As the third depth charge arced away from the Ericsson, water boiled up from the explosion of the first one. “Damnation!” Lieutenant Crowder shouted: only white water, nothing more. By the disappointed look on his face, he’d expected a kill on his very first try.
Another charge flew. The second one went off, down below the surface of the sea. Another seething mass of white water appeared, and then a great burst of bubbles and an oil slick that helped calm both the normal chop of the Atlantic and the turbulence the bubbles had kicked up.
“Hit!” Crowder and Sturtevant and the rest of the depth-charge crew and George all screamed the word at the same time. Skepticism forgotten, Sturtevant planted a reverent kiss on the oily metal side of the depth-charge launcher.
More bubbles rose from the stricken submersible, and more oil, too. Peering out into the ocean, George was the first to spy the dark shape rising through the murky water. “Here he comes, the son of a bitch,” he said, and turned the one-pounder in the direction of the submersible. The gun was intended for aeroplanes, but Moses hadn’t come down from the mountain saying you couldn’t shoot it at anything else.
Vaster than a broaching whale, the crippled sub surfaced. English? French? Confederate? George didn’t know or care. It was the enemy. The men inside had done their best to kill him. Their best hadn’t been good enough. Now it was his turn.
Some of the enemy sailors still had fight in them. They ran across the hull toward the submersible’s deck gun. George opened up with the one-pounder before Lieutenant Crowder screamed, “Rake ’em!”
Shell casings leaped from George’s gun. It fired ten-round clips, as if it were an overgrown rifle. One of the rounds hit an enemy sailor. George had never imagined what one of those shells could do to a human body. One instant, the fellow was dashing along the dripping hull. The next, his entire midsection exploded into red mist. His legs ran another stride and a half before toppling.
George picked up another clip—it hardly seemed to weigh anything—and slammed it into the one-pounder. He blew another man to pieces, but most of the clip went to chewing up the submersible’s conning tower. The sub wouldn’t be doing any diving, not if it was full of holes.
As he was reloading again, one of the Ericsson’s four-inch guns fired a shell into the ocean twenty yards in front of the submarine’s bow, a warning shot that sent water fountaining up to drench the surviving men who had reached the deck gun. They didn’t shoot back at the destroyer. Their hands went up in the air instead.
“Hold fire!” Lieutenant Crowder said. George obeyed. A moment later, a white flag waved from the top of the conning tower. More men started emerging from the hatch and standing on the hull, all of them with their hands raised in surrender.
Crowder used a pair of field glasses to read the name of the boat, which was painted on the side of the conning tower. “Snook,” he said. “She’ll be a Confederate boat. They name ’em for fish, same as we do. Looks like a limey, don’t she?”
Flags fluttered up on the Snook’s signal lines. “He’s asking if he can launch his boats,” said Sturtevant, who had far more practice at reading them than did George.
Captain Fleming’s answer came swiftly. Crowder read it before Sturtevant could: “Denied. We will take you off.” He inspected the dejected crew of the submersible. “I don’t see their captain, but they’re all so frowzy he may be there anyhow.”
Boats slid across the quarter-mile of water separating the Ericsson and the Snook. Confederate sailors were already boarding them when one more man burst from the submersible’s hatchway and hurried onto one of them.
“There’s the captain,” Sturtevant said, and then, “She’s sinking! The goddamn bastard opened the scuttling cocks. That’s what he was doing down below so long. Ahh, hell, no way to save her.” Sure enough, the Snook was quickly sliding down into the depths from which she had arisen. She would not rise again.
Up onto the deck of the Ericsson came the glum Confederates. U.S. sailors crowded round to see the men who had almost sunk them. The attitude of the victors was half relief, half professional respect. They knew the submariners could have won the duel as easily as not.
When the Confederate captain came aboard the destroyer, George’s jaw fell. “Briggs!” he burst out. “Ralph Briggs!”
“Somebody here know me?” The Rebel officer looked around to see who had spoken.
“I sure do.” George pushed through the crowd around the Confederates. His grin was enormous. “I’d better. I was one of the fishermen who helped sink you when you were skipper of the Tarpon.”
“What? We already captured this damn Reb once?” Lieutenant Crowder exclaimed. “Why the devil isn’t he in a prisoner-of-war camp where he belongs, then?”
“Because I escaped, that’s why.” Briggs stood straighter. “International law says you can’t do anything to me on account of it, either.”
“We could toss him in the drink and let him swim to shore,” Carl Sturtevant said, without the slightest smile to suggest he was joking.
George shook his head. “When he was going to sink my trawler, he let the crew take to the boats. He played square.”
“Besides, if we ditched him, we’d have to ditch the whole crew,” Lieutenant Crowder said. “Too many people would know, somebody would get drunk and tell the story, and the Entente papers would scream like nobody’s business. They’re prisoners, and we’re stuck with ’em.” He pointed to the Confederate submariners, then jerked a thumb toward the nearest hatch. “You men go below—and this time, Briggs, we’ll make damn sure you don’t get loose before the war is done.”
“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 abo
ut 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.
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nbsp; “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.
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