The Communist's Daughter (9 page)

Through the night the fighting continued, horror upon horror. The Germans counter-attacked, having previously buttressed their forward lines with reinforcements. Waves of them came at us, and in our turn we advanced against them, and my comrades and I picked over the deep fields for the wounded who awaited us. A disembodied voice was always imploring from the darkness beyond, but too often a search party was denied permission if the position was too exposed. And so the night proceeded. Our spotters informed us as to the approximate position of a man located through sightings or his cries, then off we went like spelunkers down a dark cave.

Just days into it, we were as experienced as the French Colonials to our left and the British to our right. Distant explosions and sniper fire never let up during the lulls in fighting. Catching a moment's rest, I leaned against a wall of earth and timber and conjured thoughts of the sacrifices and the ancient battlefields of my forebears. It was my desperate attempt to find heroism in my blood. But by now I knew that it was all—the gallantry, the romance, the glory—a great deception.

*

On the seventh day we consolidated our line with the help of British reinforcements who'd arrived at the small town of St. Julien. The day broke sunny and clear. It was a great relief to feel the natural warmth on my face, but a dread, too, as the enemy's spirit would be similarly improved. Waiting for instructions to move, we played cards, wrote letters, thought about home. I wrote to my family reporting that I was alive and well, the war was proceeding apace and with luck I should be home before the end of summer. Belgium was not what I had imagined and neither was the human spirit, in fact, more noble than anything I had ever known. The common man here—the farmers and bricklayers and factory workers so in abundance along the front—possessed such dignity in these least of humane conditions that I felt honoured to be associated with them. It was horrible to witness the true horrors of war, but we all were committed to the certain victory ahead and in good spirits, our morale undaunted.

I felt obliged to include these lies for the sake of my mother and sister, whose worry preoccupied me as much as my own fate in those days. I attempted to keep my letters optimistic and descriptive in nature, highlighting my daily rituals and observations, along with a telling anecdote, such as the time one of the boys, named Bud MacFarlane, had stood a stretcher on its hand-grips and danced a waltz under a full moon. There were twenty men in the Number Two Field Ambulance, myself included—numbers enough to find characters of Bud's sort. I wrote home about some of those boys, and about a soft-spoken lad named Robert I'd met over here from my teaching days, explaining that he had no greater ambition than to return to his people back home, find a wife and raise children. As I wrote this I felt a momentary desire to claim those plain desires as my own, suspecting that my mother would find peace in such wholesome simplicity, given my perilous situation, but knowing, too, that fabricating such sentimental nonsense would do no one any good in the long run.

The Regimental Aid Station was located only three miles behind the front line. When not writing letters, we spent our time preparing for an assault, either offensive or from the enemy, organizing and stocking and making sure all was in order, from generators and surgical equipment to operating tables. Idle time was best filled with labour, an occupied mind finding fewer opportunities to dwell on the madness around us.

In fact, the solemn anticipation felt among the men before they jumped the bags and until the stretcher-bearers came forth to fetch the wounded was, in its way, less terrifying than the idle waiting. In those last moments the mind races and the body, powered by adrenalin and fear, becomes a coiled spring. Just moments behind the forward rush, the stretcher-bearers poured from the trenches into the fighting to collect the wounded and hurry them back to the Aid Post, where the surgeons worked on the boys who needed it most while many others waited. We returned again and again to No Man's Land to bring back those who could be stabilized then loaded onto horse-drawn carts and transported by lorry or tram to the Field Ambulance, where they were further cared for and eventually shipped in the space of a day or two to the clearing hospitals near the French ports, or maybe as far away as Merry Old England, if they were lucky enough to find themselves wounded out of the war.

As I say, I attempted to maintain an optimistic tone in these letters regarding my own situation, on occasion hinting at the fear and anxiety and harsh conditions, hoping that the censors would not interfere; but for the most part I wrote of my longings for home and study and the company of my family and the north woods. These letters gave me great respite and were a forum for my dreams to run free, a release from the tedium and filth and death all around me. As if from a well I drew memories of camping and fishing trips and clear air and even the confines of Edgely, Ontario, where I'd learned a thing or two about the strength of will and learning to fight with your fists. I always signed my letters “Yours with love,” and those I received with such anticipation began in my mother's hand “Our dear son” or my father's “Dear Norman.” Those words alone often provoked tears and I felt an impossible distance separate me from my family. It was like reading a book from a century past, with every paragraph registering the irrecoverable years and miles. Upon opening a letter, I sometimes found a man hiding behind his cloth. “Dear Norman,” he would write, “It will do you good to remember the Lord's words in times like these. Every day I pray for your safe return:

Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night;
nor for the arrow that flieth by day;
Nor for the pestilence that walketh in darkness;
nor for the destruction that wasteth at noonday.”

And with a definitive Amen, your grandfather would hurriedly sign off like a man late for his own sermon.

Of course, I preferred your grandmother's letters, filled with news of my brother, Malcolm, and sister, Janet, and of the precocious children in her Sunday School class and talk of neighbours and their pride that I was here in the fight as all good boys must be. Some letters I saved while others were lost in the chaos of those days. I remember clearly one in which your grandmother wrote that they were pinning white feathers onto the lapels of able-bodied men back home. “A league of women who make it their business to meddle,” she said, and went on to describe rallies in Toronto. Though my mother was no warmonger—nor was my father, certainly—their letters were predictably patriotic. Such thinking had become almost like breathing, I supposed. I did not think badly of this, only saddened on occasion that people should have such strong opinions of things which they knew so little about. Here we saw the fighting through a different lens. We did not see “war” but only a few hundred yards of nothing, beyond which were men who wanted to kill us. It was nothing like this present war in China, since we had no ideals other than to avoid death.

In an attempt to entertain ourselves, we sometimes read aloud our letters from home—the funny or pleasant bits, in any case. When I read my mother's account of the women and their white feathers, a young French literature major from the University of Toronto made a smart remark about those old biddies taking after the decadent scatologist Rabelais and employing their white feathers in a more useful manner.

The same day I saw Robert, who'd been sent to the Aid Station after cutting his hand while sharpening a bayonet. I wrapped him up, it was not serious, and sat talking with him afterwards. He seemed peaceful and said, “Does this mean I'm going home?”

“It's not up to me, Farmer,” I said, “but it's not likely. You have to be hurt worse than that.”

He nodded. “That's all right, Beth. I feel it. I'm going home soon. Look at this stretch of weather.”

“Good things to come,” I said.

“I got a letter the other day. It was from my brother, the one you walloped in school that time. He can't wait to come over and fight the Kaiser with me. He's just turned eighteen and my mother can't keep him from coming no more. Jimmy's not a violent boy, and I don't think he'd like it here. I have a letter for him in my breast pocket that I'll send tomorrow. I'm asking him to wait on the enlisting, and promise I'll be back soon. I told him I can feel it coming.”

The fighting started again the following day. It never went away but levelled off with constant ongoing skirmishes. There was always the crack of rifle fire or an exploding shell in the distance, but these seemed like waves from a distant shore. On April 29 it came as a tidal wave.

The attack began that morning at eleven o'clock. The inevitable counter-attack followed, and shortly after that we went over. Each man that day took an average two hours for the mere three hundred yards we had to travel. The mud was often past our knees. We were still going out at sunset, and the sky had a purple tinge to it when we went up for our last man, just then spotted by one of the snipers. He was lying wedged against a post, tangled in barbed wire, on a slight rise in the terrain. We followed the ears of a boy named McGraw, from Calgary, Alberta, who claimed he could hear the Kaiser sneeze in Berlin on a quiet day. It took close to an hour to locate and approach the man. The closer we came the more sure I was that he was dead and this dangerous attempt would end in futility, but from twenty yards off we saw the lump flinch. An arm wiggled, almost waving us on. “It's Farmer, I think,” one of the boys said. We came closer, and it was Robert.

It was a wonder a sniper had failed to get him in such an exposed position. Maybe the gentle rise in the land had obscured him, or from the opposite angle the enemy was unable to notice the twitching that became more evident as we approached, or they were just too tired to care. Maybe they thought to let him die out there, slowly. Then I heard the whistle of a shell. McGraw called us down right then and we jumped and the shell exploded. I realized that Robert was the lure, the bait. We'd been drawn out, I remember thinking. This was the end of us. As the dirt settled I waited. The debris cleared, and I waited still. I didn't dare to call out to my friends. Crawling on my knees, chest to the ground, I found my party dead. I tested each man for signs of life but they were all gone, each one of them. I lay motionless and cried and asked God why I had survived. I spoke to God, for the last time in my life, and He did not speak back.

Then I heard a single moan. I lay flat on my stomach without moving. It seemed I waited a century. I shifted my head ever so slightly and saw Robert, removed from the fence post now—likely by the force of the mortar blast—and sprawling flat on the ground. I saw him, or what I thought was him. He was a lump of clothing staring up to the sky. I waited. I watched him. The sun behind him sank below the horizon. The sky turned a lovely pink and yellow and slowly the blues and purples dropped from the centre directly above, spreading downward slowly to the horizon like running paint washing out the colours from the sunset, and then I was alone in the night surrounded by the dead and a handful of stars.

I listened to Robert's moans. In the new dark I saw him roll his head toward me, and his eyes opened. They were small white things. I crawled toward him carrying a canteen, an aid kit and my sidearm. “Robert,” I said, “it's me, Beth. Stop your groaning, they'll hear you.” I examined him and found a large piece of wood piercing his left thigh. His cheek was hanging open like a second set of lips. He was missing his left ear. He was a terrible sight. I told him to shut his mouth. “I'll get you back,” I said, “you can survive this. But you have to shut up. They're not far off, and they can shoot with their ears as well as their eyes.”

I remember thinking it best to leave the leg as it was. I wrapped his thigh tight with a tourniquet to staunch the flow, though it seemed already to have ebbed. In the dark I hefted him up onto my shoulders and began walking. I managed perhaps ten or fifteen feet before we fell into a crater. I lay silent, trying to catch my breath, and watched the darkness above us. Our round view of the universe looked peaceful and still. I was very tired now. It was like looking up from the bottom of a well, darkness on all sides giving way to a dark sky specked with lights. It looked like a hat full of stars above us, flowers in a lady's bonnet. A sharp chill draped itself like a shawl over my shoulders. I heard pot-shots and cannon fire but it felt far removed from our situation, as harmless as distant thunder.

I whispered, “It's like a spring evening back home, Robert.”

He moaned, a sound deep and throaty, almost echo-like. I didn't understand what caused it but then I realized that the hole in his face functioned as a second mouth and he was trying to speak as if with two voices. There was nothing I could do but keep him company in his suffering. I had no medicines to induce unconsciousness. “When you get back,” I said softly, “you'll tell that brother of yours that a German hits from behind, like a woman.”

He moaned again. After a minute he tried to speak but nothing comprehensible came out, only a strange murmuring through his teeth and that doubled sound as it passed through his destroyed cheek. He gave up and fell silent again. Soon I dozed. When I awoke it was full dark. The stars have closed their eyes, I thought, and now I am blind. I reached over and tapped Robert, who stirred and grunted. “It's time to start again,” I whispered. His head fell forward, so I tapped him again harder.

I pulled up to the ridge of the crater and left him slightly below, protected, while I peeked out. I saw nothing, just blackness spotted by distant fires far behind the enemy's lines, or maybe they were our lines, I couldn't be sure. I slipped back into the crater, took hold of Robert and dragged him moaning up into the night. “Shut up,” I said, then gripped him by the crotch and arm and stood, turning slowly in a circle to get the lay of the land. I believed I noticed the gentle incline pointing toward home and so I started. “Robert, if you know something I don't, feel free to tell me now,” I said. “Because we're knee deep in s——t now, Robert.” I stopped to adjust my grip, then continued. “Robert,” I said, “I'll be honest with you, Robert Pearce. I wish we were standing in that schoolyard. I'd take a bleeding lip over this any day.”