whisker-by-whisker for morning turnout to quarters: inspection on the firing step, heads down facing No Man’s Land, rifle at the ready. Ready for the Hun (should the Hun come today) and, worse, the Lieutenant (who came every day). Worse yet, the Sarge, who was always there, taking names (“You two! I’M LOOKING AT YOU! You and you shall walk the Dixie down to ’Bert today and fetch the water back! Chop-chop!” Sarge screamed. “Can’t the niggers hop it, Sarge?” Welly’d said. “Their turn, I’m sure…” Sarge’s mouth engulfed Welly’s nose and he give him what for: “The Nig-gers? Them Niggers ain’t yours to detail. Sing me not that hopeful song, you horrid little man! Them nig-nogs got another job, a task of never-you-mind, you dirty bugger! Now you two ’op it, you and you!” And Welly and Bill made the two-mile saunter from the front, down the zigzag to the reserve, guessing all the way—this time lucky—where and when to duck and wait the sniper’s eye, then another mile rearward along the muddied duckboards and into Albert. “Whatcher fink, Old Bill?” Welly said, pumping water at the well. He pointed at Albert’s pocked and potted steeple. The Madonna sagged, barely hanging on, her arms raised, baby God held at 9 o’clock in the shell-singing sky. “Fink she’s gonna topple or fink she’ll stay? What say ther, Bill?” And Bill, he’d had no idea except to reckon if the steeple fell one day, it would fall on him, a cert. Him, detailed by the Sarge to sit beneath and “wait for it, wait for it!” Then, with pranged and tinkered Dixie full, Bill and Welly made the same miles back to the line, ducking snipers at the crossroads of their luck/his skill and, slipping on the muck-soft duckboards—Welly remembering at one place along the way, “I sawr him go, Bill. Ol’ Ned. One minute there, then zing he scratches at a rabbit in his pants and orf the boards he slips and down he goes into that ther shellhole—that’n ther—and thas the last anyone seen Ol’ Ned, drown he was wiff all his kit. You remember Ned?” And Old Bill laughed and laughed remembering Ned. Welly, too. And returning with the Dixie barely half sloshing full of water. “GOD Damn you two! I’m watching you!” Sarge says at the nearly empty Dixie can.)
Ahead, in France and beyond, more memories. Inspection mornings: faces scraped, clothes dried and brushed as mudless as could be, their weapons ready.
“Wait for it. Wait for IT!” Waiting for the Sarge’s whistle and the call to stand down. (“You there!” Sarge yelled, plain and simple this time, no trench poetry to color it. “Munger! Keep away from that Loop, you! Hans’ll have you in his sights and I’ll be down another fool!”) Waiting for it. Waiting for it.
Then the call, “Staaand. DOWN.”
Morning. Each morning: cold water tea and the bouquet of shit, of all things redolent of the body, life steeped in piss and blood. Trench life, a heady marinade of rotted corpse brewed in No Man’s Land.
“It’s between ,” Welly said. He was peeking with Munger through the sniper’s loop toward the German lines. “ Between is what that is,” he whispered, looking at the sea of bloodied khaki that stretched from here to there. “No shelter, no trench, just holes and holes and holes blown in holes.”
Bill peeked. Some khaki bits moved but never for long. Sometimes the bodies were blown and buried by artillery, then resurrected from the muck and water-filled holes, their parts pounded, mixed and buried again by the shells. Over it all a spreading mist of night and death, gassy, gangrenous, heaving or jostled by amyl nitrate and steel. Here and there, tiny sparks of life flickered, or here and there they screamed. There was that. Since One July, screams licked day and night. The screams were of men and (he still had to laugh) horses. Horses! Mud-drowned horses. The cavalry, up for one last charge, for the old century’s sake, don’tchaknow?
Ahead, in France and beyond, more memories. Inspection mornings: faces scraped, clothes dried and brushed as mudless as could be, their weapons ready.
“Wait for it. Wait for IT!” Waiting for the Sarge’s whistle and the call to stand down. (“You there!” Sarge yelled, plain and simple this time, no trench poetry to color it. “Munger! Keep away from that Loop, you! Hans’ll have you in his sights and I’ll be down another fool!”) Waiting for it. Waiting for it.
Then the call, “Staaand. DOWN.”
Morning. Each morning: cold water tea and the bouquet of shit, of all things redolent of the body, life steeped in piss and blood. Trench life, a heady marinade of rotted corpse brewed in No Man’s Land.
“It’s between ,” Welly said. He was peeking with Munger through the sniper’s loop toward the German lines. “ Between is what that is,” he whispered, looking at the sea of bloodied khaki that stretched from here to there. “No shelter, no trench, just holes and holes and holes blown in holes.”
Bill peeked. Some khaki bits moved but never for long. Sometimes the bodies were blown and buried by artillery, then resurrected from the muck and water-filled holes, their parts pounded, mixed and buried again by the shells. Over it all a spreading mist of night and death, gassy, gangrenous, heaving or jostled by amyl nitrate and steel. Here and there, tiny sparks of life flickered, or here and there they screamed. There was that. Since One July, screams licked day and night. The screams were of men and (he still had to laugh) horses. Horses! Mud-drowned horses. The cavalry, up for one last charge, for the old century’s sake, don’tchaknow?
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