The Verdun Affair

by Nick Dybek

  “Are you married?” the major asked.

  “No,” Paul said.

  “I hope you don’t have children then.”

  “Of course not.”

  “And how old?”

  “Twenty-two.”

  “Twenty-two.” The major nodded. “No one told me the truth about anything when I was twenty-two. Have you found that to be the case?”

  “That’s difficult to judge,” Paul said.

  “It isn’t, actually. For example: we can’t abandon your position. It’s too important, strategically.”

  “Sir, I wasn’t asking for that,” Paul said.

  “I know you weren’t. But the truth is also this: I can’t give you relief, or reserves. The truth is that the Italians will have to blow up fifty more mountains if they expect to reach the Brenner Pass. This mountain will do them no good. It’s simply not worth the resources to defend it. Not at this moment. Now you know what the truth sounds like.”

  The major did manage to provide two sappers who began work on the countermine at once. If they could find the Italian tunnel under the ridge, they could lay their own charge and collapse the Italians’ work. But there was no drill, so all of the digging had to be done by hand at exhausting and almost pointless expense. At such a pace, they would find the Italians only by blind chance.

  * * *

  “Before you ask, Mrs. Hagen,” Paul said, “there are many stories about blind chance, but this isn’t one.” The tortellini had arrived. Paul took a drink of the red wine. The rain had begun, heavy and sudden. The waiter hurried between tables, banging shut the high windows with a hooked pole.

  “If it isn’t about chance or ghosts it must be about love,” Sarah said, mockingly, but Paul didn’t seem to notice her tone.

  “Do you know any love stories that don’t include chance and ghosts?” he asked.

  “I think I do,” I said.

  Sarah cut her eyes at me, a sympathetic glance at last. “Go on, Paul,” she said.

  The story was about how Paul stared into the hole the sappers had dug in the rock, claustrophobic and vacant at once. It was about the light at the beginning of the tunnel. And about how the sappers told him not to expect much.

  “What should we expect?” he asked their sergeant, a man no taller than five feet with black hands that looked too big for his wrists.

  “An explosion, Lieutenant.”

  “Can you be more specific?”

  “This Kinderhaus is a large position. I would expect a large explosion.”

  “You’re a cold one, aren’t you?”

  “Aren’t you cold, Lieutenant?” There was not a trace of irony in the sapper’s voice. He had, however, discovered one useful piece of information: the Italians were working on two tunnels, not one. Two tunnels with two drills, the first and larger one under the Austrian position, the second on the face of their own peak. He guessed that they planned to blow the western face so they could attack directly across the ridge.

  “But perhaps their plan of attack won’t matter very much to you,” the sapper said. “After all . . .”

  “On the contrary,” Paul said, “now I know not to hope I somehow survive the explosion.”

  * * *

  Paul called the sappers off after a week. The men who remained oiled their rifles and dug an extra few inches into the limestone. But it was all for morale, to keep busy, to keep from thinking too much. One day the mountain would crumble beneath them. Paul thought about the kind of voice he would have to summon to tell them that they were all going to die, and soon. Well, it was 1917, he need only use his normal voice. And they already knew, anyway. All the while the Italian drill buzzed under their feet, the shovels chipped and clinked.

  Tretta snuck back across the ridge to report every midnight, and afterward they stayed up in Paul’s dugout, listening and drinking slivovitz. Tretta imagined aloud the life he would not have, a girl he liked in Badia, the children he wanted.

  “I’d put them over my knee and give them five of the best,” he said.

  “The best?”

  “With the belt.”

  “You dream of punishing your children?”

  “What do you dream of? Kissing them?”

  That was how they always joked after that. If we survive we’ll give the major five of the best. We’ll give General Conrad five of the best. We’ll give the emperor five of the best. They stared up at the portrait on the rock wall one night when the slivovitz was gone.

  “We could give the old man his share right now,” Paul said. But neither of them was willing to go quite that far. The ground shook as the drill drew closer.

  “How much longer?” Paul asked.

  “Probably not tomorrow,” Tretta said.

  In the meantime there was terror unlike any Paul had ever felt. It wasn’t like fear at all. It was more like delirium. He’d forget the names of his men, if he had eaten, how to write a cursive letter. Sometimes he counted his breaths, wondering, quite literally, how many more he might take. Sometimes he felt the rock as a burning cold pulse through his body, he felt he could vomit powdered limestone. Chink, chink.

  He knew the Italian sappers were just men—probably illiterate, certainly poor—from squalid places he had never heard of. Still, he pictured them with flaming claws and fangs, or, just as often, as angels in white silk, halos lighting the dark tunnels. Power over life and death. Chink, chink. Shovel blows; drilling needles, colder than the wind. How much longer?

  He sent away what men he could, asking the same questions the major had put to him in the villa. Wife? Children? Perhaps we can move you into reserve. Some refused. Some thanked him in tears. To Paul’s surprise, his valet clicked his heels and left without protest. It was only then that Paul realized how little they had always liked each other.

  “How much longer, Tretta?”

  “Please stop asking, Lieutenant.”

  That night Paul awoke in the dark. For minutes he heard nothing and lay breathing in the smell of the field stove. Only when he felt the drill reengage, felt the ground convulse under him, was he able to fall back asleep.

  Then, drinking with Tretta the following night, suddenly he could hear the drill itself, the whining motor. He could smell the scorched oil, not unlike the smell of tar on the Vienna rooftops.

  And he could hear men singing, spectral voices, voices of the afterlife. It was almost a relief to realize that he had finally gone mad. What were the voices telling him? Something about ancestors, descendants? The truth in the hearts of women he thought he had loved. His brother’s heart on a bayonet in Russia, his mother with her hair up at a window. His father, black-masked at the Industrialists’ Ball. What were the songs saying? That might be worth knowing, but he didn’t recognize the melodies. When he was able to pick out a word, he didn’t recognize it either.

  “Is that Italian?” Tretta asked. “Do you hear that?”

  Paul laughed. Tretta had tears in his eyes. No afterlife. Just the Italians singing as they dug. They could hear cursing and shouting too. Shovels passing from man to man. They could smell the tobacco smoke and the coal smoke of the field stove, the simmering barley soup. They could hear the spoons rattling in the bowls. All of this drifted up through fissures in the rock.

  “What would happen if we called out to them?” Tretta asked.

  “They would hear our voices and become conscious of our shared humanity. Then they would stop digging.”

  “Mamma mia,” Paul and Tretta yelled into the dark of the dugout.

  “Ciao, bella!”

  “Prego! Prego!”

  The following afternoon the portrait of the emperor was shaken from the wall. Full pots of soup slid from the stove. That night, as they sat in their quarters trying to steady the bottle to their lips, Paul heard a tap on the table and looked up to see that one of Tretta’s gold fillings had fallen from his mouth.

  And still the digging made them feel safe. Lying down that night in a hammock that shuddered beneath him, Pa
ul slept through the calm, waking only with the explosion.

  * * *

  Limestone between his teeth, in his gums; stinging pebbles blown in through his eyelids. The candles snuffed, the lamps shattered. Paul fumbled for the canteen at his belt and poured it across his face. There was some air still in the dust, enough to breathe. The ground swayed as he searched for the mouth of the dugout. There. A sooty sheet, pathetic light.

  Outside, there was moonlit darkness to the morning. His watch had been blown from his wrist. Three men he didn’t recognize staggered in the ash. Another man was dumping soup into his eyes.

  Where was he, exactly? Half the peak had turned to fog. Their artillery had been washed into the valley, their entrenchment carried down the slope. He called roll: nine voices answered. He put his field glasses to his eyes and one of the lenses fell to pieces in his hands. On the opposite peak the Italian field glasses glinted and winked through clouds of dust, as if to say, We both know none of this is real, don’t we?

  * * *

  Over Paul’s shoulder I could see the waiter consoling the chef. The entrées had arrived, but we hadn’t touched them.

  Paul finished his glass and poured more. “I’d like to get a better bottle next if you’ll join me. Certainly I’m paying, for boring you this way.”

  “Not at all,” Sarah said. “It’s even a little interesting.”

  “We should have ten more bottles,” I said, “to celebrate that you survived.”

  “I’ve probably celebrated too much already,” Paul said. “The Italians just underestimated. Or the charge must have gone off only partially, or some other miracle.”

  “Do you call it a miracle?” Sarah asked.

  “Only when I’m speaking English.”

  But where was the Italian attack, where was the second explosion the sappers had promised? Paul’s remaining men surrounded him, bleeding from their ears, spitting bits of rubble into their hands. They reported the field telephone gone. Their best hope was to descend the western side of the ridge to where reserves waited, and from there dig in again to halt the Italian advance. It would not even be a retreat exactly, as the position that Paul had been charged to hold no longer existed.

  Then the second explosion hit, flinging them all to the ground. The rock face of Tofana, adjacent to the ridge, dropped like a curtain, and Paul knew they were as good as dead. The Italians would be on them in moments, have clean shots across the ridge in moments. There was blood on his fingertips. He couldn’t hear his own voice, but somehow he heard the Italian whistles, signaling attack. Black smoke poured from the hole in the face of Tofana, and then the Italians in their green-gray uniforms were surging through the black smoke. They made the first twenty meters across the ridge. Then they began to fall.

  One man went down, then the next. They dropped their rifles and put their hands to their throats. Paul looked through the glass to see eyes bulging in their sockets. It looked like the work of an invisible and silent machine gun, except that they dropped almost at once.

  The wine had come. Paul put his nose in the glass and breathed. “In English it’s called ‘white damp’—more of a miner’s danger than a soldier’s. The carbon monoxide from the explosion was sucked out in such a concentration that the Italians all suffocated on the spot. Amazing, isn’t it?”

  “My god, yes,” Sarah said. “You say white damp now, but at the time . . .”

  “At the time, I didn’t know.”

  “What must you have thought . . . ?”

  “Now I know I survived only because of an error caused by exhaustion or poor training. But, yes, when one sees something like that, one can’t help but feel . . .”

  “Protected?”

  “Yes.”

  She brought the napkin to her mouth. “You felt that you deserved to survive?”

  “Deserved? I don’t think deserved.”

  “That you were the only real person in the world. Obviously you would survive what seemed like certain death.”

  “You’ve felt this way, Mrs. Hagen?”

  “It’s something Lee said to me once before he disappeared. Anyway, you haven’t mentioned Tretta at all.”

  “No.”

  “But you have reason to think he survived the explosion?”

  “I know he survived. As I gave the order to fall back, and as we were scrambling down the summit, I stepped on one of his hands. It was as if he had just appeared there. Right at my feet.”

  They began the retreat, eleven of them now, with Paul supporting Tretta himself. Looking for footing on the mountain paths, coughing up the powdered limestone and descending the ladders. But then the Italians began their barrage, and with half the Kinderhaus at the bottom of the valley the Austrians were now fully exposed. The Italian guns hadn’t found the range, so the shells flew high, but this was little comfort as they struck what remained of the summit. A chunk of bone-white cliff the size of a car fell. Then another. Landslides rumbled like applause in an opera house. Explosions. The mountain melted.

  They reached another ladder and clamored down, Tretta hopping rung to rung. They scuffled onto the narrow path below, the collars of their field coats turned up against the dust. Another explosion, and an iron ladder scuttled past and dove into the valley. A shell landed twenty meters ahead, sending up blinding clouds, and Paul and Tretta limped forward, somehow avoiding the edge of the road as it twisted down the mountain. When Paul’s vision cleared, there was no one else in sight. He clutched Tretta, and they continued on.

  “I had lost any sense of where I was. I had lost sense of anything other than the fact that I was moving,” Paul told us. “That was all. And eventually we were past the range of the Italian artillery, and still we kept going, as fast as I was able. And eventually Tretta said, ‘Lieutenant, I think we have to stop, I have to.’ I don’t know how many times. Many before I heard him, I think.

  “What?” Paul asked Tretta. “What? What? What?” It was all he could say. “What? What? What?”

  “My foot,” Tretta said.

  “What?” Paul said. Tretta no longer had a foot. The sole of his boot was gone, the leather looked like a bloody sponge.

  They stopped, and Paul lowered Tretta to the ground.

  Tretta was stocky, and both his bald head and face had the permanently flushed red of too much cold, heat, or drink. Paul sat at his side and tried to belt Tretta’s thigh, tense with pain.

  The road had widened, passable by car now, but there were no cars in sight. No smoke. The limestone was chipped and scorched. Phantom dugouts, eroded, green with lichen. The sun seemed to be setting, though that was only an effect of the dust. Paul’s muscles squirmed in the aftershock. He had no chart.

  They stumbled into a dugout at the roadside, Tretta’s eyes bubbling open and shut. Paul lay down and immediately began to dream. When he awoke it was night and Tretta had managed to raise the mangled foot on a lip of rock.

  “What are you doing?” Paul asked.

  “Waiting.”

  “You can’t walk, can you?” Paul asked.

  “I can’t walk, no.”

  “If we find a crutch? If I carry you?”

  “If. If,” Tretta said.

  “I don’t know where we are,” Paul said.

  “Not where we’re supposed to be,” Tretta said.

  They should have already arrived at the Austrian positions. Somehow Paul had taken them east instead of west—but how was that possible? Weren’t they just walking down the mountain road?

  Paul closed his eyes again and saw a ball in Vienna before the war. His father was wearing the black mask he’d worn at every ball since 1888, the year the crown prince killed himself. He’d tied it around his shoulder as a mourning band and still wore it twenty-five years later, though the silk had rubbed through in many places. His father had invited Paul to take the mask—it was his first ball, he was sixteen—but Paul dressed as an Arctic explorer instead.

  “Lieutenant?” Tretta said. “I’ve been calling you
r name.”

  “What? What?” Paul tried to rub the dream from his eyes but couldn’t keep his hands still.

  “We should leave while it’s still dark, shouldn’t we?”

  “Yes. Yes.”

  But then he was back at the ball. His first. An Arctic explorer with a white fur collar and gold-tinted goggles. The Steinhof Hospital Ball, wasn’t it? Yes. Only Steinhof wasn’t just a hospital, it was an asylum. An orchestra was playing familiar music. Fake white trees hung upside down from the ceiling, and dancers swept around the bare white branches. A woman dressed as a mermaid hung on Paul’s arm. And his father—he was on the hospital board—peered at him through the old mask from across the room.

  Paul missed a step, and a man dressed as Jack the Ripper cut in on his dance and spun the mermaid. He stood alone. None of his friends had arrived as they were supposed to; they’d gone to a better ball, one he’d been invited to, but his father had made him attend this one. A girl dressed as a nun approached him. She whispered something in his ear.

  “Lieutenant, it’s almost dawn,” Tretta said.

  Paul knew they needed to get up. He knew. He could see the moon through the rough arch of the cave, yellow, boiling over into the clouds. Her face, framed by the habit, was gentle as moonlight.

  “Would you put your tongue between my legs?” she said in his ear, and touched the lobe with her own tongue. He looked away immediately and, by mistake—of course by mistake—caught his father’s eye. His father caught the eye of someone behind him, and a moment later there was a hand on Paul’s shoulder. It was one of the doctors, dressed as the kaiser in Prussian blue, left arm hidden at his side. He escorted Paul away, gently. And gave him a drink of water.

  “What did she say to you?” he asked.

  “I can’t repeat it.”

  “She’s a patient,” he said. “You realize that, don’t you?”

  “What?”

  “Oh yes, they deserve one dance a year, just like the rest of us. But what did she say?”