“Are you all right, mate?” the soldier shouts at me over the din.
He has red hair and a red moustache like McCaan. I shake my head. “There is a dead woman and child in Passchendaele,” I say, walking away.
When Elijah comes back a couple of days later, he tells me of finding some of the Frenchmen who’d taught him to scalp his enemies last year. He has brought some meat with him, a gift from the Frenchmen, he says. We sit a long way behind the line and Elijah cuts the meat into thin strips, fries it up in his tin cup and passes me pieces on the tip of his trench knife as soon as they are cooked. I try not to think of what that knife has done. This is the first hot meal I’ve had in weeks. Elijah explains how he found the Frenchmen, that they let him know where to look for them, but I do not inquire further.
“If they did not know last Christmas that I am a hunter to contend with, they do now,” Elijah says. “All they did was stare when I showed them my trophies.” He smiles at the memory. “They acted nervously around me after that. My reputation is sealed, I think.” He gloats on this.
I wonder how it is that I go missing for a day or two and am put under guard, but Elijah does so without punishment.
The meat is gamy and a little tough. “Is it horse?” I ask, pulling gristle from my mouth.
Elijah smiles his wicked little-boy smile. “No. It is human. German, to be exact.”
I jump to my feet before I know that I do it and approach Elijah with balled fists. Then I find myself reaching for my knife. But what he has said makes me gag and I kneel down and stick my finger down my throat. The contents of my stomach come out in a slimy glob.
“X! Calm down!” Elijah says. “I am only joking. What? Do you think I’m crazy? I was kidding. It’s just horsemeat.”
His forehead creases innocently and the gleam of the trickster is in his eyes. He pops some meat in his mouth, chews it and swallows.
MASINAHIKAN
The Letter
T
HE WINTER IN LENS
is a quiet one. Both sides, it seems, are licking wounds, preparing for the warmer weather of spring before they resume killing. The Germans, everyone agrees, will go on the offensive, and try to gain back the ground that they lost over this last year.
Americans are in the struggle now, and their addition has been a welcome thing. I haven’t seen many of them. They are to the north and massing in the south. They have a lot to learn, a lot to catch up on that the others have mastered over the last three years.
Elijah and I are kept sharp by being sent out on patrols. The Germans are well dug in to the Hindenburg Line, and trench raids are out of the question in this sector, but there is plenty of action in no man’s land to keep my mind occupied. I find myself taking chances more and more, not being as careful as I once was, not caring to.
One night Elijah and I crawl through an area where reports of a Fritz work party came in the night before. We crawl and listen, crawl and listen, freeze flat on the ground when flares go up. But we find nothing. Usually, I am the one to tell Elijah it is time to head back, but tonight I don’t bother.
We are out so long that dawn is approaching when Elijah says we should head back in. My ears have been buzzing and I’ve had to rely
on Elijah’s movements to let me know when danger might be near. I’ve learned to read Elijah well. He’s wound tight like a hare when we are on the move, but when he smells the enemy close by his body goes loose and fluid, just the opposite of anyone else that I have ever been in this position with. As we turn away from Fritz’s lines, maybe two-thirds across no man’s land at this point, Elijah stops and points back in the enemy’s direction. We stare into the dark that is beginning to lighten and both of us see two forms that slither quickly into a shell-hole. Getting this glimpse of others doing what we do out in this dangerous place gives me a jolt. Sometimes when we are out here I feel like Elijah and I are the only ones in the world. In not very long, the sun will be close enough to the horizon behind the German line that Elijah and I will be shadows for Fritz to shoot.
We make our way to a shell crater twenty yards closer to our line. Elijah peers over the top and begins to shout in English.
“Fritzy!” he yells. “I saw you, Fritzy! Tomorrow night we will be back in this same place and I dare you to come out to play with us.”
Despite my better judgment, I laugh. Elijah has shouted loud enough that even I can hear him through the ringing.
As we crawl out of the crater to make it back along the route to our line, I am surprised to hear a voice shout back to us. I can’t make out what he says, only the word
Tommy
. Elijah laughs, and we scurry on.
“What did he say?” I ask Elijah once we are back safe and have drunk our morning rum.
“He was a funny one,” Elijah says. “He called us Tommy and said he’d be there waiting for us tomorrow.”
“Are we going to go back?” I ask.
“No point,” Elijah says. “They will not be there.”
When we are given a few days’ rest, we wait for the rain to stop. When it does, we all congregate by the cook wagon where it is
warmest. Men sit and talk or stare out at nothing. I stay by myself, watch the others and what they do.
I see Elijah talking in a low voice with Grey Eyes. Their relationship is now one of convenience. One will rely on the other when he is short of medicine. They talk in code. One day Elijah might ask for a cup of tea, the next day Grey Eyes might ask Elijah for a bandage, the next a cigarette. I used to worry about Grey Eyes, that he would make a mistake that would cause some of us to die, as he did with Sean Patrick. But since that time Grey Eyes has become a shadow. Nobody really notices him any more, which is best. McCaan and Breech know better than to send him on anything more than work detail. McCaan must have some idea that he takes the medicine. For reasons I do not understand, McCaan does nothing. But if Grey Eyes is caught sleeping on sentry duty, or lets happen what happened with Sean Patrick and is blamed for it, there’s no question he will be sent behind the line to face a firing squad. Grey Eyes knows this too, and this fear keeps him functioning.
Fat sits by a small fire and eats a large piece of chocolate that he received in the mail. Fat has lost weight. He is still fat, and he will never have any grace or think of anything but his comfort, but he somehow has managed to survive in a place where so many others have not. Some people carry luck like others carry weight. He carries both.
McCaan discusses with Breech the winter’s action, and what they expect in the approaching spring. He continues to watch over us like a father. Lines have grown across his forehead and beside his mouth from the strain of all this. His red hair is going grey. He is a strong man, a good man. I know that he carries the burden of each death in his section, and sometimes I worry for him.
Lately, I have seen a change in McCaan’s eyes. I don’t want to admit it, but I know as surely as I know anything. McCaan knows too. I want to approach McCaan, tell him to leave this place, go to
England, go back to Canada, anywhere but here. But you can’t run from it. It finds you when the time has come. We both know McCaan doesn’t have long, but neither of us says anything. There is no point.
But I do not worry for Bastard Breech, the man who is so concerned with appearance, waxing his moustache to points every morning, slapping his riding crop against his leg as he talks to us like we are children. He would make a good teacher at the residential school.
I wish as much as Elijah that it was Sergeant McCaan and Corporal Thompson in charge of us and that Breech would go away. Although Thompson is not one of our originals, he is the one who taught Elijah and me about scouting and patrolling and raiding. He is quiet like an Indian and stays to himself. Rumour is that he was a lawyer back in Toronto. Nobody knows much about him and he likes it that way. Thompson notices Elijah more than he does me, and I’ve become used to it. Elijah. He fools everyone but me. I am the only one who can see through his mask.
I stay awake the whole night before we are to go back up the line. In the middle of the night I’m forced to face something I have been fighting. Elijah is mad. The acts he does will bring bad luck onto all of us. Something is coming, but I cannot quite see what it is.
Our battalion is moved back to the caves and tunnels of Vimy late in the winter. Talk is that this is where the Boche will focus their spring offensive. The Boche like the high ground, and the Canadians have the ridge now.
One night word goes out of a trench raid, the first in a while. The plan is simple. Go in under cover of a box barrage, and once we are in, inflict as much damage to the trenches as we can. This will be one of many small raids. The call goes out for five volunteers. Elijah and me, Thompson, a new soldier, and McCaan. I’m surprised that McCaan is going with us. He’s better at staying back and helping with the barrage.
We are over the top and crawling across no man’s land late in the night. Artillery laid down an unnecessarily large barrage earlier in the evening that went on too long in the hopes of picking apart the section of Hun line that we head for. We make it through the wire with little problem and I am spooked to find that when we slip into the enemy trench, no enemy is there to engage. It seems as if they’ve abandoned this line. Then the realization hits me.
They have abandoned this section for a reason. I’m beginning to think that the barrage has given us away, and whisper this to Elijah as the first shell screams in and the young soldier ten yards away disappears in a flash of white and red. The rest of us are thrown to our backs. It was a German shell. It came from that direction, not the Canadians’. Fritz has been waiting.
Another shell screams in, then another. They are landing so close that the air is sucked out of my lungs and I cannot breathe. I roll onto my stomach and begin crawling. I have no idea what has happened to the others. Shards of frozen earth rain down on me as I find a dugout and roll in. Impossible to see anything in the smoke and darkness. The earth smells burnt.
The shelling stops as quickly as it started and I know that Hun will swarm into this section any moment to finish us off, but I’m too stunned by the explosion to move. My ears hear only silence.
Where are the others?
I force myself to crawl from the caved-in dugout. In the darkness I grab onto a leg. I pull myself along it but find it is not attached to a body. The leg belongs to one of us, and a sick wave washes over me. Nothing for me to do but crawl back over the side and make my way back to our line. Up on the parapet I look down once more. Some of the smoke has cleared and I can see McCaan on the ground.
“Sergeant,” I call to him. He’s looking up at me but his eyes don’t seem to take me in. I see that his arm is gone. Blood spurts out of him in pulses. He struggles to sit up. I’m frozen up on the parapet,
my legs and arms not responding to what I ask them to do. “Sergeant McCaan!” I shout, and my voice is muffled in my head. His eyes focus on me then. A smile comes to his face and his red moustache curls with his lips. He stretches his remaining arm to me.
I see the movement to my left. A couple of soldiers run up with rifles pointed and stare down at McCaan. One of the soldiers shouts at him and the other lifts his rifle and aims at McCaan’s head. I see the spit of fire come out of the barrel and then McCaan lies still. I squeeze myself flat, trying to disappear into the earth, frightened like I have never felt before. If I make a sound they will kill me too. I watch them move on a short way, and when their backs are turned, I force myself to roll away from the parapet’s edge. Now I can move to save myself, but I could do nothing for him. I am a coward, and the thought of living through this moment takes over my limbs. Tears and smoke burn my eyes as I turn away and crawl back across no man’s land alone.
Morning is close and I am the only one who has made it back. I report to Breech the confirmation of McCaan’s death. Word travels out to the company quickly. We begin to fire our artillery all afternoon, a great barrage in anger and sadness and revenge. Nothing has changed by early evening. The three most popular men in the battalion, all lost in one night.
Late that night I am awakened by Elijah’s ghost. He is so thin that I think I can almost see through him. Elijah laughs and talks but I can’t make out what he’s saying. I turn away from him to go back to sleep and Elijah pushes at me. I turn back and see that it really is him.
“I had to hide out in a shell crater not ten yards away from their line all day!” he says, excited.
“What of the others?” I ask. “Speak louder!”
“I dragged Thompson out just before Fritz arrived,” Elijah says.
I think of my inability to do the same for McCaan. The thought crushes something inside me.
“That new private was killed instantly,” Elijah continues. “I couldn’t find you or McCaan and I had to get out of the trench when I heard Fritz coming.”
“McCaan is dead,” I say. “I watched it happen.”
“I’m glad you’re alive,” Elijah says. “Thompson was hit bad. I’m lucky I was carrying morphine or his cries would have given us away. I helped him to sleep out there through the day. He was gut shot so bad I can’t imagine he’ll make it. But I got him back to our side in the dark.”
I look at Elijah, follow his lips moving. He’s found a way to remove himself from the pain of all this. None of this seems to affect him.
Everyone is stunned by the death of McCaan, but Elijah’s and Thompson’s miraculous survival takes a bit of the sting away. The men have something positive to focus on. I too feel some relief that Thompson has made it. McCaan is gone forever, though, and this continues to eat away the small part left in me that keeps me walking forward. Thompson won’t make it. I know this as surely as I knew McCaan’s fate before he did. I grieve in my own way for my two friends, burn sprigs of dried grass that I find along the roads that lead in and out of this place. The prayers sent up on the smoke seem so small. McCaan and Thompson were the ones who anchored the company, made Lieutenant Breech bearable. I realize I’d come to think of them as my relations.