Counting Up, Counting Down

by Harry Turtledove

  “All I used to want to do was get drunk and fuck,” Fonsagrive said. “I still want to do those things. Like you, I also want to keep the Boche from killing me, especially when I have my pants down around my ankles. What do you say that you feed our friends down there another couple of strips, to show them you were not taken up to heaven while answering nature’s call?”

  “And why not?” Barrès peered over at the German trenches. He was very careful not to lift his head above the parapet in the same spot twice in a row. Boche snipers knew their business. The Germans would not have been where they were, would not have been doing what they were doing, had their soldiers not known their business.

  His eyes slid past motion out in no-man’s-land, then snapped sharply back. Any motion out there was dangerous. But this was not a Boche, sneaking from shell hole to shell hole to lob bombs into the French trench. It was a couple of rats, fat and sleek and sassy and almost the size of cats, on promenade from one favorite dining spot in field-gray or horizon bleu to the next. Rats thrived at Verdun—and why not? Where else did men feed them so extravagantly?

  Barrès was tempted to knock them kicking with a burst from the Hotchkiss. In the end, he didn’t. There would only be more tomorrow, eating of their obscene meat. And these were as likely to go down and torment the Germans as they were to come up and molest his comrades and him.

  Then Barrès spotted motion in the trenches of the Boche. A man so incompetent as to give away his position to a machine gunner did not deserve to live. Barrès squeezed the Hotchkiss’ trigger. The German crumpled. “I got one,” Barrès told his loader. “I saw him fall.”

  “One who won’t get us,” Fonsagrive replied.

  The Germans promptly replied, too. Their riflemen picked up their pace of fire. The Maxim gun came back to life, flame spurting from its muzzle as if from the mouth of a dragon. And, a few minutes later, the Boche artillery began delivering presents to the French trenches. Barrès scuttled into the little cave he had scraped out of the front wall of the trench. The Germans—and, he understood, the English, too—forbade their soldiers from digging such private shelters. If a shell landed squarely on one, it would entomb the soldier huddling there. But a man in his own little cave enjoyed far better protection from splinters than one simply cowering at the bottom of the trench.

  Some of the rounds—77s, 105s, and 150s—exploded with a peculiar muffled burst. Even before poilus started banging on empty shell casings—carillons of dread, not hope—Barrès yanked his gas helmet out of its case and pulled it down over his head. He got a quick whiff of chlorine, enough to make his throat scratchy and bring tears to his eyes, before he could secure the helmet.

  He took several anxious breaths after that, fearing the pain would get worse. But he’d protected himself fast enough; it eased to a bearable discomfort. He stared out at the world through round windows, filthy as the portholes of a cabin in steerage. Wearing the helmet, he had to move more slowly and carefully, for he wasn’t getting enough air to do anything else. A man who exerted himself too strenuously in a gas helmet was liable to burst his heart.

  But when the Boche used gas, he was liable to send assault troops as soon as the barrage ended. And so, regardless of the high-explosive shells, still coming down with the ones carrying chlorine, Barrès got out of his shelter and took his place at the Hotchkiss gun again. Better the risk of a shell fragment piercing him than the certainty of a bayonet or a bullet if the Boche got into his trench.

  He spied no special stirring in the German trenches. Jacques Fonsagrive peered over the parapet with him. “Nothing,” Barrès said. “Nothing at all, not this time.”

  “Not quite.” When Fonsagrive spoke, his voice, heard through two thicknesses of varnished cloth, sounded as if it came from the bottom of the sea. The laugh that followed seemed even worse, almost demonic. “Look at the vermin.”

  Out between the lines, several rats kicked and frothed as chlorine seared their lungs. They were enough like men to sneak about. They were enough like men to steal. They were enough like men to prey on the dying and the dead. But they were not quite enough like men to invent such ingenious ways of murdering one another, or to come up with defenses against that deadly ingenuity.

  “I don’t miss them a bit,” Barrès said.

  “Nor I,” the loader agreed. “As when you shot that German earlier today, I merely think, There are a couple who will not gnaw my bones.”

  “Even so,” Barrès said. The gas shells were still raining down. “I hope we do not have to wear these cursed helmets too much longer.”

  “Ah, to hell with a mealy-mouthed hope like that,” Fonsagrive said. “What I hope is that the wind will shift and blow the gas back on the pigdogs”—yes, he was enamored of that word—“who sent it to us. They deserve it. They are welcome to it. Hope for something worth having.”

  “That is a better hope,” Barrès said after due reflection. “It is also a hope that could come true without much difficulty.” The German trenches lay downhill from the one in which he stood, and chlorine was heavier than air. Even a little breeze would give the Boche a taste of his own medicine.

  “Do you want to feed them a few strips?” Fonsagrive asked. “Let them know they have not put paid to us?”

  “I had in my mind that thought,” Barrès said, “but then I thought again, and I decided I would rather not. If they know they have not gassed us, they are likely to drop more ordinary shells on our heads, are they not?”

  Behind the gas helmet, Fonsagrive’s expression was as hard to read as the unchanging countenance of a praying mantis. After a little while, though, he nodded. “That is a good notion. We can give them a nasty surprise if they come at us, and by then their men will be too close for them to shell us.”

  “I wish they would give it up soon,” Barrès said. “I would like another swig of pinard. Even a tin of monkey meat might not taste bad right now.”

  “My poor fellow!” Fonsagrive exclaimed. “You must have inhaled more of the gas than you think, for your wits have left you altogether.”

  “It could be,” Barrès admitted. “Yes, it could be. Did I truly say I wanted to eat singe? No one in his right mind—no one who is not starving, at any rate—would be so foolish.”

  “I wonder if we will be starving before too long,” Fonsagrive said. “The cuistots will have a hellish time bringing supplies to the line through this.”

  “That is a duty for which I would not care,” Barrès said—no small statement, coming as it did from a machine gunner at the front. The cuistots walked, or more often crawled, to the front festooned with loaves of bread as if with bandoliers, and with bottles of pinard. They paid the butcher’s bill no less than anyone else—more than many—and had not even the luxury of shooting back.

  And, if the bread arrived covered with mud and loathsome slime, if some of the wine bottles got to the front broken . . . why, then the weary, hungry, thirsty, filthy poilus cursed the cuistots, of course. And if the bread and wine did not arrive at all, the poilus still cursed the cuistots, though in that case the bearers were more often than not in no condition to take note of curses.

  “Bread and wine,” Barrès muttered. “The communion of the damned.” He’d had that thought before, as no doubt many Catholics at the front had done, but it struck him with particular force today.

  “What is it you say?” Fonsagrive asked. The gas helmet muffled voices and hearing both. Barrès repeated himself, louder this time. Fonsagrive gestured contemptuously. “You and your God, mon vieux. How important you think you are—how important you think we are—to merit damnation. I tell you again: if there is a God, which I doubt, as what man of sense could not, then we are not damned. We are merely forgotten, or beneath His notice.”

  “You so relieve my mind,” Barrès said. Through the gas helmet, Fonsagrive’s chuckle sounded like the grunting of a boar. Barrès cocked his head to one side, listening not to the loader but to the German bombardment. “It is easing off.”
He might have been speaking of the rain. Indeed, he had so spoken of the rain many times; in the trenches, rain could be almost as great a nuisance as gas, and lasted far longer.

  After another hour or so, Jacques Fonsagrive cautiously lifted his gas helmet from his head. He did not immediately clap it back on. Neither did he topple to the ground clutching at his throat with froth on his lips. He had done that once for a joke while Barrès was taking off his own helmet, and had laughed himself sick when his partner on the machine gun pulled it back down in a spasm of panic. Barrès had not known he could curse so inventively.

  Now he pulled off the gas helmet with a sigh of relief. The air still stank, but the air around Verdun always stank. If anything, the chlorine that remained added an antiseptic tang to the ever-present reek of decay. Behind him, the sun was sinking toward the battered horizon. “Another day at the shop,” he remarked.

  “But of course,” Fonsagrive said. “Now we go home to our pipes and slippers.” They both laughed. They might even sleep a little tonight, as they had the night before, if the Boche proved to be in a forgiving mood. On the other hand, they might stay awake three, four, five days in a row—if they stayed alive through the end of that time. Barrès had done it before.

  Fonsagrive did light a pipe, a stubby little one filled with tobacco that smelled as if it were half dried horse dung. All French tobacco smelled that way these days. For lack of anything better—the only reason a man with a tongue in his head would do such a thing—he and Barrès opened tins of singe and supped as they had breakfasted. Even in the twilight, the preserved beef was unnaturally red.

  “Poor old monkey,” Barrès said. “A pity he got no last rites before he died.” He took another bite and chewed meditatively. “He tastes so bad. . . . Maybe he was a suicide, and they found his body two or three days later and stuffed it in a tin then. That would account for the flavor, to be sure, and for his getting no rites. Yes,” he went on, pleased with his own conceit, “that would account for a great many things.”

  “Would it account for your being an idiot?” Jacques Fonsagrive enquired. Barrès chuckled to himself. He is jealous, Barrès thought. Usually, such foolishness falls from his lips, and I am the one who has to endure it. But then Fonsagrive continued, “We are all suicides here, and none of us shall receive the last rites. It is true, is it not? Of course it is true. We are suicides, and the Boche, he is a suicide, and the whole cursed world, it is a suicide, too, throwing itself onto the fire as a moth will hurl itself into the flame of a gas lamp.”

  Pierre Barrès dug into the tin of singe and ate without another word till it was empty. It was not that he disagreed with his loader. On the contrary: he felt exactly as did Fonsagrive. But some things, no matter how true they were—indeed, because of how true they were—were better left unsaid.

  Fonsagrive seemed to sense the same thing, for when he spoke again, after flinging his own empty tin out of the trench, what he said was, “Perhaps the two of us will succeed in botching our own suicides. We have botched so many things since this tragédie bouffe began, what is one more?”

  “Maybe we will,” Barrès said, glad for any excuse not to contemplate what was far more likely to happen to him.

  And then, from down the trench, voices were raised in simultaneous greeting and anger. That could mean only one thing. “The cuistots have got here at last,” Fonsagrive said, spelling out that one thing, “and the bread is even filthier than usual. Either that, or they have no wine at all.”

  “Fuck you and fuck all your mothers, too, the ugly old bawds,” a cuistot was saying furiously in a voice that broke every fourth word: he couldn’t have been above seventeen. “I suppose you stand up and wave when the Boche drops shells on your heads. If you think my job is so easy, come do it.”

  “If you think fighting up here while you’re starving is so easy, you come do it,” one of the poilus retorted. But his voice held less outrage than those of the front-line troops had before; the cuistot’s answering fury had quelled theirs, as counterbattery fire reduced the damage gun crews could do. None of the soldiers cared for the notion of becoming a cuistot himself: no, not even a little.

  Eventually, Barrès and Fonsagrive got bread and wine for themselves. Barrès’ share of the wine did not quite fill his water bottle, and he had to use his belt knife to cut away several muddy, filthy spots from the chunk of bread. Even after he’d done that, it still stank of corruption and death. Or perhaps it was only his imagination, for the whole battlefield stank of corruption and death.

  Fonsagrive gave the bread such praise as he could: “Lord knows it’s better than singe.” He drank some of the pinard the cuistot had brought forward. “And this is better than horse piss, but not much.”

  With his belly full, Barrès was inclined to take a somewhat more charitable view of the world. “Let it be as it is, Jacques,” he said. “All the grousing in the world won’t make it any better.”

  “To hell with the world,” the loader replied. “If I grouse, I feel better.” His eyes glittered in the gathering darkness.

  Barrès decided not to push it any further. What the devil was the use? What the devil, for that matter, was the use of anything up here at the front line? Survival was the most he could hope for, and his odds even of that weren’t good. “Let me have a cigarette, mon vieux, will you?” he said. “Either that or some tobacco for my pipe. I’m just about all out.”

  “Here.” Fonsagrive handed him a leather pouch. “Help yourself.” Tobacco got to the front even less reliably than pinard and bread. A few days before, he’d been the one who was low, and Barrès had kept him smoking.

  A brimstone reek, as of a fumigation or an exorcism, rose from the match Barrès struck. He got his pipe going and sucked smoke into his mouth. It was vile smoke, but less vile than everything else around him. He leaned back against the wall of the trench, savoring the pipe. The Boche must have been at his supper, too, for there was silence in the trenches about the space of half an hour.

  He looked up. The stars were coming out, as if all the world beneath them were at peace. He always marveled at that. The stars did not care. Maybe it was just as well.

  From high above, cold and thin in the distance, came the sound—Barrès dug a finger in his ear, for his mind at first would not credit what he heard—of a brazen trumpet blowing a long blast. “That is not a call of ours,” he said, repose dropping from him like a hastily donned cloak. “That is surely some thing of the Boche.”

  “Bugger the Boche,” Fonsagrive said, but he, too, scrambled to his feet. Barrès set his finger on the trigger of the Hotchkiss gun. If the Germans wanted to pay a call on his stretch of trench by night, as they had been known to do, he would give them a warm reception. Fonsagrive went on, “I think they mean to bombard us from above: that horn must surely be coming from an avion.”

  “So it must.” Barrès shrugged and sighed. “If only our own avions were worth something more than an arse-wipe article from L’Illustration.”

  “If only, if only, if only,” the loader mocked him. “If only you did not say ‘If only’ so much. The Boche has more artillery, he has more men, and he has more avions as well. Such is life. We shall go on killing him anyway, until we are killed ourselves.”

  Down in the German trenches a couple of hundred meters away, men were shouting and stirring, as the French soldiers were to either side of Barrès’ machine gun. Barrès thought he saw movement, and started firing. The German Maxim gun answered instantly, and riflemen on both sides also opened up. Muzzle flashes stabbed the night.

  Then the aerial bombardment Fonsagrive had feared began. It was like no bombing raid Barrès had ever known: hail and fire rained out of the sky together. “Mother of God!” Barrès shouted, diving for shelter. “The Boche has learned how to take his cursed flamethrowers up into avions.”

  “So he has,” Fonsagrive answered. “What he has not learned to do, the stinking pigdog, is to aim his flying fire. Listen to them howl down the slo
pe, roasted in their own ovens!” He chuckled in high good humor.

  “Might as well be our artillery,” Barrès said, laughing, too. The Germans were howling when hail smote or fire burned, and the bombardment seemed to be falling on them and the French almost impartially. Barrès cocked his head to one side. “Truly their pilots are great cowards, for they are flying so high, one cannot even hear the sound of their engines.”

  “As you say, might as well be our own artillery.” Fonsagrive got to his feet. “And this bombardment is not so much of a much, either. Shells or bombs would do far worse than these drippy wisps of fire.” A hailstone clattered off his helmet.

  Barrès did not think the Boche could come out of his trenches and attack, not when he was being bombarded, too. Nonetheless, the Frenchman peered toward the enemy’s line. The rain of fire had started blazes in the wrecked and battered woods, although, thanks to the hail, they weren’t spreading very fast.

  Fonsagrive stuck up his head, too. He shrugged. “One part in three of the forest on fire, more or less,” he said. “I had not thought the Germans to be such a slovenly people. If they have this weapon that burns, they would do better to bring it all down on our heads, not scatter it about as a running man with dysentery scatters turds.” He sounded rather like a critic explaining why a dramatist had ended up with a play worse than it might have been.

  After a while, the rain of hail and fire eased, both ending at about the same time. Never once had Barrès heard the buzz of an avion’s motor. The woods and such dry grass as remained on the ground burned fitfully. They would, Barrès judged, burn themselves out before long: so many of those trees had already burned, not much was left on which flames could support themselves.

  He said, “With any luck at all, the next time the Boche trots out his fire, he will use it against the English farther north.”

  “It could be,” Fonsagrive said. “He honored them with poison gas before he gave us our first taste of it, but now he shares it with them and us alike. He is a generous fellow, the Boche, is he not?”