by Bryan Young
He’d broken something though, which boded well for me. He called out in pain and let go of me, giving me time to spin around and face him. His left arm dangled at his side, limp and useless.
The remaining navigator snarled, his face pained with the look of a cornered animal. He kept his right arm up, balled in a fist. Making circles in the air with his good arm like a pugilist, he seemed to keep his energy up as he weighed his defensive options.
His teeth were clenched in hurt and determination. Even his mustache was contorted with the effort through his agony.
Feinting in, I brought my fists up and danced around as though I’d ever spent a day in my life boxing.
He reacted to my feint and lunged in with a counter of his own. My left temple took a jolt of a hit and I saw stars and flashes for just a moment. The blow sent me sprawling back in a daze.
Shaking it off, I resumed my posture.
This one had me worried. He had the build and gait of a real featherweight boxer, not someone imitating the art. It didn’t matter how he knew the art of fighting, he was the only thing in my way and I’d die before I gave up. He wasn’t a person then. He was an obstacle. He had no dreams for a better life, no love, no family, nothing. He was an inanimate object. An automaton coded in a lab.
At least that’s what I told myself. Then and now.
With my dukes up, I came in closer and feigned another punch, distracting him from the the real attack, which came in the form of a kick: my booted heel impacted the side of his right knee, causing another popping sound.
Crestfallen, his head dropped to look at the damage in his knee, putting him off balance. I launched a solid right cross that sent him spinning like a hurricane, out of control until he put his weight on the bad knee.
With a yelp, he crumpled to the floor. I leapt onto him, hoping I could find some way to tear him apart.
I overshot him. My knees pinned him to the ground and he flailed with his right arm in a desperate attempt to force me away. With both hands, I caught his wrist and exerted as much downward force as I could muster, pinning it to the ground as well. I inched across his chest with my knees, hoping I could make it all the way to his neck.
Roaring in pain, he slapped me from the opposite direction with his limp, left arm, but it did nothing to dissuade me. I swatted his bad arm aside and made my way to his neck.
My left knee forced its way between his chin and his chest, pressing down with all of my weight, shutting off his windpipe. The struggle grew in him, his left arm uselessly flailed up again, trying to dislodge me and the strength in his right arm doubled.
But it wasn’t enough.
He turned ever darkening shades of red and purple, gurgling as he did so, letting out what little breath he had left.
Slowly, I choked the life from him until he was nothing more than a pained memory.
My plan had worked, but the weight of what I’d done to these people with my bare hands would have been enough to keep me on the ground forever.
Discarding my feelings like a good soldier, my attention turned toward the steering wheel and the surroundings. We were close to the French lines. Through the front window, I could see the darkened infinity of the sky. Looking down I saw the webbed tendrils of French trenches reaching out into the hillside. Explosions and gunfire marked the movements of the men, who looked like little more than insects infesting the base of a tree.
Looking to my right, I saw that the crew of the neighboring zeppelin was readying their bombs and gas.
Taking one out of the German airships might save some lives, but taking them both down would win the battle.
I had an idea, but it was going to cost me.
8
The rudder wheel needed one good spin to send the German zeppelin in a slow arc toward its sister in the sky. I held the polished wooden pegs firmly in place, keeping us on a crash course with the second German zeppelin. I hoped I was as lucky as LeBeau thought I was, and the weight of his lucky charm tugged at the chain around my neck.
Air and smoke poured in through the shattered windscreen, which obscured my view at a distance, but the closer I got to the enemy zeppelin, the easier it was to see the enemy crew.
To say they were in a bit of a panic may have been an understatement.
The enemy captain barked and pointed at his helmsmen, demanding evasive maneuvers from the man at the wheel. It was to my advantage that German air machines, as impressive as they were in the air, weren’t quick to the helm and had all the maneuverability of an elephant high on opium.
They saw the writing on the wall.
One of the navigators took one look at me, then to his shouting captain, then to the door. He stood, running for the exit. I wondered what in the world he could be thinking. Was a fall from a mile-high really preferable to the imminent, burning death of a zeppelin collision? Perhaps there were parachutes somewhere on the outside for use in an emergency. That would only seem natural.
The navigator reached the egress and opened it as the captain drew his pistol, firing at the deserter. He missed and the bullet lodged into the door’s frame. The navigator made it through to the railing on the gangplanks outside as the captain fired again. This time, he hit the navigator, exploding a spot of red on his back and sending him spinning over the edge of the railing.
The navigator was gone, free falling to the ground below.
Poor bastard.
Maybe he could have survived the shot to his kidneys and just maybe he was wearing a parachute, and part of me hoped he did. But I wasn’t under the impression the Germans allowed parachutes on their airships, opting to go down with them rather than admit defeat and escape with their lives.
Or maybe that was just a myth.
To this day, I don’t know.
For their part, the rest of the crew of the zeppelin I barreled toward, stood fast in the face of coming death, doing their best to avoid it or meet it with dignity.
But there simply wasn’t much they could do.
The captain of the opposing zeppelin turned from shooting his navigator to face me. He raised his pistol and fired through the glass, but the bullets lost too much of their velocity, pinging off the panes of glass on my commandeered airship.
But impact was imminent.
The tips of the rigid skeletons that made up the balloons of the zeppelins touched and the airship I’d taken control of lurched with the initial impact. I staggered with it, holding the wheel fast, forcing the collision.
My thoughts were consumed with the image of what the crash must have looked like from below. Would they be cheering? Could they even see it in the darkening light? Were they too occupied with the infantry to worry about their victory in the sky?
For me, I wasn’t sure how much of a victory it would be. I could feel the heat of the gas balloon above me vaporizing in flames and the rapid loss of altitude causing me to feel weightless, a growing sickness in the pit of my stomach.
That feeling I’d dreaded so much in the sky returned, but with a floor below me. The sensation was confusing. I’m sure the impact of my airship with theirs caused the same rapid altitude loss and explosions. The sounds of crunching metal screeched in my ears. It was the first clear sound I could make out.
The sky had turned a brilliant orange, glowing soft from the fire above. We were falling apart and would drop in a ball of fire together.
Watching the ground grow closer and closer, faster and faster, turning brighter with the flames, I counted down to my end, knowing in my heart this was it.
The end.
Where the other zeppelin was crash landing, I had no idea, but no man’s land raced toward my field of view, and I looked for somewhere to brace myself. Letting go of the wheel, I leapt across to the navigator’s chair to my side, feeling just a bit lighter than air. Clutching the chair tightly, wrapping my feet around its legs, I strapped myself down with the restraining belts. My fingers were wrapped so tight around the armrests that my knuckles turned white.
The speed of my descent increased as the fuselage above me broke off in larger chunks, and the aerodynamics of the crew compartment became less and less conducive to flight.
When I signed up, I suspected my final thoughts would be with Lucy, with my jealous hatred of her parents, and of the letter I carried in my breast pocket. Instead, my hands came up to my chest and clutched LeBeau’s metal cog.
If it had any luck left in it, I needed it then.
And the ground came fast…
Three.
Two.
One.
Impact.
Part Two
9
I awoke in the hospital, confused and in pain.
I wasn’t sure how I survived the crash or who thought to check the wreckage for my body. I wouldn’t find out until much later it was Renault who had insisted, above the protestations of our superiors, that they search for me.
Beyond all my expectations, I was hailed as a hero and not a deserter.
LeBeau’s lucky charm had worked.
Like any hero in the war, I had the scars to show for my actions. I wouldn’t see them for a good long time; they were safely hidden away under plaster bandages and gauze.
The dingy, yellow hospital was filled from one side to the other with fallen heroes of the Great War. Each of us were fighting our own battles, great and small. Some we could see and some we couldn’t.
We were all covered in casts and bandages. Some were much worse off than me, with legs or arms gone. Some had eyes out. Others were hooked to massive respirators, their lungs so damaged by the German’s chemical warfare they couldn’t even breath on their own.
War wasn’t a pleasant business, and that knowledge was never more acute than in a war hospital.
Though I’d found myself much more resilient than most, given the damage I did to my body, I realize just how fragile a creature I really was. Trying to do damage to someone else seems so difficult. Seeing the damage after it’s been done, is a different story.
I asked the first passing nurse where I was and what had happened. The luck in my charm had been used up entirely in saving my life, both from the crash and the firing squad, since the nurse spoke only French. I tried to ask my questions in her native tongue, but, thanks to my bandages, my mouth had a hard time with the language.
In fairness, I was also close to delirious. Why else would I assume she knew who I was, let alone what had happened to me?
My ravings were a terrible first impression to make on the woman whose care I would be trusted to. Her name was Hortense and she might have been the worst nurse I’d ever encountered. She’d greet every task with a smile, but she was so poor at her job that every task ended in excruciating pain. Where other nurses were gentle, she was harsh. When it came to delicacy, she brought clumsiness. Where other nurses apologized to us empathetically for our plight, Hortense would constantly be apologizing for causing us even more hurt.
That’s what made things worse. She wanted so badly to help, but she was just so bad at it.
She looked just like the other French nurses in the ward, slender in an ill-fitting white uniform. Her black hair stayed pinned beneath her white-winged hat, and her soft eyes were constantly apologizing, even when she wasn’t saying as much.
Her incompetence was so thorough and complete that she never managed to say or do the right thing. Her instincts were not suited for the care of the wounded in any way, but I got the impression she wanted to help, and how could you refuse a willing volunteer in such stressful times?
She’d failed upward to the position of head nurse. She seemed more capable of bossing the other nurses around and pointing them to problems than dealing with them herself. I’m not sure if I had simply caught her eye or had just drawn a short straw during my unconsciousness, because she treated me as her own personal patient.
There was no delicacy to her touch. Every time she changed a bandage, she managed to do her best to scrape it across the wounds and stitches. When she approached, I’d panic, wishing someone–anyone–else would help.
“Ce n'est pas la mort du petit cheval,” she would say as she tended my wounds, trying her hardest to hush and reassure me.
Nothing in her tone made me feel reassured, though.
“What is that she says?” I asked the fellow next to me after she left, my voice pressed low. I had no interest in hurting her feelings, talking about her behind her back on the off chance she understood any English.
“It means don’t cry. The horse… the little horse. It hasn’t died. The world isn’t ending. You’ll be fine.”
“She doesn’t know how it feels.”
It wasn’t just Hortense’s rough nature that panicked me, either. She had no social grace whatsoever, proving that best intentions simply weren’t enough. I remember during my first night in the hospital I woke with nightmares.
I’d dreamt that I was flying high over the Seine in Paris, with the left bank off to my right side.
I soared to Notre Dame, flying toward it head on. A collision course. The buzzer in my helmet was louder than I remembered it, and it sounded different, too, though I couldn’t pinpoint why.
Heading for the medallion of stained glass that made Notre Dame special, I found that I couldn’t change direction. Panic set in. Jerking my body back and forth, trying to barrel roll, I found that I was locked on course. Adrenaline punched me in the chest like morphine, nauseating me. Though I was hundreds of yards away, I knew what it would be like to crash through the blue glass, I could feel the phantom razors of glass shards, the iron veins of its skeleton, and the hunks of stone support I would eventually crash through.
The sound of my dreamscape faded.
The buzzer minimized to nothing, the loud hissing of my pack disappeared, and all I could hear were the tweets of birds carried along the gentle breeze.
I assumed my life would simply flash before my eyes, but instead a pair of hands gripped my shoulder straps.
My head fell and I found myself face to face with Andre LeBeau.
He was soaked, head to toe. His light blue uniform turned the color of midnight from the water it had absorbed. His hands left wet spots on my chest.
“You drowned,” I told him.
“You’re lucky,” he said. I couldn’t tell if he was crying or if his face was still wet from his watery suffocation. “Remember…”
He brought his knees up into my chest and pushed off, altering my trajectory where I’d been powerless to do so before.
LeBeau replaced me, flying on his back and closing his eyes, meeting his fate with the dignity I’d come to expect from him.
Sound returned when his head pierced the rounded glass of the cathedral.
Blinking, I found myself in a trench.
A whistle blew and I had to go over the wire.
Looking up to the lip of the trench, a flood of men went over, but then the gunfire started. I flinched, feeling like every bullet was hitting me, but instead it was killing everyone above me. The wave of men crested and the bodies tumbled back down until I could feel nothing but the sensation of being buried alive in a sea of dead soldiers. I couldn’t move or speak, much as I tried, and the bodies kept coming down. Each had the face of someone I’d killed or watched die.
Smothered in a field of black, pressed down to the ground, one dead face came to me, floating, dismembered.
LeBeau’s.
I awoke with a scream and in the bleak darkness of the hospital, there Hortense stood.
There was no understanding on her face, merely a finger pressed over her lips. “Quiet.”
That’s all she said in a hoarse approximation of English.
“Quiet.”
Though there was nothing sinister about it, her gaze penetrated me with fear. I wished I had the ability to crawl out of my bed and run, fleeing from her, the dreams, and the whole damn war.
Instead, I worked to catch my breath and push back at the anxiety rising in me.
Stifling m
y sobs in the dark, I wondered how any of it had been my fault. The war gave me the bad dreams; I didn’t give them to myself. I should have been grateful I was no longer dreaming about Lucy and our goodbye on the airship, but, thanks to the pain of my injuries and Hortense’s care, I hardly had time to think of the things I was grateful for.
The next night I dreamed again. The details were different but the same. I flew with my pack and was crashing toward some landmark or another. LeBeau saved me, sacrificing himself once more on my behalf.
I woke up sobbing, but this time things went much differently. Hortense was nowhere in sight. Instead, seated at my bedside, there was a beautiful young nurse with a smile that pierced my heart. The finer details were vague through my bleary eyes, and I almost assumed I was sitting next to a ghost.
“There, there,” she said, shushing me gently as she brushed the back of her hand across my forehead. It rippled warmth throughout me and, for a moment, I forgot the pain I was in.
Her voice, a soft entrancing melody, reassured me. “It’ll be all right.”
Confusion gripped me. Why was I dreaming of a nurse with a British accent?
Soon enough, I’d been lulled back to sleep by her singing.
For the first time since I’d left from America, my dreams had brought me comfort in the warm feelings of love, rather than the bitter anguish of losing loved ones.
I wondered if my respite from Hortense was real, or if it was simply a lie my mind knitted together to keep me from going completely insane in my convalescence.
As my mind decayed, I tried to focus on other, more corporal things, but that was no help. My body was broken.
As difficult as it was dealing with my fragile mental situation, the meal situation was somehow worse. For those of us with trouble walking, the staff brought each of our meals to our beds on trays. For those that couldn’t keep food down, it was bland porridges they needed, but that’s all Hortense seemed to bring any of us for breakfast.
There’s no telling what I would have done for a croissant in those early days, and a pat of camembert and a nice bit of fruit.
