“I’m afraid we’ve given her more work to do,” the captain said, to which Lucien could only nod. The wagon was already packed tight with wounded, some moaning, some ominously still. More lay on the ground. Their unhurt comrades were doing what they could for them, but most, obviously, had little skill.
Lucien pointed to the road. “There is an ambulance from the hospital. It goes to Riviere-du-Loup to pick up the blessed.” The captain looked confused. Lucien realized he’d made a mistake, using a French word for an English one with the same sound but a different meaning. He corrected himself: “The wounded.”
“He doesn’t need to go that far, not now he doesn’t,” the captain said. Soldiers were waving to the ambulance. As Galtier had done before, it pulled off the road and came jouncing over the rough ground toward the tracks. The driver and his attendant scrambled out of the machine. The attendant shook his head. “What a mess,” he said.
“Yeah.” The ambulance driver scowled. He couldn’t have been more than seventeen or so, not with that unlined face, but was dark and handsome and looked strong as a bull. “This is what you do. You die.” He sounded world-weary beyond his years. “You do not know what it is about. You never have time to learn.”
“Let’s get ’em on the stretcher and into the bus,” the attendant said.
“Yeah,” the driver said again. But then he recognized Galtier. He nodded. “You are Nicole’s father, n’est-ce pas?” His French was bad, but few Americans spoke any.
“Yes,” Lucien answered. In spite of himself, he’d come to know some of the people at the hospital. “Bonjour, Ernest.”
“Not a bon jour for them,” the ambulance driver said. His broad shoulders-almost the shoulders of a prizefighter-went up and down in a shrug. “We will take them back. We will do what we can for them.”
Up in Riviere-du-Loup and elsewhere along the St. Lawrence, the antiaircraft guns started banging away again. Lucien noticed that only in the back part of his mind till he heard the buzz of aeroplane engines.
“Jesus fucking Christ!” an American screamed-doubly a blasphemy for Galtier. Then the man in green-gray said something even worse: “Here they come again!”
Whether they were the same two aeroplanes or two others, Lucien never knew. All around him, soldiers scattered, some diving for cover under the halted train, others running as far away from it as they could. Lucien stood there, foolishly, as the machine guns began chewing up the dirt close by.
The pilots did not try to shoot up either his wagon or the ambulance near it. He was and remained convinced of that. But they were flying fast, and didn’t miss by much. The captain who’d given him the goldpiece spun and toppled like someone with no bones at all, the top of his head shot off. Fresh cries of pain rose from every direction.
Roaring just above his head, the aeroplanes streaked away. A couple of Americans fired their rifles at them. It did no good. They were gone. Galtier looked around at carnage compounded.
A moan that stood out for anguish even among all the others made him turn his head. The young, strong ambulance driver lay beside the soldier he had been about to help. Now he was wounded, too. His hands clutched at himself. Lucien shivered and made the sign of the cross. Maybe, if God was kind, he had been wounded near there, but not there.
The ambulance attendant, whose name Galtier did not know, came over to him and the injured driver. “We’re going to have to bandage that and get him back to the hospital,” he said, to which Lucien could only nod. The attendant stooped beside the driver. “Come on, kid, you got to let me see that.”
In the end, Lucien had to hold the fellow’s hands away from the wound while the attendant worked. The driver writhed and fought. He wasn’t altogether conscious, but he was, as he looked, strong as the devil. Hanging onto his hands turned into something just short of a wrestling match.
Lucien hadn’t intended to look as the attendant cleaned and bandaged the wound. But his eyes, drawn by some horrid fascination of their own, went to it. He winced and wanted to cross himself again. There, indeed.
He and the attendant got the driver into the back of the ambulance with another wounded man. “Thanks for the help,” the attendant said.
“Not at all.” Galtier hesitated. “With this bl-wound-do you think he can-? Will he be able to-?” He ran out of English and nerve at the same time.
“If he’s lucky,” the attendant said, understanding him anyhow, “if he’s real lucky, mind, he’ll be able to just do it.” He climbed into the ambulance and drove it back toward the hospital. Galtier followed at his necessarily slower pace. He said nothing at all to the horse.
Klaxons hooted, everywhere on the Dakota. Sam Carsten threw his mop into a bucket and ran for his battle station. He’d expected the call even before the battleship fished its aeroplane out of the waters of the Pacific. Officers had been bustling around with the look that said they knew something he didn’t. The aeroplane must have spotted something out there ahead of the fleet and sent word back by wireless.
And, out here south and west of the Sandwich Islands, the only thing to spot was the enemy. “The limeys!” Carsten gasped to Hiram Kidde when he ducked into the forwardmost starboard five-inch gun sponson.
“Them or the Japs,” Kidde agreed. The gunner’s mate rubbed his chin. “Taken ’em damn near two years, but they finally figured they could come out and play with the big boys. Now we got to show ’em they made a mistake, on account of if we don’t, the Sandwich Islands are up for grabs again.” He’d been in the Navy his whole adult life. He might not have been able to order units around like an admiral, but he had no trouble figuring out the way tactics led into strategy.
Lieutenant Commander Grady stuck his head into the sponson. “All present and accounted for?” asked the commander of the starboard-side secondary armament.
“Yes, sir,” Kidde answered. “Loader”-he nodded at Carsten-“gun layers, shell jerkers, we’re all here. Uh, sir, who are we fighting?”
Grady grinned. “Looks like one hellacious fleet of British battleships over the horizon,” he answered, “along with all their smaller friends. I don’t expect they sailed out of Singapore just to pay their respects.” His face clouded. “By what the pilots say, they’re at least as big a force as we are. They’re playing for keeps, no doubt about it.”
“So are we, sir,” Kidde said. “We’ll be ready.” Grady nodded and hurried away, his shoes ringing off the steel of the deck.
“We don’t have the whole Sandwich Islands fleet out here on patrol with us,” Carsten said unhappily. “If the limeys smash us up and push past us-”
Kidde shrugged. “Chance you take when you join the Navy. If they smash us up and push past us, thing we have to make sure of is that we do some smashing of our own.”
The sponson had only small vision slits for laying the gun. Even those had armored visors to protect against shell splinters in action. The visors were up now. Carsten looked out through one of the slits as the Dakota swung into a long, sweeping turn. The patrolling fleet was going into battle formation, the line of half a dozen battleships anchoring it, with smaller, swifter cruisers and destroyers supporting and screening them.
He felt a rumble through the soles of his feet. “That’s the big turrets moving,” he said unnecessarily.
Luke Hoskins, one of the shell-jerkers, made an equally unnecessary comment: “They’ve spotted the limeys, then.” He already had his shirt off against the exertions that were to come. Even now, with him doing nothing, sweat gleamed on his muscle-etched torso.