TWO

On their second day in France they awoke to the bugle and the sun dancing between gray flecked clouds, while a young breeze played with their tent flaps and tickled their unit flags. The two man tents were temporary, and always ready to be struck quickly; a quick stay in St. Nazaire and then to another tented place.

A week later. And men began arriving, again, some pulled from posts and ships from the four curved corners of the earth; men who, like them, had seen some death and towns where urchins wandered. But now there were many more men just out of Parris Island and San Diego; men who were trained in six weeks and sent over; men whose eyes were still blinking into the bright sun of adventure. But to the veterans, only the noise of guns, distant and muffled, reminded them that adventure was a pauper and to teach the new ones to remember the sounds that may soon deafen them.

And it was now rumored that the 6th Machine Gun Battalion wouldn’t be arriving until December; so the fields outside of St. Nazaire was their field of residence only briefly. It was also rumored that General Pershing had plans for the 5th while they waited for further training by the French.

July opened like the door of a hot oven. The fields around their encampment were covered with red poppies and the butterflies flitted from one to the other; to a butterfly, nirvana, and a far distance from the molt of the caterpillar.

They walked back to their tent holding their long handled tin mess plates and canteen cups not quite filled with coffee. Eddie Bellers and Packy Raymond were sitting in front of their tent which was perfectly placed next to theirs; all the tents in their row, and all of the rows of the 4th and 5th Brigade camp were aligned as if to a mathematician’s specification, with its perfect lines and right angles. Their plates were balanced on their crossed legs and the cups were on the ground next to them. Tom Rulac and Dov Lasky occupied the tent on the other side of their’s. Corporal White was the first to sit. Fallon Killrain was looking down the line of twenty-five and smiling, eating his breakfast as he stood, chewing slowly, reaching down for his coffees.

“What’s funny, Sarge?”

Rulac and Lasky were coming in the opposite direction from the mess tent carrying their breakfast; they each had extra biscuits. They had stopped to see Rulac’s cousin in the 1st Battalion who had joined-up with him.

“Just thinking what a circuitous route it’s been, China, Haiti, Dominican Republic to here.”

“What the hell’s circuitous…?”

He looked down at Packy Raymond, still smiling.

“Means kind of going in circles.”

He wanted to use another word, perhaps meander, to explain it but he would have had to explain that, too; another responsibility of his sergeancy.

Dicky looked up, smiling, licking some particle of food from his upper lip.

“Fuckin’ right, Fal. Shit, we been to one end and the other end.”

“We have that, Corporal White.”

“Beein’ uppity with this Corporal White, ain’t ya?”

Fallon looked down at the corporal, squinting, the smile now holding just a corner of his lips.

“I thought you liked being called Corporal White?”

“Everybody else, yeah. We known each other too long for the formal shit.”

The sergeant nodded.

“Maybe.”

“What’s this MP shit the captain told you about?”

Fallon lifted his right shoulder rubbing his chin against it, as if scratching an itch.

“Pershing want’s to use us as a line of communication troops and mainly MPs but something about other duties I’m not privy to - means I don’t know.”

“Who’re we MP’n?”

Fallon smiled.

“Anybody and everybody. Y