The Cartographer of No Man's Land: A Novel (12 page)

What Angus remembered since was not their words so much as the spaces between them, the unspoken certainty of their decision that he should go and the heart-stopping reality that he was. What he remembered, too, was the feel of his hands around her slim frame, the slight arch of her back as she handed Young Fred off to Ida. He knew that arch, the vulnerable small of her back, her head thrown back. Even there on the platform, it seemed a long-ago dream.

As Angus stepped onto the train, she clutched his arm. Don’t, he thought. Don’t have doubts now.

“Promise you’ll be safe,” she said.

“You know I will. It’s London! I’ll be completely safe,” he’d said as the wheels started to roll and her hand slipped away. “I’ll find him,” he said. “You’re the man of the house now, Simon Peter!” he called out to the boy, whose face was crumpling. “Proud of you already.”

“Must miss her terribly, eh?” Publicover opened the tin of matches. “She’s a peach from that picture you carry. Lucky for me I left no sweetheart behind. Maybe find one in Paris when the war’s over. Course by then I’ll be too old for romance.” He flashed a grin and sat down. He had a beautiful smile, full of grace and happy expectation, as if the world had nothing but good things to offer. He struck a match on his thumbnail, watched it burn out, then struck another.

“You intending to use up all those matches?”

“That’s my plan . . .”

Angus screwed the cap on his pen and held out his hand. Publicover reluctantly handed over the jar of matches. It was not the first time they’d been through this. Angus put them on the shelf, then glanced at the picture of Hettie once more before putting the envelope in his breast pocket. She was a beauty, alright. Spitting image of her mother, it was said—the wild and beautiful Ellen Langston, from Alberta. Buried out there when Ebbin and Hettie were barely out of the cradle. Angus had seen Amos Hant, with a few drinks in him, shake uncontrollably at the sight of Hettie entering a room. Trying to comfort him only made it worse, Hettie said.

Publicover leaned back on his bunk, arms behind his head. “Here’s my plan, when we’re off the line. Hot bath, first off, then a long, uninterrupted sleep. The Princess Pats can’t get here soon enough for my money. I know a couple of those boys. Good lot, mostly, but I’ll be happy to say, ‘see ya boys,’ as we pass in the night. Or wait, did I say the Pats? It’s not them. It’s some McBride’s Kilties taking our places. Anyway, hot bath. Down pillow. Mother, mother, mother, pin a rose on me. How about you?”

“Me? Billets aboveground will do—a place that you don’t burn down. Then, sleep without rats and your snoring. Then see if I can find out more on Ebbin.”

“So, ‘missing in action’ isn’t good enough . . .”

“No. Plus a friend at home thought he saw him around Courcelette.”

“Yeah. Wouldn’t be enough for me either, if he was my brother or pal or whatever he was—is, I mean.”

“Brother-in-law. You have a brother?”

“Nope. Tons of sisters. I told you before. Back home baking pies.”

“Pies?”

“Apple pies. Apple butter. Apple jack. Don’t you listen? The apple orchard in the Annapolis Valley—a place called Paradise?”

“Ah yes, Paradise.”

“Born and raised there.”

“Lucky you.”

“Lucky me—long as I end up there.” Publicover swung his legs onto the floor and leaned forward with his head down. “Not everyone is, you know. Lucky. Can’t always find the tags. It’s not always bodies, it’s bits. Hate to say it, but you know it’s the truth. The
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th went through it. We all did.” He looked up slowly.

Angus held his gaze and without warning found himself flung across the dugout. A few feet away, Publicover hunched on the shuddering ground. In the thunderous boom of the explosions and stuttering confusion, a crate rattled toward Angus. The shriek of a shell filled the air, and then another. Angus gasped for a breath, just one breath to get his lungs going. Breath came when he saw a timber falling. He lunged for Publicover and yanked him out from under just in time.

“Hit the line!” Publicover coughed out as he got to his feet. “Something blew. Underground maybe. A mine or—”

T
HE SHELLS HADN’T
hit the line. They hit part of the communication trench just behind the line, wiping out eleven of the Kilties and wounding three of their officers. As for the explosion, Publicover was right. Mills bombs, stored in a tunnel, had gone off. God only knew how many dead there, Conlon said. He told them he and some handpicked officers would stay on an extra night to settle the Kilties while their own boys marched back. Publicover and Grafton, a lieutenant Angus had met only in passing, were to accompany them. Angus was to stay on the line with Conlon and help sort things out.

The Kilties straggled up. Shadowy forms on the way out cursed forms on the way up as rifles struck packs and picks struck helmets and men tripped over cables and missed their step on the duckboards. Eventually, their own boys formed up, Publicover in the lead, followed by Angus’s platoon—Hiller, in a trance, then Wertz, older than the rest, helping Boudrey get his footing, then Eisner and Bremner, both burly Lunenburgers, the ever-steady Hanson, and then Zwicker, a thick-set man with a high-pitched laugh. Then came McNeil and Katz, the scribbler. Ostler, shadowy and brooding, shoved Tanner onward. Then came the baby-faced LaPointe and the quick-tempered Kearns, a good man to have when the line was the Front and the Krauts the ones crossing it. Oxner must have been up ahead. Sergeant Keegan, a fast-moving troglodyte, brought up the rear. Ghost figures all of them. Then they were gone.

The Kilties were given a ration of rum. Mules coming up had been scattered to the winds when the shells hit, and with them went small-arms ammunition, adding to the light show behind the line. It was pretty clear the Germans knew the exact location of the communication trench.

As if in confirmation, another mortar sailed overhead directly toward it. A
5
.
9
by the roils of black smoke. Publicover. His men. Angus gripped the timbered wall for support. A white-faced Conlon pointed to two privates and told Angus to take them out to Vicar’s Crater. His hand was shaking, but his voice never wavered—routine patrol, he said, just like every other night at Vicar’s.

Vicar’s was a crater into which a padre was rumored to have van
ished, a myth no stranger than any other in the trenches—the Angels of Mons, hovering ghost soldiers in the sky, witnessed by hundreds up and down the line in
1915
; the Crucified Canadian, a soldier said to have been spread-eagled by the Germans on a tree with bayonets for nails. The Front was as rife with omens and visions as long voyages at sea. And who knew? Maybe in this bleak world of extremes, a padre could vanish and the dead could return. Angus felt himself nearly vanishing. He steadied himself as the privates stuffed extra flares, flare guns, and Mills bombs into their packs. There was a grenade launcher at the site. Conlon narrowed his eyes at Angus. “Focus on the Hun across that crater. Any movement, any sound, take the bastards out,” he said.

Angus took a deep breath and eased himself over the parapet. The privates followed. Archer was an “original”—in the war from the start, that much Angus knew. Another, Andrew Dickey, a fresh recruit who looked about twelve with eyes round as saucers, had stammered out that his sergeant was wounded in the explosion as they came up. That he was screaming and couldn’t move. Was he still out there? he asked Angus. Angus had considered replacing him, but with whom? He didn’t know the Kilties. Besides, there wasn’t time.

Now they were inching on their elbows along the shallow ditch that would take them up a slope to the crater rim, too wide in the darkness to make out the German patrol that was surely on the other side. The going was slow as they cleared debris out of their way, desperate to keep from making a sound. Finally, near the edge of the crater, they slid into a low ditch next to the grenade launcher. Angus ordered Archer to take up the left post and Dickey to take up the right. A curtain of silence hung in the air.

Dickey crept into position, but kept looking back at Angus. An hour went by. Suddenly, a Verey light shot up and blossomed into arcing stars. Under its thumping silver-white light, everything below stuttered like a flickering film. Angus saw Dickey, head down on his arms. Tiny points of red light darted about. Rat eyes. The light died out, and sparks showered down like fading fireworks at a county fair.

Then things were still again. Except for a low moaning that turned into a wail and kept up and kept up, faded, and started up again. Dickey looked back anxiously at Angus. Angus shook his head. The boy turned around, but kept craning his neck toward the source of the cries so Angus elbowed over and stretched out beside him. He could feel Dickey shudder down the length of his body. Dickey lifted a finger from his rifle in the direction of the cries, then dropped his rifle and covered his ears. Angus carefully removed the rifle. “Might be one of ours on patrol,” Dickey whispered. “Why doesn’t anyone help him?”

Angus clamped a hand over the boy’s mouth, the lips continuing to move against his palm, the eyes pleading. Angus wanted to strangle him. He could not risk explaining that the cries were probably fake, a way of luring them over, or that, even if it was one of theirs, a separate party would have to go out. He shook his head no, no, no. He’d have to get the kid back to the ditch.

Another flare turned the ground red. Dickey arched up and pointed to the German tunic, still hanging on the wire. No! Angus lunged for him, grabbed him, but not fast enough. Dickey rolled out and ran toward the German tunic, a zigzagging figure under yet another Verey light, until he reached the coat and fell to the ground beneath it as machine-gun fire kept at him, twisting him this way and that and making him jump and jump some more. Then the air was alive with bullets screaming past Angus, bouncing off the hardened mud. He covered his head with his arms and somehow made it back to the ditch where Archer was already training the grenade launcher toward the machine-gun nest. “Bastards! Bastards!” he was shouting. Beyond them, Dickey kept jumping as bullets sliced him up. Archer got a bullet in the leg. Angus shoved him aside and slipped the grenade in the launcher and fired it off. They heard the explosion and saw a helmet fly up. The gun across No Man’s Land was silenced, and the air filled with the sound of men screaming. Angus loaded the grenade launcher again and fired off another shot, and another, until the screaming stopped.

“W
E’RE OKAYED TO
go back. Get your gear and meet me back here,” Conlon said to Angus when he made his report that morning. “Good job with that MG nest. Another body under that tunic. Christ. I’ll find one of the officers with the
35
th. They can send someone out to get him—Dickey, was it?—and have them take that blasted tunic down.”

Angus grabbed his pack and stuffed the leather drawing portfolio in it. Clouds roiled overhead, and the wind picked up. The temperature was dropping fast, as Publicover said it would. Publicover . . . he hardly knew him and had known him all his life.

He lifted a shred of paper stuck to his boot—just the head and open beak of the bird on the wire remained. He crumpled it, then lit a cigarette with shaking hands and fixed his eye on the ridge—its slopes no longer a rising wave, but a menacing man-made monster—its teeth, three parallel lines of twisting trenches lined with rifles and bayonets; its intestines, the concrete bunkers, pillboxes and tunnels from which its spike-helmeted minions rose up and trained their mortar and machine guns on the Allied armies below. And on one poor boy Angus should have been able to save. He imagined the Germans biding their time, occasionally mowing down an advancing army. He imagined them lolling on their guns, eating sausages and smiling.

He spat on the ground.
Fucking Kraut bastards
.

Snow began to fall on his shoulders. He barely noticed. Conlon shadowed up beside him. They said not a word and headed out together.