The Wars

Mines explode and shake the earth. Robert wakes up in pain in the darkness of the devastated dugout. The “pounding of the guns” (104) begins and the roof starts to collapse. Levitt helps excavate Robert, Rodwell, and the caged animals. Poole is missing; Levitt is “suffering from shock” (105) and asks Robert not to swear. Robert and Rodwell are finally pulled free. The animals have all survived. As Rodwell lights candles, Levitt asks him not to with “an edge of craziness in his voice that sounded dangerous” (106). Robert digs through the collapsed hut for Poole. When Levitt complains that Robert is making a mess, Rodwell strikes him, causing Levitt to flee the dugout. Twelve minutes after the mines explode, they continue to dig. Robert is about to give up when a voice appears beside him and asks who they are trying to find. It is Poole.

Robert looks for the trench below, but it is “gone” (108), replaced by a hole. Shells thunder around and above. Robert searches desperately but the trench no longer exists and the men who had lived there are gone. He passes a dead man and frees a trapped rat. It takes Robert over an hour to stumble a quarter of a mile to the Battalion Signals Office. When he does reach it, communications are down. He must wait to send his message as the few lines still open are busy. Robert’s company commander, Captain Leather, arrives on the scene. Leather assigns Robert an operation and gives him a team of “trouble-makers” (110). Robert feels “condemned” (110).

Robert leads 22 men, including Corporal Bates. They lose two men to shells en route and Bates threatens to shoot anyone who stops. They arrive at the dugout. Levitt is “stony calm” (111); Robert gives him the lesser assignment, despite his doubts over Levitt’s sanity. Rodwell and Poole remain at the dugout. Robert and his men arrive at the forward trench and find it full of dead and wounded men. Robert cannot stop; he leads his men forward because “that was the rule” (111).

Arriving 150 yards from his objective, Robert sees the strewn-out corpses and the crater is filling with water. They need to position their mortars on the edge of the crater and return fire. Robert leads the way, painfully crawling and swimming as best he can along the ground. Slipping and sliding, Robert eventually corrals the men into position inside the crater. Robert clambers to the rim and finds himself facing “the last twelve yards of No Man’s Land and then the German trenches” (115). Men dig in the mortars. As he calculates the mortar range, the barrage ceases above them. The silence means an imminent German attack. Robert draws his pistol. A man alerts him to “a pale blue fog” (116) which begins to slither over the crater’s edge. Robert is the only one with a mask; “they sent us up so quick that none of us was issued masks” (116) Bates explains, shivering. Robert tells them all to jump into the water in the bottom of the crater.

The water is so deep that the men cannot touch the bottom. Three men cannot swim, one breaks both his legs in the jump. They become “eight panic-stricken men […] trapped in the bottom of a sink hole, either about to be drowned or smothered to death with gas” (117). Some men try to fight Robert for his mask, but he tells them to back off, brandishing the pistol. He tells them to take their handkerchiefs or tear their shirts and “piss on them” (118). He gives his mask to the man with the broken legs. The gas sinks down above the men as they try to obey the order. No one can but Robert, who rips his own shirt and urinates on the scrap. Bates finally manages to urinate and, convinced that he is going to die, lays on the ground with the wet cloth on his face.

As they wait, Robert remembers his childhood chemistry lesson. They wait an hour. Even as the gas dissipates, the men dare not move. Another two hours pass, and it begins to snow. Finally, Robert decides to move. White snow covers the entire landscape. Just when he thinks he is alone, Robert sees a German watching him. Slowly, he begins to move. The German remains still. Robert draws the pistol. The German raises his binoculars. Robert orders Bates to roll over and reveal himself, the pistol trained on the German. He tells Bates to escape the crater. The German watches Bates escape and then nods at Robert. Next, the men follow (though one has died). Robert checks on the man with broken legs but finds him dead. Robert begins to climb out of the crater. The climb is agonizing and slow.

When Robert is six feet from the lip, Bates shouts at him. Robert slips and sees the German “reaching over the lip of the crater” (122). Something explodes and the German is dead. Robert scrambles toward Bates and collapses on top of him, finally realizing that he has his gun in his hand. Turning back to look, he sees the German’s binoculars; the man had not been reaching for a weapon when Robert shot him. A bird sings and “the sound of it would haunt [Robert] till the day he died” (123). Everyone else in the trench is dead.

As “one day bled into the next” (123), the fighting continues. More men die and are replaced. The Germans have a new weapon called a flame thrower, the “ultimate weapon” (123). The dugout is rebuilt, and Levitt has “gone quite mad” (124). Devlin, Bonnycastle, and Robert try their best to hold order. They foray and argue. Rodwell disappears for 24 hours; his animals died in the gas attack. Only the toad was saved. Then, everything falls silent. Robert stands on the dugout roof. It rains.

Rodwell reappears and announces that he is being transferred. Captain Leather visits and gives them new orders. Then the men—Robert, Levitt, Poole, and Devlin—head back to Wytsbrouk. Rodwell hands them a letter and his toad, asking Robert to post the former and release the latter “as far behind the lines as you can get him” (125). Rodwell is going “down the line” (125).

Robert, Poole, and Devlin put Levitt into a medical flat-car. Two days later, Robert hears word that Rodwell shot himself. He had been sent down the line and placed in a company of men driven mad. The men had been torturing animals. After being forced to watch the murder of a cat, he “wandered into No Man’s Land and put a bullet through his ears” (126). Robert reads Rodwell’s letter, addressed to his daughter, Laurine. Rodwell tells his daughter that “nothing dies” (126) and Robert makes certain to have it delivered.

During this time, Mrs. Ross begins to “seek out storms” (126). Rain and snow please her, and she insists on walking through inclement weather. She studies reports of the Parliament Buildings burning in Ottawa and believes that the country “was being destroyed by fire” (127). Some days, she gets drunk and sits in Rowena’s chair for Davenport to wheel her about. She reads and catalogues Robert’s letters meticulously and writes him every day, though her letters are indecipherable. Mr. Ross never complains, “though he missed her terribly” (128). He remembers her as she was. He fears for his wife, though he has become “a portion of her silence. He was just another room through which she passed towards the dark” (129).

Robert’s present tour of duty is over, and he is being sent back to Britain. He examines one of Rodwell’s sketchbooks on the train. Amid the pictures of animals, he finds one of himself. The likeness is good, but the shading is “not quite human” (129). He releases the toad beneath a hedge.