“ 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.”
Creel would tell them that he had no home and a silent apartment in Kansas City didn’t count because it depressed him. He hated being at the front and he hated being away from it. That was something they understood.
“No wife or little ones, mate?”
“None. One divorce. Can’t hold a family together jumping around the world looking for that story I can’t seem to find.”
“How many wars for you now?”
“Thirteen,” he’d tell them.
They wouldn’t comment on that number as if acknowledging it would contaminate them with its poor luck. They’d just keep asking him why he was there and he’d tell them the truth: “I’m looking for something.”
They’d ask what and he would not say.
What really could he say?
That he saw Flanders as a great poisonous flower and they were all trapped in its petals, waiting for it to close up, caught in the inevitable venomous darkness, waiting for the slow call of forever night? Even to him with the somewhat morose and macabre rhythms of his thoughts that sounded more than a little like some kind of psychological/metaphorical sinktrap, the result of an overtaxed mind and an overburdened imagination.
But that was how he saw it.
Death was here, in this place. Malignant, wasting, hungry death and it was a force far beyond anything as simple as the misfortunes of war. It was alive, elemental, discorporeal and sentient…and he could feel it and had felt it ever since he got to Flanders.
Like it has been waiting for me, he often thought in the heavy shades of night. I’ve hounded it through battle after battle and now it’s not running from me anymore, it’s not hiding, it’s just waiting in the darkness like an ivied graveyard angel, arms open to embrace me and draw me beyond the pale into a world of rustling shadows and nonexistence.
And whenever his cynicism laughed at the very idea, he needed only take a tour of the countryside by day, chain-smoking and nail-biting, to see that it was not too far from the truth.