To the Last Man - Jeff Shaara [245]
“Has to be. This is a strange country. They probably have it figured out that wherever we’re heading, we’ll be forty miles from Homs and eight miles from Cheevax.”
Behind him, Ballou said, “You’re both idiots. Chevaux means horse.”
Scarabelli glanced back. “How the hell do you know that, Cowboy? You can’t even read.”
“I can read just fine. There’s lots of horse shows in Montana. Chevaux means horse.”
“All right, Cowboy. What the hell is a homs? A cow?”
“Hell if I know.”
They reached the car now, and Temple stepped up inside, knew to push in as far as he could, the men pressed tightly together, no empty space. Behind him, he heard the lieutenant. “Thirty-nine, forty. That’s it. The rest . . . to the next car.”
He tried to turn, felt the huge mass of Parker’s body pressing against him.
“I figured it out. Homs is men. The car fits forty men or eight horses.”
Scarabelli was on his other side, the small man turning, low curses.
“Forty Frenchmen, maybe. They don’t have anybody as big as you damned farm boys. I can’t breathe.”
The car lurched, the mass of men suddenly crushed toward the back of the car. Scarabelli cursed again, and Temple knew to wait, that the car would tilt the other way, bringing them back upright. He could hear the engine now, a thick cloud of black smoke swirling around them, the train rolling, the men finding their balance.
Above the sounds of misery, the sergeant called out, “Next stop boys, the Gates of Hell.”
CHAUMONT-EN-VEXIN, FRANCE—MAY 30, 1918
The company was spread out over a cluster of small farmhouses, and the fifty-eight men of Temple’s platoon occupied a farm that could not have covered an acre of ground. In the house itself, there were at least six men to each of the small rooms, more than a dozen in the compact barn that had once housed a small herd of livestock. Temple had accepted that the veterans should occupy the houses, none of his squad making much of an argument that the new men should of course sleep in the barn. It was their second night gathered around a mound of hay, a makeshift mattress on which they could spread their blankets. To the vast relief of the men, there were no other occupants of the barn. Whatever livestock had survived the war had certainly been led away by their owners, or done in by whatever troops had occupied the place before. The barn was a simple box of four slatted walls supporting a roof of wood planks and a patchwork of woven tree branches. There was nothing watertight about the structure at all; the men grateful there was no rain. The floor beneath them was a blend of dirt and years of hard-packed manure, and despite the absence of animals, the smells remained. To Temple, it was not so different from any barn he had played in as a boy. To some of the others, it was hell on earth.
He unrolled his blanket, saw a faint shadow, glanced up, caught a glimpse of the moon through a wide split in the roof. Scarabelli was closest to him, the small man sitting up, wrapped inside his own blanket.
Scarabelli said, “Savages. These damned people have no sense of clean.”
A low voice responded, the slow drawl of Parker. “Where you expect us to sleep, Gino? They can’t build us houses every time we set up camp.”
“I don’t care about that. It’s the stink. Everything stinks here. Not just normal stink. I used to go to the Hoboken docks, watch my uncle unloading all kinds of crates from ships. Some amazing stinks there. Dead things, stuff rotting inside those damned ships. They found a dead man once, some poor bastard fell into a bunch of cargo, didn’t find him until the ship docked. I never went back to the dock after that. But even that didn’t compare to this place.”
Parker moved closer, sat beside Temple.
“I figured every city smells pretty bad. I heard about all them rats and narrow streets. Don’t the horses leave a pretty bad mess?”
“Hell, Mountain Man, they wash the streets. Jersey City is the cleanest place in America. I heard people in Virginia don’t take a bath unless it rains. You oughta feel mighty comfortable