Adolphus wasn’t looking for a fight, but neither was he one to run from it. He finally took his drink, knocking it back in one smooth motion. Then he set his cup on the bar and turned towards me, his hands conspicuously unoccupied. ‘Watch yourself.’
I caught the bright sheen of metal pinned to his ill-fitting dress coat, and felt fury like bile well up from my throat. ‘What’d they strike that medal from? Platinum? Gold? Horseshit?’
‘I already warned you once.’
‘Hero of Aunis – that’s a hell of a title. What did you do to get a title like that?’
The look on his face would have made a wise man run. Even most stupid ones for that matter.
‘Funny thing is,’ I continued, ‘I was at Aunis, and I don’t remember no heroes. Just a turn-color coward who left his best friend to die.’
I won’t blame it on the drink, though I was drunk enough that I barely saw it coming – had I been sober as a churchman, it wouldn’t have mattered. Adolphus was just about the best man with his fists I’d ever seen, truly skilled, not just big. On the credit side of the account the booze meant that I barely felt the blow. I was standing and then I was lying down, but what came between was as abrupt as a thunderclap.
I lay there awhile, in no great hurry to stand. I’d have stayed there all night, really, if decorum had allowed it. My nose was broke, one more tic on a long tally. I didn’t suppose it would make me any uglier. ‘Big man,’ I said, pulling myself up finally. ‘Tough as a boot nail with an old drunk.’
He’d used all his anger up on my face, seemed more stung by the blow than I was. ‘I’m . . .’ He stuttered over this opening for a while, his mouth flapping in apology.
‘For the punch? Or because I was right about why you threw it?’
He didn’t answer.
‘Stay the fuck away from tomorrow’s march, unless you want to join Roland in martyrdom.’
I had the presence of mind to grab the bottle on my way out. I left it in a ditch off Pritt Street and kept walking, and given that I was a third full with liquor, making it all the way to Offbend displayed extraordinary fortitude. I didn’t suppose I’d get a medal for it, though.
43
It was raining. It had been raining since the beginning of time, so there was no reason to expect it to stop now.
It rose ankle deep on a good day, but most days weren’t, and it settled up around your knees. It soaked through your clothes, of course. Through your greatcoat, through your shirt. Through your backpack and anything you had in there. Through your pants, and your underwear. You’d think at some point you’d get used to wearing wet underwear but you’d be wrong, you never do.
It rained every moment of the day, whatever you were doing. It rained when you were on watch, when you tried to roll a cigar-ette, when you tried to smoke it. When you slept, when you shat and pissed. It rained during mealtime, a garnish on whatever you ate. Bully-beef with rainwater. Worm-ridden grain with rainwater. Our liquor ration was mostly water, but we drank that with rainwater too.
The rain was bad. The mud was worse. Mud doesn’t really describe it. Women step over puddles of mud in the street, children make mud pies and throw mud balls at each other. Mud doesn’t swallow whole men, full-grown adults with five stones of equipment. Our mud did though. A member of our battalion swore up and down that he’d once excavated an entire supply wagon, a team of mules and a driver. I wasn’t there to see it, but I wouldn’t bet against it either.
A distant third, after the rain and the mud, were the Dren. Sure, now and again they’d murder a few of us, but we did the same to them, and their occasional forays at least broke up the monotonous struggle against the elements. You could slit a Dren’s throat and at least feel you’d accomplished something – good luck taking aim at a raincloud.
It was the fourth year of the war. From Beneharnum we had moved hundreds of miles inland, slowly and fitfully, marching over the bodies of our comrades, every inch won with a pint of blood. When we had first found ourselves in Dren territory nine months back, it had seemed that things might be coming to an endgame. Unfortunately it turned out the only thing more ferocious than a Dren fighting to take another country was a Dren fighting to keep his own, and progress had long since slowed to a crawl.
Little else could be said of our general situation with any certainty. Accurate information was more or less impossible to stumble across. You could read the broadsheets, but they were all lies, censored away to nothing by the anxious pen of the commandants. The headline of every issue trumpeted victory and the small print foretold of similar success in the immediate future. Victory when we advanced, victory when we held steady, victory when we retreated. Victory at every point on the map.
If this was victory, you could fucking keep it. We’d stalled out, and the Dren were getting ready to respond. All month there had been signs. Our raiders had captured men from companies we’d never heard of, and intelligence reported vast goods being stockpiled in the trenches in front of us, shells and quarrels, spare blades and bandages.
I was the head of a company of a hundred and fifty men. A hundred and fifty on paper, maybe half that in reality, the rest sick, missing or deserted. Most were the first two. Everyone wanted to run off, of course, or at least I sure as hell did. But there was nowhere to go – we were hundreds of miles from the coast and even if you somehow made it, you couldn’t very well swim to Rigus. Desertion was the act of the broken and desperate, practically speaking little different from suicide. They hung absentees, rotting corpses strung from rotting ropes, gallows behind the lines instilling martial spirit in the living.
It was shortly before the theoretical dawn, though the permanent overcast and the dense layer of fog rendered morning indistinguishable from afternoon, and evening only barely distinct from day. I was huddled beneath my greatcoat in the support trench fifty yards back from the front line, propped up on a couple of crates, keeping my legs elevated out of the run-off. Every so often I’d nod asleep and wake up a moment later hell-deep in slush. Finally I dragged myself up and went to check on my number two, currently taking his time on watch.
Adolphus had weathered his time as well as any of us, which is to say he was a broken shell of a man. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen him smile. Not that there was much to smile about – despondency was appropriate to the situation. He’d wrapped his body around a half-pike and a wool blanket around his body, and all three were caked in mud. He didn’t stir at my approach, which didn’t exactly instill confidence as to his abilities as a sentinel.
‘’Lo, Sergeant.’
He didn’t answer.
‘Adolphus.’
He raised his head up slowly, but his eyes wouldn’t stick on me, slick as the weather. ‘Hey.’
I let his lack of proper military etiquette slide. ‘Quiet night, I guess.’
‘I guess.’
‘Nothing to report?’
‘Nothing to report.’
It was a half-hour before the watch would change. ‘Why don’t you head back, try and scare up some grub.’
He nodded, but it took him a long time to stand. ‘I guess they’re gonna hit us today,’ he said, passing me the pike.
‘You never know. Maybe they’ve all gone pacifist.’
He didn’t laugh, but then again it wasn’t funny. Thirty minutes later I gave a very surprised private a spear and went to get breakfast.
There was no breakfast. Our supply wagon had been hit by artillery, or gotten lost trying to find us, or the commandant sold it on the black market and pocketed the change. I’d meant to save something from dinner the night before, a cracked biscuit or a few mouthfuls of salted meat. I hadn’t though. A line of very glum men sat on the barest nub of an incline, trying to light cigarettes beneath wet greatcoats and parceling out what remained of their liquor ration. The silver on my collar precluded my joining them, so I went back to check on the line.
Four years of being ground beneath a millstone meant that virtually the entire company consisted of
