“You don’t have to set down your pen, Bailey, if you will but bend a little.”
“I can’t write things that I don’t believe, Douglas.”
And with that, Dennis Bailey turned and walked out of the office of the man who only a moment earlier had been his employer. The departure ended a decade of stories from the imaginative pen of Dennis Bailey — adventure tales, tales of the sea, stories of the breaking of the plains and the taming of the American West, narratives of muscle and valor, of knights of old who fought for vaulted ideals, of American patriots who took up muskets to win their freedom from colonial servitude.
Of those stories about America’s war for independence from England, one in particular, “A Riotous Little Tea Party,” had been adapted for the stage and was set for production in New York City in the fall. Unknown to Dennis on this day was the fact that investors were being quietly asked to withdraw their financial backing. Such a play, said the war propagandists, would send the wrong message about the relationship between the United States and its present ally, Great Britain. Particularly injurious to the cause of an Allied victory was the fact brought out in both the story and its theatrical adaptation that America, in its infancy, had come only one vote shy of making its official language…
German.
Sometimes the past must be ignored to achieve the goals of the present. Everything now was about the war message.
And The Family Companion would do its part, with or without Dennis Bailey.
1918 TREPID IN FRANCE
Oh God, did I hate that infernal gas mask. The straps itched and burned. The rubber tube made my jaw ache, and after a while I began to drool like a baby. Running while wearing the blasted thing winded me to the point of near suffocation. I cursed the Goddamned Boche for introducing these deadly gases into this war, along with everything else to which my fellow doughboys and I found ourselves rudely subjected. War is hell, as they say, but this diabolical twentieth-century war was especially hellish in ways you cannot imagine: lousy food and tepid coffee, always being cold and always being wet, sharing bedding with rats and lice, and the possibility of permanent hearing loss from all the shelling.
Did I leave out death and bodily dismemberment?
I was a nobody — a lowly private in Uncle Sam’s army. We were there to finish the job that the British and the French could not, the Tommys and the Poilu who loved us for showing up and hated us for taking so long to get there and for our Yankee arrogance. But who was I to make an opinion? All I wanted was just to get the thing over with and hightail it back to Mom and Pop and Sis — to put myself back behind the counter at the family candy store and back into the arms of my girl Suzie, with whom I’d cuddle and coo on the front porch, serenaded all the while by the cicadas and the nightingales. Nothing chirred or sang in this part of France. Everything that didn’t carry a bayonet or skitter and crawl with parasitical designs through the trenches had left this place in one way or another auld lang syne, as the skirt-wearers say.
At thirty-one, I felt like an old man. A few steps closer to death among all those pups.
For several days our artillery units had been intermittently bombarding the German lines. It wasn’t the first time I’d been exposed to the sound of modern heavy artillery, but this was the loudest by far. With each thunderous blast, everything in the trench clattered and shook, the attendant vibrations traveling up my feet and through my entire body. Along the several-mile front held by Allied troops in this region of northern France great guns were speaking, and the German army was being forced to listen. I resigned myself to listen, too, and to spending the rest of my life — should I be so lucky as to survive — half-deaf with a brass ear trumpet stuck in one ear like my ancient Aunt Ernestine.
Over the last couple of days, the skies in the east had turned gray and overcast, made darker still by the brume of war. Great clouds of airborne dirt marked where each new shell was being detonated. Billows of black and white smoke competed for prominence in the middle distance. It was deadly to poke one’s head over the top of the firing trench, but even from my vantage point tucked below in the support trench I could see lace-like shrapnel wreaths hanging low above No Man’s Land, blossoms of artillery clouds dissipating for fleeting moments to reveal the contorted skeletons of once-proud trees, the tops of bullet-perforated posts marking the location of our defensive wire entanglements, distant chalk bluffs riddled and riven by trench mortars and French-made 75 mms.
On the third day of the bombardment, near the end of a three-hour shelling, I had an interesting encounter with a young man from our companion platoon — a fellow private.
The blasts had become more powerful as the shelling went on. With each explosion the ground shook, clods from the revetment falling around me as I sat upon a muddy wooden crate and leaned uneasily against the dirt wall.
War, to me, can best be described as waiting and waiting, and then something unspeakably horrific happens, and then if you’re still alive you go back to waiting again.
There was little that one could do during this period but count off the minutes until the tumult was scheduled to end. Earlier, some of the other boys and I had passed around our letters from back home. Some were scented. It was odd smelling something so fragrant and appealing in such a putrid place. Suzie never perfumed her letters. They always smelled of whatever her mother had been cooking as she scribbled away at the kitchen table.
I had ventured from the relative safety of the dugout, where I was being bivouacked here on the front lines. I had tired of my earthen cave — a dank and stifling place, odoriferous in a variety of ways, including most offensively the overriding stench of stale feet. I preferred the slightly less noxious air of the open trench. Adjustments had been made to the usual rotation of troops from the front trenches to stations offering temporary relief and recuperation behind the lines. Fewer of the men were being removed to relative safety in the rear, our commanders fearing a German counter-assault upon our defensive positions that could be compromised by a depleted troop presence. Like everyone else, I wondered if at some point the Huns would have their fill of our deadly artillery assault and climb from their trenches to retaliate en masse.
The young private I met this day, whose name I later learned was Cantwell, didn’t even try to speak — not that I could have heard him if he did. He looked ill; a bit deranged, upon closer inspection. As he approached me, I wondered what he was up to. I had heard about the very young ones, new to the fighting. The ones who gave in to their fears, who reverted to frightened children. Even the more seasoned soldier could be alert and fully functioning one moment, and the next — as if someone had flipped a switch — suddenly be shut down to all thought and feeling, removed, as it were, from all engagement with his surroundings. Still others would remain active witnesses but spend their time screaming hysterically until they, too, succumbed to merciful catatonia.
I wondered what it was that this young man wanted from me. Surely, he wasn’t in his tortured mind mistaking me for a Boche raider and making ready to plunge his bayonet into my side. Yet I readied my hand upon my pistol and held still to my position, lest movement on my part be cause for some frenzy-fed attack upon me. The young man — he didn’t seem much older than twenty-one — moved slowly, almost hypnotically, toward me. With each new blast his whole body jerked like a clumsily manipulated marionette, his head turning first this way, then that, but his eyes always returning their penetrating gaze on me alone.