Return Engagement Read Free

he’d heard when bombs hit bare ground. “McCloskey!” Armstrong sang out, doing his best to imitate a pissed-off sergeant. “Pick up your fucking socks!”
    Four or five scared recruits stopped screaming and laughed. Somewhere up the trench, Eddie McCloskey gave his detailed opinion about what Armstrong could do with and to his socks.
    Then a bomb burst
in
the trench, less than a hundred feet away. The earthwork zigzagged, so the blast didn’t travel far. What the bomb did do was bad enough anyway. Something thumped Armstrong in the shoulder. He automatically reached out to see what it was, and found himself holding a little less than half of somebody’s hand.
    Blood splashed and streaked his palm. With a cry of disgust, he threw away the ruined part of a man. But shrieks from close by where the bomb had hit sent him moving in that direction. (Only silence came from the very place where the bomb had landed. Nothing right there lived to shriek.)
    He stumbled over a man’s head. It moved when his foot hit it—moved like a kicked football, moved in a way that proved it was no longer attached to a body. He gasped out a couple of horrified curses. He’d made a joke about Eddie McCloskey’s socks when he didn’t know how bad things could be. Now he was finding out, and whatever jokes might have lived within him withered.
    It was still nighttime. He couldn’t see very well. But he knew the bloody smell of a butcher’s shop. He knew it, and he’d never expected to find it here, especially not mingled with the darker outhouse reeks of offal.
    Along with the young men who were dead were several who wished they were. They shouted loudly for someone to kill them. Armstrong would have done it, too, if only to make them shut up, had he had any kind of weapon. Since he didn’t, he had to try to keep them alive instead.
    That was hardly easier than putting them out of their misery. He had no bandages, no medicines, no nothing. He found one fellow clutching a gaping wound in his calf. He tore the laces out of the injured soldier’s shoes and used them for a tourniquet. He never knew for sure if that did any good, for he went on to someone else right away, but he dared hope.
    Somebody let out a whoop of savage glee, shouting, “We got one of the sons of bitches, anyhow!” And so they had. A C.S. bomber overhead trailed fire from one engine. The flames slid up the wing toward the fuselage.
    “I hope all the cocksuckers in there roast,” Armstrong snarled.
    Several other men nodded or wished something even worse on the Confederate fliers. “Shitheads didn’t even declare war on us,” someone said.
    “Well, what do you think?” another soldier asked. “You think we’re at war with them now—or shall we invite ’em in for tea?”
    Armstrong kept hoping this was a nightmare from which he’d wake up. The hope kept getting dashed, again and again and again. The bombers didn’t linger overhead very long—they must have had other targets besides Fort Custer. It only seemed like forever, or ten minutes longer. As the bombs started falling somewhere else, Armstrong came out of the trench and looked around.
    Nothing was left of the barracks except burning rubble. Several other buildings were also on fire. So were autos and trucks. Bomb craters made the paths and lawns resemble what people with high foreheads said the surface of the moon was like. Armstrong didn’t know much about that. He did know it was the biggest, most godawful mess he’d ever seen in his life. His mother and his granny had gone on and on about what Washington, D.C.—his home town—was like during the Great War. He hadn’t taken them too seriously.
He
didn’t remember such things, after all. But now, with a convert’s sudden zeal, he believed.
    “Who the hell is that?” One of the other men pointed at somebody walking in out of the predawn darkness.
    The newcomer wore coveralls of an unfamiliar cut. Even by the light of blazing buildings and