Harry Turtledove

Morrell pulled another horrible face. “Makes the war even more wonderful than the bombing raids and the poison gas and the machine guns, doesn't it?”

Rohde shrugged. “No doubt. You're the one who makes his living fighting it, though, you and the fellows like you on the other side. I just make mine patching up the ones you don't quite kill.”

“Thanks a lot, doc. I love you, too.”

Rodriguez remained dubious. Everybody who was an old-timer at this, that, or the other thing always went on and on about how tough things had been before all these new fellows came in. Talk was cheap. Talk was also commonly nonsense.

“If we can figure that out, how come the brass can’t?” Szczerbiakowicz asked.

“Beats me, Eyechart,” Sam said. “You want stuff to make sense all the time, why the hell’d you join the Navy?”

“How am I?”

“Except for being a damn fool for wanting to do this in the first place, you’re healthy as a horse,” Freedman answered. “But if they disqualified every damn fool in the Navy, they’d have twenty-seven men left, and how would they win the war then?”

He thought the army could get along without lieutenants much more easily than it could without sergeants. Lieutenants, no doubt, would disagree with him—but what the hell did lieutenants know? If they knew anything, they wouldn't have been lieutenants.

Moonlight had a way of letting you down when you needed it most.

They weren't entering a different country, but they were coming into a different world.

Nothing was worse than a battlefield. Nothing could be. He was convinced of that. The devil hadn't known how to run hell before he took a long look at a Great War battlefield.

And a pair of albatrosses glided along behind the Remembrance. They really did look almost big enough to land. He wondered what they thought of the great ship. Or were they too birdbrained to think at all?

But this was their home. Men came here only to fight. That being so, who really were the birdbrains here?

Morrell laughed out loud. There went one cliché, shot down like a dive bomber with a fighter on its tail.

“I know something you don’t know.”…

“Oh, yeah? What’s that?” Fishbein bristled at the very idea.

“I know you talk too goddamn much.”

He didn't feel like a knight in shining armor. He was filthy and fleabitten and probably lousy again. If they would have put him on a train and shipped him home, he wouldn't even have turned around to wave good-bye. He was here because the Army told him to be here and would shoot him if he bailed out, not because he thought God willed it. God was bound to have better things to do with His time.