Story: Belleau Wood VI.
Clockwise from upper left: Seraphim emerging from stone, a ruined church, Viajero, Viajero again.
Significant music to listen to quietly whilst reading if you so wish:
Click to viewField Hospital One, Bezu-le-Guery, 11th June 1918.
When awake Corporal Viajero was silent. His stare was that of a basilisk; cold, blank and absent. At some point the noise of the shells had stopped from the artillery batteries, but it hadn’t ceased inside his head.
In the confines of his skull the shells still whistled through the air to impact in the mud and detonate into a million jagged shards of hot shrapnel that tore through everything in their path until at last, gore encrusted, they were spent, cooling in muddy puddles and eviscerated corpses. He had retreated from their slaughter, digging himself a foxhole in which to curl and cower, as far away from everything as he could make it.
He drank when a cup was placed in his grasp providing it wasn’t too full and the shaking of his hands didn’t spill it. He ate when given bread or broth but neither stayed in his stomach for long. He was blindly unresponsive to the kindness of the Red Cross Nurses, the cynicism of the medics and the agonies of his fellow soldiers.
Somewhere in the beleaguered foxhole of his psyche, Viajero had accepted he was dead. He was just waiting for his body to realise.
He slept for much of the time. When he slept he screamed unceasingly like a man being gnawed alive by rats. They locked him in the crypt after he had taken an officer’s revolver and been a second away from blowing his brains out over the poor bastard behind him. At first he’d been shut down there by the Ward Sister out of shear desperation because she had nowhere else to put him and no hands to spare in restraining him. The ambulances had arrived with the latest casualties from the lines at Vaux, and her choices were either to tie him to a pallet, keep him in the crypt or let him shoot himself.
It was many gruelling hours later, when the hospital was once more approaching order and the worst of the blood and panic had ceased, that someone thought to let him out. It was remarked upon it was a mercy he’d been so quiet. From then on, the Corporal was locked in there whenever there was no one spare to watch him - which was often - and when it was discovered he screamed less. The doctors supposed he felt safe there. Wounded comrades though it was more likely he felt at home amongst the dead. It was only Joseph, one of the orderlies who knew the truth of it and it was not a story he repeated to a single soul.
Joseph had been a hospital porter before the war, but his lungs had been left weak by pneumonia caught when he was a child; he was excused conscription on medical grounds. When some of the nurses and doctors from St Helene joined the field hospital at Vaux, he went with them, travelling as the hospital moved from one site to the next along the Marne to Bezu.
To every Ward Sister, Joseph was invaluable. He’d worked around the scent of blood and carbolic soap, iodine and vomit for fifteen years; he knew how doctors behaved, what supplies they always needed to hand and what they needed tidied away. He had a gruff, reassuring voice and a strong arm, both of which were necessary when treating the blooded and broken young man who were carried, stretchered or dragged into the hospital each day. At night, when the day’s chaos had calmed and those who could sleep had given in to their exhaustion, Joseph took an oil lamp and made his rounds: tidying soldiers, belongings and stray medical equipment, giving brief words of comfort to those who cried, and satisfying himself all was as ordered as he could make it before the dawn came bringing new trials and horror with it.
The crypt was his last stopping point before he allowed himself the luxury of sleep in his little camp bed. Once or twice after Corporal Viajero had been stashed down there he had thought before he lifted the latch that he’d heard a woman’s voice, low and sweet as wild honey, speaking softly from within. But when he’d opened the door and raised his lantern, there had just been the dead, neatly laid out in rows, and the Corporal, huddled in his coat, trembling and flinching away from the light.
“It’s all right,” Joseph told him absently, lowering the light. “Rest easy lad, you’re safe. Rest easy.” He’d not thought further on it; after all, sounds and whispers carried strangely in a church, it must have been one of the nurses comforting someone in the nave.
On the fifth night, after a day as grim and gruelling as any he could remember, Joseph stood once more before the crypt doors. One of the soldiers had told him Viajero had been screaming for most of the day; but with the number of wounded men crying out in pain - new arrivals from the ongoing assault at Belleau and Thierry - Joseph couldn’t say he’d noticed. He could hear the Corporal now though, through the age-warped wood of the door, sobbing breathlessly as if his screaming had torn something inside him and he was incapable of making any other sound.
Joseph ran a hand across his eyes in sympathy and exhaustion; poor bastard. As his fingers reached for the latch, he stopped. There was a noise like someone stepping out of water, the faint sibilance of liquid releasing its hold on something, and then the rustle of cloth against stone. The orderly was frozen, straining to hear, the hairs along his forearms prickling to gooseflesh.
“Shh,” said a voice, recognisably the sandstone and honey voice he’d heard before. “Hush - hush little one.”
Soundlessly, Joseph set the lantern on the hook beside the door and hunkered down onto the floor, propping himself on his elbows and aligning his eye with the gap between wood and jamb at the lower right-hand corner. A single candle burnt in the crypt; it had been brought in by one of the soldiers earlier in the evening along with a cup of thin broth; both had been ignored by the living occupant as thoroughly as by the dead lain in the room with him.
By that single star of light Joseph could see Viajero curled on his side, could see too a woman wrapped in shawls like a gypsy who knelt by his head, gentling him with quiet patience and gathering him into her arms as his sobs subsided. Her face was cloaked in shadow, but what he could see of her features was sharp and proud as if chisled. The skin of her hands was smooth and her voice unmarred by age, but in the tallow light her hair that fell loose was long, grey, corkscrews; like the tresses of an aging medieval icon.
“You’re safe, hush kultaseni, hush now.” Her words were French, save for one or two of some other tongue Joseph didn’t know.
He quieted as the minutes passed but still the shivers wracked him. “I can’t send it away,” he rasped in a voice worn thin with too few words and too much screaming. His hands gestured weakly like a conjurer with palsy. “The wind is sulphur. The rain has turned red, I can’t make it go - make it go - make it go!” The words rose to a shout.
“Shhh,” she told him, stroking his hair back from his forehead. “I have you. I have you, Cestovatel.”
He shuddered in response to his name, one far older and more familiar to him than Viajero. Cestovatel lived in Prague and sipped coffee in the plaza of the cathedral on market day: Cestovatel had never been to France, never been drafted, never been in a foxhole beside his comrade who was a man one minute and a shower of viscous bloody rain the next. “Make it go,” he begged, but the plea was just an echo as lost and substance-less as the rest of him.
“Lie still. You know me, Cestovatel,” she insisted quietly. “You know me - do you remember? A village by Stranná, on the edge of the river. There was a girl, far from home and the people she knew, a strange looking girl with hair like rain-clouds and eyes like an owl. She was barefoot and could not speak their language. After she arrived many villagers grew ill with fever. They blamed her, said she was lichvár, an upír and they were going to burn her. But the saints sent a second stranger to that village; a man with a fox’s smile and eyes brighter than silver pennies. The man whispered to the wind, and the wind answered, for it loved him. He raised his hands to heaven and the rain fell, for the rain loved him; and the earth - the earth trembled just to kiss his feet. To please the man, the rain fell and no torch would light, the wind blew and no villager could stand against it, the river mist rose and the girl slipped away... She met the man with the laughing silver eyes by the river before dawn and although she had no words to speak her thanks, she promised the saints one day she would save his life, just as he had saved hers.” She leant her head closer to his, a long lock of flint-grey hair falling forward to brush his cheek. “I am watching over you. I will keep you from harm. I repay my debts.”
Her quite words shook him, tore him apart as surely as machine gun fire. He felt himself falling, ripped to ribbons and sundered at every seam: and all that held him back from oblivion was a pair of calm amber eyes. “Serafové...” he ran the word over with leaden tongue, letting it drop from dry lips along with the faintest memory of a tiny timber church, men with burning brands, a storm so fierce it doused all fire and a kiss beneath dawn’s twilight more heated than a thousand bonfires. The meagerest measure of clarity came to him then, but it was enough. His eyes cleared for a moment and, “Kill me,” he said.
For the longest of moments she looked at him, and then at last she nodded. “Think of home, Cestovatel, remember the earth that loves you,” she instructed, tightening her arms around him, pulling him close to her chest before letting herself fall backwards, dragging him with her.
Joseph watched, unblinking, as the woman slipped through the stone of the crypt into the foundations like a pearl-diver knifing neatly beneath the waves.
The earth and stone closed about Viajero’s head and for the first time in an eternity, the shells ceased to fall. All was silent save for the beat of his heart as it sped up, pumping the last of his breath through his veins and stuttering furious and helpless as no further breath could be taken. White light exploded behind his eyes and fell through his senses like a cleansing rain, bringing numbness in its wake.
She felt his chest struggle to expand beneath her fingers and the cold embrace of the stone and knew she had little time. Somewhere, to the north-east of them in Bois Belleau, was a small leather pouch, tanned and hardened, closed tight and strung with gut. It had fallen from his neck, perhaps been severed, and now lay lost amidst the earth.
Her grandfather had spoken of it once, of how those in the Clan strong enough could not only see through earth, travel through stone - but know that all earth and stone is one, and use it accordingly. There were old stories of the Ran dipping their hands into a rock at the fjords and pulling out gold from a mountain thirteen kingdoms away.
“Saints help me,” she swore although only the stone heard her. With one hand pressed against Viajero’s heart and one reaching outwards into the earth, she quested, blindly seeking. She felt his limbs twitch and his heart hammer, felt the pulse of it become uncertain as the minutes passed, but still her other hand was empty. Felt his heart weaken... Her fingers closed around something and she rose swiftly back from her earthy bed like Lazarus, pulling Viajero with her.
She laid him neatly on the floor, arranging him as if he was only sleeping. Ear and cheek pressed to his chest and held close to his lips satisfied her that he still lived, barely. At last she allowed herself to look at the object in her hand, to see if she’d found the gold she sought or only river shale. In her palm was a leather pouch, tough as an old boot, sealed tight with gut-string and hung on a snapped leather cord. She grinned, feeling giddy and hastened to tie the cord about his neck once more and hide the pouch beneath jacket and shirt close to his skin.
She leant over him, her hair pooling around him like an ashen halo. “Sleep well my love,” she told him, kissing his cheek, his brow, his lips. “Saints watch over you.” And she walked away from him through the wall of the crypt as if it was no more solid than dust motes and spider’s webs.
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Corporal Viajero remained unconscious for four days; it was assumed he would not awake. But awake he did, dull eyed and uncertain, the horrors he’d been through smudged from his mind into a lacuna of memory into which had been swept his name and past.
Arrangements were made to take him to Base Hospital No. 117, at La Fauche, which specialized in the treatment of shellshock, but six hundred miles proved a logistic the army wasn’t prepared to overcome. He was discharged and sent instead to the hospital at Neuilly-sur-Seine just outside Paris to convalesce.
In the four months it took him to regain weight, strength, a measure of wit, confidence and fractured remembrances, the Great War had burnt itself out, the Armistice signed at eleven o’clock on the eleventh of November, 1918.
The guns across the killing fields of Europe were silent at last, the trenches abandoned. No longer would men stand in lines, rising up to slaughter one another to gain a strip of land smaller than a village green.
They called it the Great War, and knowingly spoke in sorrowful tones of ‘superior numbers’ and ‘attrition’. If some found unpleasant irony in the fact that attrition also meant repentance for a sin motivated by fear and not love, they kept such thoughts to themselves.
Instead of fragments of metal and shattered limbs the earth gave forth a new harvest: that of row upon row of white crosses, some named but many inscribed only with ‘Known Unto God’. Time worked its alchemy of change: the white glints of bone were transformed into stone markers, the pools of blood became nine million poppies nodding scarlet heads amidst the meadow grass.
They called it the War to End All Wars, and swore fervently to the nine and a half million soldiers who had died that there would never be another.
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NOTES
"Kultaseni." - My darling (Finnish)
Lichvár, upír - bloodsucker, vampire (Czech)
Serafové - Seraphim (Czech)
The name Cestovatel means 'Traveller' in Czech, just as Viajero does in Spanish.