Opening the door to Jack’s room, he finds the interior chamber bathed in soft, golden sunlight. The shades have been drawn back so that a beam of the morning’s heat falls squarely upon the veteran, who – reclined on his back with eyes closed – reminds the onlooker of a cat on the garden wall.
Taking a seat near the window, he leisurely observes the outside world and waits for Jack to finish his nap. His gaze is drawn to a women smoking by the entrance below: a not entirely unwelcome surprise. She’d told him that the trip was too far. Has she already spoken to Jack?
Probably not is the answer that comes to mind as the man’s eyes shift back toward the dozing vet.
To his surprise, Jack is sitting up in bed, complacently gunning at a dish of gelatin that is supposed to be breakfast. In greeting: “Something interesting out there?”
“No . . . How you feeling?”
“Nauseous mostly, but they told me that was normal.”
The listener nods his head in agreement, not quite sure how to sympathize with the pain, only able to reply blandly: “Do you want to talk more about the war? Maybe that’ll take your mind off things . . .”
Jack looks as though he’s not sure whether thinking about the war is better than feeling the full force of pain. It’s a battle of the physical versus the mental. Eventually, muttering to himself at first, he says, “Eh, why not? . . . France: that’s what I should tell
you about. I mean, you’ve never been, right? That’s a damn shame, cause the country really is nice, or at least it was . . . We tore it up pretty good.”
* * * * *
I passed in and out of reality for a long time . . . You see, I’d gotten the jungle fever. It wasn’t so bad that the doctors gave up on me right off the bat, but I don’t figure they were very optimistic about my odds of getting out of Africa alive. Anyway, the docs gave some kind of cocktail of a bunch of drugs; they told me it wasn’t strictly proven – the medicine they were using on me – and that if I didn’t want to take it, then they wouldn’t be able to force me. I told them to hurry up and give me the damn shot already.
Within a couple of weeks, I was starting to feel a bit better, though my whole body still ached like hell and I would see these weird flashes of imaginary light now and then. The docs told me not to worry, that that stuff was probably just a side-effect of the medicine. I didn’t quite believe them cause the field hospital was full of other sick people and mounds of waste and a bunch of other stuff I figured could put a guy straight into a grave right fast. . .
So, as worried as I was about getting back under the bullets, I was relieved to get discharged from the hospital. Anyway, by that point, autumn 1915 was in full swing – that is if you tell the seasons by calendar and not the heat – and the whole operation in Africa was reaching its close. The brass back in the U.S. had decided to prematurely pack the operation in, even though some of the land was still held by the Krauts. You see, the situation in France was reaching loggerheads and the head-Brit had been apparently been yelling at Wilson for months about getting some American reinforcements to France.
As much as he wanted to stay out of a continental war, the pres caved and the army started toward its undoing . . . We landed in Calais in November, and I remember my first impression of France being that it was actually a pretty nice looking place, what with a war going on and all. Then we moved over the beachheads and onto a high place from which we had a grand view of the countryside. It was like looking across a window into Satan’s garden, full of the ugly flowers he’d been growing up for years: death and mayhem and destruction everywhere . . . You took one look at those trenches and knew immediately that it was going to be some kind of crucible in your future.
(To Be Continued)