Behavior Report 29

Dearest Love,

Earl and I agreed to follow Rosalie and her uncle to the mountain the next morning. They took us to one of the houses in the stone village to spend the night and I don’t have much to write about it because I fell asleep as soon as I sat down on the couch in the living room. The couch wasn’t particularly comfortable. I was just exhausted.

All I remember is waking to a pounding noise on the door at dawn. We opened the door to find Rosalie’s uncle grunting and waving for us to follow. We quickly gathered our things and met them at the river.

“We go,” Rosalie said with a smile stretched across her face. “Mersee!”

I was certain to fill my canteen before we began our journey. Earl reloaded his Schmeisser with that last of the rounds. He didn’t have enough to fill the entire magazine, but there were plenty to help in a tight situation.

We set out with Rosalie’s uncle in the lead. He knew the way or at least led with conviction and that was enough for me. Our travels went to the opposite side of the stone quarry from which Earl and I entered. We came upon a similar sloped path that zigzagged along the side of the cliff.

The Cauchemar Forest on the other side of the stone village valley had a different feel. It must have been an older part of the forest. Gone were the smaller plants growing on the forest floor that provided us shelter from the wildlife in the trees. We did find portions of the forest where the leaves from past seasons littered the ground.

Just like in our backyard, crickets strummed their constant symphonies from unseen spots. I wondered where they could have hidden, especially when they were likely the size of a school bus. High above, amongst the intertwined branches, sat flocks of birds with yellow breasts and blue wings. They fought over their positions on the branches, with some pecking at others while several flapped around jockeying for a new spot. Those that weren’t fighting were scatting melodies and watching us move along the forest floor. I couldn’t help but wonder if they looked upon us as little insects ripe for supper.

We never stopped for a break. I wasn’t worried about Earl or myself, but Rosalie and her uncle were just freed from the cave the day before where they stumbled into the sunlight. But with a good night’s rest and a bath in the river, both appeared to be in perfect health. Whenever Earl or I felt a little worn from our march, we took a nip from my canteen and were right back at it.

Sunlight broke through the canopy from time to time, moving from the direction we marched to overhead to finally our backs. Strangely, Rosalie and her uncle argued for most of our journey. I wished we had a translator. All we had to work from was their gestures and tone, of which Rosalie’s uncle always seemed angry while Rosalie appeared to shed more optimism. Earl and I trailed behind them, rifles readied, and exchanging smiling glances from time to time.

“Getting anything from what they’re saying?” Earl said at one point.

“No, but French people arguing sounds a lot nicer than us English speakers, doesn’t it?”

Earl laughed, looked up, and pointed toward the sky. “Daylight’s waning. Think that they have a camp in mind for the night?”

I shrugged my shoulders and then said to Rosalie, “Mademoiselle.”

She turned and smiled.

“Do you have a place … camp in mind for the night?”

“C’mon, Frank. You should know this one,” Earl said. “Mademoiselle. Bivouac?”

Rosalie nodded in understanding and said something to her uncle. He turned to us and, with a frown, threw out his hand in a half pointing, half waving gesture that suggested painful indifference to our question. I followed where he pointed and saw nothing that suggested any sort of safe place to camp. With night fast approaching, I dreamt several scenarios of sleeping on the Cauchemar Forest floor like sausages waiting to be eaten up by the nightlife.

“I think we just have to trust him,” Earl said.

After another hour or so and more moments of concern, we came upon a dirt path, man-made, and wide enough to allow vehicles passing in both directions. Nothing suggested that whoever made the path did so with any equipment. There were no barriers from undergrowth, no fallen leaves, no hills, or valleys. It appeared to be a path of least resistance.

Rosalie’s uncle stopped at the edge and looked both ways before stepping out and turning toward the mountain that loomed in the distance. My attention was drawn in the opposite direction where three destroyed Kraut tanks rested. I dropped to one knee and began scanning the area with my rifle. My heart pounded within my fingertips. I noticed that the birds were not singing. The air was still. Profound silence surrounded us.

“Panzers,” Earl whispered. He too held his Schmeisser at the ready.

Black crosses of the Kraut Wehrmacht were painted on the side of each vehicle. All three were the same type, blocky and engineered with functionality emphasized over form. On a battlefield among normal men, they would appear frightfully large, unbreakable, and could make an atheist a true believer; however, in the Cauchemar Forest, they appeared like empty match boxes, crushed by careless hands. They were all in bad shape. The first in line was a mangled mess of broken treads and a bent cannon that was twisted like a braided rope. Tanks two and three were flattened in the back and pressed into the earth. Their fronts aimed toward the sky, frozen in a cry to the heavens.

“Do you see anyone?” Earl whispered.

I searched the tanks for any signs of life and found the wrong kind. “There are vines growing through the treads of the second tank. Anyone who was here has likely been gone for ages.”

With our attention focused on the tanks, we completely missed Rosalie and her uncle laughing at us from the side of the path.

“Pah de dongay,” Rosalie said.

“Huh?”

“Okay,” she said. She pointed at the tanks and repeated herself. Then, she mimicked putting a gun away and repeated herself again.

“Camp!” Rosalie’s uncle yelled.

“Well, I’ll be,” Earl said with a sigh. “Never thought I’d sleep in a tank, much less a Kraut tank.”

We stood up and walked over to the disaster. Even with Rosalie’s assurances, the tips of our rifles kept to the tanks as if they were magnetized to the mangled steel. There are several types of Panzer tanks. Each one has a different structure and feel. For instance, the one that chased me in the village was flat, low to the ground, and rounded in places. The three in Cauchemar Forest looked like a shoe box stacked on top of a hat box that had tank treads. The cannon was stubby and short, but just as lethal. Tanks have hatches on top where the crew enters to manipulate the machine. The hatch is about the same size and shape as a manhole cover in the street. On the blocky tanks, the hatch sticks out almost like the top of a tin can, just waiting to be cracked open.

I climbed up and tried to open the first tank, but the hatch was completely crushed and flattened into the roof of the tank. “Wow,” I said with a whistle. “I never want to cross whatever attacked this tank. We wouldn’t be able to open this hatch even if we had a torch.”

“If that’s the case, do you think opening the tank is the smartest thing to do? If you can’t get in, whoever was inside couldn’t get out,” Earl said.

“Oh,” I thought for a moment and added another “Oh” when the realization struck.  

Earl joined Rosalie and her uncle as they crawled into the second tank. I believe a Kraut tank crew consists of five men to cover all the roles needed to make it work. Peeking inside from the hatch, I found my three companions bent and contorted between seats and steel. They barely fit in the belly of the beast. I wondered where two more could fit. I couldn’t imagine what life would be like fighting inside. The smells. The noise. The horror when all hell broke out. Their only consolation had to be the protection the walls offered.

Rosalie’s uncle showed spots where everyone could go to spend the night. Directly underneath the hatch were remnants of past fires. Ash and bits of blackened wood lay dormant from previous nights spent by other inhabitants.

Earl dug around the floor and in between cubbies where the previous owners left their personal effects. He found a small hickory colored leather satchel, a dented helmet, and a watch with a shattered face. Earl raised the bag to me and said, “What if Roland were to keep a satchel instead of a briefcase for work? You need something like this if you’re going off on your own.”

“Makes sense,” I said. “Let’s hang onto it. If we find something better, we can at least use it to carry anything else we find.”

I took the bag and Earl continued to fish through the tank. I left everyone to search the third tank. The hatch opened with a “Screech,” and I was met with a pungent wall of sweat, fear, excrement, and all the other normal trappings of soldier life. I had to take off my sword, pack, and even my helmet to squeeze through. Everything inside was steel – the walls, the floor, the seats, everything. It was cold, uncomfortably cold, like stepping outside without a jacket on the first cold day in late October. A shiver ran through me from the chill and the thought of what I might find. The light from the hatch wasn’t enough to see anything, so I grabbed Roland’s lighter.

The space wasn’t much larger than the interior of an automobile, yet I gathered where each of the five men sat to work the beast. Most didn’t have a window or slot to look through. They were stuck inside. No fresh air. Nothing to see. I couldn’t imagine what it must have felt like in the heat of a battle. For most, their only sense of understanding came from the sounds of what hit their tank. I moved about the inside of the beast, sitting in each of the spots where the men sat, and attempted to feel what they felt during a battle.

My Love, I don’t want it to sound like I was sympathizing with the Krauts. I wasn’t. The tank made me realize that every soldier has a purpose and whether that purpose is to turn a tank or load a gun or lead a team, everyone must work together. The inside of the tank was a microcosm of an army.

It’s hard to feel purpose when you are one of thousands running through a grassy field and firing a weapon. That’s how I felt at the start. But now I know my purpose. How I was assigned the purpose was quite possibly the most awful and heart wrenching way possible, but it provided me something that felt right.

I found an assortment of Kraut items like a clipboard with blank paper and a black pen, a black jacket strewn upon the floor and covered in dust, and a black set of trousers folded neatly in an unused corner. I checked the pockets of the jacket for anything of interest. I found another pen with a swastika embossed into the clip. Besides the clothing, there were brass casings and empty ammunition belts littered everywhere.

“Find anything?” Earl hung his head inside through the top of the tank. 

“A few pens for Russell.” I said, reaching up to hand him one. “They have a swastika imprinted on the clip. Did you find anything more?”

“Mostly empty shell casings.”

He helped me out of the tank.

“I can’t imagine the battle that happened here,” he continued. “The other tank fired off its entire inventory of shells.”

“What do you think they came across?”

“A giant monster? Stone creatures? I don’t know.” He paused for a moment and then added, “But I can tell you one thing, I don’t want to meet up with whatever it was.”

I let his words sink in and began imagining a monster that could bend a tank in half. I pictured something covered in dense thick skin, able to ward off bullets and explosive shells, but before I could allow my mind to wander too far, Earl slapped my shoulder.

“These pens are perfect for Russell,” he said. “Rosalie and her uncle are already snuggled into their spots. Seems like they’ve done this before.”

I crawled out and sat on the roof with my legs dangling inside the hatch. “Do you think the tanks were leaving?”

“Leaving what?”

“They’re facing away from the mountain. Were they trying to get away?”

Earl looked down the path toward the mountain and then the other direction. “You got me.”

A thought occurred to me. “Maybe we’ve been going about this all wrong. Maybe Rosalie’s uncle is right. Instead of trying to avoid the mountain, maybe our best chance is to walk toward it. These tanks are moving away from the mountain and were destroyed. We’ve been avoiding the mountain and have run into all sorts of trouble. Would it really be all that strange in this forest if the mountain had the power to keep people in?”

Earl tried to say something, but his thoughts seemed to get in the way.

“Didn’t those Krauts who took you talk about someone who lived in the mountain?”

“The Alter Man.” His reply was steady, thoughtful.

“The Alter Man. Yes. Maybe he can help us out of the forest. Or maybe he has things we can use for the promises?”

Earl shook his head and said, “I don’t think that he had anything good for us. I’m pretty sure that those Krauts wanted to take me to him so that he could torture or interrogate me. I don’t think they took me hostage to show me something swell.”

“Suppose they were. Suppose they knew of a place filled with riches and all it needed was a sacrifice to appease the Alter Man. Suppose—”

Earl interrupted me. “Frank, stop. Listen to yourself. Sacrifice?”

“Well, I don’t know. The man who took me wanted to sacrifice me to the monster that, that—”

“That killed me over and over again?”

“Yes.”

“If something like that lives in the mountain, then that gives me every reason to walk in the opposite direction regardless of the riches it may have amassed.”

“But Rosalie’s uncle …”

“Pardon?”

Both Earl and I turned quickly at the sound of Rosalie’s voice. She snuck up on us and stood on the ground at the side of the tank.

“Mademoiselle,” I said.

“Montangnay,” she said, pointing toward the mountain. “Only … way … out. Me fameel.”

I tried to ask the first thing that came to mind as simply as possible. “Montagnay out of forest or montagnay only to free family?”

Earl’s shoulders straightened after my question and we both looked to Rosalie for the answer. Her response was raised eyebrows in a sign that she didn’t seem to understand.

Earl mimicked walking with his hands and fingers and then pointed to the trees around us. “No leave, no exit forest?” Then, he pointed to the mountain. “Montangnay is exit? We leave forest through montangnay?” He paused to wrap his arm around my shoulder. “Or montangnay is where family … or fameel is? We save fameel at montagnay?”

Rosalie nodded. “No go.” She pointed down the path leading away from the mountain. Then she turned to the mountain. “Montagnay yes. Fameel, yes.”

“But I got into the forest from a bridge,” I said, quickly, not thinking about the language barrier.

“No,” Rosalie replied. “Un pont … bridge … in. No out. Morir.”

Earl said, “I think she’s saying that we can’t take the bridge because we’ll die.”

Rosalie pointed to the sky and began flapping her hands like a bird. “Bridge. Die.”

“You know what? When I crossed the bridge, I saw these massive birds, as big as our bombers, flying all around,” I said. “They ignored me because I was going into the forest. I wonder if they attack if we try to leave.”

Earl sighed. “So, our only hope for leaving is by going to the mountain.”

Rosalie nodded and said, “Montangnay out.”