by Amanda Dykes
“Orders are orders. Chaplains don’t go into battle.”
I turned to go and could feel the complete crushing of the first show of courage this man had mustered. The very first—and offered from the very depths of him, into the greatest heights of courage.
“But . . .” I stopped, hand clasped around my wrist behind my back, not turning back to look at him fully.
“Seems this is a place where unlikely things happen. If I were to see a chaplain go over the top, I’d be privileged to live to tell about it.”
I walked away, letting his stunned silence sink into himself. Maybe I’d see him up there. Maybe I wouldn’t. But one thing was certain: the rollicking Briton who’d come to Harvard to tunnel out of a war had emerged into its heart as a man of courage and substance.
These fires of war, they were something to be reckoned with.
I skirted a group of men telling jokes and knew their laughter for what it was: a desperate play for some sense of normalcy. An act of collective defiance against the curtain of despair that would take them in their clutches so easily, if they did not fight it by whatever means they had.
That curtain swished its way into the shadows, following me as I turned down a small side trench. I could feel its heaviness overtake me, almost hear it kick up the dust around me.
But it would not take me. And not because I would ignore it. But because I would face it.
There in a dugout so small, tucked out of sight and notice of the others, I sat. Drew myself into the earth and prayed to its maker.
I prayed for that girl of the woods. For her baby.
I prayed for my own girl—or rather, thanked God in heaven for the sweetness of her in my life. Like honey poured upon mud-caked hands had been Amelia’s love in my life. She had deserved better than me . . . and I thanked God that she had had better in Him. That He held her now. And He held her mother, too.
Then I prayed no more, for the words liquefied. They seeped through the walls of my being, until I began to shake with trying to hold them back. But then—a crack. The same one that opened all those years ago on that Panama cliff—it widened. Quaking waves rolling up from that cavern, across the miles, through the war-torn soil of France, and out of me. Silent, choking my breath into shaking sobs so deep they tried, and failed, to find voice.
If not for the cover of shells falling, machine guns firing, earth shaking already, I surely would have set these trenches to trembling. My own fingers trembled, fisted tight and pressed to my eyes. Roots, exposed when some soldier dug this hole for unearthly respite, clung to clumps of soil and rained them down on me as if they, too, cried.
It was wretched. It was right. This mingling of mud and tears, a man no better than clay, laid bare before One, and only One.
I prayed. Not words, but this continued strain of wracking sobs—and somehow knew that God in heaven was here, too. Here in the mud. Hearing my prayer-beyond-words. Wretched man that I am. So many faces swam before me, faces of soldiers I’d lost, should have done better by. And that silent sob turned into a heaving shudder . . . a relinquishing of myself. As if someone had reached inside my ribs cracking under the weight of these memories, these souls whose blood was on my hands . . . all the way back to Amelia. As if that invisible hand had taken a key and opened a rusted-over lock—and let every bit of it out in a rushing current. At the back of that lineup, the bottom of that river, there was one more face.
Mine.
I could see it as I must look. Lines from years, lines from unspoken lives that lived within me because they lived no longer. These ghosts that followed me. I saw them sometimes in my dreams, always silent, eyes wide as if asking me, What would have happened? If I’d lived? Innocent eyes, like children.
And in my wordless prayer, I saw this wordless answer. My own face—the last straggler from the shadows—was the one whose eyes were filled with torment. These others . . . they had lived. They had died. They—I hoped, and knew for some of them to be true—dwelled in unending comfort and safety now.
It was I who was still on the run. I who was the living skeleton, a shell of a man who could bark orders and orchestrate battle but couldn’t bear to face up to the battle inside his own self.
Come.
That was the word. I didn’t hear it so much as feel it pulling me, a desperate invitation born in blood and bought with life. I knew what the holy scriptures said, I knew how many of my men lived, carried by hands that knew the same battle as I, but had given His own life instead of watching others fall all around Him.
Come. As if I, too, could know such a way. I could be one of the ones who reached into that nail-scarred grip and took the life offered.
Come.
“Captain Truett!”
Two callings. One of heaven, one from Sergeant Steerforth, right here on earth.
Two realms colliding, there in the clash of my own breath.
“Here,” I said. “I’m here.” Here I am.
The words slammed me. What was it that Schulman had said? That word . . . Hineni. “It means you are listening. You are ready. You will live into what comes next, with everything you have.”
I was ready. Ready to be seen—scars, sins, and all. To be known by the God who perhaps knew me all along and used that airship crashing into my train car to bust down my walls and show me.
I pulled my compass out, the old familiar companion. Gave it a shine on my battle-stained jacket, the only thing I had to offer. And when I opened it to see that sorry old familiar broken needle, my breath caught in those ragged lungs. There was that old needle, bent and tired . . . but it buoyed back and forth, homing in on its purpose: to point the way.
I thought of the night before, our camp. The chaplain uttering his prayers. Petticrew pining after Paris. And the journalist—the good-for-nothing journalist I’d tried and failed to be rid of—studying us all. Seeing me. Watching that compass too close.
A smile tugged at my mouth.
Maybe he was good for something, after all.
For the first time, I was going into battle not to run. Not to drown out the hounding pursuit of my own mistakes. But to fight for life.
41
Matthew
History repeats itself. I was here, with all the men, living yet buried in these trenches. Waiting for the whistle that would send us over the top and make us heroes or cowards, let us live or render us corpses.
The wedding bands twisted. I did not have one, but for the invisible one that cinched my heart and bolstered my soul. Collective breath was held. Sweethearts’ pictures were kissed—and though I did not have a picture, I had a love engraved deep onto my being.
Twenty-three days since Saint-Mihiel. Eighteen days since arriving at Argonne and hearing that song. Ten days since we left with the Angel . . . and she, through waking nights of shared survival, embedded herself irrevocably in my thoughts, in my heart. My bride of only four days.
So short a time, back home. So long an eternity, here. Enough to change everything, for always.
“Fix bayonets!” Captain Truett yelled. The metal-domino sound all up and down this planked subterranean corridor click-click-clicked, metal registering readiness where our hands did not. I followed the sound with my eyes and saw them: scores of men, capped in identical metal helmets and muted green uniforms. Every one identical, and every one cloaking a vastly unique universe inside him. I wished we could see them—the memories, the hopes, the hearts they held within their own. Surely the sheer volume of past and future, hope and possibility, would explode this entire war.
But we could not see them.
I closed my eyes and envisioned the finish line. It was not the sifted-earth soil of Maplehurst. It was not the enemy trench of Saint-Mihiel. This time . . . it was the forest. Mira’s forest. Branches twining, ground soft, magic held in its dark. And now . . . enemy.
I pressed my eyes closed harder. This was where I was headed. To take ground for our country and for France. To drive back the enemy. To end—as t
he murmurs from headquarters and trench-hovels alike were saying—this war to end all wars.
I released my breath.
The whistle blew.
And the mad scramble over the top began. Our voices drove us on with feigned courage or animal instinct or sheer determination, one great collective battle cry. Ushering one another inward and onward, onward and upward, across this gouged land.
It was strange. In all the hollering and battle cry, the skirting of craters and plunging into clouds of midday night, brown dust . . . it was Celia’s voice I heard. Asking me, as she did when she was only ten, if I thought men would ever visit the moon.
We’d lain on our backs in a haystack watching a moon so bright it hurt to look at, though it had no light source of its own. Only reflection of a sun invisible to us in that moment.
“No,” I’d told her. “No man can do that.”
No man.
No-man’s-land.
This place between trenches, unclaimed and fought for with blood and life. I was here, ready to cross that impossible moon.
God above, give us light.
The journey across was familiar, and I hated it for being so. The same as Saint-Mihiel, the same as a thousand other battles fought by a million other men before me. All to take a few inches of ground, perhaps then to lose that same ground the next day or the next week. Lines in territories, shifting like tides. But we pressed on. And on, and on, until we reached it. The edge of the forest, standing there like a fortress we did not know if we could trust.
We slowed, me and the others, slamming into the ground when machine gun fire erupted, creeping forward when it fell silent.
And then we were in.
The hush was heavy. Our movements slow, knowing that in this place, where shell fire behind us turned to distant echoes of thunder and stillness before us belied the danger that lurked here, our mission was simple: Push the Germans back. Win the war.
And the execution of that was impossibly complicated. Every hill, tree, creek, reach of overgrowth, nest of undergrowth—all fodder for poets who came before us centuries ago to write of the peace of such a place—every corner of this forest could hold our enemy, and our end. It shivered up my spine and hollowed me out, causing me to shift my eyes in every direction, constantly. A haunted forest, in tree-bark flesh. It did the same to every one of us.
On we went. Up rises. Into thickets. Dodging a spray of bullets, having our hearts ripped from us when those bullets hit a fellow soldier not two inches from us. Why him and not me? It was a question that would keep, and haunt. For now, we left that question to swirl over the ground as we tromped forward.
We spread out among trees, following the officers’ gestures to stay low and keep quiet. Captain Truett was near me, kept looking back at me. Was I doing something wrong?
A sound erupted beside me—Chester, sucking breath through his teeth and wincing like he’d just been pierced through. A look at his foot told me he had. He’d stepped on something, dark liquid already seeping through his boot. His foot jerked and knocked something down the hill behind him, ricocheting with a sickening noise that may as well have been a giant arrow in the sky pointing out our whereabouts to any who might be listening.
As he tried to silence himself from his body’s reaction to the searing pain, we all heard the telltale zip-click that informed us he was too late.
The Boche had heard.
“Potato masher!” Captain Truett hissed. A grenade. Where it would come from and where it would land and who it would erase from this earth, we would learn in a matter of five seconds.
A quick look around and most men took cover—but two did not. Chester, limping and trying to find shelter, and the captain, eyes alert as a deer’s, rifle at the ready. To our left was a wide tree. I pulled Chester to it, into its overhanging branches, which reached low to the ground. Dashed back out and silently nodded the captain over. We had three seconds left if we were lucky. Maybe two . . . one . . .
He tore himself from his position and dove to join us, none too soon.
Searing explosion. Billowing cloud, dust swallowing us. Bark, twigs, bits of tree and earth. Deafening sound that set off silence, punched through with the pounding of my own pulse.
I looked at Chester and Truett, and they looked at me and each other. Each of us scanning for one thing: wounds. Shrapnel. Of which there was none.
A blessing and a curse . . . for that meant one thing.
“Concussion grenade,” I said, hearing my own voice stifled and swallowed up by the ringing that pinged around my head.
“What’s that mean?” Chester shouted.
“It means they’re coming,” Captain Truett said, silencing him. “They’ve stunned us, and now they’ll want to finish us off with bayonets. Stay put. Stay low.”
But Chester’s foot was gushing, still. “Captain,” I said, tipping my head at the wound.
His mouth was grim. He’d seen worse, and so had I, but we both knew if the kid lost too much blood, he’d be a goner. Unconscious, unable to move, and a sitting duck for the Germans.
As it was, we were barely shrouded by the veil of leaves and branches. I looked around, inched as quietly as I could around the tree to see if there was a better place—somewhere I could fix him up with what little I had in my pack.
It was much the same. Branches blessedly low, but good for little more than a curtain in the way of protection. A favorite hideout for children, under different circumstances. But not a fortress by any means.
And then my hand, sliding along blindly as I scanned the woods through shaking leaves, gripped something. An edge. I followed it, discovering a wide gap in the trunk, hollowed out and weathered to smoothness and complete darkness.
It was familiar. As if I had gripped this very place in my hands before, though there was no way I could have.
“The tree was like a house,” I could hear Mira’s low, captivating voice, rising and falling thoughtfully as she described her tree. “I called it ‘le cœur,’ for the way the hidden inside was like a heart. A safe place. All the life and branches around it protecting a perfect hideaway, and all the life of the tree coming from inside.”
Surely this couldn’t be it. Of all the trees in all the woods, we wouldn’t now find Mira’s hideaway. But whether or not it was hers, one thing was true: it was hollow and dark. Safer than where Chester was now.
I inched back around and managed, with Captain Truett’s help, to pull him in. All the while, a nagging thought swam just beneath the surface of my still-clouded mind. Where were they? The Germans? If that had been us—if we’d been the ones to launch a stun grenade, we would’ve seized the moment while the enemy was still stunned to rush in and take them while we could.
But a glance outside our green-leafed fortress showed not a soul in sight. It should have been a freeing realization . . . but it was just wrong enough that a sickening heaviness rolled in instead, along with a distant roll of thunder and the hanging scent of coming rain. Something else was afoot.
In the dark, I ripped into my supplies and strained to see. I got Chester’s boot off, got him wrapped, and waited.
Captain Truett was gone. He’d known it, too—I’d seen it in the hyper-concentrated look on his face, the way just a slip of madness threatened to surface in the not knowing.
But he was a professional soldier. Nothing rattled him into incapacity. He was what I aimed to be, as long as I was here. And he slipped back out wordlessly, motioning for me to hold position.
I don’t know how long he was gone. Long enough for the thunder to grow louder, closer, and for rain to begin. Long enough that Chester bled through the thin excuse for a bandage—and long enough for me to realize his heaviness, laying against my shoulder, was suddenly speaking on his behalf.
The pit in my stomach twisted. I jostled my shoulder a little, hoping he’d stir. Nothing. I nudged him harder, and his head only rolled back. His name burned silent in my lungs, held where it couldn’t be spoken, lest it gi
ve us away—and I leaned in to hear a verdict from his own lungs.
A beat with no breath. And another. But there—so slight I almost missed it—he breathed. He lived.
And then, as if they’d heard it, too, came the voices.
“Jetzt! Loslassen!” I didn’t know the words. But I knew the tone of a command, of something critical on the edge of that voice.
The zip-click of another grenade. Another explosion somewhere beyond our tree.
Weapon readied, I strained to hear, praying the captain would come.
But no footsteps fell. In their place, a silent visitor came instead. Green like the leaves and yellow like the sun and sinister in its combination, creeping along the ground like a predator on the prowl.
Gas. Phosgene. Chlorine. Mustard. Tear. My brain rattled off the types of gas that had been drilled into us back at Plattsburg, and it didn’t do a lick of good. I couldn’t remember which was which. Which needed the masks, which didn’t; which smelled of moldy hay and which had no smell; which would kill us right away, which would take its time.
So my hands sprang into action to make up for my lagging brain. I reached for my mask and buckled it on, fumbling with the straps. Reached for Chester’s to do the same—and found none.
No mask.
The green-yellow monster crept closer, entering our wall of leaves. It’d be in here soon, filling up this tree cavern and filling up his lungs, taking what little life he had left.
I thought to when he fell. The tumbling object down the hill. His mask.
The realization knocked into me.
I looked at him. Fifteen years old. That worn picture sticking out of his jacket; two parents, two sisters, kid brother, and Chester grinning like his muscles weren’t worn out waiting for the camera’s shutter to release. The picture was torn at the corner, patched up with a label from one of the tin cans of apples.
