He opened his hand and, with thumb and index finger separated, Kranz landed a fast jab on Ernie’s fleshy throat, then snapped his wrist back and brought the palm of his hand up hard into the jaw. Kranz rolled his hand over Ernie’s face, his fingers seeking the eyes. Ernie’s head forcibly tipped back so he was looking at the ceiling of the warehouse.
Kranz could not outmuscle Ernie, and did not need to. He slammed a leg backward into the rear of Ernie’s knee. The bigger man was now unbalanced on two measures, his head tilting his body backward and his body balanced on a single leg. Ernie dropped the length of wood as he crashed backward to the ground. The moment he landed, a flurry of fists pounded his face, each blow quick and sharp.
Ernie jerked his head to the left then, wild and uncoordinated, swung his right arm with all the strength he had. It only hit Kranz’s chest, but it carried enough force to knock him from his crouching stance and send him to the concrete.
Kranz regained his feet immediately. Ernie was still scrambling on hands and knees, trying to coordinate his groggy mind and push his bulk upright. Kranz focused his strength into a driving kick that was meant to be a swift end to a fight that had already gone on too long. Ernie presented his face just as Kranz wanted, but then he dropped his head at the last second and Kranz’s foot drove into the top of Ernie’s hard skull.
Thin skin cut between the anvil of Ernie’s skull and the hammer of Kranz’s boot, and blood immediately spilled from the wound—but Ernie was not knocked out or even knocked back. Indeed, he now had an opening. The force of the blow left Kranz within striking range.
Ernie, still on his hands and knees, used one arm to sweep up Kranz’s legs, who slammed into the ground. Ernie’s fist followed, brought down like a hammer, flat edge first. It landed on Kranz’s shoulder and something crunched. Kranz’s right arm fell limp.
Ernie was still on his knees. He raised his body up and stood tall, all six feet and three inches of him. His hand balled into a fist half the size of the head he intended to crush. Kranz’s leg shot out and columned into Ernie’s crotch. The big man slumped.
Kranz had already spun his body around and twisted onto his feet. For that brief moment, Ernie and Kranz faced one another, Ernie on his knees, Kranz standing tall. Ernie raised his head so that their eyes met briefly, then Kranz smashed his knee into Ernie’s jaw and followed it with a left elbow to the temple.
Ernie finally toppled and did not get up. He lay prone on the ground, blood pooling beside his head.
38
The farmer’s field was dark, but not pitch black. The moon penetrated just enough to show towers of black and ominous purple overhead. A spattering of thick drops started to fall, then a blanket of water seemed to crash down at once across the entire front. Visibility instantly reduced to a few meters.
It was now or never.
Émile rolled to his side. Blood rushed to his wounded shoulder and a blade of pain cleaved his back. He had to ignore it. He gritted his teeth, hoped to dear God he could not be seen and got to his feet. He staggered across to the boy who had not stopped crying for hours.
Émile bent down so the boy could see his face. Wide eyes stared back, desperate and pleading. The boy said nothing, but his hand grabbed.
“You are going to be all right. I’ll get you back to the trenches,” said Émile in French.
With his one good arm, Émile grabbed the back of the boy’s tunic and started dragging. The jolt of movement set the boy screaming again. Émile hoped it was drowned out by the storm, and kept dragging. It was that or leave him.
A figure suddenly appeared in the syrup of night. Émile dropped the boy. His head jerked left and right as he searched for a weapon. There was a rifle underneath a corpse. With his good hand Émile tried to pry it from beneath the rigid mass.
“Wait!” The figure called to him. “Friend! Friend! Canadian.”
The figure loped over and did not waste time with niceties. “We gotta shut that man up. He’ll get us killed.”
Émile understood the English word “us”. It was good to be in this with someone else. “Shot,” Émile said, pointing at the boy. “Bad … no walk.”
The boy’s screams settled into whimpers as the soldier pulled a flask from his pocket. “Whiskey,” he said, by way of explanation.
He pulled the boy’s head up and let it rest on his knee. He poured the whiskey into the boy’s mouth. He coughed and spat, but the man kept pouring anyway until the flask was empty, and some of it made it down the boy’s throat.
“Gotta be quiet now, ok?”
He laid the boy’s head back down on the ground and stood up, and that is when Émile realized the man was injured, too. His ear was mangled and part of his scalp had been flayed from his skull. It was hard to tell how much damage had been done.
“Your arm busted?” asked the man, pointing.
“Arm. Ok.”
“Let me drag this guy. Should be a bit quieter now. You lead the way back.”
Émile nodded. The man grabbed the boy by the scruff of the neck and started dragging him through the mud. The wet was good lubricant, so the boy slid. He had stopped screaming and only cried.
In the distant fields a bolt of lightning cut a path across the night sky. For the briefest moment, the horror of no-man’s-land was lit. But Émile did not see the death that lay all around, only the promise of salvation. It was another hundred yards or so till they were in safety.
Nevertheless, the lightning was more curse than blessing. The rain had already started to back off, so they would be silhouettes on the horizon. Easy targets, and not just for the Germans. There was no way the men in the Allied trenches could know if they were friend or foe. Émile prayed that his comrades held their fire till they were close enough to make themselves known.
Two more bolts of lightning arced down from the clouds. Émile grabbed a handful of the boy’s tunic and did his best to help the Canadian drag him. They had to get to the trenches, but now there was water pooling on the surface of the ground, unable to penetrate the plate of impermeable bedrock beneath. It was like oil on wood. Every few labored steps their feet slipped and legs splayed and both men kept dropping and getting up and scrambling forward.
There was more lightning and so more light. They were crazed men now, jerking violently at the boy’s body, constantly slipping and falling, desperate to escape. Another barrel of thunder, then another series of lightning bolts.
Émile thought he saw the mud in front of him explode. Another lightning strike, another spray of mud. He heard a whizzing sound beside his head, and he understood that they were under fire.
39
The Canadian felt warmth on his hand and knew that was not right. He wondered if he had been shot but was yet to register the injury. Sometimes men went hours during battle unaware they were badly wounded, unaware that the annoying itch in their leg was a three-inch piece of pig iron. Maybe the warmth was a bullet wound in his arm that he would only feel once they stopped and were safe, and then it would hurt like hell. He felt nothing now, so it was unimportant. They had to keep going.
They had fought their way through the slime and were nearing the trenches, having laboriously dragged the weeping boy every miserable inch of the way. But they were not safe yet. Plenty of men had been shot returning to their own lines.
If there was anyone alert in the trenches the Canadian figured they had to have seen them scrambling back. He started calling out, “French! French!”
Émile copied him, but in the native tongue, “Français! Français!” and kept calling until finally a challenge issued from the night.
“Stop! What company?”
“Twenty-first!”
Émile ran forward, speaking in a constant stream, as the Canadian continued to drag the boy. Émile slipped into the trench where a solitary two soldiers were on guard, then helped the Canadian drag the boy over the embankment. They sloshed into the trench, which was filled with knee-deep water. Mud was caving in all around. I
t was hellish—but safe.
The relief was immense. The Canadian dragged the boy up out of the water as much as he could.
“It’s all right, buddy. Field hospital’s not far. You’ll be in a warm bed in minutes. Good doctors there. Put you back together. Good as new in no time.”
He held the boy, looking into his face, speaking words the way a mother talks to an infant—nothings that were just the comfort of a voice—when a series of lightning strikes lit the trench. Only then did the Canadian see the hole in the boy’s neck and the glazed eyes staring back at him, blank and lifeless.
During the year he had been in France, the Canadian had seen everything. He had seen his friends blown to pieces in the trenches when an artillery shell landed in their laps; he had seen mutilated corpses and, worse, mutilated limbs attached to damaged men who would live; he had seen soldiers gone mad, women manic with grief, children lost and confused; he had seen all that the war had to offer.
But he had always managed to keep those images from haunting him, to keep them from the fore of his mind—enough to keep functioning, keep moving, keep surviving. Now, he looked down at the dead boy in his lap. It was one more time he had managed to survive when others had not.
Too many times. He could not pretend any more that it would be all right. It would not. It was not. He thought to himself that maybe he would have been better off among the others, dead in the field. He had no rationalization for that, no conviction, just a heavy gut feeling that was the weight of the war making a man think endlessly about death and survival till eventually one’s own death just seemed natural, inevitable, and when it did not come it somehow seemed wrong.
An ingrained sense of decency brought him back to the present, for he had been taught that Christians must not think about giving up on living. Worse, he was feeling sorry for himself when the sacrifice was not even his. It was the boy’s. And the boy’s family.
He reached into the boy’s tunic and searched for anything that might identify him. He found a letter in his pocket, still in its envelope, a wax-paper sheath protecting it from the wet and grime. The Canadian turned to Émile, who was slumped in the mud, wrecked by exhaustion and the pain of his shattered shoulder. He grabbed his tunic and tugged a little to get his attention. Émile looked at him.
“The boy, someone’s got to write his people and tell them … tell them he didn’t die alone. Ok?” He held out the letter. “Ok? You’ll do that, right?”
Émile took the letter with his one good hand. “Yes.”
The Canadian let the boy slide from his lap into the mud. He fell back against the trench and closed his eyes. He had nothing left.
Émile stood. He took a few steps in the water, then turned back. “Come. We go together.”
The Canadian opened his eyes. He saw Émile’s outstretched hand.
“My name is Émile. Come.”
Slowly, the Canadian reached out, met his hand and stood amid the morass.
“Chuck. Mine’s Chuck.”
40
The false silence broke with the gentle patter of dirt spitting into the water, spsh spsh spsh, mud and soil raining the breadth of the lake. At the dam wall the first splashes were followed by clods of earth spraying the tin roof of the master’s hut, tatt–a–tatt–tat.
Henry ducked out of instinct. A bigger clod landed with a mighty thud and relief filled him as he realized it was just the debris from the explosion. A last hail of small fragments landed, but then there were more sounds, crack–ptshew, crack–ptshew, and without thinking Henry knew from months on the front that there were bullets ringing from the darkness, aimed at him.
Maudette and Damia opened up with the 75mm cannon. A huge retort was followed by an even grander explosion where the round hit the base of the distant cliffs. A moment of silence, then the rifles started again.
This time zzzt sounds were bullets inches from putting an apple-sized hole in the back of Henry’s head. He sucked his gut in and tried to make himself disappear. The spotlight shook as his body and arms quivered. It was like being on the frontline, except worse, for he was not just a sitting duck, he was the only sitting duck.
The women readjusted their aim based on the muzzle flashes coming from within the tree cover. They fired another round of the 75mm. The explosion precipitated a volley of small arms fire.
There were sounds all around Henry, bullets peppering the air beside him and smashing into the woodwork and tin and then there was a small explosion as a bullet smashed the spotlight to pieces, showering glass through the tower. The remains of the bullet deflected down, searching for something else to shatter.
Henry dropped and screamed. He was hit. It was now dark but still the Germans peppered the tower with bullets. Henry lay still for a second, in a state of shock, until he began to notice the damp of his own blood.
Below, Maudette and Damia pumped shell after shell into the distance, firing almost blind without the spotlight to guide them. Henry crawled across to the portal and threw himself headlong down the ten-foot drop to the concrete walkway.
The women were reloading and the firing from the treeline stopped. Maudette and Damia waited for a muzzle flash to direct their aim, but none came, so they fired blindly. A shell exploded on the edge of the treeline with a burst of light, enough to illuminate the sight of a group of men sprinting across the narrow beach beneath the cliffs.
“Enough, girls. Enough.” Michel had come from the other side. His voice was calm. “Save the shells.”
He turned his attention to Henry, who was writhing on the ground, wide-eyed and panting like a dog. Michel laid his shotgun down and crouched next to him.
“Be still, Henry,” said Michel. His voice was plain, neither frustrated nor sympathetic.
He briefly looked over Henry’s body. He found his skin peppered with little cuts from the glass, but nothing so severe that it could not wait. There was only one patch where the blood was really streaming, at the upper arm. It looked to Michel like a bullet had entered through Henry’s little bicep. Michel rolled the arm over and found an exit wound. It seemed clean, no bone fragments.
“I think you’ll be fine, Henry. I’m going to bandage this and stop the bleeding. Understand?”
Michel did not bother with the buttons as he ripped the shirt from his own back. He flicked his knife out and made a perforation, then used his strength to tear the shirt in two. He made a second incision and tore a long strip of rag. Henry winced and squirmed as Michel wrapped it tightly around his arm.
“All right, that’s as good as can be done. Quickly, on your feet. I need you.”
Henry said, “Wh … what?” and remained on the ground, his fat top lip pouting and his forehead filled with furrows that pointed to wide eyes.
Michel had already turned away. He ran across to Maudette and Damia and said, “We’ve got to head the Germans off before they make the wall. Henry and I are going to flush them out. But listen to me: once Henry and I are gone, the only thing stopping them wiping out Oraon is Ariane and you two. You do whatever you have to, but you make sure they don’t get inside the dam wall. If they do, the whole thing goes.”
Michel went to Henry, who was sitting on his rump, looking at his arm. Michel extended a hand. Henry grabbed hold and Michel yanked him to his feet.
“Henry, I need your help. I wish there was another way, but there isn’t.”
Henry’s head started shaking side to side. He was not cut out for this—he had not been cut out for a single second of the whole war.
“I need you to draw the Krauts’ fire. I want you to sprint—sprint like the wind—along the south shore of the lake. They are going to fire at you, Henry. You need to know that. They’re going to fire. But you’re going to be the wind, yes? And so they’ll fire, and they’ll miss. When they miss, I will be right there. And I won’t miss. You’ve just got to run. That’s all. Can you do this, Henry?”
“You … you want me to be a target?” he said.
“I won’
t lie, Henry. Yes.”
“I’ll be a sitting duck!”
“No, Henry, you’ll be a flying duck. A target they can’t possibly hit.”
“You’re mad. Fellas shoot flying ducks all the time.”
“But you are a big man-duck, Henry! A fast duck! An English duck! Quack. Quack–fucking–quack! Come on, Henry, quack with me. Quack! Quack!”
“You’ve lost your mind.”
“Yes. Now quack with me. Quack–quack. Come on, Henry. Fucking quack!”
“Quack,” said Henry, without conviction.
Michel grabbed him by the shirt. “Like hell. Quack! Quack!”
“Quack!” yelled Henry.
“Yes!”
“Quack! Sodding quack! Quack!” screamed the Englishman.
“All-fucking-right,” said Michel. “We do this?”
Henry bit down hard. With gritted teeth and bloody lips, he nodded his answer.
“Good man,” said Michel.
When they reached the end of the dam wall Henry veered toward the ladder, his hand shooting out to steady himself on the railing.
“No!” said Michel. His arm smashed into Henry’s body, the back-hander sending the smaller man tumbling to the ground. Henry landed with a rough thump.
“It is electrified! Fuck, Henry!”
Henry got to his feet. His bulbous lip started to quiver and he hyperventilated through flaring nostrils.
Michel grabbed him by the shirt with both hands. “Snap out of it! We can feel sorry for ourselves when we’re dead.”
“Hbbb … ” moaned Henry, and lightning quick Michel sent two sharp slaps across his face. Henry reeled, still in Michel’s grasp, his one good arm hacking at Michel’s grip.
“F-f-fuck you!” said Henry.
“Yes. Yes! Fuck me,” growled Michel. “And fuck them. Fuck. Them. Come on, Henry. You and me. Same as always. Let’s finish this.”
Michel And Henry Go To War (The French Bastard Book 1) Page 18
