John Wray - The Right Hand of Sleep

The Germans had new, lightweight artillery and quick-loading mortars and shells filled with chlorine gas; they moved among us like royalty the next few weeks, clean-shaven and imperious, giving lessons in the loading of shells. Everyone was talking about a last big offensive before the snow made it impossible to move. The general opinion among the Germans was that we were an unqualified disgrace and would have stayed where we were for the rest of the war if not for the new artillery. Tullberg, their commanding officer, compared us to a mouthful of rotten teeth, crying whenever the wind blew. Most of the others resented the Gemans but I, for one, was eager to learn everything I could from them, especially about the guns. My father had often explained to me that while our empire was unsurpassed in the sophistication of its arts, he credited his time in Berlin and Leipzig with whatever understanding of the modern world he might possess. “The Germans are our rule-and-compass-toting cousins, Oskar,” he was fond of saying. “Regrettable as it seems to us, we must study them.”

The new shells were black around the seams and flew off soundlessly when you fired. I remember that best, out of everything: the soft, flat report of the firing gun and the faint click just after, muffled and bright at once, like a cup or a spoon falling from a low height onto the carpet. Gas burns were blue and white and began under the skin. The gunners were all German and wore down-quilted anoraks and yellow cowhide gloves to protect their hands.

By the time of the twelfth offensive the snow had begun in earnest and the new trenches we dug were set slantwise into the drifts. We were closer to the Italians now than we’d ever been. Mortars tore into the walls as though they were confetti paper and burst through in great pillars of twisting smoke, scattering us like pigeons up and down the line. The Germans had brought an entirely different war with them from the one we’d been in; even the Italians seemed to have noticed. I tried to imagine them huddled up the hill in their own dugouts, feeling the same fear I was beginning to feel, but I could never manage to picture them as anything other than flat, gray-faced caricatures. Occasionally voices would carry down to us in the pauses between shellings but they always had a smoothed-over, lifeless quality to them because of the snow and the trees and the near-to-constant wind. Sometimes at night we’d hear the sound of singing.

Two days before the offensive the shelling stopped almost completely. It was clear to everyone that the Italians knew what was coming and when, but the Germans were relaxed and confident. On the day of the offensive we sat in a long row against the uphill wall, pounding on our feet through the toes of our boots to bring the feeling back into them, waiting on the order. Finally late at night the word came through.

The bombardment lasted more than seven hours. I was feeder to a German fusilier, a taps sergeant named Wachmann who was patrician and friendly and spat whenever he had to give an order. His sense of humor reminded me of my Uncle Gustl’s, self-serving and full of bluster; he also had Gustl’s same Kaiser Wilhelm mustaches. I found myself wanting very badly to please him. We fired at eight-minute intervals, sowing cover for the infantry, pausing to give them time to reach their next point of shelter, then firing again. After three and a half hours of loading my hands were numb and white with cold and Wachmann sent me down for padded mittens. The walls of the back trenches made the firing seem very far off and the narrow strip of sky overhead was patterned by clouds with streaks of thin, rust-colored smoke across them. I was a long time getting the mittens.

When I came back to the post I saw that the wall had fallen in and an instant or two later I saw Wachmann himself, pressed down backward into the snow with his eyes shut and bleeding and violet scalloped burns over his face and shoulders. He rocked from side to side, arms pushed tightly down against his legs, murmuring something through his blackened teeth I couldn’t decipher. His mustache and eyebrows had been burned away and his face looked to have been lifted up somehow and shifted slightly off its bones. I knew as I looked at him that the noise of the bombardment was all around me and that I myself was saying or shouting something but all I could hear was the noise of Wachmann trying to speak. It was a sickening noise. I stood without moving for a few moments longer listening to it and deciding whether or not to touch him or to take his pistol from its holster and kill him with it before the sound of the shelling and my stuttering voice returned all at once and I ran back through the trench and the columns of infantry that were suddenly filling it, screaming for an officer. The taps sergeant’s been hit, I gasped to the fusilier in the next gunner’s post. He turned round and looked at me as though I’d just asked him whether he could spare a schilling. Get back to your position, you idiot! he yelled, shooing me away with his yellow gloves.

I ran back through the smoke to find the wall fallen further in and the mortar canting over against the pile of shells. Wachmann was still there with his head lolling back and a cord of thickened mucus jutting like a tusk from his mouth into the snow. I watched him for a little while, waiting for him to move, then crossed to the far side of the dugout and vomited. Afterward I sat back against a heap of spent shell casings and did nothing for a long time with the guns booming all around me. I knew my leaving for the mittens had had nothing to do with the rest but it was exactly that, the thought that nothing I did could have made any difference, that made me feel I should have been in the dugout when the shell came down. Wachmann was just on the other side of the casings but I couldn’t look at him anymore. I felt very small and very light. A strange smell hung in the air, a smell like the tips in a box of wooden matches that has gotten wet. The air was clotted thickly in my mouth and it was hard to breathe. I stretched myself out on the ground and tried to lie completely still, looking up at the play of clouds and smoke across the sky. Hours passed. The returning fire grew fainter and fainter, like the clatter of a departing train, then vanished altogether. For the next half hour there was no sound along the line but a wet, muffled buzzing. Then even that ended. Everything was silent, palpable and alive, like the air between pealings of an enormous bell.

Voxlauer awoke late that night as the train entered the last limestone gorge curving down onto the plain. His pulse quickened instantly and he felt a cold weight pressing against his forehead and shoulders. He put his face to the window. The passageway now empty of freight threw its light onto the closing rock walls, leaded over and sheer. They could of course have been any walls but he knew it was the last gorge and memories fought for precedence in his brain and he felt bewildered and childlike in his fear. Why he should be afraid now, so groundlessly, he had no idea, but he was helpless in the face of it. With a great effort he brought the walls into focus. Fifty-odd meters down ran the brook, soon to vanish under the rubble of its bed only to reemerge two kilometers downstream in the pools of the old spa at Brunner’s Cross. His breath clung to the windowpane but he made no effort to clean the glass, looking out instead through the ebbing and gathering fog as the pines flew past. The bloodless white lights of the spa when they came marked the opening of the gorge into fir-shrouded eaves curving off to each side like the pages of an album, falling away and turning. Then came the river and the bend by which the bell towers were visible for the first time, the ruin looming up behind them like the hull of an immense capsized ship. To the left was the toll road to Italy running south between the willow rows; to the right the canal which held the half-moon-shaped town fast against the foothills, laddering up into the pines. He could feel the breath clutching in his throat like a baby’s, close-gutted and strange. But the air, when it came, was a nectar to him.