Creel gave him a cigarette, an American one, and he liked that. Started laughing at how American tobacco could make it to the front but no Americans.
“Country’s divided,” Creel told him. “Some want to fight, some don’t. Lots of Americans joining the Canadians to get a taste.”
“Nothing against your countrymen, mate. If I was them, I’d stay home. Enjoy life, ain’t nothing but death here. We ain’t winning and neither is the Hun.”
As night drew on, Creel was in the dugout with a group of enlisted men and the stories started circulating as he knew they would and he knew he was going to hear things that he wanted… and dreaded… to hear. Lot of it, of course, was scattered recollections about the raids on German lines, just bits and pieces that shook themselves loose from the men’s minds as they sat and contemplated. As Creel listened, he watched men stripping their shirts off, their backs scratched raw and red from flea and lice infestations. Some of them stripped naked and ran the flame of a candle along the seams of their underclothes and you could plainly hear the lice eggs crackling. It was the only sure way to get rid of them or keep them at bay.
“Funny bit, it was,” a corporal was saying. “One night, the mist hanging heavy, we lost C Company’s machine gunner and his two mates, see? We go up to the fortification, the gun pit, there’s the Lewis gun, all the ammo boxes pretty as you please… but no men. All five of ’em are gone. How do you figure that? German sappers took ’em, they wouldn’t leave the gun and ammunition, would they?”
“No bodies?” Creel said.
“Nothing, mate. Must’ve carted off the bodies even though it makes no bloody sense to take corpses and not weapons, now do it?” He shook his head. “Nothing there except them funny prints in the ground.”
Creel felt something cold take hold of him. “Funny?”
“Sure. Bare prints, they was. You know, like somebody were walking about without boots on.”
This would have been the point, Creel knew, that if the corporal’s story was just a lark the men would have begun ridiculing it. But they didn’t. They just sat about in the semi-darkness, smoking silently, their eyes shining in the murk.
“Were they… small prints?”
The corporal shook his head. “The prints of men not children. And the funny thing is they was full of worms, squirming worms.”
Creel swallowed. “Worms, you say?”
“Sure. Maggots. Lots of maggots.”
Creel did not interrupt as the stories made their rounds and each one—from maggoty footprints to skulking things like children that scavenged the dead to Hun that took .303 caliber sniper rounds and kept walking—only confirmed what he feared; that something absolutely incredible and horrifying was happening out there.
Later, he went out into the trenches and it was a quiet night save for the falling rain that went on for several hours before drying up. What it left in its wake was a sickening odor that was beyond dirt and mud, blood and filth and dank uniforms… it was the vile stench of rot, of tanned hides and dark sewers, sumps and mass graves and backed-up cisterns. He had all he could do not to vomit and was that because of the stink of war or was it because inside his own head he was smelling something infinitely worse, infinitely more pestilent, and infinitely more dangerous to his sanity?
He got away from the Tommies, leaning against the trench wall, mud up to his knees, smoking cigarette after cigarette, listening to the rats crawling around him, and wondering, dear God, just wondering. Something was going on out in the body dumps and sunken graves and green-stinking fields of carrion. How did he track it to its source and if and when he did, what the hell could he really do about it?
Colonel, now I know you don’t like me because I’m a journalist but just listen for a minute, will you? The dead are rising out in No-Man’s Land and something has to be done about it.
Creel almost started laughing at that one.
No, it wouldn’t go over well.
The Tommies were suspecting things, hinting and intimating at the worst possible occurrences. Down in their hearts they knew something was wrong beyond the usual calamities of war. Maybe they would not put a name to it, but they knew. Some of them, anyway. But the officers? No, never, ever in a million years would they accept it. They didn’t teach the old boys anything about the living dead at Sandhurst, it just wasn’t cricket.
Creel stumbled through the mud, snaking through the trench system, eyes glazed, skin damp from the rain, heart beating with a low and distant rhythm, wilting beneath the pall of stark memory, sliding down deeper into himself, seeking a cool, smooth darkness that was his and his alone.
13
Battle Fatigue
Sometimes he would come awake at night gasping for air like a stranded fish and once the sweating and gasping were over with, he’d wonder what had been suffocating him, but he’d know: the war. After awhile in the trenches it was like all the sweet, pure breath was sucked from your lungs and you were subsisting on corpse-gas, marsh mist, and the smoke of burnt ordinance.
Awake and knowing sleep was beyond him, he’d make his way up to the fire trench and listen to the Tommies whispering, telling each other how they were certain they would die and they’d never see home again. He’d listen to their voices until they became a lulling soft murmur like ancient clocks ticking away into eternity and soon enough, those voices were rain and running water, clods of earth gently striking coffin lids which was the sound of time. As dawn neared, there were low voices, the rattle of equipment, the snap of a rain-soaked poncho, the slushy sounds of mud. Now and again, something like laughter or sobbing, and then deep silence winding away into emptiness. The wind would sing a final mournful song amongst the battlements and clay-spattered earthworks. Rats would scurry out beyond the sandbags. A lone dog would howl.
In the days following the Battle of Loos, Creel began to wonder—and not for the first time—about the state of his mind and more so, the state of all minds in that war. He was starting to think that there was some infectious, collective insanity making the rounds like a germ and he could not remember the last time he had spoken with anyone that was remotely ordinary.
The Tommies bothered him.
Their youth ground to ash, they contemplated their deaths like old men, hoping only that there would be something to bury. The relentless, dogged combat and deprivation and inhumanity and suffering of the trenches were deteriorating their minds into a stew of morbid dementia and pandemic melancholia. The good white meat of reason had been chewed away and what was left was something rancid that sought the earth and quiet entombment. So many of them had reached the stage where they were convinced that the only way to be a good soldier was to die in battle. And it was not some misguided heroism, but a sort of fatalism that each day survived only prolonged the pain and the sooner it was over with the sooner they would be out of the mud and filth of the trenches and even death was better than living like a rat in a hole.
With their wide white eyes and muddy faces, they would look upon Creel like he was some sort of exotic species, a mad thing that belonged in a cage, and ask the inevitable: “What in the Christ are you doing here? You could be home.”