Evan Hunter - Sons

There was, you could not, all order was gone, the troops retreating on our front were French, their uniforms, you could, the Bois de Condé was where they would hold, the reserves of the 28th were waiting there, French at first, you could see their uniforms. And then the color changed, the landscape changed, the army coming over the railroad tracks and into the fill was German, fierce against the summer sky, bayonets glinting in moonlit pinpricks, machine-gun carts hauled by barking dogs, horse-drawn batteries rumbling into place. They wished to go to Paris, and we were there to stop them, but Paris was not the prize to defend, Paris was the immediate goal. The prize was Hill 231, where a strategically placed machine gun could control the entire plain, a knoll worthless for anything but artillery now, perhaps a good site for a small French château in another time and in another place, but not here and not now. Here, with the German batteries in place and beginning to pound shells into the slit trenches, now with the machine guns adding their staccato ululation to the din, we understood very little, and cared less, about over-all strategy or logistics. We did not know where the 4th or the 7th were, did not even fully comprehend whether Château-Thierry was to the east or the west across the Marne. We knew only Hill 231. This was our reason for being here, Hill 231, this was why we crouched and waited to kill, crouched and saw Fritz come over the horizon with identical intent, to kill for that elevation of ground behind us, from which our own guns were now firing over our heads.

I knew I would remember Hill 231 forever.

The rest was chaos.

Fear, excitement, and incredibility waged a war within me as fierce as the one that lurched across that disputed plain.

I had never known such terror. It came in successive waves of shock, the same tingling crack of surprise accompanying it each time, a sharp spasm jerking the neck and causing the eyes to pop wide open, a hot rush of blood to the head, a loosening of the bowels, a weak drained feeling in the crotch, but no time, no time to think or feel because new white tremors erupted almost at once, like unexpected slaps to the face in a pitch-black room.

The excitement rode over each exploding peak of horror, a curious wild and heady sense of adventure, a feeling of absolute maleness contradicting the terror, the rifle in my hands as enormous as a penis on the edge of ejaculation. Dodging, running, crawling, I fell like a soldier, and I regretted that no one was there to see me behave so courageously (even as fear rocketed into my skull again), no one but other men exactly like myself experiencing the same crude mixture of emotions, no one there to take my picture and shout exultant praise.

I could not believe what was happening. In my terror and excitement, a logical tiny section of my mind kept asking what I was doing here, was I insane running a zigzag course through exploding grenades, were my eyes actually witnessing a man’s body being cut in half by a shell, his head and torso flying off in one direction, his legs standing lifelessly erect for an instant before they toppled over like twin sandstone columns, was I dreaming? A grenade exploded some ten feet ahead of me and a German fell back into the wheat with a gushing hole in his abdomen. A machine gun instantly opened fire, and I leaped sharply to the left, eyes straining, the terror was back, the fear had a stench of urine I could smell in the crevices of my brain, I threw myself headlong through the rustling wheat, and watched the slender golden stalks dancing fitfully as the bullets whined through, and began to weep in fear and ecstasy and open incredulity.

I did not kill a man until four o’clock that morning, I think it was four o’clock, they told me later that was when Captain Reid made me a corporal in the field, but I have no recollection of being promoted, I can only remember the first time I killed a human being.

He was, I could not, I was exhausted, we had been fighting since midnight, there had been no letup. Endless corridors of wheat, running, why was I running? Explosions everywhere, the feeling that I alone was the quarry, a desperate skittering figure in a moonwashed landscape, some unseen force trying to obliterate me, hurling salvo after salvo of lethal steel wherever I turned, however I maneuvered. I was tired enough to fall flat to the earth and hug the trampled stalks to my mud-stained tunic, but too frightened to rest because machine guns relentlessly chewed the night and new bomb craters opened everywhere, spewing fresh legs and arms, sodden mannequin limbs dripping human blood, a severed helmeted head rolling, rolling, rolling, and coming to a stop at last, black with powder, red with blood, startling white where bone fragments had come through the cheek.

He appeared, he suddenly, I had expected someone like myself, young and frightened, the German equivalent of an Eau Fraiche lumberjack, with a girl back home in Dusseldorf, a fräulein writing the equivalent of Nancy’s letters, someone who perhaps had listened to our own barrage this past midnight and trembled as I had, someone who had never slain and who now, because of a numbered hill behind us, was ready to kill for the first time. But he, the wheat shifted in a sudden wind fresh off the river, I raised my head and jerked my eyes to the right and then rapidly to the left, every sound was terrifying, every movement cause for fresh panic, and he, he rose, he suddenly stood before me in the undulating wheat. For a moment brief and static, for a frozen moment brittle enough to shatter with a heartbeat, we looked at each other, our eyes met and we stood on the edge of homicide in a foreign wheatfield while machine guns clacked like distant farmyard fowl.

He was very big, I thought Why, he’s a man, they’re asking me to fight a man. Not a boy, not someone like myself, but a grown man who looked at me in shocked surprise from beneath a helmet certainly more formidable than my own, new leather boots and belt, gas mask slung and hanging from a strap on his massive chest, rifle clutched in both hands, his finger inside the trigger guard. I looked at him, this all took place in a tick of time, there was a sudden hush as the machine guns stopped for only an instant, and we looked at each other, and I thought Say something to him and I thought What are we doing here? and I wanted to giggle, I was possessed of an uncontrollable urge to giggle, I could feel my face cracking with an overriding need for laughter. And then the machine guns near the railroad fill began again, and I knew that one of us must kill. I knew, he knew, we faced each other in that foolish instant of non-recognition, and were both murderers in our hearts long before one of us became a murderer in fact.

As my finger groped for the trigger of the rifle, the notion that this stranger would want to kill me seemed idiotic, we did not know each other. And yet my finger moved of its own volition, it seemed, found the trigger with practiced ease, those weeks and weeks of pulling off shots at lifeless targets paid off now in a moonwashed field south of the river Marne, and I raised my rifle even as my finger tightened and the gun recoiled sharply, the butt hitting me in the ribs, so that I was aware only of my own sharp pain at first and did not see the German’s face burst open. I winced, I must have cursed, he was falling away from me, falling back straight and stiff, already dead, the force of the bullet knocking him back some three feet. I watched as he fell, fascinated by his face spurting blood, and wondered if he, like me, had wanted to giggle at our unexpected confrontation.

And then I turned away.

Feeling nothing.

Only later that day, when Captain Reid told us we’d broken the back of the German attack and with it their hopes of taking the Surmelin Valley and the Rocq Plateau, only then did I say to Timothy Bear, “I killed a man, Tim.”