Regardless, they’d come surging out, swarming, infesting, feeding off the dead, biting the living, scavenging for food scraps, crawling through refuse heaps, and even eating leather boots and belts…quite often while some poor bastard was wearing them. Numbering in the millions, they knew no fear. They ran through the trenches in numbers, crawling over men whether asleep or awake. They were huge, gray things, fattened on carrion, rabid eyes beady, pelts greasy with slime and drainage, teeth forever gnawing and chewing and nipping.
They were a constant of war. When there was a lull in the action and the Tommies got bored scraping their tunics free of nits, they’d shoot rats off the sandbags or bait them with bacon on the muzzles of their rifles. When a nest was found, they’d kick the rats to death with their heavy boots and stomp the young…not that it thinned their numbers any. Sometimes enterprising young officers, new to the trenches and horrified by the idea of sharing them with mulling rodents, would rat-proof the dugouts with wire netting, spending hours and hours at it only to discover four or five rats crowding under their dinner table looking for scraps.
War produced refuse and human wreckage and that brought the rats. It was a vicious cycle and there was only one cure for it: peace.
5
Casualties
The Germans broke up a fierce dawn raid by the 12 ^ th with a chemical attack, a combination of mustard gas and chlorine. Quite a few men had gotten enveloped in yellow clouds of death before they got their masks on. Creel volunteered to go out that night beneath the light of the moon with a burial party. The Germans would be doing the same and it would be something of an unofficial ceasefire while what could be collected was collected.
“Bloody hell,” Sergeant Burke said when he got wind of things. “What the hell’d you get us into this time? A pissing burial detail?”
“ Come on, Burke,” Creel said. “Just a little walk out into No-Man’s Land.”
“ I’ve been out there more times than I’d like to recollect.”
“ This time no one will shoot at you.”
Burke grunted. “So says you.”
That afternoon, they took a ride on an ambulance with the last of the gas survivors to Number Four Rest Camp. There were wounded aplenty amongst the neat rows of peaked hospital tents, but most of the men seemed quite fit, Creel thought. Groups of Tommies were in the fields digging graves, sweating rivers, while a sergeant- major stomped about swearing at them and snapping a riding crop against his leg.
“ What gives here?” Creel said.
Burke laughed. “Oi, don’t be so bleeding silly, mate. What you think is going on here? These boys is got the jack, near everyone of them.”
“ The jack?”
“ Aye, the clap, the crawlies in the ballies, the old Syph. The pox.”
Creel got it then: syphilis. As they toured the camp they learned in bits and pieces that there was something of a pandemic of venereal disease laying unit after unit low. The War Office was losing its patience with the situation and there was a posting on the notice board from Lord Kitchener himself saying something to the effect that in the future, any man rendered unfit for active duty because of VD would suffer an appalling fate: his wife, parents, or relatives would be informed in writing of his condition and how he had contracted it.
Those with the pox were in camp to go through a new German treatment called 606 which involved mercury injections.
Creel scribbled it all down in his notebook.
“ You don’t think they’ll let you print that, now do you?” Burke said and Creel told him that one day the war would be over and he would be back in the states and when that happened he was going to write a book about it, tell it the way it was not the watered-down, censored claptrap the press corps allowed.
The problem with VD, Creel was told by the Medical Officer, was that many French women were in a desperate state. Their men were off fighting the Hun. Even old men were being conscripted, anyone that could hold a rifle. So these women had no way to buy food or feed their children, so they turned to the oldest trick in the book.
A cheeky private from the Royal Artillery told Creel exactly how it worked: “You get these old haybags what will put anything inside ‘em, see? You give ‘em a five-franc note and they takes you into this dirty old room with a dirty old bed in the corner. Then, quick as you please, sir, she undoes your fly and has herself a feel and a squeeze to see if you’ve got the pus or any such foulness. Then off come her knickers and such a sight that is. If it don’t cool yer business, then in you go. And when yer done sweatin’ and puffin’, she has herself a boiling kettle and gives you a cuppa with herbs and brews and what not for disease’s sake.”
Creel wrote it all down already figuring on a chapter reserved to prostitution and vice in his book. It was going to be a good one and when he told Burke about it he couldn’t stop laughing.
“ Your brain is not strictly right, Mr. Creel,” he said.
Creel took a few shots of the men burying the dead because he could not help himself. He was drawn to it. Burke got him out of there as some of the diggers looked ready to add another corpse to their collection.
On the way back to the front, he tried to get Burke to speak of his experiences with the London Rifles. He’d won the Victoria Cross at the Battle of Aisne for single-handedly capturing a German machine-gun and dispatching the crew that manned it, then turning it on the Germans themselves and mowing them down in ranks. But Burke didn’t want to talk about that.
Instead:
“ A lot of the boys had dysentery so bad they slit open the arses of their trousers so they could shit while they were fighting,” he said without a trace of humor. “Nothing can take away a man’s dignity like fouling himself every five bloody minutes. You’re sent here to fight in the trenches with rats and lice, corpses rotting at your feet, and you get trench fever and dysentery. What kind of fucking war is that, I ask you?”
He went on to tell a tale of the men of the London Rifles fighting with their trousers at their ankles, so riddled with dysentery-or “the screaming squats” as he called it-were they. A sergeant named Holmes that they’d all cherished for his wit and common sense and fatherly, fair treatment of the boys in his platoon had gotten dysentery so bad that he could no longer walk. He crawled about, white and trembling, his pants down, his backside and shirt fouled brown with his own shit. They kept watch on him but he’d crawled off to the latrine trench at some point and been so weak with it, that he’d fallen into the slime and hadn’t the strength to climb free. He’d drowned in a vile, fly-specked pool of excrement.
6
Burial Detail
By six that night, Creel and Burke were back at the trenches and then it was off with the burial detail which Burke was still grumbling about. Sergeant Haines formed up his burial party and they went over the top into No- Man’s Land. They carried gas masks because gas was still clinging to hollows and low spots. German burial parties came within a few yards of them but were ignored as they ignored the Tommies.
The mud was thick and slopping when they stepped off the duckboards, sinkholes sucking men right up to their waists at times and it was a real struggle pulling them back out. The corpses were everywhere, some jutting from the mud and some floating atop it, all of them yellow with gas, blistered, limbs contorted, death-white fingers clutching at their throats, bubbling tangles of yellow vomit hanging from their mouths along with regurgitated chunks of their lungs.
It was ghastly work.
Since sniper fire was not a worry, the men carried shaded lanterns with them and more than once they stopped as scurrying trains of rats came up from flooded burrows and bomb craters, immense things that paid them
