"Wonderful! In fact, I have an extra."
The two scurried off into the house, where Spotts initiated his sister into the mysteries of proper military attire. With a dab of gum spirits and trimmed hair, they created a very believable mustache. It was uncanny, but Celeste really looked like Spottiswood's twin. On their reappearing, Ramelle and Curtis were amazed at the resemblance.
"Introduce me as a distant Chalfonte cousin." Celeste lowered her voice.
"It would help if you didn't have your ears pierced," Ramelle said, giggling.
"Fannie'll never notice."
Fannie, in fact, didn't notice. With the practice of many years, she shooed off Spotts after the introduction, sensuously picked up Celeste's hand and put it in her lap. Curtis, Ramelle and Spotts huddled behind the peonies.
"Oh, you big naughty man."
'Tell me, Mrs. Creighton, what do you see in my future?"
"Travel and many adventures." Fannie paused and then looked invitingly into the captain's eyes. "Romantic adventures with the opposite sex." She hissed the word "sex."
"I hope not," Celeste sarcastically remarked.
This startled Fannie Jump.
Celeste quickly amended her reply to: "I hope not without good reason."
Fairy Thatcher, champagne in hand, came over and lingered by Fannie's shoulder.
"Fairy, I need all my powers of concentration to call up the forces of the beyond," Fannie told her irritably.
"I say, you do look like a Chalfonte. I'm Fairy Thatcher, a bosom friend of Celeste."
"Fairy, this adorable young captain isn't interested in Celeste's bosoms."
Celeste couldn't resist it, "Quite right, Fannie. May I call you Fannie? But your bosoms—such mountains of pleasure."
Fannie forgot to be shocked, even in front of Fairy, as she was moving in for the kill. Celeste charged on. "I can't stand it, Fannie. Your lips tempt me. You are Venus and I a poor mortal."
"Oh, my." Fairy was riveted to the spot.
"Fairy, do you mind?" Fannie snapped, then turned back to bestow a grateful smile on this ardent fellow.
"Your skin glows like a Renaissance portrait. Your hands indicate such compassion, and oh, your smile; you beguile me like the Mona Lisa." With that Celeste impetuously kissed Fannie, who loved it. Fairy smacked her hand over her mouth in shock and forbidden delight. The peonies shook suspiciously.
Triumphant, Celeste tore off her mustache and whipped off her officer's cap, letting her black hair fall around her epaulets. Fannie wobbled to her feet.
"Damn you, Celeste. This is the limit!"
"Ha, you shameless seducer. Let that be the last time you crow about walking in on me and Grace Pettibone at Vassar. You're just as bad!" Celeste's eyes filled with merriment.
Celeste's prank stirred the sedate lawn party. By dusk all manner of devilment broke loose. Carlotta, after making the sign of the cross over the revelers, left.
Later that night, as the family and Ramelle chatted in the wicker-furnished sun porch, knocking off the last of the champagne, Celeste lifted her glass and toasted her brothers. "From Waterloo to 1914 was a brief interlude of civility. Shall we rejoin the mainstream of violence?"
September 26, 1918
Cora dusted the massive relief map Celeste had set up in her drawing room. Allied Command Headquarters couldn't have been more elaborate. The Western Front, all six hundred miles of it, covered half the room, on a raised platform built for the occasion. On the walls she had pinned maps of the Eastern and Southern fronts. Small blocks of wood represented troops: British = red, French = blue, Germans = yellow, Russians = black, U.S. = white, and Anzacs = green. For the wall maps she used colored pins. Since so many nationalities collided in this conflict, she put the armies of smaller nations under the colors of their heavier comrades. She scanned both her brothers' letters for clues as to their true whereabouts. She read between the lines in the newspapers. Often she was not far off in her calculations. Fannie Jump Creighton and Fairy Thatcher eagerly came every day for briefing. Ramelle sidestepped the martial show and Cora alternated between amusement and irritation. Juts was fascinated by the whole setup and since she displayed aptitude for math she was pressed into service after school to help figure out sectors, vectors, rates of advance, shell trajectories and other exotic numerical puzzles, which ultimately meant carnage. Louise, in her last year at Immaculata, prayed over the map, to everyone's horror. Her saintly streak deepened because Pearlie Trumbull had enlisted in the navy and was somewhere on the high seas in a dreadnought.
"Orrie Tadia accosted me yet one more time today to 'Do My Bit, Save the Pit,'" Celeste informed her war room generals.
Fannie hummed "Our Boys Need Sox, Knit Your Bit."
"Ha! You can't sew a button on, much less knit," Fairy tormented her.
"Indeed, that's why I'm rich," Fannie retorted, swinging her British officer's crop.
"Fannie Jump Creighton, does this mean you are cheating on wheatless Mondays, meatless Tuesdays, porkless Thursdays and gasless Sundays?"
"Well..." Fannie swung her crop less vigorously.
"Any more news from Spotty?" Fairy asked.
"He no longer complains that this war is boring as bat shit. He's working with the 78th Division, 312th Regiment. Finally got himself transferred off staff. Sinking amid a horde of boys from New Jersey doesn't sound too thrilling, but he says it's better than the tedium of being the bright young thing at HQ."
"He's hardly a babe," Fannie muttered.
"Compared to those elderly gents he is," Celeste remarked.
"What's that saying? Old men start wars and young men fight them?" Fairy wondered. "You'd think after all these thousands of years fellows would catch the hint."
"Rationality is a failed belief, darling. Whatever gave you the idea humans learn from experience, theirs or others?" A slight smile twitched on Celeste's mouth.
"Marx is very rational," Fairy threw in.
"Lenina among us," Fannie growled. "I don't see it, Fairy, I just don't see it. Russia is Russia and the U.S. is the U.S. You can't go grafting systems onto one another. Besides, what is a wealthy woman like you doing waving the red flag? You're getting obsessed with this, you know!"
"You haven't read a word yet," Fairy accused.
"Bother," Fannie growled again.
"Puritans are the plague of revolution. Just wait They'll strangle this one, too. Besides, Fairy, your Bolsheviki wrecked hell out of the Eastern Front. What have you to say for that?" Celeste kept on the war, as always these days.
"Each nation must find its own solution." Fairy liked the ring of that.
"They're all a bunch of scorpions ringed by fire, if you ask me," Ramelle said. Her quiet statement produced the usual disquieting effect.
Celeste chose to ignore it. "All right, girls, let's review today's positions."
The three old friends placed themselves around the huge table and began moving the colored wood blocks. Fannie's bearing intensified during these sessions until she swaggered. Ramelle left the room and went into the kitchen.
"Hey, Ramelle, honey," Cora greeted her warmly. "What can I get you?"
"Nothing, Cora. I think I'll put on a pot of tea. The generals are at it again."
Shaking her head, Cora began to throw together a batch of muffins. "With brothers over there, I guess Celeste wants to keep up with them."
"You know as well as I do this project has gotten out of hand."
"Well, it's not my business to judge the ladies."
Ramelle watched over the stove. "I wish I could be as gentle as you, Cora."
"Why, thank you, but I'm sporting no halo."
"You are to me."
Cora walked over and kissed her on the cheek.
"Thank you, punkin, but I'm no angel. As for sweetness, you are the one."
"On the surface, but I entertain dark thoughts."
"We all do."
"You, too?"
"Yes, many's the time I wonder why the Rifes
of this world go on while the kind souls drop away. There are times when I question God's will. I see no justice."
'They are sons-of-bitches."
"They may be sons-of-bitches but they're our sons-of-bitches." Cora sifted flour.
"I see what you mean. Water's boiling. Dare I take this back to the High Command or do you think whiskey more appropriate?"
Cora laughed. "Here, let me put that on a tray for you, and some sweets, too."
The three heads didn't turn as Cora and Ramelle brought in the refreshments.
". . . shifting troops from Verdun," Fannie Jump was saying.
"Can't risk the loss of prestige. I don't think they will," Celeste countered.
"Well, what do you think is happening, then?" Fairy insisted.
"I don't really know," Celeste confessed, "but I feel we must be preparing for something. If we wait too much longer well be immobilized by cold. Spotts writes it's already raining and quite foggy where he is." "Where is he?"
"He's got to be on the Meuse somewhere. Did I tell you his last letter mentioned that communications from behind the lines always begin or end with 'All Quiet on the Western Front'?"
"Would you ladies like something to eat or drink?" Cora took advantage of the pause.
"You bet." Fannie raced over. "Love your cakes, Cora just love 'em. Now, Celeste, be a good hostess and break out the ale." Cora walked over to study the map. Celeste noticed her. "Incredible, isn't it?" "Yes, but I still think they're all loose as ashes." "The impersonal selection of victims and survivors grates on the nerves. It does all seem so insane—and yet oddly exciting."
"Exciting," Fairy garbled through her tea, "because you're here and not knee deep in mud."
"Of course, Fairy, but the reality of hundreds of thousands of men, millions really, swarming against one another ,. . the sheer weight of it numbs one to the horror. I wonder could Napoleon have imagined it." Celeste leaned on the map table.
"I still don't know why we're in this thing. Democracy be damned." Fannie munched another sweet.
"We're in it so Rife can get richer," Cora calmly asserted.
"He sure as hell is doing that," Fannie concurred.
"I do wonder, though, what madness impels normally decent men to hurl themselves at one another." Ramelle looked at the three generals.
"Fear." Celeste spoke as though laying down the law.
Fairy perked up. "Of what—the enemy?"
"No, of being thought a coward by one's associates."
"Celeste, you can't mean it. I certainly wouldn't fling myself into machine gun fire because some creature next to me is dumb enough to do it." Fannie filled her glass again.
"You're a woman," Celeste reminded her.
"How good of you to notice." Fannie swallowed her favorite gin mix.
"Women fought in the War Between the States." Fairy paraded her historical sense.
"True, but only when the war intruded on their personal sphere. Our mothers and grandmothers neglected to form up in battalions." Celeste pursued her line of thought. "Don't you know killing is a sacred privilege?"
"Drivel." Fannie rolled the contents of her glass, imagining life on a battleship. "That still doesn't explain why a man is more afraid of his mates than the enemy."
"Men must prove they are men. We don't need to prove anything." Celeste finally hit home.
Cora listened to the debate with curiosity, but it answered few of her questions, "For all that, Celeste, don't you wonder? Half of Runnymede carries German names, but our boys go over there and kill their cousins, if you think about it."
"Hell, little more than fifty years ago we killed our brothers," Fannie added.
"Don't seem right, for all the reasons." Cora stuck with it.
"No one could argue it's right, but it's there." Celeste's voice rose slightly. "It's them and us . . . always them and us."
"Maybe the first division really was men and women." Fairy's eyebrows drew closer together, her concentration apparent and somehow endearing.
"Oh, I don't know." Cora smiled. "Maybe it was the right-handers against the left-handers."
Celeste stood straight. "No, the first division was plants versus animals. Inside you, microbes dine unmolested. One insect eats another and is consumed by a bird, who becomes tabby's feast. And so it goes. The nature of this world is combat. We're not plants. We're in the kingdom that kills."
October 23, 1918
The 78th had been in it for days now. No one had time to count how many Americans rotted in the Meuse-Argonne. Spotts didn't have time to think about it. Attack, attack, attack. These death orders issued relentlessly from Black Jack Pershing. Spottiswood Chalfonte, far from headquarters, carried no overall picture of the battle plan. All he knew was his small plot of ripped earth. Orders from above seemed intent on massacring as many Americans as possible. He thought of General Grant, who massed men and squandered them in ways unthinkable at the time. Pershing must have learned a lot from the bastard, Spotts thought. So many officers were already killed he was jumped up to major, the same rank his father held in the War Between the States. There'd been no time to write Celeste of the useless honor.
He wondered where Curtis was in this fresh hell. He'd lost track of the California fellows. He hoped Curtis was spared what happened to the group his own men had followed up; four hundred of the six hundred men of the 1st Battalion, 308th Infantry, were dead.
"Canned heat," yelled out a voice. Spotts rolled into a ball. An explosion shot up dirt some hundred yards off. He and his men were pinned down on Talma Hill, a steep incline festering with Germans at the top. The 312th had tried to take this place before. Why they were ordered in again after that past meat-grinding he didn't know.
The Germans on the heights of the Bois de Bourgogne as well as on Talma Hill dumped an avalanche of fire on the Americans. They couldn't believe the Yanks were edging upward. How could they know the 312th was a patchwork of poor men from Jersey— Irish, Poles, Slovaks, Germans, Italians, Jews—and one blueblood Chalfonte. Even if the Germans could have known who faced them, they would never have understood the courage of these men sneered at back in the States. Immigrants and sons of immigrants were earning the right to look a Chalfonte, a Creighton, a Thatcher, in the eye. Three generations later their sons and daughters would wonder if it was worth it.
"Major Spotts, any bright ideas, have ye?" a perversely cheerful McDougal called to him as they flattened themselves along the reverse slope.
"We need artillery support, Sergeant."
"Sure, and I'm for kissing a Paris mademoiselle myself." McDougal laughed.
"Only hope is a runner, Major." Steinhauser spoke on Spotty's right.
"In daylight? Not a chance," Spotts called back.
A scream and explosion slightly to the rear shut them up.
"Goddamn whiz-bangs," McDougal cursed.
The men hated whiz-bangs worst of all. The shell raced along at the speed of sound and smashed you before you heard it. A man down below shrieked.
"We'll all be in hell tonight if we get no support." Spotts crawled forward, his handsome features still discernible under the stubble and filth.
"Ah, then I'll be seeing all my friends." McDougal grinned.
"Runner?" a small fellow called over to them. "I'll go."
"Parker, it's suicide," Spotts warned him.
"I've the luck of the Irish, Major Spotts." The tough little fellow took off without waiting for a reply. No sooner up than a piece of lead flattened him. Parker Dunn jumped up once more and tore off. Ground quivered around him, jets of earth flung upward from raking machine gun fire and shells. Spotts and the men watched, muscles locked, not moving. Dunn crashed to the ground a second time.
"Done for. Shit." Steinhauser stared at the small figure. His eyes widened as Parker, gripping the pulverized earth for support, staggered once more to his feet and willed himself forward. Blood spurted out of him, but the man would not stop. A geyser of brown dirt shot upward immediately i
n front of Parker. Steel conquered will. He never got up again.
"Artillery or not, we're going up," Spotts shouted, crawling forward.
The men, enveloped in dirt, blood, the screeching of shells, drove upward. No one at headquarters had ever expected the 78th to reach the top. Unbeknownst to them, their objective was to keep the German flank stationary. They were being sacrificed so the 32nd and 42nd divisions could slam into the center of the German line and pulverize it. The 78th, freed from higher military knowledge, fulfilled its assignment.
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