The sky over the trench was a dull silvery brown, thick with smoke from exploded shells, and rippling with the golden light of the sun as it tried to batter its way through. Below that was the line along the top of the dark brown trench they were in, a close-up horizon decorated with howitzer barrels and the points of bayonets. Bits of logs, draped with razor wire, tumbled along the edges of the trenches like badly decorated and very ugly cakes.
In the bunker in front of Stanley was Lt. Billings, who was talking with the sergeant in charge of ammunition. The chaplain was withthem too, though his reason for being in the bunker made no sense to Stanley. If they were all handing out death at the far end of their weapons, what good was a chaplain except to bury the bodies? Then there was the scout, a wiry fellow, coated up to his hips in mud, his arms wrapped around himself as he talked to the lieutenant.
“Can you hear what they’re saying?” asked Isaac. “Can we go? We already told them that Commander Helmer hadn’t told us anything about what he was going to do.”
Stanley turned his head, holding his tin mug in front of his mouth so the other fellows wouldn’t see that it was trembling. He watched Isaac put down his tin mug to turn up his jacket collar in the jaunty way that pilots did, except that Isaac wasn’t a pilot. He was a lance corporal, third class gunner, one level below Stanley because, as Stanley had often thought, though Isaac’s hands were always steady on the trigger, he didn’t have the heart for it.
“Are you going to barf on my boots?” asked Isaac.
Stanley could see in his eyes that, while he might pretend to be angry about it, he wouldn’t be. Sometimes in the trenches, when things got scary, you simply had to throw up and there wasn’t always a bucket.
“I’m going to go in there,” said Rex.
The statement rang in Stanley’s head, as if he’d heard Rex say that exact same thing a dozen times, and would have to make his weary way through hearing him say it another dozen if he didn’t do something about it. But what?
“Better not,” said Bertie, in a way that told Stanley that he expected Rex to obey him, just as he’d expected the young newsies back home to obey him.
“Hey fellas,” said Stanley, suddenly moved by an impulse he couldn’t identify and that scared him half to death. “Why don’t you come sit on the other side of me?”
“Why?” asked Isaac. “We’re quite close right now, aren’t we, darling?” Isaac batted his eyes like a showgirl, and Rex almost splashed coffee out of his tin mug as he elbowed Isaac in the ribs, laughing.
“Right now, come on the other side of me,” said Stanley, not hiding the urgency in his voice. “I’ll let you sit on the canvas that Isaac gave me.”
“Now?” asked Bertie. “They’ll see us moving and think that we’re trying to get close enough to hear what they are saying.”
“They’re saying that Commander Helmer deserted in the night,” said Rex in a tired way, as though he’d said this many times already. “And they’re deciding whether or not to go and look for him, or to report him. Or whatever it is that you do when a coward runs off.”
“He was too young for command,” said Isaac, shaking his head. “Just because his pop owned that shoe factory in Denver, and he was set to take over the board if his pop ever died—”
“Doesn’t mean he was fit to lead,” said Stanley, finishing for him, feeling yet again that this was a conversation they’d had not only once, but maybedozensof times. “It’s all moot now, as there’s no way he could have made it to wherever he thought he was going. Not with the Germans getting closer every time we look away.”
It had been like a game of Stop-and-Go for days. The Germans, with their massive amounts of manpower, had been able to build new trenches in the middle of the night, and now they were closer than ever. If you listened hard enough, if it got quiet enough, you could hear their voices saying German words that nobody could understand.
Well, except for Bertie, who knew thatAchtungmeantattention, andfeuer wenn fertigmeantfire when ready, andkleines madchenmeantlittle girl, though how he knew that was anybody’s guess. Rex had gone as far, that one time, as to accuse Bertie of being a German spy. They’d almost come to blows over it until Commander Helmer had broken it up and told them that Bertie had been close to being accepted into cryptography training. Only they’d needed more warm bodies for the battle, and his paperwork had been stamped for the front lines.
Stanley looked at Bertie with his narrow face and wide blue eyes, his crop of flaxen hair now shorn so it could fit beneath the metal helmet. The way he squinted because he needed glasses, only he never asked Commander Helmer for them.
Stanley thought Bertie never wanted to draw any attention to himself because doing so back home had gotten him beaten up in a back alley somewhere. Bertie should have gone into the ranks of ciphers and coders, and he sure as hell shouldn’t have ended up at the front with Stanley. In a trench up to their ankles in mud and who knew what all else.
Then there was Rex, who was big across the shoulders, enough to strain the seams of his uniform. He had tree trunk thighs, and wore huge boots, the biggest the army had to give him, but he walked with the grace of a dancer. He hated Germans so much that he was first up in the morning, and the last asleep at night.
His aim was quite deadly, so deadly that there had been mutterings by Commander Helmer that Rex might be transferred into sniper training. Only Helmer had deserted. Lt. Billings sure as hell wasn’t going to order a transfer right in the middle of their current disaster when every man was needed in the trenches, so Rex was stuck with the rest of them, destined to fight in the mud, to die in the mud.
And then there was Isaac, who was still looking at Stanley as if waiting to answer an unasked question. It was a question that Stanley would never ask because, as he looked at Isaac, he knew the answer would be no. It wasn’t that Isaac would get angry and punch Stanley in the face. Instead, Isaac would refuse and demur, then make a little joke, brush the scar on his chin with his thumb, and then they could go on as they always had.
Whatever private impulses Isaac might have, he hid them. He moved away and then close, whatever suited him, always the dashing young soldier more concerned with his uniform than he ought to be, given their situation. He always looked as though he was on the verge of hopping into a little wood-and-canvas biplane, a silk scarf around his neck, to fly up into the blue, blue sky. He was like a story that Stanley enjoyed reading, but it was a story only, and would always be so.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
“You fellows ought to move on the other side of me,” said Stanley, urgency rising within him, strong, like a punch to the gut. “I’ll give you my chocolate for the rest of the war if you do it right now.”
“Even the chocolate that Isaac gives you?” asked Rex, always on the lookout for what was right and decent, where every man got his share.
“Yes, even that,” said Stanley. He stood up and gestured to the canvas, which was wide enough to cover the muddy bench front to back, and long enough to accommodate at least three soldiers, if not more.
“What about me?” asked Isaac as he stood up.
In his eyes was the expression that Stanley had seen a hundred times before, the one that had made him want to move close and to say things he’d regret in the morning. But that was just Isaac; he didn’t mean anything by it.
