Morbid Anatomy Read online

  They were a constant of war. When there was a lull in the action and the Tommies got bored scraping their tunics free of nits, they’d shoot rats off the sandbags or bait them with bacon on the muzzles of their rifles. When a nest was found, they’d kick the rats to death with their heavy boots and stomp the young…not that it thinned their numbers any. Sometimes enterprising young officers, new to the trenches and horrified by the idea of sharing them with mulling rodents, would rat-proof the dugouts with wire netting, spending hours and hours at it only to discover four or five rats crowding under their dinner table looking for scraps.

  War produced refuse and human wreckage and that brought the rats. It was a vicious cycle and there was only one cure for it: peace.

  5

  Casualties

  The Germans broke up a fierce dawn raid by the 12th with a chemical attack, a combination of mustard gas and chlorine. Quite a few men had gotten enveloped in yellow clouds of death before they got their masks on. Creel volunteered to go out that night beneath the light of the moon with a burial party. The Germans would be doing the same and it would be something of an unofficial ceasefire while what could be collected was collected.

  “Bloody hell,” Sergeant Burke said when he got wind of things. “What the hell’d you get us into this time? A pissing burial detail?”

  “Come on, Burke,” Creel said. “Just a little walk out into No-Man’s Land.”

  “I’ve been out there more times than I’d like to recollect.”

  “This time no one will shoot at you.”

  Burke grunted. “So says you.”

  That afternoon, they took a ride on an ambulance with the last of the gas survivors to Number Four Rest Camp. There were wounded aplenty amongst the neat rows of peaked hospital tents, but most of the men seemed quite fit, Creel thought. Groups of Tommies were in the fields digging graves, sweating rivers, while a sergeant-major stomped about swearing at them and snapping a riding crop against his leg.

  “What gives here?” Creel said.

  Burke laughed. “Oi, don’t be so bleeding silly, mate. What you think is going on here? These boys is got the jack, near every one of them.”

  “The jack?”

  “Aye, the clap, the crawlies in the ballies, the old Syph. The pox.”

  Creel got it then: syphilis. As they toured the camp they learned in bits and pieces that there was something of a pandemic of venereal disease laying unit after unit low. The War Office was losing its patience with the situation and there was a posting on the notice board from Lord Kitchener himself saying something to the effect that in the future, any man rendered unfit for active duty because of VD would suffer an appalling fate: his wife, parents, or relatives would be informed in writing of his condition and how he had contracted it.

  Those with the pox were in camp to go through a new German treatment called 606 which involved mercury injections.

  Creel scribbled it all down in his notebook.

  “You don’t think they’ll let you print that, now do you?” Burke said and Creel told him that one day the war would be over and he would be back in the states and when that happened he was going to write a book about it, tell it the way it was not the watered-down, censored claptrap the press corps allowed.

  The problem with VD, Creel was told by the Medical Officer, was that many French women were in a desperate state. Their men were off fighting the Hun. Even old men were being conscripted, anyone that could hold a rifle. So these women had no way to buy food or feed their children, so they turned to the oldest trick in the book.

  A cheeky private from the Royal Artillery told Creel exactly how it worked: “You get these old haybags what will put anything inside ‘em, see? You give ‘em a five-franc note and they takes you into this dirty old room with a dirty old bed in the corner. Then, quick as you please, sir, she undoes your fly and has herself a feel and a squeeze to see if you’ve got the pus or any such foulness. Then off come her knickers and such a sight that is. If it don’t cool yer business, then in you go. And when yer done sweatin’ and puffin’, she has herself a boiling kettle and gives you a cuppa with herbs and brews and what not for disease’s sake.”

  Creel wrote it all down already figuring on a chapter reserved to prostitution and vice in his book. It was going to be a good one and when he told Burke about it he couldn’t stop laughing.

  “Your brain is not strictly right, Mr. Creel,” he said.

  Creel took a few shots of the men burying the dead because he could not help himself. He was drawn to it. Burke got him out of there as some of the diggers looked ready to add another corpse to their collection.

  On the way back to the front, he tried to get Burke to speak of his experiences with the London Rifles. He’d won the Victoria Cross at the Battle of Aisne for single-handedly capturing a German machine-gun and dispatching the crew that manned it, then turning it on the Germans themselves and mowing them down in ranks. But Burke didn’t want to talk about that.

  Instead:

  “A lot of the boys had dysentery so bad they slit open the arses of their trousers so they could shit while they were fighting,” he said without a trace of humor. “Nothing can take away a man’s dignity like fouling himself every five bloody minutes. You’re sent here to fight in the trenches with rats and lice, corpses rotting at your feet, and you get trench fever and dysentery. What kind of fucking war is that, I ask you?”

  He went on to tell a tale of the men of the London Rifles fighting with their trousers at their ankles, so riddled with dysentery—or “the screaming squats” as he called it—were they. A sergeant named Holmes that they’d all cherished for his wit and common sense and fatherly, fair treatment of the boys in his platoon had gotten dysentery so bad that he could no longer walk. He crawled about, white and trembling, his pants down, his backside and shirt fouled brown with his own shit. They kept watch on him but he’d crawled off to the latrine trench at some point and been so weak with it, that he’d fallen into the slime and hadn’t the strength to climb free. He’d drowned in a vile, fly-specked pool of excrement.

  6

  Burial Detail

  By six that night, Creel and Burke were back at the trenches and then it was off with the burial detail which Burke was still grumbling about. Sergeant Haines formed up his burial party and they went over the top into No-Man’s Land. They carried gas masks because gas was still clinging to hollows and low spots. German burial parties came within a few yards of them but were ignored as they ignored the Tommies.

  The mud was thick and slopping when they stepped off the duckboards, sinkholes sucking men right up to their waists at times and it was a real struggle pulling them back out. The corpses were everywhere, some jutting from the mud and some floating atop it, all of them yellow with gas, blistered, limbs contorted, death-white fingers clutching at their throats, bubbling tangles of yellow vomit hanging from their mouths along with regurgitated chunks of their lungs.

  It was ghastly work.

  Since sniper fire was not a worry, the men carried shaded lanterns with them and more than once they stopped as scurrying trains of rats came up from flooded burrows and bomb craters, immense things that paid them no mind, squeaking and chewing on the dead, dipping their snouts into freshly gored throats and tunneling into the bellies of corpses.

  Twice the burial party paused when the wan circle of light revealed hundreds of leering red eyes watching them.

  If I only had my damn camera and some light to shoot with, Creel thought.

  The rain fell in a clammy mist and pockets of groundfog twisted around their legs as they pulled their boots out of the muck and carefully took yet another step, the noxious stench of the unburied dead fuming about them. They saw lots of bodies or fragments of the same that had been there a long time, most of them nothing but well-gnawed skeletons. They found the skull of a German in the barbwire, its helmet still in place…someone had put a cigar butt in its teeth. Battle-ravaged cadavers rose from the sucking yellow mud li
ke leaning white tombstones, rats moving in black verminous armies around them. One of the Tommies stepped into a pool of mud and sank into the soft white mush of a dozen bloated Hun corpses. He nearly went out of his mind before they yanked him free.

  The night was tenebrous, the air dank and cloying. Now and again, they could hear the Germans cry out as they made some grisly discovery.

  “Bloody hell,” Burke muttered when he stepped on a body and three or four oily rats escaped the abdomen with meat in their jaws.

  Creel found a corpse that was moving and Haines, using his bayonet, discovered why soon enough: there was a rat nest inside it. Worked into a mad frenzy, he slashed the adults into ribbons and stomped the blind squirming pups to paste.

  Haines told them to don their gas masks when they started to see dozens and dozens of rats creeping about on their bellies like great fleshy slugs. They’d all been poisoned by the gas and were dying in numbers. A couple of the Tommies started kicking them like footballs, giggling as they went sailing away into the brown slop.

  About thirty minutes into it, they found three corpses tangled together at the edge of a run of duckboard. They were men from the 12th and Haines and the others recognized them, despite the fact that they were covered in yellow slime.

  “Look here,” Haines said. “Rats again.”

  The bellies of all three had been hollowed out quite thoroughly, even the flesh of their throats were missing. Haines and the others stood around in their bug-eyed masks, swearing and kicking at anything handy while Burke had a closer look. He waved away clouds of flies that were thick as a blanket.

  “See?” he said to Creel, out of earshot of the others, pointing to great gashes and punctures in the bones of exposed ribs by lantern light. “Ain’t no rat ever born had teeth like that. Too big.”

  “Dogs?”

  But Burke just shook his head and would not say.

  “Footprints over here…small ones,” one of the Tommies said.

  They went over to the duckboard and there was a crowding of muddy footprints on it which was not so surprising except for two things: they were the prints of bare feet and very, very small.

  “Children,” Burke said. “Children’s prints.”

  “Out here?” Haines said, stripping off his mask and mopping his sweaty, mottled face. There was something quite akin to stark horror in his eyes. “No kids…not out here…”

  But the evidence was unmistakable: children had been out in No-Man’s Land stalking about barefoot. It seemed inconceivable, but to each man standing there, there was no denying what they were seeing. Sometimes mud could expand in size with the dampness, make prints larger than they were but certainly not smaller.

  Nobody said anything for some time and Creel thought that moment would be burned into his brain forever: the Tommies standing around, ankle-deep in the Flanders mud, rain running down those grim gas masks, mist coiling about them, corpses rotting in the muck.

  And as he framed that moment in his mind with something quite near to hysteria, a voice in the back of his head said: The prints of children. Children are out scavenging No-Man’s Land by night. Barefoot children. And these bodies have been eaten by something that is not rats or a wild dog, Burke says. You don’t dare make the connection because it would be insane to do so….yet, yet you know something is terribly, dreadfully wrong with this scenario. You can feel it in your guts, in your bones, in the shadowy recesses of your soul.

  “Heard a story once about—” one of the Tommies started to say and Haines jumped on him, took hold of him and shook him wildly. “You’ll shut up with that talk! Do you hear me? You’ll shut up with it!”

  After that, solemn as only undertakers can be, they finished up their work quickly, each man suddenly very aware of the long shadows stretching around them and what might be hiding in them. They wasted no time in getting back to the trenches.

  For there was something damnably unnatural haunting No-Man’s Land and they all knew it.

  7

  Tall Tales

  The Tommies, when they gathered in the dugouts to warm their fingers about the glowing little coal brazier at night, their bellies warmed from the daily rum ration, would start telling crazy tales by the light of the moon. And maybe sometimes that was because they had a story to tell and sometimes because they just needed to hear their own voices.

  Creel understood that part of it just fine.

  After a particularly violent barrage in the Le Touquet sector by German 18-pounders, whizz-bangs, which blew sandbags into fragments, a young private from the 2nd Lancashire Fusiliers with eyes like smoked glass kept touching his arms and legs and chest in the observation trench.

  Standing there, knee-deep in the frozen mud, Creel said, “It’s okay, son. You’re still intact.”

  “Oi, it’s not that, sir,” said the private, touching his grime-streaked face. “It’s not that at all, you see. It’s just…well, I’m making sure I’m solid and what, not a ghost. One minute you’re solid as brick, the next naught but a ghost drifting about.”

  In the trenches where death came so swiftly there was a real need to prove to yourself that you were truly alive, a thing of flesh and blood. When you spent week after miserable week living in what amounted to sandbagged ditches with freezing drizzle raining down on you, ears ringing from machine-gun fire, the pitted landscape a cratered run of barbwire and unburied corpses lit at night by flickering green flares…it all became very surreal. And the need to prove to yourself that you were not in some desolate hell or purgatory whiling away eternity became very strong.

  Creel had felt it himself more than once.

  Scribbling down the vagaries of life in the trenches, the madness was always there and he was mute witness to it. Very often, it vented itself in the form of stories. Particularly after a fierce action or raid, like bad blood that had to be lanced.

  He’d heard about monstrous packs of rats that took down living men. About visions of Christ and the Virgin Mother in the trenches. The phantoms of dead men patrolling the perimeters. And from one particularly terrified sergeant of the King’s Royal Rifle Corps, he’d heard about a creature half-bird and half-woman, a hag that fed on corpses (later he learned that was an old one, so old it had hair growing on it, a twice-told battlefield tale that predated the days of Cromwell).

  But he was a realist.

  Seventeen years as a combat correspondent will do that. It will leech the poetry from your soul and sometimes that’s not a bad thing. War, any war, is bad enough without a fertile imagination complicating things.

  But after the burial party…and what that German sergeant had said…he began thinking differently.

  It was the state of those corpses and the footprints that haunted him for days afterwards. Maybe it meant nothing at all…yet, his mind would not let go of it. Over and over again, it went through what he’d seen out there and he began to get that feeling in his gut he hadn’t had in years…the sense that he was onto something. And when that feeling grew strong, when he smelled the blood in the water, he knew he’d have to track it to its source, one way or another.

  But he went slow.

  He went easy.

  When you were in his position, there by the good graces of the BEF—even if their reasons weren’t exactly altruistic—you could not make waves. He wasn’t like some of the British newsies, guys like John Buchan or Valentine Williams, Henry Nevinson or Hamilton Fife, established accredited war correspondents. They had been selected by the Brits to shovel out the propaganda and were doing a bang-up job at it, steering the British public away from the godawful truth of the war and finely tuning their misguided perception of a valiant struggle against the bloodthirsty savage Hun (with only light, acceptable losses, of course). If they knew the truth of what was being done with their sons and husbands, brothers and fathers in the meatgrinders of the trenches, there would be rioting in the streets.

  Creel was offended by censored news.

  Maybe his own stories were
watered down, but he did manage to keep a somewhat despairing undercurrent to them. He would not be a tool of corrupt politicians regardless of what side of the Atlantic they spawned on.

  But he knew he had to be careful.

  He had to step light.

  So he didn’t make much noise at first, he just listened.

  And he kept hearing the same thing again and again: there was something out there. Something that wasn’t a man. Something that fed on the wounded and dying. He jotted it all down in his notebook, thinking it was the sort of thing that might spice up yet another dreary account of war.

  Then three men of the 12th disappeared from a listening post a stone’s throw from the German forward trenches. And this after not one but two wire-cutting parties failed to return.

  “It’s nothing but the Jerries,” Sergeant Haines said. “They snuck up on ‘em, took ‘em prisoner. Them Jerries is quite good at things like that.”

  It was always possible. But Sergeant Stone, who’d led the three, was extremely capable.

  “So when are you going out?” Creel asked him.

  “Tomorrow,” Haines said. “We’ll have a bit of a look. Be a morning mist coming in.”

  “I want to go with.”

  “You?”

  “Yes.”

  The sergeant sighed. “All right. But you carry rifle and kit like the rest. If you lag, you’re left behind.”

  8

  No-Man’s Land

  Haines was right about the mist: it came with the dawn, white and fuming, a perfect enveloping wall that obscured everything, turned all the wreckage out in No-Man’s Land to gray indistinct shapes. As the sun rose higher and higher, it did not dissipate. It seemed to be steaming from the broken, mud-slicked ground itself. It fell over the trenches like a shroud and visibility was down to ten or twelve feet. Creel could hear the men and the clank of their equipment but not see them.