Excerpt from:
The Anemones

15th of September 1915

Père Louis Breton stood in his Lieutenant’s uniform on the starboard side of the merchant steamer waiting his turn to join the long line of young soldiers picking their way down the steep gangplank to the pier below. From under the visor of his peaked cap, he glanced offshore where the crisp light bounced off the moody Atlantic like stars. This bright morning, he thought, was a gift from the gods. The capricious and cruel pagan gods, that is, and specifically Mars, the god of War with his virile spear, who was granting the warriors a respite from his insatiable savagery. For some months now, ever since Louis Breton had been Chaplain to the men in the trenches, the blood thirsty heathen gods had felt more real to him than the absent Christian one. The war had been raging now for a year with no end in sight, a war that, after only a year, had killed more than a million young men and wounded three times that many. A war of futile and wholesale slaughter that had all but wiped out the original British army. A war whose only foreseeable winner was The War itself. A war, finally, that after Breton had seen it, felt it, heard it, tasted it, smelled it, would crowd out almost everything he had thought or felt back in those innocent days before the war, and the naïve person he had been back then, and all the pap of that bygone world of long ago. And so too for the God he had believed in, all gone. Except Elodie. Elodie was the only one to whom he would admit to these feelings. He wrote to her in his diary almost every day. These were journal entries only, not letters that he would ever mail to her.

One reason he could not mail them was the problem of Army censorship. All letters were read and heavily censored for information the Army wanted kept from civilians, or for unpatriotic sentiments which included any complaints about the War. Then there was the obvious complication that Elodie was married and anything he wrote that was too personal would compromise her. So, writing to her had simply become writing. It was liberating; he could tell her everything and not worry about sparing her, or himself, the worst bits. It was at once freeing and safe.

“I’m worried about these boys and how impossibly young and innocent they are,” he had already written to her.

These fresh recruits, who were disembarking with him at the French port of Boulogne-Sur-Mer near Calais, formed the new 22nd French Canadian battalion. After months of training at Salisbury Plain, in Southeast England, they had boarded their ship at Dover Harbour in the half light of dawn. Now, on a sunny morning, all of them were agog to be in a medieval city in France whence their ancestors had come. Like pilgrims in the holy place, they craned their necks up, gawking at the massive grey stone walls girding the city, at the ancient port buildings, at the great fortress dominating the old town.

These young men of the French-Canadian Expeditionary Corps numbered 1,200 officers and soldiers under Canadian and British command. Their marching orders were to reach the Front at Ypres in Belgium by September 20th. Their Chaplain, Père Louis Breton, had only joined the battalion two weeks ago. Before that, he had been commissioned with the Canadian Expeditionary Corps, first in training, then at the Front at Ypres. Breton, one of nineteen Catholic Chaplains in the whole British fighting force, and, so far, the only French Canadian priest, wore his two Lieutenant’s pips and crowns on his shoulder badge, and a black felt cross sewn onto his lapel; he carried, besides some few clothes, his missal, a bible, a vial of holy oil for last rites, a portable mass kit and his stole, a collection of poems by Verlaine, a rum filled silver flask, his journal, some writing paper, several pencils, his small red Swiss army knife, and a pair of Army issue wellies, altogether a light load compared to what the privates were weighed down with: the Enfield rifle, 250 rounds of ammunition, a sandbag, a tarp, a blanket, field dressing, emergency ration biscuits, a water bottle, wire cutters, pick and shovel, barbed wire. The stronger men also balanced fence posts, field telephones or cages of carrier pigeons on their shoulders.

As soon as the battalion was in formation on the dock, they marched out of the old town on echoey cobblestones, and into the countryside. Here the road was lined with tall hedgerows bulging with ripe blackberries, followed by pastures from where spotted brown and cream-colored cows stared at them impassively. Then meadows of sweet-scented mauve heather, and orchards of apple trees laden with drooping red fruit. All this bounty reminded the country boys among them of a version of home. (Except, they noted, their own cattle were black and white Holsteins.) Here in this pastoral haven, it was the war that seemed like an ancient fable.

After two hours under the hot sun, they were allowed to break rank to have their lunch of bread, cheese, and hard-boiled eggs, under the shade of roadside poplars. As was customary, the officers settled on one side of the road, except for Louis Breton who sat on the other side with the men – boys, really – and chatted with them. By now, after six years in Europe, first in Rome, then Belgium, and finally Paris, he had acquired an accent that sounded posh to these working-class Canadiens. He had to keep explaining that he was not French, but Canadien like them, from la province de Québec, had gone to the Séminaire in Montréal. The men knew Breton had been at Ypres the previous spring when the Germans had launched their gas attacks and they looked up to him. They had heard the story.

None of the allied soldiers had gas masks. The chlorine cloud hit the French Algerian troops first. It burned and asphyxiated them. Those who survived fled, opening a six-kilometer breach in the line. From behind the creeping gas cloud, the Germans attempted to advance into the gap, but the Canadians (The Canadian Expeditionary Forces) rushed in with a bayonet charge. After four days of desperate non-stop fighting, the Germans launched a second gas attack directly onto the Canadian forces. Following the advice of their medics they survived the poison by wrapping their mouths and noses in urine-soaked rags. They held fast and pushed back the Germans. That, at least, was the story they had read in Lord Beaverbrook’s papers. These same papers even now failed to mention that the troops still didn’t have gas masks.

Breton surreptitiously surveyed the impossibly young faces of these boys and feared for them. They had all voluntarily enlisted.

“Racontez-nous Ypres, mon Père,” asked one blond boy, “tell us about Ypres” as though it had been a legendary party he had missed, as though the war was a series of magnificent exploits to be proud of. The boy hadn’t yet learned the unwritten rule: never ask a soldier outright about his combat experiences. Direct questions were likely to trigger visions of the horrors the man had survived and usually met with silence or anger.

Breton’s expression darkened.

“What’s your name, young man?”

“Gustave Lanctôt, mon Père”

“The papers you read, Gustave, were indignant about the “atrocity” of the gas. They condemned it for being “new”, and therefore unfair, as if the war is a sport with its own sense of fair play. But they condoned the massive casualties. They downplayed the death of 2,000 Canadians, of 6,000 wounded. Among the dead and wounded were many young French-Canadian boys just like you.”

“But we won that battle, Father,” countered Gustave. “We closed the line. The Canadian Expeditionary Forces made a name for themselves, even in Lord Beaverbrook’s newspapers.”

Breton nodded but said little else. They didn’t want to hear that along the roughly ninety miles of the British line, some 7000 soldiers and officers were killed or wounded every day. What these boys cared about was that they would be joining the now famous and seasoned troops of the fifth infantry division of the Canadian Expeditionary Corps. They were full of antique notions of duty and glory on the battlefield. As though the unprecedented industrial scale of devastation from the constant bombs, the shells, the shrapnel, the automatic rounds of machine guns could even be properly called “a battle” in the traditional sense. The traditional sense that ennobled and gave meaning to what was in fact, mass slaughter. Breton was only a half dozen years their senior, but he felt much older. He himself had nightmares about the massacre at Ypres which he avoided thinking about during the day. But sometimes, in an instant, like now, the horrors would overtake him, and he saw the trenches, the ones the Canadians were rushing to re-occupy after they’d been abandoned; they were filled with the bodies of the dead packed in like sardines in a tin can; this mass grave was a recurrent image in the confessions of the Catholic soldiers; what haunted them was that they had had no choice but to walk on the corpses to retake the trenches. He himself had trampled a dying French soldier who had moaned. He had given the man last rites. The injuries from the gas were a new form of ghastly: that dying Frenchman had a black hole burned into his face where his cheek should have been; there was a man with empty sockets for eyes; Breton had heard screams, dreadful inhuman shrieks coming from the thick poison fog. With a shake of his head, he shooed these phantoms away and returned to the moment at hand: the trill of a whistle and the shouting English voice of the Major ordering them to “Reform Ranks and March!”

They reached the camp on a rainy day and, after taking his early supper at the officer’s mess, Breton headed for the commissary where he bought a bottle of rum and three packs of cigarettes. Then he turned back towards the kitchen complex. When the cooking staff saw him, they knew why he was there. They assembled a large pot of hot beef stew, fresh bread wrapped in towels, a ladle, and tin mugs. They knew he was taking this food to the men in the trenches who were close to the end of their weeklong rotation. By now their rations would be low and probably soaked through. Taking mess food to the trenches was forbidden, but the staff made an exception for Breton because he was a priest and an officer and he wouldn’t try to make a fast dollar by selling it to the men, as some scoundrels had been known to do. Loaded with the stew pot dangling from one arm, the rum in his mackintosh’s outer pocket, the bread in the inside pocket, and the ladle and mugs rattling on a rope around his neck, he made his way to the mile long communication trench which connected with the front-line trenches. None of the trenches were built in a straight line to avoid what they called enfilade fire: in a straight trench, a sniper would have an easy shot all the way down. At every turn, the drizzling rain made the duckboards slippery. Occasionally, there was an isolated burst of machine gun fire from “the enemy” that was occasionally answered. Otherwise, it was quiet. The real work, he knew, would begin after dark, after the evening Stand To when the troops would stand to arms just behind the parapet, ready for an attack. Dawn and dusk were considered the most likely times for an assault.

On first arriving at the camp, he had recognized the unmistakable stench of death wafting from No Man’s Land. But here it was worse, even worse, more nauseating, rottener than when he’d left, almost three weeks ago. Apparently, all of No Man’s Land was flooded from the German dam bombings, especially here in what was called the Salient of Ypres, a huge U-shaped bulge of land, nine miles wide, advancing four miles into formerly German held territory that protected the city of Ypres. The allies were desperate to hold Ypres for its rail lines to the coast and points south. From the barrage of enemy fire coming from two, sometimes three sides, it had been near to impossible to retrieve the dead, but now, with the flood, the bloated corpses floated in the putrid waters, spreading their fecal gases like poisoned fumes over the entire plain of Flanders. It was this reek of decay that drew the rats by the thousands, rats that fed on the cadavers, rats that scurried and thrived everywhere men died. The foul vapors made Breton gag a few times, and he had to stop and bend over in case he vomited. ‘The nausea always hits you first’, he’d written to Elodie. ‘Later, the dizziness can make you faint’. There was nowhere to set down his stew pot. He saw a rat scuttle over his boots and kicked his foot. The worst of the queasiness passed, and he went on deeper into the quagmire.

Within two weeks, the first rotation of young volunteers from the 22nd were ordered to relieve the soldiers in the front-line trenches. After a week there, those who had survived moved back to the support trenches; a week after that, they moved back further to the reserve trenches for yet another week before they finally got a week of “rest” behind the lines.

One of the boys who didn’t make it on his first week on the front line was Gustave Lanctôt, the blond boy who had wanted to hear from Breton about the gas attacks. He was killed in a night raid. The orders to send out raiders always came from generals thirty miles behind the front lines who insisted the forays were important for “information” about the enemy’s capabilities. The night raiders were meant to capture an enemy soldier from a German trench who would then be “interrogated” by British command. These raids were extremely dangerous and unpopular among the men and the lieutenants who served with them in the trenches. Two or three men were usually killed or wounded in these attacks which often failed. The raiders had first to get through their own barbed wires, which, if they were lucky, a digging party had, the previous night, dug enough of a hole under the barbs to crawl under. If it was too muddy and sloppy to dig, a wiring party would have cut the wire the night before. Then, as quietly as possible they had to creep through No Man’s Land to the German wires where, they prayed, their diggers or cutters had done their job. The German wire was often so thick that it was like a wall of black barbed metal. They also prayed that German flares didn’t give them away to the enemy sentries scanning the wasteland. When they got beyond the enemy wire and reached the German trench, they had to throw in a couple of grenades and almost as quickly jump in and start shooting the startled soldiers. Whichever German survived the surprise attack would be taken prisoner and dragged back the same way they had come. Nobody ever volunteered for the raiding parties. The Lieutenant would have to go “You. You. You. You. You. And you.” Gustave Lanctôt had volunteered for a night raid. A machine gun volley cut him down coming out from under their own wire. His comrades hid in shell holes while bullets flew over them. Eventually, they managed to grab the boy’s collar and drag him back to the trench, where Breton waited anxiously. The boys slid and tumbled down into the trench, Gustave in tow. The boy lay twisted on the duckboards covered in mud. The Lieutenant screamed “Medics” into the fracas of constant gunfire and exploding bombs. Breton kneeled next to Gustave and turned him over; his head lolled back exposing his mud-covered face. Breton grabbed his rum-soaked handkerchief tied over his nose and wiped the boy’s face. His eyes were closed. He didn’t seem to be breathing. When he wiped his mouth, the slight pressure released a drool of blood. Breton found his holy oil and made a cross on the boy’s forehead with it while he recited the last prayer. As soon as he was finished, the stretcher bearers rolled the boy onto their canvas litter and disappeared. Breton was still on his knees covered in blood. A medic arrived, assumed Breton was injured and attempted to get him onto a stretcher. They could not hear each other over the uproar and had to communicate with signs. Finally, Breton unbuttoned his uniform to show the man he had not been hit. All that night, and hundreds since, Breton dreamed about Gustave Lanctôt’s face and the blood trickling from his mouth.