1
Granny 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 4th Brigade were on their objectives by 7 A.M. On the left near Monquet Farm, the 8th Brigade had done its duty with despatch. General Turner directed the 4th and 6th 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.
The second Canadian assault of that day was carried out in broad daylight. After ten minutes of ‘smart bayonet fighting’, the 22nd and 25th Battalions advanced right through the village. The 26th 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.
Six 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 15th September, however, the 4th 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 49th 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.
The 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 25th Battalion was pressing stubbornly forward. The men of the 49th 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.
...Eddie was alone. In the din and pall he recognized no one. There were no units, no officers, no direction. Twice out of the mist of smoke and steam of opened flesh, greenish limbs had blundered into the rage of light around him, and he had fired or stabbed, stepped over the crumpled baggage and tried to find a place to run towards. Once, he had stood up stock-still and tried to squeeze his eyes shut against his own death, but the cordite tears in them flushed them wide and searing with absolute sight. Everywhere he put his foot down, it skidded on blood, rubbed against bone, slithered on living intestine.
Through a fissure in the maelstrom, his glance caught the blank bulls-eye of a machine-gun. He felt himself launched towards it. It stuttered, and jammed. His rifle jumped and the youth behind the gun gasped as the bullet sliced through his throat and cut off his cry. Eddie turned in time to see the wayward shell – it could have been from either side – complete its mile-long random arc no more than a handspan from his next step.
Eddie was flung sunward with the slow-motion ease of a levitation dream, blood stretched to the fingertips, toes, the whites of the eyes. The joints unhinged. The bones disengaged – legs, arms, scapula, skull spun out of the disintegrated skin towards the compass-points of some unimagined gravity. The centrifuge of the heart at last gives way and releases with it from time’s cradle these fragments: snatches of a Celtic lullaby; a telltale bubble of healing laughter; the perfect stanza of an unfinished poem; phrases of affection shaped but not uttered; three flawless lines from ‘Tintern Abbey’; cherished moments of child-bravery, fright, longing, devotion, steadfastness, the courage-to-be; memories as green as the hours that nurtured them one by one in all the afternoons and evenings and mornings it takes to bring the man out of the boy; dreams of generation wherein the future is scanned with the past’s prophecy; and dreams that run deeper than memory, that feed in the shrubbery of our chromosomes and sip the cryptic ink of that gene where the myths of the species itself are made memorial.
The Battle of the Somme began on July 1, 1916 and ended on November 28 of that year. The Germans lost 582,919 men. The Allied Forces counted 623,907 casualties. Of these, Canadian losses were 24,029 killed, wounded, and maimed.
Every one of them was Eddie.
2
Granny came out of the house into the austere light of the September morning. She might have been on her way to tend the chrysanthemums or the cucumber beds or the tomatoes that had survived the first frost. She carried her trowel but no hamper. Her left hand was tightened into a fist, and her walk a little less spontaneous than usual. She moved slowly but without hesitation towards the big tree at the end of the property. The wind which had risen with the sun filled the yellowing leaves with sibilant motion. She stood under its shade, the breeze from the Lake on her face, and tried to imagine what this place – the knoll east of the marshes below and the great hickory above – was like when Southener’s forefathers had first come upon it, seeing it surely – as Lily had so long ago – from the water’s edge staring eastward into the rising sun. Were they drawn to its sibylline whispers? Its promise of shade and renewal? Its bounteous strength bridging four seasons? The sweet nub of its fruit under Carcajou’s tongue in the long hallucinatory nights? Even now with the magic of the talisman gone, she recalled the words Southener had spoken to her, in trust, more than sixty-five years before: “I received this magic stone on a sacred ground, long known as such by generation upon generation of tribes who have dwelt in these woods and waters and passed on, as we all do. The days of its guardianship are almost over; there is little magic left in the forests and the streams, older now than our legends. So when you have no more use for the stone’s powers, I ask that you return it to the sacred grove whence it came, to the gods of that place who lent their spirit to it.”
She opened her left hand. The jasper amulet lay in the palm as cold as when she had removed it a minute ago from the leather sachet she had carried out of the bush in another century. Only two of the treasures now remained there: the Testament with Papa’s inscription inside the cover and the cameo pendant bearing the face of the woman who may have been her grandmother. Transferring the stone to her right hand, she dug a small hole in the ground between the two largest roots of the tree. She placed the jasper in the hole and for several minutes watched it carefully; then she brushed the soil over it. Under that seal of earth lay the dead amulet, Lil Corcoran, Lady Fairchild, Lily Ramsbottom, Lily Marshall, Cora Burgher, Granny Coote and what remained of whoever she was now.
Mrs. Carpenter, who had just heard the terrible news, came through the hedge and spotted Granny coming towards her from the garden.
“Oh Cora, we just heard. It’s all over town. You poor, dear thing.” She was wringing her apron and putting on the bravest face she could muster. “What can we do to help?”
Granny opened her mouth to reply but nothing came out – not a vowel, not a spent breath. From that day forward not a single intelligible word passed her lips.