Napoleon Dibble added, “We got to fight the sons of bitches, sure, but that don’t mean we can’t do a swap every now and then when we ain’t fightin’. Won’t change how the war turns out, one way or t’other.” He laughed a loud, senseless laugh; Reggie didn’t think he was very bright.
“I suppose you’re right,” Reggie said slowly. “But what does Lieutenant Nicoll-is that his name? — think about it?”
Hairston stared at him. The whites of the sergeant’s eyes glittered in the starlight. “You out of your mind, Bartlett? Who the devil you think set this deal up in the first place?”
Reggie didn’t say anything. He couldn’t think of anything to say. All he could do was try to figure out exactly what they thought the war was all about out here in the west.
“Here they come!” Chester Martin threw himself into a shelter dug into the forward wall of the trench a split second before the Confederate shells started landing. The earth shook. Fragments hissed through the air. He sniffed anxiously, wondering whether the Rebs were throwing gas and he needed to pull his mask on over his head. He didn’t think so.
He wasn’t the only one in the shelter. He was lying on top of Specs Peterson in a position that would have been a hell of a lot more enjoyable had Specs been a perfumed whore instead of a bad-tempered private who hadn’t been anywhere near soap and water any time lately.
“They’ve been shellin’us like bastards the past couple weeks,” Peterson bawled in his ear-not much, as sweet nothings went.
“Yeah, they-oof!” Martin’s rejoinder was rudely abridged when somebody dove in on top of him, making him the squashed meat in a three-man sandwich. Peterson, in the role of the lower piece of bread, didn’t much care for it, either. Everybody thrashed around till nobody was kneeing anybody too badly, at which point two more soldiers came scrambling into the hole in the ground. It couldn’t hold five men, but it did.
“Amazing how you can pack these shelters when it’s a choice between packing ’em and getting blown to cat’s meat out there,” said Corporal Paul Andersen, one of the latest arrivals.
“Yeah,” Martin said again. “Now what we got to do is, we got to synchronize our breathing. You know how the officers are always synchronizing their watches when we go over the top. If we all breathe in and out at the same time, maybe we all really can squeeze in here.”
“Hell, maybe the Rebs’ll drop a big one right on top of us,” Specs Peterson said. “Then we won’t have to worry about breathing at all no more.” Martin and Andersen stuck elbows in him, which had the twin virtues of giving them more room and making him shut up.
Martin took advantage of the extra room to draw a deep breath. “Like I was saying before half the division jumped on me, I figure the reason the Rebs are shelling us so hard is on account of they ain’t got no barrels. They’ve moved a hell of a lot of artillery forward to shoot at the ones we got when they come up-and to make life miserable for us poor bastards in between times.”
“Makes sense, Sarge,” Andersen said. “Wish it didn’t, but it does.” A big shell, a six-incher or maybe even an eight-, did land almost on top of the shelter then. Dirt rained down between the boards holding up the roof; some of the boards themselves cracked, with noises like rifle shots. That sent more dirt spilling down on the soldiers.
Can I claw my way out if I get buried? Martin wondered. Even inside the shelter, shielded from the worst of the blast, he felt his lungs trying to crawl out through his nose. Get too close to a big one and the blast would kill you without leaving a mark on your body.
With commendable aplomb, Andersen picked up where he’d left off: “We came up with the barrels, I thought that first morning we were going to win the war then and there. But even if the Rebs don’t have any, they’ve sure as hell figured out how to fight ’em. Same with gas earlier.”
“You notice, though,” Peterson said, “the Rebs ain’t makin’ many attacks these days, not like they were doin’ before we made it over to this side o’ the Roanoke. Costs us more when we got to go to them instead of the other way round.”
“We got what we came for,” Martin said. “We got the iron mines. ’Course, we can’t use ’em much, because their long-range guns still reach most of ’em. And we got the railroad, too. ’Course, they’ve already built new track further east and slid around the part of the valley we took away from ’em.”
“Ain’t it great when we’re winnin’ the damn war?” Andersen said.
That drew a profane chorus from the men stuffed into the shelter with him. A few minutes later, the Confederate barrage abruptly stopped. It didn’t do anything to ease Chester Martin’s mind. Sometimes the Rebs would really stop. Sometimes they’d stop long enough for people to come out of their shelters and then start up again to catch them in the open. And sometimes, no matter what Specs Peterson said, they’d send raiders over the top, hoping the U.S. soldiers would stay huddled in the bomb-proofs. What to do? For this shelter, it was his call. He was the sergeant here.
“Out!” he shouted. “They start shelling again, we jump back in.”
People spilled out. By the way things worked, Martin was the next to last one to make it out into the trench. Every muscle in his body twanged with tension. If the Rebs were going to open up again, it would be right about…now. When the moment passed without fresh incoming shells, he breathed a little easier.
Back behind the U.S. lines, artillery came to life, answering the Confederate barrage. “Let the big guns shoot at the big guns,” Paul Andersen said. “Long as they leave me alone, I don’t care, and that’s the God’s truth.”
“Amen.” Chester looked around the trenches and sighed. “Got us some spadework to do, looks like to me.” High explosive and steel and brass had had their way with the landscape, blowing big holes in the trenches, knocking down stretches of parapet and parados, and incidentally knocking a couple of vital machine-gun positions topsy-turvy.
Here and there, up and down the line, wounded men were shouting-some wounded men were screaming-for stretcher-bearers. Heading toward one of those shouting men, Martin rounded the corner of a firebay, stepped into a traverse, and was confronted by a man’s leg, or that portion of it from about the middle of the shin downward, still standing erect, foot in shoe, the rest of the man nowhere to be seen. A little blood-only a little-ran down from the wound to streak the puttee.
He’d seen too much, these past nearly two years. Put a man in a place where he grew acquainted with horror every day, and it ceases to be horrible for him. It becomes part of the landscape, as unremarkable as a dandelion puffball. He reached out with his own foot and kicked the fragment of humanity against the traverse wall so no one would stumble over it.
“Poor bastard,” Paul Andersen said from behind him. “Wonder who he was.”
“Don’t know,” Martin answered. “Whoever he was, he never knew what hit him. Hell of a lot of worse ways to go than that, and Jesus, ain’t we seen most of ’em?” About then, by the noise, a couple of other men came on the wounded soldier for whom they’d been heading. He’d found one of those worse ways.
Andersen sighed. “Yeah,” he said, and stood against the wall, a few feet away from the severed foot, to relieve himself. “Sorry,” he muttered as he buttoned his fly. “Didn’t feel like holding it till I got to the latrine. Damn shelling probably blew shit all over the place, anyway.”
“I didn’t say anything,” Chester Martin told him. “You got any makings, Paul? I’m plumb out.”
“Yeah, I got some.” The corporal passed him his tobacco pouch.
He rolled a cigarette in a scrap of newspaper, pulled out a brass lighter, flicked the wheel, and got the smoke going. “Ahh, thanks,” he said after a long drag. “Hits the spot.” He looked around. “Sort of feels the way it does after a big rainstorm, you know what I mean? Peaceful-like.”
“Yeah,” Andersen said again, quite unself-consciously. A couple of rifle shots rang out, but they were three, four hundred yards away: nothing to w
orry about. “Might as well finish taking stock of what they did to us this time.”
All things considered, the company had got off lucky. Only a couple of men had died, and most of the wounds were home-towners, not the sort where the fellow who’d taken them begged you to shoot him and put him out of his anguish, and where, if you did, nobody ever said a word about it to you afterwards. Martin had seen his share of wounds like that; talking with the other soldiers in his squad, he said, “You see one like that, it’s your share for a lifetime and then some.”
“Yeah.” Specs Peterson laughed. “You want to hear something stupid, Sarge? Back before the war started, I was thinkin’ about lettin’ my beard grow out, on account of I couldn’t stand the sight of blood when I nicked myself with a razor.”
“That’s pretty stupid, all right,” Martin agreed, which made Specs glare at him in what might have been mock anger and might have been real. He went on, “You too cheap to pay a barber to do it for you? Those boys, they make damn sure they don’t cut you.”
“Too cheap, hell,” Peterson came back. “Where you from, Sarge?”
“Toledo,” Martin answered. “You know that.”
“Yeah, you’re right. I forgot,” Peterson said. “All right, Toledo, that’s the big city. Me, I’m off a farm in the western part of Nebraska. The barber in the little country town, he was so drunk all the time, it’s a wonder he never cut anybody’s throat. And I was ten miles outside of town, and we ain’t never gonna have the money for a flivver. So how the hell am I supposed to get a barber to shave me?”
“Damned if I know,” Martin answered. “So blood doesn’t bother you any more, that right?”
Specs Peterson snorted. “What do you think?”
Martin inspected him. He was even filthier than he had been before the dive into the shelter, and had unkempt stubble sprouting on cheeks and chin. Frowning sadly, Martin said, “So why the hell haven’t you shaved any time lately?”
“I was going to this morning, Sarge, honest, but the Rebs started shelling us.” Behind his steel-rimmed spectacles, Peterson raised an eyebrow. “You may have noticed.”
“Oh, yeah.” Martin snapped his fingers. “You know, I knew something was goin’ on then, but I couldn’t quite remember what.” Paul Andersen threw a clod of dirt at him. In the trenches, though, it passed for wit.
The Dakota steamed out of Pearl Harbor. Standing on deck, Sam Carsten said, “You know somethin’, Vic? This ship puts me in mind of the old joke about the three-legged dog. The wonder is, she goes at all.”
“Yeah, well, I ain’t gonna argue with you, you know what I’m saying?” Vic Crosetti answered, scratching his hairy arm. “I’ll tell you something else, too. She’s as ugly as a three-legged dog right now.”
“Yeah,” Sam agreed, mournful for a couple of reasons. For one thing, if he’d scratched himself half as hard as Crosetti was doing, he’d have drawn blood from his poor, sunburned hide. For another, the Dakota really was ugly these days. “What she’s really like is a guy who took one in the trenches and he ends up with a steel plate in his head.”
“Got enough steel plates to eat a whole steel dinner off of,” Crosetti said, whereupon Carsten made as if to pick him up and fling him over the rail.
Bad pun aside, though, the description was accurate enough. Not all the damage the Dakota had taken in the Battle of the Three Navies was repaired; parties were still patching, strengthening, refurbishing. Some of the damage wouldn’t be fixed, probably, till the war was over. But the battleship could make twenty knots and fight, and the Japanese and the British hadn’t disappeared off the face of the earth. Ugly or not, jury-rigged or not, she was going back out on patrol.
“I just hope the steering holds us,” Carsten said.
Vic Crosseti’s bushy eyebrows went up and down. “Why the hell do you want that? Didn’t you think it was fun, charging the whole damn British fleet all by ourselves? Nobody else had the balls to try anything like that. The other guys, they stayed in line like good little boys and girls. You want to stand out from the crowd, is what you want to do.”
“When they shoot you if you stand out, it’s not as bully as it would be otherwise,” Carsten said. Crosetti laughed. Then he got busy in a hurry, swiping a rag against the nearest stretch of painted metal. Sam imitated him without conscious thought. If somebody near you started working for no obvious reason, he’d spotted an officer you hadn’t.
Commander Grady-the fat stripe where a thin one had been before got sewn onto his cuff after the Battle of the Three Navies-said, “Never mind the playacting, Carsten.” He sounded amused; as sailors knew the nasty ways in which officers’ minds worked, so officers had some clues about how sailors operated. Grady went on, “You come with me. I’ve got some real work for you.”
“Aye aye, sir,” Sam answered. As he followed the commander of the starboard secondary armament, he knew without turning his head when Vic Crosetti would put down the rag and light himself a smoke. He also knew the little dago would be grinning like a monkey, because Sam had had to go do something real while he got to stand around a little longer.
Grady said, “We’re trying to get the number-four sponson into good enough shape so we can fire the gun if we have to.”
“Yes, sir,” Carsten said doubtfully. The number-four sponson had taken a hit from somebody’s secondary armament, whether British or Japanese nobody knew-nobody had been taking notes, and the shell hadn’t left a carte de visite: except for smashing the sponson to hell and gone, that is. Nobody had come out of there alive. Thinking about it gave Sam the horrors. It could have been the number-one sponson, easy as not.
“I think they can do it,” Grady said. “In fact, they damn near have done it. But the gun mount still isn’t quite right, and there’s not a lot of room in there, what with all the other repairs they’ve had to make. I want somebody familiar with a sponson as it’s supposed to be to pitch in with some good advice for them.”
“Yes, sir,” Sam said again. “Uh, sir, so you know, ‘Cap’n’ Kidde has forgotten more about sponsons than I’ll ever know.”
“He’s still helping with the rebuilding of the number-two on the port side. That got it worse than this one. He suggested you for the duty.”
“All right, sir,” Carsten answered. He didn’t know whether Kidde was mad at him and wanted to keep him hopping or whether the gunner’s mate was putting him in a spot where he could shine for the higher-ups. A little of both, maybe: that was “Cap’n” Kidde’s way. If he did this right, he’d look good where looking good could really help him. If he fouled up, he’d pay for it.
He ducked through the hatchway. Commander Grady didn’t follow; he had other fish to fry. Even the bulkhead around the hatchway showed the damage the sponson had taken. It was a mass of patches and welds, none of them smoothed down or painted over. There might be time for that later. There hadn’t been time for it yet.
Inside, the sponson was even more crowded than it had been when the gun crew filled it during the Battle of the Three Navies. A bunch of men in dungarees turned their heads to stare at Sam. One of them said, “You must be the guy Commander Grady was talking about.”
“Yeah, I’m Sam Carsten, loader on the number-one gun, this side.” Carsten pointed toward the bow.
“Good.” The fellow in dungarees nodded. “Then you know how one of these damn things goes when it’s working right.” He jabbed a thumb at his own chest. “Pleased to meetcha, Sam, by the way. I’m Lou Stein. These here lugs are Dave and Mordecai and Bismarck and Steve and Cal and Frank and Herman.”
Sam spent the next couple of minutes shaking hands and wondering how the hell he was going to keep the repair crew straight in his head. The only one he knew he wouldn’t forget was Mordecai, who’d lost a couple of fingers in some kind of accident and whose handshake was strange because of it. He couldn’t have had any trouble with tools, though, or they wouldn’t have let him do his job.
At the same time as Sam was sizing up the r
epair crew, he was also sizing up the sponson. It was even more cramped than it would have been otherwise, because they’d welded steel plates inside the inner curve to cover up the damage the entering shell had done. They hadn’t covered quite all of it. Above the new steel, a dark, reddish brown stain still marked the inside of the armor plate. Carsten tried not to look at it. It might easily have come from a loader.
He shook himself. Got to get down to business, he thought. “Commander Grady said you were having some kind of trouble in here-I mean, besides all this stuff.” He waved at the roughly welded steel slabs. He wouldn’t have wanted to serve this gun-might as well put toilet paper between him and enemy gunfire as that thin metal. But then again, the armor plate over it didn’t look to have done the best job of protecting the sailors in here, either.
Mordecai said, “Damn gun won’t traverse the way it’s supposed to. It gets all herky-jerky about a third of the way through the arc. Here, I’ll show you.”
He demonstrated. Sure as hell, there was one point at which the five-inch gun would not hold a target steadily. “That’s pretty peculiar, all right,” Carsten agreed. “Acts like there’s a kink in the hydraulic line some kind of way, don’t it?”
“That’s what we figured, too,” Lou Stein said. “But if there is, we sure as hell ain’t been able to find it. Those things are armored, after all; they shouldn’t kink.”
“If I hadn’t done all the things I shouldn’t do, my mama would be a happier lady today,” Sam answered, which made the repair crew laugh. He went on, “Besides, in this mess, how the devil can you tell which way is up, anyhow?” He waved his hand. The plate on the inner curve of the armor wasn’t the only new, raw repair, not by a long shot it wasn’t. Other rectangular plates of metal covered damage to the roof and to the deck.
As soon as the words were out of his mouth, he wondered if this crew had done all that quick, rough work. If they had, he’d just stuck his foot in his face. But Mordecai said, “Tell me about it, why don’t you?”
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