American Front (57 page)

“As well as I could be—considering,” she answered. “You know how I am—the rest of it, though. You must have got my letters, even if I haven’t heard from you.” She stared at him as defiantly as a Confederate soldier in arms.

He had a mouth full of kugel, and used that respite to good advantage. “Yes, I know,” he said, and then, “I’m sorry, Sophie. I didn’t intend that to happen.”

Didn’t intend which to happen?
Flora wondered.
Didn’t intend to sleep with Sophie or didn’t intend to get her with child?
But she held her tongue, to see what her older sister would do.

“People don’t intend that to happen,” Sophie said, taking him to mean he hadn’t planned to impregnate her. “But it does, and then they have to decide what to do next.”

“That’s why I came here,” Yossel answered. “I managed to get four days’ leave. I spent most of one day coming up from Maryland, and I’ll need most of another to get back. Between times”—he licked his lips—“we can get married.”

Bourgeois respectability
, Flora thought as Sophie clapped her hands together once and nodded. The idea should have carried more scorn than it did. Somehow, the feeling of contempt for bourgeois values was harder to come by when those values benefited her sister.

Benjamin Hamburger also nodded, as if he’d expected nothing less from Yossel. Maybe he had expected nothing less. But he raised an objection: “Even with the war, you’ll have trouble finding a rabbi to perform the ceremony on such short notice.”

Yossel Reisen shrugged. “Then we’ll find a judge, and find a rabbi when I get a longer leave, or else after the war is over.”

“
You
say that?” Flora exclaimed. “You, who wanted to do nothing but sit on your
tokhus
and study Talmud all day?”

“Flora!” Sophie said indignantly. Flora realized everyone else must have heard what she said as an insult. She hadn’t meant it that way; what she’d been expressing was astonishment.

For a wonder, Yossel understood that. He held up a hand, which, after a moment, quieted the angry outcry from the rest of Flora’s family. “Yes, I say that,” he answered. “When you have been where I have been, when you have seen what I have seen, when you have done what I have done…” His voice trailed away. He was sitting across the table from Flora, and looking in her direction, but he wasn’t looking at her. He looked through her, to some place he alone saw, some place maybe more real to him than the crowded apartment in which he sat. He needed a little while to realize he had stopped talking, and coughed a couple of times before he resumed: “When all that is true, you know, right down to the soles of your boots you know, how little time there is. And when you have a little of that little time, you do what you can with it, and what you cannot do now, you will do later, if God lets you.”

No one spoke for a minute or so after that. Then, quietly, Benjamin Hamburger asked, “Sophie, is this all right with you?”

“Yes,” Sophie answered, also quietly. Perhaps of its own accord, her left hand settled on her belly, which was beginning to bulge. “As Yossel said, we have only a little time. We’ll do as much as we can with it.”

Flora’s father looked to her mother. Sarah Hamburger didn’t say yes, but she didn’t say no, either. “It is not a perfect arrangement,” Benjamin said, “but what in life is perfect except God? If Sophie agrees, it will do.”

Flora was temperamentally opposed to compromise of any kind: she was the one who’d wanted to fight to the end against voting to pay for Roosevelt’s war. Here, though…when it was her own family, things didn’t look the same. It wasn’t her choice, anyhow; it was Sophie’s.

“You’ll sleep here on the divan tonight,” her father told Yossel, “as if you were a boarder again.” Everybody smiled at that. Benjamin Hamburger got up and went into the kitchen. He rummaged in the pantry and in a cabinet, and came back with a bottle of whiskey and enough glasses for everyone; Flora’s brothers told how the old men at the
shul
had given each of them his first shot just before his bar mitzvah.

Amid toasts of “
L’chaym!
” everybody knocked back the drinks. Isaac might have been emboldened by the whiskey, for he asked Yossel Reisen, “What—is it like at the front?” Emboldened or not, he sounded hesitant.

Yossel looked into the depths of his glass as he had looked through Flora. At last, he answered, “Think of all the worst things you know in the world. Think of them all in one place. Think of them as ten times as bad as they really are. Then think of them ten times worse than that. What you are thinking about when you do that is one ten-thousandth of what the front is like.”

Nobody asked him any more questions.

Somewhere in the Yankee lines in the ruins of Big Lick, Virginia, a rifle cracked. About fifty feet away from Reggie Bartlett, an incautious Confederate soldier toppled back into the trench, shot through the face. He wasn’t dead, not yet: a scream bubbled through the blood flooding from his nose, his mouth, and the wound between them.

“God damn that fucking sniper to hell,” somebody snarled as a couple of men hauled their wounded comrade back toward the doctors to see if they could do anything for him. “That’s the fourth one of us he’s got on this sector this week. We ever catch him, I’ll gut-shoot him and watch him die.”

Bartlett hardly looked up, either for the gunshot or for the screams and curses following it. He was hunting lice, a matter that could have taken up most of his waking day if duties demanded by his officers hadn’t intervened. Every one of the little bastards you crunched between your thumbnails was one more that wouldn’t bite you, one more that wouldn’t leave sores and scabs in your hair, one more that wouldn’t leave itchy welts on your body.

He tried to remember his leave in Richmond. He knew he’d been there, seen old friends, made new ones, got drunk, got laid at a soldiers’ brothel full of bored-looking colored girls. It was a matter of a few weeks, not months or years, but seemed far more distant than that. When you were at the front, everything else was distant.

If you singed the seams of your tunic and trousers, you killed nits and drove lice out to where you could grab them and squash them. Reggie lighted a candle, shed his tunic, and ran the flame along one sleeve, pausing every so often to slaughter the vermin he’d flushed out.

A fat rat came strolling down the middle of the trench. It was light enough not to get stuck in the mud from the recent rains; Bartlett wished he could have said the same. The rat paused and stared at him with its beady black eyes.
I’ll steal your rations, see if I don’t
, it seemed to say.
And if I don’t, one day soon a Yankee shell will turn you into rations—for me
.

Shells never seemed to kill rats—or maybe it was just that there were so many of them, every piece of artillery in the world couldn’t have slaughtered them all. Well, if wholesale didn’t work, there was always retail. Reggie snatched up the entrenching tool beside him and threw it at the rat. The rat was quick and alert, but he’d guessed right about which way it would jump, and it couldn’t outrun the sharpened shovel blade, which cut it almost in two. Bartlett retrieved the tool and used it to smash in the twitching rat’s head. The twitching ceased. He looked around to see if any more rats were close by. Spying none, he went back to delousing his tunic.

“You hammered that fat, ugly bastard,” Corporal Robert E. McCorkle said.

“Sure did,” Bartlett agreed. McCorkle was a fat, ugly bastard himself, but saying so struck Reggie as impolitic. “They’re getting awfully bold these days, parading through the trenches like they’ve got stars in wreaths on their collars.”

McCorkle laughed at that. Reggie relighted the candle, which had gone out, and went back to killing lice. He had just started on the other sleeve when first one man and then several began banging with entrenching tools on shell casings that had been hung like temple bells from tripods made of boards. With the unmusical banging, a warning cry raced up and down the trench line: “Gas! The Yanks are using gas!”

Being shot at, having artillery shells land all around, even going out between the trench lines to lay wire or to raid—Reggie was used to all that, almost to the same degree he’d been used to waiting at a Richmond corner for the streetcar to pick him up on his way between his apartment and the pharmacy where he’d worked. It wasn’t that he was fearless; it was much more that anything, even the worst of horrors, becomes routine, and what is routine no longer terrifies.

But gas, gas was new. The U.S. soldiers hadn’t used it on the Roanoke front, not till now. The masks—which looked like plump versions of the ones surgeons wore over their mouths and noses—and the hyposulfite solution in which to soak them had arrived days before. He snatched his mask out of the breast pocket in his tunic where he’d stowed it and sprinted, bare-chested, for the hyposulfite tin.

There, he discovered arrangements could have been better. Everybody else was as frightened of the poisonous stuff the damnyankees were spewing as he was, and the big tin stood at the center of a struggling knot of men.

“From a line!” Corporal McCorkle shouted from behind him. “God damn you, from a line, and on the double!”

Discipline held; when a voice with command told the men what to do, they did it. Bartlett dipped his mask into the big, widemouthed tin and tied it over his face as the first yellow-green tendrils of chlorine gas came down into the trench like so many poisonous snakes slithering in the late spring sun.

His eyes burned. He passed the palm of his hand over the dripping mask and then over his eyes. That helped, a little. He had no idea whether the hyposulfite solution would hurt his eyes. He knew damn well the chlorine would, though.

His lungs burned, too. He could smell the harsh chlorine in his nose, taste it in his mouth. The mask he wore like a cold, clammy veil was anything but perfect. But men who hadn’t donned masks, or who hadn’t tied them tight, were coughing and choking, clutching at their throats and turning blue, Not perfect, no, but a hell of a lot better than nothing.

“If you can’t get to the chemical, piss on your mask!” That was Captain Wilcox, his voice muffled by the mask he was wearing “It’s disgusting, but it may keep you alive.”

As the chlorine spread from the front-line trenches toward those farther to the rear, U.S. artillery opened up, pounding the Confederates with a harsh bombardment. Reggie Bartlett huddled in the mud near the rat he had killed. Any one of those shells could lay him open the way his entrenching tool had gutted the rat. He held his hands over his face, both to protect it from splinters and to keep his mask on tight.

The bombardment was sharp, but it was also short: no more than fifteen minutes. “Up, dammit, up!” Captain Wilcox shouted. Farther along the trench, the battalion commander, Major Colleton, echoed the command: “Get up and fight like Americans! Here come the damnyankees!”

Bartlett’s eyes burned worse than ever; tears streamed down his face. But he hadn’t been killed, he hadn’t been maimed.
Thank you, Jesus
. He scrambled to his feet and ran to the firing step. Sure enough, the Yankees were cutting their way through the wire. Most of them wore masks like his. The white cloth squares made good targets. He fired again and again and again. U.S. soldiers fell. More kept coming, though, their uniforms almost the color of chlorine.

Confederate machine guns opened up. The damnyankees started falling faster. But still they came, urgent shouts blurred under the hyposulfite-soaked gauze pads on their mouths. Some of them got close enough to throw grenades. One burst near Bartlett, leaving him stunned and half deafened. After a moment, he realized his left leg hurt.
Fragment or a nail or whatever must have kissed me
, he thought. When he put weight on the leg, it held. He could worry about the wound later, then.

A few Yankees leaped down into the Confederate trench, but none near him: those men were dead or wounded or running or crawling back to their own lines. A pistol barked, its sharp report like a terrier yapping amid retrievers. Probably Major Colleton, doing some of his own fighting. You couldn’t fault him for guts.

“God damn,” a man in butternut beside Reggie said reverently as the firing slowed. “We beat the sons of bitches back.”

Bartlett needed a moment to recognize Jasper Jenkins with a mask on his face, even though the two of them had shared cornbread and jam and coffee for breakfast that morning. “Sure as hell did, Jasper,” he answered, using his friend’s name to cover his own embarrassment. “These masks do help. Nice to know we got something at least partway right.”

Negro stretcher-bearers, Red Cross armbands on their left sleeves and masks on their faces, came forward to take the men who had been gassed and the other casualties back to where the doctors could work on them. Staring at the yellowish foam on the lips of one poor fellow who moaned with every breath he took, Reggie wondered what the quacks could do for him, and if they could do anything at all. He brought his hand up to his mask. If he’d been at the tail end of that line instead of near the front…

“I’d have pissed on my mask,” he said. “Anything is better than nothing.” He unbuttoned his fly and faced the wall of the trench. He noticed he was pissing on a dead rat. Nobody had smacked it with an entrenching tool: like the gassed soldier he’d seen, it had yellow foam on its whiskers.

As he walked along the trench, he saw more rats, either frozen in death or thrashing like soldiers who’d inhaled what wasn’t an immediately fatal dose of chlorine. He kicked a couple of the corpses, and stamped the life out of a couple that were still breathing.

“Gas must bring the sons of bitches up out of their holes,” Jasper Jenkins said.

“Reckon so,” Reggie agreed. “They come up for fresh air, but there isn’t any fresh air. Maybe we’ll have a few days without them thieving and chewing on dead bodies.” He picked up the tunic he’d thrown down when the gas attack started. “I wonder if that chlorine stuff kills lice, too. If it does, there may be something to it after all.” He squatted down to examine the tunic and find out.