Navy ships were supposed to be dry, but Pete had never served on one that didn’t have some unofficial alcohol available. As long as the producers didn’t get greedy, didn’t get blatant, and did grease the proper palms, they could go about their business without much trouble.
So things went here. Nobody got too curious about the tent way off by itself. Nobody got too curious about the steady trickle of men who visited it, either.
Pete came back with a couple of canteens’ worth of the enterprising corporals’ firewater. They claimed the stuff was cognac. Pete thought any Frenchman who brewed up such nasty stuff would kill himself for shame-which, of course, didn’t keep him from drinking it. A leatherneck from Mississippi called it stump-likker. That came closer to truth in advertising.
After he’d drunk enough to take the edge off his own gloom, he wondered what would happen if you got an albatross toasted. Would a cop pull the bird over for reckless flying? Would a drunken albatross land any worse than a sober one? Could a drunken albatross land any worse than a sober one?
The only problem with finding out was, he had no idea how to inebriate a gooney bird. The sole fresh water on Midway was the stuff the desalinization plant turned out. He’d never seen albatrosses drink. Maybe they got everything they needed from the fish they ate. Or maybe they drank from the Pacific. Pete had no idea. Someone who studied the birds might know, but he didn’t.
Another way to assassinate some hours was with a deck of cards. Yes, the poker games on Midway had started before the last Japs got hunted down. They hadn’t stopped since. Back in Peking, Pete had learned the expensive way not to mix booze and poker. Booze turned you into an optimist. It also turned you into a sucker. Better, or at least smarter, to wait till you had a clear head and to fleece the fools who didn’t know enough to do that.
Games here got insanely expensive. Guys had nothing else to spend their money on. They didn’t know when, or even if, they’d ever escape Midway. And so they bet as if there were no tomorrow.
For one poor leatherneck, there was no tomorrow. He’d won for a while. Then he started losing, and losing, and losing some more. He went through all the money he had. He went through a year and a half’s pay he hadn’t earned yet. He wrote IOU after IOU, figuring he’d start winning again pretty soon.
Only he didn’t. And, one dark, moonless night, he walked down to the edge of the ocean and blew his brains out. The note by his body read Well, I guess I’m square now, and my folks will get my insurance.
That was sobering. It didn’t stop the games, but it did make people cut back on the stakes and not allow gamblers down on their luck to pledge money they hadn’t made yet. Pete liked the changes. Gambling was all very well, but the only way anyone needed to risk his life was in action against the Japs.
Or, now, against the Germans. Pete still held his grudge against the slanties, but he wouldn’t have said no if someone sent him storming ashore on some Belgian beach. Hitler’s would-be supermen thought they were hot shit. Their daddies had, too, till U.S. Marines taught them better in France. Some of those old Marines were still in the service. Lots of them had taught Pete the soldiering trade. Giving the Nazis what-for would be a way to show them how well he’d learned his lessons.
Would be. He was about as far from the Wehrmacht as a human being could get. He had no idea when the brass would decide Midway was decontaminated enough to make shipping people off it safe. In the meantime, he had stump-likker and poker games. Oh, it was one hell of a life, wasn’t it? Wasn’t it just?
Spring was in the air. Aristide Demange surveyed it with the same jaundiced gaze he turned on summer, fall, and winter. So birds were singing? So flowers were blooming? — at least till artillery fragments cut them down to size. So bright green grass sprouted in shell holes and on the parapets of entrenchments?
So what?
Demange scowled at his men, too. “You think the Boches can’t kill you because the sky is blue and you’ve got a stiff bulge in your pants? The Germans don’t care. They’re just waiting for you to do something stupid so they can blow your balls off. Then you won’t have to worry about hard-ons any more.” His voice rose to a shrill, mocking falsetto.
“It’s spring for them, too, n’est-ce pas?” one of the poilus ventured.
“Oh, sure. It’s spring. But they’re professional about it, you know? And you’d better be the same way, Émile, or you’ll be sorry.”
“Yes, sir,” Émile said, which was never the wrong answer. Maybe he knew what Demange was talking about. He’d seen some action, and he hadn’t disgraced himself.
“All right, then.” Demange paused to light another in his long string of Gitanes. It had started when he was eleven or twelve and would stop only when they shoveled dirt over him: say, a thousand years from now, or maybe an hour and a half. He went on, “Listen to me, you dumb cocksuckers. I’m not trying to get you killed, because if you get killed, chances go up that I get killed, too, and I’m not ready to die just yet. You got that?”
Their heads bobbed up and down. The only thing wrong with them was that their superiors kept trying to use those heads-and Demange’s along with them-to bang through reinforced concrete.
Émile spoke up again: “If you look at it that way, sir, what we ought to do is, we ought to sit tight here and wait for the Americans.”
Demange thought so, too. That was pretty much what France had done the last time around. After the mutinies of 1917, France couldn’t have done much else then. Even so, Demange had mixed feelings about it. He would rather see Americans dying for liberty than die for it himself. But wasn’t it monotonous and even a little embarrassing to get your chestnuts pulled from the fire twice in a row by the same country? If God was writing the script, He could have used some help from a competent dramatist.
Daladier and his kind, of course, would defend France to the last drop of American blood. But the French generals didn’t mind killing off Frenchmen. When had they ever?
“Tell you what, Émile,” Demange said. “When they give you a field marshal’s baton-and I promise you won’t get yours a day later than I get mine-you can tell people what to do. In the meantime, we’re both stuck with following orders from the fat, white-mustached fucks who’ve already got theirs.”
Émile grinned at him. Some of the other soldiers muttered among themselves. Sure as the devil, one of those sniveling little rats would report him. That would be pretty goddamn funny. What was the worst the brass could do to him? Demote him? He’d thank them. He’d kiss them on their talcumed cheeks. Send him to the front? He’d already logged more time at the front than any other three men you could name. Not fearing consequences gave a wonderful sense of freedom.
He might have invited the poilus to tattle on him, but the German loudspeakers chose that moment to come to life. Both sides had them. They were something new, something modern, something to make war even more awful than it had been for the past five thousand years.
“Soldiers of France!” the loudspeakers boomed. Whoever was talking through them, he spoke perfect Parisian French. A prisoner reading a script? A French Fascist who’d gone over to the other side? Probably not someone from Alsace-Lorraine, at home in German and French-the accent would be different. Whoever this cochon was, he went on, “Soldiers of France, why spill your blood for Jew Bolsheviks and Jew capitalists? Do you want your towns full of nigger American troops cuckolding you and leaving you with black babies to raise? When you fight the Reich and your fellow white men, you fight the wrong enemy!”