THE ARMY OFTEN WORKED ASS-BACKWARDS, Walter Waters had come to learn, and his temporary transfer here to the Chemical Warfare Service training school at Hanlon Field was just the latest confirmation of this unerring law of striped boneheadedry. He had already seen plenty of gas shelling up at the Front, but the brass, headquartered comfortably in that castle across the river, had decided in its infinite West Point wisdom that he and forty other doughboys should be pulled from their units for two days to be trained in the art of putting on a gas mask.
Not that he minded the rest, but the other stretcher-bearers in the 146th would have to do double time while he was away. Only a week ago, he had been promoted to sergeant, not because of any great leap of medical acumen or leadership on his part, but because most of the other veterans of the Mexico border duty had been killed or wing-clipped. If some desk colonel wanted to treat him to the first hot meal he’d had in a month in exchange for playing guinea pig with the new elephant-snout masks, who was he to complain?
That afternoon, he and the other men walked out of the mess hall rubbing their bellies and belching with satisfaction from a lunch of cornbread and peppered gravy. As they took a stroll, they heard a distant crack, one that seemed vaguely familiar. Another crack followed, and then another in the same interval, each reverberating with an echo through the crisp autumn sky.
They walked down the rows of barracks, stalking the tantalizing sound from their halcyon boyhood days. Turning a corner, they looked out over a flat, sheep-grazed pasture bordered by a meandering stream on one side and a long, tubular building on the other. In the middle of this emerald expanse, two dueling men stood facing each other. The tallest, blond and blessed with the predatory eyes of an eagle, wound up with his long right arm and threw a baseball toward a wiry, tobacco-spitting batsman. The hitter, gripping a thick limb as a substitute for a Louisville Slugger, whipsawed the ball over the pitcher’s head.
“That’s the Georgia P-P-Peach!” Waters shouted.
The other gas trainees froze in astonishment, unable to believe that they were watching the best hitter in baseball smack line drives across a Marne cow field. Ty Cobb, the Detroit Tigers’s legendary centerfielder, acknowledged their shouting with a second spit of tobacco and then turned to wait for another pitch. The lanky hurler opposing him tracked down the lopsided baseball and returned to his mound, which consisted of a pile of fresh dirt recently raised by a gopher. The pitcher went into his windup and sent a tumbling curveball toward Cobb, who methodically slapped it into right field.
“Come on, Big Six!” Cobb shouted at the pitcher. “Cut loose with one!”
The doughboys traded another round of stunned looks.
Waters took a step closer to confirm the improbable sighting. “That’s Mathewson d-d-dishing it up to him!”
“Give Peach the old backdoor, Christy!” shouted one of the men.
The doughboys ran to form a semicircle behind home plate, eager to see the famous manager of the New York Giants, Christy Mathewson, spin the seams on one of his unhittable screwballs.
Cobb slammed his bat against an imaginary plate and dared his buddy from the big leagues to try fooling him. “What’s a matter, Big Six? You nervous? Ain’t you ever had more than fifty people watching you?”
“Hell, he ain’t thrown c-c-competitive in three years, Peach!” Waters shouted. “Let him g-g-get loose first!”
Cobb turned his bushwacker’s glare on Waters. “Watch your mouth, boy!”
Waters and the other men retreated a step, aware of the Southerner’s notorious temper and his penchant for cutting up opponents with sharpened spikes. Cobb had been known from time to time to go into the stands and fisticuff anyone who sounded like they’d had a daddy in Sherman’s March. Everyone knew that the Peach had been brought into this world weaned on violence. When Ty was a lad, his father had come home one night suspecting the boy’s mother of sleeping around. Armed with a pistol, the old man had staked out the roof waiting for the culprit, but his missus mistook him for a burglar and shot him dead, dropping him like a pigeon from the chimney.
Big Six cut loose a nasty screwgie, and Cobb just managed to foul it off.
“Pretty w-w-weak, Peach!” Waters taunted. “I saw Big Train s-s-strike you out twice.”
Stalking the source of that slander, Cobb thumped his makeshift bat against the ground like a cop wielding a brains beater. “Who’s got the smart lip?” When the men pushed Waters to the fore, Cobb pointed to the captain’s bars on his collar and warned him, “Don’t ever call me that again, or I’ll crack your neck like a Sunday turkey!”
The gentle Mathewson hurried over to play peacemaker. “Take it easy, Ty. He was just tossing a few friendly gibes. Like at the ball game.”
“I won’t abide insolence! Not from some smart-assed Billy Yank!”
Waters saw Mathewson up close for the first time and was stunned by the thirty-eight-year old pitcher’s sickly pallor. “Big S-s-six, you okay? You don’t look so g-g-good.”
Mathewson covered a nasty cough. “Been fighting the flu, is all.”
Cobb walked over to a wagon and lifted the lid on one of the trunks on the flatbed. He began pulling out gas masks. “Form up! And get these on!”
The men fell into ranks and examined the twenty-pound contraptions that looked like football helmets with leather masks attached to a hose that filtered air through a canister of charcoal and soda lime.
“Hey, Captain, can we even breathe in these things?”
Cobb screwed his prunish face into a look that suggested he was going to bite the poor soldier’s head off and spit it out for being too sour. “Hell, crackerhead, you think Captain Mathewson and I would have cut short our season and come over here as instructors to show you how to use these goddamn masks if they didn’t work properly?”
“No, sir.”
Cobb marched down the ranks as if addressing his team before the seventh game of the World Series. “Anybody else here have any doubts about the truthfulness of my word?”
Waters had some doubts, all right. For instance, if these gas masks were such an easy sell, how come those birds in Washington had to recruit two of the most famous baseball players in the world to promote them? He raised his hand and reminded Cobb, “It gets pretty t-t-tough out there in no-man’s land, Captain. Breathing through that hose s-s-standing here is one thing. But when the f-f-firing starts and the smoke f-f-fills the air, there ain’t much g-g-good air at all to be had.”
Cobb blew into the front of a mask to prove that wind could pierce its filter. “There’s plenty of goddam air in these.”
“Then why does C-c-olonel MacArthur in the R-r-rainbow Division refuse to wear one?
The Peach turned redder than an overripe apple. “That stupid Yankee sonofabitch nearly went blind from a phosgene cloud, didn’t he? They had to blindfold him for a week! Now shut your pie hole and grab that bat over there! We ain’t got all day!”
Waters did as ordered and reluctantly picked up the shaved limb.
With a nasty sneer, Cobb walked down the line lecturing the confused men. “Captain Mathewson and I are going to exhibit for your education how easy it is to run and exert oneself while wearing these masks. We’re all gonna play an at-bat wearing ‘em. And this stuttering wisecracker here is going to lead off. You boys take positions out in the field. I’ll ump.”
“What’s the rules?” asked one of the men, eager for a contest.
“Little game called Last Man in the Gas Barn,” Cobb said. “You see that shed that looks like a giant stogie?” Receiving uncertain nods, the Peach explained what he had in mind. “Soon as Captain Mathewson records the out, you men are gonna remove your masks, keep them in hand, and hightail into that barn like you was going into the locker room at half-time of the Army-Navy game. The door will be shut behind you, and you’ll be surrounded by a dim green light.”
Waters pounded the bat on the ground, eager to show the Peach why he should have made the majors. He pointed out to the mound, imitating one of Cobb’s upstart rivals, a combination outfielder-pitcher for the Red Sox named Babe Ruth. “Don’t try that soft stuff on me, Christy! I’ll eat that for breakfast!”
“Now listen up!” ordered Cobb, annoyed by the tomfoolery. “This is the critical instruction. Captain Mathewson and I will be in that barn there with you. When the officer at the valve gives us the thumbs up from a small window outside, we’re going to signal you to put on your gas masks immediately. Don’t dilly-dally in there. Ten seconds after the signal, the gas will enter the barn. The signal will be three raised fingers, followed by a tug of the front brim of his helmet.”
One of the men in the rear piped up, “You never were much for following signals from the third-base coach, were you, Captain?”
Cobb glared the wag into a shiver. “This ain’t a goddam game! We’re using real mustard in there. You got the signal down in those thick skulls reportedly housing your brains?”
The men, sobered by the description of the dangers, nodded nervously. Finally, one of them blurted with preening bravado, “I reckon if Black Jack lets the two best players ever put on cleats go in that gas barn with us, we got nothing to fear.”
Cobb pushed Waters toward home plate. “You got that right! Now batter up, fritter mouth!”
The next two minutes were a blur. Waters slammed on his gas mask, which pinched his neck and caused him to feel claustrophobic. A nose clip was supposed to prevent him from breathing through his nostrils, but it still felt loose. The Peach had promised him he’d be able to breath while running, but he could hardly wheeze enough air in to keep from passing out while standing in place. He managed to raise the bat from the ground, but before he could set it on his shoulders, he heard a swish around his knees. He looked down behind him through the two blurry oculars and saw that the catcher somehow had the ball in his hands. He squinted out at Mathewson, barely finding his silhouette.
This time, the pitcher lobbed the ball toward him on an easy arc.
Waters swung and felt a vibration in his hands, and next thing he heard was a distant baying of the command to run. He dropped the limb and took off on a staggering plunge toward what he remembered to be the direction of first base. He fell to his knees somewhere in the vicinity of the base, gagging and praying for air. He was about to rip off the mask when he made out, through the oculars, the demonic image of Cobb yelling a warning at him.
Now in an oxygen-deprived haze, Waters felt a sharp tug at his shoulder. Somebody removed his mask and slammed it into his hands. From his knees, he looked up and saw the other nine hurtling toward the barn, some vomiting, others passing out. How much time had passed?
He staggered to his feet and ran to catch up.
Cobb and Mathewson herded him and the other trainees into the long, narrow barn and flipped the lever to lock it airtight. Inside, he saw that a trench had been dug along the wall to imitate the terrain on the Front. After motioning them all into the defile, Cobb walked to the far end of the chamber and peered through the tiny glass window at the officers of the Chemical Service Corps manning the valves outside. The men inside clutched their masks while watching for the signal from the two baseball legends. Mathewson was distracted, rubbing his red eyes and hacking.
Seconds later, a low hiss came from somewhere around the foundations.
Waters grabbed at his seizing throat. A peppery stench suffocated him and singed his vocal cords. The men in the trench began heaving and gagging. Too choked to yell, Waters ran for the door and pounded on it.
Cobb and Mathewson signaled wildly and pointed for the men to put on their masks, but most were now thrashing on the floor and puking green vomit. Those who could still crawl piled on top of those in front. The iron panel covering the exit finally swung open, and the suffocating men scrambled to escape. Medics wearing gas masks rushed in and began dragging out the unconscious victims.
When Waters had finally managed to regain his breath, he looked up and saw Cobb berating the officer at the valve for failing to give the signal on time. Nearby, Mathewson was bent over in pain with his hands to his knees, blowing green snot from his nose.
And all around the field, men with burned lungs lay writhing in agony.