The Eleventh Man - Ivan Doig [161]
Staring, he bent closer over the column of names of young ones grown to military age in the quarter century since.
Adamic, Stefan, killed in action in New Guinea.
Baker, Raymond, died in military hospital of wounds suffered in the Anzio invasion.
Cooper, Samuel, sailor on the USS Yorktown, missing in action.
Copenhaver, Theodore, killed in plane crash during training at Sweetwater, Texas.
Crosby, Vern, killed in action at Leyte...
With a chill he ran his finger on down and down the alphabet of death. Godalmighty, that many? In one county? A county— and an editor—he thought he knew like the back of his hand. In their span of political alliances of convenience he considered Bill Reinking a bit soft on Roosevelt, but rock solid other than that. The list broke at the bottom of the newspaper column, and started anew at top of the next.
McCaskill, Alex, killed in strafing attack in Tunisia.
Peterson, Morton, died as prisoner of war in Bataan death march.
Petrie, Laura Ann, Army nurse, killed by artillery barrage behind the lines at the battle for Avranches.
Quigg, James, shot down over Germany, missing in action.
Rennie, Victor, died in England during a bombing raid...
He felt as if he was reading something direly biblical. Old family names of the Two Medicine country, the soul of the state. Heavy loss in more ways than one, and the Gleaner editor must have been driven to do this by its unavoidable weight.
The Senator rubbed his long jaw and rapidly riffled through the rest of the weeklies in that stack. The Choteau Acantha also listed its county's war dead, as did the Lewistown Argus, the Sidney Herald, the Dillon Herald-Examiner. He hesitated, then started going through the next batch of newspapers from the eastern part of the state. Lists of the war dead showed up in several of the papers from there too, so whatever Bill Reinking had caught was still breaking out elsewhere.
Something else, too. Like father, like son. The Senator went back and counted. Of the sixteen weeklies in the two batches, nearly all had run Ben Reinking's story on the last flight of the Supreme Team's ninth man, Lieutenant Jacob Eisman.
The Senator stalked out to the telephone on the hallway stand and dialed as if incising the numbers.
"Mullen, get me the goddamn figures on how many Montana soldiers have been killed in this war. And then compared to the other states."
As the general finished up and presented the Senator's letter to Cass, his aide stood ready with the bright-colored service ribbons for her to pin on the chests of her pilots. She hoped her hands would be steady enough; she set her mind to making them steady enough. The women mechanics on the wings of all the planes stood watching now. Someone started it by clanging one wrench against another, and then the others began banging their tools, the thunderous metallic applause filling the East Base hangar and rolling out to the glistening buttes.
The hill, white and pyramidal and alone of its kind in the spongy Belgian countryside ahead, sent a chill through Ben as the jeep wheeled through the village of Waterloo to the actual battlefield. When he hastily checked, Maurice's guidebook described the area as gentle farmland when the armies of Europe massed there on a midsummer day in 1815, and the out-of-place hill, so artificially perfect in contour, as a mound of earth built to honor one of Wellington's Dutch generals, the Prince of Orange, wounded in the battle but of the kind he could heroically write home about that night. Ben already was jotting—the Butte du Lion, name piled on it as sod was heaped in homage to a royal wound—when Maurice proposed as if on cue: "What do you say we take the high ground, Ben? If glory does not await us there, luncheon does."
From up there, the winter rumple of the land for a few miles around was hard to read as history written in blood. Not much had been made of the battlefield.