1901 (32 page)

Ludwig glanced at the sky. It was early evening and their instructions were to be back in their quarters by dark. Although the army controlled the town, it was still considered dangerous.

The sound of loud laughter and running footsteps brought him back to reality. It was two of the younger men, the brothers Klaus and Hans Schuler, all giggling and red-faced. A few moments before, Ludwig had seen them with Ulli. Now where the hell was poor, dumb Ulli?

“He’s getting fucked,” said one, laughing. The other nodded, giggling too much to speak.

Ludwig, as corporal, was their leader. The Schuler brothers were the intellectual equal of Ulli. Sergeant Major Gunther had once commented acidly that they didn’t have one full brain among the three of them. They were, however, cheerful and friendly, fit companions for each other. “He’s getting what? Where the hell did he find someone who’d screw him in this forlorn place?”

They waved. “A couple of blocks back. This woman, young and not too bad if you like them scrawny, came up and asked if we wanted to fuck her. She was white too,” he added, as if that gave her greater status.

“Just like that?”

They nodded. “Just that simple. She said she’d do it for one American dollar each. None of us had any dollars, but Ulli got her to agree for some of our money. She offered to take us all on, but Ulli said he was gonna keep her busy and we should come back in about an hour.”

Ludwig laughed. “My God, she’s probably giving him six different kinds of clap.”

“Nah, she’s clean. Ulli made her lift her dress and show him her crotch before he’d go with her.” Hans snickered. “He got so close I thought he was gonna put his nose right up her pussy.”

They all doubled over in laughter. Ulli was so horny, yet so naive and particular. “Well,” Ludwig chuckled, “we better go back and wait for him. We can’t have him wandering off alone in this town. The poor fool’ll get lost and we’ll get blamed.”

The small group of German soldiers walked casually to where they’d last seen Ulli. The area was empty. Where the hell had he gone?

“Ulli!” Ludwig yelled. Nothing. He hollered again, as did the others. It created a din, and one of the German military police walked over and asked what the matter was. Upon being told, he asked where the woman had come from, and one of the Schulers pointed to an alley. Grimly, the soldier pulled his revolver and moved slowly into the grimy passageway, littered with refuse of all kinds. Ludwig and the others followed, all suddenly aware that they were unarmed in a hostile land and that the shadows of the alley conveyed a sense of menace.

The alley turned a corner and, now thoroughly frightened, they followed. The policeman gasped, then paused and pointed. A pair of bare feet jutted from behind a barrel. Not wanting to see but knowing they had to, they moved closer. It was Ulli. He was naked and his crotch was a bloody mess. His throat had been cut. His penis was in his mouth.

Richmond Hobson watched as the train rolled slowly into the huge warehouse and dock complex on Newark Bay. When it finally stopped, the guards dropped nimbly to the ground. They were all wearing civilian clothes instead of their customary uniforms. Hobson had wanted no uniforms to attract attention to the unidentifiable, canvas-draped shapes on the flatcars.

As he walked along the train, the guards acknowledged him and moved away. Richmond Pearson Hobson had a reputation as a very different and difficult man. At thirty-one, Hobson was the youngest officer in the U.S. Navy to achieve the rank of captain. It was the result of an incredibly brave action in which he had tried to sink a coal ship, the
Merrimac
, in Santiago harbor during the war with Spain. If he had been successful, the Spanish fleet would have been unable to sortie. But he hadn’t been successful. Although the
Merrimac
had indeed sunk, he failed to block the channel and, worse, wound up as a prisoner.

It was more than ironic that he had been promoted and lionized in the press for achieving nothing. The attempt was a failure and it galled him.

Undeniably brave, Hobson was also highly intelligent, some said brilliant. He had graduated at the head of his class at Annapolis and was thought to have a magnificent future ahead of him. His specialty was naval architecture. Of course, no one could yet give him command of the fleet, but now he had been given responsibility for hurting the Germans in some manner, and that was good.

A righteous man, Hobson neither drank nor swore. He had a stern and handsome look that made women turn and stare. He was not a womanizer and scarcely noticed their existence.

A small, bearded man in a dark suit and a derby hat walked up to him. “Satisfied, Captain?” Unlike the guards, who were military men in civilian clothes, this man was very much a civilian and unawed by Hobson’s rank.

“Not until the Germans are gone, Mr. Holland. One more trainload and my men will be ready for action. They are getting nervous. Idleness does not suit them with the enemy in sight. How about your crew?” he asked, thinking of the strange vessel that bobbed helplessly alongside the dock.

“They will be ready, Captain, and they will perform well, as will my little creation.”

“Good,” Hobson said. “Just what I expected.” The two men strode outside and stood in the soft rain staring at the covered shapes in the water. To a casual observer, they looked like small craft that were out of service. There were many such covered craft in the harbor and these went totally unnoticed among them.

“Mr. Holland, do you know what I did today?”

“Can’t imagine.”

Hobson chuckled, an act that surprised the other man, since Hobson rarely smiled, much less laughed. “I took a carriage over to the East River near Hoboken and looked at the enemy through my telescope. And do you know what I saw?”

“No.”

“John, I saw German officers looking through their own telescopes at me! Their presence on American soil made me ill. They must be driven off and made to pay.”

Hobson glanced down into the water at the small boats that were his command and smiled grimly, which caused the other man to shudder. “And very soon, Mr. Holland, we shall come to collect.”

The scene at the field hospital was one of organized confusion. Several of the colored soldiers from the 10th Cavalry loitered around the tents, wondering fearfully about their comrades. Patrick pulled back the tent flap and entered. Ian Gordon, dirty and bloodied, tried to rise from his chair. Patrick pushed him down. “Ian, how badly are you hurt?”

“Mainly my pride. Except for some bruises and minor cuts, the bulk of this blood belongs to others.”

“Heinz?”

Gordon nodded grimly. “Sad to say, yes. He’s badly wounded. Possibly dying. Damnit, we did all we could to bring him and the others back.”

“I know.” At least the boy was still alive. Better this was a skirmish, not a great battle. Thus the doctors could give Heinz proper attention, and not be overwhelmed by the numbers of hurt and maimed, as had happened in the past.

Gordon continued. “He got shot in both the arm and the leg. The leg wound seems fairly simple, but his arm is all ripped up. We just stuffed a rag into the leg hole, but we had to use a tourniquet on the arm to stop the bleeding. There were bones sticking out too. Thank God he was unconscious most of the time. I just hope he hasn’t lost too much blood. Tourniquet or not, he just wouldn’t stop bleeding. The doctors have him now and are operating on him. They say it might be hours before they know whether he will make it.”

Patrick forced himself to think beyond Heinz. “How many others?”

“One of the 10th dead, and two wounded. The wounded were able to walk back under their own power.”

One dead and three wounded out of a patrol that normally consisted of ten men and had been augmented to twelve by the addition of Heinz and Ian. Not good numbers. “Okay, what happened?”

Bad luck, Ian explained, just poor, dumb, bad luck. It had been organized as a two-day, two-night patrol by the 10th Cavalry, entirely on foot. They’d made it to within sight of the German defenses in one day and settled in to observe. They spent that night and the next day in safety, but discomfort. “Damn mosquitoes were bigger than some birds we have in England. It rained, of course. It was impossible to brew tea.”

They were on their way back the second night when they’d blundered into a German patrol. “One minute we were moving along in the dark, trying not to step on each other, and the next we were clawing and stabbing at shapes in the night. It was so sudden, so awful.”

Ian added that there had been little time for gunplay, and few shots had been fired. The accident of fate had brought both patrols within arm’s length of each other before bullets could be chambered and safeties removed. For what seemed an eternity, they fought with hands, clubbed with rifles, and stabbed with hunting knives. Finally the Germans fled, leaving several dead comrades. As they distanced themselves from the Americans, a few got their weapons ready and fired. It was then that Heinz had been hit.

“If it’s any consolation, we killed three of the bastards, and others must be wounded. We almost got a prisoner, but he slipped away in the confusion. I guess we had too much on our minds to keep proper track of him.”

Patrick sighed. No, it was not really much consolation, although it would have been interesting to have a fresh prisoner. “Well, at least you saw the German lines. What are your thoughts?”

“Of Byzantium.” He smiled slightly at Patrick’s puzzlement. “Surely you remember Byzantium and its fabled triple walls. Didn’t you get to Istanbul during your European trip?”

“No, Ian, I managed to miss Istanbul. But I do understand your analogy.” Byzantium had been the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire for about a thousand years until its fall in 1453. During that long time, its triple walls were the stuff of fable and legend. Huge and high, incredible works of man, they encompassed the city and protected it from barbarian invaders, many of whom could only stand in awe at the massive constructions. It was not until the advent of gunpowder and the siege guns brought by the attacking Turks that the walls were finally breached and the city was conquered. The result was the end of the Eastern Roman Empire and the city of Byzantium. After a period of looting, it was renamed Istanbul. The walls, even in ruin, are impressive to this day. If Ian was comparing the German fortifications to Byzantium, then he had truly been impressed. “Are they that good, Ian?”

“Yes, I’m afraid they are. They have spent a huge amount of effort building fortifications that run solidly from the Sound to the boggy ground about twenty miles north. Unless you have some secret advantage like the Turkish artillery, the American army I’ve seen will not be able to penetrate them. Sorry.”

Patrick shrugged. “I’m not too surprised. The near miss at Danbury must have put the fear of God into them.”

“So why haven’t you built as sturdily as well? The American lines are nothing in comparison with theirs—just some trenches and some barbed wire.”

“Good point. The fact of the matter is we don’t want them to fear our forts so much that they won’t come out. You’re right, we can’t take them. Their forts are not really impregnable—nothing ever is—but the price we’d pay to take them would be just too horrible. The Germans must come out of their defenses and fight us. MacArthur’s plan is to tempt them with several lines of defenses, but not any one as formidable as theirs. He hopes to entice them to come out. Then, pray God, we can defeat them, no matter how good they are.”

Patrick stood. “If you can, stay here and let me know about Heinz. I’d like to stay, but there is the rest of the brigade to take care of.”

Ian nodded sadly. “I know. There’s a war on.”

To Patrick’s relief, Trina was not nearly as upset as he had feared she would be when he finally summoned the nerve to confront her at her cottage. “Then Heinz will live?” she asked, her face pale. Once again the war had struck someone she knew.

“Yes, he should live. As Ian suspected, the leg wound was minor, although he will limp for a long while. It was the arm and the loss of blood that were the major problems. The arm was disinfected and the bones were set. He will probably lose some use of it because of the way the bones were broken and the muscles were shredded, but, barring infection, he will keep it. We will know for certain in a couple of days.”

“What about the blood loss?”

“He’s getting transfusions.”

She paled. “But those are so dangerous. I’ve heard that many people die from them, and for no apparent reason.”

Patrick smiled. “Well, you learn something every day. The doctor treating Heinz is a civilian and a correspondent of another doctor, a Karl Landsteiner, who recently discovered that several different blood types exist and a person can receive a transfusion only from others with a compatible type. He checked and found people with the same blood type as Heinz—type O, I believe—and started providing him with blood.”

“Fascinating. And invented by a German?”

“No. Landsteiner’s an Austrian living in the United States.”

Trina folded her hands on her lap and nodded her head. “Good. Much better an Austrian than a German.”

He thought of saying that she sounded more like Molly than Katrina Schuyler, but he deferred to discretion. The thought of moving blood safely from one person to another was intriguing. What if blood could be taken in advance and stored until needed, not only for military purposes but for other problems and disasters as well? The army doctor—what the hell was his name?—said they were working on it. He also reiterated how lucky Heinz had been that he’d been wounded during a period of low activity. Along with the time to treat him, there was the matter of sanitation. Both the doctor and the operating room were clean. Although the idea of doctors and attendants washing up before operating was widely popular, it was not universally held to be advantageous. And after a battle, the press of numbers often precluded sanitation, good intentions or not.

Patrick left Trina with the burden of informing Molly about Heinz. Thus he was not surprised when Trina showed up at his command tent a few hours later.