“Thanks.”
The wagon was loaded with hungover iron workers when Brodie climbed aboard. A few minutes later, the driver cracked his whip and they started up the hill. As the wagon reached the crest, Brodie looked back at the town where he was born and where his life had changed forever in the years since the death of his mother. A great sadness flowed over him. Then he turned his back on Eureka and dismissed it.
Good-bye forever and good riddance, he said to himself, and he knew he would never return.
Fate had other plans for Brodie Culhane.
1918
In the spring of 1917, a dispirited President Woodrow Wilson, the liberal idealist who had ardently resisted America’s intervention in the war in Europe, was finally forced to admit the inevitable: America was about to be drawn into the most savage conflict in the history of warfare. In 1914, nine European nations were embroiled in what would become known as the Great War, a conflict unparalleled in its brutality. On one side, France, Italy, Great Britain, and Russia, among others. Opposing them, Germany, Turkey, and the Ottoman Empire.
It quickly became apparent that World War I was to become a campaign of mud, trenches, barbed wire-and machine guns, the first time the deadly weapon was used in a major war.
By the time the United States entered the conflict, the trench war was approaching its grotesque and barbaric finale…
A thick fog laced with the smell of death lay like a shroud over the battlefield. Then there was a howl in the sky as a star shell arced and burst, briefly revealing a ghastly sight. Silhouetted in the heavy mist was a wasteland of staggering destruction. Trees, fragmented by constant artillery shelling, were reduced to leafless, shattered stalks. Fence posts wrapped in rusting barbed wire stood like pathetic sentinels over trenches that snaked and crisscrossed the terrain. Shell holes, surrounded by mounds of displaced earth, were filled with rancid rainwater. There was no grass, nothing green or verdant, just brown stretches of mud, body parts dangling from endless stretches of wire, abandoned weapons, and corpses frozen in a tragic frieze of death.
And there were the rats, legions of rats, scurrying back and forth in the no-man’s-land, feasting on the dead.
A few hundred yards beyond the haze-veiled scene, the Germans were gathering for another attack-there had been dozens through the years. The star shell burned out and darkness enveloped the shell-spotted battlefield.
Brodie Culhane was chilled even though it was early September. His boots and socks were soaked and he had removed his puttees, which were in rags. Damp fog wormed through his clothing and clung to his skin. The machine-gun nest he had set up had an inch of water in it from a rainstorm the night before. There wasn’t a spot of dry ground for miles in any direction. It made him think of Eureka. All around him was mud. Mud as demanding as quicksand, sucking a man’s legs down to the knees with every step. As he stared into the darkness, another star shell burst overhead, illuminating the grim no-man’s-land that lay between his machine-gun line and the Germans.
From Switzerland to the English Channel, the French had lined their border with trenches and barbed wire, four rows of each separating them from Germany. Now, almost four years later, the grim sight before him defined what had become known as the Western Front.
He was dying for a cigarette. And in the deadly silence, a song suddenly echoed in his head.
K-K-K-Katy, K-K-K-Katy,
You’re the only g-g-g-girl that I adore…
It was their first day on the line. They were marching down a road past a park on the outskirts of a French town called Chateau Thierry, heading north toward a game preserve called Belleau Wood. One of the squads started singing, as if it were a parade. One platoon singing one song, a second company answering with another.
K-K-K-Katy, K-K-K-Katy,
You’re the only g-g-g-girl that I adore,
When the m-m-m-moon shine’s, over the c-c-c-cowshed,
I’ll be w-w-w-waiting at the g-g-g-garden door.
Answered by:
You may forget the gas and shells, parlay-voo,
You may forget the gas and shells, parlay-voo,
You may forget the gas and shells,
But you’ll never forget the mademoiselles,
Hinky-dinky parlay-voo.
They were still singing when the Germans fired the first volley. Machine guns. His men went down like string-cut puppets.
Barely six months ago.
Baptism day.
Behind him, the radiophone buzzed, its ring muzzled to prevent the enemy, a few hundred yards away, from hearing it.
The radioman, a clean-cheeked youngster, answered it, cupping the mouthpiece with his hand. He gave the receiver to Culhane, who could feel the youngster’s hand shaking as he took it. The nineteen-year-old had developed the shakes after only two weeks on the front.
“Culhane,” he whispered.
“Brodie, this is Jack Grover. The major wants to have a chat. I’m on the radiophone by the five-mile post.”
“Stay where you are,” Brodie answered, “I’ll come to you. You’ll never get that tricycle of yours through this damn muck.”
“Appreciate that,” Grover answered with a chuckle, and the radio went dead.
“Relax, kid,” Culhane’s voice was calm and deep as an animal’s growl as he handed the phone back to the radioman. “Nothing’s gonna happen for three or four hours. Think about something else. Think about your girl back home or Christmas or something. Fear’s worse than the real thing.”
He checked his watch in the masked glow of his flashlight. It was three-fifteen.
“I gotta run back to HQ,” he told the kid. “Cover the stutter gun.” He grabbed his rifle, crawled out of the nest, and headed east in a crouch toward the dirt road four hundred feet away, mud snatching at his boots with every step.
Grover was waiting on the motorcycle when Culhane emerged from the dark. His clothing and face were caked with mud, he was unshaven, and his eyes were dulled by lack of sleep.
“Jesus, you look like hell,” Grover said as Culhane clambered into the sidecar.
“Haven’t you heard, this is hell,” Culhane answered. Grover wheeled around and headed back down the muddy road.
Temporary HQ was a two-room bunker a mile from no-man’s-land. It had wood-plank floors, sandbags for walls, and the ceiling was made of fence posts and logs. The first room was occupied by the top sergeant, a beefy old-timer named Paul March. Wooden planks stretched between upended ammo boxes substituted for a desk. A radioman named Caldone was huddled over his equipment and a runner was catching a nap on a cot in the corner. A tattered piece of burlap served as a door to the other room, the major’s office.
“How’s it going up there?” March said to Culhane.
“Wanna take a guess?”
“No thanks,” March said. “Let me be surprised in a couple of hours when we join you for tea and crumpets.” He walked to the burlap curtain and knocked on the wooden frame that supported it.
“Yes?” The voice from inside the room was deep, with the soft roll of the South in it.
“Sergeant Culhane’s here, Major.”
“Good, show him in.”
They entered, saluted, and Major Merrill walked around his desk to grab Culhane by the arm.
“Good to see you, Brodie,” he said.
“Glad I’m still around.”
The major was a big man, broad-shouldered and muscular, his hair trimmed almost to the scalp, his dark blue eyes dulled by too many attacks and counterattacks and too many “regret” letters written to mothers or wives or sisters. He was a year younger than Culhane, but the war had put ten years on his face. Culhane had served under him for two years, starting when the battalion was formed in South Carolina. Merrill was a compassionate man in a business where compassion was a liability.
“Jesus, you’re a wreck,” he said to Culhane.