No, I would. Chester swallowed the words long before they passed his lips. Rita wouldn’t find them funny. He did, but only in the blackly humorous way that didn’t make sense to anyone who hadn’t been through the things front-line soldiers had.
Rita came over, bent down, and laid her head on his shoulder. She really started to bawl then. “I don’t want to lose you, Chester!”
“Hey, babe.” Awkwardly, he put his arms around her. “Hey,” he repeated. “I’m not going anywhere.” He did laugh then, because that was literally true.
Almost to Chester’s relief, the orderly came in then and said, “You’ve got to go, ma’am. Doctors don’t want him tired out.”
The look she gave the man should have put him in a hospital bed. She kissed Chester. His eyes crossed; nobody’d done that since he reenlisted. Then, reluctantly, she let the orderly lead her away.
When she’d left the ward, the guy in the next bed said, “Must be nice, getting a visit from your wife.” He wasn’t even half Chester’s age. By pure coincidence, the two of them had almost the same wound.
“Yeah, it was,” Chester said, more or less truthfully. “She sure caught me by surprise, though.” That was also true.
“Too bad you don’t have a private room.” The kid-his name was Gary-leered at him.
“Yeah, well…” Chester didn’t know why he was embarrassed; the same thought had crossed his mind. He went on, “If I wasn’t just a noncom, if I was an officer like the snotnose whose hand I was holding, maybe I would have one. Life’s a bitch sometimes.”
“Would we be here if it wasn’t?” Gary was a buck private. To him, a top sergeant was as exalted a personage as any officer, at least this side of a general.
“You’ve got a point,” Chester said. Of course, instead of ending up in a military hospital, they could have ended up dead. Or they could have been maimed, not just wounded.
Or we might not have got hurt at all, Chester thought resentfully. But he knew too well how unlikely that was. If you stayed in the meat grinder long enough, odds were you’d brush up against the blades.
Gary was looking at him. “You’re not a lifer, are you?”
“Me? Hell, no,” Chester said. “Do I look crazy?”
“Never can tell.” Gary wouldn’t get in Dutch for sassing a sergeant here; the rules were relaxed for wounded men. “It’s like your wife said-if you’re so smart, how come you signed up for round two when you’d already been through round one?”
“We licked those Confederate bastards once, but then we let ’em up, and look what we got,” Chester answered. “Millions of maniacs screaming, ‘Freedom!’ and out to take anything they can grab. If we don’t beat ’em again, they’ll damn well beat us, and then we have to start all over.”
“Yeah, but why you?” Gary persisted. “You paid your dues the last time. You didn’t have to take a chance on getting your ass shot off twice.”
“You’re too young to know what Remembrance Day was like before the last war,” Chester said slowly. “It really was a day of remembrance and a day of mourning. Things shut down tight except for the parades and the speeches. Nobody who saw it could ever forget the flag going by upside down. The Confederates and the limeys and the frogs beat us twice. We had to get tough. We had to build up if we were going to pay them back-and we did. I don’t ever want to see the country go through anything like that again.”
“That talks about the country. That doesn’t talk about you,” Gary said. “Me, I’m here on account of I got conscripted. But they weren’t going to conscript you.” You old fart. He didn’t say it, but he might as well have. “So how come you volunteered to let ’em take another shot at you? You’re not Custer-you aren’t going to win the war all by yourself.”
That would have been insulting if it hadn’t been true. “Yeah, I know,” Chester said with a sigh. “But if everybody sat on his hands, we’d lose. That’s the long and short of it. So I put the uniform back on.”
“And look what it got you,” Gary said.
“I think I did some good before I got hurt,” Chester said. “I commanded a company for a while the last time around, so-”
“Wait a second,” Gary broke in. “You were an officer then?”
Chester snorted. “Hell, no. Just an ordinary three-striper. But when everybody above me got killed or wounded, I filled the slot for a while. Did all right, if I say so myself. After a while, they found a lieutenant to run it. If I could do that then, I didn’t have any trouble helping a shavetail run a platoon this time. I’ll probably do the same thing somewhere else when they turn me loose here.”
“You’re like a football coach,” Gary said.
“Sort of, I guess. I never even thought about coaching football, though. I used to play it-not for money, but on a steel-mill team. We weren’t bad. We sure had some big guys-you better believe that.” Chester’s eye went to the clock on the wall. It was a few minutes before eleven. “Hey, Greek. you’ve got two good legs. Turn on the wireless, why don’t you? News coming up.”
“Sure.” The guy called Greek had one arm in a cast, but nothing was wrong with the other.
The knob clicked. The set started to hum. Everybody waited for the tubes to warm up. What came out of the wireless when the sound started reminded Chester of a polka played by a set of drunken madmen. When it mercifully ended, the announcer said, “That was the Engels Brothers’ new recording, ‘Featherston’s Follies.’ ” Everyone snorted; the Engels Brothers were madmen. The announcer went on, “And now the news.”
">“Heavy fighting is reported in and around Cleveland,” a different announcer said. “The fierce U.S. defense is costing the Confederates dearly.” Chester knew what that meant-the United States were getting hammered. The newsman continued, “Occupation authorities have also declared that the situation in Canada is under control, despite enemy propaganda.” He went on to another story in a hurry. Chester didn’t think that sounded good, either.
X
Too many things were happening all at once for Flora Blackford’s comfort. None of them seemed to be good things, either. The U.S. offensive in Virginia, on which so many hopes had been pinned, was heading nowhere. The new Confederate assault in Ohio, by contrast, was going much better than she wished it were. The Mormons still tied down far too many soldiers in Utah. And the Canadian uprising, from everything she could gather, was a lot more serious than the authorities were willing to admit in the papers or on the wireless.
All in all, the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War had plenty to do. She would rather it didn’t.
And there were other distractions. Her secretary stuck her head into the inner office and said, “Miss Clemens is here to speak with you, Congresswoman.”
“Thank you.” Flora meant anything but. Some things couldn’t be helped, though. “Send her in.”
In marched the reporter. Ophelia Clemens had to be fifteen years older than Flora, but still looked like someone who took no guff from anybody. There, at least, the two women had something in common. “Hello, Congresswoman. Mind if I smoke?” she said, and had a cigarette going before Flora could say yes or no. That done, she held out the pack. “Care for a coffin nail yourself?”
“No, thanks. I never got the habit,” Flora said, and then, “That’s a Confederate brand, though, isn’t it?”
“You betcha. If you’re gonna go, go first class,” Ophelia Clemens said. Flora didn’t know how to answer that, so she didn’t try. The reporter came straight to the point: “How many soldiers are we going to have to send up to Canada to help the Frenchies keep the lid on?”