Once an Eagle

“Except what?”

  “Love apples. They’re a poisoned fruit.”

  “I never heard of them …”

  “He means tomatoes,” Damon said; the sniper was getting on his nerves and he found himself anxious to talk. “Isn’t that what you mean, Reb? Tomatoes?”

  “Bright red fruit on a furry green vine about two foot high, full of juice, bearing around August,” Raebyrne explained patiently. “You don’t want to touch those. Fruit of the devil. Give you strangles.” The sniper fired again, the slug slapping into dirt, and Raebyrne shook his fist over his head and called angrily, “Just keep it up, you contrary son of a bitch, and I’ll starch you like a go-to-meeting collar …”

  It was a terrible place they’d found themselves—a land so desolate and battered its very existence seemed to assault credulity. There was nothing the eye could recognize: a swollen, heaving terrain churned into an immense pudding of ridges and shell holes littered with big gun shells like bloated stovepipe sections, barbed wire in rusty, tangled snarls, abandoned helmets and bits of weapons—all of it like some growth spawned by a race of giant toads. There was no sun. It reminded Damon of the gale-whipped North Atlantic three days out of Hoboken—but a sea hideously frozen into clay-and-water immobility, and spiked with the scarred stumps of trees. The moon might look like this, perhaps; but the moon in all its hard, boundless aridity could never fill the heart with such despair as this—for the moon held no frantic, blasted arms of trees, the mangled remains of what had once been orchards and tilled fields and the homes of men; the moon did not give off incessantly the sweet, foul odor of death …

  He heard it, then—that, thin shearing sound, like the ripping of the most delicate silk. He shouted, “Get your heads down—!” He had just time enough to be seized by dread, and then the dry, tearing noise swelled into a colossal indrawn breath, hung suspended above their heads, deepened to a threnody of rapidly descending shrieks—and the wasteland around them shook and jolted. 77s again. He forced himself to raise his head, saw nothing but churned earth and the blue-white flashes of the bursts. Nothing else. There was no movement on the crest of the hill a quarter of a mile ahead of them. Glancing back to where the old mill had been he saw, or thought he saw, a figure dive into a shell hole; and wondered if it was Blake, one of the battalion runners. If it was Blake—

  There was a deeper note now in the bending roof of sound: a bubbling rumble that mounted to an all-consuming roar, then broke apart in a thunderclap of unbelievable magnitude. Another, behind them. Bracketed, they were bracketed. Nine-inchers. That God damn filthy mountain! The air grew dark, then red, then filled with dancing flashes; the ground rocked and heaved. Damon found himself doubled up like a foetus, gripping the Chauchat handles in a maniac’s clutch and gasping for breath. The very air had been caught in a set of malignant thumbscrews, was being crushed into something solid—a mailed fist that buffeted and battered and crushed the helpless flesh beneath it. Jesus. This was worse than the embankment at Brigny, this was worse than Saubricourt Ridge. He felt rather than heard a brief lull and tried to raise his head, could not. What was it?—bombardment preliminary to counterattack? Where in Christ’s name was our own artillery? What were they doing—playing pinochle back there? Where was anybody at all?

  The burdensome freight-train rumble came again; there was a detonation that seemed to take place just beyond his left shoulder, and the great mailed fist had hold of his brain, was squeezing it calmly into pulp. He bit his helmet strap in a paroxysm. Shrapnel sang through the air like bandsaws run by a brace of madmen; something struck his helmet with a sharp, bright clank—and at that instant the fear gripped him firmly and completely. He had awakened around four thirty that morning after a two-hour catnap, clutched with dread. Today, the thought had lain on his soul; today you will get it: you will be killed: and when you least expect it. For the next few hours, under the pressure of work and defensive measures, he had thrust the evil dart of premonition aside; but now it returned. Cringing, contorted, he tried to beat off the fear. This barrage—was it moving? was it rolling? he could not tell. He could not feel anything but the monstrous, stunning pain of the pressure waves, the incessant slam of high explosive and the whine of splinters. Think! he commanded. But his mind had no intention of obeying—it wandered away derelict and craven, it cared about nothing but repeating with dogged, importunate insistence, No, no, not today, I’ve gone this far, not today, oh God I’ll do anything but not right now, let up, please, I’ve had enough of this, let up, enough—!… and then as the bombardment redoubled its fury it abandoned even this plea and began to prattle in feverish panic: How much wood would a woodchuck chuck, if a woodchuck could chuck wood? Why, he’d chuck as much wood as a woodchuck would if a woodchuck could chuck wood …

  He was lifted and dropped as if thrown. Someone very near was talking rapidly. He was. He was talking. Aloud. Nothing could survive this, nothing. No creeping thing or the waters under the earth, our Father Who Jesus God—! A terrible crepitation that was like the exploding of his very own soul, his head was slammed against the barrel of the Chauchat, his ears rang and rang. Why he’d chuck as much wood as a woodchuck could chuck woodchuck would—

  … It had stopped. Had it? Sight and sound returned in sliding, faltering rainbow panels, wobbling strips of sensation. His eyes were streaming from cordite fumes. He felt sick, and when he wiped his face and eyes his hand shook wildly; but he was alive. Just the same. He was all right. Smoke lay overhead in dirty, rolling clouds. A few shells were coming over, but far to their right now, toward the 39th. It was over, for a while.

  Then he heard the cries. He straightened, peered anxiously to his left, saw Raebyrne talking to Tsonka, and Devlin crawling out of his hole; and was flooded with relief. He called in a clear, calm voice: “Who’s hit?”

  “Me, me—!” It was Ellis, one of the replacements. A long tear in the upper arm, blood soaking the sweat-blackened wool.

  “Conger!” he shouted. He climbed out of his hole and began crawling from pit to pit, checking the line. Walsh had a tiny fragment in the neck. Pelletier lay at the bottom of his hole. Below the hairline was a huge slick cavity of bone and gristle and tissue from which blood was pulsing, soaking the wet clay. No face at all. No Pelletier. Farther on he saw a hand move and called “Clay?” There was no answer. He wriggled through the muck and slid into Clay’s hole, and grunted. The boy’s body had been blown almost in two and his face, pressed against the mud, was gasping for air; his eyes were rolling crazily and his lips were drawn back from his teeth in a tight snarl, hideous and feral; his mouth kept opening and closing with a dry sucking sound. Blood lay in a pink froth around his lips.

  “Oh, Jesus,” he muttered. He heard movement and turned to see Brewster crawling toward him. “No,” he said. “Go back …”

  Brewster stared at him, his thin face tense with fear. “Bill?” he whispered; and then: “No, I’ve got to see him, I’ve got—”

  “Tim, go back to your hole!” He pushed at Brewster’s shoulder. “Don’t look at him.”

  “No—not Bill … ” Over the past month he and Clay had drawn together, the brash cockiness of the Ohioan forming a strange complement to Brewster’s shy diffidence. It was hard to believe they could be friends; but after Krazewski’s and Ferguson’s deaths, Raebyrne and Tsonka had teamed up, and Brewster had turned to Clay. It was part of the ceaseless, pathetic reshuffling of friendships among the old men after battle, when the replacements came in. Now Brewster was gazing at Damon, his mouth slack with fright, shaking his head and murmuring, “Not Bill, not Bill—he’s not hurt, is he?”

  “—He’s in bad shape,” Damon answered roughly. “Now go back to your hole!”

  Brewster turned away and dragged himself off like a beaten animal through the slime; and at that moment the awful gasping of Clay’s mouth stopped. He gave a long, trembling shudder, his fingers clutched the clods of earth convulsively, and his life ran out. Damon tried to turn him over and the boy’s body sta
rted to come apart in his hands. He swallowed two, three times, fighting off nausea, left Clay’s hole and wriggled his way over to Ellis, who was being bandaged by Conger.

  “What do I do, Captain?” Ellis kept saying. “What do I do?” After staring at the wound for several minutes he now had his eyes resolutely averted, like a child waiting for the needle.

  “Nothing for now. Just take it easy.” The sniper fired then and he ducked. Clay’s blood was all over his hands, and his hands were shaking badly. He felt sick and weary and overborne—unequal to anything, no matter how trivial, that might come up. There was so much blood. Ellis was watching him with large, fearful eyes and he wiped his hands on his mud-caked breeches. “Just sit tight and take it easy,” he said with a desperate semblance of calm. “We’ll get you out of here any time now …”

  They had entered this fog-shrouded nightmare landscape of the Argonne nine days before, in a morning assault in concert with the 39th and 17th Divisions. After a perilous reconnaissance the afternoon before, Damon had sent them forward in echelons as fire teams rather than in the murderous platoon front; they’d got through the wire, had lost contact with both flanks, regained it, had taken the German trenches and pushed beyond them through lacerated woods to the remains of a village called Miravalles. The Germans had counterattacked that night in a driving rain, without success, and later had shelled them incessantly with 77s and toxic shells. The next day the Company again started well, but in this flooded, boggy landscape it was hard to move and almost impossible to see, and once more they lost contact with both flanks. Damon went forward the day following, picked up Manion’s Chauchat and got them going again, fighting savagely from rifle pit to rifle pit, from gun to gun. After terrible losses they reached the second phase line from Chabert Mill to the St. Aubry Woods; and there—or what once had been the Chabert Mill and the St. Aubry Woods—facing a series of steadily ascending ridges crowned with the ruins of farm buildings, where the Germans were entrenched in force, they’d been stopped for good. The Third Battalion had come to grief in an evil marshy place called for some perfectly inexplicable reason Les Festons, A Company had been cut to pieces by shelling, the whole advance had bogged down in mud and rain and uncertainty and the hateful chatter of the Maxims. Next morning the fog and rain had lifted—and it was then they saw the mountain looming on their right, with twin peaks like misshapen little horns, sheathed in oak and fir and laced with great blunt outcroppings of blue-black stone.

  “Mother of God, what is that?” a replacement named Santos muttered.

  “The Mont de Malsainterre,” Damon told him.

  “Are we going to have to take that?”

  Their faces were scored with dread. He told them no, that was for the Thirty-ninth, the Grizzly Bears; but for the rest of the afternoon they kept glancing at it with increasing apprehension. Early that evening on its gaunt stone flanks flashes came and went like fierce little pinpricks of light; and soon after that their desolate, muddy world was swallowed up in a maelstrom of shrieks and detonations. They were ordered to advance again the following noon and they did, and after a thousand private agonies took another patch of this tortured moonscape. But there was no getting away from the mountain; the shelling increased, and Damon, raging, watched his half-company shrink to a platoon. Again. All over again. It couldn’t happen still again: but it had. He had two captured Spandaus set up on their flank at the base of the Mill and deployed his people as skillfully as he could; but they had other worries now. The kitchens couldn’t be brought up under the mountain’s interdicting fire; he sent Johansen and Hughes back on a canteen-filling detail and both of them were hit. Devlin had successfully led a little group back for tinned beef and salmon and that was what they had been living on for three days; for the past eighteen hours they had been drinking water out of the shell holes. And continually rasping him, like a needle pressing on a nerve, was his fear of a German counterattack. If they took it into their heads to come down from those smashed-up buildings on the ridge the Company could never stop them; he knew it in the pit of his stomach, and it combined with the recent bombardment and the nerve-wracking presence of the sniper, to add to his fear. He had to get hold of himself: he had to!

  “Sam?” He looked up; Devlin was sprawled at the edge of his hole. “Peters wants me to take over one of the Spandaus. All right?”

  He shook his head. “No. I’d rather—would you take a water detail back in an hour or two?”

  “Sure.” Devlin’s face was perfectly expressionless; but his eyes flashed once at Damon—a swift, outraged glance; fell away. He had taken hold well since his return to the Company. He had been competent and resourceful, and in the initial assault on Miravalles he had fought superbly; but in place of his old emotional force, the extremes of levity and exasperation that had made him the bellwether of the outfit, he now moved with a mute, dogged stoicism. Formerly gregarious, he was now a loner; only his eyes occasionally—just as now—glowed with a fiery, rebellious light, scornful and raging and full of peril. “Whatever you say, Sam,” he concluded; and added tonelessly, “That means we don’t get relieved today, then?”

  “I’m afraid not, Dev.” He watched the Sergeant swing away, and a pang went through him. “Dev—” he began.

  “Yeah?”

  “If anything should—” but he couldn’t say it: “happen to me”; he refused to say it aloud “—go wrong today, send Reb back to Battalion: he’s got the best chance of getting through. You know what I mean?”

  “Sure, Sam …” Devlin’s face was shaded with concern. He started to say something, then his lips came together and he crawled off toward Lieutenant Peters’ foxhole. And with his departure came the high-arching shriek of a flight of 77s. They struck far in their rear, behind the Mill.

  “Why in God’s name don’t we get out of this place … !”

  The tenor of the voice alerted him. He turned. Brewster, bareheaded, his hands fluttering in front of his face, was climbing out of his hole.

  “Tim!” he shouted. “You stay put, now …”

  “—ridiculous! I tell you—stay here in this wretched place until we’re all killed, every last—”

  “Brewster—!”

  The New York boy was on his feet now, walking quickly toward the rear, gesticulating. He had left his rifle. Damon leaped out of his pit. Brewster crouched, and drew his bayonet with startling dexterity. “No!” he cried. “I’m going home, you hear?—I’m going home!—”

  “Tim, look—”

  “Don’t you try and stop me, Damon! I know you! Just don’t come near me, that’s all …”

  There was a quick, low whistle in the air near them and then the crack of the sniper’s rifle. And then Brewster was running—stumbling and sliding in the mud, his eyes wild. Damon made a sudden rush and dove at him, pinioning his arms; they fell into a shell hole in a clumsy tangle. Brewster had lost the bayonet but he was wrestling with surprising strength; he squirmed and flailed like a netted fish, struck Damon on the side of the head and in the throat.

  “Let me go, you monster!” he screamed. “Let—me—go!” Just when the Captain didn’t think he could hold him any longer, all the strength went out of him; he stopped struggling and lay panting on his side, his hair in his eyes.

  “All right, Tim,” Sam said quietly. “Take it easy, now.”

  “—ridiculous—mice in their holes until the cat stamps on them, yes!—until every one of us is crushed to pudding … Don’t you see—!” His face, gray as old ash, was convulsed, his mouth slack. He began to weep, then; great dry sobs that were nearly like laughter.

  Damon held him gently, felt the boy shivering. “Take it easy, Tim,” he murmured. “Try and hold on, now. You don’t want the new men to see you—”

  “—I can’t help it, Captain, I’ve done everything you’ve told me, everything they’ve wanted for months and months, but I can’t stay here any more—!” He coughed thickly, and tried to break away again. Damon gripped him in a bear hug and he
subsided.

  “—leave us here day after day and nobody cares … it’s all right for you, you haven’t any nerves at all, you don’t know—but I won’t stand for it!—no more of this, ah God, no more, no more …!” And again he dissolved in shuddering, gasping sobs, his hands over his face.

  “… It’s all right, Timmy.” Holding the frail, slender body in his big arms he rocked him to and fro, speaking in a low, even, crooning voice. “It’s all right, now. You won’t have to do any more, Timmy. You’ll be all right, now …”

  The sniper fired again, and he heard the low drone of the bullet overhead. Holding Brewster, comforting him with a soft, meaningless litany, he felt a fearful anguish sweep over his soul. Was that how they really saw him? under the web of griping and jocosity, the awe? as a flint-hearted, blood-drinking killer with twin silver bars on his shoulders who lashed them on from hell to ever lowering hell, laughing at their torments? A Traprock Merrick?… He didn’t believe it.

  But he could not raise his eyes to the others at that moment.

  “How do you stand, Captain?” Lieutenant Colonel Weyburn said.

  “Sixty-three effectives, sir.”

  “I see. How would you estimate their fighting capabilities?”

  Damon paused and looked down. They were sitting in piles of rubble in the cellar of the Chabert Mill, a gloomy vault damp with seepage from the incessant rain. Over the lintel hung a large, beautifully lettered sign, now split, that read Kommandoposten Dambacher XLVII, under which some wag had scrawled in chalk: Welcome to Valley Forge. Bring your own monkey meat. But that had been four days ago …

  Colonel Weyburn was staring at him expectantly. He was a broad-shouldered man with a quiet voice and clear brown eyes; he’d been sent out from a stateside garrison post to take command of the battalion after Major Williams had been killed. He was a good officer, a good administrator—but now, watching the solid, ruddy face, the small mouth pinched with just a touch of annoyance, Damon felt beleaguered and resentful. What the hell did Weyburn know about it? He hadn’t been up here … He shot a glance at Caldwell, but the Colonel was scraping mud off his boots with a piece of shingle.