The Trench by Brian Hesse (ebook e reader .TXT) 📕

“Hey girls,” said Paul laughing as he placed his machine gun on its heavy metal stand.

“Ok, in all seriousness, my assistant gunner was decapitated during the bombardment and I need one of you to feed me ammunition and piss on the barrel if it gets too hot.”

Otto and Friedrich just stared at Paul for a moment in disbelief. Who would ever have thought they would hear the words “my assistant was decapitated” as if he were talking about dropping his sandwich in the mud?

“Hey, you two, make a decision before the swarm of angry French bees charges right for our beady little Hun eyes. The Germans were called the Huns by the enemy, and not in a way to signify respect or compliment.

“Otto, you do it,” whispered Friederich into his still ringing ear. “I don’t think my hands are steady enough to load that steel beast fast enough.”

Otto agreed but was not fooled by his friend’s explanation. He looked at his friends’ hands and not surprisingly, they were steady like two solid slabs of rock. But this attempt at deception did not anger Otto. His friend was sparing him from having to take more human life than was necessary because every life you obliterate takes a tiny piece of a person’s soul in payment.

Otto crawled between Friedrich and Paul and prepared the Fifteen two hundred and fifty round clips for the machine gun. He did not neglect to drink a few sip-full of warm water from his canteen. The remark about pissing on the barrel of the gun was not another typical Fischer joke. When the barrel of a machine gun became red hot the metal parts began to melt, fuse, and bend in shape. Sometimes a good little stream of urine was just what was needed to cool the barrel and fire off the last remaining life-saving clips of ammunition.

Charge

“Here they come,” shouted Otto, as he stared straight into the strange alien green glow, cast by a French flare. The green of the flare mixed with the heavy fog gave no man’s land a colorful luminescence that reminded him of pictures he had seen as a boy of the aurora borealis. The first wave of French infantry pierced the fog with bayonets fixed to their rifles, screaming an incoherent war cry that sounded more like a death throe and less like a hope for victory. The war had become an endless series of artillery barrages, charges against a wall of enemy fire, the occasional hand to hand bloody fighting, and endless days of lonely boredom in between. Otto was sure that this charge, like all others, would only end in more corpses between trenches, more fresh meat for the resident vermin to feast upon.

“Get ready with another clip,” shouted Paul amidst the pattering of machine gun fire, intermittent pop shots of bolt action rifles, and screaming of the falling French soldiers just yards from the top of his trench. Otto loaded clip after clip while watching dozens of men being torn apart by the Germans bullets. But this was no time to feel good about the one-sided situation. His comrades have yet to make a charge since digging in at Reims, but his time would come. He felt sick as he realized that he was not watching anything else but a glimpse of his own future, like peering into a large hazy crystal ball with splatters of blood and gore smeared upon its inner glass.

“Ha, Ha, look at them fall,” shouted Paul with enough vocal girth to drown out the sounds of slaughter.

“Apparently Paul did not see the unfolding butchery as a look into the future,” thought Otto with a just a touch of envy.

“How nice it must be to flick a switch inside oneself and function with a single-minded purpose,” he thought.

“Yea, Otto look at them run!”

Otto looked ahead and could see the backs of the enemy trying to outrun the swarm of German bullets chasing them down with indiscrimination, as the wounded and dead are left until morning, or maybe for weeks. At times, civility would show its noble face and an agreement after a charge made between both forces, to collect the wounded, bury the dead, and even share some coffee or smokes before resuming with normal duties. However, as he considered not for the first time, as the war drags on civility itself will be left to die in agony in the middle of a foreign field. His suspicions were confirmed the next day when no attempt was made to rescue the dying from the previous night.

“Ok guys, I’m going to get some shut eye at the dug-out,” stated Paul, as he disassembled his gun and staggered away down the length of trench, into the growing fog, to the squad dug-out. Otto thought he saw a large dark red stain on the back of Paul’s shirt just below the right collar bone but thought nothing more of it. Paul would not be walking if he was hit in such an area by a French bullet.

Otto and Friedrich stayed in position throughout the following day in silence, watching a French boy slowly cease crying for his Mother holding his spilled guts together with soft boyish hands.

The Charge

Otto crouched low to avoid bumping his against the low overhang to the first squad dugout. Although part of the same Army, in the trenches, during long stretches of calm, civilian habits of preferences and exclusion, reared their ugly heads. Troops from the same hometown, school, and neighborhood would flock together as birds of a same feather, on constant guard against those considered “on the outside of the flock.”

During battle, these walls crumbled in the face of the enemy exploding shells and replaced with the needed solidarity to ensure or, in the least, to offer hope of victory. The shelling was finished, the attack repulsed, and the time for a successful counterattack long passed, now it was time to crawl back underground.

The dugout he shared with ten other soldiers is no more than ten feet wide, twelve feet in length, and an impressive fifteen feet below the surface of the trench floor. Otto walked into the hideaway remembering the labor involved in its creation. His entire squad pitched in, some gathering whatever wood to be found as support, others shoveling the soft French soil with fury, and others, carrying away bucketsful of dirt and filth as fast as they were coming out. It took ten men five full days to complete their home away from home, and only first squad had rights to its advantages. Other soldiers, loners, less than motivated, or just too scared, ended up sleeping under the stars or in hastily dug holes no bigger than the size of an average man and offering very little protection from flying shrapnel and razor-sharp pieces of wood.

“Hey, there he is. Glad to see you survived.” Old machine gun Paul said you are one hell of an assistant. Must have been one hell of a sight watching those French ripped to shreds just a stone toss from your position.” The lighting was poor in the dugout, but Otto didn’t need to see the person responsible for the remark. That squeaky adolescent voice could belong to no other than Private Werner Schmidt. Otto sat down in the middle of the floor next to the small fire that was normally kept burning most of the night. The temperature, fifteen feet below the surface was always a few degrees warmer than the top and even three or four men sleeping in the dugout raised the temperature to comfortable levels. The continuous camp fire was more for rat control purposes. Otto thought about the rats with a chill crawling up and down the length of his spine. As the dead increased in numbers so did the rats, and the lice, and the scabies, and every other parasite and germ devised by nature. But the rats were the worst, and this was the consensus of every soldier in any trench, German, French, British, or Russian. They would crawl on soldiers as they slept, steal food out of the hands of a weary troop, swarm over a corpse before a proper burial, and carry parasites that tormented a man day and night with microscopic jaws that bit into the flesh.

Otto looked away from the fire and buried his troubling thoughts of the vermin and scanned the faces of the other four of his click, sullenly sitting around the fire.

Friederich Konig, his best friend, the man he looked up to for guidance. The man he saw as a rock—steady and reliable in a raging ocean of blood and guts. They went to school together, played hooky together, fought together, chased girls together, and more importantly, told each other things that neither boy could tell anyone else. Like the time that Otto lost his favorite dog Hansie when he was just seven years old. He remembered finding old Hansie laying in the yard under a blaring July sun, tongue protruding from his mouth and a greenish yellow froth puddling under his snout. Hansie was just three and Otto always suspected his old hag widowed neighbor Mrs. Shultz of poisoning him. She always bitched and moaned about his barking. But Friederich was there with a shoulder to cry on when his own Father looked him sternly in the eye and said, “Its just a dog you little cry baby. Be a good little soldier and stop your crying.” He was sure that both he and Friederich would survive the war and always be best friends.

There was Private Paul Fischer directly across from the fire, looking like a demon as the flames made his face glow red. This was fitting to Otto since Paul’s personality was certainly not one forged by the angels. Otto could see how the war transformed boys into hardened killers. But Paul could take it too the next level. It is one thing to tear a dozen men into shreds with a machine gun, it is quite another to achieve an erection while doing such butchers work, but he was part of the group. Without him, more than half of the Company would be dead or just as good as dead. He worked that machine gun like a painter works her brushes and paints. Nobody knew much else about his home life, other than he was from the Black Forest region, the only son of a butcher and his much younger wife. A man good for war but with a lowered mentality and not good for much else.

To Paul’s left sits Private Werner Schmidt. Otto couldn’t help smiling each time he looked at Werner, with his two large protruding ears attached to a small round head, containing two slightly crossed eyes, and a crooked pointed nose. However, he was member of the group because despite those crooked eyes he was the Company sniper with the ability to shoot the wart off a frog’s ass at a hundred yards, maybe two hundred Otto thought. To match his expert shooting, Werner was also just as brave, if not braver than any other man in the Company. He would rise before anyone in the dugout, long before sunrise to crawl into no man’s land searching for the perfect sniping position. Snipers were rare to come by for two reasons. First, because not everyone possesses the gift of a steady aim and hawk like vision. Second, because the life span of a sniper was short.

Otto looked to his right and watched Private Hermann Becker as he stared deeply into the flames. He was also a fellow schoolmate from the old meat packing Hamburg school. That’s what they called school these days in Germany, meat packers, because every teacher too old to fight had no qualms with talking every able-bodied boy to put on a uniform and go to the trenches. They were meat packagers providing fresh meat