Losing Julia

by Hull, Jonathan

  Now I’m at the German wire. Which way to go? Panic overwhelms me. To the left? I can’t see through the smoke. I crouch among men struggling to find a way through. A hand grenade explodes nearby, then another. I reach for my wire cutters and soon my hands are raw and bleeding as I cut at the entanglements. A machine gun to my left sweeps back and forth. Am I hit yet? Any second. I feel so numb.

  “There is no break in the fucking wire!”

  “Move! Move! Move!”

  The wire cutters slip from my hands.

  “We can’t get through!”

  “The fucking artillery missed the wire!”

  “Try to the left.”

  “Bring up a bangalore goddamn it!”

  “Ah, Jesus!”

  “Son of a bitch.”

  “Stop that machine gun!”

  “Help me.”

  “Quick, hand grenades.”

  Another explosion, so close.

  “Oh God I’m hit.”

  “Ow shit goddamn!”

  “Medic! Medic! Medic!”

  “My leg my leg my leg!”

  “You bastards!”

  “I can’t see I can’t see!”

  “Get down goddamn it!”

  “Don’t leave me here. Please don’t leave me.”

  Dear God.

  I run to the right and then drop and crawl and I see men hung up on the wire like clothes on a line and the clothes are tearing and screaming and clods of dirt are jumping from the ground. I lie on my stomach and look through twenty yards of coiled wire and I can see German soldiers peering over their trenches and firing at me and I fire back and crawl but the wire keeps tearing at me.

  Any second.

  Am I dead, Mother? Father? But I can’t be because the screaming won’t stop. Then everything goes slow and I see Giles pulling himself forward in the dirt. John, this way, over here. But he doesn’t have a jaw where is your jaw John your jaw?

  Blood is soaking through my shirt. Must keep moving.

  Daniel? No, who is that? I crawl closer. Figures hurry past. Someone steps on me.

  Lawton? Is that you, Lawton? Lawton is on his knees vomiting and trying to stuff his intestines back into his shirt but they won’t fit and they’re filthy. I’ll help you Jack; get you a medic. They’ll know what to do. A shot hits him in the face. Then another.

  Any second.

  Another explosion. Something wet hits me in the face. In front of me I see a severed hand, palm facing upward. Mine? No, one of the fingers bears a wedding band.

  And who is crying? I hear someone crying. There are dozens of screams maybe hundreds of them but one of them is so close, sobbing like a lost child. Who is sobbing? I hear you sobbing who are you? I think I see him, a shadow caught in the wire to my left but I cannot see his face. Just a shadow suspended in wire and sobbing.

  I’m coming for you I’m coming for you hold on. I tear at the wire and scream and shake myself in fury.

  “Turn back turn back!”

  Someone is pulling on me.

  “Go go go!”

  Not yet not yet. Don’t leave them. A hand pulls hard on my shirt. “Get out of here!”

  I’m running now but something catches my boot and I fall. Oh shit my shoulder is burning I’m on my knees now Mother and Father crawling on all fours but I’m going to faint.

  A shell hole? Yes. I fall into it, rolling down into blackness.

  Daniel?

  Losses in retreating over a fire-swept zone are greater than during the advance. If the main attack is effectually stopped, either by obstacles or the enemy’s fire, or both, the troops remain where they are, under such cover as the ground affords or they can improvise, until night, the withdrawal being then effected under cover of darkness.

  —United States Army Field Service Regulations,

  War Department, 1913.

  SEAN CALLED me today. I could tell from his voice that he was thinking about losing me and how it was going to feel never to say “Dad?” again. So he called me. Old people can sense that, when friends and relatives are calling just to hear a voice that will soon be extinguished or visiting to take one last look because they’ve got a premonition. Then they hang on to each gurgled word as though it may be the last, as though Gramps might finally excrete some cosmic wisdom or at least the location of a Swiss bank account. The pressure can be enormous, though it hasn’t made me any more eloquent. What will my last words be? “Where’s the Metamucil?” “What day is it?” “Who the hell are you?”

  I guess I haven’t really given much thought to last words. Perhaps I should. “Death, where is thy sting?” is sort of catchy, though not so convincing when rasped from clenched teeth. What about “Oh shit,” or “Fuck” or “Damn!”? Too knee jerk, I suppose, though certainly to the point. “Help!” seems rather appropriate, though such a cry would inevitably rattle those standing helplessly by. Maybe I’ll just try to wink and let them read into it what they like or mouth some gibberish that will keep me topical for years as family members puzzle over what I was trying to say. (If I didn’t love my children I might expire with the words, “The treasure is buried beneath the… ” so that I could go to my grave cheered by the thought of them digging holes for the rest of their lives.)

  Sean’s voice makes me sad too, not so much because of what’s happening to me but because of what will happen to him when I’m no longer there. Growing old will be the one phase of his life where he won’t be able to call me and say, “Christ, Dad, you won’t believe what happened to me today! You’ve been through this shit before, how the hell did you manage it?”

  “So how’s it going, Dad?” His voice was softer than usual and I wondered if something had happened.

  “Fine, just fine. What’s up with you?”

  “Same old shit. You know, I was just thinking… ”

  “Yes?”

  “Well, remember when I was a kid, maybe six or seven, and I used to say how much I wished that we were kids at the same time?”

  I remembered, and looked down at the little face with a sprinkling of freckles across the ridge of his nose; the face that was always looking up at me when I visited and saying, “Watch me Dad watch me look!”

  “I wish you were in your fifties now,” he said.

  “How the hell do you think I feel?”

  “What I mean is, I was just thinking how nice it would be if we could both go away for a few days, go fishing in Alaska or something. Drink some beers, talk. We never did go fishing.”

  “I hate fishing.” He laughed.

  “You know, Dad, the older I get the more I feel like I understand you, or least some of the things you must of been going through.”

  “You poor bastard.”

  “It must of been awful when you and Mom divorced, watching me and Kelly crying and begging you not to leave after each visit.”

  “It’s still awful,” I said.

  “Did you guys ever think of sticking it out for our sake? I’m not saying you should have, I’m just wondering if you thought about it.”

  “That’s all any parent thinks until they feel as though they are going to burst inside. You ask yourself, ‘I’d happily lay down my life for my children, so why can’t I just keep the family together for their sake, for a few more years?’ But one morning you wake up and you realize that there is not enough air to keep the family alive, that if you don’t leave you’ll all suffocate. But that doesn’t make you feel any less guilty. It just pushes you out the door.”

  We were both silent and I was thinking of something to say when he said, “I think a lot about your experiences in the war and I wanted you to know that you’ve always been kind of a hero for me, even when I was so angry at you for divorcing Mom.”

  “A survivor. I’m definitely a survivor, though my skills are being a little taxed these days.”

  “How’s your health?”

  “It’s okay.”

  “You sure?”

  “Sure.”

  Pause.


  “I wish you had visited more when I was young.”

  “So do I. I think I missed more than you did.”

  “When I was a kid I couldn’t believe you and Mom were no longer together, and now I can’t believe you were ever husband and wife.”

  “Neither can I,” I said, adding quickly, “though I loved her.”

  “Dad, Sally and I are in marriage counseling.”

  “I see.”

  “Things have been pretty rough. Now that the kids are away and it’s just the two of us, well, it seems too quiet.”

  “It’s worth the work, Sean.”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  “You okay? You want to talk about it?”

  “I’m okay. I’m late for the office but I just wanted to call you. I’m sorry I don’t call more.”

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  “All right then, I’ll talk to you soon.”

  “Good-bye.”

  After I hung up I went back to my room and sat at the desk that Martin and I share. After a few minutes I pulled out my stationery and began a series of letters to Sean and Kelly to be opened when they turned sixty and seventy and eighty. It took a month to finish them but when I was done I decided to write one more letter to each of them, to be opened when they were eighty-one and a half years old, if they made it that far. I wanted to see what it felt like to address my children not as a spokesman of the impenetrable past but as though we were a couple of old farts sitting right next to each other, say on a bench overlooking the ocean or by a fire, and we were just sitting and gabbing and catching up after all these years, all of us the exact same age.

  I’m just sorry I won’t be there to see their faces when they open the letters.

  “DANIEL?”

  I pull myself to the top of the hole but the machine guns are still firing so I sink down and load my gun and stare at the torso at the bottom of the pit.

  God the screaming is awful.

  And my shoulder hurts.

  Am I the last one alive? No, I hear voices behind me. How far am I from our line? I’ll wait until dark, then crawl back. But if the Germans counterattack? I’ll play dead. Can I do that? I don’t know that I can. Should I be on my stomach to protect myself? But if they are going to bayonet me I won’t see it coming.

  I hear Daniel.

  Yes, I am sure it is Daniel. Dirt rains down on me. Someone’s throwing hand grenades. My shoulder’s bleeding.

  “Daniel!”

  I know it’s you Christ where are you? I crawl back to the top of the hole and listen and peer out between clumps of dirt and I see hundreds of figures through the stinging smoke running and squirming on the ground and quivering in the entanglements.

  “Daniel?”

  Oh shit Daniel what are you doing out there come back.

  “Daniel?”

  Dear God is that you in the wire? No please it can’t be. Is that you Daniel? Is that you in the wire?

  I REMEMBER Daniel twisting in the wire.

  TODAY FOR a few minutes I couldn’t find my room. It was just after lunch and I wanted to retrieve a book from my bed stand, but I didn’t know which way to go.

  “Now what’s that expression all about?” said a woman’s voice. It was Sarah, my Sarah. “You heading outside, Patrick? Beautiful day, isn’t it?” I stood still, one hand on the shiny steel railing that runs along the length of the corridor. Could it be Erica?

  “Yes, I’m heading outside.” I saw sunlight and headed toward it. Left foot right foot left foot right foot careful with the cane. Sarah? Sarah my jaw feels numb and I’m lost. Sarah?

  SCOTTY WESLEY, a nineteen-year-old chicken farmer from Arkansas, lasted in no-man’s-land for forty-eight hours. Or at least that’s how long we heard him. But I hear there’s a German down the line who hung on for four days before a shell silenced him.

  THIS AFTERNOON I watched Sarah sitting outside during her break. She was drinking coffee and reading the newspaper but then I saw her put the paper down and pull out an envelope from her sweater pocket and read one of my letters over again. I went back to my room and closed the door and put the soundtrack to Camelot into my tape player and turned the music up loud.

  DANIEL STOPPED crying just after eleven p.m. I hope his eyes were closed.

  I GOT A new photo of Katy this morning. She’s wearing pigtails and a little blue dress and patent leather shoes and she smiles on the verge of a laugh. I sit in the corner of my room and stare at the photo, which I cup gently in my hands. What is it about the photo of a great-granddaughter that makes an old man in a nursing home break apart?

  It is everything. I head back outside to my bench, walking faster than usual.

  IF, ALL TOLD, eighteen million people died in World War I, how many broken hearts is that? How many individually crushed, aching, shattered hearts? A multiple of three? Four?

  How many simply stopped?

  I HATE YOU God.

  KATY?

  DANIEL’S BODY remained in the wire for three days until it disappeared during a bombardment. We took the German line that afternoon and I looked for Daniel but all I could find were pieces of clothing and leather and belt buckles and helmets and boots and metal and paper and bone all blended together in utter filthy anonymity.

  Your letters Daniel, what about your letters? I don’t even know Julia’s last name.

  A KID FROM New Hampshire died the cleanest death I ever saw. Just after a barrage we found him curled up near the latrine like he was sound asleep. We yelled his name and shook him and rolled him over looking for wounds but there was nothing, not a scratch. So we checked his breathing and his pulse and opened his mouth and ripped off his shirt looking for what was wrong and he was already going cold.

  “What the hell happened to him?”

  “Damn heart attack?”

  “Beats me.”

  “You sure he’s dead?”

  “Can’t be gas.”

  “Stroke?”

  “That’s no damn heart attack that’s a shell concussion.”

  “Shell concussion?”

  “Yeah, just from the blast. Seen it at Château-Thierry.”

  “The air knocks you dead?”

  “Sucks the air right out of you.”

  “Shit.”

  “Never seen nothing like it.”

  “Here, you take his legs.”

  THE WHISTLE shrieks. I’m up and over the top running. So much noise and fear. Then a sudden blow to my leg. I look down. Blood’s coming fast from my thigh. A bullet? Shrapnel? I step once, then stumble. I rise and step again, then fall to the ground. Again I struggle to my feet, but they give way. My pants are soaked. I turn my head sideways and see figures running past. I push up to my hands and knees, crawl forward, then collapse again. So tired. Something knocks my helmet off. Then a sharp pain in my right arm. I’m up again, on my knees. Which way? To the right? Too much confusion. A figure runs past, knocking me over. I try to rise again but cannot.

  THE GUNS SHOOK my hospital bed that morning right up until eleven a.m. on November 11, 1918, when the Western Front finally went completely mute, as though someone had ripped the vocal cords from an angry beast. A doctor stood in the center of the room and called out the minutes. We laid in our beds and listened, knowing that somehow the world was about to change. Next to me a badly wounded young blond boy with the letters GP (German Prisoner) painted with silver nitrate across his cheek mumbled and struggled to raise his head.

  I’m not sure that any of us lying there really believed that the guns would actually cease. Can four years of violent momentum be stopped cold? I couldn’t believe that war was so containable, that you could blow a whistle and stop the whole thing like a football game. Was bravery at 10:59 a.m. really just common murder at 11:01 a.m.?

  My thigh throbbed with pain but it wasn’t that bad, not as bad as for the ones hidden behind the white curtain on the far side of the room, which is where men were placed to die. I was certain that the man on my right was ne
xt. His lungs were destroyed by gas and all they could do was put zinc ointment on his blisters and castor oil on his eyes and tell him lies. I tried to talk to him but he couldn’t hear; everything was drowned out by his own fight for air. I felt particularly sad for those who couldn’t hear well through their pain and bandages and fevers, because the change from war to peace was certain to be such an audible thing.

  At 10:45 a.m. the guns increased, escalating toward a cataclysmic grand finale. They were our guns mostly, and I wondered whose idea it was to lob a few more shells before time was called. Or was the point to contrast the noise of the barrage with the sudden, breathtaking silence of peace when the larks finally reasserted themselves? But how long would it take the farthest shells to land? Technically, wouldn’t a shell fired at eleven a.m. shatter the peace?

  But most of all I wondered how many men died that morning, and I thought how much worse that would be than dying at any other time during the previous four years, especially if you were lying behind the white curtain when everything went still.

  I WISH YOU could hear this, Daniel. The silence is so enormous.

  On the Fourth Army front, at two minutes to eleven, a machine gun, about 200 yards from the leading British troops, fired off a complete belt without a pause. A single machine-gunner was then seen to stand up beside his weapon, take off his helmet, bow, and turning about walk slowly to the rear.

  —Herbert Essame, British Army.

  GOOD-BYE, DANIEL.

  SIX WEEKS AFTER I returned from France I took a train to San Francisco to find Julia. The train was full of soldiers and I listened carefully to the stories they told their girlfriends and mothers and fathers. The ones who hadn’t fought told tremendous tales of battle while the ones who had were at a loss for words. I kept to myself and alternated between gazing at the landscapes rolling by and reading one of several books I had packed.