Archive of Our Own ^beta

Thibault had not returned from last night's raid.

Shermy would not call him a close friend (or even a friend to begin with). Thibault had come from the other side of the tracks back in Birchwood, and growing up Shermy had only seen him on those occasions when their baseball teams had played against each other, but even as a child it was clear Thibault carried a chip on his shoulder that he dared everyone to knock off. Whenever he had talked to Shermy out here in France, it was usually to make some crack about his "pampered" upbringing or to sneer at Shermy being an unarmed stretcher bearer instead of a proper soldier.

"He's probably a little jealous of people from our side of town," Shermy's friend, Pig-Pen, remarked patiently when Shermy had mentioned it to him. "Peppermint Patty told me once that Thibault had to start working when he was three years old, and he couldn't go to school except at night. Compared to his upbringing, you have lived the life of a prince. Perhaps he takes his anger out on you so that he can feel better about himself."

"Well, my upbringing sure doesn't mean a thing out here," Shermy replied dryly, sweeping a hand to indicate the deep, muddy trench cut into French soil in which they stood. "Rich folks can be taken out by a single bullet just as easily as poor folks."

Pig-Pen chuckled. "I think it would take more than a bullet to knock out ol' Thibault."

Yet as unpleasant and disagreeable as Thibault could be, Shermy did not wish him any real ill. The young soldier was still a fellow Birchwooder, after all, and he was part of Shermy's battalion, and that was enough for Shermy to remain civil toward him. When he learned that Thibault was among the missing, he and his fellow stretcher-bearer, Roy, had risked several trips into no man's land under enfilading bullets to search for the kid, often sloshing their way through cold mud that went up to their knees. With the help of Spike, the skinny, taciturn beagle who sniffed out wounded for the stretcher bearers, they had found and rescued doughboys hiding in shell holes and behind mounds of dirt and rock, but so far Thibault had not left even a trace behind.

With the sun rising high over the battlefield now, they could not chance any further trips, lest they become target practice for the Germans in the machine-gun nest on the far hill. Still, Shermy did not want to give up completely. He, Roy and Pig-Pen went to their second lieutenant for permission to man the look-out post, which was hidden inside a fake tree mounted at the edge of the trench, and they had already spent two hours taking turns.

"I should think a normal wounded soldier would wait until nightfall before making a move," said Roy as he and Shermy sat on sandbags while Pig-Pen balanced on the ladder inside the tree to peek through the slit, "but Thibault is the type of guy who would risk crawling back in full view of the enemy, just to prove to the Germans that they could not stop him."

Roy did not think Thibault was dead. The two had played on the same baseball team as boys, and Roy said Thibault was far too stubborn to die in the middle of a war.

"He would never give the Germans the satisfaction of saying they killed him," he declared with a sardonic smile.

Shermy agreed, but there were other dangers besides the enemy. The night had been a cold one, with temperatures leaving them all shivering in the dugouts. Disease lurked where rotting bodies laid strewn across the pockmarked landscape, and dehydration alone could be a deadly foe. Thibault would have to battle all these to get out of no man’s land alive, and yet no challenge would find an easy victim in that kid.

Up and down the trenches, doughboys in khaki leaned against boards mounted against the dirt walls or sat where they could to write letters, to clean their rifles, to smoke, or to sleep in the cold air, if they could not make it all the way to the dugouts. Some were put on repair work to hammer up loose boards and parapets. That was typically how daylight hours went in the trenches. Unless a battle was underway — with clouds of mustard gas and a creeping barrage of shell fire to hide the advancing army's movement — the biggest challenge during daylight hours was to find a way to occupy one's time.

Of the three friends keeping a lookout for Thibault, only Pig-Pen had any weapons to clean, and his rifle and pistol were the most pristine in the whole battalion. When they had been in basic training together, Shermy had half-expected Pig-Pen to be discharged within the first few weeks since the US Army expected their soldiers to keep their uniforms and their weapons clean as much as possible, and Pig-Pen could not step out of a bathtub without every dry speck of dust in the area leaping up to embrace him and enveloping him in a cloud of dirt. Yet Pig-Pen's ability to attract dirt had been the secret to his success. He needed only to pass his hand over a piece of equipment, and every unclean atom found its way into his palm, so his weapons were always spotless (his uniform, not so much, but that did not matter out here in the trenches where mud covered just about everything).

Shermy and Roy, on the other hand, carried nothing with which to defend themselves. As stretcher bearers, they took only a canteen each and some bags of medical supplies over the top, ready to help men rather than hurt them. Roy belonged to a church that had been against the war, so he had petitioned for an exemption as a conscientious objector, but his request had been denied. He had then applied to be a stretcher bearer so that he could follow his conscience by maintaining a non-combative role. For Shermy, at the start of his military career, he had harbored dreams of glorious battles and coming home a decorated officer, but before he had even completed the first week of the six-month-long basic training, he had realized he had no stomach for killing men, even Germans.

Well, strictly speaking, he was himself German — at least, one of his ancestors, Hans Plepler, had come from Germany, way back when America had been thirteen colonies. Hans had married a girl with an English surname, and their son had married a girl with an English surname, and down it went until Shermy's father had married a girl with an English surname. Shermy had been born with a German name, but he had no other connection to his German heritage. The only thing he knew about Germany was that hamburgers supposedly came from there. That was why Americans had been calling them "liberty sandwiches" lately, because that was how they could still feast on German foods without feeling unpatriotic (which seemed pretty hypocritical to him, but to say such would have gotten him labeled as pro-German). He used to be afraid someone in the army would recognize "Plepler" for its Germanic origins and send him off to an internment camp, but so far nobody had said anything. Maybe it helped that he looked like an Anglo-American rather than a German-American — that was what Ma always said anyway, but Shermy could not tell one kind from the other. He was an American through and through, and that was good enough for him (even if the rest of the country did have a differing opinion right then).

But even though he considered himself a faithful nephew of Uncle Sam, he found he did not really like the idea of killing Germans. For that matter, he did not want to kill Austrians or anyone else who might be behind enemy lines. That was what he had discovered when he had been told to stab his bayonet into a limp training dummy and when he had been told to throw a grenade, which had shook the ground when it had exploded and promised an unpleasant surprise to anyone caught within its blast range. But he was in the army now, and he could not very well tell his commanding officer, "Sorry, sir, but this really doesn't seem like something I want to do. Maybe you could send me home on the next train?"

Fortunately, he had been put in the same barracks as Roy and had learned about him becoming a stretcher bearer, which required weeks of training. Shermy quietly applied, and he had no short amount of relief when he had been accepted.

Up in the fake tree Pig-Pen checked his wristlet watch and stepped down the ladder, and Roy stood up to take his turn inside the fake tree. The former stretched and twisted himself around before he plopped down beside Shermy, sending out wreaths of billowing dirt. While Shermy turned his head to avoid breathing the dust in, Pig-Pen leaned back against the trench wall and took a deep sniff.

"The Red Cross is cooking lunch behind the lines," he declared, licking his lips. "Makes me wish we were already on leave."

Shermy breathed in the air, and his stomach rumbled at the aroma of savory soup mingling with the scents that usually filled the trenches. The American Red Cross dugout near the railroad station offered hot meals to soldiers for seventy-five centimes, and the Salvation Army people came along to the camps and handed out donuts. Sometimes when the wind blew just right, the smell of soups, bread and coffee reached the front trenches, and it gave the men something to think about besides the mud and cold and boredom and sounds of dying soldiers out in no man's land waiting for nightfall when stretch bearers would be free to go hunt for them, assuming they were still alive by then.

Shermy closed his eyes, pretending he was there in the quaint little dugout. The Red Cross and Salvation Army workers were all nice, especially the ladies. Most were about twenty-five, the kind who fawned over a nineteen-year-old stretcher bearer like a kid brother. He could not vote, but he could fight, and so they showed their appreciation of his service with soup and donuts, and they smelled better than the trenches, and sometimes Shermy hung around even when he was not hungry just so that he could hear them say nice things to him.

"Still a while before we get our own chow though," Roy said wistfully from the look-out post.

Shermy looked up at him with a lopsided smile. "Well, if it takes too long, I might have to go A.W.O.L. and sneak down to the Red Cross."

Pig-Pen laughed and slapped his back, sending up another dust cloud. "Big talk, small man, Sherm."

"For a bowl of soup, I might do anything," Shermy answered, taking the ribbing in stride.

"Didn't Esau say something like that just before he sold his birthright?" quipped Roy.

"You'll have to ask Linus Van Pelt. He was always the theologian of our group," grinned Shermy.

They were no less concerned for Thibault than before, but this was how they kept themselves from snapping under the weight of everything. A joke here. A laugh there. Thinking of something else when it was not their turn at the look-out.

Pig-Pen linked his dusty hands behind his dusty, helmeted head and let out a wistful sigh.

"Sometimes, when I smell that good food, it makes me wish that my Patty was a Red Cross canteen worker instead of a nurse, so we could see each other more often," he declared. "Ah, but then I remind myself that she's miles away from the fighting, and she's saving men's lives. That's where I want her to be right now, 'til we can both be on leave in Paris."

Patty Swanson was Pig-Pen's fiancée and childhood sweetheart. At the big going-away party that some of the neighborhood ladies had thrown for the young men who had enlisted, the two of them had announced their engagement, and they had been exchanging letters ever since. Patty, who had always been impulsive, had joined the Red Cross as a nurse, "conveniently" leaving out the little detail that she was not yet twenty-five, and she had been assigned to a hospital some miles away from the front.

Two other girls from their neighborhood were also nurses there: Lucy Van Pelt, the older sister of their theologian, and Violet Gray.

Sometimes Shermy thought a lot about Violet Gray.

Usually, he didn't.

Or he tried not to, anyway, but Violet was Patty's best friend, and since Patty wrote to Pig-Pen about what went on at the hospital, Shermy inevitably heard all the latest news about Violet Gray. How she had assisted in surgery for eight hours straight, and how she and other Red Cross girls attended dances for the soldiers to keep their morale up even when none of the ladies felt like dancing, and how she sat at the bedside of sick men and boys, some of whom called for their mothers in the night.

But he tried not to think of Violet when he could help it. When his mind turned to her too much, he pulled out his collections of letters that he had received while at the front, and he focused instead on a different girl.

An incredibly different girl.

He checked his wristlet watch.

"The post should be here soon," he announced, "if there hasn't been a delay."

"There usually is," said Roy, still gazing out at the mostly quiet battlefield, "but if any of your war godmothers send you something nice to eat, make sure you share with us."

"I make no promises," answered Shermy, adjusting his helmet so that he could lean back against the trench wall comfortably, but though he tried to feign nonchalance, his eyes kept darting in the direction that the corporal who handed out mail usually came.

Many soldiers had war godmothers, usually ladies who wrote to them platonically and sent care packages filled with homemade clothes and sometimes food, if they could spare extra comforts to send to the front. Shermy had six war godmothers currently, one French, three Americans, a Scotswoman, and an Englishwoman, most of them about his mother's age, some older. Only one of them was young, and she was his favorite.

Roy was half-right. There was a delay, but only by a few minutes this time. Once the corporal's voice came down the line announcing, "Mail," Shermy was on his feet with the rest of the soldiers.

"Get mine too, if there's any," Pig-Pen called after him.

A letter for Spille, and two for Carlson, and a package for Trotter — there was one for Thibault, but the corporal remembered he had not returned with the rest after yesterday's raid, so the corporal tucked that to the back of the stack — and then Mendelson, then Littlejohn, then Zaslove, then Timmins.

Then: "Plepler."

Shermy accepted his stack of letters greedily, and his heart leapt to see "F. Rich" on the top envelope. It took all his will power not to tear the envelope to pieces to get at the letter. He accepted a letter for Pig-Pen — he could tell it came from his parents instead of Patty because the envelope was covered in dirt streaks — and he returned to his spot on the sandbags. He borrowed Pig-Pen's trench knife and carefully cut the side of the top envelope before he shook out the contents.

A military censor from the Signal Corp had already attacked two or three lines with black ink, but the rest was all for Shermy to enjoy. From the first cheerful word, the whole letter radiated with that friendly, conversationable, and charming way which Frieda Rich had always possessed. After a cheery greeting, she offered brief answers to the questions Shermy had sent in his last letter, then she plunged into details about her life in Paris. She shared the funny thing that Major So-and-so had said when she had been at the switchboard the other day, and she told Shermy how the ladies at the Y.W.C.A. had helped her and Marcie Carlin to find new lodgings after a small fire had broken out in the house where some of the "Hello Girls" had been staying. (She assured Shermy that she was not the least bit hurt, but the smoke had not been good for her naturally curly hair.)

Then the letter switched to her thoughts of home. She missed her cat, Faron, and hoped her mother remembered to give him a bit of fish every week. She suspected he still had a nice winter coat, but she hoped he did not get outside too much because she did not like the idea of her poor little dear shivering in the snow (for it sometimes snowed this late in the year in Birchwood). Then she fondly reminisced about how they would all play together in cold weather as children, and how Shermy, Charlie Brown and the other boys would play hockey on the frozen pond while the girls practiced ice skating. Oh, she hoped that she and Shermy might go ice skating the next time he was on leave, but of course it might not be cold enough by then. Fortunately, one of the Y.M.C.A. Huts had an indoor skating rink for soldiers. She would have to see if they allowed the Signal Corp women to roller-skate there as well.

Shermy's lips stretched wider and wider until a dull ache arose around the corners of his mouth, but his smile receded not a width. He feasted upon her vivacious letter, vividly picturing her shining face as though she spoke each word to him in person. Frieda had long been a part of his group of neighborhood friends, but in his youth he had privately regarded her as a silly, if well-meaning, girl who talked too much. It had taken a full-on war for him to realize her winsome qualities, and he asked himself yet again why he had not noticed her back when they were both safely living in Birchwood.

…And yet again, he could answer that in a single word.

Violet.

Throughout his boyhood he had loved Violet Gray, and he thought Violet Gray loved him. Maybe she had a few moments of caprice, and maybe sometimes he had thoughtlessly aggravated her until she ordered him out of her house, but he was also quite sure that they would be a perfect fit for each other.

So after his high-school graduation, he asked her to marry him.

And after his nineteenth birthday he asked her again.

Then, a few days before he had left for basic training, he went so far as to lay his whole heart out before her. Didn't she know how much she meant to him? Didn't she see how perfect they were together? Her father had given Shermy his blessing, so what was stopping them from proceeding? Shermy had a little money put away that he had inherited from his grandfather. They could get married right before he left for the army, and he would send part of his pay home to her. He would be brave and go above and beyond the call of duty, and in no time he would be promoted, which would mean an increased in pay. Then he would come home a decorated hero, and they would live in style for the rest of their days.

Violet looked at him calmly, almost like a mother listening to a little boy ramble about his castles in the sky, and she said, "Shermy, you would never be able to go above and beyond the call of duty. You are just too ordinary."

Ordinary.

The whole sum of his existence — the entirety of Violet's regard for him — expressed in a single word.

He had known he was an ordinary man. He had suspected as much anyway. As a child he had always liked the sort of things ordinary boys liked, such as cowboys and toy trains and baseball. He had modest success in school, and in the Christmas plays he had always played a shepherd. He had no remarkable qualities or even remarkable flaws for that matter. He did not drag around a blanket or devote himself to studying Beethoven. He did not draw dirt to him like a magnet or have a number for a name. He was not a beagle who believed he rode with Teddy Roosevelt up San Juan Hill, and he was certainly not a Charlie Brown and all that implied.

He was ordinary. And he had always hoped that if he absolutely had to be ordinary, then it would give him an advantage in life. Ordinary men were reliable, didn't smoke or drink, didn't go out of their way to hurt anybody, and few people had a reason to hurt them. Ordinary men found ordinary jobs that always put food on the table, and while they might never live in a Rockefeller mansion, they sure never wound up in the poorhouse. An ordinary man was stable and could support a wife.

But girls like Violet Gray did not marry ordinary men.

He could still hear the patient way she had said it — that was probably the worst of it. She was patient with him. He was ready to lay the whole world before her, and she was patient with him.

"Well, do you love me, or don't you?" he demanded in a moment of heartbreak.

She was honest and said she did not know.

Which was just the same as saying no.

And so he went off to basic training and tried to stop thinking about her.

It did not help that Pig-Pen had announced his engagement to Patty Swanson before they left home, or that Patty wrote a lot about Violet in her letters to Pig-Pen, so Shermy wound up hearing quite a lot about Violet.

But he had almost a full year to heal now. And now Frieda's letter was in his lap, and Frieda's warm personality radiated from each pen stroke, and Frieda was pleased to make him smile. He wondered if she had always known he was ordinary, but maybe, if she did know, she would not hold that against him.

She was only his war godmother right then, but she was a link to his past, and maybe — when things settled down, and life was normal again — maybe she would be a link to his future.

If she did not mind an ordinary man.

"Shermy, your turn."

Standing, Shermy stuffed the letter back into the envelope and placed it securely in pocket, then climbed his way up the ladder while Roy collapsed against the trench wall to rest his eyes. After getting himself situated, Shermy peered through the opening, scanning the desolate mass in front of him. Beyond the rows of barbed wire, blades of stubborn grass, pale from the winter months, sprinkled the mounds of mud and rubble, and yawning cavities left by shellfire left a grim, slipshod pattern in what had allegedly been a flat field before the war, but Shermy paid little attention to these details. He was interested only in signs of human life: movement where there should have been none, a face peeking out of a shell hole, a flag waving over a crest, or…

He straightened on the ladder, gasping.

There — in the shadow of one of the mounds — what might have been a human in a M1917 helmet was dragging itself toward their line, a painful bit at a time.

"Hey! Hey!" he cried. "I think I see something!"

At once the other two were on their feet and crowding around the bottom of the ladder.

"Is it Thibault?" Pig-Pen called up to him.

"Not sure," answered Shermy, squinting, "but he's definitely an American."

With all the dirt and mud, it was nearly impossible to tell anything further, but as a stretcher bearer it was Shermy's duty to help the poor soul anyway. He was just about to climb down the ladder when the mysterious soldier raised his head, and Shermy recognized the unmistakable scowl on the young man's face.

"It is him!" he cried, and he grabbed the sides of the ladder to slide down. "Let's go!"

A tense fifteen minutes followed. Pig-Pen walked up and down the trench until he had worked up a good dirt cloud that set the men coughing and reaching for their gas masks. Pig-Pen, who could work up a cloud of dust in a literal rainstorm, found no trouble getting every available dry speck from the mud and dirt walls. Once the cloud encompassed his body, he pulled himself up over the sandbag parapet and started crawling on his belly over no man's land.

The cloud wafted up high above his head, as tall as a man.

Shouts in German rang out on the other side of the war-scarred land. The sight of a cloud on the battlefield probably looked like the Americans were launching some sort of new gas attack. In seconds an enfilade of machine fire followed, but Pig-Pen continued crawling forward, ignoring the bullets whizzing above him, and the dirt cloud kept rising higher and higher, obscuring him further from sight.

Shermy waited with grim determination until he heard Pig-Pen's whistle, and then he signaled for Spike, the beagle, to go first to lead the way with his nose. Shermy followed as the front-facing stretcher bearer, crouching low with a hold on the blood-stained stretcher, and Roy brought up the rear. The two men had to wear gas masks to keep the dirt out of their eyes and lungs, and poor Spike made several coughs as he navigated them forward by scent, but at last they found Pig-Pen beside Thibault.

"Took you long enough," Thibault grumbled when he saw them, but none of them took offense.

They eased him on the stretcher, and Shermy administered as much first-aid as he could manage: a drink from his canteen, a morphine tablet under the tongue, a shot of anti-tetanus serum, some iodine and a bandage on a nasty cut that Thibault had not been able to treat himself.

"Ha! It doesn't hurt a bit!" Thibault sneered right before he sucked air sharply through his clenched teeth.

Then Pig-Pen waved for them to start back, signaling he would maintain the dirt-cloud cover until they returned to the trench.

But this was the most dangerous part of all. Shermy, now the rear stretcher when they turned to go, had to stand up with his back facing the machine guns and only a cloud of dust to shield him. More fire blasted, trying to penetrate the dirt cloud, and one bullet grazed Shermy's ear, and one ricocheted off his helmet at just the right angle to avoid a lethal shot.

But then they all were back over the parapet, and a medic rushed forward to look over Thibault. Then Thibault was taken down to the aid station and turned over to the medical officers and Red Cross nurses there.

Word got back to their commanding officer, and the second lieutenant said he would put in a recommendation for Pig-Pen to be promoted to corporal. They needed N.C.O.'s badly with how many men were falling, and even a trench digger could be considered if he proved himself worthy of the rank.

The second lieutenant congratulated Shermy and Roy for their bravery, but he said nothing about promoting them. After all, they had been ordinary stretch bearers doing exactly what was expected of them.

But Shermy discovered he did not mind.

He had performed his work exactly as was expected of him, from braving no man's land to administering first aid, and he returned to the trench with no evidence of his endeavor except for a slightly bleeding ear, a damaged helmet and some of the dirt from Pig-Pen’s dust cloud.

And because of his ordinary actions, a man was still alive.

And yet, if an ordinary man could behave in an ordinary way, even with death at his back and bullets flying around his head, then wasn't he more admirable than the so-called remarkable men who would have lost their nerve?

If an ordinary person managed to stay ordinary when he was in the deadliest region of a war, then didn't that make him, essentially, extra-ordinary?

Later that night, he wrote out his adventure in a letter to Frieda. He wrote it in a nonchalant way, as though he was not at all concerned or frightened. It was really an ordinary letter.

But maybe Frieda would be impressed by an ordinary man who somehow managed to be extra-ordinary.

THE END