VILLA GRANDE SECTOR,
ITALY, 1943

THE COMPANY HOLDING THE POSITION had established its advanced command post in the carcass of a tank that had driven over a mine. The message came over the radio in the middle of a German counterattack: machine gun almost out of ammunition. Bédard, the brigadier-general, ordered two cases of cartridges to be loaded onto a donkey and two men to go with it. Poor beast, he thought as he watched them leave, nothing of what’s happening here is its fault. But when he thought about it, that was the case with them, too, wasn’t it? With each shell that exploded, they could see the donkey stiffen, plant its hooves in the ground, and flatten its big ears, and the two men had to pull it harder each time to get it to move, one pulling, the other pushing from behind to take up the slack. The rest were able to follow their progress from a distance thanks to the Boche flares that kept going up and coming down, slowly burning themselves out above the incredible confusion of battle, the close combat, sometimes at point-blank range in thick shadow saturated by explosions and lights, tracer bullets, and the smell of gunpowder and burnt flesh, the dry rattle of the machine gun still holding its position, and the muffled sigh of mortars followed by the exhalation of shells and the shaking of the earth all around. Halfway to the machine gun’s position, the donkey stepped on a mine.

A huge orange geyser filled with bits of donkey and steel rose from the ground into the illuminated night. Clots of earth and sharp explosions were still peppering the roof of the shelter when the brigadier-general’s voice resumed yelling — “Stretcher-bearers!” — as though he really expected anything in that heap to be still alive. A stretcher-bearer, identifiable by the red cross on his armband, grabbed one end of the stretcher and caught his colleague’s eye. The colleague nodded, and it was clear they were thinking the same thing. They set off at a light trot, leaning forward, heads drawn down as far as possible into their shoulders, in the direction of the cloud of sulphurous dust that filled the entire space ahead of them and was spreading slowly over the battlefield and into their lungs until there was nothing else to breathe where they were. Their route looked impossibly long to them as the mortars continued to explode, making the mud quiver around the bombed-out assault vehicle below them. At the spot where the donkey and the two men had last been seen was an enormous crater into which they almost fell, smoke rising out of it as from a huge volcanic mouth that had been hidden from view. They crawled into it and began their search. By patting the ground ahead of them in the darkness, they came up with several bits of skin, three or four pieces of donkey hide, and one hoof. That was it.

Meanwhile, the situation on the hill had become critical, and the brigadier-general ordered the men to make a second attempt. When the stretcher-bearers appeared at the shelter with their empty stretcher, they were met by General Bédard, hands on hips, standing as straight as an I. “Where are the wounded?” he thundered. “Up in smoke,” came the reply. But the man who made it could see that this response was not going to make the brigadier-general’s day. Surely he wasn’t going to send them back in there? He hadn’t even had time to formulate that thought before he felt himself being grabbed by one arm, and before he could understand what was happening he had been turned precipitously around and, still clutching the stretcher, was doing his best to avoid a series of swift kicks to his backside delivered by the brigadier-general. “Follow me!” cried the latter, and he meant it, overtaking the two men and leading them back into hell. They could see the general’s gigantic silhouette rising up out of the smoke at the lip of the crater, hands on his thighs like a tourist peering over the edge of a cliff. The scene was illuminated by the flares and explosions that continued to rain down around them. When they saw their commanding officer doing their work, the stretcher-bearers felt foolish and began to look around as well, groping their way through the burning shadows in a kind of frenzy. They found one of the men ten feet away, missing two legs and an arm; blood was spurting in huge, burbling jets from the stump.

The brigadier-general came up to them. One of the stretcher-bearers, who was on his knees beside the body, looked up and shook his head: dead. “Are you quite certain of that?” shouted Bédard. Just at that moment there was a momentary lull in the roar of battle, and the man who had just been declared dead opened his eyes and said: “Not sure . . . I’m quite dead yet . . . commander.”

They put a tourniquet on him, then hoisted him onto the stretcher, and while they were doing so the general found the other soldier a few feet away, in no better shape than his fellow soldier. The general lifted him across his shoulders like a sack of potatoes. And so they headed off into the night, completely soaked in blood from the stumps of the half-dead man who, admittedly, was easier to carry because he was missing two or three limbs. Whenever the pair at either end of the stretcher stumbled with their load over bomb holes, the good general found some way to keep them going. If anyone had predicted that night that the two donkey attendants would make it, he would have been laughed out of the regiment. But that’s what happened: they both survived, costing the government a fortune in prostheses.

In the 22nd regiment this story was often told. It was like a glorious wreath around the brow of the regiment and its mythic commander, to show to the lowliest orderly stationed in Cyprus what sort of stuff Brigadier-General Jean-B. Bédard was made of.