Lovely War(46)

He nodded frantically.

Aubrey stood up, uncocked the pistol, and slid it into his pocket.

“Tell it to the rest of the bigots,” he said. “Harlem boys won’t put up with your shit.” He kicked at the body lying in the snow. Not too hard. But maybe a little harder than was needed. “Get out of here. Don’t let me see your ugly face again.”

The body scrambled upright and skidded away until the darkness swallowed him.

Aubrey patted the gun at his side and disappeared into the darkness himself. Too bad, he thought, that he’d never actually seen the kid’s ugly mug a first time. He’d like to be able to recognize his new friend if he saw him out and about.

The wine of victory was on his tongue. Just try to get in my way again, white-trash boy.

He glanced back once at the Y hut before leaving and breathed in the Rococo-scented thought of purple sleep.

Still worth it. He might wait an extra day or two, just to be smart, but no Southern coward would keep him from coming back to try to win Colette’s heart. Noway, nohow.





ARES


     Under the Moons of Mars—January 9, 1918





THE SOLDIERS IN James’s 3rd Section ate lunch on their feet with 2nd Section—fried bully beef with cheese—then gathered in the reserve trench for gas mask training.

“The most important thing, with any kind of gas,” said Sergeant McKendrick, “is to stay calm. Folks want to panic and run, but you suck in a lot more air. Stay calm. Yes, soldier?”

Chad Browning gulped. “Don’t these gases, sir, destroy your lungs? And your eyes?”

Sergeant McKendrick nodded matter-of-factly. “If they don’t kill you first,” he said.

“But”—Browning looked pale—“how do you stay calm for that?”

“Put your mask on,” McKendrick said. “If you’ve lost your mask, you still stay calm. If all else fails, piss on a hankie and breathe through that.”

The 3rd Section recruits glanced around. Was it a joke? Apparently not.

“Now, the Germans are mostly using mustard gas,” the sergeant went on. “With a mask on, your lungs’ll be all right, but it’ll make your skin break out in sores. It gets into your clothes, and you’ll have to strip as soon as you can, or you’ll break out in damnable sores everywhere.”

He seemed to enjoy their stunned faces.

“But, pip-pip,” he said. “The sores hurt like hell, but you recover eventually. Now. These,” he said, passing out small haversacks, “are your box respirators. Put them on.”

James opened the kit and pulled out a rubberized mask. It felt grotesque in his hands, like a freshly killed thing from a swamp. Mick Webber got his on first. Tinted lenses goggled out, and the breathing tube looked like some sinister, groping proboscis. Like a human insect out of a nightmare. No, from a space story he’d read in a serial magazine: “Under the Moons of Mars.”

“Something holding you up, soldier?”

The sergeant eyed him expectantly.

James fumbled to put on his mask. Breathing through the tube was suffocating.

“Take it easy,” warned the sergeant. “You’re lucky you’ve got masks that work. Those poor buggers in the first gas attacks drowned in their own blood.”

The sergeant covered how to distinguish a gas shell from a regular artillery shell, and what the different forms of gas looked and smelled like, and how to spot which way the wind was blowing. At last the 3rd Section folded their masks and trudged back to their traverse of the trenches.

James sat on his pack. So many ways to die, and all they required was the least instant’s neglect of one of two thousand rules for survival. Blow smoke out through your coat. Don’t ever light a third man’s cigarette with the same match; by the time you’ve gotten to the third fellow, a sniper will have spotted your match and taken aim at you.

Even if he followed every rule, a trench mortar or a grenade or—what was it?—Jack Johnson could drop in his lap one day for pure spite and blow him to smithereens.

Goodbye, Life; goodbye, Future; goodbye, Mum, Dad, Maggie, Bob; goodbye, Hazel. Some other lad would someday give her the kiss he’d stupidly postponed.

He had to see her again. He had to get leave time to go see her, somehow. Wherever she was. If she was here in France, there must be a way.

Frank Mason decided to join him.

“You’d best get some sleep now, while you can,” Mason said. “At dark it’ll be stand-to, and then the night work begins.”

James gulped. “You mean, trench raids? Going over to attack the Germans?”

Mason smiled. “Nah. Not yet. Not for you new lads, back here in reserve. But there’ll be plenty of work for us to do. Sandbagging, maybe, or repairing trenches, or digging new ones. We’ll see what fatigue the sergeant assigns us.” He tipped his helmet low over his eyes.

“Mason,” James whispered.

“Yeah?”

“What are the chances of someone like me getting permission to go on leave?”

Mason burst out laughing. “You just got here!”

“I mean, once our rotation is through,” he said. “Thirty days, he said. Ten in each trench, and then some rest. What would the odds be of me getting a couple days’ leave then?”