Once an Eagle

by Anton Myrer

  Sam was shouting at them, his mouth wide, inaudible; his arm was pumping up and down, and making long, sweeping motions. He ran obediently, inclining toward his right. The earth lurched and tilted, flames flared, smoke rose in foul, belching towers. He could make out nothing ahead of him. There was wire now, everywhere, in sprawling, spidery strands and tangles. He vaulted over some, tripped, righted himself, climbed over a log—checked at a narrow little pit and a man in a horizon-blue helmet. French. Spotter, or advance post. He crouched, panting, the point of his bayonet a few inches from the face of the man, who eyed it wildly.

  “Combien?” he screamed. “Combien de kilomètres aux Boches?”

  The Frenchman’s narrow, leathery face cracked in amazement. “Kilomètres—! Je m’en fou, cinquante mètres, mètres! …”

  He raced on through the boiling, hellish roar, conscious of only one purpose; waves of concussion smote him in the face, dragged at him, bent him double. Bits of trees, leafy branches floated gently by.

  Two helmets. Round and deep. He was on them before either they or he could react; he leaped the pit and dashed on. There came a descending, deepening shriek, like a giant knife blade drawn down an endless metal plate, and then the explosion. He was knocked off his feet; his head was ringing, his eyes hurt. All right. He was all right. He was up like a cat, mindful of nothing but Sam’s stern injunction, bending still farther to the right. He glanced back furtively once, saw no one, fell sprawling into a rusty tangle of wire that slashed at him like an animate thing. God damn filthy stuff! He wrenched upward in a staggering, capering hop and got clear again.

  He could hear the machine guns now, their flat, metallic, shuttling pang-pang-pang, in series, in chorus. He thought with a throb of dread of the embankment at Brigny, and gritted his teeth. There was a fearful slapping sound in a tree trunk near his head and he plunged out and down into a tangle of branches and torn green leaves, his head hammering; his sight turned blue, then red, then bright green—cleared at last. Someone sprawled down beside him, looked up. Turner, his eyes wide, his mouth open.

  He nodded, as though Turner’s gawping, strained face were exactly what he had expected all along, and started crawling off toward the right of the gun, which hadn’t once stopped. Its hail swept over him, and bits of bark and leaves sifted down around his head. He waited: it swung off to the left and he snaked his way forward in a rush, across an open patch and into a slight depression, lay cringing again while bullets spanked into the earth a foot beyond his head and dirt stung his face and neck.

  “—Jesus,” he gasped. “No room. No room …”

  Behind him now he heard the coughing, hiccuping burst of a Chauchat: a short sequence, then a longer one. The Maxim stopped, started again, and another Chauchat, back and to the left, began firing. Lying in against the damp earth, his mouth dry, he nodded tensely: they were moving right now, automatic fire working scissors from the flanks, just as he and Sam had taught them. The Maxim stopped again. He leaped to his feet, saw the German bent over, struggling frantically to get the dead gunner off the weapon. He fired: the man threw both arms to the sky and fell backward out of sight. He shouted something, he did not know what, conscious of people running on his left now; he crashed through a network of brush—and all at once saw through the trees a clump of lean men in mustard uniforms and blue casques, running hard, their bayonets flickering like needles, uttering high, yapping cries. Senegalese. He crouched at the base of a tree, faced left again, raised his right arm and clenched his fist. Then he dropped to the ground.

  The machine guns were everywhere—a snarling chatter that seemed to press against the inside of his skull. He saw Turner behind a log, firing, ran forward and sprawled beside him. Someone was shouting from a thicket on their left. He looked around him, watched Ferguson coming up in an ungainly, shambling rush, holding his rifle tight against his chest. There was the whine of a ricochet and Ferguson was gone. No, he had stepped behind a tree and now was peering out; his narrow, heavy-jawed face looked curiously guilty. He had started forward again when Devlin saw the grenade—a fat, round billy club spinning in the air. “Ferg-get-down!” he screamed. Ferguson turned toward his voice, his face pinched with perplexity. Devlin buried his head in his arm. There was a deafening, shocking crash, and things of terrible menace whined and sizzled and showered around him. He looked up to see Ferguson clutching at his face, soundlessly screaming; blood rushed forward over his eyes and mouth. Like paint, a huge bucket of scarlet paint thrown. Ferg. He was filled with rage—a black, seething fury that had no thought but vengeance. He felt nothing, no fear or weariness, no sensation in his arms and feet. He rose up cold as a shaft of marble, already aiming. The grenadier too came up with his arm back to throw again, and he shot him cleanly, effortlessly, fired again. The grenade went off in the thicket with a muffled boom.

  “Come on!” he roared, and started forward, aware of Turner and several others moving with him. A gang of kids in a playground mob game, yelling and screeching. He leaped over a dense mat of twigs and branches and there they were. He was conscious of a flurry of field-gray figures fearfully close, whirling, reaching—then the place dissolved in a feria of violence. A man pointed a rifle at his chest. He bayoneted him once, withdrew. There was another, a huge man with a trench knife, an amazingly broad blade like a trowel. He swung around with the butt and the man went down in a sitting position. He pivoted to use the bayonet—and felt a tremendous blow on his helmet and shoulder that drove him to his knees. He clutched at his rifle, could not raise it; his arm was numb to the shoulder. He gazed upward to see the German raise the clubbed rifle again. All his soul protested, Oh no! Not again—not to me! He drove forward into the man’s legs, felt him give—and then something hit him in the small of the back and he was flung to one side. In an evil dream of confusion he got to his knees and drew his pistol fumblingly with both hands, heard a thick, choking cry, and saw his tormentor lurch backward against the emplacement, blood pouring from his neck.

  It was all over. All at once. Raebyrne, his face tense and white, was cleaning his bayonet blade methodically on the uniform of a dead German. Sam was standing behind him wiping sweat from his face with a shaking hand. Little Turner was shouting, “Sons of bitches, sons of bitches—!” and kicking in a frenzy at a body in the corner of the pit. Devlin got to his feet, rubbing his shoulder, and the two Mexican veterans looked at each other, panting.

  “You all right, Dev?”

  He nodded. His rifle was buried under a body; he rolled the man away and picked it up. His arm was still numb and he flexed the fingers slowly.

  “Yes,” he said, for no reason he could see. “I made contact. With the Moroccans.”

  “I saw you. Good going.”

  There seemed nothing on earth to say. Blood was dripping from Sam’s left wrist. “You—you’re hit, Sam …”

  Damon shook his head. “Wire.”

  “Oh,” he answered numbly. It was like a kind of drunken brawl, endless and benumbing. What was next? What were they—

  “All right, come on out of there, you bastards, come out—!”

  He turned in mild surprise to see four or five Germans hurry out of a connecting pit, their hands high over their heads. Turner was pointing his rifle at them. The last man had a heavy mustache with upturned points, and was smiling apprehensively. Two of them began to gibber in German.

  “Shut up!” Turner screamed. “You no-good murdering bastards—shut your faces!” The Germans gazed at him in alarm; the one with the mustache shuffled backward, crying something. Turner watched them coldly, his eyes slitted. “Yes, now crawl! Oh Jesus, yes …” and Devlin watched in dulled amazement as he very deliberately raised his rifle to his cheek.

  “None of that!” Sam had stepped past him and pushed Turner’s weapon up and away. “Take them back …”

  “Shit to that! They let Ferg go back, I suppose—!”

  “Terry, take them on back. That’s an order!”

  Turner gave Sam
a surly, savage glance, then turned and kicked the nearest German, who almost fell. They went back through the trees, their hands stiff above their heads, the prisoner with the mustache still babbling in a high, strained voice.

  “Come on, now. Let’s go, let’s go,” Sam was saying to them tersely.

  There was no rhythm, no ordered movement; there was no sense to anything. It was a treadmill—a jittering, bedlam treadmill of shattered trees and mangled corpses, of heaps of discarded equipment that kept flowing by like some foul river, laced by the spanking hammer of machine guns. There was a woodman’s hut, which apparently had been used as a dressing station and was now abandoned, where there were stretchers and several medical chests and an improvised table covered with blood-soaked blankets, and a man whose head and chest were swathed in crimson rags held one hand to his eyes and kept reaching out to everyone with his free arm, moaning something in German over and over. There was a massive beech-tree at whose base two Americans lay side by side, their hands almost touching, like lost children asleep in a wood—except that one of them was half-naked, with his back laid open from neck to thigh, and the other, shot through the head, was Captain Crowder. Somewhere there was a Senegalese platoon sergeant who grinned at him, a vile and merry grin, and tapped at a curious collection of leaves, or mushrooms, or apple slices strung on a piece of wire around his neck—only they were not leaves or mushrooms or apple slices but human ears. “Cochon,” Devlin heard himself say, his gorge rising, “sale bête d’un boucher. Crapule …” But the Senegalese had vanished. Farther on, a beautiful black-and-brown German shepherd dog yanked in terrible silent fury at the rope tying him to a tree, its eyes rolling; and still farther on, a machine gun cleverly hidden behind a log cribbing got Mecklar through the throat before they even knew it was there. The Chauchats tied it down, and led by Sam they went in and killed the crew, and swept on. And after that, some strange time after that, he had paused, his hand to his head, sick with raging, weak with slaughter. A wounded man was watching him, a wounded man sitting propped against a root bole behind an emplacement; his eyes still on Devlin he reached stealthily inside his tunic. Devlin fired from the hip; the German shook with the impact, struggled to withdraw his hand, then fell over weakly. The blood in his lungs and throat made a rattling, gurgling sound. His eye still followed Devlin, who started on by—on an impulse stepped back and reached down and lifted the man’s hand out of his tunic. A stiff, small piece of paper fell to the ground. The Sergeant picked it up. A snapshot, a young girl with fine chestnut hair holding a baby in her hands and smiling, squinting a little in the sunlight. Behind her was a bridge with bronze horses prancing.

  He put the photograph back in the man’s hand; his breathing no longer made any sound. Devlin wiped his own hand on his breeches and hurried on, whipped by fear, regret, a scalding mortification that made him pant. “What the hell—it might have been a pistol; it could have been …” But there was no comfort in that. There was no comfort in anything at all.

  Then all at once there was light, up ahead—oh Jesus, light!—and the giddy, sick treadmill slowed; they burst out of the woods and onto a high plateau all fair and golden with the wheatfields stretching off into the morning sun; and there, far over on their right they could see infantry in deep black helmets running back, carrying things. Running bent over, like tired old men.

  “Hauling ass!” someone was yelling. “Look at them go!”

  “Get them! Get the bastards …”

  They were all firing now, furiously, offhand, kneeling or crouching, shouting to one another in a gleeful, savage rage. And remembering Brigny, Devlin heard himself mutter between his teeth, “All right, run like rats, you run this time, see how it feels …” He stopped to insert another clip and saw Turner kneeling beside him, firing in a frenzy at the distant scurrying figures.

  “Terry,” he said. “What are you doing here?”

  “What?”

  “Those prisoners you had …”

  Turner’s eyes narrowed, his pointed chin thrust against the helmet strap. “They made a break for it.”

  Devlin looked down, finished reloading. Of course. Because of Ferg. Well. But a kid like Turner—a kid who hadn’t even really shaved yet …

  Sam was waving them on now, shouting to them to spread out, spread out more, extend to the right. He gazed at Sam gesticulating, the monstrous naked sweep of wheat. Oh no, he murmured. His whole spirit recoiled, fled wildly from the field, the woods, the soil of France. No: they can’t expect us to cross that field, walk on across that endless open place. For several seconds he was incapable of movement. I’ve been a good soldier, he told himself, I’ve done what I could, time after time. But they can’t expect that of Jesus Christ himself—

  Then his will took over, his training and his pride, and he was in the wheat, putting one leg in front of the other. There came the relentless spank of the Maxims, and shrill, forlorn cries, and he was crawling forward, with the hot, burned beeswax odor of the grass and the stench of cordite deep in his nostrils. The snapshot of the young wife splashed against the face of his mind like acid: the soft, round face, so proud and shy, under the prancing horses; and below his knee the bloody, tremulous hand. All the ardent fury of the attack had deserted him. His chin was trembling now, his head, his hands. You could go just so far on Irish temper, and then you ran down. It was true: he remembered once back at Fort Early, Sam saying: “Oh come on, Dev, you know you can’t stay mad for more than five minutes, anyway …” What had he been hot about? He couldn’t for the life of him remember.

  His head ached brutally, he was shaky from the effects of the night march and no food for hours and hours; there were too many machine guns, too many Germans and they were all too deadly and implacable … He was swept with a desire as entrancing as the very gates of heaven to give up, to lie here prone and unobserved in the hot, gentle wheat and let it all thunder on beyond him, all the slashing and butchering, the curses and the moans; give it up, and go back to Charmevillers, to the still, high-ceilinged room and Michele … Yet he found himself crawling along, working his way forward with all the craft he possessed, cringing and gasping when the bullets sang their threatful way close above him, sizzling in the heavy heads of wheat; cursing himself for being such an insane fool, such a bloody automaton as to go on with this but constrained nonetheless, creeping and crawling, a filthy, hungry, frightened animal, toward what he knew could only, finally be his death …

  A figure was coming toward him from the right. Sam, cradling his Springfield in his forearms, his face a powdery mask of urgency. “Dev. We’ve got to get this gun …”

  Which one? he thought with bitter fury. Just which one of the frigging anvil chorus do you suggest? Aloud he said, “Yes.”

  “See those two trees over there? those two big chestnuts?”

  He raised his head, dropped it instantly after a flash impression of two sturdy shade trees with powerful branches, and what looked like a little clump of stones at their base. He nodded.

  “We’re going over there. I’ve sent Kraz over on the left for some covering fire.” Damon swallowed painfully. “If we get behind those two trees and stand up, we can spot them. You take one tree, I take the other. First I fire, then you fire while I reload. Got it?”

  He nodded mutely. It was a fine plan: it was clever, impossible, brilliant, suicidal. He had no idea. Get behind those trees and stand up—! Only there lay Sam with his face only inches away; his sad, steady, deadly serious gaze. No! he wanted to shout. No! No more of this God damned madness! Don’t you know there’s hardly any of us left now—? What the hell’s the matter with you—do you by some lunatic chance think you’re immune—that a bullet won’t starch you just as quick as—as Crowder or Mecklar or any of the others …?

  But he said nothing; he could refuse Sam Damon nothing.

  “We’ve got to get them going,” Sam was saying, “we can’t stay here …”

  He nodded still again. Only you, he thought, following his o
ld friend off to the right, keeping his heels in view, creeping and pausing, his teeth chattering with fear, remembering the ambush on the path beside the ravine near Brigny Farm—only for you, and only this once, Sam—

  Damon had paused and he moved up abreast of him. There was a shell hole and then a last little clump of wheat, followed by a barren place where wagons had gone, making a hard, narrow path. The grain lay white and broken in the ruts. Thirty feet. About thirty feet. In the open. Sam was looking at him. His face had that hard, heightened expression he remembered from Brigny Farm: a peculiar rigidity, and yet it was at the same time oddly expectant, and aware—as though he had seen all that might happen, and had made for it some fantastic provision. And suddenly he knew: he was afraid of Sam. He loved him, he owed him his freedom and perhaps his life, he respected him as all that a man and a soldier might be—but he was afraid of what he now saw in Sam’s face. He felt his legs start to tremble.

  “All set?”

  He ducked his head in confirmation—he did not trust himself to answer; sweat was soaking his eyebrows and running salt into the corners of his mouth. He opened all the flaps on the right side of his belt. Fire passed around them droning, moved off to the left again. Sam was up and running hard; he looked hulking and enormous and utterly vulnerable. A geyser line of spurting dust skipped along the ruts behind him. He was down.

  “Sam—!” he called—a barely audible sound. No: he could see him now, moving like a great brown lizard behind the field stones. He gathered himself together and hiked up his right leg, his weight on his elbows. You’ll never make it, a voice told him with cold authority; they’re waiting for you now. He shook with dread, a black certainty of death and maiming, kept glaring toward the trees. He couldn’t see Sam anymore.