The Shadow Of The Mole - Bob Van Laerhoven

Historical War Fiction Set In 1916 France

The Shadow Of The Mole by Bob Van Laerhoven

Book excerpt

The sky was the colour of straw, with a deep blueberry glow at the horizon. The Meurisson Valley, home to the field hospital which served the whole region, lay in Bois de Bolante, a low-lying part of the great Argonne woods. Dr Michel Denis walked there through the trenches. The recovery area was crudely constructed – a semi-underground complex harbouring medical provisions, ammunition and food storage, bathhouses and a sickbay. Like everyone else who worked there, Denis was curious about the infamous ‘Mole’, and he wanted a closer look. The sappers digging tunnels under the German lines had found the unconscious man, dressed in civvies, in the tunnel of an old charcoal burner. A day later, the man was still unconscious.

In the sickbay, Denis went to the patient’s bed and studied his facial features. Wide ears, a somewhat beaked nose and jowly cheeks, perhaps Semitic. Denis guessed The Mole’s age at about forty-five. Baggy blue skin under the eyes. As he made these observations, Denis came closer and now he stood at the bedside. Startled, he glanced at where his own right arm, severed by a piece of shrapnel, should have been. Involuntarily, he was reaching out with his phantom limb to touch the man’s left leg. All at once, a hail of shells passed over, as though the memory of that shrapnel had provoked the Germans at the north side of the Meurisson Valley. The shells drummed the basement walls with their deafening low thunder. Denis pictured the men in the icy trenches at the front, frantically seeking shelter. Since February 12th, after heavy snowfall, a light thaw had set in. It drenched the trenches with cold, gurgling mud, and inundated the mine corridors, used to infiltrate enemy territory, with melted ice: sluggish, foul-reeking, and copper-coloured.

An explosion shook the basement. Denis looked around him. Rumour had it that the Germans, being technically advanced, had electric lighting in their shelters. The French hospital had to make do with candle lanterns. As a result, bizarre shadows waved on the walls in a slow, undulating rhythm. No wonder the wounded called the hospital le pot de chambre de la France. At the moment, the chamber pot of France was a dazzling phantasmagoria of shapes chasing each other on the walls and the floor. Light and darkness played on The Mole’s face.

In the shadows, the man opened his eyes.

***

Captain Réviron, a thin, wiry man with close-cropped wavy hair and rotten teeth, was middle-aged and bone-tired. Nevertheless, his slicked-up hair seemed to have been parted down the middle of his skull with a razor. His face betrayed a heroic tiredness, highlighted by the feeble lanterns in the damp-smelling, propped-up cave that was supposed to be his command-post. He sat before a crude table made from logs scavenged out of the woods, littered with documents and maps. Denis felt his gaze like the eyes of a suspicious dog.

“Lieutenant Denis,” the Captain said. “If this so-called Mole of yours has deserted from the ranks, he’ll get court-martialled. I imagine your Mister No Memory will recall his name, rank and number pretty sharp once he’s looking into a row of black muzzles. But that’s for after the changing of the troops – when we can send you both back behind the lines. Till then, make it your business to find out who he is.”

Denis should have been repatriated ten days ago when he had recovered sufficiently from the amputation of his arm, but the bad weather and the Germans’ relentless offensive had made that impossible.

“With all due respect, Captain, I don’t think the man is faking. His behaviour is so aberrant that…”

Réviron shot Denis another dubious look.

Denis wanted to scratch his ear, remembered that his arm was gone and reached over to rub the lobe with his other arm. “Let’s say peculiar at least, if you don’t like the term aberrant.”

“There are rumours, Denis.”

“I’ve heard them, Captain.”

“I heard the men prattle that he’s some goddamn ghost. The Garibaldiens are fighting on our side but they are a superstitious lot and could turn against us if we don’t quell these rumours. I don’t want any of that fluff in my regiment.”

“I understand, Captain. But there will always be rumours amongst the men. These dismal woods, these gruesome circumstances – it sets off their fantasies: evil spirits, the devil, all manner of chimeras… Mind you, I don’t suffer such affliction and personally I regard The Mole as a patient, not as Satan in person.” A pinch of irony was not absent in the young doctor. “My diagnosis is that the patient is genuinely suffering from shell shock and has really lost his memory, maybe even his mind. Moreover, I think he’s a civilian. He wasn’t wearing any military tag. Since he was on foot, we may assume he’s from this region. I examined his hands. Those are not the hands of a soldier or a farmer.”

“That’s no proof at all. Recently, they’ve drafted everyone who can carry…” Réviron shot a glance at Michel’s stump and waved dismissively, in an almost feminine gesture.

“Yes, but no man can be on the frontline for weeks or months without traces of gunpowder on his hands.”

“Denis, I am truly sorry for what has happened to you and I understand that for a young man, it must be tough to lose an arm. But your theories about ‘front line traumas’ are a threat to discipline in the ranks. A true soldier has no traumas. Bring that man’s memory back – use all means necessary, by Jove – and we’ll see if it’s a trauma or the booze that made him burrow in a deserted mine tunnel.”

***

Back on the surface, a row of sharpened branches had been driven into the muddy ground, with the cadavers of at least fifty rats strung up by their tails between them. Denis walked along the line, smiling and nodding to the grinning group of soldiers who invited him to a “rat bouillabaise”. After such a brew, he assured them, their breath would be foul enough to take out any German soldier within ten meters.

Soon, we’ll all be like those rats, Denis thought. Bloodless corpses strung up on barbed wire. Denis had been a psychiatrist in training when the war started. He had learned to be attentive to the difference between what his professor had called the ‘projected self’ and the ‘inner self’. When inwardly he was sombre, he tended to crack jokes.

The distant booming of war began again, like a thunderstorm gathering strength, coming closer, fast.

War’s having fun, Denis thought, with a sudden sense of unreality.

***

In Denis’s ears, the war-sounds outside the field hospital were a mixture of screeching, beseeching, wailing, and hailing.

The war-victims presented a dizzying array of bloody limbs and faces: some of the eyes without a trace of hope, others clenched tight, tears here and there painting grimy patterns on twitching jowls.

The stretcher bearers didn’t supply the hospital with men. They came and dumped ‘wounds’: a lot of lungs, a fair amount of heads, a sickening number of underbellies and now and then, thank God, a leg, a foot, an arm: trios of lucky bastards.

Denis had been considered a lucky bastard, when they’d brought him in a few weeks ago.

In the tumult and the frenzy of the field hospital, the young doctor felt as good as useless. He couldn’t operate anymore and diagnoses in war time took only a glance. You just scanned for blood and missing parts. He walked through the rows of wounded who followed him with eyes full of silent prayers. They wanted a miracle. There were not enough bunks; many men lay on the ground in between. A disarray of bodies and faces, all coated with the sheen of misery.

Denis stood there, in this putrefied chaos, lost in thought. He was a tall, young-looking man of twenty-nine, a southern type with jet black hair, something almost Indian in the slant of his indigo eyes. His cheeks were covered with dark stubble.

He was handsome in a full-blooded way.

Even without his right arm.

Which was being touched now.

Marie Estrange, daughter of a wealthy wine merchant, war-nurse out of moral compulsion, had touched the air where Denis’s arm had been.

He had felt it.

She looked at him. Her big eyes were attentive, the broad curve of her full-lipped mouth was tight with concentration, and there was a haze of sorrow around her – which in Denis’s opinion was far more exhausting than mere compassion.

“How do you feel, Michel?”

He looked away, evading an honest answer. “Like an old man waiting for the end with the impatience of a young man.” Now, wasn’t that a bit melodramatic? He often didn’t find the right tone when Marie was near.

She took his left arm. “You can help me distribute water, old man with two forenames.”

His name – Michel Denis – had become a formal joke between them. His normal, sarcastic answer was, “Having two forenames means you don’t have family.”

Now he only nodded.

***

As Denis squatted on the ground, holding a cup of water to a feverish soldier on a make-do bed of straw, he felt a tingling in his neck. He looked over his shoulder. The eyes of The Mole were on him. Denis observed intently the silent message of that stare, and noticed the jaundiced whites of The Mole’s eyes. Liver problems? It contributed to the man’s eerie appearance – like a sleep-walker, neither awake nor asleep. A catatonic state due to shell shock?

“Enfants de Malheur,” The Mole said. “Children of ill-luck.”

Denis stood slowly. Since his amputation, he had the impression that his balance was different, less secure than before.

“Our suffering isn’t bad luck or an accident. We are the source of our own misery.” With these unctuous words, he hoped to make contact with the man. His words bounced back to him, like pebbles against a rock. The Mole let his yellowish eyes drift through the lazaretto. In a puzzled tone, he said, “Why do they hold on to life?” His eyes fixed on Denis. “Do you know why you want to live?”

The doctor’s irritation grew. This was not the time for petty philosophies. “It’s an instinct.”

“You live because you’re made and then you have to sit through your punishment.” The patient seemed to have difficulties with his vocal chords. He swallowed some syllables and his voice sounded querulous.

“We will pursue this conversation later,” Denis said, realizing how odd his formal behaviour was in these surroundings. The young doctor turned to give water to a soldier with a ghastly wounded face, his mouth a gurgling mound of blood.

“It’s not an instinct,” the half-strangled voice behind him said. “The desire to live is a disease.”

Book Details

AUTHOR NAME: Bob Van Laerhoven

BOOK TITLE: The Shadow Of The Mole

GENRE: Historical Fiction

SUBGENRE: War Fiction / Military Fiction

PAGE COUNT: 420

IN THE BLOG: Best War Fiction Novels