Walk in Hell (72 page)

“You can try,” the submersible skipper answered. “My duty is to escape if I can.” He nodded to George Enos. “I wish I’d never seen you once, let alone twice, but I do thank you for speaking up for me there.”

George looked him in the eye. “If you were the skipper of the damn commerce raider that got my fishing boat when I was still a civilian, you’d be swimming now, for all of me.”

“Get moving,” Lieutenant Crowder said again, and, along with his crew, Ralph Briggs headed for the—

“The brig. Briggs is going to the brig,” George said, and laughed as the Confederates, one by one, went down the hatchway and disappeared.

Standing in Bay View Park, Chester Martin peered east across the Maumee River to the Toledo, Ohio, docks. Mist that was turning to drizzle kept him from seeing as much as he would have liked, but a couple of light cruisers from the Lake Erie fleet were in port, resupplying so they could go off and bombard the southern coast of Ontario again.

Martin turned to his younger sister. “You know what, Sue? This business of watching the war from the far side of the river is a…lot more fun than being in it up close.” The pause came from his swallowing a pungent intensifier or two. In the trenches, he cursed as automatically as he breathed. He’d horrified his mother a couple of times, and now tried to watch himself around his female relatives.

Sue giggled. She’d caught the hesitation. She found his profanity more funny than horrifying, but then she was of his generation. They shared a sharp-nosed, sharp-chinned family look, though Sue’s hair was brown, not sandy heading toward red like his.

She said, “I’m just sorry you had to get hurt so you could come home for a while.”

“Oh, I knew it was a hometowner as soon as I got it,” he said, exaggerating only a little. “Never worried about it for a minute. Now that my arm’s out of the sling, I expect they’ll be sending me back to the front before too long.”

“I wish they wouldn’t,” she said, and took his good right hand in both of hers. She was careful with his left arm, even if he’d finally had it released from its cloth cocoon.

From behind him, a gruff voice said, “You there, soldier—let’s see your papers, and make it snappy.”

Martin’s turn was anything but snappy; it let the military policeman see the three stripes on his sleeve. The MP was only a private first class. He didn’t worry about that, though, not with the law on his side. Martin was convinced the military police attracted self-righteous sons of bitches the way spilled sugar drew ants.

But this fellow wouldn’t be able to give him a hard time. He took the necessary paperwork from a tunic pocket and handed it to the MP. “Convalescent leave, eh?” the fellow said. “We’ve seen some humbug documents of this sort lately, Sergeant. What would happen if I took you back to barracks and told you to show me a scar?”

“I’d do it, and you’d get your ass in a sling,” Martin answered steadily. He looked the private first class up and down with the scorn most front-line soldiers felt for their not-quite-counterparts who hadn’t seen real action. “Why is it, sonny boy, the only time you ever see a dead MP, he’s got a Springfield bullet in him, not a Tredegar?”

Sue didn’t get that. The military policeman did, and turned brick red. “I ought to keep these,” he said, holding Martin’s papers so the sergeant couldn’t take them back.

“Go ahead,” Martin said. “Let’s head back to your barracks. We can both tell your commanding officer about it. Like I say, doesn’t matter a bean’s worth to me.”

A soldier ready to go back to barracks and take his case to the officer of the day was not a spectacle the MP was used to. Angrily, he thrust Martin’s papers back at him. Angrily, he stomped off, the soles of his boots slapping the bricks of the walkway.

“That’s telling him,” Sue said proudly, clutching her brother’s arm. “He didn’t have any business talking to you like that.”

“He could ask for my papers, to make sure I’m not absent without leave,” Martin said. “But when he got nasty afterwards—” He made a face. “He didn’t have any call to do that, except he’s a military policeman, and people have to do what he tells them.”

“Like the Coal Board officials,” Sue said. “And the Ration Board, and the Train Transportation Board, and the War Loan subscription committees, and—” She could have gone on. Instead, she said, “All those people were bad enough before the war. They’re worse now, and there are more of them. And if you’re not a big cheese yourself, they act like little tin gods and give you a nasty time just to show they can do it.”

“Makes you wonder what the country’s coming to sometimes, doesn’t it?” Martin said. “Old people say there used to be more room to act the way you pleased, back before the Second Mexican War taught us how surrounded we are. Gramps would always go on about that, remember?”

She shook her head. “Not really. I was only six or seven when he died. What I remember about him was his peg leg, and how he always pretended he was a pirate on account of it.”

“Yeah. He got hurt worse than I did, and the doctors in the War of Secession weren’t as good as they are nowadays, either, I don’t suppose. He used to talk about stacks of cut-off arms and legs outside the surgeons’ tents after a battle.”

Sue looked revolted. “Not with me, he didn’t.”

“You’re a girl,” Chester reminded her. “He used to tell me and Hank all the horrible stuff. We ate it up like gumdrops.”

She sighed. “I was only seven when Henry died, too. What a horrible year that was, everybody wailing all the time. I miss him sometimes, same as Gramps.”

“I was—eleven? Twelve? Something like that,” Martin said. “He was two years older than me, I know that much. I remember the way the doctor kept shaking his head. For all the good he did us, he might as well have been a Sioux medicine man. Scarlet fever, any of those things—I wish they could cure them, not just tell you what they are.”

“He’d be in the Army, too—Henry, I mean.” Sue’s laugh was startled. “I don’t think I ever thought of Henry all grown up till now.”

“He’d be in the Army, all right,” Chester agreed. “He’d be an officer, I bet. Hank was always sharp as a razor. People listened to him, too. I didn’t—but I was his brother, after all.” A chilly breeze from off the lake seemed to slice right through his uniform. “Brr! Enough sightseeing. Let’s go home and sit in front of the fire.”

They caught the trolley and went southwest down Summit, alongside the Maumee. After three or four miles, the trolley car turned inland and clattered past the county courthouse and, across the street from it, the big bronze statue of Remembrance, sword bared in her right hand.

Pointing to it, Sue said, “We just got some new stereoscope views of New York City. Now I know how good a copy of the statue on Bedloe’s Island that one is, even if ours is only half as tall.”

“We’ve still got a lot to pay people back for—the United States do, I mean,” Martin said. Now he laughed. “I’ve got a Rebel to pay back, and I don’t even know who he is.”

The trolley took them over the Ottawa River, a smaller stream than the Maumee, and up into Ottawa Heights. The closest stop was three blocks from their apartment house. Chester remembered how cramped he’d felt in the flat before the war started. He had no more room now—less, in fact, because they’d had to make room for him when he came back to convalesce—but he didn’t mind. After crowded barracks and insanely crowded bombproof shelters, a room of his own, even a small one, seemed luxury itself.

His mother—an older, graying version of Sue—all but pounced on him when he came in the door. “You have a letter here from the White House!” Louisa Martin exclaimed, thrusting the fancy envelope at him. The Martin family had a strong tradition of never opening one another’s mail; that tradition, obviously, had never been so sorely tested as now.

“Don’t be silly, Mother,” Chester said. “The Rebs are still holding onto the White House.” His mother glared at him, and with reason. Even if business got done in Philadelphia, Washington remained the capital of the USA.

Sue squeaked. “Open it!” she said, and then grabbed his arm so he couldn’t.

He shook her off and did open the envelope. “‘Dear Sergeant Martin,’” he read from the typed letter, “‘I have learned you were wounded in action. Since you have defended not only the United States of America but also me personally on my visit to the Roanoke front, I dare hope my wishes for your quick and full recovery will be welcome. Sincerely yours, Theodore Roosevelt.’” The signature was in vivid blue ink.

“That’s wonderful,” Louisa Martin said softly. “TR keeps track of everything, doesn’t he?”

“Seems to,” Martin agreed. He kept staring at that signature. “Well, I was going to vote for him anyhow. Guess I’ll have to vote twice now.” If you knew the right people, in Toledo as in a good many other U.S. towns, you could do that, though he’d meant if for a joke.

His mother sighed. “One of these days, Ohio may get around to granting women’s suffrage. Then you wouldn’t need to vote twice.”

Stephen Douglas Martin, Chester’s father, came home from the mill about an hour later. “Well, well,” he said, holding the letter from TR out at arm’s length so he could read it. He was too old to worry about conscription, and had been promoted three times at work since the start of the war, when younger men with better jobs had to put on green-gray. “Ain’t that somethin’, Chester? Ain’t that somethin’? We ought to frame this here letter and keep it safe so you can show it to your grandchildren.”

“That would be something, Pop,” Martin said. He thought of himself with gray hair and wrinkled skin, sitting in a rocking chair telling war stories to little boys in short pants. Gramps’stories had always been exciting, even the ones about how he’d lost his leg. Could Chester make life in the trenches exciting? Was it anything he’d want to tell his grandchildren? Maybe, if he could show them the president’s letter.

“I’m proud of you, son,” his father said. “The Second Mexican War was over before they called me up. My father fought for our country, and now you have, too. That’s pretty fine.”

“All right, Pop,” Martin answered. For a moment, he wondered what his father would have said if he’d stopped that bullet with his head instead of his arm. Whatever it was, he wouldn’t have been around to hear it.

“Supper!” his mother called. The ham steaks that went with the fried potatoes weren’t very big—meat had got expensive as the dickens this past year, he’d heard a hundred times—but they were tasty. And there were plenty of potatoes in the big, black iron pan. She served Chester seconds of those, and then thirds.

“You’re going to have to let out the pants on my uniform,” he said, but all she did was nod—she was ready to do it. His father lighted a cigar, and passed one to him. The tobacco was sharp and rather nasty, but a cigar was a cigar. He leaned back in his chair as his mother and sister cleared away the dishes. For now, the front seemed far, far away. He tried to stretch each moment as long as he could.

“Come on!” Jake Featherston called to the gun crews of his battery. “We’ve got to keep moving.” Rain poured down out of the sky. The southern Maryland road, already muddy, began turning to something more like glue, or maybe thick soup. “Come on!”

A whistle in the air swelled rapidly to a scream. A long-range shell from a Yankee gun burst about a hundred yards to Featherston’s left. A great fountain of muck rose into the air. None splattered down on him, but that hardly mattered. He’d long since got as muddy as a human being could.

More U.S. shells descended, feeling for the road down which the First Richmond Howitzers were retreating. The damnyankee gunners couldn’t quite find it. The barrage, instead of swinging west from where the first one hit, went east. That meant they’d probably find another road and hurt a different part of the Army of Northern Virginia. Jake didn’t care. If he got out in one piece, he’d settle for that.

“Hey, Sarge!” Michael Scott said. With the shelling and the rain, the loader had to call two or three times to get Featherston’s attention. When he finally had it, he asked, “What do we do when we get to the Potomac?”

“You think I’m the War Department, God damn them to hell?” Featherston answered. The War Department, and especially its upper echelons, did not contain his favorite people. “If the damnyankees’ aeroplanes haven’t bombed all the bridges to hell and gone, I reckon we cross over ’em and go back into Virginia.”

“But what are we gonna do there?” Scott persisted.

“I told you, I’m not the goddamn War Department,” Jake said. He shook his head, which made cold rainwater drip down the back of his neck. They wouldn’t make him an officer, they didn’t have the brains to notice when the niggers were going to rise up, and they were still in charge of running the war? Where was the justice in that? And his own men expected him to think like a fancy-pants Richmond general? Where was the justice in
that
?

“But, Sarge—” the loader said, like a little boy complaining when his mother wouldn’t let him do what he wanted.

“All right,” Featherston said wearily. “Here’s what we do, you ask me. We cross the bridge, if it’s still up there. All the artillery we’ve got goes into battery on the south bank. Soon as the last man from the Army of Northern Virginia comes out of Maryland, we drop the bridge right into the middle of the river,
bam
. Soon as the damnyankees get in range of our guns, we start plastering them, hard as we can. Those sons of bitches are already in the western part of the state. Sure as the devil don’t want ’em getting a toehold anywhere else, do we?”

“Nope.” Scott sounded—not happy now, but contented. He’d got Jake to tell him what he could have worked out for himself if he’d had an ounce of sense. Featherston shook his head again. More rainwater ran down his neck. What difference did that make, when he was already so soaked?

He cursed the Yankees, he cursed the mud, and he cursed the War Department, the last more sulfurously than either of the other two. “Christ, no wonder we’re losing,” he told the unheeding sky. “If the damn fools can’t do the little things right, how are they supposed to do the big ones?” He supposed the United States Army was afflicted with a War Department, too, but somehow it seemed to be overcoming the handicap.