"I've done that," said Napoleon Dibble, one of the privates in the squad. "Puked my guts out, too, I tell you."
"I puked my guts out, too, the first time," Bartlett agreed. But it wasn't quite agreement, not down deep. By the way Nap Dibble talked, he'd done it once. Reggie had lost track of how many times he'd known that oozy, yielding sensation and the sudden, stinking rush of corruption that went with it. By the time the damnyankees captured him, having it happen again hadn't been worth anything more than a mild oath.
Something swooped out of the black sky and came down with a thump and a scrabble only a few yards away. Hissing an alarm, Reggie swung his rifle that way. To his amazement, Sergeant Hairston laughed at him. "Ain't nothin' but an owl droppin' on a mouse, Bartlett. Don't they got no owls up on the Roanoke front?"
"I don't hardly remember seeing any," Reggie answered. "They've got buzzards, and they've got crows, and they've got rats. Don't hardly remember seeing mice-rats ran 'em out, I guess. Hated those bastards. They'd sit up on their haunches and look at you with those beady little black eyes, and you'd know what they'd been eating, and you'd know they were figuring they'd eat you next." Napoleon Dibble made a disgusted noise. Ignoring him, Bartlett finished, "The one good thing about when the Yankees would throw gas at us was that it'd shift the rats-for a little while."
"Gas," Hairston said thoughtfully. "Haven't seen that more than a time or two out here. Haven't missed it any, neither, and that's a fact. You run up against any of those what-do-you-call-'ems-barrels?"
"No, I've just heard about those, and seen 'em on a train after I got out of the Yankee camp," Bartlett answered. "They hadn't started using them by the time I got captured. They have 'em out here?"
"Ain't seen any yet," the sergeant said. "Like I told you, this is the ass end of the war. Those armored cars, now, I've seen some of those, but a trench'll make an armored car say uncle."
"Don't like 'em anyways," Nap Dibble said, to which the other members of the squad added emphatic if low-voiced agreement.
Not too far away-farther than the owl that had frightened Reggie, but not all that much-something started screaming. He froze. Was it a wounded man? A crazy man? A woman having a baby right out in the middle of no-man's-land? "Coyote," Sergeant Hairston explained laconically. "Scares you out of a year's growth the first time you hear one, don't it?"
"Lord, yes." Reggie knew his voice was shaky. His heart pounded too fast for him to feel more than mildly embarrassed. Crazy coyotes were something he hadn't had to worry about back on the Roanoke front.
And then, from up ahead, he heard a noise he did recognize: the metallic click of a bayonet against a rock. He stiffened and stared around for the nearest shell hole into which to dive. The other members of the patrol looked around, too, but not with the tight-lipped intensity they would have shown back in Virginia. Softly, Pete Hairston called, "That you, Toohey?"
"Yeah, it's me. Who the hell else is it gonna be?" A Yankee voice came floating out of the night. The accent was different from the one Ralph Briggs had tried to get Reggie to learn, but it wasn't like anything that had ever been heard in the CSA. Toohey went on, "Your damn artillery don't ease up, you're gonna run into a patrol where the sergeant don't feel like doin' any business 'cept shootin' you Rebs."
"Chance we take in this here line o' work," Hairston answered. "You got what you said you was gonna have?"
"Sure as hell do." Something in a jug sloshed suggestively. Toohey went on, "What about youse guys?"
Several of the men in Hairston's squad passed the sergeant their tobacco pouches. He went forward by himself and exchanged a few low-voiced words with the U.S. soldiers. When he came back, he didn't have the tobacco any more, but he was carrying the jug.
The Yanks withdrew. They were pretty quiet, but not quiet enough to have kept star shells from going up on the Roanoke front and machine guns and mortars from chasing them back to their lines. Things were different out here. "Is that what I think it is, there in the jug?" Bartlett asked, pointing.
"Sure as hell is," Hairston answered. "Hard to get popskull around these parts. All sorts of Indians here in Sequoyah, and they all got chiefs that hate the stuff. So what we do is, we swap smokes for it with the damnyankees: tobacco they got is so bad, it's a cryin' shame."
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.