'They're getting awfully bold these days, parading through the trenches like they've got stars in wreaths on their collars.'
McCorkle laughed at that. Reggie relighted the candle, which had gone out, and went back to killing lice. He had just started on the other sleeve when first one man and then several began banging with entrenching tools on shell casings that had been hung like temple bells from tripods made of boards. With the unmusical banging, a warning cry raced up and down the trench line: 'Gas! The Yanks are using gas!'
Being shot at, having artillery shells land all around, even going out between the trench lines to lay wire or to raid-Reggie was used to all that, almost to the same degree he'd been used to waiting at a Richmond corner for the streetcar to pick him up on his way between his apartment and the pharmacy where he'd worked. It wasn't that he was fearless; it was much more that anything, even the worst of horrors, becomes routine, and what is routine no longer terrifies.
But gas, gas was new. The U.S. soldiers hadn't used it on the Roanoke front, not till now. The masks-which looked like plump versions of the ones surgeons wore over their mouths and noses-and the hyposulfite solution in which to soak them had arrived days before. He snatched his mask out of the breast pocket in his tunic where he'd stowed it and sprinted, bare-chested, for the hyposulfite tin.
There, he discovered arrangements could have been better. Everybody else was as frightened of the poisonous stuff the damnyankees were spewing as he was, and the big tin stood at the center of a struggling knot of men.
'Form a line!' Corporal McCorkle shouted from behind him. 'God damn you, form a line, and on the double!'
Discipline held; when a voice with command told the men what to do, they did it. Bartlett dipped his mask into the big, wide-mouthed tin and tied it over his face as the first yellow-green tendrils of chlorine gas came down into the trench like so many poisonous snakes slithering in the late spring sun.
His eyes burned. He passed the palm of his hand over the dripping mask and then over his eyes. That helped, a little. He had no idea whether the hyposulfite solution would hurt his eyes. He knew damn well the chlorine would, though.
His lungs burned, too. He could smell the harsh chlorine in his nose, taste it in his mouth. The mask he wore like a cold, clammy veil was anything but perfect. But men who hadn't donned masks, or who hadn't tied them tight, were coughing and choking, clutching at their throats and turning blue. Not perfect, no, but a hell of a lot better than nothing.
'If you can't get to the chemical, piss on your mask!' That was Captain Wilcox, his voice muffled by the mask he was wearing. 'It's disgusting, but it may keep you alive.'
As the chlorine spread from the front-line trenches toward those farther to the rear, U.S. artillery opened up, pounding the Confederates with a harsh bombardment. Reggie Bartlett huddled in the mud near the rat he had killed. Any one of those shells could lay him open the way his entrenching tool had gutted the rat. He held his hands over his face, both to protect it from splinters and to keep his mask on tight.
The bombardment was sharp, but it was also short: no more than fifteen minutes. 'Up, dammit, up!' Captain Wilcox shouted. Farther along the trench, the battalion commander, Major Colleton, echoed the command: 'Get up and fight like Americans! Here come the damnyankees!'
Bartlett 's eyes burned worse than ever; tears streamed down his face. But he hadn't been killed, he hadn't been maimed. Thank you, Jesus. He scrambled to his feet and ran to the firing step. Sure enough, the Yankees were cutting their way through the wire. Most of them wore masks like his. The white cloth squares made good targets. He fired again and again and again. U.S. soldiers fell. More kept coming, though, their uniforms almost the color of chlorine.
Confederate machine guns opened up. The damnyankees started falling faster. But still they came, urgent shouts blurred under the hyposulfite-soaked gauze pads on their mouths. Some of them got close enough to throw grenades. One burst near Bartlett, leaving him stunned and half deafened. After a moment, he realized his left leg hurt. Fragment or a nail or whatever must have kissed me, he thought. When he put weight on the leg, it held. He could worry about the wound later, then.
A few Yankees leaped down into the Confederate trench, but none near him: those men were dead or wounded or running or crawling back to their own lines. A pistol barked, its sharp report like a terrier yapping amid retrievers. Probably Major Colleton, doing some of his own fighting. You couldn't fault him for guts.
'God damn,' a man in butternut beside Reggie said reverently as the firing slowed. 'We beat the sons of bitches back.'
Bartlett needed a moment to recognize Jasper Jenkins with a mask on his face, even though the two of them had shared cornbread and jam and coffee for breakfast that morning. 'Sure as hell did, Jasper,' he answered, using his friend's name to cover his own embarrassment. 'These masks do help. Nice to know we got something at least partway right.'
Negro stretcher-bearers, Red Cross armbands on their left sleeves and masks on their faces, came forward to take the men who had been gassed and the other casualties back to where the doctors could work on them. Staring at the yellowish foam on the lips of one poor fellow who moaned with every breath he took, Reggie wondered what the quacks could do for him, and if they could do anything at all. He brought his hand up to his mask. If he'd been at the tail end of that line instead of near the front…
'I'd have pissed on my mask,' he said. 'Anything is better than nothing.' He unbuttoned his fly and faced the wall of the trench. He noticed he was pissing on a dead rat. Nobody had smacked it with an entrenching tool: like the gassed soldier he'd seen, it had yellow foam on its whiskers.
As he walked along the trench, he saw more rats, either frozen in death or thrashing like soldiers who'd inhaled what wasn't an immediately fatal dose of chlorine. He kicked a couple of the corpses, and stamped the life out of a couple that were still breathing.
'Gas must bring the sons of bitches up out of their holes,' Jasper Jenkins said.
'Reckon so,' Reggie agreed. 'They come up for fresh air, but there isn't any fresh air. Maybe we'll have a few days without them thieving and chewing on dead bodies.' He picked up the tunic he'd thrown down when the gas attack started. 'I wonder if that chlorine stuff kills lice, too. If it does, there may be something to it after all.' He squatted down to examine the tunic and find out.
Nellie Semphroch went from table to table with a tray for empty plates and coffee cups and a damp rag to wipe the tables clean of spilled coffee and bits of bread from sandwiches. Thanks to Mr. Jacobs, she hadn't had any trouble getting good bread and meats, despite what her ration books said. No snoopy Confederate inspectors had walked in and started asking questions; Mr. Jacobs evidently knew a way to keep that from happening, too.
She looked around the coffeehouse. Business was good. Business, in fact, was booming. If she wasn't careful, she'd get rich. Confederate inspectors might not come into the coffeehouse, but Confederate officers did, and they told their friends, and- She stiffened. There sat Nicholas H. Kincaid, moodily sipping at a cup of coffee. He hadn't come in for food or drink. He'd come in to try to seduce Edna, having come so close once before.
Why, Nellie thought resentfully, hasn't he gone and gotten himself killed? She wished she could walk up to him and throw him out on his ear. Since he was an occupier and she one of the occupied, she couldn't do that. What she could do, and did, was thank heaven she had Edna in the back washing dishes and not here out front waiting tables. With a final scowl at Kincaid, she carried the tray back to her daughter.
'Hello, Ma,' Edna said, looking up from the sink. 'You got more presents for me? Why don't you bring me a diamond ring and a motorcar, instead of all these miserable, stinking, goddamn dishes?'
'You've got the soap right there.' Nellie pointed to it. 'Why don't you wash your mouth out with it?'
Mother and daughter glared at each other. Mother and daughter had been doing a lot of that lately. The more Nellie tried to keep an eye on Edna, the more Edna took to sneaking around. Nellie didn't know what to do about it. She had to sleep, she had to eat, she had to mind the customers-and Edna was so wild for life these days-that was what the young people called it, anyway; to Nellie, it was just another word for loose — that fifteen or twenty minutes unwatched might well have been all she needed.
'Why don't you let me be?' Edna said.
'Oh, no,' Nellie answered. 'I know you too well.' You're too much the way I was, more than half a lifetime ago. Easing back never occurred to her, nor did the notion that part of Edna's wildness might have sprung from being watched too closely too often for too long.
