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
