French- clear Parisian French, which stood out almost as much as English did from the Quebecois dialect. English- speaking Canadian soldiers said Quebecois French sounded like ducks making love, a claim always good for starting a fight when you were bored.
Galtier couldn't make out much of what the major was saying. Whatever it was, Father Pascal was listening hard. That worried the farmer a little. Father Pascal was a good man, but ambitious- witness his desire for Riviere- du-Loup's becoming a bishopric. If the Americans fed his ambitions, he was liable to go further with them than he should.
Well, one Lucien Galtier couldn't do much about that. Having sold his chickens- and made more for them than he'd expected, thanks to Americans too stupid to bargain- he got into his wagon and started for home. Boom! Boom! Boom! The American field guns south of town, which had fallen silent, opened up on another ship out in the St. Lawrence. Galtier looked back over his shoulder. Yes, there was a dim shape moving on the river.
And then, to his surprised delight, that dim shape answered with booms of its own, booms attenuated by traveling over some miles of water but plainly of much larger caliber than the three-inch popguns that had fired at them. Explosions followed almost instantly thereafter, in the place from which the field guns had been firing. Some of the housewives jumped up and crossed themselves. Galtier waited to hear if the field guns could reply to what had to be at least a cruiser out there. They remained silent. He drove home, a contented man.
IV
Paul Mantarakis wished he had a chaplain of his own faith with whom he could pray. He'd heard there were a few Orthodox priests in uniform, but he'd never seen one. Protestant ministers, yes. Catholic priests, yes. Rabbis, even- yes. But none of his own.
He fingered his amber worry beads and murmured, ' Kyrie eleison. Christe eleison.' Lord, have mercy. Christ, have mercy.
'Leave off your Latin and your rosary,' declared Gordon McSweeney, a dour Scotsman in his platoon. 'They are the road to hell.'
'It's not Latin,' Mantarakis said wearily, for about the hundredth time. McSweeney just glared at him with pale, angry eyes. If you prayed in a language that wasn't English, it was Latin to him. He even thought Jews prayed in Latin. Mantarakis would have liked to give him a good kick, but McSweeney made two of the little Greek, both of the two armored in cement-hard muscle.
'Shut up, both of you,' Sergeant Peterquist said. 'Come on, get moving onto the damn barge.'
Onto the damn barge they moved, each man weighed down with pack and ammunition and rifle. If you went into the Ohio before you made it ashore on the Kentucky side, you'd surely drown. Theouthelontos- God willing- that wouldn't happen.
A couple of shells went by overhead and crashed down behind the small town badly misnamed Metropolis, Illinois. The Rebs were still shooting, but U.S. artillery had beaten down their guns to the point where General Custer thought the invasion of the Confederacy could begin. Mantarakis wasn't nearly sure he agreed with that, but he was just a private, so who cared what he thought?
Metropolis had already given him a taste of the South, with its rolling lawns and its magnolias. The South Philadelphia neighborhood where he'd cooked dolmades and cheese steaks hadn't been anything like this, not even close. But the little town had its own slums, down by the bridge the Rebs had dynamited when the war broke out: Brickbat Ridge, they called it.
'Come on, pack in tight, you birds!' Peterquist yelled in his raspy- foghorn voice. 'Come on, come on, come on!' All over the barge, non-coms and officers said the same thing in a lot of different ways.
Mantarakis already felt like one anchovy in a whole tin. Anchovies and sardines, you packed the fish in tight as you could, because the oil that went in with 'em was worth more than they were. Finding out stuff like that was the only bad part of being a cook, as far as he was concerned: sometimes, because you were in the business, you learned things you'd rather not know.
Well, now he was in the business of killing people, and he had the feeling he was going to learn all kinds of things he'd rather not know. At the moment, what he was trying to learn was how to breathe without moving his chest.
'We're tight enough now, don't you think?' Paddy O'Rourke said in his musical brogue. 'If I was jammed up against the pretty girls, nowbut faith! It's all you ugly bastards.'
The men around him laughed. When everyone exhaled at once, it did seem to give more room. Mantarakis said, 'You're pretty ugly your own self, Paddy.'
'Ah, but I can't see me,' the Irishman answered.
What seemed like all the artillery shells in the world opened up then, on the Illinois side of the river. The roar of the guns, large and small, was music to Mantarakis' ears. The more shells that came down on the Rebels' heads, the fewer of the sons of bitches would be left to try and shoot him. He stood on tiptoe, trying to get a look at just what kind of hell the Kentucky side of the river was catching, but he couldn't see over the shoulders of his bigger comrades.
The steam engine that powered the barge started up, making the timbers tremble under his feet. 'Cast off!' somebody yelled; Mantarakis heard the order through the thunder of the artillery. Somebody must have obeyed because, ever so slowly, the barge crawled away from the landing and out into the Ohio.
If he turned his head to one side, Mantarakis could see the river and catch glimpses of other barges wallowing across the current toward Kentucky. Something came down with a splash between his barge and the one closest to it. Cold water fountained up and splashed down on him.
'That came too damn close to hitting us,' somebody behind him said. Only then did Paul realize the something had been a Confederate shell. If a shell did hit a barge packed with soldiers- He dug in his pocket and started working the worry beads again. If that happened, it would be like an explosion in a slaughterhouse, with young men playing the role of raw meat.
More shells landed in the river. Mantarakis got splashed again, and then again. Somewhere off to his left, he heard a shell hit a barge, and then heard a clamor of anguish from it. When you headed for battle this way, you were as helpless as a cow being driven along the chute to the fellow with the sledgehammer. You couldn't even fire back, the way you could when you got to solid ground.
How long to cross the river? It seemed like forever, though it couldn't have taken above fifteen minutes, twenty at the most. The soldiers in the front rows, who could see where they were going, passed word back that they were nearing the enemy side of the Ohio. One of them said, 'Hope the Rebs don't have no machine guns down by the bank, or we ain't ever gonna make it onto dryland.'
'You don't shut up, Smitty,' somebody else said fiercely, 'I'm gonna shove you in the river and you sure as hell won't make it to dry land.'
Paul fingered the worry beads harder than ever. His sympathies were with the soldier who'd threatened to push Smitty overboard. The very idea of machine-gun bullets stitching through men who couldn't even duck was enough to make his testicles try to crawl up into his belly.
A big shell landed in the river, all too close to the barge. Mantarakis, who'd already been wet, was now soaked to the skin. Most of the shell fragments and shrapnel balls, fortunately, went into the water, though a couple of unlucky soldiers howled as they were wounded. The barge itself dipped and then recovered, almost as if it were a buggy jouncing over a pothole in the road.
Mixed in with the racket of artillery came the sharper discharges of rifles and, off in the distance, sure enough, the endless death-rattle bark of machine guns. A couple of men at the front of the barge started shooting, too. Mantarakis didn't know whether he liked that or not. It was liable to draw Confederate fire onto men who couldn't shoot back-him, for instance.
The barge lurched again. Paul didn't hear any explosions especially close by; no more upthrown water drenched him. Before he had time to think about what that might mean, whistles started squealing at the front of the barge and men screamed, 'Out, you bastards! Move! Run! We've gone aground!'
All at once, Paul could move. Along with his squadmates, he ran forward and jumped off the bow of the barge. He got splashed then; the water into which he'd leaped came up past his knees. The mud on the bottom of
