Sketch with Soldier and Blasted Roots

It was his own face, in the sketch, certainly. His own body.

The field on which it was to happen was wide and grassy and dotted with small groves of trees like dark eruptions from an innocent earth. He was not at the very front – thank the Lord God – but in the second group, which would follow the first into battle, but only – and the General had been very specific about this, had promised death without honor to any who failed to follow this particular command with absolute fidelity – one minute and fifteen seconds after the attack was initiated. The General had a new kind of pocket-watch, supposedly more accurate than any previously designed, accurate down to fractions of seconds so small one could scarcely conceptualize them, and he had begun to stay up the nights before battles until the sky was heavy with the gray of dawn, testing calculations against the marks on its face in the hopes of discovering some secret choreography of attack which could lead to nothing but victory. It was a topic of much conversation at the camp, around the fire, with the unshaven men eating chunks of stale bread and thin meal. An unsettled topic, generative of oaths and prayers. In any case, he was in the second group, in the second row, standing with his rifle on his shoulder, and then the first group was charging, and the sounds of gunpowder and horses began to color the air, and then a minute and fifteen seconds must have passed, because the order was given, because now he was charging, too, bayonet forward, for the first time he was going into battle. Going into battle now barely a month since he had been stopped on the road one night, and bundled into a wagon, and bound in stiff ropes and a dirty rag in his mouth, and told that he was a soldier now, and if he tried to run away he would be shot down like mangy dog. Now he was in battle. He was in battle, somewhere. He was not charging anymore, he realized dimly. He was in the thick of surging, falling bodies, all of them pressing their heavy weight together. He looked down and found his bayonet in another man’s chest with a wet nauseous sound, and the man was looking at him and his eyes were sinking back into his face and everything was going out of him and he fell away, the other man, and he looked down and there were dead and dying bodies all around him, groaning and clutching at themselves or at the churned grass or simply lying very still in ways, angles, positions he had never seen a man lie before and hoped never to again, and it seemed the battle was moving away, was somewhere else, and he wasn’t sure if he was heading towards it or away from it or somewhere else entirely, and there were shouting voices somewhere that he couldn’t understand, and then suddenly there was a sound and a sensation which together were so totalizing that everything inside him was wiped blank and he saw he was not on the ground but was in the air, was falling towards the ground, and there was smoke and debris and clods of earth all around him in the air, and it was all falling towards the ground, and he saw he was going to hit the ground, and he could think nothing about it, and then it simply happened.

He had been hit. That was the first thought that surfaced. He had been hit. Something had hit him. The thoughts were coming slowly, as though he were lifting them, hand over hand on an old and stubborn pulley, from the bottom of a well. He felt something like pain, although it wasn’t pain, really, he realized, so much as a strangely weightless ache. A placeholder for some sensation he could not feel right now. It was coming from his leg. He had been hit in the leg. Something had hit him in the leg. Something explosive, because he was in a crater. He was in a crater in the field. If he ducked his head down, he could hide, and no one would be able to see him. He ducked his head down. He was in a crater in the battlefield. A fresh crater. Something had hit him. Something had hit him in the leg. His leg should hurt, but didn’t. He looked down at his leg. There was a chunk missing from his thigh. There was blood. He tried to move. The weightless ache instantly became unbearably heavy. Debilitating. He couldn’t move. He had been hit in the leg and was lying in a fresh crater and couldn’t move.

With this understanding of his condition and of his situation and of what had happened and of where he was exactly, into what miserable position he had been plunged by his cruel fate, with no warning, for no reason he could comprehend, in his very first battle ever, his senses finally began to return to him, properly, and his thoughts were no longer slow and blunted and deliberate but overwhelmingly fast and sharp, chaotic, piling up atop one another as he began to look around, began to grasp the true scope of his misfortune, began to be filled with choking panic. The battle, he could hear, still raged somewhere with clashing steel and rifle bursts and horses and men making sounds of agony as they fell, fell somewhere close by, still, he thought, but not so close by, not here – here there were only corpses and craters and mud and blood-soaked spume and the smell of wet iron and gunpowder and a gray fog, a gray fog had descended and enclosed all around him, such that the ground disappeared into blank nothingness, flat and slightly marbled with curls of smoke, just a few feet on all sides of him, and he realized he no longer had any idea where he was, what corner of the battlefield he had found himself on, who he might find, ally or enemy, if he poked his head up above the rim of the crater, and if he would even be able to tell the difference. If there would be anyone there at all.

Then suddenly he looked and he saw a man crouched near him in the gathering fog, just a little ways off, a man crouched almost directly before him who was not wearing a soldier’s clothes, who was not quite clean-shaven but almost, and who had propped on his upturned knees a wide parchment sketchpad, open towards the middle, and was making marks in it with a stick of graphite quite intently, glancing up towards him from time to time, only briefly.

He called out. "Please, can't you help me?"

"No, I need to draw."

"Are you an artist?"

"No, sir. Just a draughtsman."

The draughtsman, then, did not slow his work has he spoke, his blackened fingertips working a flurry of marks across the page, drawing, smudging, erasing, redrawing, all quite invisible to him from his place in the crater, his place from which he was too weak to move, to even lift himself, the upturn of the draughtsman’s knees quite ably hiding whatever shape was taking form on his page. And the gray fog grew ever more opaque around them.

“Please…” he tried again.

“Be patient, sir. I’m almost finished.”

He tried to be patient. He couldn’t understand what was happening. There was nothing he could do but lie there and try not to think about his leg, about where he was about what would become of him. All he could do was lie in the cold mud, in the gray fog, in front of the draughtsman, watching him work. There was no fatigue in his eyes, he saw. He looked like how he imagined a gentleman of Paris or Berlin or Stockholm would look, one who had just risen, and wiped the sleep from his eyes, and enjoyed a long morning of leisure, reading the paper over coffee and eggs and warm muffins, and had just now stepped outside for the very first time, for a stroll in the park with his sketchpad, and found himself here – he thought this although he had never seen such a man, had always kept his eyes pointed humbly downwards when a figure on horseback trotted by. And still he had ended up here in this crater in this gray fog. But there was a seriousness in the draughtsman’s eyes, too. A seriousness of total concentration, almost of devotion, he thought, like those of heretical fanatics, seen sometimes whipping themselves in the courtyard outside a church, a seriousness that spoke of something which he had never understood, and by turns admired and despised, something beyond the holy and the profane. And he lay there and watched him work over the sketchpad, small, deft marks and swooping, confident ones, watched him work without pause or even hesitation, and saw the gray fog sink lower, grow thicker, and realized the sounds of battle had grown more distant, realized he could hear now only now and again the report of a rifle, the scream of a wounded or dying man, and it was like it was all drifting farther and farther away, and he was being left here, stranded, forgotten, in this bank of fog with this indifferent draughtsman, sketching away on his pad into indifferent eternity.

And just as he felt he could take it no more, would begin to scream and writhe and tear his hair out at its roots from the feelings of sheer absurd impossibility and desperation growing in his mortal guts, the draughtsman made one last, firm stroke, and set his graphite down.

“Finished,” he said. “Would you like to see it?”

Before he could say anything, or even nod or shake his head, the draughtsman was already right there above him, crouching down, holding the sketchpad open before him on outstretched hand, inviting him to lean forward and take a look. So he did.

It was his own face, in the sketch, certainly. His own body. He was in the crater. There was an expression of a terror on his face, a terror that looked, in the sketch, more awful than any he had ever known, far more awful than even what he had felt upon first realizing he had been hit and could not move, a sort of terror so horrible and awful that he felt sure that if it were to grip him it would leave him bent and warped and broken beyond repair, and it was captured there on his face, in the draughtsman’s sketch, mid-scream. And beneath his face, his face that was contorted with that awful terror, was his body, and looking at his body he saw why his face was as it was, what it was that terrified him so. The draughtsman had drawn him not as he was, simply lying there in the crater, with the wound on his leg, and the numbness spreading through his body, but instead lying there but wrapped in gnarled, twisting roots, blasted roots revealed, hidden, in the crater of the explosion which had struck him, roots twined around his legs and arms, around his chest, around his neck and shoulders like horrible crushing boneless fingers. They seemed to be pressing on him somehow, and squeezing and twisting him, as though trying to pull him apart, each appendage in a different direction, but also, at the same time, pull him back and down into the earth from which they had come, and him, lying there, in the sketch, able to do nothing but scream helplessly, as the horrible process took its course. He looked up at the draughtsman, struck dumb, uncomprehending, and saw that the fog had grown very thick around them now, so thick that even the draughtsman seemed to be receding from him, that everything seemed to be disappearing from around him except the sketchpad held out towards him, and the drawing thereupon, and the hand holding it, a hand which, he saw now, bore a pallor like he had never seen in flesh where blood still flowed, and which led off only into the fog, where there was nothing to be seen at all, and he called out to the Lord God and received no answer and then all time lost meaning.