They unhitched the horses and fired a couple of shells at the damnyankees. Stuart made no effort whatever to seek shelter. On the contrary-he stood in the open, defying the Yankees to hit him. In short order, he went down, blood spurting from a neck wound. The gun crew got the horses hitched again in moments. Under Featherston’s bellowed orders, they got the howitzer out of there-and Captain Stuart, too. They saved the gun. Stuart died before a doctor saw him.
Chester Martin wished he’d had a bath any time recently. He wished the same thing about the squad he led. Of course, with so many unburied corpses in the neighborhood-so many corpses all up and down the Roanoke front-the reek of a few unwashed but live bodies would be a relatively small matter.
Turning to the distinguished visitor (without whose presence he wouldn’t have cared nearly so much about the bath), he said, “You want to be careful, sir. We’re right up at the front now. You give the Rebel snipers even the littlest piece of a target, and they’ll drill it. They won’t know you’re a reporter, not a soldier-and the bastards probably wouldn’t care much if they did know.”
“Don’t you worry about me, Sergeant,” Richard Harding Davis answered easily. “I’ve been up to the front before.”
“Yes, sir, I know that,” Martin answered. Davis had been up to the front in a good many wars over the past twenty years or so. “I’ve read a lot of your stuff.”
Davis preened. He wasn’t a very big man, but extraordinarily handsome, and dressed in green-gray clothes that were the color of a U.S. uniform but much snappier in cut-especially when compared to the dirty, unpressed uniforms all around him. “I’m very glad to hear it,” he said. “A writer who didn’t have readers would be out of work in a hurry-and then I might have to find an honest job.”
He laughed. So did Martin, who asked, “Are you all right, sir?” Handsome or not, Davis was an old geezer- well up into his fifties-and looked a little the worse for wear as he strode along the trench.
He was game enough, though. “I’m fine. Bit of a bellyache, maybe. I eat Army chow when I come up to the front. God knows how you poor souls survive on it.” It probably wasn’t anything like the fancy grub he ate back in New York City, Martin thought with a touch-more than a touch-of envy. Then Davis went on, “As a matter of fact, Sergeant, I know your work, too. That’s why I chose this unit when I decided to visit the Roanoke front.”
“Beg your pardon, sir?” For a second, Martin didn’t get it.
Richard Harding Davis spelled it out for him: “Teddy Roosevelt recommended you to me, as a matter of fact. He said you knocked him flat and jumped on him when the Rebs started shelling your men while he was on an inspection. If you’d do it for him, he said, you might even do it for me.” He flashed that formidable smile again.
“Do you want to know the truth, sir?” Martin said. “I’d almost forgotten about that. Been a lot of war since, if you know what I mean.”
Davis produced a notebook from a coat that had as many pockets as Joseph’s must have had colors and scribbled in it. “If you forget about the president of the United States, Sergeant, what do you remember?”
Martin chewed on that. When you thought about it, it was a damn good question. Most of what happened in the trenches wasn’t worth remembering. Most of what happened in the trenches, you would have paid anybody anything to forget. Davis right behind him, he turned out of a traverse and into a long firebay, and there found his answer. “When you get down to it, sir,” he said, “the only thing you want to remember is your buddies.”
Here came Paul Andersen, who’d been with him from the start. After so many casualties, that alone was plenty to forge a bond between them. Here came Specs Peterson, who looked as if he ought to be a pharmacist and who was probably the meanest, roughest son of a gun in the whole battalion. Here came Willard Tarrant, Joe Hammerschmitt’s replacement, who carried the name of Packer because he worked at the Armour plant in Chicago.
“Fellas, this here’s Richard Harding Davis,” Martin said, and let them tell the correspondent their own stories.
They had plenty of stories to tell him. If you stayed alive for a week at the front line, even a week where the official reports called the sector quiet, you’d have stories enough to last you the rest of your life-stories of courage and suffering and fear and endurance and everything else you could name. Experience was intense, concentrated, while it lasted…if it lasted.
Davis’ hand raced over the pages of the little notebook, trying valiantly to keep up with the flood of words. At last, after what might have been an hour or so, the tales that came of themselves began to flag. To keep things going, the correspondent pointed east across the rusting barbed wire, across the cratered horror of no-man’s-land, over toward the Confederate line, and asked, “What do you think of the enemy soldiers?”
Now Packer and Specs and the rest of the privates fell silent and looked to Martin and Andersen. It wasn’t, Martin judged, so much because they were sergeant and corporal: more because they’d been there since the beginning, and had seen more of the Rebels than anybody else. Chester paused to gather his thoughts. At last, he said, “Far as I can see, Rebs in the trenches aren’t a hell of a lot different than us. They’re brave sons of bitches, I’ll tell you that. We’ve got more big guns than they do, and there was a good long while there last summer when we had gas and they didn’t, but if you wanted to move ’em back, you had to go in there with more men than they had and shift ’em. No way in hell they were going to run then, and they don’t now, either.”
Paul Andersen nodded. “That’s how it is, all right. They’re just a bunch of ordinary guys, same as we are. Too damn bad they didn’t let us have a real Christmas truce last year, way there was in 1914. Nice to be able to stick your head out of the trench one day a year and know somebody’s not going to try and blow it off. But what the hell can you do?”
“I’ll tell you something, Corporal,” Davis said. “The reason there wasn’t a truce last year is that the powers that be-in Philadelphia and Richmond both, from what I hear-made certain there wouldn’t be, because they watched the whole war almost fall to pieces on Christmas Day, 1914.”
“What? They think we’d have quit fighting?” Packer Tarrant shook his head at the very idea. “Got to lick ’em. Taking longer than anybody figured, but we’ll do it.”
Several men nodded, most of them new to the front. Richard Harding Davis wrote some more, then asked, “If they’re just like you are in the trenches, what keeps you going against them?”
In a different tone of voice, the question would have been subversive. As it was, it produced a few seconds of thoughtful silence. Then Specs Peterson said, “Hell and breakfast, Mr. Davis, we done too much by now to quit, ain’t we? We got to beat those bastards, or all of that don’t mean nothin’.”
“That’s about the size of it,” Chester Martin agreed. “One of my grandfathers, he got shot in the War of Secession-and for what? The USA lost. Everything he did was wasted. Jesus, it’d be awful if that happened to us three times in fifty years.”
Corporal Andersen pointed over to the enemy lines. “And the Rebs, they don’t want to find out what losing is all about, either. That’s why they keep comin’at us, I guess. Been a lot of what the newspapers been calling Battles of the Roanoke, anyway.” As if to underscore his words, a machine gun started rattling away, a couple of hundred yards to the north. Rifles joined in, and, for five or ten minutes, a lively little firefight raged. Gradually, the firing died away. Anything might have started it. Martin wondered if anyone had died in the meaningless exchange of bullets.
“Are the Rebels any different since their Negroes rose in revolt?” Davis asked.
The soldiers looked at one another. “Not when we’re coming at them, that’s for sure,” Martin said, and everybody nodded. “You think about it, though, they haven’t been coming at us as hard lately. ’Course, it’s been winter, too, so I don’t know just how much that means.”
“Confederates more inclined to stand on the defensive.” Richard Harding Davis said the words aloud, as if tasting them before setting them down on paper. Then he grunted. It sounded more like surprise than approval. He looked at Martin-no, through Martin. His mouth opened, as if he was about to say something else.
Instead, he swayed. The notebook and pencil dropped from his hands into the mud. His knees buckled. He collapsed.
“Jesus!” Martin and the other soldiers crowded round the fallen reporter. Martin grabbed for his wrist. He found no pulse. “He’s dead,” the sergeant said in blank amazement. Davis’ body bore no wound he could see. He knew a shell fragment as tiny as a needle could kill, but no shells had landed anywhere close by.
His shouts and those of his squadmates brought a doctor into the front line within a couple of minutes. The soldiers wouldn’t have rated such an honor, but Davis was important. The doctor stripped the correspondent out of his fancy not-quite-uniform. Try as he would, he couldn’t find a wound, either. “His heart must have given out on
