American Front

If Briggs had been red before, he was incandescent now. Kimball leaned back in his chair and waited to see how she'd take his blunt answer. She nodded to him. "Thank you. This happened to someone in your crew?"

"That's right. We were laughing about it for days afterwards," Kimball answered.

"Everyone but him, of course," A

Kimball shook his head. "Jim, too, after he got hold of a washrag."

Briggs poured his glass of bourbon full and gulped it down, maybe in an effort to drown his own embarrassment. Perhaps not surprisingly, he fell asleep in his chair about ten minutes later.

Kimball leaned him against the wall of the dining car. "There," he said in satisfaction. "Now he won't fall down and hurt himself." He got to his feet. "Thanks for sharing the table with us, Miss Colleton."

Not even A pleasure to have met you or Hope to see you again sometime, A

Kimball made no effort to take up the unspoken invitation to walk with her. He didn't move so fast, though, as to leave her behind. They went through a couple of cars not quite together, not quite apart. Then he stopped in the hallway to a Pullman and said, "This is my compartment. Ralph's, too, matter of fact, but he found himself that berth in the diner. Not the one I'd take, but what can you do?" His eyes twinkled.

When he slid open the compartment door, A

"What…?" he said, both reddish eyebrows rising. Then she kissed him, and after that matters took their own course. The lower berth was cramped for one, let alone for two, or so A

Afterwards, just as efficient, he helped her dress again, those clever hands doing up hooks and buttons with accurate, unhurried haste. He stuck his head out into the hallway to make sure she could leave the compartment u

She was almost back to her own seat when, ignoring her body's happy glow, she stopped so suddenly that the old man behind her stepped on the heel of her shoe. She listened to his apologies without really hearing them.

"That sneaky devil!" she exclaimed. "He pla

Sergeant Chester Martin looked down at the three stripes on the sleeve of his green-gray tunic. He didn't delude himself that he'd done anything particularly heroic to deserve the promotion. What he'd done, and what a lot of people-an awful lot of people-hadn't, was stay alive.

He looked back toward Catawba Mountain. Coming down it had been almost as bad as righting his way up it. The Rebs moved back from one line to another, and made you pay the butcher's bill every time you attacked.

"Dumb fool luck," he muttered. "That's the only reason I'm here, let alone a three-striper."

"You bet, Sarge," said Paul Andersen, who was using a wire-cutter to snip his way into a can of corned beef that let out an embalmed smell when he got it open. He wore a corporal's chevrons now himself, for the same reason that Chester was a sergeant. "A machine gun, it doesn't care how smart you are or how brave you are. You get in front of it, either you go down or you don't. All depends on how the dice roll."

"Yeah." Martin tore his eyes away from the scarred slopes of Catawba Mountain and looked east, toward the Roanoke River and Big Lick. He didn't stand up for a better look; you were asking for a sniper to blow your lamp out for good if you did anything that stupid. The lines were quiet right this minute, but what did that mean? Only that the Rebel snipers, who were used to shooting for the pot and reckoned men deliciously large targets, had plenty of time to get ready to take advantage of any chance you gave 'em.

He knew what he'd see, anyhow. Big Lick, or what was left of it after end less shelling, still lay in Confederate hands, though a lot of the iron mines nearby had the Stars and Stripes flying over them now. But the last big U.S. push had bogged down right on the outskirts of town, and after that the Rebs had counterattacked and regained a mile or two of ground. One of these days, he expected, the Army would try another push toward the river. He was willing to wait-forever, with luck.

He dug in his own mess kit and chose a hardtack biscuit. Hard was the word for it; it might have been baked during the War of Secession. And at that, troops were better supplied than they had been at the start of the campaign. Railroads were snaking out of West Virginia to the front, to bring in food and ammunition faster and in bigger lots than horses and mules and men could manage.

"Now if we could only put the Rebel trains out of action," he said. That was a big part of the reason the brass had attacked Big Lick in the first place. But the tracks remained in Confederate hands, though repeated bombardment meant the Rebs tried ru

"Good luck, Sarge," Andersen said. Now he pointed east. "'Stead of earthworks, they got their niggers ru

Chester Martin nodded gloomily. Captain Wyatt had been grousing about those lines, too. But the captain's grousing wasn't what worried Martin about the Confederate tracklaying. Sure as hell, the brass would want to push guns up close enough to pound the new lines. And who'd have to do the dirty work to make that happen? Nobody he could see but the infantry.

As if thinking of him had been enough to make him appear, Captain Orville Wyatt stepped into the firing pit Martin and Andersen were sharing. He tossed each of them a chocolate bar. "Courtesy of the cooks," he said. "They had so many, they didn't know what to do with 'em, so 1 liberated as many as I could. They'll probably eat the rest themselves."

"Yeah, who ever saw a ski

Wyatt dug a much-folded newspaper out of his pocket. "This came up to the front on the last train-only four days old," he said; he believed in keeping minds full along with bellies. He gave the sergeant and corporal the gist of what was in the news: "Big fight out in the Atlantic. We torpedoed a French armored cruiser, and it went down. We sank some Confederate and Argentine freighters heading for England, too."