Eureka

1918

In the spring of 1917, a dispirited President Woodrow Wilson, the liberal idealist who had ardently resisted America’s intervention in the war in Europe, was finally forced to admit the inevitable: America was about to be drawn into the most savage conflict in the history of warfare. In 1914, nine European nations were embroiled in what would become known as the Great War, a conflict unparalleled in its brutality. On one side, France, Italy, Great Britain, and Russia, among others. Opposing them, Germany, Turkey, and the Ottoman Empire.

It quickly became apparent that World War I was to become a campaign of mud, trenches, barbed wire-and machine guns, the first time the deadly weapon was used in a major war.

By the time the United States entered the conflict, the trench war was approaching its grotesque and barbaric finale…

A thick fog laced with the smell of death lay like a shroud over the battlefield. Then there was a howl in the sky as a star shell arced and burst, briefly revealing a ghastly sight. Silhouetted in the heavy mist was a wasteland of staggering destruction. Trees, fragmented by constant artillery shelling, were reduced to leafless, shattered stalks. Fence posts wrapped in rusting barbed wire stood like pathetic sentinels over trenches that snaked and crisscrossed the terrain. Shell holes, surrounded by mounds of displaced earth, were filled with rancid rainwater. There was no grass, nothing green or verdant, just brown stretches of mud, body parts dangling from endless stretches of wire, abandoned weapons, and corpses frozen in a tragic frieze of death.

And there were the rats, legions of rats, scurrying back and forth in the no-man’s-land, feasting on the dead.

A few hundred yards beyond the haze-veiled scene, the Germans were gathering for another attack-there had been dozens through the years. The star shell burned out and darkness enveloped the shell-spotted battlefield.

Brodie Culhane was chilled even though it was early September. His boots and socks were soaked and he had removed his puttees, which were in rags. Damp fog wormed through his clothing and clung to his skin. The machine-gun nest he had set up had an inch of water in it from a rainstorm the night before. There wasn’t a spot of dry ground for miles in any direction. It made him think of Eureka. All around him was mud. Mud as demanding as quicksand, sucking a man’s legs down to the knees with every step. As he stared into the darkness, another star shell burst overhead, illuminating the grim no-man’s-land that lay between his machine-gun line and the Germans.

From Switzerland to the English Channel, the French had lined their border with trenches and barbed wire, four rows of each separating them from Germany. Now, almost four years later, the grim sight before him defined what had become known as the Western Front.

He was dying for a cigarette. And in the deadly silence, a song suddenly echoed in his head.

K-K-K-Katy, K-K-K-Katy,

You’re the only g-g-g-girl that I adore…

It was their first day on the line. They were marching down a road past a park on the outskirts of a French town called Chateau Thierry, heading north toward a game preserve called Belleau Wood. One of the squads started singing, as if it were a parade. One platoon singing one song, a second company answering with another.

K-K-K-Katy, K-K-K-Katy,

You’re the only g-g-g-girl that I adore,

When the m-m-m-moon shine’s, over the c-c-c-cowshed,

I’ll be w-w-w-waiting at the g-g-g-garden door.

Answered by:

You may forget the gas and shells, parlay-voo,

You may forget the gas and shells, parlay-voo,

You may forget the gas and shells,

But you’ll never forget the mademoiselles,

Hinky-dinky parlay-voo.

They were still singing when the Germans fired the first volley. Machine guns. His men went down like string-cut puppets.

Barely six months ago.

Baptism day.

Behind him, the radiophone buzzed, its ring muzzled to prevent the enemy, a few hundred yards away, from hearing it.

The radioman, a clean-cheeked youngster, answered it, cupping the mouthpiece with his hand. He gave the receiver to Culhane, who could feel the youngster’s hand shaking as he took it. The nineteen-year-old had developed the shakes after only two weeks on the front.

“Culhane,” he whispered.

“Brodie, this is Jack Grover. The major wants to have a chat. I’m on the radiophone by the five-mile post.”

“Stay where you are,” Brodie answered, “I’ll come to you. You’ll never get that tricycle of yours through this damn muck.”

“Appreciate that,” Grover answered with a chuckle, and the radio went dead.

“Relax, kid,” Culhane’s voice was calm and deep as an animal’s growl as he handed the phone back to the radioman. “Nothing’s gonna happen for three or four hours. Think about something else. Think about your girl back home or Christmas or something. Fear’s worse than the real thing.”

He checked his watch in the masked glow of his flashlight. It was three-fifteen.

“I gotta run back to HQ,” he told the kid. “Cover the stutter gun.” He grabbed his rifle, crawled out of the nest, and headed east in a crouch toward the dirt road four hundred feet away, mud snatching at his boots with every step.

Grover was waiting on the motorcycle when Culhane emerged from the dark. His clothing and face were caked with mud, he was unshaven, and his eyes were dulled by lack of sleep.

“Jesus, you look like hell,” Grover said as Culhane clambered into the sidecar.

“Haven’t you heard, this is hell,” Culhane answered. Grover wheeled around and headed back down the muddy road.

Temporary HQ was a two-room bunker a mile from no-man’s-land. It had wood-plank floors, sandbags for walls, and the ceiling was made of fence posts and logs. The first room was occupied by the top sergeant, a beefy old-timer named Paul March. Wooden planks stretched between upended ammo boxes substituted for a desk. A radioman named Caldone was huddled over his equipment and a runner was catching a nap on a cot in the corner. A tattered piece of burlap served as a door to the other room, the major’s office.

“How’s it going up there?” March said to Culhane.

“Wanna take a guess?”

“No thanks,” March said. “Let me be surprised in a couple of hours when we join you for tea and crumpets.” He walked to the burlap curtain and knocked on the wooden frame that supported it.

“Yes?” The voice from inside the room was deep, with the soft roll of the South in it.

“Sergeant Culhane’s here, Major.”

“Good, show him in.”

They entered, saluted, and Major Merrill walked around his desk to grab Culhane by the arm.

“Good to see you, Brodie,” he said.

“Glad I’m still around.”

The major was a big man, broad-shouldered and muscular, his hair trimmed almost to the scalp, his dark blue eyes dulled by too many attacks and counterattacks and too many “regret” letters written to mothers or wives or sisters. He was a year younger than Culhane, but the war had put ten years on his face. Culhane had served under him for two years, starting when the battalion was formed in South Carolina. Merrill was a compassionate man in a business where compassion was a liability.

“Jesus, you’re a wreck,” he said to Culhane.

“So I’ve been told,” Culhane answered. Haunted eyes peered out from his mud-caked face.

Major Merrill looked Culhane over.

“Sergeant March,” the major called.

“Yes, sir,” March answered, peering through the burlap curtain.

“Do you think you can find me a pair of dry boots, ten-and-a-half C, and some dry socks and puttees?”

“Yes, sir. Right away, sir.”

To Culhane, the major said, “I could hear your boots squishing when you came down the steps. A soldier has a right to go into battle with dry feet, damn it. Sorry I can’t get you a fresh uniform.”

“I’ll be up to my ass in mud two minutes after I leave here, anyway,” Culhane said. “But it’ll be nice to have dry feet for a little while. Thanks. Okay if I smoke?”

“Of course.”

Merrill watched Culhane’s mud-caked hands as he took out a pouch of tobacco, papers, and matches wrapped in tinfoil to keep them dry. Not a tremor, he thought, as he watched Culhane roll the cigarette and light it.

Culhane took out a roughly sketched map and spread it out on Merrill’s table, but Merrill pointed to the other curtain in the room.

“There’s a makeshift sink and some clean water in there. Why don’t you wash up before we talk. My razor and strop’s in there if you want to grab a quick shave. I’ll get us some coffee.”

March came back with fresh footwear, and Culhane put on the socks and boots. When he returned to Merrill’s office, there were two tin cups of coffee sitting on the table. Merrill took a silver flask from his back pocket and laced both with brandy while Culhane rolled another cigarette.

“According to our intelligence, whoever the hell they are, the Germans are lining up to take another crack at us,” Merrill said.

“What a surprise,” said Culhane. “When?”

“Dawn.”

Culhane looked at him for a moment, then asked, “What’s the weather look like?”

“We’re supposed to pick up some wind about sunrise. That’ll clear the fog, then it’s going to be a bright, sunny day.”

“A break for us, for a change.”

“If we can stop them this time, I think they’re beat. They need to make this breakthrough and get behind our troops. Brodie, you’re going to have to…”

“… stall their front line at my forward post until you can move the company up,” Brodie finished the sentence.

Merrill laughed. He had not laughed for some time. Culhane could sense a lot more relief in his laughter than joy.

“Where will you be?” Brodie asked.

“Fifty yards behind you. The company will move up to within fifty yards of your position before the Krauts start shelling us. I’m gambling that they’ll think we’re in the trenches, and pepper the trench line between them and us. If they find out we’ve moved back from the line, they’ll raise their big guns and blow us to hell and gone. Your gunners are our front line. As soon as you make contact, we’ll attack.”

“How long do I have?”

“With the mud? Ten minutes. Can you hold them for ten minutes?”

In a place where a minute equals an hour anywhere else in the world? He shrugged. “If that’s what I gotta do, that’s what I gotta do.”

Culhane turned his hastily sketched map toward Merrill and pointed out his positions as he spoke. “I got ten machine-gun nests set up along our perimeter with overlapping fire. Max Brady’s in charge of the line. I got sappers out there planting mines in the trenches only. The mines are marked with circles on the map. I’ve got my two best shooters on the road and Rusty, the human ear, in a trench about fifty yards out. They should hear something before the shelling starts. The Krauts have four trenches to cross, a lot of wire, the mud, and the mines. The trenches are laced with ’em, Major. Warn our boys to jump across them. If they fall in one, there’s a four-in-one chance they’ll land on a mine.”

“Classic setup for an ambush.” Merrill smiled. “You outguessed me.”

“I need the fog to lift, because if we can see them, we can hold them in place. But if the fog holds and they get right on top of us before we can engage them…”

He let the sentence die.

“So you have fourteen men holding that line?”

“Actually eighteen, counting me. We have two radiomen and two corpsmen up there, too.”

“You travel pretty light.”

“I got the seventeen best men in the company. You got the rest.”

Merrill leaned forward and stared at the map. “So we need the fog to hold, to cover us,” Merrill said, “and then lift just as they attack so you can zero in on them.”

“That’s about it. My two point men and Rusty the Ear are out there listening for movement. They’ll fire flares when they’re sure the Krauts are on the move. Then you can lob some star shells over them and, with luck, we’ll get a nice look at ’em.”

“They’ll charge at that point.”

Culhane nodded. “And move their artillery down the road. If they lead off with a tank, we can take it out with grenades. If they bring on the caissons first, we’ll kill the horses and stop their artillery dead in its tracks.”

“It’s a daring plan,” Merrill said. Then he nodded. “But if it works, we can drive them right into the river. They’ll have to surrender.”

“A lot’s gonna depend on the fog.”

Major Merrill reached in his pocket and took out a lieutenant’s gold collar bar, put it on the desk, and slid it toward Culhane.

“I knew you’d be ready, Brodie,” he said. “You’re the best I’ve got. I’m giving you a battlefield commission. Colonel Bowers approved it last night. I don’t have a commissioned officer left in this company.”

Culhane stared at the bar for a full minute. He reached out with a forefinger and spun it around.

“How’d you like to tell some kid’s mother that her son was blown to bits for five miles of mud, Major?”

“I do,” Merrill said quietly. “I write the letters every day. I tell them their sons died heroes.”

“There aren’t any heroes in a slaughterhouse.”

“Brodie, in four years, the battle lines along the western front have moved less than ten miles in either direction. It isn’t about taking ground, it’s about artillery and machine guns and bodies. We’re expendable because we can be replaced. The guy back on the production line cranking out those howitzer shells and firing pins and cannon barrels, he’s the one who’s important.”

“So whoever runs out of ammo, guns, and bodies first loses?”

“That’s about it,” Merrill said. Then added: “I’m giving you a battlefield commission. You’re the best Marine I ever met.”

They finished their coffee in silence. Somewhere to the west, they heard a shell scream to earth and explode. The tin cups jittered for a moment and some dirt dribbled down from the ceiling of the bunker.

“I’d like to pass on that. The reason you don’t have any comms left is they’re the first ones the Krauts knock off. I’ll do whatever you call on me to do, but I’ll keep my stripes if it’s all the same to you.”

“You’re a lifer, Brodie. Do you realize what life will be like for a Marine officer when this is over?”

“I may not stay in. If I’m not rat meat by the time this is over, I’m thinkin’ of taking a crack at civilian life again.”

“You’re throwing away what, fifteen years?”

“Closer to sixteen. I lied about my age. But I think it’s time I went back to the hole I left.”

“Where’s that?”

“California. Called Eureka. Sits right on the Pacific. That’s where I first learned to hate mud.”

“Why go back to it, then?” Merrill asked.

“My best friend lives there.” Brodie smiled and added, “I’ve got a godson I’ve never seen.”

“What’ll you do there?” Merrill asked.

“There’s a sheriff there, an old-timer. He was kind of a mentor to me. Taught me to ride and shoot, do things with a sense of style.”

“You thinking of taking his place?”

“Nobody’ll ever take Buck Tallman’s place,” Brodie said. “Better get back. Dawn’s just around the corner. Thanks for the dry boots and the coffee.”

Merrill stood up, offered Brodie his hand, and they shook. Saying good-bye, just in case.

“Just remember,” Brodie said as he brushed through the burlap doorway, “once it starts you’ll have ten minutes. And not one minute more.”

Rusty Danzig huddled against a battered sandbag in a shallow trench forty or fifty yards in front of the machine-gun line. His eyes were closed and his legs were curled up beside him. His rifle was resting against his legs. He could have been mistaken for dead or asleep, but he was neither; he was listening.

He had his ear pressed against a piece of burlap to keep it dry, and he had been listening for two hours in the darkness. Not for sounds he knew. Not for the sound rats make skittering across a board or chewing on a corpse, or the thunk of a shell as it splattered deep into the mud before exploding, or the sound barbed wire makes when the wind rattles it. Danzig was listening for the unusual. The sound of boots slogging through the mud, or a metal canteen accidentally scraping against an ammunition belt, or someone trying to muffle a cough. The sounds of life in a field of death.

Danzig was a South Boston tough guy who did not take well to orders. He would nod, say “Yes, sir,” and then do it his own way. He was a short, burly, black-haired man who had great ears. He claimed he could hear a fly clear its throat from a hundred yards away. He was fifty yards in front of Culhane’s foxhole, in a trench that was mined on both sides of him. The second most dangerous position in the planned ambush.

The most dangerous spot was reserved for Big Redd, whose father was a Chiricahua Apache, his mother a white schoolteacher from Minnesota. The big Indian was the forward sniper. Redd had once told Culhane that he had joined the Marines just to get off the reservation, where his father was a drunk and his mother the schoolmarm. The Marines got the best of that deal, Culhane had thought. We got a great tracker and hunter, with the instincts of a mountain lion. Eyes, ears, and nose were part of the combination. The tall, muscular man could smell a horse half a mile away with the wind at his back. His job: listen for the sounds of an advance and, as soon as possible, shoot the lead horse pulling the caissons with a clean front-on shot, two inches to the left of its foreleg and a little higher. A heart shot that would drop the horse in its tracks. Then pick off drivers, officers, whoever he felt was worthy of an old frontier Sharps. 30-caliber shot to the head. Delay the line, cause chaos, and when it got too hot, run like hell. Culhane once asked why it was Redd’s favorite assignment even though it was the most dangerous. Redd’s answer: Because it was the most dangerous.

The number-three suicide spot was reserved for Lenny Holtz, from Bend, Oregon. Son of a crippled lumberjack and his bitter wife. A born sharpshooter who, like Culhane, had lied himself into the Marines at fifteen. He was a sapper along with Danzig-first planting mines in the three trenches between the Marines and the Germans and, if he didn’t blow himself up, then acting as Redd’s backup. Anybody that got past the Indian’s Sharps rifle was meat for Holtz. His shooting eye was as flawless as Danzig’s ears.

The three best men Culhane had were in the most vulnerable positions. The ten machine gunners were spread across a fifty-yard-wide perimeter. Max Brady was his lead gunner. Their job, once the charging Germans reached the farthest trench, was to lay down a deadly. 30-caliber barrage, force the survivors of the gunfire to jump into the mined trenches, and create panic in the German front lines until Merrill charged with the rifle company. Newsmen had nicknamed the Marines “Hell Hounds” because they screamed like wounded dogs when they engaged the enemy in hand-to-hand combat. Throw in mud, fog, and barbed-wire fences, and in the red glow of sunrise it became a howling, bloody ballet of death. The American Marines aimed not only to kill the Germans but to break what fighting spirit was left in the war-weary German infantrymen. Culhane thought it would work, but, he knew, not without taking its toll…

Max Brady orders the machine-gun barrage. The Germans fire back. In the first exchange, a sniper bullet rips through the bridge of Brady’s nose and takes out his eye. He stuffs a handkerchief in it and keeps firing.

Red dawn. The fog turns pink in the sun’s early rays. Danzig hears it first. A hundred and fifty yards away, a horse snorts. At almost the same instant, Redd smells horse flesh. But before either can fire a flare, the German. 88-millimeter howitzer barrage begins. Merrill was right. The Germans are shelling the no-man’s-land between the two enemies, gambling that the major has moved his forces into the trenches to await an attack. Danzig is caught in the middle of the deadly onslaught from the sky.

“Rusty, get outta there now. Run for it. Come in, come in!” Culhane yells. The beefy Bostonian jumps from the trench and zig-zags toward them, a chunky silhouette in the pink mist. He is yelling, “A hunnert-fifty yards, a hunnert-fifty yards,” as the howitzer barrage rains down around him. Ten yards from Culhane’s position, a bomb explodes. It is a few feet away from Rusty. He is knocked to his knees, clutching his throat. Blood spurts between his fingers.

Culhane fires a red flare, signaling Merrill to attack, and then jumps out of the foxhole, runs to Danzig, and pulls him to his feet. He shoves Danzig into the foxhole a moment before another. 88 goes off.

At their posts, Redd and Lenny peer into the mist. They can hear the horses snorting and the wheels on the caissons squealing. They are getting too close for comfort. To their left, the whole trench area is being bombarded.

And then a miracle. The wind comes.

The mist swirls and blows away.

The road is bound on both sides by four-foot-deep ditches. In the morning’s glare, Redd sees the first horses. Four of them, pulling a heavy gun. He aims, finds his mark, and fires. The Sharps kicks into his shoulder, then the lead horse’s head flips up, and the animal falls straightaway to the ground. A moment later, Lenny Holtz drops the other horse in the lead team. The remaining pair panic; eyes scared, nostrils flared, they bolt. Redd’s next shot takes the driver. He topples forward into the crazed horses. Lenny drops the third horse and the fourth breaks loose and gallops past them. The second horse team goes crazy. A commander, obviously an officer, is screaming at the second driver to get his horses under control. Redd waits a moment until he gets the officer’s profile in his sights, aims just in front of his ear, but before he can fire, the side of the German’s head erupts. Lenny has beaten him to it.

“Redd, come on, the shelling’s stopped!” Lenny yells. “We gotta get out of here!”

But Redd sees something else. Behind the second caisson is a tank. A stubby little box topped by a tin can of a turret, with a cannon swinging back and forth. Below it is a window with a machine gunner, both looking for targets.

Behind him, he can hear Merrill’s troopers yowling.

“Go on,” Redd yells back. “I’m going to get me a tank.”

“You’re nuts.”

“Sure am.” And Redd runs up the gully toward the Germans.

“Well, shit,” Lenny snarls, and follows him up the opposite side of the road. Behind him, he can hear Merrill’s yowling “hounds” as they wallow through the mud toward the advancing lines. Ahead of him, Lenny sees another German officer ordering several men to shoot the four horses in the second team and push the caissons into the ditch so the tank can get by. Lenny kills him and begins picking off the men who had been ordered to shoot the horses.

Redd doesn’t shoot anything. He just keeps running up the gully toward the tank.

With the firing of Culhane’s flare, Merrill blows his whistle, a shrill signal that the attack is on. The company, in staggered lines, races toward the enemy as the morning wind sweeps across the battlefield and the fog swirls away. A hundred yards in front of him, the front element of the German line is mowed down as the machine-gun trap opens up on them. The Hell Hounds charge forward through the mud and the battle becomes even more surreal.

A white horse, like a manic ghost, its eyes crazed, its nostrils flared, suddenly materializes from what’s left of the fog, gallops into the attacking force, knocking men down and stomping them as it snorts and whinnies with fear.

“What the hell!” Culhane says. He screams “Kill the horse!” as the crazy animal flails among the advancing Marines. A soldier shoots it in the leg and the hobbled animal goes even crazier, whinnying wildly and kicking out its back legs even as it begins to fall. Culhane jumps from his nest, runs toward it. For a moment, his mind sees an image of Cyclone, the beautiful white horse from his youth on the Hill, then quickly flashes back to the frantic horse, and he fires a shot from his. 45 into its brain. The horse’s head snaps and it collapses. The wave of Marines sweeps on.

Culhane races back toward his machine gun, hears the banshee scream of the howitzer shell, feels the hot concussion smack his back, the shower of mud, a searing pain in his right leg as he is blown into his shallow foxhole. Culhane looks down at his leg. It is shredded by shrapnel.

He thinks he hears somebody, somewhere, screaming, “Corpsman! Corpsman!”

Big Redd sticks close to the wall of the gully. The German artillery line is in havoc. They are too busy shooting horses, shoving them into the gully to clear a path for the tank, and getting shot, to pay attention to him as he creeps up beside the tank. On the other side of the road he can hear Merrill’s men charging the trench line.

In the tank, the machine gunner sees Redd as he steps back to grenade the tank. He fires a burst.

In the ditch, Redd ducks as bullets spout along the rim of the gully. He falls against the wall, spins about ten feet down it, jumps up, the Sharps already against his shoulder, and fires one shot. It zings down the machine gunner’s barrel and hits him in the forehead.

Redd lobs two grenades under the front of the tank’s screeching gears. Both grenades do the job. The tread splits in two and rolls off its runners. Crippled, the tank turns to the right. The turret man swings the cannon toward Redd, but before he can get off his shot the tank goes over the opposite side of the gully and crashes on its side.

Lenny crawls out of the ditch and runs toward the advancing Marine line. The German infantrymen are still bottlenecked at the trenches; hundreds are being slaughtered by both the American gunners and the mines when they jump into the trenches for cover. As Lenny jumps over the last trench, his foot slips in the mud. He scrambles to keep from falling into the deadly pit. He tries frantically to get a handhold but the mud defeats him. He slowly slides over the rim of the trench, flips over, and falls headfirst into it. When he hits the murky floor, he hears the deadly click of a mine as it is triggered. He dives away and rolls over as the bomb explodes. The blast slams him against the trench wall, showers him with shrapnel, and blows off the lower part of his left arm.

Above him, the attacking Marines jump across the trench.

“Hey,” he yells, “somebody gimme a hand!” He holds up his good arm and one of the charging Marines falls to the ground, reaches down and pulls him out of the death trap. It is then that Holtz realizes his other arm is gone at the elbow.

“Maybe I shoulda said ‘gimme an arm,’ ” he moans, before passing out.

As Merrill leads his men toward the embattled Germans, he runs past Culhane’s foxhole and drops down beside him.

“The trap’s working like a charm,” he says and then he sees Culhane’s leg. “Sweet Jesus!” he cries out.

“Don’t let ’em take my leg, Major,” Culhane says, his voice so weak Merrill can hardly understand him.

Merrill looks through the charging company of Marines and sees a red cross. “You, Corpsman, get over here!” he orders.

Culhane grabs a handful of Merrill’s shirt.

“I got you your ten minutes, Major.” His voice gets stronger. “Don’t… let… them… take… my… leg.” He begins to shake. Shock is setting in. The corpsman drops beside them and puts a tourniquet on Culhane’s upper thigh.

“Promise me, damn it!” Culhane yells above the din of battle.

Merrill grabs a leatherneck by the arm. “Listen to me,” Merrill bellows, shouting above the sounds of the Hell Hounds screaming, the peal of bayonets clashing, the thunder of guns. “You stay with your sergeant, get it? You stay with him when you get to the field hospital. You stay with him when they operate, and you tell whoever takes care of Culhane that I said if he takes off that leg, I’ll personally take off one of his.”

“Yes, sir, Major Merrill.”

“Th’nks,” Culhane stammers, and Merrill races into battle. He doesn’t hear Culhane’s last whisper before he passes out: “Good luck.”