The doctor walked over to him when he saw him awake. “How are you doing?” the man asked.
“Awful,” Pete said honestly.
“I believe it. Fractures, abrasions, contusions… You’re lucky to be here.”
“Some luck.” Pete wanted to wail again, not for himself but for his lost love.
“I am going to recommend that we evacuate you to Manila,” the doctor said as he stuck Pete once more. Now he wasn’t going on about addicting him. He’d had a better chance to see how badly hurt Pete was. And maybe he hoped the morphine would help dull the pain in Pete’s soul along with the one filling his battered carcass.
That was a forlorn hope. “What’s wrong with the hospitals here?” Pete asked. “I want to be near-” He couldn’t go on. He choked up instead.
“You can’t do anything for her here,” the doc said. “You’ve got to know that. It isn’t like you two were married or anything. And besides, any excuse that lets us get our personnel out of here, we take. Hospitals here are still here, and we can’t protect you if you’re in one of them.”
Protect him from whom? More Chinese bombers? The Japs? Himself? No, they couldn’t protect him from any of those, and he couldn’t protect himself, either.
Chapter 15
“All right.” It wasn’t all right, not even slightly, but Luc Harcourt wasn’t about to admit it till he found out what the hell was going on here. Since he didn’t know, he asked: “What the hell is going on here?”
One of the poilus in front of him had a fat lip. The other had a mouse under one eye. They glared at each other as if they would sooner have tangled with machine guns than with fists. Fat Lip jerked a thumb at Mouse. “Sergeant, this con is a filthy Communist. He says he doesn’t want to fight the Russians no matter what kind of orders we get.”
“Merde,” Luc said wearily. He’d been waiting for this kind of crap to break out. The only thing that surprised him was how long it had taken. “Did you really say that, Boileau?” Were you really that dumb?
“You bet I did, Sergeant.” The man with the shiner sounded proud of his own stupidity. He gave his accuser a withering glance. “And Paul here isn’t just a squealer. The fairy wants to suck Hitler’s cock.”
“Listen to me,” Luc said. “Listen hard, because this is your first, last, and only chance. You can’t make a mutiny. You can’t disobey orders or tell other people to disobey orders. If you do, they’ll shoot you. Have you got that through your thick wooden head? Well? Have you?”
“I hear you,” Boileau answered. “I know you have to come out with that kind of garbage. But you’re a proletarian, too, right? Where’s your class consciousness? I bet one man in three won’t follow orders to attack the heartland of the glorious Socialist revolution. Your precious government can’t shoot all of us. To the barricades!” He thrust a clenched fist in the air.
“Quit trying to sound like Victor Hugo,” Luc said, which earned him a wounded look.
“You ought to have the military gendarmerie take him away, Sergeant,” Paul said. “He’s talking sedition!”
Boileau thrust his arm in the air again, this time in a Nazi salute. Paul jumped on him. They fell to the ground, slugging and swearing. “Cut it out!” Luc yelled. “Cut it out, goddammit!” When they didn’t, he kicked them both with savage impartiality.
For a bad moment, he wondered if that would make them gang up on him. Fortunately, it didn’t. They separated. Now Boileau had two black eyes, while Paul, whose last name Luc couldn’t-and didn’t want to-remember, was bleeding from the nose.
“Save it for the enemy, will you?” Luc snapped.
They might have been doing a vaudeville turn out in the provinces. Their timing impeccable, they pointed at each other and chorused, “ He’s the enemy!”
“No. Nom d’un nom, no,” Luc said. “We’re all Frenchmen together. We do what the government tells us, or we’re all screwed together.”
“We do what the government tells us, and we’re all screwed together,” Boileau said. The Communist soldier walked away, rubbing at sore ribs.
“Are you going to let him get away with that?” the rightist soldier demanded indignantly.
“Paul…”
“Yes, Sergeant?”
“Why don’t you fuck off?” Luc made it a friendly suggestion. Under it, though, lay the warning that he would whale the kapok out of Paul if the private didn’t fuck off. Paul eyed him, considering. The sergeant’s hash mark didn’t change Paul’s mind. Luc’s look of anticipation was a different story. Muttering, Paul departed-not in the same direction Boileau had chosen. That was good, anyhow.
It was the only good thing Luc could see about the situation. He did what he did when he didn’t know what else to do: he hunted up Lieutenant Demange. If anybody was above (or maybe below) politics, Demange was the man. He hated the whole human race, white, black, yellow, brown, and Red.
Luc poured out his tale of woe, finishing, “How many sergeants are trying to deal with this shit right now, all over France? What can I do about it? What can anybody do about it? We’re liable to have a civil war on our hands!”
“Yeah, I know,” Demange said, the perpetual Gitane in the corner of his mouth twitching as he spoke. “You aren’t the first guy who’s come to me up in arms about it, either.”
“What can I do?” Luc asked again.
“Sounds like you did what you could-and I hope you booted both those assholes good and hard,” Demange said. “As long as they remember they’re soldiers and do what you tell ’em, we’re all right. If they don’t…” His ferret face screwed up in a nasty grimace. “If they don’t, it’s gonna be worse than 1917.”
“Ai!” Luc winced. Any Frenchman would have. Things in 1917 had got mighty bad. After one more failed offensive against the Boches, whole divisions of the French Army had mutinied. A combination of executions and granted privileges kept things below the point of full explosion, but barely. The army was useless for the rest of the year. The Germans could have walked over it in the spring or summer if they’d ever learned about the mutinies. Somehow, they didn’t. Germans could be blind in the most peculiar ways.
Demange glanced east. German soldiers wandered around out in the open, confident the cease-fire would hold. Part of the deal was that they would evacuate France once the French and English went into action with them against Russia, but they were still here now. “Want to find out what they think about it?” Demange asked with a sour sneer.
“I already know. They’re laughing their nuts off,” Luc said bitterly.
“You don’t want to fight alongside ’em, either, do you?” Demange said.
“No more than you do,” Luc answered. “I don’t mind shooting Russians. Plenty of Russians nobody’d miss for a minute, I bet. But son of a bitch, Lieutenant! Marching with the fucking Nazis?”
“It’s like you said to your privates-if they tell us, ‘Do it,’ we’ve got to do it,” Demange said. “Will I jump up and down about it? Not a goddamn prayer I will. But maybe it’ll turn out for the best-I dunno.”
“Fat chance… sir,” Luc said.
“Sorry, kid. I don’t know what else to tell you,” the older man said. “This is what they’ve cooked for us, and we’ve got to eat it.”
“Even if it tastes like shit?”
“Even then.” Demange sounded disgusted, but he nodded. “No matter how crappy it tastes, mutiny’d taste worse. They’d beat on you for causing trouble, and then they’d make you do what you mutinied to try and get out of.”
That struck Luc as much too likely. All the same, he said, “Not if the mutineers won.”
Demange laughed in his face. “Good fucking luck!”
“It happened in 1789,” Luc said stubbornly.
Demange laughed some more. “And what did they end up with? The Revolution, and the Terror, and Napoleon. And Napoleon, he was the Hitler of his day, by God! He marched ’em all over everywhere, and they got their balls shot off while they were yelling, ‘Vive l’Empereur!’ Pretty fucking lucky, right?”