No Man's Land #5

Unintended Exits.

The batteries welcomed our return. The shelling sounded different. Heavier. Every explosion shook the hill we climbed like a Titan’s footsteps, tore gluttonous handfuls from the earth, lifting them high into the air. The spectre of Big Bertha’s devastation loomed large, my mind flooding with the memories of bodies mangled beyond recognition.

As I caught sight of the trench, the fear that haunted my steps leaned closer still, its breath as cold as winter’s iron. Yet this time, panic did not follow. In its place came a strained, sinking calm, clear enough to allow me time for a single thought.

I will die tonight.

By all logic, it should’ve sent me after the Frenchmen. But instead, my feet led me forward. A hand lay palm up, reaching out from the beyond. The arm it was connected to ended just below the elbow. I rushed on, into the corpse-filled trench below. Unseeing eyes watched my approach with horror and surprise. Strewn across the section, some were given a half-hearted burial when the explosion collapsed part of the section. Out of some forty men, only a handful were left standing and manning the line.

Among them, Ribière.

He bent over the sandbags with a grim expression, working the bolt of his rifle like a man possessed. We rushed forward, unshouldering the instruments we were taught to master, and began our murderous serenade.

It wasn’t long before the first men began to fall beneath my fire. It didn’t take them long to reciprocate; as I reloaded, the soldier to my right dropped his rifle and wheeled back from the line, gargling. I glanced over long enough to see him stumbling around, trying to close the hole in his throat, his lips and chin smeared with red. Our eyes locked a sliver of an instant and I shrank away from the desperation in his eyes. The disbelief. I started firing blindly into the fray but couldn’t help hearing his fall.

I did not look. There was no point. The man was dead and it would not be long before I was the one falling back from the line, screaming in pain and clutching my belly while hated lead lay smoking in my gut. Already the line was breaking down. To the south, along the curve of the front line, I could see some gutted trenches, their positions shifted several meters back. The fighting had dissolved in brutal skirmishes, playing out beneath indiscriminate shelling. We were too slow in pushing them back, allowing them the foothold while the artillery inched closer, gauging the perfect placement to pound our defenses into the ground. Up until then, their successes had limited, the gunners experimenting with trajectories. Trepidation, while they waited for us to field our own equipment. Now, beneath the October skies, the field had turned into a quagmire, the enemy’s horse and cannon struggling in the Flemish mud. It had bought us time. Even so, it wouldn’t be long before they would take the risk. Their strength would thrust us from the high ground, and the guns would tear us apart as we ran, hoping for a chance to drown in the river.

I tried to drive these thoughts from me, letting the world shrink down to iron sights, moving from one target to another. Stopping blind hatred with hot lead. And when another one of ours screamed out in pain not long after, I did not flinch. I fought these men who sought to end my life, taking theirs instead. Somewhere close, someone muttered something in French. At first, I thought it was nonsense. But as my mind began to translate the words, I realized it was a bible verse. Corinthians 25:42.

“…autre l'éclat des étoiles; même une étoile diffère en éclat d'une autre étoile. Ainsi en est-il de la résurrection des morts. Le corps est semé corruptible; il ressuscite incorruptible; il est semé méprisable, il ressuscite glorieux; il est semé…”

Listening to these words, my skin broke out in gooseflesh. They seemed to ring out above the bursting shells, above the gunfire and the screams. I wanted to shout to stop but I couldn’t. My heart swelled, a sweet effervescence that glued my tongue to the roof of my mouth.

I blinked, surprised at the tears in my eyes.

From the section next to ours, the machine gun sprang to life, ripping through the words and the oncoming Germans alike. As it doled out death in merciless bursts, I shook my head. Almost grateful, I bent back over my rifle, suddenly desperate to pull the trigger. But every target I settled on the machine gun found first. Men shuffled and danced in a fine red mist, torn apart as they stood. Frustrated, I fired twice on one of its helpless victims, unsure if I hit him before he fell back with his face turned to ground meat.

Another, I thought. Give me another.

The rapid fire rolled to a stop, the belt spent or jammed. The words continued, another verse I could not place, and then the next ones came rushing up the incline. An eagerness that matched our own. They ran close together as they picked their way across the sodden ground, past what was left of their comrades.

Stupid.

I ran back the bolt as fast as I could. There was no need to take my time. The rifle kicked; the muzzle flashed. My tongue pushed a bitter taste against my teeth as I brought my punishment down upon them. For coming here. For what they sought to steal from us. For what they’d already stolen from me. Again and again I fired, not simply seeking to kill, but to obliterate.

I was not the only one aiming for the huddled group struggling through the shallow water, even though there were others speeding across the muck now, closing the distance on the right. Our eyes lingered on them, helpless and weak. Bodies snapped this way and that, held aloft by our bullets. A cruel bit of butchery that ended only after a shot struck a grenade, and the twisted heap of bodies blew apart in a cloud of ragged meat. And I knew that if I looked around, I would see the same expression on every face spread across our trench. The confusion of a man who has just woken up from a bad dream, the memory of which has crumbled like rotten paper, leaving behind nothing but rank sweat and an amorphous terror.

Yet even then, I think we understood the necessities of our existence here on some unconscious level and listened to its imperative. In that regard, Collaert is wrong to imply that we are the sane ones, if only because we are still around to share our stories. But the line exacts a price. Every time we join it, we empty ourselves out. What remains is something less than human, base and cruel. Able to do all the things no man should ever even have to contemplate. It has no room for words and sentiment; it lives for the furious struggle of survival. And every time it relinquishes control, it takes away a part of us, until there’s nothing left but a stranger. A monster. A hollow husk that refuses to lie down between its fellow dead. I felt it, even before Ribière, and sometimes it makes me wonder if what happened is perhaps not his fault at all, but all of ours.

Collaert and the others are right that he was a difficult man to get along with, even amid the chaos and confusion of those final desperate days, when the line began to crumble around us, and sections became isolated islands in a swamp choked with mud and corpses. He was the one muttering bible verses under his breath as he fired at our enemies. And whenever he sensed a wavering resolve, he would bellow out furious speeches about our glorious victory and the divine rights of the motherland. Failing to retain, it seemed, that he shared his trench with Belgians, not French.

Although the Germans sensed our weakness, there were still brief moments of respite, both sides reeling from the carnage they had managed. During these interludes we smoked, brought in ammunition, and repaired what we could. Our trench had held out, in no small part because of the machine gun in the next section. But even so, we had lost a fair number of men. Among them, the Walloon with whom Ribière had quarreled. There had been a number of Flemish reinforcements sent our way—Collaert was among them. The influx of men was puzzling after so many difficult days, but there was no time to dwell on it.

It's during these brief moments of rest that I came to know a bit about Marcel Ribière. What he told me was precious little, but enough to see that he was not a man who indulged in the luxuries of friends. A devout man, he only ever spoke at length about his faith, scripture, or the war. What he shared about himself, he shared in short and clipped answers, his eyes always returning to the pages of his Bible—a leatherbound copy with gilded edges. He was not discourteous; simply not interested in aimless conversation. Even so, I managed to learn that he was a watchmaker from Lyon, where he had a shop (“It does reasonably well, and the prices are fair”), and that he was married with three children: two boys and a girl. I could see him, hunched over a gutted pocket watch, replacing the parts with infinite care. Every spring and gear a function, every piece a perfect mechanism.

The men didn’t like him. His cold and rigid personality, coupled with his constant talk about faith and the glory of the war got on our nerves. Most of us were raised Catholic but his recitations, delivered among the bodies, grated over frayed nerves and poked something deep inside that snarled in response. And I was not the only one. Halfway through a verse from Revelations, another Walloon rose to his feet and yelled at him to shut up, shut up, shut up. When he drew in a breath to say more, his lower jaw disappeared in a spray of blood and bone—another lucky shot from the krauts. As he fell back against the trench wall, his tongue dangling like a monstrous tail, the guns started up again and I stood to meet the enemy’s violence, grateful.

But his piety was causing problems in other ways as well. Verheyen, the Flemish soldier I met just down the hill, was the first to start looting the corpses. I didn’t much care for him and his constant self-pitying complaining. Nor did I like his practices. But there was a small step between claiming ammunition and checking pockets for other valuables. Especially with all of us starving and hard up for tobacco. Ribière accused us of stealing; of disrespecting the sacrifice of our fallen brothers by rifling through their belongings, which he felt should go to the families.

Verheyen confronted Ribière, asked him if he was aware, at all, of the circumstances we were in. Ribière smirked and waved a hand around.

“All of this is temporary, monsieur. Vous âme—your soul—is eternal. You should take care it will burn in torment until the end of days.”

It took five of us to wrestle Verheyen’s revolver from his grip.

Perhaps it would’ve been better had we let the situation play out, but we couldn’t risk it. The French drifted in and out of our trenches as the battle raged. God only knew how they would react if they witnessed the coldblooded murder of a countryman. We would almost certainly be reported, and while the officer we came across had forgotten about us by now, he would remember Ribière’s name when he read it. Court-martial would follow for all present, along with all the logical consequences.

A tenuous peace prevailed but I felt sure the situation would lead to disaster before long. All of us were exhausted and starved, and the Germans, smelling blood, no longer relented. To the north, the line was bowing inward, ready to break. In the field, we could see Belgian regiments struggling to push back, their sections not much more than lengths of duckboards and heaps of sandbags dumped in the mud. Some were assisted by field cannons, their wheels half-submerged in the yellow puddles. Under these circumstances, there was no room for Ribière’s quotes from the book of Revelations.

We were living it.

What added to our rising panic was the constant shifting of regiments to the north. Some felt sure the King was making preparations for a retreat and that we would be sacrificed. We pushed back on these speculations, pointing out there was no retreat possible—not unless they wanted us to ford the Yser with heavy artillery. But despite our argument, I felt the same hot fear cinching tight. There was a charge in the air, something expectant. It spread across the front line like a sickness.

The only one who seemed unbothered by it was Ribière, of course. He moved through this nightmare with a calm that was unnerving, ending each rest with a quiet prayer, kneeling in the muck with his hands clasped before him. Before the war, I had been a faithful servant of God, attending services three times a week. Even then, I still prayed. Yet what Ribière did was obscene, imploring God’s protection kneeling between the dead. I did not condone Verheyen’s actions but sometimes I caught myself wishing the next engagement would make an end to the situation before someone would take matters in their own hands.

I did not expect to see my wish granted. But the next time the German batteries started up again, I knew it would be trouble. The first shells fell too close by half, shaking the ground beneath our feet. The machine gun stuttered, our cue to rise. I was half up when a shell exploded with a deafening roar to our left, a ball of flame rising, wreathed in crumbling earth.

When the debris came down, the machine gun lay on its side, at the edge of the crater—a small miracle. Its barrel was still smoking, now pointing down our trench. Behind it, flames lapped at the air. The men yelled at one another, a few clambering over. I shouted for them to stay put but it was too late. The first man got three bullets in the side. The second one managed to slide back down behind cover.

“We need to get that gun,” Collaert hissed.

“Go on,” another said. “It’s right there.”

“Just stay put,” Verheyen said. “We’ll get it later.”

“There might not be a later.” This was Collaert again.

“Christ, what—” Verheyen began again, when his words were cut off by the sound of a gunshot. The bullet buried itself in the duckboard a few meters down the trench.

In a panic, we looked around, trying to locate the shooter. But there was nothing. Another series of explosions shook the hill, and we did our useless ducking act as clumps of dirt rained down on us.

Verheyen began to scream, clasping his leg in front of him. Blood oozed between his fingers.

Shrapnel? I thought, but then one of the men yelled: “There! Look!”

He was pointing up the hill to where the machine gun lay. I didn’t understand, until I heard another sharp report. I watched the belt spasm, just before another bullet splatted in the mud at our feet. The heat from the fire was causing the bullets to explode.

“We need to—” Collaert said as another shot rang out. Verheyen screamed again, the tip of his boot ripped open.

“Son of a bitch!”

“I will do it,” Ribière said, and before anyone had a chance to react, he duckwalked up the trench, past me and Collaert.

“Just—Just push it into the crater,” Collaert said. “Goddam it.”

“Do not use the Lord’s name in vain,” Ribière yelled, crouching in the small corner between the sections, just as another bullet whizzed by.

Shouting went up from the men. Collaert yelled at him to do his job and be quick about it.

Ribière pointed at him. “I will not—”

That was as far as he got before the world exploded.

Far as I can tell, the round hit the trench at the far end of our section. Otherwise, we would’ve been killed along with the others. As it was, the force of the blast threw us up and over.

Which was our salvation.

The second shell hit close behind, finishing the work the first one had started. Dazed, I saw a few of the others gaining their feet. Beyond, I spied ragged lines of Germans, looking at us from the edge of the shallow water. They were holding back, afraid to get caught by friendly fire. But as we got up, they started shouldering their weapons, hoping to finish the job. I wasn’t even sure I was still in one piece and too afraid to look. Collaert sat up, shaking his head and I began to pull at him, urging him to hurry up. Together we started struggling up the scored hill, trailing German rifle fire.

Once we reached the relative safety of our trenches, I collapsed. I couldn’t belief my own luck. None of us could. A few breathless chuckles made way for a laden silence, as the knowledge of what happened asserted itself.

My eyes crept over the gathered. So many gone.

Including Ribière. Faced with his absence I lowered my gaze, ashamed of the dark thoughts I’d harbored. I said a silent prayer for him, said I would take back my ill wishes if I could.

I should’ve learned to leave well enough alone.