Drink for the Thirst to Come (8 page)

“That chantusey back there,” Bill went on. “Them civilians. They don’t know we’re here neither! None of ’em even sees us passing…”

“Fire now the GUN!” chanted the gunner.

WHOOM said the gun. And the next to it. And the next. Ten miles on.

“Yea,” said Bill.

“But wasn’t she a piece?
Parleyvoo
.”

The guns spoke on, and on.

Old Bill disembarked with the other day-trippers. He wandered Calais then, finally, took the train to Wipers.

“Ypres!” said the station agent. “Belgique!”

Not a long ride, Calais to Wipers, but farther than Dover was from Calais.

Wipers was still rebuilding. Thirteen years on and Cloth Hall was still rising from the rubble, a meandering medieval blockhouse, stone icicles melting upward, Bill thought. He had his look. The place was new. Ugly. He wondered about the steeple in Albert.

Precious few buses to be had and all that were were filled with smiling trippers.

“Oh well, oh well. Oh, oh, oh what a lovely day,” Old Bill said, and walked.

Flanders was flat, green, small trees now grew here and there. More amazing, it was dry. As he’d known it, Flanders had been wet brown runnels, naught but holes and mud. The trees had been crooked stakes, solitary or, here and there, forests of sticks arising from the muck and drifting mist.

Welly said it: “Holes and holes and holes blown in holes.”

A motorcycle and sidecar passed, going like 60MPH, and Bill stepped off the road. Warm day and Castrol fumes washed him. He stood on the dirt. The dirt was warm and giving. He took a handful. The war in miniature, dirt, steel bits, bone chips, old powdered flesh, all that, more, sifted between his fingers. A gust of wind carried his thinning hair into his face. Dust breathed across his neck. A wind shadow rippled the pale green grass.
The grass come quick, hasn’t it, Bill?

It’s been years
, Bill thought.
Years, Welly.

Ah, right you are Billy lad.

Grassy places had remained in No Man’s Land, a tuft here and there,
the between
, Welly called it, where a rabbit nibbled or a flower came red and sudden one morning till Welly or he or Munger or Riley took it with a shot and a laugh. Looking across the rolling green wind, his old eyes dissolved the day down to the earth as he had known it. Down below, under the grass, the day was still 1917. In 1917, the world was mud down to the chalk. Holes in holes, chalk scooped by steel and high explosive, stone turned liquid by rain, a fluid like flesh rendered by jellied petrol…

Another wind shadow rolled the field; the waves spread.

1917: Concussive ripples spread as shellfalls walked like giants in the wet wild land between armies… or the shadows, rising, nights.

Sarge said, “You two. That’s you and you!”

“Me, Sarge?” Welly said.

Bill stared. “Me?”

“You want to see them nig-nogs work? Why, aren’t you the lucky lads? You’re going to go an’ join ’em. Grab your kits, you two. Chop-CHOP!”

That was that.

“Never look ’em in the eyes,” Welly said. He and Bill and the rest walked the zig-zag to the rear. “Never, in their eyes, me ol’ ma’am sez. Steal your soul, them Niggers will.”

“An’ yer kit,” Bill said, giving him a shove. A face along the side shone black with sweat, dull with mud and dust. The face watched them.

The blacks were sappers, diggers. Their dig began five hundred yards to the rear of the line. The mine entrance was wood-framed and shored, a black hole in brown earth. A ladder down to a stage, from the stage a lift dropped into the black.

They rode the lift together. Sixty, seventy feet and more. The world winked shut above. With the sun went the stink of dead men, shit, cordite, quicklime and filthy life. They breathed humid earth. Day was yellow bulbs.

The tunnel began at the bottom of the lift. It descended, running east, toward the German lines. Electric lights every ten feet gave edges to the darkness. Their kits clacked as they walked until a voice from the dark said, “Halt.” Not like Sarge, a whisper, yet every man of them went still.

“One by one. Advance.”

One by one, they advanced. The whisper in the dark was a black, a sergeant nonetheless. A five-foot sergeant, no less. He met them at the entrance to a side gallery, just a hole in the wall and darkness beyond. One by one the sergeant shoved each man into the hole, whispering as they passed.

Welly winked at Bill, ducked and entered. Bill waited. When he came out, Welly winked again and headed down the line.

The sergeant grabbed Bill and pulled him to his mouth. “Go in. Drop kit. All of it, quite. Then come.”

“For a cert?” Bill said. He looked the little nig-nog in the eye. He felt a shove and in he went.

The gallery was cooler than the tunnel. Naught but a slick of light that snackered in from the tunnel lit the place. From the sound that pressed his ears, Bill felt the room around him was large. Around him lay a dozen kits or more. He unslung his gear, all he’d carried and treasured. The weight of iron, steel, canvas, rubber, leather, and webbing slid from his body. And wasn’t that better? His feet barely held him to the earth.

“Sss.” The corporal hissed from the light behind him. Bill rejoined the column.

A dozen feet along, Bill caught up with Welly. “Still in the trenches, us, eh Billy?” Welly turned, a smile on him. He spread his arms, walking backward. His hands brushed each side of the tunnel. His smile flicked on and off as light and shadow crossed his face. “Trenches, eh?” He reached up, ran his hand along the fresh air pipe that led them down. “Just a trench wiv a lid on it?”

They walked another dozen steps east and down. “And quiet, eh?” Bill whispered.

The pipe exhaled a breath from the world above.

“Phew,” Welly said.

“Hshh. No talk,” a voice ahead said. “No talk. Here on. Hshh.”

They went silent a dozen steps or more. The pipe exhaled another gasp, rank with death and life too long stewed in sweat and filth.

“What a pong,” Welly said. “Is that us up ther? No wonder we ain’t had no lovin’, word nor touch, since dunno when, eh Bill? Remember that chantusey…”

From dark by Welly’s side stepped a black fellow cloaked in canvas and dirt, all eyes and teeth. His paw took Welly by the shoulder and dragged him into the shadow of a side passage.

“Oi!” Bill said. “My mate!” He stepped out of line following Welly and the wog.

“Hsshhh.” The black man turned and took Bill and Welly together by their shirts, drew them together, spoke to their ears. “They above a little. Little-bit above.” He showed with his blistered fingers how far above was the enemy.

“We’re 80, 90 feet down, mate,” Welly whispered. “Who’ll hear us, 90 feet of muck and war between?” he whispered.

“Right, Sambo,” Bill said to the darkness. The detail had passed, still heading downward, forward, still toward the German lines.

“Not soldier. Not above. Digger. Them diggers.” The African let go. When he did the tunnel was truly still. Their mates had passed them. Now the war was Welly, Bill, and the nig-nog sapper alone in the shade of the war, in the black, black earth and silence.

“Hshh,” he said again.

Then Bill heard: first, the wheeze and momentary stench of the pipe’s breath from above. Then the now and again rumble, a grumble on the chest, a tap upon the eardrum, the guns above, far, far away, too far to reach. After, there was stillness and the rich loamy smell of the quiet earth. Subtracting all of that, what remained was something else.

“Whaa?” Welly’s breath in Bill’s ear momentarily erased the something. Then, a scratch. The smallest scrape, as of something soft moving above, ahead. A little ahead, not far above but insistent, a scratch and a small fall of sand and earth, like through an hourglass. Persisting.

“German dead, they dig too,” the nig-nog whispered.

“Whisss,” Welly...

Later. Much later, after it all, November 11: There came a final volley from the 8-inchers in their rear at 10:59 Ack Emma and a little more. A round went over like a fast express, thudded somewhere beyond. Then all went silent. 11 Ack Emma, the eleventh day of the eleventh month. Along the lines, 800 miles of everything went still.

Bill and Welly stared at each other. Rain drizzled as it had since… Since, God love it, 1914. Bill was shivers and shakes in the silence. Then his legs held him no more and he fell. Welly caught him. They stared at each other. Then a million men sighed. No joy, just noise.

Others, below, did not shout.

Bill and Welly were ordered back the way they’d come. They knew. They dashed. They rose from their lines and walked the way they’d come four years before, the churned earth and charnel world behind.

“She fell,” Bill said to Welly as they passed through Albert. The Madonna of the steeple lay in the rubble that was the rest of the town.

Finally, a train, the train to Calais: cattle cars for them—forty men per car, or ten horses (“Horses,” Welly laughed. “Horses!” He laughed and laughed and didn’t stop, Bill thought, until they boarded the boat).

They waited and waited aboard until things were right, just right, for some officer or other. Welly smiled at the sea, the horizon. He wouldn’t look back, not at France, not at the ruin of Europe. No. He would not.

Someone—many, actually—had a bottle or three. When they cast off for Blighty it was dark. The boat kept blackout. Regulation.

“Oi!” a hundred shouted at the captain. “Give us some light ’ere, won’t ya! U-boats ain’t hunting no more!”

The lights stayed black.

“Some’them submarines down there may not have got the word, eh, Welly?” Bill said. He took a long pull on a bottle a mate had handed him out of the dark.

“Down there, right!” Welly said. “Asleep in the deep, eh Bill,” and he took a long haul on the bottle. “All that
down
, down there, eh, Bill. All that
below
! Holes in holes and what else in the holes?” He laughed and drank some more.

“Home for Christmas, Welly!” Bill shouted. “This year, home! Come on, let’s inside, out of the air, out of the cold. Let’s us have some warmth.” He steered Welly toward the blacked out salon bar.

A hundred bodies, a thousand for all Bill and Welly knew, a million survivors and them, gathered, singing in the light of a hundred candles. Welly showed what was left of his teeth. “Horses!” he shouted over the singing. “Horses!”

Bill laughed with him.

“Gotter go!” Welly shouted over the song.

“What?” Bill shouted at his ear.

Welly made an arc with his hand, pointed to the deck.

“’ave a piss for me,” Bill said and let him go.

Much later, someone said someone, one of the Lanc’s he reckoned, had gone over the side and into the briny. “I shouted but over he went and down, like that,” he said with a snap.

They didn’t stop the boat.

Back then, when Welly and the war still lived, the nigger in the dark took them by their arms and led them. He pointed and slipped away with not a sound. Back in the tunnel and lights, Welly and Bill listened as they walked toward the mine face.

“What’cher fink ther, Bill?” Welly whispered.

“Germans is digging toward our line, we’re digging to theirs. First one there gets to blow t’other off the world, is what I think.”

“‘Th’ German dead’s wot he said. Howzat you fink, Bill?”

“Who knows what they mean, Welly?” Bill whispered. “Their way of talking, is all, I reckon.”

Welly snorted. “Yea. All uv us is dead men, eh Bill!” He snorted again.

Scratch, scratch, scratch,
said the darkness overhead.

Bill sat by the road. The sun settled into the earth behind him. His shadow rippled across the field as daylight drained from the sky. From sunup on the boat until now, he’d had a day in France and Belgium. Thirteen years ago, life, the war, all of it, was the narrow strip of land he now stared at in gathering dark.

“Sun setting in England, too, Welly,” he said.

No answer but gentle wind. Across the fields toward Messines the grasses rolled, dark shadows chasing light. In the last of the light, the wind settled to earth. Bill closed his eyes and whispered to the night.

Once down, they didn’t leave the mine. Day, night, all the same: day was work.

“You here. You carry.” The African corporal threw an empty sandbag at Welly, at Bill. The nig-nog marched down the line tossing sacks to the fifty blokes detailed to the dig. White blokes. “Soon dirt gone. When then, we lay big boom. You carry boom stuff. Then Boom.”

Welly shot Bill a look. “What’s that, mate?” Welly said, cocking his head, his hand to his ear. “Couldn’t quite catch’er ther, Womba…”

The corporal turned. A low growl came from his chest. He looked far into Welly’s eye, laid a black hand across Welly’s mouth. Welly’s eyes widened, he started to speak, but the corporal pressed his left thumb on Welly’s forehead. Pressed and pressed. The thumb entered Welly’s head. Seemed to. Of course it did not, could not. Then the corporal let him go. Eye to eye, the corporal said, “Some carry. Other some dig. Now, you carry. Sometime… sometime you dig. You hope you not dig.”

The shiny corporal’s eyes scanned the line of men. They rested on Bill, the eyes, gold and shot through with brown. “Now carry.” He walked away and the men followed.

“He hurt you?” Bill said.

Welly spit and wiped his mouth. “Nuh,” he said.

“What’d he do, then?”

Welly twitched and wiped his face, touched his head where the corporal’s thumb had pressed. “Dunno. Dunno. He mark me?”

No mark, none that Bill saw.

“Ah. I always been a bit touched, eh Bill? Touched! Get it?”

They kipped, wrapped in wool blankets, huddled in a side gallery.

“How long you fink, Bill? ’Fore they trick orf this lit’le home o’ ours? Blow it to hell and let us get back up to the real fight?”

“Dunno.”

“Nor me. Questions mate. Questions is what I got. You too? Yea. Them nig-nogs, now, they’re in charge. They got answers. I reckon we’re here for the duration, like. Here till we’re done!”