The Communist's Daughter by Dennis Bock Page B

I feel it. I’m going home soon. Look at this stretch of weather.”

    â€œGood things to come,” I said.

    â€œI got a letter the other day. It was from my brother, the one you walloped in school that time. He can’t wait to come over and fight the Kaiser with me. He’s just turned eighteen and my mother can’t keep him from coming no more. Jimmy’s not a violent boy, and I don’t think he’d like it here. I have a letter for him in my breast pocket that I’ll send tomorrow. I’m asking him to wait on the enlisting, and promise I’ll be back soon. I told him I can feel it coming.”

    The fighting started again the following day. It never went away but levelled off with constant ongoing skirmishes. There was always the crack of rifle fire or an exploding shell in the distance, but these seemed like waves from a distant shore. On April 29 it came as a tidal wave.

    The attack began that morning at eleven o’clock. The inevitable counter-attack followed, and shortly after that we went over. Each man that day took an average two hours for the mere three hundred yards we had to travel. The mud was often past our knees. We were still going out at sunset, and the sky had a purple tinge to it when we went up for our last man, just then spotted by one of the snipers. He was lying wedged against a post, tangled in barbed wire, on a slight rise in the terrain. We followed the ears of a boy named McGraw, from Calgary, Alberta, who claimed he could hear the Kaiser sneeze in Berlin on a quiet day. It took close to an hour to locate and approach the man. The closer we came the more sure I was that he was dead and this dangerous attempt would end in futility, but from twenty yards off we saw the lump flinch. An arm wiggled, almost waving us on. “It’s Farmer, I think,” one of the boys said. We came closer, and it was Robert.

    It was a wonder a sniper had failed to get him in such an exposed position. Maybe the gentle rise in the land had obscured him, or from the opposite angle the enemy was unable to notice the twitching that became more evident as we approached, or they were just too tired to care. Maybe they thought to let him die out there, slowly. Then I heard the whistle of a shell. McGraw called us down right then and we jumped and the shell exploded. I realized that Robert was the lure, the bait. We’d been drawn out, I remember thinking. This was the end of us. As the dirt settled I waited. The debris cleared, and I waited still. I didn’t dare to call out to my friends. Crawling on my knees, chest to the ground, I found my party dead. I tested each man for signs of life but they were all gone, each one of them. I lay motionless and cried and asked God why I had survived. I spoke to God, for the last time in my life, and He did not speak back.

    Then I heard a single moan. I lay flat on my stomach without moving. It seemed I waited a century. I shifted my head ever so slightly and saw Robert, removed from the fence post now—likely by the force of the mortar blast—and sprawling flat on the ground. I saw him, or what I thought was him. He was a lump of clothing staring up to the sky. I waited. I watched him. The sun behind him sank below the horizon. The sky turned a lovely pink and yellow and slowly the blues and purples dropped from the centre directly above, spreading downward slowly to the horizon like running paint washing out the colours from the sunset, and then I was alone in the night surrounded by the dead and a handful of stars.

    I listened to Robert’s moans. In the new dark I saw him roll his head toward me, and his eyes opened. They were small white things. I crawled toward him carrying a canteen, an aid kit and my sidearm. “Robert,” I said, “it’s me, Beth. Stop your groaning, they’ll hear you.” I examined him and found a large piece of wood piercing his left thigh. His cheek was hanging open