Articles of War by Nick Arvin

have been any of them: to Heck, mired in his own problems, the men around him had all remained more or less indistinguishable, except for Quentin and the fellow who had cowered from the falling pans, but that one had been sent away a couple of weeks before. Heck didn’t regard any of the others as particular friends or enemies. They came and went, from the hospital, to the front, faces, bodies filling cots; they became a blur and he gave them little heed. But one of them had noticed him. Perhaps this was just a joke.
You God damned bastard.
No, more likely someone had finally noticed that he was idling and wasting time here, that his wound, never serious, was now largely healed, that there was no discernable reason he should not be sent immediately back to the line to face the same risks that the others here had faced.
    A red-haired boy with a white bulge of bandages taped against his right ear came into the tent, took something from the duffel bag under his cot, and left without glancing around. Men could be heard playing football in the mud outside—the quarterbacks shouted their snap counts, bodies smacked into bodies and into the mud. Occasionally the players broke into laughter. From the opposite direction came the tentative notes of someone testing a bugle. Boots struck the wooden boards laid over the muddy grounds with a cold dull impact followed by a faint suction. A jeep, far away, raced its engine as it spun in the mud, the engine whining higher and higher, as if the driver were determined to defeat the mud by sheer stubbornness. Then it stopped.
    Heck wanted very badly to be rid of the envelope in his hand. He looked at the coal stove beside Quentin, who was loading a clean sheet of paper onto his clipboard. The stove was burning, but he didn’t want to answer the question Quentin would sooner or later ask. He put on his coat and went out.
    From the ranks of tents rose ranks of streaming smoke, released by improvised stovepipes built of rusting ductwork or cans welded end to end or, in one case, a 75mm gun barrel turned upright. The men playing football were extravagantly dirty and moved slowly in the chill, a race of mud-men engaged in strange ritual combat. Heck stood a moment on a muddy plank, touching lightly the envelope in his coat pocket. He looked at the tents and all the columns of rising smoke. He turned slowly. The bulk of the brick warehouse of the temporary hospital stood in the distance. There were several large woodstoves there. Heck stepped gingerly across a couple of planks, but the planks had become so interred in the filth that they offered little protection, and he soon gave up and set out directly across the mud.
    He toiled across a churned and muddy field and by the time he reached the warehouse he was heaving forward his sodden, filth-covered boots as if they were cloven hooves. A pair of ambulances stood near the door and some wounded were being unloaded. A stretcher went by bearing a cocoon of gauze—it was impossible to say whether anything human lay inside. A couple of orderlies were lounging by the door on a high-backed, ornately carved church bench. They were eating steaming soup from cans, gripping the hot metal awkwardly with pliers. A nurse hurried by, spattered from neck to knees with blood. One of the orderlies looked up as Heck knocked his boots clean. “What you want?” the orderly asked.
    Heck had prepared for this question. He drew a pair of cigarette packs from his pocket for evidence. “Visiting my cousin.”
    â€œBrought him scags?” The orderly turned his attention back to his soup. He shifted his grip on his pliers, scraped with a spoon inside the can. “Stay away from the surgical areas.”
    Inside the only illumination came from occasional electric lights hung by long black wires from the ceiling. The odors of alcohol and cleaning chemicals were inadequate to obscure the vaporous presence of bile, pus, excrement, and human rot.