Losing Julia (7 page)

“What?”

“That’s what they call us.”

“I don’t mind it.” I slid my thumbs under the straps of my pack, arched my shoulders and smiled.

Moments later I heard a low buzzing sound and looked up. An airplane appeared from the south, dropping low.

“It’s one of ours,” someone said.

As it skimmed the treetops the flier leaned over and dropped a small object, which fell quickly to the ground.

“What was that?”

“A messenger cylinder.”

“Maybe it’s from your mom,” said a voice up ahead. Laughter.

WE MARCHED
with little rest for three days, sometimes cutting through fields and woods to avoid the endless caravans that clogged the roads. Daniel and I spent much of the time talking, and after that he rarely left my side, especially at the front. We talked about our childhoods and our hopes for the future and he told me about his writings and about the war and what it did to people and how difficult it would be to ever explain to those back home. At the time I didn’t really understand what he meant.

“But won’t you feel proud for what you did?” I asked on the third day, as we were ordered to strip down to combat packs.

“Proud?”

“Yes. Back home men are dying to get shipped over. They’re afraid it’ll all be finished before they get here.” I pulled out my extra blanket and boots.

“No, I won’t feel proud.” When I looked at the solemn expression on his face I sensed for the first time that maybe the war wasn’t going to be quite what I’d expected.

As we wound around a low ridge lined with poplar trees I looked down at the stone skeleton of a small village. One corner of a church remained; the adjacent cemetery appeared untouched. I imagined a grand wedding party pouring out of the church and into a line of black carriages and smoke arising from the town bakery on a crisp winter day. From the ridge I heard, for the first time, faint thuds in the distance, like the low growl of a very angry animal.

“The guns, of course,” said a voice behind me. Those of us who were new tried very hard not to show any fear.

“Yes, quite a lot of them,” said another voice.

“How far do you suppose they are?”

“Maybe a couple dozen miles yet, I’d guess.”

“Sounds like a lot of guns to me.”

“Mostly French 75s and German 77s.”

“What about our guns?”

“We don’t have any guns.”

“We don’t?”

“Not many. We use a lot of French 75s.”

“They any good?”

“The best.”

“You know something about artillery?”

“A little.”

“You can hear them things all the way from Dover.”

“Where’s Dover?”

“In England. Across the Channel.”

“No shit?”

“No shit.”

“How far is that?”

“Far.”

“Must be a damn lot of guns.”

“Wait until we get closer.”

“Goddamn. Isn’t this gonna be something, huh boys?”

“You got that.”

“Time to have a talk with Fritz.”

“Yep. Time to talk to Fritz.”

“Fucking Huns.”

By late afternoon the faint pounding had become a thunderous beating of drums, as though in anticipation of some gruesome tribal ritual. At a bend in the road several men were gathered around a man lying on the ground next to a tree. Nearby, I caught just a glimpse of an Indian motorcycle on its side, its front tire rim bent.

“What happened to him?”

“He ate it.”

“Huh?”

“Took the turn too fast. They say he broke his neck.”

“Ever ride one of those things? Dangerous as all hell.”

“Looks fun to me.”

“Don’t ever be a dispatch rider.”

“Why not?”

“Because you’ll eat shit, that’s why. It’s the fucking suicide squad.”

We passed abandoned earthworks and broken wagons and huge piles of empty ration tins. Many trees were shattered, bent this way and that like cornstalks after the harvest. In an orchard on our left a battery of guns manned by the French was hidden beneath chicken wire covered with painted cloth and branches.

“My cousin’s at the artillery school at Fontainebleau,” said Jack Lawton, who eyed me suspiciously for a few days before deciding I was worthy of the squad, or might eventually be, if I wasn’t killed first. A tough-looking carpenter from Michigan, he befriended me one morning by pulling out a wad of letters from his pocket and asking in a hushed voice if I might read them to him. Tall and muscular with dark blue eyes and thick, curly black hair that carpeted not just his head but his arms and chest and legs as well, Lawton was the strongest man in the squad. He also had the quickest temper, which struck me as an unfortunate combination until I realized he was quite harmless—so long as you didn’t make fun of his mild lisp, which seemed to worsen when he was scared or horny (the latter condition arising with extreme frequency). Until I met him I never realized that someone so disarmingly dumb could be so pleasant. With his animallike instincts for danger and exceptional marksmanship—he could hit things the rest of us couldn’t even see—I began to think of him as the ideal soldier, complete with an infinite store of extraordinarily dirty jokes.

“Fuck the artillery,” said Vince Tometti, a hotel clerk from New Jersey. “What the hell do you think the German artillery is aimed at?” Tometti, who claimed to be nineteen, was the puniest-looking soldier I’d ever seen, with only a thin line of peach fuzz on his upper lip and the shoulders of a small woman. Fortunately, he also had one of the best singing voices on the line, which he used to redeem himself several times a week with a vast repertoire of Italian love songs. Most of them he dedicated to a girl back home named Teresa, whose picture he carried in his shirt pocket in a thin, black leather case, frequently removing it to study it and kiss it and show it to everyone he met. She was so pretty that we assumed he either stole the photograph or cropped out extensive deformities in her lower body.

I reached for my canteen and took a long drink.

“Easy,” said Daniel. “Only one refill per day.”

“No shit?” I felt my canteen. It seemed light.

Behind me a voice sang:

If the ocean were whiskey
And I were a duck,
I’d dive to the bottom
And never come up.

As we crossed a culvert I saw dead horses piled in a ditch, their bodies stiff and bloated. On the left side of the road old men and women and young children hurried past pulling mules and oxen and trundling large wheelbarrows teetering with burlap sacks of food and chicken coops and crates and folded featherbeds and furniture. Then a regiment of French poilus streamed past, their sky blue overcoats filthy with mud and their faces drawn and unshaven.

I couldn’t keep from staring at the passing faces, some completely void of expression while others were set in a sort of permanent wince; the look of someone just about to burst out crying or receive a blow. I wondered what made a person look like that. Most of the poilus stared at the ground as they walked, too tired to look up. Several had their arms in slings while others limped. I looked at the overcoat of one soldier and saw crimson stains all across the front. I wondered how they got there.

“Your turn,” shouted a poilu. His left hand was wrapped in bloody gauze.

“Turn back, it’s useless,” said another.

“La guerre est fini,”
shouted a tall, hollow-eyed soldier.

I caught a Frenchman’s eye. He nodded and slowed down.

“Là-bas, c’est terrible.”
He shook his head.

“I don’t speak French. Terrible, huh?”

“Les Allemands attaquent de tous côtés.”

“What’s that?”

“He says the Germans are attacking everywhere.”

“Oh.”

“Partout.”

“Yes, well, we’ll see about that,” said a voice behind me in a southern drawl.

“Damn right,” said another.

A distant whine grew louder and louder, howling through the sky.

“Take cover!”

We scattered into a ditch filled with horseshit.
BANG!
The air slapped my face and snapped against my eardrums.

Again, then again.

Jesus Christ.

Back on the road, marching. I stared at the bobbing olive-drab canvas pack in front of me; at the bayonet strapped on the left, the small shovel strapped vertically to the back of the pack and the rolled greatcoat tied across the top. I struggled to keep my eyes open.

How nice it would be to lie down, just for a few minutes. The thought of going into battle without sleep made me want to cry, big vulnerable tears of protest spilling down my cheeks. Since I was a child sleep deprivation has always made me feel grossly inadequate to the day’s demands, causing many weepy scenes in kindergarten, when I would simply collapse in great big puddles of frustration. But to fight? Hand-to-hand combat with knives and bayonets when I can barely put one leg before another?

I felt sick, sure that a terrible, irrevocable mistake had been made.

Farther up we passed a makeshift field hospital built in the partial ruins of a large church. Then a first aid station, where dozens of men lay in rows under blankets while others stumbled about bearing freshly bandaged wounds. That’s where I first heard the moaning, which seemed a pitiable reply to the roaring guns. From the sound of it the war was like a shouting match between men and machines. Only you could barely hear the men.

We stood at the side of the road as five Ford ambulances passed, men clinging to the running boards.

“Gas,” someone said. I looked and saw a row of men with their eyes blindfolded. They shuffled slowly to the rear, each man clinging to the shoulders of the man in front. We moved quietly to the side to let them pass.

“Look at them damn German sausages,” said someone ahead of me, pointing to the sky. I looked up at the horizon and saw two silver observation balloons hanging in the distance. Could they see us? A few men waved. “Over here, you bastards.”

At nine p.m. I entered a reserve trench, ate some hardtack and a can of corned beef—which made me thirsty—and curled up in the dirt, feeling the earth shudder and snarl as I withdrew into sleep.

“YOU UP
for a game of checkers?” It was the ever-flatulent Oscar Bellamy, who is constantly on the prowl for a partner. I was sitting in the lounge with an unopened book in my lap. Emily Dickinson’s poems.

“Sure, I’ll play you,” I said, regretting my offer immediately. Oscar smelled unusually bad.

“Great!” He unfolded the board he keeps in the back pouch of his wheelchair and set up the pieces. I began first.

“So, how long’ve you been here, Oscar?” I asked.

“Four years. Six months after my wife died I had a stroke. Small, but scared the hell out of me, you know? I went to live with my daughter and her family, but after I fell and broke my hip we decided I’d be better off here.”

“You miss being home?”

“Home’s not an option anymore,” he said, hopping his red checker over three of my black checkers. “Besides, I sort of like it here, what with the different levels of care. It’s not just a bunch of critical cases, know what I mean? And with all the dances, sing-alongs, guest speakers and field trips, what more could you want?”

“Beats me. It’s a wonder we don’t get any honeymooners.”

He ignored me, concentrating on his checkers. “After Rose died I couldn’t bear to be in the house by myself. She did all the cooking and homemaking. Jesus, I never realized how hard she worked, my poor Sweets. I just about starved on my own. You ever try cooking lasagna? You’ve got to be a structural engineer just to put the ingredients in the right order.” He skipped a king loudly across the board, scooping up my remaining two pieces. “Another game?”

“One more.”

“What about you?” he said, pausing to fiddle with the oxygen tube strapped beneath his nose. “You’ve been here about two years, right?”

“Yeah, after my bypass operation… ”

“How many bypasses?”

“Three.”

“Had two myself,” he said. “Wife dead?”

“No, we divorced many years ago.”

“How many years ago?”

“How many? Oh God, I don’t know. That was, let me see, 1932.”