The Last Lady from Hell (11 page)

T
he fuzzy image of a man’s face was coming into focus. He was trying to say something, but nothing was coming out of his mouth. It was like watching a silent movie. His face was dark and smeared with dirt and soot, and he looked to Alan like a coal miner or a chimney sweep. The haze behind him was being interrupted by what seemed to be men running in all directions. The man’s mouth was asking a question, his teeth seemed so white in contrast to his blackened face.

Alan tried to read his lips.

“Are you all right?” the man asked again.

Why is he asking me that? Alan wondered. This was the first, modestly clear, cognitive thought that had run through Alan’s head in at least forty minutes. As Alan began to recognize his surroundings, or what was left of them, he realized what had happened and the background images began to make sense. His hearing was partially returning and he became aware of the rattling of machine guns and the pops of the Enfield rifles being interrupted by the explosions of the ever-falling artillery.

He preferred the temporary deafness that had accompanied his close call with a Krupp 5.9-inch shell, known by his comrades as a “Crump.”

The man with the dirty face was checking Alan’s arms, legs, and torso. Alan recognized him now. It was his friend John McCrae. He brought his face close to Alan’s and yelled, “Do you know who I am Alan?”

“Yes, John,” Alan responded, dazed.

“Can you move your arms and legs?” McCrae asked.

“I think so,” Alan said.

“Then do it for me!” McCrae commanded.

Alan painfully moved his extremities for the doctor.

“You’re one lucky bugger, Alan,” McCrae said. Then with a pat on Alan’s shoulder, he turned and ran into the confusion to attend to the wounded.

Alan was lying in an awkward position. On his back, he felt like a sheep in a ditch. He moved his arms and legs around and made an effort to roll over onto his stomach. With a great heave, he pushed himself into an unsteady upright position which caused a wave of searing pain to run through his body he thought he might pass out, but fought to hold on. Lucky bugger, eh? He thought.

His first step was unsure and he almost toppled over on the rough terrain. His gate was that of a string puppet, a Pinocchio, as he walked in a strange, animated manner, trying to regain his balance. Alan’s equilibrium was returning slowly as he walked in a zigzag pattern. He tried to establish his location, but everything had changed.

“The sun,” Alan said aloud, testing his hearing as much as his senses. “It’s setting in the western sky, that’s the way back.”

Now he knew which way to go, but, before he could start his retreat, Major McCrae reappeared.

“Al, I need you to help with the wounded. Bring them back to the dressing station,” McCrae ordered.

Confused, Alan looked at John and then at the landscape around him. There were men everywhere. Some were crawling, some run
ning, some writhed in pain on the ground. Others lay dead in the mud. He recalled what had happened and how he had gotten there. The devastation slowly sank in, and brought him back to the present. Despite his own pain and unsteadiness, he knew he was needed.

Alan went to the first and closest man he saw. Following orders like a mechanical man, he grabbed the wounded lad under the arms and tried to help him to a standing position. The wounded man let out a howl that would curdle blood as Alan brought him upright. A passing ambulance corps stretcher bearer yelled to Alan.

“Put him down you fool! He has no feet! His feet are gone!” Stunned by the revelation, Alan looked down at the fellow’s legs and indeed, his pant legs were bleeding and tattered with no sign of feet.

“Tourniquet his legs and carry him out!” the stretcher bearer commanded. Alan quickly took out his pocket knife and cut the pant leg off at the knees. He used the material to make tourniquets which helped to slow the bleeding greatly.

Having grown up on a farm where he had to slaughter chickens, pigs, and cows, the sight of blood was nothing new to Alan, but this was different. He fought a wave of lightheadedness at the sight of the soldier’s shredded legs, but he did what he knew he had to do.

The other advantage of growing up on a farm was that he was no stranger to physical effort. As a youth, Alan and his younger brother, Ian, would compete when carrying bags of grain. He could carry two 100-pound bags with ease and run from one barn to another in an effort to show up his younger brother. The soldier weighed about 170 pounds and went up and over Alan’s shoulder with relatively little effort.

He trotted down what was left of the duckboard path with his wounded cargo and arrived at the field dressing station in several minutes. The scene was total chaos, with McCrae yelling out orders. Two orderlies grabbed the wounded man from Alan’s back and yelled, “Go get more!”

The allied artillery was barking and flashing behind the dressing station up on a hill, and wounded were being brought in at an
alarming rate. Alan returned to the trenches. He ran back to the area he had just left minutes ago and found that the scene had not changed except for the presence of a medic who was busily moving from man to man tying up tourniquets, bandaging wounds and administering morphine.

Alan ran over to a man curled up in a fetal position who the medic had just finished with. He bent over and was about to grab the man for transport when the medic reached over and held his hand against Alan’s shoulder stopping him. Not a word was said. He simply shook his head then pointed to another. The medic had been trying to help those who could be saved and heavily morphine dosing those he knew were doomed. Alan passed over the poor soul who was slipping into a quiet sleep of death and picked up the fellow the medic had indicated.

It wasn’t long before Alan lost count. He became like a machine carrying out of this hell hole the broken remains of every mother’s sons. He didn’t lose himself in deep thought about man’s inhumanity to his fellow man. In fact, he didn’t think at all, he simply did what he was told with mindless perseverance.

The more men that ran through the trenches toward the front to meet the battle, the more wounded Alan had to carry off. He was carrying a soldier on his back when a shell landed in the trench behind them knocking the ungainly duo to the ground. Alan clambered to his feet and began to hoist the wounded man up onto his back again when he realized that the young man was now dead. He had absorbed the force of the explosion along with a deadly dose of shrapnel and, as a result, Alan’s life had been spared. Alan left him in the mud and went back for more wounded.

Time seemed to be inconsequential as the battle raged on. The gas had done its dirty work and had dissipated, yet the Germans couldn’t take advantage of the attack by pressing forward because
of the continuous bombardment by the French, British, and Canadian artillery.

The steady stream of soldiers moved up to meet the battle and the steady stream of wounded returned to move through John McCrea’s dressing station. It was dark now and the horizons to the east and to the west were alive with great muzzle flashes. The artillery rounds would explode with a blinding flash, like a huge camera flashbulb, leaving a momentary imprint on Alan’s eyes and exposing the panorama of mud and wounded. He would begin to move toward the outline of a wounded man and then wait for another round to flash and light his way.

There were still so many wounded in the area that it seemed his job would never cease. He kept moving toward the wounded man and noticed the dim lantern of the medic as he kept up his marathon of mending the broken bodies.

Alan’s foot kicked into something in the darkness and a howl was heard from right beneath Alan’s feet. He toppled over a wounded soldier and landed partially on top of him producing another howl.

“Sorry,” Alan said as he tried to right his equilibrium. The lamp swung around to dimly illuminate Alan on top of the soldier he had just tripped over.

“I’ll have the litter bearers take him. He’s stable,” the medic hollered. “There’s someone over the top who’s calling for help. See if you can do something!”

Alan knew that the trench system provided modest protection against the bombs and machine guns, and to leave them would be suicide. Yet, between the explosions and constant growling of the Maxim MG08s, the wounded man’s pleas rolled over No Man’s Land and into the ears of all in the outer trenches.

Alan took a rough bearing on the sound of the man’s cries and waited at the edge of the trench peering into the darkness in that direction. All he needed was a flash from an explosion to get a visual on the wounded man.

He hadn’t waited long before a shell, about fifty meters away, lit up the dismal panorama with a ghostly white flash. The picture was imprinted on Alan’s eyes. He saw the man. He quickly scrambled up and over the parapet stumbling and running over the uneven terrain in the direction of the fallen soldier. Another flash from an exploding shell froze the landscape in front of Alan for an instant and he clearly saw the wounded man four meters ahead of him.

He dove ahead and landed on his belly in the muck as an observant machine gunner hosed the area where Alan’s frozen image had been moments before.

“I don’t even have a gun! I’m just trying to save this man!” Alan yelled in frustration to an enemy gunner who couldn’t hear or even understand his angry rant.

He crawled over to the moaning man and tried to quiet him. It was no use. The fellow was in agony and was beyond caring. Alan fished around in the dark until he found a small stick of wood about an inch thick and four inches long. He rolled it up and down his muddy tunic sleeve, cleaning off most of the mud and pushed it into the man’s mouth crosswise.

“Bite hard on this and be quiet!” Alan yelled in the man’s ear. He did as he was told. Alan looked around to get his bearings and took a deep breath.

“Now’s as good a time as any,” he told the wounded man. “This may hurt a lot, but I’ll have you to safety in no time!”

The man looked up at Alan, his eyes wide with pain and piercingly white compared to his mud-caked face. “Thank you,” he snorted through the tightly clenched piece of wood in his mouth.

Alan grabbed the man under his arms and began dragging him backward toward the forward trenches of the allied forces. The artillery was being kind for the moment. Alan was being protected by the veil of darkness. Only the sweeping Maxim machine guns, randomly firing at ghosts, presented a threat. Alan continued to trudge backward sweating profusely from the combination of physical and mental stress.

The night became oddly quiet for a moment, and the loudest sound Alan could hear seemed to be the pounding of his own heart as he struggled with his load over the uneven ground.

Thump… thump… thump… Alan knew that sound. It wasn’t his heart pounding. It was the distant report of German artillery guns firing. He knew there would be only seconds before he saw the flash of explosions from incoming shells. He had to increase his pace.

The first explosion was several hundred meters to his left, toward the Algerian forces. The flash momentarily lit up the countryside just enough for Alan to see that the trenches were only two meters away. He tugged at the man’s armpits, but he would only drag so fast and Alan was beyond exhaustion. The next explosion was to his right, well into the Canadian trench system, lighting up the area behind Alan as if he had back lighting on a theater stage. He was at the trench’s edge.