He went on more slowly, inhaling the familiar stagnant smell of summer. A rotten coracle lay on the edge of what he had expected would be the next large open expanse of water, but instead half-dried gray mud filled a large bowl in the earth. A few decaying fish lay on the surface. He suspected the British had extracted so much water for their needs that the levels had dropped, drying up the shallower pools. He considered whether to try to cross the depression; it would save him time, particularly desirable since he was already tiring again. He stood on the edge, picked up the largest stone he could find, and threw it. It thudded down and skidded a short distance, scattering up dust. He took out his knife, cut a long pole from an alder, and, testing the ground ahead of him, stepped forward tentatively.
He continued to move slowly, prodding the surface to either side like a blind man. As the pole found only solidity again and again, he became more confident, and the ground held under his feet as he edged out. He looked behind him: one footprint had dented the surface and filled with water. He was wondering about the wisdom of continuing when, about two meters from the bank, his right foot cracked the clay surface, went through, and found nothing: no purchase, no bottom at all; just the waiting lake that he could feel pouring into his boot.
His left foot started to sink too, albeit more slowly than the right. Trying to extract it, he sank farther to the right and almost toppled over. He lay down, pushing himself backward—they always said you should take your weight off your feet, spread it over the surface. He threw his arms back behind him, his scars burning as he stretched. He could feel the edge of dry land but couldn’t extricate his right foot; each time he attempted to lever himself free, the weight of the lower half of his body seemed to sink farther. His right leg was in mud up to the calf. His left heel was touching something solid, but he was frightened to put any weight on it in case it lost this fragile purchase.
One hand grasped and lost a tuft of vegetation and then, flailing, the other found coarse grass. He pulled. Nothing but pain—it felt as if he were tearing his old wound apart. He felt panic growing; the watery mud was rising around him. He was going to drown here, slowly, after so long, so close to home. He pushed down hard with his left foot, grasped the reeds; and as one tuft came away, cutting his palm, his bottom lifted and his feet slid out of his boots.
He scrabbled backward and sat gasping, giddy, on the bank. Because he was exhausted and hungry and afraid of man-made danger, he had been stupid in a way that would never have happened when he was a boy. He had always respected the river and the land it lay claim to. He was proud of the landscape and had never taken it for granted. Everyone around here knew someone who’d drowned. Drowned and been eaten by eels, they said. It was Godet who had told him that if a man wore boots, not sabots, he should untie them before walking in the fens. The marshes swallowed up boots, but a man without laces could slip his feet out of their hungry grasp.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
Frank, France,
July 1, 1916, Mid-Morning
IT WAS A NICE DAY, July 1, in weather terms.
We were back in support. After breakfast, a handful of big bangs went off, just like the sappers had promised. Then the infantry must have gone forward. We could hear the machine guns open up. Isaac made a face at me. The firing went on and on. And we just sat. Some lance corporal was playing with a kitten. He looked up and said “Them Germans sound pretty lively, truth be told.”
We had tea. We watched our aeroplanes taking off from the base at Doullens and heading south toward the big balloons. We didn’t see any of Fritz’s. We were bored, and it seemed all wrong when other men were out there fighting for their lives. The morning got hotter and we moved into the shade.
“What’s a Battenberg cake?” said Isaac.
“Search me.”
They said the cavalry would follow through after the initial attack, but the horses stayed behind the front line the whole time. Beautiful, they were, so I was glad.
When did we see it? The signs? They crept in. An hour or so in. The officers as had working telephones were getting news. You could see it in their faces and see it wasn’t good. Just after lunch, there seemed to be a lull in the fighting. Men who should have been in new positions came back: a mass of them. The walking wounded and the convoys of ambulances, and some said the attack had failed and yet not half the men that had gone forward came back. Some said, well, they wouldn’t have; they’d be having their hot dinner, as promised, at their objective. Others said the Ulsters at least were well forward.
There were rumors flying like bullets, humming overhead with no fixed target. The wave had broken and here was its vicious undertow; with the casualties came all shades of truth and speculation. The unbroken wire, the broken promises (this was mostly the young ones who still believed in such things). All those shells, they said, the crossfire from machine guns that had never been taken out. Men had been mown down as soon as they left the trench, or were left dying on the wire; they’d tried to hide in foxholes but found them stuffed with corpses. They said an upturned rifle stuck in the ground to mark an injured man had been used as a target by Fritz. They said brigadier generals and even full generals had died; that one had killed himself right there—or right somewhere else that someone had told them of—and whole regiments had been lost; the 7th Green Howard—probably the Green Howard, probably the 7th, but maybe the 1st—had attacked by mistake; the Londoners were through but unsupported; that it was hand to hand and slippery and the Scots using their knobkerries; that the 30th had done all right but in the northern sector it was a disaster. That the Devons, poor boys, lads I thought I might know, had gotten through but with terrible casualties; that ambulances were driving from one dressing station to another and being turned away while the men in the back slipped into death and the ambulances themselves got blown to kingdom come from time to time.