Butterfly's Shadow - Lee Langley [105]
Here and there were glimpses of what this country had been before the war arrived: stone farmhouses sitting on hilltops, pale oxen grazing in grassland, the spears of cypress trees dark against a blue sky. Wheat fields fat with grain. Olive groves where silver leaves – coins minted by sunlight – hung in the branches. The calm south. In that moment of indrawn breath before an attack, the only noise was the twittering of birds and the sound of a stream as it bounced over smooth boulders; a green and yellow landscape where poppies fluttered scarlet among long grass. Then, shattering the silence, tanks and guns crested the horizon and the sky was blotted out by sulphurous fog, the greens and yellows savagely whipped into a palette of mud, and farmhouses reconstructed, as ruins.
Across the open terrain between the woods and the water, they run crablike, in zigzags, knees bent, leaping, crouching, dropping when a shell explodes, locating the source, firing back. Stumbling on, through air filled with gunfire, confusion, the brief scream of a man as he dies. Close at hand Joe hears the muffled crump of a mortar; and for a fraction of time there is a sense of suspended action, as in a car crash, a slow motion collision, before the hit: the thunder, the metallic crunch, the smell and sound of battle.
49
No one had told him it wasn’t the enemy you should be afraid of, it was the generals. Your own high command. You could kill the enemy. The generals tell you what to do and you obey them. The generals send you off to die.
And here’s where it happens.
The orders are clear: secure the next stretch of ground, the next hill; silence the artillery, cross the river. Silence the artillery? The river is fast-moving, treacherous. The Germans are on the high ground, concealed, perfectly placed to pick off men up to their armpits in icy water, attempting the insanity of crossing. Blinded with spray, slithering down the banks, fighting the current, he entrusts himself to the churning flood.
How can something as soft, as formless as water hit you with the force of a blow? Water fights dirty, spiteful, no rules. He loses the contest.
The green fills his lungs; the river engulfs him, the fight is over and he sinks into darkness, the chill dulling all pain. He is aware of a vast sorrowful regret. Then he is dragged from the blackness, hauled from the sucking mouth of the riverbed, is face down on the bank, choking, retching, water streaming off him, an unseen figure punching him repeatedly between the shoulders, screaming, ‘Cough, damn you, cough!’
Spewing river water, blinded by mud, Joe is hauled to his feet. He tries to wipe mud from his eyes with mud-caked hands. All around, men are running, yelling, falling, cursing. Smoke envelopes him like a shroud.
He peers, blinking, at his shadowy saviour. ‘Otishi?’
‘Christ, man, you took your time with the breathing!’
Water dribbles from Joe’s mouth and nostrils. His lungs stab and he doubles over, coughing liquid mud, tries to draw breath.
‘What happened?’
‘Shell. Too close.’
They stagger together up the slope towards the trees, Otishi hauling Joe with him. They are clumsy, climbing with absurdly slow, exaggerated care; boots weighed down with a cladding of yellow mud that covers them head to foot; life-size clay maquettes, only eyes and dark, stretched mouths revealing their humanity.
Later, after dark, they slump alongside the others, waiting for the next morning’s push.
Joe says, blearily, ‘Otishi, you don’t do action stuff. You can’t even swim. You just read fucking history. How come—’
‘Don’t knock history. It teaches you things.’
‘How to save a drowning man?’
‘Right. Bonaparte’s men bent bayonets into hooks to fish enemy bodies out of the Nile—’
‘You reckoned if the French could fish—’
‘Listen, it worked.