The Death and Life of Zebulon Finch, Volume 1

by Daniel Kraus

  GOTT MIS UNS

  It meant “Gød Is With Us,” or so I would later learn, a pretty good joke, seeing how the German crouched before me looked as abandoned by divinity as anyone in history. His rifle was leveled at my chest but his eyes were wide and frightened. He looked nothing like the Übermenschen spoken of by German agitprop; rather, he looked like the Hun equivalent of Jason Stavros—deerlike, barely of drinking age, and equipped with fingers accustomed not to his engine of death but to pen and paper.

  A battlefield end, I told myself. Here it is, just as I wanted.

  But the German delayed before doing me the favor.

  Was it my face, young as his own, that stilled him?

  I shall never know.

  For thirty seconds he did not fire, and then his rifle exploded in his hands, a crack shot from a leatherneck coming in from my right. The German yipped in pain, tucked away bloody hands, and withdrew along a retreat path that put him directly into my line of fire. I aimed, an easy shot, but found that I, the same as him, could not pull my trigger. Do it! I scolded myself. You shot how many innocent men in Chicago?

  The soldier dropped from sight into an enemy hole.

  Marines overwhelmed my position; I took a seat lest I be tackled. Later I would hear that it was the Eighth Machine Gun Company, joining us at last, and with their additional firepower our column pushed the Huns with renewed gusto. Men roared by and I swear to you, Reader, I heard through the chaos the famous shout that would put Belleau Wood into the history books:

  “Come on, you sons of bitches, you want to live forever?”

  A funny question for me, when you think about it.

  Inside the bedlam it was difficult to string together rational thoughts. How could I have let the dirty Heine live? Was I a traitor? A weakling? Or was there another, deeper reason? I thought of Church, his unflinching rescue of Peanut, his lemon drops of deliverance. Doubtless he was right here in the thick of it, saving Americans and taking down Huns. What right to be in these particular woods on this particular day had I, a grunt who could not claim a single German?

  Church had been right.

  I did not belong here.

  I ran straight toward home base, heedless of the tongues of fire overhead and the mortars bashing holes to my left and right. Our trench coalesced from the gloom like a battleship. I shouldered against what remained of a sandbag stockade and flipped over the edge, falling six feet into the rainwater puddled below.

  Boots were plugged into the mud right beside me. I extracted my face from the ooze and saw that they belonged to no less than Major Horstmeier. Good—he was the man who needed to hear the full, treasonous truth behind the lies that had brought me to France.

  I fought to a standing position but the major did not notice. He, too, had returned from the field, his sleeves charred and his face tenderized from shrapnel. He barked orders at a seasick-looking captain while moving his finger along a homemade map. And who held that map? None other than my foxhole friend, Piano, his cheeks paled with the same shock as everyone, though suspiciously free of soot or dirt.

  The Skipper finished his order. I snapped off a muddy salute.

  “Sir!”

  Horstmeier knocked my hand aside.

  “We don’t salute out here, son! You want every mother-loving Jerry knowing who the brass are?”

  “No! I’m sorry, sir.”

  The Skipper squinted so hard that beads of blood squeezed from his abrasions.

  “Private Prefer-Not-To? What the hell are you doing here? Do we have Hill 142? Do we?”

  “No, sir, but—”

  “Then get out of my trench, soldier! Get back in that wheat!”

  “I’m not supposed to be here, sir! I’ll explain! There were these women in Georgia—”

  “Not supposed to be here? Well, no shit, Private! I could’ve told you that the second I laid eyes on you! Here, let me give you a tip! There isn’t no one supposed to be here, besides a few fellas who were born to kill, and those are the same fellas who are going to take home the medals, run for office, and someday sign your paychecks. Next to those kind of men, you’re always going to look yellow, Private. So get your ass back out there and start doing whatever the hell they say, because that’s going to be the rest of your life, son, if you’re lucky enough to live it! Now get out of my goddamn face!”

  VII.

  FIELD ORDER NUMBER TWO WAS issued at 1405 hours. Far sturdier Marines than I had taken Hill 142, but it was a tenuous ownership, and we survivors were told to redirect our assault to recapture the strategically located Bouresches, a blameless little burg caught in the middle of the worst war the world had ever seen.

  It was no good, no good at all. We had conquered not even one mile of deformed forest that no man in his right mind would want, and the fight coming from the Huns remained resolute. The first line of our afternoon skirmishers was naked to what we later learned were two hundred machine guns; every last man of this first wave drowned in a choppy sea of German lead. Shielded by these corpses, our second line made it farther, only to be picked off by snipers perched in trees. Clean red arcs of American blood capered across blue skies.

  Predictably, I suppose, our staunch, methodized offensive rived into smaller skirmishes. When dusk came at last, men from all nations were mishandling their weapons, discharging fire into their own countrymen, or dropping their firearms altogether due to numbness. The scene had the absurdity of a clown revue.

  It was with great relief that I received the passed word that operations were winding down along with the sun. I crawled from the crater where I’d cowered for a shameful amount of time—let us not speak of how long—to hear the exciting news that Hill 142 remained in our control. Huzzah! And while a superior field of German fire had put up a fight, Bouresches was mostly ours as well. Hear, hear! Of course, the loss of life had been catastrophic—but that’s the wrong way to think, soldier! Why not look on the bright side? We Allies were the proud new owners of a cute little corner of Belleau Wood, a pitiful foothold, for sure. But a foothold nonetheless!

  None of us grunts, I promise you, gave a shit about this pile of dirt versus that. Massacred bodies created their own piles, and those were the hills that concerned us.

  Peanut had been evacuated by ambulance and the word was that the Prof was missing in action. By now Sten Ehrenström could be one of the thousands of pounds of carrion being feasted upon by scavengers, or he could be caught behind enemy lines with a carving knife to his scrotum. Would he sob forth our secrets or would he forge a filibuster out of one of his memorized lectures?

  No one had time to consider every gruesome possibility. There were fresh foxholes to be dug and a new trench to be twisted to our means, for nightfall would give le Boche updated conditions under which to launch bewildering new counteroffensives. Church was hip-deep in a hole to my left and I ogled his relentless action. I’d seen a lot of dead men that day, half of them with lemon stains upon their tongues. No feat of sharpshooting impressed me as much as that.

  Unlike Piano, beside whom I again dug, or any soldier for that matter, my body suffered none of the travails of the fatigued: uneasy stomachs ejecting the blandest of biscuits, eyes bleeding from shrapnel filaments, muscle cramps felling men as surely as if by sniper. The single but significant aftereffect I endured was that my dead bones continued to vibrate from the day’s shellings. With each stab of my shovel, this buzz reverberated in my skull and from it came a whisper.

  (((How does it feel, Finch, the electric charge of my Voltaic Bed?)))

  Like that, I was swept back across the Atlantic. The spoiling corpses around me were but a repopulated People Garden, the steaming heaps of red guts an advanced stage of meat etiquette, the entire forest an expanded Jefferson Street laboratory.

  (((Oxygen gives your brain a bone-chisel sharpness, doesn’t it?)))

  No, non, nein! I
stabbed the walls of the foxhole with my shovel. Leather could not have a single additional piece of me!

  (((A piece here, a piece there, I shall get all of you eventually.)))

  Leather’s mocking echoes did not let up. Neither, then, would I. I attacked the foxhole until the blade of the shovel began to wiggle from its wooden hilt. As the last kernel of sunlight winked out behind our line, I threw down my shovel and leaned back against the hole, body a-tremble not from exhaustion but from terror. That contemptuous voice! For now, I seemed to have buried it, but the strike to my confidence had been true.

  So shaken was I that I recoiled at the sight of a page of newspaper somersaulting along the edge of the trench. I collected myself, picked up my rifle, fixed the bayonet, and stabbed it—a direct hit.

  I began to unwad the mess.

  “Boy-o.” Piano snapped his fingers. “Give that to me.”

  Though the Irishman had spent the day out of enemy range holding his map for officers, he had nonetheless been rattled among the worst. His left cheek had acquired a violent tic. With each crack of distant fire, the cheek contracted like a fist, swallowing his eye inside a vulgar wink.

  “For maps,” insisted he. “I’m running low on paper. Hand it over.”

  The paper was French. My fluency had rusted since childhood, but surmising the gist was not difficult.

  LES MARINES SAUVENT PARIS, NOS HÉROS AMÉRICAINS!

  So the Marines had saved Paris, had we? I was sure that would come as a surprise to us trench-cowerers, who disassembled our pieces to give them a quick oiling before the night sky lit up with more payloads of TNT. I was certain the news would also surprise those poor saps stuck up on Hill 142—Target Number One for rebuked Germans. The paper was propaganda, a hurried attempt to recast a bloodbath to boost morale, but I was appreciative of it. My indignation, at least, pushed Leather even further from my mind.

  A bayonet at my throat ended that line of thought.

  “Maps,” hissed Piano. “I need to be making more maps.”

  I was tempted to lean into the blade so that it pierced my neck straight through, for no other reason than to give this Irishman a good scare. But far too many holes weakened my corpse, so I folded the paper, taking my time, and relinquished it. His face spasmed so forcefully that tears shot from his eye, then he drew back his bayonet and retreated to his end of the pit.

  Though I should have detested him, the worshipful manner in which he fondled the newspaper struck me as poignant. His cheek convulsed; as a result, his hand jerked and the newsprint tore, causing him to cry out like a frustrated child. Before I could think better of it, I removed that day’s rations from my kit and tossed it onto his lap.

  He glared. One of his hands touched his rifle, a bolt-action Springfield I coveted.

  “What’s the catch, boy-o?”

  “Not hungry,” said I. “Eat up.”

  No further encouragement was required. He cranked open the tin and with filthy fingers tore into the sow-belly and gravy. The sight dredged up opposite memories: the gold-gilded chandeliers and silver candelabras of Abigail Finch’s dining room, Mr. Dixon’s spotless trays and finicky ballet of decorum. Repulsive as were Piano’s eating habits, I preferred them to the endless sheathed daggers of civilized manners.

  The Irishman sucked a finger clean but offered nothing resembling gratitude.

  “Yes, I’ll be needing lots of grub. For energy, you know. For making maps.”

  VIII.

  JUST AS THE SPECTER OF Dr. Leather would not let go of me, neither would the Germans abdicate the sixth of June. The lions came by night: poison gas heralded by the bells, rattles, and green rockets of U.S. alarms. The wind drifted it to our north, out of range of the Third Battalion. We suffered only an atonal chorus of high-pitched wheezes, the croaking pleas for medics. Was it mustard gas? Chlorine? Phosgene? Whatever it was, it was heavy; it groveled along on its belly before sinking into the trenches. We lit the sky with flares; in the light the creeping gas became a preposterous pink. But it helped our artillery hang a curtain of fire, beneath which our gassed brothers could flee for the safety of higher ground.

  At midnight, the colonel, a short man with a pointed goatee, walked the lines escorted by the banged-up Major Horstmeier. At the call of “ten-hut!,” men drooping from the twenty-hour clash were forced to stand upright and salute. I was one of the lucky few the colonel chose to directly address.

  “A good day, eh, Private? A famous day!”

  There was a blot of shaving cream on his neck. It smelled clean, like mint.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Tomorrow will be even famouser! We’ve got intelligence coming in from the Tommys. We’ve got rebuilt mortars rolling in with a twelve-hundred-yard range. If we’re lucky, a Renault tank. That would be all right with you, wouldn’t it, Private?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “That’s the spirit! Say, how many Krauts you kill today, soldier?”

  I pictured the one I did not kill.

  “Private!” barked Horstmeier. “The colonel is asking you a question!”

  (((Indicate, Finch, indicate!)))

  I bucked the voice as if it were a rat landed upon my back.

  “I . . . I am sure I don’t know, sir.”

  The colonel gave me a prankish squint. “Too many to count, eh? That’s what I like to hear! That’s what the world likes to hear!”

  Morale was in the shitter and there was nothing a colonel with time enough to cultivate a goatee could do about it. Duckboards had been placed in our trench to protect us from moisture, but most were critically split. For a while we used pumps to drain the trench of brackish, blood-swirled water, but it was no use, and besides, we were tired. Eventually we sat, our trousers and underwear soaking through.

  How had the French, British, and Russians withstood four years of such conditions? It had taken but a single day for the Marines to become infested with “cooties,” a cute term for the lice that hatched eggs into the seams of our clothing and itched so that we clawed ourselves raw. I, as always, was rejected by bloodsucking pests, though I was not immune to the plague of frogs—yes, literal frogs—that moved by the thousands into our ankle-high water. This moat soon became creamy with stomped amphibian guts.

  But no beast was as intimate to us as the rat. The black rats were bad enough—should one doze for thirty minutes, the little assholes would chew through tin and steal one’s rations. But the brown rats! Those cat-sized rotters feared neither bomb nor bullet, and not thirty seconds passed when you did not see one paddling our canals. It was easier, sometimes, to just tip your helmet and let them swim past.

  What a tableau the Third Battalion made! Faces gray with ash, eyes Satan-red, sweat-blacked uniforms accented with crimson-stained white gauze. There were fewer of us now—it was a shock how many fewer—but the Prof, at least, had returned, armed with a story about playing dead within a tangle of dead German soldiers, only to discover that one of the Germans was playing dead, too. The Prof laughed about it, too forcefully for comfort. Our thoughts returned to Peanut. No doubt, said the boys, he was in some Paris hospital under the care of a horny nurse, loopy with morphine and not thinking at all about what kind of chef could find work without a functioning nose.

  For once I was not the only one who could not sleep. One reason was the dead body of a well-liked Marine named Morgan. He was spread-eagle atop an embankment of barbed wire in full view of our line. It killed the men to see it. By the time binoculars revealed that crows were pecking at Morgan’s eyes, the Skipper had had enough. He directed three men to crawl out there and cut Morgan down. But Jerry was waiting and our would-be rescuers were driven back. Men in the trench became edgier. Racial epithets were spewed and hung in ugly clouds. Chaos was close.

  Fllllpppp.

  It was the sound of cards being shuffled. We looked to find that Church had pulled o
ut a sweaty leather billfold and was sifting through the enclosed photographs. He collated a small selection, elbowed our unit’s collective little brother, Jason Stavros, and handed over the pictures.

  “Lillian Eve Johnson. Lilly. Nineteen. Hair like silk. Clever as a fox. She’s in Iowa, waiting for me.”

  Jason Stavros handled the photos as if they were ancient scrolls. In a solemn whisper, he read aloud the notes penciled on the back of each one.

  “Lilly at beach. Lilly on pier. Lilly at church picnic. Lilly in car.”

  Church sighed. “She does take many a fine photo.”

  “Exquisite,” said Jason Stavros. “Look at those lips. Those delicate rosebuds.”

  “Easy does it, boy-o.” Piano’s face clenched, unclenched. “That’s a man’s woman you’re talking about.”

  Church waved off the warning. “The kid’s right. Lilly’s lips are as red as the day is long. Soft as the night is black.”

  The Prof affected the posture of a lovelorn matinee idol. Church grinned.

  “We’ll be married when I get back,” said he. “The day I get back.”

  “Perhaps the day after,” said the Prof. “You might be a little busy that first night.”

  The men chuckled—a startling but melodious sound.

  “Hey, I’ve got one too.” Jason Stavros rifled about his pack until he brandished that beloved volume of Shelley. A single photograph served as the bookmark. He plucked it out and passed it to the man on his left. “Her name’s Cassandra. She’s sixteen and perfect.”

  “She’s waiting for you, too, I suppose?” asked Piano.

  “Well, she’s wearing my ring! It’s just a class ring, but that’s got to mean something, doesn’t it?” He smiled, for a moment lifted away from this cesspool. “Cassandra Stavros. Gee, doesn’t that sound grand? Doesn’t it, guys?”