really think you're going to come through alive, or with all your arms and legs if you do live?
Captain Wyatt said, 'We hope, sir, that the next offensive will bring us up to the river, and from there we'll proceed toward the Blue Ridge Mountains.'
'Bully,' TR said. 'Our German allies have offensives in the works, too. With God's help, they'll strike the French and the English a heavy blow on the continent.' He shook his head. 'I don't know what we would have done without Germany, boys. With England and France backing up the Rebels, we were fighting out of our weight when we tried to scrap with them. Not now, though, by jingo, not now.'
'Yes, sir,' Martin said. 'We have friends in high places, eh?'
'The All-Highest place,' TR answered with his famous chuckle, still boy ish though he was in his mid-fifties. 'Kaiser Wilhelm's done everything he could for us, and we've paid him back, thanks to soldiers like you men.'
Martin didn't stand straighter now; Roosevelt had ordered him to be at his ease. But he felt tall and proud just the same. Again, TR made him believe the war had a point, a goal, beyond the miseries of the front. He wondered how long he'd go on believing that once the president left.
A few hundred yards off, a couple of U.S. machine guns started hammer ing away at some Confederate target or other. Rifle fire answered from the Rebel lines, and then their machine guns. After a few minutes, U.S. field guns started pounding the enemy's forward trenches.
Captain Wyatt frowned. 'They shouldn't be doing that, not now. It's going to bring down — '
'Captain, I didn't come here to watch a Sunday-school debating society,' President Roosevelt said. 'This is war. I know what war is.I-'
Before he could finish, the Confederates' quick-firing three-inch guns started raining shells down, on and near the U.S. front lines. The Rebs seldom wasted time replying to an artillery bombardment.
Paul Andersen threw himself flat, Captain Wyatt threw himself flat. To Martin's horror, he saw TR start to stand up on a firing step so he could get a better look at what was going on. Without thinking, he knocked the president down with a block from behind that would have been illegal in a football match, then flopped over TR's squirming body. 'Stay flat, dammit!' he shouted. He'd never expected to have the president's ear. Now that he did, this was what he got to tell him? It would have been funny if he hadn't worried about getting killed.
Shrapnel balls and jagged bits of shell casing whined through the air. Bigger U.S. guns started firing, trying to silence the Confederate field pieces. Bigger Rebel guns struck back at the bigger U.S. guns. Both sides forgot about the men at the front for a while.
Warily, Chester Martin sat up. That let TR get up, too. Martin gulped, wondering what the penalty was for levelling the president. But all Roosevelt said was, 'Thank you, Sergeant. You know conditions here better than I.'
'Uh, thank you, sir.' Martin looked at Roosevelt, whose green-gray uniform was now as muddy as his own. 'You look like a real, modern soldier now, sir.' The president of the United States laughed like a man possessed.
X
Lucien Galtier muttered unhappily to himself as he loaded the jug of kerosene into the back of his wagon. The ration the American soldiers allowed people was ridiculously small. Thank God, nights were shorter now than they had been in the middle of winter, but he still had to leave a lot of his lamps dry. The world, he was convinced, held no justice.
'No, it certainly is not fair,' he told his horse, which, for once, forbore to argue with him. 'When a man comes into a town, he cannot even buy for himself a drink of a sort he cannot get at home.'
Strictly speaking, that wasn't true. None of the taverns in Riviere-du-Loup had signs up ordering-or even advising-townsmen and local farmers to stay out. Nor were the taverns out of liquor; a lot of their stock these days was shipped up from the United States, but that did not mean it would not burn in your boiler. Drinks, in fact, were actually cheaper these days than they had been before the war started, because the occupying authority taxed liquor at a lower rate than the provincial government had.
All of which was silver lining on a large, dark cloud. If you went into a tavern, you were almost certain to find it full of American soldiers, which was the reason the occupying authority held down liquor prices. And American soldiers, especially American soldiers with drink in them, did not take kindly to sharing what they thought of as their taverns with the locals.
'Oh, you might go in, have a whiskey, and get out again,' Lucien said. His horse's ears twitched, perhaps in sympathy but more likely, knowing the beast, in mockery. 'But if there should be a fight, what is one to do? There are always many soldiers, they are always all against you, and, even if your country men come to your aid, it leads merely to riot and then to punishment of the entire unfortunate town. All this for one little drink? It is not worth it!''
The horse snorted. Maybe that meant it agreed Maybe that meant it thought Galtier was complaining too much, too. If it did, too bad. He could complain to the horse without worrying his wife — and without making her angry, too, for she was less than delighted when he went into a tavern even for one whiskey, her fixed view of the matter being that no one ever went into a tavern for only one whiskey.
Galtier was just climbing up into the wagon when, from behind him, a cheery voice said, 'God bless you, Lucien.'
He turned. 'Oh. Good day to you, Father Pascal. Pardon me, if you please. I did not hear you come up. I am desolate.'
'There is no need to apologize, my son,' Father Pascal said with an ami able wave of his hand. 'You are full of your own concerns, as any busy man would of course be.' He studied Galtier. His black eyes, though set rather close together, were clever and keen. 'I pray your affairs march well?'
'They march well enough, thank you, Father.' Lucien would complain to his horse. He would complain to his wife. He would not complain to Father Pascal. These past months, he had even taken to editing his confessions, which he knew imperilled his soul but which helped keep his mortal flesh secure. Fa ther Pascal was too friendly to the Americans to suit him.
'I am glad to hear that.' The priest salted his words with the lightest sprinkling of irony. Lucien sometimes thought he talked like a lawyer. Father Pascal went on, 'I am glad to see you have survived a winter difficult in so many ways.'
'Yes, I have survived,' Galtier agreed. I would have done better than that had the Americans whom you love so well not stolen everything that would have let me get through with something more than bare survival.
'And your family, they are all thriving?' Father Pascal asked.
'We are well, thank you, yes.' No one had starved, no one had come down with tuberculosis or rheumatic fever. Was that thriving? Lucien didn't know, not for certain. Whatever doubts he had, though, he would not admit to the priest.
Father Pascal raised his hands in a gesture of benediction. His palms were pink and plump and soft, with none of the calluses ridging Galtier's hands. His nails were clean, and not a one of them broken. Truly, he lived a different life from that of a farmer.
'God be praised they are well,' he said, turning his clever eyes toward heaven for a moment. 'And how do your prospects seem for the coming year?'
'Who can guess?' Lucien said with a shrug. 'The course of our health, the course of the weather, the course of the war — all these things are in God's hands, not mine.' There. Now I have been pious for him. Maybe he will go away.
But Father Pascal did not go away. 'In God's hands. Yes. We are all in God's hands. The course of the war- who can guess the course of the war? But then, who would have guessed a year ago the Americans would be here?'
'You are right in that regard, Father,' Galtier said. Some priests might have compared the coming of the Americans to the Ten Plagues God had vis ited upon the Egyptians. Father Pascal didn't. Every line on his chubby, well-fed face said he was content with the military government.
Maybe Lucien let some of that thought show on his own face: a mistake. Father Pascal said, 'I am but a
