The Cartographer of No Man's Land: A Novel (11 page)

“ F
ebruary
18
th,
1917
,” Angus wrote at the top of the tablet in his lap. He ran a filthy hand through his filthy hair. The sack of censored letters slumped beside him on the frozen ground of the dugout. Some he’d censored himself, as was required of junior officers—a task he found embarrassing, and one which Publicover sailed through on the winds of duty. I get through mine in ten minutes flat, he told Angus. Just scan for anything that reveals location or tactics and for grievances against king and country, the CEF or the top brass. No need to get bogged down with memories of apple blossoms or hopes for Aunt Bertie’s recovery.

In the process Angus had learned a few things about his men—that some, like Boudrey, could barely write; that Katz, McNeil and Wertz could turn a phrase with ease; and that some wrote no letters at all. Many were homesick, some heartsick, but they generally refrained from self-pity. Survival demanded that someone, somewhere, had it worse.

There was about an hour of daylight left, Angus figured, maybe twenty minutes of it to himself. By midnight, he’d be gone. His men, too. Off the Front Line trenches and back to the camps a few miles behind the line to drill and train, and then sent up again in the regular rotation. Two weeks done. Still alive.

He stared at the page and flexed his hand. “Dear Family” he began, then wrote with abandon,

As I write this, I’m still alive, though God knows why because, despite the unrelenting boredom, the possibility of death is in every corner, every timber, every moldering bag of sand, in the very air we breathe and the filth we lie in. It is in the faces of the men and in my every dream. As we wait and wait some more, spirits are kept up with fresh news of the enemy’s treachery which we in turn inflict. It is a grim madness in which grand purpose is lost and men die regardless. As for Ebbin, I am no closer to the truth than I was before I left.

He flipped the page over. Get a grip. At the very least he had to respond to Hettie’s letter telling him that her parents had gotten word—Ebbin had been officially declared missing in action. “At least not ‘known dead.’ Missing suggests hope,” she’d written. Christ.

He blew on his hands and picked up the pen. The pen had curves in mind. That was the problem. The rounded head and upturned throat of a speckled lark, the V of its beak opened in song. Sketching would settle him. Write! he told himself.

He stared down at the mail sack. Half the letters in it were Field Service Postcards. This was the choice of Boudrey, who dutifully filled one out every day. Angus helped him memorize the boxes you could check: “I am quite well” or “I have been admitted to hospital.” After the word “hospital,” you could pick “sick” or “wounded,” followed by either “and am getting on well” or “hope to be discharged soon.” There were no options for “my arm’s been blown off” or “been blinded by gas” or “the doctors don’t think I’ll recover.” If there had been, they would have been followed by “but otherwise in the pink.” Thus, the ranks could send word home without actually sending words.

Which seemed an excellent idea. Words were too paltry and powerful, both. To write home was to evoke home. And to evoke home was to risk images of home that, like whirring shrapnel, could slice through the simplest of tasks and render him impotent.

Should he write about his first patrol and the mortar attack that left him uncertain which way was up and left the sergeant, Ricketts, not ten feet away, with his throat sliced open? Keegan was elevated to sergeant the next day. Whizbangs, Angus had learned, gave a warning whiz on release, but were so fast to explode it didn’t much matter. Like so much else at the Front, mortar attacks seemed disconnected from human motives, launched by a shadowy menace across the void who every now and then showed a helmet, fired a gun, raised a sausage.

Which again made him think of the bird. And the German.

He’d seen them both that morning. Wertz, Hanson and Boudrey were crouched near a pot of water, waiting for tea. Boudrey, the mouth-breather, was so young and gullible, he’d taken on the status of a mascot. The men figured if he made it through, they would, too. Just as the water began to steam, the heady smell of cooked sausages wafted over the sandbags. It filled the nostrils and made the mouth water.

McNeil grabbed the periscope. At that moment, what looked like a bunch of sausages, fixed to a bayonet, rose high above the German parapet.

“Fritzie’s showing us his sausages,” McNeil said, still at the periscope.

“Yeah, you can drop the periscope. We all see them, smart boy,” Kearns said.

“Sausages? Fucking Kraut bastards! Let’s show him what Canadians have for breakfast!” Keegan, thick-set and agile, lunged into a funk hole and came up with a German helmet. This he balanced on the tip of his rifle, rattling it above the sandbags at the parapet. “How’d you like that, eh, Fritz?” He grinned back at the others, a toothpick between his teeth. The men sniggered.

Angus yanked his arm down. “Want them to send you a couple of whizbangs for breakfast? Set an example here, Sergeant.” Keegan’s mouth fell open. The helmet bounced on the hardened mud.

Angus took the periscope from McNeil and had a quick look for other signs from the enemy. The sausages waved about. No other movement in the German trench, but his eye caught something that he couldn’t quite make out further east where No Man’s Land widened out. A German appeared to be hanging on the barbed wire. Angus looked again. No, just a gray tunic, the German no longer in it. A hanging scarecrow. And something else. A bird flitted about its crumpled arms. It fluttered straight up, then darted down, and hopped gamely to the empty neck of the coat. There it tipped its head back and opened up in song. The song filled the air and the men were quiet. The sausages went down.

“I believe there’s a bird nesting out there on a Kraut jacket,” Angus said.

“Yes sir. Been there a week,” Wertz replied.

“The tunic or the bird?”

“Both.”

This set off an argument between McNeil and Katz as to whether they had been there a week or a week and a half.

“And the owner of the uniform?” Angus broke in impatiently.

“Below, sir.”

“That’s where I got my helmet,” Keegan offered.

Angus risked another look with the periscope and saw the slumped form below the coat. Trousers, suspenders. His first German soldier. Saw the bloating. Imagined Ebbin left hanging askew on the wire, his features swollen beyond recognition. Wondered if anyone had found Wickham, pulled him out. “Is that a lark?”

“Appears so to us, sir. Sounds like it, too. Now, it could be a different species of lark or . . .” Wertz answered.

“Don’t larks nest on the ground?” Angus demanded, as if the habits of larks had taken on military significance.

“Exactly. How could it be a lark?” McNeil asked with a trace of triumph.

“You can see the problem, sir. No grass,” Wertz replied, calmly lighting his pipe.

I
T WAS THIS
bird his pen wanted to re-create for the very reasons the soldiers looked for it daily. A grace note. He’d have liked to include the incident in a letter, but it would hardly translate—not without inflicting the unspeakable upon the innocent.

Angus jerked open the dugout door. To his left, Hanson and Tanner sat solemnly popping lice eggs off their uniforms with lit matches. Two others beyond them were hunched over, staring dumbly at the ground in a waking sleep. Everyone was short on sleep. A medical officer told Angus it was the source of delusions and hallucinations that afflicted men and officers alike in the trenches.

The slice of sky above was dull gray, but welcome. At night, that same sky pulsed with mortar fire and blinding flares—star shells and Verey lights—as sentries were posted, snipers took aim, engineers laid wire, sappers dug saps, tick-tick-ticking their picks against the chalk earth while ammunition, sacks of tea, jam, bread, bully beef and beans, bags of mail, more sandbags to be filled, more duckboards, tarpaulins, and wire were brought up by men with white eyes in dark faces.

The pounding seas, the flat calms, the rise and fall of swells. These were the rhythm of his being—not this man-made underworld. Men said that life in the trench was like being buried alive. More like an open grave, Angus decided, where, panting and immobilized, you waited for that first shovel of dirt.

Far down the line from his section of trench and across No Man’s Land, the seven-mile length of Vimy Ridge loomed, honeycombed with three rows of German bunkers and trenches. With
150
,
000
French and British troops lost trying to take it for two years, Angus had been prepared for a towering presence. But no. Even from a ground-eye view, it was a gradual grade, maybe a mile to the top—a hulking rogue wave that could suck you into its undertow, bury you beneath its fathoms, and move on.

In heaving seas and flying foam, Angus had somehow always managed to find the slot—the physical slot between wind and water that kept the boat afloat and the mental slot between anger at God and the hope He would save you—the point at which outward displays of courage transformed to courage itself. He knew that slot, but didn’t know if he could find it here.

“What’s
our
quarrel with Germany? Empire be damned!” his father had said when Angus told him he’d joined up. “Men on both sides turned to cannon fodder. Without them, the high and mighty would find another way to settle differences.” To which Angus had countered, “You call a bald-faced grab for Europe, for England, a matter of
differences
?”

His father’s white sleeves had glowed against the dark wool vest in the fading light. His white hair, too. His short, muscular frame barely contained his fury. He’d leaned over his desk, and said, “You can’t be serious about this. You’re my
son.
We’re pacifists, for Chrissake!” And Angus had shot back, “
You’re
the pacifist!” He’d refused to repeat that he’d be behind the lines. His father’s response had triggered a foolish desire to be in the thick of it.

And now he was.

Besides dodging whizbangs, his role at the Front had been limited to keeping morale up and his head down, with a lot of supervisory tasks in between. He’d gotten to know his men, not just by their letters, but by their feet as he inspected them for oozing blisters and applied cold whale oil to them. His silent ministrations gave him the chance to check for the dreaded trench foot, which could turn feet to necrotic, misshapen blobs from the damp, from constriction and cold. Afterwards, as needed, he’d hand out clean wool socks sent over by women’s groups at home. The men took them without making eye contact, probably figuring that Angus, like the other lieutenants, would be dead and gone long before the battle took place. Except for Boudrey, who always stuck his feet straight out and said, “Thank you, sir.”

The battle for Vimy was months away. Everyone knew it, including the Germans. In the endless stagnation, the demoralizing term “war of attrition” had been bandied about. “Attrition?” Publicover said. “Heck, I don’t even know what that word
means
. Don’t care if I do. All I know is we’re getting ready for the big show, and when it comes, oh mother, oh brother
, then
there’ll be action! Plenty of it!” And so they waited. And across No Man’s Land, soldiers just like them blew on their hands in the cold.

Angus drew a breath, put pen to the page, and in minutes produced a remarkably detailed sketch of the lark, five-inch barbs to either side of it, mouth opened in song. He placed it in his case just as Publicover bounded in. “I just passed Hiller. Pathetic,” he said, and started packing his kit.

“He’s a worry,” Angus agreed. He’d found Hiller that morning, hands in his armpits, crouched in a funk hole. Angus had to shake him to get his attention, and when he stood, the tremors started up again.

“Hiller
should
worry you. A coward pushing for sick leave is what he is.”

“What makes you so sure?”

“Because I know one when I see one. He wants out.”

“A reasonable response.”

“Exactly. Faking it. Either way, he’s a danger. Believe me, when one of your own is a coward, you’ll wish him dead when the bullets fly.”

“I’m sending him to a camp doctor when we’re back of the line.” Angus reached for the photo envelope lying next to his writing tablet and ran his hand over the soft leather cover of it. On one side, Hettie Ellen—her high cheekbones, a slight upward turn of her chin, her lips softly parted as if distracted by something offstage. On the other side, Young Fred in short pants looked sternly at the camera. Simon Peter, arm around him, struck a happy-go-lucky pose. “Don’t go,” Young Fred said solemnly to Angus at the station in Chester the day he left. Angus had taken Simon aside, away from old Athol McLaren, who was strolling the platform, wheezing out send-off tunes on the pipes as best he could. Angus had put his hands on Simon’s shoulders and looked him in the eye, intending to say something profound. But all he could manage was, “You’re the best boy in the whole wide world. Not one boy better. You know that, don’t you?” Then he pulled him in tight as the train pulled into the station. Through the clouds of steam he saw Hettie. Her hat blew up in the breeze.