Just when I’m beginning to wonder whether they even remember that we are among them, the tall, wiry one turns to us. He neither smiles nor sneers, but just stares for a while. Elijah is looking away, but I know he sees everything anyway. I meet the man’s gaze and hold it till the Frenchman motions for us to join them at the table. We are given a bottle of thick red wine. Elijah takes a deep drink.
“You do not look like the Canadians that I have seen,” the wiry one says. His voice has a heavy accent, but his English seems good.
The other men continue to talk with one another, but I can tell that they are listening.
“I’m an Indian,” Elijah says. “From the North. This one too, but he doesn’t speak much English. ”
“Does he speak French?” the man asks.
Elijah shakes his head. “He is a heathen, speaks his own tongue fluently, nothing else. ”
I look to Elijah and I think only then does he realize how much my English has improved these last months that I understand his joke.
“I’ve heard of one of you Indians, a Canadian too. They say he has killed many, many men, that he is the best hunter of us all. ” Elijah smiles and is ready to nod his thanks for the kind words when the Frenchman continues, “His name is Peggy, and he works alone. ”
Elijah has heard of this Peggy just as I have. Neither of us has spoken about him lately since he hasn’t been active.
“I hear rumour that he is dead,” Elijah says.
“No, he is not dead,” the thin one answers. All in the room are listening now. “He just works alone. His C. O. refuses to acknowledge all the kills he makes since he doesn’t like to work with a spotter. But he is the best. He has killed many Hun. ”
“I would like to meet this Peggy,” Elijah says.
We all drink and Elijah and I listen to them talk their French, and I can see he grows angry thinking about this Peggy. What kind of name is that, anyway? I can hear him say to himself. Getting up, I watch as he makes his way outside and to the back of this house, the voices and music wafting out the open window. He notices the cold as he rolls up his sleeve and searches for skin that is not too bruised. Even in the darkness he can see the black discoloration running up and down his arm. He takes the short needle from the moosehide bag in his chest pocket and slips it in quickly, efficiently,
wincing as he hits a tender area. His whole arm is tender. Elijah practises self-control, knowing as he floods his vein that he is using the medicine right now out of anger. Just enough goes into him that he no longer feels the pain of his arm or of the cold. The golden halo settles down around his head, and he’s protected once more.
When he turns to go back inside, he’s startled by me standing there, watching him.
“I don’t like these ones,” I say. I talk in Cree. “Let’s find the others. ”
“I would like us to stay for just a while longer. ” Elijah wants to find out more about this Peggy.
“I will wait outside, then,” I tell him.
I wait, listening and watching.
Inside, the men continue to drink and some of them are very drunk, fighting with their knives in a type of practised dance that Elijah hasn’t seen before. They come very close to cutting one another but always manage to pull back at the last moment, even in their condition. Elijah sits back down with the thin one. He tells Elijah his name is Francis G.
“I know who you are,” Francis says. “There is talk about you and the silent one. ” Elijah nods to him. Everything really is better with morphine. “You two killed the Boche sniper by Saint-Eloi. ”
“We did,” Elijah says. They sit without speaking for a time.
“Avoid what happens to Peggy,” he says. He smiles at Elijah now. “Do what we do. Collect evidence of your kills. Do what my people taught your people a long time ago. Take the scalp of your enemy as proof. Take a bit of him to feed you. ”
Elijah doesn’t know how to answer this. He smiles. “And what will collecting these trophies really do for me?” he asks.
“They will buy you honour among us,” Francis says. “And we are honourable men. ”
W
E ARE MOVED NORTH
before the new year. This place that we have been sent is called Vimy Ridge, rolling countryside near a smashed town named Arras. I can see that it was once beautiful country, but is now mashed earth. I look around at the ruins and wonder if this place will ever heal. I try to imagine the countryside here in ten years, in fifty years, in a hundred years, but all I can see in my mind are men crawling in and out of the tunnels in these hills like angry and tired ants, thinking of new ways to kill the other.
Elijah and I are back in the front line. Breech acts as though he wants to keep a close eye on us. “This war would be a fine thing if not for that man,” Elijah says to me.
It seems that every private who is sent in to replace Sean Patrick dies soon after arriving. The men have taken to calling it The Curse. Right now we wait for a replacement to bring our section to strength. Elijah tells me he feels sorry for the one who arrives. Word comes that Thompson is recovering nicely and will be sent back to us sometime soon. Elijah wears the power that he’s been given as acting corporal comfortably. But we are kept from going on raids in this new place.
This Vimy Ridge is quiet compared to what we endured at the Somme in the autumn. And I’m glad for it. Fritz’s line runs along the high ground to the east. The Canadians sit hunkered below him, our every movement visible. Troops must move at night or be pounded by Fritz with great accuracy. This is the place where the French army was nearly wiped out two years ago, and the British last year. Although the Canadians are not supposed to hear of it, word is that the French lost 150,000 men in the fighting here, and the British 60,000. Those numbers are impossible to keep secret. They are impossible for me to understand. I ask Elijah, “How many does that mean?”
He smiles. “A very difficult question to answer,” he says.
I can see that he has the medicine in him. His lips curl at the edges in a slight smile and his eyes shine. When he is taking the morphine he forgets all about his British accent.
“Think of all the trees we passed canoeing to the town. Think of how many trees the fire ate. That many, maybe. ”
I sit and contemplate this for a long time.
The cold weather finally comes and the rain turns to snow. The mud of no man’s land turns hard, which makes movement easier, but when a shell lands close by, the earth thrown up is as sharp and deadly as needles. With the snow on the ground, Elijah and I find that night patrols are more difficult. We stand out in our dark uniforms against the white of snow, and so McCaan is issued white tunics that we throw over our coats.
The cold is exhilarating. Elijah and I watch through our sniper scopes for puffs of breath on the German line that rise up from the trenches like steam and give away positions. When our artillery knocks out chunks of Fritz’s line, we watch and wait for the poor soul who doesn’t know any better to appear in the opening just long enough to disappear in the red spray of Elijah’s bullet, or mine.
Breech lets us go hunting out of the trenches. Elijah has been on his best behaviour the last weeks as January has deepened. He and I work as a team again, me spotting and Elijah shooting. We move constantly and find new and better places to hide in the ruined earth and crushed brick of this place. At nighttime we come alive, constantly patrolling and planning large and elaborate raids on Fritz’s supposedly impenetrable trenches.
It’s as if the winter weather has inspired the Canadians dug in here. In this place that is a gigantic cemetery for the French, we raid Fritz at will, making him jittery and afraid. The officers like these big raids, and although Elijah tells me he prefers to work alone or with one or two others, he has no choice but to go out with so many other men to patrol and attack. He breaks off from the group when they are in no man’s land, never so far that if spotted by them he will be accidentally shot, but far away enough that he feels invisible.
On a night in late January, word goes out for volunteers to go on a mission to overrun a section of Fritz’s trench that has been pinpointed as a sector of accurate sniping. Elijah’s excited at the prospect of finding his own Mauser with a scope, and uses the medicine sparingly so that he has all of his faculties sharpened. Our artillery isolates a section of Fritz’s line, the booms of the guns sharp in the cold air.
I don’t volunteer for this one. I’m not sure why. A slight buzzing like a wasp in a burlap sack tells me not to go, and so I listen to it. I’ve talked even less than usual lately. I think of needing to get back behind the lines soon so that Elijah and I can build a
matatosowin
, a sweat lodge, so we can sit together for a while. I realize I miss home.
I sit back instead and watch as faces are blackened. Elijah carries his war club and the revolver that has been issued him as an acting corporal. They have carefully outlined their plan of attack, and the forty volunteers who will charge into the enemy trenches and go berserk upon Fritz before running back to their own lines again are as focused as any soldiers I’ve ever seen. I don’t know most of the others by name but recognize many of the faces, all of them Second Division who came over at the same time.
As I watch them prepare for the raid, I’m reminded of those Frenchmen back at Christmas. They put the chill in me. I think that they are
windigos
.
I watch the raiders slip from the trench and get eaten by the night. Back in my dugout, I listen for the box barrage that is to come. When it does, I light a cigarette and watch the smoke curl up, carrying its message. No sleeping the rest of the night. I wait for Elijah, troubled by our separation.
When maybe two hours pass, I hear a different shell attack, this one coming from the German line and landing a long way from us. Not long after that I hear a rustle outside the dugout. Elijah climbs in, his face blackened and his eyes standing out white. He lights a
cigarette with hands covered in blood. He sees that I am awake and waiting for him.
“How did it go?” I ask in Cree.
“It went very well,” Elijah answers. He waits a few moments, sees that I am listening. He begins to tell me the story of his night.
The raiders crawl along their listening-post trench that juts out toward Fritz’s line, then slip over the top. It is a starless night, and Elijah can tell that by morning it will snow again. They spread out in a thin line and advance on their bellies across the frozen ground. Leaving by way of their listening post puts them close to Fritz’s wire without having to pick their way through their own. When star shells and Very lights pop up and drift down toward them, they lie still, their white tunics becoming a part of the snow-covered ground. This will be a good raid. He can feel it.
At Fritz’s wire he finds a place easy to slip through and this puts him ahead of the raiding party by a couple of minutes. He lies still and scans the sandbags of the parapet. The knowledge that yards from him there are sentries with guns pointed out at him and sensing he is close but not able to see him is exhilarating. The Canadian artillery is spot-on tonight. It lands with crunching thuds and blasts of fire and frozen ground one hundred yards on either side. This will cut off reinforcements from entering this section of trench that they plan on demolishing, and also keep the heads of the sentries down so that the raiders can slip in without notice and catch them by surprise. Still, the window to do this is small. The artillery can’t keep the fire up for long without giving them away.
As soon as Elijah knows that a good part of the raiding party is close by him, he crouches and moves toward the parapet, the others following. Vaulting over it, he feels as if he is flying, not knowing or caring what is below. But he does not fall long. His boots thud on a sheet of corrugated metal that collapses below him so that he crashes in the midst of three soldiers staring at him with wide eyes. It seems
that he landed on the roof of their dugout and caved it in. They begin to scramble for their rifles as he tries to pull his legs from the crumple of metal and dirt. He is stuck in the old fallen roof up to his waist and can only move his torso.
He acts immediately, pointing his revolver into the face of the closest and pulling the trigger. With a flash of light the soldier’s forehead explodes. The gunpowder burns Elijah’s nose. As the soldier furthest from him grabs a rifle leaning on the wall, the other grabs Elijah’s revolver with both hands and begins twisting it away from him. With Elijah’s free hand he swings his war club hard and sinks the sharp nails deep into the soldier’s skull. The soldier stares in shock as Elijah struggles to pull the club out and hit him again, but it is stuck too deep and he lets the soldier fall with the club embedded in his head.
When Elijah turns, the third soldier stands calmly now with a look of anger on his face. The soldier’s rifle is levelled at Elijah’s chest. This moment freezes in Elijah’s head as men all around scramble and shout and the artillery explodes in the background and the German pulls the trigger and Elijah waits for the impact to throw him back. But the look of confusion on the soldier’s face lets him know that something has gone wrong. The soldier stares down at the useless rifle in his hands as Elijah raises his revolver and takes his turn aiming it at the other’s chest, pulling the trigger so that the gun jerks in his hand and his enemy falls backwards and lies still.
He feels a little ridiculous struggling to get free from the collapsed roof as the raiding party runs through this section of trench whooping and screaming, throwing bombs into dugouts and clubbing dazed Fritz with their knobkerries. Elijah’s worried there will be nothing left for him. Finally he is out and leans toward the first of the three soldiers. The face is gone and he is obviously dead. Elijah places his foot on the head of the second soldier and wrenches his club from it. The soldier mutters and speaks gibberish, his eyes
making crazy circles. Elijah points his revolver at the soldier’s forehead as if he is a wounded dog and fires.
Elijah finds no thrill in this part. This is simply what this place and these conditions have done to him. He makes his way to the third soldier. He is close to death and his chest makes a sucking sound with each laboured breath. His eyes are open and staring, and so Elijah covers them with one hand and with the other squeezes the soldier’s throat hard until he stops breathing. The soldier struggles a little and in the madness of the shouting and bombing, and rifle and revolver fire all around, this is an oddly peaceful moment.