Page 12 of Clive Cussler The Iron Storm (An Isaac Bell Adventure #15)
The channel crossing was without incident.
The French port of Le Havre was just as chaotic as Southampton, with strings of ships arriving from all points on the compass—Aussie soldiers fresh from the Outback, troupes of French colonial police pulled from duties in Africa and elsewhere, and freighters hauling goods from all over the world in an all-out effort to defeat the Central Powers.
Dockworkers swarmed like ants, while parallel lines of soldiers disembarking from the troopships made straight for waiting trains that would take them to the front to the north and east of Paris.
Bell saw the inevitable strings of horses.
No matter how mechanized armies were becoming, the mud and mire of trench warfare meant that equine power and agility still ruled the transportation sector.
With the French countryside ravaged by war, and so many of its men in uniform, the country relied on food imports, and so much of the cargo coming off the freighters was lowered directly onto flat-bottomed barges that would then be towed up the Seine to Paris.
Word was that rationing in Paris now required that bakers make only one type of bread.
Gone were the beloved baguettes and brioches, replaced by a utilitarian loaf called pain national .
To the average Frenchman this was a sacrifice of the highest order.
Bell also saw the rows of ambulances pulling up to a hospital ship from the run across to England.
Some men could walk under their own power, their bandages white against their khaki uniforms. They had drawn, gaunt faces and eyes made hollow by pain and the horrors they had witnessed.
The blind walked with an arm touching the man ahead.
Those coming out of the ambulance on stretchers lay under army blankets, but their silhouettes were off.
Limbs were missing, oftentimes more than one, blown off on the battlefield or sawn off by an overworked surgeon just behind the front lines.
It was a sobering sight that made both men grunt in that understated way men have who don’t want to show how deeply they were affected.
The Acasta had no place to berth as she was not discharging any cargo and would soon return to England.
Instead, Bell and Fleming and their bags and mysterious trunk were rowed to a boat ramp down one of the port’s artificial channels.
The seamen helped unload the baggage and were gone before Bell and Fleming realized they had no transportation off the ramp.
Being of a certain class and having a certain flair, it didn’t take long for Valentine Fleming to enlist the help of a pair of dock boys of no more than thirteen to drag the steamer trunk up the ramp and onto the quay.
They were further convinced with a few shiny coins to find them a car to take them back to the railhead and the troop trains.
They found no automobile, but rather a wooden wagon pulled by a single donkey with such bad flatulence that Bell and Fleming walked beside the carriage rather than in it.
“ C’est la guerre ,” Fleming quipped.
It took an hour to make their way across the sprawling port, but then things accelerated quickly.
Fleming was an officer, a major, with travel papers that couldn’t be questioned and an air of studied indifference that made all around him want to be at his beck and call.
No one bothered to check Bell’s hastily drawn-up orders signed almost illegibly by the munitions minister.
The trunk was loaded aboard a railyard flatbed with hundreds of wooden crates of .
303-caliber ammunition. Rather than travel in an officer’s carriage, Bell wanted to head to the front with some of the regular soldiers.
The enlisted soldiers’ railcar had no amenities, the seats were roughly hewn wood, and the windows didn’t open.
The men lucky enough to find a seat sat packed shoulder to shoulder.
Others were relegated to a spot on the floor atop the packs that had been dumped as soon as the men boarded.
Bell and Fleming shared a bench that normally would have accommodated three men.
A couple of the soldiers who were forced to the floor looked resentful until Bell pulled a bottle of Portuguese port wine from a rucksack.
Because the nights were still cold, Marion insisted that port was better than claret because it warmed the blood.
The distance was roughly a hundred and thirty miles, but took the better part of ten hours because they were forced to stop on sidings at random intervals to let other trains pass.
The closer they got to the front lines, the more the countryside bore the scars of battle.
Whole forests were reduced to blasted stumps and disarticulated branches that looked like the skeletal hands of giants that had been lopped off by the gods.
The earth, too, was torn and pounded with topsoil pushed deep under the surface during one barrage, only to be flung high into the air at some later cannon fusillade, so all that remained was pockmarked mud as cratered and desolate as the moon’s surface.
As they neared their destination, the young soldiers’ boisterous talk, their bragging of feats past and boasts of future glory, slowly petered out until, as the sun’s final rays were retreating to the west and the landscape took on a funereal air, they no longer looked each other in the eye.
Closer still to the front, when they realized the rolling thunder they heard in the distance was thousands of cannons, howitzers, and mortars firing in a crescendo without end, some began to tremble and a few began to weep.
As seasoned fighters, Bell and Fleming knew this moment was coming for the boyish conscripts and enlistees, and said nothing.
The marshaling area behind the front was as chaotic a scene as Bell had ever experienced.
Under the glare of powerful arc lamps that were nearly blinding at a mere glance, tens of thousands of men were being organized into groups according to their units.
New replacements stepping off the trains were met with the bellows of sergeants gathering their men, like militarized carnival barkers drawing in a crowd.
Fleming led Bell into the melee, freshly laid gravel along the rail line crunching under their boots.
Though miles away, the scent of burnt powder drifted in from the mass of gun emplacements bombarding the German lines.
They had made it just a few steps from the carriage when one of the NCOs tapped Fleming on the shoulder.
“Oi. Where da ya think you’re ’eading?”
“Queen’s Own Oxfordshire Hussars, if you must know,” Fleming replied, only half turning to face the cockney sergeant.
“Queer oddities on ’orses, ay?”
Fleming had heard the nickname many times. “Sergeant, before you dig your grave any deeper, look at my insignia,” he said with a sting like a hornet.
The man went green. “Begging the major’s pardon. I, ah…You stepped off an enlisted carriage. I thought you—”
“Truly a comedy of errors. I will gladly forget this incident if you get me two men to carry a rather heavy trunk, another for our bags, and a vehicle to take us south to our sector of the front.”
“Right away, Major.” The sergeant snapped off a parade ground–quality salute and vanished into the night.
An hour later, the borrowed lorry deposited Bell, Fleming, and their gear at a compound of army tents set up in a clearing amid one of the only surviving copses of trees in this part of France.
Nearby were pens for horses, whose breath steamed the quiet night.
They were too far away to hear the barrage raging to their north.
“Last thing,” Bell said as the driver shut off the engine, “what was it the sergeant said back there? I couldn’t follow because of his accent.”
“The QOOH is a cavalry outfit, as you know, but there hasn’t been a proper cavalry charge since the disastrous early attempts that saw horse and rider cut down by the barrelful.
We keep our horses, naturally, and exercise them regularly, but don’t use them in battle.
Other units have taken to calling us Queer Oddities on Horses, as we do look rather ridiculous practicing maneuvers we will never use in battle. ”
“War is hell.”
“Your General Sherman, I believe. So where do you want your trunk?”
“I suppose wherever your NCOs congregate. I’ve brought stuff for your men, and it’s best the sergeants pass it about.”
The NCOs had a ten-person tent they used as an informal club, with some furniture either pilfered from abandoned farms or lugged up from Paris.
Their prize position was a sideboard with a couple of liquor bottles that had been pilfered from an antechamber at the Hotel George V.
Fleming wrapped a knuckle on a tent pole before entering the space, as was customary for all officers.
“Sergeant Major Everly, permission to enter.”
“Major Fleming. Welcome back, sir,” said a grizzled veteran with iron-gray hair and a brow as furrowed as a freshly turned farm plot. “By all means.”
There were a half dozen other NCOs in various poses of relaxation. The air in the tent was warm from the body heat and cozy with the scent of pipe tobacco. Light came from a pair of kerosene lanterns hanging from two poles.
Two of Fleming’s men lugged in the steamer trunk. “Gentlemen,” Fleming started, “this is Mr. Isaac Bell. He’s an observer from America who is to report directly to their President Wilson about the war. Sergeant Major, he will be your responsibility for his time here.”
“Isaac, this is Sergeant Major William Everly.”
The command NCO didn’t look too happy about this new responsibility, but took Bell’s proffered hand.
“Thank you, Major,” Bell said. “No one likes to have someone looking over their shoulder and quietly judging, so I promise here and now that I will make all my judgments as loud as possible.” That got a few polite chuckles.
“I also know that nobody likes a mooch, so I brought along some things for you and your men.” He opened the trunk with a theatrical flourish.
The men had gathered round, and when they saw the standard white and blue labels for Tickler’s Jam, a regular commodity on the battlefront, a couple groaned aloud. This was no treat.
Bell plucked one of the tins from the trunk, hiding the label a bit with his hands. “I hear that the plum and apple flavor is jolly good.” He spun the can so they could all read the label. “But strawberry is much better.”
At this the men roared their approval for such a rare delicacy.
There were at least thirty such prized cans of jam.
Under it were tins of kippers and crackers, a couple of bottles of scotch, bundles of thick wool socks, expensive cigarettes that actually contained more tobacco than filler, stationery to write home, chocolates, several vinyl records in case they had a phonograph, and anything else Marion could think of to give a common soldier a lift.
“I think this’ll cover your stay for a few days, Mr. Bell,” Sergeant Major Everly said. He’d splashed some whiskey into one of their bar’s mismatched glasses and handed it over.
“I was hoping it would.” Bell smiled back, noting that one of Everly’s eyes was slightly clouded by a cataract and that there was an old scar running down from its lid to his cheek.
Everly usually never talked about it with strangers, but he felt compelled to tell the mysterious American.
“German with a trench knife two years back. He thought he’d blinded me when he saw all the blood.
He stepped back for an instant. I kneed him in the clackers and whacked the back of his head with a shovel.
Earned me a month of convalescence, though I’ll be blind in that eye soon enough and away from all this. ”
That last bit was said with true regret. Bell saw that he was a career soldier who wanted nothing more than to shepherd his boys through the war and see them all returned home in one piece.