Bright's Passage: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page B

pulled the dress over her head and let it fall forgotten on the bank. Then she was wriggling in the icy water. When she stood, the water halfway up her calves, Henry Bright looked upon her naked body for the first time. She bent her head to the stream, dunking it, and then straightened, looking frankly at him as she twisted the water from her hair.

7
     
    You were never to run when advancing. You were to move at a slow and steady pace that allowed the artillery behind you to fire over your head and clear the way for you. Of course, when the ground at your feet exploded it was impossible to tell whether the barrage was coming from in front of you or behind you, so you forgot about slowly advancing and you ran, you ran right into the gun barrels of whoever was there in front of you.
    When the order was given, the men climbed the lip of the trench and were soon running across the field. There was always much screaming when this happened, and even Bright would find his mouth hanging open and releasing sounds that he could never quite catch up with and that he could never quite remember afterward. He never looked down no matter what he felt himself stepping on. The fields in between the trenches were wind-whipped ponds of bodies, and even though the bodies were dead they could still pull you down with them; the dead were hungry that way. This morning, with the white beacon of the church in the distance marking the location of the village toward which they were to advance, he climbed out from behind the bags and ran keening and lurching across the dead world of cold limbs and helmets and faces with forgotten names. He had done this before, but this time something feltdifferent. To either side men should have been falling by now. Instead, two had gotten tangled in the barbed wire and a third was frantically trying to cut them loose with a wire cutter. Bright continued on, expecting at any moment to be shot, but as he got ever closer and was not cut down, it became evident that the trenches that lay between them and the village had been surrendered.
    After the ragged and slapdash improvisation of their own dwellings, the deserted German trenches were a wonder to behold. Cut much deeper into the ground than the American and French ones, they were reinforced against the shifting mud with concrete. There was a regularity to their construction as well, as if they had been designed dispassionately by some crisp gray architect rather than a panicked animal with a short shovel. A man of average height could almost stand upright in a few of the rooms, and the German soldiers who lived in them, far below the clamor of artillery barrages above, must have experienced, in quieter moments, the same placid satisfaction that brown trout feel as they dream away far beneath the rainaddled surface.
    Uniform artillery gaps between the sandbags afforded a clear view of the cavitied village in front of them. The little cluster of buildings seemed far less worthy of defense than the snug bunkers that Henry Bright and his companions now found themselves in.
    They scoured the trench for souvenirs but there was little left to take. A couple of large skillets had been abandoned, their weight disqualifying them as items to accompany rapid retreat. There were indecipherable books and a few utensils. Bright was holding an empty cracker tin when a shot rang out. Twenty yards off the trench cut sharply left, then right. Rounding the turn, he saw a wooden door that had swung wide from the trench wall. He crept up to it and, peering around the doorway, foundhimself looking directly down the black pupil of a pistol barrel. He squeezed the trigger of his own gun reflexively, firing a bullet into the ground between Bert’s feet.
    “Whoa, Bright! Whoa!” Bert said. “It’s me! It’s me!” He lowered the pistol he had been pointing at Bright. “Jee-roosh! You trying to kill me or what?”
    Three others came around the corner, rifles at the ready. Bright set his