Walk in Hell

When it didn’t, he gave it all the power it had. “A short life but a merry one,” he said, and wondered whether he was talking about the engine or himself. He’d find out, one way or the other.

Abruptly, the engine went from dying to dead. That left him in charge of a nose-heavy glider a couple of hundred feet above no-man’s-land. He kept the nose up as best he could. The ground got closer with every beat of his heart.

He was over the American trench line-not very far over it, either. An idiot took a shot at him. Thwump! The bullet drilled through the fuselage, not far behind him. Nice to know our boys on the ground are such good shots, he thought, and then, If I ever find out who that son of a bitch is, I’ll kick his teeth in.

Between trenches and shell holes, he couldn’t have found a worse landscape in which to try to set down an aeroplane. If he’d had a choice, he wouldn’t have tried it. He had no choice. There was a road of sorts, one on which fresh ammunition and supplies came to the front. And there was a little train of wagons on it, bringing forward whatever they were bringing.

Would he-could he-get over them and set the Martin down? “I’ll do it or die trying,” he said, and giggled. Never had a hackneyed phrase been more literally true.

With his engine fallen silent, he could hear the horses whinny in fright. He could hear their drivers cuss, too. He thought that, if he’d wanted to, he could have reached down and snatched the caps off those drivers’ heads. He cleared their wagons that closely.

A moment later, his landing gear thudded down on rutted earth. The ruts, God be praised, ran in the direction he was going. The surface, he thought thankfully, wasn’t that much worse than the usual landing strip.

Then one of the wheels went into a hole. His teeth slammed together on his tongue. Blood filled his mouth. The aeroplane tried to stand on its nose. If it had succeeded, it would have shoved the engine and machine gun back into his chest and squashed him into jelly. It didn’t have quite enough momentum. The tail slammed back to earth. Moss bit his tongue again.

He unfastened his harness and scrambled out of the Martin. It hadn’t caught fire, but that didn’t mean it couldn’t. He stood there on the muddy, half-frozen ground, looking for any sign of the rest of his flight. He saw no aeroplanes at all.

The driver of the rearmost wagon hopped down and ran toward him. “You all right, buddy?” he asked.

Moss spat a mouthful of red into the muck, but then he nodded. “Think so,” he answered. Talking hurt, but other than that and what would probably be bruises where the harness had kept him from going facefirst into the instrument panel, he didn’t seem damaged.

“Thought you was going to clip me there,” the driver said. “Had time for one Hail Mary”-he crossed himself-“and then you was over me.”

“Yeah.” Moss’ legs suddenly felt as if they were made of some cheap grade of modeling clay, not flesh and bone. Now that he was down, he could realize what a narrow escape he’d had. Before, up in the air, he’d been too busy trying to stretch every last inch from his bus.

Soldiers came out of the trenches to shake his hands and congratulate him on being in one piece. Among them was a captain who asked, “Where’s your aerodrome, pal?”

“Back near Cambridge,” he answered.

“We’ll get you home,” the captain told him. “Probably tomorrow, not today. You can enjoy the hospitality of the trenches tonight.” He stuck out a hand. “I’m Clyde Landis.”

“Jonathan Moss, sir.” Just then, the Canucks started lobbing artillery at where they thought his aeroplane had gone down. Diving into the trenches seemed the most hospitable thing in the world.

All the rest of that day, the soldiers made much of him. They gave him cigars and big bowls of horrible slumgullion and enough shots of the rotgut they weren’t supposed to have to make his head swim. They all sounded convinced he was a hero, and made him tell story after story of what fighting in the air was like.

More shells rained down. He wouldn’t have done an infantryman’s job for a million dollars. If there were any heroes in the war, the foot sloggers were the ones. They laughed when he said so.

“This is a letter from your father,” Sylvia Enos said to George, Jr., and Mary Jane. “See how it says NAVAL POST on the envelope by the stamp?” George, Jr., nodded impatiently. He knew his ABCs, and he could read a few words. To Mary Jane, the rubber-stamped phrase didn’t mean anything.

Sylvia opened the envelope and took out the letter. She read aloud in a portentous tone: “‘Dear Sylvia’-that’s me-‘I hope you and the children are well. I am fine here. We have done some fighting on the river. I came through it fine and so did the ship. We hit the enemy and he did not hit us.’”

“Boom!” George, Jr., yelled, as if he were a shell going off. Then, as best he could on the floor of the front room, he imitated a stricken warship capsizing and sinking, finishing the performance with a loud, “Glub, glub, glub!”

Mary Jane thought that was very funny. So did Sylvia, till it crossed her mind that the Punishment could have been the vessel going to the bottom as easily as its foe. “Do you want to hear the rest of the letter?” she asked, more sharply than she’d intended. She wanted to finish it; George didn’t write so often as she wished he would. With a touch of guilt, she realized her own letters were also fewer and further between than they should have been.

“Yes, Mama,” George, Jr., said, Mary Jane chiming in with, “Rest of letter!”

“‘I miss all of you and I wish I could come back to Boston,’” she resumed. “‘Here in the middle of the country you cannot get any fish that is very good. The cooks do up catfish we catch in the river but no matter what you do to it it still tastes like mud.’”

“Yuck!” George, Jr., exclaimed. Mary Jane stuck out her tongue.

“‘I love all of you and hope I will get some leave one day before too long,’” Sylvia finished. “‘Tell the children to be good. I bet they are getting as big as can be. Your husband, George.’”

“George,” Mary Jane said in tones of wonder. She pointed to her brother. “George.”

“That’s right,” Sylvia said. “George, Jr., is named after his papa-your papa, too, you know.”

“Papa.” Mary Jane dutifully repeated the word and nodded, but she didn’t sound convinced. She hadn’t seen her father for months. Sylvia wondered if she remembered him. She said she did, but then she said all sorts of things that had only the vaguest connection with reality. Seeing her, remembering George, Jr., at the same age, Sylvia was convinced two-year-olds lived in a very strange world. She wondered if she’d been like that at the same age. She probably had.

George, Jr., asked, “Will Papa ever come home before the war ends and we’ve beaten the Rebs all up?”

Where does he hear such things? Sylvia wondered. At home, she didn’t talk much about the war. That left Brigid Coneval and the other children she watched. Sylvia shrugged. She supposed war needed hate, but wished it didn’t. The question deserved an answer, though, no matter how it was framed. She said, “When Papa talked about getting leave in his letter, that meant he hoped he could come for a visit before he had to go back to his ship.”

“Oh,” her son said seriously. “Well, I hope he can, too.”

“I’ll get supper going now, and then we’ll wash you two and put you to bed,” Sylvia said. That drew mixed responses. Her children were hungry, but unenthusiastic about baths and even more unenthusiastic about bedtime. She told them, “If you eat all your supper up and you’re good in the bathtub, maybe you can play for a little while afterwards.”

They wolfed down fried halibut and potatoes, they didn’t do anything too outrageous when she took them out of the apartment and down the hall to the bathroom at the end (a good thing, too, with her carrying hot water to mix with the cold), and they didn’t splash up the place too badly. She brought them back swaddled in towels, and changed George, Jr., into pajamas (which made him look very grown-up) and Mary Jane into her nightgown.

George, Jr., played with toy soldiers, the U.S. troops storming trench after Confederate trench. Sylvia wished it were really so easy. Mary Jane gave her doll a bottle, then climbed up into Sylvia’s lap and fell asleep there. Not even the bloodcurdling explosions her brother kept producing did anything to stir her.

Maybe so much warmaking had worn out George, Jr., too, for he didn’t put up his usual complaints about going to bed. That left Sylvia the only one awake in the apartment, which seemed, as it often did at such times, too big and too quiet.

“I should write to George,” she said. She found paper and a pen soon enough, but the bottle of ink had escaped. She finally came upon it lurking in her sewing box. “I didn’t put it there,” she