American Front (69 page)

“You think
we’re
ugly,” Reggie called to them, “you should see the fellows who aren’t walking out.”

That drew gales of laughter from his comrades. They’d seen everything war could do to the human body: bullets, shells, gas. If you didn’t laugh about some of the things you’d seen, you’d go mad. A couple of men had gone mad, or so convincingly given the appearance of it as to fool their officers. They were out of the fight for good, not merely coming back for baths and delousing and a show or two from a charitable group. Reggie envied them intensely.

“You got to watch out for the front-line lice, boys,” Jasper Jenkins said to the replacements. “Some of them babies is big enough so they have you ’stead of you havin’ them.” He scratched his crotch.

One of the men going up to the line, a tall, thin, pale fellow who looked so earnest that Bartlett pegged him for a preacher’s son, went paler yet and visibly gulped.
Poor bastard
, Reggie thought with abstract, abraded sympathy. He’d been fairly fastidious himself, back in his civilian days. Anybody who couldn’t stand living like a pig—right down to wallowing in the mud—had an even worse time at the front than everyone else.

He didn’t like being in the zigzag communication trenches. They weren’t deep enough, and they didn’t have any shelters into which to dive if the damnyankees started throwing artillery around. The officers felt the same way he did. “Move along, boys, move along,” Captain Wilcox said. “We don’t want to camp here.”

Major Colleton hustled up and down the line of marching—actually, more like shambling—men to deliver the same message: “Keep it moving there, fellows.” His uniform was as spruce and neat as any of the ones the replacements were wearing. With Colleton, it was no more than part of his jaunty persona. He’d have been a plumed cavalryman back in the War of Secession. Cavalry these days wasn’t what it had been, though.

And Major Colleton’s jauntiness wasn’t quite what it had been, either. “Shake a leg,” he said. “Sooner we’re back behind the secondary trenches, sooner the Yankees won’t be able to reach us any more.”

A lot of people—Colleton among them, and Reggie Bartlett, too—had gone into the war wanting nothing but the thrill of combat. Bartlett had seen plenty of combat. If he never had another thrill of that sort for the rest of his life, he’d be content.

And he, unlike Major Colleton, was the only man of his family in the Army. “Sir, how’s your brother?” he asked when the major came near.

Colleton’s face clouded. “He’s back home now. From what my sister writes, he’s never going to be able to do much for himself any more: a couple of more breaths of chlorine and they’d have put him under the ground. Likely that would have been a mercy.” He remembered his manners; he had the virtues of the Southern gentleman. “Kind of you to ask, Bartlett.”

Reggie nodded. Colleton went on his way, still urging the men to hurry. He knew just about everyone in the battalion by name. Of course, the battalion carried only about half of its establishment strength, which made learning names easier than it would have been when the war was young.

Machine guns poked their snouts over the parapets of the secondary trenches, ready to rake the ground ahead with fire if a U.S. attack should carry the front-line positions. In theory, Reggie approved of the precaution. In practice, a U.S. attack sufficient to bring those machine guns into action would likely have left him dead, wounded, or captured. He was happy they sat there quiet.

The men in the secondary trenches were veterans: grimy, worn men much like Bartlett and his comrades. A couple of them nodded toward the troops going out of the front line. One fellow touched his butternut slouch hat in what looked like half a salute. He’d likely been up there, and knew what the regiment coming back was escaping.

Behind the secondary trenches, Negro laborers, their uniforms dark with sweat rather than dirt, were digging positions for Confederate guns. “Nice to see those,” Reggie said to Jasper Jenkins. “The Yanks have been throwing more shells at us than we’ve been able to give back.”

“Ain’t that the sad and sorry truth?” Jenkins looked back over his shoulder toward the front line. “One good thing about havin’ to pull back to this side o’ the river is, we don’t have the damnyankees shellin’ us like they was whenever we had to cross it.”

“I’ve been places I liked more than some of those bridges.” Bartlett agreed with a reminiscent shudder. His comrade’s chuckle said Jenkins appreciated the understatement. Reggie went on, “It might not have been hell on earth, but if it wasn’t, you could sure as blazes see it from there.”

“You got a good way with words,” Jenkins said. “You ever try your hand at writin’ or anything like that?”

“Oh, all the time,” Bartlett answered. Jasper Jenkins stared at him, maybe wondering whether he’d been serving alongside a famous author without knowing it. Jenkins could sign his name, but that was about as far as his reading and writing took him. Reggie explained: “I worked in a drugstore in Richmond. The pharmacist would make the pills and the syrups, and I’d write ‘Take four times a day’ or ‘Take two before meals’ or ‘Do not take on an empty stomach’ and glue the label to the bottle. It was a wild and exciting life, I tell you that.”

“Sounds like it.” Jenkins tramped on for another few paces, then said, “Bet you’d trade this for it in a red-hot minute.”

“No takers,” Reggie said with considerable feeling. Both men laughed as they marched back toward the base camp.

That was near the little town called Clearwater, a name it might once have lived up to but no longer deserved. No little town suddenly inundated by a great sea of butternut tents could hope to keep its water clear. The wonder was that it still had enough water for the men to drink. To men who had spent a turn in the trenches, the idea of sleep under canvas on veritable cots looked very attractive indeed.

But before they could approach the earthly paradise, they had to pass through purgatory. Purgatory was guarded by stern-looking military policemen, and bore the banner,
DELOUSING STATION
. “Peel off by squads,” one of the military policemen shouted, and then, seeing how small the squads were (
What does he know about the front?
Reggie thought scornfully), corrected himself: “No—by sections.”

The men had been through the drill before. They didn’t need the military policeman, exultant in his petty authority, to tell them what to do. Along with the rest of the men in his section. Reggie went into one of the big delousing tents. He got out of his clothes and handed them to a Negro attendant, who threw his underwear into a pile that would go back to the corps laundry farther from the front and put his outer garments into a bake oven that went by the name of a Floden disinfector, after the genius who had invented the exercise in futility.

That done, Bartlett soaped himself at a footbath. The soap was strong and stinking. He rubbed it into his scalp, his half-grown beard, and the hair around his private parts anyhow, in the hope that it would get rid of the nits he was surely carrying. Then, along with the rest of the men in his section—and, he saw with amusement, with Major Colleton—he leaped with a splash into a great tub, almost a vat, of steaming-hot water.

Everyone was splashing and ducking everyone else. The major joined in the horseplay with no thought for his rank. He came up spluttering by Reggie after someone else pulled him under. Saluting, Reggie said, “It’s a rare honor to share an officer’s lice, sir.”

“Don’t know what’s so damned rare about it,” the battalion commander retorted. “You’ve been doing it in the trenches for the past year.” And he ducked Reggie, holding him under till he thought he was going to drown.

The disinfector baked the soldiers’ uniforms for fifteen or twenty minutes. When they were done, more colored attendants issued fresh underwear.

“Feels good—not itching, I mean,” Reggie said, buttoning up his tunic. The laundrymen had ironed and brushed it, so he looked as smart as he was going to.

“Enjoy it while it lasts,” Jasper Jenkins said.

They went with the rest of the unit to stake places in the tents assigned to them, and then had the rest of the afternoon to themselves. Before they even found the tents, they spotted a crowd of men listening to a tall, thin man in a black sack suit and a straw hat. Reggie’s eyes widened. “That’s the president!” he exclaimed.

“I’ll be a son of a bitch if you’re not right,” Jenkins said. “Shall we find out what the devil he’s got to say for himself?”

“Might as well,” Reggie answered. “I was there in Capitol Square in Richmond when he declared war. Might as well find out how he likes it now that he’s seen a year’s worth.” They hurried over and joined the crowd.

Woodrow Wilson was speaking earnestly, but without the changes in tone and volume and the dramatic gestures that were likeliest to win his audience over. He sounded more like a professor than the leader of a nation at war: “We must continue. We must dedicate our lives and fortunes, everything that we are and everything that we have, with the pride of those who know that the day has come when the Confederate States are privileged to spend their blood and their might for the principles that gave them birth and happiness and the peace they have treasured.

“The challenge, in fact, is to all mankind. The choice we make for ourselves must be made with a moderation of counsel and a temperament of judgment befitting our character and our motives as a nation. We must put excited feeling away. Our motive will not be revenge or the assertion of the physical might of the nation, but only the vindication of right, of which we are but a single champion in concert with our allies.”

“That’s pretty fancy,” Reggie murmured to Jasper Jenkins.

“Too goddamn fancy for me,” Jenkins whispered back. “What I want to do is, I want to smash those damnyankee bastards. If he’d tell me how we’re going to do that, I’d be a sight happier.”

“We must stay the course,” Wilson said, though a few soldiers drifted away as others came to listen. “We must not swerve suddenly in the middle of the great conflict upon which we have embarked. Giving ourselves over to foolish radicalism at a time like this would only spell disaster for our nation and for all we hold dear.”

A light dawned on Reggie. He’d wondered why Wilson had come to the base camp when speaking before soldiers was so obviously unnatural, even uncomfortable, to him. “Presidential election’s less than three months off,” he said. “He wants to make sure we don’t go and elect the Radical Liberal.”

“He don’t have a hell of a lot to worry about,” Jenkins said. “We’ve never sent one of those crazy bastards to Richmond yet, and I don’t reckon we will this time, neither.”

“Politicians take all sorts of crazy chances—don’t suppose we’d be in this damn war if they didn’t,” Bartlett said. “But they sure as hell don’t take chances about what happens to their party. Wilson can’t run again himself, so he wants to make damn sure the vice president, whatever the devil his name is, gets the job.”

“Sims? Sands? Something like that,” Jenkins said. “Whoever the hell he is, I’m gonna vote for him.”

“Me, too, I think,” Reggie said, “but I’ve got better things to do than listen to speeches that tell me to do what I’m already going to do.”

“Yeah,” Jenkins agreed, and they both walked off. Signboards here and there in the base camp listed attractions. “Let’s go watch a boxing match,” Reggie suggested.

“White men or colored?” somebody asked.

Bartlett ran his finger down the list of matches to see who was fighting whom. “Our division’s colored champion is taking on a fellow from the Confederate Marines who’s touring base camps,” he said. “That’s gonna be the best fight today, no doubt about it.”

Nobody argued with him. The crowd around the squared circle was already large by the time he got there. He and Jasper Jenkins so effectively used their elbows to get closer to the ring that they almost started a couple of fights of their own.

They cheered Commodus, the division champion, and lustily booed the Negro from the Confederate Marines, whose name was Lysis. “Which,” shouted the soldier doing duty as announcer, “means
Destruction
.” More boos.

Reggie bet another soldier two dollars that Commodus would win. He had to pay up depressingly soon: Lysis knocked Commodus cold in the third round. Attendants had to flip water into the fallen champion’s face before he could get up and groggily stagger out of the ring.

“That’s one tough nigger,” Bartlett said as Lysis swaggered around with arms upraised in victory. He gave the fellow he’d bet a two-dollar bill. Then a strange thought struck him: “I wonder how he’d do against a white man his size.”

“Bet he wonders, too,” the fellow who’d won his money answered. “If he’s a smart nigger, he won’t let anybody know it, though. Wouldn’t be much point if he did—nobody’d let a fight like that happen any which way.”

“You’re right, I expect,” Reggie said. “Niggers start thinking they can fight white men, we got more trouble than we need. And seeing as how we’ve already got more trouble than we need—”

At that moment, as if on cue in a stage play, one leg started to itch in an all too familiar way. He scratched and swore and scratched again. The Floden disinfector was like an artillery barrage—it made the lice put their heads down, but it didn’t get rid of all of them. Some nits always survived and hatched out after you’d had your clothes on for a while. He sighed and scratched still more. No matter what you did, you couldn’t win.

Anne Colleton wrote a check, computed the balance remaining in the account, and made a nasty face. Everything cost more these days—niggers’ wages, their food, the manure to keep the cotton fields fertile, the kerosene for the lamps in the nigger cottages—everything. She’d got more money than usual for the latest crop she’d brought in, but the rise in prices hadn’t stopped since then. If anything, it had got steeper.

A discreet tap at the door to her office made her look up. There stood Scipio, starched, immaculate, stolid. In his deep, rumbling voice, he said, “Ma’am, as you ordered, I have brought the Negro Cassius here for your judgment at his recent abscondment.”