A Band of Brothers

by William R. Forstchen

  Rick looked back at a team of men and nodded. They cut open five-gallon tin cans of kerosene and upended them, letting the fluid pour down into the sewer. He could hear shouted roars. One of the men then lit the fuse to a canteen grenade and lobbed it down the opening. A whooshing roar erupted, a blowtorch of flame snapping out of the tunnel. Wild screaming echoed, and the men roared with delight, shouting curses down into the inferno.

  Pat collapsed by Rick’s side.

  “So you seen it?”

  Pat, grateful for the half-filled canteen offered by Rick, took a swallow, then gasped when the shock of the vodka hit him. He nodded his thanks.

  “Jesus Christ, Schneid, it’s like what that Dante fellow wrote about.”

  “Thought you were a goner up there—could see the airship bombing the temple. Hell of a mess if you’d gotten killed. Nothing against Marcus, but you don’t know if he’s lost his nerve or not, might want to throw in the towel. You took a hell of risk coming up here.”

  “Had to see what the boys were enduring. Can’t lead from a chair. Have to let them see me up here with them.”

  “Well, do me a favor, get the hell back.”

  Pat nodded, motioning for the canteen, and took another swallow.

  “They’re starting to go crazy, you know. Days of this crawling around, fighting underground, Bantag five feet away in the next room. The corps is used up.”

  Looking at Rick, he made his decision, though he feared he might regret it.

  “I know. I’m rotating you out. We’ll start tonight. The 12th will come up to replace you.”

  “The 12th? Hell, they ain’t seen much action. Might lose this whole sector.”

  “It’s their homes—let ’em fight for it.”

  A lieutenant came crawling up to the two.

  “General O’Donald here?”

  “Right here, son.”

  “Sir, you’re needed back at headquarters. Marcus wants you now.”

  Pat felt a stab of pain. “It’s not Colonel Keane, is it?”

  “I don’t know, sir.”

  Pat looked over at Schneid. “Come on, let’s get back.”

  “Vincent Hawthorne, what in God’s name are you doing here?” Hans Schuder cried, rising from the chair behind the map table and coming forward with hand extended.

  Vincent gladly took the hand, surprised when Hans suddenly patted him on the shoulder, a rare display of emotion.

  Next came a torrent of questions about Andrew, his wife and child, Vincent’s family, the situation around Roum, and the political situation at home.

  Finally settling down, Hans poured a steaming cup of tea, spiked it with a nip of vodka, and offered it Vincent, who smiled gratefully.

  “Hate those damn ships,” Vincent said. “Didn’t keep a thing down the whole way out.”

  “That’ll settle your guts.”

  “Ship’s loaded with half a million rounds of small- arms ammunition, two thousand ten-pound shells, a thousand twenty-pound shells, five hundred rockets, two hundred thousand rations.”

  “Need it all.”

  Vincent leaned back in his chair, gaze lingering on the map.

  “How tough is it here?”

  “Hate to admit it, but as long as you keep me supplied, it’s damn easy. They’re strung out here—everything has to be hauled all the way across from the Great Sea, near two hundred miles. Mainly facing arrows again—they only have five batteries of artillery. I guess nine, maybe ten or eleven umens ringing us.”

  Vincent smiled.

  “With breechloaders and artillery, if they charge you’ll rip them to ribbons.”

  “They learned better, just dug in. Problem is, for now, if I try and break out. I’ll get a hundred miles out into that steppe, then the shoe’s on the other foot—it’ll be us getting surrounded by them on horse. Now, if you could give me fifty of them land ironclads, the new ones you claim will go a couple of hundred miles without breaking down, I’ll be on the Great Sea inside of two weeks.”

  Vincent shook his head.

  “Good God, don’t tell me you’re sending them up to Roum! They’ll get cut up in the streets. I heard about them rocket launchers in the report Pat sent down.”

  Again Vincent shook his head.

  “All right, young Mr. Hawthorne, what the hell do you have in mind? You didn’t come out here just to pass the time of day and drink my vodka.”

  Reaching into his haversack, Vincent pulled out a map. He unrolled it and began to talk.

  Chapter Nine

  Exhausted and moving slowly, Pat came back into his headquarters, glad to finally be rid of his greatcoat, which was still covered with the gore of the dead Bantag and the filth of the sewers.

  One of his staff came up.

  “Sir, dispatches just came in on one of the monitors.”

  “Where are they?”

  “Sir, Dr. Keane was up here, and she insisted on taking them to the colonel. Word came back up to find you at once.”

  Pat whispered a quiet prayer. Andrew was nowhere near out of the woods yet. Emil had briefed him on how the wound inside the lung would take time to scab over and heal. There was no telling if it might suddenly hemorrhage. He was pleased to hear that Kathleen had finally come out of her confinement with Andrew.

  Pat headed down the long flight of stairs to Andrew’s room. At his approach the door opened, Kathleen barring the way. She took one look and held up her hand, beckoning for him to halt where he was.

  “Pat O’Donald, you’re as filthy as a pig. Now damn you, we’ve got a bath down in the basement. You’re to get your dirty hide down there and wash. I’ll have new clothes sent, then you come up here.”

  A half hour later, feeling strangely refreshed though he would never admit it, he finally stepped into the sickroom. Andrew was propped half up in the bed. His eyes darted over to Pat, and he forced a weak smile.

  “Tell me about what it was like.”

  Pat briefly talked about the fight at the temple, the confusion in the sewers, and his decision to pull 1st Corps out and bring 12th up to the line.

  “That’s the last fresh reserves,” Andrew whispered.

  “I know, Andrew. But 1st is used up. Besides, there are two other things. One, they’re bitter, feel that the Roum troops aren’t bearing their share of the fight. After all, it was the 9th that broke.”

  “That wasn’t their fault. The attack was aimed straight at them.”

  “You can’t explain that to a boy who’s been eyeball to eyeball with them furry bastards now for near on to two weeks.”

  Andrew finally nodded.

  “Second, something’s scaring me a bit. It’s the boys, Andrew. They’re hardening. I don’t mean becoming tough veterans—they were already that on the Shenandoah, at Rocky Hill. It’s something more. They’ve been too close for too long, and they’re getting as vicious as the Bantag. Maybe that’s what we need to win, but if so, we’ve also lost something.”

  Andrew sighed. “Become like your enemy in order to defeat him. Years of war are doing that to us. We saw it a bit at Hispania, but that was only three days of constant battle.”

  He fell silent and looked away for a moment.

  “What is it we’re fighting for, Pat?” Andrew whispered.

  “Andrew?”

  “I don’t mean the Rus, Roum, that’s obvious. I mean us.”

  “Because we’re here, Andrew, we’re here.”

  “Why? I’ve wondered that of late. Why us? If it hadn’t been for that damn boat, the Ogunquit, we’d be home now, you in New York, me in Maine. Home, the war long over for us.”

  “No sense in wondering on that, Andrew. Hell, me go back to New York, the stink of the Five Points, after being a general and all? And you, a professor type after running an army bigger than the old Army of the Potomac?” Pat chuckled.

  His gaze darted to Kathleen, who sat silent, intently watching Andrew. There had been no mention of her by Andrew, no statement that if it hadn’t been for her
chance assignment to the Sanitation Commission nurses going down to Fort Fisher, and her missing her assigned boat and scrambling aboard the Ogunquit at. the last minute, they never would have met.

  “How many left of use who came over, Pat? More than four hundred of us dead from your battery, my regiment, the crew of the Ogunquit. I saw the casualty reports—five more killed in the last week. Since we’ve come here to this damn place, twenty more of them insane and locked away, half a dozen just wandering off into the woods or out into the steppe and disappearing. You look up at the stars at night, wondering which world was ours, which one we belonged to. The Lost Regiment, lost never to return.”

  He hesitated for a moment.

  “And thirteen of us suicides. At least the ones who put guns to their heads or hung themselves out of grief, loneliness, or fear. God knows how many others, like poor John Mina, who simply took a gun and ran straight at their lines and disappeared.”

  “Andrew, what the hell are you talking about?” Pat snapped.

  Andrew forced a weak smile.

  “I’m used up,” he whispered. “I’m resigning my commission.”

  Pat started to speak, but Andrew held up his hand.

  “Hans is a bit too old, and I worry about his heart. Plus, something got taken out of him when he was a prisoner. You’ll take over, young Hawthorne will be chief of staff, Hans will be second in command.”

  “Andrew, darlin’, you’re tired. You get some of that strength back and you’ll be up in the saddle again. This is your army, and you’re the only one that could ever lead it.”

  “And suppose that shell fragment had driven another inch into me? Who’d be running the army now?”

  Pat said nothing.

  “There comes a time, Pat, when you know you’ve been used up. At Hispania I felt that way. But we had a couple of years, I had time to rest, to not think about what it was like. Now I know.”

  “You could never stay away from a fight, Andrew.”

  “Now I can,” he whispered.

  He looked over listlessly at Kathleen, but she shook her head.

  “Say it in front of me, Andrew. Say it,” and her voice was harsh.

  Andrew lowered his head, and to Pat’s stunned disbelief tears were in Andrew’s eyes.

  “I couldn’t stay away from a fight,” he whispered. “You were right. God help me, I remember Gettysburg, Wilderness, even Cold Harbor. I’d hear the guns, smell the black powder, hear the huzzahs of a charge, and I was one with it. In those moments never did I feel so alive. The joy of battle. Back in Maine, back when I taught history. I’d read of it, tales of Napoleon, of Mad Anthony Wayne at Stony Point, of Alexander and of Homer. I dreamed like a boy of it then and tasted it as a man, and God forgive me, I did love it.”

  The tears fell silently onto his bandaged chest as he continued.

  “Even here, at the start of it all. Against the rebs there was still the restraint of their being men. Even of they’re being Christians, fellow Americans. The Tugars, the Merki, you could hate them without guilt, without shame, without fear that God was somehow watching, looking into your heart even though we are millions, maybe billions of miles from home.”

  Pat nodded, understanding the pure unrestrained passion of battle.

  “Yet each time it took its toll from my heart,” Andrew whispered, and he pointed to his chest, and Pat felt that if the bandages were removed he could indeed see that heart beating, so fragile had Andrew become.

  “And finally I learned to be afraid,” Andrew said. “One too many close calls. Too many times had I gone to the edge, and yet still we seemed to win in spite of my mistakes. We lost the Potomac Line, lost Suzdal. Except for poor Ferguson’s passion for making rockets we would have lost Hispania. But something happened at Port Lincoln. Ha’ark outgeneraled me.”

  “Like hell he did,” Pat sputtered.

  “The truth, Pat, the truth. I should have seen the weakness at Fort Hancock. If I had kept a division stationed there rather than one exhausted regiment of old men and disabled veterans, we could have slaughtered them at the water’s edge and held the line. You’d still be on the Shenandoah rather than fighting here in Roum. We got out by dumb blind luck.”

  “We got out because you had trained the best army on this entire damn world.”

  Andrew shook his head. “I watched you at Rocky Hill. You still had the passion. I was afraid we had lost, you kept on fighting. Hans got out because he’s a soldier’s soldier. Vincent got us out by sacrificing his flesh, and Ferguson’s dying act was to give us the weapon to shatter their ironclads. All that to atone for my mistakes.”

  Pat said nothing, feeling a knot of fear, watching his old friend.

  “So it kept whispering at me, nagging my soul, in the pull back to Capua. Ha’ark had outgeneraled me. He could do it again. But besides that, Pat, there was the fear. Once too many times under the guns and a voice whispered that my number was about to come up. That it would be me carried back from the line, screaming, the agony of fire tearing into my heart, blinding my soul, my mind.”

  He closed his eyes, head turning away as if the memory of the agony was again consuming him.

  Pat reached out and touched his arm. The memory was there for him as well, the gut shot when they had stormed Suzdal after its capture by the Cartha. Yet it had never struck him like this. He fearfully remembered boys from the old 2nd Corps of the Army of the Potomac whispering how after Hancock was wounded in the groin at Gettysburg he was never the same. But Andrew breaking—it was impossible to imagine.

  “Every time I hear a shell burst, I tremble,” Andrew continued, “even down here in the basement knowing nothing could get me.

  “Pat, I’m used up. The well is dry. All I want is to go away now, to hide.”

  “But the army, the Republic?”

  “The Republic will survive without me. It was going to have to someday anyhow.”

  “It’s on the edge of collapse,” Pat announced. “Kal and even Marcus are thinking about a separate peace with that devil Ha’ark.”

  Andrew shook his head wearily.

  “I’m tired, Pat. I want to sleep now.”

  “Andrew?”

  The eyes looked up at him, dim, unfocused. Andrew stirred listlessly.

  “Kathleen, it hurts,” he moaned. “Some morphine, I need morphine.”

  “You had some two hours ago,” Kathleen replied sharply.

  “I need to sleep, and I can’t,” and his voice was filled with self-pity.

  Kathleen sat still, watching him closely. His gaze locked on her, and finally she lowered her head, nodded, went over to the medical bag, and drew out a needle.

  “God knows I love you, Andrew,” Pat said, gently reaching out to touch his hand. “You’ll come back. Till then I’ll just keep the chair warm.”

  “It’s your chair now, your star. My last act in this army is to promote you to General of the Armies effective as of today.”

  Pat stood up as Kathleen came to the side of the bed and knelt down to scrub his arm before inserting the needle.

  “We’ll talk more later, Andrew. Get some sleep,” Pat said nervously.

  “It’s yours now. Do better than I did.”

  Andrew turned his head away as the needle slipped in. He sighed and closed his eyes.

  Shaken, Pat backed away from the bed. His gaze caught Kathleen’s, and he nodded for her to follow. She withdrew the needle, brushed the hair back from Andrew’s brow. He moaned softly, then seemed to drift off.

  Leaving the room, she motioned for Pat to go down the corridor, and they stepped into a small room and closed the door. She dissolved into tears, leaning against his chest, and gently he put his hand on her back, holding her close.

  “Now, lass, stop that, lass.”

  He struggled with his own tears but held them back. Finally she stepped back, as if a door into her grief had been opened but for a moment and then firmly locked shut again, her emotions back under control.

  �
��Something’s dead. Emil said it’s normal—not a man alive it doesn’t happen to sooner or later if he’s under the stress Andrew has been under for too long. But Pat,” and again the tears formed, “he’s dead to me too. Something gone. All he dreams of, whispers of, is going away.”

  “That damn morphine,” Pat said. “It needs to stop.”

  “Without it he can’t sleep now. Emil said he needs sleep to heal. And the way he looks at me, like an animal caught in a trap, I just can’t refuse it. At least when he sleeps there’s no pain.”

  “Life is pain, Kathleen,” Pat replied sharply. “I saw many a good man in the army come back from the hospital with a needle hidden in his pack. You’ve got to start breaking him of it now. It’s poisoning his thoughts.”

  “Let him heal just a bit more, Pat, just a bit more, then we’ll ease him off it.”

  “He feels unmanned,” Pat replied. “Him weak as a baby, you tending to his every need, he can’t even lift a spoon.”

  She said nothing, lowering her head. “At least he’s alive. A week ago I didn’t even think I’d have that. Emil talks to him, hours a day. Frightful to hear, the dreams, the dead men calling him. The guilt.”

  “For what?” Pat snapped. “He’s saved all of us.”

  “Not anymore. That doesn’t count. It’s the price inside of him.”

  Pat sighed, unable to respond. That was something he could understand. At Second Manassas he had been ordered to pull his battery out but stayed too long and was overrun. An infantry regiment had charged back up to extract them, but two of his guns were gone, half his crews lost. He had wept bitterly that night and for long nights afterward, and it still haunted him. Lads from the same streets he had lived on, fought alongside against other Irish and German gangs in the street, they were all dead.

  Something was broken inside for the longest time, and even now it had never fully returned. But the disintegration of Andrew in one flashing moment of fire and steel, a blow that had nearly killed his body and seemed to have killed his soul, was too much of a burden to bear.