Still, the mere
'SO THE BLOODY YANKS FINALLY decided to give us a hand, then.' That was Matt Brennan, the barman's brother. Poor Matt had lost a leg and his arm had been terribly mangled, and half the time seemed to have lost his speech as well. Brother Thomas kept him on as potman, collecting the glasses, doing a bit of sweeping up, and let him sleep somewhere on the premises once the place was closed. It wasn't much, but it was work.
The news had finally percolated to Broom that the United States had actually joined the war that the rest of the world had been fighting for the past three years, and it was likely to be the sole topic of conversation here in this pub for the rest of the week. Everyone who came in started it over again.
'What d'ye think of them Yanks, captain?' Ross Ashley asked. 'Never caught sight of one myself.'
'Well,' Reggie said, measuring his words carefully. 'We got quite a few Yanks in the RFC, boys that wouldn't sit still and watch while someone else was having a fight. I heard the French picked up a few, especially in the Foreign Legion.'
'So they got the gumption to stick it, ye think?' asked Will Stevens, who had been a good yeoman farmer before the war began, and was again, just without three fingers on his right hand.
Reggie shrugged. 'Hard to tell, really. The ones I saw all seemed to think of themselves as being in some sort of Wild West show. Talked about 'flying by the seat of the pants, didn't pay a lot of attention to instruction, and tended to be 'thirty-minute men' if that. Though when they were good enough to survive, they were
Young Albert Norman (chest wound, lost a lung) coughed and cleared his throat. Mind, he coughed a great deal, but this was the sort of cough he used when about to say something.
'There are a great many of them,' he said carefully. 'It's a bigger country than Canada. And I shouldn't think it would be too terribly difficult for them to turn all those factories to making armaments.'
Reggie nodded. Albeit was well read; Reggie didn't doubt in the least that he had the right of it.
'So,' Doug Baird (shrapnel to the legs) said bitterly. 'We'll have fought the Kaiser to a standstill for three bloody years, and the Yanks will just come in with convoys of fresh troops and all the damned supplies you could ask for, roll over the trenches, and take credit for the whole thing, then?'
Reggie sighed. To be brutally honest, he didn't see it turning out any other way. But he decided not to say anything. These men were bitter enough without his adding to their discontent—or despair.
'At least it will be over,' Richard Bowen said, with resignation. 'That's all I care about. Just let it be over.'
Thomas Brennan cleared his throat. 'Last call, gentlemen.' 'My round again,' Reggie said decisively.
He did a lot of round-buying—not so much as to make it seem as if he was patronizing them, but because he knew very well that there was not a lot of money to spare in their households, and it seemed a hard thing to him to have a man leave bits of himself in France in the service of his country only to find he couldn't afford his pint when he came home again. A hard thing, and a wicked, cruel thing; there wasn't a lot of pleasure left in the world for these men.
Those that had gone back to their work—farmers, mostly—were finding it difficult. Those who hadn't lost limbs outright still had injuries bad enough to muster them out. Legs didn't work right anymore, arms didn't have the same strength. They found themselves depending on their wives or children to help them with difficult physical jobs, and that was humiliating. Often the young horses they'd depended on to help with plowing had been taken for the war, leaving only the old fellows who should have been taking up pasture-space. They found themselves with a house full of Land Girls, who might or might not be of any use. Nothing was the same, everything was more difficult, and what had they gotten out of it all? Nothing to speak of. The best, the very best that they could say was that because they were at the production end of the food supply it was easier for them to hide a bit from the government and circumvent some of the shortages. If you were a farmer, you could still have your sweets, if you made do with honey instead of sugar, and though sugar was rationed for tea, it was, oddly enough,
