When he’d finished eating, he took his mess tray over to a barrel of water, waited for his turn, and sluiced the tray around before drying it on his shirttail. He made sure he’d got all the gunk out of the corners. If you came down with food poisoning here…well, the prison camp was a bad place, but the hospital next door was worse.
“Work detail!” a Confederate officer bawled. Some men went off to chop firewood, others to clean the latrines, still others to police up the grounds of the camp.
Jasper Jenkins shook his head in bemusement. “Never thought I’d be glad of a chance to work,” he said, “but it sure as hell beats standing around doing nothing like we been doin’.”
“Yeah,” Reggie agreed; like Jenkins, he had no duties today. And when there wasn’t anything to do, you just waited for the minutes and the hours to crawl by, and every one of them moved on hands and knees. He’d never imagined the worst part of being a prisoner of war was boredom, but the damnyankees didn’t care what their captives did in here, so long as they didn’t try to escape and so long as they didn’t try to get U.S. soldiers to do anything for them.
“Feel like some cards?” Jenkins asked.
“Not right now, no,” Bartlett answered. “I think I’m going to stand here till the dust covers me up. Maybe the Yanks won’t notice me any more after that.” Jasper Jenkins laughed. He thought Reggie had made a joke. Reggie knew too well he hadn’t.
Sergeant Chester Martin cowered in a bombproof shelter in a trench dug through the ruins of what had been Big Lick, Virginia, waiting for the Confederate artillery bombardment to end. The bombproof was thirty feet below ground level; even a shell from an eight-inch gun landing right on top probably wouldn’t collapse it. And the Rebels didn’t have many heavy artillery pieces, though their light field guns were better than anything the U.S. Army owned.
But a collapsed roof wasn’t Martin’s worst worry, although his lips skinned back from his teeth whenever a shellburst nearby made the candles jump. Nobody could see the expression on his face, though, not behind the soaked pad of cotton wadding he wore over his mouth and nose. The chemicals in the pad would-with luck-keep poison gas out of his lungs. Without luck…
He feared gas more than a direct hit. The dugout that sheltered him from explosives and splinters could be a death trap now, for gas, heavier than air, crept down and concentrated in such places. The USA had started using the deadly stuff several months before the Confederacy could answer in kind, but the Rebs had the knack now.
Sitting there beside him in the flickering near-dark, squeezed up tight against him as a lover, Corporal Paul Andersen muttered something over and over again. The mask he wore muffled the words, but Martin knew what he was saying: “Fucking bastards.” He said it a lot. It was a sentiment with which few of the men in the company would have disagreed.
All at once, sudden as a kick in the teeth, the barrage stopped. Martin’s stomach knotted in pain. He was senior man in the bombproof. He had to order the men to rush out to their posts-or to stay there. The Rebs were sneaky sons of bitches. Sometimes they’d stop shelling you long enough to draw you out from your cover, then pick up again with redoubled fury once you were more nearly out in the open.
But sometimes they’d send their men at your lines the minute after a barrage ended. If they reached the trenches before your troops got up to the firing steps and the machine guns, you were gone: captured if you got lucky, more likely dead. No wonder his guts knotted. He had to figure out which way to jump, his own life depending on the answer along with everyone else’s.
He weighed his choices. Better to guess wrong about more shelling than about a raid, he decided. “Out! Out! Out!” The words were muffled and blurry, but nobody had any doubt about what he meant.
Men streamed out of the dugout and ran shouting up the steps cut into the earth. Those steps were full of dirt that had cascaded down from hits up above; enough hits like that and it wouldn’t matter whether the bombproof caved in or not, because nobody could escape it anyway.
Clutching his rifle, Martin ran for a firing step, waving for his men to follow him. Sure as hell, here came the Rebels. They didn’t move forward yowling like catamounts, not any more. They’d learned better than that. But come on they did.
Martin started shooting at the butternut-clad figures stumbling toward him through no-man’s-land. The Rebs went down, not in death or injury so much as to take shelter in shell holes and what had been trenches and were now ruins. In their mud-caked boots, he would have done the same.
Not all of them took refuge. Some kept moving, no doubt thinking their best chance for survival lay in seizing a length of U.S. trench. They might have been right. But then a couple of machine guns added their din to the mix. At that, some of the Confederate soldiers did yell, in horrified dismay. Advancing against rifle fire was expensive, but might be possible. Advancing against machine-gun fire was suicide without the fancy label.
None of the Rebs made it into the trenches. The ones who hadn’t fallen broke and made for their own lines. Some of the ones who had fallen lay still. Others twisted and writhed and moaned, out there in no-man’s-land. Some U.S. soldiers took pleasure in shooting the Rebs who came out to try to recover their wounded. Some Confederates did the same thing to U.S. soldiers seeking to pick up their comrades.
Martin took off his gas mask. He breathed warily. The air still had a chlorine tang to it, but it didn’t make him choke and turn blue. “We threw ’em back,” he said. “Not too bad.”
Maybe twenty feet down along the firing step, Joe Hammerschmitt suddenly cried out. He dropped his rifle and clutched a hand to his right shoulder. The Springfield fell in the mud. Red started oozing out between his fingers.
He opened his hand for a moment to examine the wound. Once he’d done that, pain warred with exultation on his long, thin face. Exultation won. “Got me a hometowner, looks like,” he said happily.
Half the men up there with him made sympathetic noises; the other half looked frankly jealous. Hammerschmitt was going to be out of the firing line for weeks, maybe months, to come, and they still risked not just death but horrible mutilation every day.
“Get him back to the doctors,” Martin called. A couple of Hammerschmitt’s buddies roughly bandaged the wound and helped him out of the front line of trenches. They got envious looks, too. They weren’t going on a long vacation like Joe’s, but they were able to escape the worst of the firing till they’d turned him over to the quacks in the rear.
“You take care of yourself, Joe,” Specs Peterson told his friend. “Don’t let the bugs bite you back at the hospital.” Everyone laughed at that. The bugs bit harder in the trenches than anyplace else. Peterson went on, “I’ll see if I can’t shoot the damn Reb who got you there.” For that moment, he looked and sounded altogether serious. Birds who wore glasses were supposed to be peaceable types. Somehow Specs hadn’t got the word.
Paul Andersen let out a long sigh. He sat down on the firing step, took off his iron helmet, and ran a dirty hand through his dirty-yellow hair. “Another one of the old boys down,” he remarked.
Chester Martin sat down beside him and began to roll a cigarette. “Yeah,” he said. “Time this war’s finally done, ain’t gonna be a lot of people left who went in at the start.”
“Don’t I wish you were wrong.” Andersen touched the two stripes on his sleeve, then the three on Martin’s. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t need to say anything. They’d both been promoted because men senior to them had gone down. One of these days, you had to figure they would go down, too, and fresh-faced kids would inherit their jobs.