Jonah Unger wanted the end. He saw the grey shape of Rupert Fuchs running through the snow ahead of him. He knew Lieutenant Durant and Sergeant Renoir were just beyond Rupert, charting the course. He sensed James Cox and saw his arms pumping in his peripheral vision. He heard Captain Strathmann coming just behind them, his presence urging Jonah to keep pressing forward. The pressure his peers were applying was all that kept him from laying down and succumbing.

  It was the horses that had done it. The sight of them sapped his will to live. That early morning in 1914… the re-visitation of the sights, sounds, and smells of the day were triggered by the brave British cavalrymen. He had managed to suppress the memory for two years, crushing it into a tight ball and shoving it into the corner of a deep hall closet in his mind, slamming the door shut and bolting it, nailing sturdy beams across the threshold to keep it interred. The mental exercise had been a success. It held the memory at bay, or at least kept it out of the sunlight, but it seemed now that all the effort was in vain. In the dark closet of memory, the thing his actions birthed must have continued to grow and flourish, feeding on the darkness; and now, it seemed to have found a key and escaped, a fully matured black mass inside of him.

  The wheat field had been prime. Green and still growing, the spears thick, the stems and stalks seeming longer by the second. Unfortunately, the men who should have been champing at the bit to reap the harvest of their laborious planting were dead, or on their way to it.

  The patriarch, Thiéry, died of a heart attack when the family fled the German invasion. The eldest son, Michel, was killed on the battlefield two weeks after he graduated from infantry school. The youngest son, Henri, too young to join the French Army, currently lay in hospital, dying of influenza he contracted, as he and his mother moved from refuge to refuge, seeking shelter in Paris. But the sum total of the men’s labors had outlived them all and was in a gorgeous state. Had they lived to see their field, pride and avarice would have moved through all of them. The harvest would have been spectacular, the cash return, huge.

  Jonah walked through the winter wheat, stunned. Wolfgang Strathmann was near at hand. Lieutenant Diestle, too, whose quiet gallows’ laughter was the only thing Jonah heard over the tinny ring in his ears. The green wheat brushed his knees, and he wished he could smell it, but his nose was filled by the stench of machine-gun oil, burnt lead, and ignited white powder.

  The sun caught the bright, shining horse hides perfectly. Their brushed coats and braided manes gleamed in brown, honey, and gold tones. The blacks of fetlocks and forelegs shone like pitch, the white diamonds on their foreheads and chests gleamed like fresh paint. Their riding tack was immaculate; polished saddles and reins, shining brass, and silvery steel bits between their teeth. The blood was the brightest shade of red Jonah had ever seen.

  Jonah staggered. His acne-pocked loader, Ernst Steiner, grabbed him and helped him stay standing.

“Chin up, Jonah, chin up,” Ernst said.

  Jonah nodded. He did not want to look like a weakling, especially in the presence of Lieutenant Diestle, who never let up with the ridicule and name-calling of his ‘Little Jew Gunner’. Looking as though he had lost his appetite for war would lead to no end of abuse, and in Jonah’s experience, abusive behavior spiraled at the first sign of weakness in the victim. He would walk this field as brazenly as Lieutenant Diestle, or die trying.

  Jonah did not count the dead horses. Later he was told that there were one-hundred and forty-four of them. He could not help but keep count of the ones he finished at close range.

Eight.

  Eight magnificent beasts in various states of suffering that he, or one of the other two gunners, began killing with their machine guns and now had to summarily finish with a bullet to the head. He shut his eyes each time he fired his rifle.

There were eighty-five dead men, too, and a score of stunned survivors and wounded, but they were not put down. They were catalogued and disarmed, sent to the rear to suffer the loss of their equine companions in prison camps for the remainder of the war.

  After the last dying horse was extinguished, Jonah’s company moved forward. The ASC Labour battalion arrived, and before midday, had crafted a long, zig-zagging trench at the far edge of the field. The battlements would only deepen and grow from there, shooting arteries out in all directions like a living thing; a virulent, spreading cancer fed on the death and horror that took place above it.

  By mid-afternoon, Jonah and Ernst had finished setting up their MG ’08 in its emplacement. They secured it with sandbags around the tripod, on a perfect fire-step that would keep them low enough to avoid snipers, but high enough to direct their field of fire into any British infantryman sent screaming in their direction, bayonets fixed, ‘killing faces’ engaged.

  The wind washed a bitter scent over Jonah and Ernst. Jonah looked back at the field of green wheat. The Labour Battalion had stripped the dead horses of their riding tack and dropped it all into wagon beds. All the leather and metal would be put to good use. Nothing wasted. Then they began the butchering. The ripe blood, organs, and intestines, the stench of an open-air slaughterhouse caught by an easterly spring breeze, nearly brought Jonah to tears.

  The meat and organs would end up in stew pots, the beautiful hides would become gloves, belts, boots, and black leather gaiters for German officers. The intestines would be stretched and strung into suture thread for the medical corps. The rest––the bones and cartilage, the spilled blood and brains––would stay in the field, feeding the green wheat’s roots until it flourished to full growth. Then the stalks would be scythed down, ground to flour, and baked into loaves of bread for the army.

Nothing wasted.

Everything wasted.

  Jonah was given the Iron Cross, First Class for gallantry. He survived two more years of war and never fought off another cavalry charge. He purposefully avoided looking at horses that entire time. Of course, he was aware when a quartet of the beasts hauled artillery past or dragged the field kitchen up for a hot breakfast, but for thirty-one months he succeeded in never looking directly at a horse again. It was a curious feat, but he managed it quite well. If he could pretend the horses were not there, he could certainly pretend all the ones he had machine-gunned and mercy-murdered did not still reside in a dark closet in his brain.

  But now, with the world at its end, the sight of the British horsemen coming to their rescue had broken that streak, and broken the door that held those memories fast, and he felt them charging out of it. The memory was alive. It felt as real as if it was all happening again. The recall of that Indian summer morning and all that came with it filled him to his toes, engulfing him, stampeding over him, revealing him as broken, trampled––his insides, his soul, his very being smashed to nothing by the things he had done and seen. Jonah prayed. He prayed for death to find him quickly and put him out of his misery so he would not have to do it himself.