Counting Up, Counting Down

by Harry Turtledove

  “To a fault,” Barrès said. “I wonder when he will do us another favor of this sort. Not soon, I hope.”

  In that hope he was disappointed, as he discovered within minutes. He had been disappointed a great many times since the war began, and was hardly surprised to have it happen again. As if proud of their ingenuity, the Germans heralded the new onslaught with another of those trumpetlike blasts that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere at the same time.

  “Look up in the sky!” Fonsagrive exclaimed. “One of their avions must have walked into a shell, for it is burning, burning.”

  “That is a very huge bastard of an avion, to be sure,” Barrès replied. “I wonder—I wonder most exceedingly—how such a machine could even so much as hope to get off the ground. Look at it, Jacques. Does it not seem like a great mountain burning with fire?”

  “So it does,” Fonsagrive said. “And may all the Germans inside it burn with fire, too. There it goes, by God! It will crash in the river.”

  Crash in the Meuse it did, behind the French lines and to the west of the trench in which Barrès and Fonsagrive huddled. The ground shook under Barrès’ boots. “Good!” he said savagely. “All the bombs and all the fire the salauds still had with them have gone up. Now there can be no doubt they are dead.”

  “They are dead, yes, and probably one fish in three in the Meuse with them,” Fonsagrive said. “That was a formidable explosion.”

  “A pity the avion did not crash into the trenches the Boche holds,” Barrès said. “It would have been sweet, having him hoist by his own petard.”

  “So it would,” Fonsagrive said. “It would also be sweet if, having made a nuisance of himself in the first part of the evening, the Boche would roll up in his covers and go to sleep for the rest of the night. As you said, another favor like the falling fire we do not need.”

  But the respite the two Frenchmen got did not last long. For the third time that evening, the horn sounded not behind the German line but, as best Barrès could tell, above it. “What is the Boche playing at?” he demanded in a cross voice. “When he does strange things, I grow nervous, for then I do not know what he is likely to try next.”

  Even as he spoke, a great searing white light sprang into being above him. “Parachute flare!” The cry rose from up and down the line. Barrès ducked down below the lip of the parapet. In that pitiless glare, the Germans would have had an easy time picking him off.

  He waited for the Maxim gun in the trench down the slope to take advantage of the flare and start potting poilus less cautious than he. But the enemy’s machine gun stayed quiet, as did his own Hotchkiss. He wondered why. When he said so aloud, Fonsagrive answered, “Could it be that no one told the Boche machine gunners the flare was going up? Could it be they think it is ours, and wait for us to shoot at them?”

  “It could be, I suppose,” Barrès said dubiously, “but it sounds like something our own officers are more likely to do than those of the Germans.” He had a healthy, indeed almost a fearful, respect for the men who wore field-gray and coal-scuttle helmets, and for their commanders. They had come too close to killing him too many times for him to feel anything but respect for them.

  Slowly, slowly, the parachute flare sank. It was an extraordinarily fine one. It scarcely flickered or dimmed as it came down, staying so bright, Barrès could not even make out the ’chute supporting it in the air.

  It lit in a muddy puddle—a water-filled shell hole, no doubt—off to the right, in the direction of Fort Douaumont. Even after it sank into the puddle, its light still shone for a moment. The Boche remained in his trenches. “Whatever he was supposed to do, he has buggered it up,” Fonsagrive said.

  “So it would seem,” Barrès agreed. “Who would have thought it of him?”

  From that muddy puddle, and perhaps from all the other sodden shell holes nearby, of which there were a great many, rose a bitter odor penetrating even through the horrid stench of the battlefield of Verdun. “What the devil is that?” Fonsagrive said. “Some new German gas?” He grabbed for his gas helmet.

  But Barrès held up a hand. “No, that’s not a gas,” he said. “Don’t you recognize it? That’s the smell of wormwood.”

  “Wormwood?” The loader frowned. “The stuff that goes into absinthe?”

  “The very same,” Barrès replied.

  Fonsagrive snorted. “And what do you know of wormwood, of absinthe, eh, mon vieux? I suppose you are going to tell me you were one of those Paris dandies who knocked back the stuff by the beaker before they made it against the law because it drove some of those dandies mad?” As Barrès’ eyes readjusted to the night, he saw Fonsagrive gesture airily, as he guessed a Parisian dandy might do. Whatever effect the gesture might have had from a Paris dandy, it altogether failed of its purpose when coming from a filthy, unshaven corporal.

  “Oh, yes, I used to guzzle absinthe by the tumblerful,” Barrès said.

  His loader snorted again, louder and more rudely this time. “The truth, if you please. Do you know what the truth is?”

  “Better than Pontius Pilate. Better than you, too,” Barrès retorted. But then he sighed. “Oh, very well. The truth. Back when the war was new, my company commander used to drink the stuff. Every day, at noon and in the evening, he would pour some absinthe into the bottom of a glass, hold a perforated spoon filled with sugar above it, and drip a little water through the sugar and into the absinthe. Then he’d drink it down. I don’t know where he got the stuff, but he had plenty.”

  “What sort of officer was he?” Fonsagrive asked, interest in his voice. “Did the absinthe make him crazier than those who don’t drink it?”

  “Not so you’d notice,” Barrès answered. “He was just a soldier, like any other. He’s dead now, I heard.”

  “As who is not, these days?” Fonsagrive said. “It’s almost a fucking dishonor to stay alive, if you know what I mean.”

  “Only too well, mon ami—only too well.” Sadly, Barrès shook his head. After he’d done it, he wished he hadn’t. “Those cursed fumes of wormwood are giving me a hangover, and I didn’t even get to enjoy the drunk.”

  “Life is full of tragedies,” Fonsagrive said. “Shall I weep for you?”

  “If you would be so kind,” Barrès answered. His loader rolled his eyes. Both men laughed. After a little while, Fonsagrive began to complain that his head hurt, too. “Ah, quel dommage,” Barrès said, his voice full of lachrymose, even treacly, sympathy. “How I grieve that you suffer!”

  “How I grieve that you lay it on with a trowel,” Fonsagrive remarked. The two soldiers laughed again.

  Barrès said, “The Boche has been trying all sorts of strange and curious things tonight. I wonder whether he is finished, or whether he will show us something else new and interesting.”

  That made Jacques Fonsagrive stop laughing. But then, after some thought, the loader said, “The Boche has shown us strange and curious things tonight, oui, but I cannot see that he has hurt us very badly with them. His fire did him as much harm as it did us, and if he somehow turned water into absinthe—well, so what? Jesus Christ turned water into wine, and look what happened to Him.”

  “If a priest heard you say that, he would swell up and turn purple, like a man stung by many hornets,” Barrès said. “But, since it is my ears you assail . . .” As Fonsagrive had earlier in the day, he shrugged a fine French shrug.

  A fourth trumpet blast sounded, above and beyond the battlefield. Barrès tensed, but not so much as he had done when that strange horn call first sounded. These German attacks were strange and curious, true, but, as his loader had said, they were less dangerous than most of the things the Germans had done before.

  For some time, he wondered if this trumpet blast were merely sound and fury, signifying nothing. But then Jacques Fonsagrive asked, “Where has the moon gone?” By his tone, he suggested that Barrès was hiding it in one of the pockets of his uniform tunic.

  Looking east, Barrès saw that the waning cresce
nt moon which had crawled up above the German-held land in that direction—without his noticing, the hour had got well past midnight—was now vanished. He spied no cloud behind which it could have disappeared . . . and, for that matter, the stars in that part of the sky also seemed to have gone.

  “Absinthe fumes,” he said again. “What else could it be? They poach your wits like the eggs in eggs Benedict.”

  “Hmm.” Fonsagrive pondered the phrase as if he’d seen it in some new essay from Anatole France. “Not bad,” he said at last. “Soon the sun will be up. If you see strange things in the light of day, you will know your wits are not poached, but as addled as the eggs a Picard peasant sells you for fresh.”

  A good many of the infantrymen in the trench with them were Picard peasants. If they heard, if they thought the comment a slander on their habits, they gave no sign. Probably laughing up their sleeves, Barrès thought.

  And the sun gave no sign of coming up. When a waning crescent moon rises, the sun cannot be far behind. So a lifetime of experience had taught Barrès. But, even though the sun did not rise and did not rise, he refused to let it fret him. After all, among all the other stenches, the stench of wormwood remained strong in the air. “A few minutes seem like an hour,” Barrès remarked after some time had passed.

  “True: time marches on hands and knees,” Fonsagrive said, adding, “It could be that we should put on our gas helmets, to clear these fumes from our heads. The sun should have risen long ago.”

  “To the devil with that,” Barrès said. He waved out across no-man’s-land. “The Boche is in the same state we are. The Boche must be in the same state we are, or he would have come over here and done us a mischief.” He leaned against the wall of the trench and closed his eyes. “I am going to sleep for a bit, while I have the chance.”

  “Not the worst idea in the world,” Fonsagrive agreed, and he stretched out, too. They knew they could be up and firing in a couple of seconds if the Germans had been rendered less nearly insensible than seemed to be the case.

  When Barrès opened his eyes, he was prepared to swear on a stack of Bibles two meters high that he had dozed only a few minutes. But the sun, that suddenly treacherous beast, stood high in the sky, having somehow traveled a third part of its journey across the heavens while he lay snoring.

  Ever so cautiously, he sniffed. Yes, the odor of absinthe lingered. If it had thrown him into such a stupor, maybe he should have thrust the gas helmet over his head in the darkness. But, while it might save his life, he hated it, just as he hated donning a rubber that might save him from disease.

  Fonsagrive woke up a couple of minutes later. “What’s going on?” he demanded, pointing toward the sun. “Where’d that little bugger sneak out from while we weren’t looking?”

  “Damned if I know,” Barrès answered. “But there he is, and we just have to make the best of it.”

  They weren’t the only ones who’d taken advantage of what still felt like unnaturally extended darkness. All up and down the line, poilus who’d just awakened were exclaiming in wonder at how the sun had come out of nowhere. Barrès spoke no German past “Hände hoch!”—which he mispronounced abominably—but he knew surprise when he heard it. By the noises the Boche was making down in his trenches, he was as surprised as his French foes.

  Before Barrès had a chance to marvel at that, the aerial trumpet sounded again: the fifth time overall, the first in daylight. Fonsagrive made a disgusted noise, then said, “Ahh, I thought we were done with that weird crap.”

  Then, together, he and Barrès exclaimed not in disgust but in fright. A shell—it had to be a shell, though it glowed like a star even in broad daylight—was falling from the sky, seemingly straight toward them. Barrès had seen plenty of German 420s and flying mines: half the terror of those things was that you could see them as they fell. The same held true here. This was no parachute flare, like the one that had somehow brought with it the reek of absinthe. This one plunged to earth unimaginably faster than any stooping hawk.

  Barrès barely had time to dive into his cave before the starlike shell burst in no-man’s-land. By the way the ground shook beneath him, it had landed not far in front of his Hotchkiss gun. Dirt and gobbets of decayed man’s-flesh rained down on the trench, as they did after any near miss from a big shell. He gritted his teeth, bracing himself for the storm of steel sure to follow that first shot.

  But the storm of steel did not come. When it didn’t come, Barrès scrambled to his feet and seized his machine gun’s trigger instead of sheltering in the hole he’d scraped for himself in the front wall of the trench. Maybe something had gone wrong with the Boche’s artillery signals, and footsoldiers in field-gray were about to swarm out of their trenches and up the slope toward him.

  He saw no swarming footsoldiers, for which he heartily thanked God. He did see the enormous hole the shell had dug, about halfway between his line and the forwardmost German positions. From that hole, a great smoke rose: perhaps the star shell had been of armor-piercing make, and had penetrated deep enough into the soft earth to ignite a stock of cooking oil or motor oil merely buried by all the other thousands of rounds that had slammed into the slope. The smoke spread quickly, all but blotting out the light of the sun that had so mysteriously reappeared in the sky.

  Something stirred, there at the edge of the hole. Barrès’ finger tightened on the trigger of the Hotchkiss gun. But then, frantically, he jerked his hands away from the weapon, snatched the gas helmet off his belt, and stuffed it down over his head. “Holy Virgin Mary Mother of God,” he gasped, almost as if the phrase were but a single word. “The absinthe fumes were ever so much worse than I thought.”

  Beside him, Fonsagrive was also putting on his gas helmet with desperate haste. “Tell me what you see,” the loader begged.

  “I will not,” Barrès said firmly. “In no way will I do that. You would think I was mad. I would think I am mad, did I put into words what my fuddled brain makes of what my eyes see.”

  Locusts the size of horses? Locusts the size of horses with the tails of scorpions and the faces of men? Locusts the size of horses with iron breastplates, with wings that rumbled as they shook them out? Locusts with women’s hair streaming out from under golden crowns, with the fierce teeth of lions huge in their jaws?

  Though Barrès breathed clean air now, the absinthe fumes had already fuddled him, and the hallucinations—for such they had to be—did not resume their proper form, which could be nothing but men in field-gray with coal-scuttle helmets on their heads.

  “I do not care what they look like to me,” he declared as the impossible things began to advance on the trench. He was lying. He knew he was lying, but saying the words helped him control his fear, even if he could not banish it. And what he said next was surely true: “If I can see them at all, I can kill them.”

  He squeezed the machine gun’s trigger and sent a strip of ammunition into the Germans who did not to his mind look like Germans. Mechanical as if powered by steam, Jacques Fonsagrive fed the Hotchkiss another thirty-round strip, and another, and another. All along the trench, poilus, some wearing gas helmets, some not, emptied their rifles at the advancing enemy as fast as they could.

  The slaughter was gruesome. The Boche had to be throwing in raw recruits, for they knew nothing—less than nothing—about taking cover. Barrès had heard that the Germans were trying out armor like that which knights of old had worn. Maybe the breastplates he thought he saw on the giant locusts were in fact breastplates on Germans. If they were, they weren’t proof against machine-gun bullets.

  And then Barrès laughed out loud, a huge, delighted laugh. Some—perhaps even half—the Germans in no-man’s-land, unable to stand up against the withering French fire, started back toward their own line. And the Germans in that line, as fuddled from wormwood fumes as Barrès was himself, opened fire on their comrades as if they were Frenchmen. The Maxim and Mausers worked an execution as ghastly as the Hotchkiss and Lebels.

  A few
got into the trenches on either side. None lasted long, not against bullets and bayonets and grenades. Then one more rose out of the pit. Maybe the fumes were fading from Barrès’ head, for this one looked like a man. But what man he looked like kept changing from moment to moment. Now he had lank, dark hair, a small mustache, and wore what looked something like a German uniform, save with a red armband bearing some kind of symbol on his left arm. Then again, he might have been a short, pockmarked fellow with iron-gray hair and a large mustache, wearing a suit halfway between military and civilian cut, with a gold star hanging from his left breast pocket. Or—

  Barrès waited to see no more. He fired at the man who shifted shape. So did the German Maxim gunner. They both started shooting at essentially the same instant. They both scored hits, too, a great many hits. The man—a German officer?—went down and stayed down. He didn’t look now like one man, now like another, not any longer. He just looked dead.

  “Is that the end of it?” Barrès asked.

  “Am I God, that I should know such things?” Fonsagrive returned. “I will tell you what I think, though. What I think is, it will never be over for us, not until we are killed. In the meanwhile, we are obliged to make ourselves as difficult for the Boche as we can.”

  Since Barrès thought the same thing, he did not argue with his loader. Down the trench, someone was screaming, “It burns! Aii, it burns! The sting, the horrible sting!” Barrès wondered what the absinthe fumes had made that poor poilu imagine he was fighting.

  And then, clearly audible even through the varnished cloth of his gas helmet, Barrès heard that trumpet sound for a sixth time. “Merde alors!” he exclaimed angrily. “Has the Boche not yet realized that, whatever his wormwood-filled gas shell may have done to us, it has done likewise to his own men?”

  “If our generals are fools, why should the Boche’s generals not be fools as well?” Fonsagrive said.