by Bryan Young
“Come on. Time to go, Monsieur Américain. It’s coming up on our watch.”
“Our watch?”
“It’s our turn on the wire. Like the sergent told you, you’re one of us for the time being.”
“How could I forget?”
I felt naked heading toward no man’s land without my jump pack and armour. I was handed a rifle just like the rest of the poilus and a spare change of uniform that made me blend in with the rest of them.
Renault led me through the maze of trenches so confidently I was sure he must have had a map. They curved and zig-zagged constantly, which was smart in case a German got inside; they wouldn’t be able to shoot up the whole place in one long go.
“Our line goes this way,” Renault took us to a junction on the left instead of forward, down a passageway. “The sappers are working in that direction.”
When he said that, it made me glad I hadn’t been absorbed into that unit. I’d rather face the wire and the gas and German bullets than the back-breaking labor of digging new lines.
The length of trench that faced no man’s land was different from the rest of the network. It was deeper than the rest, but a step was dug into the wall, allowing men to stand up and look out over the wasteland and to the German trench beyond.
On one side were soldiers huddling against the dugouts, seeking sleep and rest as they could. On the other were mirrored periscopes every ten or twenty feet so we could see what the Germans were up to without getting shot in the head.
And then, of course, there was the razor, coiled up across the whole length of the front, stretching as far as a mile or more. There must have been tens of thousands of us, termites in an earthen tree.
“Go ahead, take a look.” Renault handed me one of the periscopes.
Beyond the wire, there was very little detail to see. It was dirty and soot stained, bombed out bits of soil everywhere, torn up from the mortars. Bodies from both sides were sprawled out at odd angles. The bloated corpses of fallen cavalry horses were strewn here and there, one, in a state of decay, had its ribcage exposed and guts spilling onto the battlefield.
In the center of the battlefield was a fallen steam machine. A bullet must have hit it in just the right place since the steam chambers and gears had exploded, leaving only the chunks of the immovable, leaden skeleton to litter the field.
A thin, yellowish powder covered over parts of the field, residue left over from the gas.
I’d never seen no man’s land from this perspective before. Every other time, I’d been soaring over the middle, paying more attention to what was happening on the far side. It felt so distant and small.
Seeing this contested stretch of land through the grimy mirrors of the periscope at ground level, there was almost a mile of death and destruction to cross. I’d always felt somehow more heroic jumping right into the enemy lines as a target. The thought of flooding up a ladder and going over the top from here was a terrifying prospect.
Renault smirked. “Looks different from here, non?”
“Yes. What’s it like?” I asked him.
“Going over?”
“Yes.”
“Like anything else in this war. Frightening and lethal. Only more so. What of you? What is it like?” he said.
“Going over?” I pointed up to the sky and brought my finger down in an arc.
“Oui,” he said.
I smirked. “Frightening and lethal.”
We stood there for hours, watching the sun cross over from one side of the combat zone to the other, making its slow pilgrimage to dusk. Across the distance, the only movement any of us noticed were the occasional glints of periscope mirrors, just like ours. There was no indication of anything untoward coming.
The distant pop of a mortar sounded, followed rapidly by a rocking explosion and an impressive spray of dirt that sent soil into my periscope.
“The shelling always starts in the evening. They don’t want us to sleep.” Renault grinned. “Lucky for you, you’ve already slept.”
Another mortar popped, this time from behind us, landing and exploding across the field near the German line.
“And since they shell us,” Renault continued, “we shell them. It is a very deadly circle.”
“Do their mortars ever make it inside?”
“Maintenant et puis. Now and then. Gas concerns me more.”
“How often do they gas?” I’d never had the pleasure of facing a gas attack. I didn’t want to start.
“As the wind allows. We’ve been lucky. It’s been to our backs for the last few days.”
“They were right to call you lucky.”
“Luck changes,” he said.
“I know.” I let out a deep sigh of a breath. “I know.”
More time on the wire passed and more mortars came. Renault’s supply of cigarettes must have been inexhaustible, because I don’t remember a moment when he didn’t have one either in his hand or in his mouth. He was constantly offering them to me, as well. As stressed as I was, I still couldn’t keep pace with my chimney of a companion.
After a time of standing there, taking turns looking through the periscope, adjusting our bayonets, sitting on the bench of moist soil, trying hard to keep our feet dry, Renault asked me the one thing I didn’t want to talk about.
“So, Monsieur Américain, do you have a girl back home in your United States?”
“No.”
Lucy’s parents didn’t think the war was worth Americans fighting in, and I did. We were kids and our feelings didn’t matter. Her letter to me, the sorrowful one that said goodbye forever, still burned in the front pocket of my uniform. I kept it close to me as though it was the heaviest burden I would ever bear.
What a fool I was. Am.
Standing in that trench, listening to everything being blown to bits around us, the furthest thing from my mind was love. There would be time enough for that later, whether I wanted it or not.
Renault left the conversation of love at that.
We continued our watch, along with a thousand others up and down the line, in silence. That awkward sort of silence, when you seem to get along all right with someone, but don’t know them well enough to know what to say...
And it wouldn’t have surprised me to discover that I’d used up all of Renault’s English.
As the sun inched ever closer to the horizon at our backs, cutting the sky into ribboned bands of color ranging from brilliant red and orange upward to the blue of the French uniform, a clean-shaven boy of a soldier approached us. On his back, he bore a piping hot cylinder filled with warm soup for those of us on watch.
Renault, myself, and those around us each took a turn scooping out a bowl of the broth with our tin cooking kits.
“How old are you?” I asked the boy while I sipped the tangy beef and vegetable soup.
He looked at me, confused. Without prompting, Renault asked the boy for me in French and the boy responded.
“He says he’s eighteen,” Renault said.
“I don’t believe that for a second.”
“Neither do I. But someone must have.”
I was barely twenty and would have guessed I had at least five years on the young soup-bearer.
Another boy, who must have similarly lied about his age, came along behind the soup boy, passing out chunks of bread.
I remember feeling satisfied and filled by the food, but what came next is blurrier. Someone down the line shouted an alarm of some type, sending everything spinning into the proverbial latrine.
Whether I dropped my soup to the ground, mixing the broth in with the ubiquitous ground water, or I’d gulped the rest of it down my gullet, I couldn’t say. What I do know is that I was suddenly pressed up against the muddy wall of the trench with my eyes pressed into a periscope, searching for the source of the alarm.
Scanning the vast swath of death across no man’s land, I scoured the horizon for any activity emanating from the German line.
The shelling had sto
pped, adding a stillness on the outside to counteract the scrambling on the inside.
Then I saw it.
On the horizon, beyond the German wire, I saw it.
I’ll never forget the feeling in my stomach, that sinking sensation of dread when you know something terrible is about to happen and you feel like you’re the only one who can do anything about it. Fear. It was fear and something else. Duty? A swell of courage? Responsibility?
Whatever it was, it hit me in the gut like nausea.
Cruising directly at us in the twilight were a pair of German zeppelins, armed to the teeth. They must have been ahead of schedule, since anyone with half-a-brain would have tried sending them just after dusk instead of just before, but no one could control the air.
Whether or not it was their intention to come later, here they were, bearing in our direction, loaded to capacity with all manner of deathly devices. If they made it as far as the trenches, we’d all be dead and we’d lose another mile-long stretch of front to the Kaiser’s men.
I wanted the war over as soon as the next man and losing another position would certainly bring the end closer, but the wrong side would win.
The bomb-bearing airships must have been their answer to the Aeronauts. They brought soldiers with guns. We brought men with jump packs and flamers. In turn, they responded with flying machines of death a mile in the air. I wondered what we’d come up with next.
A whistle blew somewhere down the line. A hoarse voice shouted in French: “Aux armes! Aux armes!”
“Battle stations,” Renault translated for me.
The troops lounging along our strip of trench scrambled to mobilize. If the zeppelins were coming, an attack was imminent, and every able body needed to be rifle-ready on the front.
Others weren’t readying rifles, though. They’d been getting more and more adventurous in the contraptions they deployed to the front in order to gain an advantage over the Germans. To my right, a pair of young soldiers prepared to use just such a device.
It looked like a crossbow, but it was steel and stood about the height of a man. A narrow groove ran down the center line, just big enough for...
“Is that...?” I asked.
“We call it la sauterelle. The grasshopper.”
They loaded a grenade into the slot and pulled back on the launching cable, ready to pull the firing mechanism and let it fly.
I found the whole enterprise ironically unnerving. I’d been willing to strap a combustible jet engine on my back, propelling myself hundreds of feet into the air and into full firing force of the German Army, but a simple machine device to throw grenades over the wire made me anxious.
All at once, those of us with rifles stepped up onto the shelf in the dirt and stood, sighting the enemy wire down the barrels of our guns.
The wind was still at our backs and, for that, I was grateful.
There was a stillness to the battlefield I couldn’t understand. Why were the Germans waiting? Why were we being forced onto the line? Was an attack even coming?
The zeppelins reached the German lines and inched their way closer to us. It was easy for me to imagine the view from their perspective.
I cursed myself. I should have been up there, facing the enemy from the sky as well.
But then, why shouldn’t I?
Glancing over, I saw that Renault had a pair of field glasses strung up on the wall between us. Snatching them up, I pressed them to my face, hoping for a view of the zeppelins close enough to discover their purpose. Spinning the knob and adjusting the distance of the lenses between each other, the lumbering German air machines came into focus.
They still didn’t seem all that close, but I could make out much more detail than before. I noticed something out of place on the runners below the crew compartment: a pair of massive gas tanks on each flying machine and an entire row of bombs behind them.
They were going to pound the hell out of our trenches and then, most likely, gas us all.
When I understood what it was I was looking at, I knew I had to do something drastic.
The belly of the zeppelins seemed impregnably armoured; no bullets from the ground would stop them.
There was only one thing to be done.
“Where are you going?” Renault called out to me as I pulled back from the wall and turned to run. “They’ll shoot you for desertion!”
But they couldn’t.
I was the only one who could save them.
After ten feet at a full run, I stopped. I had no frame of reference for where I was going and time wasn’t on my side. “Renault,” I called out as I turned back to him. “We need to go. Now.”
“They will shoot us both!”
“Never mind all that: do you want to save everyone or don’t you?”
Renault’s face contorted into confused horror. I was asking him to desert his post on the front line, a shootable offense. “I’m lucky, Monsieur Américain, but I’m not that lucky.”
“I need to get to the steam shop, and you’re the only person who can get me there.”
The Frenchman looked back at the pending bloodbath, then back to me. His body twisted toward the battle, as though the better part of him knew where he should be, but his head knew better.
Reluctantly, he dropped his rifle and stepped down onto the duckboards, “Fine, then. I will regret this, but we go this way.”
He turned, bearing in the exact opposite direction as I had been heading.
At a full sprint, we ran and took a sharp left, leading back inside the maze of trenches behind the front line. Passing a line of soldiers, we rounded a corner that led us right into the copper-alloyed barrel of an officer’s pistol. The weapon was inordinately large for the man who held it, perhaps some comment on his ego.
The officer bared his teeth and shook the pointed pistol at us. “Retournez à votre poste. A la fois.”
To his credit, Renault began to argue with him in French, and it was certain the only way we were going to get out of being shot for desertion was if my plan worked. Otherwise, I’d just signed a death warrant for the both of us, and the French always collected on that score.
When the officer motioned his pistol up toward the air, I understood that he wanted our hands up. Renault and I both raised them slowly. When he motioned for us to turn around and march back to the front, neither of us budged.
Renault reinitiated his effort to talk his way out of this mess, but he spoke so fast I could only pick out a few words here and there. Zeppelin. Jumper. Urgent. Steam shop.
The officer remained unmoved. His face tightened. “Retour. Maintenant. Ou je vais tirer.”
Renault stood resolute. “S'il vous plaît?”
One of the bravest things I’d seen in my life was Renault’s steadfastness in helping me.
Without warning, my compatriot’s arms came down like lightning, grabbed the officer’s pistol, and he worked to wrestle it away from him. The best Renault could hope for was a draw with the pistol. Discarding it from the equation would not be an option since it was tied to the officer’s pants with a length of leather string.
Their hands both clenched the pistol, balling them into white-knuckled fists. One of Renault’s hands shot up to the man’s face, clutching it, forcing it to its side.
The sound of a shot rang, startling everyone, me most of all. In the echo-filled trench, I couldn’t tell if the sound came from the fight in front of me or the front behind me. Relief hit me when I noticed Renault standing solidly, showing no signs of being wounded.
To our detriment, the overbearing officer seemed to be holding steady as well.
Turning around, I lowered my hands and looked back to see the shooting had begun from our side. The Germans must have gone over the wire and our defensive positions opened fire. Dragging my gaze up to the sky, I saw the zeppelins looming larger on the horizon.
If I couldn’t help, it was only a matter of time before we’d all be dead anyway.
Renault must also have known
.
As I spun back around to help him, I found I didn’t need to. He pulled his right hand back, balling it into a fist, then let loose with a spectacular right cross, sending his fist right into the poor fellow’s jaw.
The officer staggered, losing his balanced footing. The gun fell toward the ground, dangling on its string, as the man reached up to stop Renault from delivering another blow.
Angling around the fray so I could get behind the officer, Renault continued his attack. With the officer dazed and distracted, I had my opening. Using the handle of my own tiny pistol, I clubbed the unlucky bastard in the back of the head.
Finally still, he dropped to the ground.
“They’ll shoot us for this,” Renault told me as he stood upright, wiped his brow, and worked to catch his breath.
I put a grateful hand on his shoulder. “They’ll hail us as heroes.”
“It does not work like that, but, for what it is worth, I hope you are right.” Renault wiped a spot of blood from his lip with his forearm.
I glanced around, thankful that everyone was so focused on the German attack that our own French assault had gone unnoticed.
“Help me sit him up,” Renault said.
“We don’t have time for this,” I told him, but helped anyhow. We propped the officer up against the trench wall, his face already swelling and darkened from Renault’s brutal assault.
“Now, let us get you to the steam shop, before we are caught. Or worse, shot for desertion.”
Since we’d made it through the first layer of trenches, it became much easier to bluff our way through checkpoints. All we had to say was that we were on orders to report to the steam shop and the path opened before us.
A feeling of angst and sadness made its way up my throat from deep in my stomach, thinking about what might happen if that first officer awoke from his stupor and could identify us.
As much as I would dwell on that risk now, I had to force it out of my mind and off of my list of priorities. I knew the consequences and couldn’t focus on them.
My mind was fixed on making it to the steam shop and to my jump pack. The spider’s web of trenches made sense when trying to repel an attack, but they made it difficult to get anywhere with speed, especially if you felt as turned around and directionless as I did. It was even worse in the dwindling twilight, letting dim, sputtering bulbs light our way.
