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Upstarts
Davis was all soldier. He didn't waste time on questions; he just held his breath
while he reached between the seats, handed me my mask, and put on his own in one
continuous movement. I took my time, making sure the waterproof patch was off this
time. If there was gas, I'd already been pretty well exposed, so there was no point in
making a jackass of myself as I had on the ship.
Then I went back to the CP tent and asked questions about the message. It wasn't
easy to communicate through those masks, but by a combination of grunts, sign language
and written notes, I learned that the message hadn't been meant for us anyhow, and that
the encoder had used a mysterious mix of today's and yesterday's codes, probably
because it was so close to midnight.
I looked at my watch. Twelve-thirty. Col Costain would be frantic by now. I
asked them to send another message canceling the first one, then got back in the jeep and
headed for home as fast as you can go at five miles an hour. The mask was uncomfortable
and made visibility even worse, if possible. I lifted a corner of it cautiously to test for gas.
I still couldn't smell anything except the artillery fumes, so I took it off. Joe B. Davis
pulled his far enough away from his mouth to ask, "Is it all right to take these off now,
sir?"
"I guess so. If there was any gas around, we'd both be dead already." He stripped
the mask the rest of the way off.
Our own CP was in chaos. The first thing I heard was two men arguing. They had
their masks out of the carrying cases, but not on their faces. They were shining a blackout
flashlight at a chalk mark on a tree. "Look at the damn' thing," one of them shouted. "It's
red!"
"Of course it looks red, shit-for-brains! You've got that red thing on your
flashlight. Everything looks red. Lemme see your armband."
"It's red too."
"It don't look red to me. Ain't anything red but your dumb face.”
I pushed past them. Obviously our scientific means of detection were useless in
the dark. Everything had been loaded onto trucks and most of the vehicles had their
motors running and spewing out exhaust. Half the men had their masks off and were
engaged in putting them on. The other half already had them on and were taking them
off.
At the center of things I found Col Costain and Major Hughes carrying on a
conversation of sorts with Capt Bob Wilson. The discussion was as heated as the one
between the men with the flashlight, but harder to understand, because they were all
masked. Wilson seemed to be saying that he knew there was phosgene gas around
because he had been up the road a ways and had gotten a definite smell of new-mown
hay.
I entered the argument. "Maybe some farmer has been cutting hay," I suggested.
Anyhow, there's no gas up that road, because I just came from there with no mask
on, and I'm still alive."
220
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