by Daniel Kraus
The truth was that whatever sport my friend chose, I was willing to play it. From June 22 to June 26, we did just that, though one would need to untangle the bodies to tally the precise score. French command, slap-happy, reasserted that we were to drive from the forest every last stinking Kraut, and thus the Americans continued to shoot and slash while Church and I sped about, vital messages poised upon our tongues or folded into our pockets.
Other runners—mere humans!—were subject to the sonic confusion of battle. My advantage was a silent, still body; I had space to listen, to gauge each danger, and to proceed in kind. I was a runner, and so I ran, away from cowardice, from intimidation, from fear. The path I forged on June 24 was my finest; it twisted through smoky ravines, across fetid streams, and beneath fiery barricades all the way from Vaux to Torcy. Dozens of times that day I zigzagged it, saluting each of the three dead GIs who served as my signposts. Their faces, melted off, supplied me with whatever I needed: approval, encouragement, or pardon.
Uniquely adapted though I was, it goes without saying that Church was the finest runner the Marine Corps had ever produced. In late June, soldiers fell in such abundance that two hundred ambulances were called in for evacuation. What minor breakthroughs there were became critical, and most came courtesy of the touchdown speed of the valiant Iowan.
You could feel it, how a single man began to tip the scale in our favor.
We reached the northmost end of the forest on June 26. There, Belleau Wood was officially declared captured at the bargain price of two thousand dead, eight thousand injured, and sixteen hundred captured. As surrendered Germans filed past, I searched for the boy I had spared in battle but did not find him. Most likely he had been killed. Still, he counted toward the Theory of 17, didn’t he? Even if his eventual death had been an extended torture involving slugs in his stomach and crows at his face? I tried not to dwell upon it; it was cold calculus indeed.
While men wrote letters home about a victory that would, with alarming speed, be forgotten by history, I toured an emptied German trench. Compared to our slop-holes, it was the Taj Mahal. These charming environs were well-stocked with comfortable seating and small tables on which lay unfinished games of cards and dominoes. I took a seat and toyed with an ivory six/six as well as a treasonous thought: if Der Vaterland was anything like this trench, it could not be so bad.
A boot connected with the table and the dominoes sprang into the air like shrapnel. I leapt to a fighting stance before recognizing the leer of Piano. He wiped the remaining dominoes from the table and dropped into the very seat I’d vacated. He was fatter than the rest of us, fed for too long on my extra rations. In one hand, naturally, he clutched a roll of his maps, while with the other he tapped ragged fingernails across the scarred table surface. It was a tetchy sound.
“You get an earful of that wallop a while back? It was one of those pile-o’shite Jerrys who done it. Had a grenade stashed up his arse, threw it right into a tent of officers.”
I could have shot him for his glibness.
“How many dead?” asked I.
Piano looked bewildered. His left cheek clenched, unclenched, clenched.
“Who bleedin’ cares who and how many. It’s the maps, Prefer-Not-To. Those chinwagging cans of piss were carrying every last map we had. Now we’re walking blind.”
“We can acquire more maps.”
“Can we really now? From who, the French? Ye thick as a brick, boy-o. You ever laid eyes on a French map? Here, let me show you something.”
For the first time in our short military history, there was no superior around to tell us to report for muster, stand guard, et cetera. I sighed to communicate that I would grant him a brief moment, nothing more, and sidled up to the table. Piano, in caricature of a saboteur, shifted his eyes about to verify that we went unobserved before unrolling ten inches of the topmost map.
Could this be what he’d been laboring over for so long? Instead of a legible background of white or pale green, his map was a patchwork of bright reds and yellows and oranges, each delineating a geographic or political feature beyond my understanding. While some iconography, such as rivers, hills, and towns, were recognizable, others were alien: dotted hexagons, slanted crosses, triangular flags, and rainbow-colored bridges that spanned the entire Wood, a fantasyland of easy access. Atop good old Hill 142 was an obelisk with a lidless eye.
I backed away.
Piano’s eager smile, in one second, curdled.
“Now don’t you be getting ideas, boy-o. Don’t you go nattering about this.”
Whether he feared theft of his proprietary brilliance or tattling of his madness I did not know.
“Whatever could I say,” spoke I, “that would do it justice?”
His frantic hands crumpled the paper, and he rocketed upward, knocking over the table with a knee and jabbing the rolled maps at me like a bayonet.
“Bleedin’ hell, I shouldn’t have showed you a thing! I knew I couldn’t trust you, you daft molly!”
He elbowed me aside and made for the nearest ladder. Halfway up it, he swung to the side and shook his fist.
“I won’t be eating your rations ever again!”
As threats went, it was a weak one, but still it gave me pause. Piano’s body might have emerged from Belleau Wood untouched, but you could not say the same about his mind. My Dearest Reader has no doubt made her or his diagnosis: J.T. “Piano” O’Hannigan, with his crippling anxiety, clockwork diarrhea, facial convulsions, and rampant paranoia, suffered from a paradigmatic case of shell shock and needed to be hospitalized before he hurt someone. Sadly, this was a number of years ago—1918 to be precise—when the most dangerous issue related to this perilous disorder was that very few people believed it to exist.
XIV.
TAKE ONE CORKSCREWED, CLIFFBOUND MEUSE RIVER, add to it an impenetrable, underbrushed Argonne Forest, sprinkle within its ruined ravines a few thousand folk willing to bomb one another to kingdom come, and you have the Meuse-Argonne Offensive, the Great War’s final battle. The luck of the Seventh Marine Regiment, Third Battalion—always in, always bad—brought our battered leftovers to the front just as it was getting good.
Over the latter half of 1918 we had contributed to offensives stretching ever northward toward the waffle-sugar air of Belgium, from Soissons to Saint-Mihiel to the Blanc Mont Ridge. Along our way, we waded through stinking rivers of fleeing refugees, picked paths through entire towns of torpedoed châteaus, suffered weeding by snipers through monsoons of rain until the overhead zipping of bullets had us marching with permanent hunches. We lost boots in the mud and were too tired to care, then picked up other boots as we found them, praying each time that they did not contain feet. Never did our objectives become more than arbitrary geographical quirks. Take that crest, that hill, that rail station. We did, dying all the while, if not by lead than by typhoid, diphtheria, dysentery, malaria, measles, smallpox, or influenza. One way or the other, Death found us.
Our boys had arrived at a town called Verdun exhausted past reason and complaining of high fevers, empty stomachs, and blistered feet. I, meanwhile, felt not a single one of these hardships, and so was quite awake when, at the cockcrow hour, my foxhole position became surrounded. At first it was but a single figure materializing from the fog. I patted around for my rifle. My pledge to not kill anyone did not mean I was unable to deliver a bayonet poke. Then my hand stayed, for it was Church, my friend, the one person in this historic mess I was invariably glad to see.
Before I could raise a hand in greeting, other wracked figures emerged from the brume and fanned out to Church’s sides: the Professor, Jason Stavros, the other four runners, a dozen more faces I’d come to know as well as my own. Steam rose from their unsmiling mouths. For the first time, I felt the November chill. These men looked to be a vigilante firing squad hoping to break their curse by sacrificing the company’s monster. No, they were too
clever for that; they would hang me, something quiet. I held my tongue. I would not beg for mercy.
Church squatted and spoke, voice low so as not to disrupt the fitful sleep of nightmaring soldiers.
“This battle smells bad, Finch. Squareheads been dug in here for years. It’s a fortress. Heck, I figure we’ll take the Hindenburg Line, but it ain’t coming cheap. Guys are going to get shot up, no two ways about it. That’s why we’re here.”
“You wish me to draw their fire. I accept.”
“What? No, me and the boys, we talked it out. We don’t want you in this hash at all.”
“Because of inglorious conduct. You wish me court-martialed. I shan’t protest.”
“Would you shut up? It’s like this. Lots of guys, they take wounds, they get sent home. There’s no shame in it. I heard about these three doughboys who mailed each other a bandage with gangrene on it so they could all catch it. Probably lost their legs, the nitwits. Fact is, Private, you been wounded worse than any of us. But you just keep on fighting.”
I looked from face to grubby face.
“They know?” whispered I. “About me?”
“Marines ain’t dumb. They’ve seen you take bullets, take gas.”
“And they don’t want to . . . destroy me?”
Church chuckled.
“Merry Christmas, no. We want to protect you, Private.”
The lips of one of the soldiers began to fluctuate in a manner so erratic that I blamed it on my disequilibrium. This same symptom infected the man to his right, and then another, and another, and soon I was surrounded by the strangest sight yet seen in a very strange war: a detail of quiet, grinning soldiers.
Church fired me a signature wink and swiveled on his boot heels to face his men. Gray dawn made an opalescent backdrop of treetops as he stood before them and began to speak. That morning there was no doubt of Church’s greatness; it felt to the assembled as if he’d spent all twenty-two of his years preparing for this moment.
“Listen up, Marines. You heard the Skipper last night. You know what we’re in for. It’s going to be hard. And guess what? I’m here to make it harder. I’m here to give us a second mission. It’s one we don’t do for the brass hats, one we don’t do for country. We seen a lot of things in this war, you and me, things we’d never have believed. So what’s one more? See, there ain’t any real difference between us and Finch. Maybe he don’t bleed, but what is our blood now, exactly? I say our blood is mud. I say our blood is smoke. It’s lead, it’s fire, it’s mustard gas. That’s what makes us brothers. Boys, one of our own is injured. He doesn’t say it, he doesn’t act it, but he’s injured all the same. And what do we do for a fallen brother? Heck, I don’t have to tell you. You’re Marines. You know what we do. We rise up. We are unafraid. We laugh in the face of enemy fire. Private Finch will not exit this war in pieces. He has saved too many of us already, and now, Marines, we’re gonna save him. Are you with me?”
“Yes, sir!”
“Now we save him!”
“YES, SIR!”
Neighboring gyrenes were jolted from slumber by the shouts but I heard not one grumble or curse. Cries of camaraderie so late in so grueling a campaign moved their emotions by instinct and summoned quick tears to their addled eyes. My own dry eyes could not respond in kind; too bad, for I longed to express this brand-new, unexpected, and unbelievable sensation of true belonging.
Wilma Sue, Johnny, Merle—they might be gone but I was no longer alone.
At that moment came a hollered report that the Browning rifles of lore had at last arrived. No, not enough for every man, but who cared? Optimism bounded back to us like lost dogs. Hoots of joy rose up. Sunlight cleaved the ashen clouds and we gasped at the sight before us: hoarfrost blanketing a rolling valley yet unsullied by boots, or craters, or flame. Even German barriers of razor wire shimmered as if bejeweled.
This was how the world looked before war.
Don’t you remember it?
XV.
BY NOVEMBER 10, 1918, THE final night of World War I, when Armistice was but a formality for the morrow, the leathernecks huddled about Church as if he were holy fire. How else had they survived the past ten days of ferocious fighting? We Americans had taken the forest and commandeered the Sedan railway center, the heart from which Western Front German rail support flowed. Steal it and you steal Hun initiative, they said. Own it and you own the war, they said.
They had a knack for making objectives sound like a cinch, didn’t they?
Instead, the Meuse-Argonne affair had been the whole war tidied into a synopsis: black rapids of artillery fire; poison gas so heavy you had to slop it aside like mud; grenades fat as rats plopping into peopled pits; the chugging of airplanes dipping into our world only to spit iron. Ridge after ridge after ridge was taken as easily as one takes a handful of beef from a living cow. (Not easily.) But the Hindenburg Line had shattered and Germans were everywhere, flapping white handkerchiefs and shouting, “Kamerad! Kamerad!”
True to their word, the Third Battalion had shielded me. Whenever the skipper delegated me to a ticklish task, another runner, often Church, would intercept and trade me a low-risk objective like leading captured Jerrys back to HQ. My fellow runners trudged through rain and mud the likes of which we’d never seen and they did it all for me. They died for me, too; I do not know how many. I was a novice to largesse and knew not how to refuse it.
The pup tents pitched atop the open bluffs and bustling with French and American generals said everything about Allied confidence. Goosed by the promise of peacetime promotions, these dignified, selfless leaders of men determined that their troops should run, shoot, and stab till the last second—and then, perhaps, one second more. This was how we of the Seventh became involved in a most unfavorable final assignment: traversing the river in order to rout one or two last machine gun nests.
One hundred Americans were to cross while a French regiment flanked us. We were told that the doughboys had improvised a bridge earlier that day under fire, but once the sun had set none of the runners could find it. As had become routine, I’d been safely stashed in a thicket, yet I could hear what the other runners, distracted by their noisome bodies, could not—namely, the hiss of river water against an obstruction. With each passing minute this knowledge brought me greater upset. This was my last chance to help those who’d so selflessly helped me.
I alighted toward the telltale sound and within ten minutes had isolated it. I whistled the signal and the runners converged, and before they could scold me for my involvement, they squinted into the fog and saw evidence of the bridge.
We spread out so as to guide the troops. By the time we brought up the rear, soldiers by the dozens were making their way across the river in single file, new Brownings slung across their backs. It was far from the silent crossing we wanted. From the murk came the splashes of boots into water, disbelieving mutters, and fearful curses. I searched the hills of the opposite bank but fog concealed all.
Church gestured for me to return to my hiding place but I would not have it. I planted a boot upon the first plank only to realize that “bridge” was a generous assessment. The GIs had gathered whatever scraps of semi-floatable wood they could find and tied them together, so that each step sank beneath the surface the moment you put boot to it. The only way to remain afloat was to keep moving. A knee-high rope had been strung from bank to bank, reassurance that we were not wandering into an abyss.
Even this late in the war, the Germans were patient.
They waited until all hundred of us were in motion before opening fire.
Towering columns of black water jetted upward as mortar bombs drilled into the riverbed. No direct hit but the water swelled and men were thrown asunder, clinging to the guide rope, clutching planks too measly to support a man’s full weight. Before the first scream, the deafening TAC-TAC-TAC of Maxims ripped through the night, chop
ping the fog into geometric shapes. White mist was striped with red blood. Hands, arms, legs, and scalps went skipping across the water, only to be gobbled by machine-gun piranhas.
Our queue mimicked the river’s chaos. Men bunched and collided; the planks sank with the multiplied weight; adjacent sections of bridge were sucked down with them. I found myself sunk to my knees yet still searching for the next underwater step. It was no use and I splashed down into a clumsy dog-paddle. I threw aside my brand-new Browning in order to swim and so did dozens of others, and the river, already boiling with bullets, began to spark orange as those same bullets struck our discarded weapons.
Hands of drowning men grasped at my ankles but it was fruitless because those clever Huns had lined the bottom of the river with barbed wire. I paddled through warm red water, slapping aside the algae of shredded flesh, before my foot found a solid step, then another. I was grateful until I realized that these steps were bodies, piled so high that they created a new, and frankly much improved, bridge.
The far river bank was in sight but the shallows blistered with thousands of rounds of gunfire. Each of us dove in a different direction. Some lived for but a second, dropping face-first into the purple mud, while others like me found ourselves pressed to an embankment embedded with body parts.
Between my legs rested a detached head. It did not seem unusual, so accustomed was I to seeing this particular face. It was Sten Ehrenström, the Professor, his body abolished, including those clog-trained Swedish feet of which he was so proud. That perfect tenured brain, however, was undamaged. If I had more time, swore I, I’d dig it out and slide it into my pouch, for it was an organ that deserved to outlast this war even if I did not.
Yelling—more yelling—but this was a single word repeated, so I unplugged my face from the mire and saw Americans pointing toward a ravine cut into the hill above us. In progress was a creeping advance led, no surprise, by Church, who crawled up the bank on his belly. The rest of us followed.