Combat

La Marmite
Ernest Gabard
Source

Louis didn't like the dugout his squad lived in when they weren't manning the firing step. He had told the Baron, when he'd first arrived at the front, that it felt like a tomb.

"It may become one, it has happened before. Some people call them a 'bomb proof' dugout, but that's not entirely accurate. It will protect us from anything other than a direct hit and those are rare enough."

"If it's a direct hit?" Louis wondered out loud.

"Then it becomes a tomb. But don't worry lad, you think too much. It doesn't pay to have an imagination out here."

Louis was trying to sleep, he could hear scratching and furtive movements in the shadows cast by the sputtering lamp. He knew that the rats were always looking for food, while he tried not to think of them skittering there in the dark, he was, after all, a boy from a rural village. He was used to mice and the like, but these beasts were huge in comparison. The thought of one walking around near him while he slept was unnerving.

After a while, Louis did sleep, exhaustion overcame his fear eventually. It was that way every night. He liked night duty when he could be in the open air, he didn't mind sleeping during the day. But that was rare.

Louis awakened in terror, the earth was heaving and moving, dirt was showering down over him from the logs overhead. He laid there, wide-eyed, until the Baron slapped his feet and shouted at him.

"Get up, boy. That's artillery landing nearby, I think the enemy might be trying something, we're to stand to. Let's go laddie, move!"

Louis scrambled to find his helmet and his rifle, they always slept fully dressed. The first night he'd taken his boots off only to have the sergeant yell at him to "put your damned boots on boy, this ain't a hotel!"

When the Baron had told him that the rats liked to nibble on toes while people slept, that had convinced him to keep his boots on all night. After a few days though, his feet had started to bother him. The Baron had taught him to always wash his feet when he could, dry them off, then let them air out for a bit.

"And change your socks every time!" he'd been admonished. After that, his feet didn't bother him nearly so much. However, the ability to have a pair of dry, clean socks continued to be his biggest problem. Especially now that the rains were upon them.

The sergeant slapped the back of his head and Louis realized that he'd been daydreaming. Imagine that, preparing for a possible attack and he'd been thinking about his socks.

"Damn it, kid, pay attention!"

At that very moment a shell had burst nearly overhead, the force seeming to press Louis down as if a giant hand had hit him. His ears were ringing and the trench was misty from the water thrown up in the air by the shell burst. He was shaking his head and looking around in confusion when the Baron grabbed him and got him back on the firing step.

"They're coming boy, look alive!"

Louis looked out towards no-man's-land and saw people out there, furtive shapes darting from one shell hole to the next. Some of them would fall and not get up, others would get up only to dart ahead once more. Some occasionally would stop and fire their rifles. When he heard a bullet hiss by overhead, he looked up. The Baron shoved his head back down.

"Stay low. When the machine guns start firing, then you start firing as well. Don't just point it out there, but aim at the enemy if you see him. Even if you think you see him, aim and shoot. Shoot to kill, boy, they certainly are!"

Louis heard the machine guns start to chatter, so he put his cheek to the buttstock of his rifle, aimed and then realized his safety was still on. He glanced at the Baron, he was methodically aiming and firing his weapon, stopping to load as necessary, but looking for all the world as if this was simply a mechanical task, aim, fire, work the bolt, then fire again. No thought being given to the fact that he was shooting at another man.

Louis saw a man out there, his head down, moving forward as if walking into a strong wind and a heavy rain. Louis aimed, then fired. He was astonished as he saw his target drop to one knee, then try to get up again. The man took a halting step, then fell out of Louis' line of sight. Had he just killed a man?

The Baron slapped him on the shoulder, "Don't stop to admire your handiwork, keep firing!"

He worked the bolt, he fired, he reloaded, he gave it no more thought then he would to swatting flies back home. Then again, he was no longer aiming at the shapes in the increasing smoke out there. He was simply shooting, not aiming.

A little voice in his head kept whispering, "You took someone's life. How dare you?"

Louis was still firing when he heard the command, "Cease fire!" echo up and down the line. Apparently the enemy had been repulsed. When Louis looked out there, he noticed a few shapes, inert on the ground, wearing the uniforms of the enemy. One man had fallen within a stone's throw of the trench. He wasn't moving.

Two men came scurrying down the trench line, handing out more ammunition. The Baron admonished him to grab as much as he could, "The bastards might come back!" he'd said.

Louis was looking at the dead man out there. His helmet had come off, the soldier had longish blond hair, and the wind was tugging at it. Louis couldn't take his eyes off the man, or what had once been a man. With his hair moving in the breeze, he looked like he could still be alive, were it not for the fact that the back of his uniform was shredded where the bullet that had killed him had come out.

The Baron noticed what he was staring out, and spoke.

"Little hole going in, big hole coming out, if it comes out."

"W... w... what?" Louis had stuttered.

"Bullet hits a fellow, it punches a little hole in him, then it tumbles a bit and tears a track through him. If it comes out, it doesn't always, but that fellow," he pointed at the blond corpse, "he was hit at close range, so the bullet only tumbled a little, so it went through him. Seeing that mess on his back, I'm guessing he was hit more than once."

Louis swallowed carefully, he felt the need to urinate all of a sudden. Then the Baron spoke again.

"But that fellow is lucky."

"Lucky, how is he lucky?" Louis let a speck of outrage enter his voice.

"Well, it's a matter of degree then, innit? He died quickly, I've seen fellows out there, hit but not killed right away. The can linger for hours, if not days. Hard to get to 'em as well. If it's one of ours, sometimes one of our fellows will shoot him, make it quick like. Don't want the chap to suffer now, do we?"

"We shoot our own guys?"

"Would you rather he suffer, would you like to hear him scream for his mother all night, his voice getting weaker and weaker until he goes silent? Perhaps dead, perhaps not. If you can't get to him, better to put him out of his misery,"

"What of it's one of theirs?"

"Ah, depending on how much noise the bastard makes, we like to let 'em go on a bit. Make the bastard suffer, might encourage his buddies to stay at home next time."

"That's horrible," Louis objected, before he could say another word, the Baron shushed him, then explained.

"War is horrible. There is no glory here. Only suffering, pain, and death. The idea is to inflict enough of that on the other fellow so he wants to quit. In a perfect world, it would be the politicians out here shooting at each other. Want to bet that wars would be pretty damned short if that was the case?"

Louis had no answer to that, the Baron was, as he so often was, correct in his assessment of things. But that night, Louis dreamed, horrible dreams. Of blond hair blowing in the wind, of a man staggering and falling with Louis' bullet in his belly, of horrible things in the dark, things that wanted to eat his soul and end his life on this earth.

When the Baron shook him awake at midnight, Louis stepped up on the firing step and looked out over no-man's-land. The little voice in his head, the one accusing him of murder, was gone. Snow was falling, the horror of no-man's land had taken on a different aspect. Dusted with the new fallen snow, it looked clean somehow.

Louis breathed the cold air in, savored it, then thought, "If I survive, fine. If I don't, Lord, please make it quick."