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."
"Yeah," Andersen said again, quite unself-consciously. A couple of rifle shots rang out, but they were three, four hundred yards away: nothing to worry about. "Might as well finish taking stock of what they did to us this time."
All things considered, the company had got off lucky. Only a couple of men had died, and most of the wounds were home-towners, not the sort where the fellow who'd taken them begged you to shoot him and put him out of his anguish, and where, if you did, nobody ever said a word about it to you afterwards. Martin had seen his share of wounds like that; talking with the other soldiers in his squad, he said, "You see one like that, it's your share for a lifetime and then some."
"Yeah." Specs Peterson laughed. "You want to hear something stupid, Sarge? Back before the war started, I was thinkin' about lettin' my beard grow out, on account of I couldn't stand the sight of blood when I nicked myself with a razor."
"That's pretty stupid, all right," Martin agreed, which made Specs glare at him in what might have been mock anger and might have been real. He went on, "You too cheap to pay a barber to do it for you? Those boys, they make damn sure they don't cut you."
"Too cheap, hell," Peterson came back. "Where you from, Sarge?"
"Toledo," Martin answered. "You know that."
"Yeah, you're right. I forgot," Peterson said. "All right, Toledo, that's the big city. Me, I'm off a farm in the western part of Nebraska. The barber in the little country town, he was so drunk all the time, it's a wonder he never cut anybody's throat. And I was ten miles outside of town, and we ain't never gonna have the money for a flivver. So how the hell am I supposed to get a barber to shave me?"
"Damned if I know," Martin answered. "So blood doesn't bother you any more, that right?"
Specs Peterson snorted. "What do you think?"
Martin inspected him. He was even filthier than he had been before the dive into the shelter, and had unkempt stubble sprouting on cheeks and chin. Frowning sadly, Martin said, "So why the hell haven't you shaved any time lately?"
"I was going to this morning, Sarge, honest, but the Rebs started shelling us." Behind his steel-rimmed spectacles, Peterson raised an eyebrow. "You may have noticed."
"Oh, yeah." Martin snapped his fingers. "You know, I knew something was goin' on then, but I couldn't quite remember what." Paul Andersen threw a clod of dirt at him. In the trenches, though, it passed for wit.
The Dakota steamed out of Pearl Harbor. Standing on deck, Sam Carsten said, "You know somethin', Vic? This ship puts me in mind of the old joke about the three-legged dog. The wonder is, she goes at all."
"Yeah, well, I ain't gonna argue with you, you know what I'm saying?" Vic Crosetti answered, scratching his hairy arm. "I'll tell you something else, too. She's as ugly as a three-legged dog right now."
"Yeah," Sam agreed, mournful for a couple of reasons. For one thing, if he'd scratched himself half as hard as Crosetti was doing, he'd have drawn blood from his poor, sunburned hide. For another, the Dakota really was ugly these days. "What she's really like is a guy who took one in the trenches and he ends up with a steel plate in his head."