I take some deep breaths that echo in my clogged ears, hunch there, then at the agreed time stand and run hard. Elijah immediately swings his rifle over the side of the wagon and I hear the crack crack as he fires into the window. I am almost there when a bullet whizzes close enough to me that I don’t know how it missed. I dive behind the shattered wall, skinning my hands so they bleed. Rolling onto my back, I check my rifle, then roll to a small break in the wall from which I can sight in on the building with my scope. I search the windows through my scope and catch a glimpse of movement in the bottom left one. I can’t make much out except the shadow of a crouching body. Breathing out half a breath, I squeeze the trigger. The rifle’s explosion in my ear is a hollow echo. The shadow slumps and I know I’ve hit it. I signal to Elijah. Elijah signals back for me to cover him while he comes over.
We decide to go into the building to investigate. If it was used as a command post, we might find valuable papers. I have to read Elijah’s lips to understand. The hearing will come back. It always does. We make our way along the wall and to the side entrance of the building, leapfrogging, one covering the other as we go. We know of no more than one shooter so far, but we must be wary of others. The one that I killed was a straggler. I do not know why he stayed behind.
We let our eyes adjust to the darkness, then make our way in. Not much interior of this building is left. The walls are mostly gone. I point to where I hit the figure.
He lies face down. Elijah rolls him over with his boot. I had hit him high in the chest and there is a large pool of bright red blood on the floor beneath him. Lung blood. Elijah goes through his pockets and finds a little German money and his papers. Nothing else worthwhile. He was just a private. His Mauser is an old one, not worth keeping. A deserter, from what I can guess.
“Search the rest of the building, would you?” Elijah says in English.
“There is no one else here,” I say.
“Be a good chap and do it anyway. I know that you don’t like what I am about to do.”
The look in Elijah’s eyes is frightening. I can only believe that this war has made my friend this way. Elijah, he will get better when we are gone from it, I think.
I nod and then turn away, wandering far enough that I don’t have to think of the tearing of scalp from skull.
I walk into what remains of another room. A table rests in the middle with a little food on it. My stomach rumbles. As I head toward it, I catch a movement to my left coming toward me. I turn and fire my rifle just as I see that it is a young woman. She flies backwards, her face startled. She slumps against the wall. I peer quickly around me to see who else might be in here. A small child huddles in the corner, staring at me with wide eyes. She begins to cry when I approach the mother.
“I am sorry, I am sorry,” I repeat over and over, to the child, to the mother. “I am sorry.” I turn toward the child to try and calm her, come close enough that she begins to swing her fists with terror at my legs. I hear Elijah’s boots as he runs into the room.
A rifle shot explodes and the child goes still, a red hole punched in her chest by the bullet.
“Mo-na!” I scream. I spin around to Elijah and he stands there with a blank look on his face, absorbing the scene.
“I didn’t know it was a child,” he says, staring at her. “All I saw in the darkness was her fighting with you.”
“You couldn’t tell that she was a child?” I yell at him.
“I am trained not to hesitate in situations of danger,” he answers coldly. He glances to the woman as if to make his point.
She is breathing shallowly, each breath gurgling red spittle. What was she doing in such a place? I lean toward her to see if I might do anything to help. I already know. A large red bubble forms at her mouth. She stares into my eyes. Hers are dull. She’s thin and brown-haired. Plain, Sergeant McCaan would comment of her. My hands tremble. I reach out to her, but stop myself.
WE ARE KEPT IN PASSCHENDAELE only until the end of November, but in that short time we have done what was needed. It is our third big victory in a year. The Canadians are proving to be the only ones who win their battles. It makes the men around me happy, but I realize that this only means we will continue to be sent in as the spearhead to the rest of the hellish places that have been created here. Nobody is sad to leave this place as winter sets in and the mud fields begin freezing in the night. Passchendaele is by far the worst place we’ve been.
The faces of the woman and child haunt me. Elijah did not report their killing to battalion headquarters. There would be too many questions. It would not look good. But he did report the killing of an enemy sniper, giving me credit for it. I am too numb to care.
We’re sent back south to the old familiar country of Lens. My hearing continues to leave me, but for longer stretches now. It is punishment for my crimes, I think. Many times I look over to Fat or McCaan or Grey Eyes only to find them staring back at me with a strange expression on their faces, waiting for me to answer a question that they have asked. I play it off as my not understanding their English too well, and they leave it at that. They all know my silence so well now that they do not question it.
Their big holiday approaches once more, in a week or so, the one called Christmas that celebrates the birth of their Gitchi Manitou. Already, I have spent two with them. This Christmas will be my third. The time is one of celebration and of drinking, but me, I don’t see much of their god in it. Their god is a fighter manitou, I assume, although this is not how their holy men talk of him. When they talk of him, they use words like forgiveness, virgins, children. But I believe their god must be a warrior, for he is the one they all pray to before they go over the top. I will never understand this god, these people.
Fat and Grey Eyes and McCaan are the only originals left. All the others are dead. I don’t bother getting to know the new ones who come in any more. No secret now that the one who comes in to take Sean Patrick’s place is always very young and always dies within a month of arriving. Nobody bothers getting to know the new one. The rest all look, thinking that the new boy is cursed but not daring to say so.
This Christmas celebration of theirs bleeds through a week to another celebration of the beginning of the new year. I realize that all of this drinking and false celebrating just masks the sadness. They all talk about what has happened in the last year and speak of how they hope that the next year will be the last year of war. This new year that begins they call 1918. I know that this is how many years have passed since they say their god was born as a man.
This sadness and reflection rubs off on me. I do not like their way of keeping time. Their way is based loosely on the moons but is as orderly as the officers try to keep the trenches, full of meaningless numbers and different names for days that are all the same anyways. I worked it out and I have been with the wemistikoshiw twenty-seven full moons. I’ve been in the battlefields for nineteen full moons. It is a long time, and there is no end in sight for this war they have created.
On the night of the eve of the new year we are in a reserve trench and are given double rations of rum. Elijah’s gone missing. I am the only one to notice. He slipped away to try and find the Frenchmen he met a year ago when I was with him in that town. They are the ones who told him about keeping trophies of the enemy, but his madness is all his own. He goes to meet them and show his skill as a hunter. All he carries now in his pack are the trophies of the dead. He collects them like pelts. His pack is full.
Elijah seems to have no more need for food. He is thin and hard like a rope. He is a shadow that slips in and out of the darkness. He is someone I no longer know.
I drink the rum and more is passed around. I take it greedily. Anything is better than another night of waiting for the shell to land close enough to kill us. I drink with the others and the shells continue to land in the trenches up front and punctuate the songs that they sing all around me. I stand up and walk away from them. I want to be alone tonight. Without thinking, I walk up a suppor
t trench that leads to the front line. Soldiers scurry and duck when shells scream in, but I ignore them. Another battalion is up here on the front line, one I do not recognize. Most of them do not pay any attention to me.
The world feels unreal, like it is not me but someone pretending to be me walking along the front-line trench and not caring. I’ve drunk a lot of their rum. At a dugout where a small group of men huddle, I stop.
“Do you have rum for me?” I ask.
They look up at me. “Who the hell are you?” one of them asks.
“I am Xavier Bird. I am a sniper with the Southern Ontario Rifles.”
“You’re a drunk Injun, is what you are,” one of them says. The others look at my Mauser slung over my shoulder, at the scope.
“I’ve heard of this one,” another says. I have to read his lips to understand. “Works with a fella called Whiskeyjack. Quite the reputation! You can have a drink on me any day!”
He hands me his tin cup and I drink from it deeply. My legs start to feel unsteady, like I have not used them for long.
I wave and walk away. Down the line a starburst erupts, illuminating the sky and no man’s land. I get onto the fire-step to get a better look. The ground is lit by a red glow, like a fire is burning just below the surface of the earth. I can see Fritz’s line of barbed wire, the hump of his parapet.
I pull myself up as the light dies down, go over the top. I stand straight and begin to walk along no man’s land, along the length of the trench. I stop and stare at Fritz’s line. I walk toward it, then back toward my own. I feel free for the first time in a very long while. Walking further, I follow the sandbags of my trench. No sound. Even the shells have momentarily stopped falling. Silence but for the constant buzz in my ears.
I notice movement from my trench. A man waves frantically for me to come to him. His mouth is forming words, but I can’t hear them. Another starburst lights up the sky. Everything is suddenly bright like daytime. I walk toward him and jump into the trench beside him. He is saying something to me but I can’t hear it. Something in my head pops and the hearing in one ear returns. Rifle fire on either side of me, the heavy breath of shells down the line, the whomp of their impact.
“Are you all right, mate?” the soldier shouts at me over the din.
He has red hair and a red moustache like McCaan. I shake my head. “There is a dead woman and child in Passchendaele,” I say, walking away.
When Elijah comes back a couple of days later, he tells me of finding some of the Frenchmen who’d taught him to scalp his enemies last year. He has brought some meat with him, a gift from the Frenchmen, he says. We sit a long way behind the line and Elijah cuts the meat into thin strips, fries it up in his tin cup and passes me pieces on the tip of his trench knife as soon as they are cooked. I try not to think of what that knife has done. This is the first hot meal I’ve had in weeks. Elijah explains how he found the Frenchmen, that they let him know where to look for them, but I do not inquire further.
“If they did not know last Christmas that I am a hunter to contend with, they do now,” Elijah says. “All they did was stare when I showed them my trophies.” He smiles at the memory. “They acted nervously around me after that. My reputation is sealed, I think.” He gloats on this.
I wonder how it is that I go missing for a day or two and am put under guard, but Elijah does so without punishment.
The meat is gamy and a little tough. “Is it horse?” I ask, pulling gristle from my mouth.
Elijah smiles his wicked little-boy smile. “No. It is human. German, to be exact.”
I jump to my feet before I know that I do it and approach Elijah with balled fists. Then I find myself reaching for my knife. But what he has said makes me gag and I kneel down and stick my finger down my throat. The contents of my stomach come out in a slimy glob.
“X! Calm down!” Elijah says. “I am only joking. What? Do you think I’m crazy? I was kidding. It’s just horsemeat.”
His forehead creases innocently and the gleam of the trickster is in his eyes. He pops some meat in his mouth, chews it and swallows.
MASINAHIKAN
The Letter
THE WINTER IN LENS is a quiet one. Both sides, it seems, are licking wounds, preparing for the warmer weather of spring before they resume killing. The Germans, everyone agrees, will go on the offensive, and try to gain back the ground that they lost over this last year.
Americans are in the struggle now, and their addition has been a welcome thing. I haven’t seen many of them. They are to the north and massing in the south. They have a lot to learn, a lot to catch up on that the others have mastered over the last three years.
Elijah and I are kept sharp by being sent out on patrols. The Germans are well dug in to the Hindenburg Line, and trench raids are out of the question in this sector, but there is plenty of action in no man’s land to keep my mind occupied. I find myself taking chances more and more, not being as careful as I once was, not caring to.
One night Elijah and I crawl through an area where reports of a Fritz work party came in the night before. We crawl and listen, crawl and listen, freeze flat on the ground when flares go up. But we find nothing. Usually, I am the one to tell Elijah it is time to head back, but tonight I don’t bother.
We are out so long that dawn is approaching when Elijah says we should head back in. My ears have been buzzing and I’ve had to rely on Elijah’s movements to let me know when danger might be near. I’ve learned to read Elijah well. He’s wound tight like a hare when we are on the move, but when he smells the enemy close by his body goes loose and fluid, just the opposite of anyone else that I have ever been in this position with. As we turn away from Fritz’s lines, maybe two-thirds across no man’s land at this point, Elijah stops and points back in the enemy’s direction. We stare into the dark that is beginning to lighten and both of us see two forms that slither quickly into a shell-hole. Getting this glimpse of others doing what we do out in this dangerous place gives me a jolt. Sometimes when we are out here I feel like Elijah and I are the only ones in the world. In not very long, the sun will be close enough to the horizon behind the German line that Elijah and I will be shadows for Fritz to shoot.
We make our way to a shell crater twenty yards closer to our line. Elijah peers over the top and begins to shout in English.
“Fritzy!” he yells. “I saw you, Fritzy! Tomorrow night we will be back in this same place and I dare you to come out to play with us.”
Despite my better judgment, I laugh. Elijah has shouted loud enough that even I can hear him through the ringing.
As we crawl out of the crater to make it back along the route to our line, I am surprised to hear a voice shout back to us. I can’t make out what he says, only the word Tommy. Elijah laughs, and we scurry on.
“What did he say?” I ask Elijah once we are back safe and have drunk our morning rum.
“He was a funny one,” Elijah says. “He called us Tommy and said he’d be there waiting for us tomorrow.”
“Are we going to go back?” I ask.
“No point,” Elijah says. “They will not be there.”
When we are given a few days’ rest, we wait for the rain to stop. When it does, we all congregate by the cook wagon where it is warmest. Men sit and talk or stare out at nothing. I stay by myself, watch the others and what they do.
I see Elijah talking in a low voice with Grey Eyes. Their relationship is now one of convenience. One will rely on the other when he is short of medicine. They talk in code. One day Elijah might ask for a cup of tea, the next day Grey Eyes might ask Elijah for a bandage, the next a cigarette. I used to worry about Grey Eyes, that he would make a mistake that would cause some of us to die, as he did with Sean Patrick. But since that time Grey Eyes has become a shadow. Nobody really notices him any more, which is best. McCaan and Breech know better than to send him on anything more than work detail. McCaan must have some idea that he takes the medicine. For reasons I do not understand, McCaan does nothing.
But if Grey Eyes is caught sleeping on sentry duty, or lets happen what happened with Sean Patrick and is blamed for it, there’s no question he will be sent behind the line to face a firing squad. Grey Eyes knows this too, and this fear keeps him functioning.
Fat sits by a small fire and eats a large piece of chocolate that he received in the mail. Fat has lost weight. He is still fat, and he will never have any grace or think of anything but his comfort, but he somehow has managed to survive in a place where so many others have not. Some people carry luck like others carry weight. He carries both.
McCaan discusses with Breech the winter’s action, and what they expect in the approaching spring. He continues to watch over us like a father. Lines have grown across his forehead and beside his mouth from the strain of all this. His red hair is going grey. He is a strong man, a good man. I know that he carries the burden of each death in his section, and sometimes I worry for him.
Lately, I have seen a change in McCaan’s eyes. I don’t want to admit it, but I know as surely as I know anything. McCaan knows too. I want to approach McCaan, tell him to leave this place, go to England, go back to Canada, anywhere but here. But you can’t run from it. It finds you when the time has come. We both know McCaan doesn’t have long, but neither of us says anything. There is no point.
But I do not worry for Bastard Breech, the man who is so concerned with appearance, waxing his moustache to points every morning, slapping his riding crop against his leg as he talks to us like we are children. He would make a good teacher at the residential school.
I wish as much as Elijah that it was Sergeant McCaan and Corporal Thompson in charge of us and that Breech would go away. Although Thompson is not one of our originals, he is the one who taught Elijah and me about scouting and patrolling and raiding. He is quiet like an Indian and stays to himself. Rumour is that he was a lawyer back in Toronto. Nobody knows much about him and he likes it that way. Thompson notices Elijah more than he does me, and I’ve become used to it. Elijah. He fools everyone but me. I am the only one who can see through his mask.