Lt. Billings stood up too, though he didn’t reach out to shake Stanley’s hand. Stanley was glad about the lack of the gesture because that would have truly meant that Lt. Billings did not expect him to return, but was only sending him out because there was nobody else who would go.
“Find Major Walker,” said Lt. Billings. “Give him half the message, and he’ll know I need the other half. He’ll tell you what that is, and when I have the whole message, I can call retreat. Tell him I sent you, you got all that?”
“Yes, sir,” said Stanley. His heart was thumping in his chest, threatening to push its way out, and his knees started to knock together. “I’ll bring the message back, I promise.”
“It’s a foolish thing to make such promises,” said Lt. Billings. He shook his head and looked down at the busted radio before looking up at Stanley. His expression was so deep and serious that Stanley knew he was going to die the minute he stepped out of the trench. The alternative, however, was to stay in the trench and watch whilehis friends’ bodies froze in the mud, taking his heart with them as they became one with the earth, and that he could not bear.
“Here’s a canteen and here’s your rifle,” said Lt. Billings. “You might need to kill some Krauts, and you won’t believe how thirsty you can get when you’re running hard, terrified enough to piss your uniform.”
Stanley took the canteen and looped it over his neck and shoulder, then hung the rifle across his chest in the other direction. He wasn’t exactly armed to the teeth, but he had a pouch of bullets and could give somebody a run for their money. After that, he’d be out of bullets and dead in a ditch somewhere.
He couldn’t think about that now. He needed to go over the top and start running. The major would be in a trench at the back of the field. At least, that was the general idea in most battles.
“That way, right?” asked Stanley. He pointed over his shoulder with his thumb.
“More over that way,” said Lt. Billings. “Straight across and then over. He’ll be in the right quadrant. You won’t see any flags, but it’s going to have more sandbags and look a damn sight tidier than where we are now.”
“Yes, sir,” said Stanley.
He straightened up and gave Lt. Billings the most efficient salute he’d ever managed, out of respect. Then, not allowing himself one last glimpse at the pile of bodies at the end of the trench, he pushed his way past the three soldiers who were manning a howitzer that was almost out of shells, and climbed up the ladder.
Stanley slipped at the bottom rung, and was tempted to call it done then and there. For the memory of Isaac, Rex, and Bertie, and all the others, he made himself go up and up till he was standing on top of the ridge, looking over the dip in the earth that ran next to the ruined castle and the small cottage whose roof was half gone.
The sprawl of barbed wire along the top of each trench was intertwined with the dark flags of smoke that twisted and moved as though it were alive. The sun was a smudge through the brown and black haze, and the smell of hot oil and human excrement shot itselfinto his lungs with his first breath. The air was cold, and it seemed as though frost speckled the air like little bits of diamonds made half yellow by the smoke from fires and the general exhalation of despair and gloom and death. Stanley watched a shell explode a hundred feet to his left, turned the other way, and started running.
The idea was to get out of the line of fire, for that was where the major was to be found. The easiest way was to follow the line of trenches, to run inside of them along the bottom, and make his way there. He started to run, his canteen bouncing, his rifle banging into his thigh the whole while.
At the edge of the trenches were the round tops of helmets. Beneath those glimmered the exhausted, tired eyes of soldiers who saw him go, who knew where he was headed, and who had no hope that he would make it. A few soldiers stood up and fired beyond Stanley to draw enemy attention away from him when he had to cross over the top of a trench to get to the next one. The shots zinged around him, anyway. If he slowed down, he was going to take a hit, so he kept low in the trenches and kept running.
His boots slipped as he headed down a small hollow, and he almost fell to his knees as he went up the other side; it was like trying to run up a waterfall, only this one was of mud, with bits of shell and hunks of rock. Just as Stanley got halfway to the top, he heard the high-pitched pop of a canister as it opened, and even before he smelled the bitter tang, a yellow cloud of mustard gas descended around him like a blanket of pure poison.
He brought his hand to his mouth, and staggered to the top of a trench, and though he kept his breath shallow, he felt his lungs collapsing, and fell to his knees, coughing up spit, his hands in the mud, his eyes closed. The yellow swirl filled his brain until there was nothing left but an empty ache and the sting in his lungs. He barely felt his head hit the mud and then sighed, thinking that it would be good to stay right where he was, for what did it matter anyhow? And then it became blackness, so, so much blackness.
CHAPTER TWO
Devon checked his notes, which he kept in a suitably old-fashioned canvas notebook, and continued typing on his laptop. It was always easy if he just started and kept typing for a good solid hour. That way, he didn’t have the time or brain energy to doubt his own ideas. Besides, he was on the tail end of the project, so there was no shifting to another thesis now, no changing themes. No going back. Soon the miracle of the grant would come to an end, and his time in the cottage near the little French village of Ornes, where once the brave 44thBattalion had met its sad fate, would come to an end as well.
He paused to consult the chart that the university’s meteorology department had emailed him, though he didn’t really need to. He had it memorized, as well as the other five spreadsheets and the fifteen colored charts that indicated the weather over the course of the battle. He’d picked this one battle because his advisor had told him to focus, which would help keep the thesis from going all over the place.
It was slightly amusing to know so much about a single event, but it was a little sad, too, with the futility of it all. The lack of supplies, plus the terrible rain that had remained positioned over the small valley, made life in the trenches a living hell. The men in the battalionhad all been young and inexperienced, fighting and dying without having much effect on the overall war, which had ended three years after the battalion had met its fateful demise.
Devon pulled up Google and enteredWW1,which the search engine finished for him, as he’d entered the term so many times that he and the search phrase were practically on kissing terms. He didn’t even have to capitalize it, though he did, out of respect. Then he clicked onImagesand scrolled through what came up.
It was always the same, hundreds and hundreds of black and white images of battlefields. Some of the images were streaked with the dust that was on the camera lens when the photo was taken, others scratched, some sepia toned. Then he typedsoldiers, and pressed enter, and sighed as the familiar array of pictures of World War I soldiers displayed before him.
The young men who had fought the war had no idea what they were getting into. At the beginning, it must have seemed like a lark to join a war, as their uncles and grandfathers had. But the brutal conditions in the trenches, the lack of technology to coordinate efforts over vast tracts of land, not to mention the flu pandemic, all of that had been bad enough. To Devon, the worst of it had been the innocence that had been destroyed.
If he really wanted to torture himself, he’d enteredAmerican doughboysin the search field, as the nickname would bring up hundreds of pictures of young American soldiers fresh-faced and ready to ship out to war, but his heart wasn’t in it this morning. He couldn’t bear to see them, not when he was writing about the lack of bullets, the bad food, and the cold front that had lingered over the area for weeks, making the boys cold and damp and miserable.
He was fascinated, however, with how they looked, though it wasn’t always good to let himself give in to his obsession. He loved their American faces, sweet and innocent, their eyes full of adventure. Their hair was typically greased back in a jaunty way, as if they assumed that once they got to the front that there’d be more Macassar oil and mirrors available so that they could check their look once they’d applied it.
So he didn’t do more searches. Instead, after writing a few hundred more words, he got up and stretched, and thought about making some coffee. The French had the best coffee he’d ever tasted, smooth and silky; even the regular stuff was miles better than it was in the States, though maybe that had to do with the lack of haste in which the French drank it. Though that was only in town, as there was nobody in the cottage to watch him whip up a cup in his French press, and then to stand there drinking it black, hoping it would wake him up so he could finish his stint for the day.
Or maybe he should just go for a walk now? Anything to take him away from the dull task of replicating spreadsheets of data into small, manageable tables. He hated working with tables, and never could remember how to get them to break between rows instead of across them. Besides, it was good to step back from his obsession every now and then so that he wouldn’t be so much the mad grad student who couldn’t think of anything else other than doughboys or coffee rations, or canvas tents, or canvas puttees, or canvas-covered canteens with lift-the-dot fasteners, which had been invented in the Civil War, or before that—
With a shake of his head, Devon put on a pair of sneakers that would instantly mark him as being an American, but he wasn’t going into town, only across the fields. Then he grabbed a sweater and jacket, and after he’d bundled up in layers, went out into the misty afternoon. He could leave the door unlocked, and usually did, unless he was going into the village or would be gone for a while.
Back home, he was lonely, just as he was now, mostly because he was always involved in his work. But also it was because nobody else he knew was doing a master’s thesis on how weather affected the battle of the 44thBattalion outside of the village of Ornes. Nobody from his college days could understand his passion for the subject, let alone take the time to listen. He bored everybody he knew within moments of meeting them, and his loneliness had grown.
