories. Hurrying along the edge of the Connecticut, the sound of its full summer flow rippling through the woods. In my hand, a long stake of maple. I have just read a book, the most wonderful yarn, about a shipwreck, and a single survivor marooned upon an island. It has gripped my imagination for days as I have lain on the carpet of the library, reading. When I tell Bill about it, he comes up with the idea of harpooning our catch, just like Crusoe might have done.

I haven’t thought of that boyhood afternoon in years. It comes clearly to me now, the swift, downward thrust, the frenzied thrashing at the other end of the stake as the impaled fish tried desperately to break free.

So tired. All around me are the cries of the wounded, the fizz of blood-drunk flies. All the water’s gone, and most of the ammunition. There’s no food. Only now do I appreciate why Gaillard urged us to fill our canteens before each of the offensives, to hoard whatever bread we could before the charge.

Water, everywhere the cry for water from the wounded.

I hear Gaillard’s voice again in my head, from when we first marched here to Artois. The pride in it as he recounts the old legends.

The defence unto death at Sidi Mohamed, twenty-seven legionnaires and their lieutenant facing down a thousand.

The enemies routed at Sebastopol and Inkermann.

At Magenta.

At Solferino.

Of that fight to the finish at Camerone, of the sixty-two legionnaires who stood shoulder to shoulder against nearly two thousand Mexican troops. Brothers unto such a valiant death, that when the paltry five who remained at the end attacked with bayonets drawn, in a final, gallant charge, the Mexican commander ordered their lives spared. A battle so gloriously fought the words ‘Camerone 1863’ are permanently inscribed upon all the flags and banners of the Legion.

We listened enthralled. This hallowed legacy of which we are now part, a ballast, lifting us from narrow definitions of self, to greater ideals. We are warriors, we are the Legion. We stand as one against tyranny, defending justice to our last.

Will they talk of us too one day, of the legionnaires who advanced at Artois, of all those who fought in these red fields of France? They will, they must; we sang as we marched in May, deep, full-throated, all the way here.

Different, this time around. Again that heightened sense of perception, of smell, on this, our second march to the Front. The warm musk of passing cavalry stirring up older, concentering memories, of hay and hillside barns. Whereas in May we saw ourselves at the epicentre, now it all seems oddly removed. The images push up against each other, now looming close, now blurred and receding. As if the moorings are already coming undone, the fastenings loosening to earth and body so that our shadows seem to fall off kilter, a halfstep to the side.

The songs come to mind again this morning though, in the forward trenches as we await the signal to advance. For an instant, they don’t matter any more, the insanities of this war. We stand there, together. There is rare beauty in this moment, such rough perfection in this fellowship of tempered steel. Touched as it is by the voices of ghosts, a harsh purity, such as that of a peregrine’s scream, of wintered woods, of a bobcat, muzzle bloodied, feeding in the snow.

The whistle sounds for the charge; we swarm up the ladder as one.

Here I lie now in the mud, too spent to move. I shut my eyes, tired, so tainted, wanting only to sleep, to sink far into the deep.

The Verey lights keep going up, their flares stamped upon my eyelids. Make a wish upon a shooting star. From within that centre of light, the faint silhouette of a child. Jim, in the orchard, swinging from the old oak. The sounds of a summer afternoon. The swoosh of the tyre, the giving creak of the bough. A child’s innocent laughter. I reach forward, to touch the sunlight in my son’s hair.

Someone is calling my name, shaking my arm, slapping my face. I open my eyes with a start.

Obadaiah.

We are the Legion, brothers to the end.

I get on my knees. We crawl forward once more.

Artois • 1915

he war don’t end that winter. It spill over into January, and a cold, wet spring. The rain, she set our new uniforms to leakin’. Them generals back at headquarters, they figured the old red trousers be too easy a target for snipers. Only, these new blue ones been ordered in such a hurry that the dyes still raw, leakin’ every chance they get. Reckon them generals ain’t spent too much time in a trench either – red or blue, it don’t matter down here – take hardly a day for everyone of us to be wearin’ the same brown, mud colours.