The Trench by Brian Hesse (great novels txt) 📖

The Western Front 1914

Private Otto Wagner cautiously poked his head above the third tier of sandbags, the only barrier between his high forehead and a French sniper’s bullet. Despite only having served two months in the newly dug trenches of the Western front, he witnessed enough head shot wounds to know that peering over the sandbags when the enemy is just a stone’s throw away, is beyond brash, its plain stupid. Feeling like a petulant child ignoring Mother’s warning, he silenced his inner voice and scanned the length of the enemy trench. He didn’t need to scan too long for what he was risking his life to see. There just a few hundred yards behind the French line was the still smoldering cathedral of Reims.

“Hey dumbass, how about crouching down some before I am put in a position of having to scoop your brains up with this shovel,” came a familiar voice from behind.

Otto relaxed his strained leg muscles and let his body slide along the smooth black soil of the trenches front wall. He was not the only young soldier to slide his way down along the trench’s wall when the need to take quick cover arrived. He wasn’t sure why this strange ritual of sliding was so popular among the men, but he had a suspicion that his corporal knew why, because every time the thirty-five-year-old Corporal Max Hoffman would witness such a spectacle, he would half smile like a Father watching his son get into some harmless juvenile mischief. It occurred to Otto that most of the fresh recruits in his section of the trench were boys no older than nineteen, and some as young as fifteen. It also occurred to him that sliding down the soft dirt of a trench felt very similar to sliding down an icy winter hill of his hometown, Hamburg Germany, face first on some cardboard, or garbage can lid, with icy cold wind blowing through his auburn hair. With a little embarrassment, and a solemn promise to himself never to slide down the trench side like this again,  he realized that boys fighting in a man’s war remain boys, and he was determined to become a man.

“Ok, Ok, Friedrich, I was just curious,” he said with a laugh as he looked at the concerned expression of his good friend, Private Friedrich Konig.

But Friedrich was different than most of the smooth faced, barely out of boyhood, troops fighting this war. Friedrich was shaving by thirteen and now, at nineteen, standing over six-foot-tall with corn silk golden hair, bright baby blue eyes, square chin, and a good deal of blood and dirt covering it, he looked like the Keiser himself, just prettier, thought Otto with a hint of rose color spreading across his cheeks. Both young men, just nineteen each, came from the same working-class section of Hamburg. Looking at the enraged face of his friend glowing hot under the red hue of a setting sun, Otto’s life flashed through his mind and his protective friend was in every picture. He recalled countless Summer days fishing along the grassy banks of the Rhine River, throwing rocks at old man Hoffman, the town hermit, and throwing loose change on the ground to get a look up Martha Becker’s skirt at the Hamburg Elementary School playground. Otto smiled at his friend and apologized for his rash behavior. He felt like a child again under the Fatherly gaze of his same aged friend and was once again determined to kill all childish things that still lingered within him.

“Ok my friend, sit by me, we have some time before the next attack,” stated Otto, patting the cold October soil of the Reims.

Friedrich placed his back against the wall of the trench and slid down until his backside was planted in the dirt next to his friend.

“So, you think another attack is coming Otto?”

Otto just looked at him with a blank stare, fighting back the urge to make his friend feel stupid for asking such a question. Everyone in the Company knew that what he lacked in maturity at times, he made up for with a sixth sense for battle. He took great pride in the knowledge that above all others in this two-mile section of the trench, he could smell an attack hours before the horrific event. He also had a reputation for knowing when an artillery barrage was about to come pounding into the trenches, bombs whistling in the air like flocks of giant birds, falling with a buzzing like angry bees, and hitting the ground like a hammer wielded by the hand of a vengeful God. But, and he would never tell a soul, he wasn’t so mesmerized by his ability. In fact, he could scarcely believe that nobody else seemed to catch on yet that attacks generally only happen at dusk and dawn and are generally preceded by an artillery barrage.

“Well I guess after some time they will all catch on,” he thought to himself.

“Everyone except you Friedrich,” he stated aloud between fits of laughter.

“Everyone but me what?” asked his friend with a dumbfounded expression.

Otto just continued laughing at his private joke until a soldier in the next section of trench told the boys to shut up because he was trying to get some sleep.

“Don’t get too comfortable over there, shouted Friedrich, Otto says that were in for an attack any minute.”

Both Otto and Friedrich could hear the boy shuffling around frantically gathering his equipment and standing at the ready—ready for a fight.

“The power of the mystical Otto stated Friedrich, laughing between light pats on Otto’s shoulder.

“Ok, that’s enough out of you old friend. Hey, you ready for some leave time. I hear that in a few weeks all of us old veterans from the first attack through Belgium are getting some leave time.”

“I will believe it when I see it, Otto old boy. I will believe it when I see it. Let me know when the Froggies (French soldiers) start their suicidal attack.” Friedrich rested his head against Otto’s shoulder, closed his eyes, and began a light snoring that brought a strange sense of comfort to Otto.

“No need to my friend,” whispered Otto, the falling bombs will wake everyone up in just a few minutes.” Otto watched the sun set in the distance as his heart began to flutter violently in his chest in anticipation of the death to come.

Into Battle

The barrage began, as it usually does, with a few distant overhead howling sounds followed by equally distant thuds, like large tree branches falling to the ground during a windstorm. Otto, and a few more astute soldiers, laying in the stagnant water of the trench, knew that this was just the enemy artillery troops marking distance. The war was still in its early pupa stages in what was quickly becoming a horrifying transformation. His fellow German troops enjoyed a rapid advance through Belgium just several months before marching to the outskirts of France’s capitol, Paris, but no further progress could be made. Tired troops on the march for weeks without sleep, over extended supply lines, and an unanticipated enemy resolve pushed the Germans back forty miles to the Aisne river. With nowhere left to go, except back to Germany in shameful defeat, Otto, his five closest friends, his Company, and about one million Germans began digging what some would call home for the next four years, and others would call their grave.

“Oh, great just when I was having the most marvelous dream about Martha Becker,” came the low moaning voice of Friedrich.

“Rise and shine Romeo, Martha and her crusty drawers will have to wait until you get your leave time,” replied Otto, smiling at the thought of ruining his friends dream by implanting the image of Martha holding out crusty underwear, with a seductive look in her baby blue eyes.

As if reading Otto’s mind, Friedrich reached up and playfully slapped Otto along his tightly fastened helmet and said, “thanks for the lovely image you little daisy.”

You little daisy was an expression Friedrich used quite often with Otto. He was referring to Otto’s peculiar soft nature in the face of brutality and blood. During more serious times, he would affectionately compliment on Otto’s ability to “retain the soul of a poet,” as he would say.

The moaning sounds of the French artillery shells changed to sharp whistles, reminding Otto of a pleasant evening watching fireworks with his Mother and Father along the river Rhine what seemed like a lifetime ago. But now, in the rat-infested trenches, the sharp whistle meant death, the enemy found their mark and were raining in bombs that would shatter into a thousand pieces, sending hot metal splicing through the cold October air, searching for warm flesh to shred.

Otto and Friedrich did all that they could do in this situation. They frantically dug further into the foul-smelling soil and hoped that a shell did not land on their position. Neither soldier, even the so-called clairvoyant Otto, could predict when the shelling would stop. Otto recalled the first night when his section of trench was being hastily dug and fortified with as much good timber that was brought to the front, following the decision to dig in for dear life. The French halted their advance, being just as overextended, hungry, and exhausted as the retreating Germans. That night was their first taste of an artillery barrage, a night of flashing lights, sharp whistles, ear shattering explosions, and the image of what the human body looks like from the inside out.

Otto screamed loudly knowing that not even Friedrich, the man he looked up to, could hear his screams over the bombs exploding just behind the parados (rear wall of the trench).

As he screamed, a handful sized portion of wet dark soil flew into his mouth and down the back of his throat making him choke and his stomach churn.

“Hold it together old boy,” he thought, “Just hold it together.”

After what seemed like days, but was only two hours, the shelling stopped, but nobody felt any sense of comfort at this momentary lull. The young boys up and down the line, not naïve enough to believe that the enemy would expend so much ammunition and then calmly sit down to breakfast and cigarettes. The artillery barrage was an opening act for a macabre chapter of a senseless play. Otto and Friederich, without looking down the line for fallen comrades, crawled to the top of the parapet and placed their bolt action Gewehr 88’s overlooking the one-hundred-yard gap between their trench and the enemies (no man’s land).

Otto felt his body shake telling himself it was from the cold evening air, and not from the anticipation of falling French artillery shells. He tried to convince himself that it was the cold ground beneath him that filled him with nervous discomfort, and not the thick darkness laced with fog directly to his front. He even tried to ignore the eerie deafening sound of silence with thoughts of his Mother, standing over a hot stove making potato pancakes and humming her favorite tune with the voice of an angel.  But to no avail, the fear brought his mind back to the reality of the trench. He slowly retracted the bolt of his rifle making sure that a round was firmly in place. They waited in the dark, because what else was there to do?

Both soldiers were relieved when another of the five musketeers noisily plopped himself next to Friedrich with a loud clinking sound. Otto was aware of what this distinctive metal against metal sound signified. Paul Fischer, the crazy man from the Black Forest and the best Maschinengewehr 08 machine gunner in the Company. This piece of weaponry was the saving grace of the defensive position. At firing over five hundred round