American Front (78 page)

Marie stamped her foot. “If he wants to build it in a safe place, why does he not put it in Father Pascal’s church? No one would bring war to holy ground, is it not so?”

“That is an excellent thought,” Galtier said. “Even the pious father could not disagree with it, good and Christian man that he is.” He shook his head. The war was making him more cynical than he’d ever dreamt of being before it began.

“But no,” Marie went on. “It must be on our good cropland. Well, I have a hope for this hospital of theirs.”

“I have the same hope, I think,” Lucien said. His wife looked a question his way. “I hope it is very full of Americans,” he told her. She nodded, satisfied. They’d been married a long time, and thought a lot alike.

Stephen Ramsay used a makeshift periscope to look up over the parapet at the Yankee lines between Nuyaka and Beggs. If he’d stuck his head up to have a look around, some damnyankee sniper would have blown off the top of it. The Creek regiment in which Ramsay was a captain had pushed U.S. troops a few miles back from Nuyaka, but then the lines had set like concrete.

He turned the periscope this way and that. What he saw remained pretty much the same, regardless of the angle: barbed wire, some shiny and new, some rusting; firing pits for Yankee scouts; and then another trench line just like his.

Lowering the periscope—a couple of little hand mirrors mounted at the proper angles on a board—he turned to Moty Tiger and said, “Far as I can see, those damnyankee sons of bitches are here to stay.”

“That’s not good, sir,” the Creek sergeant answered seriously. “This is our land, Creek land. If we can, we have to throw them off here. You Confederates have the right to be here. You are our friends. You are our allies. But we have been enemies of the United States for many generations. The Yankees do not belong here.”

“I’m not going to argue with you, Sergeant,” Ramsay said. “All I’m going to do is give you this here periscope and let you take a look for yourself. If that looks like a position we can rush, you tell me straight out. Go on—take a look.”

Moty Tiger looked. He looked carefully—or as carefully as he could, given the limitations of the instrument. As Ramsay had before him, he lowered it. His coppery face was glum. “Doesn’t look easy, Captain,” he admitted.

“I didn’t think so, either,” Ramsay said, with more than a little relief. He’d been afraid Moty Tiger would think like a Creek before he thought like a soldier, and would feel duty-bound to try to recover every scrap of Creek territory regardless of the cost. He outranked his sergeant, of course, but Moty Tiger was a Creek and he wasn’t. In a contest for the hearts and minds of the soldiers in the Creek Nation Army, that counted more than rank did. For that matter, Moty Tiger didn’t just influence the opinions of his fellow Indians: he also reflected those opinions.

There the matter rested till late that afternoon, when Colonel Lincoln came up to the front-line trench. When Ramsay saw the regimental C.O.’s face, his heart sank. Lincoln looked thoroughly grim. He didn’t say anything. Ramsay got the idea that wasn’t because he didn’t know anything—more likely because he knew too much, and didn’t like any of it.

When Lincoln stayed quiet for more than five minutes, Ramsay, who favored the direct approach, asked him, “What’s gone wrong now, sir?”

Colonel Lincoln gestured for Ramsay to walk with him. Once they got out of earshot of the men, Lincoln said, “I’ll tell you what’s gone wrong. Charlie Fixico’s up and decided he’s a goddamn general, that’s what.”

“Uh-oh,” Ramsay said, without any great eloquence but most sincerely. “What sort of stupid, impossible thing does he have in mind for us to do?” He still thought like a sergeant, not an officer: what were generals for but ordering troops to try to do stupid, impossible things?

Lincoln was a longtime officer, but he looked to feel the same way. Pointing northeast, he answered, “He wants us to break through that Yankee line and retake Beggs.”

“Jesus,” Ramsay said. He’d talked Moty Tiger out of that. Talking the chief of the Creek Nation out of it wasn’t going to be easy. “Why does he want to do that? Isn’t he grateful we saved Okmulgee for him?”

“Not any more, he’s not. That was a while ago, and politicians aren’t what you’d call good at remembering,” Lincoln answered. “Why? Two reasons, far as I can make out. First one is, he wants to get back the oil fields around Beggs. Second one is, it’s Creek territory, it’s got damnyankees on it, and he wants ’em gone. That’s about what it boils down to.”

“Jesus,” Ramsay said again. “Doesn’t he know that if we try to take those Yankee positions, we’re gonna get ourselves slaughtered, nothing else but?”

“If he doesn’t, it’s not because I didn’t tell him till I was blue in the face,” Lincoln answered. “He ordered the attack to go in anyhow.”

“I hope you got the Confederate corps commander to overrule him, sir,” Ramsay said. “It’d be suicide, like I said.”

“I went to corps headquarters, yes,” Lincoln said. “They told me that if Chief Fixico wants an attack, Chief Fixico gets an attack. Two reasons, again. One is, his own men—us—are in it, so he’s not asking the CSA to do all his work for him. Two is, near as I can tell, they don’t want to make the Indians angry, so they go along with any requests they get. Bombardment begins tomorrow morning at 0300—supposed to chew up the barbed wire between us and them and make reaching their trenches easier. We go over the top at 0600.”

“Yes, sir,” Ramsay said. He couldn’t think of anything else to say. He knew what was liable to happen shortly after 0600. He wasn’t afraid—or not very much afraid, at any rate. What he felt was more like numbness, as if he’d been told out of the blue he’d need a surgical operation.

He went up and down the trench line, letting the men know what they’d be doing at dawn tomorrow. Some of the Creeks, especially the younger ones and the replacements who hadn’t seen much action, looked excited. A couple of them let out happy yowls; war cries. Moty Tiger just glanced up at Ramsay and nodded. What was going on behind those black eyes, that impassive face? Ramsay couldn’t tell.

He made sure his rifle was clean and that he had plenty of ammunition, then wrapped himself in his blanket and tried to sleep. He didn’t think he would, but he did. The beginning of the barrage at 0300 woke him. He got up and made sure the men would be ready to move forward when the shelling stopped. “With luck,” he said, “the damnyankees’ll be too battered to do any shooting back till we’re in amongst ’em. Good luck, boys.”

At 0600 on the dot, the bombardment ended. Colonel Lincoln blew a whistle. “Let’s go!” he shouted.

Out of the trenches swarmed the Creek Nation Army, along with Confederate troops proper to either side of them. They went forward as fast as they could, knowing their best hope for safety was getting to the enemy front line before U.S. troopers could recover from the barrage they’d taken and reach the firing steps—and the machine guns they surely had all along the line.

The shelling had knocked aside or wrecked some of the barbed wire, but not all, or even most. First one Creek, then another, then another, got hung up in it. “Don’t try and cut ’em loose,” Ramsay called. “Keep moving. That’s the best thing we can do.” It wasn’t easy. The stuff grabbed and clung and bit, so you felt as if you were moving underwater with sharks nipping you, or through a nightmare, trying without much luck to run from a monster you dared not turn around and see.

But the monster was in front. Here and there along the Yankee line, muzzle flashes showed men who, despite the artillery barrage, knew they had to kill the attackers now or die themselves in moments. Then a couple of machine guns, one right in front of Ramsay, came to hammering life.

Men of the Creek Nation Army fell before that hateful patter like wheat before a reaper. There went Moty Tiger, clutching at his belly. There went Colonel Lincoln, down with boneless finality.

My regiment now
, Ramsay thought. He waved the survivors forward. “Come on!” he shouted. “We can still—”

One moment, he was advancing. The next, without warning, he found himself lying in a shell hole, staring in confusion at dirt and a couple of bits of rusty barbed wire. He had trouble breathing. He couldn’t figure out why till he tasted blood in his mouth.
How did that happen?
he wondered vaguely. He looked up at the sky. It was going black.
That’s not right
, he thought.
It’s morning, not

XX

Sylvia Enos collected the mail from the box in the front hall of her apartment building. She crumpled up a patent-medicine circular. The allotment check from the Navy she kept.

Her lips twisted in a bitter smile. She had the money, drawn from George’s pay, as he’d said she would before he enlisted. The only trouble was, she didn’t care about the money. She would sooner have had her husband back. When he’d stayed in Boston after joining the Navy, when he’d, in essence, gone back to being a fisherman, she’d been overjoyed. Her life had returned to one not far different from what she’d known before the war started, even if she had kept her job at the canning plant. Considering all the dislocations that had come since 1914, she’d counted herself lucky.

“So much for luck,” she said as she started upstairs. Now George was gone, and gone father and more irrevocably than when he’d languished in Confederate imprisonment. All she had by which to remember him were the monthly allotment checks and an occasional letter. There could have been more letters, she supposed, but George had never been much of a writer.

The hallway and the stairwell were not so warm as they had been a few weeks before: Boston’s summer, hot while it lasted, couldn’t be counted on to last far into September. For the moment, cutting the heat only made days and nights more pleasant. Pretty soon, though, she wouldn’t be wrangling with the Coal Board over fuel enough to cook her food. She’d be wrangling with its inflexible clerks and stubborn supervisors over fuel enough to keep her from freezing during the winter.

She left the stairwell and trudged wearily down the hall to Mrs. Coneval’s apartment. She stood there in front of the doorway for a moment before she knocked. It sounded as if the children were fighting a battle of their own inside, a battle about the size of some of the big ones on the Kentucky front. She wondered how Brigid Coneval put up with the noise.

When she did knock, she needed to hammer on the door to get anyone within to notice she was there. After a while, Brigid Coneval opened the door. The racket, without wood between it and Sylvia, grew from alarming to appalling. “A bit rowdy they are today,” Mrs. Coneval said with a smile that could only be described as wan.

“So it would seem,” Sylvia agreed. She knew she would have gone crazy, cooped up in there the day around with a horde of screaming children. Given the choice between that and the factory job she had, she would have chosen factory work a hundred times out of a hundred. Her own two children were plenty to try to keep under control.

“I’ll get your wee ones,” Brigid Coneval said, and disappeared back into chaos. A toddler smaller than Mary Jane started to howl. Sylvia thanked heaven she hadn’t got pregnant again after George came back from the CSA. Trying to take care of a new baby by herself, along with two small children, was nothing to anticipate with glee.

Mrs. Coneval came back holding Mary Jane by one hand and George, Jr., by the other. George, Jr., twisted in her grasp and fired an imaginary rifle at one of the other children. “I got you, Joey, you dirty Reb!”

“No, you didn’t—you missed me,” Joey shouted back—the next small boy who admitted himself slain in imaginary conflict would be the first. “And I’m not the Reb—you are!”

“Liar, liar, pants on fire,” George, Jr., yelled at him, which made Mary Jane giggle. George, Jr., said, “Hello, Mama. Joey cheats.”

“I don’t either!” Joey exclaimed.

“It doesn’t matter now, one way or the other,” Sylvia said. By the look on his face, her son was prepared to disagree with that as eloquently as he could. She didn’t give him the chance. “See you tomorrow morning,” she said to Mrs. Coneval, and took her children back to their apartment.

It seemed empty without her husband there. She was used to having him gone for days at a time; she’d even had to grow used to having him gone for much longer than that while he was a Confederate detainee. Now, though, with him in St. Louis, she had the strong sense she wouldn’t see him again till the war ended, and it didn’t look as if it was going to end any time soon.

She had some good scrod in the icebox. She hadn’t lost the connections she’d made down on T Wharf; as a fisherman’s wife (even if her husband wasn’t actually fishing right now), she could find better fish than the ordinary shopper and pay less for it. She breaded the scrod, pan-fried it in lard on top of the stove, and served it up with mashed potatoes.

George, Jr., ate everything up and demanded more. He ate almost as much as a man, or so it seemed. She was probably wrong about that, she admitted to herself as she gave him more potatoes, but she wasn’t wrong about his outgrowing all his clothes. She patted her purse. The allotment check would come in handy the next time she went shopping at Filene’s.

Mary Jane, by contrast, had to be cajoled into eating much of anything. Sylvia produced a gumdrop from a bowl on a shelf too high for the children to reach. She set it on the table. “Do you want it?” she asked her daughter.

Eyes wide with longing, Mary Jane nodded. Having once made the dreadful error of saying no to candy, she wasn’t about to repeat it.

“All right,” Sylvia said. “Eat up your supper and you can have it.” Sometimes that got results, sometimes a tantrum. Today it worked. Mary Jane cleaned her plate and stretched out a hand that needed washing. “Good girl,” Sylvia told her, handing her the sweet.

After she’d scrubbed the dishes, she settled the children down on the couch, one on either side of her, and read to them from
Queen Zixi of Ix
. Mary Jane’s attention sometimes wandered. When she got off the couch, went over to get a doll, and then came back to play with it, Sylvia didn’t mind. The story held George, Jr., rapt for most of an hour. By then, it was time for Sylvia to get the children into bed. Morning came all too early.

Then she had the apartment to herself, before she also had to go to bed. When George was home, they’d sit and talk while he smoked a pipe or cigar. When he was out fishing, she’d look forward to his return. Now…now he was gone, and the place seemed large and empty and quiet as the tomb.

She walked around for a while with a feather duster, flicking specks from tables and gewgaws. What with the dirt and soot always in the air, things got dusty faster than they had any proper business doing. That would worsen in winter, when everyone burned more coal—always assuming the Coal Board didn’t decide to let people turn to blocks of ice instead.

She realized she was dusting a china dog for the third time. Shaking her head, she put the feather duster away. Time hung heavy when she was alone, but not that heavy. She went into the bedroom, changed into a nainsook cotton nightgown with lace at the neck and sleeves, and set out the drawers and skirt and shirtwaist she’d wear the next morning. Then she went into the bathroom, where she cleaned her teeth and gave her hair a hundred strokes with the brush in front of the mirror over the sink. Evening ritual done, she went back into the bedroom, turned off the gas lamp, and lay down.

She sat up with a start. “Lord have mercy, I’d forget my head if it wasn’t sewed on tight!” she exclaimed. Not wanting to get up and light the lamp again, she fumbled in the darkness with the alarm clock on the nightstand. Had she forgotten to set it, she would surely have been late to work, which would have got her docked at best and fired at worst. “Can’t have that,” she said, as if someone lying beside her was trying to talk her into sleeping as long as she wanted.

But no one was lying beside her. The bed felt large and empty. Some nights, she was so tired she hardly noticed George was gone and would be gone God only knew how long. Others, she missed him to the point where tears ran down her face. They did no good. She knew that. Knowing didn’t help.

She lay on her back, staring at the ceiling and trying without much luck to go to sleep. She closed her eyes, which didn’t seem to make the room much darker. But with her eyes closed, as they usually were when she and George made love, it was easier to imagine him on top of her, imagine his familiar weight pressing her down on the mattress, imagine his breath warming the hollow of her shoulder in quick gasps.

Imagination, now, was all she had. She shifted restlessly on the bed. If George were there now, she’d be able to sleep pretty soon. She shifted again. The hem of her nightgown rode up past her knees. She reached down. Instead of straightening it, she hiked it up to her waist.

A few minutes later, she rolled over onto her side. She would sleep now. She knew it. She bit her lip, not caring to remember what she’d just done. But when your man was away for months, maybe for years, what were you supposed to do? It wasn’t as good as the real thing with George (actually, that wasn’t quite true—it felt as good, or maybe even better, but it was lonely at the end), but it was better than nothing.

“Better than nothing,” she muttered drowsily. With the war on, wasn’t that as much as anybody had any business expecting? Her eyelids slid down over her eyes, of themselves this time. She started to say something else, but only a soft snore passed her lips.

“Masks and goggles!” Captain Orville Wyatt ordered as the bombardment of the Confederate positions east of the Roanoke began. Chester Martin quickly tied the hyposulfite-impregnated mask over his mouth and nose. He breathed in chemical dampness. That was unpleasant, but much less so than breathing in the poison gas that shells were spreading up and down the Rebel lines. He took off his newly issued helmet to strap the goggles over his eyes. He didn’t know whether to curse the weight of the thing or bless it for making his brains less likely to be splattered over the landscape.

Beside Martin, Specs Peterson swore. “They’ve been usin’ this damn gas more since they started loading it into shells than they did when they shot it out of those projector things, and I fucking hate it,” he said. “I can leave my glasses on and have the chlorine eat my eyes up, or I can take ’em off and fall on my damn face half a dozen times before I get to where the Rebs are at. Hell of a deal, ain’t it?”

“I’m in the same boat, Peterson,” Captain Wyatt said, touching the earpiece to his own spectacles. “I’ve been leaving my glasses on. My eyes get better after a couple of days, seems like.”

“Yeah, but you want to be a hero,” Peterson muttered under his breath. “Me, I just want to get out of this in one piece.”

“Amen,” Chester Martin said. “All I want to do is live through this damn war and go home and make steel. I used to complain about that job like nobody’s business. It was hot and it was dirty and it was hard and it was dangerous. And it’s still every damn one of those things. And you know what else? Next to what we’re doin’ now, it’s so fine, I’ll never grouse again.”

“Nothin’ worse than farm work—I always used to say that,” Corporal Paul Andersen put in. “Only goes to show I didn’t know what the hell I was talking about. You do your two years as a conscript and that’s not so bad. You figure real soldiering works out the same way. Ha!” His wave took in the trenches, the filth, the vermin, the fear, the foe.

Captain Wyatt said, “Once upon a time, Virginia used to belong to the USA. Now we’re working to take it back. It’s not the kind of job anybody wants to do, but it needs doing. If everything goes right, we keep their front trenches. No matter what happens, we bring some prisoners back for interrogation.” He went up and down the trench line, checking to make sure his soldiers’ masks and goggles were on securely. He was a long way from being the most good-natured of men, but he fussed over the soldiers in his company like a mother cat with a litter of kittens. As far as Martin was concerned, that made him a good officer.

The bombardment went on and on. Every so often, the Confederates would lob a few shells back at the U.S. lines, but they were taking it a lot harder than they were dishing it out. That suited Martin fine. He’d been on the receiving end of too many barrages to suit him. Giving was better—an un-Christian thought but a true one nonetheless.

Sharp as an axe coming down, the shelling ended. Up and down the trench line, whistles sounded. Martin scrambled up the steps made of sandbags, over the parapet, and toward the Rebel lines.

Pioneers had cut some paths through the barbed wire between the U.S. and Confederate lines, marking them with strips of cloth tied to the wire. Martin liked that and hated it at the same time. It gave him an easier way toward the enemy trenches, but also gave the Rebel machine gunners a notion of what the way was. If they’d zeroed their weapons on it…He tried not to think about that, as he tried not to think of any of the disasters that might befall him.

Here and there, the bombardment had knocked down the posts that supported the barbed wire, leaving it sprawled in snaky coils on the rubble-strewn ground of what had probably been a suburb of Big Lick, Virginia. When Chester Martin saw relatively clear stretches of that sort, he used them to move forward. The Rebs wouldn’t have so many guns pointed there as they would at the paths.

He blew out through the thick, wet gauze pad he wore over his mouth. The first couple of gas attacks had let U.S. forces gain and consolidate their positions east of the Roanoke River. Now, though, the Rebs had learned how to defend themselves against the new American weapon, and pushing them back had turned into another hard job.

He wasn’t more than halfway toward their trenches, and already the Rebels were shooting back at him and his men, the muzzle flashes of their rifles seeming bright as the sun. Machine guns started up a moment later. Somewhere not far away, he heard the wet smack of a bullet striking flesh. Whoever was hurt there, he hoped it wasn’t too bad and he hoped they’d be able to get the fellow to a doctor before he bled to death. That also made him hope nobody would get hurt picking up the wounded man. Nobody was supposed to shoot at people wearing Red Cross armbands, but bullets, as he’d learned too well, weren’t fussy about whom they hit.

One of the machine guns, traversed by what their crews matter-of-factly called a two-inch tap, sent bullets kicking up dirt not far from his feet. He dove headlong into a shell hole in front of him. A horrid stench rose. Part of it came from the pool of noisome, stagnant water at the bottom of the hole. More was from the body, or rather fragments of body, entombed under dirt and shattered bricks. U.S. forces were advancing, so the dead man was presumably a Confederate. But he would have smelled just as bad had he been born in Michigan.