Fall of Giants

In vigorous action, Chuck commented with surprise, Gus revealed a certain lanky grace, previously seen only on the tennis court. “You look like a goddamn giraffe,” Chuck said, “but you run like one too.” Gus also did well at boxing, because of his long reach, although his sergeant instructor told him, regretfully, that he lacked the killer instinct.

Unfortunately, he turned out to be a terrible shot.

He wanted to do well in the army, partly because he knew people thought he could not hack it. He needed to prove to them, and perhaps to himself, that he was no wimp. But he had another reason. He believed in what he was fighting for.

President Wilson had made a speech, to Congress and the Senate, that had rung like a clarion around the world. He had called for nothing less than a new world order. “A general association of nations must be formed under specific covenants for the purpose of affording mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity to great and small states alike.”

A league of nations was a dream for Wilson, for Gus, and for many others-including, rather surprisingly, Sir Edward Grey, who had originated the idea while he was British foreign secretary.

Wilson had set out his program in fourteen points. He had spoken of reductions in armaments; the right of colonial people to a say in their own future; and freedom for the Balkan states, Poland, and the subject peoples of the Ottoman Empire. The speech had become known as Wilson’s Fourteen Points. Gus envied the men who had helped the president write it. In the old days he would have had a hand in it himself.

“An evident principle runs through the whole program,” Wilson had said. “It is the principle of justice to all peoples and nationalities, and their right to live on equal terms of liberty and safety with one another, whether they be strong or weak.” Tears had come to Gus’s eyes when he had read these words. “The people of the United States could act upon no other principle,” Wilson had said.

Was it really possible that the nations could settle their arguments without war? Paradoxically, that was something worth fighting for.

Gus and Chuck and their machine-gun battalion traveled from Hoboken, New Jersey, on the Corinna, once a luxury liner, now converted to troop transport. The trip took two weeks. As second lieutenants, they shared a cabin on an upper deck. Although they had once been rivals for the affection of Olga Vyalov, they had become friends.

The ship was part of a convoy, with a navy escort, and the voyage was uneventful, except that several men died of Spanish flu, a new illness that was sweeping the world. The food was poor: the men said the Germans had given up submarine warfare and now aimed to win by poisoning them.

The Corinna waited a day and a half off Brest, on the northwest tip of France. They disembarked onto a dock crowded with men, vehicles, and stores, noisy with shouted orders and revving engines, busy with impatient officers and sweating stevedores. Gus made the mistake of asking a sergeant on the dock what was the reason for the delay. “Delay, sir?” he said, managing to make the word “sir” sound like an insult. “Yesterday we disembarked five thousand men, with their cars, guns, tents, and field kitchens, and transferred them to rail and road transport. Today we will disembark another five thousand, and the same tomorrow. There is no delay, sir. This is fucking fast.”

Chuck grinned at Gus and murmured: “That’s told you.”

The stevedores were colored soldiers. Wherever black and white soldiers had to share facilities, there was trouble, usually caused by white recruits from the Deep South; so the army had given in. Rather than mix the races on the front line, the army assigned colored regiments to menial tasks in the rear. Gus knew that Negro soldiers complained bitterly about this: they wanted to fight for their country like everyone else.

Most of the regiment went on from Brest by train. They were not given passenger carriages, but crammed into a cattle truck. Gus amused the men by translating the sign on the side of a railcar: “Forty men or eight horses.” However, the machine-gun battalion had its own vehicles, so Gus and Chuck went by road to their camp south of Paris.

In the States they had practised trench warfare with wooden rifles, but now they had real weapons and ammunition. Gus and Chuck, as officers, had each been issued with a Colt M1911 semiautomatic pistol with a seven-round magazine in the grip. Before leaving the States they had thrown away their Mountie-style hats and replaced them with more practical caps with a distinctive fore-and-aft ridge. They also had steel helmets the same soup-bowl shape as the British.