Savior

A Short Story
by
Jacob Kruse

    He lay still throughout the day.

    The clouds dispersed overhead, shoving off to avoid the sun, and the rays of dawn poured in across the muddy ravine. The Somme River coursed south of where he had sprawled out on his belly, and between sporadic Mauser fire, he thought that he could hear the rippling water, swirling down from the Swiss frontier.

     He did not hear the river. He wanted to but did not. Adam remembered telling the men in the trenches that the word somme was Celtic in origin and that it meant tranquility. The men in the trenches had laughed but with the silence following their chuckles that often hangs in the air when something is not quite funny. He hoped that he had not lied to them. He tried to remember his coursework in English history, and the more he thought on it, the more positive he became that he was right.

     But on his belly in the mud, he could not hear the river to be sure.

     He had not minded being in the trenches. He was there only a few weeks before the real fighting began, before the Allied advance into the valley. Were he back in the trenches crouched down beside Ambroise, Adam would be satisfied. He did not want to remove himself completely. There had been a moment, kneeling against the trench wall with the soldiers in his platoon breathing bursts of fog through their bone-white hands and the invisible drizzle that collected on his rifle and lapel and sloped down to his boots.

   That moment. He was satisfied then.

    His French Lebel 8mm was below his feet trampled in the mud. He could feel the rifle with the heel of his boot but could only see the stock. He thought that maybe the barrel had been shoved into the dirt and wouldn’t be safe to fire, but he could not be sure. Ambroise would have reprimanded him for shoving the barrel into the dirt. The French medic hated treating self-inflicted wounds. He instructed Adam that if he was to be hurt that he had to catch a Kraut bullet or else Ambroise would not treat him. He told Adam that if his injury was self-inflicted that he would amputate his leg whether or not it needed to be cut off.

     Adam hated firing the Lebel. It was poorly designed. The magazine was a long tube that ran underneath the barrel, and the bullets were loaded nose-to-tail. Eager soldiers rammed the cartridges into primers and blew their hands up. But he hadn’t really started to hate firing the Lebel until after he talked to Ambroise. He did not want to lose his leg.

     Ambroise was a good man. He deserved a medal for keeping up morale, but Adam wasn’t sure if medics received medals in the French army. The French went about things differently than Americans. He supposed that Ambroise was like every other Frenchman, but he couldn’t really tell because Ambroise was a hard man to judge. Adam never knew if he was telling the truth, and when he thought he was, Adam never knew what the truth meant.

      Ambroise had explained when Adam first arrived that the Germans were lovely because if there was fighting on the fields, the German soldiers would return after the battle and make friends with the dead. The soldiers in the trenches chuckled and then were silent, and Adam didn’t know what to think. He thought that maybe Ambroise was being cruel because Adam was a foreigner and fresh to the war. But he could not be sure because the soldiers in the trenches laughed and then said nothing

.    He understood Ambroise now.

     The Germans kept firing in the bottom of the ravine. Adam heard nothing but the sporadic Mauser shots and his own shallow breaths. The Krauts were picking through the dead and the not-so-dead for ammunition, and they fired upon the not-so-dead like a BB-gun game at the carnival. Ten points for every not-so-dead that you make dead. He supposed that the Krauts were really doing the dying soldiers a favor because they were left for dead, and it was a terrible thing to die knowing that no one was coming to see you off.

     He was surrounded by dead. They were British mostly but a few French remained. The rest were fighting at Verdun. He had heard that the dead at Somme would be much more than the dead at Verdun and was impressed that the armies knew just how many dead it would take to win the battle. He wanted to ask how many had already died at Somme so that he would know how close the battle was to being over with, but he could not ask the soldiers around him about the fighting at Somme because they were dead. He was the only not-so-dead that his positioning allowed him to see. He thought that he might try to run.

     The Germans fired again.

     Ambroise wanted to know why Adam was in the war.

    "What American is dead?”

     "No one that I know,” Adam said, shaking his head.

     "Then why are you here? Are you a patriot?” Ambroise hopped to his feet, smacking his chest and angling his chin to the sun. “A defender of freedom?”

     "No,” Adam said above the chuckles. “I am just here.”

     Ambroise crouched back against the trench wall and arched his eyebrow. “Ah, he is smitten,” he said. “Any man that does not love to fight does not seek a battle unless he is smitten with a woman. This war is over a woman. If only Ferdinand had been assassinated and not Sophie too, we would not be fighting now.”

     "None of that is true,” Adam replied. “If you really believe that, Ambroise, then you have absolutely no understanding of why you’re here. Sophie’s face never would have launched a fleet even close to a thousand ships. She’s no Helen.”

     Ambroise crossed himself. “Helen or not, you should never speak of the dead that way, Adam, even when your friend makes a mockery of your beliefs. What offended you? Was it that I pretended that I am fighting for no purpose? Or because you believe that you are in love with your woman?”

      "I wasn’t offended.”

     Ambroise grasped his friend’s hand. “You’re a liar.”

     "You’re a damn fool.”

     Ambroise let go. “Then it is settled. Young Adam is not in love. He is neither smitten nor fighting for a purpose. He merely has a gun that he is afraid to shoot, and he has no idea why he should have to use it.” He stood, backing away. “Do not fight too close to Adam when we begin the advance. Men who fight without a cause have weak trigger fingers.”

     "I'll use it when I have to.”

    "Sure, child. Of course you will.”

     The men in the trenches laughed and then were quiet.

     Adam didn’t try to run.

     He heard the retorts echoing up the valley from where the Germans were executing the not-so-dead Allied soldiers, and his legs numbed. He felt like a child again, lying still beneath the covers at night and afraid to move because his father had told him about the boogieman under his bed. His father told him stories at the table because Adam did not have a mother. She had seen too many years to give birth when she did, so his father fed him stories about the boogieman hiding in his room and only checked on him in the mornings with a short open and shut of the door followed by a soft grunt.

     He had pissed the sheets as a child. He wet them until he was five and then his father made him sleep in the horse stalls. But sleeping in the barn nearly put him out of his wits. He pissed all over the hay every night, and the horses eventually refused to eat it. Rather than see the horses starve, his father relented and let his child return to the house. Back in his bed, Adam felt secure and hadn’t thought about the boogieman or woken up underneath wet sheets again.

     But outside of the trenches he had found new boogiemen. He decided then that all age groups had their form of the boogieman, and as a person aged, the boogiemen only grew more terrible because they became more and more real and more and more like the people who feared them. Below him in the valley, the field was crawling with boogiemen, and the crotch of his pants was soaked.

     He realized that he could not run.

     His remaining friends in the platoon would laugh at him, and rumors would make it back to the states that he had panicked. He had thrown his rifle in the dirt and hugged the blood-splattered earth as a child clings to its mother’s bosom. Adam’s father, who had fought for the Union and was decorated with the Medal of Honor for capturing a Confederate flag, would not be disappointed or surprised. Adam might have tried to run if he thought that his father wouldn’t have expected him to flee back to the trenches or to some far-off tree line, slinging piss as he ran from the battle. He imagined how nasty his own comrades would be and how they would laugh and not say a word and then send him packing to the states in his stained pants so his father could make him bed out with the horses again.

     He would not run. He decided against it. A terrible and pleasing thought crept into his head, and Adam nearly laughed at how clever was. He would stay put, sprawled-out with his face buried in the mud, and wait for the Germans to come. It was not so difficult to die. He marveled at how passive he could be in his own death and at how shocked Private Samuel W. Anderson would be to receive a medal awarded posthumously to his little pisser. He might even be shocked enough to give his soft grunt of forced acceptance and then frame the medal and engrave a nameplate that would read, “For actions resulting in the honorable death of Little Pisser Anderson.”

     Adam set his mind to it. He grew increasingly fond of the outcome as he mulled over it but eventually realized that he would not return to Catherine. He had not considered that at first and felt it unusual that she had not been foremost in his plans when his memory of her had so completely captivated his attention since leaving the states. He imagined her now as a thin, pale figure gliding into white light, illuminated and fading out all at once, and he partly blamed Ambroise for this ambiguity.

     The French medic was Adam’s friend and a good man as well, but he had pressed too hard on the matter of Catherine, his delicate and precise fingers digging until they had created a wound in his subject. Adam carried a photograph of her, a profile of her powdered face gazing towards an open window. She had given it to him, explaining that she was staring out at the east, waiting eagerly for his return, and he had tucked the picture down deep into his breast pocket.

     Adam did not tell the medic. Ambroise simply sought the photograph out. His intuitive and probing nature as a physician seemed to give him a deeper understanding of what Adam carried over his heart, and maybe it was purely his medical instinct that drove him to uncover and uproot the truth. Or maybe it was that Adam fought so hard to conceal it.

     Ambroise was inconsolable.

    "You should not lose the arm. This is a terrible cut, but I don’t think it will be necessary to take the arm. You will be ready for the advance into the valley tomorrow.” He paced the trench with a cigarette clutched by his lips and feigned pathetic sobs between each drag of smoke. “Whatever imbecile left his bayonet over-turned like that in the bunker should be court-martialed.” He knelt and patted Adam on the back. “But don’t worry, boy. We will find the owner of this rifle and arrest him. We will hang and quarter him—or if you prefer, we will send him to the guillotine and then beat his body with your arm. I think we will take it below the shoulder.”

    "You’re drunk,” Adam said. “It hardly bled.”

      Ambroise cradled his head in his palms. “I am no such thing. A drink calms my nerves before I operate. Steady hands,” he said, thrusting them out to inspect them. He frowned. “Will she still want you with only one arm?”

      "Who?”

      "The woman that you carry around in your pocket. The one that you are smitten with,” Ambroise replied. “She may not be as fond of her young Adam if he comes home from the war with only one arm.”

     "You don’t know what you’re talking about. And neither do I.”

      "French women are flighty,” Ambroise said. “They love many different body parts on many different men.”

      "American women are different.”

      "They are? Just as you are different from me?”

      "You judge the world solely on what you see.”

      "Ah, touché. You are right then, Adam. We are very different.”

       Adam stood and began to peel the bandage away.

      "You should not do that. The smallest nicks kill the greatest warriors.”

       Adam tossed the gauze in the mud.

       "Why do you carry her picture?”

        Adam covered his heart with his hand instinctively but then lowered it away from his breast pocket and looked away. “Reassurance.”

        Ambroise frowned. “Then she understands why you’re here?”

        Adam said nothing.

       Ambroise shook his head and lit another cigarette.

        "Poor, poor boy.”

        Ambroise was dead.

       His body was crumpled, his face contorted and mashed into the helmet of another French soldier. Adam could twist his head slightly and see the medic’s sternum, splintered by a German round, and his icy, blue eyes, half-closed and half-focused on his not-so-dead friend. Adam had not seen the medic fall but knew that Ambroise had carried a man off the front line. The injured man’s torso had been ripped open by shrapnel, and Ambroise draped the soldier over his shoulders, their bodies interlocking into a bloody human cross.
Ambroise deserved a medal. Not many men would have bore that weight.

      Adam could not run. Ambroise had ruined that. The medic’s cold, dead eyes had settled on him and contained a sense of finality—a last judgment that his scurry up the hill would pronounce complete. He could only wait and listen to the river that he could not hear and repeat his new maxim that it was not so difficult to die. He would prove Ambroise wrong, and his father and Catherine would receive his dedication to a cause in the form of a folded flag.

    At his side, the medic stared through him.

    "We have a good enough time, don’t we?”

    Catherine sat on the dock, dangling her bare feet in the murky water. Adam stood beside her, casting flat-bellied rocks across the calm pond surface. The rocks skipped to the other bank, leaving a trail of rings where they touched the water.

    "Of course. Why else would we be together?”

    "I guess you’re a fine enough boy,” Catherine said. She was talking to herself. “Your father won a medal in the war. Daddy would like that. He likes to have friends who have accomplished great things.”

    Adam ignored her and threw another rock. She was too drunk to make a bit of damn sense, and he was too drunk to try and interpret. He thought it best to ignore her. She would talk her way out of her problem.

    "Why did your father win the medal?”

    "He captured a Confederate flag.”

    "That was brave of him.”

    He chucked another rock, and it plunked in the water. “I know.”

    "You’ve been through a year of college. That’s a good thing. There aren’t enough thinkers in Hickory.” She poured herself a drink. “We shouldn’t have any more of this nasty stuff. Mother will have lunch ready before long, and Daddy will think we’ve been fooling around.” She glanced up, squinting in the sunlight. “You would like to kiss me, wouldn’t you?”

    Adam didn’t respond. She was provoking him.

    "You’re absolutely horrible at lying. If Daddy asks if we’ve fooled around, please just ignore him.” She stretched back onto the dock. “Your father is helping the men who want to fight for the Allies. Will he want you to go?”

    "No. There’s no need for me to fight. France and Britain have enough men.”

    "You don’t agree with your father?”

    "I don’t have to. His actions don’t affect me.”

    "Someday you might have to fight. What will you do then?”

    "You just said that I wouldn’t have a choice.”

    "I thought that you would fight then. After all, your father won a medal.”

    They finished the bottle of whiskey and left the dock. She skipped ahead of him on the dirt path, and he carried the unused fishing lines and tackle. They followed the path through the woods and back to the gravel road that led into town. He spotted two young men that he remembered being in his father’s house earlier that week. They were the Johnston twins, and both wanted to go to war

    Catherine slowed, allowing him to catch up. The tallest Johnston twin nudged his brother with his elbow and pointed at the couple. They trotted up the road and kept pace with Adam and Catherine.

    "That’s a pretty lady you’re escorting there.”

    Adam kept walking. Catherine had sped up.

    "I say that’s a pretty lady you’re escorting there, Cat.”

    The Johnston twins snickered, and Adam spun on his heel. Catherine stepped off the road into the grass, her hand pressed firmly over her mouth. Adam could not think through the whiskey haze. He tightened his grip on the reels and tackle and said nothing. He had never fought before.

    The Johnston twins waited for his response and when none came, exchanged a glance and parted, brushing past him and continuing into town, the hot breath of their laughter drifting over their shoulders. Adam stayed in the middle of the road as blistering as the gravel underneath their feet.

    Catherine took his arm. “It’s all right. It’s just fine,” she said. “You don’t have to be like them at all. They’re not thinkers. Hickory needs more thinkers and that’s a fact. Daddy will like you for that.”

     Adam rolled over.

     The Mauser fire had ceased momentarily, and he flipped over onto his back. His fingers dug restlessly into his breast pocket and retrieved the picture, pressing it close to his face in the failing light of day. He inspected the photograph, his flitting eyes picking out details that were never visible to him before. Catherine’s face, half-blanketed in the shadows creeping through the room, held no expression; the lines of her face never smoothed into recognition. She only stared away to the window as if insulted by his searching eyes.
Adam eyed his friend accusingly. The medic had altered the photograph without ever touching the material with his hands. Adam dropped the picture at his side and turned away from Ambroise. Still far below in the valley, the Germans began firing again.

    He ran.

    Adam sprang from the ground, his legs rubbery after sitting idle all day, and he stumbled over bodies, falling back down onto his belly. He righted himself with his forearms, thrusting his body off the muddy earth and into a crouched stance. He winced with every Mauser shot, sure that the next would pierce through his spine. Ahead, several artillery craters separated him from the tree line, and he crawled to the nearest one, flinging himself into the mud.

    He waited only long enough to catch his breath and then prepared to break for the trees. He took a solitary step and then fell, his foot caught on a dead body. Adam grabbed hold of his knee, desperately trying to wrestle it free. A hand—a soldier held his ankle. The man was a Brit, his uniform and face spoiled by dried blood and speckled mud from the artillery explosion.

    He tried to pull Adam to his side. “Help me.”

    Adam shook his head and tried to claw out of the crater. The soldier tripped him up, and Adam lost his balance, tumbling down on top of the wounded man. The Brit wheezed and entangled Adam with his thick arms. Adam shrieked, kicking wildly and jabbing his elbows into the man’s torso, but the Brit didn’t release him. He reached out for a pistol, abandoned inside the crater, and discharged a round into the Brit’s gut. The soldier lurched forward and turned Adam loose.

    He didn’t look back to see the soldier die.

    He didn’t stop until they had him.

    They were a platoon of British reinforcements sent to assess the viability of rescuing the wounded on the field. A lieutenant caught Adam and helped steady him on his feet.
“Did you fire that shot?” he asked.

    Adam did not respond.

    "I’ll wager that you did.” He slapped Adam on the back. “Any man that kills one of those blood-thirsty Krauts is a hero in my book. Do you hear that, son? You’ve done a good thing. A good, right thing.”

    He led Adam among the platoon. “Don’t you worry none. We’ll let them all know about you. I mean, to lay out there all day with those bastards all around you and not come unhinged. You’re a hero, son. A bloody hero.”

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