The Belleau Frame

Belleau Wood, department of Aisne

Hauts-de-France

6 of June 1918

This smell is obstinate. It's the foul odour of rotten flesh scattered between roots and rocks, under the shadows of the trees and in the bushes.

Some more heaps of corpses lie in the holes, unearthed by the bombardments. Each blast throws mounds of hot, whistling debris in the air; its fumes mix with the smell moments before the rain, of bodies and earth, tickles down in large, muddy drops.

Hour by hour, the cloud lingers on. A cascade of fumes runs on the trampled wheat, just south of our position, grey and black and laid with dust. Gusts of damp wind, rocking the branches of many burnt trees, spits the smell back on our faces. At each breath, it feels like the fumes are grating on your vocal cords, grinding until you are so thirsty it gets to you the idea that it's as if you never drank, not once, in your entire life.

A barrage does strange things to your mind. These and many more. It's something both distracting and annoying, awesome and terrifying. When it lands, it's like a hammer drilling a confused series of nails on a plank. The ensuing cacophony gets to your mind, hurling its violence on your thoughts. They disappear, reappears and soon they are again gone in the wind, smeared by dust, ash, rocks and fire.

You stand among the nails, flanked by their stunted statures. There, you wait for one clash among hundreds and thousands.

It can go on for minutes, hours or days.

I will make this clear; I was not expecting a postcard lookout with singing birds and spotless sunshine when I got posted to France. Once aboard the ship, I thought my job t was going to be, at least in some capacity, comparable to that of the early photographers of the Civil War. Gets to a lookout, fix your camera, get behind it, a job's done.

On many levels, I was more wrong than right.

This place makes my job quite tiresome, not to say dangerous, nevertheless, that was part of the deal; you don't get to follow our corpsmen in their stroll through Hauts-de-France without risking your life at least a couple of times, especially if you are an army photographer. Many here and back home don't like you and everyone with a Kodak Vest thinks he can do your job better than you.

Of course, of course, they can. Prancing idiots.

Yet, this is the gist of it; you either take a very good shot, that gets you some fame, or you end up with a crapload of blurry figures, deformed, indistinguishable from the background black and white. Now, mister Wilson can't know what's going on with the AEF with those, can he?

Between me and you; I voted for the other candidate. It seemed more affable than this dull, haughty, High Professor. It doesn't matter, though: he's the chief, isn't it? Going up and up and up in the chain of command, he's the guy paying me for a job well done.

And now he needs some damn proof, for the people back home, the American Expeditionary Forces are fighting tooth and nail here in France.

Propaganda and all of that, I suppose. A stream of explosions rocks the pillars of the earth on my right, each cascading past the previous one. Tides of fire raise skywards, throwing whips of flames and fragments to slam against the dead branches of the forest. The wood trembles and a solid rains tickle down, carrying splintered woods on the dried ground.

Someone screams. American voices, a multitude of accents. Some I have never heard before. Some others are thick, somewhat funny; I take that for some of these corpsmen, English is not the tongue they grew up with. Still, they are here.

Dying and fighting amidst shadows, desolation and the buzzing streams of machine-guns and rapid rifle fire. A mortar round hits a tree, cracking it like an egg. I cover my face with the elbow just in time to feel a breeze of splinters screeching above me. My arm burns from a dozen scratches.

It could've been much worse.

I take a deep breath in. I wonder, there will ever be coloured photos? This thought is bizarre, I know, but the potential is enormous! Sceneries and landscapes captured with their original colours; can you imagine? That would be extraordinary... and lazy, now that I think about it. People wouldn't have to force their imagination on our pictures, disrobing them of all the magic.

Buzzing from two or three directions, the storms of steel arises and rages around me. I shudder when the tree stump is hit. Shards of wood and splinters roars, skedaddling past my right ear. A whistle punches its way above the machine-guns, landing close to a black crater. The fire spread like a geyser of boiling water, smeared with dust, cracked rocks and broken roots. Pieces of stifling iron pierces the tree. They smack it hard, a row of punches that would've cut off my head in a moment had they hit me instead of Good Ol' Branchy. I throw a look at the biggest one. It's as large as my fist. And how it vibrates! Its burning red contrasts with the begrimed, black-brown stump.

An alien piece of pottery landed in a dull world.

Maybe this tree is not a good cover as I thought it was. I would gladly abandon it if only I could move. The problem is, I am pinned here.

Not a very good predicament, eh?

Twenty-to-twenty-five meters before me, a platoon shares my same condition. Hunched behind a fallen tree, skinned by the streams of a machine-guns, their curses are rough, only just audible overhead the bullets flying at them. One sharpshooter is advancing, ever so slow, crawling on a bed of dead foliage and spent cases. A couple of whiffs lands close to him, some more screech past his helmet and storms a half divested, burning bush.

A whistle ends somewhere to the north. The vibration rocks my feet before the smoke rolls in, carried by the hot wind. The corpsmen behind the tree throw themselves ahead. For a moment, they are out in the open, dead men dazzling between mutilated colossus.

Five of them falls in a blink, scythed by a machine-gun. There it is: five men have died in a second and everything keeps on going, uncaring of it. The same must be happening in the German lines. Some of them must have the same thoughts about it.

The other corpsmen, if they are so instead of army soldiers, persists, running past the sharpshooter and landing close to me. Two sweaty, poor bastards have hauled till here a small gun; they prepare it to fire, covered by shots by their comrades, laying close to the handles.

The sharpshooter gets up and advances further than his comrades, slogging in the cloud of smoke poured here by the explosions.

«Grenade, fire! » cries one of the two behind the little gun. The barrel rocks, ejecting a dart of iron against the German position. It lands short, throwing skyward a shovel of dirt and plumes of smoke and fire. Another shot is fired and its shriek thuds against my eardrums.

Hold on, wait a moment. Stay still, boys. Just a second.

This. This is perfect.

I give a smack to my camera. Good Ol' Branchy is hit again, rocking against my shoulders. It doesn't matter, I don't care. Not now, Germans, if you please.

The Autographic VPK is fully extended, ready for the shot. I adjust the scope, then I kneel to get the corpsmen in the objective and to stabilize myself. If the picture gets out blurry, it's lost forever.

It's funny, though. We are so close to a burning bush, eh? I suppose Moses would've something to lament about it.

The two-men small gun has fired one shot. The sharpshooter is running, hunched, through the smoke and between the dead trees. Another soldier is kneeling close to the artillery piece.

I like it. This is the photo I came here to take. This is my Bellau Frame.