Blue Ravens: Historical Novel (21 page)

The First Pioneer Infantry was ordered by French commanders to rush the enemy at Fismes on the Vesle River between Soissons and Reims. The soldiers had driven the enemy out of Fère-en-Tardenois and then advanced toward the Vesle River.

Fismes was in ruins and the central road was covered with the smoldering debris of buildings, wagons, bodies, and the wreckage of military equipment from several days of enemy bombardments. The explosions dismembered
the soldiers, and armies of rats ate the faces, eyes, ears, cheeks, and hands. My face shivered as the rats devoured the exposed bodies. Two soldiers shot at the rats, but the sergeant shouted not to waste ammunition.

The soldiers marched quickly through the town of ghosts and shadows, and then were ordered to pursue the enemy across the river to Fismette. There, the infantry encountered heavy fire from machine guns and were caught within hours in a massive barrage of enemy artillery. The soldiers were under direct enemy fire and there was no immediate military support or escape.

The French had ordered two companies of infantry soldiers to carry out a frontal attack against an entrenched enemy. The strategy was borrowed from some ancient manual of ritual war. The French and British courtly commanders had lost many, many battles and had endured hundreds of thousands of casualties over the centuries by a direct charge of soldiers with no strategy of stealth or recovery. The French officers were unready and should have learned elusive maneuvers and how to outwit the enemy some century earlier from native warriors in North America.

Fismes and nearby forests were bombarded the entire night by the Germans. Two infantry regiments were under constant machine gun fire and besieged by the entrenched enemy across the Vesle River in Fismette. The French officers who ordered the offensive should have been the first to face the enemy, and the last to leave the field of battle. The opposite was more obvious that stormy night as hundreds of soldiers were blown to pieces in the bombardment. The officers had gathered in secure tents to dine, study maps, and pose war strategies.

Sergeant Sorek ordered his two native scouts on another risky overnight mission. I protested that my rifle was too bulky and, as a scout, demanded a pistol. His stare was mean and steady, the tiny black eyes of a predator, then he turned away in silence and prepared a military requisition for two Colt pistols and regulation holsters. The order might have taken several weeks, even months, and the great ironic war might have ended by then. So, the taciturn sergeant borrowed two pistols from other soldiers, a driver and a telephone engineer.

Sergeant Sorek acted at once and only because we had already captured five enemy soldiers on seven missions, and the most recent captives provided
important information about enemy artillery and machine gun positions. The Germans had been routed to the east in the past few days and the gun positions changed nightly.

Aloysius painted his face late that afternoon, wide bands of blue with black and rouge circles, in preparation for our overnight mission to locate the current enemy machine gun emplacements. My brother had never painted his body as a warrior. The pattern of his face colors was original, more aesthetic than menace, a comic mask, but not the war paint of a traditional native ceremony.

I blackened my face and hands, and with no trace of blue or rouge. Camouflage was more important than war paint, but my brother was persuasive. Seven infantry soldiers in the regiment wanted their faces painted for combat. Aloysius painted the blue wing feathers of abstract ravens on the cheeks of the soldiers. The spread of primaries created the illusion of a face in flight. Yes, every painted soldier returned safely from combat that night. Blue was a secure color of peace, courage, and liberty. The soldiers saved the paint on their faces, and later my brother retouched the feathers.

Later that night we floated a short distance on a pontoon boat through the debris of war on the black Vesle River. The river was about thirty feet wide and seven feet deep in the middle. The boats were towed back by the engineers. We waited in silence near the shore, and then moved into the fractured forest. We were armed with Colt pistols, four magazines of ammunition, and our Elephant Toe pocketknives.

Aloysius wore a floppy hat to protect the distinct paint on his face. He was determined to scare at least one enemy soldier before the paint washed away overnight in the rain. I wore a soft hat too, but the rain actually improved my face paint, the ordinary disguise of a withered tree trunk.

The gusts of wind and rain, flashes of lightning, and thunder were head to head that night with mighty explosions, the roar and shudder of allied and enemy artillery bombardments. Once again we took advantage of the rainy weather, the crash of artillery shells, and thunder that pitchy night to cover the slight sounds of our moves in the forest.

Aloysius led the way through the forest muck in leaps and bounds with each burst of lightning and explosion to a secure natural mound in the center of huge cracked trees. Our strategy was to fall asleep there despite the
weather and artillery, to become a native presence in the folly and deadly chaos of the war. My brother was a warrior beam with a mutable comic face in the rain and in every flash of lightning.

The artillery bombardment ended early in the morning. The trees around the mound emerged in the faint traces of light as black and splintered skeletons. We were native scouts in a nightmare, a curse of war duty to capture the enemy.

The war was surreal, faces, forests, and enemies.

The Boche reeked of trench culture, and we could easily sense by nose the very presence of the enemy. An actual presence detected by the cranks and throaty sounds, and by the very scent of porridge, cordite, moist earth, biscuits, and overrun latrines at a great distance. Some odors were much more prominent, urine, cigarettes, and cigars, that moist morning. Officers smoked cigars, so we knew we were close to a command bunker. The most obvious scent of the enemy was the discarded tins of Wurst and Schinkin, sausage and ham, and the particular rations of Heer und Flotte Zigaretten and Zigarren.

The Great War could be described by the distinctive scent of machine oil, mustard gas, chlorine, the malodor of urine, putrefied bodies, cheesy feet, and by cigarettes, Heer und Flotte, Gauloises Caporal, and Lucky Strike.

The artillery bombardments were suspended time and again before dawn, an unspoken truce so the soldiers could eat breakfast in peace, crap at ease, and then restart the war. We took advantage of that truce absurdity and moved slowly to outflank the enemy.

Seven common cranes soared over the desecrated forest to the south. The animals, rabbit, deer, wild boar, and fox, had escaped the ravages of the enemy, but few birds survived the war. The poison gas and constant bombardments were devastating to natural flight and the ordinary songs of the seasons. Later we saw more cocky northern ravens, the
grands
corbeaux
, than any other bird, and only one magnificent
aigle botté
, a booted eagle with great white shanks.

Aloysius lowered his head and moved in the smart spirit of an animal, sudden leaps, lurches, and slithers on his belly. I followed in the same manner, and our moves were precise, only at the instance of other sounds in the forest. I was close to my brother, at his side, and could hardly hear his
moves over the wind, or over the distant sound of trucks, airplanes, and the noisy light tanks, mainly the French Renault.

Once the artillery barrage started again we could move with greater speed, but with increased caution, of course, not to create a silhouette, or show of face or shoulder on the move. Snipers were certainly positioned to cover the entire area, communes, forests, rivers, and patiently waited for a single rise of eye, turn of cheek, or slight exposure, a face above a ravine, trench, or bomb crater. Scouts are trained by stories and by experience to anticipate the secret shot of a sniper. Every scout must envision the sniper with even the slightest moves. Native hunters moved in the same way to avoid the sight and scent of the animal. The sniper waits to shoot, and the wise animal converts familiar silhouettes and escapes the scene.

Aloysius gestured with his finger in the direction of a machine gun placement. We had detected the scent of moist earth, cold metal, machine oil, and slithered in the muck a few feet at a time to the right and behind the enemy position, and waited for the roar of artillery.

We could not yet see the enemy but we sensed the presence of two or three soldiers in a new trench with a machine gun. Minutes after the first rounds of artillery that early morning we raised our heads, crouched in the muck, and then rushed toward the enemy soldiers. I shot the first soldier who had raised his rifle, and my brother leaped into the trench and stabbed the second soldier in the stomach and chest with his Elephant Toe knife, and then with a swift back swing of his hand cut the throat of the enemy. The third soldier raised his hands to surrender, and pleaded not be scalped as my brother raised his bloody Elephant Toe. The soldier pointed to other machine gun emplacements nearby, and one by one we attacked the enemy positions.

Aloysius shouted, a wild curse, and rushed the enemy. The Boche soldiers were stunned by the face paint and surrendered for fear of being scalped by a fierce native warrior. We assaulted three machine gun emplacements that morning and captured seven young soldiers who were grateful not to be scalped and eager to end the desperation, fear of death, and the war.

I shot and killed only two soldiers and my brother scared the others with his bloody knife to surrender. As we marched the seven enemy soldiers through the forest back to the river ten other soldiers surrendered without
a fight. We forced the seventeen enemy soldiers to wade and swim across the Vesle River to Fismes. Early the next day several infantry regiments and other military units had advanced beyond the machine gun emplacements that we had seized and put out of action. The two-day battle was fierce and the infantry soldiers captured Fismette.

The Boche were routed from the Vesle River.

Sergeant Sorek counted the captives twice, and ordered me to write their names. Later he told me not to worry about the borrowed pistols. We could return them at the end of the war. The sergeant promised to recommend my brother and me for the Distinguished Service Cross. The blue face paint, a woad dye, was smeared and lasted for more than two weeks. The black charcoal on my face easily washed away in the morning rain.

››› ‹‹‹

Aloysius carved three wooden boats from pieces of shattered
arbre de charme
, or hornbeam trees. The boats were about the length of hand grenades with blunt bows and wide sterns for stability. He had collected chunks of various broken trees, oak, hazel, wild cherry, and beech with smooth bark similar to maple. The best grain for boats and pendants was
charme
, hornbeam, or otherwise named ironwood on the White Earth Reservation.

My brother painted each boat blue with a rouge bridge and carved the name of Odysseus on one boat, Misaabe on the second, and Augustus on the third. The three boats of tribute were christened and launched one sunny morning on the Vesle River. We recounted stories of the trader, the healer, and our uncle on the reservation and walked with the boats down the river. Someone, a lonesome child or an old man, might discover the boats ashore in England, Portugal, Spain, or on an island in the Caribbean.

The
Odysseus
,
Misaabe
, and
Augustus
sailed with the flow of the Vesle River from Fismes to the Aisne River, joined the Oise River, and then sailed down the River Seine near Paris to the port of Le Havre and the English Channel. We were scouts on risky missions at the end of the war, and the boats carried our stories and memories out to sea. Later my brother painted blue ravens and boat scenes on the River Seine in Paris. We searched for the
Odysseus
,
Misaabe
, and
Augustus
on rivers, docks, lakes, ocean beaches, and in many ports.

I leaned against a tree near the river that afternoon and read book five
of
The Odyssey
.
In the end he deemed it best to take to the woods, and he found one upon some high ground not far from the water. There he crept beneath two shoots of olive that grew from a single stock—the one an ungrafted sucker, while the other had been grafted. No wind, however squally, could break through the cover they afforded, nor could the sun's rays pierce them, nor the rain get through them, so closely did they grow into one another.

› 14 ‹

M
ONTBRÉHAIN

— — — — — — —
1918
— — — — — — —

Margaret, our mother, wrote that she had read newspaper stories in the
Tomahawk
about the major offensives against the Germans at the Vesle River and Fismes in France. She mentioned several divisions and places of combat but she never expressed her worries directly. My stories were published several weeks later on the reservation, and even then she did not comment on our risky missions as scouts.

My mother always wrote separate personal letters to me and to my brother. She understood our individual sentiments and selected just the right words of intimacy, and special memories. In a recent letter she mentioned our cousins in the war, major military offensives, the proud bandage brigade, gold star mothers, and the purchase of war bonds on the reservation. Luckily very few native soldiers from the reservation died in the war. Specific names were censored, of course, but general references and some regional place names were acceptable, such as Château-Thierry, Fismes, the Vesle River, and Picardy.

Ignatius Vizenor wrote to his mother, for instance, but could not reveal by name that his division was under the command of the British Expeditionary Forces. Angeline was not aware that her son Lawrence Vizenor had been deployed in the Battle of the Argonne Forest. Naturally, we were eager to have more recent information about our cousin and the advance of the Thirty-Third Division in combat near the valley of the Meuse River.