The Eleventh Man - Ivan Doig [158]
On the spot, he thought it over. "Somewhere between."
"Wise choice. All horizons kept open, that way," the man from Nowhere spelled backwards declaimed, bouncing it word by word. "I should leave to you any excursions in the direction of sin, however, personal taste and all that. What would please you in the other direction?"
"What I really want," Ben was somewhat surprised to hear himself say, "is to go to Waterloo."
20
The next day the two of them set off as soon as there was light enough to see by, before the fog was up. The stonework of Antwerp receded behind them in the thin winter dawn as the jeep passed through the successive belts of anti-aircraft gun pits, the ack-ack suburbs, and then out onto the main road in company with the around-the-clock line of trucks from the port. Squeezed in between the big six-wheeled cargo carriers, Maurice steered with the patience of a man whose reward was coming. "There are farm roads once we're out a ways—those will swing us around Brussels and this clot of lorries." He patted the plasticine map case atop his briefcase. "You're the navigator."
Before long Ben spotted the first of the rural roads and they turned off into a landscape white and quiet. Low ruined houses and sheds stood skeletal every little distance, and even the few farms that the war had not ravaged sat empty in a spectral way. Wrapped in his horse-blanket overcoat and glad of it, Ben blew on his writing hand whenever he jotted in his notepad. As the stark farmyards went by, he noticed there were no animals in the fields and then caught up with why—all had been eaten during Belgium's starving years of Nazi occupation, including the horses.
The graying snow on the farmyards and fields like a tablecloth on an abandoned empty table, they drove on into the flat midland of Belgium. In that world with all the noise smothered out of it, he and Maurice could talk comfortably. Moxie had told him they were goofy for going out on this. "You haven't seen enough battlefields to last you for one lifetime, Rhine King?" Not enough ones gone quiet. "I don't know if these are the same roads Wellington and Napoleon had," Ben remarked as he pointed out the next turnoff, "but you're sure as hell making better time than they did." Maurice handled the jeep as if captaining a yacht, swinging wide on the curves and making up for it with unfurled speed on the straight stretches.
"Ah, well," the figure presiding at the wheel said loftily, "one likes to get there in timely fashion, forth and back."
Not for the first time in honor of the New Zealander's locutions, Ben chuckled. "Is that a Southern Hemisphere way of looking at things, like the bathtub draining the opposite direction?"
"Hmm? Not at all, it's simple logic. One cannot, Ben, go back before one goes forth, therefore—"
Ben pursed a smile. "Spoken like a professor of argumentation."
"We shall see how I am as a battlefield muse." Maurice patted the attaché case between them. "The Trekker's Guidebook to the Historic Battle at Waterloo. Gift from my father, right off, when he learned I'd been posted to Belgium."
"He sounds about like mine," Ben mused. "Spends his nights in history up to his ears."
"Up to his rifle shoulder, in my father's case," came the response to that. Ben glanced over, sensing why it was put that way.
Maurice stayed staring straight ahead over the steering wheel as he spoke, the words suddenly less clipped. "Reads all the military history he can, the old fellow, says he's going to keep on until he finds the one that gets it right. He was at Gallipoli, in the first big go. Caught fragments from a Turk grenade in that shoulder, invalided home by Christmas of 1915. He never afterward could lift that arm enough to comb his hair. Mum has combed it for him for thirty years." A light of remembering, distant and wintry, had come into his eyes. "Even so, he counted himself one of the lucky ones. Some ten thousand New Zealanders and Australians did