Before him stretched Niemands Land, the place for no man, a pitted chaos of mud and barbed wire sown with mines and unexploded shells, and well-fertilized with the blood and bodies of men. The stench of death in the moldering, flooded shell-holes was carried to him intermittently on the cool morning breeze. The other men in the trench, strangers all, were equally afraid, even as breakfast bread and kaffee and salt pork were handed out down the line. They ate in silence, oppressed by the clear blue sky. No one sat near him, since their line had been thinned by casualties and transfers out. He was alone in this bend of the great trench, but did not dare desert his post to be with others.
It hadn’t been like this in those first exuberant days of the war, or so Bernhard remembered it. He thought of the cheering townsfolk at the rail depot back home, the oompah-ing brass bands and the flowers stuck by flaxen-haired maidens into the young men’s gun barrels. Like a dream to him now was the long overnight train ride, and then the brisk march into Belgium, along straight roads with seldom even the sound of a gunshot. A triumphant beginning, but it all stopped suddenly when they reached the fortresses around Liège and Namur.
That brought weeks of anxious waiting, listening to the rolling thunder of the three-hundred millimeter siege cannons and the howl of the really huge Big Bertha gun as the forts were reduced. Then at last came the forced marches down country lanes, following the thump of smaller howitzers, which finally led him here to this long, open grave called a trench line.
How strange it all seemed, thinking back. His first certainty of war had come when they drafted his beloved Putzi from the farm. Returning from the fields, he saw her trooping away down the road at the head of a line of livestock. She was a fine horse, a dappled bay, his favorite to ride. But like every mule and ox in Germany, she had a registry number in the event of wartime mobilization. Early the next morning the telegram arrived–after all his reserve training, Bernhard too had been called up and was to report in town that same afternoon.
He was willing, and his parents and sisters helped him pack. Everyone had said the war was coming. The foreign encirclement, depriving Germany of warm-water ports, had to be broken. A strong young nation like the newly formed Germany, if they were to have any standing in the modern age, needed trade and colonies. To be continually met by foreign obstacles and insults, and held down by legions of inferiors, was insufferable. Every German knew that, given the chance, they could regain all the stolen territories and more than equal France and Britain’s global empires. And they had set out to do so. But who would have thought such a noble crusade would stumble to a halt here, in a muddy field in Flanders?
Well, Bernhard was ready to fight. But he prayed that, if he was to be wounded in an assault, it would come late in the day, with some hope of rescue by night. Those who fell and lay in no-man’s-land in the early hours–whether just hurt and playing dead, crying out for help or moaning in delirium–faced a daylong ordeal in the sun without treatment for their wounds. With no relief possible, they lay at risk of being pierced again by random shellfire, or shot by tortured listeners merely to silence their cries.
Worst of all was the jagged wire, where men, even if unwounded, were caught without food or water in steel barbs for days. Though exposed to enemy fire, sometimes they were left alive as bait to lure out would-be rescuers to their deaths.
In the assaults, leading men were detailed to throw themselves onto the concertina wire, to flatten the coils for their comrades to advance over. Bernhard had never yet been one of those. When trapped, if the attack was successful and gained ground, they could be cut loose and saved. If not, they might be trampled by the retreating troops or pulverized by shellfire.
This morning, as it happened, it was the French who decided to attack. With weather reports from the British Isles far to westward, they may have known this clear spell was coming and made secret preparations. At breakfast, while crouching in the muddy trench and trying to keep his feet dry on the slimy boards, Bernhard heard the thunder of the enemy cannon as the first shells came whistling in. He felt the mud quiver as the explosive rounds struck, and he dove into a revetment to cower from the flying dirt and whining shrapnel.
The bombardment lasted forever, an eternity of cringing, praying, and bracing his whole body against the direct hit that never came. When it ended, there began the terror of the assault. A shrill whistle shrieked in Bernhard’s dulled hearing, and he squirmed up the parapet to defend his post.
Here they came, through smoke and vapor lingering from the shellfire. The French poilus trudged forward in their ridged helmets and long coats. Bayonets gleamed on their rifles as they charged into the morning sun; it was those blades Bernhard dreaded, more than the few bullets that whizzed overhead or spurted mud from the parapet. He had been trained to thrust his own bayonet, twist it and then, if the blade stuck in bone, fire his rifle to dislodge it. But the one time Bernhard used his bayonet, he’d jerked the blade smoothly out of the downed, writhing man and stumbled onward in his attack. He didn’t have the heart to twist the knife. He never knew what became of his French adversary, whether the poilu lived or died. But that victorious charge had won Bernhard this little place in hell.
Before the bayonets came near, the defending machine guns in his line opened up. Chattering, hammering from side to side with industrial efficiency, they swiftly and blessedly mowed down the lines of attackers that materialized out of the smoke. The unevenly spaced figures strode forward through the sunlit haze…then danced, spun, capered and fell to earth as the bullets stitched them. A Spandau Ballet, their death-dance was called, named after the Berlin suburb where the automatic guns were made. By the grace of the Spandaus, the gleaming blade-tips stayed far away; the poilus never got close to the German trenches. Bernhard discharged his own Mauser rifle twice in their direction, with no clear target. Then the morning onslaught was over.
Now would come the worst horror, the counterattack. To follow up on this glorious success, to exploit the enemy’s weakness, to take new land for Germany and finally break through the immobile trench lines…all of these illusions would lure his commanders to waste more lives. It did not matter, could not matter that they had just killed hundreds of French. It would take only a few more behind their machine guns and barbed wire to hold those enemy trenches.
Where was his Putzi right now, he wondered wildly. Was she dead in some field, bloating in the sun like the cavalry horses he had seen? More likely pulling ammunition carts for the endless bombardments. Or maybe between the legs of some lucky courier, carrying orders to and from generals far behind the lines. How he would love to leap on her back right now and gallop her out of here, right back to his farm!
Bernhard huddled head-down, not risking a look over the parapet, still waiting for the attack whistle. Would there be artillery first, to soften up the mud and warn the French? It didn’t matter, since shelling never silenced the machine guns for long. Soon enough would come his turn for a death-dance in the teeth of the French Maxims.
But then a new sound intervened. It was a grating, throbbing noise that came along the trench line, rapidly drawing near. Bernhard rolled aside and saw it approaching, fifty meters above, a biplane with red and yellow Belgian markings on the bottom wing. No machine guns fired, but there was a flurry in the German trenches beneath. A babble of shouts and cries grew louder as the engine pounded overhead. Then he saw it…a fine spray of glinting sparks spilling out of canisters fixed between the landing wheels.
Bernhard writhed for cover, squirming in the mud, but there was no overhang, no protection from this new menace. Filthy water splattered up near him, and a lancing pain pierced the back of his left knee. He heard himself shriek in agony and bent to feel the wound, but the flexing of his body intensified the pain and so he lay, paralyzed and sobbing as the enemy aeroplane droned onward.
He’d heard of this terror, and now it had found him. Flechettes, metal darts dumped from Allied air
craft that could pierce straight through huddled troops on the ground. Here in the bottom of his trench he’d been struck from the skies. He would lose his leg, the racking pain told him. No other way to avoid lethal infection in these filthy mudholes,
Bernhard lay sobbing, involuntarily heaving with waves of agony from his knee. As the medics finally came and dragged him onto a stretcher, he knew that the tears on his face were not from mere pain, but tears of joy and thankfulness as well. He wouldn’t be in any more assaults, or test any Frenchman’s bayonet point. He wouldn’t lie wounded all day, raving in the sun, or be blown apart by artillery. The pain he felt wasn’t fatal, so long as gangrene didn’t set in. What he had now was more precious than any medal or victory. With a clean amputation, it meant a million-reichsmark wound that would take him out of Hell and send him home.
Chapter 9
Marconi Waves
In the wireless room at the center of Lusitania’s top deck, night hung heavy. The steady throb of the ship’s engines was broken occasionally by faint, nervous pulses of Morse code coming in over a speaker. Second Telegraphist Dave McCormick sat at a table in the tiny radio shack. His senior Cunard officer, Chief Telegraphist Bob Leith, wore headphones as he turned the dial of the large gleaming Marconi set, scanning the airwaves for signals.
McCormick listened for coded traffic on the main channel, meanwhile leafing through the morning’s New York Herald newspaper. He waited patiently to relieve his superior at the end of his shift, still getting used to the routine of the job, six hours on duty and six off, day in and day out.
When McCormick came to the page that listed the ship sailing times, he held the paper up to the light to make out the small, black-bordered warning from the Imperial German Embassy: “Vessels flying the flag of Great Britain, or of any of her allies, are liable to destruction….” To McCormick, the dull menace of the words contrasted strangely just then with the stray notes of dance music that wafted up through the ship’s ventilators, or else from the blacked-out skylights of the Grand Saloon.
“Traffic is slow,” the senior telegraphist remarked as he spun his dial.
Dave took this as an OK to speak. He’d found that idle talk to keep the wireless operator awake during the last weary hour of a shift was an unwritten part of the job. “Seems slow for wartime,” he said, laying down his newspaper.
“Aye, bloomin’ slow,” Leith repeated, stifling a yawn. “Just a quick burst of code now and then, like a chicken scratchin’. Most everyone keepin’ radio silence.” The chief ruffled his hatless hair under the headphones.
“We might as well be down below, dancing with the ladies,” Dave remarked, trying to liven things up as louder strains of music thrummed from below. “Better than wireless dots and dashes.”
“Well, don’t sell us short,” Leith said. “Just remember, this very Marconi wireless set was visited and blessed by its inventor, the great Guglielmo himself, on our last Atlantic crossing in March. That was when he was heading back home to Italy from New York, before you came aboard.”
“Well then, if it’s so great,” McCormick joked, “why doesn’t it play music? It’s bigger than a church pipe organ.”
“You’ll be surprised sometime, Davie m’boy,” Bob Leith said, taking his cue. “Someday a bloke will talk at you right out of this box. The Yanks are tryin’ out voice transmission more and more now; they call it radio-telephone. It’s goin’ to be weather reports, sport games and music, not in any code. A few years back, they transmitted Enrico Caruso from the New York Metropolitan Opera. I wasn’t on shift to hear it, though.”
“And how about band music?” Dave suggested. “We’ll all be dancing to that box someday, won’t we, here aboard Lusty Lusi?”
Shoving himself up from the table, he tried a few foxtrot steps, cutting a suave figure in his blue jacket and white trousers.
“Not too much skylarkin’ about, now,” his superior good-naturedly chided. “And on your watch, don’t even think about leavin’ this room. You’ll have to stay on the alert. Captain Turner keeps late hours, and he might just drop by durin’ your first solo shift under his command.”
“Hardly a problem, with traffic so slow.” McCormick said, resuming his seat. “Not like back at dockside this morning, with all those cables coming in. Even for Alf Vanderbilt himself, the Yank tycoon.”
“Aye,” Leith mumbled, yawning. “It was wires from the newspapers beggin’ for interviews first. And then later those batty, anonymous warnings, likely from reporters tryin’ to stir up news or start a panic. Lusi’s last voyage—make the ship stop dead in port, they would! A good thing the captain put a lid on it. Sealed all those anonymous cables…nothin’ in them anyway, except scare talk.”
“Aye,” McCormick said. “And did you see, Captain Turner held a press conference right down on the pier, with Alf Vanderbilt and Frohman and all the reporters. He told them everything was fine, and both of the Yankees backed him up.”
“Yes, I heard. And not a minute too soon, either…Cunard could ’a lost half her customers. No sense scarin’ all the passengers and having a jinxed voyage. Or stoppin’ the ship in port for days on end.”
Leith gave up the banter, yawned, and looked at the illuminated clock. “Well, ten minutes to shift change. Are you ready for your first night’s solo duty?”
“Yes, sure,” McCormick said. “You can knock off right now if you like.”
“No, thanks, I’ll stay till midnight,” Leith said, not surprising to McCormick. Among Marconi men, especially on shipboard, it was a point of honor to hold out to the bitter end of a watch.
“It should stay blighty slow,” Leith said. “Just ring down to the cabin if you need me.”
“OK,” McCormick said. “But not likely. Cunard’s wireless station won’t even be on the air for hours yet, right?”
“Aye, at daybreak in bloomin’ England, about 0400 hours ship’s time. But there’s the Admiralty; you never know about them. They can broadcast day or night. That’s where our real orders come from, not from Cunard. In wartime it’s the Royal Navy that’ll likely be warnin’ us about raiders, tellin’ us where to go and how to get there.”
“Right, but all that will be in navy code, won’t it? We’ll never even know what they said. I’ll have to ring up the quarterdeck and have a deck hand carry it to the captain, for him to decode in his cabin.”
“Aye, and that’s the way it always worked on board the Caronia too,” Leith said. “But then, it’s not likely they’ll be sending us any orders tonight. We’re not in the war zone, and they don’t make a U-boat yet that will cruise this far from the Channel. We shan’t be hearing from them just now.”
“No, not unless they order us back to New York,” McCormick mused. “Atlantic too bloody dangerous–it wouldn’t surprise me, these days.”
“Quite right, that could happen. So keep alert,” Leith said.
He put his officer’s cap on his head in place of the headphones. “Well, I guess I’ll be turnin’ in.”
“Aye, sir. Good evening to you, and sleep tight.”
Chapter 10
Dark Seas
After the supper dishes and tablecloths were cleared away, the Grand Saloon was prepared for dancing. As tables and chairs were unbolted from the deck, the ship’s band set up on the mezzanine and began tuning. Alma went off to powder her nose, and Matt, having agreed to meet her at the saloon entry, headed below to fetch an overcoat from the stateroom.
He wanted to get her alone and speak freely, away from friends, table acquaintances and other interruptions. But it had to be in public, enough so that his news source wouldn’t feel threatened or mistake his intent. Accordingly, he’d invited her to take an evening stroll on deck, and she’d accepted.
He would have to tread carefully. The danger wasn’t just from Big Jim’s goons, but from any unknown female in Alma’s position. It was from his own feelings and r
eactions, too. As a worldly male, he wasn’t ready to become a patsy to some sorry frail with a sob story. Being alone with her could be risky, just as much as being seen in her company.
If Hogan really was after her, it could be for some secret she knew. Or else he might believe she’d stolen something from him–a risky proposition, knowing Jim. If it was a case of romantic obsession, that could prove more dangerous to any man caught in the middle.
And how far was Hogan willing to go? It was a safe bet he wouldn’t just forget her. He had that vengeful, possessive streak that seemed so prevalent in New York ward politics. Or was that kind of ruthlessness, perhaps, the defining trait of all leaders?
Returning to the ballroom and listening to the band play a maudlin refrain of Sweet Adeline, he felt a thrill as the equally sweet-looking Alma appeared at last. She still fit in splendidly, tall and shapely against the slow press of dancers. Moving with short quick steps measured by her frilly hemline, she suddenly seemed irresistible.
* * *
When taking leave of Matt, Alma parted cordially from Mary Plamondon as well. She fled, lest the gregarious woman should go along to the powder room and pump her for information. On her own, she then had time to reflect. Dinner in the Grand Saloon had been marvelous, the society convivial, the meal courses delightful. But once it was over, she felt weary from her masquerade.
After escaping New York and having to hide out from the prying steward, she’d been unable to rest that afternoon in the cabin. It had taken much coaxing by the others to disguise herself for First Class, and it was going to take a lot more nerve to impose on near-strangers for shelter and food during this voyage.
In spite of all Flash’s assurances, how would Matt Vane react? Would he even be there waiting for her, Alma wondered, or might he neglect to come back at all? Did she have a right to expect anything of him on such short acquaintance? And just how far would his gallantry go? Could he be trusted?
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