Our men are ready to go home. Because they can actually conceptualize the long-impossible idea of returning to the States, some of them are getting nervous. I hear them saying things like, “I’m not going to be the last man to die in this war.” They shoot indiscriminately. Take out anything that even looks at them wrong. There are butchers among us.
Pedals is in fine fettle. Yesterday, as we were mopping up one of the towns, he asked me if I was an investor. Not that I looked like one.
I told him I was. (Though the man who had invested that money twelve scant months ago has died twice over. The body and soul I inhabit is 300 percent casualty, just like the company.)
“Well, you better check your portfolio,” he said, and chuckled.
He went on to tell me the US stock market was going down in anticipation of peace, which it turns out is bad for corporate profits.
Can we live in so base an equation as that, brother? That peace is for paupers and war is the oil of prosperity?
I would rather have nothing.
I would rather have the fullness of the silence I felt on that day I went AWOL.
The seamlessness of a world without words, thoughts, or concepts.
War has never been born of silence, only from words.
At least that is what I have seen in my own heart.
All the sharp-edged things that have come from me, all the damage I have done to the world, came from ideas, from words running in circular rampancy in my mind. Righteousness is born of those words. I wish they would shut up. I wish more than anything all those words and soliloquies and conversations in my head would go mute, would drop into a permanent soundlessness. But war abhors silence, doesn’t it?
Another day has passed. And I once again seek solace in pen and paper, play that trick we all do in letter writing—conjuring the recipient from the lonely void, imagining they are sitting right beside us as we put our hearts to paper, imagining that they, if only mutely and spectrally, put a comforting hand to us, acknowledge our pains, embrace us in our fears.
Pedals died yesterday.
A thirteen-year-old sniper split open his head from two hundred yards.
He died before I even got to him. I can only hope his death was as painless as his morphine-soaked life was.
It is a horrible thing to look inside the head of someone you loved—at the indifferent blood and biological architecture there, all scrambled up like leftovers in a butcher shop. Because I did love Pedals in a way; war has a peculiar way of accelerating relationships, doesn’t it? You walk beside someone for hundreds of miles, and you hardly know him. But the moment you share in the terror of incoming fire, there’s suddenly that bond that none but soldiers can know. And the ones that could smile in the face of it—could bring to the horror of your days even the briefest ray of levity—you fell hard for them, even if you didn’t acknowledge it. You are my brother by blood, but he was my brother here in Europe.
I have been sick to my stomach ever since. If only I could vomit, purge my insides of this roiling hell within. But it’s a sickness of the soul, I think, rather than the body, and I have no clue if the soul is capable of healing when it’s stricken with something like this.
I could not bear to send this letter off with those last lines as sentiment. I know you are no doubt in your own sort of hell over there, and I was hoping that perhaps if I waited another day or two, new insights or developments might occur that would allow me to finish on another note.
I’m not sure that happened. It might have.
I was offered the opportunity to kill myself this morning. I would be lying if I said I didn’t consider it.
We’d advanced into another town—a mission which turned out mainly to be busy work, because word had come down that the Russians were going to take Berlin and the war was all but over. It was an inconsequential town, without strategic import, other than its proximity to Berlin. The idea, I guess, was to show Hitler and his Nazi High Command that we were coming on fast, with massive fire power, even if in truth, we were largely in a holding pattern, because we’d advanced as far as the generals would allow, per the terms of their arrangement with the Russians. From what I gather, it was a show of force—however unnecessary—to ratchet up the pressure on the Nazis to surrender.
The town offered no resistance when we showed up. Yes, there were soldiers stationed there, but like the overwhelming majority of soldiers that we were now encountering, they were ready to surrender at our first appearance. We never gave them the chance.
We pounded them with 155s. Shot up the place with bazookas and Shermans. We were not to “secure” anything, but instead to “reduce to nothing” the enemy’s ability to resist. Which meant to flatten the town. The idea was that some lucky Wehrmacht soldier would get out, or make a phone call, or what have you, and word would get back to Hitler that the Americans were coming on like the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, which would hasten his decision to surrender.
And that we did. The town was helpless. We were merciless. The buildings collapsed in on themselves under the shelling. Huge plumes of smoke and dust ate up what had once been a pleasant spring sky. Then the voices came—they always did, between volleys, as the 155s reloaded and the forward observers reassessed—people inside the town calling out, for mercy, for help. But we could really see nothing from our positions, because, as I said, the smoke and dust were everywhere—the breezeless morning did nothing to dispel it. All we could see were the shadowy jagged fingers of buildings—what remained of them—faintly through that massive haze we’d spread across the land. Then figures materialized through the dust, advancing on us. We opened fire—it was no match—we were two companies strong, and they were hardly a half dozen. It was only after the fusillade of bullets tore through them that we recognized them to be women, old men. One of them had even fashioned some sort of white flag in vain hopes of signaling surrender.
Our line briefly fell silent, held fire.
Then someone said: “Fuck ’em—can’t be stupid enough to think you can walk into a hundred guys with machine guns and think you’re gonna be all right.”
A couple of guys laughed because they didn’t know what else to do.
I saw one of the kids moving on the ground. Writhing.
Instinctively, I stood and moved for him.
Someone told me to sit the fuck back down.
Maybe I was subconsciously inviting a bullet—from our side, their side, it didn’t matter—because I kept walking. Right into the horrible stillness of that dust and smoke. It enveloped me readily, erased all blueness and dimension from the sky. It just bore this strange dull orange radiance—the morning sun slanting in from afar, painting all the confused particulate that hung in the air a thousand shades of dim light that can never be held or understood. It was like walking in a riddle. How will you behold me, the light said. What words will you put to this, when your eyes see the shimmering edge of a thing that is so perfectly horrifying and glorious?
The kid was dead by the time I got to him. All of them were, save for one: an older woman, face as gray as her hair.
Our men were moving in behind me, splitting the silence and smoke.
The old woman had been hit badly—two or three well-placed shots to her torso. I knew an old body like that couldn’t withstand the insult of a single .30-06 shot, let alone the two or three she’d taken, so I put a syrette to her. I just held her that way, as the morphine made still the fearful tremor in her lips. She looked up at me with eyes that said “I am not supposed to die this way.” After all the travails, that great endurance test that is life, she deserved a more noble end. A more mundane one. I noticed then that she had been the bearer of the improvised surrender flag; it was a wedding dress—judging by the style, probably hers, from the turn of the century. It lay beside her, ignobly fastened to a broom handle, a fine sheen of dust settling atop it; blood from her wounds crept across the ground for it, found solace there in the fading whiteness. Then she was dead.
Our men were already shooting again, filling the dirty orange haze with injudicious gunfire.
In short order, it awoke something. Return fire. In response to our BARs and M1s came the distinct retort of Mausers. It’s like a language, isn’t it? The way the guns talk to each other, argue in their different accents, trying to outshout each other.
More bitter-enders, incredibly, were still out there in the haze.
I knew instantly they were sighting me, because a bullet tore into the old woman’s corpse beside me. They either did not see the Red Cross symbol on my helmet or did not care.
I ran, stumbling blindly for cover. Which direction the lines were, I no longer knew; I scrambled over debris fields in the honey-colored light, turning my ankle repeatedly as my feet panicked their way across the thousandfold bricks scattered in the streets. I tried my best to burrow down behind the scantest bit of cover, to get away from the world like a rodent. But the gunfire intensified, and my horror did too. Blind impulse drove me recklessly onward, until I found a small bit of foundation I could press myself into, and there I pushed my face to the cool stone, feeling my own hot, acrid breaths bouncing back at me.
Out there, the battle had been joined. The frequency of gunfire increased until it overlapped, stretched out into a constant rolling symphony, a thousand instruments intertwined in murderous disagreement. Then came the heavy percussions of the 155s and I knew something had changed. Our artillery was firing into the town. In the confusion of our sudden advance into the smoke, the rear didn’t know we were here.
Have you been on the receiving end of artillery strikes? Have you felt the unholy spasm of the ground beneath your feet, rolling and bucking like an animal trying to rid itself of a parasite? It forces itself up through you, that furious energy, as it passes in a split second from shell to earth to your body; every bone, from your ankles to the top of your head, rattles, your eyes and eardrums and lungs swell instantaneously, as if they’re trying to escape your body, and then it is through you, the worst sort of evil spirit exiting the crown of your head, leaving you as horrified as you have ever been, spent like you have just been raped.
Unintelligible things went through my head and came from my lips. The human being had been knocked out of me. I babbled and moaned, there was no division between thoughts and emotion—I experienced things only on one level—roiling colors and sensations, unbidden, unframed; for less than a split second I had a strange flash of that thing I was before language, that baby in the crib that could put no dimension or sense to his experience, but could only experience it.
I just remember that abject state. No words can be put to it. Terror is a weak, shallow strain of what I felt.
Then, incredibly, I was underground. The honey-lit world above gave way to a darker radiance; I’d fallen.
It was dark here. But there were walls. On all sides. And more than half a roof above. I could see the splintered timbers of what had once been a ceiling above, and the faint suggestion of the rest of a building rising above it. I was in a basement.
But how to explain this basement? As I gathered myself, instinctively seeking out the nearest wall, pressing myself against it, I saw that there was a steel cot fixed into the wall beside me, that the basement had been subdivided into cells, and I was standing in one of them. It must have been a jail. And yet arranged throughout the place were some of the most beautiful Christian icons I had ever seen. Wooden effigies of saints looked out at me from various cells. Chairs filled the spaces between the open cells, all facing a makeshift shrine, where a wooden Christ on a cross, some ten feet high and undoubtedly moved from a much larger church, had been leaned into a corner. He cast his eyes down, as if ashamed to meet my gaze as the world above continued to burn.
A candle yet burned here. An altar had been improvised from a small cart before that cross, upon which dozens of candles, all spent now, save for that single remaining flame, rested.
Despite that roiling wall of hate above, the candle burned.
Someone had been here sometime today. No doubt praying for the war to end, for the sons of this town to come home safely, for the town itself to be spared during these horrible spasming death throes of the war.
Prayer is a wish cast into an unlistening infinitude, isn’t it, brother?
I would not move. I would sit here in this strange, dark bunker and press myself to the wall and try to still the fear, try to regain control of my rationality. It was not to be. My nerves had been shattered in the way glass shatters; shards were everywhere, and no matter how assiduous and exacting an attempt was at putting them back together, the vessel would never be whole again.
Words assembled themselves in my mouth. I had no say in their construct or intent. Other things had taken over. I was in some ways no more than a witness to myself.
I talked to Christ. Christ That Would Not Meet My Gaze.
I talked to Christ. Christ So Ashamed by This World of Men He Had Created.
I talked to Christ. Told him that, yes, as soldiers, we were damned for all the killing we did, but not as damned as the generals, because the generals actually had power, power to choose, to marshal the most incredible forces the world has ever known, and they’d chosen it for destruction. With power comes responsibility, right? The generals would burn. And the string-pullers behind them—the politicians and corporate bosses—would burn even more.
But, you know what? I said to Christ.
You will burn the most.
Because you are the general of all generals.
The king of kings.
The divine creator that pulls all strings.
And with power comes responsibility.
This—that worldwide plague above, which the sun never sets on—is your responsibility.
Christ said nothing. Just sat behind those bars and stared at the ground.
And yet another voice materialized through the din raining down from above.
The English was so polished that I initially thought it was one of my company men, who had somehow found his way down to the basement.
But it was a German minister. I recognized the clerical collar tucked beneath his overcoat. He stood unsteadily in the dark basement, separated from me by the bars.
He had apparently descended into the space within the last minute and I had not noticed.
“It’s only wood,” he said. It took me a moment to realize he was referring to the effigy of Christ. He was strangely calm, this minister, despite the shelling above. In short order, I would realize he was drunk. Everyone these days was drunk.
“If you want to talk to someone, talk to someone who can actually listen. Listen and maybe respond,” he said. He motioned to himself, sat down.
Above, ordnance sought more flesh.
I didn’t take the bait. Not initially. I remained pressed against the wall, a cornered animal, eyes on him, but ears on the unseen battle above.
We just sat that way in the half-darkness, gauging each other. His eyes were prematurely baggy from booze, his hair matted as if he had not bathed in months. The only thing clean on him was that collar, its whiteness pure, indifferent to the overwhelming scheme of mud and dust and cordite around us.
“Talk to me,” he said again.
“Fuck you, Fritz,” I finally said.
He looked at me with those bloodshot, haunted eyes. “And if one of those shells hit us, those would be your last words, you know.”
“Fuck you.”
He smiled a great, painful smile. “I tell you, I have heard many last words, but those particular two are not a good culminating statement of a man’s life.”
“Well, maybe mine is.”
“Ah, so your existence is more wretched than the rest of ours?”
“No, we’re all equally fucked. When they put us all in our collective grave, as this War is almost certainly going to do, they should put up a single epitaph on that headstone. THEY WERE FUCKED FROM THE OUTSET.”
He smiled vaguely. Felt in his pocket
like he wanted a flask to be there though it wasn’t. “And who would read it once we’re all gone?”
Can you believe this was happening, brother? The earth was eating itself alive around us and we were just a couple of guys having a conversation while hell encroached. As I said, if it were not paid for in blood, war would be farce.
“He would read it,” I said, despite myself, with a nod to Christ That Would Not Meet Our Gaze.
“No,” the minister said with an indifferent shrug. “He’s just a piece of wood. Wood doesn’t read.”
I eyed him. “You lose your faith, minister?”
His eyes flickered inwardly at that, but he did not answer.
“What if we’re not hit today? What if you walk out of this town with nothing more than the nosebleed you currently have?”
I instinctively wiped my nose, realized that blood had been streaming from it, framing my mouth on both sides for some time. I must have been a garish sight to him.
“I’d say we’re still fucked.”
He eyed me in silence. The world continued to rage against itself above.
“Even if I walk out of here, and in fact walk out of Europe, I’ve seen the truth,” I told him. “War’s not some interruption in our otherwise tranquil life. War is a revelation. War is a window. And we see the bedrock, the true impulse of the world and God that has always been there and always will, hibernating between wars, looking for an outlet—it is the naked face of Man. War is beneath everything, waiting for its moment. We are animals. Not even that; we are worse, we are animals with a guilty conscience, because who else could have dreamed up the Devil but Man? You have to have it in you to imagine it.”
“Then by that logic you’d have to have God in you, too.”
The Far Shore Page 12