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It was a cold, still afternoon with a hard, steely sky overhead when Barry slipped out of the warm barracks into the open air. The sun struck hot on his skin as he ran from the dugout, hefty axe in hand. He wouldn’t have much time to set up the barricades.
The land was a confused, noisy, foul-smelling place. The air was thick with smoke that hung, yellow and brown, above the ground. Around him, everywhere, far across the expanse of a field, lay groaning men.
A wild-eyed horse, its bridle torn and dangling, trotted frantically through the mounds of men, tossing its head, whinnying in panic. It stumbled, then fell, and did not rise.
He heard the sound of the advancing dead, overcoming the groans of the weary men with their own, all so dumb and hungry.
On the lip of the trench were loose logs, half-buried in the muck, and he quickly assembled them on top of each other and secured them with nails, using the blunt end of his axe as a makeshift hammer.
Every day, an awful scramble of fetching nails and hammering and erecting barricades and lunches and ten minutes of night so you barely get your eyes closed before the colonel’s screaming at you to get up and start the scramble again, go this way, do this—one, two, three, hut! Going through the full schedule of a day maybe twenty times an hour.
And then, like some kid fooling with a moving-picture projection machine and finally got tired watching the film run at ten times its natural speed, got bored with all that silly scampering and insect squeak of talk, turned it back to normal.
Comparatively, it was like being suspended in the air for hours, where lying down a log took three days, and Barry’s body was so terribly sluggish he thought it might collapse. All the while, the cannibals on the horizon made their slow march.
Barry finished the last barricade and vaulted over it, landing with a splash on the duckboards.
Barry heard a voice next to him. “Water,” the voice said in a parched, croaking whisper.
He turned his head toward the voice and looked into the half-closed eyes of a boy who seemed not much older than himself. Dirt streaked the boy’s face and his matted blond hair. He lay sprawled, his gray uniform glistening with wet, fresh blood.
The colors of the carnage were grotesquely bright: the crimson wetness on the rough and dusty fabric, the ripped shreds of grass, startlingly green, in the boy’s yellow hair.
The boy stared at him. “Water,” he begged again. When he spoke, a new spurt of blood drenched the coarse cloth across his chest and sleeve.
Slowly, he reached to his side, felt the metal container there, and removed its cap. He held it to the lips of the boy. Water trickled into the imploring mouth and down the grimy chin.
The boy sighed. His head fell back, his lower jaw dropping as if he had been surprised by something. A dull blankness slid slowly across his eyes. He was silent.
But the noise continued all around: the cries of the wounded men, the cries begging for water and for Mother and for death. Horses lying on the ground shrieked, raised their heads, and stabbed randomly toward the sky with their hooves.
From a distance, Barry could hear the thud of cannons.
And then, splash again!
He looked and recoiled with disgust at the man who had joined him, a Frenchman! He toppled over and onto the body of the blonde man, cushioning his fall. He was wearing a (now muddied) 1er Régiment d'Infanterie de Ligne uniform with a green pom pom on the shako. His skin was fair, unblemished, and he had a thick, droopy black mustache to match his dark, downcast eyes.
Barry tackles him as soon as he surges upward onto his feet, much to his bewilderment.
“What are you doing?!” he cried, a nasal and harsh sound.
“You froggy bastard!” Barry yelled, raising his axe above his head and bringing it down onto the man, who hastily blocked it with his musket.
“Stop!” He pleaded, “Are you fou?”
Barry struggled to un-wedge his axe from the man’s musket, which gave him ample time to weasel out from under him. When he freed his weapon, he brandished it at the defenseless Frenchman.
He clutched at his thundering chest, regarding Barry with horror. “What is wrong with you—can’t you see there’s a war started?”
“Yeah, with you!” he said, shaking his axe at him. “You think I am not true blue to England?”
“With the cannibals, you British pig!” he screamed. “Give me my musket,”
“I shan't! I don’t want a bayonet up me arsehole, or me bollocks shot away! And pray tell, what bleedin’ good are you to me, if not dead?”
The wooden barricades began to keen, that tell-tale creak, creak of a splintering defense getting overwhelmed by a swarm of humanity.
Then they began to wobble, their whispering creaks turning to sharp grunts. Overzealous, soughing arms erupt from the slits in between the wood like stones in a receding tide, the bark taking some skin in sighing gray tendrils. They flounder wildly, scraping at the wood with blunt nails, grabbing anything that’d offer purchase.
“Bloody hell, they’ve near broken it,” he whispered.
He looked at them, then back at the Frenchman, and scoffed, tossing him his musket. It was a stupid choice, he could’ve very well turned it on the man and shot him dead, but instead he climbed up the firesteps and set his musket over the parapet, firing.
It did little to deter them; if anything, it urged them on. They clamored, and wailed, and roared.
Finally, one barricade buckled with a defeated groan, as if sorry, and a flood of zombies filled the trench. Barry hacked at a few, their limbs departing from their bodies like wet tissue paper, spewing black, foul blood all around them.
The Frenchman aimed carefully and downed three out of the twenty-something of them. But they were far too numerous, too angry, too hungry.
The two left the clouds of gunsmoke and dead behind them, running through the trenches and taking cover in a dugout.
Barry hastily ripped up the duckboards and nailed them to the entrance, hoping that the beasts wouldn’t sniff them out among all the other soldiers and viscera. Chinks of silver light filter through the cracks, just big enough for a man to peek out of. Barry watched as the light was briefly engulfed by the shambling, leaping forms of the dozen cannibals, sun fluttering like a gossamer wing.
And they passed.
Barry slumped down, the dark pressing in on him. His breathing was quick, like something in his chest was snatching the ends of every breath.
"Blimey! Th-that was close, eh? Nearly became shambler chow!”
Shk, shk, shk… He heard a match scrape against the side of a carton. Light sprang into being, dancing along the mud walls. The Frenchman extended his arm forth and revealed an ashen campfire, which he lit, expanding the light.
They were both quiet, uneasy.
Barry looked at the man, scrutinising him with eager curiosity, with a new, strange, almost morbid feeling. He gazed at that pale, thin, angular little face, those soft brown eyes, which could flash with such fire, such stern energy—and it all seemed to him more and more strange, almost impossible, that he was hunkering down in a dugout with a dirty French.
“I am right weary in holding back from bashing your bloody head in, froggy.”
“I would shoot you dead if I had the black powder, pig,” he spat, “And you’re of use to me alive.”
They both stared at each other. This, for some reason, made Barry almost ashamed. He pleated his pant leg, eyes averted. The fire crackles thoughtfully.
"How do you do? How does all at home?" he finally asked.
“Why would I tell you?”
“Oh, God forbid I make chit-chat. Well, we can sit in silence all you want, then,” he scoffed. “You French ought to learn manners.”
“Same to you,”
And they delved into silence again. Barry counted the breaths between them before someone would say something. He was on sixty-five when the man said:
“Ah…au diable! I’m Jean, you?”
“Barry,” he smiled his cocky, toothy smile, revealing his yellowed and crooked teeth—one front tooth missing. “I say, some have catched a cold back home, but seem to be much mended. Has your family written anything to you? Do you know of their health?”
Jean grabbed a stick and began to rouse the fire, all the while holding a stoic expression. Red and orange and black flit over his face, carving it out in planes.
“My wife had brought to bed a daughter. She was learning her letters by the time I left," he said solemnly.
"Aye, I am heartily glad to hear this. And, pray, how have your wife and daughter fared?"
"Indeed, they have fared well, though I have concerns that I may not return home to them. Mais c'est la vie."
The cries continue outside. It is not men, they could not cry so terribly. It's unendurable. It is the moaning of the world, it is the martyred creation, wild with anguish, filled with terror, and groaning.
Both are pale. It gets under their skin.
Then, as if deliberately, the fire dies down. The screaming of the beasts becomes louder. One can no longer distinguish whence in this now quiet pocket, it comes; ghostly, invisible, it is everywhere, between heaven and earth, it rolls on immeasurably.
Jean held his ears. But this appalling noise, these groans and screams, penetrate; they penetrate everywhere.
The ground shook; it rained clods, and for a moment, Barry was petrified that this dugout would collapse on them. He grabs his axe to hack away at the duckboards, but Jean stops him, whispering—”Don’t, that’s what they want,”
Slowly, humbly, Barry sinks to the ground.
The trembling passes; the cannibals have yet again been duped.
“Close one, that,” he said, voice instinctively low.
“Would you shut up?” Jean scolded, “You’re going to get us killed.”
“Nonsense. They can’t hear us in here. A bloke could fall asleep all the while canons are blastin’ away.”
Even still, doubt lingers in the air like marshy gas. So they keep quiet as they talk.
“Anyway,” Barry starts, “that wife and daughter of yours,”
“Oh, right. My wife's name is Beatrice, and my daughter is Clarie. I can’t recall how long I’ve been in this war; time becomes meaningless in a place like this.”
“Aye,” he nodded.
“They’re all I think about, really,” says Jean bluntly. "But there won't be any civil life again for me, I’m afraid."
"Well, but if—" persists Barry, "what would you do?"
"Go see them!" growls Jean.
"Of course. And then what?"
"Get drunk," says Jean.
"Don't talk rot, I mean seriously—"
"What else should a man do?"
Barry takes his canteen, swallows some water, then considers for a while and says: "You’ll catch a train home first, of course, get drunk, but then what?"
“Suppose I’ll be a writer. Always had a knack for it.”
Barry nodded amiably.
“When I get out of here, I’ll find myself a lady. Get married, settle, maybe have a kid. But most of all I want to see my family again, my sisters Rachel and Helen are out there waitin’ for me, my father too.”
“What about your mother?”
His face changed as if quirt-lashed. “My mother,” he sighed, “She passed. Childbirth killed her.”
“Mm. I lost my grandfather to tuberculosis.”
“Shame,” he clicked his tongue.
And after a brief silence, Barry looked out the little slits in the boards and asked Jean, “Say, you fancy getting out of here? It’s getting awfully hot.”
“Oui,” Jean agreed. “It’s cowardly to stay like this, letting all those men die when we could be helping.”
Barry cleaved through the planks, one by one, and the air streams into them like cold water. Briefly, sunshine, the color of skim milk, breaks through the clouds and shines upon the land.
It’s a beautiful sight.
Cautiously, both men creep out of the dugout and look around waspishly. No dead, no living. It’s barren.
“Well then,” Barry declared. “Suppose the fight’s over?”
There was a gleam of fire in his lustreless eyes; he seemed to be glad to think that he was in the clear.
“Don’t be so quick to assume,” Jean reminded him. “Let’s go, I need to find my men…”
“Aye, likewise.”
Barry left, thinking kindly of the French soldier, oddly yearning to meet him by chance once more.