And louder.
12
Burial Rites
The commanders of the London Irish Rifles had no true idea of how many men they lost in the abortive raid on the German lines at Lens that September day. The Battle of Loos raged for three days and early estimations were that some 20,000 members of the BEF had died and another 50,000 were wounded. That information was to be kept from the troops, but of course it reached them as everything did.
In charge after charge, the LIR had captured German trench systems only to be pushed back by heavy shelling and intensive machine-gun fire that raked the barren hills of Cite St. Auguste.
Creel and Burke were there, having taken their leave of the 12 ^ th Middlesex for a time. Each morning was the same: the men were fed an extra large ration of rum and then it was up onto the firestep with rifles and fighting kit, the sergeants crying out, “FIX BAYONETS, BOYS!” and then over the top, fighting a costly battle through No- Man’s Land, stumbling over the bodies of the fallen, over twisted-up unburied corpses, leapfrogging bomb craters, slopping through the mud, hiding in shell holes, rising up to charge yet again across open fields and fighting through massive barbwire entanglements as they were raked by German sniper fire, volleys of shells and deadly accurate machine-gun strafing.
The BEF, lacking shells for true artillery support, used chlorine gas for the first time and the masked Tommies found themselves fighting through a rugged, scarred land that was obscured by rolling pockets of gas. One of the sergeants kicked a football ahead of him so his boys would charge in the right direction.
When it was finally over with and the smoke cleared, the offensive had been a disaster. For days, stretcher bearers and Field Ambulance companies moved the wounded rear to the battalion aid post and Ambulance HQ, the worst being shunted off to the Casualty Clearing Station. Both Creel and Burke worked hour after sleepless hour moving the wounded.
In the aftermath, Creel witnessed something he would never forget.
When the officers were in the dugouts, the men had a symbolic funeral for their fallen comrades: they arranged some thirty skulls in formation on the open ground beyond the support trench and paid homage to them. Who the skulls belonged to he did not dare ask, but such things were easy to come by in that war. The wind was blowing and little dust-devils were swirling about, coating those skulls with a fresh coat of age.
The soldiers, all with the same blank eyes, walked past, saluting. One guy they called Slivers-because he’d been a carpenter in Knightsbridge-openly broke down, went to his knees, and began to sob.
No one went to him.
The Tommies stood around in their mud-caked boots and filthy greatcoats, Enfield rifles slung at their shoulders. They were dirty, desperate, their eyes huge and hollow, faces like living skulls. They had lost the ability for pity.
Burke finally went over to Slivers and helped him to his feet and Slivers clung to him like he was something he had lost long ago and found again. “Got Dick, didn’t they? He was my mate. He was right in front of me and the pissing Hun got him. Right in the fucking head, they did.” He showed Burke a series of dirty smears on his uniform blouse. “That’s Dick’s brains. They sprayed on me. They was in me eyes and all over me face. This is what Dick thunk with. Poor old Dick. He was such a good mate. What am I supposed to do now, eh? What am I supposed to do without me mate?”
But nobody really knew. They were all shattered, fatigued, worn thin as wires and they didn’t have the strength to do much but stumble back into the trenches and consort with their private hell.
“ It was a mess,” one of the sergeants told Creel later. “See, what kind of action is it when you’ve got no bloody artillery what to support you with? No bleeding shells for them bleeding guns?”
“ Not good,” Creel said.
“ No, sir, not good.” The sergeant looked up and down the trenches, that long stare in his eyes like he was looking for something he could never hope to find. “It was a real mess out there. Shells coming down and men dying, fighting for every inch of ground. Patrols bumping into patrols, companies getting tangled up with other companies and that gas coming down and which way was which and who was who…saw our own boys get gassed by our own shells. Plunk, plunk, plunk, they went and no warning. Our artillery, what there was of it, didn’t cut through the Hun barbwire like it was supposed to and I was watching men, mates of mine, getting their boots tangled in it while the Hun cut them down. Ain’t that the life?”
Creel gave him a cigarette, an American one, and he liked that. Started laughing at how American tobacco could make it to the front but no Americans.
“ Country’s divided,” Creel told him. “Some want to fight, some don’t. Lots of Americans joining the Canadians to get a taste.”
“ Nothing against your countrymen, mate. If I was them, I’d stay home. Enjoy life, ain’t nothing but death here. We ain’t winning and neither is the Hun.”
As night drew on, Creel was in the dugout with a group of enlisted men and the stories started circulating as he knew they would and he knew he was going to hear things that he wanted…and dreaded…to hear. Lot of it, of course, was scattered recollections about the raids on German lines, just bits and pieces that shook themselves loose from the men’s minds as they sat and contemplated. As Creel listened, he watched men stripping their shirts off, their backs scratched raw and red from flea and lice infestations. Some of them stripped naked and ran the flame of a candle along the seams of their underclothes and you could plainly hear the lice eggs crackling. It was the only sure way to get rid of them or keep them at bay.
“ Funny bit, it was,” a corporal was saying. “One night, the mist hanging heavy, we lost C Company’s machine gunner and his two mates, see? We go up to the fortification, the gun pit, there’s the Lewis gun, all the ammo boxes pretty as you please…but no men. All five of ‘em are gone. How do you figure that? German sappers took ‘em, they wouldn’t leave the gun and ammunition, would they?”
“ 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?
