Martin was less interested than he might have been. Putting one foot in front of the other so he wasn't a dead weight took all the concentration he had. The bandage Specs had slapped on him was red and dripping.
Somewhere back toward the rear, a couple of men with Red Cross armbands took charge of him. "Go back to your unit, Private," one of them said to Peterson.
"If I can find it," Specs answered. "If there's anything left of it. Good luck, Sarge." He turned around and trotted toward the sound of the fighting before Martin could answer.
He spoke to the stretcher-bearers-who bore no stretcher-instead: "How is it?"
He'd meant his wound, but they had other things on their mind. "It's a hell of a mess, Sergeant," one of them answered as they helped him stumble westward, away from the firing. "They drove a hell of a lot of barrels through up to the north and down south of us, too. With those bastards on their flanks, a lot of our infantry just caved in."
As if to demonstrate the truth of that, several unwounded soldiers trotted past them. A military policeman shouted a challenge. Several shots rang out. Martin didn't see the panicked soldiers coming back his way, which meant they'd shot first or best and were still running.
"It's a disaster, is what it is," the second stretcher-bearer said. "They're liable to push us all the way back to the river-maybe over it, for God's sake." Even through the blazing agony of his wound, that got through to Martin. The USA had spent two years and lives uncounted to drive the Confederates back to the Roanoke River and then over it. If they lost all that in one battle…
He stumbled just then, jarring his arm. He'd only thought he hurt before. The battered landscape turned gray before his eyes. He tasted blood, from where his teeth had bitten down too hard on a scream. Whatever he'd been about to say disappeared, burned away by shrieking nerves.
When they got him to the field hospital, the stretcher-bearers exclaimed in dismay, because it was dissolving like Lot's wife in the rain. "Evacuation!" somebody yelled. Somebody else added, "We're gettin' the hell out before the Rebs overrun us."
By luck-and maybe because, since he wasn't on a stretcher, he didn't take up much room-Martin got shoved aboard an ambulance. Jouncing west over the shell-pocked track toward the river was a special hell of its own. He couldn't look out, only at the other wounded men shoehorned in with him. Maybe that was a blessing of sorts. He couldn't see how many Confederate shells were falling on the road, how many others throwing up water from the Roanoke River as they searched for the bridge.
Engine roaring flat out, the ambulance sped across. The driver whooped triumphantly when he got to the other side: "Made it!" He, of course, was still in one undamaged piece. Martin couldn't decide whether he was glad he hadn't been blown up or sorry.
Flora Hamburger stood on a little portable stage in front of the Croton Brewery on Chrystie Street. The brewery was a block outside the Fourteenth Ward, but still in the Congressional district, whose boundaries didn't perfectly match those used for local administration. She thought she would have come here even had it been outside the district. The associations the brewery called up were too perfect to ignore.
"Two years ago," she called out to the crowd, "two years ago from this very spot, I called on President Roosevelt to keep us out of war. Did he listen? Did he hear me? Did he hear the will of the people, the farmers and laborers who are the United States of America?"
"No!" people shouted back to her, some in English, some in Yiddish. It was a proletarian crowd, women in cheap cotton shirtwaists, men in shirts without collars and wearing flat cloth caps on their heads, not bourgeois homburgs and fedoras or capitalist stovepipes.
"No!" Flora agreed. "Two years ago, the Socialist Party spoke out against the mad specter of war. Did Teddy Roosevelt and his plutocratic backers heed us? Did they pay the slightest attention to the call for peace?"
"No!" people yelled again. Too many of the women's shirtwaists were mourning black.
"No!" Flora agreed once more. "And what have they got with their war? How many young men killed?" She thought of Yossel Reisen, who hadn't had the slightest notion of the ideological implications of the war in which he'd joined-and who would never understand them now. "How many young men maimed or blinded or poisoned? How much labor expended on murder and the products of murder? Is that why troops paraded through the streets behind their marching bands?"
"They wanted victory!" someone shouted. The someone was Herman Bruck, strategically placed in the crowd. He'd borrowed clothes for the occasion, the fancy ones he usually wore being anything but suited for it.
"Victory!" Flora exclaimed. Bruck was doing everything he could to help her beat the appointed Democrat. That she had to give him. "Victory?" This time, it was a question, a mocking question. She looked around, as if she thought she would see it close by. "Where is it? Washington, D.C., has lain under the Confederates' heavy hands since the first days of the war. We have won a few battles, but how many soldiers has General Custer thrown away to get to Tennessee? And how many battles were shown to be wasted when the Confederates, only two weeks ago, drove our forces back to the Roanoke River? How can anyone in his right mind possibly claim this war is a success?"
Applause poured over her like rain. Two years ago, when she'd urged the people here not to throw the United States onto the fire of a capitalist, imperialist war, she'd been ignored or booed even in the Socialist strongholds of New York City. Now people had seen the result of what they'd cheered to the skies. Having seen it, they didn't like it so well.
She went on, "My distinguished opponent, Mr. Miller, will tell you this war is a success. Why shouldn't he tell you that? It's made him a success. He was a lawyer no one had ever heard of till Governor MacFarlane pulled his name out of a top hat after Congressman Zuckerman died, and sent him off to Philadelphia to pretend to represent this district.
"Friends, comrades, you know I wouldn't be standing here today if Myron Zuckerman were alive. No, I take that back: I might be standing here, but I'd be campaigning for him, not for myself. But I tell you this: if you remember what Congressman Zuckerman stood for, you'll send me to Philadelphia this November, not a fancy-pants lawyer who's made his money doing dirty work for the trusts."
More applause, loud and vigorous. In preparation for her speech, party workers had done a fine job of sticking up election posters printed in red and white on black all over the brewery, the synagogue across the street, and even the school at the corner of Chrystie and Hester. The Democrats had more money and more workers, which meant they usually put up more posters and hired people to tear down the ones the Socialists used to oppose them. Not this time, though.
And no hulking Soldiers' Circle goons lurked to break up the rally, either. As the fighting heated up, more and more of them-the younger ones-had been called into the Army they so loudly professed to love. And, as the Remembrance Day riots of 1915 slowly faded into the past, the lid on New York City politics slowly loosened. Socialists elsewhere in the country were using government repression in New York as a campaign issue, too. Embarrassment was often a good tool against the minions of the exploiting class.
A couple of caps went through the crowd. Before long, they jingled as they passed from hand to hand. Party workers talked that up: "Come on, folks, give what you can. This is how we keep the truth coming to the American people. This is how we beat the Democrats. This is how we end the war."
Flora descended from her platform. A couple of men-boys, rather-and a couple of solidly built women who looked like factory workers disassembled it and hauled it off to the wagon on which it had come from Socialist Party headquarters. Conscription had hit the party as hard as anyone else.