By Christopher Brown
The other day Gilles came over with his mighty iron-tracked Case CX16OD digger. There was a huge hole to be excavated. A twenty-foot deep, twenty-foot-long pit in the most waterlogged and heaviest of primeval clay. A real hodge-podge of stodge; brown clay, red clay, even 200-million-year-old blue clay dating back to Triassic Times.
Boy, was I ever happy to have Gilles at the helm of that well-worked excavator. It was like finely performed choreography. He glided forward with ease and pirouetted his machine like a ballet dancer, stretching out its muscular, articulated hydraulic arm and thrusted it into the surrendering earth to claim his first yard full of heavy water-saturated clay.
He clenched the bucket teeth down to grip the weighty grey mass and raised it aloft as buoyant as a baby. He focused on his bucket of dripping terra-firma and swung it 180° to release its iron-clad grasp and let the leaden oozing sediment fall with a thundering thud.
Swirling like a dervish the mighty arm swung back and with the flick of a digit it was driven once more into the heavy clay with the ease of a hot knife through butter.
And so the dance continued and ever deeper the hole, ever higher the hill, bucket after back-breaking bucket of shining, glutinous, heavy wet clay gave way to the man and machine and as I dragged my muddy Billy boots, as heavy as curling stones, through the ever-increasing ooze to my front door my mind shot back to trenches in a different land and of a different time.
I gazed at my gum boots and saw hobnailed military issue waterlogged leather boots and mud-splattered putties.
I heard machine gun bullets whistling overhead instead of bird song.
I saw flaming flashes in a smoke-filled sky and not the benign blue of fall.
I saw fallen bodies skewered on barbed wire entanglements and not gently waving corn.
I saw flailing arms in yellow clouds of acrid mustard gas and not the yellows and golds of autumnal trees,
I saw shattered trunks of timber and heard the shriek of shells and then the trembling earth heaved as another crater created a hollow for mud and rat-infested water and an impromptu grave for the fallen.
I saw the dead and dying swallowed up by Mother Earth.
I heard Sarg. calling ” Dig in boys.”
So get that rickety folding spade out from your soaking kit and grasp it with those cold-as-bone fingers and plunge that blunt blade into 200-year-old Triassic mud as the thud of the mortars numbs your mind.
Six inches of rusty shovel blade, not a six-foot wide two-yard bucket.
“Dig that trench deep, build that baum high”, before you are riddled by bullets or shredded by shrapnel as sharp as knives.
“Come on lads” ” faster, deeper”
Let’s not forget that they were ” lads” and they were “boys”.
They were plucked like flowers in the flower of their youth and sent to an unholy place at an unholy time to dig in clay and mud, to fight and to defeat the evil that threatened the freedom we enjoy today:
The freedom to call in Gilles with his Case CX160D excavator and dig a hole as big as a hellish crater in No Man’s Land.
So let’s not forget, let’s remember this every day of the year not simply November 11th at 11 o’clock.
Let’s not forget also that as we enjoy the Peace of our Canadian Fall, that not too far away, on a tortured line between Ukraine and Russia those same boys, those same lads and lasses carrying cornfield yellow and sky-blue flags are doing exactly the same. Digging in! Trenching shovels in mud and bullets whistling overhead whilst we sleep peacefully.
I shiver as a cold November wind cuts in with the shortening days and drag my muddy boots home.
I kick them off and abandon them on the stoop and venture inside to a warm house, a hot shower, a cozy fleece, a wholesome meal and snuggle up on the couch with blanket and book.
So let me never forget the khaki-clad lads who could not take off their sodden boots, and who instead, suffered from putrefying trench foot.
Who could not swap their itchy wet woolen uniforms for soft fleece.
Who could not slip under the eiderdown and drift into enchanted dreams but instead hunkered into cold and wet muddy hollows and wondered if they would wake to see another dawn.
