The Communist's Daughter by Dennis Bock

often a search party was denied permission if the position was too exposed. And so the night proceeded. Our spotters informed us as to the approximate position of a man located through sightings or his cries, then off we went like spelunkers down a dark cave.

    Just days into it, we were as experienced as the French Colonials to our left and the British to our right. Distant explosions and sniper fire never let up during the lulls in fighting. Catching a moment’s rest, I leaned against a wall of earth and timber and conjured thoughts of the sacrifices and the ancient battlefields of my forebears. It was my desperate attempt to find heroism in my blood. But by now I knew that it was all—the gallantry, the romance, the glory—a great deception.

    *

    On the seventh day we consolidated our line with the help of British reinforcements who’d arrived at the small town of St. Julien. The day broke sunny and clear. It was a great relief to feel the natural warmth on my face, but a dread, too, as the enemy’s spirit would be similarly improved. Waiting for instructions to move, we played cards, wrote letters, thought about home. I wrote to my family reporting that I was alive and well, the war was proceeding apace and with luck I should be home before the end of summer. Belgium was not what I had imagined and neither was the human spirit, in fact, more noble than anything I had ever known. The common man here—the farmers and bricklayers and factory workers so in abundance along the front—possessed such dignity in these least of humane conditions that I felt honoured to be associated with them. It was horrible to witness the true horrors of war, but we all were committed to the certain victory ahead and in good spirits, our morale undaunted.

    I felt obliged to include these lies for the sake of my mother and sister, whose worry preoccupied me as much as my own fate in those days. I attempted to keep my letters optimistic and descriptive in nature, highlighting my daily rituals and observations, along with a telling anecdote, such as the time one of the boys, named Bud MacFarlane, had stood a stretcher on its hand-grips and danced a waltz under a full moon. There were twenty men in the Number Two Field Ambulance, myself included—numbers enough to find characters of Bud’s sort. I wrote home about some of those boys, and about a soft-spoken lad named Robert I’d met over here from my teaching days, explaining that he had no greater ambition than to return to his people back home, find a wife and raise children. As I wrote this I felt a momentary desire to claim those plain desires as my own, suspecting that my mother would find peace in such wholesome simplicity, given my perilous situation, but knowing, too, that fabricating such sentimental nonsense would do no one any good in the long run.

    The Regimental Aid Station was located only three miles behind the front line. When not writing letters, we spent our time preparing for an assault, either offensive or from the enemy, organizing and stocking and making sure all was in order, from generators and surgical equipment to operating tables. Idle time was best filled with labour, an occupied mind finding fewer opportunities to dwell on the madness around us.

    In fact, the solemn anticipation felt among the men before they jumped the bags and until the stretcher-bearers came forth to fetch the wounded was, in its way, less terrifying than the idle waiting. In those last moments the mind races and the body, powered by adrenalin and fear, becomes a coiled spring. Just moments behind the forward rush, the stretcher-bearers poured from the trenches into the fighting to collect the wounded and hurry them back to the Aid Post, where the surgeons worked on the boys who needed it most while many others waited. We returned again and again to No Man’s Land to bring back those who could be stabilized then loaded onto horse-drawn carts and