Spawn of Man (14 page)

Frank tried to remember if there had been a day when it did not rain. Eventually he stepped away to lean against the trench wall.

‘We attacked at dawn, I think,’ he said. ‘I had been snapped back into reality by the burst of a light and the sound from a gun being discharged. It was the sight and sound that always brought me crashing into the here and now. I was huddled in a trench that had been sliced into the Belgium landscape and left like an open wound, half frozen, drenched in icy rain, calf high in thick, syrupy mud that clawed at a man’s being. I could still be jerked into the present moment by the report of rifle fire. And I instinctively crouched and covered my head as the cracks sounded, booming in the enclosed space, again and again.’

Alex approached Frank again and extended a hand, touching his tunic in the same places he had moments before. Instantly her nervous system was flooded with a jarring wave of energy, as if electricity was passing through her body. Alex collapsed to her knees as her vision swam and nausea built in the pit of her stomach.

***

It took a few minutes for her head to clear, but as her senses returned Alex noticed Frank had gone and it was dawn. A thick smog hung about Alex, pierced by lances of hazy sunlight, and she half knelt, half crouched against the cold, wet mud that had seemed to constitute the fabric of this world.

A heavy, dank odor assaulted Alex’s regained senses and she gave an involuntary shiver, partly induced by the cold but also incited by the nature of the stench. The smell was of dead bodies rotting in shallow graves and it mingled with the stink produced by unwashed living bodies. The air was clogged with the reek of human waste, spewing unimpeded into the thick mire from shallow pits. The clogging scent of creosote or chloride of lime, almost dense enough to taste, was carried on lingering veils of poisonous gas. This combined with cigarette smoke and stagnancy of every kind, from sodden and decaying sandbags to rancid food.

Alex looked at her dirty hands, but there was something amiss with them. As she began to comprehend, Alex’s attention was drawn to something half concealed in the mud by her side. She started and began to rise, but was unable to keep her balance and fell backwards into the sludge. She sat and studied her legs now stretched out before her in the mire and realized she was not in her own body. Alex tentatively ran her fingers across her face, only they were not her fingers, the face was coarse with a day’s growth of stubble and the contours were sharper and heavier than her own. Alex glanced to the left and saw that a makeshift mirror stood on a small shelf gouged out of the trench wall. She leaned over and angled the glass so that it captured her image through the streaks of dirt and blood. Staring back and half obscured by the filth smeared across the object’s surface was the face of the young soldier, Frank. Alex traced the rips in her tunic again, feeling the roughness of the fabric where the bullets had torn and scorched the material and the stiffened texture where blood had congealed. Now she looked again at what she had glimpsed moments before, buried in the floor of the trench.

A dead soldier lay half buried in the sludge, his face and hands still uncovered by his earthy shroud. They shone
ghostly
white, framed by the blanket of dirt, and appeared unconnected to the submerged body. Muscle contraction had curved the dead, juice-less lips upwards into a demented grin, mocking my continued existence in this nightmarish place. Then large drops of rain hit the face and ran tear-shaped across the cheeks, lending it the mask of a clown, smiling through its sorrow.

Alex pulled the collar of her tunic against the exposed flesh of her neck. She felt tired and her hair was alive with lice. A numbing, nameless terror ached deep in her bones and Alex felt Frank’s shame at this perceived weakness. ‘Don’t be ashamed, Frank. You were young and none of you should have had to witness this obscenity.’

Alex met the vacant, yet intense, stare of the fallen man. Small puddles of murky water hid the parts of the soldier’s body that the mud did not. In one of these dark pools sat a rat, black, glistening and as big as a cat. It had meticulously, and with studied endeavor, removed the corpse’s liver and was gorging on the organ, its long, silky whiskers twitching and catching the early half-light, like liquid, as it gnawed on the putrid flesh. Alex was abruptly hit by the image of a table of ripe and plentiful carnage, at which multitudes of huge, black rats feasted.

Alex looked down the pitiful line of men that Frank commanded, as they prepared to rush headlong into a wall of bullets and shells. When she spoke it was with Frank’s voice and his perception.
A generation sacrificed to a great concept or, maybe, just great ambition.
The soldiers, some looking as if they were in their sixties, some looking like children, had little spirit left. Man’s big guns had torn at the sky and land and now Mother Nature fought back, incensed by the desecration wrought upon her. Men cowered in her open wounds as biting, numbing cold froze them and driving rain fed the filthy mud.

Alex saw a young man sat with his foot cradled by a comrade. At first she though the boy wore a boot, but then she realized it was his foot, grossly swollen and blackened. As she watched a huge horned beetle crawled over the soldier’s foot and a sticky, yellow liquid clung to its shell as it passed. Alex looked at her own boot and saw it was covered in slugs and a black frog sat on the laces, regarding her blankly. She reached into her pocket and produced a cigarette case and she lit one slowly, breathing the smoke in deeply before exhaling, although she had never smoked before.

Watching the soldiers Alex was struck by the variety of their moods. Some were tired, some irritable or giddy, some obviously lacked concentration or suffered from headaches, all appeared battered and half alive but prepared to follow orders to the death. Alex knew something was very wrong. She could sense it, but not explain it. Something was wrong with time. It was as if she had the ability to simultaneously measure time in its actuality, and to experience it as merely a concept, that had no influence on this existence. So she could relive a tender memory as if it had happened seconds before, whilst feeling the emptiness spawned by the passage of a hundred years. It was as if she was reliving experiences eternally, in a circle that had a beginning and end, but she could not define those two points.

The cigarette burned away to nothing, without Alex putting it to her lips again. A young man was staring at her. He looked terrified and very young, maybe not even twenty. He was crying softly, but his teeth were clenched in an attempt to steady his jaw. Presently he became aware that Alex was still watching, however her eyes were merely resting on the man’s face as her thoughts were too raw and serrated now to lie neatly focused in any one place for long.

The young soldier did not see Alex, only the persona of his officer. He smiled ironically, removed his helmet and began to wipe away a film of cold sweat that dampened his forehead and matted his dark hair. Alex then became aware of a voice blasting down the line of men from the opposite direction. The voice was loud and angry and was screaming something to the young soldier about replacing his damned helmet.             

The young soldier smiled a curious, serene smile at Alex, as if he knew something that made everything fine somehow. More than that, it was as if he had just received a note from an unknown agency, informing him of the way things would be now, and this knowledge gave his youthful features an aspect of calm resignation. Alex felt an ineffable sense of foreboding well up in her stomach and she tilted her head quizzically at the young man. The soldier half raised a hand, a gesture of acknowledgement, Alex thought. No, that wasn’t it. Then moments collapsed into conclusions so very quickly. Sergeant Tompkins appeared twenty feet away, stumbling and swaying in the disabling mud, cursing the boy’s stupidity. But the boy let his helmet slip slowly from his hand, still wearing the same sad, slight smile of acquiescence, and he turned and climbed a small wooden ladder to the parapet of the trench.

Alex heard herself screaming with Frank’s voice, ‘Here, here, look at me, friend, for God’s sake man, look at me! No! Come down man
.
’ Alex rose and stumbled to the ladder, gripping it tightly and looking up to the lip of the trench, catching a handful of the boy’s boot too late.

Alex saw Tompkins watching the young soldier and a poignant expression now replaced his previous anger and he crossed himself, ‘God speed lad.’

She looked up and met the boy’s eyes one last time. There was no terror in them, they shone blue and clear and seemed to offer solace to her
,
then the boy spoke softly, almost tenderly, ‘See you on the other side, sir.’

Alex’s heart felt as if it would be torn from her chest, as she watched the soldier scale the last rungs of the ladder and breach the sandbags lining the apex of the trench. The young soldier was very calm and he walked two or three paces then stopped and inhaled deeply. He closed his eyes and looked upwards to the bruised sky. It was as if he had swum up to the surface of the sea from a great depth. He stretched his arms out wide, as if crucified upon an invisible cross. He turned and his face was pale and vacant, his thoughts seeming far away and removed from the present. At that second, the first bullet hit his body.

The bullet entered through his left temple and came out of his right cheek. Almost simultaneously another shell went into the left side of his neck, exiting through his right shoulder. Blood leapt from the entry wound but Alex heard no cry of pain in the boy’s final moments and if he made any noise at all, it was borne away on the gusting wind.

Alex watched the young soldier slump to his knees, dead, but curiously he remained kneeling, as if in prayer, balanced in that attitude, back arched, chin pressed against his chest and his legs beneath him. Then a third bullet hit the top of his head and he rocked sideways and backwards, overbalanced by the impact. For a moment it appeared as if he was attempting to stand again, but this was only the shifting weight of his lifeless form, and he finally fell on his back.

Alex saw blood forming a scarlet rainbow from the soldier’s head wound as he fell, and he came to rest with his head hanging back into the trench at the very point he had alighted moments earlier. He was still smiling with his eyes open but empty and staring at Alex.

Alex rose from the mud and closed the young man’s eyes, leaning against his shoulders and resting her forehead against his, and she began to pray.

The sergeant turned away and screamed, ‘And that’s how you will end up boys, if you don’t keep your bloody helmets on your bloody heads.’

Alex heard Frank’s voice inside her head, ‘
Do you think mankind has ever before created such a perfect replication of hell on earth, Alex? This is it; this is the day that defined my existence in the world. In a few minutes I could be lying next to this boy or be blown to pieces in no man’s land. I wanted to see my mother and father again, I didn’t want to die there, not that day, and I prayed to God not to take me. And I was ashamed.
’

Alex spoke and the voice seemed to be hers momentarily, ‘You have
nothing
to be ashamed of Francis, absolutely nothing!’

The sky was on fire with every hue of red imaginable, the noise thudding towards a crescendo. It felt like the world was ending, being torn asunder by the guns, it did not seem possible that the cracks of thunder could increase in volume or violence, but they did. Tompkins was administering each man a tot of rum. Alex took hers and when the thing hit her stomach, it pitched and turned in her gut.

Alex felt directed to the breast pocket of her tunic and she opened a notebook she found there. In amongst the pages Alex found a poem Frank had been composing since the word had filtered down the lines that his unit would spearhead an assault on the German trenches.

Alex opened the book. Some of the letters darkened as blobs of rain fell on the notepad’s pages, but the words refused to run away or became unformed.

Alex read the words to herself in a whisper, unable to determine whose voice she now used.

‘
There is no tenderness in these fields of flame, no mother’s kiss upon my bloodless face.

There is only memory of a love lost to time and there is the cold wind with its withered, empty embrace.

Once a flower grew where my rifle lays now, a blue sky where the thunder’s choking
clouds spill,

But my mind remembers only the bad things past and my saddened eyes have had their fill.

No need to creep through that hell on earth, where man’s lust for blood is satiate and spent,

No need to light this perpetual night, to which my youth and innocence I have lent.

Yet the painful truth is greater than the sacrifice we have given, when grass and flower has replaced the bloody seed,

They will only know of us in books and words and numbers, that no one will ever hear and no one will ever read
.’

Alex closed the notebook and replaced it in Frank’s tunic pocket, and rested her head against the muddy trench wall, closed her eyes and thought of Jake again. It was raining hard now and she could not tell if tears or the rain ran down her cheeks.

Then the word was passed down the line of soldiers to mount the scaling ladders, the ladders of death, and as Alex moved forward, her arm was caught by the soldier next to her. It was difficult for Alex to keep in mind that these men saw their commanding officer stood there, and not her.