Walk in Hell

XIX

Destroyers and a couple of armored cruisers screened the Dakota and the New York as the two battleships steamed southeast through the Pacific. On the deck of the Dakota, Sam Carsten said, “I won’t be sorry to leave the Sandwich Islands, and that’s a fact.” As if to emphasize his words, he rubbed at the zinc-oxide ointment on his nose.

“You’re gonna bake worse before you get better,” Vic Crosetti said with a chuckle. He could afford to laugh; when he baked, he turned brown. “We’re going over the equator, and it don’t get any hotter than that. And besides, it’s heading toward summer down in Chile.”

“Oh, Jesus,” Carsten said mournfully. “Sure as hell, I forgot all about that.” He looked at his hands, which were as red as every other square inch of him exposed to the sun. “Why the devil didn’t the Chileans get into trouble with Argentina six months ago?”

Crosetti poked him in the ribs. “Far as I’m concerned, all this means is, we’re doing pretty well. If we can detach a squadron from the Sandwich Islands to give our allies a hand, we got to figure ain’t no way for the limeys and the Japs to get Honolulu and Pearl away from us.” He paused, then added, “Unless that John Liholiho item tells them exactly what we’ve got and where everything’s at.”

“You know, maybe we ought to send a letter back to the Sandwich Islands when we get to Chile,” Sam said. “About him being a spy, I mean. They’ll rake him over the coals, you bet they will.”

“Yeah, maybe we should do that,” Crosetti said. “Hell, let’s.”

“Reckon you’re right about the other, too, dammit.” Carsten scratched one of his sunburned ears. Did being happy for his country outweigh being miserable at the prospect of still more sunburn? That one was too close to call without doing some thinking.

“Right about what?” Hiram Kidde asked as he came up. Carsten and Crosetti explained. The veteran gunner’s mate nodded. “Yeah, the brass has got to think the islands are ours to keep. We’ve got enough guns and enough soldiers on ’em now that taking ’em away would cost more than the limeys can afford.”

“What about the Japs?” Sam said. “They showed better than I ever figured they could, there in the Battle of the Three Navies.”

“Yeah, I suppose the Japs are a wild card,” Kidde admitted. “But as long as we don’t fall asleep there at Pearl, I expect we’ll be able to take care of them all right.” He studied Carsten. “You’re looking a little down in the mouth. You find a gal in Honolulu you didn’t feel like leaving?”

“Nah, it’s nothing like that, ‘Cap’n,’” Carsten answered. “I was hoping I’d get out of the damn sun for a while, but Vic here just reminded me the seasons do a flip-flop down there.”

Kidde let out an undignified snort. “Old son, that ain’t gonna matter a hill of beans. How long you think we’re going to stay in Valparaiso? Not anywhere near long enough to get to know the senoritas, I bet. Once we refit and refuel there, we’re gonna head south to join the Chilean fleet. I don’t care whether it’s summer or not, your poor, miserable hide won’t burn in the Straits of Magellan.”

Sam considered that. “Yeah, you’re right,” he said happily-so happily that Kidde snorted again.

“Listen, Sam,” he said, “sunburn’s not the only thing that can go wrong with you, you know. We get down there, you’ll find out what kind of a sailor you are. The Dakota’s a good sea boat, and she’s gonna need to be. Down in the Straits, they’ve got waves that’ll toss around a ship as big as this one like she was a wooden toy in a tin tub with a rambunctious five-year-old in it. I’ve made that passage a couple-three times, and you can keep it for all of me.”

“‘Cap’n,’if I start puking, I know it’ll be over sooner or later, no matter how bad I feel while it’s going on,” Carsten said. Ever so gently, he touched his flaming face. “This here sunburn never stops.”

“I’m gonna remember you said that,” Vic Crosetti told him, “and if I ain’t too sick myself, I’m gonna throw it in your face.”

“And if you are that sick, you’ll throw somethin’ else in his face,” Hiram Kidde said. “I’ve done my share of puking down in that part of the world, I’ll tell you. You take a beating there, you and the ship both.”

That made Sam think of something else: “How’s our steering mechanism going to do if we take a pounding like that? The repairs were a pretty quick job.”

Kidde grunted. “That’s a good question.” He laughed without humor. “And we get to find out what the good answer is. Hope we don’t have to do it the hard way.”

“Can’t be any harder than the last time,” Crosetti said. “No matter what Argentina’s got, we ain’t sailin’ straight at the whole British and Japanese fleets-and a damn good thing we ain’t, too, anybody wants to know.”

“Amen,” Sam said solemnly. Hiram Kidde nodded. After a moment’s contemplation, Crosetti crossed himself.

“New York took the next biggest beating in the Battle of the Three Navies after us, now that I think about it,” Kidde said. “Looks like they’re sending what they can most afford to be rid of at the Sandwich Islands.”

“That makes sense to me,” Carsten said. “It probably means they don’t think the Argentines are very good, either.”

“Listen,” Hiram Kidde said positively, “if we fought the goddamn Royal Navy to a standstill, we ain’t gonna play against a tougher team anywhere in the whole damn world-and that includes the Kaiser’s High Seas Fleet. The limeys are bastards, but they’re tough bastards.”

Vic Crosetti started to say something-maybe agreement, maybe argument-but klaxons started hooting all over the ship, summoning the sailors to battle stations. Everyone ran, and ran hard. Sam ran as hard as he could. He’d never yet beaten Hiram Kidde to the five-inch gun they both served. Since the two of them were starting from the same place, and since he was younger than Kidde and had longer legs, he thought this was going to be the time.

It wasn’t. Kidde stuck to him like a burr on the deck. Once they went below, the gunner’s mate’s broad shoulders and bulldog instincts counted for more than Sam’s inches and youth. The “Cap’n” shoved men aside, and stuck an elbow in their ribs if they didn’t move fast enough to suit him. He got to the sponson a couple of lengths ahead of Carsten.

The rest of the gun’s crew tumbled in seconds later. “All right, we’re ready,” Luke Hoskins said, his hand on a shell, ready to heave it to Sam. “What do we do now?”

Kidde was peering out of the sponson, which gave a very limited field of view through a couple of slit windows. “I don’t see anything,” he said, “not that that proves one hell of a lot. Maybe somebody here or aboard one of the destroyers heard a submersible through the hydrophones or spotted a periscope.”

“If they’d spotted a periscope,” Sam said, “we’d be making flank speed, to get the hell away from it.” Hoskins and the rest of the shell-heavers and gun-layers nodded emphatic agreement.

But Hiram Kidde spoke in thoughtful tones: “Maybe, maybe not. Remember how that aeroplane decoyed us out of Pearl and into that whole flock of subs? They might be letting us see one so we don’t think they’ve got any more waiting up ahead.”

“Mm, maybe,” Sam said. “Wouldn’t like to charge straight into a pack of ’em, and that’s the Lord’s truth.” His wave encompassed the vast empty reaches of the Pacific. “This isn’t the best place to get torpedoed.”

Hoskins spoke with great authority: “Sam, there ain’t no good place to get torpedoed.” Nobody argued with that, either.

The klaxons stopped hooting. Commander Grady stuck his head into the sponson a moment later. “Good job, men,” the commander of the starboard secondary armament said. “Only a drill this time.”

Luke Hoskins let out a sigh of relief. Sam was relieved, too: relieved and angry at the same time. “Damnation,” he said. “It’s almost like the shore patrol raiding a cheap whorehouse when you’re the next in line. I’m all pumped up and ready, and now I don’t get to do anything.”

“Don’t you worry about that,” Kidde said. “Nothing wrong with shore leave in Valparaiso, no sir. Nothing wrong in Concepcion farther south, either. There’s some pretty, friendly-and pretty friendly, too,” he amended, noting his own pause, “senoritas in Chile, and that’s the truth.”

In more than twenty years in the Navy, Kidde had been to just about every port where U.S. warships were welcome-and some where they’d had to make themselves welcome. He had considerable experience in matters pertaining to senoritas, and wasn’t shy about sharing it.

Sam hadn’t been so many places. His working assumption was that he’d be able to find something or other in the female line almost anywhere, though, and he hadn’t been wrong about that very often. So, instead of asking about women, he said, “What’s Valparaiso like?”

“Last time I was there was-let me think-1907, I guess it was,” Kidde answered. “It was beat up then; they’d had themselves a hell of an earthquake the year before, and they were still putting things back together.”

“That’s the same year as the San Francisco quake, isn’t it-1906, I mean?” Sam said.

“Now that I think about it, I guess it is.” Kidde laughed. “Bad time to be anywhere on the Pacific Coast.”

Luke Hoskins said, “What were the parts that weren’t wrecked like?”

“Oh, it’s a port town,” the gunner’s mate answered. “Good harbor, biggest one in Chile unless I’m wrong, but it’s open on the north. When it blows hard, the way it does in winter down there-June through September, I mean, not our winter-the storms can chew blazes out of ships tied up there. I hear tell, though, they’ve built, or maybe they’re building-don’t know which-a breakwater that’ll make that better’n it was.”

“Not storm season now, then,” Hoskins said.

“Not in Valparaiso, no,” Kidde answered. “Not in Concepcion, either. Down by the Straits of Magellan, that’s a different story.”

“You know what I wish?” Sam said. “I wish there was a canal through Central America somewhere, like there is at Suez. That would sure make shipping a lot easier.”

“It sure would-for the damn Rebs,” Hiram Kidde said. “Caribbean’s already a Confederate lake. You want them moving battleships through so they could come up the West Coast? No thanks.”

“I meant in peacetime,” Carsten said. For once, his flush had nothing to do with sunburn. He prided himself in thinking strategically; his buddies sometimes told him he sounded like an officer. But he’d missed the boat this time.

Kidde drove the point home: “I guess you were still a short-pants kid when the Confederates talked about digging a canal through Nicaragua or one of those damn places. President Mahan said the USA would go to war the minute the first steam shovel took a bite, and they backed down. Reckon he’s the best president we had before TR.”

Commander Grady peered into the sponson again. One of his eyebrows rose quizzically. “Not that much fun in here, boys,” he remarked.

He might have broken a spell. The gun crew filed out. Hot and stuffy as the sponson was, Sam wouldn’t have minded staying there a while longer. Now he’d have to go out in the sun again. Out of the entire crew of the Dakota, he might have been the only man looking forward to the Straits of Magellan.

Arthur McGregor hitched his horse to the rail not far from the post office. His boots squelched in mud till he got up to the wooden sidewalk. He scraped them as clean as he could before he went inside.

Wilfred Rokeby looked up from a dime novel. “Good day to you, Arthur,” the postmaster said. “How are you?” He spoke cautiously. Everyone in Rosenfeld, like everyone in the surrounding countryside, knew of Alexander McGregor’s execution. Arthur McGregor had been into town once since then, but he hadn’t stopped at the post office.

“How am I, Wilf?” he said, and paused to think about it. That was probably a mistake, for it required him to come out with an honest answer in place of a polite one: “I’m right poorly, is how I am. How would you be, in my shoes?”

“The same, I expect.” Rokeby licked his thin, pale lips. Lamplight glistened from the metal frames of the half-glasses he was wearing, and from the lenses that magnified his eyes without making them seem warm. “What can I do for you today, eh?”

“Want to buy some postage stamps,” McGregor answered. “When I need beans, I’ll go to Henry Gibbon.” In a different tone of voice, it would have been a joke. As he said it, it was only a statement of fact. He’d seldom joked before Alexander was shot. He never joked now.

“Sure enough.” Rokeby bent his head down and looked over the tops of those glasses as he opened a drawer. McGregor studied the part that ran down the middle of his crown, dividing the brown hair on one side from that on the other as if Moses had had a bit of a miracle left over after parting the Red Sea. To make sure none of his hairs got Egyptian tendencies, Rokeby slicked them all down with an oil reeking of spices. The odor was part of coming to the post office for McGregor, as it was for everyone in and around Rosenfeld. After taking out a sheet of stamps, Rokeby looked up at the farmer. “How many you need?”

“Let me have fifteen,” McGregor answered. “That’ll keep me for a while.”

“Should, anyway,” the postmaster agreed. “Sixty cents’ll do it.”

McGregor stared at him, then at the stamps. They were some shade of red or other, though only a stamp collector could have told at a glance exactly which. Every country in the world used some sort of red for its letter-rate stamps. And the letter rate in occupied Manitoba, as it had been before the war, as it was in the USA and CSA, was two cents.

“Don’t you mean half that?” he asked Wilfred Rokeby. “Look, Wilf, I can see for myself they’re two-cent stamps.” They were, as far as he was concerned, ugly two-cent stamps. They showed a U.S. aeroplane shooting down one either British or Canadian-the picture was too small for him to be sure which.

“Two cents still is the letter rate, sure enough,” Rokeby said. “But you got to pay four cents each to get ’em, all the same. These here are what they call semipostal stamps: only kind we’re gonna be able to sell hereabouts from now on. See? Look.” He pointed to the lower left-hand corner of the stamp. Sure enough, it didn’t just say 2. It said 2 + 2, as if it were part of a beginning arithmetic lesson.

“Semi-what?” McGregor said. “What the devil is that supposed to mean? And if two cents is the letter rate but I’ve got to pay twice that much to get one of these things, where do the other two cents go?”

“Into the Yankees’ pockets-where else?” the postmaster said. “Into a fund that pays ’em to send actors and dancing girls and I don’t know what all out toward the front to keep their soldiers happy.”

“We get to pay so they can do that?” McGregor demanded. Wilfred Rokeby nodded. McGregor took a deep breath. “That’s-thievery, is what it is,” he said slowly, suppressing the scream.

“You know it, and I know it, and I expect the Yankees know it, too,” Rokeby said. “Next question is, do they care? You can figure that one out for your own self. If we’re paying for their damn vaudeville shows, they can spend more of their money on guns.”

In its way, the casual exploitation of occupied Canada appalled McGregor almost as much as the casual execution of his son. It showed how the invaders had the conquest planned out to the last little detail. “What happens if we don’t pay the extra two cents?” he asked, already sure of the answer.

“The surcharge, you mean?” Rokeby’s fussiness extended to using precisely the right word whenever he could (come to that, McGregor didn’t remember ever hearing damn from him before). “If you don’t pay the surcharge, Arthur, I can’t sell you the stamps, and you can’t mail your letters.”

“You don’t happen to have any of the old ones left?” McGregor asked.

“Not a one,” Rokeby said. “Sold out of ’em right quick, I did, when these here first came out last month. I’d have expected you to notice the new stamps on your mail by now.”

“Who pays attention to stamps?” McGregor said, which drew a hurt look from the postmaster. The farmer took another deep breath and dug in his pocket. “All right, sell ’em to me. I hope the dancing girls give the Yankee soldiers the clap.”

Rokeby giggled, a high, shrill, startling sound. He gave McGregor fifteen cents’ change from the quarter and half-dollar the farmer laid on the counter. McGregor took the change and the stamps and left the post office shaking his head.

Henry Gibbon’s general store was only a few doors down. The storekeeper nodded when McGregor came inside. “Mornin’, Arthur,” he said.

“Good morning.” McGregor’s eyes needed a little while to adjust to the lantern-lit gloom inside the general store. Boards covered what had been the big window fronting on the street before a bomb blew it out. That was a year ago now. “When are you going to get yourself a new pane of glass?”

“Whenever the Yanks say I can have one,” Gibbon answered; no U.S. soldiers were in the store to overhear his bitterness. “I ain’t holding my breath, I’ll tell you that. How’s your family, Arthur?”

“What I have left of it, you mean?” McGregor said. Bitterness…how could you replace a broken son? But the storekeeper had meant the question kindly. “They’re healthy, Henry. We’re all down at the mouth, but they’re healthy-and thank God for that. We’ll get by.” He stood a little straighter, as if Gibbon had denied it.

“That’s good,” Gibbon said. “I’m glad to hear it. Like I told you last time you were in, I-” He broke off abruptly, for two men in green-gray walked in off the sidewalk and bought a few cents’ worth of candy. When they had left, the storekeeper shook his head. “You see how it is.”

What McGregor saw was Henry Gibbon making money. He didn’t say anything. What could he say? “You still have any of those beans, Henry? I want to buy a couple of sacks if you do.” No postage stamps here, he thought, and almost smiled.

“The kidney beans, you mean? Sure enough do.” Grunting, Gibbon put two sacks of them on the counter. “What else you need?”

“Sewing-machine needles and a quart of vinegar for Maude, and some nails for me,” McGregor answered. “Ten-pennies, the big ones. Got some wood rot in the barn, and I’m going to have to do a deal of patching before the weather gets worse. Don’t want the stock to freeze.” He gave the storekeeper a quart bottle.

“You’re right about that,” Gibbon said, filling the bottle from the spigot of a two-hundred-pound barrel. “How many nails do you want?”

“Twenty pounds’ worth should take care of things,” McGregor said.

“I should hope so,” the storekeeper said with a chuckle. He dug into the relevant barrel with a scoop. But as he dumped a scoopful of nails onto the scale, a frown congealed on his plump features. “Only thing I got to give ’em to you in is a U.S. Army crate. Hope you don’t mind.”

“It’s all right,” Arthur McGregor answered wearily. After a moment, he added, “Not the box’s fault who made it.”

“Well, that’s right.” Gibbon sounded relieved. “It’s only that, what with everything, I didn’t think you’d care to have anything to do with the Yanks.”

“It’s just a crate, Henry.” McGregor dug in his pocket. “What do I owe you for everything?”

“Dollar a sack for the beans,” Gibbon said, scrawling down numbers on a scrap of butcher paper. “Sixty-eight cents for the needles, nineteen for the vinegar, and ninety for the nails. Comes to…” He added up the column, then checked it. “Three dollars and seventy-seven cents.”

“Here you are.” McGregor gave him four dollars, waited for his change, and then said, “Let me bring the wagon by, so I don’t have to haul everything.” The storekeeper nodded, patting the beans and the crate and the jar and the little package to show they’d stay safe till McGregor got back.

As the farmer headed out of Rosenfeld, soldiers in green-gray inspected his purchases. They didn’t usually do that; they were more concerned about keeping dangerous things from coming into town. Seeing what he had, they waved him on toward his farm.

A week later, in the middle of the night, he got up from his bed as if to go to the outhouse. Maude muttered something, but didn’t wake. Downstairs, he threw a coat and a pair of boots over his union suit, then went outside. The night was very still. Clouds in the west warned of rain or snow on the way, but the bad weather hadn’t got there yet. For the moment, no traffic to speak of moved on the road near the farm. He nodded to himself, went into the barn, saddled the horse in the darkness, and rode away.

When he came back to bed, Maude was awake. He’d hoped she wouldn’t be. “Why were you gone so long?” she whispered as he slid in beside her.

“Getting rid of some things we don’t need,” he answered, which was no answer at all. He waited for her to press him about it.

All she said was, “Be careful, Arthur,” and rolled over. Soon she was asleep again. Soon he was, too, however much he wanted to stay awake. If anything happened in the night, he didn’t know it.

Three or four days later, Captain Hannebrink drove out to the farm in his green-gray Ford. Out he came. Out came three ordinary soldiers, all of them with guns. Half a minute after that, another automobile, this one all full of soldiers, stopped alongside Hannebrink’s.

Arthur McGregor came out of the barn. He scowled at the American. “What do you want here now, you damned murderer?” he demanded. Through the kitchen window, he saw Maude’s frightened face.

Calmly-and well he might have been calm, with so many armed men at his back-Hannebrink answered, “I hear tell you bought some nails from Henry Gibbon not long ago.”

“I am guilty of that, which is more than my son was guilty of anything,” McGregor said. Maude came outside to find out what was going on. She held Julia’s hand in one of hers, Mary’s in the other. She was holding both daughters tight, for they both looked ready to throw themselves at Hannebrink and the soldiers regardless of rifles and bayonets. McGregor went on, “Have you come to put the blindfold over my eyes because of it?”

“Maybe,” Hannebrink said, calm still. “Show me what you’ve done with them.”

“Come back in here with me,” McGregor told him, motioning toward the barn. Hannebrink followed. So did the American soldiers. So did Maude and Julia and Mary. McGregor pointed here and there along the wall and at the hayloft and up among the rafters. “You’ll see where I’ve done my repairs.”

“Davis-Mathison-Goldberg.” Hannebrink told off three men. “Check those. See if they’re fresh work.”

“Look to be, sir,” one of the men said after he’d clambered up to inspect McGregor’s carpentry at close range. The other two soon called agreement.

“All right, Mr. McGregor,” Hannebrink said, easygoing, in nothing like a hurry. “Say you used a pound or two of nails there. By what I hear, you bought more like twenty pounds. Where’s the rest of ’em?”

“On my workbench here.” McGregor pointed again. “Still in the box Henry Gibbon used for ’em.”

Captain Hannebrink strode over. He picked up a couple of the nails. “New, all right,” he said. “Still have that shine to ’em.” He let them clank back in among their fellows, then picked up the box. He nodded again. “Heft is about right, figuring in what you would have used. Good enough, Mr. McGregor. Thank you.”

“Want to tell me what this is all about?” McGregor asked.

“No.” Without another word, Hannebrink and the U.S. soldiers left the barn, got into their motorcars, and drove back toward Rosenfeld. Maude started to say something. McGregor set a hand on her shoulder and shook his head. She took their daughters back into the house. He wondered if she’d ask him questions later. She didn’t do that, either.

A day or two later, he had to go into town again himself. He stopped by the post office to see if Wilfred Rokeby had any stamps but those larcenous semipostals. Rokeby didn’t, but he did have news: “The Knights are in more trouble with the Yanks,” he said.

“What now?” McGregor asked. “Haven’t been off the farm since I was here last, and nobody much comes and visits. People figure bad luck rubs off, seems like.”

“Bomb in the roadway near their land killed the man who stepped on it last week, and three more besides,” Rokeby answered. “Good many hurt, too. Yanks say they planted it because of their boy.”

“Stupid to set a bomb by your own house,” McGregor remarked, “but the Knights have never been long on brains, you ask me. Biddy’s always going around gossiping about this and that, and Jack’s no better. Anybody who runs on at the mouth that way, you have to figure there’s no sense behind it.”

“That’s so.” Rokeby nodded vigorously, but not vigorously enough to disturb the greased perfection of his hair. “They would even talk to the Americans now and then, people say, in spite of what happened to their boy.”

“Really?” McGregor sucked on his pipe. “I have to tell you I hadn’t heard that.” Because he had to tell it to Rokeby didn’t make it true. As he’d calculated, Captain Hannebrink had been so interested in those new nails that he hadn’t thought buying new ones meant McGregor could get rid of old ones. And a farm was a big place. You could search it from now till doomsday and never find dynamite and fuse and blasting caps, even if they were there-which some of them, at any rate, weren’t, not any more. Some of the Yankees blown to hell and gone, the runny-mouthed Knights in hot water-very hot water, he hoped-with the occupying authorities…Two revenges at once wasn’t bad. “No, I hadn’t heard that,” McGregor repeated. “Too bad.”

Nellie Semphroch set fresh coffee in front of the Confederate colonel. “I do thank you, ma’am,” he said, courteous as the Rebs were most of the time. Once the words had passed his lips, though, he might have forgotten she existed. Turning back to the other officers at the table, he took up where he’d left off: “If we have to leave this town, we ought to treat it the way the Romans treated Carthage.”

The classical allusion meant nothing to Nellie. The officers to whom he was speaking understood it, though. “Leave no stone atop another?” a lieutenant-colonel said.

Another colonel nodded. “We’ll give the damnyankees a desert to come home to, not a capital. This place has been frowning down on the Confederacy as long as we’ve been independent.”

“Too right it has,” said the first colonel, the one to whom Nellie had given the new cup of coffee. “Let them rule from Philadelphia. Washington was a capital made before we saw how we were treated in that union.”

“Tyrants they were, tyrants they are, tyrants they shall ever be,” the second colonel agreed. “The White House, the Capitol, all the departments-dynamite them all, I say. The Yankees only maintained their presence here after the War of Secession to irk us.”

Nellie glanced over toward Edna, hoping her daughter was listening as the Rebel officers calmly discussed the destruction of the capital of the United States. Edna, however, was casting sheep’s eyes at Lieutenant Kincaid. Why should she care? Nellie thought bitterly. She’s got a Rebel officer for a fiance.

The lieutenant-colonel said, “Too bad about the Washington Monument. No matter what we did with the rest of the town, I would have left that standing. Washington was a Virginian, after all.”

“Fortunes of war,” the colonel said. “Can’t be helped-it was in the way of our barrage when the war started, and of the damnyankees’ fire once we forced an entrance into the city.”

“That sort of destruction is one thing,” the lieutenant-colonel said. “But deliberately wrecking the monuments as we retire may cost us Yankee retribution elsewhere.”

For a wonder, that made both colonels thoughtful. Before the war, the arrogant Rebs wouldn’t have worried about how the USA might respond to anything they did. Now-Now Nellie had a hard time holding on to her polite mask. Now they’d learned better.

Edna got up and filled Nicholas Kincaid’s coffee cup. She didn’t charge him, which annoyed Nellie but about which she could say nothing. She didn’t want Edna to marry the Confederate lieutenant-she didn’t want Edna marrying any man-but she knew she couldn’t do anything to stop it. She consoled herself by thinking that marrying Kincaid might get Edna out of Washington before the United States battered their way back into the city. Had Nellie had some way of escaping the bloodbath that likely lay ahead, she would have taken it.

She did have a way to escape the coffeehouse, if only for a little while. “I’m going across the street to see Mr. Jacobs,” she said to Edna. “Take care of everybody while I’m gone, would you, dear?”

“All right, Ma,” Edna said sulkily. She no doubt suspected that her mother wanted to keep her from spending so much time with Nicholas Kincaid. She was right, too, but she couldn’t do anything about it.

The bell above Jacobs’ door jangled when Nellie came in. The cobbler looked up from the boot he was resoling. “Why, hello, Nellie,” he said, as if his fondest wish had just been realized. “How good to see you this morning.”

“Good to see you, too, Hal,” Nellie said, a little stiffly. She was still nervous about having let him kiss her once, and even more nervous about having liked it. But that didn’t matter, or didn’t matter much. Business was business, and wouldn’t keep. “You remember how I told you not so long ago that the Rebs would do anything to try and hang onto Washington, on account of they reckoned it was their capital by rights, and not ours?”

“Yes, of course I remember that,” Jacobs said, peering at her through his spectacles. Then he took them off, blinked a couple of times as he set them on the counter, and looked up at her again. He smiled. “That’s better.”

Nellie said, “I think they’re starting to get the idea they can’t keep Washington no matter what they do. The USA won’t get it back in one piece, sounds like.” She told the shoemaker what the Confederate officers had been discussing in the coffeehouse.

Jacobs clucked reproachfully. “This is foolish wickedness,” he said. “No other word for it, Widow Sem-Nellie. I promise you, I will make certain it is known, if you happen to be the first to have heard of it. Your country owes you a great debt if we can use this knowledge to keep the CSA from carrying out such a vile scheme.”

“That would be good, I guess,” she said. “If they want to show they’re grateful, they can keep from shelling this part of town when their guns get into range.”

“Yes, I also think this would be an excellent reward,” Jacobs said with a smile. But that smile did not last long. He coughed before continuing, “Widow Semphroch, I am glad you came by today, because there is something of importance I need to take up with you.”

“What’s that?” she asked. It was something important, or he wouldn’t have returned to the formality with which they’d once addressed each other.

He coughed again. It wasn’t something he wanted to bring up, plainly. At last, he said, “Widow Semphroch, what have you done to Bill Reach?”

“I haven’t done anything to him, except tell him to stay away,” Nellie answered. “You know I don’t want anything to do with him.” She cocked her head to one side. “Why?”

Even more reluctantly than before, he said, “Because he is acting-strangely-these days. I believe he is drinking far too much for a man in his position. He often speaks of you, but gives no details.”

Thank God for that, Nellie thought. Aloud, she said, “The last time I saw him, I thought he’d been drinking,” which was politer than, He stank of rotgut.

“If there is anything you can do for him-” Jacobs began.

“No, Mr. Jacobs. I am sorry, but there is nothing.” Now Nellie threw up the chilling wall of formality. “Good day. I will call again another time.” She left the cobbler’s shop without a backwards glance, and without giving Jacobs the chance to say a word.

She supposed she should have been warned. But all she wanted to do with Bill Reach was put him out of her mind, and so she did not pay as much heed to Jacobs as she might have done. Two evenings later, Reach threw open the door to the coffeehouse and lurched inside.

Nellie was in back of the counter, pouring coffee, making sandwiches, and frying ham steaks and potatoes. Edna was out among the customers: the usual crowd of Confederate officers, the sleek Washingtonians who collaborated with them, and a sprinkling of fancy women who collaborated more intimately with both Rebels and local cat’s-paws.

All of them stared at Bill Reach, who looked even more disreputable than usual. By the boneless way he stood, Nellie knew he’d had his head in a bottle all day, or maybe all week. His eyes held a wild gleam she didn’t like. She started out toward the front of the coffeehouse, certain he was going to do something dreadful.

She hadn’t taken more than a step and a half before he did it. “Little Nell!” he said loudly-but he wasn’t looking at Nellie at all. He was looking at Edna, so drunk he couldn’t tell daughter from mother. “Makes me feel young just to see you, Little Nell, same as it always did.” Edna was less than half his age-no wonder seeing her made him feel young. A leer spread over his face.

“Get out of here!” Nellie shouted, but he was too drunk, too intent on what was going on inside his own mind, to hear her.

And Edna, after a glance back at her mother, a glance filled with both curiosity and malice, smiled at him and said, “What do you want tonight, Bill?”

It wasn’t quite the right question, but it was close enough. Over Nellie’s cry of horror, Reach pulled a quarter-eagle out of his pocket, slapped the gold coin down on a tabletop as if it were a nightstand, and said, “Tonight? Well, we’ll go upstairs like always”-he pointed to the stairway leading up to Nellie and Edna’s rooms, which was just visible from where he stood swaying-“and then you can suck on me for a while before you get on top. I’m feelin’-hic! — lazy, if you know what I mean. I’ll give you an extra half a buck all your own if you’re good.”

“Get him out of here!” Nellie screamed.

A couple of Confederate officers were already rushing toward Bill Reach. They landed on him like a falling building, pummeling him and flinging him out into the street with shouts of, “Get your foul mouth out of here!” “Never show your face here again or you’re a dead man!” One of them noticed the quarter-eagle. He threw it out after Reach, then wiped his hand on a trouser leg, as if to clean it of contamination. That done, he bowed first to Edna and then to Nellie. “You tell us if that cur comes back, ladies. We’ll fix him for good if he dares show his ugly face in here again.”

Nellie nodded. Her customers worked hard to show good breeding by pretending nothing out of the ordinary had happened. Edna didn’t say a thing. Edna didn’t need to say a thing. Whatever else she was, Edna was no fool. She could figure out why Bill Reach thought he had any business saying those filthy things to Nellie-or to someone he thought was Nellie. The only possible answer was the right one.

Edna glanced back at Nellie again. Her mother could not meet her eye. That told her everything that still needed telling. Nellie hung her head. She’d tried to stay respectable for her daughter’s sake. That was over. Everything was over now.

Over the past couple of winters, Lucien Galtier had discovered, somewhat to his surprise, that he liked chopping wood. The work took him back to his youth, to the days before he was conscripted. He’d swung an axe then, swung it and swung it and swung it.

After he came back from the Army, the farm had burned far more coal than wood. The Americans, though, were niggardly with their coal rations, as they were niggardly with everything else. He was glad old Blaise Chretien, only a couple of miles away, had a woodlot. It made the difference between shivering through the winter and getting by comfortably enough.

Chopping wood also kept him warm while he was doing it. Down came the axe-whump! Two chunks of wood leaped apart. “Ah, if only those were Father Pascal’s head and his fat neck,” Lucien said wistfully.

His son Georges was walking by then. Georges had a way of walking by whenever he had the chance to create mischief. “You want to be careful, Papa,” he called. “Otherwise you’ll end up like Great-uncle Leon after Grandfather took off his little finger with the axe when they were boys.”

“You scamp, tais-toi,” Lucien retorted. “Otherwise your backside will end up like your grandfather’s after he took off Leon’s finger with the axe.”

Georges laughed at him. Georges had a right to laugh, too. He was sixteen now, and almost half a head taller than his father. If Lucien tried to give him a licking, who would end up drubbing whom was very much in doubt. Lucien thought he would win even yet-you learned tricks in the Army that simple roughhousing never taught you. But he didn’t want to have to find out.

Up went the axe. Down it came. More wood split. Marie would be happy with him. “No, she cannot call me lazy today,” he said. Some people, he had seen, worked simply for the sake of working. A lot of English-speaking Canadians were like that, and Americans, too. Fewer Quebecois had the disease. Lucien worked when something needed doing. When it didn’t (which, on a farm, was all too seldom), he was content to leave it alone.

He wiped his forehead with the back of his sleeve. He’d worked up a good sweat, though it was chilly out here. The day was clear, though, the sunshine streaming down as if it were spring. Only the slightly deeper blue of the sky argued otherwise.

Up in the sky, something buzzed like a mosquito out of season. He stopped chopping for a little while and peered upward, trying to spot the aeroplane-no, aeroplanes: a flight of them, droning north. His mouth twisted. “I hope all of you are shot down,” he said, shaking his fist at the heavens. “This is our patrimony, not yours. You have no business taking it from us.”

Afterwards, he blamed the American aeroplanes for what happened when he went back to chopping. They had, after all, broken the smooth rhythm he’d established before they disturbed him. And if he hadn’t blamed them, he would have blamed Georges instead. Better to put it on his enemy’s head than on his own flesh and blood.

He knew the stroke was wrong the second the axehead started on its downward arc. He tried to twist it aside; in the end, he didn’t know whether that made things better or worse. The axe hit the piece of wood on the chopping block a glancing blow and then bit into his left leg.

“Tabernac!” he hissed. The blade had a red edge when he pulled it free. Blood started running down his calf into his shoe. It was warm on what had been cold skin. “Ah, mauvais tabernac.”

The axe had sliced into meat, not bone. That was the only good thing he could say about the wound. He started to throw the axe aside so he could hobble to the farmhouse, but held onto the tool instead. That leg didn’t want to bear much weight, and the axe handle made a stick to take it instead.

Marie let out a small shriek when he made it inside. “It is not so bad,” he said, hoping it was not so bad. “Put a bandage on it, and then I will go out and finish what I have to do.”

“You will go nowhere today,” she said, grabbing for a rag. “You should be ashamed, bleeding on my clean floor.”

“Believe me, I regret the necessity more than you do,” he said.

She got off his shoe and sock and pulled up his trouser leg. “This is not good,” she said, examining the wound. He did not want to look at it himself while she worked. He had not a qualm about slaughtering livestock, but his own blood made him queasy. “It is bleeding right through the bandage,” she told him. “A cloth will not be enough for this, Lucien. It wants stitching, or heaven knows when it will close.”

“That is nonsense,” he said. Even as he spoke, though, the two raw edges of the wound slipped against each other. His stomach lurched. He felt dizzy, a little lightheaded.

Firmly, Marie said, “J’ai raison, Lucien. I have sewn up a cut hand once or twice, but I do not think I should sew this. It is too long and too deep. I think you should go to the American hospital, and let them do a proper job of putting you back together.”

The mere idea of going to the hospital was enough to restore her husband to himself. “No,” he said. “No and no and no. It was bad enough that the Americans took my land, took land in this family since before the battle on the Plains of Abraham, took my patrimony for their own purposes. To use this hospital, to acknowledge it is there: this is a humiliation that cannot be borne. Sew it yourself.”

“If you do not acknowledge the hospital, why does Nicole work there?” Marie asked. “If you do not acknowledge the hospital, why have you drunk applejack with Dr. O’Doull three times in the past month? Why have you probably got one of his cigars in your pocket even now?”

Galtier opened his mouth to give her the simple, logical explanation to the paradoxes she propounded. Nothing came out. His wits, he thought, were discommoded because of the wound. He told her that instead.

She set her hands on her hips. “Then, foolish man, it is time to get the wound seen to, n’est-ce pas? You will come with me.”

Go with her he did, still using the axe as a stick and with his other arm around her shoulder. Even with such help, he had to stop and rest three or four times before they got to the hospital. When they did, one of the workmen there tried to turn them away: “This place is for Americans, not you damn Canucks.”

“Hold on, Bill,” a nurse said. “That’s Nicole’s father. We’ll take care of him. What happened to you?” The last was to Galtier.

“Axe-cutting wood.” Remembering English was hard.

“Come on in,” the nurse said. “I’ll get Dr. O’Doull. He’ll do a proper job of patching you up.” She pointed to the door, maybe seeing that Marie had no English.

At the door, Lucien ordered his wife home. “They will help me the rest of the way,” he told her, pointing to the nurse and the workman. When she protested, he said, “Some of what is here, you should not see.” He knew what war looked like. She didn’t, not really. He wanted to keep it that way.

In English and in horrible French, the people from the hospital told her the same thing. She was still protesting when an ambulance skidded to a stop in front of the hospital. The driver and an attendant carried in a man on a stretcher. A bloody blanket lay over the lower part of his body; it was obvious he’d lost a leg. Marie abruptly turned and walked back toward the farmhouse.

The first thing Lucien noticed inside the hospital was how warm it was. The Americans did not have to stint on coal. The second thing he noticed was the smell. Part of it was sharp and medicinal: the top layer, so to speak. Under it lay faint odors he knew from the barnyard-blood and dung and, almost but not quite undetectable, a miasma of bad meat.

“You wait here,” the nurse told him, pointing to a bench. “I’ll get the doctor to see you.”

“Merci,” he said, his injured leg stretched out straight in front of him. A couple of soldiers, young men hardly older than Charles, his older son, sat there, too. The wounded man who’d been brought in on the stretcher wasn’t in sight. They were probably working on him already.

One of the soldiers asked, “You speak English, pal?” At Lucien’s nod, the youngster asked, “You get that from a shell?” He pointed to the wound.

“No, from to chop the wood.” Lucien gestured to eke out his words. The American nodded in turn. Seeing him polite, Lucien asked, “And you-what have you?”

“Flunked my shortarm inspection,” the young soldier answered, flushing. That didn’t mean anything to Lucien. The Yank noticed. “This hoor up in Riviere-du-Loup, she gave me the clap,” he explained. Lucien had heard that phrase in his own Army days. Inside, he laughed. He had a more honorable wound than the American.

“Well, well, what have we here?” That was good French, from the mouth of Dr. Leonard O’Doull. He wore a white coat with a few reddish stains on it. Looking severely at Lucien, he said, “Monsieur Galtier, if you want to visit me here, it is not necessary to do yourself an injury first.”

“I shall bear that in mind, thank you,” Lucien said dryly. “It was, you must believe me, not the reason for which I hurt myself.”

“Of that I have no doubt,” O’Doull replied. He undid just enough of the bandage to see how big the wound was, and whistled softly when he did. “Yes, you were wise to come.”

“It was my wife’s idea,” Galtier said.

“Then you were wise to listen to her. As long as one in the family is wise, things go well. I shall have to show you how neatly I can sew.” He turned and spoke to a nurse in English too rapid for Lucien to follow. She nodded and hurried off.

“I am glad you are the one to help me,” the farmer said.

“I speak French,” O’Doull answered, “and you are the father of my friend.” Did he hesitate a little before that last word? Lucien couldn’t tell. O’Doull went on, “This is a duty and an honor both, then.” The nurse came back with a tray full of medical paraphernalia. The doctor went on, “It is an honor that will be painful for you, though, monsieur. I am going to give you an injection to keep you from getting lockjaw. This will not hurt much now, but may make you sore and sick later. We must roll up your sleeve-”

Next to the fire in Galtier’s leg, the injection was a fleabite. Then O’Doull said, “And now we must disinfect the wound. You understand? We must keep it from rotting, if we can.” Lucien nodded. He’d seen hurts go bad.

O’Doull poured something that smelled almost like applejack into the wound. Galtier gasped and bit his lip and crossed himself. If the wound was a fire, O’Doull had just poured gasoline on it. “’Osti,” the farmer said weakly. Tears blurred his vision.

“I do regret it very much, but it is a necessity,” O’Doull said. Lucien managed to nod. “Now to sew it up,” the doctor told him.

Before O’Doull could get to work with needle and thread, another nurse came in. That was how Galtier thought of her till she exclaimed, “Papa!”

“Oh, bonjour, Nicole,” he said. He’d seen her in the white-and-gray nurse’s uniform with the Red Cross on the right breast before, of course, but here he’d looked at the uniform instead of the person inside it. Embarrassed, he muttered, “The foolish axe slipped.”

“Nothing that can’t be fixed,” O’Doull said, fitting fat thread to a large needle. “Do hold still, if you’d be so kind. Oh, very good. I have seen soldiers, M. Galtier, who gave far more trouble with smaller wounds.”

“I have been a soldier,” Lucien said quietly. He counted the sutures: twenty-one. O’Doull bandaged the wound thicker and more tightly than Marie had done. Lucien dipped his head. “Merci beaucoup.”

“Pas de quoi,” O’Doull answered. “I will give you a week’s supply of sterile wound dressings. If it’s still oozing after that much time, come in and see me and we will disinfect it again. Let your sons do the work for a while. They think they’re men now. Work will show whether or not they are right. We’ll take you home in an ambulance, if you like.”

“No,” Lucien said. “Marie will think I have died.”

“Ah. Well, let me get you a proper walking stick, then.” O’Doull did that himself. The stick with which he returned was so severely plain, it was obviously government issue. That the U.S. government manufactured large numbers of walking sticks for the anticipated use of wounded men said more plainly than words what sort of war this was.

But, as Lucien made his slow, hobbling way home, he despised the Americans less than he had before. Almost everyone at the hospital had been good to him, even though he was a civilian, and an enemy civilian at that. No one had asked him for a penny. He was not used to feeling anything but scorn for the occupiers, but he prided himself on being a just man. “It could be,” he said, slowly, wonderingly, “that they are-that some of them are-human beings after all.”

“I wish Pa would come home again,” George Enos, Jr., said.

“Me, too!” Mary Jane said loudly. She didn’t say no as much as she had when she’d first turned two, for which Sylvia Enos heartily thanked God. Now her daughter tried to imitate George, Jr., in everything she did. Most of the time, that wasn’t bad at all. Every so often-as when she piddled standing up-it proved unfortunate.

“I wish he would, too, dears,” Sylvia said, and wondered just how much she meant that. No time to worry about it now. “Come on, both of you. We have to get you to Mrs. Coneval, or I’ll be late for work.”

They followed her down the hall to Brigid Coneval’s apartment. Several other children were in there already, and making a racket like a bombardment on the Maryland front.

“A fine mornin’ to you, Mrs. Enos,” Mrs. Coneval said after she’d opened the door. “I’ll see you tonight. Come in, lambs.”

Sylvia went downstairs and headed for the trolley stop. Newsboys hopped up and down on their corners, trying to stay warm. The sun wouldn’t be up for a little while yet, and the air had a wintry snap in it, though Indian summer had lingered till only a few days before.

Nobody was shouting about great naval battles in the Atlantic, nor about a destroyer lost at sea. With the war now in its third year, Sylvia knew how little that meant. A sunken destroyer was the small change of war, hardly worth a headline. Anything might have happened to the Ericsson, and she wouldn’t know about it till she found the paragraph on page five.

If she bought a paper at all, that is. These days, she didn’t do that every day, as she had when George was serving on the river monitor. She walked past the newsboys today, too, and stood waiting for the trolley without a Globe.

“Men,” she muttered as the streetcar clanged up to the stop. She threw a nickel in the farebox. An old man stood up to give her his seat. She thanked him, hardly noticing he was of the sex she’d just condemned for existing.

She wished George had been either a better person or a better liar. She would have preferred the first, but the other might have done in a pinch. For him not to have the need to visit a whore (and a nigger whore at that, she thought, appalled by his lack of taste as well as his lack of judgment) would have been best. If he had gone and done it, she wished she’d never found out.

Actually, he had gone, but he hadn’t quite done it. That didn’t make things any better. How was she supposed to trust him now? (That he wouldn’t have been worth trusting if he hadn’t told her about going to the whore never occurred to her.) When he wasn’t in her sight but was ashore, what would he be doing? “Men,” she said again.

She was so lost in her angry reverie, she almost missed the stop in front of the canning plant. The trolley was about to start up again before she leapt from her seat and hurried out the door. The driver gave her a reproachful look. She glared at him. He was a man, too, even if he had a white mustache.

She punched in and hurried toward her machine. Isabella Antonelli was already at hers. “Good morning, Sylvia,” she said with a smile that did not match the mourning she still wore.

“Hello, Isabella,” Sylvia answered as she made sure the machine had plenty of labels in the feeder and the paste reservoir was full. That done, she really noticed the smile she had seen, and smiled back at her friend. “You’re looking cheerful this morning.” Her own smile was mischievous. “Did you put a little brandy in your coffee before you came to work?”

The capitalists who ran the canning plant hadn’t spent any more than the bare minimum on lamps. The ceiling was high, the bulbs dim. And Isabella Antonelli was as swarthy as any other Italian, which made her seem very dark indeed to fair-skinned Sylvia. Nevertheless, she blushed. It was unmistakable.

Sylvia waggled a finger at her. “You did put some brandy in your coffee.”

“No such thing,” Isabella said. Maybe she hadn’t. Sniffing, Sylvia couldn’t smell any brandy, but they weren’t standing face to face with each other, either, and the whole plant reeked of fish anyhow. But Isabella Antonelli had done something or other. What? How to find out without embarrassing her further?

Before Sylvia could come up with answers to either of those questions, the production line, which had shut down for shift changeover, started up again. Here came the cans. They came fast enough, nothing else mattered. Sylvia began pulling the three levers that carried them through her machine, gave each one a couple of girdling squirts of paste, and put on the label bearing a fish that looked much more like a fancy tuna than the mackerel the cans contained.

Pull, step, pull, step, pull, back to the beginning, pull, step…It was going to be a good day. Sylvia could feel that already. A good day was a day she got through barely noticing she’d been at the plant at all. On bad days, her shift seemed to last for years.

Here came Mr. Winter, limping up the line, a cigar clamped between upper and lower teeth. “Good morning, Mrs. Enos,” the foreman said, almost without opening his mouth. “How are you today?”

“Fine, thank you,” she answered, politely adding, “And you?”

“Couldn’t be better,” Mr. Winter said. His mouth still didn’t open wide, but its corners moved upwards. He was happier than she’d seen him in a good long while. After a moment, he returned to business: “Machine behaving?”

“Yes-see for yourself.” Sylvia hadn’t missed a lever while talking with the foreman. “The action feels smoother than it has.”

“They oiled it last night. About time,” he said. After a brief pause, he went on, “Hope your husband’s all right.”

“So do I,” Sylvia answered, despite everything more truthfully than not.

“God’s own miracle he was saved off the Punishment,” Mr. Winter said.

“I suppose that’s true.” Sylvia had all she could do not to laugh in the aging veteran’s face. George had gone up on the riverbank to get drunk and commit adultery. The God she worshiped wasn’t in the habit of manufacturing miracles of that shape.

“God’s own miracle,” the foreman repeated. He, of course, didn’t know all the details. Sylvia wished she didn’t know all the details, either.

Nodding to her once more, Mr. Winter went on up the line to see how Isabella Antonelli and her machine were. Over the noise of the line and of her own machine, Sylvia couldn’t hear much of what the two of them said to each other. She could see, though: could see the foreman’s hand rest lightly upon Isabella’s for a moment, could see the way the widow’s body bent toward his as a flower bends toward the sun.

Sylvia automatically worked her machine. She stared at her friend, stared and stared. She was not a blind woman. When things went on around her, she noticed them. If Mr. Winter and Isabella Antonelli weren’t lovers, she would have forfeited a week’s pay.

I should have known what kind of smile that was, she thought, annoyed at herself for not recognizing it on Isabella’s face. She’d worn it often enough herself, when things with George had been good. Mr. Winter’s smile wasn’t quite the usual large male leer, but the cigar would have fallen out of his mouth if it had been.

Pull, step, pull, step…She wanted to see if Isabella would say anything at lunch. All of a sudden, the day that had been moving swiftly ceased to move at all. At half past twelve, the line finally stopped. The weather was too raw for Sylvia and Isabella to eat outside, as they had earlier in the year. They sat down together on a bench not too far from one of the handful of steam radiators the factory boasted.

Isabella solved Sylvia’s problem for her by speaking first. She blushed again as she said, “I saw you watching me.”

Sylvia’s face heated, but she nodded. “Er-well, yes.”

“He is not a bad man. I have said this since he and I were only friends.” Isabella Antonelli tossed her head, as if defying Sylvia to make something of that. Sylvia only nodded again. That seemed to mollify her friend, who went on, “He has been lonely for years now, since his wife died. I know what being lonely means-Dio mio, how I know. Believe me when I tell you not being lonely is better.”

Sylvia imagined lame old Mr. Winter touching her, caressing her. She didn’t know whether to be revolted or burst out laughing. But she was lonely herself a good deal of the time these days, with George aboard the Ericsson…and when he had been home, had she been anything more than a piece of meat for him, a more convenient piece of meat at the moment than a Negro harlot? Did she want him to love her, or to leave her alone? For the life of her, she didn’t know.

And so, very slowly, she nodded. “You may be right after all, Isabella,” she said. “You may be right.”

Jonathan Moss had reached that pleasant stage of intoxication where his nose and the top part of his cheeks were going numb, but he was still thinking clearly-or pretty clearly, anyhow. As he generally did at such times, he stared into his whiskey glass with bemused respect, astonished the amber fluid could work such magic on the way he felt.

Dud Dudley stared around the officers’ lounge. “What we need here,” he declared, “are some women.”

“I’ll drink to that,” Moss said, and did. “They ought to bring some up from the States, as a matter of fact. All the Canuck gals treat us like we’re poisonous.” That wasn’t strictly true; every now and then a pilot would find a complaisant young woman in Ontario. Moss never had, though.

His flight leader nodded vigorously. “There’s an idea!” Dudley said. “They can call them something that sounds as if it’s military supplies, so the bluenoses won’t have conniptions. ‘Tool mufflers,’ maybe. Yeah, tool mufflers. How do you like them apples?”

It seemed funny and then some to Moss. “We ought to give Hardshell a requisition for ’em, start it going through the Quartermaster Corps. ‘Yeah, Fred, we need another couple dozen tool mufflers on the Toronto front.’” He spoke into an imaginary telephone. “‘Split ’em even between blondes, brunettes, and redheads.’”

He would have gone on embroidering that theme for quite a while, but an orderly poked his head into the officers’ lounge, spotted him, and brightened. “Lieutenant Moss, sir?” he said. “Major Pruitt needs to see you right away, sir.”

“I’m coming.” Moss got to his feet, a process that proved more complicated than he’d expected. “I’m coming. Lead on, Henry.”

Henry led on. As Moss left, Dudley called after him: “Requisition a couple extra redheaded tool mufflers for me, pal.” They both laughed. Henry the orderly grinned in a nervous sort of way, not getting the joke.

Major Shelby Pruitt raised an eyebrow when he saw the state Moss was in. That was all he did. The weather was too lousy to let aeroplanes get off the ground, so the pilots had little to do but sit around and drink. The salute Moss gave him was crisp enough, at any rate. “Reporting as ordered, sir.”

“At ease,” Pruitt said. He passed Moss a little velvet box with a snap lid. “Here. As long as you’re celebrating, you can have something to celebrate.” Moss opened the box. Two sets of a captain’s twin silver bars sparkled in the lamplight. He stared at them, then at Pruitt. The squadron commander grinned at him. “Congratulations, Captain Moss.”

Moss said the first thing that popped into his head: “What about Dud, sir?”

He made Hardshell Pruitt smile. “That does you credit. His are in the works. They should have come in with yours, but there’s some sort of paperwork foul-up. I’d have saved yours to give them to the both of you at the same time, but I can’t. You’re both getting shipped out, and to different places, and they’ve laid on a motorcar for you in an hour. As soon as you leave here, go pack up what you have to take with you. The rest of your junk will follow you sooner or later, maybe even by the end of the war.”

Things were moving too fast for Moss to follow. He thought-he hoped-they would have been moving too fast for him to follow had he been sober. “Sir, could you explain-?” he said plaintively.

“You’re a captain now.” Pruitt’s voice was crisp, incisive. He used it as a surgeon uses a scalpel: to slice through the fat to the meat. “You’ll be a flight leader for certain, maybe even a squadron leader if casualties keep on the way they’ve been going.”

“We keep flying Martins against these Pups, sir, we’ll have a lot of casualties,” Moss said with conviction.

“I understand that,” Major Pruitt answered. “Well, it just so happens the Kaiser’s come through for us. Wright is building a copy of the Albatros two-decker; a German cargo submarine finally made it across the Atlantic with plans and with a complete disassembled aeroplane. The orders detach you to train on the new machine.”

“That’s-bully, sir,” Jonathan Moss breathed. “Can we really fight the limeys in this new bus?”

“Everybody seems to think so,” the squadron leader answered. “The copied Albatros isn’t quite as fast as the Pup, but it’ll climb quicker and it’s just about as maneuverable. And we’ll have a hell of a lot more of them than the limeys and Canucks will have Pups.”

“Good-we’ll make ’em have kittens, then,” Moss said. When sober, he was sobersided. He wasn’t sobersided now.

Hardshell Pruitt also grinned. “Go pack your bags, Captain. Pack the undowithoutables and don’t worry about anything else. I want you back here at 2130, ready to move out for London. Here are your written orders.”

“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.” Moss looked at the pocket watch he wore strapped to his wrist. Like a lot of fliers, he’d started doing that because of the difficulty of groping for a watch while wearing a bulky flight suit. Learning at a glance what time it was had proved so convenient, he wore the watch on a strap all the time now. “See you in forty-five minutes, sir.”

He seemed to float several feet above the muddy ground as he made his way back to the tent he shared with Dudley and with Phil Eaker and Thad Krazewski, who’d taken the place of Orville Thornley, who’d taken the place of Tom Innis. A match got a kerosene lantern going. The space around his cot was as full of junk as more than a year’s settling in and an easygoing view of military regulations would allow.

One green-gray canvas duffel bag didn’t seem enough. He wondered if he could lay hands on a White truck, or maybe two. He shrugged. He’d manage, one way or another. And whatever he left behind wouldn’t go to waste. Some would, as Major Pruitt had said, follow him wherever he went. The other fellows in the flight were welcome to the rest.

He heard Eaker and Krazewski coming. Eaker said, “Jonathan’ll be glad we sweet-talked the cook out of a corned-beef sandwich for him. I’ve never seen anybody as keen for the stuff as he is.”

The two young fliers came into the tent and stared. Grinning, Moss said, “I will be glad for the sandwich, boys. It’ll give me something to eat while they take me wherever I’m supposed to go.”

“Sir?” they said together, twin expressions of blank surprise on their faces.

Moss wanted to tell them everything. The whiskey in him almost set his mouth working ahead of his brain. He checked himself, though. Saying too much-saying anything, really-wouldn’t be fair to Dud Dudley, who had to stay a while longer because of his botched paperwork.

What Moss did end up saying was, “They’re shipping me out. I’m going into training on a new aeroplane.”

“That’s wonderful, sir,” they exclaimed, again in unison. Krazewski clapped his hands together. With his wide cheekbones, blue, blue eyes, and shock of wheat-blond hair, he would have made a gorgeous woman. He made a hell of a handsome man, and the Canucks and limeys hadn’t managed to kill him yet. He asked, “Does Lieutenant Dudley know, sir?”

That’s Captain Dudley, Moss thought, but Dud doesn’t know it yet. “I’ll tell him as soon as I finish packing,” Moss said. He didn’t say anything about all the stuff he wouldn’t be able to pack. His tentmates would go through it soon enough, almost as if he’d died.

He had intended to head for the officers’ lounge as soon as the duffel bag was full. That didn’t happen, because Dud Dudley came in when he was trying to stuff a tin of shaving soap into a bag already full to the point of seam-splitting. “A fine day to you, Captain Moss!” he exclaimed in a voice to which whiskey gave only part of the glee.

He’s heard, Jonathan realized. Hardshell must have decided he couldn’t keep it a secret. “A fine day to you, Captain Dudley!” he returned. The two men solemnly-well, not so solemnly-shook hands while Eaker and Krazewski gaped all over again.

“Too damn bad we’re going to different aerodromes to train,” Dudley said, which reconfirmed Moss’ guess. The flight leader slapped him on the back. “I’ll miss you, you son of a bitch. We’ve got to look each other up if we both come through this stinking war in one piece.” He scrawled his name and address on a scrap of paper. “Here. This is me.”

Moss found his own scrap and borrowed Dudley’s pen. “And this is me. I’ll miss you, too, Dud. And I’ll miss these two sorry ragamuffins-” At that, the pilots who would stay behind gave him a pair of raspberries. He shook hands with both of them, too, then slung his duffel bag over his shoulder. He mimed collapsing under the weight, which wasn’t far from being true, and tramped back toward Major Pruitt’s tent.

A Ford was waiting there for him, the motor running. The driver took the duffel, gave him a reproachful stare at its weight, and tossed it into the automobile. “Hop in, sir,” he said. “Off to London.”

The drive was less than a delight. The Ford’s headlamps were taped so they gave out only a little light; the enemy’s aeroplanes would shoot up anything that moved at night. The road would have been bad even had the driver been able to spot all the potholes. Not spotting them meant he and Moss got to fix several punctures along the way. They didn’t do better than ten miles an hour, which made a hundred-mile journey seem to take forever.

Dawn was breaking when they finally reached the aerodrome. No one seemed to be expecting Moss, which, after the time he’d had getting there, didn’t surprise him at all. “Well,” a sergeant said doubtfully, “I guess we’ll put you up in Tent 27. Basler!” A private appeared, as if by magic. “Take Captain Moss to Tent 27. He’ll fit in there, one way or another.” The noncom’s face bore a strange sort of smile.

Moss, who hadn’t managed to doze in the automobile, was too worn to care what a sergeant thought. The private led him to a green-gray tent distinguishable only by the number stenciled on its side. “Here you are, sir.”

“Thanks.” Moss went inside. Sure enough, there was a cot with no belongings nearby. The three officers in the tent, who were readying themselves for the day, looked him over. One of them, a tall, thin, good-looking fellow, exclaimed, “Jonathan!”

“Percy!” Moss said. “Percy Stone!” Then he burst out laughing. “Now I know why that billeting sergeant said I belonged here. Moss and Stone, like the old days.” He pumped Stone’s hand. “Jesus, it’s good to see you in one piece, chum.”

“It’s good to be in one piece again,” Stone said. He’d been Moss’ photographic observer when Moss was still flying two-seaters instead of fighting scouts, and a Canuck had badly wounded him. He pointed to the pilot’s insigne on his chest. “You see I’ve got both wings now.”

“Yeah,” Moss said enthusiastically. “Between us, we’re going to show the Canucks a thing or two.” Percy Stone nodded. They shook hands again.