Remember Ben Clayton (32 page)

“It’s so lovely,” Maureen said, and then looked at Arthur like she felt bad about saying it. “But I suppose there’s nothing lovely about a battlefield.”

“I remember looking out at Reims from up here,” Arthur said. “But I knew we were about to get in the fight and I was pretty scared by then, I guess, not really noticing much. By the time we got to the top of this ridge the marines had already taken it, and while we were going up we kept passing them going down. You could see it in their eyes that they’d had a tough time. There were a lot of trenches up in here. They’re mostly filled in now, but those Germans were dug in tight and those marines had a time getting them out.”

“And that little village there,” Mr. Gilheaney said, pointing off to the north a mile or two. “That’s Saint-Étienne?”

“Yes sir, it is. That’s where Ben and me were headed. We hadn’t been told that yet, but we could guess it. The Germans were making a stand there and it was pretty clear somebody had to kick them out.”

“And what was your mood at that prospect?”

“We were just tired mostly. I guess a part of me wanted to get in there and do what they’d sent us over here to do. But I was scared too.”

“And Ben?”

“Maybe he was scared too but he didn’t show it any. He was pretty calm in his mind. That’s why I wanted to be around him. He made me feel like I could get through whatever was coming.”

They kept walking along the road, down the slope on the far side of Blanc Mont and on toward the plain that led to Saint-Étienne. Mr. Gilheaney strode out ahead again.

“Your dad doesn’t look like he ever gets tired,” Arthur told Maureen.

“No, I’m afraid he’s inexhaustible.”

She smiled at him and he nodded his head but didn’t smile back. He knew that trying to grin with that prosthesis in his mouth would give him the look of a snarling dog and maybe worse.

“How do you feel coming back here?” she asked him.

“I don’t feel that much. It’s a whole lot different now than it was then. This stretch here, we came through at night. It was dark and we couldn’t see anything. We had these guides who were supposed to know the way but they kept getting lost, so every so often they’d call out ‘About-face’ and sure enough we had to walk back the way we come. It was poor planning if you ask me but I guess that sort of thing just happens in a war and there’s no point to complain about it.”

It was true it had been dark that night and he wouldn’t have recognized the ground from walking across it now. But he could still remember exactly how it had felt to be walking toward Saint-Étienne, the whole company anxious and silent and exhausted, the captain and the top kick cursing out the useless guides in a whisper. He remembered the taste of the canned salmon he had eaten for dinner still in his mouth, not enough water to wash it away. He remembered the big blister growing on the ball of his foot, and that worried him more than anything, the idea that he would be crippled by it and left behind. There were German patrols out and he knew that at any minute the company could walk in front of a machine-gun nest or that one of the long-range shells vaulting overhead could come down right on top of them. He had walked behind Ben, keeping his eye on the back of his friend’s neck, trying to copy the steadiness of his step, the calmness he had told Mr. Gilheaney about. Every once in a while Ben would look back and smile at him, like the two of them were in on a joke together. Arthur was all right as long as he was in step behind Ben, as long as the two of them were pretending this was all just a big adventure and not a nightmare that was drawing them closer and closer into itself.

Arthur was all right until they ran into that damn Indian from Company E. After that, everything changed and Arthur felt alone in the night.

THIRTY

A
bout right here was the jump-off line,” Arthur told them. They had walked north for a half hour from the top of Blanc Mont. Now they stood facing the village of Saint-Étienne-á-Arnes, several hundred yards away across an open field. The ground was mostly level, the big craters filled in by Arthur and his colleagues. But the field remained untilled and unplanted, still scarred and bare.

Gil brought out his sketchbook as Maureen took aim at the desolation in front of them with her Kodak. He sketched quickly, the big wooded hill to the right, the long, barren approach to the village, the scattered stone buildings visible beneath bare winter trees whose spreading branches had been sheared off in a lopsided manner by the shelling of a year and a half ago. He wasn’t sure why he was sketching all this, what purpose it could possibly serve in the execution of the Clayton statue if he decided to resume work on it. It was only curiosity leading him on at this point. From the beginning he had been vexed by some missing understanding in his portrait of Ben Clayton, and he was intrigued by the idea that this hidden something could be grasped and given life in his statue.

“Better watch your step,” Arthur said as Gil put back his sketchbook and the three of them began to walk toward the village. “We got most of the shells out but some of them were buried deep and might have worked their way up to the top. And there could be some wire and rebar and such too.”

As they strolled along at a casual pace, Arthur fell silent. This was the killing zone, Gil realized, and he could detect this same solemn awareness in his daughter’s face. She stopped taking snapshots and hung the camera by its strap over her shoulder, just walking forward with a respectful stride. Gil had the odd feeling he had just become a kind of proxy for Lamar Clayton, walking across a stretch of ground on the other side of the ocean that the old rancher would never see, could never bear to see.

Gil and Maureen waited for Arthur to speak. As they waited they drew closer to the village. They could make out towering gravestones behind the gray rock of the distant cemetery wall, the shattered steeple of the village church off to the left.

“I expect you want to know what it was like that morning,” Arthur said, coming to a stop about halfway to the village.

“We do,” Maureen answered. “We’d be grateful if you told us.”

“Well, it wasn’t too bad at first. They had what you call a rolling barrage in front of us, and we were supposed to be walking behind that. But we got kind of a late start and nobody seemed to know what was going on and by the time we jumped off that barrage didn’t do us much good. Right about here was where all hell broke loose. There were machine gunners up on that hill and behind that cemetery wall, and in that steeple in the church. Pretty much everywhere, it seemed like. They didn’t open up till we got here. That’s where the wire was, where a lot of boys got hit. Ben and I got through somehow and we made it to about right over there. Twenty yards, I’d guess.”

Arthur walked to the spot with deliberate strides, as if he was confirming his estimate of the distance.

“There was a machine-gun nest over there,” he said, pointing off to the left. “They had us pinned down here pretty bad. But we were in a shell hole and as long as we kept our heads down they couldn’t get us, so I was happy right where I was. Ben wasn’t, though. He didn’t even say a word to me about it, he just took off to go after that machine gun.”

“And you stayed here?”

“No sir, I went with him. I didn’t want to be left behind here by myself. I wanted to be with Ben.”

The ground today looked nothing like it did that October day, when there had been a gray, rainy sky to begin with, and then the shells erupting all around them, shrieking metal and soil and sugar beets flying everywhere, the dirt clods pattering down on his helmet. Arthur remembered how winded he had been, how he couldn’t get a good breath because his nose was plugged up with mud and he was afraid to open his mouth because he didn’t know whether there was gas or not. He remembered how in the middle of all that terror he had still been irritated by blisters on his feet, by the entrenching tool digging into his groin.

He had followed Ben to the next shell hole, the bullets from the German Maxim guns swarming all around them. Even now, it seemed impossible to Arthur that they were not hit. But neither of them was, not then. They dropped into the hole beside four men from another company they didn’t know. One of them had lost his rifle. Another had a Browning but he didn’t seem like he was planning to use it. He just sat there crouched over it like he was trying to protect it from the dirt.

“We didn’t have any trench mortars to take out that machine-gun nest,” Arthur told the Gilheaneys as he stared at the place where the emplacement had been, a gentle mound of earth now. “Just rifles and grenades. There was a French tank wandering around over here to the left, and we tried to wave it over to help us out, but it never saw us.”

“So you decided to take out that machine gun yourselves?” Gil asked.

“I didn’t decide anything. Ben did.”

He told them about the rest of the fight, just setting it out in a matter-of-fact way. Talking about it made the events of that day seem weirdly normal: this happened, then that happened. But at the time the day seemed to be something completely unrelated to the whole rest of his life. It hadn’t even seemed to be him who was living through it. It was somebody with no memories or thoughts, somebody with an empty mind and a body that was just a throbbing mass of fear.

They were lying in the shell hole with their heads down, listening to the puttering of the machine gun thirty yards away. The gunner knew they were there and he kept the dirt flying at the rim of the crater.

Arthur didn’t see how there was anything they could do except stay where they were, but that wasn’t what Ben thought. He turned and yelled at the soldier with the Browning, told him and his loader to get ready and cover for him because he was going after the machine gun. Arthur remembered how hard his face had looked, how hard and sharp and old all of a sudden. Ben didn’t care about anything anymore and Arthur knew it. After what he’d learned from that Indian he would just as soon get himself killed as not, and the rest of them with him. Arthur resented it, the way he was suddenly barking orders at everybody. Ben wasn’t his friend anymore, he didn’t care about anything other than killing the men in that machine-gun nest.

“All right, I’m going!” was all he said. Arthur and the others opened up in the direction of the machine gun and Ben scrambled up over the rim of the crater. Arthur was sure Ben would be cut down before he went a yard but he got far enough to throw a mills bomb into the grass-covered slit from which the barrel of the machine gun was pointing. Before the Maxim could open up again he threw another grenade and then he was charging toward the gun with his bayonet. Arthur had just put another clip into his rifle. He climbed out of the shell hole and started shooting and the other men followed behind him. Two of the Germans ran out of the nest and before Arthur could fire, the soldier with the Browning caught them both in a single burst. Another German came screaming at Ben with his bayonet but he lost his footing in the mud and went down backwards and the sound of his knee popping out was loud enough that Arthur could hear it even above the noise of the battle.

Another machine gun opened up then from the hill to their right and cut down the Browning team beside him. Arthur dove into the scrape behind the machine-gun nest and sliced open his nose on the boot of a dead German. Ben was still fighting with the other Boche gunner twenty feet away, the two of them grunting and yelping as they tried to stick each other with their bayonets. The German was still on the ground with his leg splayed out to the side but even lying there like that he wouldn’t quit. When Ben finally managed to drive in his bayonet, the man let out a gasping astonished wheeze.

Ben scrambled into the scrape next to Arthur. His hands were shaking with what he’d done but there was still that look in his eyes that said he didn’t care and wasn’t finished.

“We’ve got to get that Browning,” he said to Arthur. He was looking behind him at where the two men had been shot down. They were both on their faces, perfectly parallel with their heads pointing in the same direction and the automatic rifle lying in front of them like they were priests and it was something they’d laid down to worship. Arthur didn’t know where the other man had gone.

“We can’t go out there, we’ll—”

But Ben was already gone. He grabbed the Browning and threw it back to Arthur and then he pulled off the dead ammo bearer’s webbing and bandoliers. Arthur gave him what cover he could, shooting in the direction of the hill where the machine-gun fire was coming from. He couldn’t believe it when Ben made it back into the scrape again.

“You remember how to do this?” he asked Arthur, handing him the ammunition. Arthur nodded. The Browning was a brand-new weapon and they’d had a class on it at Camp Bowie. Mostly what Arthur remembered was how the rifle shot so fast it could hammer you to the ground with each recoil.

He loaded the magazines while the machine-gun fire from the hill kept them pinned down. The support and reserve troops were coming up now. Some of them were attacking the positions on the hill and others filtered their way forward, scrambling for cover along with Arthur and Ben fifty yards in front of Saint-Étienne’s cemetery wall. There were three or four machine guns in that cemetery and another up in the steeple and lots of tied-in trenches where the Germans were going to make a stand.

Half a dozen men jumped into the hole with them. One of them was a lieutenant. He glanced at the Browning and told Ben and Arthur to cover him and the other men while they made a grenade assault on the closest machine gun. The men slung their rifles and pulled the pins on their grenades and they ran out of the hole. It was hard for Arthur to see what was going on from his place in the shell hole but it looked like at least a couple of them had made it through.

“Let’s go!” Ben yelled. He leapt to his feet and ran forward firing from the hip with the Browning and strafing the top of the wall. Masonry dust, mixed with spraying arterial blood, hovered like a pink cloud. Now there was a surge of other doughboys rising up from cover to join them as they climbed over the wall and into the cemetery. Ben emptied the last magazine and threw the Browning on the ground. The red-hot barrel bounced up against Arthur’s shin but he was so busy and scared that the deep burn he felt was only just another streak of sensation, another one of the thousands of things that were happening to him or around him all at once. He had unslung his rifle by then and was face-to-face with a German soldier who had just crawled out of the trench. The German looked old and he thrust uncertainly toward Arthur with his bayonet. Arthur thrust back, and then the two of them looked at each other like they were trying to decide whose turn it was now, until finally the German figured out he could just drop his rifle and spin around and run away.

THEY WERE STANDING
in the cemetery now. Maureen and Mr. Gilheaney were walking among the marble vaults and tombstones, reading the names of the dead villagers of Saint-Étienne. Half of the monuments were broken and still lying in pieces, their inscriptions as often as not chipped away by shrapnel or machine-gun rounds.

“The fighting appears to have been pretty heavy here,” the sculptor remarked.

“It appeared that way at the time too,” Arthur said. He didn’t know how peevish that sounded until the words came out. He hadn’t meant to feel any anger toward Mr. Gilheaney and Maureen for putting him in the position of tourist guide. But maybe he was just angry with himself, for playing that role, for enjoying it maybe. It was probably his own fault because he couldn’t seem to feel any more than a tourist guide would feel in the first place. Here’s where Ben went after that machine gun, here’s where we charged the cemetery with that Browning. He had led them across the open ground, telling them everything he could remember about the assault against Saint-Étienne, but the more he talked about it the less real it began to seem. You couldn’t talk about it without leaving most of it out. He didn’t know how to tell anybody what it had felt like to be face-to-face with that German soldier, the unexpected anger in the man’s face as he came running toward Arthur with that bayonet. The man had come at him with a hateful grin, the long roots of his teeth exposed in his shriveled gums. It had felt peculiar to be the specific target of this stranger’s rage. Why, out of all the people in the world, had this old man chosen Arthur Fry to hate and to kill? But there must have been something of the same murdering spirit in Arthur’s face as well, or else why would the man have dropped his rifle like that and run off?

He wasn’t the only one who had done so. So many Americans were swarming into the cemetery by then that half of the defenders were throwing up their hands in surrender and shouting
“Kamerade!”
and the other half were trampling each other as they ran away through the interconnecting trenches like cattle in a chute.

“And Ben?” Mr. Gilheaney said. “Where did it happen?”

“Right about here. We took the cemetery but the fighting wasn’t over. The Germans retreated to across that stream over there, and there were some still shooting at us from the town. There was a machine gun up in the steeple of that church and Ben decided to go after that, and that’s when he got hit.”

Arthur gestured toward the village church, rising from the center of the town west of the cemetery. It was still in ruins, the steeple mostly shot away now and shell holes all through the roof. He noticed that some of the villagers were standing there at the edge of town looking toward them in the cemetery, wondering what they were doing there.

“He died instantly?”

“Yes sir, it was pretty quick.”

It had been so quick his mind was still trying to catch up to it, almost two years later. He told Mr. Gilheaney that Ben “decided” to go after the gun in the steeple, but whatever deciding Ben had done had happened before that. He had determined something in his mind back before they even jumped off. Whether he lived or died in this fight hadn’t concerned him at all.