That is when I see the telltale flash of muzzle fire spitting out, not from somewhere on the bottom of the pile, as I’d assumed, but from up on top. They’ve cleverly concealed themselves with canvas, grey like the colour of the flattened pillbox. It seems obvious to me now. I would have done the same thing. I should have known better.
The machine gun continues its stream of fire. I squint through my scope and in the lightening snowfall can once again make out a soldier’s head just above it, peering down his sight. I can also see that the machine-gunner’s partner is beside him, feeding the gun its belt of ammunition and spotting for him. It makes sense to me to take out the gunner first, then his partner. Breathing out, then in deeply, then out again, I try to steady my nerves. I let out half my breath as my crosshairs find the place just below the lip of the gunner’s helmet, and I gently squeeze the trigger. Once again my rifle bucks, but I keep my eye on the target long enough to see the soldier jerk back. I move the scope to my left and focus in on the other. He hasn’t noticed yet, his gaze on his hands doing something below the point where I can see. I watch him look up and see for the first time his dead mate. His mouth makes an O and then he hurries to take over the position behind the gun. Once again I breathe and exhale. Nothing exists except the sound of my own breath in my head. I pull the trigger and the soldier falls back in a spray of red.
The first of the Canadians make their way to us now, their mouths open and chests heaving, no longer screaming so much as whimpering in the clatter of rifle fire aimed at them. Their faces are grimy and drawn and their eyes are wide. Their bayonets are attached to their rifles and look heavy in their hands.
I reach down to my belt and feel for my bayonet, pull it from its sheath and slide it onto the barrel, clicking it into place. I lie on my back for a second, feeling the snow fall on my face, and try to calm myself into standing up in this stream of fire. I sit and breathe deeply, my face toward the sky. The snow feels cold, good on my face. I look over to see if Elijah is still alive and am surprised to see that he is no longer there.
Men begin to pass me more frequently now, and I stare up into their faces as they run as fast as they can, at a slow jog now, staring ahead at the rifles that shoot at them. I see a face that I recognize approaching. Gilberto. Gilberto sees me too, and turns toward me, offering his hand to help me up, an expression on his face as if he’s finally found a long-lost friend. I reach up to take it, just as the smile on his face blooms into a red flower. He collapses onto his knees and falls across me. Screaming, I struggle to push my friend’s heavy weight from me. When I manage this, I stand up and begin running with the others toward the German line.
The rise gets steeper the further I get. Men all around me scream and fall to the ground grasping themselves. Others slump like sacks of flour. I think that in a little while no one will be left but me. The world has gone almost silent in my head but for a deep hum and what sounds like the faraway surge of waves crashing on a beach and then pulling away. I try not to think, but a memory of me playing on the muddy shore of the Great Salt Bay comes to me, a presence near me, my watchful aunt protecting me. You, Niska. I don’t know why I think of you now as bullets zing by my head so close that they whisper to me. One cuts through my coat and I can feel my side burning. I think I have been shot but the pain is almost absent, just an annoying bite. I begin to mouth your name over and over, like a protection against the bullets. Niska, I whisper as I run up the hill and approach a stretch of barbed wire. Niska. Niska. Niska. Niska. Niska. I realize as I stumble and fall to my knees that the sound of the waves crashing in my head is my own breathing.
I look up to the wire in front of me and see that it is still a tangled mess despite the shelling that was meant to blow it apart and despite the efforts of the sappers, many of whom lie dead and tangled in grotesque positions on the wire. Others all around me shout and scurry toward it, their mouths moving but no sound coming out. I stand again and push ahead. A break in the wire and men bunch up at its opening, trying to get through. Not knowing what else to do, I head toward them, but see that too many are being shot and too many corpses jam up the hole for anyone to get through now. I look along the stretch of wire and notice that a few others have found another place to get through by throwing themselves on the ground and crabbing under it. Others are climbing over the bodies of the dead or throwing planks of wood carried up from their trench to create bridges over the wire. I find a place that will allow me to scamper under it.
Bullets tear up the ground all around my head, tossing up painful clods of dirt into my eyes. I make it through the wire and see that I am close to their parapet, Germans leaning over it and shooting point-blank. Lying on my belly, I aim my rifle, the scope useless now that I’m so close. I fire at one soldier who seems to be doing a lot of damage. The soldier drops and I reload and fire at another, dropping him too. I want to just lie here and keep shooting until I myself am shot, but the legs and bodies of the other Canadians block me from shooting any more. I stand up then and with a desperate scream join them on the charge at the parapet.
For the first time, the faces of the Hun look nervous. The Canadians are so close now that rifle fire is almost useless, and the ones just ahead of me are on the German sandbags, stabbing with their rifles at the men below them. The Canadians pour over the line and into the enemy trenches. A great panic takes over the men as I stare for just a moment at the chaos below me. Soldiers battle with rifles, frantically using them like pikes to stab and parry. There is none of the smoothness of our training in their movements. Others desperately struggle with their hands, strangling one another or using whatever they can, helmets, rifle butts, pieces of wood, to smash each other’s skulls.
Gripping my rifle in both hands, I jump into the trench. A young man with startling green eyes runs at me, his rifle pointed, his small frame almost like a child’s in his oversize coat. I sidestep the rifle and let the momentum of the German’s charge carry him onto my Mauser’s bayonet. The boy’s eyes go wide and I feel the knife’s length cut into his body. Then the point hits something hard and stops. The young soldier opens his mouth as I try to pull the bayonet from him. But it is stuck and I am forced to raise my boot to the soldier’s belly and kick hard to dislodge it. He falls back, clutching his stomach.
I turn from him to stop myself from throwing up, just as another soldier runs at me, this one much larger, a giant of a man it seems to me, his red hair and eyes wild as if on fire. He carries a war club in his hand and swings it clumsily but with great force at the top of my skull. I jump to the side and the force of his attack carries the man forward and onto the ground so that he is on all fours. Before he can get up, I raise my rifle with both hands and drive the bayonet into his back. I can feel it bounce sharply off his spine before it finds a softer spot and sinks in halfway. The big man falls onto his stomach as I struggle to pull the bayonet out.
The German swings his arms wildly behind him, trying to reach that centre place in his back as if he has a great itch. I pull with all my might but the bayonet is stuck. I have no choice but to stand on the man’s back, and as he writhes around I pull up hard, the knife suddenly coming loose so that I fly off him and land on my tailbone, the breath knocked from me. All around me are the legs and torsos of men struggling with one another, and as I gulp air I can only watch in horror as the red giant stands up with dazed anger in his eyes and on wobbly legs bears down on me, hands outstretched to squeeze my neck. The man leans down so close that I can smell his sour breath. He mutters something I cannot make out, and it is then that I realize I’m going to die now, my diaphragm relaxing in this knowledge so that I can breathe a little again. The German’s hands are calloused and very strong as he begins squeezing, and all I can do is stare up into his angry bloodshot eyes. He is no monster, just a man, I think, as my eyes bulge and I stop breathing once again.
Throat burning, I catch the movement of someone coming up beside the big man, and as I look over I see McCaan with his officer??
?s revolver drawn. He places it to the side of the big man’s head and I watch his finger pull the trigger. The man’s head pops open in a spray of red and grey that covers my face in its warmth, a startling feeling in the cold air. I suck in a great breath of air and blood, then begin sputtering. McCaan calmly moves on, aiming his revolver and firing as he walks along the trench.
When I have the strength, I stand up, but then fall back down again. From what I can tell, the Hun are retreating. My eyes close, but I am still alive.
ISHINAKWAHITISIW
Turning
WE ARE OUT OF THE LINES for a few days’ rest and all of the Canadians around me are loud and happy. We’ve taken the place where hundreds of thousands of Frenchmen and Englishmen died in their attempt to do the same these last years. We are an army to be reckoned with suddenly, no longer the colonials, as the Englishmen call us, looking down at us.
Fat took a bayonet to his lower leg, enough to send him to Blighty because it swelled and became infected. Word is that he did it to himself halfway across no man’s land, which makes sense since there were no Fritz around for a couple of hundred yards at the time he claims he was wounded. The story that came out later was that he stumbled and fell, somehow cutting his leg badly in the process.
We are billeted by the wreck of what was once a town, the only standing building an old half-destroyed hotel that still serves us liquor and food when it’s available. Those lucky enough not to be running supplies up during the night to the front line stay out late, drinking and playing Crown and Anchor, and trying to be the ones to bed the couple of local women who accept food just as readily as money for their friendship. I miss the girl called Lisette, the one with hair blonde like I’ve not seen hair before. I fight the urge to begin walking north the thirty-five miles or so to see her. I’ve actually worked it out over and over in my head. I can walk the distance overnight, spend the day with her, and walk back the next. I would probably not be missed if I were to do it. There is much madness around here with reinforcements arriving and departing and supply wagons and artillery rumbling through this place night and day. We now have the ridge that looks out and over the long Douai Plain, and we have forced Fritz back to his deep trenches, the place they call the Hindenburg Line. It is the first Allied victory of this war.
I don’t remember much after gaining their trench and the hand-to-hand fighting. My mind cracked after Gilberto was killed in front of me, broke further when the big man began strangling me. I am told I stood after McCaan shot the man in the head and that I continued on with the others, helping to secure the first trench, then offering cover fire when we stormed the secondary trench and eventually the reserve trench. Elijah found me slumped over a parapet and was sure I was dead. The way Elijah tells it to me, when he turned me over I opened my eyes to Elijah and told him I’d been talking to my mad aunt, to you, Niska. Elijah picked me up then, strung my rifle over his shoulder along with his own and carried me all the way back to our morning trench, where I slept under Elijah’s careful eye for thirty-six hours.
And now it is spring and we are here on top of Vimy Ridge rather than below it. The snow and blowing wind that came to us that morning has left, and I wonder if it wasn’t sent by you to help us, Niska. A warm day arrives, the first in a long time, and the sun comes out. We take off our shirts and lie by a small river that runs close by. The braver ones swim in the ice water. I sit with Elijah and Grey Eyes and Graves, and Fat just back from Blighty. We are the only original privates left, and all of us look up at the observation balloons that try to keep track of what Fritz is up to. The others’ chests are as white as fish bellies, and even Elijah’s and mine seem paler than I ever remember them being. Nobody talks of Gilberto. He is gone now. To invite his memory will only invite sadness, and sadness can collect here as quick as rain in trenches, until it drowns everything. Elijah speaks of writing Gilberto’s wife and children a letter describing his bravery and kindness, but I don’t know if he ever will.
Someone points up to the sky and in the distance we hear the drone of an aeroplane. We all strain to see which direction it comes from, ready to bound away for cover if he comes in to strafe us. “There it is!” Graves shouts, and I see the flash of sun on its propeller as it pops out from a cloud and aims itself at one of the balloons. Its machine gun is just a tick tick tick in the distance and we watch mesmerized as the observation balloon it heads toward pops into flames, the basket and men in it plummeting to earth. The plane turns and heads for another balloon, and it too erupts into flames, the men in it specks tumbling to the ground. Again the plane turns and this time begins firing at a third balloon. This one, rather than becoming a candle flame in the distance, simply goes limp, the air in it gone so that it spins lazily down. Some of the Canadians cheer as two more planes appear on the horizon, ours by the way they speed toward the other. The three planes swoop and fire, chase one another in circles and dives until an orange flame and thick black smoke erupts from the German plane and it falls to earth, disappearing behind the rise of Vimy Ridge.
“I would give my left arm to fly in one of those aeroplanes,” Elijah says to the others.
I can’t imagine anything more frightening. Elijah begins to speak softly, so that the others around him must lean toward him. Everyone, it seems, wants to hear what he says as he begins to recount the events of that morning on the ridge in no man’s land, and my English and my ears today are good enough to understand most of it. I must strain to hear Elijah, though, even though I lie close to him. I live in a world now where my head feels permanently stuffed with cotton.
Elijah talks of sneaking out in the pre-dawn darkness, slipping into a Hun listening post and slitting their throats. I notice that he has left out how he cut the hair from their heads. I also notice that he doesn’t speak with his Englishman’s accent much now that he has discovered the morphine. He tells of how the creeping barrage nearly caused him to soil his pants, how the shells landed so close he could taste the Canadian-made metal in his mouth, how he cursed his own artillery for being so accurate. The men around him laugh. He talks of hearing the chatter of their machine guns before he could see them through the snow and explosions, how he took out at least three nests from a distance and countless soldiers who were foolish enough to have their heads above their parapets. He stood and ran with the others, shooting from the hip, too close to use his scope, and joined the rest of the men around him in bayoneting the frightened Hun until the survivors ran from their trenches and down toward the Douai Plain, Elijah carefully and casually picking them off as they ran. It is as if I was not even there, as if I did not do as much as him in the attack.
One soldier pipes up and claims he witnessed Elijah hit a retreating Hun from at least five hundred yards away, says he’s never seen anything like it in his life and probably never will again.
“Until the next time you are with me in a similar situation,” Elijah answers him.
They all laugh.
I look around and realize that I know very few of the men by name any more. So many have come and gone that I’ve lost track. Amazingly, Elijah seems to know all of them, acts as if he has known them for years. One of the new ones asks if it is true that Elijah was mentioned in dispatches that day. He nods.
“He’ll probably get a bar added to the MM they promised him,” another says. “You’re the pride of the company.”
Elijah’s eyes glow with the medicine in his veins. He has not mentioned me once.
We watch as a small duck flies along the stream, looking for a place to land. It skitters onto the water and floats with the current, maybe one hundred yards away. The soldier who’s been praising Elijah says, “That would be something nice to eat for supper,” looking to the others for a reaction. I can see that the duck’s a fish eater and know its meat will be greasy and stinky. “I’ll bet Whiskeyjack could hit it from here.”The others around us laugh and agree. Elijah picks up his rifle, checks the action and slides a round into the chamber. He sits with his
knees up and rests the rifle on one. We all go silent, watch for what will happen.
His shot cracks out and the water a foot ahead of the duck sprays up, sending the animal into a panicked flight. I watch as it lifts up high, then circles, looking for another place on the water to land. The men laugh and say, “Nice shot,” anyway. The duck comes back in and lands not far from its original place.
I pick up my rifle and slip in a round, then take careful aim through my scope. With half a breath released, I pull the trigger and my rifle barks. The duck’s feathers spray up, then slowly float back onto the water, landing on the surface and around the ripped carcass. The men around us stare at me as I stand up and walk away. Me, I won’t let them forget who I am.
Two months pass and all I want is home. I’m sick with wanting to be back there now that summer has arrived here and small red flowers bloom in the most unexpected places on the front, around dead soldiers and their rifles, a feeble attempt to cover up the horror before the flowers are pounded into black slime by artillery. If I cannot be back home, I will be with Lisette, even if for just a night. Every day I plan how to do it, and in its small way this takes my mind off the desire to be home.