Lily's Story (114 page)

55

1

G
ranny had not heard
from Eddie – nor Cliff or Sandy – for more than a month. She knew
why. The papers couldn’t be avoided. News of the ‘big push’ to end
the war and bring the boys home for Christmas was in the air, and
some believed it. Without letters, the hours were empty, and would
not be filled. Ralph’s mother came to see her, and stayed the
afternoon. She wrote a long letter to Henry’s father and,
reluctantly, put all of Henry’s notes and cards in the envelope.
Except one. Bart’s parents wanted her to visit them in Toronto. She
felt strangely touched by the gesture.

Just before midnight on the
fourteenth of September, Granny came awake with a start. She was
fully dressed, in her chair by the back window where she had been
watching the sun set behind the great hickory tree. The stars shone
in the moonless dark. Something had drawn her awake, something
outside. She got up, shook the sleep out of her left arm, and went
out into the back yard. It was so dark she could only make out the
curve of the tree-top where it blackened the skein of stars above
it. Wittingly she entered the arc of the shadow under the tree, let
its dark radiance possess her. The North Star brightened just to
the left of the point where Lake and River conjoined. Then it
widened, like the lens of a prophet’s eye. Somewhere five or six
hours away to the east, the sun was rising over the Somme and the
Ancre.

Zero hour for
the move on the village of Courcelette was 6:20 A.M. The Canadian
Corps was to attack with two divisions on a 2200-yard front. In a
single bound they were to advance 1000 yards and strike at the
defences in front of Courcelette: Candy Trench, the fortified ruins
of a sugar factory, and 1500 yards of Sugar Trench. The siege-guns
in Sausage Valley behind Pozieres opened up in a furious
bombardment as mile upon mile of batteries of every calibre joined
in. Then came the grinding mechanical roar of tanks entering combat
for the first time. The front-line German trenches, blown apart by
the artillery barrage, were taken in fifteen minutes. On the right,
three assaulting battalions of the 4
^th
Brigade
were on their objectives by 7 A.M. On the left near Monquet Farm,
the 8
^th
Brigade had done its duty with
despatch. General Turner directed the 4
^th
and
6
^th
Brigades to establish posts on the
south side of Courcelette.

...Eddie was
sitting on his heels in the trench, a piece of paper that might
have been a page from a letter tucked into the pocket over his
heart. The five or six recruits squatting near him were not looking
in his direction, yet the angle and arrangement of their figures
took as their fulcrum the solemn calm of their corporal’s face.
Shreds of the night’s shadows washed about their feet, more
comforting than the yawn of light at the parapet’s edge. Eddie
glanced at his watch, then touched with a reassuring eye each
member of his platoon. A few yards away to his left Cliff
Strangways stood smoking a tailor-made. He risked a glance at
Eddie. To Cliff’s right Sandy Lecker checked and re-checked the
bolt on his Lee-Enfield, the clicking noise jarring stomachs all
the way down the mile-long trench. Reaching for his cigarettes,
Cliff accidentally grazed the back of Sandy’s hand, and the silence
of the early morning resumed. Then the ground trembled as if there
were anguish inside it, and the bastinado of cannonfire roared once
before it deafened them all. The seventeen-year-old huddled next to
Eddie was sobbing, his trousers wet and steaming. No one looked.
The veterans counted the seconds by distinguishing the howitzer’s
screech from the whump of eighteen-pounders or the popping of
trench mortars. The thunder ceased on some anonymous command. In
its wake: the livid scream of silence in the heart’s hollow. A
minute later the first wave went over the top. Rifles cracked,
cries schismed, smoke and cordite careened on the imperceptible
breeze. Eddie counted to twenty and rose to his feet. He couldn’t
feel them. He put an arm on the boy beside him. He saw the
sergeant’s battle-cry before its tremor struck him. Eddie’s lips
were moving. He may have been shouting ‘go’, but the word
no
sallied in his head. He leapt up and over. The sunlight
grooved him with all its strength. He released the boy, and watched
him fall away, bowels blown out.

T
he second Canadian
assault of that day was carried out in broad daylight. After ten
minutes of ‘smart bayonet fighting’, the 22
^nd
and
25
^th
Battalions advanced right through the
village. The 26
^th
Battalion was
left to mop up. However, in front of Courcelette, the Canadians
came under severe German counter-attacks, suffering numerous
casualties. There was also trouble on the right. The Princess Pats
lost their bearings over the broken ground, where every
distinguishing landmark had been obliterated. They struggled
forward through shell-holes while being raked by repeated rifle and
machine-gun fire.

...Within a minute the
second wave had overtaken the first one. Eddie tripped on a body
and went down, instinctively thrusting his rifle upwards at an
angle as his elbows hit the muck. His face pitched into a patch of
slime. He tasted urine and shit. His eyes burned. He could see
nothing but a blurred echo of sun behind a shroud of smoke, like a
Turner sunset. Then shadows jerking forward, lumpish puppets
unstrung, running on their own courage. When he got up, there was
blood smudged on his right sleeve. Not his own. He ran forward,
dodging the bodies tipped and askew everywhere. Some seemed to be
crying out, but he could hear no human sound whatsoever, not even
his own frantic breathing. The crack of rifle and machine-gun was
so continuous it was a single blank roar; only the quaking of the
earth under the earth told him the big guns were mailing their
javelins to the enemy’s throat. He could sense comrades running
beside him, faceless, trusting in kinship, in collective valour, in
the numbers of death’s lottery. No one was ahead. Through the smear
of air before him he could make out the chasm of the German trench,
the cordite puffs from their rifles drifting as wispy as
pipe-smoke. Eddie dropped to his elbows, aimed vaguely and began
firing. Something heavy and unprepared flopped on his legs. He
twisted around, keeping low, and rolled the wounded soldier as
tenderly as he could into a small depression. A bullet had ripped
the right arm almost completely away from the shoulder. Muscle,
bone and blood gaped at the sudden air. Cliff tried to speak but
shock still gripped him. In a moment pain would annihilate speech.
Eddie tore off a shirt-sleeve, already bloodied, and strapped the
limb to the torso. Cliff was blinking as if he were staring down an
eclipse. “It’s okay, old chap, you’re gonna get a pass home. Lie
low and wait for a stretcher.” Either Cliff smiled or the pain
creased his lower face, but Eddie was already up and plunging ahead
towards the ragged outrunners of his platoon no more than thirty
yards from the enemy trench. Suddenly the ground jumped under him
and a vertical wall of granite straightened him to his full height,
flattened him and rolled on. He felt the ooze from his punctured
eardrum as he scrambled to his knees, dizzy and sick. He had
dropped his rifle somewhere. A shell. Trench mortars. From the
German second-line behind the village. He was facing west. The
morning sun warmed the skin on his exposed back. Cliff was gone.
Where he had lain, the shell had made a crater, unblemished by
blood, pus or excrement.

S
ix of the mechanized
behemoths, now simply called ‘tanks’ by the infantry-men, were
assigned to the Canadian Corps. The new weapon in its maiden gambit
failed to carry out any of its objectives. All six were out of
action before the first phase of the battle ended at 11 A.M.
Several broke down, their 105-horsepower Daimler engines glowing as
red as an overheated Dodo’s heart and coughing black exhaust. Two
got stuck permanently in the mud – one ‘male’ (with two
six-pounders and four Hotchkiss machine-guns) and one ‘female’
(machine-guns only, five Vickers and one Hotchkiss), though it
seems no attempt was made during the unexpected pairing to
consummate the relationship. The sixth flipped over in a
bomb-crater where it was dispatched like a capsized tortoise.
Before dark on the 15
^th
September,
however, the 4
^th
Canadian
Mounted Rifles, with heavy losses due to German barrages and
enfilading fire from the direction of Monquet Farm, captured parts
of the Fabeck Graben Trench. Shortly thereafter the
49
^th
took some chalk pits beyond. The
infantry continued to beat off repeated counter-attacks from the
north and east of Courcelette.

...The barbed wire and
breastworks of Fabeck Graben were now visible through the pall of
smoke that clung to the windless air. This time the Germans were
ready. The ground Eddie was running over had no flat plane on it
anywhere. Where the noon-hour artillery duel had accidentally
focussed, it was an oozing rubble. Sandy had momentarily
disappeared behind a hummock of dirt on top of which the trunk of a
corpse lay preposterously – which side it had belonged to was
impossible to say. Eddie could hear, with his good ear, pounding
feet everywhere, yet he seemed to be alone. Ahead, the terrain
levelled somewhat, pools of liquid phosphorous under the haze. He
waited, crouched – the animal panic in him stunting, then stirring.
Sandy’s familiar figure uncurled in the light and charged across
the open ground. A tear-gas shell burst behind him like a smashed
sunflower. The ground bevelled and shivered. Eddie couldn’t hear
the shrieks of Sandy’s platoon behind him, protesting
dismemberment. He sprinted forward, dropped, fired with a
keen-crazed instinct, rose and charged. As he dropped again,
another shell exploded to his left. For a second he could see
nothing. The searing pain in his eyes drove him to his knees, his
arms flapping like a grounded gull’s wings. He felt the din of
battle and dying in the tremble of his skin, through the sting of
his ruptured eardrum, along the taut veins of his strummed throat,
in the tuning fork of his long leg-bones. The epileptic stutter of
mortar shells, the screech of shrapnel, the wail of the maimed, the
hiss of gas, the bark of futile commands, the ululation of the
terror-struck – he heard each one as though he had ears and a heart
that had survived dumbfounding.

The
thirty-foot rolls of barbed wire glinted darkly just ahead. To the
left some of his comrades had found breaks in the wire and their
bayonets flashed silver and then red. Eddie sighted and fired, a
green coat stiffened in the act of straightening, and folded. Dead
ahead Sandy was running alone towards the bristling parapet,
zigzagging like a soccer player, dancing wildly amidst the bullets,
his rifle floating in his hand as if he were carrying a flag on the
end of it. Then, aiming his body like a missile, he dropped the
rifle, flew over the
remaining
terrain with the grace of a five-minute miler, and while the
astonished enemy gaped in disbelief, sailed into the barbed wire as
if he had not seen it or else disdained its petty intercession. As
a result he lifted, flattened and hung there, stunned. Slowly, with
some regret, a machine-gun barrel swivelled around, locked into
place and chattered. Eddie saw the steel-jacket bullets rip out of
Sandy’s back, the helmet snap off and clatter to the ground, the
head loll giddily from side to side saying no, no, no. But the body
remained on the wire.

What was left
of Eddie’s platoon came up behind him. Their sergeant and company
captain were dead. The soldiers raised their rifles and fired at
the nameless targets. Bolts jammed. Barrels blushed and seized.
Cartridge chambers exploded, blinding. Eddie took the rife from the
corpse beside him, a scarlet welt where the face should have been.
He inched forward. The dirt sizzled in front, this side, that side.
Bullets hummed in there like maddened worms.
When they didn’t, you were dead. Eddie continued
to crawl forward, alone now, close enough to throw his grenade. It
landed short. The barbed wire unsprung, jangling. But nothing they
could do over the next two hours,
nothing
could stop the
Germans – standing in the ruins of Fabeck Graben on balustrades of
their own dead – from blasting to shreds, one bullet at a time, the
pinioned flesh-and-bones of Sandy Lecker, the farmboy from Waterloo
County.

T
he Princess Pats,
says one semi-official account, fought with magnificent valour, but
their right suffered most severely. Scattered groups forced their
way into Fabeck Graben here and there to the western side of
Courcelette, where the 25
^th
Battalion was
pressing stubbornly forward. The men of the
49
^th
reached the trench in time to relieve
the situation and assist in the consolidation there, it being
impossible in the face of enemy fire – both artillery and
machine-gun – to advance farther. Down the line, one of the
attacking companies ran into a terrific barrage, almost half its
members being wiped out. The attack continued, however, and in
spite of all obstacles the Germans in Fabeck Graben were routed.
Throughout the entire line, despite some reverses here and there,
the success was magnificent and quite deserving of the
congratulations of the commander-in-chief.