The Death and Life of Zebulon Finch, Volume 1

by Daniel Kraus

  It is law, I believe, that every unit in every war must have a fellow who goes by “Professor,” and the Seventh was no exception. Sten Ehrenström taught at a college in Wisconsin, and before work on our holes was through, he’d used his full-throated lecture-hall voice to expound upon everything from the historical precedent behind Pope Benedict XV’s recent plea for peace to Germany’s unrivaled status as the home of expressionist playwrights. Not once in my tour of duty did I witness the gray-haired Prof complain; instead he used any unfavorable situation to discourse on the “historical forces” that “led us to this nexus,” and what, if anything, we, “as a people,” could learn from it. Most astonishing was that he did not even mind our infamously ill-fitting boots. The Prof, a Swede, had been raised in wooden clogs, which had prepared his feet for such unforgiving footwear.

  PFC Alfred “Mouse” Bartosiewicz, a bespectacled Jew of Polish descent, lived in Kansas City with his family and worked as a typesetter, and that, my friend, was all we knew. So quiet was Mouse that even these specks of information were suspect. Mouse was of gray complexion and could not have weighed more than 125 pounds; if you let your eyes lose focus he would evaporate into the dirt, or smoke, or fog. Yet Mouse was never mistaken for dumb. His fine, bespectacled features were so expressive they approached the prehensile; with but a twitch of his eyebrow or curl of his lip he could communicate more than the Prof could with two hours and a willing audience.

  Even now it is difficult for me to even think of Jason Stavros without feeling as if I am liquifying at the joints. Officially the twenty-year-old Utahan was a part-time student of literature and a part-time florist. Unofficially, however, he was a poet and dreamer, too gentle for this war. Everyone loved Jason Stavros with a jealous ferocity, and when they told him to put away the volume of Percy Shelley poems he kept as close as his gun, they hated to do it, for the study of beauty was what Jason Stavros was meant to do. Yes, they called him “Jason Stavros,” the first and last name strung together as if each repetition of it were an appeal to Gød to spare this one most of all. He would survive because he was charmed—the men were sure of it.

  And then, of course, there was the Adonis. His name was Burt “Church” Churchwell, and though his documents declared him a good Baptist boy from Iowa, he was from America—as simple and profound as that. Unlike the rest of our accented masses, Church was astonishing in his lack of inflection; his voice was as tall and ubiquitous as corn. Where Jason Stavros toted poetry, Church toted a football, deflated but who cared? He could nonetheless throw the same spiral he was throwing at Grinnell College when Uncle Sam had come a-calling. To him, the war was “the Game,” and his all-purpose substitute for damn or shit was “Merry Christmas!” In short, he was the sort of sky-eyed, teetotaling goody-goody I had joined the Black Hand to avoid becoming. Major Horstmeier might shout the orders, but the men of the Seventh Regiment fought under Church.

  I attribute to loneliness my ache for a nickname of my own. Would I have to be patient and earn one? Hellfire! How I loathed being patient. I stabbed my shovel into foxhole clay and felt my pocket for the hard nodule of the Excelsior and the crinkle of Merle’s photograph. Memories of family lost were the only cohorts I had, and those memories, as you well know, were of sour vintage.

  Feeling quite low, I leaned back into our rectangular foxhole. It took me a couple of minutes to see it, but when I did, I could not help but smile.

  I’d just dug my own long-awaited grave.

  “Boy-o! What’s the problem? We got sand here that needs packing!”

  It was Piano, shouting to be heard over the timpani of battle. He stood at the front end of the dug-out, slapping into place a ridge of protective sandbags. I adjusted my helmet and tried to reorient. It was midday. Word had been passed along that the U.S. had secured a line all the way to Les Mares Farm (wherever that was) thanks to the Frenchies who, despite apparent decimation, would not stop bombarding the Germans. The report from the Eighteenth Company was nevertheless bleak: the Wood seethed with Krauts and sooner or later we’d have to do something about it.

  Our neighboring foxholes were finished and their occupants had progressed to checking, rechecking, oiling, and stroking their cherished weapons. Their love of their pieces was fast and faithful, almost lustful; to these steel ladies, they had pledged everything. Feeling derelict, I crawled next to Piano and got to work on the bags.

  “Look here, ye going to have to pull your weight! I need to depend upon this wall if I’m going get work done on me maps!”

  “Maps?”

  He sighed, removed from his side pouch a stack of paper, and shook it at me.

  “My da was the best mapmaker in Ireland, and it’s in me blood as well, ask anyone. What I’m going to do is map these entire woods, show the major what I can do. It’s my ticket right up the ranks, wait and see. I’ll leave this war a captain!”

  “How pleasant for you.”

  “Is that brass ye giving me? There will be nothing ‘pleasant’ about it if I have to spend every waking moment arranging these bags! You’re the sand man of this foxhole. You got that, Private Prefer-Not-To?”

  My face fell, as did my hopes; worse, they fell right in front of this maligning Irishman. How could I have forgotten that the Skipper had already nicknamed me during our march, and the name was nothing of which to be proud? I was disappointed, and embarrassed that I was disappointed, and the infuriating cartographer gave me a smug grin before removing his papers, rulers, and pens.

  The sky all at once exploded with sound and light; smoke trails of orange, red, and gray cutting through the blue, followed by concussion blasts so resounding the cold guts behind my sewed stomach listed to one side, then the other. Though the salvo was to our west, terrified soldiers grabbed their helmets and ducked in their holes.

  Not Church. He bounded from his foxhole, planted his shovel, and leaned upon it with an elbow so as to better enjoy the streaming bands of fire. Peanut, that big, friendly Italian, roared with laughter at this fantastic display of swagger. The Prof applauded and Jason Stavros stuck his pinkies in his mouth to whistle. Mouse’s head barely cleared his rifle pit, but he, too, was smiling.

  Church flashed us a million-dollar grin.

  “Will you look at that, boys? Jerry organized some Fourth of July fireworks just for us! Now that’s what I call German hospitality!”

  VI.

  WERE YOU BORN ON JUNE 6? Renounce it. Choose another date. I have heard June 5 is lovely; June 7, too, cannot be so bad. But the sixth day of June has been the passageway for too many souls, and to be born on that day is to clog the conduit between heaven and Earth, to risk being forced on the wrong path, the one to Hell.

  The Germans, the Krauts, the Huns, the Heinie, le Boche, Fritz, Jerry—call them what you will—the entirety of their 237th Division had advanced upon us on June 4, four or five lines of them appearing like specters from the fog, spaced twenty-five yards apart and firing for hours until sand from ruptured sandbags scoured the skin beneath our uniforms, until we were half-buried in clay from the flexing trenches. We, the mud-crunchers of the Third Battalion, were crouched in a supply trench, removed from the action, which, I began to wonder, must be worse than being fired at, for all you had to go on was the quake of the entire planet.

  At 1500 hours on June 5, the French Sixth Army general had sent us our mission: Hill 142, the highest spot in the Wood. At 2245 hours, Field Order Number One was issued. The Marines would attack between Hill 142 and the Champillon ravines to prevent the Huns from opening flanking fire against the French 167th Division. Confused, Reader? That, I am afraid, mirrors our own state. Only the juiciest meat of the order was tastable: we were to overwhelm the German position with hundreds of charging Americans, infiltrate their trenches, stick any living Huns with the points of our bayonets, and at all costs, take the goddamned hill.

  On June 6, 0500 hours, we gathered in the frontline trench fo
r our first true test. A wand of dawn blazed the horizon over the German stronghold. Look at us in the light. Painted boot-to-helmet with dirt, eyes blazing whiter than white. We were stripped to the basics—weapons, bandoliers, grenades, gas masks—and looked fragile without our packs. Someone remind us how had we ended up in rural France? Men whispered to crucifixes and fiddled with wedding bands, every follicle attuned to the sergeant atop the ladder peering through a periscope at what we could only imagine. We were a single suspended breath: inhale, inhale, inhale.

  Even I, breathless creature, was lightheaded with fear.

  The call went down the line, captain to captain.

  “Fix bayonets!”

  We did. They slotted in just fine. Sharp, too. We’d tested them on our own thumbs to our own horrors.

  Footsteps—fast—hurtling down the line.

  Our runner, that suicidal screwball, sprinted by, shouting two terrible words:

  “TAKE COVER! TAKE COVER!”

  And then the trees were obliterated. Great oak gods, black from rain, became white butterflies, a million of them trapped against the ugly brown sky before diving as shrapnel against our turned backs. Severed treetops suspended in midair before dropping with the sound of a giant broom swatting a giant rug. Into our noses shot the hot odor of burned powder and fresh dirt. The stink of nervous sweat leaked from the men like urine.

  The sergeant turned, made curt hand signals. Smoke parted to reveal Major Horstmeier squatting on the aboveground turf like an ape, pendulating his arms toward the swirling silver fog while blowing the whistle clamped between his teeth.

  “Over the top! Over the top, men! Over the top!”

  Church was first, of course, his broad back the dreadnaught behind which we might advance. Here was the moment I’d envisioned in Xenion, Georgia—noble annihilation—and yet I could not move my legs. Regardless, I surged upward, pushed along by crazed soldiers, boots to the ladder, knees to the sandbags, elbows to the grass, belly to the dirt, and then I was crawling on my stomach as someone—who?—had instructed us.

  No matter; this was it! The fabled no man’s land upon which thousands of troops from a dozen different nations had been pestled into dust. We took to our feet, against orders, but who could resist running when every second was spent as a target? We hurtled into unknown terrain so thick with smoke that I could see only the flash of wet boot heels from the soldier in front of me, the gleam of an oiled rifle stock from the soldier to the side of me, the fires from downed trees burning red through the coarse, woolen world.

  Horstmeier’s whistle was still blowing.

  The Marine Corps responded with the cry learned in training; it came natural even now.

  “EEE-YAH-YIP!”

  Bees flew past my ears. Even insects were fleeing the scene! No, idiot, not bees but bullets, melted down from excavated street pipes in German villages made destitute by four years of war, shaped in a Berlin foundry into slugs, shipped on trucks and horse-drawn wagons across the hills and mud of Europe, and for what purpose? To be shoved into a rifle and shot out at me, Zebulon Finch, Marine and Madman, sprinting blind through a pea soup of scorching smog. These bullets nicked at my extremities like a scalpel.

  Perfect little pieces for the Revelation Almanac.

  A sucking void of sound and pressure lifted me from my feet and dropped me down, still standing, yards away, followed by a deafening thump—Gød’s indifferent backhand shoving me from a blast zone. My brain punched against my skull and clods of clay dropped upon my shoulders, and then there were cries—First aid! First aid!—that no one listened to, because we were still running, still hooting our cry, still without a single visible checkpoint.

  Flesh against my fingers. I grunted with instinctive rage, wrestled with a man for control of my rifle. But it was Peanut and he took a handful of my collar and shouted into my face. His gums were packed with moss, his tongue black with dirt.

  “Bottleneck! Bottleneck! Bottleneck!”

  He pointed a finger into the gloom and then began to search for an alternate path.

  It made no sense to me. I shoved past the Italian and kept on until I began to make out the five-foot-tall barbed-wire bulwark separating us from Jerry. Our artillery had launched a torpedo to destroy this barricade but either it had failed or we soldiers were off the mark.

  A gust of summer wind blew by with the same stink as my slaughterhouse in Salem, and for thirty terrible seconds I could see beyond the soot. Some brave gyrene had managed to cut a narrow path through the wire. The wire clippers, in fact, still hung suspended in the wire, as did the dead solider who had plied them. The bottleneck Peanut had warned me of was a single-file line of soldiers that might as well have been raw meat pushed into a grinder. A Maxim ripped them apart with ease: TAC-TAC-TAC! The leathernecks became leather, the doughboys dough.

  Before the black fog rolled back I saw the blurry red glints of German bayonets flashing from a trench not fifty feet away. I dropped to my stomach and rolled to the left, through the mud of a shell crater, over a warm pile of human flesh, across a Hotchkiss rifle abandoned because its action bolt had been melted by fire. My roll was stopped by the body of a gyrene, a dead one, I assumed, until I made out the voice of Church. If there was a soldier still kicking, it had to be him.

  He was lying flat and shouting into the face of a downed Marine. Bullets had torn through the soldier’s biceps, which now dangled in gray and red braids of uniform and flesh. Church had managed to extract a tourniquet from the soldier’s utility pouch, but the man’s writhing complicated its application. He cried out in pain; Church pressed a hand over his mouth and ducked. The dirt spat around us from a spray of bullets.

  “It’s the Game, soldier!” shouted Church. “It’s fourth down and inches! You gotta hang tough, do it for the team, push it on through to the end zone!”

  “I don’t—” came the casualty’s anguished response, “know shit—about your damn—football.”

  The Italian accent was familiar. I propped myself on an elbow to get a look.

  It was Peanut; I could be certain only because I’d encountered him mere minutes ago. His nose was gone—I could see the pink channels of his sinuses—but there was no mistaking the thick billows of hair popping from his chest and arms. Church ignored the sensational face wound in favor of the biceps, and for good reason: while Peanut’s cauterized nose shed ash, his biceps fountained blood.

  “Lemme go.” The absence of a nose muffled him. “I gotta kill me some Kraut.”

  Church set the tourniquet aside, reached into his front pouch, and removed two lemon drops. With his other hand he pried open Peanut’s clenched jaw and shoved in the candies.

  “Suck on these, Peanut! Mmm, good, right? Sour as heck, huh?”

  Peanut drove his head back against the dirt in a wild kind of nod.

  Church patted his chest. “Good boy! Now hold still, all right?”

  The end of the tourniquet passed through the buckle and wrapped around the biceps twice before Church cranked the wooden handle to tighten the pressure. Peanut sucked the candies with abandon; lemon-colored froth fizzed into the abscess of his sinuses. I looked away. No injury I’d witnessed under the Black Hand compared to this. How many others out here were in worse condition?

  I gripped Church’s arm.

  “There’s a bottleneck. We have to fall back!”

  He gave me an incredulous stare.

  “We fall back when the Skipper tells us to fall back.”

  “How would we know? We can’t hear him!”

  A man shrieked in agony off to our right.

  “Merry Christmas!” Church glared at me. “You hear that well enough, Private?”

  Steeling himself with an elongated inhale, he dug several more lemon drops from his pouch, clenched them inside a fist, and began crawling on his elbows in the direction of the cries. I launched mys
elf the opposite direction, parallel to the German barricade, anything to separate myself from disconcerting displays of doomed heroism. The Maxims pursued me; plumes of dirt geysered at my heels like rawboned devils shooting up from an underworld.

  I sprawled face-first into a patch of wheat ornamented by bright red poppies. Lead swept over me with such force that the chaff was severed from the wheat, the poppies from their stems, leaving the foliage with a military crewcut. While lying there, arms over my head, I heard the telltale EEE-YAH-YIP! of Marines flooding in behind me, searching for another path through the wire. Had I become their inadvertent leader?

  They stormed past, half of them dropping from Hun fire to become black lumps beyond the curtains of yellow wheat. The other half, though, hurled themselves at the bastions of barbed wire and, from what I could see from my low vantage, some of them were making it through. The assault from the enemy trench became more erratic, as the Germans were forced to divide their fire at dozens of moving targets.

  This was no way to go out. I lifted myself and skulked into the blasted farmland. There they were—Germans! Scattering in pale green costumes and bowl helmets, hurling grenades from behind trees, firing Lugers from the hip, and making aweless stands in the clear with submachine guns firing 450 rounds per minute. I jostled sideways behind the line of advancing Marines, many of them taking bullets that otherwise would have been mine.

  Having dashed to the northern edge of the flank, I found myself alone in an orchard. I kicked through dank mulch that had recently been tree bark and took a sharp turn westward. There I collided with another soldier. Our rifles clacked together and we both fell to kneeling positions. I pushed my helmet up out of my eyes and the first thing I saw was a brass belt buckle imprinted with three words: