The Cartographer of No Man's Land: A Novel (32 page)

Angus took a step closer and the man lunged for him. Angus fired. The officer fell over, a knife in his hand. The Luger fell from Angus’s pocket as he leaned over the man. The German looked at it sadly. “Yours?” Angus said. The man nodded. Angus kicked the gun away. “You could have surrendered, damn it. I’d have taken you in.” The officer managed a smirk at this impossibility, his cheeks now pale. A line of blood, bright against the colorless lips, formed and filled and trickled down the side of his mouth.

“Royal Vic,” the man said in an almost inaudible whisper.

“What?” Angus balled up the man’s coat and pressed on the wound. The officer whispered, “Royal Vic.” He looked at Angus intently until life faded from his eyes. Angus forced himself to go through his pockets and found a map, which he held in his shaking hand. And a picture postcard of the Royal Victoria Hospital in Montreal with German words on the other side. The sheath for the Bowie was snapped to the officer’s belt. He must have had the knife up his sleeve. Angus pocketed the map and the pistol and stood.

Keegan and Kearns rounded the traverse. “Here’s the owner of the pearl-handled Luger,” Angus told them. “And this.” He unfolded the map.

The blade of the knife glinted up at him. A Bowie, known as the German’s favorite weapon for slicing throats of the wounded left in No Man’s Land. Soundless death. He picked up the knife. “Sheffield” was imprinted on the outsized blade. It could have sliced a throat, alright. And gone through his groin like butter. He looked down at the dead officer, sorrow turning bitter in his mouth. “You could have surrendered,” he said again as he unfastened the sheath and slid the knife into it. The postcard fluttered away.

W
ITHIN THE HOUR,
they’d angled partway down the steeper east
ern side of the ridge and caught up to the troops Angus had seen through his binoculars, but who, it turned out, were a remnant of B Company from the
91
st. Angus reported to the officer in charge, a bandy-legged captain with a curling mustache, who said he thought the
17
th had joined the
45
th somewhere toward La Chaudière.

Angus looked at the map. “You sure they’re headed toward La Chaudière?” he asked.

“Look, Lieutenant,” the captain snapped. “I’m not sure of anything. It’s one day after the battle. You can’t find your own company. I think our rations party is lost. We’ve passed any number of lost bands of men roaming about. We were supposed to hold the line. Then I get word the line is moving by the hour as the Germans retreat. We need to pursue. Fine. All for it. Then I hear from a runner that we’re supposed to halt. Then, no, that’s wrong. I’ve got this map here . . .”

They compared maps, but the captain refused to take corrections from Angus. “I’ll trust my Allied map over your Kraut one,” he said. “And anyway, what good is that map if you don’t know where you’re headed. I’m going to stop at that abandoned breastworks up ahead and send scouts back to find that blasted rations party. You’re welcome to hook up with us temporarily.”

Angus declined.

“Should we maybe stick with them, sir, for now? You know, strength in numbers?” Keegan eyed the open terrain.

“They’re not headed for the
17
th. We’ll find our way. Trust me,” Angus said. “I know where I’m going.” He tucked the map in his pocket and felt the knife hitched now to his belt. He’d shot that German before he’d even seen it. But the man did have a knife. And had faked a wound. “Royal Vic.” Maybe he’d been a doctor there once. Or a patient. Left Montreal and went back to the homeland. Forced into the war . . . or had volunteered. What did it matter? Angus flung the Luger as far as he could and moved on.

Sleet dulled sound and obliterated the landscape, except for the shadow of the ridge behind them. The ground was slick and, oddly, they were moving through tall grass. Angus had it in mind to find a point beyond the Lens–Arras Road that lined up between La Chaudière and La Coulotte. From there he’d find the
17
th on their way or already encamped. He was certain of it. His platoon struggled on behind him.

As they drew near the point where Angus planned to site their position, they came across a silver-haired man leading a small party. Colonel Stokes! Thank God. Or maybe not. There was a vacant look in his eye. He didn’t salute. He was disheveled and alone, save for a corporal and two privates. His uniform was blackened.

Angus asked him about the camp. Stokes looked to the east, to the west, and behind to the south. “Have you seen my horse?”

“No sir,” Angus replied.

“Right then. Form your men up,” Stokes said.

“Form up?”

“Can’t afford to have discipline break down. Lead on.”

“Sir, do you know where the camp is? Your staff . . . ?”

“Had to see to these boys here from the
102
nd.”

“
101
st,” the corporal whispered.

Angus pulled the corporal aside and asked him what was going on. “We got separated from our company, when we . . . came upon the colonel.” The corporal glanced back nervously.

“Alone? Was he alone?”

“Yes sir. Sitting in the grass.”

Angus left it at that. How Stokes had become detached from his staff and possibly from reality was something Angus had no time to find out.

The Lens–Arras Road was hidden from view by mist or by a rise in the landscape, he couldn’t tell. The slope was almost imperceptible, but yes—a gentle swell, and another just beyond it. The camp was probably in the hollow between the two. There were enough trees left of the “
wald
” on the German map to indicate a wood. Where else could the
17
th be? It was the only possible place if the officer from the
91
st had been right, and if the German map in his hand was accurate, and if they were where he thought they were.

They moved on. Stokes stood to the side and watched the group file by as if on his stallion reviewing the troops. Angus sent Keegan back to fetch him, to no avail. To get him moving, Angus asked for orders, which he supplied with military demeanor and dignity of rank. All he was missing was context.

A
N HOUR LATER
they were threading their way through a group of men shoveling in bully beef at the edge of the camp. Biscuits, too. Angus nearly grabbed one off a soldier’s plate. He saw a private weeping on the ground in the arms of his pal. His breath quickened at the sight of the men from the
45
th. But he kept on, Stokes stumbling beside him. A few of the men registered astonishment at the sight of Stokes, his ribbons dangling at an angle, cap missing. Angus told Keegan to see that the men got fed, and turned to lead Stokes on to Rushford, when he stopped dead in his tracks. Not ten yards away, crouched on the ground, tin plate in hand, was Ebbin. Not dead. Not wounded. Not missing.

“Know him, sir?” he heard Keegan say. Angus ignored him but couldn’t move. Keegan squinted suspiciously at Ebbin and back again at Angus. Angus kept his eyes on Ebbin, who set his plate down and looked up. They stared at each other, and time stretched out between them to the innocence of boyhood and back again to the blackened corpses on the hill. There was in that moment a thread of connection to home and each other. But in that raised chin and sober face, Angus saw Havers as well. Havers who had taken Ebbin Hant through Thiepval and now through Vimy without a scratch on him. It was with a prayer thanking God that Angus left him there as Lance Corporal Havers.

W
HEN HE USHERED
S
tokes in, Rushford saluted and said, “Sir! Thank God,” but whatever relief Rushford may have felt vanished as Stokes saluted absently and lowered himself into a camp chair, where he sat fingering a button on his tunic, unresponsive to Rushford’s questions. Aghast, Rushford pulled Angus aside. Angus told him how he’d found the colonel. Stokes had been given up for dead, Rushford whispered. His party had unaccountably gotten caught in the actual battle, and the colonel’s horse had charged off. An explosion. Perhaps the horse threw him, Rushford said. Miraculous he was still alive, all the more that he’d been found. His immediate aides had not been so lucky. He told Angus to make a full report but cautioned him against mentioning the colonel’s condition. “Amazing you found the camp,” he said. “Good instincts. Well done.” Angus handed him the German map. Rushford took it gratefully, then sniffed several times. “Fritz is out there, you know,” he said, running his knuckles under his mustache. “Bringing in fresh recruits, preparing a counterattack. We’re sitting ducks until we can build a road and get our heavy artillery over that ridge.”

“L
OOK WHO’S COME
in from the cold,” Conlon said when Angus found him. The shoulder of his tunic was in tatters. He got up off the crate he was sitting on and smiled that slow smile of his, and they exchanged a rough embrace.

“You look like hell,” Conlon said.

“As do you. Hell and back. Were you wounded?”

Conlon shrugged. “Nope. Lucky break. Bullet through the sleeve.”

Publicover rounded the tent. A dirty field dressing dangled from his earlobe; a thin row of stitches held the top of his ear together. He clapped a hand on Angus’s shoulder and said not a word. In the silence of their circle, Angus felt the fragments of the past twenty-four hours begin to gather and fall into place.

“Any accounting of the battalion?” he asked.

“Not yet. The numbers are coming in.” Conlon paused, then added, “Stokes is missing.”

“Was lost and now he’s found,” Angus said.

“Really. And you the one who found him?” Conlon asked.

“Now, that’s a story I want to hear.” Publicover ripped the bandage off his ear.

“All in good time. Got something for you.” Angus was about to hand him the horn-handled Bowie, but remembered the old wives tale that handing someone a knife cuts the friendship. He placed it on the crate. “Might come in handy for your future kills,” he said with a smile.

“A Bowie.” Publicover whistled as he slid the knife from its sheath and slowly turned it over. He looked up from under a shock of matted blond hair. “Let me guess, found it on some dead Imperial. Or took it off a Kraut officer you killed with your bare hands.”