Walk in Hell

you know that?”

“It’s a fact, sure enough,” Andersen said. They both smoked on till their cigarette butts were too tiny to hold. Then they tossed them into the mud at the bottom of the trench.

Rain began pattering down a few minutes later. “Always comes right after a bombardment,” Martin said. That wasn’t strictly true, but shelling and rain did seem to go together. At first, he welcomed the rain, which washed the last remnants of poison gas from the air. But it did not let up. It kept raining and raining and raining, till the trenches went from mud to muck.

Martin ordered men to start laying down boards, so they could keep moving up and down the trench in spite of the rain. That would work-for a while. Eventually, if the rain kept up, the muck would start swallowing the boards. Martin had seen that the winter before. He’d never expected to spend two winters in the trenches. But then, when the war started, he hadn’t figured on spending one winter in the trenches.

“Only goes to show,” he muttered, and began to fix himself another cigarette. He hadn’t known how to keep one going in miserable weather till the war started. He did now. The sort of talent I could live without, he thought as he struck a match and lighted the cigarette, shielding it from the wet with his cupped hands as he did so. He sucked in more smoke. As long as he had the talent, he saw no reason not to use it.

“Come on,” Sylvia Enos said to George, Jr., and Mary Jane. “We’re going to be late to the Coal Board if you two don’t stop fooling around.”

Her son was five, her daughter two. They didn’t understand why being late for a Coal Board appointment-as with any government appointment in the USA-was a catastrophe, but they did understand that it was a catastrophe. They also understood Sylvia would warm their backsides hotter than any coal fire if they made her late. She’d made that very plain.

Taking one of them in each hand, she started to head away from Brigid Coneval’s flat, which lay down the hall with the one she and her children had shared with George, Sr., till the Navy sent him off to the Mississippi.

George, Jr., said, “Why can’t we stay with Mrs. Coneval? We like staying with Mrs. Coneval.” Mary Jane nodded emphatically. She couldn’t have said anything so complex, but she agreed with it.

“You can’t stay with Mrs. Coneval because she has an appointment with the Coal Board this afternoon, too,” Sylvia answered. Had George meant, We like staying with her better than staying with you? Sylvia tried not to think about that. She worked all day five days a week and a half-day Saturday like everyone else. That meant her children spent more time awake with Brigid Coneval, who hadn’t taken a factory job when her husband was conscripted but made ends meet by caring for the children of women who had, than with their own mother. No wonder they thought the world of her these days.

“Don’t wanna go Coal Board,” Mary Jane said.

Sylvia Enos sighed. She didn’t want to go to the Coal Board, either. “We have to,” she said, and let it go at that. The Coal Board, the Meat Board (not that she couldn’t evade that one, with her connections to the fishing boats that came into T Wharf), the Flour Board…all the bureaucracies that kept life in the United States efficient and organized-if you listened to the people who ran them. If you listened to anyone else, you got another story, but no one in power seemed interested in that tale.

Mary Jane stuck out her plump lower lip, which had a smear of jam beneath it. “No,” she said. Being two, she used the word in every possible intonation, with every possible variation on volume.

“Do you want to go to the Coal Board, or would you rather have a spanking?” Sylvia asked. As she’d known it would, that got Mary Jane’s attention. Her daughter held still long enough so she could button the girl’s coat all the way up to the neck. It was early December, still fall by the calendar, but it felt like winter outside, and a hard winter at that.

George, Jr., had buttoned his own buttons. He was proud of everything he could do on his own, in which he took after his father. He had, unfortunately, buttoned the buttons wrong. Sylvia fixed them quickly, and with as little fuss as she could, nodded to Mrs. Coneval, and took the children downstairs and down to the corner where the trolley stopped.

Had she imagined it, or did Brigid Coneval seem to be looking forward to a trip to the Coal Board offices? Putting up with a dozen or more little ones from before sunup to after sundown had to wear at her nerves; George, Jr., and Mary Jane were often plenty to make Sylvia wish she’d never met her husband, and they were her own flesh and blood. If you didn’t sneak into the whiskey bottle while caring for your neighbors’ brats, you were a woman of stern stuff.

Out on the street, newsboys wearing caps and wool mufflers against the chill hawked copies of the Boston Globe and other local papers. They were shouting about battles in west Texas and Sequoyah, and up in Manitoba, too. Sylvia thought about spending a couple of cents to get one, but decided not to. The black-bordered casualty lists that ran on every front page would only make her sad. So long as the newsboys weren’t yelling about gunboat disasters on the Mississippi River, she knew everything about the war that mattered to her.

She clambered onto the trolley and put a nickel in the fare box. The driver cast a dubious eye at George, Jr. “He’s only five,” Sylvia said. The driver shrugged and waved her on. She was having to say that more and more. Next year, she’d have to pay her son’s fare, too. When every five cents counted, that hurt.

“Coal Board!” the trolley man shouted, pulling up to the stop half a block away from the frowning gray-brown sandstone building. As if by magic, his car nearly emptied itself. It filled again a moment later, when people who had already arranged for their coming month’s ration climbed aboard to go home.

“It didn’t used to be this way,” an old man complained to his wife as Sylvia shepherded the children past them. “Back before the Second Mexican War, we-”

Distance and the crowd kept Sylvia from hearing the rest of that. It mattered little. She knew how the old man would have gone on. Her own mother had always said the same sort of thing. Back in the 1870s, the USA hadn’t been full of Boards watching every piece of everybody’s life and making sure all the pieces fit together in a way that worked best for the government. Back then, the CSA, England, and France had humiliated the United States only once, in the War of Secession, and people figured it was a fluke. After the second time, though, it seemed pretty obvious that the only way to fight back was to organize to the hilt. Thus conscription, thus the Boards, thus endless lines and endless forms…

Coal Board forms were stacked in neat piles, a whole array of them, on a long table just inside the entrance. Sylvia started to reach for the one that said, ENTIRE FAMILY DWELLING IN SAME LIVING QUARTERS. She jerked her hand away. That hadn’t been the right form for some months now. Instead, she grabbed the one reading, FAMILY MEMBER ON MILITARY SERVICE.

She sat down on one of the hard, uncomfortable chairs in the vast office. After fishing a cloth doll out of her handbag for Mary Jane and a couple of wooden soldiers painted green-gray for George, Jr., she guddled around in there till she found a pen and a bottle of ink. Normally, she would have contented herself with a pencil, if anything, but since the start of the war all the Boards had grown insistent on ink.

The form was long enough to have been folded over on itself four different times. As she did each month, she filled out the intimate details of her family’s life: ages, address, square footage, location of absent member(s), and on and on and on. She wished the bureaucrats could remember from one month to the next what she’d put down the month before. That didn’t seem to be in the cards, although, if you invented a palace for yourself so you could get a bigger coal ration, they generally did find out about that, whereupon you wished you hadn’t.

“Come on,” she said to the children. They got into the line appropriate to the form. It was, naturally, the longest line in the entire office: conscription had made sure of that. Up at the distant front, a clerk standing behind a tall marble counter like that of a bank examined each form in turn. When satisfied, he plied a rubber stamp with might and main: thock! thock! thock!

“Wonder what’s keeping him out of the Army,” the middle-aged woman in front of Sylvia muttered under her breath.

“When they start conscripting clerks, you’ll know the war is as good as lost,” Sylvia said with great conviction. The woman in front of her nodded, the ragged silk flowers on her battered old picture hat waving up and down.

The line inched forward. Sylvia supposed she should have been grateful the Coal Board offices stayed open all day Saturday. Without that, she would have had to leave work at the fish-canning plant in the middle of some weekday, which would not have made her bosses happy about her. Of course, she would have been far from the