Sure enough, here came Captain Wyatt with a fellow Martin hadn't seen before, an older man wearing a major's uniform cleaner than those of most soldiers who actually made their living in the front lines. Some sort of inspector, snooping around to see what he thinks we've done all wrong, Martin thought. He hated people like that, hated them with the cold contempt a practical man gives a theoretician's high-flown, useless notions.
He started to laugh, and turned his face away so the new major, whoever he was, wouldn't see. The fellow had spectacles just like the ones to which Paul Andersen had slightingly referred, and a sandy mustache heavily streaked with gray, and a mouth full of big, square teeth…
Chester Martin's head whipped around. It couldn't be, but it was. Ander sen was staring and staring. Captain Wyatt said, "Boys, here's the President of the United States, come to see the war for himself."
Martin hadn't come to attention in the front-line trenches in months. Now he stiffened to straightness so suddenly, his backbone cracked like knuckles. Beside him, Andersen also came to a stiff brace. "At ease," Teddy Roosevelt said. "As you were. I came here to see soldiers, not marionettes."
"Yes, sir!" Martin relaxed, though not all the way. If the battlefield stench bothered TR, he didn't let on. He acted like a soldier, though he hadn't led troops into battle in thirty years or so. But he really could have been an elderly major, not just some politician posturing for the newspapers.
As if picking that thought out of Martin's mind, Roosevelt said, "Reporters don't know I'm here. Far as they know -which isn't far, believe me, not with most of them-I'm still in Philadelphia. If the papers don't know, maybe the Rebs don't know. You think they wouldn't like to put one between my eyes?"
"Yes, sir, they sure would," Martin said. If the Confederates did know the president was here, they'd do everything they could to keep him from getting away again.
"This isn't what war was like out on the plains back before you were born," Roosevelt said. "There was glory in that, the sweep of horses rushing forward, movement, adventure. This… The most I can say for this, gentle men, is that it's necessary, and what we gain from it will make certain that the United States of America take their proud and rightful place among the nations of the world once more."
When you listened to the president talking, you forgot the reek of unburied bodies, the mud, the lice, the barbed wire, the machine guns. You saw farther than your length of trench. You got a glimpse of the country that would come out the other side of this war. It was a place where you wanted to be, too.
Yeah, and what are the odds of that? asked the part of Martin that had been under fire for months. Do you really think you're going to come through alive, or with all your arms and legs if you do live?
Captain Wyatt said, "We hope, sir, that the next offensive will bring us up to the river, and from there we'll proceed toward the Blue Ridge Mountains."
"Bully," TR said. "Our German allies have offensives in the works, too. With God's help, they'll strike the French and the English a heavy blow on the continent." He shook his head. "I don't know what we would have done without Germany, boys. With England and France backing up the Rebels, we were fighting out of our weight when we tried to scrap with them. Not now, though, by jingo, not now."
"Yes, sir," Martin said. "We have friends in high places, eh?"
"The All-Highest place," TR answered with his famous chuckle, still boy ish though he was in his mid-fifties. "Kaiser Wilhelm's done everything he could for us, and we've paid him back, thanks to soldiers like you men."
Martin didn't stand straighter now; Roosevelt had ordered him to be at his ease. But he felt tall and proud just the same. Again, TR made him believe the war had a point, a goal, beyond the miseries of the front. He wondered how long he'd go on believing that once the president left.
A few hundred yards off, a couple of U.S. machine guns started hammer ing away at some Confederate target or other. Rifle fire answered from the Rebel lines, and then their machine guns. After a few minutes, U.S. field guns started pounding the enemy's forward trenches.
Captain Wyatt frowned. "They shouldn't be doing that, not now. It's going to bring down -"
"Captain, I didn't come here to watch a Sunday-school debating society," President Roosevelt said. "This is war. I know what war is.
I-"
Before he could finish, the Confederates' quick-firing three-inch guns started raining shells down, on and near the U.S. front lines. The Rebs seldom wasted time replying to an artillery bombardment.
Paul Andersen threw himself flat, Captain Wyatt threw himself flat. To Martin's horror, he saw TR start to stand up on a firing step so he could get a better look at what was going on. Without thinking, he knocked the president down with a block from behind that would have been illegal in a football match, then flopped over TR's squirming body. "Stay flat, dammit!" he shouted. He'd never expected to have the president's ear. Now that he did, this was what he got to tell him? It would have been funny if he hadn't worried about getting killed.
Shrapnel balls and jagged bits of shell casing whined through the air. Bigger U.S. guns started firing, trying to silence the Confederate field pieces. Bigger Rebel guns struck back at the bigger U.S. guns. Both sides forgot about the men at the front for a while.
Warily, Chester Martin sat up. That let TR get up, too. Martin gulped, wondering what the penalty was for levelling the president. But all Roosevelt said was, "Thank you, Sergeant. You know conditions here better than I."
"Uh, thank you, sir." Martin looked at Roosevelt, whose green-gray uniform was now as muddy as his own. "You look like a real, modern soldier now, sir." The president of the United States laughed like a man possessed.
X
L ucien Galtier muttered unhappily to himself as he loaded the jug of kerosene into the back of his wagon. The ration the American soldiers allowed people was ridiculously small. Thank God, nights were shorter now than they had been in the middle of winter, but he still had to leave a lot of his lamps dry. The world, he was convinced, held no justice.
"No, it certainly is not fair," he told his horse, which, for once, forbore to argue with him. "When a man comes into a town, he cannot even buy for himself a drink of a sort he cannot get at home."
Strictly speaking, that wasn't true. None of the taverns in Riviere-du-Loup had signs up ordering-or even advising-townsmen and local farmers to stay out. Nor were the taverns out of liquor; a lot of their stock these days was shipped up from the United States, but that did not mean it would not burn in your boiler. Drinks, in fact, were actually cheaper these days than they had been before the war started, because the occupying authority taxed liquor at a lower rate than the provincial government had.
All of which was silver lining on a large, dark cloud. If you went into a tavern, you were almost certain to find it full of American soldiers, which was the reason the occupying authority held down liquor prices. And American soldiers, especially American soldiers with drink in them, did not take kindly to sharing what they thought of as their taverns with the locals.
"Oh, you might go in, have a whiskey, and get out again," Lucien said. His horse's ears twitched, perhaps in sympathy but more likely, knowing the beast, in mockery. "But if there should be a fight, what is one to do? There are always many soldiers, they are always all against you, and, even if your country men come to your aid, it leads merely to riot and then to punishment of the entire unfortunate town. All this for one little drink? It is not worth it!''