Zombie Pulp (36 page)

“Quit yer yabbering,” Burke told him.

But if it was yabbering, then it was some of the most unusual yabbering that Creel had heard in that war. Maybe his German wasn’t the best, but what the sergeant was saying was all too clear and the fear behind it unmistakable.

The dead,
he was saying.
The dead that walk.

That’s when Creel began to get a few ideas and getting them, smelled blood in the water.

3

Memento Mori

The Germans mounted a small, inconsequential, half-hearted offensive that left their corpses scattered about the perimeter like rice after a wedding. The rain fell, bloating the corpses, puffing them up into particularly unpleasant white mounds of decomposition that flowered weird growths of fungi. Though the stink of them was no worse than the usual smell of Flanders, they did season things up to the point where the officers were complaining and that got action. A small group was sent out to bury them in a mass grave.

Creel went with, taking his little box-shaped Brownie camera with him and getting some nice shots of the cadavers. He had quite a collection by that point: corpses blown up into trees, tangled in the wire, sinking in the mud, nested by rats, and—his favorite—a Hun officer who’d been machine-gunned but was held upright in a casual sort of stance by a sharp oak branch that had speared him through the back. When Creel had snapped that one, many months after the First Battle of Ypres, the officer had been nearly picked down to bones by the local ravens and buzzards—sparrows nesting in his ribcage and skull—and he looked very much like a skeleton on a jaunty afternoon stroll, steel helmet tipped at a rakish angle.

It became an obsession for Creel in that war to collect photographs of the dead as it had in other wars he had covered. The Tommies either politely ignored him or were openly offended by what he was doing.

“Why?” Burke asked him one day. “Why do you want pictures of that? Your paper won’t print such things.”

Creel had laughed as he always laughed at the question: a cool, bitter sort of laugh. “I do it because I don’t understand death. I don’t understand the process of life becoming death.”

“Nothing to understand, mate. You get it or you don’t get it, saavy? Me mum would say it’s God’s province.”

“Yes, God’s province, but man’s suffrage.”

The day after the Hun were shoveled into a mass grave, the BEF put together their own little counterattack and with similar results. The trenchlines were stagnant and had been for months, the only thing that ever changed was the amount of corpses left to boil in the sun and melt into the mud of Flanders like wax effigies.

Afterwards, Creel watched the walking wounded coming in—grimy, mud-caked, fatigued, bloody—with their slings and bandages, none of them speaking as if the war had erased their voices and turned them into mutes. They shuffled along, limping and hobbling on swollen feet, a procession of the maimed and he got the feeling that when they signed on beneath the grim shadows of Kitchener posters (WE WANT YOU!), they hadn’t expected it to be like this. All of them had the same dead tombstone eyes gray as puddles of rain. The only difference between them and the dead spread across No-Man’s Land is that they were walking.

Die toten dieser spaziergang?

Without a doubt.

The stretcher bearers brought the real bad ones over to the ambulances for a trip to Battalion Aid or the Casualty Clearing Station and most of them would die before they got there. Creel liked to hang around and catch whatever after-action gossip he could. He listened to three men, blinded by gas, eyes patched with gauze, discuss what they had seen out there and it was more of the same. The gas came down on them in a mushrooming, rolling green cloud, they said, that appeared a luminous yellow by the time it reached them, blown by eastern winds. Then the Hun let loose with a massive barrage of shell-fire and smudge canisters that enveloped the battlefield in a pungent white smoke thick as London fog. Men got lost. They charged in the wrong direction. They fell into flooded shell holes and drowned. Some sank without a trace in the yellow-brown mud. The combined gas and smoke smelled like sulfur, one man insisted. No, more like ether, yes definitely ether, said another. But the third claimed it was the odor of rosin. They could not agree on that but they did agree that hundreds died, both Hun and BEF hard-chargers, suffocating on the fumes, choking, gagging, lungs dissolved to yellow froth that spilled from shrieking mouths.

Creel walked amongst the wounded and discovered that some of them had been out there for days following the last offensive, lying in craters in the falling rain, no food, no water, fighting off the rats who were attracted by the raw, meaty smell of their injuries. Many of them were stark mad and many others in good spirits despite the fact that their wounds were crawling with maggots.

Long after the stretcher bearers and ambulances had moved on, Creel was still standing there in the gray afternoon drizzle listening to the distant thump of artillery pieces and the much closer flapping of sheets that covered the dead at his feet. He took snapshots of them and particularly those where his own dark shadow had fallen over them like Death coming to collect His due.

Smoking a cigarette and muttering things under his breath that even he was not aware of, he stood amongst them, breathing in the cool coppery odor of shattered anatomy and the hot smell of infection, filthy dressings, and corpse gas.

He did not feel as if he were alone.

An asphyxiating, cold-crawling fear took hold of him and he could not put a name to it. Only that it was all around him, a pall of rising black death, an unearthly possessed malignant intelligence that seemed to be standing just behind him and breathing cold catacomb breath down the back of his neck. He felt like he was bathing in it. When it passed, he was on his knees, panting, shaking, ignoring a wild, insane urge to lay down with the dead and close his eyes so he might know what they knew.

And in his head, over and over and over again, that German voice:
Die toten dieser spaziergang.

4

Corpse Rats

At night, the rats would come out.

Like some black pipe had ruptured, they’d flood out in numbers from hidey-holes and warrens, filthy nests out in the barbwire and crawlspaces beneath the sandbagged ramparts. Some of the Tommies said they lived inside corpses out in No-Man’s Land, chewing a hollow in the belly where they could bring their young to term in putrescent darkness.

Regardless, they’d come surging out, swarming, infesting, feeding off the dead, biting the living, scavenging for food scraps, crawling through refuse heaps, and even eating leather boots and belts…quite often while some poor bastard was wearing them. Numbering in the millions, they knew no fear. They ran through the trenches in numbers, crawling over men whether asleep or awake. They were huge, gray things, fattened on carrion, rabid eyes beady, pelts greasy with slime and drainage, teeth forever gnawing and chewing and nipping.

They were a constant of war. When there was a lull in the action and the Tommies got bored scraping their tunics free of nits, they’d shoot rats off the sandbags or bait them with bacon on the muzzles of their rifles. When a nest was found, they’d kick the rats to death with their heavy boots and stomp the young…not that it thinned their numbers any. Sometimes enterprising young officers, new to the trenches and horrified by the idea of sharing them with mulling rodents, would rat-proof the dugouts with wire netting, spending hours and hours at it only to discover four or five rats crowding under their dinner table looking for scraps.

War produced refuse and human wreckage and that brought the rats. It was a vicious cycle and there was only one cure for it: peace.

5

Casualties

The Germans broke up a fierce dawn raid by the 12
^th
with a chemical attack, a combination of mustard gas and chlorine. Quite a few men had gotten enveloped in yellow clouds of death before they got their masks on. Creel volunteered to go out that night beneath the light of the moon with a burial party. The Germans would be doing the same and it would be something of an unofficial ceasefire while what could be collected was collected.

“Bloody hell,” Sergeant Burke said when he got wind of things. “What the hell’d you get us into this time? A pissing burial detail?”

“
Come on, Burke,” Creel said. “Just a little walk out into No-Man’s Land.”

“
I’ve been out there more times than I’d like to recollect.”

“
This time no one will shoot at you.”

Burke grunted. “So says you.”

That afternoon, they took a ride on an ambulance with the last of the gas survivors to Number Four Rest Camp. There were wounded aplenty amongst the neat rows of peaked hospital tents, but most of the men seemed quite fit, Creel thought. Groups of Tommies were in the fields digging graves, sweating rivers, while a sergeant-major stomped about swearing at them and snapping a riding crop against his leg.

“
What gives here?” Creel said.

Burke laughed. “Oi, don’t be so bleeding silly, mate. What you think is going on here? These boys is got the jack, near everyone of them.”

“
The jack?”

“
Aye, the clap, the crawlies in the ballies, the old Syph. The pox.”

Creel got it then: syphilis. As they toured the camp they learned in bits and pieces that there was something of a pandemic of venereal disease laying unit after unit low. The War Office was losing its patience with the situation and there was a posting on the notice board from Lord Kitchener himself saying something to the effect that in the future, any man rendered unfit for active duty because of VD would suffer an appalling fate: his wife, parents, or relatives would be informed in writing of his condition and
how
he had contracted it.

Those with the pox were in camp to go through a new German treatment called 606 which involved mercury injections.

Creel scribbled it all down in his notebook.

“
You don’t think they’ll let you print that, now do you?” Burke said and Creel told him that one day the war would be over and he would be back in the states and when that happened he was going to write a book about it, tell it the way it was not the watered-down, censored claptrap the press corps allowed.

The problem with VD, Creel was told by the Medical Officer, was that many French women were in a desperate state. Their men were off fighting the Hun. Even old men were being conscripted, anyone that could hold a rifle. So these women had no way to buy food or feed their children, so they turned to the oldest trick in the book.

A cheeky private from the Royal Artillery told Creel exactly how it worked: “You get these old haybags what will put anything inside ‘em, see? You give ‘em a five-franc note and they takes you into this dirty old room with a dirty old bed in the corner. Then, quick as you please, sir, she undoes your fly and has herself a feel and a squeeze to see if you’ve got the pus or any such foulness. Then off come her knickers and such a sight that is. If it don’t cool yer business, then in you go. And when yer done sweatin’ and puffin’, she has herself a boiling kettle and gives you a cuppa with herbs and brews and what not for disease’s sake.”

Creel wrote it all down already figuring on a chapter reserved to prostitution and vice in his book. It was going to be a good one and when he told Burke about it he couldn’t stop laughing.

“
Your brain is not strictly right, Mr. Creel,” he said.

Creel took a few shots of the men burying the dead because he could not help himself. He was drawn to it. Burke got him out of there as some of the diggers looked ready to add another corpse to their collection.

On the way back to the front, he tried to get Burke to speak of his experiences with the London Rifles. He’d won the Victoria Cross at the Battle of Aisne for single-handedly capturing a German machine-gun and dispatching the crew that manned it, then turning it on the Germans themselves and mowing them down in ranks. But Burke didn’t want to talk about that.

Instead:

“
A lot of the boys had dysentery so bad they slit open the arses of their trousers so they could shit while they were fighting,” he said without a trace of humor. “Nothing can take away a man’s dignity like fouling himself every five bloody minutes. You’re sent here to fight in the trenches with rats and lice, corpses rotting at your feet, and you get trench fever and dysentery. What kind of fucking war is that, I ask you?”

He went on to tell a tale of the men of the London Rifles fighting with their trousers at their ankles, so riddled with dysentery—or “the screaming squats” as he called it—were they. A sergeant named Holmes that they’d all cherished for his wit and common sense and fatherly, fair treatment of the boys in his platoon had gotten dysentery so bad that he could no longer walk. He crawled about, white and trembling, his pants down, his backside and shirt fouled brown with his own shit. They kept watch on him but he’d crawled off to the latrine trench at some point and been so weak with it, that he’d fallen into the slime and hadn’t the strength to climb free. He’d drowned in a vile, fly-specked pool of excrement.

6