The Spoils by Toni Juliette Leonetti

Themes that some readers may find distressing – see tabs

***

July 7, 1917, Arras, France

It was no great shock to hear of corpses rising from their graves.

Not in this toppled world, where men turned moles. Where the fresh aged fastest, stooped and wizened in their dark holes, dreading the sun. Where a man’s next breath might kill him before he smelled hay in it. Just that, no longer the searing pineapple and peppered bleach of chlorine. Phosgene suggested merely a whiff of musty hay before the man’s lungs drowned him. Drowned, with no water in sight.

Anything that used to be shocking could happen here, and did, common as nightfall.

Lieutenant Lucas Marsh of the Dorsetshire Regiment knew that well. After damning those Huns and their infernal gas, he didn’t condemn Brits for trying it in retaliation, two years ago at Loos. Where the wind blew it back on them.

Here, spring battles varied like wind. Canadians’ victory at Vimy Ridge. French failure to seize the Chemin des Dames. Brits’ victory and failure on the Scarpe, ending again in stalemate, this amorphous netherworld between life and death.

So the news that soldiers were refusing to stay buried didn’t have the power to shock it once would have, in the right-side-up world. But it did frighten. Anger the men. And inspire.

Theories echoed through their tunnel network of quarries under Arras. Rabid wolves had dug open those graves. The blasted Boche had, unwilling to call truce with the dead.

Ideas improved after a third heap of bodies surfaced, this time, two miles from Oppy Wood. It was rumoured that an officer had been killed, an aristocrat who kept jewels sewn into his undergarments for insurance or bribe. Surely, there were seekers after that buried treasure.

Diamonds, rubies, a sapphire of safe sky. Emeralds like grassland along the River Hooke.

Spoils for a survivor, at least, if not victor.

Such optimism was brief.

A gruesome successor was born in their caves, where it was meant to hang and squeal, and rush at heads blindly. The same tale that rushed to the men’s heads when they were boys, reading a book their mothers forbade. When terror was confined to books.

Some of the “dead” must be Bram Stoker’s. Undead. They woke at night, churned up honest corpses as they broke from their shared soil. And flew into these very caves, to feed, infect, multiply. 

The younger privates began swaddling their necks before sleep, and soon, every inch of them but eyes and noses. Their elders unbuttoned shirts, leaving throat and chest exposed.

To grow undead, albeit unliving, struck them as a decent bargain. They could taste comfort in it, like blood already sweet on their tongues. The shield, the immortality, that no frog’s mask or covering artillery could promise.

Captain Rawles was one of those who lately bared more for bed. Yet when he summoned Marsh today, his orders countermanded his dreams.

“It’s been quiet for a spell. Don’t think Jerry will advance this direction. Not immediately. This is our chance. To catch those beasts. Whatever—whoever’s—defiling our graves.” 

“Catch them? How, sir? It happens at night. The men won’t leave the tunnels then.”

“They’re at war, aren’t they? They’ll bloody well leave this rats’ maze whenever they’re ordered.”

“War is different. Begging your pardon, sir. They’ve seen what killing’s like. But—”

“But what?”

“They thought—killing was the end of the story.”

“Claptrap. You end the story, Marsh. Take a dozen. Dismissed!”

For three nights, Marsh and his dozen hunted vampires before returning to their tunnels by dawn. Seven men were needed just for the Lewis machine gun he insisted on bringing, with its spare parts and loaded pans of ammunition. The team also carried rifles and grenades, entrenching tools should they need to burrow, field dressings if they didn’t burrow fast enough.

Their rum rations increased on each foray. They spoke less. They shook in sudden sweeps of cold like the snow at their backs on April ninth. The day after Easter, when the assault through Scarpe Valley began. When they believed in resurrection, the peaceful kind. And winning.

As they approached Neuville-Saint-Vaast on the fourth night, beneath a waning gibbous moon and a claw of trees, they found two empty ambulances. They heard breaths heaving nearby, spades slicing dirt, hitting more. Objects solid and hollow, gurgling.

The men dropped to the ground and slithered forward. They saw flaming torches.

Giant crows scavenging remains. A few monster birds in a crater, pecking it deeper. 

No. Not birds. Or bats. Women—seven women—in black, capes flown behind them as they shovelled earth. As they tore from its suck a company of limbs, torsos, faces. Bruised and bloated, whole bodies of gangrene past amputation, syrupy and peeling. One tall black cape flew to each unveiling, shrank into its hood, and sped to another. 

Marsh gestured for the men to spread out. “Stand when I do. Hold fire till I—”

“We’ll not kill ladies?” Tim Wareham, the youngest there, shuddered.

“Not ladies,” John Symes argued. “They’re devils. Look what they’re doing to those poor blokes.”

“What are they doing?” Daniel Bartlett, hugging the Lewis gun, voiced the gasp in open mouths around him.

Marsh whispered, “No questions. Shoot if I order it. Only if. Go.”

He was waiting for Bartlett to get in position, when the crater screamed.

Six women flocked to its edges.

“Anabel!” One yelled down. “Is it?”

A barrage of sobs answered.

Marsh stood with his Webley revolver drawn. His team loomed over them. “British army! You’re surrounded. Don’t move!”

When the men reached the crater, they peered into its core.

The tall cape knelt there, hood thrown back, her black hair pouring over the neck, the shoulders, the waist of the man she held. Man? Her fingers sank into a mass that rippled with maggots.

“Lieutenant Marsh, 6th Battalion, Dorsetshire Regiment. Release that body.”

Her wet eyes, darker than the pit, met his. “Why should I care who you are? Or do what you command, with my own?” It was an English accent, sharp as her dirt-streaked cheekbones and the inch of white roots in her hair. But she was hardly old—mid-twenties, at most—he’d have sworn.

“Come. You’re under arrest—”

“No.” She shifted from him and faced the corpse in her arms. Stroked the rusty strands congealed on his scalp. “Ich sagte, ich werde dich nie verlassen. Willkommen zu Hause, mein Geliebter.” She kissed the crawling lips. And, still kissing, she slid a pistol from her pocket, behind her curtain of hair, and shot into her temple.

Men shouted with women. A jerked rifle sputtered at the moon.

“Drop weapons!” Marsh scrambled into the crater, turned the woman’s head—the half there—and replaced it where it had fallen, lips to lips.

His team’s faces, half-lit by torch fire flailing in the wind, seemed half-gone, too.

The halves left to them blazed with horror and pity. Envy.

Three men were retching. Two folded to the ground. Though they’d never done that in battle.

Marsh picked up the gun beside the bodies. “What did she tell him?”

The weeping woman closest to him replied. “I said I’ll never leave you. Welcome home, my Beloved.”

He spotted it finally, the soldier’s grey tunic. The colour had been a near twin to British khaki, in this state. “Was she—”

“English. English as you. And us. They met at Oxford. When it didn’t matter so much.”

The rest of their story gushed from her like warm blood filling that hole. Anabel and she were ambulance drivers. The others were nurses. They volunteered their sleepless nights to help Anabel search for her fiancé, Ernst, after she learned he’d been killed in this area.

“She wouldn’t leave him here. But we thought—she’d try to send him back to Triberg. We didn’t know. That she’d—”

“You’ve been digging up men? So many bodies? Just to find one dead—”

“The one who mattered.” A nurse leaned heavily on her shovel. “To her.”

“A German?” John Symes spat at the ground. “You call yourself English? You’re mad. And she was the maddest of the lot.”

 “Was she? My husband’s been dead a year. It’s too late to find him. Anabel had better sense than I did, or better—no, not love—courage.” She choked on that. “Maybe they’re the same. Oh, Charlie, forgive me.”

Marsh shook his head. “Ask forgiveness from the men you disturbed.”

“Weren’t they disturbed before we came?”

Another nurse spoke. “We reburied all we could. Occasionally—we ran out of time. And strength. But I have asked forgiveness. I always told them I was sorry. That no one came for them.”

The women were checked for weapons. They bore none. Other than the lockets they wore, with soldiers’ photographs sheathed inside.

“Are we really going to arrest them, sir?” Tim Wareham blinked repeatedly and gulped.

Marsh looked at his men, stiff and pale, their missing halves clearer. “Perhaps not. Not if we agree on how to proceed. And keep this tight amongst us. Tighter than our skin.”

They did agree. Including Symes, who anticipated less trouble for himself, and his skin, in going along.

Anabel and Ernst were laid in a grave separate from the interred soldiers.

Marsh scrawled a record of the women’s identification cards. “If this happens again,

I’ll give your names to the authorities. Regardless of consequence. To you or me. If you dare repeat this—desecration—”

 “We can’t.” A chorus sighed. “It’s too late for us.”

Morning wove a grey shroud—a shade away from khaki—before the Dorsets entered their tunnels.

Bartlett ducked in last. “What will you tell the Captain, sir?”

“Wolves were pulling up bodies and we shot them. Understood?”

Tears washed faces as they went to their bunks. Not to sleep, but to write their sweethearts and wives, to beg a word of love, assurance that they were wanted, would be, whatever their condition when they returned. That they’d be remembered, clung to, even if they rotted in this dirt, forever alone.

Marsh sat on his bunk and wrote, too. To the girl he’d loved since they were children, hunting fossils together on Monmouth Beach in Lyme Regis.

She was a moving picture that unreeled for him daily. Emma, in the amber July of another world, right-side-up. Her small hand plucking two shiny ammonites, pressed together through millions of years to form a figure 8. “They’re gold!” She put them on his palm. “A gift for you.”

The stupid, smug boy he was passed them back to her. “That’s not real gold. It’s pyrite. Just fool’s gold.”

“You’re the fool, Lucas Marsh, if you don’t know gold when you see it.” And he glimpsed in her storm of sea eyes, even at ten, that she wasn’t speaking of the ammonites. He blushed, ashamed. That evening, he found in his sack those fossils with her note: I’ll love you older than these are.

When he left for war, he gave her a ring that copied those whorls in real gold. “I’m no fool. We’ll marry when I get back. All right, Em?”

She nodded. Kissed him, as if he were her only air. Then cried. “You’re still a fool,

Lucas Marsh. Else we’d marry before you go.”

His letter now didn’t plead for love. Instead, it crafted a new one. A Frenchwoman. His pen slashed details certain to wound Emma, enrage her, with her sun-spun hair, her soft cloud of body—exquisite cloud, sparked with lightning for him—that she always complained should be taller and slimmer. He made Adrienne raven-haired—no scar of white weeds—a long willow switch. Thin enough to cut him on her embrace. At the altar, tomorrow.

He surrendered his dearest jewels, those joined ammonites, to the envelope.

His lie ended with a truth: I’m sorry, Em. And two words more, final as a bullet fired from a crow’s wing.

Forget me.

Toni Juliette Leonetti

Image: Gas mask from WW1 Collection of Auckland Museum Tamaki Paenga Hira, 1996×2.381 from Wikicommons