The Wilson Deception (3 page)

The president took a breath and shook his head. He turned to the next bed. “Hello, son,” he said, leaning over this time.

They had been at it for three hours. When he arrived, Wilson said he was going to see them all, except for those with infectious diseases. Admiral Grayson had barred him from seeing anyone who might be contagious. A bit past halfway, Wilson had seen much of the hospital's horrors. Men with bullet wounds. Men peppered with shrapnel. Men with parts blown off by cannon shells or rotted off by trench foot. Men without ears or noses.

After another fifteen minutes in the gas ward, they retired to the corridor where Wilson's two aides loitered. Mrs. Wilson had already departed for another soldiers' hospital.

“Would you like a break?” Fraser asked the president.

“No. I should keep going. Dare I ask how much more?”

“There are the shell-shock wards. Some of those men will always need to be in a hospital. They can be . . . difficult, trouble-some—”

“I'll go there, Major.”

“And four more general wards.”

Wilson nodded.

“President Wilson!” The voice came from an approaching wheelchair occupied by a red-haired man whose legs ended at the knees. He held his hand out. “I'm from Georgia, outside Augusta.”

“Well, sir, Augusta was my home, too, though I was only a boy there.” Wilson flashed his smile as the two shook hands.

“I know it, sir. That's why I wanted to tell you, so's you'd know that at one of the hospitals I was at over here, they mixed the colored and white troops together.”

Wilson turned to Fraser. “Is this true, Major?”

“I can't say, sir. Close to the front, when men are wounded and dying . . .”

“Not this hospital, of course,” said the soldier in the wheelchair. “There's no colored here. But I thought you should know.”

“Thanks, soldier. I'll look into it,” Wilson said. “Perhaps you can tell me something. Why do there seem to be so many soldiers with leg wounds in this hospital?”

The man in the wheelchair gave the president a searching look, then shrugged. “Well, sir, the boys who got wounded higher, not many of them got this far.”

“Of course,” Wilson said. He bowed slightly. “Thank you for stopping to see me.”

As the wheelchair rolled away, the hinge of Wilson's jaw bulged with tension. “I sent these men to war, Major. These are my fellows. They've made terrible sacrifices. I must use all the moral force I can summon to give meaning to their sacrifices, though it means remaking the world. I will see it through. You may rely upon that.”

 

I
n the hesitant morning light, Joshua's eyes traced the cracks in the ceiling plaster of what had once been the dining room. The cracks formed a spider web of decay and fatigue. Some were wide enough for a fingertip. After four years of occupation by the French Army, then by the American Expeditionary Force, the chateau's owners soon would recover a husk of what was once a sumptuous home. Their decision to settle close to the border with Germany had been a mistake. Some of the trenches were no more than twenty miles away.

The guards from the Negro soldiers' lockup—a glorified tent enclosure—had brought Joshua in early. His trial would end that day in the makeshift courtroom. His defense lawyer wanted to talk with him about what to expect. Not so much a conversation, Joshua figured, as a warning.

One of the guards at the door cried out, “Attention!”

Captain Chadsworth Nash waved for Joshua to remain seated, then extended his hand. He turned a chair to face Joshua and sat with a groan. For an officer and a lawyer, he wasn't so bad. For a soldier, he was short and stout.

Skipping social niceties, Nash reviewed the day's schedule, beginning with the closing arguments. He nodded toward the table that served as the judge's bench. “I know they look stuffy up there, but three of the five were combat officers. They'll appreciate that you're an educated man, a college graduate, and your record as a platoon leader. They know that you and the Ninety-third were in bad places and that you fought well. We've got testimony on that.”

“You mean we took a lot of German lives.”

“Yes, that, but also that the men followed you, you led them well.” Nash was giving Joshua his earnest look, the one he used on the judges.

Joshua was tired of it, tired of being on trial for desertion. “I was thinking about that last night, taking lives,” he said. “One minute they had their lives. Then we took them. What did we do with them? We had no use for them.”

“They were trying to kill you.”

Joshua smiled with the corner of his mouth. “Yes. Some were.”

Nash shifted in his chair. “Sergeant Cook, this isn't the moment for philosophy.”

“Sir, I still think we should have testimony from the French officers. They know my conduct better than the Americans do. Hell, we wore French helmets and carried French guns.”

“I'm afraid this court wouldn't care much what some French officers said. I've seen it in other trials. The British, either.” Nash made as though to stand. “Listen, I need to go over my argument.”

Left alone again, Joshua's mind wandered. He couldn't stop it. When he was first arrested, two months before, he raged over the stupid charges. It was incredible really, to be accused of desertion after the fighting he had seen. As the legal process ground forward, blithely indifferent to his innocence, his rage could slide into terror that he would be officially labeled a coward, then shut up in prison for years. Since the trial began two days before, he had sunk into passivity. Nothing he did seemed to matter.

He had started remembering the fighting. Not in any coherent pattern, just patches and moments.

The feelings. Terror. Chaos. Decisions based on hunches, guesses that saved your life or gave it away. Go forward. Turn back. Take shelter. Help a wounded man. Not that one, he's dead. That one'll die soon. Save yourself. That was the voice that never stopped. Save yourself. It made for bad sleep, no sleep. He sometimes dropped off, only to wake up after ten minutes, or an hour, or two hours. Never more than that. He could lie there and smoke and lose track of time. It was the best he could do, but it wasn't sleep. Once he woke to find himself curled up on the floor of his cell.

He saw a man do that at the front, curl up, right there in the trench. Some ran. Joshua wanted to, but he couldn't. The men in his platoon watched him. Some of the guys were brave, some were sorry specimens. But they all watched him. He was supposed to lead them. So he couldn't run.

The men liked having guns in their hands. All the colored soldiers did. French or American rifles, they didn't care what. Most wanted to fight, fight someone. The hard part was the bombardments, huddled in trench muck, water up to your knees, while shells rained down, hoping not to be shredded by shrapnel or vaporized by a shell blast, hoping not to disappear without a trace, leaving no more evidence of your death than of your life. There was no safe place, less dignity. Jefferson was blown up emptying latrine buckets behind the front trench. It was like playing Russian roulette with a revolver that has cartridges in every chamber.

Joshua spent so much time waiting to die, waiting for the bullet or the shell. Five minutes of bombardment could last forever. The fighting ebbed and flowed, but it never ended. There was always somebody, not far away, trying to kill him. Even dozing, upright, sunk in mud, his brain listened to mortar bombs and rockets and shells, flare guns and rifle fire, gauging the risk, deciding whether to dive on the ground or huddle in a dugout.

At first, he thought that patrols and attacks would bring relief. It would be movement, finally doing something. But they were worse. It wasn't just the artillery and mortars and gas, but also machine guns and riflemen. You were out in the open where they could aim right at you. It was even easier to get killed out there.

The prison camp hadn't seemed so bad at first. At least his men weren't watching him any more, looking to him to have the secret, to know how they could survive.

Joshua realized that Nash was back, shuffling papers next to him. The prosecutor was seated at the parallel table. The guard called out again. The room stood to attention as five white officers walked purposefully to their seats behind the front table. The windows behind them overlooked the chateau's semicircular front drive. On a signal from the presiding officer, the prosecutor began his final argument.

He was hanging it all on the two MPs who arrested Joshua. They were a couple of prize crackers, not interested in a word Joshua said. He found it hard to listen to the prosecutor. So much he said was wrong. The man's heart didn't seem to be in it. The war, after all, was over. Even if Joshua had been hiding out from the front line, even if he was the worst coward in history, what could it matter now?

“Gentlemen of the court.” Nash's voice snapped Joshua out of his reverie. “Sergeant Cook served as a brave soldier for five months of hard fighting. He was wounded twice, and both times returned to the front.” Nash's voice was low, nearly conversational. He didn't gesture a lot. Yet he conveyed, in a controlled way, that he believed in his case, in Joshua.

Joshua appreciated that.

“Sergeant Cook's company had been advancing for six days, through miserable weather. They took two villages from the Germans and a hill that was a powerful stronghold. They were too successful, advanced too far, got out beyond their supplies. They hadn't received provisions for all six days. If it hadn't been for food they took from the Germans, they would have starved. If they hadn't found a well at a farmhouse, thirst alone would have stopped them. But still they advanced, never really sleeping, never really resting, driving the Germans before them.”

Nash paused. “And then his commanding officer, Lieutenant Markham, made a decision. They couldn't last without provisions. Someone needed to go get them. So he chose his best non-commissioned officer, Sergeant Cook, a man he had placed in the front of several attacks. He told the sergeant to take two soldiers and go to the rear. Markham told Sergeant Cook to find food and water, and bring it back. When the sergeant reached the rear, he could see the problem. All was confusion. Thousands of men, separated from their units, wandered here and there. The roads were clogged. Supplies went to the wrong place, and were just plain lost. There was no order.”

Joshua could see one of the officers nod in agreement. It had been pandemonium. Trucks stalled on one-lane roads while horse-drawn teams tipped over, spilling their loads. Other trucks pulled around, then sank in mud up to their hubcaps. MPs screamed. Horns blared. Voices shouted. And always the artillery boomed. It was amateur night at the vaudeville show. It had been better when the Ninety-third fought with the French. At least the French knew how to feed their own soldiers during a battle.

“My colleague,” Nash waved a hand at the prosecutor, “complains that Lieutenant Markham didn't write out his order to Sergeant Cook. He complains that the two men with the sergeant didn't hear the lieutenant give the order. He complains that the lieutenant cannot confirm the order in this trial because he lost his life shortly after ordering Sergeant Cook to retrieve provisions.”

Lost his life, Joshua thought. Careless.

“We wish that the lieutenant, a valiant officer, was able to testify in this court. Nevertheless, gentlemen, this was the middle of the decisive battle of the war. Orders are shouted over blasts of artillery and machine gun fire. Grenades explode. Written orders are a luxury that frontline soldiers like Sergeant Cook don't often enjoy.

“My colleague, though, has no explanation for a key part of the testimony given by those military policemen who are the key to his case. When Sergeant Cook was arrested, he and his men each carried two haversacks jammed with food, enough for an entire platoon. If they were running away, if they had decided to flee danger and abandon their comrades, why would they carry heavy loads? Why wouldn't they travel as light as they possibly could and get away as fast as possible? And why would all three of them stay together? Had they split up, each might have fallen in with some stevedore unit or a trench-digging unit. Several colored units were working behind the lines in that sector. After all his time at the front, Sergeant Cook certainly knew how to avoid battle if he wanted to. But that's not what he was doing. He was gathering supplies, desperately needed supplies, for his comrades.

“The prosecution of this fine soldier doesn't hold together. It's contrary to his record and it's not supported by the evidence or the experience of war. I urge the court to return a verdict of not guilty and send Sergeant Cook back to the duties he performs so well.”

The guards took Joshua outside while the judges conferred. He was grateful for the chance to smoke. War had taught him the virtues of tobacco. It can be smoked most anywhere. It never loses its power to distract from the unpleasantness of the moment. During a shelling, burrowed into a dugout, he could focus his entire mind on the rising smoke from a cigarette tip, its lazy, curving ascent a graceful helix just inches from his face.

He indulged in a trace of a smile. In fat times and thin, cigarettes deliver the same subtle message: the world is unchanged, whatever you experienced before is the same. He remembered what Nash had said. Not the moment for philosophy. What was the moment for?

It wasn't more than fifteen minutes when word came to return to the courtroom. Nash had said a quick verdict would be a good one. Joshua pinched off his cigarette. He pocketed the stub.

After the court delivered its verdict of acquittal, after he stood at attention and saluted the judges, Nash sat him down again. Neither man was smiling.

“You remember what I told you,” the lawyer said.

“General Parkman.”

“Right. He reviews the verdict, and he's the worst son of a bitch in the army. He can sustain it or vacate it and order a retrial.”

“You think he'll vacate it?”

“I do, sergeant. He's death on deserters and just itching to make another example. And he's no friend to the Negro soldier.”

“Then I get retried again?”

“Yup. But without me. They're shipping me out next week.” Nash started to stuff his papers into a valise. “Even if the Germans don't sign a peace treaty, the army figures it doesn't need a lot of lawyers over here any more.” He sat back and passed a hand over his short brown hair. He looked like his stomach hurt. “Listen, after eighteen months I still haven't got the army figured out. But I'm going to tell you that something bothers me. I don't know anything specific. It's little things. The way people in my office act, the way they talk to me about your case. I don't think we were supposed to win today.” He looked up directly at Joshua. “I'm sorry, Sergeant. I wish you luck.”

 

 

 

Joshua was glad to have any visitor on Christmas Eve, even a stranger like Sergeant Virgil Carr. Though Carr was also from the Ninety-third Division, Joshua didn't know the name.

Last Christmas had been miserable enough. They had been on board a converted freight ship so decrepit that it had to return to port twice for repairs. Out on the Atlantic, he had expected any minute to head to the bottom of the ocean, courtesy of a German U-boat or maybe the simple disintegration of the ship. This Christmas promised to be worse.

He shivered once as he waited in the tent used for visits. His greatcoat was heavy, but there wasn't much heat in the camp, certainly not in the tent he shared with seven other prisoners. A guard stood on either side of the tent's entrance, facing him.

A dark-skinned man came through the tent flap. Grinning, he tossed over a pack of Camels. Joshua caught it. As a Christmas gift, it wasn't the worst he'd ever received.

“Now I know you want those,” said Carr, “but I got more than that.” He pointed to a chair on the other side of the tent and one of the guards shrugged. Carr dragged it over next to Joshua, lit his cigarette, then one for himself. “Colonel Hayward sent me.”

“Have you and I met?”

“I'd be surprised. I've been playing in Captain Europe's band, setting these Frenchies on fire. They can't get enough of us. I'm on cornet.”