Mark Dunn - American Decameron

After reaching a spot about three or four feet away, the boy let his rifle slip from his grasp and fall to the ground, almost as if he’d forgotten it was in hand. Then in one sudden, fluid move, he drew up beside me. He curled himself next to me upon the oversized crate, burying his face in my tunic.

He began to cry, gushing sobs rocking his entire body.

I didn’t know what to say to him.

There were men in my company who would have denigrated him for such a “show of obvious cowardice”—who would have used this display to, by convenient contrast, build up their own reputations for battlefield bravery (or bravado). I could have told him that for this reason alone he needed to fight the fear that had reduced him to sniveling and quivering. It betrayed the honor of his manhood before his fellow soldiers. But I said nothing. Even if he had been able to hear me, I couldn’t bring myself to attempt to restore manhood to a man whom fear had already defeated. And so I let him sit next to me and draw strength from me — such as he was able. Perhaps he saw in me someone he had always trusted — an older brother, perhaps, or an uncle. (I was, obviously, much too young to be the age of the soldier’s father.)

Eventually, the guns retired for the day and relative quiet returned. The boy stopped shaking, his sobs subsiding as well. Yet I did not seek to extricate myself from his presence. Nor did I stop patting him gently upon the shoulder.

In time he fell asleep. I soon grew groggy as well and retreated to the dugout. As I was walking away I saw something of my younger self in that boy. No one is without fear, I thought. It is what we do with fear in the course of overcoming the obstacles that have been placed in our way that defines who we are and tell of what we’re made.

Two days later, the Germans had had enough. They decided to give back as good as they got. That morning, hell visited the AEF’s front lines. Fatigue parties had spent most of the night repairing and fortifying the firing trench with additional sandbags. Still, we all wondered if we could withstand the kind of shelling that we had been dishing out to the Huns all week. We were at stand-to when the first mortars came over. All along the opposing lines, German artillery of every description headed in our direction. The German command had figured out our game and was set on preempting our anticipated attack with all the firepower in their arsenal.

The waterproof sheets that had been protecting our machine guns from night dew were pulled away. Our Maxim guns answered the German assault. We stood at the parapet and strained our eyes to see through the early morning shadows, to find and nail our targets. Shrapnel burst above us, around us. Exploding shells flared intensely white, dull orange. Here and there explosions of other colors — no beauty in this fountain of detonated shells and signal bursts, the coloration of the deadliest kind of war known to man. Through the general cacophony one could distinguish the singing of machine gun bullets, the whiz of the whiz-bangs. High explosives cratered our front trenches. I saw men go down to the left of me and to the right, limbs blown off, heads opened like smashed cantaloupe, brains and blood splattering us all. The worse was yet to come: a barrage of German cannon fire that shook the ground with earthquake intensity. Hundreds of shells landed in straight rows, short of the trench, behind the trench, squarely within the trench.

The captain signaled retreat into the communication trenches. If this deadly counter-barrage kept up, there would be no men left to mount the troop assault. A potentially catastrophic error in planning had now become evident. The multiple-days’ bombardment hadn’t hurt the Germans to nearly the degree that we had hoped. There was fire and fight left in them.

We prepared for our inevitable attack. Thousands of other men crushed toward us, the communication trenches filled with soldiers — shoulder to shoulder, checking the luminous dials of their radium wristwatches, steadying their rifles, stuffing more wads of cotton into ears already stuffed, passing assault ladders overhead.

I found Cantwell hunkered down in the shadows, tears streaming down his boyish face.

I looked up. Against the hazy blue of the morning sky tufts of smoke hung here and there. A black, acrid-smelling blanket of gloom settled upon us.

We shook it off. Some of the boys made jokes. I took a moment to look at faces that, when the order to don gas masks came around, I wondered if I would ever see again.

Cantwell put on his gas mask with difficulty, his hands fumbling, his fingers tremulous. I fought the urge to go to him and help him. There were things that soldiers in the Great War did for one another: heroic things, acts of fraternal self-sacrifice. Helping a shell-shocked kid put on his gas mask was not one of them.

It started with a whistle singing shrilly above the din: the “follow me” signal. The moment had arrived. The captain waved the men of our company forward, and we climbed in slightly disordered fashion up the assault ladders to the top of the sandbag parapet, a place in which every fear found justification and in which death was a permanent companion.

No Man’s Land.

Yet it was not a place that I would see on this foray, because a German bomb — delivered right to our doorstep — sent me, along with those men who climbed next to me, back into the arms of those behind us. These men shook us off and clambered up and out as I felt myself falling in slow motion to the bottom of the trench. I was still conscious, though dazed, the clouded eye-glass of my mask making it difficult to see anything — not that there should be anything in that moment to see but a blur of legs and arms and swinging bayonets: men on the move, men following the orders of other men as I lay helpless and suffocating.

After the trench was emptied of all able-bodied men — only the dead and wounded remaining (and I wasn’t sure for those first few moments exactly which group presently claimed me as member), I tore off the mask with my blood-spattered hand so that I might breathe. Even mustard gas, I thought in that crazed, head-clouded moment, had to be better than dying in this face vise. I saw a soldier that I knew lying next to me, still and lifeless. The muddy duck boards of the trench were carpeted with the bodies of others whom fate had kept from going over the top.

Among them was Cantwell. He wasn’t moving. I crawled over to him, wondering if taking a fatal concussive blow before facing his ongoing living nightmare was a better thing than that which awaited him over the bags. Had circumstances — in cruel irony — been merciful to the frightened young man? I removed his gas mask to discover a place in his temple where a bullet had entered — a small spot, really, almost surgically produced.

There was a wounded man lying next to him, the khaki of his uniform darkened at the shoulder by fresh blood. He was fumbling for a cigarette.

“Was he a friend of yours?” the soldier asked between grimaces.

I shook my head. “I didn’t know him. Not really.” I touched my left arm and winced from a sudden stab of pain. Something — shrapnel perhaps — had imbedded itself in the crook of my arm. I wondered where else I had been hit.

“I’ve been watching him. We’ve all been watching him,” the young man said in a voice raised to be heard over the roar of battle, “wondering what would happen when the time came. He didn’t disappoint.”

“How do you mean?”

“I mean, when we all moved forward, he just sat down, fixing himself to that spot. Lieutenant Lyster had apparently been watching him, too. When he refused to advance any further, the lieutenant took out his pistol and drumheaded him.”