No Man's Land #4

Encore pour Dieux et la patrie.

As the horse thundered off into the trenches running south, I lost sight of it. But glancing around, I found it was not all that had disappeared. During the chaos, the remnants of my improvised battalion had drifted away. I couldn’t blame them. There was no telling what would’ve happened if the horse hadn’t bolted. Chances are, it saved my life that day.

But you can’t linger on these thoughts. Not out here. Everything comes at a price, and I’m certain the horse and the cavalrymen paid mine. So when it’s over and my heart catches up to the knowledge, starts hammering away in my chest, I concentrate on the beats, on my own breath tearing in and out, and let it wash away everything but what’s humming inside my teeth. The stroke of black lightning, of sheer nothingness, that collapses the universe of my thoughts and senses, and for a single instant shows the whole of me. It’s a bittersweet note played on a knife’s edge, powerful enough to seem to squeeze tears from every inch of my skin.

Life.

Precious life.

I tasted it as I staggered off; my mind a blank as soldiers moved to and from the line, bumping into me and almost knocking me flat. I descended the hill at a diagonal, making for the hollow where we’d taken our rest. All around me, officers relayed orders, shouting to be heard over the shelling. It’s a miracle I wasn’t swept up in another lunatic attempt to rush the enemy position. But at that moment, I don’t think I would’ve cared. The sweet flood of survival now receding, I was left to the cold and numbness that had come over me more and more. This time, I reached for it, eager for its cover. Yet this time, it wasn’t enough. Again I saw blood and brains spurt through the air; saw the horse’s hoof crush the rider’s head with the ease of a thumb digging into a piece of overripe fruit.

Struggling down the hill, I wiped sweat mixed with blood from my forehead. I felt sick. The twisting nausea of someone confronted by an obscenity that keeps them in thrall, nonetheless. The sight of the officer firing on his own men, the look of cold hatred on his face. It curdled inside me, became a lead weight.

I thought I’d gone too far when I spied the river, a grey snake slithering by some hundred meters to the west. But when I turned, I saw a handful of soldiers sitting next to a broken cart. I went over, lowered myself on the ground by the wheel.

The man next to me lit a cigarette. As the smoke from his first drag billowed out, our eyes met. His gaze crawled over my face and uniform, covered in blood and shredded meat. He plucked the cigarette from his mouth, held it up.

“Want one?” he asked in French.

I had started by then, what I dragged into my lungs no more bothersome than the smoke from the guns and the fire. But it would be weeks before the first rations were doled out, which meant there were only two ways to come across tobacco: bumming it off others… or looting the dead. A newly minted smoker, I wasn’t desperate enough to consider the latter option, but I took the offer without pause.

He handed me one—machine-rolled—and lit it for me. I pulled the smoke in deep and held it, long enough for my head to start swimming. My eyes slipped closed as the smoke escaped in a slow sigh. It’s wrong to say it calmed me down. But it coated my frayed nerves enough for me to find my voice.

“Merci.”

“Oui,” the man said.

I blew out another lungful, puzzled at the strange reply. Then said: “Ik ben Vlaming.”

The man let out a sigh of relief.

“Thank Christ.”

Despite it all, I smiled.

He looked at me, considering. “You one of ours?”

I let my head roll to the side, studied him as he studied me. In the end, neither of us could say with any degree of certainty.

 The man shook his head. “Christ, what a mess this is. Got pulled from my regiment three days ago. Now it’s a new one every five minutes. Haven’t come across a Flemish soldier in days. I started thinking I was the only one left.”

He let out a laugh that edged towards a giggle, mercifully cut short by the crumping impact of a shell landing somewhere close behind us. The krauts were still advancing.

“What are we even doing out here?” the man said at length. “The frogs and the krauts are all that matters in the bloody thing, anyway. The King should’ve stepped aside, let them murder each other in peace. What difference does all of this make, huh? Only more dead Belgians, that’s what.”

His voice started rising while he spoke until he was almost screaming. I turned away, too late to miss the gleam of tears in his eyes. There was truth in what he said, however simplistic. But there was little to gain from his talk. One needed only to look across the field, where men were in the process of raising tents. It was the reason we had been moved. A great billowing sea of white as the field hospital went up—an irony that did not escape me. Already the bodies lay waiting outside, placed in long rows, head to toe. Prostrated figures without number, twisting with their agonies. And still more coming, an endless flow that dribbled down from the infernal hill that stood at the edge of the world.

I had to look away from it, my entire body clenching tight. For some time, I had moved through this hell in a daze. But what had happened earlier had ripped me from it, enough that I felt the sight of the field pulling at my insides with freezing fingers. It was in the faces of the gathered soldiers, too. A strained quality, almost solemn. One by one, the voices fell silent, the fickle flames of a dying campfire, and then we were lost to the darkness of our own thoughts—something so vast and terrible it could never be poured into words.

For a while, there was only the sound of the battlefield and the choir of the wounded. Then a cry went up from the hill above us and I turned to see a handful of French soldiers stumbling down towards us. They were almost running, and my first thought was that the Germans had broken through the line. I found myself standing, rifle in hand. But as the seconds passed, no one crested the hill after them. None, except the medics, bearing their dreadful cargo, that is.

The cry had gone up from the soldier in back, who was pursuing his fellows, giving voice to a stream of rapid French I could hardly make out. But as they came closer and the man got winded, I caught some of it.

“Vous est des laches!” he screamed. “France a besoin de nous. On doit combattre, pour Dieux et la patrie!”

One of the soldiers, a Walloon, let out a hiss of humorless laughter. I glanced at him, then back at the approaching soldiers. His reaction was understandable. A lot had been said about the way the French viewed the war. The scene before us summed up the situation better than any newspaper cartoon ever could. Yet in that moment, I did not feel resentment. I felt a touch of disquiet, the man’s words echoing those of the officers that had sent us over the first time.

As the soldiers neared, I tensed. No one was interested in driving them back up the hill, but there’s little difference between a horse and a man driven mad with fear. The French had their rifles gripped tight. It wouldn’t take much for bullets to start flying. As the first man closed the distance to the cart, his eyes wide and staring, I sucked in a breath—

            And blinked in surprise as he ran past. when the others sped by in a blur of red, white, and blue, rounding the corner of the cart on their way across the field. Dumbfounded, I turned to watch their escape. Five men in full battledress, down to their packs and ammo pouches, sprinting through the open country at an impressive clip, considering.

I followed their progress, interested what they would do once they reached the Yser, when their pursuer tore by, still yelling after them.

“Lâches! Deserteurs!” He pulled up short, doubling over, then started off again. “Your families should be ashamed of you, des chiens sans honneur!”

I exchanged a glance with one of the Walloons. The man shrugged, lowering himself back down, now that the immediate danger had passed.

“Goddam French bastards,” the Flemish soldier snapped. “We’re all out here because of them. We should’ve shot them.”

I ignored him, watched the lone soldier staring after his comrades before turning back and walking towards us. As he came closer, I recognized him. A short man with a hard and humorless face, he’d been stationed at our section, part of the French reinforcements that had arrived before everything went down in chaos.

Perhaps he remembered my face as well, because when he reached the cart, he turned to me.

“Have you seen an officer around?”

“No,” I said. “Why?”

He jabbed a thumb over his shoulder. “Those men need to be reported.”

Low growls went up from those gathered.

“What is he saying?” the Flemish soldier asked.

“He wants to report the soldiers for desertion,” I said, without looking away from the Frenchman.

“Bloody bastard,” he said, even though he’d been ready to shoot them not a minute ago.

“What does it matter to you?” I said to the Frenchman, a madness in me still looking to prevent senseless violence.

“They are cowards. Deserters.”

“Maybe they had the right idea,” one of the soldiers said. “If you all run back home, maybe us Belgians can stop dying.”

“Coward,” the French soldier spat.

“What did you call me?” the soldier said, his face darkening as he took to his feet.

“You heard me. God is with France. Through sacrifice, we will—”

That was as far as he got before the other man wrapped a hand around his throat, choking off the words.

“Yeah, but… you’re not in France, are you?” the soldier grunted. “It’s not your soil drenched in blood. Not your families starving and suffering beneath the enemy’s boot, you fucking French bastard!” He screamed in the man’s face. His grip tightened, the Frenchman’s face turning red. A cruel smile pulled at the soldier’s mouth.

“I should—”

“You should let him go,” a voice behind us said.

I turned to see a sergeant, accompanied by a brigade of cavalrymen.

“Explain yourselves,” the officer snapped.

None of us spoke. We watched as the Frenchmen stumbled forward, drawing in hitching breaths, until he managed to relay what had happened. At some point, he held up a hand, cutting off the rest of the story.

“These men will be dealt with in time. Your duty is on the line, soldier. You are needed. All of you.” His eyes crept over us. “There seems little need to bicker about the fate of a few deserters when right now our comrades are dying while you lot sit here enjoying yourselves.” His nostrils flared. “Now go and bring glory to your country.”

The Frenchmen saluted, starting up the hillside. The officer called after him, and he turned.

“Sir?”

“What is your name, soldier?”

“Ribière, Sir,” he said, standing at attention as if he was still on the parade grounds, instead of halfway up the hill that led to Hell itself. “Marcel Ribière.”

The officer gave a curt nod. “You have heart, Ribière. Help your fellows find theirs and this war will be ours before long.”

“Sir,” he said, snapping off a salute before turning back and rushing up the incline.

“As for the rest of you, don’t let me catch you fighting amongst yourselves again. We need to stand united. Your behavior is disgraceful, and a poor tribute for the sacrifices that have been made on these fields.”

He dismissed us and the men followed Ribière up the hill, their burdens heavy on their shoulders. With the chances of finding my old regiment slim at best, I tagged along.

Halfway up the hill, I glanced back. The horsemen rode back the way they’d come, away from the line. Skirting the sea of dead and wounded without slowing, he stared off across the field, to where the Yser rushed by. I followed his gaze, tasting metal, and found myself wishing the French had shown courage in the end, and crossed it.