On the night that I choose to do my raid, everything feels wrong. A lot of troop movement bustles through my part of the line. Fritz has picked up his shelling and focused it on the Canadian wire, and I am not left alone long enough to blacken my face with burnt cork and sneak over the top without being noticed. When the middle of the night has come and passed and I still sit in my dugout, frozen by indecision and trying to find a good time to make my move, I finally and bitterly tell myself to call it off. I lie back on my blanket, the dark of the night sinking into me. Elijah would have just gone, I tell myself. Elijah would not have worried about anyone else or anything else but focusing on those dead Fritz and what was in their pockets and he would not have let any excuses, any fear, stop him. He would have just gone. I do not sleep all night, this defeat that I’ve suffered biting at me like scurrying, passing rats.
Elijah and I are called into McCaan’s dugout in early April. We both know, as all of the soldiers around us know, that an offensive comes soon. McCaan talks fast and I can’t make out all of what he says. It isn’t that I can’t understand English. I’ve become good at that. It’s my ears. They ring constantly and sometimes I can’t hear anything at all. But I know Elijah listens closely, and I will ask him to repeat it all to me in Cree later. I watch McCaan’s lips move, and my ears whine as if plugged with dirt or wax. I try to clear them with my finger, which usually helps a little, but now they only feel plugged more. I am relieved when Elijah and I are dismissed.
“What did he say?” I ask, my voice echoing in my head. Elijah’s lips move, but nothing seems to come out. “Louder,” I say. I tug hard at my earlobes and this seems to work some, but the whining continues somewhere deep.
“We are to begin scouting out positions in no man’s land as close to Fritz as we can comfortably get,” he says. “We are to take as much ammunition with us as we will need, along with rations and drinking water.” Elijah smiles. “We are to try and spot Fritz’s machine-gun nests, and on the morning of the ‘operation,’ as McCaan calls it, we are to take out as many of them as possible.” Elijah looks at me strangely then. “You are going deaf,” he says.
For the next few days we scan every inch of ground in front of our section. Our biggest challenge is that Fritz has the high ground and without much difficulty will identify almost all of our hiding places. An area stretches out fifty yards in front of the Hun wire, though, where a pile of old bricks and a mud breastwork was formed by one of the bigger shells. We both agree that this is the best-looking place and that we will check it out this evening.
Elijah reports to Breech and he gives us the go-ahead. I try to sleep a little after stand-to, but as usual I can’t. Instead, I lie back in my dugout and count the flares that go up and cast shadows on the wall of mud across from me. I’m worried about my ears. The deafness comes and goes, followed by the ringing, which is enough to drive me mad. When the ringing does die down, I feel as if I am living in a hollowed cave.
We blacken our faces and only the two of us go out, just like old times. We make our way down the now familiar listening-post trench and slip out when enemy flares die down. Fritz is nervous because of all the recent trench raids, and I know to move cautiously and silently toward him. When a flare goes up we lie still and flat, knowing that we won’t be seen in the shadows. In this way we make it to the place we’d agreed upon earlier.
This seems a good spot in the darkness, but Elijah is tense here. He motions to me and makes his sign that Fritz is close, two fingers pointing to the ground. We lie unmoving and listen to the darkness, but I cannot hear much of anything. Elijah motions to our left and in front, in sign language lets me know that someone’s twenty or so yards away, four or five of them. We scan the horizon and I note that this place will be a good one for our purposes, with lots of spots to crawl into and take refuge in, while offering a wide view of Fritz’s line. We make our way back carefully and report to McCaan.
“We’ve found a suitable place,” Elijah tells McCaan. I stand beside him, listening best I can. “But Fritz has a listening post twenty yards or so from it. I imagine it will serve as a machine-gun nest once we begin our advance.”
“Well, then,” McCaan answers, “I suggest that that post is the first thing you take out when the attack begins.”
Elijah nods and smiles, before turning with me and heading back to our dugout. We will be given word on the evening before to head out to our position, and we have been told to be ready to move at a moment’s notice.
Neither of us speaks in the dugout that we’ve claimed for our own. The day was a quiet one and already another evening approaches. The rest of our section has been given sentry detail in shifts tonight, and I can hear Fat snoring in the dugout next to ours, Gilberto muttering angrily for him to shut up. I listen as Elijah shuffles in his kit, hear the now familiar glass clink of a small syringe and the light slapping of his arm, the heavy sigh when he is done. I think he is asleep but then his voice drifts to me. My hearing is all right tonight. I hope it stays that way.
“I have something for you in my kit,” he says. “A gift. There are two magazines of Mauser rounds that I’ve been saving for you. Use them wisely.”
I reach over and feel for his knapsack. I pull it to me and dig my hand in. Something soft and furry. I pull my hand back in case it is a sleeping rat that will wake to bite me. Maybe Elijah plays a trick. I feel the outside of the bag but there is no warmth or movement inside. I reach cautiously into it again and pull out the soft thing. I cannot tell what it is in this light, a small hide, maybe, but the fur is too long to be a rat’s. When I raise it to my nose to sniff the hardening leather side of it, the familiar reek of rotting human flesh makes me snap my hand away in disgust. I realize just what it is that Elijah keeps.
I place it back in the kit and extract the magazines. Lying there for the second time in as many nights, I watch the shadows on the trench wall and listen to the thunder and rumble of the big guns. I run my finger along the cold flat metal of a bullet casing and wonder what is happening all around me.
Two nights later, McCaan gives us word to take our position in the field. The trenches are alive with movement. Companies of men move in until they are all shoulder to shoulder. The engineers have finished their digging, and men and rifles and Mills bombs and machine guns fill the tunnels that lead up to Fritz’s line. To try a frontal attack in the open and up Vimy Ridge would create a slaughter, and so we’ve done the natural thing, dug tunnels that lead under and out into no man’s land where Canadians will pour from the earth close to the German line and take it by surprise. Elijah is shocked and even a little angry that he was wrong and I was right.
We make our way out to our position, lugging knapsacks full of ammunition and our rifles and our rations, our line’s shelling masking the movement. I had less than two dozen rounds for my Mauser, and so McCaan put out the word up and down the line. A number of soldiers came forth with more, and now I have many.
We dig ourselves in at the place of brick and mud, and I create a loophole in the brick from which I can fire my rifle. It will be well hidden from Fritz. Elijah works with handfuls of mud and loose brick and does the same. The German line almost hums, I think. The Canadian bombardment lands close to us and the earth shudders below me like a living thing. Fritz must know that something is coming, and now that they have gotten a taste of the Canadians at Saint-Eloi Craters and the Somme and here at Vimy Ridge, they know their opponent is worthy.
Fritz’s listening post is still nearby and it’s causing us to work very slowly. The Germans close by will not be able to hear Elijah and me over the din of the bombing, but they will spot movement if we are not careful. Elijah motions to me to lean toward him. “Stay put,” he says. “Offer me cover if I need it. If I do not make it back, hold this place and kill as many of them as you can in the morning.” He slips out with trench knife and crawls into the darkness.
I am sick with worry. Elijah has let the medicine drive him mad. I don’t want to be
left in this position alone come daylight, facing the machine guns and their accuracy, the artillery and point-blank whiz-bangs.
Nothing for me to do but lie still and wait. The world explodes around me, shells landing fifty and a hundred yards ahead, wrecking the German line. I order my mind to drift, to shut down, but it will not.
It feels like hours have passed when finally I sense rather than see or hear a form close by. Elijah. I can tell by his scent. He crawls up and his eyes are wide with excitement.
“Three of them!” he whispers. “I slit the throats of three of them so quickly that I surprised even myself! I am truly a ghost man now!” His hands look black in the dark, and I realize that they are covered with blood.
“Did you cut the hair from them?” I ask.
“How did you know?” he answers, excited like a young boy who’s taken his first grouse.
We settle in and wait.
The lightening sky in front of us puts the urge in me to begin crawling back to my own trenches before it’s too late and I’m caught here in the open. The temperature is below freezing and I feel cold and stiff in my greatcoat. We scan the still-dark horizon, waiting for that moment when the sun peeks up in front of us and sheds light on their line. Very soon the shelling will begin. Elijah and I were warned by McCaan that it’ll be a huge and intense event. The artillery will rip apart the Hun trenches, and there will be an absolute silence for just a moment before we hear the shrill whistle behind us that signals for the Canadians to begin pouring over the top and then the world will explode once again.
Every minute that passes brings the dawn a little closer to the horizon. Without warning, the artillery behind begins with a roar and quickly reaches a crescendo. I watch as shells scream overhead, close to me, sounding like they will land upon me, but beautifully accurate on this morning, flinging mud and shrapnel and sandbags and human remains and showers of sparks into the air. For a second I wonder if this will be the last morning of my life.
Elijah nudges me and passes me a canteen. Drink, he mouths, and I take it from him, tipping it to my parched throat. The taste is not water at all and as it burns down my throat I realize that it is rum. “McCaan gave us double rations. Drink!” Elijah shouts over the din.
I tip the canteen and drink again as deeply as I can. I need this, I think. When I pass the canteen back, I can now make out clearly the details of Elijah’s blackened face in the approaching light, the high cheekbones and hollowed cheeks, so gaunt from the medicine. His eyes sparkle like sunlight on water and I stare for a while, taking all of him in. He is beautiful, like a wild animal. Too delicate, it seems, for what he is so good at. Elijah stares back at me quizzically, and then his face breaks into a wide smile, the whiteness of his teeth startling me.
Elijah turns to his rifle, sliding open the bolt and checking the action, pushing a round back into the chamber. He shoulders his rifle and peers into the scope, then looks to me, shouting, “Do you see that knoll there?”
I look up at Fritz’s breastworks and nod. A large mound rises directly ahead of us in the slipping darkness, like a pimple on the earth.
“You are responsible for everything on your side of it. I will be responsible for everything on my side. There will be machine-gun nests for sure in that area over there.” He points to small mounds that rise up from their parapet, sandbagged reinforcements, I assume. “We’ll pour our fire into them,” he says.
We can both tell from the light that there will be no sun this morning. The day is birthing a heavy grey and a wind has picked up that blows past us and sweeps up the hill into Fritz’s line. It is cold and thick flakes of snow swirl about. All of this is good for the Canadian boys, the wind at their backs and natural cover falling. It will be more difficult for me to find my targets, but that is a small price. With the snow in Fritz’s eyes, he will have a far more difficult time spotting the attackers.
Just then the shelling stops.
A hum rises in my ears from a quiet I haven’t heard since leaving Mushkegowuk.
A whistle, high and piercing, echoes somewhere in the cottony air behind me. A moment later, the desperate roar of men scrabbling their way over the top and approaching me a hundred yards behind.
Elijah and I peer through the falling snow for signs of movement. I keep one hand by the trigger of my rifle, the other shielding the scope from falling snowflakes. Enough light now that I can make out the details of their line, sandbags and brightly coloured cloth, no discernible patterns in it. The shelling appears to have been accurate. Huge gaps have been blown in Fritz’s line and there is still no movement anywhere to be seen. I swing my rifle along the blasted trench, scanning through the snowflakes for any movement. Nothing. Is it possible that we’ve blown Fritz into the other world? I can hear the approach of men behind me. The terrain’s difficult and they are obviously struggling up it with their heavy packs and rifles and muddy boots. But still they continue their shouting, more desperate and breathless now. I move my eye away from my scope and squint at Fritz’s line. Unbelievable. Still no movement. Maybe all the talk of this place being an impregnable fortress was lies.
That’s when I spot something.
I peer through my scope and focus in on the clear outline of a rounded Fritz helmet and below it the pale face of a young man struggling, his tongue sticking out, to do something with his hands that is out of my view. I am mesmerized by the young German. He feels so close through the scope that I might reach out and touch him. Just one man. Only one man is left who has survived the shelling!
But then my stomach goes into my throat. Soldiers pop up from nowhere through the settling smoke of the barrage and fall into place along the parapet, rifles trained directly at me. In the seconds that I watch, their line fills up with the outlines of shoulders and heads, all pointing rifles toward the soldiers approaching behind us. It dawns on me that through all of the winter that the Canadians dug tunnels toward the Hun, the Hun have been digging down deep to hide from the shelling.
“Look at them all!” Elijah says.
Without thinking, I place the crosshairs of my scope squarely on the chest of the struggling soldier that I first saw and firmly squeeze the trigger. My rifle bucks and the soldier sails backwards as if pulled from behind with great force, a startled expression flashing on his face before he disappears from view. The concussion echoes dully in my head and I realize that this is the first rifle shot to shatter the morning. Then the world seems to erupt once more.
The Canadian artillery opens up again in a creeping barrage somewhere nearby in the falling snow. I squeeze my eyes shut and pray that it is in front of me and not behind. The Canadian barrage falls so close to us in its attempt to cover the advancing soldiers that the air is hard to breathe, most of it sucked up by the concussions. I want to run screaming but my body is an impossible weight stuck in the earth. I cannot dig deep enough to escape it, but try anyway, burying my face in the mud. Is it in front? Yes! It is!
Gradually the tremendous pound recedes just enough to let me know it moves away and not toward. McCaan’s calculations and Elijah’s instincts were right. We are just behind the invisible line where our artillery begins its pounding cover. The whole earth is on fire in front of me, exploding in huge fountains of mud and fire. I can feel the rumble below me, through me, swallowing me. My whole body vibrates with it. We both remove our arms from over our heads and watch the shells steadily creep forward toward the Hun.
But audible just below the shells is the sound that empties the stomach of every infantry soldier as he makes his way across open ground toward the enemy. The rattle of machine guns barks out into the grey morning. Elijah systematically fires, reloads, fires, reloads, picking off soldiers whose heads appear suddenly through the snow and smoke and spraying mud, then just as quickly disappear. My greatest fear is that we will give away our position, but so far the bullets are well over our heads.
I try to locate where the machine-gun nests are, but in the snow, seeing much of anything
is difficult. All I do know is that with every minute, their bullets are hitting Canadians. Elijah nudges me and points in the direction of a rise. When I look long enough I see what Elijah has caught, the flash of muzzle fire that gives away a nest’s position through the thickening snow. We both train our rifles on the flash and I aim mine just above it, hoping that with luck I might hit the soldier working the gun. We both begin an even, methodical fire, but the flashes continue. Elijah pauses to reload a magazine and I have two bullets left before I must do the same. I aim through my scope again, and in a brief slowing of snowfall think I can make out an outline hunched above the flash. I squeeze off one shot, then another. The flash of the machine gun stops. I wait for it to begin again, but it doesn’t.
“I think I got him!” I say to Elijah, excited.
“Impossible to say,” he answers.
We will keep up a covering fire until our troops make it to this position, then we are to stand and join them in the sweep up the hill. From the sounds behind me, they are getting close.
Dirt and pieces of brick kick up in front of my face. Somebody has spotted my muzzle flash. I sweep my scope across the parapet but snow has fallen onto the lens and makes it more difficult to see. More bullets zing by my head. I duck out of the line of fire and look over to Elijah. He continues to focus in on a target, fire and reload. A slight smile has settled on his lips.
“We’ve been spotted!” I shout to him in Cree.
He apparently doesn’t hear what I say. That or he is ignoring me. Bullets cough up dirt all around him. I look back. The Canadian soldiers are only forty or fifty yards from us now, but another machine gun cuts large holes in their line.
I look over to the secondary position that Elijah and I had scouted last night. I can slip down into the shell crater behind me, crawl along it and take position there without being seen by their line. I shout my intention to Elijah and then make my move, not waiting for an answer. He’s in his own world. I scramble in case I’m not as invisible to them as I hope I am. Once in place, I pull some dry cotton from inside my coat and pat my scope dry. I nudge my rifle barrel between two piles of brick, make sure I have a clear line of fire and once again begin searching for the machine-gun nest that is inflicting so much damage. A pillbox lies a hundred yards or so in front and to my right. The pillbox is so blasted by shells that it’s now more a pile of rubble than a structure. Elijah and I had both known it existed but assumed that it was too damaged to be of use. But something tells me to train my scope on it. I scan the blasted concrete and brick but there doesn’t seem to be any place to fit a machine gun in the flattened wreck.