Near the River Somme in summer 1916, there are several innovations: Canadians have helmets, and rifles that fire most of the time. Germans have machine-guns. July 1 the British plan is this: a million shells to cut the Boche wire. Shoulder your seventy-pound pack as usual. Go over the top. Walk towards the German lines, they’ll all be dead by now. Keep walking till you hit Berlin.
In four and a half hours, fifty thousand Britons and Canadians are shot. That afternoon, the British plan is revised: do everything as before. But this time, run.
Abe is killed walking. Rudy is killed running.
Neither of them killed any Germans. Aleihem Ha’Shalom.
July 2, 1916
Dear Missus,
All is well….
Mrs Luvovitz never recovers. She functions, has to, she has her youngest son, she has Benny. And there’s Materia, a child still really, I remember when I found her on the cliff, what would she do without me? She took the news about the boys very hard. Materia’s husband will probably be killed, a blessing, God forgive me, I don’t know why but he scares me. Benny says that’s prejudice. It isn’t. It’s superstition. There’s something not right, I can’t prove it, I can feel it. I may be meshuga, one thing I know, I’ll maim my son Ralph before I let him go to a war, I’ll nail his feet to the floor.
It’s begun to sink in on two continents. Younger sons are being dragged away from recruiting stations before they can say, “Sixteen, sir, honest.” Everywhere, the youngest have suddenly become the eldest.
None of this is what Materia intended.
Ypres: gas — at least it kills rats too. Passchendaele: it doesn’t matter if you can swim.
Dear Missus,
I am fine….
Summer of ’17, Number 12 Mine, where James worked, explodes. Sixty-five dead. The war has created a boom in the Sydney coalfields. Full employment, lower wages, and strikes forbidden by law, coal being vital to the war effort. Production has been stepped up, airways left shut, gas building up. Number 12 was always bad that way. Materia plays at many funerals, and ponders James’s luck and her own stupefying sins.
To whom can she confess? Not to her dear friend, Mrs Luvovitz. She tries to tell the priest. “Father forgive me for I have sinned, I brought the war.” But he tells her she’s guilty only of the sin of pride; “Say the rosary three times and ask God for humility.” So Materia goes unabsolved. She visits the cliff every day in her mind and every day she swan-dives off it, weightless for a moment, feeling the slim girl she used to be, then the sudden satisfying impact of the rocks. It’s where she belongs, she craves the caress of the violent shore, to come alive like that once more in a clash of stone and then to die. Peace. But she has her little girls, and suicide is the unforgivable sin.
In the fall of 1917, Our Lady appears to three children in Fátima, Portugal, and tells them three secrets, the third of which remains a Vatican secret to this day. But Materia knows what the third secret was. It was this: “Dear children; I sent the Great War in order to shield, a little longer, the body and soul of Kathleen Piper.”
Dulce et Decorum
Now we wear the feather, the 85th feather,
We wear it with pride and joy.
That fake Advertiser, Old Billy the Kaiser,
Shall hear from each Bluenose boy.
Where trouble is brewing, our bit we’ll be doing,
To hammer down Briton’s foes,
With the bagpipes a-humming, the 85th coming,
From the land where the maple leaf grows.
85TH OVERSEAS BATTALION, CEF
It must mean something, there are so many of us — never have so many sacrificed so much for so little. It must mean something, otherwise there would not be this parade; there would not be this royal inspection, these brassy buttons, these slender wounds in the earth across Europe, these sturdy beams holding back the tide of mud and human tissue, this meticulous network of miniature mines, these lice, these rats, these boots returning unto dust, these toes lying scattered about my feet, like leaves, like fallen teeth.
James has spent three years in a narrow strip of France and Flanders, dodging snipers in order to collect the dead and comfort the dying. He is not a medic, he just volunteers a lot. Wiring parties, digging parties, reconnaissance parties, one big party. The streamers, fireworks and ticker tape that sent them off are nothing compared to the bright bits of men that sail through the air and festoon the remaining trees here in the land of permanent November. These decorations will stay up for years.
Chloride of lime to kill the stench, cordite to kill the lice, whale oil to keep the feet from rotting. Fifty-four days at a stretch in the flooded mass grave of the living but he never complains. James has prolonged the lives of so many men that he has been mentioned in dispatches several times. Originally he was recommended for the Victoria Cross, but as the Great Adventure dragged on his brand of “conspicuous gallantry” reflected poorly on the war.
Once, a wrecked man called him Mummy and clutched at the buttons on James’s chest. Nothing was surprising. James let the boy from Saskatchewan suck on one of his brass buttons before dying. The Mother Country.
The mud between the opposing trenches is known as No Man’s Land. This is a reasonable name for a stretch of contested ground that has yet to be won by either side. But James and possibly a number of others along the line have forgotten that this is the origin of the name. The name has come to mean a haunted foggy expanse of silent slime. A limbo — grey, yellow, green, mostly grey, and empty except for the dead. Rats may scamper across it and remain rats. Birds may fly above it and remain birds; they may alight and tear and eat and prick up their heads to stare motionless and beady for a moment before pecking and eating again, and remain birds. But no man may venture into this space between the lines and remain a man. That is the difference. No man may enter, either stealthily on his belly alone, or noisily on two feet racing through glue with a thousand versions of himself firing, falling, on either side as far as the eye can see, and remain a man. It is possible to become a man once more if you make it back behind your line again, but you suspend your humanity for your sojourn in between. That is why the place is called No Man’s Land.
By 1916 James had volunteered so often that other men assumed he had a death wish. Either that or he was protected — by an Angel of Mons, perhaps, or Old Nick. They didn’t know whether it was lucky to stick close to James, or if that was asking for the next bullet that missed him by an inch. Before a night raid or a dawn attack, when other men were tucking Bibles into their left breast pockets, kissing love letters or a lucky rat’s paw, James was relaxed against a reeky sandbag full of mud and pieces of former men, reading.
James’s first act of “total disregard for his own safety” was in the fall of 1915. Five men had gone out after dark with their bouquets of barbed wire, and four came back, but no one had heard a shot or a shout. That meant the fifth man was out there lost, wandering around in the place of no reference points. German Very lights bloomed in the sky from three directions, adding confusion to danger. Briefly lit, a shattered tree, a sea of craters, corpses interchangeable, now pink, now bronze, now blue. On the western front there is nothing so colourful as the night. James went out after the fifth man. He wasn’t a friend, he was just some fella.
After two hours he found the man walking towards the German line. James brought him in, but he didn’t make friends with him or anyone else.
On Christmas Day 1914, the British and the Germans had laid down their arms, climbed out of their trenches, and walked into No Man’s Land. They met halfway between the lines, and exchanged gifts. Not so strange, considering that never before had so many nice men with families and decent jobs volunteered to face each other under arms across distances as brief and static as twenty yards. Such chocolate. Such bully beef. The truce was completely spontaneous and not repeated in anything like those numbers again — somehow people can still get into the Christmas spirit when they’ve only been mowing each othe
r down with ordinary bullets, but the festivity goes right out of the season once they’ve gassed each other. Nonetheless, James brought over a gift on the Christmas of 1916.
At night you tell yourself that the howls and whimpers out there are wild dogs. This gets difficult if one of the dogs starts praying. The night before Christmas, James had already brought in two wounded and he was out looking for another. By the light of a flare he saw two dead stretcher-bearers lying at either end of a stretcher containing a bandaged man — an unusual sight in that the dead were whole. As the flare died, James saw the man on the stretcher stir. He approached but found the man was dead after all — a feast for the rats that had turned him over in the course of their meal. James carried on, blind-man’s-buff, listening for any sound that was not a rustling or a gnawing. He stopped and crouched over a whimper. He felt for arms, legs, and guts (if the guts are merely exposed, it’s worth picking him up; otherwise, finish him off quietly). This man was in pretty good shape, though unable to walk, and when he answered James’s “How ya doin, buddy?” with “Ich will nicht sterben, bitte,” James picked him up and walked east. When they got close to the German trench, the man cried out to his comrades, “Nicht schiessen, nicht schiessen!” James laid him down within arm’s reach of the parapet, turned around and walked back to his own side.
James could do all this because he had made a bargain with himself: he wouldn’t try to get killed, nor would he try to survive. He could do all this because he felt terribly sorry for the men he rescued. They harboured the saddest and most foolish desire of all. The desire to go on living.
The Bobbseys At Home
One evening, Kathleen has instructed Mercedes and Frances to play on their own while she finishes a letter to Daddy — “… school is great … lots of fun….” By now she finds their chatter less distracting than their eager silence.
Frances is at the reins of the covered wagon they’ve made from Kathleen’s bedspread. “When I grow up I’m going to have so much hair and be the boss of everything and I’ll be singing and eating candy.”
Mercedes is the pioneer mother with the babies. “Me too, and when I grow up I’m going to the Old Country and visit Sitdy and Jitdy.”
“Me too.”
Kathleen looks up from her letter. “They’re not in ‘the Old Country’. What are you talking about?”
Frances clicks her tongue at the horses, Mercedes comforts the monkey baby and answers, “Yes, because they prospered —”
“But then they missed the fruits and diamonds —”
“They darn well live in Sydney,” says Kathleen.
Frances blinks and the horses disappear. The babies cool to porcelain and rubber in Mercedes’ arms. “… Mumma said —”
“I don’t care what she said, they live in Sydney and they hate us, they’re stupid rotten idiots and we’re better off without them.” Kathleen tosses her pencil onto the desk and stands up. “What shall we read?”
Frances looks to Mercedes. Mercedes says, “The magazine.”
“No,” Kathleen decrees.
“The Red Shoes.”
Frances enthuses, “Oh yes, and she gets her feet chopped off.”
Mercedes bursts into tears. Then so does Frances.
“She does not get her feet chopped off,” says Kathleen.
Frances sobs, “She does, she does.”
Mercedes wails, “She does.”
“Not if I say she doesn’t.”
But they are inconsolable, clinging to each other and crying for Mumma.
“What a couple of sissies, come on, we’ll read something else.”
She wipes their noses, hands Frances her hairbrush and settles Mercedes in her lap.
“Can we sleep with you tonight?”
“Oh all right, get in —”
“Yay!”
And when they’ve snuggled down, “Now clam up and listen. The Bobbsey Twins at the Seashore —”
It’s wonderful when Kathleen reads because she does all different voices and accents. “‘Suah’s yo’ lib, we do keep a-movin’!’ cried Dinah, as she climbed into the big depot wagon. Dinah, the colored maid, had been with the family so long the children called her Dinah Bobbsey, although her real name was Mrs Sam Johnston.’”
Downstairs, Materia wrings her hands before a big bout of cleaning and baking. She received a telegram today. James is coming home.
Boots
On a cold April afternoon in 1917, James got the inspiration for his boot business from a French soldier near Vimy.
The Frenchman wandered skeletal from the fog, his bare feet sucking the yellow muck where James was looking for wounded. The Frenchman drove his thumbs into either side of James’s windpipe, slamming him into the slime, holding his head under. Then he went to work on James’s boots, slicing the laces. James wrenched up and stuck the man. Luckily no one saw for the fog — the French were our allies.
From that moment, boots are all James can think about. It’s the only thing that will drown the sound of his bayonet scraping between Frenchie’s peekaboo ribs, and the sight of him scarecrowing off the end when James managed to shoot free — under and up, ladies, under and up. Boots are what count. More than weapons, food or strategy. We will win because we have more and better boots, boots determine history. Warm dry feet will allow us to go on being killed longer than the enemy. When the enemy’s boots wear out, they will no longer be able to run in waves into our machine-gun fire, and they will surrender. I’m going to be ready for the next war by making boots. I’ll be rich enough to send my daughter to the conservatory in Halifax for a year, then to anywhere in the world. But not Milan or Salzburg or even London. The Old World is a graveyard. “‘Is’t not fine to dance and sing, When the bells of death do ring?’” No, it isn’t. The great music will immigrate to the New World. New York. James can smell it. He has a distant cousin there — an old maid with an odd first name … Giles — that’s it — she works with the nuns. Everything is turning out beautifully. Everything’s going to be fine. Spit and polish, rise and shine.
James starts polishing his boots every day, sometimes all day, because often all day is all there is. Between the rips and rotten bits, around his exposed toes, the remains of James’s boots positively glow through the perpetual fog. The other men call him “Rudolph”.
It is this habit of the boots that prevents James from yet another tour of duty, although he’s volunteered. His superiors determine that he is no longer fit for combat conditions. Sticking someone is perfectly normal in the mud culture. Obsessively polishing a pair of disintegrating boots is not. It’s shell-shock. James’s superiors do not refer to him as “Rudolph;” they call him “Lady Macbeth”.
Along with an invisible part of himself, James loses a toe. It falls off, painlessly. And is seized and carried away by a rat right before his eyes. If the shell-shock hadn’t got him, this thing with the toe would have. So, out of consideration for a man’s pride, “shell-shock” is not what James’s superiors write on his discharge; not even “battle fatigue”. Officially he is invalided out because of the injury to his foot.
James is taken out of the drowning pools of Passchendaele and across the Channel to Buckingham Palace, where he is awarded the Distinguished Service Order “for extreme devotion to duty in the presence of the enemy”. During the ceremony he looks from people’s footwear to their faces and decides whether or not they match.
He is shipped home to be honourably discharged. No one can know how tired he is. He will be tired for the rest of his life.
When James sees Halifax Harbour from the deck of the troopship in December 1917, he revises his plans for Kathleen. He’ll have to send her straight to New York City. Halifax has been blown up. He doesn’t wonder how or why. The war has grazed the edge of Canada, is all.
The Candy of Strangers
A war changes people in a number of ways. It either shortcuts you to your very self; or it triggers such variations that you might as well have been a larva, pupat
ing in dampness, darkness and tightly wrapped puttees. Then, providing you don’t take flight from a burst shell, you emerge from your khaki cocoon so changed from what you were that you fear you’ve gone mad, because people at home treat you as though you were someone else. Someone who, through a bizarre coincidence, had the same name, address and blood ties as you, but who must have died in the war. And you have no choice but to live as an impostor because you can’t remember who you were before the war. There’s a simple but horrible explanation for this: you were born in the war. You slid, slick, bloody and fully formed, out of a trench.
The Great War was the greatest changer of them all.
James has one thing in common with the man who marched off to the wars three years before: their daughter, Kathleen. On December 10, 1917, he steps off the train in Sydney, an unexploded shell.
He has had a few years’ practice being present and absent at the same time so he is able to find his way from Sydney to New Waterford. He walks the nine miles of frosted dirt road in his civvies, his duffel bag over his shoulder, and with each step his mind says, “Sydney, New Waterford. Sydney, New Waterford.” To his left is Europe.
Several people see him enter town and walk down Plummer Avenue. They don’t know he is a hero, they just know he has survived when most died — are still dying. James walks up the steps onto his veranda and is able to say hello to his wife as though she were someone he once knew, pat two little girls who squeal and call him Daddy, and avoid the eyes of the one person who is all too real.
He walks past her into the house and up to the attic. He puts his bayonet in the hope chest. He ignores the military doctor’s orders and gets straight to work. He must banish her before he gets used to being alive again.
Kathleen is worried but tries to be grown up about it: it’s not that Daddy doesn’t love me any more, it’s that the war was so terrible.