Chapter One - 9

9

 

I was awakened by a tap from Jean. It was a dark and cloudy morning. I hurried out to put on my gear and found the rest of the platoon already there. They were looking up at the sky with somber expressions. A few snowflakes danced in the air above us. I took roll call and went over the day's itinerary with the other platoon sergeants and lieutenants.

“No wonder it's so cold.”

I looked out over the distant plains. The rubble of the town had turned into a faint world of white. The outlines of the collapsed buildings and fallen trees were outlined in white, clearly highlighting the devastation.

I heard the sound of a mortar. “Make as much noise as possible to alert the enemy forces before starting a full-on artillery barrage.” This was an unwritten rule of trench warfare to keep things from degrading into a war of attrition.

“It looks like the trucks aren't coming. We'll march on foot.”

“It'll be a good way to keep warm.”

We started marching down the dirt road. I thought about Marie as I marched. I regretted that I'd left without saying anything to her.

Every time we heard the sound of heavy shelling, we'd stop, our necks stiffening.

“I remember one guy who got sent to the hospital with shell shock. What ever happened to him?”

“He's in jail. No one just comes out and says they have shell shock. They suspected he was trying to get out of the service, so they threw him in jail.”

“So nobody believed him, even though they could see the look of terror on his face.”

“We're in the same situation he was in, and we haven't gone crazy.”

“Yes we have. We've all gone crazy.”

After about an hour of marching, the shells started landing nearby. We were getting closer and closer to the war zone. The snow had stopped.

Soon, we were down in the trenches.

As expected, they were filled with water. They looked like irrigation canals. We entered the water and were instantly up to our waists. The water was muddy. Moreover, it was cold. Instantly, my entire body was chilled, and my legs shook beneath me. I was frozen so stiff that I couldn't take the gun off my shoulder. I heard someone's teeth chattering. I could hear the screams of my allies on the front lines. But I was so busy shivering from the cold that the war seemed like total nonsense. In a situation like this, it was inevitable that I'd die sooner or later. We joined up with another unit and received instructions from that company's commander, a lieutenant. All he said was “Attack.”

“What happened to repairing the trenches?”

“There's no need for that. The enemy is close at hand. Listen here, a foolish coward who can't even pull a trigger is no better than a pig. The French army won't honor the deaths of pigs. Go die a human death.”

The officer's voice sent us running. We knew we couldn't run because of the water, but we had to because we'd been ordered to. One of the soldiers, perhaps having gotten fed up with the muddy water, scrambled out of the trench on a ladder that had been set up on the ground. He took up his bayonet and started running. Instantly, he was hit by a machine gun firing at a rate of 500 rounds per minute. Blood sprayed out. His body was reduced to a red mass.

“We need to keep going,” someone said.

Those words may as well have been a curse.

Our group split up at a fork in the trench. Hale and Jean had already gone off somewhere hunting Germans. I made for the front line, picturing the terrain in my mind's eye. I pulled the bolt on my gun and loaded the bullets. I put my helmet on. I never knew when the Germans would attack from directly above. I held my gun slightly upwards. A reconnaissance aircraft was flying overhead. An allied machine gun was firing at it. The shots were in vain, and the aircraft disappeared into the eastern sky.

I stopped at a bend in the path. Looking closely, I noticed a slight disturbance in the movement of the water. Someone was on the other side of the bend, which turned left ahead of me. The water rose and fell in waves with the movement of the person walking ahead. I held the gun to my chest and took a deep breath. Then I exhaled, slowly, so that my breath wouldn't form a white mist. The distance between the waves on the surface was shrinking. The person was coming closer. I pointed the gun at the bend. A mortar exploded just behind me. A flash of light blinded me for a moment. My ears rang. The waves rolled. Finally, the enemy soldier appeared from around the corner. I was confident that I could fire my gun faster than the enemy. But I didn't pull the trigger.

The enemy soldier appeared from around the corner, staggering towards me, his chest stained with black blood. To my shock, his head from the shoulders up was gone. His missing head exposed a mess of flesh and blood. I suppressed a scream and reflexively backed away. The headless corpse collapsed into the dirty water. A red spray hit my cheek. The corpse floated in the water, hands hanging limp.

He must have been alive. He'd been alive until just before he'd appeared in front of me. Until that moment, he and I had been enemies, and we were in a position of kill-or-be-killed. He must have been walking towards me with bated breath. And yet, when he'd appeared, his head was missing. Had he been walking through the trenches with no head? I looked at where he'd come from. There was no one there. All I could see was the muddy water swaying with the vibrations of the bursting shells.

A machine gun roared overhead. Allied machine gunners seemed to be firing blindly at the enemy. I don't know how many German soldiers died. However, the sound of the machine gun brought me back to my senses.

I couldn't hear anything but the explosions of shells. I couldn't hear the shots of rifles or the screams of soldiers. The battlefield had been monopolized by a symphony of 75 mm field guns, 42 cm siege guns, and 25 cm mortars. There was no more room for infantry. It was impossible to distinguish between shots from allies and the enemy. Only within the trenches was there a silence that seemed a lie. Even the shells that landed near us seemed to be part of a war taking place in another world.

After a short walk, I ran into Jean. Floating beside him was a man in a French army uniform. It was obvious at a glance that he was dead.

“Who was it?”

“Christophe,” Jean said, angry. “The notebook, the I.D. tag, the watch, the boots, they're all Christophe's. We were going to go home together. We were both from Montpellier. But then this happened. Look! His head is gone! How can he go back home like this!? Who did this to him!?”

Jean was lost in his emotions. I had to calm him down somehow.

“He was hit by a German shell. Shouldn't we avenge our comrades before we mourn them?”

“So we're going to go kill a specific artillery gunner 500 meters away from here? And how can we do that without getting reduced to mulch by machine gun fire first? Moreover, can a person be hit by a shell and only have their head blown off?”

“It's not impossible.”

As I said it, I was taken aback by my own words. It wasn't impossible, that much was true. But it wasn't very likely. Looking at the body, the cut on the neck looked more like it had been inflicted by a sharp blade than ripped open by an explosion.

“It's more than that,” said Jean with a wince. “Christophe's head disappeared in an instant.”

“In an instant?”

I couldn't quite make out the end of Jean's words over the sound of a shell that landed nearby. Jean nodded.

“We were walking together. Christophe was a bit behind me. Around us, the sounds of machine gun fire and shelling were constant. Indeed, when it comes to being noisy, German science is the best in the world. We were making our way through the hail of shells and bullets. Then, I turned a corner. I thought I heard a voice calling for me mixed in with the sound of the shells. I turned around. Christophe was gone. I turned back around the corner. It's hard to believe, but there he was, still standing, but headless.”

As I listened to Jean's story, I thought back to the headless German soldier. Our stories were similar. At the same time, I also thought back to the legend of the Six Headless Knights.

“Let's go, Jean” I said, taking his arm. “There's no point in us staying here.”

We were about to start moving when a German soldier suddenly jumped in the trench, attacking us from above. He came straight at me, the bayonet attached to his Mauser outstretched. He shouted something in German. I raised my Berthier, but it was too late. I accepted the prospect of my death. Death comes for us all in the end. Whoever had originally said that hadn't been wrong. My chest ached violently. I thought I had already been stabbed in the heart. But when I opened my eyes, the German soldier was still in front of me, about to make the kill. The instant felt like hours.

Just as I was about to die, the side of the German's head popped like a balloon, sending blood flying. There was a small hole in his head. He fell dead in the trench, creating a splash of muddy water.

“It's a bit early to be reincarnating again, isn't it?”

It was Hale who'd fired the shot. He was standing at the bend in the trench, holding his rifle.

“Ah.”

“Here come some more.”

Two more German soldiers came running and screaming. We'd already calmed down. Hale shot one and Jean shot the other. My bullet went off somewhere far away.

“What are you idiots doing standing still in the middle of a war zone?” Hale asked as he came up to us. “What's this?”

“Christophe's body.”

“Headless again?”

“Again?” I couldn't help but ask. “You saw it, too?”

“Yeah. I saw four headless bodies in the bunker just now. There was a big gaping hole in the ceiling of the bunker, so I figure they got hit by artillery. I hear that German siege guns can even punch through solid steel. Apparently that happens sometimes. The heads had all been taken clean off.”

“Were they the bodies of our allies?”

“Of course, they were all wearing French uniforms. They were probably new recruits waiting on standby.”

“I see,” I nodded. “I'm sorry, but I have to go.”

“Where to?”

“The bunker you just mentioned.”

I started walking, leaving Hale and Jean behind. I tried to swim as I made my way towards the underground shelter. With this much water, the bunker had probably turned into a pool by now.

I arrived soon enough. I stood at the entrance. I couldn't actually go inside, as the water had almost reached the ceiling. There were four bodies floating around. Three of them were floating on their stomachs, so it looked as though they simply had their heads down in the water, but the fourth was on its back, and it was clearly missing its head. It was a bizarre situation. Every body I'd seen today was headless. I had seen many unbearably awful corpses on the battlefield in this war of attrition, but this was quite unusual.

As Hale had said, there were marks on the ceiling that looked as though they'd been left by a bomb. Looking at the bodies, it did look as though their heads had been blown off by an explosion.

A faint light came down from the large hole in the ceiling. Something flashed around the edge of the hole. It was a German rifle. I quickly raised my gun and aimed it at the enemy. A German soldier was peering down at me from above the hole. His gun was definitely trained on me. His face was shadowed against the sky, so I couldn't see his expression. We stared at each other for a while. The coldness of the water, up to my waist, chilled me to the bone. I was definitely at a disadvantage.

“How are you doing?” the German asked me in French.

“Who, me? I'm doing great, thanks for asking.”

“Do you want to die?”

“Not really. You?”

“I'm not as afraid of death as you are.”

“Put down your gun.”

I asked, but he didn't move at all.

“You're going to lose here.”

“Maybe.”

“In that case, you should put down your gun.”

“But I can't die here.”

“Even if you die, you'll just be born again. Isn't that right, Raine?”

I gasped. There was no doubt about it. He knew everything.

“Don't move!” I screamed. “It's all over. This ridiculous repetition ends here!”

I pulled the trigger. But he'd vanished faster than the bullet. The bullet hit the edge of the hole in the ceiling. I quickly pulled the bolt and loaded my next shot, keeping calm, but he didn't reappear.

I ran out of the bunker and peeked above ground. On the shell hole-riddled ground, I saw a few dead bodies and some barbed wire. I looked around and saw nobody. Smoke rose in the distance. I could see machine guns spewing lead. A huge shell landed nearby. The vibrations shook the area for a long while. I slowly crawled my way up the trench, gun in hand. Perhaps the enemy was preoccupied with other targets, as they didn't fire their machine guns. I kept one eye out for snipers as I ran to the base of the burnt out husk of a tree. I ducked under the tree and checked my surroundings. There were so few living humans to be seen that it made the human cost of the war seem like a lie.

I crawled back and went to the top of the bunker. There was a huge hole in the ground. This was where the German soldier had been standing moments ago. I stretched my neck to look in the hole left by the shell. There were no headless bodies in the bunker. I leaned over even further and lay down at the edge of the hole so that I could see all the way into the bunker. There were no bodies. Only mud brown water filling the bunker to the brim. All four corpses were gone.

I had been planning to pursue the German soldier, but I gave up on that and decided to search for the bodies. In the short time I had been looking away, four corpses had vanished. That was a job for eight medics. It had been done in an instant, with no one in sight to do it. I jumped back into the trench and returned to the entrance of the bunker. I looked inside, but the bodies were still gone.

As I stood at a loss for words, Rolo came walking up to me from the other side of the path. He was moving slowly along the surface of the water, searching for something.

“What is it?”

“Oh, sub-lieutenant. My glasses got swept away somewhere. I put them in my case.”

“How's it look on the front lines?”

“It's a stalemate. It's been like that for a long time now. I remember a few infantrymen came charging in, but that's it.”

“Did you see any bodies?”

“I've seen a lot of bodies, sir.”

“No. Headless bodies.”

“I didn't see anything like that. I came from the other side, but I didn't see any bodies there.”

I nodded and helped him search for his glasses. But they were nowhere to be found. Rolo quickly gave up on them and returned to the front line.

If someone had moved the bodies, it would have taken a long time. I continued on to the auxiliary trench. I ran into Jean and Hale again. They were taking turns sipping from a small bottle of whiskey. They'd mounted their guns on the edge of the trench and were watching for enemy soldiers.

“I'll confiscate that.”

“Don't be such a spoilsport.”

“What's going on all of a sudden?” asked Hale. “Did you go to the bunker?”

“Uh-huh. As you said, there were certainly bodies there, but they're gone now. All four of the bodies vanished.”

“Vanished?”

“Has anyone come by here carrying the corpses?”

“We'd have seen right away if that had happened. We've been here this whole time,” said Jean.

“Then where did the bodies disappear to?”

There was no evidence that the bodies had been moved, either in the trenches or up above. On the contrary, the combined testimonies of Jean, Hale, and Rolo made it impossible for the bodies to be anywhere.

The sound of shelling never stopped. Even though the bodies had disappeared, the war continued on.

 

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