Julian Comstock

by Robert Charles Wilson

  “Those must be very fine ships,” I said.

  “But in my dream the ship was leaving New York Harbor, not arriving. She had just caught the wind in her sails—‘took the bone in her teeth,’ as sailors say; and she was passing under the old Verrazano Bridge. I knew I was being carried away somewhere … not to a safe place, exactly, but to a different place than I was accustomed to, where I might change into someone else.” He smiled sheepishly, though there was a haunted look in his eye. “I don’t suppose that makes sense.”

  I said I guessed it didn’t, and I didn’t believe in prophetic dreams any more than Julian believed in Heaven; but something about the melancholy way he spoke made me think his dream must be another Poetic Metaphor, like that figure of speech involving hooks and hearts—the kind of riddle that cuts close to the tear ducts in its nonsense.

  Around dusk we sailed past the Dutch fort at Tadoussac. It had been taken by American forces, and among the soldiers on deck a cheer went up at the sight of the Thirteen Stripes and Sixty Stars flying above those battle-scarred and broken walls on the high headland. What did not please us so much was the litter of broken ships clinging to that stark shore. Half-sunken hulls gutted by artillery fire stood sentinel over islands of charred debris trapped by the whorl of the river. Here there had been fighting of the fiercest kind, both ashore and afloat; and it was a dire and oppressive place by the fading light of day.

  We reached the craggy mouth of the Saguenay shortly thereafter, and our flotilla of troop-ships, their wood-fired engines straining, sailed up that “fjord,”* making a scant few knots against the current. Most of us tried to sleep in the narrow bunks that had been assigned to us. But we kept our arms close, and come morning we could hear the distant sounds of war.

  They landed us at the Siege of Chicoutimi, and we spent three weeks in the trenches.

  The companies of our Regiment were kept close together, to prevent our morale from being deflated by the long-term infantrymen who had fought their way here from Tadoussac over the course of the summer, and whose losses had been staggering. It had been a badly-planned and deadly campaign, and the Staff had not been spared the effects of its winnowing. It was rare to see an officer at Chicoutimi even as old as Sam Godwin. High rank and hasty promotions had been handed out to boys no older than myself, and commanders’ tents had become kindergartens from which one graduated to the grave.

  The “siege,” in fact, was a stalemate. Our entrenchments had encountered their entrenchments, and it was all we could do to keep the daily killing at an equitable level—no grander goal could be imagined. We controlled the Saguenay right up to River-of-Rats, but the Mitteleuropans held Chicoutimi in a firm grip, and their supply lines were secure all the way to the railhead at Lake Saint John, where the Stadhouders had established farms, mills, mines, refineries, shipworks, and a flourishing community of workers and owners. No matter what artillery we dragged upriver to attack them, they could float some equivalent weapon downstream to repulse us. And because of their greater numbers, we were in constant danger of being outflanked.

  On top of all that, winter was coming fast. Cold weather had already driven off the Black Flies, but that was the only good thing about it. Our lines were a wasteland devoid of trees or vegetation. We had dug our trenches and redans out of the soil, which in this neighborhood was thick with the debris of the Efflorescence of Oil—bricks, broken foundation-stones, and that tarry crumble with which the ancients paved their roads. Our entrenching tools turned up human bones from time to time. The bones were not useful to us,* but the bricks were largely sound, and we worked them into our defenses. Some of the more ambitious men made entire brick fortifications, with mud for mortar, but these barricades were a two-edged sword: fine against rifle fire but dangerously unstable when artillery shells exploded nearby. Craftsmanship was everything, and men with bricklaying experience were in high demand for their advice, at least until the ground froze over, making it impossible to dig bricks or mortar them. These are the subtler arts of war.

  We had nothing to eat but trail rations, and little enough of that. It was difficult even to keep warm. There were days when all we had to burn were fragments of rotted wood and asphalt. And there was no relief by night, for the Dutch loved to shell us during the hours of darkness, and our artillery companies were obliged to return fire. By the end of three weeks the lack of sleep, constant cold, and inadequate rations had turned us all into automatons, shuffling through frozen or muddy trenches according to orders given by distant madmen or local commanders no older than ourselves. Major Lampret was with us—the stories of his cowardice and self-regard had made it mandatory that he travel to the front lines, or lose all credibility with the men—and he conducted Sunday services on three occasions, each event less well-attended than the one before. His rivalry with Julian still simmered, and I expect Lampret wished he had demoted or even imprisoned “Private Commongold” when the opportunity presented itself; but Julian was well-liked, and Lampret could not do anything against him. Sam knew that Lampret had a spy among us, and he had concluded that the informer was most likely Private Langers, our entrepreneurial colporteur, who had been seen conferring with Lampret on several occasions; and certainly there was nothing about Langers’s moral character that would make the charge implausible. But Langers was careful, and no money or favors were seen to change hands.

  The last Camp Meeting held by Major Lampret drew a larger audience, but that was because we were ordered to it. We stood in a circle on cleared ground, under cloudy skies, in a spitting snow, as grim news was announced. General Galligasken had been injured by shrapnel from an enemy shell, even though his headquarters had been set up out of the range of conventional artillery—perhaps a Chinese Cannon was responsible. The General still lived, but he had been taken down to Tadoussac for emergency treatment, and he would probably lose an arm, if he survived. His replacement was a new General from New York City named Reddick. A pawn of the Executive, Sam whispered, and a lackey of the Dominion as well. This was bad news indeed.

  There was worse to come. Reddick in his enthusiasm had ordered an all out dawn attack. We were to sleep on our arms, and be prepared for heavy action come morning.

  The quartermaster issued us double rations—a welcome change, though as a “last supper” it did little to dispel the gloom—and fresh rounds of ammunition. We were more convincingly cheered by the arrival of a new division of cavalry, men armed with Trench Sweepers of the type that had proved so effective in the Battle of Mascouche. Perhaps we were not doomed after all. That faint hope sustained us.

  The sky was red with dawn when all the bugles sounded and all our artillery fired at once, announcing the attack.

  We deployed by regiments, and ours was in the vanguard. I asked Sam what the strategy might be, but he couldn’t tell: the armies were too large for one man to survey them, and this battle was being coordinated by staff in the rear. Telegraph cables had been laid to help Reddick communicate with field commanders, and there were messengers and horsemen to carry intelligence back and forth. But this was a clumsy way to manage something as fluid as a massive battle, Sam said, so most of the initiative would be in the hands of regimental captains. Julian asked pointedly, and loudly, whether Major Lampret would deign to involve himself in the attack, or whether he would supervise, in a spiritual sense, from behind. Lampret overheard this comment—as he was no doubt meant to—and announced to the assembly that he would take up a rifle if there was one to spare. This won him a few scattered hurrahs; though his face, when he made the offer, was chalk-white, and he gave Julian a long daggered stare.

  Then we were in the thick of it. I will spare the reader the ghastly minutiae of that awful morning, except to say that our company was reduced to half its numbers before an hour had passed; and I saw so much of what ought to have remained inside the human body, but hadn’t, that I passed beyond revulsion into a kind of emotionless efficiency. The roar of battle was all but deafening, and if not for the organiz
ing genius of flags and bugles I suppose we would have abandoned all order and fought for our lives, individually.

  Here, as in Mascouche, it was the Trench Sweeper that made the difference. I had learned to recognize the sound of those heavy rifles—a sort of deadly, prolonged cough—and so had the Dutch troops, who dreaded it. The Army of the Laurentians began to make a striking advance as soon as those weapons were brought to bear, though I was still not sure what our ultimate objective might be. But General Reddick ordered a pursuit of the fleeing enemy, and we had no choice but to oblige.

  The battle passed out of the cratered no-man’s-land of trenches and abandoned redoubts as the Mitteleuropans fell back to prepared positions on forested, hilly land. The order for pursuit rang out from all quarters, and Sam (who had been slightly wounded in the thigh, but stanched the bleeding with a cotton handkerchief) guessed that Reddick intended to destroy the Dutch army in detail, if our cavalry could flank them and get in their rear. To this end our regiment was ordered into the trees, to keep the enemy moving, and acquire any loose supplies or animals they left behind, and capture or kill any stragglers.

  It was a bold plan, and we might have been a useful part of it, except for the consequences of a single bullet.

  Our company commander was Captain Paley Glasswood, formerly a New York City counter clerk, who was at least ten years younger than Sam Godwin—perhaps about Major Lampret’s age—but senior in rank to most of us. Today he led us through a volley of fierce but (as it then seemed) ineffective sniper fire, into the woods, and across a stream, and along the bow of a gentle ridge, then down into a forested valley, never encountering the enemy even once; and we marched for more than two hours in this fashion, patient but puzzled, before the Captain stopped and said in a ringing voice:

  “I’m tired, boys, and the stars are awfully bright.”

  Then he sat down on a log, sighing and mumbling.

  We were hours from darkness, though the day was gloomy, with little squirts of snow now and again, so his comment about the stars surprised everyone. Sam went up to Captain Glasswood to ask him what was the matter, but got no response. Then he examined the left side of the Captain’s head and grimaced. “Oh, Hell! Here, Adam—help me lay him down.”

  Captain Glasswood made no protest as we stretched him out on the cold forest floor under a canopy of creaking pines. The Captain’s gaze was distant, and the pupil of one eye had grown as large as a Comstock dollar. He looked at me solemnly as I cradled him down to the ground. “Oh, now, Maria, don’t cry,” he said in a petulant voice. “I haven’t been to Lucille’s since Tuesday.”

  “What’s the matter with him?” I asked.

  Sam, who had been holding the Captain’s head, lifted up his palm and showed me streaks of clotted red. “Apparently he was shot,” he said with disgust.

  “Shot where?”

  “In the skull. Through the ear, by the look of it.”

  That was a dreadful thing, I thought, to be shot in the ear. The idea of it made me shudder, despite all I had seen today. “I didn’t hear any rifle fire.”

  “It must have happened during the battle, or just after. Perhaps one of those sharpshooters got him.”

  “That long ago! Didn’t he notice?”

  “The wound didn’t bleed much, externally. And he has a bullet in his brain, Adam. People with bullets in their brains lose all kinds of sensibility, and sometimes they don’t even know they’re hurt. I expect he still doesn’t know he’s wounded. And never will. He’s dying. That’s a certainty.”

  I was afraid that Captain Glasswood might overhear this unhappy diagnosis and be upset by it, but Sam was right; the news, if he understood it, didn’t trouble him at all. The Captain just closed his eyes and curled on his side like a man making himself comfortable on a feather bed. “Can’t you get a blanket from the cedar chest?” he asked wistfully. “I’m cold, Lucille.”

  Then he screamed once and stopped breathing.

  There were not quite twenty of us left in the company, and we had lost our only commanding officer. There was Lampret, of course, who was accompanying us. But Lampret was a Dominion man, not a seasoned combatant. And at the moment he was no more useful than a stick of wood, staring at Captain Glasswood’s corpse as if it had popped up from the ground like a poisonous mushroom. The men of the company, by some unspoken mutual instinct, looked to Julian for leadership. And Julian looked to Sam, and by so doing bequeathed on him the respect and obedience of the common soldiers.

  “Post a guard,” Sam said, when he realized the burden of command had fallen on him. “But I guess we’re far enough from the battle that we can bury Captain Glasswood without attracting enemy fire. We can’t carry him back, at any rate, and it doesn’t seem right to abandon him.”

  It was, of course, impossible to truly bury him in the frozen ground; so we scraped a shallow trench out of pine-needle duff, and rolled Captain Glasswood into it, and covered him over. This would not protect his body from wild animals for very long, but it was a Christian gesture; and after a little prodding we even got a funeral prayer out of Major Lampret, though he delivered it in a small and quaking voice. Julian seemed moved by the death, and he did not make any disparaging remarks about God. All of us were badly taken by the Captain’s death—as peculiar as that might seem, given how much death we had already witnessed and absorbed today. It might have been the loneliness of the woods that made the difference, or the clouds leaking frigid grains of snow, or the conspicuous absence of banners and bugle-calls.

  The problem we confronted now, though Sam did not say so explicitly, was that Captain Glasswood had led us, according to what we all imagined was some clever strategy, deep into the wilderness, and away from the field of battle. But the only strategy at work had sprung from the Captain’s damaged mind, and it was no longer available to us, if it ever existed.

  In other words—words I was reluctant to pronounce even in the privacy of my own thoughts—we were lost in the wilds of the upper Saguenay.

  The sound of battle had faded behind us long ago. Either the Dutch had been chased from their trenches, stragglers and all, and the war had entered another pause, or we had simply passed out of hearing of it. The latter possibility was undeniable, for we had crossed many wooded ridges, which baffle or amplify sounds in unpredictable ways. The best plan now, Sam told the company after we had finished prayers for Captain Glasswood, would be to return to our own lines. But that return might not be direct, he said, “until we get firm bearings,” and in the meantime we must act as a scouting party, and note the position and defenses of the Dutch, should we stumble across any. Sam said he would try to backtrack us. Whether he truly possessed this skill or was only saying so to buoy our spirits, I couldn’t tell.

  We walked for hours more, and by nightfall we seemed to be no closer to our lines. Sam remained mute on the subject. We dared not make a fire. We carried only minimal rations, and we ate sparingly, and made what shelter we could, and wrapped ourselves in blankets in order to sleep … which I suppose some of us were able to do, though the bare limbs of the trees creaked like the timbers of a ghostly ship, and the wind made a sound like the sea.

  “It seems to me,” Lymon Pugh said, “that we’re sunk pretty deep in a vinegar brine of trouble,” and that truth was impossible to deny.

  Lymon Pugh was as emaciated as the rest of us after all our time in the trenches, but his muscular forearms, sliced by flensing knives and tattooed by beef blood, were still impressive, even buried under the sleeves of his thick woolen jacket; and he made a reassuring companion. We walked behind Sam, who was scouting a path. We had come a good distance up a wooded hill, all of us sweating despite the frosty air.

  The day, though cold, was fortunately not overcast, and the position of the sun gave us some clue as to the cardinal points of the compass. We knew we were east of the Saguenay, and probably well north of our own lines. It was fortunate for us that this part of the country was not much inhabited, or we might have been
taken captive long ago. But we could not avoid civilization for long, unless we set up housekeeping in the woods, and that would have been a tall order, since there was nothing much to eat—even small game had been chased away by warfare or scoured up by hungry Dutch soldiers. So we continued to climb this increasingly steep bluff until, as we reached the top, Sam held up a hand, signaling us to stop, and whispered that we should not make any noise.

  We came up singly or in twos, crouching.

  From the height of this ridge we could see a long declining counterslope, gentle enough that a railroad (of the narrow gauge the Dutch prefer) ascended it at an angle, passing close to where we stood. This was presumably the line between Chicoutimi to the Mitteleuropan estates at Lake St. John, or perhaps it ran all the way to the rocky Atlantic—the Dutch had built skeins of railroads across occupied Labrador in the decades during which they controlled this land.

  The most important fact about this railroad was its connection to the town of Chicoutimi, which we could also see, though dimly, across a misty expanse of winter wilderness, attached like a smudged appendix to the blue ribbon of the Saguenay. And that meant we were no longer lost—though we were still a great distance from where we wanted to be. The way ahead was clear and obvious: we need only follow the railroad until we could veer off toward more friendly territory. And our hearts were light, for that did not appear to be an insurmountable task. We might even be back with our old regiment in time for a hot meal before bed.

  But the journey had to be postponed a few moments more. Sam urged us to keep silent. He had seen a train approaching from the east—he pointed out a trail of smoke hovering over the eastern passes. “Stay hidden until it goes by, every one of you.”