An Unkillable Frog
By N.J. Smith
Copyright 2013 N.J. Smith
ISBN: 9781476423524
For my father
“Paradox is only a conflict between reality and your feeling of what reality ought to be” – Physicist Richard Feynman
They dug well that summer. An entire trench system took shape upon the hillside they had claimed. It was scaled down for ten-year-old boys, of course, yet every parapet and dugout proclaimed their intent, belying the fact only bracken-banks troubled the cool valley sides opposing their position. At places, their digging had far outpaced their speed in design. There, the trenches became tunnels-in-waiting, with a random few graduating to fully fledged bunker-hood. The earth here was red clay, easy to work and forgiving of mistakes. They could have asked for no better place in which to carve a playground for war.
Three competing plans for the trench complex were literally intertwined in the labyrinth of narrow passageways. Like worms in the corpse of a giant they bored and burrowed, the sinuous galleries tumbling into each other. An early attempt to map it had been abandoned. To do that would require a map in "at least three dimensions," as Jeremy had put it.
As no single blueprint had been followed, the trench was a beast with many mouths. Each of these dusty throats seemed to whisper to the boys under any touch of wind, their hollows speaking a language thick with lost meaning.
This, they thought, was a compound to repel all enemies. The trenches extended perhaps a hundred metres from the pine plantation, down to where a natural gully began. Jeremy drew a line in the dirt here with his spade.
"This is the final line of defence," he said. "If we wanted, we could dig down across the gully and to the road. You all know we could.”
"It's a long way, Jeremy,” said Nathan.
Jeremy either ignored him or was lost in the vision.
"Nothing could stop us. We'd go under the road, down through the reserve until we got to the school. Right through the playground, circling the whole thing.”
The boys looked down at the distant school roof. Ian smiled, saying:
"Yeah. That would be good. And I'd put traps through the whole thing.”
Nathan knelt and mashed a beetle absent-mindedly with a stone.
"Are we putting in any traps up here?" he asked.
"We should vote on it. I don't think we need to," said Ian. He looked at Jeremy.
"Maybe we reserve a single trench for traps. Like a test bay. It would be stupid to put traps everywhere.”
Nathan's voice was rising in excitement. "But if we trap everything, right, then we'll expect it.”
The other two looked at him.
"It would be like training. So if an attack came we could retreat -"
Jeremy and Ian spoke in unison:
"Fall back.”
Nathan corrected himself with an embarrassed smile.
"Fall back. If we had to fall back we'd slow them down.”
The other two boys said nothing and contemplated the tactical possibilities of traps. Ian was in favour of a spiked log, suspended from between two trees, which would swing murderously free upon its release by an unwitting victim. His description of the destructive power of such a weapon was punctuated with screams and the mimed piling of guts back into his abdomen. After several minutes of this he looked up hopefully from the forest floor, his last death spasms subsiding. Nathan looked wistfully into the trees.
"A lot of little kids come up here too, Ian," he said. "If we slam a spiky log into one of them, there'll be trouble.”
This image - a clutch of smaller children spitted upon the trap's barbs - took hold in all their imaginations simultaneously and they fell to the ground laughing. Nathan could not help but think of them being crushed by the dozen as might a rolling pin swatting flies.
Jeremy put his arm around Ian, pointed to the shadows under the pine trees where a shaft of afternoon sun caught the turned earth. His voice was a whisper.
"Look over there. We've repelled their first attack. Nathan is stuck in the forward lines but he's not dead yet. He's got a sharpened entrenching tool and he's making them pay for every inch!"
Nathan ran ahead, his stubby legs scrambling up the gully flanks. Ian bolted after him, shouting.
"Ian sees that Nathan is in trouble. He sends a heavy barrage of grenades into the middle lines!"
Jeremy bolted last but easily beat his friends to the edge of the trench rim.
"Only Jeremy is brave enough to join Nathan in the brutal hand to hand fighting!” he picked up a stick and swept it around like a bayoneted rifle as he ran.
A cloud of purest silver slid over the sun, sweeping the shadows up under the trees. The wind, which had not troubled the boys for the whole day, gusted for a moment. Pine branches whipped and sighed; red soil rose swirling into the air. The trenches took on the quality of a stage as the dimming light washed over the earthworks. It seemed that there was a crescendo of sound just behind the wind, a lion's roar that did not end. Running and diving amongst the ramparts, the boys could hear it better; when they stood still it faded to nothing. Ian picked up a pine cone and hurled it far.
"Don't let them get to the reserve trench!" he yelled.
A broad line of soldiers was advancing towards them across the valley. Nathan stood at the lip of his foxhole and aimed a Sten gun. The cloud above thickened. Ian saw their enemy grow in number where gloom lay in pools under the tussocks of grass. Jeremy leapt up beside Nathan, and the pair unloaded their weapons down into the ranks of their foe. It seemed that the soldiers were emboldened with the sun's departure; the khaki ether of which they were constructed solidified. Ian called to his friends but was not heard over the cacophony of battle.
Later, Jeremy suggested that the other boys should be killed and he would make a last stand with his bayonet in the Command Bunker. The other two protested loudly, until Jeremy pointed out that, of course, they could have their turn. Ian advised that he had secreted a line of satchel charges in a ring beneath the bunker, and that he would detonate these at the critical moment of enemy infiltration, with a resultant bloody devastation he described breathlessly. Nathan demanded to be slain by an onslaught of tanks. A few minutes’ searching turned up a hollow loglet he thought to be an accurate replica of a bazooka.
"I have had both my legs blown off already," he said from the ground. "But Ian left me a whole box of ammo before he was run over.”
Jeremy piped up.
"Strictly speaking, Nathan, you are not run over by a tank but crushed, because its tracks don't move when it's on top of you.”
Nathan aimed his bazooka intently at Jeremy's face and squeezed the trigger.
"OK, Ian had been crushed. Jeremy, you went to check on Ian but were shot.”
His friends assumed their roles. Nathan yelled out a banzai mantra of "Take that you bastards!" and a favourite line he had read on the lyric sheet of a Heavy Metal album that belonged to his brother:
Bathe in the lead-corrupted stream of your life's blood!
The boys played for hours, their yelled commands and shrill death screams echoing up into the pines where the sun' glow slowly broadened into an orange splay of dusk. Nathan loved the twilight. A remnant of day still glowed on one horizon, yet night was already claiming the sky's opposing corner. Stretching one hand towards the west and the other eastward, Nathan looked directly above him. The sky above was beyond his powers of description. Each second he watched, its texture thinned as light leached from the atmosphere and the world's true nature was revealed through incremental shades of darkness. When night had finally settled upon the hill, Jeremy bade them to crouch on their haunches at the perimeter of the earthworks.
"We have sniper rifles now," he whis
pered. "Silenced German ones with rubber guts that are quieter than a mouse. Full night vision too. We can see them but they can't see us.”
Taken with this concept, his voice rose in tone:
"They are sending in troops to probe us, but we're seeing them way off. We are waiting for the sure kill, though, until we can see how scared they are. But we don't care. We have to defend the position.”
His voice softer now.
"We have to defend the position.”
A night bird began a song of crisp lamentation. The moon seemed on an invisible string tied to the ruined oak atop their Command Bunker, its attendant stars dull, their cold intensity muted in deference to the boys' own. Nathan knee-rose and assumed a firing stance forged in long study of war movies on gray Saturday afternoons. Ian whispered:
"I am going back to my normal rifle, Jeremy.”
"Don't," his friend hissed. "If you give away our location we're all dead.”
Ian nodded and raised his weapon again.
Jeremy was wise in these things.
He was on the Web until late most nights, lost in