Free Bright's Passage: A Novel by Josh Ritter Page B

man’s voice his own sounded thin and desperate.
    A faint scent, insidious and sharp as chopped radishes, rose to his nostrils. In an instant he had thrown the canteen on the ground and dropped his hand to grope at the belt where he kept his gas mask. It wasn’t there, and he searched frantically for it before realizing that he’d left it with his jacket back in the ditch by the stone wall. Cold panic held him for an instant, then drifted away like mist. He’d heard no shells fall nearby.
    It was still possible he had missed the sound of a gas canister, which traveled at slower speeds than artillery shells and hummed lowly like old men in workshops as they flew. When a gas alarm was raised, you had six seconds to get your mask on or, if not, you had two days in which to experience annihilating agony and then forever to be either dead or terribly wounded. There were many false gas alarms on the line, and men were forever putting on and taking off their masks. Sometimes men would dream the alarm in their sleep and would open their eyes with their masks already on, having put them on without waking. Phosgene, if you noticed it at all, smelled of new-cut grass. The next day, however, you were coughing up pints of thick yellow fluid from your lungs every hour, and the day after that you were headed for a lifetime in some peeling hospital, the helpless ward of aging nurses. Unlike phosgene, mustard gas didn’t evenneed to be inhaled. It was heavy, gangrenous stuff that trundled close to the ground, burning any skin that it came in contact with and causing huge, disfiguring blisters. Eventually the gas would settle, collecting with the rainwater in greasy floating slicks at the bottom of shell craters, potholes, and trenches.
    His temples were throbbing and he realized that he had been holding his breath. He let it out slowly and sniffed the air again. The smell of the gas was certainly there but it was very faint. Looking down, his eyes came to rest on the trough. In the darkness, its pale-gray stone shone up around the water it held like the wide mouth of some monstrous fish. Whatever mustard gas had recently drifted through this farmyard was gone now, save for the stuff that had settled in a thin layer over the surface of the water in the trough.
    All at once, with a kind of pent-up gaiety, the War started up once more where it had left off. In the distance, explosions strobed haphazardly against whatever poor clouds had wandered into the path of the big guns. Bright stared down into the gape of the great fish’s mouth until he’d finally caught his breath and his heartbeat had slowed. Then he picked up the canteen from the ground and replaced its top before stooping to collect the others.
    When he got back to the stone wall, Bert was asleep and Carlson was dead. He looked at the sergeant’s face a long minute and then sat down again next to his remaining companion and waited.
    It was well past midnight when Bright stood again and nudged Bert awake with his boot. He awoke violently, his pistol flashing out in the starlight. Bright knelt and put his hand against Bert’s chest to hold him still. “Sergeant’s dead.”
    “Yeah?”
    “Time to go.”
    Bert leaned out over the ditch and looked up and down theroad. “So that’s that?” he asked, his voice rising, turning harsher between his teeth. “We’re just gonna run, huh?”
    “We have to go before it starts to get light. If it gets to be morning and we’re on the wrong side of the line, we’ll be in worse trouble than we are now.”
    “We’ll make a great sight then, won’t we?” Bert jeered. He fumbled angrily in his pocket for a cigarette. “You may not have to impress anybody, but I gotta go and take over the bank, and what am I gonna say when some little old lady comes to my desk and asks me, ‘Now, what was you doin’ while the whole army got blown to pieces? Boy, you sure are lucky to have made it alive! And not a scratch! Land!’ What am I gonna