Story: Belleau Wood IV.
Clockwise from upper left: Morrow before the attack, the Storm rises, Bois Belleau after the Allied artillery bombardment, Allies atand at graves at Lucy le Bocarge, Lewis gun shells, Illustration for In 'Flander's Field' poem by John McCrae, May 1915.
Significant music to listen to quietly whilst reading if you so wish:
(Even if you ignore all the other music you really have to listen to this piece:)
Click to view(I don't know how to embed this one, sorry, so have a link.)
http://uncertain-attribution.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/when-you-bleed.mp3
Sector 10, Allied lines outside Bois Belleau, 8th June 1918.
Morrow rubbed at the stubble on his chin and caught his smile in his hand. Bone tired, half awake and about to lead an assault - and of all the damn things he was vexed he didn’t have time for a shave. He wondered what Cait would have to say about that.
He reached into his breast pocket and pulled out the letter he’d finished the night before, handing it to a runner to put in the post-bag. He’d written to her whenever he could, inconsequential things that would escape the censor’s pen; thoughts of home and the blistering blue of the Arizona sky, or the scent of cottonwood, wisteria and iced tea that permeated all of Valdosta. Promises of where they’d go when he returned; the old town by the boarder, or Larabee’s cabin, anywhere her feet cared to take them and he’d follow gladly.
He buttoned his coat, re-adjusted his belt and checked his guns and ammunition box. HB pushed her head against his knee as he picked up his hat, ice-eyes solemn. “Not a chance in hell darlin’,” he informed her, stroking the back of her skull and letting his hand rest for a moment on the thick pelt of her ruff. “You’re stayin’ here.”
She growled.
“No.”
The pitch changed, edging towards a whine.
“Haal ma djeret,” he commanded.
HellBitch fell silent, watching as Morrow left, her tail thumping twice against the earth the only outward sign of her worry and displeasure.
==========
The wheat field at the southern foot of Belleau rippled in the pre-dawn breeze like a serene lake, the first hint of light glinting off the ripening heads of grain.
The lines were formed, men ordered by rank and unit, gathered correctly about their officers like hounds on a hunt.
The call sounded.
It was going to be a glorious day.
==========
At the edge of the wood, dug in and screened by scrub and saplings was a warren of machinegun nests. They were not heavily manned, but they didn’t have to be; six men to each gun. One to fire, two to load the belts, one to keep the water cooling system full, one to pass supplies and one in reserve: properly drilled and provided they didn’t run out of water or bullets they could keep firing almost indefinitely.
The Maxim teams strung the southernmost sector like fanged viper-pits, turning the surrounding fields into their own personal killing floor.
They waited until the Marines were halfway across the field before opening fire which ensured whether they advanced or retreated, the Americans would spend the most time possible being shredded by the many teeth of the Maxim guns.
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Sector 9, Bois Belleau, 8th June 1918.
They were cut down like rats in the grain.
==========
Time is a constant.
No matter how long you live, a second is still a second with sixty chained consecutively into a minute and sixty of those to make an hour. Twenty four hours in a day and whether you wish there are more or less, twenty four is what you get.
Time is constant. But one’s perception of time is not. Adrift in repose one may lose whole chunks of time in a blink of an eye; or alert to the world one may perceive an object fall and have time enough to catch it, compressing everything into a single second.
High-strung with adrenaline, Morrow’s seconds were very long indeed, and his senses almost painfully acute - although it was an acuity that left little room for background information. The world had rendered itself into broad strips of colour (the brightening silver of the sky, the shadows of the wood and the ghost green of the wheat) where details stood out with grotesque realism. Hamlet might have claimed there was special providence in the fall of a sparrow, but right now in a single glance Morrow could have counted every single feather in a flock of sparrows before they slipped back into the tapestry of the world.
The skin along his forearms and at the back of his neck chilled, thin hairs raised in a profusion of dread and gooseflesh. Something was wrong. He barely paused - could not halt, and he an officer at the front of an advance - but one second stretched so far it was a wonder it didn’t break.
At first there was no sound that he heard, he was just aware of the way the wheat moved in a hot wind that hadn’t been there before but tore by like the breath of god, singeing the world as it passed in an angry sigh. To his left he saw two men blink out of existence, swallowed by the wheat; to the right also, holes were opening in their lines. It was only then as the second snapped back to itself, he heard the incessant staccato rattle of the machine guns, the whine as the bullets whipped past and the little sounds of impact that often heralded a scream.
In the pre-dawn light and the beginnings of a massacre, Morrow’s eyes sheened like lightning.
==========
Bois Belleau, 8th June 1918.
She had been dozing, huddled down amidst the roots of a tree, leaves and grasses obscuring her coat like a blanket. She was tired. Time had stopped having meaning for her ever since she crossed the ocean, it was all just a matter of what direction and how far away, following the thread, winding it in like Theseus finding his way out of the Labyrinth with a trail of blood behind him.
A grubby young woman in a dead man’s coat, walking through allied and enemy territory alike with the dust of the road on her clothes and a wildcat wrapped round her skinny shoulders like a mink stole. She could hear the angry chatter of machine guns to the south at the foot of the wood. She pulled the slouch hat down over her ears as if that could muffle out the racket.
In the folds of her coat, Spindle’s purring stopped and she twisted out from beneath the heavy wool, whiskers quivering, fur beginning to puff.
Cait opened her eyes again, a scowl knifed between her brows. The light had changed, become infused with a colour as indefinable as it was indescribable. And the calm of the air had taken a sharp tang, like ozone or electricity - the wet-paper and sparks taste of a storm riding in...
Panic boiled in her empty stomach and she was scrambling to her feet without a second thought. Both Cait and Spindle started to run.
==========
He felt something tug at the sleeve of his coat like an insistent creditor reminding him his debt was due. Another tug, this time close to his collar (although it had been intent on his neck). It was becoming harder to block, harder to redirect such little things, these petty inconveniences: his circle of influence was growing smaller by the second as the screams and the rattle of the Maxims ate away at the world.
A nudge at his leg and his next step faltered. He righted himself somehow and kept walking despite the air and strength deserting him, the blood rising in his lungs as it hadn’t in months. The cacophony was louder, it was like walking into the maw of the fiercest storm he’d ever known (I am the Storm - I am the goddamn Storm - but he wasn’t so sure any more.)
A touch by his arm, a little push like that time Vin had got pissy at him, yet it had all but floored him just the same. His lungs were hitching, rattling worse than those army camions. His influence was a sorry thing, as weak and tattered as their line, but like their line it had to hold - it must...
Pain and blood bubbled in his throat at the same time as an ember of iron-hot agony was hammered into his shoulder in a single decisive strike. His legs folded beneath him, and Captain Jonathan 'Preacher' Morrow of the 5th Marines - fell.
In that moment, before darkness rose to claim him for its own, he realized one single heartbreaking truth about the world: the time of heroes had passed.
Virgil had called upon the Muse to sing of arms and the man, an epic telling of the fall of a city and the triumph of a single soul against all adversity. It had taken a few thousand years, but at last it was gone. No more duels. No more nine paces in the street at high noon. No more would a single man rise up against all odds and turn the tide of battle by the skill of his ability and the depth of his courage. That age had ended.
War was a machine, fed endless lives as the Maxims and Lewis guns were fed their endless belts of ammunition. There were no heroes, no sense either, just hundreds of scores of men being ordered to throw their lives away, forced to become the smallest of cogs in a monstrous mincing machine who’s gears were oiled in blood.
Morrow had never had a high opinion of war. War was what happened when individuals didn’t have the intelligence to come to an agreement, the foresight to forge a deal, or were just too damn yellow to fight their own battles - it was a sign of failure. But never before had he seen it as something so hungry and so hollow, an endless chasm into which men were thrown to no purpose.
The age of heroes - his age - a time when one man could make a difference, was dead.
In the face of this endless atrocity his life meant nothing, the bullets he fired meant nothing, and his death would mean least of all.
For a second (although what was a second? It might have been a heartbeat or it might have been forever) the myriad heads of wheat seemed to hold him up, cushioning his fall as their stalks bent...
Time and stalks snapped and he fell hard, the air rushing out of him as the pain rushed in. Darkness hovered like an approaching weather front, leaching the colour from his vision and filling his ears with static, his limbs with cold but never quite descending. Time wore thin again, eking seconds into centuries as the pain got worse. Blood strung across his throat and he coughed in his struggle to breathe, immediately wishing he hadn’t bothered as agony cracked his chest and shoulder open wide, causing him to twitch like something on the end of a lightning rod. That made everything worse and so with the part of his mind that wasn’t screaming he willed himself still, perfectly, deathly still...
Morrow considered it grossly unjust for the beat of a man’s heart to cause him hurt. It was like being kicked in the ribs every time one didn’t die. A last flash of sardonic humour: Scarcely encouraging.
Far above him, in another world, another lifetime, dawn had broken and burnt off the silver and shadows of twilight, warming the view to gold. It was, he thought, a stupid place to die, far away from the land that knew his name and had been home to him for almost two hundred years. The sky here was all wrong for a start; wrong shade of blue and add to that there really just wasn’t enough of it.
The Territories had a sky a man could lie back and drown in. He wouldn’t mind dying so much if the sky was right.
His eyes flickered making the view stutter like a magic lantern show; high white clouds and tall stalks of green-gold wheat bending their heads over him and whispering as far away there were shouts, screams and the constant snarl of machine guns.
He felt warmth seeping around him, cozying up from his shoulder and from somewhere near his left hip, it was comforting because the rest of him was starting to get cold; he wasn’t sure he could feel his fingers.
With a sick mental lurch and brief spike of fear he wondered if he still had his fingers. He ran his thumb over the calluses of the fingers of his right hand, they were a little numb, but all accounted for. He tensed his left, seeking to bring thumb and digits together and pain exploded down his arm. He choked back a cry and spent several excruciating seconds tracing the pathways of agony to their source before being satisfied his arm might well have been minced but his hand and fingers were still attached.
This calmed and pleased him, and Morrow ceased to struggle, returning his attention to the sky. After a time it seemed to him that perhaps it wasn’t the wrong shade of blue after all.
==========
Back at the line, a dog with a white-grey pelt began to howl.
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Major Carlton’s report 3rd Battalion 5th Marines.
8th June 1918.
Advance into Sector 9 of Belleau by 3/5 and 3/6 Marines. Started at 4.20am. Sector 9
heavily occupied by machineguns and wire; enemy dug in fast. First advance of 3/5 slaughtered. 3/6 Battalion swept into southern end of Belleau, encountered heavy resistance and sustained grave losses. Hand to hand combat commenced. Tally stands at 19 officers and 464 enlisted fatalities. Casualties currently 26 officers, 873 enlisted. Reports still arriving, total still counting. However, Marines now have foothold in Belleau Wood and are working to clear Sector 9.
Battle now deadlocked. At midnight on 7-8 June, German attack held off at sector 10. American counter-attack in the morning of 8 June similarly defeated.
God help us.
==========
Allied Line Sector 9, Bois Belleau, 9th June 1918.
When one is a child, who you like isn’t a matter of conscious thought and calculation. The young mind lacks experience, and so falls back to animal instinct for its choices. A look, a gesture, a tone of voice - something about a person will sing out to you - and you’ll know in an instant if you find them trustworthy, without being able to fully comprehend why.
She had known she could trust Preach from the moment she had seen him, and believed it without question when he offered his hand and she took it.
It was later, years later, that she thought on it again and wondered if it was the way he’d smelt that had decided it. He smelt of trail dust, linen, wool and sweat same as any other man; but twinned with that had been something else. As if there’d been a funeral wreath of dog roses, tobacco flower, wisteria, and sassafras leaves that had dried beneath a Southern sun and been crushed in a shot of the finest bourbon and dabbed on as cologne. For Cait, that was what she thought of when she thought of safety.
Her mouth was dry and her hand shaking as she knelt beside him and all she could smell was blood and something she could only describe as ‘hollowness’.
Since she’d seen him last his collar-length hair had been cut short, and his imperial beard had been shaved so that only the moustache remained. His cheeks were as sunken as when she’d first met him and his skin was of a hue commonly found on the dead.
She bit her lip, forbidding herself to cry; there was work to be done, tears could come later. She couldn’t afford to be so self-indulgent here and now.
Spindle prowled round him, heckles raised and stubby tail fluffed to twice its width, deeply displeased. At last she picked her way onto the muddle of blanket and coat that covered him and curled up against his knees, purring her displeasure.
Gingerly Cait peeled back the greatcoat, accessing the damage. A bandage was tied around his thigh, but it wasn’t sodden so at least the artery wasn’t severed. His arm was dressed and bloody, the sleeve of his uniform slickly dark, but his fingers still twitched; his arm wasn’t lost yet. Worst of all was the dressing across his shoulder, an unwieldy pad of lint that had soaked up all the blood it could and was now letting it dribble out to stain his jacket further like a sponge filled past capacity.
She tried to say his name, but no words would leave her tongue.
HB whined.
Cait reached out a hand and stroked her matted fur, noting the mud on her paws, the rip through her ear and the blood around her jaws. One of her legs was bloody too; it was clear to see that Preach would not have made it back had HB not dragged him close enough to the lines for someone to risk retrieving him.
For some minutes girl and dog sat quietly beside the wounded man, taking comfort in each other’s company. Cait’s eyes stung; she wiped her nose brusquely on the back of her hand.
Morrow’s eyelids flickered open, the cold and the pain stopping him from slipping into the release of true unconsciousness. Irises of a hazed blue and bleak-black pupils within struggled for focus. A smile, weak and bloody. “I really... fucked it up this time... Cinnamon Cait.” His gaze skittered off her like a raindrop on glass and she wondered how many times he’d said similar things to figments and fever-dreams.
“Hey! Who the fuckin’ hell are you?” It was a bark, the harsh noise of a man used to being obeyed without question. Major Carlton wasn’t usually so blunt in his greetings, but they were dug down in a thicket awaiting another German attack and all they had was mounting casualties and depleting ammo to show for it.
A week they’d been clawing tooth and nail, bloody but unbowed as they fought all along the Marne. They should have been wiped out, but somehow they weren’t. And then last night it had really gone to shit. Nineteen officers and over four hundred men had been lost in three hours. They were pinned down; any attempt to collect water or collect the wounded just resulted in more dead. This being the case he was very interested in knowing just how and why a young woman in a cast-off greatcoat and a woollen slouch-cap was picking her way through their med-point and crouching over one of their wounded.
“How the hell you get here, missy?” Given the circumstances of her appearance it would have been no more unlikely that she was a princess fallen from the moon. (Although, if she was lunar royalty, then by god standards must be slipping.)
She scrubbed the back of her hand against her face again and stood up slowly, turning to meet the interruption.
“Is that a goddamn cat on him?” he demanded, the words said before he could stop. In that moment of surprise he took in the tableau; the wounded man on the stretcher with a cat curled on his legs and an Alsatian-wolf crossbreed next to him (which identified the man as Captain Morrow more surely than a set of tags - that dog never left his side) whilst a young woman with pale hair and unusual eyes tucked the blanket more tightly round him, looking for all the world like she was just about to whistle up a cab to take them out of there. “Where d’you think you’re going?”
She didn’t find it a baseless question which only proved that somehow - impossible though that was - she had been thinking of going somewhere. “Leavin’,” she said shortly, as if his question had decided it. “Takin’ Preach with me.”
The language was English, the accent dusty and well-travelled; Arizona maybe. “Hell, I barely know where to start with that, but Captain Morrow ain’t going anywhere.” She opened her mouth, clearly about to give him a piece of her mind, but he barrelled on. “Missy, I don’t know how the hell you got here, but in a minute or so those damn field guns are gonna start pounding the shit out of us again and Fritz is gonna fry us up some bullets for breakfast.” He looked beyond her to Morrow, semi-conscious and grey-skinned on the stretcher. “If I could evac him to a Red Cross post I’d do it - send you there too just so you ain’t in my hair. But the ambulances ain’t been able t’get here in three days, reinforcements ain’t got here, supplies ain’t got here. So guess what? We’re all fuckin’ stuck here ‘til we clear Fritz outta this wood.”
His words hadn’t cowed her, in fact they seemed to have left no impression at all. “Didn’t even make a dent, did I?” he snorted. “Alright, let me put it this way. You’ve got nowhere t’go that ain’t on the end of a machinegun nest. An’ even if that weren’t true, how the fuck you gonna carry that stretcher? You only got one pair of hands.”
“Go back t’your men,” she told him.
“See here missy, I don’t care if you’re cracked in the head, I ain’t lettin’ you walk outta here and I ain’t lettin’ you try t’drag one o’my men...”
“He ain’t your man,” she said clearly. “He’s mine.”
“Don’t have time f’this,” he muttered to his boots, pulling his revolver and calling, “Brenner!”
“Sir?”
He gestured to the girl behind him. “Secure her. Don’t care how, don’t care where or with what, just...”
He blinked. “Sir?”
“Captain Brenner; either she’s gone off her head or she’s a fucking spy and either way I don’t need her walking around and...”
“Dewa-en Peri redwey penaht.”
There was a second of stunned silence and then a muttered oath from Brenner. “How’d you do that?” he asked hoarsely.
“Oh for the love o’god,” the Major muttered, raising his pistol and turning his attention fully to this small, ashen-haired and female problem who was in her own way proving quite as troublesome as Fritz. “Do what?” And then he stopped, gun half raised but now uncertain. There she stood, coat buttoned tight around her, that damn dog at her heels, and beside her the stretcher (on which lay a man, several blankets and a cat) was levitating. It was no longer on the ground at her feet where it ought to be, it was level in the air at around waist height as if being bourn by invisible orderlies. She wasn’t even holding one corner of it, wasn’t touching it at all. Her gaze dismissed them without scorn, they could have been trees or damn pebbles for all the concern she gave them. She turned on her heel, the dog with her.
“Goddamn you, missy, stop right where you are or I will shoot you.” He was bristling with nerves rubbed raw with combat and now burnt by this new unfathomable strangeness. He had men to watch over and a battle to win. He would have order, goddamnit.
She turned slowly, the molten gold of her eyes lighting on him and registering him as a threat. (Something small and primal at the back of the CO’s mind gibbered quietly to itself.) “Don’t make me do it,” she said, low and distinct, like a very calm wolf instructing a lamb not to flash its hind legs and look so tasty.
“Don’t know how you can threaten me when you’re the one with a gun pointed at you...”
She smiled, a brief and funny smile; apparently an M1911 worried her about as much as a pea-shooter. “I’m going,” she said with the air of gentle fate, unwilling to repeat herself further. “You can go back to your men. You can stay there. Or you can shoot me and I’ll blow this fucking wood apart - I don’t care which.” She turned away from him and began to walk, the dog loping and the stretcher floating in her wake. Two paces. Three. “He might be the Storm, but I swear to you I’m the goddamn Sun.” Four.
“Missy!” It was a growled final warning, followed by a vicious curse.
Five steps.
He pulled the trigger. The bullet impacted on something faultlessly solid, unseen and impervious at her back. She sighed, a short noise of resignation. “Duck,” she instructed, before clenching her fists and causing all the world to exploded around them.
==========
In the official reports it was said that on the afternoon of June 9th, a grand Allied barrage flattened Belleau Wood. It shattered the trees and turned what had once been a fine hunting reserve into a broken landscape of mud and splinters. It scoured clean too the German encampment on the southern end, smashing the lines of barbed wire, snipers and machinegun nests that had decimated the Marines not two days before. This barrage that pulverised the land like the hand of god paved the way for a further week of vicious fighting, until the Germans were finally routed.
There were few officers left alive to contradict the statement concerning the shells, and none who cared one way or the other… But the Allied artillery that had come from Vaux to Hill 142 were silent; Command had instructed them not to fire until it was certain the 3rd Battalion 6th Marines and what remained of the 5th wouldn’t be caught in the bombardment.
On the ninth of June, the Allied guns didn’t fire a single shot.
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NOTES:
"Haal ma djeret."
Lit: become gentle-handed. Means stay, stop fidgeting, stop worrying etc. (Kachina)
"Dewa-en Peri redwey penaht."
We’re leaving now. (Kachina)