The Supremacy of the Beast

THE BEAST
A TALE OF SIN

The Maxim gun chatters out rounds, that Big Black Beast of the Battlefield asserting his dominance over us poor Tommies clawing our way toward the huge mound of dirt that marked the Hohenzollern Redoubt. You learn to fear that noise. To always listen through the thundering roar of battle for that terrible voice of the King of No- Man’s land. The Beast twinkles in the distance as he hoses us down with his accomplices in wholesale slaughter. The bullets probe every inch of No-Man’s land, throwing up dirt and flinging aside rocks as they search for young men to drill holes in. My friends clutch at their wounds, the sky, each other as the Beast executes them for daring to trespass into his hellish universe. He has a long reach indeed; in the first five seconds half of my platoon goes down. Lt. Evans immediately orders us to take cover, and we need no encouragement. We drop to the ground, or hurl ourselves into folds in the earth. For my part, I find relief from the ensuing massacre in a local shell crater. Medic Alan Lasley jumps in after me. Private Willis staggers to join us, trying to stuff his guts back into his abdomen. He is not being very successful, and to make matters worse, he won’t stop screaming. It’s almost too much to bear.
“Where the fuck are the first two waves?” I shout, trying to drown out Willis. A burst of machine gun fire passes over us, and I duck instinctively.
Lasley just looks at me, as if asking why I would ask about the first two waves if I damn well knew what happened to them.
“Bollocks!” I swear loudly. Lasley just ignores me, ripping off his shirt and carefully placing it over Willis’s shredded stomach wall. He applies firm pressure to keep Willis’s vitals in place, in a desperate attempt to keep Willis's insides working. He talks to him steadily, telling Willis about his ditz of an ex-fiancée, his local cricket team, anything besides the almost certainly mortal wound. I just can’t look and instead I turn my attention to the progress of the assault.
Around us, the entire third wave struggles to stay alive in the face of concentrated fire. Entire companies are broken up, all semblance of organization swept aside as men are forced to cover as their officers die in droves. Artillery gouges huge holes into the ground as it tries to knock us loose from our earthen sanctuaries. Even our own lines are trapped in chaos’s ironclad grip. Our boys are gunned down as the scramble over the top, and are sent tumbling backwards. Wounded men try crawling back to our staging trench, and some even make it. Others pull their dead comrades back to relative safety, the last possible act of kindness for their mates. Soon even our communication trenches are clogged with casualties, with the dead and injured piled almost to the parapet, a macabre barricade. Runners are forced to try making break for it over open ground, where German snipers kill not only them, but the often hundreds of men counting on their messages to get through.
Willis stops screaming and begins to go into convulsions. Lasley bravely sticks his hand into Willis’s mouth to prevent him from biting his own tongue off. He grimaces as Willis opens and shuts his jaw repeatedly on his courageous fingers. As Willis’s abdomen heaves up and down, his white, blood-spattered guts flying out like an obscene jack-in-the-box. At this point, I had enough.
I hesitate for a moment, draw my Webley revolver, thumb back the hammer, and fire. Willis jerks one final time, and then goes still. Lasley recoils in complete surprise
“What in bloody hell was that? You killed him, you!” He gives me a look that could make the devil piss himself.
“I helped him.” I holster my pistol smoothly.
“He didn’t ask for that. Tell me something, did you shoot Private Willis in the head because of his pain, or yours?”
“Fuck off, Lasley.”
Lasley just shakes his head. “There’s something wrong with you mate.” With that, he jumps out of the trench and scurries off to find more of his stricken brothers.
I sit in silence with Willis’s body. I tell myself he would have wanted it this way. That it was an act of mercy. Yes, I killed him, but I did it for a good reason. But still, the huge gash in his torso looks tiny compared to the modest hole in his skull. I try to think of something else until Lt. Evans dives into the shell crater to join me.
“Sergeant Davies? Corporal Wilson?” He calls out. No answer. “1st Platoon?” He is rewarded with only a few scattered responses. “First Platoon! To my position, at the double quick!” He takes off his cap and waves it back and forth very briefly to indicate our location. The Beast rebukes Evans for his boldness by sending a few of his minions our way. The unscathed make a dash for our crater, crouching low and not stopping for anything, not even to fire. Fortunately, only about a dozen are cut down.
About twenty make it to us. We immediately ready ourselves for a final rush. The Beast is only one hundred and fifty feet away, so close we can smell his gunpowder breath as it wafts over the killing fields. Evans organizes us for the attack, and all of us exchange weapons. Some of us trade rifles for grenades, and some of us, including me, unsheathe our shovels. All of us know the target. We are going to storm the Machine gun nest. Not for King, not for Country, not even for the mission, but for one thing one thing only: vengeance, pure and simple.
There’s no heroic speech, no nervous chatter that so often takes in battle scenes in movies. We ready ourselves in silence. Evans has merely to gesture, and we fly forward. We are lucky for the first fifty feet or so. The riflemen immediately open fire as they rush on, suppressing the Germans guarding the nest. The grenadiers bolt for the enemy fieldworks, where they run along the top of the enemy trenches, flinging grenades into dugouts, rifle pits, and the stunned faces of German soldiers. We shovelers make a beeline for the Beast himself. The Beast is so astonished at our brazen attempt to usurp him, that it takes him a few seconds to collect himself. But then he is all fury, roaring in indignant outrage. But there is no fear for us. Everything seems to go in slow motion, and we can almost see the bullets flying at us. This is not a conventional charge by any means. It is a race against death, a primal sport played long before there was war, or even men.
Evans is among the first to go down. The bullet clangs as it punches through his helmet, an all too literal death knell. Several others follow him, crumpling to the ground, puppets with their strings suddenly snipped. But we fan out, we are close to him, and Beast knows that even he cannot cut us all down. I can almost hear a hint of terror creep into his demonic clatter.
When we reach the machine gun nest, there is no mercy. We hack apart anything that even looks threatening with our shovels, wounded or fit, dying or dead. We even go after rats. We slash our way to the Beast’s lair, and we catch the six machine gunners, the Beast’s precious attendants, by surprise. I finish the first with my shovel, then pull out my revolver and kill the other five. I barely pay any attention to slaying them. But there is one thing I must keep in mind: never use that last bullet. It stays in your gun until you walk off the field, a last weapon against a sudden enemy attack. But this is a mere triviality. I just shoot them on autopilot, already staring at my prize.
At long last, it’s the Beast’s turn to be afraid. He sits there, motionless, completely vulnerable, his only defense is my sense of mercy, and I have none for him. I slice through his precious water hose, spilling his vital coolant over the floor. I kick him over, and raise my shovel. He shrieks as I bring it down again and again, my steel shovel noisily tearing through his metal skin. I don’t stop until my shovel is entirely in ruins. This does not concern me much. After all, I still have that last bullet.
As I look down at my work, the Beast’s corpse morphs before my eyes. The monster fades into oblivion, all that is left is just a machine, as harmless to human flourishing as a butterfly. It’s just shaped metal, guided by a firm intelligent hand into an industrial killing machine. Harmless.
I hear a sound behind me. I spin around, revolver raised to see a very surprised German soldier. I point it right into his face and pull the trigger.
The revolver merely clicks, politely informing me that every one of his rounds has been spent. I blink, astonished, and then I realized why: I had already used that bullet to kill Willis. I realize something.. It is not the machine gun that is the Beast, it is the lethal intent that aims it. He is that part of us that makes us think that we can do good by doing violence. The Beast lives inside us all, whispering into our ears to cheat, to be miserly in creating happiness. I give a quick grunt in acknowledgment of the dark irony as the German cranks the bolt on his rifle and aims between my eyes. How foolish of me, to expend so much time fearing the Beast before me, never to give even the barest thought to the Beast within. I see a flash, then nothing.

And the Beast laughs.