Ian Slater - World in Flames

“You will catch the train.”

“We’d better,” the sergeant retorted, snatching back the ID, and, indicating the younger guard, asked David, “You fancy the young one? — bit of lance corporal on the side?” He roared laughing, David leaning against the machine gun, shaking his head as the truck moved out.

As the Red Cross hospital train headed for Brussels from Liege, diverted south because of a rocket-torn section of track on the more direct westward line, David fell under the slow, hypnotic sway of the carriage, the train restricted for a time to no more than forty kilometers an hour because of the danger of air-sewn mines that might still be in the area, hidden by snow.

The clickety clack of the wheels passing over the ties took David back to his childhood of going up from New York to Albany, the River Meuse, effortlessly slipping by him now, a stand-in for the narrower reaches of the Hudson River. But he knew the analogy was a strained one, more a pining for home than an accurate remembrance of things past. America was not only a long way off in his mind, it was another time, so remote, so unlike the war-filled continent that he was part of, that it might as well be on another planet. It wasn’t simply that the snow-dusted flat country around the Meuse didn’t approximate the heavily wooded banks along the upper reaches of the Hudson, but the smells were so unfamiliar.

Europe always smelled different — an older, colder brick smell, and especially in winter, with all the fumes of coal-burning furnaces that had come back into use as North Sea gasoline supplies that came from England via the Channel’s “subfloat” pipeline were jealously coveted by the armed forces. The brownish haze from the coal fires created at once the most polluted and beautiful sunsets Europe had seen in the last hundred years.

David saw a Red Cross nurse coming through from the carriage loaded with badly wounded abdominal cases into the walking-wounded carriage, where David and the British sergeant were sitting with a number of other American, British, and Belgian troops. The nurse’s experienced eye was looking for repatriation cases, which, if they were up to it, would be sent on from Brussels to the Channel ports, when these were cleared of debris, and sent back to England. The sergeant dug David in the ribs. “Look at the knockers on that, Davey boy. Imagine those dangling—”

“All right,” said David, thwarting more detailed description. The sergeant, he decided, was one of those who took a perverse pleasure in getting the sexually deprived soldiers worked up about “dipping your wick.” David turned his attention to the scenery, the train picking up speed, as he heard an American in front of him, in a neck brace, telling his buddy the train’s engineer had told him they would pass through Waterloo on their way up from Namur to Brussels. Right now David didn’t care about Waterloo — last thing he needed was to see another battlefield, no matter how historic it was. What he wanted was privacy, longing to read Melissa’s letter, to hear her voice. But he wasn’t going to spoil it like a dessert you’re so hungry for that it’s gone before you’ve time to savor the taste. Letters from home, like everything else in this war, had to be rationed carefully. He glanced back at the toilet lineup, but there were too many.

Soon his eyes were tearing because of the cigarette smoke in the carriage. The war, he mused, had been a monumental setback for the antismoking lobby. His older brother, Robert, or so his mother had told him, had mentioned it in his letters home, too, opining that sometimes he felt that, along with looking to escape unhappy situations back home, half the sub crews had joined the silent service because on a sub, you could smoke all you wanted.

“You are enjoying the scenery, yes?”

David looked up and saw the pretty young admitting clerk, Lili, the British sergeant already unabashedly leering at her, his cockney tone taking on a decidedly vulgar edge. “ ‘Ello, luv!” he said, patting the inside of his thigh. “Want to sit on Daddy’s knee then?”

“No, thank you, Daddy.” She smiled.

David burst out laughing, sending a burning pain down his arm, but he didn’t care. Momentarily he forgot everything unpleasant in his life — the heart-thumping run he’d made on the Stadthagen dump, the raid on Pyongyang, and the churning doubt inside him about whether or not he could withstand the strain of any more combat, wondering how close he was — his body was — to simply throwing in the towel, his will exhausted by the combination of physical and mental fatigue.

The sergeant wasn’t amused by Lili’s repartee, a burning resentment in his eyes against the young girl, a resentment that David felt partly responsible for because of having laughed at him. “Ah—” said David in an effort to change the subject. “Someone was saying we’ll be going through Waterloo?”

“Yes,” said Lili. “It is very famous. You know about this?”

“He doesn’t know anything, luv,” cut in the sergeant. “ ‘E’s just a boy. What you need, luv—”

“My name is Lili.” She said it without rancor but evenly.

“All right, Lili luv — listen. You know where we can get a snort?”

She looked blankly at him.

“You know,” said the sergeant as he motioned, knocking back a drink. “Booze? Ah— le vin, eh?”

“No,” she said, “I—” The train lurched, approaching the bend near Auvelais, and Lili bumped into the sergeant, quickly righting herself, blushing. “I am sorry, I—”

“Sorry!” said the sergeant. “Don’t you apologize, Lili. Just what we need on this—”

“Lay off,” said David.

“My, my,” the sergeant snorted at David. “I think he’s jealous, Lili. And ‘im wiv all those lovely letters. ‘Please, Davey, my hero — I want to marry you.’ Eh?” The sergeant was digging his elbow further into David. “Eh — that’s what they want, isn’t it, Brentwood? A bit of the old stick?”

David turned on him, but the sergeant, his face having lost all trace of humor, wasn’t to be interrupted, his grin the same expression he’d worn when whacking the heads off the brambles by the canal. “Can’t you take a fucking joke, matey? Eh?” Lili moved off.

“She’s gone now, Sarge,” said David icily. “You don’t have to—”

“Sergeant to you, Dick!”

“All right, sergeant,” said David quietly. “She’s gone.”

The sergeant sneered. “You fucking heros are all the same. Get a bit of fucking tin on your chest and you think you’ve got it on tap, right?” David turned away, refusing to be drawn further into argument, fixing his gaze back on the white-snow-dusted blur of the hills to the southeast, where the low country of Wallonia gave way to the formidable barrier of the Ardennes. His great-grandfather had been there — when Hitler’s panzers had broken through to make their last great counterattack of the Second World War, bringing the U.S. Allied advance to a bloody halt, inflicting over fifty-five thousand casualties on First Army’s Eighth Corps, and destroying more than seven hundred American tanks.

Soon David heard a noise like someone farting in a bathtub — it was the sergeant asleep, David marveling at yet another example of Murphy’s Law run rampant. If the army, concerned that David’s injuries might give him some trouble en route to Brussels, had wanted to choose a more unsuitable candidate for escorting him to identify the SPETS at the in-camera trials in Brussels, it couldn’t have chosen anyone as unsuitable as the British sergeant.

The sergeant’s mouth was agape, revealing a row of tobacco-and tea-stained teeth. The English, David had discovered, drank enormous quantities of tea. Now and then at the front he’d seen British Centurion tanks in revetment areas, the drivers jerry-rigging a small can of water by the exhaust, the water quickly coming to a roiling boil, and they’d let the tea stew until it was the color of Coca-Cola.