It seems that none of the generals around here know exactly what to do. No one had expected the Canadians to take Vimy Ridge and there was no follow-up plan. Command has us going up through the caves and tunnels of Vimy to spend our time on the front line, then we are moved to the support line, and then to the reserve line. It seems to me that everything these wemistikoshiw do is in threes. They are obsessed by that number. The front line, the support line and the reserve line is just the beginning of it. Their work parties are split into groups of three, and they are ordered to count off accordingly. Soldier one is sentry while soldier two and soldier three work. They’ve even divided their army into three sections, the infantry, the artillery and the cavalry. And these three sections are put through the same three rituals of training, then combat, then recovery.
This whole love for that number has trickled down from the ones who give the orders to the ones who take them. As soon as we are moved from the lines for rest, we follow the same pattern. Food, then rest, then women. We even die in threes. I have watched countless times how a soldier dies. He is a man before the bullet strikes, but when he is hit and the pain crashes into his body and he realizes that he has only moments left on this earth, he becomes a desperate animal. Finally, inescapably, he becomes a corpse. Sometimes I attend the prayers that the wemistikoshiw meet for and in these prayers they invoke their three manitous, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. Maybe for this reason the wemistikoshiw do so much in threes.
But it does not stop there. I too have begun to see the world in threes. It was Elijah who taught me when sniping at night to look for the flare of the match in the Hun’s trench. He showed me how to focus in on the match and to fire after slowly counting to three. The first soldier strikes the match to light his cigarette, and that is what we spot from our position. He then offers the match to his friend’s cigarette, and that is when the sniper sights in on the flame with his rifle. When that soldier offers his match to his third friend, the sniper is given enough time to fire before that unlucky third soldier inhales the smoke.
I lie deep in the trench when the day is calm and think about how the world of the soldier consists of staring up at the sky, crawling upon the earth at night and living beneath it during the day. In the dark of night I think that my life has been divided into three for me by these wemistikoshiw. There was my life before them and their army, there is my life in their army, and, if I live, there will be my life after I have left it and returned home. They must have some magic in their number of three. I know that you, Niska, taught me that we will all someday walk the three-day road, and now I’m left wondering what connection there might be between their world and mine. I need to find out if we share something, some magic. Maybe it will help me get through all this.
Elijah and I spend most of our time on the front line patrolling the Douai Plain, sniping and scouting. He is able to settle comfortably into his madness when I am around and does not have to put on his Englishman’s mask to cover it up. He carries his scalps with him and has dried them out to prevent rot and strung them together. I don’t know how many he has. He talks to me late at night in whispers as we keep watch for movement on the plain or patrol the vast cave and tunnel complexes that not so long ago housed the enemy. “The French will respect me,” he says, eyes glowing. “I am better than Peggy. He cannot take a scalp. He cannot do what I do.”
I must listen to him carefully to hear what he says. My ears go deaf for a time, but usually it does not last long and then I can hear a little again.
We’ve found plenty of Fritz’s gear in his old trenches. Lots of mess kits and helmets and articles of clothing and photos of smiling women and children, candles and boots and bullets, plenty of Mauser bullets for my rifle. We’ve found a couple of Mausers too, but none of them seem to suit Elijah, and none of them have the fine German scope that mine has. Elijah still tries to talk me out of it. It is like a game to him, but behind his friendly smile burns an obsession that is frightening. I fear many things in this place. But I do not want to fear my friend.
The craziest thing we have found was in a bunker thirty or forty feet below the earth. Behind a red velvet curtain are comfortable couches and chairs and candles everywhere and even electric lighting. And in the middle of the room is a grand piano. Elijah and I found someone who can play it, and this place soon became the officers’ mess and we are not allowed to go there any more.
By mid-summer word trickles out that our section will be moving to another area, which means that we will soon be sent into another offensive. I am sick of this. I don’t want to fight any more. Something needles me, is trying to tell me that the worst is still to come. But I can’t imagine much worse than what I’ve been through. It is in mid-July, our last night at the front before we are to be sent back for rest, that I make up my mind. I will walk if I have to and see Lisette one more time. We have at least a few days’ rest, and besides, no one ever seems to notice that I’m around.
Luck is with me on the first evening behind the line. We are bivouacked near a road and lorries carry wounded heading north. I listen carefully to the drivers talk, and through the tinny echo in my head realize that they are heading to a place only a few miles from where Lisette lives.
I grab a roll of gauze after evening roll call and make my way toward the convoy. Sitting with my rifle and pack close by me, I cut a small length across my arm with my bayonet, then dip the gauze into it, absorbing the red. The lorries begin to roll away, and I look around but no one seems to be paying attention. I walk to the lorries as they crawl toward the main road, and at the last possible second as they are gaining speed I jump onto the back of the last one and crawl between the canvas covers. I peer out to see if anyone has seen me, but the men in my company lie on their backs or sit and talk casually with one another.
As I begin to close the flaps, I spot Elijah. He stands on the road, staring at me, a quizzical expression on his face. He looks like a boy left out of the game. I wave to him, then settle back into the darkness of the truck, wrapping the gauze about my head so that I will appear wounded in the event that I’m discovered. A strange, good feeling washes over me now that I have broken away from him, now that I am the one doing and not the one left behind. The men all around me are crammed on stretchers or sitting slumped against the truck’s wall. They moan and babble and occasionally shout, but worst of all is the stench. Tinny and sharp with a hint of rot. It is the smell of desperation, the stink of the dying.
I stick my head out of the back of the lorry. Even the choking dust kicked up by the tires is better than the reek inside. I breathe through a handkerchief and as night falls I stare out at the glow on the horizon and the flash of the big guns to the south where the war rages in earnest. The lorry’s exhaust reminds me of the smell of that city called Toronto. I think back to those last few days of freedom before Elijah and I joined the army.
It seemed that every place we stopped on that train no longer had a recruiting depot. We stayed on the train and eventually it did stop. I panicked among all the people and the noise and so we found somewhere to camp by the great lake, away from it. The sand is warm in the sun and behind us a copse of trees stretches out to a marsh filled with the warbling of blackbirds.
“You’ll get used to all this,” Elijah says. He points behind him to the sprawl of the city only a quarter-mile away, amazed at this quiet beach so close to the chaos. “At least we found this good spot.”
Elijah leaves to explore the city while I walk through the bush that surrounds me. I find the tracks of a small deer, spend the day making snares along its route. Before Elijah makes it back the next morning I have the animal gutted and the hide in a small creek held down by rocks. It is a good thing. When he finally returns we are very hungry. We eat roasted deer and he tells me the story of his adventure.
He had found a cemetery on a hill that looks back down at the whole wide view of the city. At a quiet spot under the shade of a maple, he stretches out and stares up at th
e sky. White clouds scuttle along. His eyes are heavy.
Some time later he wakes with a start to the sound of voices. Turning his head, he sees a young woman and two children by a grave. The woman’s head is bowed and she whispers to herself. The children fidget and kick at the grass with their shiny black shoes.
One of them looks up. Elijah sits and crosses his arms over his knees. The child, a small girl, smiles to him. Elijah smiles back. She looks to her mother and then to Elijah again. She walks toward him without the mother noticing.
“Hello,” she says.
“Hello,” Elijah answers.
“Who are you?” she asks. Her hair is almost white, a colour he has never seen before. It shimmers in the afternoon sun.
“I am Elijah,” he answers. “Elijah Whiskeyjack.”
“You have a funny name,” she says.
“What’s your name?”
“Suzanne,” she says.
“Do you have a last name?”
“Of course!” she giggles. “Erikson.”
“Hmm …” Elijah says. “Erik Suzanneson. That truly is a funny name, especially for a girl.”
“No, silly!” she squeals. “Suzanne Erikson.”
“Oh, I apologize.”
“You have dark skin,” she says. “And long hair like a girl.”
Elijah smiles.
“Where are you from?” she asks.
“A long way away,” he answers. “A place called Moose Factory.”
“Moose Factory!” she says. “That is a very silly name!”
“Yes.”
After a time, she points in the direction of her mother and brother. The boy is a little older than her and stares back at them shyly. “That’s my father,” she says, pointing again at the two.
It takes Elijah a few seconds to realize what she means.
“He died in a war,” she says. “He died in a place called France.” She appears a little puzzled. “His body isn’t even in that grave,” she says. “They buried him in France.”
Elijah nods.
“The dirty Huns killed him with gas,” she says, then shrugs as if this is something that happens to her every day.
“Suzanne!” her mother calls suddenly. “Come here right away!”
“Bye, Elijah,” she says brightly, then turns and runs off.
By the time the lorry rolls to a stop it is the dead of night and my kidneys ache from the truck’s constant pounding on the pitted road. I get out and am greeted by the hands of orderlies trying to lead me into a building bright with electric lights. I shake them off and they stare as I make my way into the darkness. A couple of them shout at me, but they are too busy to pursue me as they unload the wounded from the truck.
If I remember correctly, the road leads out of here south and west toward Lisette’s village. I begin walking it, keeping an eye out for patrols and for sentries. They will throw me in a prison if I’m discovered here, and to be locked up so close to Lisette will surely kill me. When I reach the end of town, I head out into the darkness of the road that stretches across fields and dykes and through what were once orchards. A mist rises all around and in the darkness I’m reminded of my first month in this place, when it seemed I’d been thrown into an underworld full of skulls and quick, brutal death. So much has changed since then. I realize that the place hasn’t changed. It’s me.
I sense rather than hear soldiers coming toward me in the fog. I dive for cover in a shallow ditch and lie prone, rifle at the ready. Voices come out of the darkness and four bodies appear, ghostly in the fog. They support one another, and I realize it is a song they are shouting out, their voices swallowed by the night. They are drunk, I see, returning from Lisette’s village, trying to make it back before dawn and roll call. A knot forms in my stomach when I realize that in a few hours it will be discovered that I’m missing. When the men are past safely, I move on.
I can hear the estaminet from a long way off. Not too long before dawn now, but it still hums with life. Little has changed here, which makes me feel good. Men sit on the ground outside of it, drunk. They pay me no mind as I make my way to Lisette’s door beside the drinking place.
I decide to find out if there is a back door, and walk around the small building. I see one. My stomach is in my throat as I softly knock. Lisette lives with her mother, I think I remember her telling me. I do not wish for the old woman or Lisette’s father to answer the door. No one comes to the door so I knock a little louder. Maybe she has moved away? My heart speeds.
I knock again, and finally see the flare of a match touching candle in the window upstairs and hear the slap of bare feet on stairs inside.
The door opens a little and there is Lisette, her blonde hair shining in the light of the candle she holds. Her eyes are sleepy like a little girl’s, and my whole body fills with warmth. My legs tremble. But her eyes do not change when they focus on me. We stare at each other for a few moments.
“You are hurt,” she finally says. “Do you need some water?”
“I am not hurt,” I say in my best English. “I … I came very long to see you.”
“You cannot see me,” she says, and I realize that I still have the gauze wrapped about my head. I tear at it and pull it away to show her that it’s me.
“It is me, Xavier,” I say.
Something in her eyes brightens and I think that now she will know me and let me in.
“I remember you!” she says. “You are the Indian boy, the boy from Canada!”
“Yes,” I say.
“You can’t stay, Indian boy,” she whispers.
My stomach feels as if it has been punched hard so that all the air has left it.
“I am with another. He is upstairs.” She points with her finger.
An anger sweeps over me so suddenly that I feel I might fall down. “I come very long to see you!” I shout, and it is strange to hear my own voice, the voice that I have used so rarely in this last year.
“You must go now!” she says, and then a voice behind her startles me.
“Who’s there!” he demands in a British accent. His face appears in the candlelight behind Lisette. He has a long moustache, the moustache of an officer.
I do not answer, just glare at him with a hatred I have rarely felt.
“Who are you, soldier?” he demands. “What regiment do you belong to? What is the meaning of all this?”
My eyes might burn a hole into the officer’s head.
“You are speaking to an officer!” he shouts, and as he does so I swing at him over Lisette, hitting him squarely in the nose, the force of my arm sending Lisette to the ground too.
Immediately I feel ashamed for hurting her, and try to reach down to help her up. She screams, though, and the officer behind her moans with his hands cupped over his nose.
“Leave!” she cries.
I pick up my pack and rifle and turn from her, running from her courtyard, running down the road and out of the village as fast as I can. I keep running along the road until I can run no further, my pack bouncing on my back, my rifle in hand. The sky glows at the edges and a mist is slowly burning off the ground. Something in me has gone dull and hard, and I force myself to keep running. My ears hear nothing now but the shallow whoosh of my own breath in my chest.
I avoid the place with the hospital and begin making my way south along a dirt road, no longer caring that I will be court-martialled when I make it back. I will just keep walking along this road until I’m with my section again, and then if they let me, I will go back to the trenches and commence killing. I pass rows of soldiers marching north for a brief leave, their faces lined and dirty and tired. I blend in with a company making its way south, and we march to a place where more lorries wait to take us back to Vimy.
Not caring if I’m caught, I line up with the others and climb into the open back of a transport, a few of them looking at me but not saying anything. We begin the bumpy ride south along pocked fields of mud and the ruins of little villages. The rain be
gins, a steady mist that soaks through my clothing and gives me chills. The others in the truck, like me, seem resolved to it and they keep their heads bowed with knees close to their chests.
It is dark once more when I recognize the crossroads near where my company rests. I jump from the truck and land on one knee. Pain shoots up and through my crotch so I feel like I’ve been kicked there. I let the intensity of it burn away everything else inside of me and limp toward the darkened camp. I slip by the young sentry who is new to us. He is half asleep, and I must stop myself from reaching out and tapping him as I pass in the darkness. This one has much to learn, if he does not die first.
When we are called into formation in the morning for roll, Elijah stands beside me. “Where did you go?” he asks in Cree.
“I do not want to talk,” I say.
“I see,” he answers. “You went to find that girl, didn’t you. I could have saved you the trouble and told you she was a whore, but you would not have listened.”
I look over at Elijah, remember how he first approached her, talked to her. The truth begins to creep into my head. Something I’ve never felt before rushes over me. I want to beat Elijah with my fists until he is bloody.
McCaan and Breech appear before the line. Breech walks up and down it, inspecting the troops as McCaan calls out names. Mine is one of the first, and when McCaan calls out, “Private Bird!” I answer, the men around me turning their heads to look. McCaan pauses briefly, then continues to call out, and I am left to wonder what is happening. When McCaan is done calling names, he takes his place and Breech steps up.
“An important announcement, gentlemen,” he begins, looking up and down the rows, his tall riding boots shiny in the morning light. “You might have heard the rumours, which are true. We will shortly be sent to a new undisclosed location. It appears that our victory at Vimy has made us the darlings of the British Command and we are to spearhead another offensive.” It does not seem to be the news anyone around me wants to hear. Shoulders visibly slump. “On a separate note,” he continues, “I’ve just received word that medals have been awarded to our company for valour in the field. Sergeant McCaan, Corporal Williams and Private Reardon have all been recommended for bravery in action.” Breech pauses. “I am especially proud to note that Acting Corporal Whiskeyjack has been recommended for the MM for unmatched bravery in the face of the enemy.”