The Breath of Suspension (40 page)

I turned the corner to Catfish Row. My eyes burned, and I smelled the faint odor of new mown hay. Phosgene, or diphosgene. I drew back, fingering the gas mask that hung on my hip. The moon had risen, and its light shined full into the trench. A few rats scurried about, but no Yellow Man was visible. The concentration did not seem serious, so I clipped on a simple nasopharyngeal filter rather than putting on the uncomfortable mask, and went forward. After searching around a bit, I climbed over the parapet into no-man’s-land. Up and down the line I could hear desultory gunfire and see, here and there, the eye hurting, hanging glare of Very flares. The artillery I had heard earlier had fallen silent, their crews for the moment weary of war. I found it just beneath a clump of barbed wire. A gas cylinder. It wasn’t rusted, although it must have been there awhile, and upon closer examination I found that it was made out of aluminium. Damn clever, these Americans, I thought, and twisted the stopcock shut.

I jumped back into the trench. In much of the same way as men see faces in rocks and tree stumps, and hear the approach of a beloved in every rustle of autumn leaves, so Willoughby had smelled the Yellow Man in the phosgene. I found someone to carry the thing off to a Field Ordnance Park, and headed back toward my home traverse.

Like a summer thunderstorm, a gunfight suddenly tore across no-man’s-land. Everyone along the line joined in, shooting at nothing in particular, but making a great racket. Above me, human figures were silhouetted above the parapet, and I heard the thump of something being dumped into the trench, something about the size and shape of a human body. Another thump, softer this time, and a groan.

“Who’s there?” hissed a voice. I made it out as Lieutenant Wallace’s.

“Beeman.”

“Good. Come give us some help while Jeremy goes to get a medic.”

Jeremy King ran off into the darkness. Wallace had taken out a patrol, to investigate what the Germans were building a few hundred yards down the line. It looked to be a forward gun emplacement.

Hopkins was dead, a clean hole through his forehead. Smith and Calloway stood nearby, gasping, grateful to be back in the security of the trench. I heard moaning. Bending over, I saw Private Ackerman. His right leg was missing at the knee. The blood looked like black syrup as it spilled out in the moonlight.

I pulled off my belt, which was still real leather, and looped it around the stump of his leg as a tourniquet. I pulled it tight, and the bleeding stopped. After a moment, a Medical Officer and two stretcher bearers came and picked Ackerman up, to take him to the Casualty Clearing Station and thence to a Base Hospital, perhaps one in England. He’d be back in six months, with an artificial leg like Captain Totenham’s. I looked in the direction they’d taken him and hoped he’d have enough sense to bring back my belt.

Pogue was waiting for me when I returned, whistling idly to himself as he cleaned the head of his mattock. The task absorbed him, and it did not seem that he noticed me.

There was something about Pogue that always bothered me. We were all superstitious, of course, and each had his own protective charm or set of ritual habits that he believed kept him from harm. Most of us kept believing in ours until we were blown to bits. I had mine. I have it still. A colored bit of rock shaped like the head of an ax, worn around the neck on a chain. Lisette gave it to me. She had found it, somewhere. Pogue’s beliefs and talismans, however, carried the implication of having a significance beyond that of mere terror of dissolution, of being more religion than superstition. I didn’t know why that disquieted me.

He looked up and smiled, teeth bright in his muddy face. “Yellow Man take a while to dispose of? I sent Willoughby to help with that sap; he seemed to be wanting something to do.”

“Spot of bother. Hopkins got himself shot. And Ackerman left a leg in no-man’s-land.”

He sucked air between his teeth. “Too bad. They should have waited. Ah, well.” He paused. “Have you heard how the end of the War will be signaled, Dick?”

I knew he didn’t mean by wireless, or runner, or telephone, or anything like that. “I’ve heard the stories.” The image had pursued me in dreams after I first heard about it.

“The firing of four black or dark blue Very lights.”

Flares did not come in those colors, of course, and I remembered them, in my dreams, hanging dark and brooding over a nighttime landscape of tattered corpses where none remained alive to note that the War was over. My mouth was full of dirt and I could not laugh. “Why are you bringing this up?”

He smiled, a secret smile. “I have that Very pistol. I bought it from an old magic woman in Amiens.”

I groaned. “First Willoughby and his damned Yellow Man, and now you have to go round the bend and start blathering on about old magic women and Very pistols. You’ve been taken, but the crone’s got a line into a supply depot somewhere. You should report her.”

“Might as well report the moon for being out after curfew. Settle down, Dick. Settle down. Let me tell you a story. A war story.” He sat down in the earth with the air of a man sinking into his favorite armchair at home, in front of a fire.

“A war story,” I grumbled. “Just the thing to calm my nerves.” But I sat. It was cold and damp.

“There once was a man, quite a long time ago, a man of the land, who was called to war by his King. He was afraid, afraid of leaving his familiar place, and afraid of death on the field of battle, but he obeyed, and went, leaving his crops, and his land, and his home. He served well in the war. He had a quick wit, and a sense of order, so he became their equivalent of an NCO. When the war finally ended, he found that he did not want to return home. The slap of foreign hills beneath his sandals was a more pleasing feeling than the squish of his own soil between his toes. The work, he found, was easier, and more interesting, his men respected him, and his captains recognized him. He’d found a career for which he was suited.

“So he went to the capital, and lay a night and a day on the stone floor of the temple of the Goddess, she who made the plants to grow and the rain to fall and to whom all farmers made their prayers, and all soldiers likewise, for men wounded in battle will always call upon their mother. He beat his head against the stones and begged her to free him from his life of toil and allow him to continue at war.

“Women can be unreasonable, at least as men understand these things, and goddesses are no exception. Angered, for she misinterpreted his manly disinclination to quit what to him was an exciting game as insolence, she bade him to stay with his soldiers, if he wished, for his war was not yet over. So he picked up his spear and his shield and went back to the war, which had started anew. They sacked cities and forded streams; they made long retreats through the mountain passes and attacked again along the river. And he began to grow weary, for it seemed that just as the war was over, another began....”

The earth
was
cold. I shifted uncomfortably, confused and irritated by Pogue’s rambling. “What does this fable have to do with Very pistols?”

He yawned. “Not much, I suppose. Just a way of getting attention, a knock on the door. Let’s just say that some of the soldier’s comrades-in-arms were on somewhat better terms with the Goddess than he, and realized that it sometimes takes a third party to effect a reconciliation.”

I didn’t understand him at all. “And our friend the soldier?”

“Marches those hills yet.”

I looked up at the bean poles standing silver in the moonlight. “Still beats farming.”

He laughed, a short, sharp sound, almost a sob. “Stubborn, stubborn. Lucky his friends are just as stubborn.”

I sighed. “How much did the bloody thing cost, anyway?”

“Twenty head of cabbage, ten kilos potatoes, one kilo peas, two dozen tomatoes. Most of my summer’s production.”

I don’t know why I played along with his stupid game. “Why do the soldier’s friends keep trying?”

“Because they know that eventually they will succeed.” And he stood up, slung his mattock over his shoulder, and walked off down the dark passage of the trench.

❖

Harris and I stared off at the enemy lines, trying to see what had been built there during the night. It was just after dawn. A mist covered no-man’s-land, and there was a feeling of rain clouds coming off the North Sea.

We were standing at the end of the sap dug the previous night. The barbed wire surrounding us gleamed silver, unlike the older thickets guarding the rest of the trench, which had long ago rusted to a soft autumnal orange-brown color, looking more like hedgerows than like something that would tear you to shreds if you fell against it.

No-man’s-land was a green carpet, vivid in the mist, which quickly swallowed the craters of exploding shells. It rained much in Picardy, and plants did well there, particularly when fertilized. No-man’s-land at the Somme was probably the best fertilized area on the face of the globe.

The bodies that fell there vanished, but the equipment remained. I could see helmets, rifles, canteens, gas masks, even an occasional medal, once worn with panache in a frontal assault. Examining this detritus, I could trace the history of the War, like an archaeologist winnowing potsherds. There were the remnants of an experimental respirator, used in 78, the grinning remains of a skull inside it. Here lay a rifle with the stock made out of a brittle synthetic, 1931. Everywhere lay helmets. I could see one, German, with a brass spike on it, that must have been from before 1920. Another was gleaming beryl steel, of American manufacture.

Everywhere were the flowers of Picardy. Red poppies, yellow cabbage flowers, white cornflowers; for them there was no War. One helmet, overturned, served as a flowerpot and was full of a bobbing mass of blue cornflowers.

Harris peered through his binoculars and scowled. “Can’t see a bloody thing. Could be a machine-gun emplacement. Could be the anchor point for a mechanical sapping operation. Could be a new cookhouse for the frontline boys,” he sniffed, “though I can’t smell any sauerkraut or borscht. Could be a new twelve-hole privy, in which case I vote for an immediate assault so that we can use it before it starts to stink. Let’s go.” He turned, and a rat squealed beneath his feet. He aimed a kick at it, cursing, but it hid behind some duckboards.

Back in the trench, life had settled into its faded routine. A gang was repairing the trench wall. Others were cleaning their weapons or attempting to write letters. Most were trying to sleep, though, curled up in funk holes dug in the walls.

I descended into the officers’ dugout. Pogue and Captain Totenham were in the NCO’s dugout, discussing some operation that I didn’t want to hear about, for I suspected I’d be hearing about it soon enough and I wanted to write a letter. Most of my immediate family somehow came to be lost in the years of war, but I had been thinking about a cousin, or perhaps second cousin, who had moved off to Liverpool or Manchester when I had been a child. He’d been mentioned at my house once or twice, though I didn’t remember by whom. I had no one else to write to, and I thought that if I sent it off to General Delivery at those two cities, he might get the letter. I preferred writing on tables to balancing things on my knees and was hoping that the table in the dugout would be free.

Lieutenant Wallace was sitting at it, filling out a letter of condolence to the parents of Hopkins. He had a little book, issued to officers, open to the page that contained the approved phrases and adjectives for letters of condolence to the relatives of soldiers killed in action.

He looked up. “Beeman, I’m stuck here. Which would you say Hopkins was, gallant, brave, or intrepid?”

I remembered the hole through his forehead. “How, precisely, did he die?”

“He tried to jump me, and I was forced to shoot him with my pistol. He panicked, wanted to go back. Bloody bother, and my shot brought fire down on us. Tough luck for Ackerman, that.”

I gave it some thought. “Heroic. Try heroic.”

He peered at his book. “Hmmm... doesn’t seem to be on the list, Beeman. Funny thing, that. ‘Heroic’ isn’t here. Neither is ‘bloody fool,’ for that matter. ‘Intrepid.’ Good word, intrepid. A public school, rugger sort of word.” He wrote it down, pleased with himself.

It took me less than five minutes to give up on the letter. I couldn’t think of a thing to write, and I realized that I wasn’t even sure of his name. I decided to try again some other time, and left the dugout.

Outside, the sky had clouded up and a drizzle looked imminent. I yawned, and realized how long it had been since last I slept. I looked around. Pogue and the captain were still in our dugout, and near me was a two-man funk hole with only one man in it: Willoughby. I pulled out my waterproof sheet and curled up next to him.

Sleeping, I dreamed. The land was green and fruitful. The corn was high, and date palms hung their heavy loads of fruit over the fresh-running irrigation channels. I ran across the fields, tripping over the uneven soil, hearing the sounds of her hounds close behind me. They dug in the earth, the men of that land, slowly and patiently, their faces shaded from the glaring sun by broad-brimmed felt hats. They did not heed my cries for aid, but continued to dig their earth, grinding the clods up. Some swung sickles, collecting the sheaves of corn. The land was flat, horizon to horizon, but ahead of me rose a steep hill, and atop it stood a tower. I ran up its side. It was covered with brambles, and my shirt tore, and I bled, but I continued to run, for I still heard the hounds, and she was still in pursuit of me. I tore free of the brambles and ran up the steps of the basilica, stopping directly beneath the Virgin. The American guards were gone. She looked down on me with a half smile, even as her hounds closed on me. Pulling a knife from my pocket, I started to lever at one of the bricks. I could hear the sharp crump of the German 88s and the return fire of French mortars. A strange broad-winged monoplane with English markings flew overhead, and as it banked away to the left, the pilot, in his clever enclosed cockpit, waved to me in greeting. The brick finally came loose. Someone tapped my shoulder, and Pogue was close behind me, wearing a wide-brimmed felt hat. He stretched out his hand. Between thumb and forefinger he held a pea. I paused a moment, my heart full of wild rage, but I heard the bay of the hounds ever nearer and at last, with a feeling of surrender, took the pea and thrust it into the opening left by the brick. The entire basilica creaked and groaned. The guns stopped. A pea plant emerged from the hole and crawled its way up the side of the tower. I looked up at the Virgin. Her expression was joyful, radiant. She leaned forward to gather me up into her arms. Then there was a rumble, and at long last she broke free of the tower and began to fall toward me. As she got closer, I saw that she wore Lisette’s face. For a moment I was happy, then felt the sharp fear of being crushed beneath her. I cried out “Mother!” as her face rushed toward me....