The Cartographer of No Man's Land: A Novel (6 page)

“Maybe,” Simon said, “that’s where the war will end.”

T
HINKING BACK ON
the news and on his dream, Simon reached for the lone soldier on the sill, encircled the cold lead in his fingers, and held it there until it warmed in his palm.

T
HREE

February 3
^rd
, 1917

Arras Sector, France

A
ngus slipped. He’d been having a hard time keeping his footing. An odorous fog, lying low to the ground in wisps and patches, made it difficult to see the sergeant crouching just a few feet ahead, constantly leading him on as if sure of where he was going, then gesturing with a straight arm to stay down, stay down. The shallow communication trench had fallen in or been blown away, and they were on open ground. No sign of the
17
th.

His breath grew short. He kept trying to remember the sergeant’s name. Shell holes to the right and left—pools of stinking water, sulphurous yellow, phosphorous green, leaching up unexploded shells, empty gas canisters, rusted shrapnel, and bits of bodies. Under the chalky mud lay stick bones, blackened flesh no doubt clinging.

The moon slid out of the clouds for a moment, revealing an undulating, featureless landscape, cut through by massive belts of barbed wire. The two of them, he and the sergeant, were eerily alone. Where was all the nighttime activity—supplies coming up, working parties, troop replacements, trench repairs? Not a star in the sky, but they were angling north instead of east toward the Front Line, Angus was sure of it.

They were lost.

Angus was much taller than the sergeant, so it was no easy task crouching along behind him. Angus slipped again and his leg was sucked into what felt quicker than quicksand.

The sergeant sensed he’d stopped moving. “Lieutenant?” he whispered as he turned around.

The sergeant, on all fours, crawled back to Angus and set the pack down. Angus leaned back, and the sergeant heaved his leg straight up like a log. Mercifully, the boot was still attached. Slimed with muck, but still on tight.

Mercifully, too, the sergeant didn’t whisper, “Don’t worry, sir, you’re not the first to fall off a trench mat.” He’d simply pulled, then smiled. Kind eyes in an angular face. He looked much older than Angus. What was his name? What was his name? They knelt face-to-face for a moment, as if in prayer. Angus whispered his thanks. “Not at all, no worries,” the sergeant whispered back, and then, slapping his thighs as if to say there then, that’s done and off we go again, he unaccountably stood up and turned around, and on the crack of gunshot, fell back, knocking Angus flat and the wind right out of him.

Angus lay there sucking air, then cautiously lifted his head. Do not fall off this duckboard, he told himself. He slowly eased back. The sergeant lay between his legs, staring upward.

“Sergeant!” Angus hissed. The sergeant’s head was angled back. How strange his face looked upside down—the cheekbones and chin sharper than before, the lips thinner, the eyes, oddly asymmetric, open to the sky. Angus brushed his fingers over a dark smudge on the forehead. But the smudge was a hole and the sergeant wasn’t blinking. A warm trickle filled Angus’s other hand from the back of the sergeant’s head. Filled it to overflowing.

Angus ducked back down. A star shell lit the sky with a cascading trail of sparks, and everything took on its silver-white illumination. Heart in his throat, he dared to lift his head. The duckboard ended a few feet beyond, then a break, and some twenty yards out, great belts of barbed wire, and then . . . but the flare died out. He needed to get to that break.

Trembling, he stretched out over the sergeant, whose body answered with movement of its own. Angus imagined the two of them rolling off the side, sinking in, never heard from again. The duckboard listed to the left just as Angus reached an arm beyond the sergeant’s boots. He elbowed his way to the end, rolled over the edge and into a ditch on top of a pile of sandbags. The forward trench! No sentries. No sign of life. Abandoned—long ago, from the look of it.

Keeping his head low, he lunged for the sergeant’s boots as the torso slipped into a water-filled hole. There the sergeant lay, half in and half out. And there lay Angus, stretched out of the trench holding the man’s boots with both hands. The boots rattled against the boards. He gripped them tighter, but they kept at it. It was his own hands shaking. All he could think of was helping the sergeant, the two of them somehow finding the
17
th.

A sudden crack and a winging zip, and Angus was at the bottom of the trench, bent double—chest, neck, stomach, limbs clenched. The sandbags at the parapet were missing. Blown in. Blown away. No wonder the sniper had such a clear shot. Angus started crawling down the ditch, catching his knees on his greatcoat, crawling over—what—bodies? No, sandbags. Ripped open some of them, his hands sinking into their oozing contents.

Some ten yards along, the filled-in trench angled down. Protected by an intact parapet and timbered trench wall, he sat back and hung his head and stared at his hands.
Blood on the battlefields of France and Flanders shares kinship with the precious blood of our Lord whose sacrifice was made for us
. Dean Rennick’s high-flung words circled back from the pulpit to the bottom of the trench, where Angus was beginning to understand something of blood sacrifice.
Sacrifice lifts us to our true humanity, our true calling; through it comes salvation,
Rennick had said.
Died in the bottom of a trench, no more senseless way to die
, came his father’s words.

Angus stared at the timbers in front of him, one atop another. In the hazy moonlight, the grain of the wood stood out in sharp relief. Oak, Angus thought. Against the noxious air he conjured up creosote on the town wharf and fragrant wood shavings curling under a boat in Mader’s shed, and the tangle of oars, trap buoys, nets, linnet. And there was Simon Peter, clear as day, smiling at the shed door, sun framing his blond head, sunlight sparking the harbor beyond. Angus opened his eyes, and the grain of the timbers became narrow slots through which he might slip unnoticed and never look back.

When the trembling stopped, he risked his silhouette against the next German flare. Two boots on the rim of the shell hole were slowly sinking in, and with them, the sergeant disappeared.

“Wickham,” Angus whispered into the night. “John Wickham.”

“B
AD NEWS ABOUT
Wickham,” the captain said when, in the wee hours, Angus finally made it to the
17
th. “A good man. Fought as a private in the Boer War. Made it to sergeant.” Tunic unbuttoned, legs wide apart beneath his kilt, dark eyes gloomy, he’d offered only a shrug to Angus’s salute. He lined up two tin cups, then poured. Not a ration of rum, but Scotch. From a bottle. “A drink to Wickham,” he said, and handed Angus a cup.

Angus took it with a shaking, mud-crusted hand and downed the contents.

“Another?” The captain’s broad face had a yellow tinge in the glow of the lantern. “Thought so. Won this in a bet with an unlucky quartermaster. Step above the standard-issue rum, eh?” Angus threw the Scotch back. Its burn reassured him he was alive. He took the rag the captain offered and water from a spouted can to rinse his hands and face. Mud sloughed off, blood with it, onto the dirt floor.

“You were sent up from . . . the
183
rd?”

“Yes sir.”

“Well, you’re with the
17
th now. The Royal Nova Scotia Highlanders, assuming you survive the next two weeks up here. Glad to see you’re in the right tartan anyway. Got your papers?”

Angus reached into his greatcoat.

“And close that, would you?”

Angus looked dumbly at his coat. “The door,” the captain sighed, taking the papers. “Bastard weather. We’re either up to our knees in slime or freezing our balls off in snow. Out here where the world actually
is
flat and the drainage system was shelled to death two years ago, you’re wet most of the time. Take a seat.”

Angus shoved the corrugated door shut and sat down heavily beside the plank table that served as the captain’s desk. A lantern radiated warmth. The smell of kerosene cut through the dirt and damp, and things were suddenly cozy, if a bit foggy under the low roof of the earth-and-timbered dugout.

The captain pushed aside a rusted tin of sardines, a pair of wire cutters and a little green book, open to a page with words underlined. The sardines and wire cutters held down a stack of disordered papers that got more disordered as Angus stared at them. His eyes slid to the book, facing him now. Homer.
The
Odyssey?

“You with me, MacGrath?”

Angus jumped. “Sir!”

“Try to stay awake,” the captain said patiently. “And you can drop the ‘sir’ for now. It’s Jim. James McCusker Conlon. There are times when I can only tolerate so much formality. This is one of them.” He studied the papers in the light of the lantern. He was thick, broad-shouldered, as tall as Angus, and strong-looking, but soft-spoken in a way that made you pay attention. “So, how’d you come to be with us?” he was saying.

“Major Tucker’s orders.” Tucker had sent something more detailed to Major Rushford, but Angus hadn’t met Rushford, only his adjunct, who had paired him with Wickham and sent him on up.

“So where’s the rest of your boys?”

“Bled into the
61
st, the ones I came up with. The rest are still on the other side of the channel.”

“You might end up wishing you were with them. Did the major say why? Outside of our need for officers? Okay. Here it is. Says here you might be of use in intelligence-gathering. Now that,” Conlon said, staring at Angus with weary eyes, “assumes intelligence on the part of the gatherer. Haven’t seen action yet. Obviously.”

“Not yet.” Hadn’t
seen
action. Had just had it drop in his lap.

“We like to worry Jerry with our raids. That’s how we get intelligence. Take a few prisoners. Wreak a little havoc while we’re at it.” Conlon finished off his Scotch and reluctantly corked the bottle.

“Yes sir. Quite a reputation back of the line.”

“Good fodder for the papers, anyway. Morale booster for the homefolks.” Conlon’s humility seemed genuine. “That’s how we lost those last two lieutenants,” he added. “One captured. One bled out in No Man’s Land before we could bring him in. A colonel somewhere back of the line had the bright idea of conducting a raid in broad daylight to add an additional element of sur prise. Raids keep the men on their game until the next big push. Maybe not in broad daylight, though. Maybe
that’s
not a good idea.” He shook his head and wagged the bottle by the neck. “This keeps
our
morale up, eh?” Then he flipped open the lid of a dented footlocker and placed the Scotch carefully back in it. “Sadly, we can’t afford to dip into morale boosting too often. Nothing like a good whisky, Scotch or Irish.” He put his feet on the locker, his hands behind his head and faced Angus. “Though I prefer Irish. So, which are you, MacGrath?”

“Sir?”

“Scotch? Irish? Farmer, fisherman? Tinker, tailor . . . man about town?”