Free Eureka by William Diehl

the beach.
    â€œGo, boy, go!” Brodie yelled, as the stallion galloped in and out of the surf as he loved to do. They raced past the town, and then Brodie wheeled him around, and they trotted back to the swimming beach. Brodie slid off his back and for the next two hours he talked to the horse, emptying his heart out, explaining to him why he was leaving.
    He understands. I can see it in his eyes. He knows I gotta do this.
    The wagon to end-o’-track left at 5:00 a.m. And the weekly supply train to San Francisco left at seven. The sun was a scarlet promise on the horizon when he led Cyclone up to the sheriff’s office and tied him to the hitching post. He threw a saddlebag over each shoulder and went into the office. The deputy was half-asleep at his desk.
    â€œWhat you doin’ down here this time a day?”
    â€œI gotta go out of town,” Brodie answered.
    He laid an envelope on the desk.
    â€œMy horse is tied up outside and I got a note here for Buck. I’m asking him to take the horse back up to the Gormans for me.”
    â€œHope the hell nobody steals him,” the deputy said, looking out the window at Cyclone. “I’ll keep an eye on him.”
    â€œThanks.”
    The wagon was loaded with hungover iron workers when Brodie climbed aboard. A few minutes later, the driver cracked his whip and they started up the hill. As the wagon reached the crest, Brodie looked back at the town where he was born and where his life had changed forever in the years since the death of his mother. A great sadness flowed over him. Then he turned his back on Eureka and dismissed it.
    Good-bye forever and good riddance,
he said to himself, and he knew he would never return.
    Fate had other plans for Brodie Culhane.

1918
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    In the spring of 1917, a dispirited President Woodrow Wilson, the liberal idealist who had ardently resisted America’s intervention in the war in Europe, was finally forced to admit the inevitable: America was about to be drawn into the most savage conflict in the history of warfare. In 1914, nine European nations were embroiled in what would become known as the Great War, a conflict unparalleled in its brutality. On one side, France, Italy, Great Britain, and Russia, among others. Opposing them, Germany, Turkey, and the Ottoman Empire.
    It quickly became apparent that World War I was to become a campaign of mud, trenches, barbed wire—and machine guns, the first time the deadly weapon was used in a major war.
    By the time the United States entered the conflict, the trench war was approaching its grotesque and barbaric finale . . .
    A thick fog laced with the smell of death lay like a shroud over the battlefield. Then there was a howl in the sky as a star shell arced and burst, briefly revealing a ghastly sight. Silhouetted in the heavy mist was a wasteland of staggering destruction. Trees, fragmented by constant artillery shelling, were reduced to leafless, shattered stalks. Fence posts wrapped in rusting barbed wire stood like pathetic sentinels over trenches that snaked and crisscrossed the terrain. Shell holes, surrounded by mounds of displaced earth, were filled with rancid rainwater. There was no grass, nothing green or verdant, just brown stretches of mud, body parts dangling from endless stretches of wire, abandoned weapons, and corpses frozen in a tragic frieze of death.
    And there were the rats, legions of rats, scurrying back and forth in the no-man’s-land, feasting on the dead.
    A few hundred yards beyond the haze-veiled scene, the Germans were gathering for another attack—there had been dozens through the years. The star shell burned out and darkness enveloped the shell-spotted battlefield.
    Brodie Culhane was chilled even though it was early September. His boots and socks were soaked and he had removed his puttees, which were in rags. Damp fog wormed through his clothing and clung to his skin. The machine-gun nest he had set up had an inch of