WERE YOU BORN ON JUNE 6? Renounce it. Choose another date. I have heard June 5 is lovely; June 7, too, cannot be so bad. But the sixth day of June has been the passageway for too many souls, and to be born on that day is to clog the conduit between heaven and Earth, to risk being forced on the wrong path, the one to Hell.
The Germans, the Krauts, the Huns, the Heinie, le Boche, Fritz, Jerry—call them what you will—the entirety of their 237th Division had advanced upon us on June 4, four or five lines of them appearing like specters from the fog, spaced twenty-five yards apart and firing for hours until sand from ruptured sandbags scoured the skin beneath our uniforms, until we were half-buried in clay from the flexing trenches. We, the mud-crunchers of the Third Battalion, were crouched in a supply trench, removed from the action, which, I began to wonder, must be worse than being fired at, for all you had to go on was the quake of the entire planet.
At 1500 hours on June 5, the French Sixth Army general had sent us our mission: Hill 142, the highest spot in the Wood. At 2245 hours, Field Order Number One was issued. The Marines would attack between Hill 142 and the Champillon ravines to prevent the Huns from opening flanking fire against the French 167th Division. Confused, Reader? That, I am afraid, mirrors our own state. Only the juiciest meat of the order was tastable: we were to overwhelm the German position with hundreds of charging Americans, infiltrate their trenches, stick any living Huns with the points of our bayonets, and at all costs, take the goddamned hill.
On June 6, 0500 hours, we gathered in the frontline trench for our first true test. A wand of dawn blazed the horizon over the German stronghold. Look at us in the light. Painted boot-to-helmet with dirt, eyes blazing whiter than white. We were stripped to the basics—weapons, bandoliers, grenades, gas masks—and looked fragile without our packs. Someone remind us how had we ended up in rural France? Men whispered to crucifixes and fiddled with wedding bands, every follicle attuned to the sergeant atop the ladder peering through a periscope at what we could only imagine. We were a single suspended breath: inhale, inhale, inhale.
Even I, breathless creature, was lightheaded with fear.
The call went down the line, captain to captain.
“Fix bayonets!”
We did. They slotted in just fine. Sharp, too. We’d tested them on our own thumbs to our own horrors.
Footsteps—fast—hurtling down the line.
Our runner, that suicidal screwball, sprinted by, shouting two terrible words:
“TAKE COVER! TAKE COVER!”
And then the trees were obliterated. Great oak gods, black from rain, became white butterflies, a million of them trapped against the ugly brown sky before diving as shrapnel against our turned backs. Severed treetops suspended in midair before dropping with the sound of a giant broom swatting a giant rug. Into our noses shot the hot odor of burned powder and fresh dirt. The stink of nervous sweat leaked from the men like urine.
The sergeant turned, made curt hand signals. Smoke parted to reveal Major Horstmeier squatting on the aboveground turf like an ape, pendulating his arms toward the swirling silver fog while blowing the whistle clamped between his teeth.
“Over the top! Over the top, men! Over the top!”
Church was first, of course, his broad back the dreadnaught behind which we might advance. Here was the moment I’d envisioned in Xenion, Georgia—noble annihilation—and yet I could not move my legs. Regardless, I surged upward, pushed along by crazed soldiers, boots to the ladder, knees to the sandbags, elbows to the grass, belly to the dirt, and then I was crawling on my stomach as someone—who?—had instructed us.
No matter; this was it! The fabled no man’s land upon which thousands of troops from a dozen different nations had been pestled into dust. We took to our feet, against orders, but who could resist running when every second was spent as a target? We hurtled into unknown terrain so thick with smoke that I could see only the flash of wet boot heels from the soldier in front of me, the gleam of an oiled rifle stock from the soldier to the side of me, the fires from downed trees burning red through the coarse, woolen world.
Horstmeier’s whistle was still blowing.
The Marine Corps responded with the cry learned in training; it came natural even now.
“EEE-YAH-YIP!”
Bees flew past my ears. Even insects were fleeing the scene! No, idiot, not bees but bullets, melted down from excavated street pipes in German villages made destitute by four years of war, shaped in a Berlin foundry into slugs, shipped on trucks and horse-drawn wagons across the hills and mud of Europe, and for what purpose? To be shoved into a rifle and shot out at me, Zebulon Finch, Marine and Madman, sprinting blind through a pea soup of scorching smog. These bullets nicked at my extremities like a scalpel.
Perfect little pieces for the Revelation Almanac.
A sucking void of sound and pressure lifted me from my feet and dropped me down, still standing, yards away, followed by a deafening thump—Gød’s indifferent backhand shoving me from a blast zone. My brain punched against my skull and clods of clay dropped upon my shoulders, and then there were cries—First aid! First aid!—that no one listened to, because we were still running, still hooting our cry, still without a single visible checkpoint.
Flesh against my fingers. I grunted with instinctive rage, wrestled with a man for control of my rifle. But it was Peanut and he took a handful of my collar and shouted into my face. His gums were packed with moss, his tongue black with dirt.
“Bottleneck! Bottleneck! Bottleneck!”
He pointed a finger into the gloom and then began to search for an alternate path.
It made no sense to me. I shoved past the Italian and kept on until I began to make out the five-foot-tall barbed-wire bulwark separating us from Jerry. Our artillery had launched a torpedo to destroy this barricade but either it had failed or we soldiers were off the mark.
A gust of summer wind blew by with the same stink as my slaughterhouse in Salem, and for thirty terrible seconds I could see beyond the soot. Some brave gyrene had managed to cut a narrow path through the wire. The wire clippers, in fact, still hung suspended in the wire, as did the dead solider who had plied them. The bottleneck Peanut had warned me of was a single-file line of soldiers that might as well have been raw meat pushed into a grinder. A Maxim ripped them apart with ease: TAC-TAC-TAC! The leathernecks became leather, the doughboys dough.
Before the black fog rolled back I saw the blurry red glints of German bayonets flashing from a trench not fifty feet away. I dropped to my stomach and rolled to the left, through the mud of a shell crater, over a warm pile of human flesh, across a Hotchkiss rifle abandoned because its action bolt had been melted by fire. My roll was stopped by the body of a gyrene, a dead one, I assumed, until I made out the voice of Church. If there was a soldier still kicking, it had to be him.
He was lying flat and shouting into the face of a downed Marine. Bullets had torn through the soldier’s biceps, which now dangled in gray and red braids of uniform and flesh. Church had managed to extract a tourniquet from the soldier’s utility pouch, but the man’s writhing complicated its application. He cried out in pain; Church pressed a hand over his mouth and ducked. The dirt spat around us from a spray of bullets.
“It’s the Game, soldier!” shouted Church. “It’s fourth down and inches! You gotta hang tough, do it for the team, push it on through to the end zone!”
“I don’t—” came the casualty’s anguished response, “know shit—about your damn—football.”
The Italian accent was familiar. I propped myself on an elbow to get a look.
It was Peanut; I could be certain only because I’d encountered him mere minutes ago. His nose was gone—I could see the pink channels of his sinuses—but there was no mistaking the thick billows of hair popping from his chest and arms. Church ignored the sensational face wound in favor of the biceps, and for good reason: while Peanut’s cauterized nose shed ash, his biceps fountained blood.
“Lemme go.” The absence of a nose muffled him. “I gotta kill me some Kraut.”
Church set the tourniquet aside, reached into his front pouch, and removed two lemon drops. With his other hand he pried open Peanut’s clenched jaw and shoved in the candies.
“Suck on these, Peanut! Mmm, good, right? Sour as heck, huh?”
Peanut drove his head back against the dirt in a wild kind of nod.
Church patted his chest. “Good boy! Now hold still, all right?”
The end of the tourniquet passed through the buckle and wrapped around the biceps twice before Church cranked the wooden handle to tighten the pressure. Peanut sucked the candies with abandon; lemon-colored froth fizzed into the abscess of his sinuses. I looked away. No injury I’d witnessed under the Black Hand compared to this. How many others out here were in worse condition?
I gripped Church’s arm.
“There’s a bottleneck. We have to fall back!”
He gave me an incredulous stare.
“We fall back when the Skipper tells us to fall back.”
“How would we know? We can’t hear him!”
A man shrieked in agony off to our right.
“Merry Christmas!” Church glared at me. “You hear that well enough, Private?”
Steeling himself with an elongated inhale, he dug several more lemon drops from his pouch, clenched them inside a fist, and began crawling on his elbows in the direction of the cries. I launched myself the opposite direction, parallel to the German barricade, anything to separate myself from disconcerting displays of doomed heroism. The Maxims pursued me; plumes of dirt geysered at my heels like rawboned devils shooting up from an underworld.
I sprawled face-first into a patch of wheat ornamented by bright red poppies. Lead swept over me with such force that the chaff was severed from the wheat, the poppies from their stems, leaving the foliage with a military crewcut. While lying there, arms over my head, I heard the telltale EEE-YAH-YIP! of Marines flooding in behind me, searching for another path through the wire. Had I become their inadvertent leader?
They stormed past, half of them dropping from Hun fire to become black lumps beyond the curtains of yellow wheat. The other half, though, hurled themselves at the bastions of barbed wire and, from what I could see from my low vantage, some of them were making it through. The assault from the enemy trench became more erratic, as the Germans were forced to divide their fire at dozens of moving targets.
This was no way to go out. I lifted myself and skulked into the blasted farmland. There they were—Germans! Scattering in pale green costumes and bowl helmets, hurling grenades from behind trees, firing Lugers from the hip, and making aweless stands in the clear with submachine guns firing 450 rounds per minute. I jostled sideways behind the line of advancing Marines, many of them taking bullets that otherwise would have been mine.
Having dashed to the northern edge of the flank, I found myself alone in an orchard. I kicked through dank mulch that had recently been tree bark and took a sharp turn westward. There I collided with another soldier. Our rifles clacked together and we both fell to kneeling positions. I pushed my helmet up out of my eyes and the first thing I saw was a brass belt buckle imprinted with three words:
GOTT MIS UNS
It meant “Gød Is With Us,” or so I would later learn, a pretty good joke, seeing how the German crouched before me looked as abandoned by divinity as anyone in history. His rifle was leveled at my chest but his eyes were wide and frightened. He looked nothing like the Übermenschen spoken of by German agitprop; rather, he looked like the Hun equivalent of Jason Stavros—deerlike, barely of drinking age, and equipped with fingers accustomed not to his engine of death but to pen and paper.
A battlefield end, I told myself. Here it is, just as I wanted.
But the German delayed before doing me the favor.
Was it my face, young as his own, that stilled him?
I shall never know.
For thirty seconds he did not fire, and then his rifle exploded in his hands, a crack shot from a leatherneck coming in from my right. The German yipped in pain, tucked away bloody hands, and withdrew along a retreat path that put him directly into my line of fire. I aimed, an easy shot, but found that I, the same as him, could not pull my trigger. Do it! I scolded myself. You shot how many innocent men in Chicago?
The soldier dropped from sight into an enemy hole.
Marines overwhelmed my position; I took a seat lest I be tackled. Later I would hear that it was the Eighth Machine Gun Company, joining us at last, and with their additional firepower our column pushed the Huns with renewed gusto. Men roared by and I swear to you, Reader, I heard through the chaos the famous shout that would put Belleau Wood into the history books:
“Come on, you sons of bitches, you want to live forever?”
A funny question for me, when you think about it.
Inside the bedlam it was difficult to string together rational thoughts. How could I have let the dirty Heine live? Was I a traitor? A weakling? Or was there another, deeper reason? I thought of Church, his unflinching rescue of Peanut, his lemon drops of deliverance. Doubtless he was right here in the thick of it, saving Americans and taking down Huns. What right to be in these particular woods on this particular day had I, a grunt who could not claim a single German?
Church had been right.
I did not belong here.
I ran straight toward home base, heedless of the tongues of fire overhead and the mortars bashing holes to my left and right. Our trench coalesced from the gloom like a battleship. I shouldered against what remained of a sandbag stockade and flipped over the edge, falling six feet into the rainwater puddled below.
Boots were plugged into the mud right beside me. I extracted my face from the ooze and saw that they belonged to no less than Major Horstmeier. Good—he was the man who needed to hear the full, treasonous truth behind the lies that had brought me to France.
I fought to a standing position but the major did not notice. He, too, had returned from the field, his sleeves charred and his face tenderized from shrapnel. He barked orders at a seasick-looking captain while moving his finger along a homemade map. And who held that map? None other than my foxhole friend, Piano, his cheeks paled with the same shock as everyone, though suspiciously free of soot or dirt.
The Skipper finished his order. I snapped off a muddy salute.
“Sir!”
Horstmeier knocked my hand aside.
“We don’t salute out here, son! You want every mother-loving Jerry knowing who the brass are?”
“No! I’m sorry, sir.”
The Skipper squinted so hard that beads of blood squeezed from his abrasions.
“Private Prefer-Not-To? What the hell are you doing here? Do we have Hill 142? Do we?”
“No, sir, but—”
“Then get out of my trench, soldier! Get back in that wheat!”
“I’m not supposed to be here, sir! I’ll explain! There were these women in Georgia—”
“Not supposed to be here? Well, no shit, Private! I could’ve told you that the second I laid eyes on you! Here, let me give you a tip! There isn’t no one supposed to be here, besides a few fellas who were born to kill, and those are the same fellas who are going to take home the medals, run for office, and someday sign your paychecks. Next to those kind of men, you’re always going to look yellow, Private. So get your ass back out there and start doing whatever the hell they say, because that’s going to be the rest of your life, son, if you’re lucky enough to live it! Now get out of my goddamn face!”