Chapter One: Larry Born of Earth

I was once a princess of Alfheim, but before that I was Larry Born, so perhaps I should tell you about him first.

I was born on a little farm outside of Sioux City on March 4th, 1889, the day Benjamin Harrison was sworn into office. Not America's greatest President, nor the worst. I don't attribute anything remarkable to that factoid - that's just the day it was. March 4th was an unusually hot day, seventy-three degrees by my paw's livestock thermometer, and the heat melted so much snow that the Missouri River flooded and washed the bridge into Sioux City away. That being the case, Doc Boyd (who was a veterinary doctor and not a human doctor) delivered me in a barn just like they say Jesus was. He said he'd never done a birthing in a house before, so my maw had him do it in the barn so he'd do it right. I assume they scrubbed everything down pretty well before and after. I don't attribute anything remarkable to this factoid, either - that's just how it happened.

On February 15, 1898 USS Maine exploded in a big goddamn fireball outside of Havana Harbor. They say the Spanish were to blame, and most folks believed it. I'll bet not one in a thousand folks had ever heard of USS Maine before that, but they sure got riled up about it, and a lot of men volunteered to fight the bastards who blew it up, including my paw at the ripe old age of 38. I think he just wanted an excuse to leave the farm for a while, and he sure did - he never returned to Green Haven, Nebraska again. Only about 2,400 Americans died, most of them from disease, and one of those was my paw. He died of yellow fever in a field hospital outside of San Juan on August 13, 1898, the same day the United States and Spain signed the armistice.

It was hard times for the Born clan after that, so I lived at the Boyd farm for a while. Their farm was only a twenty minute walk from ours - the farm of Dan Boyd, the fifth son of Doc Boyd, who'd delivered me in a barn on a warm March afternoon. I was fine with living on the Boyd farm. Dan's second son, Ben, was about my age, born on November 2nd, 1889, the very day that South Dakota was admitted to the Union. He and I were peas in a pod, as inseparable as twin brothers. Wherever he went, I'd follow, and vice-versa. Usually, that meant learning farm work and farm equipment from Dan Boyd and animal husbandry when Doc would come by to check on the animals. But when we had enough money saved up, Ben and I would ride into Sioux City to visit the brand-new soda fountain, which was about the only place you could get a cold drink on a hot day, and talk to girls.

"When I'm a man, I'm going to marry a Sioux City girl," Ben was fond of saying. It was common knowledge that the girls in Sioux City were prettier than any others for miles and miles around. I suspect that this was only on account of there being more of them - last I checked, Green Haven, Nebraska had a population of 112.

"Good luck," I'd say. "A Sioux City girl is going to expect that you can buy her a soda every day." To a farm boy who made two bits a week for farm chores, that was quite an ask.

But Ben did marry a Sioux City girl, chubby, dark-haired Helen Rose, whose father owned the Rose Soda Deluxe, so she didn't need him to buy her sodas, though she probably drank too many of them. She was a nice girl and Ben was happy, so I was happy. While Ben and Helen were off on their honeymoon in the Kansas City Regal (ooh la la!), my maw fell ill, and so I went back to the Born farm to manage things - at twenty, I knew twice what I needed to know to manage forty acres of mixed-use farm. The next year, I married Abigail. She'd just stopped by for a place to room and board for a while in exchange for doing chores, but she got along with maw and she tolerated my unusual moods, especially my starry-eyed plans for the place:

"If we dig another well here, we'll be able to pipe the water to the west field, and with the profits from that, we'll be able to buy the ten acres next to it from York Henderson, who doesn't even use that field for squat, on account of it being on the wrong side of the hill."

And Abigail would laugh and, more often than not, toss one of my books at me - books on agriculture, books on philosophy and history, or the pulpy cowboy stories that I'd never quite gotten over. I never set a foot in a classroom after eighth grade, but I loved to read. "You just want a big ranch that you can ride around like Wyatt Earp," she'd say, and she wasn't entirely wrong.

I needn't have worried about buying York Henderson's ten acres - the Born farm was deeply underwater as it was and in imminent danger of being seized by the bank. Our debts had been building up for years and years since paw's death, but maw had kept the secret very well. She'd tell me that she paid for this or that with her widow's pension - which turned out to be about six dollars a week. As much as it pained her, she'd hobble out to the mailbox and stash the 'past due' notices away until she could burn them. She didn't want Abigail and me to worry about it - not with another little one along the way.

I found out we were losing the farm on October 12, 1917, two days before I took the railroad to Camp Funston, Kansas for the war.

"You're a fool and a crone," I said to my maw. She was a miserable wreck over it, but I didn't care. And that was the last thing I ever said to her.

"If they take the farm, you and the children can stay with Helen," I said to Abigail, and I kissed her and I kissed her belly. She was six months pregnant with William, our third child. I kissed her again and whispered how much I loved her and promised to telephone - which turned out to be just about impossible from Camp Funston. Those were the last words I ever shared with her in person.

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

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Four months later, they shipped Ben and me off to Liverpool with the Nebraska 909th, final destination: Northern France. On account of my quick wits, I was a corporal, whereas Ben was a buck private - he insisted that this was patently unfair, since he was set to inherit a modestly profitable soda fountain, whereas I was about to lose the family farm. It hurt a bit when he said it, but he said it in jest.

"They haven't taken it yet, on account of my being off to war."

"But they'll take it when you get back, right?"

I shrugged. "Maybe. Got a job for me at the fountain?"

Ben slapped my back. "Depends on how fast you can blow bubbles."

We were along a little strip of river, the Oise River, I think, not far from the town of Compeigne. It was a quaint little place compared to Paris, which we'd been in back in January, but probably not a whole hell of a lot smaller than Sioux City. We'd been fighting up and down the front for months, attached to a French division and mostly for engineering support - three engineering companies and our infantry company. The big German push was happening further to the southeast, but they were making feints all along the line further north to keep us from concentrating more men in the south where they were trying to push through.

A group of British tanks chugged away behind us, noisy smoke-belching machines that left ankle-destroying tracks in the ground and were just about useless when the rain turned everything into a sodden mess. They were going to the 'real' fighting while we trenched in and got shouted at by officers for not keeping low. But the krauts were barely shooting at the front lines, let alone where we were another four hundred yards back, so we ignored them.

"I always wanted to see France," Ben said. He cut his last cigarette in half and shared it with me. "For the butter you gave me yesterday."

"Much obliged," I said. "If you ask me, there's too much France to see, and too much of it is mud and cratered-out battlefields."

"True. Compeigne seemed nice enough."

"Disagree," I said.

Ben laughed. He had a little gap between his front teeth that made a little whistling sound when he had full-on belly laughs. Apparently, it drove Helen wild. "You're just sore because of how that Belgian whore cheated you out of five francs."

"I'm sore because I was still getting over having Jasper Vaughan's brains dribbling down my face, and I settled in for a bath and a fuck and that bitch made off with, yes, five francs and my good cigarette tin, which is why I have to bum smokes off of your ass."

"Poor Vaughan." Ben lowered his head.

In reality, neither of us was too sorry that. After pissing himself during the fourth offensive, when we found ourselves getting shelled outside of some little farm village, First Lieutenant Jasper Vaughan had wandered out into a poppy field the next night. I'd spotted him while I was taking a piss and was about five feet behind him and two seconds away from asking if he was alright when he shot himself in the head. Nobody could say quite why he did it, and nobody was exactly sorry to see him go. He'd been an entitled bastard, thought himself too good for war, and gave orders about as clearly as a Van Gogh. It had been up to me to see us out of the shit and back to the trenches. We lost three men and another six were out of the war from their injuries. Nine out of forty-six soldiers lost. But, somehow, I don't think that was what led the lieutenant to offing himself. That had been a week and a half ago, and they still hadn't sent us a new lieutenant.

While we waited, watching the faraway flickers of gunfire and trying to enjoy the cool breeze, a retinue walked up to us. A retinue - that's what I called it when a VIP, usually a high-ranking officer, walked around with his coterie of little toadies. Junior officers, decorated master sergeants, bureaucrats, and the like. You didn't tend to see too many of those so close to the front lines, but that's not to say it never happened. This one was a colonel, an American… I hadn't even known we had any American colonels at this part of the front. But this one sure was, and he headed toward us after some mumbled discussion with the retinue. I tossed the stub of my cigarette aside and snapped to attention.

"Is one of you Staff Sergeant Lawrence Born?"

"Yes, sir, that's me."

"Good… very good. We were sorry to hear about Lieutenant Vaughan, but the war goes on. You know how it is."

"We do, sir," Ben said.

The colonel nodded. "I've read the report of your brave actions rescuing the platoon from enemy fire after the lieutenant… had his episode. It says here you captured a machine gun post and routed a whole platoon of krauts. Any idea how many you got?"

"Just one or two, sir… they were smart enough to run."

"Well… one or two fewer to worry about down the line, isn't that right? I have here a field commission and an order from General Gouraud for a mission. A field commission - that's very rare, but I hear that, beyond heroics, you've been essentially running the platoon for months. Is that right?"

"Um… I don't want to speak ill…"

The colonel adjusted his spectacles and sighed. "I'm not going to write back to the lieutenant's mother to bad-mouth him. Do you want the commission or not?"

"Yes, sir. It's been mostly me. Or Ben and me." I nudged Ben.

"Well I'm sure you'll need a new staff sergeant. Congratulations, boys."

There was a two-minute ceremony, a paper to sign, and the colonel left us with Lieutenant Miller - Second Lieutenant Miller, who was suddenly a fellow officer rather than a superior. I didn't yet have an officer's uniform - it would take a week or more to get one sent - but they had pins and a helmet for me. And, I was very certain to clarify, Abigail would get the pension of an officer's wife if I died, because it wasn't a safe mission they needed us for.

"The 33rd engineers advanced to shore up the fortifications near Noyan before the German feints started two days ago. They've dug in and are safe because the enemy is currently situated on the other side of the river. However, our aerial reconnaissance shows that the Germans have completed a bridge here and are close to completing another here." The lieutenant indicated two points to either side of the 33rd's location. "Your job is to advance to their location and extract them with their ordinance before the Germans can capture them or worse."

"What's their ordinance?" I asked.

"It's confidential and won't affect your mission. The Germans mustn't know about it, though, so the less you know the better. Any other questions?"

I shook my head, but Ben had a question: "Have you got a few cigarettes I can bum?"