SMITE THE LAND
In the fall of 1917, when boys and men were being minced by the meat grinder that was Passchendaele, nineteen-year-old Don Mast, five days into the week that would end in his death, was holed up in a gulch in the eroded plains just behind the line, his steel pieplate helmet cocked back on his head, his face sullied with grey mud, and his new rifle cradled in his lap, bayonet affixed and pointing downward as he munched from his first and last meal that week: a tin of canned fruit. He held it out to the figure huddled beside him.
—Want some? Mast said.
There was no answer.
—Well suit yourself then. More for me.
He spooned his fingers into the mess and gobbled it hungrily. The pops of riflefire and the timpani thuds of artillery had formed a muted cacophony in his damaged ears. The rest of the squad cowered out there somewhere, in the nearby gullies and gouges formed by the shells. Now and then he would hear someone call out for a surgeon, their mother.
—I can’t see a goddamn thing. Not with all this fog.
He listened, ears pricked.
—The guns have stopped, he croaked. Maybe it’s over.
The figure beside him did not say anything about it and Mast slowly reached for his rifle and raised it to the lip of the ditch.
—Hey Joe. I ever tell you about the time I shot that Hun clear through the face? You wouldn’t of believed it. I couldn’t believe it myself. Both his eyes just popped right out the back of his head. God wouldn’t of recognized him after that.
—Hande hoch! A German in the fog.
—Well goddamn. They ain’t all dead after all. Stay still, Joe.
Mast took his rifle and slowly raised himself to a crouch when a shell burst just over the gulch.
—Kaiser Bill’s pitching blind, Mast laughed to himself.
He sat down in the muck and picked up his tin of fruit and guzzled down the dregs of it. He held the empty tin in his hand and rose to his feet but when he went to chuck it away the bullet tore through his belly.
—God.
He lay back in the sludge as a dark shadow pooled gelidly about him.
Then another.
—Nicht schiessen! Mast screamed as they shot him.
— Er war verrückt, one of them said, looking down at the sunbleached skeleton beside the boy they’d killed.