The Death and Life of Zebulon Finch, Volume 1 (32 page)

XV.

B
Y NOVEMBER 10, 1918, THE
final night of World War I, when Armistice was but a formality for the morrow, the leathernecks huddled about Church as if he were holy fire. How else had they survived the past ten days of ferocious fighting? We Americans had taken the forest and commandeered the Sedan railway center, the heart from which Western Front German rail support flowed. Steal it and you steal Hun initiative, they said. Own it and you own the war, they said.

They had a knack for making objectives sound like a cinch, didn't they?

Instead, the Meuse-Argonne affair had been the whole war tidied into a synopsis: black rapids of artillery fire; poison gas so heavy you had to slop it aside like mud; grenades fat as rats plopping into peopled pits; the chugging of airplanes dipping into our world only to spit iron. Ridge after ridge after ridge was taken as easily as one takes a handful of beef from a living cow. (Not easily.) But the Hindenburg Line had shattered and Germans were everywhere, flapping white handkerchiefs and shouting,
“Kamerad! Kamerad!”

True to their word, the Third Battalion had shielded me. Whenever the skipper delegated me to a ticklish task, another runner, often Church, would intercept and trade me a low-risk objective like leading captured Jerrys back to HQ. My fellow runners trudged through
rain and mud the likes of which we'd never seen and they did it all for me. They died for me, too; I do not know how many. I was a novice to largesse and knew not how to refuse it.

The pup tents pitched atop the open bluffs and bustling with French and American generals said everything about Allied confidence. Goosed by the promise of peacetime promotions, these dignified, selfless leaders of men determined that their troops should run, shoot, and stab till the last second—and then, perhaps, one second more. This was how we of the Seventh became involved in a most unfavorable final assignment: traversing the river in order to rout one or two last machine gun nests.

One hundred Americans were to cross while a French regiment flanked us. We were told that the doughboys had improvised a bridge earlier that day under fire, but once the sun had set none of the runners could find it. As had become routine, I'd been safely stashed in a thicket, yet I could hear what the other runners, distracted by their noisome bodies, could not—namely, the hiss of river water against an obstruction. With each passing minute this knowledge brought me greater upset. This was my last chance to help those who'd so selflessly helped me.

I alighted toward the telltale sound and within ten minutes had isolated it. I whistled the signal and the runners converged, and before they could scold me for my involvement, they squinted into the fog and saw evidence of the bridge.

We spread out so as to guide the troops. By the time we brought up the rear, soldiers by the dozens were making their way across the river in single file, new Brownings slung across their backs. It was far from the silent crossing we wanted. From the murk came the splashes of boots into water, disbelieving mutters, and fearful curses.
I searched the hills of the opposite bank but fog concealed all.

Church gestured for me to return to my hiding place but I would not have it. I planted a boot upon the first plank only to realize that “bridge” was a generous assessment. The GIs had gathered whatever scraps of semi-floatable wood they could find and tied them together, so that each step sank beneath the surface the moment you put boot to it. The only way to remain afloat was to keep moving. A knee-high rope had been strung from bank to bank, reassurance that we were not wandering into an abyss.

Even this late in the war, the Germans were patient.

They waited until all hundred of us were in motion before opening fire.

Towering columns of black water jetted upward as mortar bombs drilled into the riverbed. No direct hit but the water swelled and men were thrown asunder, clinging to the guide rope, clutching planks too measly to support a man's full weight. Before the first scream, the deafening
TAC-TAC-TAC
of Maxims ripped through the night, chopping the fog into geometric shapes. White mist was striped with red blood. Hands, arms, legs, and scalps went skipping across the water, only to be gobbled by machine-gun piranhas.

Our queue mimicked the river's chaos. Men bunched and collided; the planks sank with the multiplied weight; adjacent sections of bridge were sucked down with them. I found myself sunk to my knees yet still searching for the next underwater step. It was no use and I splashed down into a clumsy dog-paddle. I threw aside my brand-new Browning in order to swim and so did dozens of others, and the river, already boiling with bullets, began to spark orange as those same bullets struck our discarded weapons.

Hands of drowning men grasped at my ankles but it was fruitless
because those clever Huns had lined the bottom of the river with barbed wire. I paddled through warm red water, slapping aside the algae of shredded flesh, before my foot found a solid step, then another. I was grateful until I realized that these steps were bodies, piled so high that they created a new, and frankly much improved, bridge.

The far river bank was in sight but the shallows blistered with thousands of rounds of gunfire. Each of us dove in a different direction. Some lived for but a second, dropping face-first into the purple mud, while others like me found ourselves pressed to an embankment embedded with body parts.

Between my legs rested a detached head. It did not seem unusual, so accustomed was I to seeing this particular face. It was Sten Ehrenström, the Professor, his body abolished, including those clog-trained Swedish feet of which he was so proud. That perfect tenured brain, however, was undamaged. If I had more time, swore I, I'd dig it out and slide it into my pouch, for it was an organ that deserved to outlast this war even if I did not.

Yelling—more yelling—but this was a single word repeated, so I unplugged my face from the mire and saw Americans pointing toward a ravine cut into the hill above us. In progress was a creeping advance led, no surprise, by Church, who crawled up the bank on his belly. The rest of us followed.

In the ditch we huddled like rodents, soaked and shaking, each shocked face a mirror of the next. Our limbs were raveled; it was difficult to tell which wounded part belonged to whom. I stilled myself, made a count. Five, ten, fifteen, twenty, twenty-five—that couldn't be right. Twenty-five men out of one hundred? All told, the Third Battalion had made out well. Church was peeking over the crest and at his side lay Jason Stavros, gasping for air. The last one into the ravine
had been none other than Piano, and he paid no attention to the bullets owning the air above us. Instead, he spread one of his wrinkled maps across his lap and began scribbling revisions.

“Boys, we gotta move,” said Church. “They'll drop a potato masher in here sooner or later. There's a hillside up apiece, a bit of ground we can put our backs to. So we're gonna hump through this gulch till we can't hump no more, and then we go topside and run like heck. Everybody got it?”

Grim nods from all around.

Piano chewed on his pencil eraser, made another edit.

Church crammed his helmet tight and wormed northward. The ravine, narrow to begin with, constricted until we had to turn sideways. By then we were being buried in dirt falling along with every shell impact. Church tried to lock eyes with each of us before jabbing upward with his rifle.

“Two hundred feet, soldiers! Let's go, let's go, let's go!”

He lifted himself over the top, letting rip with his best Marine yap. The rest of us poured from the ravine like ants, screaming to alleviate the fear and hurtling through a darkness lit only by yellow bursts of gunfire popping from the hills. I heard the dull slap of flesh being hit, the wet crack of bodies slammed to the dirt. Troops who'd made it from the river with guns intact returned fire in a crazed attempt to buy a few more seconds.

It was a bowl-shaped indent at the base of a steep rise and we collided with it at full speed. If all twenty-five of us had survived the charge we would not have fit, not even shoulder to shoulder, but that was not the case. We were five or six down, and a good deal more were asphyxiating with the shock of new injuries—fingers blasted off, a kneecap hanging by ligaments, a bullet hole straight through an ankle.

Even these sufferers dared not move, for we enjoyed a buffer no more than ten feet; beyond that, a waterfall of bullets poured down so near we could smell the hot gunpowder and the incineration of autumn leaves. Several gyrenes emptied ammunition into the forest behind us until their guns overheated and their palms glistened with burns.

“Where's the French?” cried Jason Stavros. “Where's our French flank?”

“Telephone!” shouted Church. “Telephone! Telephone!”

An egg-shaped gent began shouldering past troops to make his way to Church. A ripple of excitement spread man to man. Our signalman had survived? Was it possible that the telephone cable laid by this intrepid paladin remained intact? We craned our heads to watch as the signalman planted his telephone box in the mud, removed the spool, and gave the cable a tug.

It was taut and from our bellies ejected laughs of relief. But then the cable dislodged from whatever twig or stone or corpse had snagged it. I held up the frayed end to wallow in the tragic absurdity. After being unspooled across the entire river and up the bank, our lone connection to base had been severed by a single goddamned bullet. We were cut off and
la Boche
, to be sure, was inching closer.

Piano chose that moment to exit the ravine. It was not that we had forgotten about him but that we'd assumed he'd been killed. Instead, there he was, sauntering through the firestorm without a single bullet hitting home. He reached our hollow and took a seat without a word, too busy scratching at a map to notice our appalled disbelief.

Church turned to me.

“I gotta go back.”

The telephone cable slipped through my fingers.

“The fire is too heavy,” said I. “The bridge is out. You'll never make it.”

“It's these soldiers who won't make it. We don't get backup and medical in the next hour, we'll all be dead.”

“Wait. Please. Reinforcements will come.”

“Private, we're way off course. They won't find us before sunup. We don't have the ammo to last. Look, I'm the fastest runner. I've got the best shot of making it out.”

Grab his pistol, put it to his head? Conjure
la silenziosità,
paralyze him to the spot? There had to be some rash action I could take to keep my friend alive! But Church never hesitated; with a wag of his eyebrows he was crossing the laps of men all the way down the line, until he crouched at the westernmost edge of our hollow. We watched in awe as he calculated our coordinates, scribbled them into his runner's log, tightened the straps of his gear, and armed both of his guns. Satisfied, he lowered himself to his belly and gave us a thumbs-up.

The caution with which he crept confirmed the peril of our position. An inch. Two inches. Trying not to disrupt a single branch. We tracked his every move until he slithered beneath a fallen tree and became mystery. The Krauts, meanwhile, were ruthless with the Argonne—it wasn't, after all, their forest. Bullets continued to rain. We made caves of our helmets and backs and resigned ourselves to trusting the one man who'd never let us down.

“Psst. Finch.”

I cracked open an eye. In our huddle, Jason Stavros's helmet rested against my own. Our part-time florist had celebrated his birthday at Soissons with a tin cup of wine and was now all of twenty-one years.
His face was unrecognizable beneath a layer of dry white mud but those pale brown eyes were unmistakable.

“You want to hear a poem?”

Come up with six more unexpected words, I dare you.

“A poem,” said I.

He forced a laugh.

“In case Church doesn't make it. Poems are meant to be heard, right? I got one I been working on and I'm afraid if I don't tell it now, I won't . . .”

I was nodding, nodding, nodding. The war did awful things to everyone; one need only evaluate a human face from Monday to Tuesday to know that much. Jason Stavros, though, was the least corrupted of us all and that was worth perpetuating, if only for a few more minutes.

“Tell me,” begged I.

“It's not good or anything, I just—”

“Tell me.”

Jason Stavros learned that the pressure of public performance was not so unlike that of battle. He inhaled, exhaled, wiped his forehead, cleared his throat, and slitted his eyes so as to look into an unclaimed middle distance somewhere between our position and the last known location of Church. Genuine fright lent his recital a cutting poignancy he'd never again capture, not even if he went on to recite his work in the world's grimiest (and thereby most celebrated) book stores.

From shallow holes inside which none dare move

Here is one thing more we cannot prove:

How poppies beckoned us with dusky slander,

The sultry moss, silk bedgown clay, the oleander

Of weddings between men and their ghosts.

Thunder, rain: a seedling, let the doctors boast

How they birthed countries from thighs of blood,

And from them rebuilt a world.

But a ghost sometimes rolls over.

He shakes roots to show his displeasure.

What sways there is a tree, gnarled and tall

Over his grave. Is that enough? Is that all?

Will it be noticed when the smoke is not men

But industry, returned here again?

Hear me, down here, infinite in my mud;

Remember when what I died for was good.

He regripped his rifle to arm himself against my opinion.

“What do you think?”

What basis had I to judge literary merit besides a handful of overwrought ransom notes that had probably gotten me murdered?