Front Lines

by Michael Grant

  “Doc! Doc Marr!”

  Frangie searches in the dark for the source of the shout, trying to place it. It’s from Doon’s gun, nearby. She grabs her bag and runs the fifty yards to the emplacement. One of the gunners has crushed a couple of fingers in the breech.

  “I’ll put on a splint. But you won’t have much use of that hand for a while, Private.”

  “That’s your jerking-off hand too,” another private says, laughing. Then he realizes what he’s said in front of a woman and hastily retreats. “I meant, um . . . Well . . .”

  Doon comes around, gives the splint a critical eye, winks at Frangie, and says, “Likely to get noisy around here pretty soon, Frangie.”

  “Any word on what’s happening?” she asks, tying off the gauze and ripping it with her teeth. She jerks her head toward the passing white soldiers and says, “That doesn’t look good.”

  “Looks like getting our butts kicked is what’s happening,” Doon says. He seems cheerful despite that gloomy assessment. “But I guess we’ll see how much the Germans enjoy the mail we’re going to send them.”

  One of the very few advantages to segregation is that despite being only recently attached to this unit, Frangie has already run into two people she knows: Doon Acey and Sergeant Green. Sergeant Walter Green of Iowa. Finding Doon with the big guns is not a surprise, but Green is infantry. She and Green managed only a brief surprised nod of recognition before Green’s platoon was dispatched up the looming hill to keep a lookout and presumably defend the vulnerable but valuable big guns.

  Lieutenant Penche, an impossibly young-looking white boy with a very deep-woods accent, comes running, a grin spoiling his attempt to look mature and officerly.

  “Men, we have a live-fire mission!” he announces.

  He’s written the coordinates in a small, spiral-bound notebook. Doon’s gun crew and the other five in the battery, having only just gotten into position, begin the backbreaking work of digging the tails back up, hefting them, and walking them to the right, bringing the cannon tube to the left. This is the crude aiming—the exacting work is setting elevation and traversing the gun with a hand crank and a wheel. As a soldier spins the wheel, Doon calls out, “Yeah . . . Yeah . . . Almost. Hold it. Yeah. Now give me another two mils elevation.”

  “Back up, Doc,” someone says to Frangie, “this girl kicks.”

  Frangie backs away ten yards but wants to see the gun in action, up close. Best to get used to the noise now—she has not yet been exposed to close-up cannon fire. This changes with a shout of, “Ready,” followed by the high-pitched voice of the lieutenant yelling, “Fire one round.”

  The explosion causes the entire howitzer to jump. It digs the tails into the gravel and bounces the cannon and its undercarriage on the two big tires. A jet of red flame shoots from the muzzle, lighting the crew like a lightning flash. Smoke billows from the muzzle, and already the crew has popped out the spent casing, hot and smoking. It rolls toward Frangie.

  A runner comes from the command post, which has heard from the forward position by radio. “Two hundred short!”

  A second round is fired, and after a few minutes comes word that it’s a hundred yards long. Frantic adjustments left and right, then from each of the six guns in the battery comes a shout of “Ready!”

  “Fire for effect!” the young lieutenant yells, and the whole world becomes one big explosion as all six howitzers fire within a split second of each other.

  Out slides the hot brass, in goes a new shell, and ka-boom! It makes the ground beneath Frangie’s feet bounce, and out slides a smoking shell and in goes its replacement, and another ka-boom!

  The other batteries, spread in an arc across a quarter of a mile, watch with envy.

  The battery fires off six rounds per gun, then stops. But within seconds a second battery opens up, its guns elevated higher. Again a total of eighteen rounds are fired. Red lightning, like camera bulbs from hell, a strobe of light now, up and down the line. The lingering smoke seems almost to hold on to that red light for a while.

  Then, another target and a battery down the line opens up, getting their chance to rain death on the unseen Germans. The more distant batteries are loud, but Doon’s, right here, right on top of Frangie, is shattering as the battery fires again, and this time it runs on longer, and at such a rapid clip that it’s like some massive drum beating out a frantic rhythm.

  Frangie is called to treat a burn, and then the shattered kneecap of an unwary soldier who stood too close as his gun fired. It means evacuating the soldier—Frangie is not a surgeon—but he’ll keep the leg and may even get sent home.

  She’s feeling pretty good, really; nothing has occurred yet that is beyond the scope of her training. The noise is stunning, and she soon discovers that neither she nor the soldiers can really hear much, certainly not normal conversation, and the flashes shrink her pupils until the darkness between explosions is impenetrable. She’s treating men who can only point and wince, but it’s nothing terrible or overwhelming, and she breathes a tentative sigh of relief.

  There’s a lull of a few minutes in Doon’s battery. He turns and shoots a grin at Frangie.

  Then Frangie hears something she doesn’t understand. She yells, “What’s that?” But the high-pitched whine she hears is not audible to men who’ve been standing right up close to the firing guns, nor for that matter is her worried cry, so no one else hears the scream of incoming shells until they land.

  The explosion of a German 88 that lands just a hundred fifty yards to their right between Bravo battery and Charlie battery. A fountain of dirt erupts into the air.

  As the dust settles, men and women scramble, running and diving into the nearest foxhole, because if there’s one thing artillery men know, it’s that a ranging shot will be followed by total devastation.

  It’s not long in coming.

  Frangie has already located the nearest hole and dives into it just seconds before Doon Acey.

  “See,” Doon says. “I told you the army was fun.”

  “You said no such thing,” Frangie manages to say before the whole world explodes. The impacts are so powerful that the ground around them, the dirt and rock walls of their foxhole, punishes them, hammering their feet, their arms, their behinds when they fall to the bottom of the hole.

  The noise is catastrophic. Frangie’s ears scream in pain from the noise but more from the sucking away and rushing in of air following each explosion. Her mind is scattered, unable to form a thought. Just a series of flashes, segments of thought. Scared. Tears. Terror. Like some mythical thunder god is beating the earth with a hammer the size of a house, hammering on her, her personally. A flash of flying dirt. Flash of foxhole collapsing. An incongruous image of her room back home. A flash of Doon’s terrified face, looking almost green.

  She and Doon hold each other like frightened children in a thunderstorm, but this thunderstorm is unlike anything they’ve ever experienced. This thunderstorm has malice behind it. This thunder and lightning are bent on murder.

  Spent shrapnel rains down into the foxhole, burning hot, singeing clothing and exposed flesh. Frangie screams now, screams unheard, “Stop it! Stop it! Stop it!”

  There’s an enormous metallic clang that’s almost musical and the twisted, smoking barrel of a howitzer lands across the top of the foxhole, cutting off any escape, hissing hot.

  A burning smell flows down into the foxhole, a toxic, chemical smell. Frangie is suddenly afraid that she’s on fire, slaps at her uniform, checking, Where’s that smell coming from, am I burning?

  It’s never going to stop.

  Round after round. It’s never going to stop until she’s dead. She’s going to die. Right now she’s going to die.

  And then, slowly, she realizes it has stopped. It’s stopped. Silence. She can’t hear anything but a loud ringing sound that’s no sound at all. She feels her own heart but surely no heart can beat that fast and go on beating?

  Her body trembles. Every cell of every
muscle shakes, shakes like she’s freezing, like she’s going to die, Oh, Jesus, take me, take me to heaven.

  “Are you hurt?” She can’t hear Doon, just see his mouth moving, a sort of unreal hole just inches from her face. He leans in, brings his head into contact with hers, and now she can hear through the skull, through the bones of their bodies. “Are you hurt?”

  Hurt? She’s destroyed. But she shakes her head no.

  The side of the foxhole has collapsed in one quadrant, opening up a space through which they might just crawl past the barrel of the destroyed artillery piece. Doon loses all self-control now and begins clawing at the dirt, tearing his fingernails as he yells, “Hey! Hey! We’re down here!”

  Frangie joins him, shouldering in beside him, tearing at clods of loose dirt that fall and cover their boots. Doon decides enough is enough and pushes his way up, kicking at the dirt, frantic, reaching up to grab the red-hot metal of the barrel, yelling soundlessly in pain, to be replaced by Frangie, who digs and scrambles, and panic feeds panic now, fear swallows fear and grows more desperate.

  All at once Frangie’s head is up and out in the air, the blessed air, the air filled with fire-lit nightmare images of twisted cannon and running soldiers and smoke. She crawls up the rest of the way and lies for a while, flat on her belly in the dirt. Then she turns and offers a hand to Doon, who takes it weakly.

  She pulls, and he loses his grip.

  She grabs his wrist with both her hands and pulls, but there’s something wrong. He can’t hold on. He’s crying now, she can see the tears, and she can feel the weakness in his grip. Sobbing, big wracking sobs.

  “Help me, someone! Help!”

  But no one can hear; it’s a landscape with no sound but the droning tone in her ears.

  She releases her grip on Doon and stands up, amazed she still can. It’s wreckage and destruction everywhere. Trucks and cannon lie like some failed attempt at sculpture, twisted, blown into pieces, jagged edged, smoking. The water truck drips the last of its water. Men and women wander lost and confused, looking for nothing, looking for something, around in circles. The young lieutenant stares down at a twisted hunk of steel and cries.

  “I’ll get help,” Frangie tells Doon. She grabs the lieutenant and jerks her head toward the foxhole. “Help me.”

  The lieutenant doesn’t understand, but he’s willing to be led. Together the two of them kneel by Doon’s foxhole. They reach down, each taking an arm, and pull Doon up.

  His intestines remain behind.

  He sits on the edge of the hole looking at the horrifying mess that slips down his lap. With limp hands he tries to reel his intestines back up, but they’re slippery and he’s crying, tears rolling down his cheeks. Frangie tries to help, tries to pull the pulsating wormlike tube up, but she’s crying and making sounds that are not words.

  Doon looks at her. He says something, words she can’t hear. Then he dies.

  Someone is shaking Frangie’s shoulder roughly, yelling at her, a sound she cannot parse, cannot understand. But the face looking at her is anguished. She nods.

  She leaves Doon and the weeping lieutenant behind and in a trance follows the soldier who guides her by the hand to a second soldier. He’s lying against an unharmed howitzer. His foot is gone.

  “Traumatic amputation.” That’s the term for it. Something has been blown off. Something is missing.

  His ankle is a mess of red worms, arteries and veins and shreds of meat and a circle of white bone oozing marrow, but half of it has been cauterized, seared shut by the heat of the shrapnel. It saved him a lot of blood, that’s a good thing. She tightens a tourniquet around the stump. Instinct. Training.

  Humanity.

  She slaps a bandage on, inadequate, laughable if laughter is ever possible again. She stabs a morphine syrette into his thigh.

  There’s more. A dead woman. Frangie cannot raise the dead, not this PFC, and not Doon Acey.

  A man with shrapnel in his chest and belly roars in pain, the first real sound she’s heard since the bombardment. More morphine. The man has to go to the field aid station; there’s nothing she can do with a belly wound. She sends him off on a cloud of morphine.

  There’s a broken arm, a scalp laceration, a few small burns. And there’s a body without its head. The head is never found. A male soldier with a superficial wound—hot shrapnel grazing a thigh—demands to be sent home.

  “Can’t do it,” Frangie says as she sprinkles sulfa powder on the wound. “That doesn’t even rate stitches.”

  “I coulda been killed.”

  “And if you had been, you’d be going home.” She’s pleased with the steadiness of her voice, she likes the toughness of it. And she’s coping, that’s the important thing, she’s coping.

  Despite the hammering they’ve taken there’s only three deaths: the PFC, the headless man, and Doon Acey. He was the only one she knew in the outfit, the only one she could talk to.

  If I were a real doctor, maybe . . .

  After doing all she can for the urgent cases she sets up an examination office of sorts, an upturned ammo crate for a chair, another one for her patients. Three men and one woman line up, all with minor injuries.

  Frangie is in charge. She’s the doc, at least for this part of the battalion.

  All around her there is frantic activity as soldiers run a length of chain to a surviving truck and haul an overturned howitzer upright. The battery must be moved if they are to avoid another barrage.

  “Sergeant Acey.” It’s the young lieutenant. His pale skin is covered with dust, so even in firelight he looks more gray than white. “There was nothing you could do for him?”

  She is busy picking at a stubborn roll of medical tape. “No, sir. It was . . . Um.” She grabs the tape end and pulls. “It was . . . It was bad.”

  “He was a good soldier.” The dust on Lieutenant Penche’s face reveals the track of a tear. He is shaken up.

  He’s not much older than I am.

  “Yes, sir,” she says. “I knew him. I know his folks. I can write them.”

  He shakes his head. “No, I’ll write them. And the others. I mean, of course you can, but I must. It’s my duty.”

  “That’s the captain’s job, isn’t it, sir?”

  “The captain . . . Well, he’s not . . . I mean, with colored troops and how . . .” Lieutenant Penche realizes he’s said too much and finishes lamely by saying, “Let’s both write to his folks, you and me, Doc.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Is there anything you need here?” He doesn’t seem to want to leave.

  “Water, sir, if there is any.”

  He’s relieved to be given something to do. “I’ll do what I can.”

  She watches him walk away. He looks lost, somehow. He’s swallowed up in the rush of soldiers and vehicles, and Frangie figures that’s it, he’s done what he thought he had to do and having discharged his duty she’ll hear no more from him. But within ten minutes a five-gallon can of awful-tasting but satisfyingly wet water is delivered.

  It takes the battalion an hour and a half before they can relocate and begin the job of doing unto others what’s been done to them, and by then half a dozen soldiers have disappeared, melting into shadows and heading toward the rear.

  Frangie has seen the insides of her hometown friend. When she writes his parents, she will not mention that. And she will try to forget it.

  Then, as if she is receiving a vision, a glimpse ahead in time, like a newsreel of her future, Frangie knows that blood and bone, spasms and shrieks, terrible, terrible things will be her future so long as she is in this war.

  She looks longingly back down the road, back toward safety, and thinks, Let them court-martial me. Let them lock me up and call me a coward. I don’t care. I can’t do this.

  I can’t.

  Dear God in heaven, you know I can’t.

  25

  RIO RICHLIN—A BEACH NEAR SOUSSE, TUNISIA, NORTH AFRICA

  “Off the beach, off the bea
ch! Come on!”

  The person yelling sounds authoritative, and Rio responds, moves, moves, anything to get away from the scene of Kerwin Cassel’s death, from the salty smell of his blood, from the memory of a beating heart come to full rest.

  It’s a panic reaction, a visceral need to get away, to put distance between herself and death, and it almost gets her killed. She stands up and instantly earns a shout of, “Stay low, you stupid bugger!” in a British accent. It’s Jack. “Sorry, Rio, didn’t mean—” His unnecessary apology stops abruptly when they hear shouts and gunfire and then . . .

  Crump!

  Crump!

  Two grenades go off in rapid succession, and the machine gun falls silent. Shots. Slow, aimed, deliberate. Someone is finishing off whoever the grenades didn’t kill. Shooting bullets into human beings.

  Liefer yells something about getting the wounded onto the boats, but most of the boats are gone already, racing away to safety in deeper water.

  What will they do with Cassel? He has to go home. He has to go home.

  A coal miner and his haggard wife, that’s what Rio pictures. Pictures them getting the telegram all the way up in the steep, green hills of West Virginia.

  “Second Squad, over here!” Sergeant Cole, somewhere in the darkness ahead, for once not mumbling.

  Rio can’t see where “over here” is, but she runs toward the sound of his voice, runs hunched over until she plows into a seated soldier and hits the sand face-first.

  “What the hell?” Cat’s voice.

  “Sorry, Preeling.”

  “Jeez, Richlin, you kneed me in the neck.”

  “I said sorry.”

  Rio spits sand and struggles into a kneeling position. After a moment it occurs to her that she should probably level her rifle. She adopts the textbook kneeling firing position, with one shin flat on the ground, the other vertical with her knee up, elbow on knee, rifle leveled. At Cole.

  “Excellent position, Richlin,” he says, looming up out of the dark. “But if you shoot me, I will be irritated at you.”