A pistol shot cracked the stillness. Up and down the line, the shriek of whistles. German soldiers, with a roar between rage and terror, poured out from the trenches by the thousands. Up the ladders, heads down against the rain, they were met by the clap and staccato of rifle and machine-gun fire. The air filled with a mist of blood and the sound of bullets piercing bodies.
Christian Schmidt leaned against the side of a ladder and waited his turn.
At twenty-one stone in weight and a good head taller than the men pressed around him, he was a hard target to miss. His sergeant held him back, a hand on his shoulder. You didn’t waste a soldier like Christian Schmidt, sending him up in the first wave.
In the nearly two hundred and forty days that he had spent in the trenches at the front, he’d been shot and gassed and filled with more splinters of shrapnel than he could count.
There was a time when he’d been scared to death to climb the ladder, to face the guns. But he didn’t think about it much anymore. It wasn’t that he felt he was indestructible, it was just that after being tired and hungry and terrified for so long, he didn’t really care anymore. He’d given up on winning the war. He’d abandoned hope of returning to his farm, or ever seeing his mother and sisters again. The only thing he believed in anymore was the bullet that would make the noise stop.
His sergeant tapped him on the shoulder. He started up the ladder.
• • •
Adi knew it was a crazy thing to do—for so many reasons. But she’d missed her chance a dozen times. The thought of being covered in blood and muck for another day was more than she could stand.
Transferring wounded to the hospital a few days ago with Gershom, she’d seen light reflecting off the water beneath a bombed-out bridge. It was not too far to the west, and it was well back from no-man’s-land.
Three o’clock in the morning now. After five endless days, the shelling had finally moved down the line toward the southeast. Everyone had their head down, huddled in their niches. It was the best chance she was going to get.
One of the things she’d noticed since she’d joined the society of men (among so many things) was that there appeared to be two kinds of men. One did their business in groups, laughing and talking. (Adi tried her best to never see this.) And the other, despite the impossible circumstances, still insisted on at least a modicum of privacy. Adi let everyone know that she was of the latter type. There was a certain measure of mockery to be contended with, but they had grown accustomed to her slipping away at odd hours.
The water under the bridge turned out to be more ditch than stream, stagnant but not yet unwholesome. The earth was torn up as it was everywhere, but not too badly.
With a last look around, she peeled off her tunic and unwound the soiled cloth that bound her breasts. She’d start with the top half.
Lifting the watch from around her neck, it occurred to her that this was the first time she’d had the damned thing off since she’d recovered it from Halick on the cliffside. She looked at it for a moment and then hung it on a branch close at hand.
Falling, falling, head spinning, she swooned. Then she was kneeling again beside the water.
Adi steadied herself, a hand to her forehead. What was this thing doing to her? She shook her head. There was no time to speculate.
Reaching down, she pulled out a bit of soap tucked into the top of her boot and began splashing water on her face. It was nippy in the dark May morning, but she didn’t care. Oh, to be clean!
And then . . . a pistol shot echoed across no-man’s-land. The shriek of whistles. The roar of a thousand German soldiers.
Grabbing her things, she reached for the watch. If only she could leave the thing hanging there. Snatching the chain off the branch, she dropped it back around her neck and ran.
• • •
It was forty-three years since there had last been a war between the European powers: France versus Germany, in the so-called Franco-Prussian War. Since then, little had altered in the way the military thought about battles, but everything had changed with the machines with which they fought.
The expectations of glorious cavalry charges, the sweep of armies with banners flying and bugles blaring, had, within weeks of the start of the war, crashed to earth. It made no difference how brave the cavalry officer was; he and a hundred like him were but a moment’s work for the machine guns.
Artillery and tanks, airplanes, flame throwers, poison gas. Europe had perfected these devices of eradication against the rebellious subjects of their African and Asian colonies, never following the logic to the end, that one day the machines would be turned upon the people who made them.
So this war, with its perfectly matched armies, was to be fought from holes in the ground. Men in trenches faced other men in trenches, across a no-man’s-land of shell craters and razor wire.
• • •
In the past four months, Adi had seen the infirmary move a half-dozen times.
There was the root cellar that Adi had started in, a bombed-out chateau, a brothel, a barn. They stayed a fortnight or only a few hours before the shelling got too precise, or the enemy pushed through the line again.
But a week ago, their luck ran out. After the German artillery took down their little schoolhouse, there was nowhere else to go but into the ground, underneath a crooked slab of reinforced concrete, all that was left of one of the old abandoned French fortresses. This was the first time since she’d been with Doc that they’d had to be in the trenches. He hated it. “Mud is no place to be practicing medicine!” he yelled.
• • •
Adi piled in through the low doorway of the infirmary and ran smack into Gershom. The tray of surgical instruments he was carrying crashed to the floor.
“He’s here,” yelled Gershom.
Doc stuck his head out of the back room and glared at Adi, just as the clangor of machine guns, perched a meter above their heads, began. Clumps of dirt fell from the low ceiling.
“Where the hell have you been, Goux?”
Adi gestured vaguely over her shoulder.
Doc pointed his chin at the forceps and scalpels in the dirt. “Clean that up and clear those tables off!” He smacked Adi on the helmet with his hand. “And don’t go off like that, without telling anyone.”
A fidgety young captain leaned his head into the room. “Ready, Doc?”
“Ready as we’re going to be.”
Gathering up the instruments from the ground, Adi dumped them together onto a shelf with tin plates and playing cards. She took a deep breath to steady herself. The air was thick with the smell of cordite and sweat.
• • •
Ten meters before they got to the enemy trenches, the man running alongside Christian Schmidt stopped as if he’d hit a wall.
Without a sound he dropped to his knees and tumbled down into the fetid water at the bottom of a shell crater. A dark stain bloomed on the front of his tunic. Schmidt jumped in after. The other man with him did likewise.
Of the dozen or so soldiers in the group that had climbed up the ladder with Schmidt twenty minutes earlier, there was only this one left, a boy, his mouth slack, his eyes already like a dead man’s. Schmidt didn’t know him.
They were lying in the shell crater, catching their breath, when the grenade splashed into the water at their feet. Schmidt dropped his rifle and rolled over to the puddle. He fished about in the black water, pulled out the prize, and flung the grenade over his head, back to where it came from.
Taking out his pistol, he listened for the explosion above, then motioned for the boy to follow him.
Before the echo faded, they’d closed the distance and jumped feet-first into the trench. There were three dead soldiers and several more wounded, holding their hands to their heads, deafened by the blast. Schmidt fired at them and pushed the boy along the trench to his left. They almost made it around the zig-zag corner before the bullets caught Schmidt.
• • •
The wounded started pouring into the infirmary as soon as the counterattack began. Every table in the low-ceilinged room was filled as fast as Gershom and his bearers, Lebeau and Cloutain, could get them there.
“Someone hold this man down!” yelled Doc, attempting to stop the blood gushing from the neck of a flailing soldier. Adi dropped a roll of bandage and threw herself across the man’s legs.
Over her shoulder, from the passageway, she heard guttural shouts in German. Spinning around, she spotted Lebeau staggering backward into the room, clutching his stomach, followed by a young German soldier, his bayonet slick black.
Behind them was a huge bear of a man, a smoking pistol in his hand, blood covering most of his face. Ducking his head through the low doorway, the German stood up inside, smashing one of the lanterns with his helmet. It crashed to the floor, splattering kerosene fire onto his boots. He looked around the room, confounded at finding himself in an infirmary. For a long second, everyone stopped dead.
Then the stretcher bearer, Cloutain, fired his pistol at the young German soldier. He missed, shooting out another lantern instead. The big man, his boots ablaze, took Cloutain down with a blow to his head.
Adi rolled off the table as the young soldier lurched forward with his bayonet. She grabbed up a metal tray, scattering instruments, and deflected the blade. Brandishing the tray, she stumbled forward and slammed the young man hard underneath the jaw, dropping him to the ground.
The only remaining lamp swung wildly in the middle of the ceiling, as shadows leapt across the room.
Adi spun around to see Doc against the wall, fighting to wrestle the pistol away from the giant. She threw herself at the huge man, pummeling him with tiny fists. He reached around and swatted her to the floor.
The soldier’s gun was an inch from Doc’s head. Adi snatched up a scalpel from the ground, got up on her knees—and drove it, with both fists, into the man’s thigh.
Bellowing, the German smashed Doc against the wall, dropping him, unconscious, to the ground. Reaching over, he seized Adi by the scruff of the neck and banged her head onto the hard dirt floor.
• • •
Christian Schmidt stood up, the room spinning around him. With thick fingers, he tried to clear away the blood pooling in his eyes, but it just kept dripping.
Remembering the gun, heavy in his hand, he held it up, examining it in the pale light. All the dirt caked into its crevices, it was a wonder it still worked. Cocking it, he leaned down and leveled it at the back of Adi’s skull.
• • •
In the corner of the room, a long shadow from the lantern flickered and appeared to solidify on the wall, like iron filings on a magnet.
Her forehead pressed to the ground, Adi drifted back into a sort of wakefulness. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the bottom of a dark coat and black leather boots stepping forward from the darkness. She heard leather soles grinding bits of broken glass—and then, more immediate, the sound of a pistol cock. Adi’s heart nearly stopped at the sharp report of a gun going off. Blood splattered across her face. The gunshot reverberated in the little room, as the big German soldier collapsed to the floor next to her, the tiniest wisp of smoke drifting out from a neat hole in his temple.
“Give me your hand.”
Dazed and streaked with blood, Adi allowed Coal to help her stand. He leaned her up against the wall, a palm to her chest to steady her. Picking up a rag from the table he dabbed it to his tongue and began to wipe the blood from her face.
Drifting in a little sphere of calm, Adi’s eyes opened and looked into Coal’s. Tiny flecks of gold floated in the gray of his iris.
There was shouting from outside. Doc groaned and began to stir in the corner.
Adi, her head clearing, looked once more at Coal, then pushed him aside to get to Doc.
She helped him sit up as Gershom and several other soldiers dashed into the infirmary.
When Adi looked over again, Coal, the bloody rag in hand, appeared to be stepping backward into a shadow.