American Front

She sat up with a start. "Lord have mercy, I'd forget my head if it wasn't sewed on tight!" she exclaimed. Not wanting to get up and light the lamp again, she fumbled in the darkness with the alarm clock on the nightstand. Had she forgotten to set it, she would surely have been late to work, which would have got her docked at best and fired at worst. "Can't have that," she said, as if someone lying beside her was trying to talk her into sleeping as long as she wanted.

But no one was lying beside her. The bed felt large and empty. Some nights, she was so tired she hardly noticed George was gone and would be gone God only knew how long. Others, she missed him to the point where tears ran down her face. They did no good. She knew that. Knowing didn't help.

She lay on her back, staring at the ceiling and trying without much luck to go to sleep. She closed her eyes, which didn't seem to make the room much darker. But with her eyes closed, as they usually were when she and George made love, it was easier to imagine him on top of her, imagine his familiar weight pressing her down on the mattress, imagine his breath warming the hollow of her shoulder in quick gasps.

Imagination, now, was all she had. She shifted restlessly on the bed. If George were there now, she'd be able to sleep pretty soon. She shifted again. The hem of her nightgown rode up past her knees. She reached down. Instead of straightening it, she hiked it up to her waist.

A few minutes later, she rolled over onto her side. She would sleep now. She knew it. She bit her lip, not caring to remember what she'd just done. But when your man was away for months, maybe for years, what were you sup posed to do? It wasn't as good as the real thing with George (actually, that wasn't quite true -it felt as good, or maybe even better, but it was lonely at the end), but it was better than nothing.

"Better than nothing," she muttered drowsily. With the war on, wasn't that as much as anybody had any business expecting? Her eyelids slid down over her eyes, of themselves this time. She started to say something else, but only a soft snore passed her lips.

"Masks and goggles!" Captain Orville Wyatt ordered as the bombardment of the Confederate positions east of the Roanoke began. Chester Martin quickly tied the hyposulfite-impregnated mask over his mouth and nose. He breathed in chemical dampness. That was unpleasant, but much less so than breathing in the poison gas that shells were spreading up and down the Rebel lines. He took off his newly issued helmet to strap the goggles over his eyes. He didn't know whether to curse the weight of the thing or bless it for making his brains less likely to be splattered over the landscape.

Beside Martin, Specs Peterson swore. "They've been usin' this damn gas more since they started loading it into shells than they did when they shot it out of those projector things, and I fucking hate it," he said. "I can leave my glasses on and have the chlorine eat my eyes up, or I can take 'em off and fall on my damn face half a dozen times before I get to where the Rebs are at. Hell of a deal, ain't it?"

"I'm in the same boat, Peterson," Captain Wyatt said, touching the ear-piece to his own spectacles. "I've been leaving my glasses on. My eyes get better after a couple of days, seems like."

"Yeah, but you want to be a hero," Peterson muttered under his breath. "Me, I just want to get out of this in one piece."

"Amen," Chester Martin said. "All I want to do is live through this damn war and go home and make steel. I used to complain about that job like no body's business. It was hot and it was dirty and it was hard and it was dangerous. And it's still every damn one of those things. And you know what else? Next to what we're doin' now, it's so fine, I'll never grouse again."

"Nothin' worse than farm work -I always used to say that," Corporal Paul Andersen put in. "Only goes to show I didn't know what the hell I was talking about. You do your two years as a conscript and that's not so bad. You figure real soldiering works out the same way. Ha!" His wave took in the trenches, the filth, the vermin, the fear, the foe.

Captain Wyatt said, "Once upon a time, Virginia used to belong to the USA. Now we're working to take it back. It's not the kind of job anybody wants to do, but it needs doing. If everything goes right, we keep their front trenches. No matter what happens, we bring some prisoners back for interro gation." He went up and down the trench line, checking to make sure his sol diers' masks and goggles were on securely. He was a long way from being the most good-natured of men, but he fussed over the soldiers in his company like a mother cat with a litter of kittens. As far as Martin was concerned, that made him a good officer.

The bombardment went on and on. Every so often, the Confederates would lob a few shells back at the U.S. lines, but they were taking it a lot harder than they were dishing it out. That suited Martin fine. He'd been on the receiving end of too many barrages to suit him. Giving was better-an un- Christian thought but a true one nonetheless.

Sharp as an axe coming down, the shelling ended. Up and down the trench line, whistles sounded. Martin scrambled up the steps made of sandbags, over the parapet, and toward the Rebel lines.

Pioneers had cut some paths through the barbed wire between the U.S. and Confederate lines, marking them with strips of cloth tied to the wire. Martin liked that and hated it at the same time. It gave him an easier way toward the enemy trenches, but also gave the Rebel machine gu

Here and there, the bombardment had knocked down the posts that sup ported the barbed wire, leaving it sprawled in snaky coils on the rubble-strewn ground of what had probably been a suburb of Big Lick, Virginia.

When Chester Martin saw relatively clear stretches of that sort, he used them to move forward. The Rebs wouldn't have so many guns pointed there as they would at the paths.

He blew out through the thick, wet gauze pad he wore over his mouth. The first couple of gas attacks had let U.S. forces gain and consolidate their positions east of the Roanoke River. Now, though, the Rebs had learned how to defend themselves against the new American weapon, and pushing them back had turned into another hard job.

He wasn't more than halfway toward their trenches, and already the Rebels were shooting back at him and his men, the muzzle flashes of their rifles seeming bright as the sun. Machine guns started up a moment later. Somewhere not far away, he heard the wet smack of a bullet striking flesh. Whoever was hurt there, he hoped it wasn't too bad and he hoped they'd be able to get the fellow to a doctor before he bled to death. That also made him hope nobody would get hurt picking up the wounded man. Nobody was supposed to shoot at people wearing Red Cross armbands, but bullets, as he'd learned too well, weren't fussy about whom they hit.

One of the machine guns, traversed by what their crews matter-of-factly called a two-inch tap, sent bullets kicking up dirt not far from his feet. He dove headlong into a shell hole in front of him. A horrid stench rose. Part of it came from the pool of noisome, stagnant water at the bottom of the hole. More was from the body, or rather fragments of body, entombed under dirt and shattered bricks. U.S. forces were advancing, so the dead man was presumably a Confederate. But he would have smelled just as bad had he been born in Michigan.

Martin wished the gauze mask he wore were as good at neutralizing stenches as it was at keeping chlorine from searing his lungs. That, though, wasn't why it had been designed. He tried to keep his unruly stomach under control. If he took off the mask to puke, who could guess how much poison gas he'd breathe in after every retch?