Beckoning War Read online

  The two grubby soldiers finish their cigarettes at the same time, and Jim immediately lights up again. He proffers another to the always grateful Corporal Cooley. Jim has strayed into the black and miserable introspection of war: the dead friends of battles past and the gnawing, corrosive dread of battles yet to be. Pull yourself together, man, he thinks. Pull yourself together or you’ll be behind a desk in London. Or back home. Or jittering and rocking yourself on a hospital bed, courtesy of the army shrink.

  “You know, Corporal?” he suddenly muses. Cooley seems surprised at Jim’s sudden talkativeness. “This whole bloody place has me beat. I feel like a bootprint in a shellhole.” The two men laugh. He continues: “I think when I get out of here, I’m going to become a monk and whip myself continually for joining the army. Flagellate myself for not knowing any better.”

  “You won’t be the only one, sir,” Cooley adds, agreeing in the manner of an upstart subordinate. “But hey, ain’t you married, Captain? Monks are celibate.”

  “Hell, yes. I’ll just have to take a leave of absence. She’ll understand.” These words are followed by the truth in his mind: I’ve already left her and I’m not sure she understands.

  “Yeah,” Cooley says. He is dreamy, likely thinking of the possibility of leave in the near future, or at least a day held back in reserve. A small, tantalizing taste of peace and freedom. “I’m just lookin’ to get laid with some Italian whore in Rome one of these days.”

  “Rome? Christ, Corporal, we’re not going to Rome!” Jim snickers and draws on his cigarette. “Reserve time is over. There won’t be much sightseeing for a long time. Besides, that’s a Yankee playground. Why, they own that place right now, armed to the teeth with more perfume, stockings, cigarettes and Hershey bars than any of you horny little bastards can offer to the ladies. They beat us there, remember? The closest we’ll ever get to that carnival again is probably seeing some snaps from some returning Americans or some goddamn prewar postcards that we’ll find in some ruined farmhouse we’re ducking out in. We can just stew about outside of town and listen to those American bastards whoop it up. Maybe steal some chickens, too, on the sly.”

  “You mean wop it up. That’s a Canadian reward for a job well done—bargain for basement wine and scrounge for chickens and eggs.” They both snicker knowingly. “And whistle at toothless old mamma-mia types. Eh, Captain?”

  “Yes,” answers Jim, who has suddenly lost the appetite for soldierly humour. He thinks instead of Marianne. Marianne, whose letters come less and less frequently. Her father, who had lost an eye, who was partially deaf and half mad due to the First World War, should have served as a warning. Jim’s nerves are already wounded, together a collective casualty paining him from within. And his ears ring, ring with a vengeance that reverberates into his soul, shaking up his dreams. He is exhausted. But he cannot stop now, cannot even think about it.

  “Look at us,” Jim says. “Just look at us: volunteers in a volunteer army. What fucking fun! As volunteers, we should be singing as we ride. A good ol’ marching song.”

  “Not I, sir. I was drafted.”

  “You? You were drafted? Of all people, you were drafted?” Jim looks at him incredulously. “You never told me that.”

  “Yessir. I was drafted and put on guard duty. Then I figured, if you’re gonna put me in the army, you might as well send me all the way. That, and I was tired of all the active guys on leave calling me a Zombie.”

  “A Zombie,” Jim muses. “Any regrets about going active?”

  “No sir, not at all. I always wanted to travel, and the Germans make it interesting. Beats baling hay on the farm in Markham, that’s what I say.”

  “True, I suppose.” Jim changes the subject. “We’re a little uncelebrated here, aren’t we? These locals should be more thankful.”

  “Yes, sir! There should be exuberant Eyeties at every turn, giving us a ticker tape parade, even while we’re fighting. Like sports fans for morale!”

  “You have it, Corporal. Why, in our volunteer army, the bloody Italians should roll out the red carpets everywhere we march, drive, crawl and dash for cover! And you know what, Cooley? They should be lighting our cigarettes for us in the heat of battle, and ladle our soup for us in our slit trenches while we’re being shelled.”

  “They, or those bloody POWs. Don’t they get a free and easy ride,” grumbles Cooley.

  “You’d count that as a blessing if you ever got captured. Do unto others as you would have done to you. Comprenez-vous?”

  “True enough sir. True enough. I was just jealous. When they give up, they get to sit it out.”

  2

  Directed by a signalling, whistle-blowing provost ahead, Corporal Cooley turns onto a detour road, an equally bouncy Italian country track heading north. Three large trucks and one small, open, tracked carrier turn with him, all being with the same company. The rest of the convoy keeps moving down the same road as they were. Jim’s entourage drives toward the shattered ruins of an Italian village, perched atop and on the slopes of a recently taken ridge that was captured by an advance Canadian patrol in the last several hours. They pass a battery of 25-pounders dug in on either side of the road, the guns obscured somewhat amid tattered foliage and underneath camouflaged netting, the noses of the howitzers snubbed squatly and arrogantly upward at high angles, the men fixing, or joking, or sleeping. A man at the gun nearest them waves, shirtless, his helmet cocked sideways as he brews up tea in a bucket in a hole where a small gasoline fire burns, dark heavy orange, just outside the crew’s truck and just far enough out of the way of the attached ammunition trailer to not be dangerous. His five compatriots smoke cigarettes while engaged in a craps game under netting in the shallow pit they have dug just behind the howitzer. Jim and Cooley wave back. A comforting sight, men making do amid mayhem. Like the birds singing anyway on the stumps of amputated limbs of blasted trees. They pass the battery, which has just moved upward in the wake of the day’s advance, leaving behind them a train of white dust and the grumbly echo of passing vehicles. The vehicles park at the base of a low hill just past a hastily hammered-in road sign that yells in its stencilled block capital print, “DANGER! YOU ARE NOW AT THE FRONT LINES. DISMOUNT FROM YOUR VEHICLES AND SPREAD OUT IN YOUR MOVEMENTS.” Jim stands up in his seat and orders the rest of the company to stop behind him.

  “Okay, dismount!” he shouts, and the infantrymen grab their gear, leave their vehicles and form up in their squads with their corporals. To his sergeant major, he says, “Lead them into the nearest orchard. The moment nightfall comes, we move right in and relieve the Sydneys at my signal.” The sergeant major, Warrant Officer Witchewski, barks corresponding orders to his men, and the men of Jim’s company form into their respective squads and march further up the road for about half a minute, and then gather under and around the gnarled oaks and cypress pines and weeping willow trees that grow in clusters in the field just beyond the weedy roadside ditches. The vehicles depart. A light evening breeze plays the leaves and the grasses in a slow rhythm, underneath a subtle and loose melody of birdsong. Breaks form in the clouds, and the leaves catch the last dying rays of the sun as it sinks in the west beyond the near but unseen sea. Behind them is heard the rumble of trucks as support troops of the battalion decamp into their positions. In perhaps two hours Able Company will move into town and once again be on the tip of the sharp end. After that, the night will become alive with flares and rockets, and the sounds of tanks moving forward into hidden attack positions, into tree stands, behind barns, under carefully assembled foliage and camouflaged nets, hidden from German view. The cat and mouse and hide and seek games of a night at the front.

  “Able Company, dig in!” Jim yells amid the clusters of trees, some of which have been blasted to ragged stumps and split kindling. Witchewski looks at Jim and says, “I’ll get them digging.” Witchewski is fortyish, with dark hair, broad shoulders and dumpling cheeks. There is a band
age wrapped round his head from where he has been slightly wounded. He turns to the main body of men and bellows, “Waste no time and dig in deep! I want real slit trenches this time, not the shitty shellscrapes you guys are accustomed to digging! C’mon Davis, throw yer shoulders into it, damn it! That’s it Keating, dig like yer diggin’ for treasure! For Chrissakes Lucas, earn your keep around here and hoof into it! I got more results from blind-drunk rotgutted work camp hoboes in the goddamn Depression!” The other sergeants and corporals follow his cue and bark at their platoons and sections of men. The soldiers pierce and hack at the earth with their spades, grunting and sweating under the crepuscular light that drips balefully between the pineneedle netting. Sweat beads on Jim’s brow and runs in rivulets down his face like rainwater, and it soaks his armpits and itches under his pack as he digs himself a shallow shellscrape with his own spade. As he shifts his weight a slight breeze makes its way through the opened flue between pack and arched back, shivering through him and cooling the sweat on his skin and soaked in his shirt, making him feel wet and dirty. There is a momentary lull in the distant shelling, all is quiet. He reaches into his webbing and pulls out his canteen, sweat pouring from his brow, his scalp sweating and itching under his helmet, and he stands amid the huff and puff of men, the clenched swearing, the chink of spades against the hard unyielding earth, the clump of discarded shovelfuls of dirt. A drop of sweat drips off his lashes and into his eye and his world goes swimmy in amoeboid distention, and he blinks to clear his eye and a curious relaxation takes hold—you took your objectives with aplomb today Jim, good work, this Gothic Line is nothing really if you just move order by order and don’t think too much on it. He looks down and ruminates a discarded German helmet, punctured by a bullet, missing its body now; an artifact, yes, an artifact layered on top of others, on muskets and spears, on top of the helmets of Malatesta nobles and Roman centurions and Carthaginian mercenaries and Greek hoplites; and he pours the water into his mouth and it is as though the cells in his mouth drink in the water, soak in the water before he can swallow, such is the relief of his thirst, and he lifts the canteen high in the air above him, leaning back to a skyward vista of cypress pines, his lips pressed to the rim in refreshing receipt of—

  A blast of shellfire, off to the side. Face hugging the dirt, shovel to his side. Jesus Christ. His canteen is still clamped tight in his hands, and he raises it to his lips and takes the sip he was denied by the volley of shells. All is silent again, and the men finish digging their holes.

  Jim settles into his shallow trench and waits. Waiting, waiting. This is very much a war of waiting, he thinks. It is in the waiting that his nerves are in danger of frazzling altogether, keying up for danger for hours or days on end at a time. It is in waiting that he and the others have discovered depths of boredom and frustration they never knew were possible. His battalion waited for over two years in Canada after he joined, before the gung-ho and tally-ho Lieutenant Colonel Hobson replaced the lazy and complacent Lieutenant Colonel Brophy and sent the unit to England. Two and a half years of exercises, moves, recruitment tours, more exercises, coastal guard duties, here, there, everywhere, everywhere but where their presence mattered. The Exhibition grounds in Toronto, converted into an army camp of huts, with marches through the streets of Toronto, sporrans flopping against their orange kilts to the pipes and drums of “Garry Owen” and “Endearing Young Charms.” Camp Borden, north of Toronto, a sea of white pointed soldiers’ tents that resembled a field sown with dragons’ teeth. Ski training in the north of Alberta, the smooth slide of skis through the snow amid the night quiet of the pines on either side. Stew cooked in the open, warming frozen bodies before sleep time in snow dugouts. Then, recruitment marches through Quebec, where they were oft hated, where in some towns and villages they were taken to be supreme examples of Les maudits anglais in their kilts and pom-pommed cobeens, where the men thus frequently found themselves fighting with the locals in pool halls and dance clubs. Guard duties in Halifax, a navy town if there ever was one, which led to inevitable brawls with sailors, and where Jim first caught an orange-hued glimpse of war in the glow of a torpedoed tanker burning outside the harbour at night. Then, England, stationed in Aldershot southwest of London, where they conducted further exercises on the Salisbury plain, drank in pubs and saloons, toured when possible, and took frequent trips to sample the London nightlife. And where they waited, waited, waited to be sent into action, reading and listening to reports of the fighting in Sicily, and then later, mainland Italy, longing to be a part of it. All this waiting fomented the whispering of rumours. Every day there was a new one. We’re going to fight the Japanese. We’re going to North Africa. While ski training in Alberta: We must be going to Finland to fight the Russians! All this while, waiting, waiting, now waiting in this orchard, this time tempered with the experience of combat in its ugly actualities, waiting tinged by fear and knowing rather than by boyish excitement.

  “Sir?”

  “Yes?” Jim looks up and sees Cooley standing over him. “Would you like me to start scrounging up dinner, sir?”

  “Not yet. I’ll bet you can find better stuff in the town. Take a moment and rest a little. We don’t have to do anything till nightfall. Consider it a temporary leave pass.”

  “Yes, sir.” Cooley stalks away to join a poker game that has just begun among a gaggle of soldiers from both his headquarters section and No. 8 Platoon. He is the perfect batman, Jim thinks. If it weren’t for him I’d be confined to eating army grub all the time. Such food at the worst of times is wont to make men want to walk toward the enemy with their hands in the air, begging to be shot. With reviled amusement he recalls the first time he ate British military food aboard the Queen Mary, stripped of its décor and turned into a troopship. Lifeless kippers staring deadeyed at him from his breakfast plate, indifferent in their inertness at their fate of being eaten. Sludgy lamb stew for dinner and cold meats for supper. Leathery and chewy cold roast beef, and Spam and Klik and Spork, soft and pink and malleable and shaped to the tins in which they were served. He thinks of a marching song sung in the barracks during training:

  There is bread, bread, heavy as lumps of lead,

  In the stores, in the stores,

  There are rats, rats, big as alley cats,

  In the quartermaster’s stores.

  Such wretched food so poorly prepared could only be transformed into the most halfhearted fighting energy. One cannot properly march into danger when made of kippers ‘n Klik. All spiced with saltpeter of course. Welcome to the army, where instead of black pepper they put gunpowder in your food.

  My cock is limp, I cannot fuck,

  The nitrate it has changed my luck.

  Ha! He thinks. Saltpeter has salted our peters and withered them as though they were leeches. The saving grace in officially issued rations and shipboard meals is the tea menu, with its cucumber sandwiches and biscuits and crackers and other nibbles and finger foods.

  These thoughts of food bubble up in gurgles of agitated stomach acid, the oasis dreams of a growling and hungry body and mind. No wonder he has suddenly awoken and is feverish with an exhausted and borrowed sort of energy—he is starving. My, he thinks, I’m so hungry I could eat my rations. Sitting here waiting makes him jumpy. For God’s sake, let night fall so I can move up. Even the front line is better than this bloody waiting for our cue. The only thing scarier than battle is waiting for it. Waiting for battle, wading into battle from behind the lines. The ominous signs that sober those marching or riding forward with a grave clarity. The sight and stink of shallow temporary graves and their wooden crosses, capped crookedly by the empty helmets of the fallen, standing in rows along the roadsides. Like scarecrows. The tree stumps. The burned-out smell of ruin. The sporadic fall of nearby shells that say in their shrieks, you are not safe beyond this point. Here, you are at the mercy of a casual and impersonal interplay of politically sponsored mathematics, of trajectories, the calcu
lated collision of bodies. Beyond this point it’s us or them. At any cost.

  Jim unfurls a map of the village, with the positions of the Sydney Highlanders company currently occupying it hastily scrawled in. He studies the positions and figures out where he wants his platoons to be stationed. He then looks at his watch: 2000 hours. Time for orders. He yells, “Company ‘O’ Group, form here by me!” thereby summoning his lieutenants for their orders. Lieutenants Doyle, Olczyk and Therrien, the Company Orders Group, assemble around Jim. Missing is Major Goldberg, wounded leading the company on his first day in action in an attack at the beginning of this offensive and leaving Jim for a time the sole commander of Able.

  “Good evening gentlemen: orders.” He shoots them together a brief glance. “I have here a map of San Matteo. When we relieve the Sydneys, we’re going to take whatever positions they have made for us. We’re covering the division’s western flank, and our company is covering the battalion’s own flank. Therrien, I want you where their No. 18 Platoon is. Right here.” He gestures with his finger. Most of the houses there, I’m told, are completely destroyed. You may want to really dig in there, if the Sydneys haven’t already.”