All That Glitters. Martine Desjardins
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opinion, we might possibly be made into mediocre soldiers at best, providing that our mascots were shot. By mascots, they meant our officers.
An unskilled worker always blames his tools, but still, the equipment we had been issued was unlikely to aid our cause. My boots with their composition soles, conceived for the Boer Wars fought in the Transvaal, had already begun to disintegrate. The constant rain had shrunk my uniform, and it was now coming unstitched at the seams. My khaki cape was indistinguishable from a mud puddle. No matter. I’ve had occasion to wear formal dress several times, and have drawn admiring glances for my elegance—none too often, mind you, but it has happened. Never before had I felt quite so dashing. With my conquering brow, my ferocious upper lip and my victorious chin, I felt rather like a one-man militia. At night, I slept fully clothed.
In my opinion, the training period was a damnable waste of time, both for us, and for those awaiting reinforcements. The newspapers were predicting that the war would be over by Christmas. I had begun to fear that I would arrive in Flanders too late for the kirmess and, most of all, for the great game to which I was destined.
III
THE OTHER DAY, when I told my pretty bluebird that I was drawn to disaster, I had not lied. Nor had I told the whole truth.
I have always been the kind of person who walks the streets with an eye on the pavement, on the lookout for a stray penny. My gaze is drawn to the bottoms of ditches; I shake the bushes and turn over stones in hopes of finding an object worthy of adding to my collection. Without going so far as to rob graves, or steal from the dead, I find it impossible to pass a cemetery without wondering how many wedding bands and how many gold watches have, for sentimental reasons, accompanied their owners to the depths of their tombs.
I take no particular pleasure in watching a house burn. But once the blaze has been controlled, I delight in strolling through the still-smouldering debris, in which I never fail to find a stickpin or a piece of silver spared by the flames. As a result of scouring the ground beneath my feet, I’ve learned to detect, as if by instinct, the presence of things buried there, without so much as having to bend over. There are times when I feel I know secrets of which the man in the street is completely unaware.
Some might call me a vulture, but I do nothing more than appropriate what others have been unable to keep. Gold that has become separated from its owner falls by rights to he who first claims it. Such is the immutable law.
As far back as I can remember, I have always been obsessed by the notion that, one day, I will come across a fortune slumbering in a hiding place that no man has ever suspected. As a boy, I wolfed down stories of treasure hunts—The Gold Bug, King Solomon’s Mines, The Count of Monte-Cristo, Treasure Island, The Musgrave Ritual, The Man Who Would Be King. But nothing captured my imagination quite like the innumerable tales of the hidden gold of the Knights Templar. I dreamed not so much of inheriting their riches as of succeeding where so many others had failed.
Anyone can call himself a treasure hunter. But not every man can style himself the inventor of a treasure. So extraordinary is the calling that he who achieves it would warrant having his name enshrined in the pantheon of the great discoverers. It is an ambition I have never foresworn.
Clearly, High Bluff was hardly the most propitious of places to pursue such an enterprise, and so, up until the present, I had been obliged to settle for modest discoveries indeed. Flanders was a different matter entirely. Since time immemorial, the Low Countries have served as an invasion route. War has displaced entire populations that have left behind, buried beneath the earth, whatever they could not carry with them. It is hardly surprising that so many legends of hidden treasure hovered over those lands. Among them, more than a few, attested to by numerous sources, told of the gold of the Templars. For a dedicated treasure seeker, could there be any greater temptation?
Therein hangs the tale of why I hastened to the recruiting office in Winnipeg as soon as I learned that Germany had invaded Belgium last August 4. I would not have missed the war for an empire.
IV
OUR COMMANDING GENERALS finally concluded that the Canadian division was ready for action. One morning, King George V himself passed us in review, and Lord Kitchener, his Minister of War, took the opportunity to impart to us his recommendations. He instructed us to maintain friendly relations with those whom we were helping in the struggle, and that the honour of the British Army depended on our individual conduct. He warned us as well against the two great temptations that awaited us: wine and women. With women, in particular, we should avoid any intimacy that might adversely affect our health. Listening to him, you would have sworn that the lasses of Belgium and France were more dangerous than the Huns themselves.
His speech failed to impress me. As a member of the military police, whose red armband I now wore, I felt certain that women would be the least of my worries. My duties would consist of ferreting out spies, apprehending deserters and any fellow soldiers who failed to respect discipline; of directing troop movements and the evacuation of civilians. And, in the trenches, I would be called upon to fire upon the cowards who refused to go over the top.
I owed my assignment to the armed forces constabulary to the good offices of Lieutenant Peakes, who had personally recruited me. Broadly built and of above-average height, the lieutenant possessed what one might call an imposing bearing. With his imperial forehead, he stood a full head taller than anyone else. His knowledge of military history was as deep as it was broad, but for all that, his view of the Templars was ill-founded. In his view, they had been little more than armed bankers, and not at all true combatants. Conversely, he held the Roman legions in boundless esteem. He confessed to me that he had nearly been rejected for service because he had filled out his recruitment forms in Latin.
“Do you know why I chose you, Dulac?”
“Because I am such a poor shot that the infantry wanted nothing to do with me.”
“You are by no means a poor shot. When Cardinal Mazarin appointed a new general, he applied one single criterion by which he judged the man’s value: was he lucky or not? Well, it’s an open military secret that you possess a luck that is, let us say, uncommon.”
As for the advantages of my new assignment, I needed no convincing. A simple soldier must stand in rank and stay at his position. A military policeman, on the other hand, enjoys a certain freedom of movement and, though he might be stopped five miles distant from his battalion, he runs no risk of interrogation. His duty is to investigate all situations, follow all leads. What better cover for my own research than the hunt for looters and other war profiteers?
Lieutenant Peakes was not a likely competitor. Gold was of no interest to him. His family owned one of the country’s largest hardware store chains; he was drawn to iron the way filings are drawn to a magnet.
“Just think, Dulac, of everything a soldier carries on his back: his first-aid kit, his rifle, his bayonet, his knife, his cartridge belt and ammunition, his tent pegs, mess tin and utensils, not to mention his canteen, his lantern, his pick and shovel. Sixty-eight pounds of metal! Magnificent, when you think of it! The only problem is that iron attracts lightning. Have you ever been struck by lightning?
“No, lieutenant.”
“It happened to me, twice.”
The first time was fifteen years ago, he said. He was in the storage shed of his father’s hardware store when a clap of thunder sounded. At that very instant, a flash of blue lightning leaped from a box of nails onto his left hand. An electrical current shot up his arm and seized his heart. His skin turned grey, his muscles began to twitch, and he found himself on the ground, half-paralyzed, barely able to speak. For an hour, he lay looking at the floor tiles that had cracked beneath his feet. Then everything returned to normal. Until lightning struck for a second time. Since that time, he said, his entire organism had been in a constant state of upheaval. He felt a sense of oppression, unable to concentrate; he could no longer recognize himself.
“How did the second strike occur?”
“I met Miss Nell.”
“Your fiancée, lieutenant?”
“No,