“I hate to desert you just as we’re going up the line, Jimmy boy,” he said, and it was true. They worked as a pair, and everyone knew it.
But Irish was too sick to work or to make jokes. It was raining and he was soaked through. His legs and puttees were coated with mud, and he was having difficulty lifting one foot before the other. The only thing that cheered him was the sight of the Virgin statue in Albert, tilted almost upside down from the church steeple and ready to fall. For days, the boys had been hearing about the famed statue of the leaning Virgin.
The recently won German dugouts were a wonder, a deep labyrinth of rooms reinforced with planed boards, and even having electric lights. One of the dugouts had become an Advanced Dressing Station. Because of the surrounding chalk country, trench lines, with their piles of white chalk along the sides, could easily be seen during the day. Irish had been left in Albert, lying in a back room of the Main Dressing Station, on one of several low cots lined up along the brick floor. The windows had been darkened and the insistent smell of acetylene gas was ever present in the building. His temperature had been 104 degrees when he’d finally seen the M.O. As the nights were colder now, he had become worse by trying to stick it out. He had been chilled over and over again.
Finner, his replacement, walked beside Jim as four squads followed
their sergeant, leaving the Chalk Cliffs at five in the morning and heading for the crossroads. Jim thought of the German prisoners behind wire cages whom he’d seen farther back the night before. He had stared hard as he passed, wondering again what kind of man was the enemy. Some of the German soldiers were sitting on the ground, tearing up old sandbags to make replacement puttees for themselves, wrapping the brown rags in circles round and round their lower legs. The Germans were talking amongst themselves and paid no attention when the Ambulance boys went past.
Evan was more nervous than ever; the tic in his cheek was pulsing and he was rolling his fingers again. As they walked Jim kept an eye on him, ahead and to the right of Stash. They moved forward by twos, with spaces between each pair. Beside Jim, Finner was talking in a low continuous monotone that filled any silence there was to fill between the noise of the guns. His voice was getting on Jim’s nerves, but Jim knew that Finner was nervous. He looked young, barely of age to be here. Perhaps, Jim thought, it was because the rest of them were looking and feeling so old. Finner had been with them only a few days; he’d been sent up a day before they marched towards the Brick Fields. In any case, he would not, or could not, shut up.
Jim tried to keep Finner’s voice on the outside rim of his consciousness. He pulled into himself and kept walking, being careful of his footing. There were shell holes and craters everywhere, and the men passed a huge pit where a mine had been exploded. The desolate land around them had been stripped of every blade of grass, every bush and shrub and tree. What lay before them now was churned to a scene of utter waste. By the time they reached the trenches and found the aid post, an unspeakable bombardment was in progress. The ground throbbed and the air ricocheted around Jim’s head. The gathered sound seemed to enter him through his mouth instead of through his ears. The dead were buried and half-buried; the wounded lying or sitting, staring out in pain.
Jim went to work in the trench, kneeling as he applied a dressing.
He reached for his stretcher and motioned to Finner. Evan and Stash had walked farther along and were now out of sight.
They loaded a soldier whose arm had been splinted to his side and who had shrapnel in his knee. As they stood to start the carry, a lieutenant ran up to them. A Canadian they’d never seen before.
“Beat it!” he yelled. “Get the hell out of here. The boys are over the top just ahead.”
Jim was in the lead and tried to get the injured man away, but he was slowed by trying to manoeuvre the stretcher and by the uneven sludge underfoot. He and Finner got themselves into a communication trench and then onto a track, and though the shelling was heavy and coming at them from all sides, they were able to get through the open unprotected area. They carried their patient as far as the cemetery tramline where the wounded were being cleared out on trucks to the next point.
On the way back, they passed Evan and Stash coming out, and Jim caught a glimpse of their faces. Stash, intense, as always. Evan, pale, the tic in his cheek more marked. More and more stretcher bearers were going up and down the line. Jim felt his stomach cramp. He had a vague memory of having eaten hours ago. He and Finner were sent farther forward this time. The dead and dying were inside and outside trenches, lying in water and mud. The clearing went on and on as they carried the wounded back, one by one by one, so that they could be moved again, eventually reaching the Dressing Station at the Brick Fields. New bearers who arrived told Jim and Finner that twelve surgeons were working non-stop over the operating tables set up in the dressing station in Albert. In his mind, Jim saw the unthinkable—blood spilling out of the boys onto the floor and tables, on the hands and arms and white aprons of the surgeons as they went about their work. Many of the boys died of shock before they could be attended to, their bodies out of equilibrium.
They tried to help a young soldier from the PPCLIs, a boy who looked no older than Egan had been. He must be older, surely, Jim thought. He kneeled to see what he could do. The upper part of the
boy’s forehead had been staved in, but not his eyes—a skull case. Jim had heard the M.O.s referring to the boys as “skulls” when pieces of missile or shrapnel were lodged in the head or when the plates of the head were crushed in. The boy’s round eyes were fixed directly on him as he and Finner did the lift. All the boys feared mutilation. They would rather take a single bullet, and told him this all the time. A single bullet was merciful because there was less chance of a septic wound and gangrene—if they survived. The boy with the injury to his forehead did not survive a hundred yards of the carry; they laid him in the mud alongside swollen and distorted bodies that had been there for some time.
They worked all day and all night. The following day, Jim realized that Finner had finally shut up. He had no recall of when this had happened—this day, or the day before, or in the night. He thought of Irish and how his friend was well out of this. Irish had often said, “These are the sights the mind gorges on in horror forever, Jimmy,” and Jim knew that he was right.
It had been raining for some time now, and the yellowish-grey mud attached itself to boots and clothing, slowing them, adding weight to the carries and to their own legs and feet. Blankets that covered the wounded were filthy. Jim and Finner had long been out of rations. A shell burst near them and they fell to the ground, momentarily shocked. Jim landed in a hole half-filled with water, and his empty stretcher flew in the opposite direction. He crawled out, soaked through—though it didn’t matter anyway, because of the rain. He looked around for Finner and saw him lying on his side in the mud, but Finner moved and pulled himself to his knees.
The next time they were at the clearing point, Evan and Stash caught up to them. They were all told to go forward again to meet up with another group of bearers who had been sent ahead. They followed one another single file, Stash in the lead, and found themselves slipping and sliding over boards that had been laid down to help with the footing. Boxes of ammunition were being
delivered on the backs of a half dozen mules ahead, and just as the bearers began to pass, the mule in the rear slipped off the boards and into the layers of muck. The animal floundered in panic and instinctively they reached towards it, but they had to stand by and watch its crazed eyes sink lower and lower, almost directly at their feet. Stash looked as if he would jump in after it, but the mule was up to its neck and disappearing. It sank completely under and a voice inside Jim said,
No head
, and he considered the normality of the thought.
“It’s a little mule, for God’s sake,” Stash was shouting into the air. “It’s a living thing. There must be something we can do.”
But there was nothing they could do. A voice from behind was shouting angrily, “Keep moving! Go on past.” The voice in Jim’s head said,
Mules don’t panic, horses do. They’re used here because it’s easier to cure them of colic
. But the waste of both was terrible. It was one of the horrors of the war—the terrible waste of living creatures. Thousands upon thousands of horses and mules were buried and unburied across the scarred landscape in these corners of Belgium and France.
Stash was still angry when they joined the other squads. Earth was spouting around them, and smoke wafted through the air. This was followed by a stillness that seemed unreasonable. The clouds were low, the late-afternoon sky as grey as the earth. There was a zigzag cut in a trench to Jim’s right and beyond that a jagged piece of corrugated iron used as a partial shelter. The place was crowded and smelled of unwashed men. Jim did not want to be in such a place. So many bodies together invited trouble. He stood unmoving, trying to sink into the quiet that had fallen on all sides.
The officer in charge was giving orders to the bearers who had arrived before them. While he was organizing, he was tying long strips of white bandage to the ends of sticks. A whine was heard, and there was an explosion to Jim’s left. Scarcely anyone ducked. But they all watched as some fifteen feet away, Stash reached up with a
hand towards his throat. He made a hissing sound and folded forward like a jackknife, and slumped to the ground. Evan, who was closest, kneeled instantly beside his friend. A piece of stray metal had struck Stash in the neck and he had died instantly.
Jim felt his legs running the short distance between them. He collapsed on his knees beside Evan, who had already turned Stash’s body face up. There was little blood. The two men dragged their friend aside and Jim stood looking at him in disbelief, vowing that he would be properly buried. He realized that the officer was shouting at him, “Get out there with the others!” Finner was behind the officer, ashen-faced. A stick had been thrust in his hand. Some of the other bearers raised their own sticks, which were tied with bandages, up and over their heads. Jim felt a wrenching pain in his gut and he thought he would vomit. Evan looked as though he were in shock, but his feet had already begun to move away from Stash’s body and towards the officer. In groups of four, three in Jim’s group—each group with a stretcher—they worked their way up and out and began to pick their way across No Man’s Land.
They dipped into craters, stepped over wire, circled obstacles and sank, at times, knee-deep. They were surrounded by a silence more eerie than the one that had settled over them before they left the trench. Even as he moved, Jim was thinking what a sight they were, a sight not seen before. Each group held high its white banner, nothing more than a rain-soaked bandage drooping from the end of a stick, to keep them safe.
They did not have much searching to do. All around the area, bearers were ducking down, checking bodies, leaving the dead and loading the wounded. Jim and Evan and Finner kept walking forward, Evan rolling his fingers, Finner holding the stick high. But the going was bad; they had to slog their way through. Up ahead, five hundred feet or more, Jim saw two new bearers rise out of the mist and gloom. Two more followed, and two more, and the realization came to him that he was watching his enemy stand up and
out of the German line. Like the Canadians, each group of Germans carried a stick tied with a length of bandage. With caution, the men of both sides made their way towards one another, step by step, step by step.
Be sharp
, Jim told himself.
Still the mind
. A German soldier raised his arm and pointed a finger at Jim and then at the mud beside him. The German was unarmed. He kneeled, then stood and pointed again, this time using sign language to beckon Jim to come ahead with the stretcher. When Jim and Evan and Finner reached the lip of the crater where the German was pointing, they saw that the German’s partner was down inside the crater and had already applied one of his own dressings to a soldier from the 42nd. The boy was conscious, slumped back against a sloping wall of mud. He looked as though he had been there for some time. His shoulder was bare and had taken a wound through to the other side, and Jim knew that he was in shock because he did not cry out when he was touched. The boy’s body began to shake uncontrollably. Finner dropped the stick with the white bandage and jumped down into the crater. The German who had applied the dressing helped lift until they could get the boy at a level with the others’ feet and onto the stretcher. Jim stood up, gripping the handles, and looked eye-to-eye into the face of the German who had beckoned him to this spot.
The face of his enemy stared back. The eyes were expressionless inside the distinctive curve of helmet. He was large, taller than Jim, and heavier, but about the same age. His eyes were grey-blue. There was a horizontal streak of mud on his chin, as if he had wiped it straight across with his hand. His uniform was as filthy and mud-caked as the uniforms worn by the Canadians.
Neither Jim nor the German spoke. Jim thought of Stash’s body, how it had jackknifed as it slumped. He tried to hate the man who stood before him. But there was only coldness, no other feeling. Coldness, and the hatred of war.
He turned his back and started for his own line and, as he did so,
across the desolate and injured landscape, he saw pairs of men, German and Canadian, binding their wounded, raising the injured on stretchers, carrying them back to their own lines.
After carrying out three other men, Jim and Evan tenderly laid their friend’s body on a stretcher and carried it as far back as they could, to ensure that he would have a burial. Jim and Finner were told by one of the Ambulance corporals to go to a dugout and rest until they were called for. Evan was sent back to the Chalk Cliffs.
The dugout was in ruins, the roof imploded, but there was enough space at one edge to provide shelter for the two men. They crawled into the place gratefully, their bodies exhausted. Jim grabbed at a ground sheet that was partly buried in the wall of mud. He cleared it off as well as he could and wrapped it around the two of them. He spent some moments trying to funnel rain down and away from their already soaked boots. Both he and Finner had long ago given up their puttees. Like every other bearer during the past days, they had used them as outer bandages for the wounded.