“And you stayed here?”
“No sir, I went with him. I didn’t want to be left behind here by myself. I wanted to be with Ben.”
The ground today looked nothing like it did that October day, when there had been a gray, rainy sky to begin with, and then the shells erupting all around them, shrieking metal and soil and sugar beets flying everywhere, the dirt clods pattering down on his helmet. Arthur remembered how winded he had been, how he couldn’t get a good breath because his nose was plugged up with mud and he was afraid to open his mouth because he didn’t know whether there was gas or not. He remembered how in the middle of all that terror he had still been irritated by blisters on his feet, by the entrenching tool digging into his groin.
He had followed Ben to the next shell hole, the bullets from the German Maxim guns swarming all around them. Even now, it seemed impossible to Arthur that they were not hit. But neither of them was, not then. They dropped into the hole beside four men from another company they didn’t know. One of them had lost his rifle. Another had a Browning but he didn’t seem like he was planning to use it. He just sat there crouched over it like he was trying to protect it from the dirt.
“We didn’t have any trench mortars to take out that machine-gun nest,” Arthur told the Gilheaneys as he stared at the place where the emplacement had been, a gentle mound of earth now. “Just rifles and grenades. There was a French tank wandering around over here to the left, and we tried to wave it over to help us out, but it never saw us.”
“So you decided to take out that machine gun yourselves?” Gil asked.
“I didn’t decide anything. Ben did.”
He told them about the rest of the fight, just setting it out in a matter-of-fact way. Talking about it made the events of that day seem weirdly normal: this happened, then that happened. But at the time the day seemed to be something completely unrelated to the whole rest of his life. It hadn’t even seemed to be him who was living through it. It was somebody with no memories or thoughts, somebody with an empty mind and a body that was just a throbbing mass of fear.
They were lying in the shell hole with their heads down, listening to the puttering of the machine gun thirty yards away. The gunner knew they were there and he kept the dirt flying at the rim of the crater.
Arthur didn’t see how there was anything they could do except stay where they were, but that wasn’t what Ben thought. He turned and yelled at the soldier with the Browning, told him and his loader to get ready and cover for him because he was going after the machine gun. Arthur remembered how hard his face had looked, how hard and sharp and old all of a sudden. Ben didn’t care about anything anymore and Arthur knew it. After what he’d learned from that Indian he would just as soon get himself killed as not, and the rest of them with him. Arthur resented it, the way he was suddenly barking orders at everybody. Ben wasn’t his friend anymore, he didn’t care about anything other than killing the men in that machine-gun nest.
“All right, I’m going!” was all he said. Arthur and the others opened up in the direction of the machine gun and Ben scrambled up over the rim of the crater. Arthur was sure Ben would be cut down before he went a yard but he got far enough to throw a mills bomb into the grass-covered slit from which the barrel of the machine gun was pointing. Before the Maxim could open up again he threw another grenade and then he was charging toward the gun with his bayonet. Arthur had just put another clip into his rifle. He climbed out of the shell hole and started shooting and the other men followed behind him. Two of the Germans ran out of the nest and before Arthur could fire, the soldier with the Browning caught them both in a single burst. Another German came screaming at Ben with his bayonet but he lost his footing in the mud and went down backwards and the sound of his knee popping out was loud enough that Arthur could hear it even above the noise of the battle.
Another machine gun opened up then from the hill to their right and cut down the Browning team beside him. Arthur dove into the scrape behind the machine-gun nest and sliced open his nose on the boot of a dead German. Ben was still fighting with the other Boche gunner twenty feet away, the two of them grunting and yelping as they tried to stick each other with their bayonets. The German was still on the ground with his leg splayed out to the side but even lying there like that he wouldn’t quit. When Ben finally managed to drive in his bayonet, the man let out a gasping astonished wheeze.
Ben scrambled into the scrape next to Arthur. His hands were shaking with what he’d done but there was still that look in his eyes that said he didn’t care and wasn’t finished.
“We’ve got to get that Browning,” he said to Arthur. He was looking behind him at where the two men had been shot down. They were both on their faces, perfectly parallel with their heads pointing in the same direction and the automatic rifle lying in front of them like they were priests and it was something they’d laid down to worship. Arthur didn’t know where the other man had gone.
“We can’t go out there, we’ll—”
But Ben was already gone. He grabbed the Browning and threw it back to Arthur and then he pulled off the dead ammo bearer’s webbing and bandoliers. Arthur gave him what cover he could, shooting in the direction of the hill where the machine-gun fire was coming from. He couldn’t believe it when Ben made it back into the scrape again.
“You remember how to do this?” he asked Arthur, handing him the ammunition. Arthur nodded. The Browning was a brand-new weapon and they’d had a class on it at Camp Bowie. Mostly what Arthur remembered was how the rifle shot so fast it could hammer you to the ground with each recoil.
He loaded the magazines while the machine-gun fire from the hill kept them pinned down. The support and reserve troops were coming up now. Some of them were attacking the positions on the hill and others filtered their way forward, scrambling for cover along with Arthur and Ben fifty yards in front of Saint-Étienne’s cemetery wall. There were three or four machine guns in that cemetery and another up in the steeple and lots of tied-in trenches where the Germans were going to make a stand.
Half a dozen men jumped into the hole with them. One of them was a lieutenant. He glanced at the Browning and told Ben and Arthur to cover him and the other men while they made a grenade assault on the closest machine gun. The men slung their rifles and pulled the pins on their grenades and they ran out of the hole. It was hard for Arthur to see what was going on from his place in the shell hole but it looked like at least a couple of them had made it through.
“Let’s go!” Ben yelled. He leapt to his feet and ran forward firing from the hip with the Browning and strafing the top of the wall. Masonry dust, mixed with spraying arterial blood, hovered like a pink cloud. Now there was a surge of other doughboys rising up from cover to join them as they climbed over the wall and into the cemetery. Ben emptied the last magazine and threw the Browning on the ground. The red-hot barrel bounced up against Arthur’s shin but he was so busy and scared that the deep burn he felt was only just another streak of sensation, another one of the thousands of things that were happening to him or around him all at once. He had unslung his rifle by then and was face-to-face with a German soldier who had just crawled out of the trench. The German looked old and he thrust uncertainly toward Arthur with his bayonet. Arthur thrust back, and then the two of them looked at each other like they were trying to decide whose turn it was now, until finally the German figured out he could just drop his rifle and spin around and run away.
THEY WERE STANDING in the cemetery now. Maureen and Mr. Gilheaney were walking among the marble vaults and tombstones, reading the names of the dead villagers of Saint-Étienne. Half of the monuments were broken and still lying in pieces, their inscriptions as often as not chipped away by shrapnel or machine-gun rounds.
“The fighting appears to have been pretty heavy here,” the sculptor remarked.
“It appeared that way at the time too,” Arthur said. He didn’t know how peevish that sounded until the words came out. He hadn’t meant to feel any anger
toward Mr. Gilheaney and Maureen for putting him in the position of tourist guide. But maybe he was just angry with himself, for playing that role, for enjoying it maybe. It was probably his own fault because he couldn’t seem to feel any more than a tourist guide would feel in the first place. Here’s where Ben went after that machine gun, here’s where we charged the cemetery with that Browning. He had led them across the open ground, telling them everything he could remember about the assault against Saint-Étienne, but the more he talked about it the less real it began to seem. You couldn’t talk about it without leaving most of it out. He didn’t know how to tell anybody what it had felt like to be face-to-face with that German soldier, the unexpected anger in the man’s face as he came running toward Arthur with that bayonet. The man had come at him with a hateful grin, the long roots of his teeth exposed in his shriveled gums. It had felt peculiar to be the specific target of this stranger’s rage. Why, out of all the people in the world, had this old man chosen Arthur Fry to hate and to kill? But there must have been something of the same murdering spirit in Arthur’s face as well, or else why would the man have dropped his rifle like that and run off?
He wasn’t the only one who had done so. So many Americans were swarming into the cemetery by then that half of the defenders were throwing up their hands in surrender and shouting “Kamerade!” and the other half were trampling each other as they ran away through the interconnecting trenches like cattle in a chute.
“And Ben?” Mr. Gilheaney said. “Where did it happen?”
“Right about here. We took the cemetery but the fighting wasn’t over. The Germans retreated to across that stream over there, and there were some still shooting at us from the town. There was a machine gun up in the steeple of that church and Ben decided to go after that, and that’s when he got hit.”
Arthur gestured toward the village church, rising from the center of the town west of the cemetery. It was still in ruins, the steeple mostly shot away now and shell holes all through the roof. He noticed that some of the villagers were standing there at the edge of town looking toward them in the cemetery, wondering what they were doing there.
“He died instantly?”
“Yes sir, it was pretty quick.”
It had been so quick his mind was still trying to catch up to it, almost two years later. He told Mr. Gilheaney that Ben “decided” to go after the gun in the steeple, but whatever deciding Ben had done had happened before that. He had determined something in his mind back before they even jumped off. Whether he lived or died in this fight hadn’t concerned him at all.
The machine gun opened up just after the prisoners had been led away, and there was rifle fire from the village as well. The Americans in the cemetery had dived into the trenches and huddled there, the Maxim rounds striking the chalk at the top of the trench wall behind them. A few men from Ben and Arthur’s company were with them by now, but there were no officers close by and nobody seemed to be taking charge. Arthur was thirstier than he’d ever been in his life. Somebody had brought up a crate of canned tomatoes and the men were passing them up and down the line. They punched holes in the cans with their bayonets. Arthur cut his bottom lip on the ragged opening but that didn’t matter to him. He drank till the juice was gone, then gouged the hole wider with the point of his bayonet and dragged out the moist, pulpy tomatoes. All the time they heard the Maxim firing from the top of the steeple and felt it kicking up white dust behind them.
He saw the look in Ben’s eyes and said, “Don’t!” But Ben wouldn’t look at him or even act like he’d heard. He was in the same state of mind he’d been in all along, shutting Arthur out, fighting some kind of war in his head along with the one that was here in front of them. Ben unfastened the bayonet from his rifle, wiped the blood off on his mud-caked pants, then methodically put it back on. He checked his pockets for grenades. He was still wearing the webbing that held the Browning pouches, so he took that off. All the while Arthur kept saying don’t and Ben still wouldn’t look at him. Arthur called him a son-of a bitch and Ben said he didn’t intend to wait around here forever for somebody to do something.
“You need to settle down,” Arthur told him. “You’re all mixed up. You may think this has all got something to do with your dad but it doesn’t.”
But it didn’t do any good to try to talk to him about it. Ben just looked at Arthur like he was an annoyance. They weren’t friends anymore. It was like they’d never trained together at Camp Bowie, or drunk together at Boot’s Place in Fort Worth or had dollar steaks at the Westbrook Hotel. It was like they’d never sat next to each other riding a train all across the country, or stood on the Brooklyn Bridge looking down at the harbor with the wind hitting them in the face, or watched the sun come up from the deck of the troopship in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, or kept each other’s spirits up during the march from Nuisement.
“Y’all cover me,” he said to Arthur and the rest of the men nearby. One of the men yelled at Ben that they ought to wait for a 37 mm team to take that gun out, but Ben said he was going to do it himself and he was tired of talking about it. They saw he was serious so they opened fire in the general direction of the steeple and Ben launched himself out of the trench.
When he fell right back in, Arthur thought he had just changed his mind. But if he wasn’t already dead he was close enough where you couldn’t tell the difference. Arthur put his arms around him and tried to pull him up. Half of Ben’s back seemed like it was missing, torn out by the Maxim rounds when they went through his body. Blood poured onto Arthur’s legs and onto the white chalky soil. Ben’s eyes were so fixed and blank it looked like he was willingly dead, like he had decided to shut Arthur out for good and that his death was nobody’s business but his own. Arthur didn’t remember saying anything, or screaming, or cursing. He had just sat there holding his dead friend, and then he started to shiver like a scared and lonesome child.
“YES SIR, it was over pretty quick.” That was all he had said to Mr. Gilheaney. He didn’t particularly care to say any of the rest of it. Even if he’d wanted to, he didn’t know how. Mr. Gilheaney just nodded and kept looking around at the tombstones. Maureen leaned against the cemetery wall, staring at him. He turned away from her. He didn’t want her looking at his face. When she reached out and touched him he shied away from her, but by then it was too late. He wasn’t crying; it was worse than that. He was on his knees, barking in pain, his chest heaving, the prosthesis shifting around dangerously in his contorted face. Out of the corner of his eye he saw the villagers walking toward them thinking he needed help, but he waved his arm at them to please go away. He tried to say “C’est rien” but the words wouldn’t come out and he had to rely on Mr. Gilheaney to go over and tell them he was all right. Maureen sat down next to him and put her arm around him and made shushing sounds like his mother used to, and it didn’t seem to him he had any choice but to let her.
The harder he tried to calm himself down the worse it got, until he was stupidly out of control, crouching tighter and tighter against the cemetery wall while the snot ran out of his nose and sounds he had never made before—like the bellowing of cattle—came out of his mouth. While all this was going on he was aware of Mr. Gilheaney withdrawing tactfully over to the German side of the cemetery and staring at the monument there, with its ugly carving of the squat, naked man with his hands on a sword hilt. He stayed there until Arthur was finally calm again, and then came back and sat down next to Arthur and Maureen against the wall.
“We’ve asked too much of you,” he said.
“No, you didn’t do anything,” Arthur told him. “I guess I just never went over it in my mind that way before.”
When he realized Maureen still had her arm around him like he was a little boy he was even more embarrassed. He shifted a little and she got the idea that he didn’t need to be comforted anymore. She stood and wiped the dry grass from her skirt and none of them said anything for a long time.
Then Maureen asked: “What about
you, Arthur? When did you get hurt?”
“I don’t know exactly. It must have been right after Ben got killed. I believe there was a counterattack. We must have fallen back because the French found me out there somewhere, in those fields yonder. But I don’t remember any of it, to tell you the truth.”
“What you went through, it must have been—”
“It was pretty bad, yes ma’am, but I don’t care to talk about it if you don’t mind.”
“Of course.”
“Maybe we should head on back to Somme-Py. You folks are probably hungry for your lunch.”
Half the cemetery wall had been blown up in the fighting and nobody had repaired it yet. Arthur stood there watchfully as Maureen hitched up her skirt and stepped over the rubble and then he followed her. He had gone only a few yards when he realized Mr. Gilheaney didn’t seem all that interested in going anywhere.
“Aren’t you coming, Daddy?” Maureen asked him.
He didn’t say anything right away; he was thinking about something.
“You said he was boiling over,” he said to Arthur after a moment.
“Sir?”
“In your letter to Maureen. You said Ben was boiling over about something he’d found out. What was he so upset about?”
“I believe I said I didn’t want to talk about that.”
“Why not?”
“It seemed like a private matter of Ben’s.”
“Ben’s dead.”
“Yes sir, I know that. But it still seems private. And I don’t expect it would have much to do with making a statue of him.”
Arthur saw that the sculptor thought he had an answer to that, something along the lines of what do you know about making a statue? The man clearly had a high opinion of himself and thought he had the right to whatever information he needed. But when he spoke again his voice was softer than Arthur expected it to be. He stepped through the breach in the cemetery wall and walked over to Arthur and stood there next to him, looking out across the sugar beet fields.
Remember Ben Clayton Page 34