Free Kaleidoscope by Darryl Wimberley Page A

And even if Becker had tracked Jack onto the Pullman, surely by now Jack would have spotted the bastard. Wouldn’t he?
    Why, then, did Jack keep looking over his shoulder?
    The cars switched locomotives at Atlanta, continuing on the Central of Georgia to arrive after midnight at Albany where the Atlantic Coastline Railroad took over, it’s ’467 engine pulling Jack deep into the Sunshine State at seventy or sometimes eighty miles an hour past small towns with place names completely unfamiliar: Monticello and Perry. Live Oak and Hampton and Ocala. Wildwood and Coleman. Jack opened his wallet. There were two photographs lodged inside. One of his son Martin. And then Gilette. She posed stiffly with a pair of other nurses in their whites and hats. He had other photographs but this was the first and his favorite.
    Sitting there in the diner, looking over his shoulder, Jack wondered how things might have been if his wife had not been taken from him so soon. Would he have remained a family man? Would he have stayed in New York working a foundry or on the docks or perhaps a shoe salesman downtown?
    The photograph had been taken in France, in Tannerie, at a field hospital. Jack had mustered from Camp Upton in New York with forty thousand other patriots or draftees or those wanting to prove something to themselves. The 77t? Division deployed from ships and rail-lines and even horseback to fill the trenches criss-crossing countryside once travelled by Napoleon. The division had engaged heavily fortified Boche for nearly a month in the Oise-Aisne region. Tens of thousands of men were shredded in that encounter. Gilette had been assigned to a French first-aid post behind the lines in Tannerie. A church had been converted for the purpose. The walls were peppered with German artillery, part of the roof was blown away, but the Virgin inside, serene in marble tranquility, was untouched. You heard stories like that all over France, that the statues of saints and virgins were impervious to German guns. It had been beneath Mary’s open hands that Jack entered the infirmary.
    You smelled the wounded long before you saw them. The ripe stench of pus mingling with the astringency of alcohol. Woefully few doctors in attendance, fluttering by intermittently in their long white coats. It was the nurses who were ubiquitous, working virtually as surgeons themselves in the daily, sometimes hourly, dressing of wounds. Nurses, mostly women, prying shards of metal or bullet from suppurating injuries. Nurses treating tetanus and gangrene and peritonitis. Everything from cracked kneecaps to trepanned skulls. Jack was not himself wounded. He had been commandeered with a half-dozen other men to secure a truck of supplies being sent to the hospital. The trucks were always clearly marked with the universal cross but supplies were short on both sides of the line and were subject to ambush, even by French civilians.
    The efficiency of trench warfare could be measured in the tons of material needed to treat casualties. Gauze was delivered over sea and land in lots of a thousand yards, along with cuvettes and gloves and platinum needles. And morphine, of course. Lots of morphine. Enough alcohol to float a city of gangsters. Supply lines were subject to any number of ruptures, however; even hospital ships were subject to attack and so Jack found the nurses at Tannerie attempting to sterilize bandages corrupt with pus or excrement in vats of boiling water. Constant streams of wounded were unloaded as so many cords of wood from trucks and cots, doctors making instant judgments as to the likelihood of survival—this man too far along to help, this man rushed for immediate amputation. The rest waiting in pain, sometimes agony, comforted only by memory or religion or most reliably the human contact of the mostly-female and mostly French nurses who lived on soup and bread and sixteen hour shifts.
    Rows and rows of American and French and sometimes even German soldiers