by Julie Berry
Still worth it. He might wait an extra day or two, just to be smart, but no Southern coward would keep him from coming back to try to win Colette’s heart. Noway, nohow.
ARES
Under the Moons of Mars—January 9, 1918
THE SOLDIERS IN James’s 3rd Section ate lunch on their feet with 2nd Section—fried bully beef with cheese—then gathered in the reserve trench for gas mask training.
“The most important thing, with any kind of gas,” said Sergeant McKendrick, “is to stay calm. Folks want to panic and run, but you suck in a lot more air. Stay calm. Yes, soldier?”
Chad Browning gulped. “Don’t these gases, sir, destroy your lungs? And your eyes?”
Sergeant McKendrick nodded matter-of-factly. “If they don’t kill you first,” he said.
“But”—Browning looked pale—“how do you stay calm for that?”
“Put your mask on,” McKendrick said. “If you’ve lost your mask, you still stay calm. If all else fails, piss on a hankie and breathe through that.”
The 3rd Section recruits glanced around. Was it a joke? Apparently not.
“Now, the Germans are mostly using mustard gas,” the sergeant went on. “With a mask on, your lungs’ll be all right, but it’ll make your skin break out in sores. It gets into your clothes, and you’ll have to strip as soon as you can, or you’ll break out in damnable sores everywhere.”
He seemed to enjoy their stunned faces.
“But, pip-pip,” he said. “The sores hurt like hell, but you recover eventually. Now. These,” he said, passing out small haversacks, “are your box respirators. Put them on.”
James opened the kit and pulled out a rubberized mask. It felt grotesque in his hands, like a freshly killed thing from a swamp. Mick Webber got his on first. Tinted lenses goggled out, and the breathing tube looked like some sinister, groping proboscis. Like a human insect out of a nightmare. No, from a space story he’d read in a serial magazine: “Under the Moons of Mars.”
“Something holding you up, soldier?”
The sergeant eyed him expectantly.
James fumbled to put on his mask. Breathing through the tube was suffocating.
“Take it easy,” warned the sergeant. “You’re lucky you’ve got masks that work. Those poor buggers in the first gas attacks drowned in their own blood.”
The sergeant covered how to distinguish a gas shell from a regular artillery shell, and what the different forms of gas looked and smelled like, and how to spot which way the wind was blowing. At last the 3rd Section folded their masks and trudged back to their traverse of the trenches.
James sat on his pack. So many ways to die, and all they required was the least instant’s neglect of one of two thousand rules for survival. Blow smoke out through your coat. Don’t ever light a third man’s cigarette with the same match; by the time you’ve gotten to the third fellow, a sniper will have spotted your match and taken aim at you.
Even if he followed every rule, a trench mortar or a grenade or—what was it?—Jack Johnson could drop in his lap one day for pure spite and blow him to smithereens.
Goodbye, Life; goodbye, Future; goodbye, Mum, Dad, Maggie, Bob; goodbye, Hazel. Some other lad would someday give her the kiss he’d stupidly postponed.
He had to see her again. He had to get leave time to go see her, somehow. Wherever she was. If she was here in France, there must be a way.
Frank Mason decided to join him.
“You’d best get some sleep now, while you can,” Mason said. “At dark it’ll be stand-to, and then the night work begins.”
James gulped. “You mean, trench raids? Going over to attack the Germans?”
Mason smiled. “Nah. Not yet. Not for you new lads, back here in reserve. But there’ll be plenty of work for us to do. Sandbagging, maybe, or repairing trenches, or digging new ones. We’ll see what fatigue the sergeant assigns us.” He tipped his helmet low over his eyes.
“Mason,” James whispered.
“Yeah?”
“What are the chances of someone like me getting permission to go on leave?”
Mason burst out laughing. “You just got here!”
“I mean, once our rotation is through,” he said. “Thirty days, he said. Ten in each trench, and then some rest. What would the odds be of me getting a couple days’ leave then?”
Frank Mason lifted the brim of his helmet. “You’re nuts,” he said. “Most soldiers don’t see leave until after months of service. And if the fighting picks up, nobody’s going anywhere.”
James persisted. “But if everything were to work out, then what? Would I just ask McKendrick? Or would he be furious?”
The fisherman-turned-soldier shrugged. “Who can say? Yeah, you’d ask him. No telling what his answer would be.”
All right, then.
“But I tell you what,” his friend cautioned. “Don’t even think of asking him if you haven’t been a model soldier between now and then. First up at stand-to. Clean and sharp always. Working hard. First to volunteer for everything.”
James nodded. “Makes sense.” He paused. “Mason,” he said. “D’you miss your wife and kid?”
Frank Mason regarded him curiously. As if to say, What kind of a question is that?
“Every minute of every day.”
James listened.
“I figure I’m lucky to have somebody to miss,” said Frank.
“Got a picture?”
Mason opened his personal haversack and pulled out a small prayer book. From its pages he pulled a faded photograph. The woman sitting there with a chubby baby on her lap looked like someone who always got the joke. The infant looked lusty and strong, ready to give even his soldier father a poke in the eye if it suited his fancy.
“You’re right,” James told his friend. “You are lucky.”
APOLLO
Colt M1910—January 16, 1918
IT’S A CURIOUS thing, sweating to death in subfreezing temperatures, but that’s what all five companies of the 15th New York’s Third Battalion did, hauling wooden railroad ties. They lined them up like the teeth of a miles-long comb and pounded in the spikes that held the iron track in place. Aubrey Edwards, K Company, filled his piano hands with splinters. I wasn’t happy about that.
They’d peeled off their coats and were working in their shirtsleeves, despite bitter breezes blowing off the Atlantic. Their backs ached and their hands were raw. Even so, it felt amazing, drinking all that cold air into a burning-up body. Like bellows to a forge, Hephaestus would’ve said.
Their captains were concerned, though. Sickness had spread throughout Saint-Nazaire. Fevers had laid up hundreds of soldiers in their beds, and some had died. Captain Hamilton Fish III, K Company, worried that sweating in such cold could sicken his soldiers. First Lieutenant James Europe told his Maker that he’d better not lose any more band members to the ague.
I heard his prayer and duly considered it.
This illness was, as I’ve said, my own handiwork, but I do not boast. You can stop giving me that look, Goddess; even then I was busy, inspiring scientists to take a second look at mold, and nowadays penicillin is the miracle of modern science, but I am humble; I seek no praise.
The field kitchen cart arrived with pork-and-bean soup for their lunch. The mess detail ladled everyone’s food and passed out chunks of bread. It wasn’t scrumptious, but it wasn’t terrible, and there was plenty of it. The wind froze them through their sweaty tunics as they ate.
“That’s it,” Joey declared. “I’m getting my coat.”
“Get me mine, too, will you?”
Joey nodded and trudged to where they’d left their belongings. When he returned, carrying Aubrey’s coat and wearing his own, his face wore a worried look.
“What’s this, man?” Joey handed Aubrey his coat, patting the interior pocket.
Aubrey led Joey away from the rest of the Company, and pulled from his hidden pocket the handgun he’d wrestled away from the stranger the night before.
Joey’s mouth hung open. “That ain’t army issue. Where’d you get it?”
Aubrey looked left and right to make sure no one could hear.
“Last night,” he said. “I was leaving the Y hut—”
Joey groaned. “You were out seeing that Belgian girl again, weren’t you?”
“Shh!” Aubrey’s eyes bugged out at Joey. “Can it!”
Joey folded his arms across his chest. Make me.
“I was leaving the hut,” Aubrey said, “and some guy stopped me. Held me up.”
Joey’s eyes grew wide.
“Said we black soldiers better not think we can help ourselves to white women.”
“He what?” Joey’s hands curled into fists.
“Said he wasn’t gonna let us get spoiled, and then go back to the States with an appetite for white women there. Said we’d never go back to black girls once we’d tried white ones.”
“Just let me catch him saying that,” Joey fumed. “I’ll teach him! Southern?”
Aubrey nodded. “Sure sounded like it.”
Joey began to pace back and forth. “I don’t know where to punch first.”
Aubrey nodded. “I know.”
Joey looked up. “You could’ve been killed.” He stopped. “How many were there?”
“Just the one.”
“Did you get a good look at him?”
Aubrey shook his head. “Way too dark last night. Barely saw him at all.”
“But you knocked his head off, right?” Joey said. “Tell me you knocked his head off.”
“Last call for more,” cried the mess soldier with the ladle.
“Dang, I wanted more,” said Joey. “Never mind that. What’d you do?”
Aubrey shrugged. “Took him out, man. What’d you think?” He wiped the dirt off his hands. “Had no weapon, but I laid him out on the ground. He’ll be feeling it for a while.”
As I say, I do not boast, but Aubrey isn’t me.
Joey took a sloppy bite of soup, then pulled out the handgun once more.
“That’s not army issue,” he repeated. “That’s a Colt. The 1910 model.”
“Since when are you the gun expert?” demanded Aubrey.
“Since I went off to war, dummy.” He ran a finger across the pistol’s rough texture. The Smith & Wesson revolvers they’d been issued felt graceful and old-fashioned, with sleek silvery curves and wooden handles. This weapon felt cruel and ugly.
“These are the handguns they give the marines,” Joey said.
Aubrey didn’t much care which branch of the armed forces they were. The 15th New York had already had enough run-ins with bigots in the army.
“What’re you going to do with that Colt?”
Aubrey turned it over in his hand. “An extra pistol might come in handy.”
Joey gave him a penetrating look. “You’re gonna tell Captain Fish about it, aren’t you?”
Aubrey thumped him in the arm. “Are you kidding me? I’d get thrown out on my ear. Court-martialed, maybe, for being out after hours. And with a white girl? No way.”
“Listen, man, you can’t just ignore this. You gotta figure out some way to report it.” He leaned in closer. “I was talking just this morning to a couple of those guys from M Company.”
Aubrey nodded. “So?”
“They’ve got a funeral to go to tonight for one of their men,” Joey whispered. “Geoff Somebody. A Brooklyn boy. They’re saying he died of the flu. That’s what their captain’s saying, I mean. But the M Company men don’t believe it. He was perfectly healthy, and the next thing you know, he disappears. And one of them, they’re saying, says he was sworn to secrecy by the captain, but he found his body. Strangled. And they think it’s the marines that did it.’
Aubrey’s mouth went dry. “That can’t be. There’s no way.”
“You know there’s a way,” Joey said. “Weren’t you at Camp Wadsworth? Or Camp Dix? Or were you busy chasing some girl then, too?”
“K Company! Attention!” barked Captain Fish. “Back to work. These tracks won’t lay themselves, and we’ve got a lot more to lay down before we head in for the day.”
They scraped up the last bites of stew and buttoned up their coats. Until they got heated up again from work, they’d need the warmth.
Joey pulled Aubrey’s elbow and spoke directly into his ear.
“Aub, those Company M boys are saying a group of them is gonna take revenge. An eye for an eye. A marine for one of ours.”
We bite back. Aubrey gulped.
“I came to fight a war with the Germans,” whispered Joey. “For democracy. But they’re gonna start a war right here at Saint-Nazaire. For stupidity.”
APHRODITE
Two Letters Arrive—January 19, 1918
THE BROWN ENVELOPE read, YMCA Interdepartmental Correspondence. It looked highly official. Miss Hazel Windicott, Y Relief Huts, US Army Training Camp, Saint-Nazaire.
Hazel opened it to find a thick envelope addressed to her, from her mother, care of the Y headquarters in Paris. It contained a letter and two more envelopes from James, sent to Poplar.
I would do Hazel an injustice if I didn’t report that she read her mother’s letter first. I would do the truth an injustice if I didn’t report that she could barely see what she read.
She opened the two letters from James, compared dates, and started reading the first.
* * *
December 30, 1917
Dear Hazel,
I like fishing well enough, and if your father loves it, I will love it too.
After Christmas, we received orders to leave Étaples for the Front. We came by train and then a long march through the snow. I’ve traded the call of seagulls for the roar of shells, but they’re still far away. You do see craters, though, and the ruins of old farmhouses. The war is felt everywhere.
We joined up with the Fifth Army just outside the two days ago. I’m not in the trenches yet. The training officer says we new recruits still have a good deal more to learn.
Are you in France? I like thinking of you on the same side of the sea. It’s grand that you volunteered. I visited our Y huts often at Étaples. The Germans may kill us, but only if boredom doesn’t get us first. I envy the lads who will hear you play. What I wouldn’t give to trade places.
I think of you every day. Can’t believe it’s over a month since we were together. Do write to me so I know how to reach you. Be safe, stay well.
Yours,
James
* * *
January 7, 1918
Dear Hazel,
In case my last letter got lost, I’ve been at for a week and a half. You must be in France now. Where did you end up?
The weather’s cold, but the sun is pleasant at midday and it warms things up considerably. Apparently I’m not half bad at target shooting.
I don’t know when my turn for leave will come around, but when it does, I could take a train to Paris and meet you there. Is Paris within your reach? Let’s meet there.
I wish I were the sort with words to express what the thought of you brings me.
Say you’ll come, do. I owe you something.
Yours,
James
Hazel burst into Colette’s room, waving the letters. She found her friend pinning up her dark curls with the help of a small travel mirror.
“A letter?” asked Colette. “From your Jacques?”
Hazel cast herself down upon Colette’s cot, nearly crumpling it. “Two letters. He’s gone to the Front.” Hazel scanned the lines again. “With the Fifth Army. But he’s not in the trenches yet. He’s still training in reserve. Colette,” s
he said breathlessly, “he wants me to go see him! In Paris!”
Colette pinned up another sleek curl. “How marvelous!”
“How can I go?” Hazel moaned. “I have to go! I must go!”
“I agree,” said Colette blandly. “Have you ever been to Paris?”
Hazel shook her head.
“Sacre bleu! Then, it is fixed. You will go.”
Hazel sat bolt upright. “I couldn’t possibly!” She gasped. “It’s unthinkable.”
Colette looked at her curiously. “Why not go?” She dabbed small drops of lotion around her face. “Because of Mrs. Davies? It can all be arranged. Volunteers take leave, now and again.”
Hazel shook her head. “You don’t understand,” she said. “I’m eighteen. I know no one in Paris. Where would I stay? I can’t just go there, all by myself. And especially not to spend time with a young man. What if—” She snatched the pillow from Colette’s cot and hid her face in it.
Colette sat next to Hazel on the bed. “Oh, you English.” She sighed. “More afraid of yourselves than of all the Kaiser’s armies combined.”
Hazel lowered the pillow. “How’s that?”
“Are you afraid,” asked Colette, “that your Jacques will take advantage of you?”
Hazel shook her head. “No. Not in the least.”
“Then what is there to be afraid of?”
Hazel sank her chin into her palm. What to say? What was it, exactly! “Myself!”
Colette’s eyebrows rose. “You are afraid you will take advantage of him?”
Hazel fell sideways on the bunk and shrieked into her pillow.
“Aha,” Colette declared. “I have hit the hammer on the nail.”
“I could no more take advantage of James than I could . . . Never mind.”
“Then what are you afraid of?” asked la belge. “You two will spend a riotous weekend in Paris, eating bread-and-butter sandwiches, drinking milk, and quoting Psalms to each other.”