Sons (12 page)

I was suddenly filled with rage.

My anger had nothing to do with sympathy for an oppressed minority or any of
that
crap. I didn’t feel any democratic principle was being violated here, it wasn’t anything like that. There was too much
real
democracy at stake everywhere else in the world; I wasn’t about to start crying over a bunch of poor bastards living in the asshole of Chicago. Actually, I didn’t know
what
caused my anger. But I suddenly did something very strange and dangerous.

I picked up a brick and threw it.

I happened, in fact, to throw it at a first-floor window which smashed with amazing alacrity, not for nothing had I been a star third baseman with the Grace School Blues. A fat Negro man sitting on an upturned garbage can and fanning himself with a folded copy of the
Tribune
didn’t quite appreciate either my anger or my throwing arm. “You sumbitch white bastard!” he shouted, and jumped off the garbage can and came racing after Michael and me, brandishing the folded newspaper like a hatchet. Michael, who was not as sober as I yet, even though he’d reacted to my window-smashing in absolute astonishment, stumbled and fell, and I ran back to help him, and then looked up to discover that seven thousand men and boys of varying sizes, shapes, and shades were coming down the street after us, led by the
Tribune
-swinging fat man.

I was terrified.

I thought how ignominious it would be for a future fighter pilot to be squashed into the pavement by a rioting band of black men who had surely misunderstood why I’d thrown a brick through one of their windows, even though I myself didn’t yet understand why I’d done it. Michael, the idiot, was laughing! I thought. Oh my God, please don’t let these boogies, niggers, Negroes, NEGROES hear this madman laughing! Clutching Michael’s hand in my own, running like the track star I once had been, though burdened by Michael, who giggled and lurched and stumbled and cursed, I heard the sudden sweet sound of the subway rumbling along the tracks on Michigan Avenue and miraculously found the platform at Thirty-first, it must have been, or Twenty-ninth, or Twenty-sixth, God knew where, while Michael laughed insanely, and behind us the Negroes shouted bloody murder just because I’d hurled one lousy little goddamn brick. The train rolled in to a screeching stop.

I never thought we’d get out of there alive.

There was, I had not expected, there was, the German guns had started shortly after midnight, star shells erupting in the moonlit sky over the Marne, the river itself a curve of molten silver winding through poppy-dotted wheatfields, I had not expected. The shells came screaming at us from twenty miles away, Holy Mother, Mary of God, and we crouched trembling in trenches we had deepened the day before when the papers on a captured German major revealed Von Boehn’s plan of attack to us. The trenches faced Varennes and Courtemont, which the French were defending and which we expected to be overrun, our own plan being to wait until the German bombardment had abated, at which time we would scramble out of these deeper trenches and move forward into the echeloned slit trenches that would form our line of defense against a flanking attack.

I was Private Bertram Tyler in Captain Reid’s F Company of the 38th Infantry Regiment, 3rd Division, with our backs to Hill 231, wooded, higher than the plain, our bayoneted rifles pointed toward the curving right flank of the Marne horseshoe, the toe caulk of which was Jaulgonne to the north, the two heel caulks being Mézy to the west and Sauvigny to the cast. The Paris-Nancy
(Nancy!)
railroad tracks paralleled the river, passing through H and E Companies massed on the bank, skirting behind the 28th’s L Company facing Jaulgonne, and then disappearing out of sight to the east.

I was Private Bertram Tyler, and I had never been in battle before. As we waited now for them to come across the river in pontoon boats, as I lay with my face pressed to the dirt wall of the trench, there was insinuated into all the smells around me — the smell of men vomiting, the smell of phosphorus, the smell of earth suddenly exploding, richly, darkly turning loamy interior to the midnight air, the oppressive biting stink of cordite, the rancid aroma of sweat produced by fear, the smell of the waist-high wheat gold and silver in the moonlight, splashed with blood-red gilded poppies — into all these contradictory smells came the stench of human flesh burning and entrails exposed, the horrible sickly scent of death.

I tried to move away from Timothy, I did not want him to know how terrified I was. I was weeping into the earthen wall of the trench, ashamed of myself, frightened beyond sanity, the Germans would be coming soon, they would cross the river and storm our position.

“Easy, Bert,” Timothy said beside me.

“I’m scared,” I said. “Oh God, I’m so seared.”

“I am, too.”

Trembling, crouching, weeping, I flattened myself against the side of the trench as another shell exploded. I had not expected, there was nothing to prepare, I did not imagine, could not have, the noise. I wanted to cover my ears, but I was afraid to let go of my rifle. There was no small arms fire as yet, only the heavy steady pounding of our own guns firing northward across the river, unrelenting, and the muted faraway counterpoint of the big German guns, a steady rumble on the horizon. The sky flickered with light, erratic and unsettling, as though the eyes were out of focus. Shells exploded in the distance, adding to the muted enemy percussion, and the air shivered with the high whining whistle of incoming artillery fire, the deafening explosions everywhere around us, the shrapnel adding its own deadly high whistle to the air, clods of earth growing wheat and poppies landing with lifeless thuds, soil sifting in a whisper into the trenches, the sound constant, until at last the barrage stopped and we knew they were coming across the river because we heard the clacking of the machine guns and the popping of the rifles and the irregular louder explosions of grenades along the bank. Someone was shouting, the shout streaked the comparative silence like a smear of blood, a whistle shrilled into the midnight expectancy, a doughboy whispered “Jesus save us,” sibilant and scared, and we came out of the trenches and ran in waist-deep wheat like children in a dream summer on a star-drenched night — It’s really only another July, I told myself, and firecrackers are popping for independence by the river.

There was, you could not, all order was gone, the troops retreating on our front were French, their uniforms, you could, the Bois de Condé was where they would hold, the reserves of the 28th were waiting there, French at first, you could see their uniforms. And then the color changed, the landscape changed, the army coming over the railroad tracks and into the fill was German, fierce against the summer sky, bayonets glinting in moonlit pinpricks, machine-gun carts hauled by barking dogs, horse-drawn batteries rumbling into place. They wished to go to Paris, and we were there to stop them, but Paris was not the prize to defend, Paris was the immediate goal. The prize was Hill 231, where a strategically placed machine gun could control the entire plain, a knoll worthless for anything but artillery now, perhaps a good site for a small French château in another time and in another place, but not here and not now. Here, with the German batteries in place and beginning to pound shells into the slit trenches, now with the machine guns adding their staccato ululation to the din, we understood very little, and cared less, about over-all strategy or logistics. We did not know where the 4th or the 7th were, did not even fully comprehend whether Château-Thierry was to the east or the west across the Marne. We knew only Hill 231. This was our reason for being here, Hill 231, this was why we crouched and waited to kill, crouched and saw Fritz come over the horizon with identical intent, to kill for that elevation of ground behind us, from which our own guns were now firing over our heads.

I knew I would remember Hill 231 forever.

The rest was chaos.

Fear, excitement, and incredibility waged a war within me as fierce as the one that lurched across that disputed plain.

I had never known such terror. It came in successive waves of shock, the same tingling crack of surprise accompanying it each time, a sharp spasm jerking the neck and causing the eyes to pop wide open, a hot rush of blood to the head, a loosening of the bowels, a weak drained feeling in the crotch, but no time, no time to think or feel because new white tremors erupted almost at once, like unexpected slaps to the face in a pitch-black room.

The excitement rode over each exploding peak of horror, a curious wild and heady sense of adventure, a feeling of absolute maleness contradicting the terror, the rifle in my hands as enormous as a penis on the edge of ejaculation. Dodging, running, crawling, I
fell
like a soldier, and I regretted that no one was there to see me behave so courageously (even as fear rocketed into my skull again), no one but other men exactly like myself experiencing the same crude mixture of emotions, no one there to take my picture and shout exultant praise.

I could not believe what was happening. In my terror and excitement, a logical tiny section of my mind kept asking what I was doing here, was I insane running a zigzag course through exploding grenades, were my eyes actually witnessing a man’s body being cut in half by a shell, his head and torso flying off in one direction, his legs standing lifelessly erect for an instant before they toppled over like twin sandstone columns, was I dreaming? A grenade exploded some ten feet ahead of me and a German fell back into the wheat with a gushing hole in his abdomen. A machine gun instantly opened fire, and I leaped sharply to the left, eyes straining, the terror was back, the fear had a stench of urine I could smell in the crevices of my brain, I threw myself headlong through the rustling wheat, and watched the slender golden stalks dancing fitfully as the bullets whined through, and began to weep in fear and ecstasy and open incredulity.

I did not kill a man until four o’clock that morning, I think it was four o’clock, they told me later that was when Captain Reid made me a corporal in the field, but I have no recollection of being promoted, I can only remember the first time I killed a human being.

He was, I could not, I was exhausted, we had been fighting since midnight, there had been no letup. Endless corridors of wheat, running, why was I running? Explosions everywhere, the feeling that I alone was the quarry, a desperate skittering figure in a moonwashed landscape, some unseen force trying to obliterate me, hurling salvo after salvo of lethal steel wherever I turned, however I maneuvered. I was tired enough to fall flat to the earth and hug the trampled stalks to my mud-stained tunic, but too frightened to rest because machine guns relentlessly chewed the night and new bomb craters opened everywhere, spewing fresh legs and arms, sodden mannequin limbs dripping human blood, a severed helmeted head rolling, rolling, rolling, and coming to a stop at last, black with powder, red with blood, startling white where bone fragments had come through the cheek.

He appeared, he suddenly, I had expected someone like myself, young and frightened, the German equivalent of an Eau Fraiche lumberjack, with a girl back home in Dusseldorf, a
fräulein
writing the equivalent of Nancy’s letters, someone who perhaps had listened to our own barrage this past midnight and trembled as I had, someone who had never slain and who now, because of a numbered hill behind us, was ready to kill for the first time. But he, the wheat shifted in a sudden wind fresh off the river, I raised my head and jerked my eyes to the right and then rapidly to the left, every sound was terrifying, every movement cause for fresh panic, and he, he rose, he suddenly stood before me in the undulating wheat. For a moment brief and static, for a frozen moment brittle enough to shatter with a heartbeat, we looked at each other, our eyes met and we stood on the edge of homicide in a foreign wheatfield while machine guns clacked like distant farmyard fowl.

He was very big, I thought Why, he’s a
man,
they’re asking me to fight a
man.
Not a boy, not someone like myself, but a grown man who looked at me in shocked surprise from beneath a helmet certainly more formidable than my own, new leather boots and belt, gas mask slung and hanging from a strap on his massive chest, rifle clutched in both hands, his finger inside the trigger guard. I looked at him, this all took place in a tick of time, there was a sudden hush as the machine guns stopped for only an instant, and we looked at each other, and I thought Say something to him and I thought What are we doing here? and I wanted to giggle, I was possessed of an uncontrollable urge to giggle, I could feel my face cracking with an overriding need for laughter. And then the machine guns near the railroad fill began again, and I knew that one of us must kill.
I
knew,
he
knew, we faced each other in that foolish instant of non-recognition, and were both murderers in our hearts long before one of us became a murderer in fact.

As my finger groped for the trigger of the rifle, the notion that this stranger would want to kill me seemed idiotic, we did not
know
each other. And yet my finger moved of its own volition, it seemed, found the trigger with practiced ease, those weeks and weeks of pulling off shots at lifeless targets paid off now in a moonwashed field south of the river Marne, and I raised my rifle even as my finger tightened and the gun recoiled sharply, the butt hitting me in the ribs, so that I was aware only of my own sharp pain at first and did not see the German’s face burst open. I winced, I must have cursed, he was falling away from me, falling back straight and stiff, already dead, the force of the bullet knocking him back some three feet. I watched as he fell, fascinated by his face spurting blood, and wondered if he, like me, had wanted to giggle at our unexpected confrontation.

And then I turned away.

Feeling nothing.

Only later that day, when Captain Reid told us we’d broken the back of the German attack and with it their hopes of taking the Surmelin Valley and the Rocq Plateau, only then did I say to Timothy Bear, “I killed a man, Tim.”