The Aeronaut Read online

  “You’re cheerier than I am capable of, LeBeau.”

  As we approached the bodies, the smile on LeBeau’s face never diminished. I wondered then if he somehow reveled in the death. How anyone could be happy in the midst of all that was beyond me. But LeBeau’s countenance was such that you couldn’t help but find yourself enamored by him. He was unflaggingly positive, even in the worst of all possible conditions.

  Kneeling down in the mud, unstrapping the jumping contraptions from the corpses of our fellow Aeronauts, it was as though LeBeau didn’t even notice. He went about his work as though he were assembling the parts of a sandwich, hungry and wishing he could eat. There was a lack of revulsion in him I found curious, but also attractive.

  That distance, that objectivity, is something I wished I could learn. It’s something I still wish I could learn.

  “If you helped, the work will be faster.” LeBeau nodded toward the next fallen brother we had to tend to.

  His pack was riddled with bullets and scuffed with filth, and I wondered if saving it would be worth the trouble for anything other than spare parts. The pack would never fly again, and I said so.

  “That’s not our concern.” LeBeau shrugged. “It’s no longer Alec’s concern, either. Let’s just get the pack off of him.”

  Confused, I furrowed my brow. “Who’s Alec?”

  “He is. This is Alec.” LeBeau ran a wistful hand through Alec’s hair before unbelting the shoulder strap of his pack.

  “You knew him?” I remember asking. I’d put the thought out of my head that anyone, on our side or theirs, was anything more than a target made of meat.

  Especially when you’re roasting them alive.

  It’s weaker, but much more sane, to focus on the sound and sight of the flame rather than the charred aftermath of a man. I’d seen the Germans I’d killed that day, I’m sure of it, and I can imagine what their blackened, cooked flesh would have looked like if I’d allowed myself to remember, but my mind and memory ignored it as though it never happened.

  “Oui. I knew him well.” For the first time since we’d met, LeBeau showed a trace of emotion that wasn’t jovial. He was somber and had every reason to be.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s not your fault. You didn’t shoot him.”

  Once the straps had been loosed, I pulled the damaged jump pack from the body and wrested it into my lap.

  LeBeau turned Alec’s body over and reached out to his face, delicately wiping the muck from his dead eyes. Then, with an open palm, he wiped the rest of the mud from Alec’s face. “He and I were both from Paris.”

  I would ask about Alec another time, when we were lying in a dark room cut from earth, trying to sleep to the lullaby of mortars. LeBeau would quietly tell me of their few adventures together, their passing acquaintances, and how they had met, among other things. But there, kneeling down in the mud on the edge of our first battle, he didn’t have it in him and I could not blame him. In return, he would ask me about Lucy, and I would tell him of the sunset sky before us on the deck of the airship and the pain in her voice when she told me we were through.

  And of the letter she handed me, the one I carried.

  Her final mea culpa to me. It said everything she couldn’t bring herself to say in person.

  LeBeau and I went about our grim task for the better part of an hour. We’d hand off the packs to other Aeronauts and they would place them on the shelf. It took so long because LeBeau and I decided we should turn them all over and clean their faces and close their eyes whether we knew them or not.

  It slowed the task, but we were in no hurry.

  “I thought death would bring peace to a man,” I told LeBeau, looking at the lifeless, pained faces of the dead Aeronauts we’d completed our work with.

  “Of a kind. But not the sort you’re looking for,” he said.

  Looking at the blank stares of nothingness before we closed their eyes, I shivered. Perhaps he was right.

  After our dirty work, they ordered us to bathe and fumigate. The process was demeaning, but at least no one was shooting at us. We marched to the rear of our lines, and there amid the tents and temporary buildings we found a tub large enough to fit five of us at a time. We lined up in front of the tub and would strip in turn when we reached the front. Then, we’d hand our clothes over to be treated with chemicals that never quite seemed to kill the lice, just before getting into the wash basin. Once in the water, we’d be handed a bar of soap and timed for thirty seconds.

  As we stood in line, waiting for our chance at the water, LeBeau nudged me by the shoulder. “I have something for you.”

  He snatched my hand and placed inside it a small trinket of some kind, then wrapped my fingers around it. “What is this?”

  “It’s a good luck charm. You’re lucky now, but who knows in the future. You need it. It’ll keep us all safe. Trust me, I know these things.”

  I uncurled my fingers to reveal the gift: a copper gear, wide enough to fit around a finger.

  “From Alec’s jetpack. It wasn’t good luck for him because he wasn’t good luck. But for you, it will be good for all of us.”

  He smiled at me, and I wondered what he had to smile about. Regardless, I thanked him for his gift and kept it concealed in my hand when they took my clothes before the bath.

  By the time LeBeau and I had our turn, the water was no longer clean or warm, but it was better than the stagnant water that seeped into the floors of the trenches. It was even worse for the fellows further behind us because the temperature of the water didn’t change and it didn’t get any clearer or cleaner, either. At first, I actively despised the process, but I grew reluctantly accustomed to it since there were no better options.

  When they reissued us our uniforms, they also assigned LeBeau and I to a tent together, along with four other soldiers. We’d done our job on the frontline, we’d performed our support duties for the day, and now it was time for our rest.

  Laying there on the cot, beneath a scratchy wool blanket and wearing everything but my boots, I clutched the trinket LeBeau had given me. Squeezing my fist tight around it, I kept seeing Alec’s face, tracked with the remains of the French mud, staring right at me. I never even knew him and don’t recall ever speaking with him during my training, but there he was, haunting me in my sleep. I told myself that I wouldn’t get close to anyone if I could help it. Jumpers didn’t last long.

  But if dreams had come that night of Alec instead of Lucy, I might have been grateful.

  “Monsieur Preston?” LeBeau said, a phantom in the dim light of the canvas tent.

  “Yes, LeBeau?” I squeezed the cog harder, remembering my promise.

  “Don’t dwell too much on what has happened. Worry about tomorrow. It would do you well, I think.”

  “What do you mean?” It was hard for me to concentrate on his words. I was too exhausted to think.

  “It is not wise to dwell on the thing in your past that brought you here.” His tone was soft and matter of fact. “Or on Alec. Or on anything you did or saw here in these trenches. None of it has any power over you unless you give it.”

  As he spoke, I could see a parade of images march from one end of my mind to the other, illustrating his point. Lucy. Alec. The flaming Germans. “What makes you think there’s something bothering me?”

  “I know what it looks like because I have been there. We all have something from before, something that frightens us. But don’t give it power. Learn to let it go.”

  I knew he was giving me the best advice I’d never follow. Though I should have surrendered to his wisdom, I surrendered to sleep instead.

  3

  A cacophony of pinging gunshots, mortal screams, and mortar fire lit up the day, and all I could do was continue crawling forward on my belly through the muck toward the bank of the river and our fourth jump of the war. The weight of my pack made me feel pinned down to the Earth. The dingy blanket that covered my pack and I, hopefully to obscure me from sigh
t, was just one more piece of straw trying to break me. The rubber strap of my goggles pinched my head. The only way I could imagine feeling more constricted was by being buried alive, face down, in a coffin.

  Like a fool, I added to my burden a thin chain around my neck with the cog I’d been given as a good luck charm. It weighed me down as much as the rest and managed to dig into my chest. The pain it brought was a reminder that I was alive, and I’d found it was lucky enough since I hadn’t died yet.

  I heard LeBeau rustling in the tall grass beside me, covered over just as I was. He suppressed a laugh. “This is more fun than the last time, no?”

  My voice was hushed, though I doubted any Germans would be able to hear us through the fire-fight or across the rushing river. “Only because their bullets aren’t aimed at us.”

  “Yet, you mean. Yet.”

  They would be. We’d received word the Germans were making another push toward Paris by way of the Marne, hoping to cut off the rail lines and push forward. After how badly we’d licked them last time, it was a bold move. But someone thought, in a battle that would see a million soldiers and hundreds of thousands killed, that we few aerial spartans could turn the tide.

  But why wouldn’t we? We’d jump the river in a blink and the Germans would be none the wiser. I wondered how much damage fifty men with flamers could do against a million. French forces had set a defensive line miles long to keep the Germans boxed in with the river on one side. They hadn’t brought enough flying machines to transport men in force across, and so the river had become their boundary. With our help it would become their weakness.

  We would merely punch the hole, though. The scared and timid poilus, hunched in teams behind us, carrying boats over their heads and bayoneted rifles slung over their shoulders, would do the damage to the Kaiser’s forces.

  “Of course. How silly of me.” My forearms edged forward, pulling me another half-foot closer to the river. “They’re always about to shoot us.”

  “Of course they are, you silly man. They’re Germans. That’s what they do best.”

  I could almost hear his smile. It made me wonder how LeBeau could remain so casual about things. Surely, the faces of our fallen fellows weighed on him as much as they weighed on me–perhaps more so, because he spent time getting to know everyone. I kept to myself and ignored things as best I could, but the losses still affected me.

  “Just a little bit further.”

  “Oui.” LeBeau agreed.

  The row of us had been inching our way up and over the berm of the Marne’s bank for at least an hour. My muscles burned with soreness and my knees were stiff. It took every bit of willpower I had to not stand up and stretch, but to do so would invite death.

  By then, I no longer wanted to die. Watching so many others accept its embrace over those first few months made me realize how unpleasant the prospect of dying actually was. And LeBeau had coached me through so many difficult and trying times.

  One late night, in our damp canvas tent, LeBeau awoke to the sounds of my stifled tears.

  “What is the matter?” he asked me softly and without judgement.

  It was Lucy. To that point it had always been Lucy. I never thought I’d find someone who could love me again, and the one person I’d found so easily discarded me.

  I’d been abandoned.

  “You will be all right, Preston,” he told me. “You have us now.”

  He gripped my shoulder and let me know he was there. I knew he was right. I really did have him and everyone else in the Aeronautic Corps, personally and on the battlefield.

  And there we were, as I said, crawling in the mud as a fraternal order of broken-hearted fools and soldiers.

  The air grew colder the closer we got to the water.

  The season had turned the temperature crisp already, so the blankets I’d been cursing were at least some small help to us. They cut the factor of the wind considerably. I wasn’t looking forward to flinging it off and being outside of its warm comfort. Feeling the cold bite at my hands, I wondered when they would issue us gloves. They’d have to if they wanted us to jump much further into the season.

  None of it mattered. As long as I was crawling to the river’s edge and covered over by the blanket, I could pretend I was in my own little world and nothing and no one could tell me what to do.

  I was a little crab stuck in his shell and minding his own business all the way back to the shore of the sea.

  “It’s time, Preston.” LeBeau’s voice was ahead of me and to the right, illustrating to me how wrong I could be about things. I’d had his position pegged at slightly behind me and to my left. Somehow he’d crossed sides and doubled his pace. It would have been no difficult task. I was not moving very fast, but then none of us were.

  The soil of the river bank was soggy, not unlike the deeper parts of the trenches we’d been forced to spend time in, though it was not barren. There was vegetation there, reeds and tall grass. Curious there were no animals, however. Bugs of all sorts, buzzing gnats and mosquitos, but not a single mammal.

  When human beings act viciously, we look around and say we’re acting like animals, but I think we have it wrong. The animals would never have allowed any of this to occur. It was no accident that when the fighting began and the bullets and the gas came the animals had fled.

  I’d always wondered what we must have looked like on that river’s shore. There were about fifty of us, give or take, all concealed, each of us woolen mounds dotting the bank like an earthy goose flesh.

  An officer crawled along with us, his sole job to sound the charge. I wondered if he would reveal himself to whistle or if he would do it from the safety of his hiding spot. I never did find out. The whistle came, and I was so focused on crossing the river that my curiosity faded to nothing and I stood, shedding my makeshift camouflage.

  LeBeau and the rest had done the same across either side of me. One by one, we engaged our jetpacks. As the packs came to life, the sounds of the battle and the river faded beneath the harsh white noise. LeBeau took off first, rising straight up, gaining altitude before his intended zip across the river. I engaged my own thrust control and sent myself on a more gentle arc, doing my best to keep up with my friend.

  The battle we flew toward was fierce, but not fierce enough that we’d gone unnoticed by the Germans. We’d been spotted and the bullets flew toward us.

  There was one German in particular, his face contorted in surprise, who shouted something I couldn’t hear and raised his rifle. I flinched for a moment, bracing for a bullet hit that never came.

  I did my best to match my speed to LeBeau and keep him above me and to my right, just inside what little peripheral vision I had through the goggles. I had no desire to go any faster. It never paid to be the first to land.

  Looking back, I saw that only half of us had so far made it off the ground. The sound of the whistle that sent us into the air had also called the troops from behind, hauling their rowboats over their heads. Their faces could not be seen since they were using the boats as shields as best as they could manage. But the boats weren’t their most effective protection.

  We were.

  Glancing down, the Marne raced beneath us, a bluish-brown flow of water. My attention was only lost for a second. When I looked back up, everything was wrong.

  The Germans had summoned the wherewithal to turn ninety degrees and meet our assault with more than the handful of bullets we’d expected. I increased my thrust, but lost my attention when a piece of metal pinged off the glass of my goggles. Something hit my right side, and my head naturally snapped in that direction to see what I was being assailed by.

  Where I expected to see LeBeau I saw nothing but the river bank and Germans along the horizon of trees. Scanning up, I wondered if he’d increased his altitude, but he wasn’t there either. My gaze dropped down in time to see LeBeau free-falling into the river. His pack gaped a hole and sprayed fluids in all directions.

  “LeBeau!” I shouted, loud
enough to feel my anguish drag across my vocal cords like glass. But I knew no one could hear me.

  He hit the water with a splash, and his pack dragged him below. I couldn’t keep my head down long enough to see if he resurfaced. The left bank of the river came sooner than I would have liked, and all I could do was tighten my cold grip on the flamer and hope I would make it through the attack.

  I wished I’d had time to mourn LeBeau, but all I could feel was anger and instinct. Through my desire to panic and flee, I was able to affect a smooth landing on the far shore of the Marne. I dropped fifteen feet from the German soldier that had dropped LeBeau from the sky.

  The noise of my own pack faded and the sounds of the battle came to the forefront: bullets, shouting, the race of the river, and the incessant whooshing of the other jetpacks.

  Rage filled me; I raised up my flamer and charged.

  It didn’t matter if there were other Aeronauts on the shore to join my assault, and I didn’t rightly care. I was going to cook this one German alive if it was the last thing I ever did.

  As I ran, I pushed the spark catch that ignited the pilot light at the tip of my flamer and then pulled the trigger. A burst of heat and flame streamed forth, warming me from the cold and adding a frying sizzle to the sounds of battle.

  A plaintive scream was the German’s final exclamation point. It faded into a gurgling cry and then nothing: a period on the sentence of his life.

  I did everything I could to feel vengeance rather than remorse. I took no pleasure in killing Germans, which wasn’t always the case amongst the French Army. Letting go of the trigger, I moved forward through the heated air and stepped over the charred body, his uniform still alight. I did it without a second look or thought.

  LeBeau was gone. It fell to me to punch the hole in the German defense, singlehandedly if I had to.

  The German line wasn’t as strong along the side as it was on the front. Since this was an advance on their part, they hadn’t the time to dig in, so they took cover where they could behind the dense trees that lined the river and hid behind the berms of the bank where they could find them.