Death Valley

Gunshots smothered John's voice, so I never made out his last words. I assume they were something to the effect of 'God save the King,' but I like to think he was splattering something less acrimonious.

A little after four, the 'other' made its way to me and John. We spent the last seven hours on watch duty for our sector of trench, staring out over the barren expanse of barbed wasteland, eyes peeled for anything white. It's a dreadful business. Enough to drive a man mad if left to his own devices, so we always watched in pairs. The night was quiet. John, ever the serious type, sat in silence. The only noise on the watch was him twirling a rusty pin from his wife. With the sun starting its climb, I got two taps on the shoulder. Our relief in the rotation. Without a word, we shuffled off our perch and across the long trench to our sleeping quarters tracing the western moon. Empty nights on watch leave you jumpy and disassociated, but John and I were experienced. Regular veterans of the night.

Pale fire took us past the shelling groups, already at work preparing that morning's volleys. We saw a friend, Paul Tenor, a shell hand from East London John and I trained up with. Instead of our usual greeting, he grabbed us frantically, swinging us round the nearest dirt corner. Paul’s eyes were worn, wild, stretched wide open and darting about. He was gyroscopic, rotating on every axis. "Quiet, quiet, quiet now. They don’t want this going around. I'm only telling you two cause you gotta be careful coming to and from watch." He went on, not stopping to breathe, crashing words into each other. "Last night in sector three, two-night watchers were coming back from rotation when they were cut down. Squealing rang like a rooster. When the shell team got to the boys, they saw something in a long black coat, moon-white face covered in blood, standing over the two with some kind of hook or sword or somehin. I can’t remember details...” We begged Paul to slow down, but his exegesis was implacable. "When the shell team approached, the man or thing it… it vanished like dust in the wind". "I think the gunpowder is getting to you Paul, or maybe your mask is too tight," John responded, releasing Paul's grip from his arm. "John John, that's not even the worst part. Captain told us this wasn’t the first time sector two was attacked, and sector one was damn near cleared out by it. Nothing is going out on comms. Command doesn't want a panic, they think it's a German fencing team trained to get in our lines.”

“A fencing team?”

“The Germans are crafty. Wouldn’t put it past em. Besides this war…who knows”

“Cmon, what do you really think?”

“I don’t know what I think, all I know is since we been on the line, this things taken down more of our men with a rickety bayonet than they have”, pointing out over the desert of mangled metal to the line of Germans scoping their iron sights. A whistle sounded, the moon received its two taps, and Paul ran off to rejoin his unit packing mortars for the morning.

Confused, John and I turned to each other and cracked into the biggest laugh of the War. "Poor Paul, the shells got him up so early and sniffing so much powder he's lost it," John tittered . I laughed along, but something about Paul's warning felt beyond soldierly. He was a proud non-believer, a shell man who stood hand in hand with geometry, calculus and a primordial hatred of Germans. Ghost stories seemed a hard sell.

The next night, we set out for our perch. Passing through the longest stretch of the soggy trench, I tripped on a piece of metal half buried in the mud. It was a mangled bayonet bent almost perfectly into a semi-circle. We thought nothing of it. "Those German chests don't go down without a fight," John remarked as I tossed the object into an empty cove dug into the wall for surplus storage. It wasn't until a few hours later, absorbed in the meditative expanse of wasteland, that a piercing image reentered my mind. Did I see something in that dark dugout? I replayed it over and over, each time being different. The night played with my memory, and by the time our relief came, I convinced myself that lording in the dugout was a tall cloaked figure. Maybe I was too stunned or too scared to react to what I saw. Or maybe I was losing my mind. I waited until we passed the dugout on our way back, which I did gripping the blade in my coat pocket, before telling John of my harrowing realization. My greatest hope was for John to refute my misremembrance. To my horror, he confessed to seeing something strange as well but thought Paul’s story was playing tricks on him. We exchanged descriptions until our stories matched, and then he fell asleep.

John woke from a soggy sleep to coffee I placed in his hand. "People will think you're crazy, John... Maybe we are crazy," I said, to which John quickly fired back, "I know what I saw with my own two eyes." While plotting our next move, we heard commotion stirring the mud-soaked bog left by overnight rain. Readying our guns and masks, we shot toward our station. A small crowd formed encircling the center of a four-way intersection now a foot or two deep with slosh. John bolted. Before I could reach the front of the group, I heard John call out, "Paul, Paul!!" I sprinted toward the commotion. John was holding Paul's head in his hand like a putrid melon cut clean from his body. Paul was dead. The 'other' got him in the early hours of the morning. Our captain assured us Paul's death was from an ambitious German raid corresponding with multiple other coordinated attacks along the front that night, but we knew the truth. It was a cover-up. There was something out there stalking us.

With a fresh soldier's courage and a dead man's bravery, John and I set out on a mission. To stalk the stalker and put an end to the madness. It took some arm pulling, but John came around to the idea. We headed towards our night watch the same as any other night, but instead of settling on our sandbag perch, we pushed deeper into the trench. No fighting broke out in the zone, no push, no ambush, nothing, not for weeks. We didn't believe our captain's reports and thought abandoning our post for a few hours to hunt this spook was plenty safe. After searching every dugout, ditch, and hiding spot without a sign of the foul beast, we called it quits and headed back to our watch before the rotation ended. Suddenly, the night broke out in an eruption of bells and shouts and gunfire. And the mud walls vibrated. And our hastily built wood frames ricocheted the terror of death unseen. And the sun and the moon were replaced with ghastly flashes of orange light. And for the first time we heard what the moon had only ever whispered.

Soldiers fired down the corridor at Germans pouring in from every side. John grabbed me and led me to cover, trading side-eye glances before lifting our rifles to join the hellfire. Grenades flew like baseballs. Gunfire banged and popped the sand mounds overhead. They broke the trench line with reinforcements crossing the wasteland. The whole sector was split by the incursion separating us from our unit, who must have thought us dead. Chaos made command an archaic memory. We followed orders from whoever was giving them. An authoritative soldier told us to fortify a nearby watch station turned makeshift fort, hoping to hold the spot until the cloven line could be reconnected. Gas leaked through my mask, creating a desert where lungs once lived. Everything was shrouded in smoke. Our only light was the orange of muzzle flashes. There was no time for me and John to commiserate our dread.

My eyes fixed down the barrel of my rifle out into the foggy wasteland, my finger firing on anything moving, I couldn’t tell if my bullets found bodies, but I kept firing. Clip after clip, seeing nothing, I could only keep firing. Another soldier yanked at my sleeve pointing to the colossal plume of smoke coming from deep in the sector behind our position. From his lips, I could read, "The Germans got in behind us." The leading man in the fort jumped out to see what was happening. His face was pale and sunken. I imagine I looked the same. We all probably did. John looked me over, our compunction synced with raised brows.

Ten minutes passed, and our courageous leader, who braved his own life for us and whose name I never did know, hadn't returned. Gunfire from behind rattled in our chests, heavier by the minute. A retreating line of our men were firing aimlessly. We were losing. The Germans were attacking hand-to-hand, bullet-to-bullet. We desperately needed to know what was going on if we were to defend our position for the long haul. Before we could decide who would go down, John dropped himself out of the fort and sprinted into the unknown. I did the same and followed after him.

"John! John!" I wailed, but he couldn't hear me. I vaguely made out his silhouette through the gas and gunpowder flowing like a river through our muddy home. John was closing in on the fighting when three soldiers in all black came from over the top of the trench. Without seeing me, they dropped into the ditch right between us. Shouting for John, I slung my gun into position and began firing on the men. He didn't even hear the gunshots. With three trigger pulls, I got them all. I stopped for only a moment to confirm their deaths and pushed onward. A particularly heavy plume completely obscured my vision beyond a foot. Making matters worse, I could no longer see any orange flashes. Disoriented and directionless, I stopped, reloaded my clip, and waited for the fog to settle. When it did, I was able to make out John. He was pinned to a dirt wall by what must have been a seven-foot figure in all black. It was the 'other'. I know what I saw. We locked eyes for a moment, but I was too late. John let out one last sound as the figure lifted a curved blade to John's throat and, with one long slice, nearly decapitated him. John's body collapsed, and I took the shot. I shot, and I shot, and I shot until I was out of bullets. The dreadful thing's body dropped. I ran to him. There was blood-soaked mud all around. I grabbed his pin and blinked for the first time all morning. Before confirming my kill or even gaining my composure, two French soldiers came barrelling toward me, shouting, "Germans, Germans! Go! Go!" The three of us ran as fast as we could, firing behind us whenever we rounded a corner. One of the soldiers had his ear shot off from close range and still kept running.

The fighting stretched on for three days before we re-established control of the line. All the Germans were pushed back, we dug in once more and the protracted battle resumed. No one ever found out about my role in the events. John received the Victoria Cross posthumously, and no one ever spoke of the 'other' again. Whenever I tell this story to the doctors, they say, "It was the Germans! It's a trench myth". But as I ran for my life, back the way I came, there were no dead bodies wrapped in black. The three soldiers I shot vanished. When I returned to the fort, my mask was missing, my face was splattered with blood, and my bayonet was never to be found.