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The wind sounds from far off, like a spring waterfall, before it reaches us further down in the woods, seeping through my wool jacket. The barren tree branches above clatter together. My feet are like two clubs, two stumps that pummel the ground clumsily. I walk with my knees; they are the nearest thing to my feet that I can feel, lifting each foot with my thighs. The ground is damp, but somehow a layer of snow has already accumulated on it. These are the miracles we get: snow sticking to mud.
I adjust my kit and rifle with a single hop. It settles on my back anew. I curl my hand around the rifle strap, drawing it tight against my back, and tuck my knuckles beneath the knit balaclava slack at my throat. The munitions and tins in my Tornister clatter against each other. A few strides ahead, making his way around a limbless pine tree, Albert glances back at me.
Beyond him, I can see the forest give way to the faux clearing. The woods used to extend far beyond the current timberline that we are fast approaching. Pine needles carpet the ground where no trees stand. An inattentive infantryman is liable to trip over an exposed root. The trees are still there, but they have been turned into sharpened spikes embedded in the tender undergrowth, or give structure to the trenches, or float in the air as tiny motes of charcoal dust.
I should be used to this now but I cannot help the rush of panic that seizes my guts. My mouth waters all of a sudden, thick and cloying in the back of my throat, tempting me to lean over and spit so that I might be compelled to vomit, and then give in to sitting to catch my bearings, just to delay my return to the front, even by a few minutes. It is so strange how the biting cold, the blisters nagging my feet, the pain in my stomach all fall away to the present actualizations of my dread: I need to vomit; I need to evacuate my bowels; I need my mother.
I ignore all three. I am a half-decent soldier. The feverish panic is almost enough to warm my feet, which I appreciate.
Stepping out of the treeline puts us all on edge. Each man as he emerges hunches a bit more, rises on his feet, tightens his grip on his rifle. I don’t know why we should feel safer in the woods. The snow is falling harder. Our trench is just a shadow on the landscape, which is smothered in gray. No distinction between the gray of the land and the gray of the sky. The sun brightens the sky to a shade of dirty bathwater. There is no way of knowing what time of day it is. A glance over my shoulder. Only the tallest, broadest trees are visible against the falling snow. Another few meters and there will be no way of knowing where one is, either.
The front is subdued, which means that the heavy artillery being fired at us are random and ineffective, and machine gun fire almost completely absent. No one can see anything. We walk across the plain like ghosts, shrouded by the falling snow. The weather swallows the sounds of the artillery. They thump here and there, muffled, more like distant thunder than the usual snarling fireworks. Große Klappe und nichts dahinter , as my father would say.
Just as Albert and I clamber down into the trench, I make eye contact with a Leutnant who is fielding a complaint from a medic. I go to look away, but his eyes intensify. A tacit order to halt. Kropp soon notices that I’m not behind him and comes back to join me. “Take him,” says the Leutnant. “And him. I cannot spare any more.”
The medic looks at us. His face is grim, his jaw held in a stiff, perpetual grimace. His eyes both seem blackened. He appears far older than us, but experience tells me he may be a medical student or a very young physician.
“Take it or leave it. I’m not putting more men on retrieval.”
“Jawohl, Herr Leutnant,” says the medic with a half-hearted salute. “Come.” He leads us south along the trench away from where the rest of our company enters the trench and keeps north. “We have only a few hours until this weather clears.” He stops where some medics have staged supplies at a ladder leading out into No Man’s Land. “Take a stretcher. We’re retrieving bodies. No bits and pieces; bodies as intact as you can find them. Be quick, but don’t rush or cut corners. One body at a time; they are waterlogged and two will rip through the canvas, and then what will you do?” He points on the other side of the trench. “Drop them off by the lorries. Oh,” he says and grabs a long shred of torn stretcher canvas. He rips it in two and extends them to each of us. “And tie these on your belts.”
Kropp laughs, but the medic just stares at him. We take the once-white shreds and tie them off with our numb hands.
Without a second thought, the medic abandons us. A sharpshooter appears above us from against the trench wall—I hadn’t noticed him before. He has peeled himself away from his telescope to look at us. “Don’t worry boys,” he says. He sounds Lusatian, more Polish than German. A cheroot butt is clamped between his teeth. “I’ll watch for you.”
We have nothing to say to that. We have a decent chance of being shot by him if we move too strangely. Taking up a stretcher, we get on with it.
Enough snow has accumulated that we leave footprints in it. We crunch quickly, hunched over, into the thick, white pall, snowflakes pelting our faces. Kropp leads, weaving through barbed wire and along the precarious banks of deep shell craters. I glance in each one as we pass, but they are all empty of our quarry. Still, there are bloodied assemblages of uniform, lumps of flesh and appendage mercifully disguised with snow and muck. A body reclines snagged in barbed wire like a beetle trapped in spider web. One of ours. It twists around him, tangled, dragged along as he tried to escape it. It would take us hours to cut him loose, so, like everyone else that has passed him, we continue on. The other medics cleared these nearer sections first, leaving us to venture out further and further. The machine gun rounds pop more clearly from both sides. Howitzer shells land astride us, a shadow of mud stretching up into the air.
Our first is a torso in a shallow depression. An indirect hit from heavy artillery. If it had been direct, there would be nothing for us to pick up. There are no legs. The arms have been gored. Half of the hip has collapsed. The chest and face likely weren’t damaged by the enemy, but the rats have eaten away at the soft parts. I pull the man up by his shoulders while Albert bashes at the rats with his spade. They do not put up much of a fight. What is one body to them? There is no competition. Rats float dead in the water pooled in deeper craters. The snow and rain that puddle are contaminated with old gas that has settled on the topsoil. The rats have drank the poisoned water and died, poisoning the puddles further. Even less competition. We come to find that the medic was right about the weight. He weighs as much as a live man when we lift the stretcher up and jog back.
Albert shouts that we’re friendly, we’re medics, we’re German. The rifleman chews on his cigar. We walk briskly to catch our breath, hurrying over the wooden footbridge and behind the trench. We lower the stretcher and offset the man. My lungs burn, but this is no place to rest. Even through the cold, which masks some smell, the stench of waste and rot is heavy.
We go back for three more corpses before we decide that we have done enough. Our last body is a simple gunshot wound, remarkably fresh compared to the others. A clean blast through the throat. Not an immediate death, but quicker than is common. A good omen. I cross his arms over his chest and stoop down to pick him up when I am immediately flattened. A quartet of machine gun rounds hiss past us. A good omen, indeed. Kropp and I stare at each other, eyes wide, as still as statues. Have we been seen, or is it a random, curious shot? Above us, I can see the air moving, swirling the thick fog. The snowflakes are thinner here. Maybe there is no fog at all on the French side and their visibility is much clearer.
“Should we leave him?” Kropp whispers. It is the first time either of us has spoken in over an hour.
“What difference does it make?”
“Our lives, I suppose.”
I creep up to Kropp and take hold of one of the handles on his side. “If it’s all the same to you…”
He nods and takes the other hand and we crawl back on our hands and knees through the muddy slush, dragging the stretcher like a sled behind us. The machine gun never returns.
By the time we reach the coffins, a man is closing the hatch on one of the lorries. The other truck’s bed is nearly full. “Are there any more?” One of the men asks us.
There are hundreds more. Maybe thousands. “No,” I say. “Not from us.”
We return to the trench and leave the stretcher where we found it. Albert and I wander through the trench. Lookouts are propped against the action-side wall, holding binoculars, snow settling on their helmets. Riflemen like the Lusatian are interspersed between them. One peers through the telescope on his Gewehr, face slack, his bare angry-red finger resting against the trigger. Inside the trench, men sit on chairs dug out from dirt walls unreinforced by wooden planks. The clay mud slips beneath our boots; we’re trampling the snow into the ground. We find Tjaden hustling a group of enlisted. He is in the hole by a couple of bucks, sheepishly folding a pair of aces with deceiver's delight in his eyes. We pull him away; he will make his money back easily later. Next, we find Kat. Although, with his impatient look as we come out of the murky distance, it seems he has found us. He stands beneath a wooden footbridge, shielding himself from the thick snowflakes.
“What’s that?” Tjaden asks.
One of Kat’s hands is tucked in his armpit. The other holds his tin cup and cigarette. Both are steaming. Kat jerks his head back. “Glühwein.”
“I thought they were saving it for Christmas dinner.”
“I reckon they’re worried we’ll all kill ourselves before then.”
We walk to the mess. My legs are flimsy with fatigue. The sound of music reaches us before the smell of spiced wine. It is orchestral and jaunty. The officers have records playing on a gramophone, amplified through the address system. We fall in with the growing line of men waiting outside of the mess. Kropp scoffs softly. I look at him. “Mendelssohn’s Italian symphony,” he explains. “A song about Macaronis for a bunch of Germans. You try to make sense of it.”
The line moves quickly. I nearly drop my cup when the cookie ladles a single ration of spiced wine in it. The cauldron of it is already just below a simmer, and I underestimated how cold my hands are. It feels like reaching into a fire and taking a handful of coal. Careful not to spill, I pass the cup from hand to hand, hissing all the while. The LT gives me an unimpressed look from over the steward’s shoulder.
I cannot bear to waste the warmth, even though it makes me grimace. I drink it as soon as my mouth can tolerate it. Both the alcohol and the heat set me ablaze all the way down into my chest. For Glühwein, it is weak and watery, but there is still a sweetness to it and a fragrant, biting spice that is just enough to remind me of a different time. My mother would make my sister and I wassail from apple juice, and my father would allow us each a small sip of his mulled wine.
Some of the men shelter in the burrows and dugouts, but we loiter outside. Tjaden and I have already finished our spiced wine. Kropp still nurses at his with cat-like sips. Tjaden eyes him like a seagull, but Kropp does not notice. He has his head craned to read a page of Kat’s newspaper. “Everything for the Fatherland; everything for freedom.”
It is so striking to hear that we all prick up like our spines have been tickled. Kat frowns at him over the page.
“Is that supposed to be us?” Kropp points.
Kat closes the paper and turns it over to get a look. The three of us stand at his shoulders. A large painting covers almost the entire back page of the magazine. Three rosy-cheeked infantrymen in clean, tailored field uniforms stand in a trench, complete with mirrors on the walls and photos of farmland. Below them are wooden crates overflowing with fresh fruits and vegetables and breads. One soldier holds a scythe, the other polishes a sword, and the last has a rifle fixed with a bayonet over his shoulder. A fourth soldier is climbing the wall, one hand beside his open mouth, the other pointing out of the trench. The Eiffel Tower rises out of the mist across the sanitized depiction of No Man’s Land—no rats, no body parts, no barbed wire or stakes. He shouts the words that Kropp just read.
“I didn’t know we could decorate in here,” Tjaden mutters. “I would’ve brought the framed portrait of my Aunt Gertrud.”
“Well, if you did, we would have to put a nice rug down, get some flowers,” adds Kropp.
Tjaden nods. “Ought to let the boys know not to break the vase on their way out.”
I have nothing to contribute. My brain struggles to comprehend what my eyes see. I do not recognize the scene in the painting. “Is that really what people think it looks like here?”
“Oh, if you think that’s good…” says Kat and he shuffles through the pages until he finds a column titled, “Front Line News: From the Desk of the Central Office for Foreign Services.” He clears his throat and reads aloud, putting on a Berlin accent:
"Though they may be far from home, home is never far from the minds of the brave men in the Kaiserliche Armee. Another successful push last week into France provided an opportunity for stability and prosperity in Germany. “A humble pair of hectares ripe for tilling; I think my family would do well here, once this war is won!” says the infantryman. His comrade clasps his shoulder. “That is all well for your livelihood, but what will you bring for your wife and your children to enjoy? Our next Iron Youth and noble wives are the very heart of Germany!” The men continue their march west as the sun begins to set on another day. The infantryman’s response is immediate. “Another hectare for us to build a lovely home on for my wife to govern, and a half more for the children to play! It will all be in a day’s work tomorrow, and the day after that we shall march home as victors!”
Suddenly, everything makes sense to me. Kantorek, my father, even my own decisions that landed me here.
“People believe that?” Albert says dryly. “Incredible.”
“So we are to understand that you enlisted for this?” Kat calls his bluff, gesturing around us. The snow has turned to rain, puddling in the mud footprints. Worms wriggle out of the soil between rotting wood panels. Shocking that they haven't been exterminated by the contaminated water seeping into the ground. The artillerists, whose munitions grow louder in their accuracy, rumbling explosions vibrating underfoot, must be able to see better in the rain than snow.
Albert has no response. He knows why he enlisted. We all know. My traitorous mind reminds me of Behm, and I feel that awful dread churning in my stomach. There was a time when I wanted a wife and children. I saw those things as inevitable, something that would fall into my lap one day with certainty after gaining respectable employment and a nice house somewhere. I cannot imagine any life after this; there is nothing like that for me anymore. After all, how could I start a family knowing clearly that I was raising grist for the mill? To be German is to be a cell in a body wracked with cancer. There is only one inevitability now.
Kat folds up the newspaper. “You two look like you need a few more rations of morale.”
Tjaden saves us, throwing his arm around my neck and drawing me into his armpit roughly. It catches me off-guard; I wonder when he got strong enough to do that. “Look at him; he needs morale like he needs a bullet to the head.”
Usually, Kat shuts down that kind of talk, but for once he entertains our gallows humor. “More likely to get one of those than a second cup of mulled wine.”