Page 52 of Two Wars and a Wedding

“Sure,” said Thede slowly. “But . . .”

“Good.” Paul stalked toward the tent he’d shared with Holt. “I’ll just get my things.”

“Paul . . .” Holt began, but the other man didn’t hear him.

Miller patted him tentatively on the shoulder. “Sorry about that. Didn’t mean to make trouble. Paul’ll simmer down.”

“Uh-huh,” Holt said, and sat down abruptly on the turf.

He must have passed out that way, because he woke up lying next to the remains of the campfire, soaked through with rain or sweat, it could have been either, with a filthy mouth and a filthy head and a vague feeling of dread in the pit of his stomach, the sort of dread he hadn’t felt since leaving his father’s house for Harvard. Waking up in the sure knowledge that something bad was going to happen, and, somehow, you’d brought it on yourself.

But this wasn’t Springfield. It was Cuba. Cuba and his head ached like the devil and someone was blowing reveille and the camp was a flurry of people packing up and bolting down what breakfast they could, because everyone was on the move, and Holt was going to have to move with them even if his head and his leg and his guts didn’t agree.

They moved their camp to the banks of the Aguadores River. There was a curious unreality about it, their days on the banks of the Aguadores, this strange pause in time, knowing a battle was coming, but not sure when it would come. There were times when Holt felt that they’d fallen into the pages of Robinson Crusoe, building lean-tos out of palm fronds, foraging for food. The men experimented with cookery, boiling mangoes to make a slush rather like applesauce, soaking hardtack to create a sort of gruel that could be fried up with bacon grease into something vaguely edible.

When they weren’t trying to fill their bellies, the men wrote home, some scratching out messages on empty boxes of quinine pills for want of paper.

Holt didn’t know who he would write to even if he had the paper. His father? His sisters? All the friends of his Harvard days had melted away along with his real name; since then he hadn’t stayed anywhere long enough to attach any more than the most casual acquaintance.

Except Paul.

Not that they’d been friends, really. You couldn’t befriend a fiction, could you? And that was what Paul saw in him, the imaginary person the papers had created, not the person he was, whatever that might be. Holt wasn’t sure anymore. Sometimes he felt like a paper doll, a flat facsimile of humanity, just the outline of a man.

But it was hard not to glance over at the campfire where Paul sat with Miller and the other Yale men, their voices loud as the rum flowed, listening to their camaraderie and feeling an aching emptiness at the lack of it.

Mostly, he just ached. Rain always brought on his headaches and it rained here daily, a hard downpour that lasted a few hours and then evaporated. Some men traded belongings for rum; Holt traded for coffee rations, trying to dull the growing throbbing in his skull. The beans were green and hard. Holt roasted them over his campfire and made a makeshift mortar and pestle out of a dried coconut and a stick. That earned him a brief modicum of popularity. But not with Paul.

He should—not apologize. Explain, that was it. But Holt couldn’t muster the energy. Even with the coffee, he felt slow and logy. In the mornings the men burned in a fierce heat worse than Florida; in the afternoons, the rains came and froze them. They hadn’t changed their clothes for weeks; the fabric was stiff with sweat and dirt. Holt suspected he might have a tinge of fever. But even if he didn’t, so what? What was he supposed to explain? Holt couldn’t even explain it to himself.

Impersonating someone you’re not, Paul had accused him.

They were all impersonating someone. The millionaires’ sons were playing soldier. The cowboys were playing the Wild West as imagined by Buffalo Bill, coming soon to Madison Square Garden. And Colonel Roosevelt—well, he was playing himself, and doing it to the hilt. Possibly with a touch of Pericles thrown in, and maybe just a dash of Alexander the Great, if Alexander the Great wore spectacles.

As for Holt . . . he’d been so many people. He wasn’t sure which one he was anymore. A scared boy in an opulent house. A law student convinced he could right the world. An angry young man boarding a train headed West.

And now . . . he’d thought he was here to help, to do something good. To atone. That, somehow, he could set the balance right. And go home.

Holt wasn’t sure where that thought had come from. He didn’t have a home. But the yearning was there all the same. To be a person again, have a place, a purpose. Not the home he grew up in—but someplace. Someplace that was his.

It was a moot point. Up on the hills, the Spaniards waited. The scouts reported that they could see the tops of their sombreros popping up and down as they dug trenches, fortifying their positions.

“You’d think they’d have us do something about that,” said Holt to Paul, nodding in the direction of the new Spanish fortifications. “With every trench they dig, the harder it will be. Assuming that’s where we’re headed.”

Paul glanced sideways at Holt but didn’t respond.

“Look.” It was early morning, but the ground was already steaming as the day’s heat burned off the evening damp. Holt wiped his face with his bandana. “I wasn’t trying to con you. I haven’t been that Harvard man for a long time. I suppose he’s still in there somewhere—but he’s a long way buried.”

Paul gave a stiff nod and turned away. But then he stopped, scowling back over his shoulder at Holt. “You could have just said, you know.”

Could he? Paul was gone before Holt could point out that he wouldn’t have thanked him for spoiling his illusions. Or maybe it was just that it had been easier to be that newspaper etching, flat and crisp, rather than too, too solid flesh that ached and bled and stumbled.

Holt tried not to stumble, but his left leg didn’t seem to want to hold him properly as the men lined up, ready to march. Wagons rumbled past, holding their precious Colt machine guns, but with no room for anything else. The men of the 1st Volunteer Cavalry could bring only what they could carry on their backs.

The column started and stopped and started again. The Camino Real was too narrow for more than ten men abreast, and the whole of Shafter’s army was trying to trudge their way through a road turned to sticking, sucking mud from a brief, hard rainstorm. Stop and start, stop and start. The jungle closed in around them, like something out of an Edgar Allan Poe story, pressing in on either side, the air so thick and oppressive that every breath was an effort. Stop and start, stop and start. Sitting, walking, sitting, walking. Men shared out their scant rations; they were marching empty, a skeleton army.

The light faded from dusk to dark, and still they walked, broken only by a pause for something like sleep in the deserted grounds of an older sugar plantation.

When reveille sounded, they choked down their breakfast as best they could, alone or in quiet groups, as they waited for orders. There was no singing, no loud conversations. There was no Ham Fish, amiably drunk. No “Bright College Years,” no glees. It was only the first of July, just a week since Las Guasimas, but there was almost no resemblance between the men, thin and tense, who hunched over their hardtack and the boisterous, laughing crew who had capered their way to the Spanish lines.