Red Love by David Evanier Read Free Book Online Page A

Americans instead of at the fascists. They dove for cover, cursing and screaming.
    Seven o’clock arrived, without the air force or the tank company. The men looked at each other. Machine gun slugs pounded into their sandbags.
    Woodhouse kept looking at his watch. He phoned Pohoric and asked about the air and tank support. Pohoric said there would be a short delay.
    Pohoric phoned Woodhouse a few minutes later and asked why the Americans had still not attacked. Woodhouse again asked for help. He said it would be hopeless without support from the flanks. Pohoric ordered him to move the men out. Just then three Republican planes flew overhead and dropped a light packet of bombs nowhere near enemy lines.
    Woodhouse blew his whistle, and the men scrambled up the trench wall. Woodhouse waved them out. As he waved, a bullet broke his shoulder in five places. The dead and wounded lay everywhere. Those who were unhurt hid behind olive trunks and fired at the enemy trenches.
    The attack was over within ten minutes.
    The wounded lay immobile, waiting for the stretcher-bearers who could not get through the enemy fire. The snipers kept firing. In no-man’s-land bodies caught fire; the wind carried the smell of burning flesh.
    When Sammy finally climbed over the top with his bayonet, he saw them: the newly arrived young comrades from Brownsville, all dead, piled on top of each other. Abe was in the middle. Sammy crawled in behind them, and he could hear the bullets hammering an inch above him. Sammy lay there terrified from noon to mid afternoon.
    Then the freezing rains came.
    The chill of fear and the chill of the rain.
    Sammy overcame his terror and made a dash to pull in one of the wounded men. The trench was filled with bleeding, vomiting, coughing men, and with corpses. Many of the wounded drowned in the bottom of the trench in puddles of red mud and ice water. The exhausted men stepped on the wounded and the dead or fell upon them as they slipped in the ice and mud.
    They waited for medical care and food. There was none.
    The men cried aloud and sobbed and shook with rage. And yet they could not help thinking as they stared at their comrades in the bloodied water, “Better him than me.”
    Sammy Kuznekov and a Franco-Belgian, Robert, slid down a hill, filed up another hill, and down to the cookhouse where they found two men, Stahl, the cook, and Koch, an officer. They were both drunk.
    “Why didn’t you bring the rations up front?” Sammy asked them.
    “Well, nobody came,” the cook said.
    “Give me the food for the battalion.”
    “Hold on,” Stahl, a blond Minnesotan with a moustache, said. “I heard there were a lot of casualties. I gotta know the exact figure.”
    Sammy stared at him. “How many rations did you prepare for today?”
    “Four-fifty plus.”
    “ Well , that’s exactly what I want.”
    “Now under brigade rules you only get rations for each man you got.”
    Sammy picked up his bayonet. “Stahl, you’re gonna give me the food. I’m not gonna carry it, you’re gonna put it on your mules. And you and Hill are coming with me—”
    “Please! Don’t take me!” Stahl cried.
    “You bastards, I’ll blow your heads off. Do you know that most of the boys are dead or wounded?”
    “Well we don’t know, we have no records,” Stahl said.
    Fuck you,” Sammy said. “I want you to load up your mules with two barrels of rum, if there’s any left after you bastards got through with it. Plus the cognac. And all the goat chops—”
    “You can’t order me. I’m a lieutenant,” Koch said.
    Sammy put his bayonet to the man’s stomach. “You’re gonna be a dead lieutenant in a minute.”
    The men loaded up the mules with the bags of food and drink.
    It took more than an hour and a half for Sammy and Robert to get back to the men. He could hear the moaning, and in the trenches the wounded wailed in pain.
    He passed out the rum and goat chops and the men drank and ate them like the elixir of