even if he could not seem to sit still save for an occasional peep into his microscope. I brought a bottle of brandy and despite the mortuary spread around us, I forced him to drink with me for Michele LeCroix had accepted my proposal and we were to be married. West congratulated me, but I could see his mind was on other things-namely that awful vat and the unsettling sounds coming from it. I was certain at that point that whatever was coming to term in there had him scared to death.
17
Incoming
Sergeant Burke did a little snooping, something he was very good at, and learned that Dr. Hamilton was attached to the 1 ^ st Canadian Light Infantry, whose battle lines were only a few miles west of the 12 ^ th Middlesex. He was an American, as Creel had suspected, a lieutenant and quite a capable surgeon. Other than that, there was very little.
“There’s got to be more,” Creel said, somewhat exasperated.
“That’s it, mate.”
“Dammit. He’s involved in this somehow and I’m going to find out how.”
Burke sighed. “You’re going to get your arse thrown out of the war. And if you don’t care about that, think about me. I’ll have to go back to the fighting and I’m not liking the idea.”
Creel brooded for hours after that. He was too close. Right on the periphery of something that might be much bigger than even the war itself and he was not going to give up now. Though his relationship with Captain Croton was a little strained, maybe he could arrange a visit with the 1 ^ st Canadian, embed himself over there for a time because that’s where he needed to be. That was the epicenter or damned near to it.
Burke was always warning him about going slow because he was already trying the patience of command, but he wasn’t about to go slow. There was a time to hide and wait, a time to listen, and a time to spring and go for the throat and that particular time was now.
As he sat in the forward trench, lost in thought, watching the slugs inching out of the trench walls, listening to the frogs croaking out in flooded bomb craters, he tried vainly to find his cynicism, his detachment, his objectivity-these were the meat and blood of any journalist-but they were gone. They no longer existed. He was one great creeping mass of anxiety from his head to his feet.
Go ahead, boyo, track down this Dr. Hamilton. Let him open his dark chest of wonders and let you peer inside. Write it all down. Write the story that can never be published. But it’s more than journalism now, it’s more than war reporting…it’s personal and you know it. Whatever’s at the root of this madness, it’s got your number.
And that number is about to be punched.
Sergeant Kirk came sloshing through the standing brown water and Creel nearly jumped out of his skin.
“ Keep your head down,” he said. “The Hun is about to come calling. I can feel it in my bones.”
And Creel could too.
He could feel the tension building through the trenches like every man there was wired together, part of some machine of cycling dread. In the dugouts, on the firestep clutching rifles with almost religious devotion, huddled over meager dinners of cheese and Bully Beef, leaning up against sandbagged ramparts-all the faces were the same: bleached white, lips pulled into stern gray lines, eyes huge and almost neurotic in their intensity. The Tommies prayed, squeezed rosary beads in their fists, holding tight to good luck charms and fetishes, everything from rabbits’ feet to a badly worn photograph of a wife or a cherished child, and-in some cases-the dingy brass button off the tunic of a mate who’d gone home or a favored spent shell casing that had saved a life or some nameless wooden effigy carved out of boredom and hope, smoothed into an unrecognizable shape by oily grasping fingers.
Creel was not immune to it.
He found himself gripping his field notebook, tensing fingers pressing into familiar grooves in the leather cover. He watched men going through the pre-battle rituals of survival-touching objects, holding their rifles a certain way, squatting in a particular stance, many of them humming beneath their breath or whistling a lost tune from childhood. These were all protections against evil, dismemberment, and death. Charms that would get them through one more battle and one more day and the stark horror of fatalism was apparent on the faces of any that had broken, however minutely or innocently, the sanctified steps of ritualization.
Night crept over the sandbags in black twisting worms of funeral crepe. Breathing was low, heartbeats high. Sweat broke on faces. Limbs trembled so badly they had to be held in place.
Sergeant Burke was next to him. “Hold tight, mate,” he said. “We’ll soldier through.”
Good old Burke. Tough as nails. Made of the real stuff, as they said. Unlike himself whom he viewed more and more as some death-obsessed carrion crow picking away at the remains of lives, Burke was the real thing: a soldier, a hero, someone you could look up to, would be glad to call friend, the sort you’d be glad to give your daughter’s hand to in marriage knowing that, in the end, he always did the right thing, the honorable thing. As he thought this, he felt Burke’s hand take hold of his own and clasp it tightly in friendship. It was something the men did when the shelling got heavy-holding onto one another, fusing themselves together. But Creel had never been part of it. He was always alone…now Burke made him part of the chain and he felt a tear in his eye.
As darkness dimmed the sky and shadows crawled thickly, the German flares burst overhead, green and yellow, turning the trench system into some weird strobing shadowshow of stiff-legged figures as they drifted earthward, sputtering, on their little parachutes, revealing the jagged wounds in the earth and the insects that scuttled in them.
Then it began.
Shells came in with screaming blue-white velocities, dropping like autumn leaves and detonating the scarred countryside in vast, ear-shattering eruptions of pulverized earth and spraying black mud. Blazing shrapnel lit anything afire that was remotely flammable. Wood and fallen trees were blackened into charcoal sticks, water boiled to steam, sandbags glowed into blossoms of fire.
Creel saw lightning flash, heard thunder and felt earthquake. Smoke and fire and screaming and burning flesh. In the distance, the heavy guns popped like champagne corks, and every man in the trenches was listening intently, giving each and every round a personality all its own. Not just mindless projectiles, but death-dealing fingers of fate that were preordained to take certain lives and spare others. Pop, pop, pop, went the field guns and the men would think, worry, contemplate the unknown, the great mystery: There…that one…that one sounds like the one for me, I know that sound, I heard it before, maybe that’s what I heard when I died last time. The sky rained shells and some detonated in the distance and some quite close, but all shrieking with their expulsions of shrapnel seeking flesh to macerate.
Crouched against the trench wall while men shouted and sobbed around him, Creel listened to the shells come as he always listened to them come, gripping Burke’s hand ever tighter: whistling and screaming, buzzing like swarms of locusts…and others, fired from the heavy guns…came roaring like freight trains passing overhead. But the result was always the same-an eruption, flying shrapnel, a shockwave that would knock you flat and give you a concussion if you were close enough.
The shells kept coming and coming as if the Hun were intent on destroying the trenches themselves, erasing the battlescars of man’s preoccupation with killing his own kind. They came in volleys that went on for thirty minutes or more then there was a shattered silence for maybe ten or fifteen and they started flying again.
When the trench wall blew apart, covering him in mud and dirt and sandbags, Creel crawled up through it like a mole seeking sunlight. All around him in the flickering glow of the German flares he could see that the trench system had been wiped out, reassembled. There was nothing but an irregular series of smoldering shell-holes all around him flanked by mountains of earth, sticks, rubble, and corpses. Men were crying out for stretcher bearers, but not many because most were either gone or buried alive.
He was still gripping Burke’s hand…but Burke was no longer attached to it. He cried out and tossed the hand aside, almost hating himself for doing so.
The darkness was broken only by flaming wreckage or an occasional flare drifting overhead, the air thick with rolling plumes of smoke and a dust storm of dirt and grit and pulverized fragments that slowly rained earthward.
