Excerpt from "The Hill", a novel

An excerpt from “The Hill”, a novel

Lens France
June, 1916

The tires on the Rover Sunbeam were worn balloon thin from the many trips the field surgeon had taken back and forth from the front lines to the makeshift hospital that stood just out of enemy artillery range. As he dressed in the dark early that chilly June morning he considered bringing it to the attention of the officer in charge later that day, but after giving it further thought, decided against it. The idea of it somehow seemed trivial given the deadly turn the fighting had recently taken. Casualties were running as high as a thousand a week, and medical supplies were drying up. The hospital, constructed earlier in the war, was stretched beyond capacity. Moreover, he had been personally selected by the Surgeon General himself to go to France to direct medical operations involving severe wounds to the face and jaw. Volunteering for the ambulance corps in his spare time would hardly be looked upon favorably, were it to ever get back to his superiors. There were, in the grand scheme of things, far more important things to be concerned about than to be running around the French countryside in an ambulance with a bad set of tires. Oh well, he thought to himself. If not me, then who? He finished with the top button of his waist length coat and adjusted the captain’s bars on his cap, and brushed away a spot of dirt next to his name that was stitched just above the front pocket. The silver-threaded letters “RH Ivy” shimmered against his brown colored, army issue uniform. Rising much earlier than usual that morning after a long night of transporting the wounded and the dead and the wounded that soon would join the dead away from the front lines, the surgeon walked unnoticed out of his tent toward the Rover and climbed in. He cranked the engine. Despite the chill in the air, it responded on the first try. Thirty minutes later he was steering the ambulance up an incline to the top of a low hill past several craters just west of the point where he last saw or thought he saw something falling out of the sky the night before. He applied the brakes and stopped at the top of the hill. He sat for a moment with the motor running and looked through the windshield at what slowly over time had become of the Flanders countryside. It was no longer recognizable. Deep craters pockmarked the land, and the bodies of dead horses still hitched to cannon or to twisted, unrecognizable piles of metal destroyed by the enemy’s big guns littered the landscape for miles all around, the white eyes of the horses staring off into space at nothing in particular, their hides split open, their blackened tongues out. The day before, most of what was left of France’s 10th army had been recovered and accounted for but occasionally just a pair of boots remained where a soldier once stood. He shut the Rover’s motor off and climbed out of the seat and looked east toward the Marne. Wiping the dust from his steel rimmed eyeglasses he could see the thick grey line of the British artillery positions that had been lobbing shells at the Germans for eight days now. He could just barely make out the shapes of the gun barrels, angled skyward, like silent sentries in the night waiting once again to rain death down on the Kaiser’s infantry huddled in their trenches. Morning light was just beginning to filter through the smoke and fog that shrouded the sparse countryside. It clung like glue to what trees were still left standing, and the odor of sulfur from the previous night’s cannon barrage permeated the air. Through dawn’s darkness off to the surgeon’s right dense black smoke curled upward just beyond the hedge that ran parallel to the rise he was standing on. He could see the glow of a small fire at the bottom of the smoke column. There were no soldiers in the area, at least none that he could see. No sign of anyone living but himself. He looked towards the English Channel and what was once home and wondered when the fighting would end. His mind turned to his mother and father now living in China and he thought back to when he last saw them. Was it Christmas 1906, the winter before graduating from medical school? What he missed most this time of year were the songbirds. Here in France, there were no birds this spring. Only the silence before the guns. A light shone dimly through the mist at the far end of the hedge. Probably a lantern outside a house or shed. He looked back toward the smoke and the coming light. That’s no wood fire, he thought to himself. Must be fuel or rubber burning. Maybe the wreckage of a troop vehicle or lorrie. He decided to have a look. He climbed back in the ambulance and cranked the engine. He engaged it in low gear and slowly made his way down the slope of the hill and maneuvered the vehicle along the hedge until the ground became impassible, a hundred meters or so from the wreckage. He turned off the engine and climbed out. He grabbed his medical bag from the passenger seat and began making the rest of the way on foot. He could hear small arms fire in the distance, sporadic at first, then more frequent as the morning wore on. He walked past several empty ration tins and canteens, French in their making, and a helmet with a large shrapnel hole in the front. And then he saw it. The unmistakable shape of a wing. It was reddish orange in color and it angled upward out of the ground, the rudder cables still attached and trailing back toward the smoke. He paused to take in the area immediately around where he stood, not wanting to overlook anything important. Satisfied, he walked past the wing and in the direction of the small fire he had seen from the hill. His eye immediately caught something about ten meters ahead. There lying flat on the ground was the plane’s rear stabilizer, circular in shape, marked by a silver bordered, black colored Iron Cross, clearly visible against its plain white field. Once again he stopped, this time to survey the debris scattered around the fire and the thick smoke. He looked back over his shoulder in the direction of the ambulance to make sure it was still there. He walked gingerly over the ground and toward the fire. There at the bottom of the smoke column was one of the plane’s tires, burning and giving off an acrid, putrid odor. Whoever rode this thing down didn’t stand a chance, he thought to himself. Or did he? He looked away from the wreckage toward where the terrain flattened out. For a distance of some fifty meters from the fire there were deep gouges in the earth leading up to where he was standing. Probably the work of the wheel struts or landing gear, he surmised. The wheels and tires were either sheared off by the tops of the trees, or had snapped off upon making contact with the ground. The fuselage, now in plain site, stood nose down at an angle with its back end up in the air, like a whale with its tail out of water, the other half of the wing still attached. From all appearances, the surgeon would note later, it was a single-seater, obviously German in make, and very modern looking for its time. But there was no sign of the pilot. The surgeon stood surveying the debris field in front of him.

The wreckage told the story of a warplane shot down or forced down by mechanical trouble, with its pilot apparently in partial control, the ground speeding up at him quickly, the Fokker monoplane not in a steep nosedive but rather gliding into the French countryside at a shallow angle, as evidenced by the long, deep scars in the earth, and the intact nature of the plane’s fuselage. With its landing gear missing, the impact was hard enough to tear off half the wing, which the plane’s momentum sent careening forward until it came to rest in its present position – angled perpendicular to the ground with its front edge facing down, while the fuselage skidded and bumped on its own, until eventually coming to a stop, partially burying itself in the soft earth as it did, tilting upward from the weight of its 19 cylinder, air cooled Uberursal engine and twin mounted, 7.92 mm Spandau machine guns. Fuel and oil bleeding from the hot engine ignited, and the ensuing fire was what caught the surgeon’s eye standing on top of the hill.

It was quiet now. The gunfire he had heard earlier had trailed off. The sun was beginning to break through the thick smoke and morning mist across the barren fields. The surgeon reached into his bag and unfolded the bright white medical apron and bib that was marked with a thick Red Cross. He hung the bib around his neck and tied the string around his waist. He picked up his bag and began walking out toward where the marks in the earth began. Short, star shaped flowers mixed in with pasture grass grew in bunches beneath his feet and off to his left and right. A cool breeze blew, carrying the scent of lavender and clover from the west, cutting the cloying odor of rotting flesh and sulfur from the Flanders air. Before long, he could see where the scars in the ground disappeared down a slight incline toward a spring-fed stream lush with watercress and violets and the promise of peaceful days ahead. Mayflies danced across the riffles that sparkled in the morning sun, and the water ran fast over the thick green tendrils of grass growing up from the stream’s bottom, swaying gently in the swift current. He reached the spot where the ground sloped sharply downward, and stopped. There lying on his back close to the water’s edge was the broken body of the pilot.