American Front gw-1 Read online

  Then the dots peeled off. They know better than to get their precious horses — and their precious selves — too close to the machine guns, Jake thought. Poor dears might get hurt. Cavalry would charge, though, when ordered. After staring a moment, he recognized the pattern the horses were forming.

  "That's not cavalry!" he shouted. "That's field artillery."

  Jeb Stuart III came trotting up beside him. He nodded as he stuck a brass telescope up to his eye. "Field artillery, sure as hell," he agreed. "I make the range about two and a half miles-say, four thousand yards for starters. Let's give them a hello, shall we?"

  He started bawling for the whole battery. Featherston handled his gun. It was the second one of the battery to open up. The shell fell a couple of hundred yards short of the U.S. field gun. The next shell, a few seconds later, was long. After that, they started landing in the right general area. You put enough shells in the right general area, you did damage. The Yanks had probably figured they could get their battery into position and into action before the retreating Confederates were ready to reply. They'd made a mistake there, and they were going to pay for it.

  The U.S. battery did get a few shots off, shells crashing down on the trench line behind Codorus Creek. But that kind of nuisance firing went on every day of the war. It was hardly worth noticing, even by the Negro labourers, who were more flighty than soldiers when it came to being on the receiving end of bullets. Since they couldn't shoot back, Jake found it hard to blame them for that.

  He glanced over to Nero and Perseus. They stood by the horses, and were plainly ready to dive into the foxhole if the damnyankees started hurling shells at the battery. They'd shot back. Featherston hoped to high heaven they'd never have to do it again.

  After a few minutes, the U.S. field guns couldn't stand the heat from deploying out in the open. They started moving again, this time against the tide of the advancing U.S. infantry. "So long!" Featherston shouted at them. "Tell your mama what it's like when you really have to work for a living." His gun crew yelled and waved their hats. At Captain Stuart's orders, they started pouring shells into the foot soldiers approaching the creek.

  They worked a formidable slaughter among them, too, but a couple of hours later they had to abandon their position and pull back another mile or two: somewhere farther west, the Yankees had forced a crossing of the creek.

  "Doesn't seem right," Michael Scott grumbled as Nero and Perseus hitched the horses up to the guns. "We were massacring the bastards."

  "Wasn't so much what they did in front of us that made us start this retreat," Featherston answered. "It was what happened off to the flank and the rear. You can win your own part of the battle and still have the whole army lose."

  "I wish you hadn't said that," the loader told him. After Jake thought about it for a while, he wished he hadn't said that, too.

  When Flora Hamburger went downstairs from the Socialist Party offices to walk across Centre Market Place and buy a sandwich in the market, Max Fleischmann was arguing with two goons outside his butcher's shop.

  "No, I don't got no ham," he said to them. "Don't got no pig's knuckles. Don't got no head cheese. Don't got no bacon. Don't got no time for no silliness, neither. I'm a Jew. You maybe may have noticed."

  "Yeah, pop, we noticed," one of the goons said. His nasty grin showed a couple of broken teeth. "Maybe you noticed this." He raised the billy club he carried in his right hand. The armband wrapped around his left sleeve read, peace and order. He and his equally unpleasant friend looked like a couple of Soldiers' Circle men, and were helping to hold down the staunchly Socialist neighborhood by main force.

  "Leave that man alone," Flora said crisply. Her English was precise and almost unaccented. The two volunteer policemen gaped at her as she went on, "Not only has he done nothing to you, but if you beat him, you will be beating one of the few Democrats in this part of New York."

  "Ain't no Democrats here," said the goon with the club ready to use. "Just Jews and Socialists." He leered at her. "Which are you, lady?"

  "Both," Flora answered. The thugs undoubtedly knew that; they hung around the Socialist Party office to harass the Party regulars, and, Maria Tresca aside, few gentiles came here. Angelina Tresca wouldn't, ever again. Flora's party affiliation, though, was a sword that cut both ways. "And if you beat me today-or if you beat Mr. Fleischmann-every Socialist paper in the country will carry the story tomorrow."

  That was true. By the unhappy look on the goons' faces, they knew it, too. The one with the club raised lowered it. "Come on, Paddy," he said in disgust. "We'll find games to play somewheres else." They mooched off, looking for people more willing to be intimidated.

  "Thank you," the butcher said to Flora in English before dropping back into Yiddish. "When you go home, you stop in here. I'll have something for you to take back to the flat. Not something big, maybe, but something."

  "You don't need to do that," she said, also in Yiddish.

  "Hush," Fleischmann told her, his voice stern. "You have a sister who can use good food right now. Take it for her, if not for you." His stiff-backed pose declared he would allow no disagreement.

  Flora gave up. "I'll stop," she promised, wondering how Fleischmann knew about Sophie. Gossip on the crowded Lower East Side was an amazing thing. No doubt Fleischmann also knew the baby would be illegitimate. Flora sighed. Even if you disapproved of bourgeois conventions, you couldn't escape them.

  More goons patrolled the Centre Market. The Remembrance Day riots had given the authorities the excuse they needed to clamp down on Socialist strongholds throughout New York City, though no one had proved or could prove a Socialist had started the disturbances.

  Flora bought a smoked-tongue sandwich from a little stall in the market, a couple of pickled tomatoes from a man who carried his great vat of spiced brine on a pushcart, and coffee from another fellow with a pushcart, this one mounting a samovar. She ate quickly, then went back upstairs, where she spent the afternoon writing one letter after another, all of them aimed at getting Roosevelt's repressive restrictions lifted from New York City.

  "If the president keeps up with them," said Herman Bruck, who was also writing, "he'll provoke a working-class uprising a hundred times worse than anything we saw in the Nineties. That will play hob with carrying on his foolish war."

  His bruises had faded. Roentgen-ray photographs had shown his left hand wasn't broken after all. He wore as a badge of honor the gap in his smile that he'd got when somebody wearing a heavy Soldiers' Circle ring had punched him in the face during the riots, and loudly proclaimed to whoever would listen that he preferred it to going to the dentist for bridgework. Flora found that absurd, but didn't say so; whenever she argued with Bruck about anything, he thought it meant she was interested in him. Maria Tresca, in mourning black, was very quiet.

  Flora finished her letter-writing, said her good-byes, and went downstairs. Max Fleischmann stood waiting for her, as if in ambush. He thrust a paper-wrapped package into her hands. Her eyebrows flew up at the weight of it. "This is too much!" she exclaimed.

  "I'm sorry, I'm not hearing very well today," the butcher said, and went back into his shop. That left her the choice of pursuing him when he plainly did not want to be pursued and going home. Shaking her head, she went home.

  "What do you have there?" her mother asked when she walked into the crowded apartment.

  "I kept Mr. Fleischmann the butcher from having some trouble with TR's hooligans, so he gave me this," she answered, and opened it on the kitchen counter. "Marrow bones and stewing beef: there must be three or four pounds of it."

  "That's very nice," her mother said. "We can use that-barley soup with onions and carrots, maybe, the way your father likes."

  "Yes, Mama," Flora said; to her mother, utility made anything, even Socialism, worthwhile. "I'll put it in the icebox."

  Her brothers came in then, bantering with her and their younger sister Esther as they hung up their jackets and caps. David lighted a cigarett
e, a habit he was just acquiring and one Flora wished he'd lose. The harsh smoke made the flat stink; it wasn't flavourful like the pipe tobacco their father used- even the cheaper grades he was using nowadays smelled better than this nasty weed.

  When Benjamin Hamburger came in, he got the pipe going right away, perhaps in self-defense. Sophie dragged in last of all. The war had created relentless demands on seamstresses in New York City, all over the USA, and, no doubt, all over the world. The bosses didn't care if you were going to have a baby. You had to show up and you had to work no matter how tired, no matter how sick you were. If you didn't, somebody else was waiting to do your job.

  Over small helpings of pot roast and big ones of potato kugel, Benjamin Hamburger remarked on that: "With so many jobs needing doing now, wages may be going up. Alevai," he added, dragging superstition into a discussion of what should have been the most unsuperstitious study of economics.

  Before Flora could turn the discussion into a more rational pattern, someone knocked on the door. Flora's mother bounced to her feet and strode to the door with a determined stride, saying, "A peddler who comes round at suppertime deserves a choleryeh he'll remember for a year, and I'll give him one, you see if I don't."

  But when she threw open the door, it was not a peddler hawking knives or pens or stereoscope slides through the block of flats. Instead, it was an unfamiliar-looking man in a green-gray uniform. "Yossel!" Sophie exclaimed, recognizing him without his beard where Flora had not.

  "May I come in?" Yossel Reisen asked when Sarah Hamburger showed no signs of getting out of his way.

  "You may come in," Benjamin called over his wife's shoulder. When she whirled around to protest, he waved for her to calm down, continuing, "How long you stay depends on what you have to say for yourself once you are in here."

  Thus appeased, Sarah grudgingly stepped out of the way. Yossel came past her and into the flat. Esther quickly got up. "Here, find a chair and eat something," she said, hurrying into the kitchen and returning with a plate piled high with potato kugel.

  "Thank you." Reisen did sit down, and looked around nervously. The grimace with which he greeted Sophie was no doubt intended for a smile, but failed of its purpose. "Hello," he said, cautiously, as if she were an armed Rebel behind a wall. "How are you?"

  "As well as I could be-considering," she answered. "You know how I am-the rest of it, though. You must have got my letters, even if I haven't heard from you." She stared at him as defiantly as a Confederate soldier in arms.

  He had a mouth full of kugel, and used that respite to good advantage. "Yes, I know," he said, and then, "I'm sorry, Sophie. I didn't intend that to happen."

  Didn't intend which to happen? Flora wondered. Didn't intend to sleep with Sophie or didn't intend to get her with child? But she held her tongue, to see what her older sister would do.

  "People don't intend that to happen," Sophie said, taking him to mean he hadn't planned to impregnate her. "But it does, and then they have to decide what to do next."

  "That's why I came here," Yossel answered. "I managed to get four days' leave. I spent most of one day coming up from Maryland, and I'll need most of another to get back. Between times"-he licked his lips-"we can get married."

  Bourgeois respectability, Flora thought as Sophie clapped her hands together once and nodded. The idea should have carried more scorn than it did. Somehow, the feeling of contempt for bourgeois values was harder to come by when those values benefited her sister.

  Benjamin Hamburger also nodded, as if he'd expected nothing less from Yossel. Maybe he had expected nothing less. But he raised an objection: "Even with the war, you'll have trouble finding a rabbi to perform the ceremony on such short notice."

  Yossel Reisen shrugged. "Then we'll find a judge, and find a rabbi when I get a longer leave, or else after the war is over."

  "You say that?" Flora exclaimed. "You, who wanted to do nothing but sit on your tokhus and study Talmud all day?"

  "Flora!" Sophie said indignantly. Flora realized everyone else must have heard what she said as an insult. She hadn't meant it that way; what she'd been expressing was astonishment.

  For a wonder, Yossel understood that. He held up a hand, which, after a moment, quieted the angry outcry from the rest of Flora's family. "Yes, I say that," he answered. "When you have been where I have been, when you have seen what I have seen, when you have done what I have done…" His voice trailed away. He was sitting across the table from Flora, and looking in her direction, but he wasn't looking at her. He looked through her, to some place he alone saw, some place maybe more real to him than the crowded apartment in which he sat. He needed a little while to realize he had stopped talking, and coughed a couple of times before he resumed: "When all that is true, you know, right down to the soles of your boots you know, how little time there is. And when you have a little of that little time, you do what you can with it, and what you cannot do now, you will do later, if God lets you."

  No one spoke for a minute or so after that. Then, quietly, Benjamin Hamburger asked, "Sophie, is this all right with you?"

  "Yes," Sophie answered, also quietly. Perhaps of its own accord, her left hand settled on her belly, which was beginning to bulge. "As Yossel said, we have only a little time. We'll do as much as we can with it."

  Flora's father looked to her mother. Sarah Hamburger didn't say yes, but she didn't say no, either. "It is not a perfect arrangement," Benjamin said, "but what in life is perfect except God? If Sophie agrees, it will do."

  Flora was temperamentally opposed to compromise of any kind: she was the one who'd wanted to fight to the end against voting to pay for Roosevelt 's war. Here, though… when it was her own family, things didn't look the same. It wasn't her choice, anyhow; it was Sophie's.

  "You'll sleep here on the divan tonight," her father told Yossel, "as if you were a boarder again." Everybody smiled at that. Benjamin Hamburger got up and went into the kitchen. He rummaged in the pantry and in a cabinet, and came back with a bottle of whiskey and enough glasses for everyone; Flora's brothers told how the old men at the shul had given each of them his first shot just before his bar mitzvah.

  Amid toasts of "L'chaym!" everybody knocked back the drinks. Isaac might have been emboldened by the whiskey, for he asked Yossel Reisen, "What- is it like at the front?" Emboldened or not, he sounded hesitant.

  Yossel looked into the depths of his glass as he had looked through Flora. At last, he answered, "Think of all the worst things you know in the world. Think of them all in one place. Think of them as ten times as bad as they really are. Then think of them ten times worse than that. What you are thinking about when you do that is one ten-thousandth of what the front is like."

  Nobody asked him any more questions.

  Somewhere in the Yankee lines in the ruins of Big Lick, Virginia, a rifle cracked. About fifty feet away from Reggie Bartlett, an incautious Confederate soldier toppled back into the trench, shot through the face. He wasn't dead, not yet; a scream bubbled through the blood flooding from his nose, his mouth, and the wound between them.

  "God damn that fucking sniper to hell," somebody snarled as a couple of men hauled their wounded comrade back toward the doctors to see if they could do anything for him. "That's the fourth one of us he's got on this sector this week. We ever catch him, I'll gut-shoot him and watch him die."

  Bartlett hardly looked up, either for the gunshot or for the screams and curses following it. He was hunting lice, a matter that could have taken up most of his waking day if duties demanded by his officers hadn't intervened. Every one of the little bastards you crunched between your thumbnails was one more that wouldn't bite you, one more that wouldn't leave sores and scabs in your hair, one more that wouldn't leave itchy welts on your body.

  He tried to remember his leave in Richmond. He knew he'd been there, seen old friends, made new ones, got drunk, got laid at a soldiers' brothel full of bored-looking colored girls. It was a matter of a few weeks, not months or years, but seem
ed far more distant than that. When you were at the front, everything else was distant.

  If you singed the seams of your tunic and trousers, you killed nits and drove lice out to where you could grab them and squash them. Reggie lighted a candle, shed his tunic, and ran the flame along one sleeve, pausing every so often to slaughter the vermin he'd flushed out.

  A fat rat came strolling down the middle of the trench. It was light enough not to get stuck in the mud from the recent rains; Bartlett wished he could have said the same. The rat paused and stared at him with its beady black eyes. I'll steal your rations, see if I don't, it seemed to say. And if I don't, one day soon a Yankee shell will turn you into rations — for me.

  Shells never seemed to kill rats-or maybe it was just that there were so many of them, every piece of artillery in the world couldn't have slaughtered them all. Well, if wholesale didn't work, there was always retail. Reggie snatched up the entrenching tool beside him and threw it at the rat. The rat was quick and alert, but he'd guessed right about which way it would jump, and it couldn't outrun the sharpened shovel blade, which cut it almost in two. Bartlett retrieved the tool and used it to smash in the twitching rat's head. The twitching ceased. He looked around to see if any more rats were close by. Spying none, he went back to delousing his tunic.

  "You hammered that fat, ugly bastard," Corporal Robert E. McCorkle said.

  "Sure did," Bartlett agreed. McCorkle was a fat, ugly bastard himself, but saying so struck Reggie as impolitic. "They're getting awfully bold these days, parading through the trenches like they've got stars in wreaths on their collars."

  McCorkle laughed at that. Reggie relighted the candle, which had gone out, and went back to killing lice. He had just started on the other sleeve when first one man and then several began banging with entrenching tools on shell casings that had been hung like temple bells from tripods made of boards. With the unmusical banging, a warning cry raced up and down the trench line: "Gas! The Yanks are using gas!"