The Gathering Storm by Bodie Thoene
“They’re bombing Ghent. And the Victoria. We’ll go around.”
“Go where?”
Papa flipped to the index. “Here. Page 50. Only about thirty-five miles beyond Ghent. The village of Passendale. And look, Tyne Cott.”
“The military cemetery?”
“The Wehrmacht won’t be interested in bombing people who are already dead.”
It made sense. What sort of military target would a vast field of dead men make? I asked Jessica, “What do you think?”
Jessica nodded and stroked the unborn child. “He’s kicking. He wants out, Lora. I think I’ll need a place to rest soon. Someplace out of the crowd.”
Papa refolded the map and passed the red book to me. “It’s settIed, then. Tyne Cott cemetery. I know the caretaker. A veteran of the Great War. He’ll shelter us.”
I agreed, never imagining that my father’s decision to take us to Tyne Cott, and his friend, Judah Blood, would place us directly in the paths of two armies.
PART FOUR
A time to plant,
And a time to pluck up that which is planted.
ECCLESIASTES 3:2B
9
The once bright poppies were withering.
Warm January days and early February rains, so pleasant across Belgium and northern France that winter of 1940, had encouraged a profusion of wild blooms. A continuous drought since March caused that time of exuberant growth to be no more than a two-month-old memory. The grassy fields around Passendale and Ypres yellowed with unseasonable heat. The poppies’ drooping heads were bowed with thirst. The once vibrant banks of color had faded to mere streaks, like threadbare, blood-stained carpet.
Judah Blood straightened up and stretched his aching back and reflected on the weather. There were fewer weeds to pluck this year from around the headstones of Tyne Cott cemetery, and none of the stone monuments were in danger of being engulfed in vines. Just the opposite was true: at this rate the entire hillside, where close to twelve thousand Allied soldiers had slept since the Great War, would be nothing but dust before midsummer.
The sun beating down on the tin roof of the shed Judah called his shop was not unbearable, but it was still too hot for this early in the year. Hooking both thumbs under the painted facemask, he pried it away from his cheekbones for an instant to let air flow beneath.
He took a sip of lukewarm water from a flask and studied the workbench. Beneath Judah’s skilled fingers, the figure of Saint George and the Dragon he was fashioning in leaded glass was taking shape nicely. It was destined for a memorial chapel in Brussels before the chapel’s dedication in July.
The rumble of trucks passing on the highway distracted him from his work yet again. It was another British convoy heading east; young men heading into yet another war. For eight months, since the Nazis invaded Poland last September, an uneasy quiet had persisted along the western front. When Allies and Nazis glared at each other across fortified positions, but no new hostilities erupted, some had taken to calling this “The Phony War.”
But now those eager, fearless young British men passing in lorries on the roads were prepared to plunge into battle. Would English dead from new battlefields be brought here to lie beside their fathers and uncles, or would new hillsides be sown with bodies awaiting the blossoming of Resurrection morn?
Judah returned to his work, pondering its ultimate fate. If the Germans captured Brussels, they would have little interest in a depiction of an English saint honoring English heroes. What would happen to it then?
The saint’s hands, gripping the shaft of the spear about to be plunged into the dragon’s heart, were particularly tricky to render believably. Judah closed his eyes and concentrated. Almost against his will, he recalled a bayonet charge from more than twenty years earlier. A terrified young infantryman hefted his rifle just so before stabbing downward into the body of a foe across a barbed wire barricade. The scene of desperate combat, illuminated by a shell burst, was etched in Judah’s vision. In indelible memory the soldier’s knuckles were clenched white, veins standing out in hands and forearms. The motion was the same as a spear thrust, the very grasp Judah needed to depict.
“’Scuse me, Cap’n Blood, sir.” The diffident tone of Sergeant Mickey Walker disrupted Judah’s image.
Judah shook his head to clear it. He was not sorry for the intrusion. “What is it, Sergeant?”
The remaining members of the Tin Noses Brigade still addressed each other by their ranks from the Great War. The fatigues worn by Sergeant Walker, late of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, had been innocent of rank or other designation for many years. However, at Tyne Cott cemetery the Irishman remained the ranking non-comm, just as Judah was commanding officer.
“Sorry to interrupt, sir,” Walker repeated, “but me and the lieutenant has been having a discussion, like.” The Irishman paused to wipe a line of sweat from his forehead before it crept beneath his fake nose.
“What about?” Judah inquired.
“We was scrubbing the markers near the Cross of Sacrifice….the captain knows the ones I mean; them as is for the boys who fell during the fight.”
The additional description of the location was not needed. During the Battle of Passendale, which some called the Third Battle of Ypres, the British had used a captured German pillbox as an aid station. Those who did not survive their wounds were summarily buried next to the field hospital.
Later, after the war, the pillbox was surmounted by a giant stone memorial cross. The surrounding slopes displayed rank on orderly rank of headstones, but these first, haphazardly placed graves were left in their original locations. It was a tribute to the heroism of those men, and a reminder this hillside was a battlefield before it was a memorial.
“Is there a problem?” Judah asked.
“The lieutenant, sir, sees as how some of them stones is leanin’ after last winter’s rains. He think we should shift ’em; straighten ’em up, like.”
“And you disagree?”
Walker adjusted the earpieces of the eyeglass frame that supported his artificial nose and plucked at the patch over his missing left eye. “I don’t like to contradict an officer, sir, but he suggested I put it to you, like. I thinks them leanin’ stones is part of the way they was left, a’purpose.”
“But we can’t have them falling down, can we?” Judah chided.
“None of them is in danger of that, sir,” Walker returned. “’Specially with the ground gettin’ so rock hard, an’ all.”
“I’ll walk over before supper and have a look,” Judah said.
“Thank you, sir,” Walker said, saluting. He turned on his heel and exited the shed as if departing from an office in a proper headquarters.
That’s the way he had always been, Judah reflected. Back in the twenties, just after the last war, when the Tin Noses Brigade was much bigger, Sergeant Walker had always been a stickler for military tradition. The men whose terribly disfigured faces barred them from home and sweethearts and society found peace and acceptance among similarly injured comrades. Without an actual plan, they had coalesced around the Belgian cemetery like raindrops sliding down and collecting at the bottom of a windowpane.
They found meaning in their lives as outcasts by serving their fallen comrades—maintaining the memorials and acting as guides for grieving family members.
In those early days Sergeant Walker had been the only master stonecutter in the troop. Over the years he had trained a dozen others to chisel names into granite and marble with precision and economy of motion.
Now the combined, long-term effects of poison gas, shrapnel, and depression had taken their toll. After two decades of failing lungs, septic wounds, and suicides, Walker was once again the only trained mason left in the brigade.
Judah watched Sergeant Walker rejoin his lieutenant. The latter was Frank Howard. In 1917 he had been a pink-cheeked junior officer. His first taste of combat had been at Polygon Wood, not far from this very spot. There, as the young and inexperienced
Sergeant Walker had been wounded in almost the same manner while rescuing his lieutenant. Both were scarred forever. Both received treatment at the Tin Noses Shop in Paris. The two men had been inseparable ever since.
As far as Frank Howard’s family knew, he died at Passendale in 1917.
Such confusion was neither rare nor surprising: a million men killed from just the forces of the British Empire alone. Some scholars said as many as ten million soldiers died. The sum was nearly incomprehensible.
In Lieutenant Howard’s case it was his purpose to keep his family in ignorance of his true fate. The bullet that had struck him had shattered more than his face. It had shattered his life. Even with the prosthesis hiding the gaping horror of his features, he would have ended his own existence if Sergeant Walker had not rescued him a second time by returning him here to Passendale.
Offspring of a noble house, and well-educated, Howard was the architect and engineer for the troop. There was nothing he could not design and few things he could not repair. Judah’s workshop and the stone cottages that housed the brigade had been of Howard’s conception.
Now there were only four members of the brigade left, and they stayed in one cottage together.
Yet another convoy bumped past on the road heading east.
Judah strained his ears. Was he really hearing the crump of distant artillery fire, was it his imagination, or simply a memory he already regretted reliving?
How much longer would the Tin Noses Brigade be able to serve their fallen brothers at Tyne Cott? And if not here, then where?
The aroma of cabbage soup pervaded the stone cottage just outside the cemetery grounds. Judah was the last to enter the squat, four-room structure. He had worked longer on Saint George than he expected. By the time he completed his promised inspection of the graves beside the cross, the sun was setting.
Walker, Howard, and the American, Jim Kadle, were gathered around the table. A steaming tureen of soup and their empty bowls demonstrated they had waited for Judah’s arrival before eating.
“My apologies,” Judah said. “I lost track of time.”
“Know you’re anxious to get finished, sir,” Walker said. “Anyway, we’ve been having a bit of a chat.”
“More like an argument, you mean,” Kadle corrected.
Judah shushed the debate long enough to ask Howard to pronounce a blessing and begin ladling out the meal. Once everyone had been served, the captain inquired, “What was this discussion about?”
With that invitation, as usually happened over meals, military protocol was relaxed. All the Tin Noses Brigade were free to state their opinions without regard to rank.
Howard had removed the prosthetic portion of his face. One cheekbone and his mouth were perfectly normal. His nose and the other cheek, of painted, galvanized copper, lay on the bench behind him. Half his features he covered with a black scarf from just below the level of his eyes. With a practiced gesture he plucked the corner of the cloth away from his mouth with one hand and tossed in a spoonful of soup with the other. “Private Kadle maintains that if the Germans cross the Meuse, they’ll be here before the week is out. The sergeant and I feel differently. With our boys in the fight, the Boche will be tossed right back to the Siegfried Line in short order.”
Judah, who never removed the tin mask covering his nose, eyes, and forehead, swallowed a mouthful of soup before responding. “Why so pessimistic, Private?”
Kadle held his head at an angle while eating his soup, the better to accommodate the fact he was missing part of his jaw on one side. “It’s this way, sir. The Germans have better tanks. They have better artillery. You know about their 88s? They have better aircraft. They are better equipped, better trained. Now I don’t say your boys won’t slow ’em down some, but I’m afraid it’ll be ‘too little, too late.’”
Kadle, like all the Tin Noses Brigade, had paid dearly for his right to express an opinion about military matters, especially when the topic was German armament and weaponry. The American private was with the U.S. 91st Infantry Regiment on the banks of the River Scheldt when his company was strafed by German bi-planes. With nowhere to escape, Kadle was lucky to emerge with only the loss of an ear and half his jaw; ten others all around him had not even been as fortunate.
That was east of Passendale, at the Battle of Spittals Bosschen, November 4, 1918.
One week before the Armistice.
One week before safety and home and family.
Just as the United States had been a late arrival to the Great War, Kadle had also been a latecomer to the ranks of the servants at Tyne Cott. Before that he had been single-handedly tending four hundred of his countrymen’s graves at Flanders Field American Cemetery. Then, quite unexpectedly, in 1928, he had run headlong into his mother and father…who believed him to be dead. They had come to Flanders to lay a wreath in honor of their missing son at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.
Terrified they might see and recognize him, Kadle had fled to join the Tyne Cott band of brothers and had remained ever since.
“I don’t mean to be a pessimist,” he said now. “But I’m a realist. The Germans have more tanks and better tanks.”
Agreeing in part with Kadle’s assessment, Judah said, “The French generals were wrong in thinking this would be 1917 all over again. The Germans can move, and move quickly. This will not be a war of trenches and gains measured in yards.”
“So you agree with me, then?” Kadle asked.
Judah shrugged. “But the Germans may still get overextended, just like at the Marne…remember? If they outrun their supply lines they can be hit from both sides in a coordinated counterattack: British and Belgians from the north, French from the south.”
Lieutenant Howard slapped his palm on the table, jostling the tureen and causing a cup of soup to slop onto the table. “Sorry, but that’s just what I said. Overextended. Outflanked from both sides at once.”
When the soup was exhausted, the men pushed back their chairs. “I think that’s enough about the war for tonight,” Judah decreed. He gestured toward where half of Howard’s face lay staring upward at the cottage ceiling. “Lieutenant, I see the paint is chipped around your nose. Pump up that lantern, and I’ll tend to it for you.”
“Thank you, sir,” Howard said as Judah opened a box of paints and delicate brushes. As the gas lantern hissed and visibly brightened, Judah mixed flesh tones on his palette and turned to work.
Later, he wandered out into the night without mentioning his destination.
“S’pose he’s off again, then?” Walker queried. “Last time it was two weeks. Before that, six. Never says where.”
“The captain is entitled to keep his personal business to himself,” Howard returned. “Anyway, I don’t think so. It’s just this war business has us all jumpy.”
“You’re right about that, sire. You’re right about that.”
It was early morning at Tyne Cott, just past daybreak. The Tin Noses Brigade gathered together around a stand of poplars screening the squat concrete form of a derelict German pillbox.
Later in the day the four comrades would disperse to their individual duties, but Judah had summoned them for this special task while the air was still cool from the night. “If we don’t get rain soon,” he said, “the grass will die. But we can, and we must, keep the trees and the hedges alive by hauling water for them.”
This morning’s chore involved digging a channel around each of the tall, flame-shaped trees. Once filled with gravel, each ring would trap moisture and direct it toward the poplars’ roots.
“Should have done this two months ago,” Kadle groused. The American had been wounded in the right hand and arm by the same attack that injured his face. Now he wielded a turf spade with his left hand alone.
No one bothered to respond to this observation. No one could have foreseen the d
Judah’s corded arms and brawny shoulders drove the point of a pick deep into the earth with each blow. As if mining for gold or diamonds, he attacked the resistant ground.
Kadle, coming immediately behind the captain, removed the layer of loosened clods. The broken pieces came out in shards and fractured clumps, more like stone than soil.
Walker and Howard, wielding shovels, deepened the ring until the depth passed the hard-packed upper layer and exposed earth that still retained some moisture. As each of the poplars was served in this way, its encircling ring would be lined with rock fragments.
Judah studied his men as they worked. Already Howard showed signs of tiring. Walker would never admit it, but even his sturdy, bandy-legged form did not possess the strength it once had.
Kadle would bear the most watching, Judah thought. The American would dig until he dropped without a word of warning to his friends.
Judah had already adjusted his estimate of how long this chore would take. There were just eight poplars in all—four flanking each side of Tyne Cott’s entry gate. At first Judah had hoped to do one stand today and the other tomorrow.
Later he amended that estimate to just two drainage channels per day.
Now, watching the tremble in Howard’s neck and legs, the captain adjusted his plan yet again. They would try to complete one tree this morning and then begin again tomorrow.
Kadle’s lift-and-toss action propelled a spadeful of earth farther than he intended. Gravel bounced off Walker’s head and something rang metallically against his shovel.
“Hey!” he chided. “Watch what you’re about, then.”
“Sorry,” Kadle responded.
Walker bent to see what had made the strange sound. From the loose soil he plucked a tarnished silver cigarette case. “Look here,” he said, holding it aloft. “Too nice for the likes of me.”