“Bird, Whiskeyjack, you go forward with Thompson and get a feel for what’s ahead of us,” Breech says. “I want you back within a half-hour to report directly to me. ”
We check our weapons and begin making our way down the trench at a crouch. From what I can see, the trench leads pretty much straight into the smoking rubble of the village. The trench gets deeper as we advance, winding along so that every ten or twenty yards a new stretch of dirt walls opens before us. We can see by the ruined brick on either side that we are at the village’s border. A sharp traverse in the trench appears ahead. We pause by it and Thompson takes out a small mirror, carefully holds it so that he can peer around the corner. He hands Elijah the mirror, whispers that there is the ruin of a church that he’s sure will contain a sniper or machine gun. If we try to advance further we’ll be walking straight into view for more than thirty yards.
Elijah peers at the mirror and sees the layout. With the sun higher now and behind us, we will make perfect silhouettes if we go forward. Elijah notes a dugout in the wall ten yards down the trench, one that he can make safely, he says. We squat on our haunches to work out this problem.
“I can make it to cover ten yards down,” Elijah says to Thompson. “That will draw the fire of any sniper who might be there. It will be up to you two to see where he’s firing from. ”
“You’re assuming there will only be one,”Thompson answers.
“One, two, three, what’s the difference?” Elijah answers. “Just make sure you get their position. Put X in that spot there where he has a clear view of the church. ” Elijah points to a brick pile that juts out from the trench corner, with a hole through it that creates a natural loophole, a place where I can lie down behind and fire from, without exposing any more than my rifle barrel and scope. I like this idea. I get down and carefully settle myself into place, aligning my rifle so that I have a view of the church. I scan along it. I’m ready.
Thompson stands above me, puts his mirror into position.
With his rifle in his right hand, Elijah takes a breath and then walks out and around the corner. He does not run, but goes as slowly as his body will allow him. Thompson whispers loudly through clenched teeth, “Move!” but Elijah wants to make sure anyone in the church can see him. When he is five yards down the trench a rifle cracks out just as he jumps to the side. A bullet crashes into the mud wall where he’d been standing. He walks forward again and then jumps backwards just before the rifle fires a second time, another bullet whistling by very close. He then walks directly to the dugout and slips behind it as a bullet punches into the wall. Elijah looks back at where he came from and I can tell he sees Thompson reflected in his mirror, shaking his head at Elijah.
“Did you get a look at where the sniper is?” Elijah calls back.
“There are two,” I answer in Cree. “One is shooting from the ground level, the other from that higher place where the bell is. ”
“Well, shoot them,” Elijah says.
Maybe he thinks this is a sure way to get me out of the funk I’d been in since my trip to see Lisette. And it is great fun for Elijah too, I can tell. From where he is he can watch me quite clearly. I lie still, breathe calmly, peer through my scope. I know that Elijah thinks that it makes more sense to shoot the man on the ground first. The one higher up has a much more difficult time of escaping if he feels pinned in his perch.
My Mauser cracks the silence and Thompson whistles out, “Good shot!” I reload quickly as a bullet tears into the brick close to my head. The other sniper has spotted me. I fire almost simultaneously, my finger jerking the trigger. It is not the shot I’d intended. The bell gongs out hollowly.
Elijah laughs. “Shoot again, quick!” he calls out.
I reload just as the sniper answers my shot. Dust rises up by my ear. I swear, steady myself. I sense Elijah watching me take a breath in, then letting it half out. I fire.
“Got him!” Thompson calls out, as the sound of a rifle clattering to the bricks below echoes down the trench.
Beyond the church ruins, artillery fire begins, and a lot of rifle fire from the trenches on either side of us. We make our way to the church and see that the wreck of the steeple where the dead sniper lies is high enough to offer a good view of the surrounding area. Elijah tells Thompson and me that he’s going up.
“A half-hour has passed,” Thompson says. “Breech will want us back. ”
“Better to secure the high ground,” Elijah says. “It won’t take long. ”
He has to make it across a pile of loose brick that is wide open to anyone on either side. I cover the church in the event that there might still be Boche waiting there, and Thompson has the impossible job of covering everything else. Without wasting time, Elijah stumbles his way up the mound. Rifle and machine-gun fire clatters and pings off the bricks. Elijah dives into the broken doorway of the church.
The next part of the story Elijah tells me afterwards. He makes his way into the little church, letting his eyes adjust to the darkness. He knows now that this is a hot area, but he’s got that good feeling, the one that is like a shroud around him. Nothing will go wrong right now.
The roof has been blown mostly off. The steeple is close to collapse. Elijah makes his way up the rickety stairs and reaches the top. The dead sniper lies on the floor face down, like he is napping. A penny-sized hole in the back of his head leaks out blood and grey brain. Elijah waves to Thompson and me, then turns him over. His eyes are still open. They are very blue but beginning to cloud up. Like a pickerel’s eyes, Elijah thinks. The dead one is young, with not much experience. A hole no bigger than a small shirt button oozes in the centre of his forehead a couple of inches below his thick hair. A wonderful shot. Elijah sometimes forgets how good I really am. How ironic, he thinks, this Hun killed by a weapon from his own country! If Elijah or I ever were to be captured, there would be no pity for us.
A new wave of small arms fire erupts on either side of Elijah. He peers through a hole blown into the side of the wall and indeed this perch offers a good view. He can see much of the way down the trench from where we just came, and in the distance he sees the plain on the outskirts of town and a number of Canadian soldiers moving along it. He makes his way to the other side of the steeple and cautiously raises his head above a small window ledge. Fallen walls and rubble block much of the view, but he can make out trench lines running through the village that are definitely not in Canadian hands, yet appear abandoned. He still must figure out where all of the fire he attracted has come from.
Leaning back in our direction, he calls out to me in Cree. He does not want to risk a Fritz soldier hearing who knows English. “Tell Thompson he and I will hold our positions while you go back and bring the company forward to us. But be quick. If Fritz decides he wants this church back, he will take it fast. ”
After a minute, Thompson shouts back, “All right,” and I head back to retrieve our section.
Elijah settles in with his automatic rifle and begins trying to figure out where the enemy is hiding. A lot of rifle fire echoes about, but not as close as what was aimed at him.
“Do you see anything?” Elijah shouts to Thompson. Before he can answer, a spray of machine-gun fire rakes the wall that Elijah crouches against, vibrating it. They know exactly where he is. He considers making his way out of the steeple to better cover below, but if he does that, he’ll lose his sight advantage. At least now he knows roughly where the Fritz are. They are to the south and east just a little way. That is the only direction from which the machine-gunner could fire and hit the wall at his back. He wishes he had Thompson’s mirror so he could get a good look without exposing his head to them.
“I can guess their location but can’t see a damn thing,”Thompson shouts out to Elijah. “Let’s just hold tight and wait for the others. ”
A tense half-hour passes and Elijah’s very surprised that Fritz does not attempt to take back the church. The fighting has moved further into the village, and he assumes that Fritz
is in a controlled retreat. He decides to risk peeking over the ledge. Slowly, he raises his head. The sun is bright and hot now, at its apex. If a sniper’s waiting, he has a clean shot at Elijah.
Elijah waits. Nothing happens. He can see an entranceway into a pile of brick that he guesses is where they are sheltered. It seems to lead into a basement. Much of the other area is crushed stone and broken timber. He can’t see a lot of places big enough to hide more than one soldier. They must have retreated from that basement when the going was good. When I arrive with the others, Elijah knows, we will throw some eggs in just to make sure.
Elijah sits back and relaxes. A whine echoes in his head, and his arms and arse ache. A sure sign that he needs a little more medicine. He reaches into his kit and removes a readied syringe. The supply is running low. He’ll have to get more soon, maybe question Grey Eyes. Not even bothering to pull his pants down, he jabs the needle through the wool and into his thigh. The prick of it feeds his anticipation. He pushes the plunger down and feels the heat and fullness of the morphine going into his leg. No injecting directly into a vein when he needs his wits about him. The world shrinks back a little and the harsh light diffuses to a pleasant glow. Even the ache of his bowels that have not been emptied for years, it seems, goes away. His hearing sharpens, and as he lets his eyes close he makes out the scuffle of boots coming down the trench. His section, coming this way. Further away he picks out the voices of whispering Boche. Where are they? Not close enough for Elijah to worry about them right now. His listening for them makes Elijah in turn think of me. Poor Xavier, Elijah thinks, he is going deaf but does not want to admit it to anyone.
McCaan’s shout forces Elijah to raise his eyelids. “Corporal Whiskeyjack, have you spotted the enemy?” Elijah crawls to his knees and peers over the ledge toward us. We’ve clattered to a halt and sneak looks over the trench toward his perch in the steeple, rifles aimed at the stretch of crushed village ahead of us.
“Indeed, Sergeant, I have. But I believe that they have retreated. There is a hole leading into a basement to the south and to the east that looks dangerous, but nothing that a few bombers can’t take care of. ” He hears Breech bark out some orders. Breech isn’t used to all this front-line activity. Graves and a new private who doesn’t even shave yet are handed Mills bombs and sent over the top to take care of it. I see Elijah climb slowly onto his knees to get a good view of the proceedings. The fighting clatters on, hundreds of yards away. Graves takes the lead position and walks toward the entrance. The young private walks six or seven yards behind.
“Don’t forget to pull the pins,” Elijah shouts. The others in the trench laugh.
“Hop to it, Private!” McCaan barks out to the young one. “The faster you do this, the quicker we can get to the action!” Everyone laughs again. This is the private’s first mission. Graves has done this sort of thing dozens of times.
Looking back to the basement, I make out the figure of a man who has emerged from it while we were all laughing. A rag is tied across his nose and mouth. He carries what looks like a rifle in his hands but it is attached to a tube that runs under his arm and to a large tank on his back. Blue flame falls from the barrel of the strange gun and splashes onto the brick. Everyone else must see this very soon after I do. The laughing stops and Thompson shouts out, “Move!” Graves stops in his tracks. He seems about to turn, stops himself and then continues forward, raising the bomb in his hand like a club.
“Lie down, Graves!” Elijah shouts, reaching for his rifle, and I realize just as he must that the words are in Cree.
Graves looks up to Elijah, confusion on his face. A stream of bright yellow fire spits from the tip of the strange gun with a great whoosh and engulfs Graves’s body. He raises his arm to Elijah as if waving, his hair and moustache burning. Within seconds he is a ball of flame writhing silently on the ground. The young private turns and begins to run back to safety but trips on the brick, landing with arms stretched toward the others, the Mills bomb he carried flying toward us. Men rush and tumble over each other around me, trying to get out of its path. Another flame spits from the gun and engulfs the private, who screams shrilly and stands, then runs blazing in a greasy yellow fire until he crumples to the ground. Only then do I realize I must pick up my rifle and end this.
Then the bomb explodes in the trench, sending men flying.
Before I can get off the ground and aim at the fire shooter, a couple of men in the trench do it. One of them hits the tank on the Hun’s back. A fiery explosion shoots up into an orange-and-black ball of flame. What was a man is now burning pieces of carrion on the ground. Elijah rushes down from the steeple. Graves is a smoking heap. The young private is still alive, the flames out now, but they’ve burned the clothes from his body and he reminds me of the charred moose that Elijah and I found on the riverbank so long ago. He is unrecognizable lying there, gasping, the pink inside his mouth the only colour that stands out against the oozing and charred black of his body.
A soldier screams in the trench. Another lies dead. Their two bodies muffled the explosion and it is pure luck that the whole section wasn’t killed by the blast. I am all right, but shaken. Fat walks in circles, muttering. Graves was the only one who treated him kindly. A couple of the others stare down at the screaming soldier in the trench. Others stare confused at the burnt kid. Nobody knows what to do. We are stunned by this new weapon used against us. McCaan begins shouting for a medic. It breaks the spell.
Elijah and I take covering positions and keep an eye out for any other Boche. That is when we hear another sound coming from the direction of Graves’s body. I turn around and watch as Fat sits beside the burnt corpse, slapping his own face hard as he can, crying.
By day’s end we’ve cleaned out the coal-mining village and word trickles down that the First and Second Divisions have taken Hill 70. The Canadians are poised now to go into the big city of Lens. Word also comes of more of the fire attacks against us, and more and more Canadian troops are being stretchered down from the front lines, bodies melted and black. The smell is sweet enough to make the stomach feel bad. Rumours travel that the Germans have introduced another new weapon, a type of gas that is fired long distance by shells and burns the skin. We’ve entered into a fire war, Elijah says to me.
Elijah tells me he dreams of Graves on fire, waving to him. Elijah sees and smells his blackened body. And this makes Elijah dream of Sean Patrick, a neat hole in his throat, his life blown out the base of his skull. He dreams of Gilberto, of me describing how one moment he was there smiling, the next his big body was lying across me, lifeless. Elijah looks up. They stand around him in his dugout. Smoke wafts up from Graves’s head. Sean Patrick is grey. Gilberto’s brain leaks out from his mouth. “Do what you can,” they all tell him. “There is nothing sacred any more in a place such as this. Don’t fight it. Do what you can.” Elijah wakes with a start.
Through the rest of August, we hold the hill and the small surrounding villages that we’ve taken. From this vantage we continue to pound Lens, but just as before, our forward movement has crunched to a stop. Elijah’s crazy with the boredom of routine. Little action in the way of trench raids, just night patrols in no man’s land. He asks Lieutenant Breech permission to resume sniping with me, tries to win his argument by explaining that we have great advantage in being on a rise, looking down at the Hun for once. It is not long before he and I are searching out good spots again, and this helps relieve the growing ache inside of Elijah that he cannot stem. We lie still for days, searching out targets. We’re after officers and must be very patient. Thompson had once told us that spotting officers is easy. They are the ones who aren’t doing anything when everyone else is working.
In the long hours of hunting Elijah tries to understand what is growing in him. He talks to me about this through the nights we spend out in the damp and mud. Mist rises from craters and swirls in the stink. In the end, the answer that comes is simple. Elijah has learned to take pleasure in killing.
> Elijah says that something in me has hardened in the last months. I talk even less than before, do not smile at all any more. He knows that I want to be home, that I am sick of all of this, but he tells me I must realize that the freedom of this place will not present itself again. But this freedom he talks about, this freedom to kill, is a choice I no longer want.
We’ve found a place that is three hundred yards from the Boche line. Elijah and I have a good view of it, but very little cover is offered here and we will be easily spotted as soon as we fire. One shot, two at best, then we must get back to our line. We wait and watch.
There is an officer who appears in the Hun line, but only for a moment each morning at stand-to. He was clearly visible this morning, and Elijah had a shot, but was still groggy from a long, restless night. He tells me he will not let that chance go by again tomorrow morning. We spend this day looking up at the sky, waiting for the aeroplanes to swoop across the trenches, strafing and bombing. But none come. “I want to fly in one of those once before I die,” Elijah says again.
The night is even longer than the day, but Elijah’s kept awake by the image of the officer coming into the sight and Elijah pulling the trigger. I pretend to sleep lightly beside him as he reaches into his kit and extracts a syringe. He needs some to steady his nerves, to take away the aches that are now a part of his every waking moment. He nudges me when dawn is approaching and he peers through his glass at their trench. Enough light now to make out forms in the darkness.
When the grey breaks from the black over the horizon, Elijah places his finger on his trigger. Just as yesterday, the same soldiers’ heads appear for stand-to, and just behind them a lieutenant appears, hands behind his back, inspecting the line.