by John Everson
Somewhere I could hear laughter in the back of my head that would not stop.
Bullets rang again outside.
But moments after Dietz, Schuster and Kretz stepped out of the slaughterhouse and into the fire—the fire stopped. In the silence, Private Lichtmann and I slipped out of the door of the house and dove for the ground to evade bullets. But none came. Instead, standing in the center of the dirt path in front of the old house, Dietz held his hands to the sky and called out something in a foreign tongue. Maybe Latin. Next to him, Schuster and Kretz stood at the ready. But there was no need. Somewhere in the brush gunfire erupted again, but this time the enemy was not the threat but the victim.
An American exploded from the bushes and ran toward Dietz, but not to attack. “Please, no!” the soldier screamed, his face a rictus of terror, before a machine gun erupted again and the soldier’s back suddenly exploded before us into a confetti of red rain.
When he collapsed, another soldier emerged from the bushes, with a muzzle still trained on the fallen man. Lichtmann and I grabbed for our guns but a motion from Dietz stilled us. Our comrade returned his hands to the air and whispered something guttural and dark. The American responded with a gale of laughter, just before he raised the automatic weapon to point back at his own face, and pulled the trigger. His face sprayed the trees with gore.
“What the hell?” Lichtmann gasped, when the echoes subsided.
Dietz put his hands down from the sky finally and grinned at us. “You can get up now,” he said. The derision bled from his lips like vinegar. “I told you, the devil is on our side.”
Dietz wasn’t lying.
Over the next several hours, we worked our way back through the forest, back to the place where our full-scale retreat had begun. All around us, gunfire erupted, seemingly at random. We all flinched and dove to the ground the first few times the deadly noise broke the silence. All of us but Dietz. With every sound of war he only smiled and raised his hands in the air, as if advertising himself as a target. But the bullets never came close. Or if they did, they didn’t touch him. Instead, screams followed our march. Sometimes I saw the enemy, from yards and yards away, chasing each other through the brush. Brother stabbing brother. Friend killing friend.
They all wore American green. There were no Germans attacking the Americans. They were eliminating themselves, inexplicably.
They killed each other violently, without remorse. Whenever we were in range, the enemy turned instead on themselves. A strange, but effective curse Dietz had wrought. The enemy became our weapons.
We camped for the night in the same field where, just the day before, half our company had died, mowed down by merciless shrapnel and vindictive lead. But we returned as if guarded by an invisible shield.
Before we turned in, Dietz called for us to place hands on each other’s fists near a small campfire—a sign of brotherhood and allegiance. “Tomorrow,” he promised. “Tomorrow we will take back what is ours.”
I slid into the musty cold fabric of my sleeping bag and despite the evidence of the past hours, I doubted. I had seen strange events today, there was no question. But the visions of men gunning down their brothers failed to sway my heart from a new singular obsession. Every American soldier’s death replayed itself in my mind as I lay in the dark on the cold, hard ground. In my mind I saw them running through the Black Forest, desperate for victory. Desperate for life. They found neither as their own countrymen gunned them down. At the climax of every murder, I saw neither victim nor executioner. Instead, I saw the innocent face of a young German girl, pinned for sacrifice by five desperate German soldiers. I saw fragile, wide blue eyes.
I saw my damnation.
I rolled and kicked on the ground for hours before sleep finally took me. Nearby, I heard the telltale snores of Dietz and Schuster. It was a miracle they hadn’t gotten us killed by now simply because of their nasal passages. But tonight, those sounds ultimately lulled me to sleep. At least for awhile.
Until she came.
For awhile, as my conscience taunted me, there was blackness, and a cool breeze. The empty air felt pregnant with abandoned hope. And then a hand touched my shoulder. And then my cheek.
I opened my eyes and rolled fast to the side, reaching for my gun. From the corner of my eye, I saw a flash of pink flesh. And the round curve of a rosy cheek. Then she was there, right in front of me, frowning as if about to cry.
“I don’t want to stay here,” she whispered, as a tear did finally begin to trail down that perfect face. “Please let me go.”
I stopped feeling around in the bag for my gun and instead asked “Stay where? How can I let you go?”
“It’s dark,” she whispered. “And he keeps hurting me.”
“Who?” I asked. “Who is hurting you?”
“I want momma!” she cried, and then someone was punching me in the shoulder. I looked over and Kretz was there, a scowl on his face. “The devil may be on our side, but you don’t have to invite the enemy to test it,” he hissed. “Shut the hell up.”
“Was I snoring?” I asked.
“No, you idiot, you were talking in your sleep. Keep it down.”
After he left, all I could see in the dark was the afterimage of the sad eyes of the sacrificial girl’s face.
The next day, we broke camp and headed out of the dark embrace of the Black Forest. We followed Dietz, whose gestures alone seemed to bring the enemy to a strange and divisive end. Again and again the soldiers on the line turned on each other as we stalked by, shooting their comrades instead of ever training a gun on us, their true enemy.
I wondered if the situation was only an ironic metaphor for our own plight. In my heart of hearts, I suspected the devil would not be content with the soul of a sad little girl for long.
Gunfire mixed with screams and the smoke of the front lines floated heavy with the iron reek of blood as we stole through clouds to kill and kill again, never once lifting our own guns.
At midday, Dietz signaled a break to our march, and we camped near the cool fishy musk of the Rhine. As I chewed the rations from my pack, I tasted sawdust, and heard the continued cries of dying men in the distance. Near a small green-barked tree, the face of the murdered girl slipped from nowhere to here. I had found no Lorelei in the Black Forest, but I had gained a haunt.
“Let me go?” she implored. She shimmered in the air just a couple feet away. I could see her clearly, yet, I could still see the forest beyond.
I closed my eyes and let my head slump, wishing her guilt away from my heart. When I looked up, the girl was gone, but the guilt still hung heavy as a boat anchor from my soul.
“What are we doing?” I asked Dietz. He looked at me in complete incomprehension.
“There are five of us,” I said. “We can march around the Black Forest and up and down the River Rhine all we want. And maybe every soldier we see will shoot their comrades and the air for miles will be thick with the smell and flicker of meat flies. But we cannot turn the tide of a war waged by thousands and thousands of men in theatres from here to Japan. What are we doing?” I repeated.
Dietz’s lips raised in a quiet sneer. “Do you think this is about killing a man at a time?” he whispered. “Do you think we are doling out drops of death?”
He laughed, and slapped me on the shoulder. “The devil is on our side now. We cannot be defeated. And these drops of death that we sprinkle will soon grow to a tide and then a tidal wave. Our march has only begun…and when it is ended, the blood of Americans and English and Russians will coat every trail, every street we pass in red rivers. The power of demons has just begun to grow and manifest through us. In days, we will be more deadly than any company you have ever known. Our rage will loosen the guts of the enemy like cannon fire in a stadium of civilians. Believe,” he said. “Believe in the power of the devil.”
I wanted to ask him about the girl, but something told me to let it be. The glow in his eyes said any answer I received would not be helpful.
We camped that night in a perverse calm in the eye of a bloodbath. During the last hour of sunset, squadrons of the enemy had charged our position, but we only sat there, complacent and mute as they advanced. Score by score, they shifted their guns from aiming at us to pointing at each other. Dietz only sat there, thin pale lips drawn in a dismissive smile of derision that never wavered. When the last shots finally stopped ringing, and the last dying American bludgeoned his captain before turning a knife on himself, we built a small fire to cook dinner. Dietz claimed the meat came from a freshly killed deer he’d found nearby, but I didn’t believe him. There was too much meat piled all around us on the ground for him to have gone game-hunting. This was American meat, I knew. His coup d'état. Murder your enemy without lifting a finger, and then devour him as the ultimate victory. I stifled the urge to taunt him with the cliche “you are what you eat” and instead chewed on my bar of rations and turned in early. I heard him whispering to the others outside, but I didn’t care. I knew he was talking about me. No doubt setting me up as the next victim for his altar. Inwardly, I shrugged. I would kill the enemy. But I would not eat him in a perverse communion.
When the voices outside had stilled, she came to me a third time.
“It hurts,” she whispered. “Every time they die, he hurts me.”
“Who?” I whispered. I knew the others might hear. “Who hurts you?”
“The mean man,” she said. Tears flowed down her cheeks and she rubbed her eyes with pudgy unsoiled fists. “I just want to go home. Please let me go home. I can hear momma calling, but I can’t find her.”
“How?” I asked. “Just tell me how.”
She leaned in close, and did. I was resigned, but not at all surprised to find out that it required more blood. My life revolved around death.
The next morning at dawn, Dietz marshaled our little company to march. We headed straight into the thickest line of the enemy. He didn’t care. “The more souls we take early, the faster our wave will grow,” he explained. “Long live the Reich!” he added, and automatically, ten fists rose in the air.
We marched.
It didn’t take long for the screams to start.
There is no way of explaining the horror of the next hour. The act of murder is a terrible, life-altering moment. It was an act we, as soldiers, were conditioned to enact, again and again. Our own lives shivered in the balance each time like hung laundry shaking in the wind. But there is something different in the murder our tiny company brought. The act of combat entails a horrible price, but somehow it is honorable. Both warriors risk death in the support of their side. But we….we didn’t risk anything. We only stood there, gleeful, for the most part, in our assured victory. Meanwhile, our enemy rushed us only to inexplicably slow as victory was in their grasp, stop and finally turn upon themselves. I could see the change in their eyes as the scopes of their battle bloodlust switched from us to their countrymen as targets. A part of their gaze froze, appalled and anguished, as the rest of their faces turned without remorse to fratricide. I turned away after the first men bludgeoned their friends with the stocks of their rifles. Brains joined kidneys on the ground in a broken stew as they beat and stabbed their way into hell.
This was not war. It was a mockery. There were no winners in this scenario. Only evil.
And Dietz’s thin grin grew and grew with every act of maniacal murder. His prophecy about growing power was coming true. Now he merely waved an arm at a group of men and they instantly turned their rifles from us to each other. And the range of his influence grew farther and farther afield, just as its breadth widened. By noon he was leading us across a battle field that had been trenched and dug in by the enemy for months. We had been unable to break the line just days before. But now, within moments of our walking near, there were screams from a mile away and echoes of gunfire that only destroyed brothers. As we walked, untouched through bloody mud while all around us men stabbed and beat and shot each other with insane intensity, my stomach sickened.
It had to end before his power grew any further. It had to end before there would be no one left to fight him. It had to end to set an innocent German girl free. Maybe the first girl who’d ever counted on me.
We walked for miles on that day, and killed hundreds of soldiers just by our mere presence. The devil was on our side, and he took great glee in threshing the weak souls and flesh of men.
“At this rate,” Dietz said, “We will give the Fuhrer all of Europe within the month.”
“We can’t walk from here to the English Channel in a month,” I complained.
“We won’t need to,” he said. “Our power precedes us. Watch this!”
Dietz pointed the horizon, and I shrugged. “Do you see the man?” he asked.
I looked harder, and this time saw the form slinking up and around bushes and trees to keep himself hidden from the German forces. He was but an ant on the farthest field.
“Ahhh, you see him now,” Dietz confirmed. Then he raised his hand and pointed and the black dot suddenly disappeared. Then it reappeared. And then, I heard a faint single retort of a gun. And the black dot disappeared for good. The soldier had shot himself.
Kretz laughed. “Now that, is warfare!” he said.
Under my breath, I whispered otherwise. “No,” I said. “That is murder.”
We camped that night under the eerie canopy of the Black Forest yet again. I felt a calming balm in its leafy embrace, and longed for another time. A time when I believed in our war, and believed if I killed the men in uniforms that were not German, that God would support us and keep us strong until we took what was ours. What we wanted.
I don’t think it would ever have been enough. And perhaps I’m kidding myself about ever feeling that way.
We found another small village on the edge of the forest that night, and stayed in a tiny, broken down inn. I don’t think anyone other than us had stayed there in weeks. The owners seemed pleased to help us. Unusally so.
The owner was a fat, greasy man who bowed after every sentence. You would have thought he was from the Orient, but he was just another sycophant, who would suck up to any coin. And it looked like it had been awhile since he’d hosted paying guests.
His daughter pranced about the rough planked dining room, pigtails flying like nascent wings. She seemed a happy thing for one living in such obvious poverty. The soup her father served was barely more than water and salt.
Dietz watched the girl, and I could see the ideas blooming beneath that pallid evil skin. It didn’t take long for them to crystallize.
“We need another sacrifice,” he said as the girl ran up to him and he ruffled her hair with cold fingers.
“I think we made several hundred today,” I pointed out.
“No, not kills,” he corrected. “A sacrifice. Innocent blood.”
Again he smiled at the little girl.
“Our allegiance to Satan must constantly be re-stated. Soldiers would likely be his at the end of their lives anyway, we’re just sending them early. But children… They make him very pleased.”
“May I show you something,” Dietz asked the little girl, Emmie, after dinner. Her father grinned at us from the kitchen. He was probably used to any strangers making a fuss over his little daughter. And soldiers were no doubt lonely for their families back home. She would remind them of a kid sister. He thought nothing of the advance. But I knew.
One by one we faded from the table and followed the two up hard plank stairs to our rooms. Dietz took the girl to the corner where our gear was stowed. She giggled as he showed her his rifle, and jumped up and down when he offered to take the weapon apart. She giggled more as he poured bullets into her hand, and then loosed the stabbing knife from the gun’s tip.
“This is for Germany,” he whispered for our benefit, and motioned for us to gather around. Then he said some ancient words as Kretz stroked the girl’s head. She rolled the bullets in her hand like marbles, ignorant of her plight, and Schuster and I stepped
in to close the dark circle.
“Do we really have to…” Lichtmann said, and the look Dietz gave him could have curdled milk.
“Do you want to win the war for our fatherland?” he hissed. “This is the only way. Our borders have fallen, our troops collapsed and retreated. Der Fuhrer is in hiding and our Reich is in ruins. This is for Germany,” he repeated, and raised the knife.
“Cover her eyes at least,” I begged. Dietz nodded, and Kretz pulled out a hankerchief.
“Let’s play a game,” Dietz said, and the girl grinned, cheeks blushing in excitement, eyes alight with energy. We may have been the first guests to play with her in weeks. She couldn’t restrain her happiness. And we were here to kill her.
“First we close your eyes,” Dietz said, honey oozing lightly through his tone. “Then we lay you here on the bed…”
She followed his instruction like a lamb, and my eyes teared as I saw her straw-bright hair spread out across the pillow. Killing men sworn to war is hard, but acceptable. We all donned our uniforms knowing the price was life—ours or our enemy’s. It’s a very different thing to take the life of a child who lays down to play a game.
Again Dietz spoke in an ancient tongue and raised the knife.
He may have had the power of Satan, but that did not include omniscience. He looked very surprised when the blood suddenly exploded like a cloud from his chest, and the report of my pistol echoed like God’s own fury through the tiny inn. From down below, I heard the fat innkeeper calling Emmie’s name in panic.
“This is for Germany…” I said, and shot him again as he raised a hand to hex me. This time his head disintegrated in a spray of blood and eyes and bone to paint the room in a gruesome spatter.
“…the Germany I once loved,” I whispered, as the hands of Kretz and Schuster grabbed me and began to beat me down to the ground in hatred.
“What have you done?” Kretz screamed just as the innkeeper burst through the door and ran, stepping over the fallen remains of Dietz to lift his daughter from the bed. His eyes went wide as he saw the blood and the body and the men battering me with fists and rifle stocks. But when his baby was in his arms, tiny hands clinging to his neck, he left us to our own disintegration and ran from the room. His departure gave me the chance I needed, and I rolled away from the beating. Just then, Lichtmann opened fire on Kretz and Schuster. Blood sprayed from their chests and faces, and in that moment time suspended, and the air was filled with suspended wet rubies.