The Gathering Storm (13 page)

Now there were only four members of the brigade left, and they stayed in one cottage together.

Yet another convoy bumped past on the road heading east.

Judah strained his ears. Was he really hearing the crump of distant artillery fire, was it his imagination, or simply a memory he already regretted reliving?

How much longer would the Tin Noses Brigade be able to
serve their fallen brothers at Tyne Cott? And if not here, then where?

The aroma of cabbage soup pervaded the stone cottage just outside the cemetery grounds. Judah was the last to enter the squat, four-room structure. He had worked longer on Saint George than he expected. By the time he completed his promised inspection of the graves beside the cross, the sun was setting.

Walker, Howard, and the American, Jim Kadle, were gathered around the table. A steaming tureen of soup and their empty bowls demonstrated they had waited for Judah's arrival before eating.

"My apologies," Judah said. "I lost track of time."

"Know you're anxious to get finished, sir," Walker said. "Anyway, we've been having a bit of a chat."

"More like an argument, you mean," Kadle corrected.

Judah shushed the debate long enough to ask Howard to pronounce a blessing and begin ladling out the meal. Once everyone had been served, the captain inquired, "What was this discussion about?"

With that invitation, as usually happened over meals, military protocol was relaxed. All the Tin Noses Brigade were free to state their opinions without regard to rank.

Howard had removed the prosthetic portion of his face. One cheekbone and his mouth were perfectly normal. His nose and the other cheek, of painted, galvanized copper, lay on the bench behind him. Half his features he covered with a black scarf from just below the level of his eyes. With a practiced gesture he plucked the corner of the cloth away from his mouth with one hand and tossed in a spoonful of soup with the other. "Private Kadle maintains that if the Germans cross the Meuse, they'll
be here before the week is out. The sergeant and I feel differently With our boys in the fight, the Boche will be tossed right back to the Siegfried Line in short order."

Judah, who never removed the tin mask covering his nose, eyes, and forehead, swallowed a mouthful of soup before responding. "Why so pessimistic, Private?"

Kadle held his head at an angle while eating his soup, the better to accommodate the fact he was missing part of his jaw on one side. "It's this way, sir. The Germans have better tanks. They have better artillery You know about their 88s? They have better aircraft. They are better equipped, better trained. Now I don't say your boys won't slow 'em down some, but I'm afraid it'll be 'too little, too late.'"

Kadle, like all the Tin Noses Brigade, had paid dearly for his right to express an opinion about military matters, especially when the topic was German armament and weaponry. The American private was with the U.S. 91
^st
Infantry Regiment on the banks of the River Scheldt when his company was strafed by German bi-planes. With nowhere to escape, Kadle was lucky to emerge with only the loss of an ear and half his jaw; ten others all around him had not even been as fortunate.

That was east of Passendale, at the Battle of Spittals Boss-chen, November 4, 1918.

One week before the Armistice.

One week before safety and home and family.

Just as the United States had been a late arrival to the Great War, Kadle had also been a latecomer to the ranks of the servants at Tyne Cott. Before that he had been single-handedly tending four hundred of his countrymen's graves at Flanders Field American Cemetery. Then, quite unexpectedly, in 1928, he had run headlong into his mother and father...who believed him to be dead. They had come to Flanders to lay a wreath in honor of their missing son at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.

Terrified they might see and recognize him, Kadle had fled to join the Tyne Cott band of brothers and had remained ever since.

"I don't mean to be a pessimist," he said now. "But I'm a realist. The Germans have more tanks and better tanks."

Agreeing in part with Kadle's assessment, Judah said, "The French generals were wrong in thinking this would be 1917 all over again. The Germans can move, and move quickly. This will not be a war of trenches and gains measured in yards."

"So you agree with me, then?" Kadle asked.

Judah shrugged. "But the Germans may still get overextended, just like at the Marne...remember? If they outrun their supply lines they can be hit from both sides in a coordinated counterattack: British and Belgians from the north, French from the south."

Lieutenant Howard slapped his palm on the table, jostling the tureen and causing a cup of soup to slop onto the table. "Sorry, but that's just what I said. Overextended. Outflanked from both sides at once."

When the soup was exhausted, the men pushed back their chairs. "I think that's enough about the war for tonight," Judah decreed. He gestured toward where half of Howard's face lay staring upward at the cottage ceiling. "Lieutenant, I see the paint is chipped around your nose. Pump up that lantern, and I'll tend to it for you."

"Thank you, sir," Howard said as Judah opened a box of paints and delicate brushes. As the gas lantern hissed and visibly brightened, Judah mixed flesh tones on his palette and turned to work.

Later, he wandered out into the night without mentioning his destination.

"S'pose he's off again, then?" Walker queried. "Last time it was two weeks. Before that, six. Never says where."

"The captain is entitled to keep his personal business to
himself," Howard returned. "Anyway, I don't think so. It's just this war business has us all jumpy."

"You're right about that, sire. You're right about that."

It was early morning at Tyne Cott, just past daybreak. The Tin Noses Brigade gathered together around a stand of poplars screening the squat concrete form of a derelict German pillbox.

Later in the day the four comrades would disperse to their individual duties, but Judah had summoned them for this special task while the air was still cool from the night. "If we don't get rain soon," he said, "the grass will die. But we can, and we must, keep the trees and the hedges alive by hauling water for them."

This morning's chore involved digging a channel around each of the tall, flame-shaped trees. Once filled with gravel, each ring would trap moisture and direct it toward the poplars' roots.

"Should have done this two months ago," Kadle groused. The American had been wounded in the right hand and arm by the same attack that injured his face. Now he wielded a turf spade with his left hand alone.

No one bothered to respond to this observation. No one could have foreseen the drought that made this effort necessary Still, it was a soldier's right to complain.

Judah's corded arms and brawny shoulders drove the point of a pick deep into the earth with each blow. As if mining for gold or diamonds, he attacked the resistant ground.

Kadle, coming immediately behind the captain, removed the layer of loosened clods. The broken pieces came out in shards and fractured clumps, more like stone than soil.

Walker and Howard, wielding shovels, deepened the ring until the depth passed the hard-packed upper layer and exposed earth that still retained some moisture. As each of the poplars was served in this way, its encircling ring would be lined with rock fragments.

Judah studied his men as they worked. Already Howard showed signs of tiring. Walker would never admit it, but even his sturdy, bandy-legged form did not possess the strength it once had.

Kadle would bear the most watching, Judah thought. The American would dig until he dropped without a word of warning to his friends.

Judah had already adjusted his estimate of how long this chore would take. There were just eight poplars in all—four flanking each side of Tyne Cott's entry gate. At first Judah had hoped to do one stand today and the other tomorrow.

Later he amended that estimate to just two drainage channels per day.

Now, watching the tremble in Howard's neck and legs, the captain adjusted his plan yet again. They would try to complete one tree this morning and then begin again tomorrow.

Kadle's lift-and-toss action propelled a spadeful of earth farther than he intended. Gravel bounced off Walker's head and something rang metallically against his shovel.

"Hey!" he chided. "Watch what you're about, then."

"Sorry," Kadle responded.

Walker bent to see what had made the strange sound. From the loose soil he plucked a tarnished silver cigarette case. "Look here," he said, holding it aloft. "Too nice for the likes of me."

"Must be mine, Sergeant," Howard teased.

Peering closer at the ground with his remaining eye, Walker adjusted his facemask. Probing in the dirt with his fingers, he said, "I don't think so. The former owner's still present." Brushing aside clods of dirt, Walker exposed a human skull.

"Hold up, then," Judah ordered.

Early records of the burials at Tyne Cott were confused, incomplete, and conflicting. Judah's study revealed that the gravesites of more than eighty soldiers known to be interred within the confines of the memorial had been lost over time.

Apparently one of them had just been rediscovered.

"All right," Judah ordered. "Sergeant Walker, you're in charge of locating as much of this soldier as you can. The rest of us will go to work on our other tasks. We rebury this man tomorrow morning and then get back to work on the trees."

Walker saluted. "Yes, sir," he said, passing the cigarette case to Judah, who tucked it into his shirtfront. "Initials
D.M.
May help identify him." The sergeant pointed behind Judah and toward the gate. "Now, what about them?"

A group of civilians, apparently a family group of mother, father, grandmother, and four children, were gathered there, hesitating beside the entry "I'll see to them. The rest of you go about your duties."

"How can I help you?" Judah addressed the gray-haired man who stood two paces in front of the others.

The man shook his head. His looks went everywhere except at Judah's face. "No English," he said. "Parlez-vous francais?"

"Oui," Judah responded, switching to French. "What do you require?"

One of the children stared openly at Judah's painted nose and motionless eyebrows and forehead.

Another buried her face into her mother's skirts in apparent terror.

"May we rest here? My children are tired."

Judah agreed readily. "You don't need my permission, but of course. Do you need water? Pood? How comes it that you are on the road this way?"

"We are from Namur," the man replied, naming a Belgian town to the east, on the Meuse river. "The Boche...they are coming. We have fled."

"The Germans have overrun Namur?"

"No, Monsieur, but we heard they are not far. We heard their cannons three mornings since."

"And where are you going?"

The father gave a Gallic shrug. "Who can say? Away from the Boches. To the sea, perhaps?"

Judah gestured toward the aged grandmere and the small children. "So far? On foot?"

"We had an automobile, but it ran out of fuel," the father explained.

"But surely this is far enough," Judah countered. "Why not go into the village here and find lodging?"

The patriarch of the refugee family pointed toward a trickle of civilians trudging along the highway, traveling the opposite direction to the flow of British trucks. "The Nazis are swallowing great chunks of France and Belgium without even chewing." Leaning closer to Judah, he whispered, "My mother-in-law, my wife—they are Jewish."

"Ah," Judah returned, comprehending at last. "Then at least let us feed you before you set out again."

It was nearly midnight. The other three members of the Tin Noses Brigade were asleep in the cottage, but Judah could not rest. As often happened on such occasions, he wandered up the hill toward the Cross of Sacrifice and seated himself between its outstretched arms.

While many would have been uncomfortable to be alone, surrounded by thousands of graves, in the middle of a dark night, such apprehension never bothered Judah. In the first place, all of those buried here were fallen comrades, men to fight alongside and, if necessary, to die with, but never to be afraid of.

Even more important than that consideration was Judah's belief that the spiritual portion of his vanished friends was much more real than their bones. Their frames were real enough, waiting to be rejoined bone-to-bone and sinew-to-sinew, as the prophet Ezekiel wrote. But their present reality was as the crowd of witnesses described in Hebrews: those whose races were already completed; who were in the grandstands cheering for Judah's success.

The tiny flock of which he was the shepherd had dwindled to the point of almost disappearing. Once they were all gone, would he have the strength to And a new set of charges? Another band who would look to him for leadership?

Judah was tired with a soul-deep weariness. Frank, Mickey, Jim—the final few of the fractured bodies and tormented souls left in his charge from the last war—had nearly run their courses.