by Dan Simmons
One of our chaps cannot find his mask. His maskless face becomes a contorted mask itself. I can clearly hear his screams.
“I smell it! I bloody smell it!” He throws down his kit, abandons his rifle, and scrambles up over the parapet toward No Man’s Land.
I am screaming at him, urging him to piss on his sock. The Sergeant is trying to grab him. Another private attempts to grip his friend’s puttees while tightening the straps on his own mask. More shells are coughing near us. It is all a comic farce.
The fleeing private gets only ten yards or so before a German machine gun slams him aside like a struck ten-pin. He had forgotten that there are more common ways to die here.
The other four men in the trench lift their weapons and prepare to fight off another counterattack. I pick up the dead private’s rifle, slide the bolt back to make sure that there is a cartridge in the chamber, and join the other chaps on the firestep we have erected from sandbags at the rear of the trench. I am sweating so heavily in this clumsy canvas bag of a mask that the thick mica eyepieces, barely serviceable at the best of times, are fogged up on the inside. A clip in the gas mask keeps me from breathing through my nose so only by gasping in the bit of air that makes it through canvas and filter can I get barely enough oxygen to survive. I imagine that I can smell moldy hay. I am essentially blind.
“There!” comes the Sergeant’s scream through filter and mask. “They’re comin’!”
Something moves, vague shapes are visible through the opaque eyepieces. Bayonets, perhaps. German bayonets. Stick bombs come bouncing and hissing into our trench but we are all too busy to deal with them. I pant through my mouth and squeeze off several shots at the attacking shadows.
The great attraction and the great danger of passion is that it is something outside of oneself, a strong wind from nowhere in the face of which the forest of everyday thought and behavior cannot stand.
She was beautiful, my Lady. I carried her from the balcony to the bedroom, across the firelit parquet floor, feeling rather than seeing the soft nap of Persian carpet under my bare feet in the second before parting the bed curtains and setting this woman, my woman, gently on the high mattress there. Her hair flowed back over my forearm where it remained, still cradling her. The pale-pink circles of her nipples were visible through thin fabric.
The time for subtlety was past. I cast off my silk robe, grasped her thin garment by its lacy collar, and tore it down the front. She raised her arms above her head on the pillow and the reflected firelight painted the lower curves of her breasts with warm tones. Her legs were long and smooth, her belly slightly curved, the triangle of darkness below meeting its apex at the juncture of her shadowed thighs.
She opened her arms to me as I stretched myself out against the length of her. She must have felt my rigid sex against her thigh, for a kind of gentle shivering went through her and she closed her eyes. To quiet her, I set my fingers in her hair, kissed her eyelids, and laid myself atop her like a blanket. When we kissed, she opened her legs to me and slid her nails lower on my back. I could feel the opening warmth of her against the head of my sex, and I paused a second to savor that briefest of moments where the two of us were on the verge of becoming one.
Our kiss seemed to continue on past consciousness, she opened her mouth to me, our tongues met in urgent strife, and I slid forward into my Lady.
The Sergeant dies just before darkness comes.
We have held off two attacks, fighting in our crude gas masks, the air swirling with invisible phosgene and then—before the second assault—with vaporous clouds of tear gas. The Germans are vague shapes through the fog outside and the fog inside our thick mica lenses. We fire at the shapes and some go down. I glance at a twitching corpse just around the bend of our trench and see that the German masks are not much more refined than ours. This man has been shot through the eyepiece and blood runs from the tapered snout of the mask’s tube. It is as if I have killed a demon.
There were five of us counting the wounded private, the Sergeant, and myself. And then, after several stick bombs go off on the first attack, there is only the Sergeant and myself. We gather the last of the ammunition from our dead comrades, patting their pockets for more Mills bombs or cartridges. Setting our masks together so that we can be heard, the Sergeant and I decide that we cannot hold the entire section of trench with just the two of us to guard the approaches. We retreat to the right where the trench zigzags back toward the main German lines. There are grey-clad bodies stacked in the mud for the length of the next section of trench. The rats are already busy feeding.
The Sergeant rests his rifle on a niche in the trench wall to cover this approach while I stack other sandbags to create a crude revetment. Anyone coming around the far corner will have to pass down the full length of our abandoned trench under my sights.
Then tear gas and smoke billow around us. My eyes are running with tears, I cannot breathe, but this has been the case for the past half hour in my mask so I do not know if there is a leak. I peer down the sights of my Lee Enfield waiting for the first of them to come around the corner. His back to mine, the Sergeant stares down his section of trench.
They come over the top, leaping down from the parados with guttural cries. From the distant place I have gone, I calmly notice how much longer the upper sections of their boots are than those issued to our chaps.
I shoot two of them. Another throws a stick bomb at us and flees. The Sergeant kicks the hissing bomb around the corner of the trench and I shoot the running German in the back. He continues to crawl. I shoot him again and feel nothing.
Two more men leap into our trench from almost directly overhead. I shoot one in the face and my rifle jams; the bolt will not eject the cartridge. The surviving German shouts something through his gas mask and drops into the stance for bayonet attack. With no time to turn and fire, the Sergeant shifts his rifle into a defensive diagonal and steps between the German and me.
The German lunges, the Sergeant clumsily deflects the blade, and lunges back. Both men have scored. The German’s thin bayonet has entered the Sergeant’s throat just under where the gas mask is tightened. Four inches of the Sergeant’s blade is embedded in the German’s abdomen. The two men sag to their knees, still attached by steel. Each pulls the bayonet from the other as if in a single, choreographed motion. As I watch, panting, almost fainting from lack of oxygen, the two forms thrust their bayoneted rifles at each other again even while they are on their knees. Neither has the strength to penetrate the other much more than skin deep. They drop their rifles and fall together at the same second.
Ignoring the threat of other Germans coming over the top, I drop my rifle and roll the Sergeant to his side, tugging off the mask. His mouth is wide and almost filled with blood, as round as a shell crater. His eyes are wide. I never learned his name.
The German is still alive, writhing in pain. I prop him up against the front wall of the trench, pull off his mask and study his face.
He is just a man: dark stubble, brown eyes, sweat-matted hair, and a shaving nick on his throat. He gasps for water—I know the German word for that at least—and I lift my water bottle to his lips. He swallows, starts to speak, suddenly convulses, and dies without uttering another word.
Leaving my own rifle in the mud, I lift the Sergeant’s, wipe the blood from the stock as best I can, check to make sure that there is a full magazine loaded, and sag against my tumbled sandbags. Whistles are blowing in the German trenches and I guess that they are readying another attack.
Then the shells begin to fall with deadly aim, tumbling the trench walls in, exploding parts of bodies into the air, and filling the length of the trench with screaming shrapnel. I know the sound of these guns. They are British 18-pounders. There will be no relief. Headquarters has decided that no British troops have made it this far. The barrage has begun again.
Our motion is liquid, oiled with passion and sweat. Her warmth surrounds and consumes me.
Death did not clai
m me when I first touched her, I am able to think through the rising surge of sensation. Nor when I kissed her. Nor when I entered her.
We roll among the bedclothes, never allowing ourselves to lose that most intimate of contact with the other, her legs around me, thighs gripping me. When she is above me, her breasts hang like fruit I must gather, the nipples visible like rising seeds between my fingers. Her hair is a curtain around us.
It must be when I reach the ultimate ecstasy. The so-called “little death” will not be so little this time. I do not care. I roll with her until we tumble off the bed and I lie atop her on the Persian carpet amidst the tangle and drape of bedclothes, the fireplace light showing me her face contorted with the same passion I feel.
We—I—move more rapidly now, beyond thought, past stopping, beyond return, past anything except the consummation of the passion that increases our rhythm to this sliding crescendo.
Wednesday, 23 August, sometime in the afternoon—
Ten minutes ago they jammed the needle through my back and drained a pint of fluid from my lungs. They are still not sure whether it is the probably fatal pneumonia caused by the gas I inhaled, or merely a return of the pneumonia I suffered earlier.
At least the liquid is not increasing. If I am drowning, I am drowning slowly.
The wound on my right leg worries me more. They have cut away flesh all around the wound, but the smell of gangrene fills the ward and I constantly sniff at my own bandages to see if I am contributing to the stench.
“It’s your own damned fault,” said the curt Dr. Babington while on his rounds after the needle extracted fluid today, “for fighting in such fertile fields.”
I have not spoken since entering this place, but the doctor took my silence as query. “It’s the French fields,” he continued, “best fertilized in the world, don’t you know. Yes, tons and tons of manure. Human waste as well, don’t you know. You chaps have it saturated in your uniforms. Then a piece of metal like this passes through flesh and drives all that merde-soaked fabric in with it. The wound itself is nothing…nothing.” He snapped his fingers. “But the sepsis…ah, well…we will know in a few days.” And he passed on down the ward.
There are no windows in this canvas field hospital, but I asked one of the overworked nurses and she said, yes, the Madonna and Child still lean over the street in Albert in the valley below us here. The small hospital I was in last time is gone, destroyed by shelling. I find myself worrying about the kind nun who had helped me there.
Thursday, 24 August, 9.00 A.M.—
Wakened early this morning, but instead of being served the gruel we receive for breakfast, I was painfully set onto a sort of wheeled cart and pushed out into a courtyard between the tents. It was raining, but they left us there—myself and two other officers I recognized from the 1st Battalion Rifle Brigade. These two men were wounded more seriously than I. One had his face tightly wrapped in gauze, but I could tell that most or all of his lower jaw was missing. The other showed no visible wounds, but was unable to sit up in the wicker wheelchair. His head lolled as if unattached to his pale neck.
We had been left there in the rain for ten or fifteen minutes when a Colonel and several aides came out of the adjoining mess tent. It was the Colonel who had spoken to the Brigade with General Shute.
Oh, no, I thought. I do not want a medal. Just wheel me in out of the rain, please.
The Colonel spoke for only a minute. There were no medals.
“I expect you all to know,” he began with his Harrow drawl so similar to General Shute’s, “that I’m damned disappointed in you chaps. Damned disappointed.” He slapped his crisply trousered thigh with a riding crop. “It is important for you chaps to…ah…understand…that you’ve let down the side. That’s what you’ve done. Just let down the side.” He wheeled as if he were going to leave but then turned back, surprising his aides who had also wheeled away as if disgusted with the three of us on our carts and wheelchairs.
“One more thing,” said the Colonel. “You should know that your Battalion was the only one of the Brigade to have failed…the only one! And I do not want to hear any complaining about the fact that the 33rd Division did not push forward on your right…do you hear? I shan’t have that bandied about as an excuse. The 33rd’s failure is the 33rd’s shame. The 1st Battalion’s failure is our shame. And you chaps are responsible. And I’m…well… I’m damned disappointed.”
And he and the pilot fish in his wake disappeared back into the mess tent. I could smell some sort of cake or confectionery from the baking ovens. The three of us sat or lay out in the rain for another ten minutes or so, not speaking, until someone remembered to fetch us back to the ward.
Afterwards, she lies in the protective harbor of my arm while we watch the firelight fade to embers.
“Would you like to hear a passage of His Nibs’s private diary?” she whispers.
I am brought back from pleasant reverie. “What? Whose?”
“General Sir Douglas Haig,” she says and smiles. “You are not the only one who keeps a private journal.”
I play with a strand of her hair. “How do you know what the General writes in his private diary?”
She ignores me, closes her eyes, and recites as if from memory. “Saturday, 19 August—The operation carried out yesterday was most successful. It was on a front of over eleven miles. We now hold the ridge south-east of and overlooking Thiepval. Nearly five hundred prisoners were taken here while the battalion which carried out the attack only lost forty men! During their advance our men kept close to the artillery barrage.”
I look at her in the fading light. “Why do you tell me this?”
She shifts sideways so that her bare shoulder becomes a faintly lit crescent leading to her shadowed face. “I thought that you might like to know that you were part of a success.”
“My battalion was destroyed,” I whisper, feeling very strange at bringing the War into our bed. “More than forty men died in C Company alone.”
She nods slightly against the pillow. I cannot see her eyes for the shadows. “But the leading battalion lost only forty. And gained several hundred yards of mud. General Sir Douglas Haig is pleased.”
“Fuck General Sir Douglas Haig,” I say.
I expect some sound of shock from my Lady, but she sets her hand playfully on my bare chest and if there is a sound, it is a soft laugh.
Saturday, 26 August, 7.00 P.M.—
It is getting dark earlier. This is the one week anniversary of my waking up in the casualty clearing station.
I remember nothing of leaving the trench or making my way back across No Man’s Land. I remember no help in finding the station. I remember nothing of taking my mask off and choking on the remnants of gas, nor of receiving the shrapnel wound that has turned my right leg into a throbbing mass of suppurating pain.
I do remember awakening. After the first attack, when I thought I was waking in hospital, I found myself among the dead. After this attack, when I was sure that I would lie unwaking among the dead, I awoke to the flare of acetylene torches with a surgeon bending over me. If he is God or the Devil, I thought, then God or the Devil dresses in army-issue white smock liberally spattered with blood. His archangels on high looked to be a sister in nurse whites, and orderly with pince-nez glasses, and a tired anaesthetist with a smock as gored as the surgeon’s.
And then I remember very little except arriving here on the 21st, not even being aware of time as I scribbled in my journal, trying to make sense of all those fragmented images.
And fuck General Sir Douglas Haig, and the Colonel, and Shute, and whoever else is intent upon killing me. I defy them. I defy the gods. I defy God Himself.
Sunday, 27 August, 5.00 A.M.—
Awoke coughing, retching yellow fluid, and drowning at 3.22
A.M. Had to shout for a nurse, who came slowly, obviously irritated at being wakened.
Could not breathe. Thought All right, then…so this is the way of it. It was worth it.
She was worth it. And then all such rational thoughts fled as I gasped for air and flailed about like the drowning man I was. Every time I inhaled I vomited yellow bile. My throat was full, my nose was full. Black spots danced all around my vision, but blessed oblivion did not condescend to arrive as I thrashed and retched and pounded the stained mattress as if it were the ocean.
I remember my last coherent thought was Dying is not so easy as they make it out… Tolstoy, this is how peasants die! and then a bored orderly sauntered in with one of the bicycle-pump needles, they slapped it through my shoulder blade into my right lung, and a few minutes later they had extracted enough of the thick fluid that I could breathe…after a fashion…although the terrible sucking, mucusy sound must have kept many of the other chaps here awake. They said nothing.
Same day, 11.15 A.M.—
A priest came through to give Communion to the Catholic lads. I watched and listened to his gentleness for almost an hour, seeing how truly moved he was by the plight of the more seriously wounded. When he passed my bed, glanced at my chart, and saw “NONE” typed in above the line that says “RELIGION,” he nonetheless stopped and asked if there was anything he could do for me. Still unable to talk, I could only shake my head and try to hide my tears.
An hour later the doctor in charge of the ward sat tiredly on the edge of my bed, “Listen, Lieutenant,” he said, his voice more tired than stern, “it seems as if the gangrene may be getting better. And the orderlies assure me that the lung problem is minor.” He polished his glasses and then leaned forward. “If you think these…minor accidents of war…are going to assure you of a cushy rest period back in the arms of England, well…the war goes on, Lieutenant. And I expect you to be back in it as soon as we can get you out of here to free up this bed for a truly wounded man. Do you understand me?”
I started to nod, but then I spoke for the first time in the week I have been here. “Yes, Sir,” I said through the phlegm and fluid that filled my throat. “I expect to go back to the Front. I want to go back to the Front.”