Cast Me Away
I was a boy when I went to war, and stumbled headlong into a world I could barely imagine.
In the summer of 1916, the naïve spirit that coloured Canadian boys' thoughts two years previously had fled. We had heard the names of casualties, seen the wounded coming back broken. The country was short of men, and nowhere more so in Quebec, where so many of my friends had no intent to risk their life for the English.
I was the son of an English father, a French mother, and I had a tie they did not. I went to the recruiting centre, lied about my age. They accepted me.
And so I left home at age sixteen, bound for Britain and an unknown destiny.
*
They trained us in the British hill country. At the time, it seemed like endless weeks of pointless maneuvers before we got to do something useful. Looking back, it wasn't nearly enough training for what they were going to ask of us. But I was young at the time, and a bit of a fool, with no idea of what I was getting into.
No idea at all how a childish lark can change a life. One night we were conducting night exercises, and in the dark, I lost my footing and fell down a hill into a lake.
The water was icy cold, colder than it should have been somehow and I sank straight to the bottom, the weight of the pack on my back pulling me down.
I flailed, gulping in mouthfuls of icy water, and finally shrugged the pack off my shoulders. I clawed my way back to the surface, sucking in air, waiting for my heart to stop hammering. On the surface, the full moon lit the night.
Then I had to dive back down for the pack. I was already going to be the butt of a hundred jokes, for coming back soaking wet—I was not going to face further punishment for losing my pack. I dove, down where the moon did not shine, into the lake's black depths.
It took several attempts, combing blindly through the embrace of underwater weeds, but finally I found my pack—a misshapen canvas lump. I grasped it with one hand by its straps, preparing to haul it to the surface, and then my other hand brushed metal. Whatever had fallen off my pack, I needed it, so I took hold and kicked my feet hard, rocketing to the surface. Panting, I used my feet and the hand with the object to maneuver myself to the lake's rocky shore.
Only when my feet touched bottom—only when I'd hauled myself out of the lake, shivering and chilled to the bone—did I see what I had found.
It was not part of my kit.
And for a brief moment in the moonlight, I thought I held a sword.
I closed my eyes, squinted, and the item in my hand resolved itself into a bayonet, razor sharp, and I knew enough English to read the words on the blade:
TAKE ME UP.
I turned it over…because it had not tarnished, however long it had been in the lake, and on the other side three more words shone dull silver in the gloom: CAST ME AWAY.
But it was war, and there were never enough supplies to go around.
And so I wrapped it in a handkerchief and put it in my pack, and took it with me to France, to the War to End All Wars.
*
I will not tell the story of my first experiences with war. There are a hundred memoirs like these, where dreams turn to harsh reality, where bravado turns to fear and fear is harnessed by courage. There are a hundred boys who have written about watching friends die, or about killing men not that much different from themselves save for the colour of their uniform. There are a hundred nightmares—rats, gas, disease, drowning in mud—recorded in the history books.
No, the story I tell myself now…the story I tell late at night, when the nurses have turned out the lights and the wheels of their carts creak in the corridors, is a story that would fit comfortably into legend. I wish it would have stayed there. Instead, it slices through reality, breaking into a world where it does not belong, and in its wake is madness.
*
They described the war as madness, and yes, indeed it was, but all of it was madness wrought by man. To the minds of myself and my comrades, there was no greater insanity than the attempt to take Vimy Ridge in April 1917. One hundred forty five meters uphill, charging dug-in German machine guns. Craziness. Suicide.
As we waited for our orders, there was little to do. Deschamps would recite passages from a muddy pocket Bible. Briand would twirl a rabbit's foot on a chain. Leclair would write letters to his girlfriend. I compulsively checked my rifle, over and over.
I don't know why I decided my bayonet was dull. I don't know what made me think of the weapon I'd kept in my pack but never used, or why I decided to mount it on my rifle that day.
But I did, and it shone in the sunlight—those glittering words, TAKE ME UP.
And we went over the top.
*
Describing war is a difficult thing. I read the history books, and their dry accounts of battles bewilder me. It is as though the books describe somewhere different.
I could not see a battle. I could see only the small fights in front of me. We had unreliable communications, and with the blinding flashes of explosions and deafening thunder of guns, we could sometimes only guess what we were seeing, or hearing. With mud on our maps and bullets whining over our heads, we made best estimates of where we were going, what we were doing.
What I remember of Vimy Ridge was my rifle's battle song, and if my aim was surprisingly accurate, that could have been a perception influenced by my desire to succeed. And if its point led the way to our destination, then that was my natural sense of direction blessing me. And if the weapon seemed to twist in my arms as my bayonet tore into the enemy, that might have been my horror at killing a fellow human being up close driving me to blame the blade for my actions. And when we stumbled into the machine-gun's field of fire and its bullets ripped through me…
I remember that. I remember that and don't know how to explain it.
It hurt….it hurt like fire in my chest and head…and it knocked me backwards. My helmet flew off my head. I raised my left hand, shaking, to my chest to catch the blood. And there was no blood. The breath returned to my lungs. My right hand still clutched my rifle with that bayonet affixed.
I sat up. I felt bruised, but otherwise fine.
But there were holes in my uniform. Holes, where the bullets had pierced. I told myself I could have gotten those holes anywhere.
Then I saw the holes in my helmet.
Reality came crashing down, the world spinning, and the machine-gun nest was still shooting, Leclair was screaming, and suddenly that bayonet's gleam turned to holy fire and burning in my mind were those words, TAKE ME UP.
And I did.
Deschamps told me later that I charged into the machine-gun nest, heedless of bullets, and dispatched its crew single-handedly.
I never got a medal because no one believed Deschamps' account, and as for me, well, I downplayed it.
I was scared as hell by what had happened, but I wasn't going to get rid of the bayonet. Briand's rabbit's foot was nothing next to the mysterious blade.
So if every once in a while I got caught up in a strange battle fury—if I could guide my troops straight and true, even in the chaos, even in the dark—if my shooting was too accurate and my strike too lethal—if the shrapnel never hit me, and the bullets didn't pierce me—it was better than ending up like poor Leclair, bleeding to death in the mud.
Vimy Ridge was a tremendous, almost a miraculous, success for the Canadians. I got a lot of promotions and eventually found myself promoted right out of the trenches.
*
During the war, I found myself struggling to learn the kind of French they speak in France. It was different in sound than the French I'd learned growing up in Quebec, but after picking up so much English from the officers around me, a different dialect of French was easy. My promotions brought me to the attention of the general staff and my language skills convinced them to give me a job away from the thick of the fighting.
On November 11, 1918, the war ended. I celebrated by wrapping the bayonet in one of my old uniform coats and shoving it into the bottom of a trunk.
I didn't need it any more. The war was over.
Most of the Canadians went home after the armistice. I was still translating for the British Army. I stayed.
I did not know how to tell my mother about the scars on my chest, about the blasts that should have killed me and didn't, or about the weapon that I tried my best not to think about. I'd come to realize it probably wasn't meant for me to have.
CAST ME AWAY. Instructions, written right on the blade, and I should have listened.
But I didn't want anyone to know that I'd had it or what it had made of me, and so I hid it away.
That trunk sat in closets and basements and attics for years, then decades, while around me the British Empire slowly fell apart.
*
In the Second World War I met a man, a literary scholar by chosen profession and a soldier by necessity, a man who asked about the carvings on the bayonet I still carried.
I told him it had been an inheritance of sorts. I thought this was a lie but now I am not sure.
Growing up in Quebec, my childhood heroes had always been the coureurs de bois and the Indian chiefs, the explorers, the generals like Montcalm. My father had been a labourer, not a literary man. I had never heard the tales that this man told, the stories of a king named Arthur, his knights, his lady, and the witch and the rival who brought him down.
And the sword.
And if its point led the way to our destination, then that was my natural sense of direction blessing me.
The sword that protected the carrier from wounds, that would not let its master bleed to death.
The sword with the same words carved on its blade. The sword called Excalibur.
When I talked to the scholar, I thought about the articles that described Vimy Ridge as the birthplace of a nation, the battle where Canada won international acclaim, and I wondered.
I wondered what might have happened if I had considered myself more Quebecois than Canadian.
And I wondered whether there was an undead king wandering the night, searching for the weapon I kept in the bottom of an old chest, wrapped in a musty coat.
When the bombs fell, I asked myself if this was Britain's darkest hour, and if perhaps I ought to pass the thing to someone better able to use it.
But I didn't know who to give it to, and in the end, I did nothing. Nothing save to avoid even thinking the name of the blade, and doing my best to pretend that trunk was empty.
This was around the time the dreams began. Dreams of a woman dressed in blue, rising from the waters of a black-watered lake. I dreamed of armoured knights and clever ladies, of cunning witches and treacherous rivals plotting under the dark of the moon. Dreams of a raging griffin, with glowing eyes, thrashing wings and bloody talons. And I dreamed of an English king, a child who pulled a sword from a stone, and a man who held on too long.
I began drinking whiskey before bedtime, to keep the dreams at bay.
In time it started to cost…my marriage, my career, my health.
But the one thing I could not do was cast it away.
*
In the year 1996 I am old and broken, sitting in a chair beside my bed. In the corridors of the nursing home, the nurses mutter about how I should have died years ago. They think I cannot hear them, but I can. They've been saying that since the seventies. I was shattered then already, and now, even a rainbow of pills cannot banish my dreams.
I have nothing to my name save the battered trunk that has not been opened in years. The trunk I keep under my bed. I'm quite impossible to deal with when it's moved, you see.
In the corners of my mind I think the blade is keeping me alive, just as it did in the war. And in those same corners I think the thing is tearing me apart.
I'm old enough to realize now that glory is not forever. No man, no nation can expect never-ending victory. Sometimes the best you can do is wait for the wheel of fortune to come around again. Sometimes the best you can do is know when to let go.
I missed my chance, I think, and then the words from the television in the corner cut through my mind's fog like a knife.
Usually the television blathers to itself, a display of sound and light that no one really sees, chattering in the corner in an attempt to entertain us. For the first time in years, I see and hear as sharply and clearly as when I was a boy.
"…rash of thefts continue," the announcer says, "and police believe that there is a link. All the items stolen are believed to be somehow related to Excalibur, the magical sword which legend says was once carried by King Arthur."
The story itself is mindboggling. Living gargoyles in New York, rampaging fairies, mythology come to life and gone wild. Bits and pieces of news from the last two years snaps to full clarity in my mind. In a world where things like this are real, why shouldn't a wayward soldier stumble upon Excalibur in the bottom of a British lake?
And good God, what am I to do with it now?
The clippings on the television are like images from my dreams. A raven-haired witch, a faery knight, a hot-eyed man with a black, black heart. And then, another trio whose faces I know well, for they have walked my thoughts in dreams.
The griffin.
The lady from the lake.
The Once and Future King.
They're out there, I know it. They're searching for the blade.
What happens if they do not find it?
Another image flashes onto the screen. It's the man again, Duval something, and while he's speaking of a reward, I can sense the malice in his eyes.
I think for a moment and then press the buzzer to call the nurse.
When she arrives, I ask her to open my trunk. She rolls her eyes, impatient, but does as I ask. She throws the bundled-up army coat on my lap and races off, responding to another call.
I open the bundle slowly. It's bigger than I remember, and when I get the cloth pushed back, it is not a bayonet, not any more.
It is a sword, a great shining thing, with a golden handle resembling two coiled snakes, and gleaming up at me are three words, a command—CAST ME AWAY.
And I know that I have been given one last chance.
*
How? How do I put the blade in the hands of the Once and Future King? How do I protect it from Duval?
I do not take my pills before bed. When the nurse is gone, I retch them up and throw them away. I sleep with the coat cradled in my arms and will not relinquish it.
For the first night in countless years, I dream. I dream of the Lady of the Lake, rising from the water, her hair swirling ethereal blue around her shoulders, her hand outstretched to take the sword.
And she is not standing in a lake, or a river, or a sea.
She stands in the ornamental pool outside my window.
*
I awaken two hours before dawn and my duty is clear.
I am frightened, so frightened, and weak. My muscles are atrophied from age and disuse. I can barely hold myself upright even with the help of a walker. The sword, still bundled, lays across the walker and I fear it may fall—I will never be able to bend over to pick it up. I make my way slowly down the hall and, miraculously, Excalibur stays balanced.
The door to the outside has a security pad. They presume us old people do not know the code to get out. I suppose the demented ones cannot remember it.
I am not demented. I am haunted. They are very different things. I know the code, and I can enter it.
Slowly, I push the door open. Slowly, I shuffle into the darkness.
Under the lamplight, I can see the ornamental pond glistening before me. It is only a few inches deep. I inch down the walkway until my walker touches the barrier around the pond.
I must return the sword to the water, to the Lady of the Lake. I must make sure it returns to the proper hands, for to give it to Duval would be disaster. My hands are shaking, my body is worn out from my exertions, and if I miss the pool, if I drop Excalibur, I will have no second chance. I am frightened.
I force myself to reach into the bundled coat and take the hilt of the great blade. It fits into my hand as though it belongs there, and I feel a rush like fire. The years fall away and I am seventeen again, standing in the trench and waiting for the bugle call. I was a soldier at Vimy Ridge and I am a soldier now.
I turn myself slowly until the backs of my knees are against the barrier. I clutch Excalibur in both hands.
I lean backwards.
It happens with a devlish swiftness—one moment I am standing, the next I am falling. The waters embrace me, icy cold. I think I hit my head on the bottom of the pool—I am not sure—but the next moment she is leaning over me, the Lady of the Lake, her hand outstretched.
I do not accept her rescue. Instead, I hand her the blade.
Her eyes shine with gratitude as she takes it.
They are on either side of her now—the griffin and the king. The griffin is saluting me, one warrior to another. The king's voice, from far away, is thanking me for guarding the sword so long…
I should bow. I should kneel. I do not think I manage anything, because I am sinking swiftly now, sinking down and down into endless dark waters.
I close my eyes and let the waters cradle my fall.
I am no longer afraid. My duty is done.