Lily's Story (113 page)

“
When we were
returning from our six-day stint in billets we marched by a
mud-pasture where the Brits were practising manoeuvres with the
latest ‘engine of Armageddon’ as our padre so quaintly calls the
‘land-cruiser’ or ‘tank’. Our entire company stopped on the
off-beat to watch, and laugh. Your boys decided to have a contest
to see who could find the best comparison to describe these
monstrosities, and you have been selected to be the judge. So here
they are, starting with my own: ‘armadilloes with indigestion’,
‘wood-burning locomotives run off the rails and floundering in the
gumbo-beds below the elevator’ (your grandson), ‘mammoths coming
out of the glacial muck and frightened by the sun’ (our historian,
Cliff), ‘Henry Ford’s rejects’ (Bart, who likes autos), ‘dinosaurs
on a toot’ (Henry, who’s seen ’em
), ‘maggots with armour’ (Sandy, who’s been too long on the
farm) – love, Ralph.”

“
In those days
every field was outlined by bush, not as it is now with stump or
snake fences and friendly little patches of forest for shade. We
had homely and domestic names for each one as we cleared them: Pine
Field, Orchard Field, Back Willow, or simply North Field, South
Field. When we looked up, we never had any doubt where we
were.”

“
Gran: we’ve
discovered a virtue in the rain and mud that permeates our daily
routine: only humans can live in it. Really. The rats, without
barns or granaries, have retreated to the billet areas behind us.
The field mice can find neither fields nor fodder, and their
burrows are washed out faster than they can tunnel them. No birds
fly overhead, except the tidy cormorants, because there is no tree
to light on, no grass for a nest, no water that is not stinking.
Even the earthworms have drowned. We are the only living things for
miles. But enough of my dark philosophizing – Bart tells me to
inform you that we also have mechanized ravens here, called
aeroplanes, but they don’t talk dirty like Mrs. Finch’s crow and
aren’t half as much fun. The German version is called a Fokker, and
Bart says it occasionally gets garbled in the
translation.”

“
Mrs. Finch’s
crow has learned a new trick. He hops along the clothes-line behind
the missus and picks off the pegs as she pins them, then slips into
the apple tree before she can figure out what ill-wind keeps
blowing her sheets away. I’m tempted to tell her, but the crow is
known to have a vengeful streak in him.”

“
We’ve begun a
series of what are called ‘night-raids’, our first real action in
the two months we’ve been here. We blacken our faces and hands with
burnt cork, and then when the moon goes under, our platoon slips
silently over the parapet and pads through the muck of
no-man’s-land with only the point of a dark ridge to our north to
act as a guide. The idea is to drop into the German’s foremost
trench, yell and stab and create havoc for ten mad minutes, then
retreat in the darkness before they can warm up their field guns or
counter-attack. This manoeuvre is designed to keep the enemy
perpetually scared – as if that were a difficult objective to
obtain. Our group went ‘over the top’ last week, and we got all the
way to the Bosch trenches without incident; I heard Cliff
Strangways give the attack cry and we leaped blindly into the gap
at our feet. It was eerie beyond description
, like jumping off the edge of the world, we didn’t
know whether we’d land on a soldier’s stomach or a keg of Bavarian
beer or a parked bayonet. We sang out our banshee howls and jumped,
swivelling our spear-guns like the Turkish infidel and waiting for
the wince of human flesh at the end of the blow. Nothing happened.
We landed askew in the dark, shouting and stabbing, but no one
shouted back. Our sergeant barked a ‘cease attack’ that brought us
all to a quivering halt. No sound of the dying or the terrified.
Cautiously a torch was turned on and we gazed in horror at the
sight around us. An hour before, during one of the periodic
artillery duels staged by mutual consent, one of our batteries must
have misfired several ‘short’ rounds meant for the front-line ridge
beyond. Those shells had made a perfect, if unintentional, strike
on this isolated part of the trench. Thirty or forty corpses, still
warm and oozing, stared out at us with death’s eyes. We had been
told in the silly propaganda paper circulating here that the
Germans were troll-like creatures who devoured their own babies
when angered, who drank blood for breakfast, and so on. But I can
tell you, Gran, all of us have looked on the faces of our enemy:
they are just men, who die as men everywhere in the futility of
battle.”

“
Some of the
logs, of course, would be used to make the settler’s first home,
there are still many standing to this day. Often that first winter
only enough bush was cleared for the cabin and an acre or two of
fall wheat sown between the stumps. The ash from the burning was
used as fertilizer, and for soap. We made our tables and chairs out
of split logs. Our beds were cedar or spruce boughs on a frame of
poles and cross-hatch of saplings. We burned wood for fuel- heat
and cooking fire. We made flutes out of softwood sticks to make the
music to carry us through the long winter. We walked over the snow
– five-feet deep – on wooden snowshoes. Our world was made of wood.
We loved and we hated it.”

“
Bart was
killed in one of the raids two nights ago. We were almost back from
a
mélée
in the enemy trench when their artillery opened
fire. We’d stayed a minute too long. I landed among some piles of
equipment and slashed my way through it without encountering a
soldier until the cry went up to retreat. Just as I dropped safely
into our own trench, the first shell exploded, and Cliff and I
heard Bart scream as if a cat had raked his flesh. Despite the
noise and panic all around us, we heard it as clear as if he’d
spoken to us across a quiet room. He’d fallen about ten yards away,
and Cliff and I went out after him, shells breaking up everywhere.
I was as scared as I’ll ever get – that much I know. I had thought
under these circumstances that I would think of my past life or my
life to come or of you and Arthur shielding me against the wind
along the river flats, but I thought of nothing, nothing – there
was nothing in my brain but a gray numbness, the way death itself
may be. We got Bart’s body back into the trench, but he was already
dead. We drew lots to see who should write home to his parents.
Ralph lost.”

“
Please do not
give me
any of the details of
the boys’ deaths or injuries, Eddie. My heart recoils at the
thought of what you must bear, alone. Tell Sandy he can prevent
Trench Feet by taking grease from the cook’s skillet and rubbing it
all over the inside of his boots. The Indians, they tell me, used
to have much success with the method.”

The
Vic-platoon saw little action as the winter dragged on in Flanders
where record rainfalls turned the mud into a quagmire. “Henry says
he ma
y be the only one here
who isn’t affected by the muck and slime. He claims the gumbo south
of Winnipeg is twice as sloppy and has four times the sticking
power. Some of the fellows are suffering terribly from the grippe
and dysentery and Trench Feet which can easily become gangrenous.
They wish they could get into battle, which they think would be a
form of relief. We try to assure them it is not so, though the wet
and the waiting are hellish in themselves – with the din of distant
siege-guns reminding us that some people out there are fighting and
dying and maybe winning the war. Morale is high, I hasten to add,
more likely because we feel a powerful camaraderie here that is
more important than the so-called reasons we’re given for our
sacrifices – the defense of the Empire and the freedoms it stands
for, as if the two notions were connected or even compatible. But
we’re here; most of us volunteered in one form or another, and here
we’re going to stay, together, to see this thing through. A strange
rationale for fighting, isn’t it? But what can you say in defense
of General Haig who refers to our combat casualties as ‘tolerable
levels of wastage’. We had a good laugh about that one, the five of
us.”

Granny was now
writing as many as four letters a week, occasionally more. No
longer did her left hand balk at the glare of a page; it skittered
across with a nervous energy of its own, sensitive now to every
eddy of the mind and emotion that propelled it. The words flowed –
now guarded, now brazen, delicate, all-thumbs, scrolled, jagged –
they carried their share of the burden and in them she was able at
last to see those reflections of herself she had not thought
possible in seventy-six years of living. She began to compose with
inordinate speed, with a soft fury of phrasing – the words tumbling
out like crumpled butterfly wings, jelling in the cold squeeze of
ink against the page, and glowing there as bright as icons at the
fulcrum of a dream.
She felt
and she wrote. She thought and she wrote. She read and she wrote.
Her room was full of voices and urgencies. The letters accumulated
in huge piles in the corner beside the table. She re-read them at
intervals. She put a rubber band around Bart Ramsay’s, and one day
she sat down and began writing a letter to Mrs. Ramsay in Toronto,
the first of many. By March she was so weary she often woke up in
the dark with her head on the table and a sentence half-finished on
a page she couldn’t recall writing.

At the end of
April the Canadian Corps, now three divisions strong, went into
full-scale battle, and though Eddie’s description of the combat and
of trench-life itself became more circumspect – he had sensed the
alarm perhaps in her letters – she was able to reconstruct the
horrific events surrounding the St. Eloi craters and the subsequent
battles of Mount Sorrel with enough clarity to comprehend their
impact on him. On April the twenty-ninth he reported that they had
slogged through slime up to their waists while under constant fire.
“But we achieved our objectives, according to the C.O.
That is no news at all to Henry. He
left us yesterday at five o’clock. I am to write soon to his
father. He was the only child of a widower. What do I
say?”

For ten full days there was no
letter from Eddie or any of the remaining boys. The papers boasted
of the recent successful offensives, and mentioned the spearhead
towards Mount Sorrel. A few days later three letters arrived, one
of them from Eddie. They were all lengthy. Sandy Lecker went on and
on about tracing his family tree back through the Lowlands to the
broken clans of 1845. Cliff Strangways had written out several
comic songs his mother had found in grandpa’s theatre-trunk – did
she happen to know the music that might go with them? Eddie
described the feelings he used to have when he first went skating
on the pond-ice of Little Lake, and quoted from a poem by
Wordsworth, the English fellow he was writing part of his thesis
on. Eddie’s words were more beautiful than the poet’s. At the end
of a long letter he said, “We’ve just come back from Sorrel. Ralph
did not come back with us. I’ve written to his mother.”

Granny could not write for a
week. For a while she thought that her arthritis had decided to
stall her efforts permanently. A second letter arrived from Eddie.
Was she all right? Perhaps it would be better if he only wrote once
a month or so, perhaps she should not hear, right off, about the
fellows leaving them. He was sorry, terribly sorry for placing such
a burden on her, he had no right to do so. She wrote him back that
afternoon, taking the letter down to the post office herself.

Eddie, Cliff
and Sandy all wrote cheering notes to her that week, each
describing in his own way the arrival of the Dumbells’ troupe for a
weekend of performance before their fellow soldiers. “The spirit of
1860 and the old Colonial Theatre,” Cliff enthused.
“You should have been there to see
it. Arthur should have been there to take a bow.” Near the end of
his letter Sandy let it be known that rumours were flying about a
“big push to end the war” coming up soon, so that if they stopped
writing suddenly, she was not, repeat
not
, to worry.
Eddie’s letter was forcibly cheerful and obsessively newsy. “Don’t
worry, Gran,” it concluded, “we’re certain it will be over
soon.”

She dropped the letter on the
table and went immediately to Arthur’s trunk. Under some posters
and playbills she found what she was looking for: a vellum
envelope. From it she drew a sheet of ordinary writing paper on
which, in Bradley’s crabbed hand, were written several stanzas of
poetry. The title over them read: “Colloquy, for Sarah.” When she
had finished writing to Eddie, she copied the poem out in her own
hand, then tucked the original in with the letter. This is all your
father brought home to me from the wreckage of his life, she said
to herself. It’s time you knew the truth about that, and about the
gifts you have to carry you into the future he refused to face. You
have an obligation to live. Please, Eddie.

O
n the evening of July
1, 1916 Granny was wakened from a restless sleep by a thunderclap
that brought her upright into the silence of her living room. She
felt a stabbing at her heart as if an icicle had been plunged there
by the Bogeyman. My heart, she thought right away, and braced
herself for the next blow. Several peremptory ‘pops’ from the
direction of Bayview Park broke the momentary quiet, and she peered
in puzzlement at the night-sky visible from her window. Three
skyrockets, celebrating the forty-ninth birthday of the Dominion,
burst against the velvet backdrop, obliterating the stars and
fanning out like irradiated metallic flowers.