For them the adulation of the public was fuel for their fire. For David, adulation only did what high marks did for him in college — drove him on not because he wanted to but because it was expected — had been expected by generations of Brentwoods in the armed services. Personal achievements were nothing for a Brentwood if they weren’t surpassed the next time around. The pressure was enormous. Dutifully he opened the next letter without having taken any notice of whom it was from. Only when he unfolded it did he recognize the handwriting — Melissa Lange’s.
“Hey, Yank!”
David turned around and saw it was the mad British sergeant, perched high in the back of a lizard- camouflaged Humvee, using its swivel-mounted.50-millimeter machine gun as an armrest. “Got you a seat on the hospital train to Brussels. Ten minutes. Better get a move on.”
“Right,” answered David, quickly folding the letter, slipping it into his top breast pocket as he headed toward the Humvee.
“ ‘Ere, ‘ere!” bellowed the sergeant, albeit good-naturedly. “Where’s your gear?”
David stopped, feeling as foolish as he had in the first terrible hours at Parris Island. He’d forgotten his kit bag in the excitement of receiving Melissa’s letter. As he climbed aboard the Humvee, he saw the sergeant pointing toward the administration building. “Hear about your little sweetie?” The sergeant was talking again about the young admitting clerk, Lili, who had flirted with David when he’d first arrived at the Belgian hospital on convalescent leave after Stadthagen. “She’s coming along, too,” the British sergeant informed him. “Which reminds me. You ever see that old cartoon — barrack room full of birds all stripped down to their waists. Tits sticking out all over the place. Sar’ major comes in, beet red. ‘Good God!’ he says. ‘I said
“That’s terrible,” said David.
“Never mind, lad. I’ll ‘ave another one for you when you get back.”
David never liked people saying things like “when you get back.” Always made him nervous.
Lili was helping some of the nurses load the last of the abdominal cases that were being transferred to Brussels on the train. She waved, smiling at him.
“ ‘Ello, ‘ello,” the sergeant teased David. “Bit of the old in-out for you, Jack. Eh?”
Before David could answer, the Humvee jerked to a stop at the gate, throwing them both against the driver’s cabin. The guards were demanding ID. “This man’s got a train to catch,” the sergeant informed the corporal of the guard.
“We must check all passes,” said the Belgian sentry in impeccably stilted English.
“We much check all passes,” said the sergeant, mimicking him to David.
“What for?” the sergeant asked the corporal. “Think I’m a bloody spy?” He dug David in the ribs, sending shooting pains down to the scar tissue.
“No, I do not think so,” replied the Belgian corporal, un-fazed. “You are too fat, I think.”
“What? You cheeky bastard!” said the sergeant, passing his and David’s ID down. “Don’t give me any of your lip. I’m responsible for this hero, see. And if we don’t catch that train—”
“You will catch the train.”
“We’d better,” the sergeant retorted, snatching back the ID, and, indicating the younger guard, asked David, “You fancy the young one? — bit of lance corporal on the side?” He roared laughing, David leaning against the machine gun, shaking his head as the truck moved out.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
As the Red Cross hospital train headed for Brussels from Liege, diverted south because of a rocket-torn section of track on the more direct westward line, David fell under the slow, hypnotic sway of the carriage, the train restricted for a time to no more than forty kilometers an hour because of the danger of air-sewn mines that might still be in the area, hidden by snow.
The clickety clack of the wheels passing over the ties took David back to his childhood of going up from New York to Albany, the River Meuse, effortlessly slipping by him now, a stand-in for the narrower reaches of the Hudson River. But he knew the analogy was a strained one, more a pining for home than an accurate remembrance of things past. America was not only a long way off in his mind, it was another time, so remote, so unlike the war- filled continent that he was part of, that it might as well be on another planet. It wasn’t simply that the snow- dusted flat country around the Meuse didn’t approximate the heavily wooded banks along the upper reaches of the Hudson, but the smells were so unfamiliar.
Europe always smelled different — an older, colder brick smell, and especially in winter, with all the fumes of coal-burning furnaces that had come back into use as North Sea gasoline supplies that came from England via the Channel’s “subfloat” pipeline were jealously coveted by the armed forces. The brownish haze from the coal fires created at once the most polluted and beautiful sunsets Europe had seen in the last hundred years.
David saw a Red Cross nurse coming through from the carriage loaded with badly wounded abdominal cases into the walking-wounded carriage, where David and the British sergeant were sitting with a number of other American, British, and Belgian troops. The nurse’s experienced eye was looking for repatriation cases, which, if they were up to it, would be sent on from Brussels to the Channel ports, when these were cleared of debris, and sent back to England. The sergeant dug David in the ribs. “Look at the knockers on that, Davey boy. Imagine those dangling—”
“All right,” said David, thwarting more detailed description. The sergeant, he decided, was one of those who took a perverse pleasure in getting the sexually deprived soldiers worked up about “dipping your wick.” David turned his attention to the scenery, the train picking up speed, as he heard an American in front of him, in a neck brace, telling his buddy the train’s engineer had told him they would pass through Waterloo on their way up from Namur to Brussels. Right now David didn’t care about Waterloo — last thing he needed was to see another battlefield, no matter how historic it was. What he wanted was privacy, longing to read Melissa’s letter, to hear her voice. But he wasn’t going to spoil it like a dessert you’re so hungry for that it’s gone before you’ve time to savor the taste. Letters from home, like everything else in this war, had to be rationed carefully. He glanced back at the toilet lineup, but there were too many.
Soon his eyes were tearing because of the cigarette smoke in the carriage. The war, he mused, had been a monumental setback for the antismoking lobby. His older brother, Robert, or so his mother had told him, had mentioned it in his letters home, too, opining that sometimes he felt that, along with looking to escape unhappy situations back home, half the sub crews had joined the silent service because on a sub, you could smoke all you wanted.
“You are enjoying the scenery, yes?”
David looked up and saw the pretty young admitting clerk, Lili, the British sergeant already unabashedly leering at her, his cockney tone taking on a decidedly vulgar edge. “ ‘Ello, luv!” he said, patting the inside of his thigh. “Want to sit on Daddy’s knee then?”
“No, thank you, Daddy.” She smiled.
David burst out laughing, sending a burning pain down his arm, but he didn’t care. Momentarily he forgot everything unpleasant in his life — the heart-thumping run he’d made on the Stadthagen dump, the raid on Pyongyang, and the churning doubt inside him about whether or not he could withstand the strain of any more combat, wondering how close he was — his body was — to simply throwing in the towel, his will exhausted by the combination of physical and mental fatigue.
The sergeant wasn’t amused by Lili’s repartee, a burning resentment in his eyes against the young girl, a resentment that David felt partly responsible for because of having laughed at him. “Ah—” said David in an effort to change the subject. “Someone was saying we’ll be going through Waterloo?”
“Yes,” said Lili. “It is very famous. You know about this?”
“He doesn’t know anything, luv,” cut in the sergeant. “ ‘E’s just a boy. What you need, luv—”
“My name is Lili.” She said it without rancor but evenly.
“All right, Lili luv — listen. You know where we can get a snort?”
She looked blankly at him.
“You know,” said the sergeant as he motioned, knocking back a drink. “Booze? Ah—
