was still a thin, ashy residue of outrage left in him. He walked over to one of the old duffers and gave him a five-dollar bill to borrow his soapbox.
The concept for it was one he had had quite a while. It had occurred to him first on Guadalcanal, last year, lying up under a mortar barrage. He had developed and expanded it later, playing with it at times when he sat alone drinking, or watched from a ridge with the company commander as their overheated, mud-breathing platoons tried to advance. He had summarized the whole concept in the slogan he worked out for it. “Soldiers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your guns!” That was what he began to shout from the soapbox.
A crowd of amused servicemen formed fairly quickly. At first they were laughing, and cheering him on, but some began to get disturbed as he went on. “Hey, you,” he singled out a private. “What are you making a month? Thirty-eight bucks, right? What do you think you’d be making if we were organized, hah? No, don’t laugh. Think about it. What couldn’t we do, if we were organized? Every country needs us, right? Everybody else has unions, why not us? Jap soldiers, German soldiers, English soldiers, US soldiers. Russians, French, Australians. All united. We’d corner the market. Hell, we could take the explosive charges out of the mortar shells and artillery! Put white flour in them instead! How would that be?” A couple of derogatory whistles came from the back of the crowd. “You don’t like that? Why not? No more casualties!” Winch bellowed in his command voice. “You simply walk to the rear. We could have arbitration committees to decide where the battles would be held.” He spread his arms. “No more jungles, right? Who’d pick a jungle?”
“What are you? A Communist?” a voice yelled from the rear. “They’re our enemies.”
“Me? Hell, no. Look at me. I’m a first sergeant. Look at my stripes,” Winch yelled. (Arlette had wanted to sew them on, and he had let her; she was so proud of them.) “But I’m more like a Jap first sergeant or a German first sergeant than I am like these civilian sons of bitches.” That brought cheers. “And you! You know what I make a month? You could be making that as a private, if we were organized.”
He saw the MPs coming through the crowd, pushing their way up toward him, and drew himself up to full height. “Soldiers of the world! Unite! I’ll be back. Same time tomorrow.” And jumped down off the box and fled.
Whistles and good-natured cheers and a lot of handclapping followed him.
It was only fifty yards to get into the narrow streets where he could hide and sneak off, but by the time he had run it he was astonished to find he was gasping for breath and had to stop. In an alley. He simply could not go on. A violent fit of coughing seized him. Fortunately, a number of the GIs had gotten themselves in front of the MPs, and impeded their progress. In his alley Winch was coughing up strings of foamy white mucus. But after a few minutes he was able to make it around a corner and into a bar and order a drink. The drink seemed to help.
He made it back to the hotel. But then he thought he wasn’t going to make it up the three flights of stairs to their third-floor room. He had to stop and gasp at every landing.
When he got to the door, Arlette was there looking horrified, and the Chinese food was in cardboard containers on the table. All piping hot and waiting.
“Good God, I could hear you all the way up the stairs. What’s happened to you?”
“Nothing,” Winch said hollowly, and leaned on the door and stared at her. “A little touch of bronchitis. Nothing a good Chinese dinner, a few drinks and a fine fuck won’t cure. Don’t worry about it.”
And, indeed, after he sat in a chair and rested awhile, he felt much better. They ate the Chinese dinner, had the drinks, and accomplished the sexual assignation. Winch felt fine. The whole attack, which seemed to have been brought on by the fifty-yard run out of the Square, seemed to have disappeared. But then in the night another coughing fit seized him, and he woke up unable to breathe. No matter how hard he pulled, he could not seem