Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America (18 page)

We were protected for a time by the thick pall of smoke, stinking of cordite and blood, that lay over the battlefield, though shells from enemy artillery exploded around us at intervals and some in our company were wounded by the shrapnel. But as we approached the enemy's lines volleys of bullets flew past at close proximity, and our company was not exempt from casualties. I saw two men fall, one wounded in the face, and one of our men who had been in the vanguard we re-encountered as a corpse in a bomb-crater, his vitals so widely scattered over the bloody earth that we had to step carefully to avoid treading on his steaming viscera. This was so irregular that I became convinced that I was mad, or that the world had suddenly become so. War, in the novels of Mr. Charles Curtis Easton, was not conducted with such sav-agery. Mr. Easton's wars allowed for bravery, pluck, patriotism, and all that tribe of reassuring virtues. The present war seemed to make no such allowances; it was purely a matter of killing, or being killed, as chance and circumstance would have it. I kept my rifle at the ready, and twice fired at wraiths in the smoke, without any way to determine whether the shot went home.

Among my swirling thoughts was a passing concern for Julian. I could not help thinking of the time we had spent hunting squirrels and other game back at Williams Ford, and how Julian had enjoyed every part of those expeditions except the killing. He was one of those gentle souls who instinctively recoil from death and who dread inflicting it on others. This was not Cowardice but a species of Innocence—an admirable if innate
tenderness of feeling,
 which I suspected was about to get him killed.

At that moment a wind sprang up, clearing some of the haze from the becalmed, though savagely active, battlefield. With the next gust the nearest lines of the Dutch defenders were revealed to us in stark clarity, as if a curtain had been drawn. A line of rifle-barrels protruded from earthen breastworks like quilly spines from a porcupine, and these were hastily leveled at us, now that visibility permitted careful aiming; and smoke erupted from their barrels.

"Down!" Sam shouted—forgetting for the moment that he was not the company commander, but only an ordinary soldier. Nevertheless it was sturdy advice, which we all obeyed. We dropped: most of us voluntarily, though several fell in a fashion that indicated they might not rise again. The Dutch bullets whined past us with maddening insectile noises, "mosquito-voiced but deadly in their flight," as Mr. Easton once wrote, in this case correctly. We hugged the ground as if the familiar meta phor of Mother Earth had become a fact—suckling pigs could not have been more intimately connected to their maternal sow.

All of us except Julian. As soon as I dared to look up, I was shocked to find him still standing.

That image of Julian has been so deeply impressed upon me that, to this day, I see it from time to time in dreams. He had washed and dried his uniform just yesterday, anticipating battle as if it were a social soiree, and despite the rigors of the march he seemed as clean and unspoiled as a stage-soldier in some New York operetta. He frowned as if what confronted him was not the barbarous enemy but an especially perplexing puzzle, which required deep thought to work out. He held his rifle at ready but didn't aim or fire it.

"
Julian!
" cried Sam. "For the love of God!
Down!
"

The love of God did not add any weight to the admonition—Julian had always been impermeable to God, and just now it seemed he might also be impermeable to bullets. The volleys surged around, and kicked up dirt at his feet, without interfering with his person. By this time nearby soldiers had noticed him standing like a sentinel in the rain of sizzling lead; and we waited for what seemed an inevitable lethal impact, already impossibly postponed.

For the Dutch shooters were finding their range as the air cleared. A bullet like a flicking finger tugged at the collar of Julian's uniform. Another doffed his cap for him. Still he didn't move. The spectacle entranced us all, and small appreciative or despairing cries of "Julian Commongold!" began to sound above the clamor of battle. He stood and kept standing—it was as if an angel had dropped down to Earth in the guise of a foot soldier—the crude material world couldn't touch him, and he was as immune to bloodshed as an elephant to flea- bites.

Then a bullet creased his ear. I saw it happen. There was no impact, since the bullet passed through the fleshy part of the lobe, spraying just a little blood; but Julian turned his head as if he had been tapped on the shoulder by an invisible adjutant.

The contact shook him into a fresh awareness of his situation. He did not drop to the ground, however. It was only that his puzzled frown evolved into a grimace of anger and disdain. He lifted his rifle with grave deliberation, sighted it on the enemy breastworks, and fired.

Though Julian had said nothing, the men around him reacted as if he had given an order to advance. Our standard-bearer, who was hardly more than a dozen years old, leapt up and ran forward with the regimental flag in his hands. The rest of us fired our weapons almost in unison, and then joined the charge, whooping.

The smoke of battle provided cover enough that we came close to the Dutch entrenchments without being decimated, and our reckless charge had a greater than anticipated effect. Only a moment seemed to pass before we were athwart the Mitteleuropan trenches, firing our Pittsburgh rifles with abandon or dropping to reload them with fresh cassettes. The Dutch at close proximity looked much like Americans, apart from their peculiar uniforms, and so it was their uniforms I fired at, half convinced that I was killing, not human beings, but
enemy costumes,
 which had borne their contents here from a distant land; and if some living man suffered for his enslavement to the uniform, or was penetrated by the bullets aimed at it—well, that was unavoidable, and the fault couldn't be placed at my feet.

This private charade was not equivalent to Courage, but it enabled a Cal-lousness that served a similar purpose.

I lost sight of Julian in the melee, and in truth I could not spare much thought for him at this chaotic moment. Even today the memory is little more than a collage of noise and ugly incidents. The battle evolved quickly, or took forever—in all honesty I cannot say which—and then we heard a new and alarming sound. It was a sort of gunfire: not the sharp report of a Pittsburgh rifle but a staccato
chain
 of gunshots, sustained for seconds and then repeated.

Sam explained later what had happened. General Galligasken had sent his cavalry out on a flank attack against the Dutch positions—hardly an unusual maneuver; but the cavalry had been training in secret with a new weapon, which was our answer to the Chinese Cannon.

This weapon, which came to be called the Trench Sweeper, was a heavy rifle with an enormous cassette the size and shape of a pie-plate, which fed bullets to its chamber and fired them in rapid succession—a volley of gunshots continuing for as long a time as the trigger was depressed. The Porter & Earle Works had produced relatively few of these guns, but a number of them had been distributed to Galligasken's cavalry division for occasions such as this.

The cavalry, riding into the Dutch at their flanks, encountered a fierce resis tance; but the Dutch commander had been fooled by Galligasken's frontal attack, and he had weakened his left and right in order to shore up the center.

A good many American cavalrymen were killed before the Dutch defenses were penetrated, but eventually the Trench Sweepers were brought to bear, and the resultant rain of fire caused enemy troops to panic and abandon their positions in increasing numbers. Before long they were fleeing across the river at which they had made their stand. Scores of them were drowned in the pro cess, and their bodies littered the shore like branches from a thunder-struck tree.

It was a rout, ultimately. More than a thousand of the enemy were killed, and twice that number were taken prisoner. Our own corpses numbered just a little over five hundred.

General Galligasken ordered a pursuit of the fleeing Dutch army, and captured a few stragglers and some supply wagons and horses; but the main column disappeared into the hills and forests, and Galligasken wisely held back, fearing an ambush, and was content with the spoils of the day. This was eventually called the
Battle of Mascouche
("Mascouche" being the name of a nearby Tip). It was a stirring victory, all in all, except that we did not capture the Chinese Cannon; it had been kept to the rear of the action, and was dismantled and spirited away before we could reach it.

In the aftermath of the battle I found Sam and Julian, both more or less un-hurt, and we made a new camp on the riverside as supplies were trucked forward and field hospitals established for the wounded. By nightfall we had been fed, and were resting in our tents. It was an incongruously warm, benevolent evening, sweet as April butter, and the moon was bright and cheerfully indifferent to the shed blood congealing beneath it.

Julian said very little that evening. In truth, although he had survived the fight with only a nick to his earlobe, I was afraid for him. It seemed that something just as vital as blood had drained out of him during the exciting events of the day.

As we were getting ready to sleep he leaned from his bedroll and whispered, "I don't know how many men I killed today, Adam."

"Enough to help ensure a victory," I said.

"Is it really a victory? What we saw today? It more closely resembled a fire in a charnel house." He added, "It's a bitter thing to kill a stranger—worse to kill strangers beyond counting."

He was speaking hyperbole; but the very flatness of his voice suggested a grievance too deep for words. And to a degree I shared it. To fire a bullet into the heart or brains of one's fellow man—even a fellow man striving to do the same to you—creates what might be called an
unassimilable memory
: a memory that floats on daily life the way an oil stain floats on rainwater. Stir the rain barrel, scatter the oil into countless drops, disperse it all you like, but it will not mix; and eventually the slick comes back, as loathsomely intact as it ever was.

"We can never again be what we once were," Julian whispered.

I sat up indignantly. "I'm still just Adam Hazzard. Adam Hazzard from Williams Ford hasn't gone away, Julian. He just went to war. Someday he'll go somewhere else. New York City, perhaps."

Julian evidently took some comfort from my crude philosophizing, for he grasped my hand warmly, and said in a trembling voice, "Thank you for saying so."

"Sleep on it," I suggested. "Perhaps we won't have to kill anyone tomorrow, and you can get some useful rest."

But I couldn't take my own advice—couldn't sleep, despite my exhaustion, any more than Julian could; so we lay awake while the moon shone down on the battlefield where we had driven back the Dutch, and on the hospital tents with their detritus of severed limbs, and on the river that flowed somewhat bloodstained to the mighty St. Lawrence and all the way to the shoreless sea.

Because of General Galligasken's humanitarian concern for the Army of the Laurentians we were not obliged to fight the following day, nor did we march in pursuit of the enemy, but stayed where we were, and buried our dead, and consolidated our defenses in case the Dutch attempted a counterattack.

In another month or less this land would be a steaming Gehenna, hospitable only to the mosquitos and the horse flies that feed on human and animal flesh; and our marches, should we make any, would be mortal contests of endurance. Already the hospital tents, where they were not wholly preoccupied with wounded men, hosted a number of invalids down with "the summer complaint," and there was the ever-present danger of an outbreak of cholera or some other communicable disease. We drew water from local streams to drink, for the Army barrel-water was stagnant and fusty; and we hoped for the best.

But the weather held calm and pleasant for a few days more. On Sunday afternoon after Dominion ser vices a general lassitude fell over the camp, and I wandered among the tents like an Aristo strolling through his garden (though aristocratic gardens are generally more pleasing to the nose than military encampments).

It was while I was strolling, and sampling the sunshine, and humming tunes to myself, that I heard a noise which puzzled and interested me.

There are all sorts of noises around an army camp: army engineers banging wood for inscrutable purposes, army blacksmiths bending horse shoes on an anvil, infantrymen at target practice, and any number of other clattery pursuits. But most of those sounds had abated on account of the Sabbath.

What I heard was a sound that could be mistaken, at a distance, for the irregular knocking of a woodpecker on a tree, or a boy drummer unsuccessfully attempting some novel rhythm. But the sound had a brittler, more mechanical quality than that; and once my curiosity was engaged I could think of nothing else but to track the noise to its source.

Its
approximate
 source, I soon discerned, was a square canvas tent situated up a sloping meadow that became, farther east, a respectable hill. The tent's flaps were open so I wandered past it, hands clasped behind my back, feigning indifference but sparing a subtle glance or two inside. But it was difficult to see inside in any meaningful way—my vision was hampered not just by the shade of the canvas but by an obscuring miasma of tobacco and hemp smoke, which wafted into the sunshine in coiling exhalations as if the tent itself were alive and breathing—and I had to make several passes before I could discern the agency responsible for so much smoke and noise: it was a man seated at a flimsy wooden table, working a machine.

My effort to remain inconspicuous was apparently not successful, for on my seventh or eighth pass the mysterious man called out, "Stop hovering there, whoever you are!" His voice was rough, and he spoke with a nasal accent not unlike Julian's. "Come in or go out—I don't care which—but choose one."

"I'm sorry if I disturbed you," I said hastily.