Blue Ravens: Historical Novel (18 page)

The
Mount Vernon
and other troopships delivered newly trained soldiers and then immediately returned with the casualties, the badly wounded in the war. Suddenly the wave of red sails and excitement of our arrival had ended, and every soldier on the dock stared in silence at the wounded. The medical vehicles were loaded with wounded soldiers, hundreds of desolate soldiers with heads, hands, and faces bound in bloody bandages. Many of the soldiers had lost arms and legs. Aloysius was moved to tears and turned away to draw blue ravens in waves of torment.

This was not the war that we had imagined that summer in the livery stable
with our uncle Augustus. This was a war provoked by an empire demon, more sinister than an ice monster, and the enemy of natural reason, and not by native visionaries, our sturdy ancestors, fur traders, or by the French. I could hear in the distance the great baritone voice of Patch Zhimaaganish. He sang the chorus of “When This Lousy War Is Over,” a song he had learned in the choir of privates at Camp Wadsworth, South Carolina.

When this lousy war is over,
No more soldiering for me,
When I get my civvy clothes on

Oh how happy I shall be.

A wounded soldier on the gangway turned and raised his last arm and shouted out the last line, “Oh how happy I shall be.” The new soldiers on the dock saluted the wounded and cheered, and later on the soldiers on the long march toward the city sang a popular song about home, honor, and camaraderie.

Goodbye Broadway, Hello France,
We're ten million strong,
Goodbye sweethearts wives and mothers,

It won't be long.

A German submarine torpedoed the
Mount Vernon
early in the morning a week later on September 5, 1918, at sea, west of Brest. The troopship carried only wounded soldiers on the return voyage. The periscope of a submarine was sighted and sailors dropped depth charges, but the torpedo exploded amidships killing more than thirty members of the crew. The
Mount Vernon
and three destroyers returned slowly to the port at Brest. The wounded soldiers boarded the
Agamemnon
and returned safely to the United States.

Brest was a remote hilly city overcrowded by soldiers, but the people, mostly women, children, and old men, were cordial and grateful for the presence of the American Expeditionary Forces. The children waited for coins, any coins, the young women smiled and wore bright flowers, the old women wore black, and the tired old men gestured with a hand or eyebrow and leaned on stone walls.

The soldiers marched smartly past Le Théâtre, Gare de Brest, and
over the Pont de Recouvrance. Brest was located on the right bank of the Penfeld River. The soldiers continued a performance march with military cadence on narrow curved streets for four miles past Saint-Sauveur in Recouvrance, the oldest parish church, and the Maison de la Fontaine, the oldest house in Brest. I learned about the names and places from a French language booklet issued at Camp Wadsworth.

Finally in a light rain we arrived at the Pontanezen Barracks, a camp the military had built for soldiers to rest for a few days before combat assignments. No one dared to mention the wounded soldiers on the dock. The food was good, and the stories of women and wine were overstated and celebrated by the hour, and with every name and place mispronounced in French.

Mademoiselle from Armentières,
She hasn't been kissed for forty years.

Hinky dinky parlez-vous.

Four days later we boarded open boxcars and toured for two long days the beautiful late summer countryside. The boxcars were noisy, unsteady, and designated for forty soldiers and eight horses. For the comfort of the soldiers the number was reduced and we traveled without horses. The drafty wooden floors were covered with straw. The boxcars were open and the slow train meandered near small farms and through quaint villages and circled the city of Paris. The Eiffel Tower was visible in the distance.

The train arrived late that night near La Ferté-sous-Jouarre, a commune on the Marne River between the cities of Meaux and Château-Thierry. Paris was only about thirty miles to the west near the Marne River. We could have floated in peace by the light of the stars almost to the great city. The Germans had destroyed the train stations and bridges, so the soldiers marched to nearby Gare Nanteuil-Saâcy and Saâcy-sur-Marne.

The night sky was decorated with the explosion of rockets, and the thunder of enemy artillery beat in my chest. The war was close at hand, an unnatural and spectacular scene, and the soldiers were hushed and hesitant that night near the river.

The Marne River flowed in silence, an ancient course and motion through the cruel memories of many wars. The shoreline was bruised with battens and memories of the dead. The glance of rockets shivered on the
dark water, and revealed the steady flow of leaves, broken trees, and human debris from the nearby war upriver near the city of Château-Thierry.

The soldiers were shadows near the shore of the river, only the slight glow of cigarettes lingered after the blaze and distant thunder of artillery. That night the war was a curious spectacle of sound and distant light. Not yet a real war, not yet the silent ruins of merciless rage. The rubble of the nearby train station was only a tease of the war disease that decimated so many ancestral cities, communes, and family farms in France.

The night sky was a constant mystery, solace on a strange road, the star traces of memories and stories, and that one night on the way to war was an exceptional consolation of a poetic canopy.

The Germans waited with a vengeance for the new maneuvers of unseasoned soldiers, the rush and break down, and yet the enemy worried more about native warriors. They were unnerved by stories of native stealth, capture, torture, and about being scalped at night in the trenches.

The war was close, a long walk away. Just a walk away, the same distance as Bad Boy Lake from the Hotel Leecy on the White Earth Reservation. My uniform was clean, my heart steady, but the river revealed by scent and shadow the scraps and detritus of war. The Marne River reflected that night the actual horror of combat.

I leaned back on the riverbank, but could not sleep. I could not even close my eyes for more than a minute. Every sight was new, an exotic and treacherous tableau, and every visionary scene was heightened by sounds, by the constant motion of insects, by artillery, the moist reach of the earth, and by my recent visual memories.

The wounded were on ships at sea, and the dead soldiers, pieces of young bodies, shattered bones, were buried in the earth, some by tillage of mince and morsel, and others by name and poignant commissions at military ceremonies. The larger human remains were tagged by religious order, covered and stacked on trucks. The earth would return once more to mustard and sugar beets, and rivers would carry forever the bloody scent of these ancient scenes of war out to the sea.

Aloysius was beside me on the riverbank, but we never spoke a word that night. He told me later the next day that he had created by visual scenes of memory and imagination the many stories told by our friend Odysseus about the American Civil War.

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C
HÂTEAU-
T
HIERRY

— — — — — — —
1918
— — — — — — —

Aloysius told the sergeant that early morning that he was a native artist in a union of three armies, the sum of three times his military service. The sergeant heard only the precious word “artist” and ordered my brother to latrine duty, to carve a crapper pit in the thicket near the river. Later we learned to be more incidental and never to linger for any reason over a hole in the earth. No soldier was ever at ease once he heard the stories about enemy snipers and strategic bowel movements.

The American Expeditionary Forces was actually a union of three armies in combat with the enemy in France. The Germans probably never made that same distinction, other than the forces of the British, French, and Americans.

The United States Regular Army, National Guard units from various states, and the National Army of volunteer and conscript soldiers were the union of three armies. The Regular Army was already in service and National Guard soldiers were activated as soon as war was declared with Germany. Drafted soldiers of the National Army were assigned to both the Regular Army and to train with various divisions of the activated National Guard for service in France.

Private Ignatius Vizenor, our cousin, was drafted and assigned to train with the Thirtieth Division of the activated National Guard in North Carolina, South Carolina, and Tennessee. The division was trained for infantry combat that summer at Camp Sevier, South Carolina, a few weeks before we arrived at the nearby Camp Wadsworth in the National Army. Corporal Lawrence Vizenor was drafted at the same time as his brother and assigned to train with the Thirty-Third Division of the Illinois National Guard.

The designation of military units mustered for service in the war was complicated, and we never fully understood why brothers, and our cousins, were drafted at the very same time and assigned to separate units. I was lucky to be assigned to the same military unit with my brother. We trained
and served together in combat, and we experienced the same miseries and stories of the war.

Ignatius Vizenor completed training and was assigned to serve with the British Expeditionary Forces in combat near Saint-Quentin and Montbréhain, France. Lawrence Vizenor was decorated for his service in the Battle of the Argonne Forest. Patch Zhimaaganish, John Razor, Louis Swan, Robert Fairbanks, and many of our relatives were never more than fifty miles away from each other during the war, but the distance was as great as life and death. The only thing we each had in common as soldiers was our combat heartache and hatred of the Germans.

More than fifty natives were drafted from Becker County and the White Earth Reservation. Most natives served in combat infantry units. Only a few natives were assigned to serve in the same training and combat units, and others were selected for special military duty. William Heisler, for instance, was assigned to the Medical Corps. Romain Fairbanks was assigned to a Gas Regiment. Frederick Broker served as Blacksmith First Class. Several natives were drafted to serve in the Spruce Production Division in Oregon, Washington, and in France. Natives, of course, had real experiences in forests on reservations, and that was mostly watching the forests disappear in two generations. More than ten thousand soldiers cut and processed spruce trees for the war. Sitka spruce was light, strong, and durable to build military airplanes.

During the civil war with natives thousands of white pine trees were cut on the White Earth Reservation and used to build houses in Chicago, not airplanes or boxcars for the First World War. Federal agents and timber companies were eager to cut down ancient trees for new houses in cities but not to build houses for native families on reservations. Natives and reservations were the means to an end in timber and in war.

The First Pioneer Infantry was ordered to wait another few days on the banks of the Marne River. French
camions
, or trucks, were not available to transport the new soldiers to combat positions near the trenches at the front. The rumor spread that every truck was loaded with rations for the hungry horses. Actually the narrow roads were impassible, rutted, muddy, and crowded with horses, wagons, ambulances, artillery, and military equipment. Only two mess trucks arrived that afternoon with food for three companies of soldiers.

The army chaplain took advantage of the delay to baptize scared soldiers on their way to war. Seventeen infantry soldiers were converted overnight and baptized the next afternoon in the Marne River. The military congregation of saintly soldiers on the riverbank shouted out new christened nicknames, Angel Eye, Porky, Banjo, Stinky, Glance, Chief, Trigger, and nine more ironic names. Chief was a native from a southern dirt farm who found religion and a family in the army.
Bless us in body and in soul, and make us a blessing to our comrades
, the new converts chanted as they stood in the steady stream of the war-stained Marne River.

Aloysius painted four blue ravens that afternoon on the shore of the river, reclined, wings expanded with a touch of rouge on the flight feathers, and blue heads of seventeen soldiers afloat. We heard the artillery of the war, but the truth of a military stance and bloody sacrifice was far away. I leaned against a tree and read book three of
The Odyssey
.
But as the sun was rising from the fair sea into the firmament of heaven to shed light on mortals and immortals, they reached Pylos the city of Neleus. Now the people of Pylos were gathered on the sea shore to offer sacrifice of black bulls to Neptune lord of the Earthquake. There were nine guilds with five hundred men in each, and there were nine bulls to each guild. As they were eating the inward meats and burning the thigh bones in the name of Neptune, Telemachus and his crew arrived, furled their sails, brought their ship to anchor, and went ashore.

The Germans had been slowly driven back, day by day, across the river, and the casualties were enormous. The Marne salient was a major allied military operation. More soldiers died in one hour of combat than the total number of natives who ever lived on the White Earth Reservation.

French cities and communes were decimated by heavy enemy artillery. We only heard the thunder and military rumors, nothing secure, and even the most reliable information that summer was promptly overstated, and some rumors were wholly outrageous. Mata Hari, for instance, was never executed as a spy and carried on as an exotic dancer for the generals. The Christmas truce was not a few carols with the enemy but a trench disease. French soldiers were in mutiny over the cooties in their blue uniforms.

Yet, rumors to a soldier were necessary, the very sources of comedy and ingenuity. Rumors were communal, shareable, ironic, and otherwise caretaker conversations in the extreme situations of war and peace. The most
obvious contradictions and distortions of fact were hardly significant or even remembered by soldiers who waited for the creative solace of new rumors.