Chapter 6: My Kingdom Full of Darkness

PASSCHENDAELE RIDGE, FLANDERS, BELGIUM

November 1917

Freddie didn’t know how much time had passed.

Sometimes he could hear the German—Winter—breathing with him, leaning unseen up against the same slimy wall. Neither of them spoke. Freddie couldn’t think of anything to say. He kept waiting for the air to run out, but it didn’t.

How long did it take to die? The bruised shock that had cushioned him through the first moments had left him, and in its place, proper thoughts, panicky thoughts, circled in the depths of his mind. He was freezing. He felt through his pockets, to give his trembling hands something to do. Found a tin. Bully beef, he thought. And with it a packet of biscuits. It was something. No water-bottle.

“Are you hungry?” he asked Winter. Freddie wasn’t. His stomach churned. But he had to do something. Anything but lie there waiting.

A startled hitch in the German’s breathing. Then— “No,” Winter said. And added, carefully polite, “No, thank you.”

“I—I’m not either,” said Freddie, although when he thought about it, maybe he was. Must not be dead yet. It was damp where they were sitting. The rain was getting in somehow, bubbling up out of the saturated earth. Was it drinkable? No. Water water everywhere and not a drop to—

Maybe they would drown. Drown while already buried, in a pillbox in Flanders.

“I’m from Halifax,” he said, struggling to fend off the silence. Why couldn’t they have just been killed at once? He thought he heard Winter turn toward him as he rambled: “Nova Scotia. Bluenose to the core, you know, although my mother’s from Montreal. My father worked on a tug in the Narrows. There. My sister’s out here too—in Flanders—a nurse—a proper nurse is Laura, not one of those who learned out here, practicing on us poor devils. An officer, even.” A flicker of pride. “CAMC gave all the nurses commissions. She’s a captain now, you know. Or the equivalent. Read you the riot act as soon as look at you. Cleverest and prettiest sister you could ask for.”

Winter said nothing.

Cursing himself for his rising panic—Why can’t you just die quietly like a man, Iven?—he said, “Where are you from, sir? Mr. Winter. Er, Herr Winter.”

No answer. There was a thick smell rising from the sludge of water at their feet. Freddie dropped the tin of beef, swore, and began groping around for it. His hand met sodden cloth. It was a moment before he realized what he was touching. He jerked back. He’d touched dead hands before, of course. He’d once been given a stack of sandbags and tasked with the cleanup after a direct hit on an artillery installation. There was one trench, near Vimy, where some poor fellow had been buried in the breastworks with his arm sticking out. Men would shake the hand for luck when they went up the line; or did until the bone started showing.

But it was different now. Aboveground, even in trenches, you were certain that there was an essential difference between you and the blue-gray fingers sticking out of the revetments. He might be buried in the breastworks, in a sandbag, in pieces, but you would, one day, when the war ended, go home to Canada and make a fortune painting stormy landscapes, or at least enough money to publish your mediocre poems.

But here…

Freddie’s world narrowed suddenly to the knowledge that in a day or in an hour, it would be him sliding into the sludge, and he’d be there floating with the other ones. Missing, presumed killed, until in five years or ten Laura gave up hoping. And all the while he’d be down here in the dark…

Something began to shatter, deep in his own mind, and he didn’t know what animal sound of terror he was making, until the German, with surprising accuracy, reached around, seized Freddie’s shoulder, and cracked him across the face.

Freddie’s head rocked back and he tasted blood. The grip on his shoulder was hard, pinching. Then Winter’s hand fell away, and Freddie heard it fall back, thump, to his side.

“I—thank you,” said Freddie, after a strange pause.

Winter was silent. Then— “Did you drop the tin?”

“I—yes,” said Freddie. “I can’t find it now.” It hardly seemed important.

He felt Winter stiffen. “Children in Munich are eating bread of turnips. And you will waste meat?”

Freddie had a moment of blank incomprehension. “Eating this—or not—won’t help the children in Munich. Wait—is that where you’re from?”

Pause. “From the mountains. And it is wrong to waste food.” It was physically impossible to feel someone frowning, and yet.

Groping around the muck was beyond him. “You look, if you want it.”

“I don’t,” Winter admitted. He didn’t move. He hadn’t moved much at all, except to subdue Freddie. His breathing hadn’t settled. It was still fast and harsh and—

“You— Are you wounded?” said Freddie.

A silence. “Yes,” said Winter, in his precise voice. “But not badly enough.”

To die, he meant. Or at least to die quickly. But— “It hurt you. It hurt you to hit me.”

“I do not want to be alive in here with a madman.”

“What if I’d killed you? What if I’d got too frightened and killed you?”

He was startled to hear a huff, Winter’s half-voiced laughter. “Kill me by all means, if you like. Do you want to—be here alone with my corpse?”

“Where are you hurt?” Freddie demanded. He thought, Oh, Christ, what if he’s dying? What if he could die any second? It didn’t matter how quickly they’d try to kill each other if they were anywhere else. Freddie knew that if Winter died, he’d go mad. He wouldn’t have enough sanity left even to kill himself. And if some miraculous hand of God came down and freed him, it wouldn’t matter because his mind would never get out of the pillbox.

“Don’t die,” he whispered.

He heard the scrape, as Winter shifted. Perhaps he understood.

Freddie said, “I’ll— I can bandage your wound. If you’ll tell me where.”

A hesitation. “Left upper arm.”

At least Freddie was good at bandaging. Laura had ruined several of his precious hours of leave, drilling him until he could stanch a wound efficiently, disinfect it, and tie it up. He crawled around awkwardly to Winter’s other side, found the arm by touch. Felt his jacket soaked—although that could be water as easily as blood. Under the wool, Winter was bone under skin, his body held rigid. He didn’t move when Freddie slit the sleeve enough to get at the gash, fumbling in his own jacket for bandages. All soldiers carried them, already soaked with iodine. He wrapped the wound by feel. It had to hurt. Winter didn’t make a sound. At least now it would stop bleeding. “You should have said something before,” Freddie said, hearing, with pain, his sister in his voice. He tied off the gauze. Christ, why are we still alive? “You’ve probably been bleeding this whole time.” How long had it been?

“Perhaps.” Winter’s voice was still dry, although not so steady as before. “I was not wanting to draw things out.”

Freddie sat back. “Why did you tell me, then?”

“You are a boy. It would be cruel, to make you hear me die.” They were near enough to speak into each other’s ears, and Freddie found himself reluctant to move away. Winter’s body was the last warmth in his whole world.

Freddie’s exhale was almost a laugh. “Not a boy.”

“No? How old are you?”

“Twenty-one. You can’t be much older.”

“I am thirty-five,” said Winter. He’d a deep, measured voice. Freddie wondered if he was—had been—an officer. Didn’t dare ask. Noncommissioned, maybe. He wanted to draw the conversation out. Anything was better than the silence, leavened with the war booming on, endless, outside.

“And from Munich?”

“I had a farm. In the mountains. Meadows. Cattle.” The deep voice dropped until Freddie could hardly hear. “Honey. Black pines, with the sun slanting in.”

Freddie said, “Well—Halifax doesn’t look like that. But we have the sea. I love the sea. Once, when I was in school, I tried to choose a different word every day for it, for the color on it. I’d pick a word and then mix up colors—how I scrounged for paints. It was easy, at first. Silver, I said, and mauve and sable. Smalt. Lapis. Rose. Pigeon’s feather. Iron. I let myself have any time of day, you see. Dawn or dark or noon. That helped. But by the end I was making up words, and none of my colors looked anything like. Bloody pretentious little thing I was, really—I’ve my list somewhere, in the box under my bed at home…Wait. Where’d you learn English?”

“I was a waiter.”

“I thought you had a farm.”

“The farm was my father’s. I went to England. I was a waiter in Brighton. I learnt English there. Many of us were in England, before the war. We went home to enlist. The Tommies used to cry Hey waiter, where the line was close together, and their snipers would shoot the men who moved.”

Freddie found himself laughing—giggling almost. “Really? Hey waiter, and—and some poor dupe’s head pops up—Yes, mister?—and blam. Really? This war’s like a two-penny vaudeville, honestly.” He was hiccuping, almost in tears. He slumped against the wall beside Winter and tried to get hold of himself.

Winter said, austerely, “My father was ill when I went back to Bayern. He is dead now. I gave the farm to my cousin before I enlisted. He promised to give it back. If I lived.”

They were both silent.

Then Winter added, low: “Iven, there must be a little air coming in, for we are not dead.”

The thought of being there until they died of thirst or drank the slime at their feet was beyond contemplation. “I suppose so,” said Freddie. His mouth felt as if it had been stuffed with cotton. “I—I think I can kill you, if you want. Could we—could we do it at the same time?”

“Kill each other? What if one person died and the other didn’t?”

Freddie said nothing. He was so thirsty.

“I have told you what I—who I was,” said Winter. Perhaps he was as afraid as Freddie to let the silence return. “Now you. What did you do in—Halifax?” He pronounced the word with care.

“I was a harbor clerk,” said Freddie. “I painted pictures. Some of them were decent. And I write—I wrote—poems.”

Winter said, wry, “We all did. Barracks were a—hellish choir of verses—once. Tell me one of your poems.”

“I—” said Freddie. “I can’t.” There was a gulf—a chasm—between the man in the pillbox and the boy in Halifax who’d sketched and scribbled things in his notebook. Even the soldier he’d been three weeks ago, on rest, standing in a barn doorway, looking out at the October rain. He’d crossed some invisible barrier. Wilfred Iven was dead. “But—I—I could recite one.”

“Recite, then,” said Winter.

Freddie groped for words. The darkness seemed to press on his eyeballs. Poetry? In this pit, at the edge of death? Poetry was nothing. They were nothing.

Then he thought that even useless words, written for another world, were better than the silence. He licked dry lips and said, “Remember Paradise Lost? After the Fall? Satan woke up in the dark. My mother used to say that the devil limps because he fell from heaven.”

“Yes,” said Winter.

Softly Freddie said, “ ‘Is this the region, this the soil, the clime, said then the lost Archangel—’ ”

He hesitated. No poet, in his bleakest dreams, could ever have imagined this darkness. But Winter said, “Go on.”

“ ‘—this the seat that we must change for heaven, this mournful gloom for that celestial light?’ ”

A crash interrupted him, a shattering roar. A heavy must have hit the remains of the pillbox. The bombardment had come close again. Freddie lost his grip on the words. The world convulsed. He tasted copper, realized he was bleeding. He jerked in the dark, some instinct to get away. But there was nowhere to go. He struck his head on—something. Winter was beside him; his last memory was of trying confusedly to catch hold of his hand, feeling an instant of gratitude—that they were dying and not lingering, buried alive. Then he was unconscious.