EXCERPTS
FEBRUARY 1918
AMERICAN YANKEE DIVISION TRAINING CAMP,
JUST SOUTH OF NEUFCHATEAU, FRANCE
Rain has been continuous—
supply roads are muck beds full of lorries
sunk up to their axles, sodden
horses so weak from the crossing
they have forgotten their commands.
Drill fields are ankle-deep in mud.
At morning formations Raymond drops
from exhaustion and nearly drowns.
Tomorrow they leave finally for the front.
The stench of the front finds Raymond
long before he arrives. Carbolic
and ether, human and animal parts
in sepsis and putrefaction, chloride of lime,
cordite, the sickly stink of gas.
And mixed with it all, the waste
of a million men. The smell reaches
back into the primitive realm of his brain.
Run, it says, and don’t stop
until you are far away from here.
Young Raymond had spent the day
making land with his father. They gathered
the spring crop of granite onto a stone boat
hitched to the old black Percheron. Her broad
haunches and powerful flanks and deep, wide
chest made light work of their burden.
Almost nightfall—
Raymond commanded the last load
to meadow’s edge, where a doe and her two young fed—
mute, indistinguishable
from what surrounded them—
The boy sensed movement and turned—
but by then they were gone.
A diabolical surround, a solid ceiling
of sound—thirty shells a minute landing.
A French poilu tells Raymond at Verdun
one barrage lasted nine days.
In the intermittent lull, he can hear,
amid black clouds of swarming flies,
the high-pitched squealing of well-fed
rats. And, sublime absurdity—
the altogether beautiful song of a lark.
The ground is churned to porridge.
The water cart half disappears; its horse
has gone off the brush-work track
and bogged. Raymond does his best
to put a sack under her hoof
for traction, while Cas strokes
her long neck and withers, chanting softly
There’s a clever girl, there’s a clever girl.
But the bony mare falls dead
right where she stands, topples
stiff as the miniature plaster horse
the boys tried to set on Raymond’s
windowsill just two springs past—
those million years ago.
Many horses arrive by ship. Slings
around their bellies, they are hoisted by crane
from the deep, airless hold where, in terror,
they have been stowed, then swung high
above the deck to the cobbled quay below.
Those that survive passage serve as
mounts for cavalry divisions, draught animals
for regimental and artillery transport.
They pull limbers, caissons of explosives,
lorries leaden with supplies.
Unprotected targets, they are often
the first to be hit. Their moaning
is worse than a human’s to hear, bringing
men to tears of rage and helplessness.
Their bloated, rotting bodies clog
roads and supply routes, sometimes
with gas masks, fitted like absurd
feed bags, still strapped on.
Over three million horses were mobilized
in 1914. By war’s end
eight million will have perished.
A nightingale sings in the wasted village.
In the sugar beet field cows bellow.
And in the wreckage of a beech copse a rook
finds scrap for its nest. The rattling of an artillery
limber is drowned out by the croaking of frogs.
Sparrow hawks circle above an ammunition
column on its way to the front, where dogs
sometimes stand sentry along the dreadful
stalemate, and rheumy horses are picketed
hock-deep in mud. Raymond weeps from weariness.
A plague of flies obscures the sky—
Out the schoolroom window
the old apple tree prevailed, one bole
bending earthward as if to invite a boy
to climb. But Miss Morton, her auburn
upsweep caught neatly in a snood,
stood tall at the chalkboard spelling
Mesopotamia in perfect cursive.
The lucky ones are sent back
to Scotland, to Craiglockhart, where
nurses float in and out of sparkling
light from high windows and the food
is hot and plentiful, where
a gramophone blares John Peel
to block out the men’s screams⎯
D’ye ken John Peel with his coat so gay,
D’ye ken John Peel at the break of day,
D’ye ken John Peel when he’s far away,
With his hounds and his horn in the morning.
One boy has stopped clawing his mouth; thus
begins his rehabilitation. First,
he is instructed in the homely art
of weaving, the loom a kind of primer
for the small boy he has become. Nurse stands
behind him to guide his hands, warp to woof,
with comforting regularity, a soothing
message to his poor excitable limbs.
In a few days, after he is helped
with his breakfast porridge, a small
piece of cloth is placed on his lap, pierced
with a few large stitches from a saddle needle
and heavy thread. Nurse croons to him,
though she is weary of it, that he can
do this too if he will just hold still.
More days of practice and he is brought
to the barley field to help harvest the crop,
and the next day to the cow barn
and shown how to grasp the teat
firmly but gently, and then,
after a time, when he gets the milk to flow,
he learns again how to hoist the rifle
just so with both hands steady,
and then to kill again.
A gentleman’s war it was at first.
The determination to accept casualties
would bring victory. Bravery was all.
In their bright uniforms, the Newfoundland
Regiment’s 87th and 88th attacked with colors
unfurled and proceeded in parade formation
into machine gun fire, as the brass and drums
of their bands played from the front trenches.
Of the eight hundred one troops who marched,
sixty-eight stood to answer roll call in the morning.
As the landscape turns melancholic, mysterious,
the boy knows he is near home: Asnabrüch.
Villages of whitewashed, half-timbered
houses capped with thatch, streams banked
with bog myrtle, old lime trees, mottled, abundant.
He’s struggled with his pack and rifle, so heavy
he’s barely managed to keep them aloft.
At last, the familiar latch,
and at the top of the stairs, fragrance
of potato cakes, mother and young Hilda
busy with Saturday cooking. A jar of whortleberries
squats on the worn wooden table.
Later, under an aegis of his beloved
chestnut tree the sun glints with purpose
through the branches onto his clean hand—
yet he can think of nothing but returning
to the front, to the only life he now can live—death
and stink, the mind-rotting boredom, where
just last night on sentry, he’d heard the unburied
belch and hiss, too far in no-man’s-land
to retrieve. When the French sent up a star shell,
a headless corpse jerked as if startled
by the sudden illumination.
September 1918
St. Mihiel salient, south of Verdun
No one can fathom the experience
at the front, where terms like wastage
means casualties, and Third Ypres is called
a battle, when surly it was a crime.
How can Raymond tell them back home
how it took ten men to carry a stretcher
a hundred yards, that forcing his legs
forward in that mud, he gladly would have died
in the place of the wounded boy they carried,
who held his own guts in blackened hands.
The philosophers are in hiding
promulgating deicide. Psychoanalysts
debate the next paradigm.
Science is the new logos.
Abraham has slain his son.
The only covenant is the deep
humiliation of land and beast. God?
Even the playwrights have given up
the idea. Each shell falling
brings deliverance.
On the farm, weather was the god
who demanded surrender, capricious
as the Old Testament god who didn’t play fair.
Winter was crimped and too white.
Raymond walked the hills along the big river
waiting for geese to trumpet their return,
longed even for the spring flies, those murmuring
black gnats, that drove his mother to fits.