Front Lines (Front Lines 1)

A dusty, dirty-looking buck sergeant comes toward Frangie’s station calling out, “You boys got any water you can spare?”

“You can have a swig off my canteen, Sergeant,” Frangie says, “and there’s a tanker truck just over behind the command tent.”

Only when he’s a few feet away does the sergeant focus and notice that Frangie is black and female.

“I ain’t drinking water out of no coon’s canteen,” he says, and rejoins the jittery, mournful parade. He’s not alone in his hostility. Some of the passing soldiers take the time to stare at the all-black artillery and some take the time to marvel loudly at, “All them Nigras with big old guns.”

“No wonder we couldn’t get no arty support, it’s nothing but jigs and jugs,” a phrase Frangie hears for the first but not the last time.

“Doc! Doc Marr!”

Frangie searches in the dark for the source of the shout, trying to place it. It’s from Doon’s gun, nearby. She grabs her bag and runs the fifty yards to the emplacement. One of the gunners has crushed a couple of fingers in the breech.

“I’ll put on a splint. But you won’t have much use of that hand for a while, Private.”

“That’s your jerking-off hand too,” another private says, laughing. Then he realizes what he’s said in front of a woman and hastily retreats. “I meant, um . . . Well . . .”

Doon comes around, gives the splint a critical eye, winks at Frangie, and says, “Likely to get noisy around here pretty soon, Frangie.”

“Any word on what’s happening?” she asks, tying off the gauze and ripping it with her teeth. She jerks her head toward the passing white soldiers and says, “That doesn’t look good.”

“Looks like getting our butts kicked is what’s happening,” Doon says. He seems cheerful despite that gloomy assessment. “But I guess we’ll see how much the Germans enjoy the mail we’re going to send them.”

One of the very few advantages to segregation is that despite being only recently attached to this unit, Frangie has already run into two people she knows: Doon Acey and Sergeant Green. Sergeant Walter Green of Iowa. Finding Doon with the big guns is not a surprise, but Green is infantry. She and Green managed only a brief surprised nod of recognition before Green’s platoon was dispatched up the looming hill to keep a lookout and presumably defend the vulnerable but valuable big guns.

Lieutenant Penche, an impossibly young-looking white boy with a very deep-woods accent, comes running, a grin spoiling his attempt to look mature and officerly.

“Men, we have a live-fire mission!” he announces.

He’s written the coordinates in a small, spiral-bound notebook. Doon’s gun crew and the other five in the battery, having only just gotten into position, begin the backbreaking work of digging the tails back up, hefting them, and walking them to the right, bringing the cannon tube to the left. This is the crude aiming—the exacting work is setting elevation and traversing the gun with a hand crank and a wheel. As a soldier spins the wheel, Doon calls out, “Yeah . . . Yeah . . . Almost. Hold it. Yeah. Now give me another two mils elevation.”

“Back up, Doc,” someone says to Frangie, “this girl kicks.”

Frangie backs away ten yards but wants to see the gun in action, up close. Best to get used to the noise now—she has not yet been exposed to close-up cannon fire. This changes with a shout of, “Ready,” followed by the high-pitched voice of the lieutenant yelling, “Fire one round.”

The explosion causes the entire howitzer to jump. It digs the tails into the gravel and bounces the cannon and its undercarriage on the two big tires. A jet of red flame shoots from the muzzle, lighting the crew like a lightning flash. Smoke billows from the muzzle, and already the crew has popped out the spent casing, hot and smoking. It rolls toward Frangie.

A runner comes from the command post, which has heard from the forward position by radio. “Two hundred short!”

A second round is fired, and after a few minutes comes word that it’s a hundred yards long. Frantic adjustments left and right, then from each of the six guns in the battery comes a shout of “Ready!”

“Fire for effect!” the young lieutenant yells, and the whole world becomes one big explosion as all six howitzers fire within a split second of each other.

Out slides the hot brass, in goes a new shell, and ka-boom! It makes the ground beneath Frangie’s feet bounce, and out slides a smoking shell and in goes its replacement, and another ka-boom!

The other batteries, spread in an arc across a quarter of a mile, watch with envy.

The battery fires off six rounds per gun, then stops. But within seconds a second battery opens up, its guns elevated higher. Again a total of eighteen rounds are fired. Red lightning, like camera bulbs from hell, a strobe of light now, up and down the line. The lingering smoke seems almost to hold on to that red light for a while.

Then, another target and a battery down the line opens up, getting their chance to rain death on the unseen Germans. The more distant batteries are loud, but Doon’s, right here, right on top of Frangie, is shattering as the battery fires again, and this time it runs on longer, and at such a rapid clip that it’s like some massive drum beating out a frantic rhythm.

Frangie is called to treat a burn, and then the shattered kneecap of an unwary soldier who stood too close as his gun fired. It means evacuating the soldier—Frangie is not a surgeon—but he’ll keep the leg and may even get sent home.

She’s feeling pretty good, really; nothing has occurred yet that is beyond the scope of her training. The noise is stunning, and she soon discovers that neither she nor the soldiers can really hear much, certainly not normal conversation, and the flashes shrink her pupils until the darkness between explosions is impenetrable. She’s treating men who can only point and wince, but it’s nothing terrible or overwhelming, and she breathes a tentative sigh of relief.

There’s a lull of a few minutes in Doon’s battery. He turns and shoots a grin at Frangie.

Then Frangie hears something she doesn’t understand. She yells, “What’s that?” But the high-pitched whine she hears is not audible to men who’ve been standing right up close to the firing guns, nor for that matter is her worried cry, so no one else hears the scream of incoming shells until they land.