Napoleon Dibble added, “We got to fight the sons of bitches, sure, but that don’t mean we can’t do a swap every now and then when we ain’t fightin’. Won’t change how the war turns out, one way or t’other.” He laughed a loud, senseless laugh; Reggie didn’t think he was very bright.
“I suppose you’re right,” Reggie said slowly. “But what does Lieutenant Nicoll-is that his name? — think about it?”
Hairston stared at him. The whites of the sergeant’s eyes glittered in the starlight. “You out of your mind, Bartlett? Who the devil you think set this deal up in the first place?”
Reggie didn’t say anything. He couldn’t think of anything to say. All he could do was try to figure out exactly what they thought the war was all about out here in the west.
“Here they come!” Chester Martin threw himself into a shelter dug into the forward wall of the trench a split second before the Confederate shells started landing. The earth shook. Fragments hissed through the air. He sniffed anxiously, wondering whether the Rebs were throwing gas and he needed to pull his mask on over his head. He didn’t think so.
He wasn’t the only one in the shelter. He was lying on top of Specs Peterson in a position that would have been a hell of a lot more enjoyable had Specs been a perfumed whore instead of a bad-tempered private who hadn’t been anywhere near soap and water any time lately.
“They’ve been shellin’us like bastards the past couple weeks,” Peterson bawled in his ear-not much, as sweet nothings went.
“Yeah, they-oof!” Martin’s rejoinder was rudely abridged when somebody dove in on top of him, making him the squashed meat in a three-man sandwich. Peterson, in the role of the lower piece of bread, didn’t much care for it, either. Everybody thrashed around till nobody was kneeing anybody too badly, at which point two more soldiers came scrambling into the hole in the ground. It couldn’t hold five men, but it did.
“Amazing how you can pack these shelters when it’s a choice between packing ’em and getting blown to cat’s meat out there,” said Corporal Paul Andersen, one of the latest arrivals.
“Yeah,” Martin said again. “Now what we got to do is, we got to synchronize our breathing. You know how the officers are always synchronizing their watches when we go over the top. If we all breathe in and out at the same time, maybe we all really can squeeze in here.”
“Hell, maybe the Rebs’ll drop a big one right on top of us,” Specs Peterson said. “Then we won’t have to worry about breathing at all no more.” Martin and Andersen stuck elbows in him, which had the twin virtues of giving them more room and making him shut up.
Martin took advantage of the extra room to draw a deep breath. “Like I was saying before half the division jumped on me, I figure the reason the Rebs are shelling us so hard is on account of they ain’t got no barrels. They’ve moved a hell of a lot of artillery forward to shoot at the ones we got when they come up-and to make life miserable for us poor bastards in between times.”
“Makes sense, Sarge,” Andersen said. “Wish it didn’t, but it does.” A big shell, a six-incher or maybe even an eight-, did land almost on top of the shelter then. Dirt rained down between the boards holding up the roof; some of the boards themselves cracked, with noises like rifle shots. That sent more dirt spilling down on the soldiers.
Can I claw my way out if I get buried? Martin wondered. Even inside the shelter, shielded from the worst of the blast, he felt his lungs trying to crawl out through his nose. Get too close to a big one and the blast would kill you without leaving a mark on your body.
With commendable aplomb, Andersen picked up where he’d left off: “We came up with the barrels, I thought that first morning we were going to win the war then and there. But even if the Rebs don’t have any, they’ve sure as hell figured out how to fight ’em. Same with gas earlier.”
“You notice, though,” Peterson said, “the Rebs ain’t makin’ many attacks these days, not like they were doin’ before we made it over to this side o’ the Roanoke. Costs us more when we got to go to them instead of the other way round.”
“We got what we came for,” Martin said. “We got the iron mines. ’Course, we can’t use ’em much, because their long-range guns still reach most of ’em. And we got the railroad, too. ’Course, they’ve already built new track further east and slid around the part of the valley we took away from ’em.”
“Ain’t it great when we’re winnin’ the damn war?” Andersen said.
That drew a profane chorus from the men stuffed into the shelter with him. A few minutes later, the Confederate barrage abruptly stopped. It didn’t do anything to ease Chester Martin’s mind. Sometimes the Rebs would really stop. Sometimes they’d stop long enough for people to come out of their shelters and then start up again to catch them in the open. And sometimes, no matter what Specs Peterson said, they’d send raiders over the top, hoping the U.S. soldiers would stay huddled in the bomb-proofs. What to do? For this shelter, it was his call. He was the sergeant here.
“Out!” he shouted. “They start shelling again, we jump back in.”
People spilled out. By the way things worked, Martin was the next to last one to make it out into the trench. Every muscle in his body twanged with tension. If the Rebs were going to open up again, it would be right about…now. When the moment passed without fresh incoming shells, he breathed a little easier.
Back behind the U.S. lines, artillery came to life, answering the Confederate barrage. “Let the big guns shoot at the big guns,” Paul Andersen said. “Long as they leave me alone, I don’t care, and that’s the God’s truth.”
“Amen.” Chester looked around the trenches and sighed. “Got us some spadework to do, looks like to me.” High explosive and steel and brass had had their way with the landscape, blowing big holes in the trenches, knocking down stretches of parapet and parados, and incidentally knocking a couple of vital machine-gun positions topsy-turvy.
Here and there, up and down the line, wounded men were shouting-some wounded men were screaming-for stretcher-bearers. Heading toward one of those shouting men, Martin rounded the corner of a firebay, stepped into a traverse, and was confronted by a man’s leg, or that portion of it from about the middle of the shin downward, still standing erect, foot in shoe, the rest of the man nowhere to be seen. A little blood-only a little-ran down from the wound to streak the puttee.
He’d seen too much, these past nearly two years. Put a man in a place where he grew acquainted with horror every day, and it ceases to be horrible for him. It becomes part of the landscape, as unremarkable as a dandelion puffball. He reached out with his own foot and kicked the fragment of humanity against the traverse wall so no one would stumble over it.
“Poor bastard,” Paul Andersen said from behind him. “Wonder who he was.”
“Don’t know,” Martin answered. “Whoever he was, he never knew what hit him. Hell of a lot of worse ways to go than that, and Jesus, ain’t we seen most of ’em?” About then, by the noise, a couple of other men came on the wounded soldier for whom they’d been heading. He’d found one of those worse ways.
Andersen sighed. “Yeah,” he said, and stood against the wall, a few feet away from the severed foot, to relieve himself. “Sorry,” he muttered as he buttoned his fly. “Didn’t feel like holding it till I got to the latrine. Damn shelling probably blew shit all over the place, anyway.”
“I didn’t say anything,” Chester Martin told him. “You got any makings, Paul? I’m plumb out.”
“Yeah, I got some.” The corporal passed him his tobacco pouch.
He rolled a cigarette in a scrap of newspaper, pulled out a brass lighter, flicked the wheel, and got the smoke going. “Ahh, thanks,” he said after a long drag. “Hits the spot.” He looked around. “Sort of feels the way it does after a big rainstorm, you know what I mean? Peaceful-like.”