Matthew Funk
When All Else Fails
June of 1944, and the war’s lost. Now German Army officers are
paying a horrible price to pretend otherwise.
Matthew
Funk
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Like any enigma of substance, it had been enticing enough in shape to lure him in, sharp
and complex enough to dig into his skin, hard enough to refuse to be dislodged.
Now he could not move without feeling the pull of its alien weight. His blood did not move
through his body without having to acknowledge it by passing around its obstinate
presence. And when he tried to organize that life, these motions, into a semblance of
existence his interactions with the world always had to negotiate their way around the
jagged shape of this parasite.
Ignoring it did no good – it was more like a tick than a burr. Not some annoyance he
could put out of his head the way one might shove aside a mess that needed to by cleaned
or paper work to be filed, not some noisy pain that could be quieted by the promise of its
passage. Not something so static and stupid as would allow it be circumvented, no. It was
already deep inside him, and ignoring it only permitted its infection to spread and its
influence to flourish in a subterranean way. It could be buried beneath the tumult of a
moment, but would eat its way out from the center. He could keep it inside him; but at the
expense of becoming hollow.
He came to his decision not long after the Cornfield, and all the disaster they harvested
there. The morning after that frenzied feast when he awoke to find he could not move, he
did not feel like himself anymore, and he was altogether sure he was still alive. He was
the feeling of the rough weave of the canvas cot on his back, the wad of stale matter in
his guts and the chill of old scars stretching to meet the morning. He was not certain
that he, as he remembered himself, played any part in this scheme of form. He strongly
suspected he had been emptied entirely when he slept and had awoken with only a
rind—these base sensations—to comprise who he was. Time became a sinkhole,
drawing in his thoughts as they made a whirlpool with their panic, and even now, looking
back on it, he was not sure he could have extricated himself through conscious act. Logic
had gone from being the rebar web that supported his every action to being the grate under
which he was trapped, soon to be submerged by rising fear. Pieces of who he was—his
confidence in his own importance, surety of survival, appreciation of sanity—snapped
off like fingernails in his struggle to dislodge that gate.
It was only the animal imperative of his need to empty his bladder that granted him escape
from that torpor. The walk out to the nearby septic hole put the blood back in him. The
feel of air cutting around him, a crisp validation of his nature as a mobile, willful
thing, restored him as if he had been a guttering candle.
That had been some weeks ago, and since that scare he had resolved not to leave the
mystery unattended.
He would give it the due consideration it seemed to demand—play with it as if it were
a particularly ugly, loathsome toddler made of his own seed, lest it grow into the monster
that had almost killed him that morning—he would be Hamlet to this Ghost. It
requested something too cryptic to understand, something it hinted at being essential, but
that was far more obscure than its demands. It demanded a tax in hours and cold sweat, and
he would give it the convoluted consideration it craved. All the while, as he studied the
sky, he would allow the storm around him to dictate the course of his actions. Necessity
in all its violence would direct him in the immediate enterprise of leading his men
through the war. This would give his mind to liberty to bandy with the mystery as much as
it seemed to require.
It was best, he had resolved, to take things head on.
* * * *
*
Shells sang like a choir as they tore through the heavens.
Pairs of boots as heavy as corpses began to trudge through mud so blackened by fire it was
only good for killing in.
At the head of the line the Colonel pushed through a wall of lead
It had been this way all day. Maybe for many days; he couldn’t recall. Time, like
wood and flesh, had been busted into splinters by the incessant incoming fire. He barely
remembered how it had begun. He only remembered where, because it was the last safe place
he had been and so was the only place he could firmly stake his mind.
It had been around the West Wall, and it was under a red sky. The Colonel had gathered his
unit among the tombstones of giants—the titanic concrete teeth that formed the tank
traps of the Wall—let them wander like museum goers among these twelve foot tall
triangle shaped monstrosities of modern art. He himself had gone up the rough cut trail,
past the damp bramble along the hillside, to a briefing in the bunker on the summit of
Hill 553. Along the way, he had picked a pinecone from one of the numerous jagged trees
that jutted from the 700 meter high rise. His nose appreciated how calm and smooth its
scent seemed as small creatures flew through the branches around him. Birds or bullets, he
was unsure. It hardly made a difference anymore.
It had been a briefing like any other. The situational board was scant on flags bearing
the symbol of his forces. On the opposite side of the thick red line on the map, it looked
like a pep rally for the enemy, a sea of stiff flags encircling the topographical loops
indicating his position. Unable to find anything of interest on that map, he surveyed the
faces of his comrades. It was an exercise he greatly enjoyed; an exercise in
self-promotion and self-flagellation all at once. Their expressions seemed like cheap
rubber masks they had pulled on to hide the fact they were still sleeping underneath. The
sense of defeat they emanated was so pronounced that they seemed dead already, like
corpses too tired to even lay down. The sense of superiority and of suicidal excitement it
stirred in the Colonel was as kind and cruel a drug as he had ever found morphine to be.
And he had the express pleasure of receiving a powerful dose, accented by the tobacco
stink and claustrophobia of the bunker, every morning. The faces never changed, the enemy
never stopped attacking, the High Command, the ultimate source at the top, showed no signs
of cutting off his supply soon. With the delightful buzz of his brain being pulled between
the liberty of nihilism and superhuman self worth, the briefing was barely audible.
Not that it mattered anyway – which lines moved into what boxes and how might have
been pertinent back when the war was a grand construct, an Empire to be built larger than
doubt or fear or death could reach, but it had long since collapsed under its own weight.
Now, in the rubble, the regular angles and thin description of lines and boxes only got
snarled up in the chaos of the battlefield. They might snag on trees, on stones, on uneven
terrain, especially when enemy explosions turned these things into weapons. The Colonel
sometimes wondered if those drawings ever applied. The dull lead weight snug up against
his bladder and kidneys suggested that they never did. That they were only as sound as a
baby’s security blanket. Armor for the subordinates, who were sent off wrapped in
boxes and lines to crash themselves against metal, fear and shame.
No, who would counterattack where and when would hardly matter once the air and earth
began to fly into pieces. The enemy always managed to shatter any assault they were hit
with, usually with their artillery, which would come down as instant and implacable as the
hand of God to snatch away hope. From that moment on, counterattack and withdrawal were
the only options – to stay huddled in a trench like it was a storm cellar and the war
was merely a hurricane was to be eaten up by the wind, because when artillery roared in
and small arms cracked with the advance of the enemy soldiers, even the wind had teeth.
Especially the wind. From the point of desperation, when the first shell came in and
punched a hole big enough to pour the world into and left everyone living by mercy of
their fingernails, there was only one option. From that point, it was best to take things
head on.
Beside his head, a sign with the words “Schnee Eifel, 2km.”, was noisily
decorated by pinwheels of flying splinters.
Under his feet, a man who had made the Colonel intimate with the softball scores of his
children empties all he had inside of himself onto the ground, begging his family for
forgiveness.
Ahead of him is a berm—a bank of earth—covered by the soggy spinach-like foliage
of the Eifel area.
It looks far too small to block so many bullets.
Boys in uniforms far too large huddle against it.
The Colonel slams himself into its protection.
This morning – the morning he attached Hill 553 – the artillery and machinegun
fire had hammered everything to pieces and whatever vault he kept that madness in
ruptured. It soon covered nearly everything, a peculiar lens through which every already
warped sight around him was further distorted. And around him, even to clearer eyes, the
world was turning uglier by the curse. The Colonel was usually a source of stability. Now
his frantic swearing turned the pale faces of his boys into masks of tears—turned
them into sheets of running whey. He winced with failure.
Images stormed him like a bayonet charge.
The boots they all wore—he had leather like that on his first saddle, the saddle of
the horse he had been made to raise for 6 years, and had been made to shoot for no reason
save that Father ordered it done. The gray green of their uniforms was the gray green of
the Manor’s granite walls, walls that he would press himself between before he became
too furious at them out of their inability to protect him. The smell of gun oil was all
too familiar, evoking memories of sleeping with his rifle, his fingers not yet long enough
to encircle it. The way the air shook could have been from fists flying towards him. He
had never laughed so hard as when he had pinned on a medal just like the one his Drill
Instructor – Drill Sgt. Hoffstead – wore, pinned it through his own arm and
watched red pour out with his giggles. He knew the black best: the black of their
soot-stained helmets, of the centers of their gaping eyes, of their belts and gun barrels.
The black of unconsciousness, the black of moonless nights, of the insides of locked
closets, the black that comes inside from too much hopeless begging, the black of a
blindfold, the black of a priest’s robes, the black of coals, glowing enticingly and
the black of burned hands. The Colonel knew that black and hated it so much he felt
himself swooning with love for it.
He wanted to take those helmets from the heads of his frightened men and beat them until
their brains ran like babyshit. He wanted to try to fit a knifepoint through those gaping
pupils. He needed the belt, the gun barrel’s ready metal straining in his hands,
straining along with his muscles, straining like a sex on the point of climax.
He was over the edge of the berm, rushing the hill, sometime between a ragged breath and a
scream.
His holstered pistol slapped against his hip like a riding crop; his boots slapped the
mud, disdaining its suction. Before him was a gradual rise, rolling like a rotten Persian
rug for fifty yards from the base of a ridge. The ridge was a spade of rock, jutting some
three meters high from the ground, three times as wide as it was tall, limned with
fluttering sparks. None of these sparks were turned towards the Colonel, instead spitting
invisible sheets of rapid fire and the occasion flaming projectile—a tracer
bullet—into a gully on the opposite flank of the rise.
To his left was another such gully, this one tangled with barbed wire, arranged like a
quaint herb garden around stubby makeshift fenceposts. This gully was somewhat shallow,
only about four and a half feet to its bottom, and ran like a gnarled, accusatory finger
along the rise until it stabbed into the side of the ridge. It was into this that the
Colonel, careening wildly, unceremoniously tumbled.
Rifles pop like his pulse.
Grenades slam a can of noise over the world, fill it with broken metal and white-hot
stone, and shake vigorously.
Barbed wire mouths bite down hard on the soft, pumping flesh of his legs, clamp down and
snarl as they’re dragged along.
He charged into the lines of the enemy, trailing the remnants of the defenses behind him
in a long, bloody wire chain—He charged into every action. The movement of his pistol
from its holster, its hard projection to the front of his body towards the old enemy
sergeant in front of him – this was a charge. His steady advance towards the man
along the trench behind the ridge, his heartbeat, his thoughts, all felt consumed by
violence, immediacy, momentum. He stabbed his attention into the features of the sergeant.
Like the other soldiers in the trench, the sergeant did not notice the Colonel. He wore a
look of concentration, so intense as to be fevered. The Colonel charged a reflex along the
length of his finger, pulling the trigger. The look of concentration became a mist of red
and incredulous, clutching hands.
The other soldiers fell the same way. They turn to meet him. He charges. They collapse;
are ground underneath his boots. He crushes their features and they crumple like the
pictures in their wallet. He charges. He moves on.
He had to move on.
He attained the top of the ridge—it was a shallow pit the enemy used to direct
gunfire—and there needed go no further. The guns remained in the pit, still steaming
from the orgiastic barrage of moments before, smoking in sympathy with the Colonel’s
pistol. They were silent, manned only by corpses, spongy and stiffened, sprayed like mud
over their bulks by the Colonel’s grenades. Everything was silent; nothing resembled
the Colonel’s memories. Not any longer. The memories had been put to rest, buried
under bodies in a shallow grave of adrenaline rush, raw fear, and encroaching fatigue.
He could rest.
He did, leaning his elbows on the top of the other side of the ridge, looking towards the
west, towards the enemy. His body, his face most of all, felt baked. He raised his eyes up
to the sky and imagined that his complexion was a sweaty replica of those colors—soot
black sky, salmon red sun. Smiling, he closed his eyelids and let the air’s heat beat
down on him, let his body’s heat beat back.
Summers by the lake had been this sublime, even without the buzzing of carbon monoxide
intoxication the burning artillery pit provided, the feeling not unlike having nature
itself make slow to love to him. The sense of peace through completion was the same, the
sense of being exhausted only to be filled with euphoria, the damp heat making sweat feel
like kisses, the keen edge to the air. The popping of his men finishing off the rest of
the enemy had replaced the burr of cicadas. It was no less beautiful.
The Colonel was slow in opening his eyes. He could see clearly, and did not wish to move
too quickly, out of consideration that he might frighten away the delicate, skittish
creature of this clarity and contentment like any rare bird. The American lines spilled
out before him, painted liberally on the burnt, damp landscape by the smoky brush of the
sun.
There was a dugout, where stoop-shouldered men might collect coffee when they weren’t
manning one of the trenches like he himself was now sitting in. There was a phone there,
to make calls to headquarters, to the quartermasters, to other units, and to resent for
not having a line to family, friends, lover. There were other trenches flanking it, and
for a peaceful hour one might use them to play cards, examine old photographs, think of
clever or contrite things to say to those one loves. Then there were other trenches still,
spilling out in a great spool, sometimes connected by great furrows, blockhouses and
bunkers, sometimes only by wire, sometimes by road.
This was the war, in all its mystery and intricacy, a great, looping web woven in a
madcap, malleable pattern across the face of a sane world. This stretched across the seas,
to houses in Midwestern America that contained people just as desperate as any captive of
this web, back around the Pacific, to Germany and the Manor, into the bed the Colonel had
hidden in as a young boy, and from there across the miles back to this ridge, this pit,
this trembling body. The Colonel saw it all, ignited by the horizon’s burning, gilded
by the haze, its complexity beautiful and horrible.
He saw it, and felt its possessive tug as his body rose and fell with breath. It was
captivity and mystery, now ecstasy. It was under his skin, burying his memories, pulling
him inexorably onwards.
It was everything true love should be.
All contents copyright © Matthew Funk 2007, all rights reserved.