Colonel, now I know you don’t like me because I’m a journalist but just listen for a minute, will you? The dead are rising out in No-Man’s Land and something has to be done about it.
Creel almost started laughing at that one.
No, it wouldn’t go over well.
The Tommies were suspecting things, hinting and intimating at the worst possible occurrences. Down in their hearts they knew something was wrong beyond the usual calamities of war. Maybe they would not put a name to it, but they knew. Some of them, anyway. But the officers? No, never, ever in a million years would they accept it. They didn’t teach the old boys anything about the living dead at Sandhurst, it just wasn’t cricket.
Creel stumbled through the mud, snaking through the trench system, eyes glazed, skin damp from the rain, heart beating with a low and distant rhythm, wilting beneath the pall of stark memory, sliding down deeper into himself, seeking a cool, smooth darkness that was his and his alone.
13
Battle Fatigue
Sometimes he would come awake at night gasping for air like a stranded fish and once the sweating and gasping were over with, he’d wonder what had been suffocating him, but he’d know: the war. After awhile in the trenches it was like all the sweet, pure breath was sucked from your lungs and you were subsisting on corpse-gas, marsh mist, and the smoke of burnt ordinance.
Awake and knowing sleep was beyond him, he’d make his way up to the fire trench and listen to the Tommies whispering, telling each other how they were certain they would die and they’d never see home again. He’d listen to their voices until they became a lulling soft murmur like ancient clocks ticking away into eternity and soon enough, those voices were rain and running water, clods of earth gently striking coffin lids which was the sound of time. As dawn neared, there were low voices, the rattle of equipment, the snap of a rain-soaked poncho, the slushy sounds of mud. Now and again, something like laughter or sobbing, and then deep silence winding away into emptiness. The wind would sing a final mournful song amongst the battlements and clay-spattered earthworks. Rats would scurry out beyond the sandbags. A lone dog would howl.
In the days following the Battle of Loos, Creel began to wonder-and not for the first time-about the state of his mind and more so, the state of all minds in that war. He was starting to think that there was some infectious, collective insanity making the rounds like a germ and he could not remember the last time he had spoken with anyone that was remotely ordinary.
The Tommies bothered him.
Their youth ground to ash, they contemplated their deaths like old men, hoping only that there would be something to bury. The relentless, dogged combat and deprivation and inhumanity and suffering of the trenches were deteriorating their minds into a stew of morbid dementia and pandemic melancholia. The good white meat of reason had been chewed away and what was left was something rancid that sought the earth and quiet entombment. So many of them had reached the stage where they were convinced that the only way to be a good soldier was to die in battle. And it was not some misguided heroism, but a sort of fatalism that each day survived only prolonged the pain and the sooner it was over with the sooner they would be out of the mud and filth of the trenches and even death was better than living like a rat in a hole.
With their wide white eyes and muddy faces, they would look upon Creel like he was some sort of exotic species, a mad thing that belonged in a cage, and ask the inevitable: “What in the Christ are you doing here? You could be home.”
Creel would tell them that he had no home and a silent apartment in Kansas City didn’t count because it depressed him. He hated being at the front and he hated being away from it. That was something they understood.
“No wife or little ones, mate?”
“None. One divorce. Can’t hold a family together jumping around the world looking for that story I can’t seem to find.”
“How many wars for you now?”
“Thirteen,” he’d tell them.
They wouldn’t comment on that number as if acknowledging it would contaminate them with its poor luck. They’d just keep asking him why he was there and he’d tell them the truth: “I’m looking for something.”
They’d ask what and he would not say.
What really could he say?
That he saw Flanders as a great poisonous flower and they were all trapped in its petals, waiting for it to close up, caught in the inevitable venomous darkness, waiting for the slow call of forever night? Even to him with the somewhat morose and macabre rhythms of his thoughts that sounded more than a little like some kind of psychological/metaphorical sinktrap, the result of an overtaxed mind and an overburdened imagination.
But that was how he saw it.
Death was here, in this place. Malignant, wasting, hungry death and it was a force far beyond anything as simple as the misfortunes of war. It was alive, elemental, discorporeal and sentient…and he could feel it and had felt it ever since he got to Flanders.
Like it has been waiting for me, he often thought in the heavy shades of night. I’ve hounded it through battle after battle and now it’s not running from me anymore, it’s not hiding, it’s just waiting in the darkness like an ivied graveyard angel, arms open to embrace me and draw me beyond the pale into a world of rustling shadows and nonexistence.
And whenever his cynicism laughed at the very idea, he needed only take a tour of the countryside by day, chain-smoking and nail-biting, to see that it was not too far from the truth.
This was Death’s place.
He did not know what Flanders was before it was scarred by trenchworks and gutted by shellholes, its viscera yanked inside out and covered in mud and sunken in stagnant rainwater, a great bog floating with carrion and peppered by bones…but he was pretty sure it had been a pretty place. Probably green and growing, fertile, old world European where you could smell the sweet flowers and count the yellow haymows at the horizon, listen to the creak of horse-driven farm wagons meandering up rutted dirt roads. Like something out of a pastoral landscape by Pissarro or Cezanne.
But now war had claimed it and forever changed its face from wonderland to wasteland. The countryside had been dotted with tiny farming villages-he knew that much because their ruins were everywhere-and he imagined they had been quaint little places once upon a time. But they would never be that way again. The hand of Death was absolute, it had cast a diabolical spell here, a sinister alchemy, an infection that rotted Flanders to its moldering bones. That could never be completely erased. When he looked around now and saw those villages like monuments standing in rubble, cold, blasted, and empty, surrounded by boneyards, mud swamps, refuse and the wrecked machinery of war, blown by a cold/hot thermal wind that stank of putrescence, sewage, and excrement… he was sick to his core.
For he could not get past the awful and somewhat monomaniacal idea that this was his private hell and it was being staged for his benefit.
Insane. Paranoid. Egostistical. Yet, it had now reached the point where he could not seem to remember a life before Flanders. Even when he tried to remember his mother, his father, his brother in Cleveland and his ex-wife in Boise, all he saw were the shattered faces of the war dead from his collection of mortuary photographs.
That’s all there was.
And he feared it’s all there ever would be.
Maybe I’m nothing but a maggot feeding on death like they always said, but it all leads here. It all leads to Flanders and what’s happening here. The dead are rising and I’m going to find out why because that’s my destiny.
One thing was certain: as he sought death, death sought him.
