Chapter XXXVIII
XXXVIII
and Bagger sleeps in straw munched by horses that will soon be dead, breathing the odor of moldy oats and uric acid, his helmet hugged like a stuffed toy, stubble cottoned with crumbs of crusty bread and gut sloshing with non-muddy water, all tortured thoughts erased, he makes sure of it, that nudge of horse muzzle is the turning hips of Marie-Louise,
and he awakes to thumps and slaps, echoes of sex, which he dreamed of all night, Marie-Louise disrobing, and disrobing, endless layers shucked until she was nothing at all, but after he swipes straw from his face, he locates the source of the sounds, soldiers in dawn’s gray putty using rifle butts to bash frozen extremities back to life, as if angry at the apostate feet that led them here, the treasonous arms that carry the weapons that make them targets,
and there’s a rhythm to the self-battery that inspires admiration in the sleepy Bagger, it’s not quite right to compare the soldiers to flagellating monks, those idiot vandals of their own bodies, these soldiers are more like farmers, rising in cold fog, same old, same old, the creak of their bones answering the bickering of birds and the umbrage of unmilked cows, while silver hoarfrost uplifts the gutted terrain into something you could paint and hang over the hearth,
and though both France and Iowa are filled with farms, Bagger accepts they represent a life he’ll never know, scoundrels like him belong alone, it’s part of the deal, but for this agrarian, frost-muffled instant he can pretend, what’s the harm, that these are his farmhands, his horses, his equipment, his land, his morning, his planet, his eternity, all distilled to a drop of honey sunlight he might yet catch with the tip of his tongue,
and it’s this same sun blading men’s eyes that prevents them from seeing the telltale streaks in the sky, so when a wall of clay bounds upward from a trench three hundred yards away, it seems to happen spontaneously, the earth upchucking an epochal breakfast, though the tiny bodies of soldiers flung wiggling into the air mark this as Hun handiwork,
and it means Jerry has both caught up and caught the 43rd unawares,
and the crackling booms of curtain fire hit seconds later, like a boot camp prank of palms slapped over Bagger’s ears, and he rocks upward, gasping, horses overhead neighing and rearing, and Bagger rolls away, hooves can crush skulls, and when he’s face up, the whole regiment has appeared out of nowhere, five thousand men scrambling like ants from a booted anthill,
and soldiers strap on bandoliers as they leap into reserve trenches, men toss other men Springfields and Enfields and Garands, knights in olive drab storm through craters with Vickers guns strapped to their backs, a team of artillerists wheel out an eighteen-pounder, engineers emplace bridges over trench tops, and staff sprint across them to string cable to telephones already being shouted into by officers, cooks drop breakfast tins in favor of rum rations, medics raise aid posts and dash off with stretchers, never enough,
and Bagger, to his breathless shock, is among them, finally among them, racing to a front carapaced by mud and straw, the horizon lit by wrath’s votive fires, ground sliding like calving glaciers, ghostly afterimages stamped onto his retinas from staccato blasts, all of which resolve into the shape of the angel, she’s probably still in that dugout, and as bad as it is that Reis has her, letting the Krauts get her would be worse, so Bagger’s got to do what he can to protect her, and that means fight, finally fight,
and someone, from somewhere, throws him a rifle, cold matte black in his hands, the weight nearly sinks him, gotta be twenty pounds, so heavy it’s got its own handle, Bagger glances down as he runs, holy shit, it’s a BAR, a Browning automatic, the sons of bitches finally arrived, the thing’s practically a myth, shoots a Spring-field’s .
30-caliber round but from a twenty-round box mag, it’s a mobile machine gun and he, Private Bagger, inveterate coward, has got one,
and he bellows, top of his lungs, can’t hear it over the barraging drums of a new round of Jerry’s shells but sure the fuck feels it, larynx shredding in the force of his war cry, holy shit, Cyril Bagger’s got a war cry, same as the other boys, it expels from his guts with the same skyward explosion as the missiled earth, he’s bloodthirsty, he’ll do anything he needs to protect she who needs protecting,
and a piece of him, a tiny, Arno-sized splinter, knows there’s something awry with all this, something awry with him as he fuses into the bloodlust funnel, the precise act he’s always avoided, individuality swapped for the exhilarating namelessness of being a ball bearing inside a mechanism, he’s succumbed, but lord, don’t it feel good, ain’t it the easiest way to bash past regret and shame, feels so much better to lose himself to a mass, to dilute into a flood of fury,
and Bagger vaults the reserve trenches, grunts with helmets askew and whistle-blowing officers flashing beneath him, though his eyes are on the front, a hundred yards off now, great quilts of smoke unfurling across No Man’s Land to divulge screaming Squareheads charging the 2nd Battalion, they haven’t seen a charge like this in weeks, it’s as if Jerry’s already heeding Reis’s plan of providing a few more years of Yank slaughter,
and the support trench yawns open and Bagger jumps into the rabble, no telling the company, Bagger doesn’t care and neither do they, the gravedigger has traded his shovel for a BAR and that’s good enough, a whoop goes up and Bagger’s ragged heart sings, it’s not too late for him after all, boys are slapping him on the back, shoving him up the line, and he can’t think of anything grander, now this, this is how to die,
and he’s into the frontline trenches, men leaping onto dirt parapets to lay out defensive fire, and there’s an officer gesturing Bagger up a ladder, a prime spot, and he follows orders, just watch him follow orders, doesn’t feel so bad to be a cog in a machine, to accept you’re a hinge and your only job is to do that, to hinge,
and he lodges himself on the top step, elbows driven into red clay, the soundscape yawping wide, a thunder of Roman conquest, boots in beating ritual, muzzles cracking, shells pealing, bayonets clashing, the first wave of Germans close enough to fence, and more than that, to stab, Bagger hears the raw-meat squish, the Revelations of the Bishop’s fiercest sermons, the scourge of frogs and lice and flies, of water into blood, of pestilence, of boils, of hail, of unbreathable darkness,
and whomp, the trench to Bagger’s right is throttled into a tidal wave of black dirt, Jerry hurling grenades, whomp, the trench to his left convulses like a gagging throat, men left without jaws, without scalps, without faces,
and it’s all the more reason for Bagger to fire and kill, he plants the BAR’s bipod into the mud, kill, the gun feels like a strong new arm, how Reis must feel, you get yourself a new arm, you goddamn use it, kill, he grips the gas tube, kill, whole body longing, kill, for the pulverizing thrust of the initial spray of lead, kill, the jellification of his biceps, kill, the tintinnabulation of his bones, kill, he tries to line up the foresight amid concussions buffeting his eyeballs, kill, and curls his right index finger, no, not even his, it’s Uncle Sam’s, the finger belongs to the shamefly, and he loops it over the trigger, kill,
and but one hair of a second before he squeezes, he’s yanked down, as if by a shark, and his very first shot of the war goes wild, rounds spitting into the wolfen mat of smoke, fog, grease, and blood, and then he’s on his back in six inches of water, staring up into the darting cardinals of traded fire, mind in cyclone, either he fell or got shot,
and a soldier’s head eclipses the destroyed dawn, a face of filth claw-marked by the tears of smoke-stung eyes, Bagger instinctively hates this doughboy, the war machine unto which Bagger gave himself to must be built of anonymous men, and this face isn’t anonymous at all, it shouts, “Bagger! You can’t! You promised her!,”
and of course it’s Lewis Arno, the kid the unluckiest of pennies, always turning up even after Bagger hurled that penny off the highest available cliff, and Bagger has the urge to smash the BAR into the kid’s nose, he’ll show the brat, he’s here to kill, kill, kill, but the kid’s more balanced than Bagger and finds the automatic rifle first and throws it away,
and Bagger screams, “Fuck!” and the goddamn kid slaps him, a rifle crack of its own, and Bagger gasps, and the kid grabs his drabs and slams him into the water, mud sliming over both their faces, and screams, “You promised her you wouldn’t kill!
,” and Bagger disinters his arms from grave muck to strangle the boy’s puny neck,
and the kid’s slapping, pounding arms wind around Bagger’s shoulders, extracting him from mire, embracing him, punching little fists of fury into Bagger’s back like the tank directions he kicked into Bagger’s kidneys, instructions on what to do, where to go, and though Arno’s orders defy those of Uncle Sam, they have the timbre of truth, and Bagger’s arms of strangulation hug the kid right back,
and he sputters into Arno’s ear, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” not even sure which transgression he’s apologizing for, there’s been so many in such a short, ugly time, and though he knows what this clinch looks like to any doughboy who spies them behind the hailstorm of detonated dirt, two chickenshits holding each other in the last chickenshit seconds of their chickenshit lives, he doesn’t care, he’s worked with chickens before and they happen to be Earth’s bravest beasts,
and Arno shouts, “We gotta save her!,” and Bagger holds tight, men exploding all over, and screams, “She’s not your mom, kid!
,” and the kid yelps, like he’s been stuck, and screams, “We still gotta save her! You’ve got to save her, Bagger!
,” and Bagger sobs, “Why?,” and the kid hollers, baritone now, suddenly a man, “Because she’s yours more than ours,” and Bagger pulls back and stares at the kid, who nods and says, “Or you’ve always been hers,”
and the feeling isn’t confusion, or even surprise, it’s astonishment, for he knows the words as truth the second he hears them, they answer the question he never had the wherewithal to ask, it was never Bagger who found the angel, it was the angel who found Bagger,
and the astonishments mount, that first mortar blast back in Bois de Fays, the one that should have killed him, maybe it did kill him, maybe he dwelt in the razor world of death long enough for the angel to notice him before the inadvertent resuscitation of a corpse thrown atop him brought him back to life, and from that moment, he and the angel have been in unbroken contact, everything Bagger has wanted, the angel has tried to deliver, and what he’s wanted has been violence, just think back to Rochambeau, the symbols he used to win,
and how Goodspeed fell to scissors, and was scissored by shrapnel,
and Popkin fell to rock, and was buried in the rock of a falling wall,
and Veck fell to paper, and perished after finding Reis’s paper note,
and Bagger, why, he was the one to kill all three, he was the major general shaking his walking stick, each Rochambeau victory translated by the loyal angel as a direct order to kill each loser, kill them in a specific way, and though Veck died believing he could bend the angel to his will, that was a fool’s mistake, I am the sword in the hand, she said, and it has been Bagger’s hand the whole time,