The Cartographer of No Man's Land: A Novel (30 page)

Lying next to Hiller, arms over his head as the bullets screamed through the air and pelted the ground above, Angus saw the
80
,
000
rise up from the valley—their rotting corpses not yet turned to dust.
Exposed, unsheltered, they continued their hollow-eyed march—nei
ther of this world nor the next. They pressed against Angus to make things right, to keep the stench of meaningless waste at bay. To make every act a footprint that said, I was here; this was worth it—this ditch I’m digging, this traverse I’m building, this cable I’m laying, this mule team I’m leading, this gun I’m oiling, this water I’m hauling, this ammunition I’m packing, this bayonet I’m sharpening. Worth it, worth it, worth it. If not, they all may as well throw their shovels in the air, run out naked into No Man’s Land, yapping and stammering and declaring the Hillers of the world visionaries. And by so doing relegate those
80
,
000
souls and Brady’s limbless friend, and Wickam and Dickey, Orland and now Tanner, all of them, to a permanent, unhallowed place, where they’d be forever stuck to the living in unholy communion.

He rose up, grabbed Hiller’s rifle, and risked flying bullets to shove it between the jumping sandbags, and began to fire. He hadn’t a hope in hell of silencing the machine gun, but he wasn’t about to die facedown in the dirt. Three shots later, a velvet silence fell around them like a curtain.

Under the blinking stars above, the men slowly lifted their heads and got to their knees. They looked at each other, and then at Angus, with the wonder reserved for a god.

“Keep digging,” Angus said. “Dig like mad.”

B
ACK AT CAMP,
they were told the date for the battle had been set for two days hence, April
8
th, Easter morning. “I am the Resurrection and the Life,” Chaplain Mercer intoned at the open-air service that Saturday evening. Angus had prayed for Tanner and Hiller and for himself because his prayer for Hiller was without a shred of sincerity. Whether it was proper to thank God for silencing the gun that last night in the trench, he did not know. Miracles were not something he was accustomed to.

Angus found Conlon later, reading his little green book. “Nothing like the resurrection to bring one comfort, but I have a feeling the men will need more than that,” Conlon said.

When he gathered C Company for the last time before the battle, that evening, Conlon reminded them why they were there. Who they were up against. Reminded them of the
150
,
000
who had tried to take the ridge before them and failed, and of those who had given their lives in the effort. He reminded them of the bloodshed and carnage each man had witnessed at the hand of the enemy. Of how the war could turn on their efforts. He opened his little green book, but instead of reading from it, looked slowly up at them. “Rage!” he said. “The rage of Achilles, that doomed warrior, smoldered and flamed and roiled across Troy’s wave-swept shores, and flung the souls of mighty fighters, great chiefs, to the dark depths below, untimely slain, lying unburied, torn and stripped by devouring dogs, moving the will of Jove toward its end.”

Conlon looked at the astonished faces around him. “I ask you now, toward
what
end? You are here to vindicate every man who has gone down before you and any man who may fall beside you. You are here to restore what is rightful and just. Put on rage as your armor and honor as your shield. Unsheathe your sword of valor. Do your part, whether in support or in the thick of it, and make Canada proud. For my part, I’m proud of you already and honored to serve with you.” He paused. “Now, let’s astound the gods and turn this war around, and bring it to its
rightful
end.”

W
EATHER OR WHIM
changed the orders at the last minute, and it was not until six in the evening that they marched out of Fouquet Wood, up Music Hall Line and into position in Happy Holly, under a cloak of utter silence, waiting for the dawn of Easter Monday, for zero hour, set for
5
: 30
A.M.

F
IFTEEN

April 9
^th
, 1917

Vimy Ridge

Arras Sector, France

F
ive-twenty came and five twenty-one, -two and -three . . . so quiet that Angus could hear the men’s every breath up and down the line—faces white in the dark, expressions blank. Snowflakes drifted down from a steel-gray sky, then swirled and lifted in the puff of a breeze. The silence was so raw, so unfamiliar, that it stripped him down and left him naked.

Then earth and sky shattered. The mines blew beneath the German trenches. Towering fountains of earth shot skyward. The Allied guns opened up—a thousand shells every twenty seconds. The steady concussion fused into an iron wall of sound. Its thundering vibration likely trembled a cup of tea in the faint dawn of a London kitchen; made old men in suspenders, reaching for collar and tie, pause and look up through curtained windows. In trench and dugout it compressed all thought—of home, of laughter, of sorrows, of chances missed and chances taken—into a whispered prayer.

There was a catch in the shell fire as the guns angled up, then the signal and the hurtling rush forward. All thought fled. Through choking smoke and contagion, Angus could see men run—upright at first, then hunched under their heavy loads, scuttling and scrambling over the shuddering earth, desperate to keep pace with the covering barrage. They were instantly lost from view in the thick-swirling smoke and snow. And if they let loose a battle cry as they climbed over the parapet, as they ran, blood pumping, hearts pounding, it was ripped from their lungs, packed down, and trampled to death.

Behind this chaos, shivering in the snow, the
17
th stamped their feet on the hardened mud of Happy Holly and hunkered down against the cold—waiting their turn with rising impatience and growing fear. When it finally came, many hours later, their hands and feet were nearly numb. A runner, dodging shell holes, slid into the trench with word that D Company of the
45
th had made it to the red line, but had been pinned down near the heights at the northern end of the ridge. The runner’s eyes were wild. His helmet had come off. He heaved, hands on his knees, before managing to choke out that they were all but decimated by machine-gun fire and trench mortar. Unrelenting, sir, he said, sliced the men up something awful. Most of the company officers were dead and their own machine guns clogged with hardened mud. Conlon sent another runner to carry the news to brigade headquarters.

“The
45
th!” Angus shouted at Conlon. “Jesus. We got to get up there!”

Conlon blew on his hands and raised an eyebrow. “Anxious to get into it, are you?”

Twenty-five minutes later, word came back that the
17
th was to send in support. Most of the ridge was in Canadian hands by that time, but there were remaining pockets of defenders. In places beyond the ridge, the Germans had regrouped. They continued to hold the high point, Hill
145
, and had started a counterattack at Givenchy. A and B Companies from the
17
th were to proceed southeast up to the second German line, clear out remaining defenders and hold the line. C and D Companies were to leapfrog over them, find the
45
th and help them meet their objective if they hadn’t already.

They got into position. The signal came. And then they were running and dodging through a tangled jungle of protruding wire and hidden shell holes. His platoon made it past a blur of abandoned weapons, mangled bodies and blood-soaked snow up to the second German trench. B Company dove in and spread down its length to check for the enemy. Conlon led C Company on. Machine-gun fire opened up and Angus kept on running as men up ahead and beside him fell. He rolled into a shallow ditch. Two men ran toward him, then turned and ran the other way and were gone. Another stumbled toward Angus, but tripped and fell on a wounded man whose bayonet pierced him through front to back, pinning him there. It was Zwicker, Angus was sure of it. Kearns tried to pull him off.

A trench mortar shrieked past. When they could, Angus and Kearns elbowed to the next shell hole. Up the slope, Angus made out three Germans in a huddled circle in front of what looked like a pile of hay, their helmets and greatcoats dusted with snow. Angus aimed his revolver as Kearns, right beside him, pulled out a Mills bomb. Before he could throw it, a huge shape, with wings like a prehistoric bird, hurtled by—legs wide apart, kilt flying. Roddy Gordon! Without missing a beat, he charged them, stabbing the first one in the waist with his bayonet. The three tipped over as one. Roddy stepped back. A grenade clinked out of the open hand of one of the soldiers and rolled toward him. He grabbed it, pulled the pin and shouted, “Here’s one for the live ones!” and hurled it up the ridge. He was instantly spun around by a bullet to the chest and crashed facedown atop the dead Germans. The hay burst into flames. Angus crawled out and heaved him over. With words surely lost to Roddy’s ears, he assured him, “You got ’em. You did.” Roddy’s head lolled to the side, eyes open, frothing blood onto Angus’s knees.

They left him and headed on, and in what seemed like mere minutes, fell, gasping, into another section of ruined enemy trench. Angus slid down over loose rubble to the bottom. His leg was bleeding, but he felt no pain. Men jumped in after him. They’d lost sight of Conlon and of Publicover’s platoon. Above the trench wall a stream of prisoners, carrying the wounded on stretchers, passed by, ghosts in the falling snow, dipping here and there under their awkward loads as if in a parallel universe.

Angus led his men farther up the ridge, only it wasn’t really up—it was more across and over and sometimes down. The pock-filled ridge was a featureless slope to nowhere, littered with bodies, water-filled holes, and the ground churned in places to slippery muck. A bullet got Eisner through the neck. Two Germans popped up, one after the other, with rifles, and Angus shot them, one after the other, with barely a pause between and waved the men on until his bleeding leg gave out and he rolled into a crater. Above him, the sun attempted to break through the heavy clouds. In the yellow haze, the falling snow took on an iridescence, and he thought of shimmering water and of oars dipping and falling. It took some minutes before he could grasp that his wound had widened and he was losing a lot of blood. One of the men was on it, peeling away the bloodied kilt from the gash in his thigh. It was Wertz. He bound up the wound without a word. Angus sat up. Men raced past in all directions. Keegan asked if they should get him to an aid station. Angus waved him off and asked for a count. “Eight of us here, counting myself,” Keegan said. “Four missing or dead.” He ticked off the names—Zwicker, Eisner, Bremner, Oxner.

“Zwicker’s dead. Bremner, too,” Angus said. “Died together. Eisner shot in the neck.”

Katz said that Oxner was definitely dead, shot in the stomach. LaPointe was missing. McNeil swore he’d been wounded and carried off the field. As he said it, LaPointe appeared.