Losing Julia (20 page)

In the charge, I got within fifty feet of the German machine-gun nests when a bullet plowed through the top of my skull… As I lay there I could plainly see the German gunners and hear them talking. They could see I was not dead and I watched them as they prepared to finish me. They reloaded their gun and turned it on me. The first three bullets went through my legs and hip and the rest splashed up dust and dirt around my head and body. Evidently thinking they had done a good job the Boches turned their gun to other parts of the field.

—Joyce Lewis, United States Marines.

BANG BANG BANG
I jolt up from sleep as a timber falls from the ceiling of the dugout, smacking my shoulder. Then another, dirt and smoke filling the air.

“You all right?” asks Daniel, pulling himself to his feet. Light from a flare pours through a large crack in the roof and illuminates his face, which is bleeding.

Another blast. We’re on the floor again, Daniel’s legs across my head.

“Son of a bitch,” he says.

“Can you move?” I ask.

“Yeah, I’m okay. Let’s get out before it collapses.” I scramble up the stairs behind him. Figures are crouched at the bottom of the trench. Others scurry back and forth, hunched over.

“It’s like a fucking meteor shower,” says a voice to my left.

To my right I see Lawton huddled near the entrance to the dugout and shaking uncontrollably.

I move down the line past Page. His face is rigid and his nose is bleeding heavily. I pat him on the back.

The explosions start again and we throw ourselves down onto the earth until I am clawing at my helmet and burrowing desperately into the dirt. Bits and pieces of metal and wood and debris fly around the trenches. I wonder if I am cut or bleeding but I feel nothing because my body has gone rigid, fully contracted. I hold on to myself trying to keep from being pulled apart by the concussions. I move down the trench until I stumble into Tometti hugging the dirt and softly singing an Italian ballad. Tears streak down his dirty face. I think of his girlfriend Teresa and wonder what she would think if she could see him this way.

Another tremendous blast. Am I buried? I push away at the dirt. No, I can breathe. But dirt is in my mouth and throat.

“Give me a hand!” cries Giles, standing near a collapsed section of trench. I see Daniel behind him. Thank God. We dig frantically with our hands and picks and shovels. Everything glows white then red beneath the volcanic sky, flickering and flashing through the smoke. I find a finger, then a hand. I tear at the dirt, searching for a face.

“Over here. Delaney’s found one!” says Giles.

I feel a shoulder, then a chin and a nose. “Pull!”

It’s Tometti. Dirt is packed tightly in his mouth and nostrils and ears. With my fingers I clear his mouth and turn him and shake him until he begins coughing. I turn to dig some more. Another body. No, a boot. I tug at it and it comes easily. The leg is severed at the knee.

Page and I struggle with a third body that seems to be buried almost straight upside down. A voice shouts, “Grab your rifles. Stand to! They’re attacking!”

I hear shouts and I notice my fingers are bleeding as I search through the dirt and rocks and splintered wood for the upside-down man’s face. I feel an ear, a clump of hair. I gently pull. The forehead is missing. Page? No, a young kid from another squad. Farm boy from Nebraska, I think. I lay the head down. Someone grabs me and pulls me away.

Where is my rifle?

A trench mortar to my right and two of the BARs we hauled up the previous night begin firing. I listen and watch as everything slows down until I feel almost completely removed; a distant observer to some strange and horrible catastrophe. My ears are ringing but I am not afraid. I look slowly left, then right.

Nothing matters but the firing of the machine guns. I listen to their ruthless work, raking back and forth with fierce mathematical certainty. That’s it: we are fighting a tremendous numbers game. Bullets versus bodies, artillery shells versus battalions, bandages versus wounds, medics versus the wounded, gas versus lungs, flamethrowers versus human flesh. What matters is volume and quantity, quantity of boots and canteens and rations and rifles and privates and lieutenants and planes and ships and submarines. Won’t someone call the score?

The Germans are in our wire now yet I fear nothing. Anger surges. I scream. Did I scream? Destroy it all. Everything. Fury and destruction. Now! Come for this cornered animal, yellow teeth bared. Rabid.

Try me.

I pull a rifle from a body stretched across the duckboards, then struggle to pull a bayonet from its scabbard. The latch is broken. The bayonet is bent. I throw it down and search for another. As I look I can hear rapid German phrases, both angry and scared, and wonder if German is the language of war. It sounds like it to me, a series of urgent commands being passed down the chain of command. Does “I love you” in German really sound like “I love you,” or is it more in the tone of “I’m gonna beat the shit out of you”? This is interesting to me because language has been an awful problem in this war, at least for those of us who would like to put it into words but can’t because the necessary words don’t and can’t ever exist. Carnage; murderous fire; mass, ritualized slaughter; gaping and septic wounds blackened with disease and flies, white bone protruding from flesh; ten thousand men cut down in an afternoon, their bodies spread across no-man’s- land like a grotesque quilt.

There, my bayonet is fixed. Cold steel. I am cold ruthless steel. My fists are tight and my temples hurt; the muscles in my neck are taut. I want to get my death over with.
Now.
I look up and see one then two then three Germans with their long field-gray coats and flared helmets dropping down into our trenches firing rifles and pistols and tossing stick bombs and lunging with their bayonets. I fire my rifle (did I close my eyes?) and then jab jab jab with my bayonet pushing and slashing in blind fury DIE DIE DIE.

Daniel grabs me and shakes me. Then Page and Giles and I crawl to the top of the parapet and lie on our stomachs and fire at the retreating shadows that flee like ghosts across the pocked, swaying earth.

For the rest of the day we repair our trenches, bury the dead and haul up more ammunition. I remember nobody talked much though we listened very carefully.

LIEBER GOTT,
hilf mir! Bitte, lieber Gott! Bitte, lieber Gott …

[Dear God, help me! Please, dear God! Please, dear God… ]

THAT NIGHT
in the darkness amid the moans and the lingering smell of cordite I realized that the earth itself was bleeding, its wrists slashed deep down to the arteries along a line called the Western Front. I wondered how long it would take to hemorrhage to death. A few more months? A year at the most?

“I WISH
they’d shut up,” says Tometti, rubbing his palms up and down his face like a man who thought he had spiders crawling on him. The moans and screams of hundreds of men, mostly Germans, drifted across no-man’s-land. Tometti takes out his knife and tries to cut a small piece of hard bread he pulled from his pocket but his hands shake too badly and he puts the knife away. Then he crosses his arms in front of him and jams his hands into his armpits.

Some of the sounds are remarkably animallike, the shrieking of dozens of creatures big and small that have stepped into steel traps. My knees feel weak and I wonder if sound alone can make you faint.

“They are fucking Huns,” says Lawton, whose dirty face is nicked with cuts, some of them an inch long. He pats Tometti gently on the back. “Just fucking Huns.”

“Yeah, fucking Huns,” repeats Tometti in a whisper.

Whoever tries to interfere with my task I shall crush.

—Kaiser Wilhelm II.

OUR FIRST STOP
in Verdun was at the Cimetière National de Douaumont on the east bank of the Meuse. We walked among the rows and rows of simple white crosses that guarded a silence so absolute and dense that it pressed against my eardrums like water at the bottom of a very deep pool. That one there, he was a new father and next to him, the last of three brothers killed and that one there was to have been a poet and that one a teacher and over there a great scientist and that one a writer and that one a priest and that one there, there in the corner, well that one could have been you,
oui?