The Grapple

by Harry Turtledove

  He knew before almost anyone else that the Confederate thrust from the east wasn’t going as well as the planners back in Richmond wished it were. As soon as the front just north of Chattanooga got its supply priority restored, he realized the Confederates either had an extravagant success and would soon swarm up from the south or had failed and would soon need to hold on for dear life here. The shipments of barbed wire and land mines said they wouldn’t be advancing.

  He sent out the supplies as front-line units shouted for them. In the meantime, he quietly swore under his breath. A generation earlier, he’d seen what a losing war looked like. Now he stared another one in the face. He hadn’t thought Jake Featherston would land the Confederacy in a mess like this. Who had? Surely Featherston himself hadn’t. And a whole fat lot of good that does anybody, Dover thought.

  Confederate gunboats came up the Tennessee River as far as Chattanooga and fired big shells at U.S. forces to the north. Then they turned around again and scooted south as fast as they could go, for U.S. airplanes struck at them whenever they got the chance. Land-based guns couldn’t be as big or move as fast as the ones the gunboats carried. But the boats had trouble moving fast enough to stay safe.

  Dover could cheer for them without worrying that their performance reflected on him. The C.S. Navy was responsible for keeping them in fuel, hardtack, and munitions. Some Navy commander had to flabble about that. Dover just hoped their shells blew plenty of damnyankees to hell and gone.

  His own worries were the usual sort: getting munitions and other supplies up from the rear and then making sure they reached the front. Keeping his dumps as close to the fighting as he could went a long way toward solving the second problem. The first was harder, especially since he had to deal with new sets of gatekeepers. The dumps in southern and western Tennessee that had nourished the Confederate armies were now withering themselves. Most of Dover’s shipments came up from Atlanta, and the quartermasters there had carved out a tidy little empire for themselves, one they didn’t care to disturb just because there was a war on.

  “Your demands are excessive,” a colonel safely behind the lines told Jerry Dover. “You can’t possibly be expending so many antiaircraft shells.”

  “No, huh?” Dover said. “What do you think I’m doing with ’em, pounding ’em up my ass?” Had that colonel in Atlanta been handy, Dover might have done some pounding with him.

  Even though he didn’t say it, that message must have got across. In frigid tones, his superior said, “You are insubordinate.”

  “Yes, sir,” Dover said proudly. “People keep telling me that. But the ones who do are always farther from the fighting than I am. The guys who really have to go out and shoot things at the Yankees, they like me fine. And you know what, sir? If I have to choose between them and you, I’ll take them any old time.”

  “Have a care how you speak to me.” The colonel in Atlanta sounded like a man on the verge of apoplexy. “You’d better have a care, by God. I can have you court-martialed like that—like that, I tell you.” He snapped his fingers.

  “Big fucking deal…sir.” Dover had heard such threats before. “If you do, they’ll kick my ass out of the Army. I’ll go to prison, where it’s safe, or I’ll go home to Augusta, where it’s safe. And I hope they ship you up here to take my place. It’d goddamn well serve you right. And if I don’t get those shells, my next telegram goes to Richmond, not to you.”

  “You can’t do that!” the colonel gabbled. “It violates the chain of command!”

  No doubt that would have impressed an officer who’d had proper training. It didn’t bother Jerry Dover one bit. “You think Jake Featherston will give a damn about the chain of command when he hears somebody isn’t doing his job and won’t do it? I think he’ll have you for breakfast…without salt.”

  He was bluffing. He didn’t think any telegram of his would reach the President of the CSA. No doubt the colonel down in Atlanta didn’t, either. But there was always that chance…. And if Featherston did descend in wrath on an obstructive colonel, that man would end up nothing but a smear on the bottom of his shoe.

  Dover got his antiaircraft shells. That meant the front got its antiaircraft shells. If he had enemies down in Atlanta, he didn’t give a damn.

  He camouflaged his supply dump as elaborately as he could. Netting and mottled tarps covered crates and boxes and stacks. Branches and uprooted saplings made the place next to invisible from the air. That wasn’t just Jerry Dover’s opinion. He sent up a Confederate artillery spotter in a light airplane to look the place over from above. The man said he had a devil of a time finding it. Dover felt proud.

  Proud, however, had nothing to do with anything. Dover was also paranoid. Half a mile from the concealed dump, he ordered a dummy depot built right out in the open. He made some token efforts at camouflaging it: the kinds of things a busy, not very bright, not very diligent officer would do so his superiors couldn’t come down on him for not doing anything, but nothing that would really keep enemy bombers from spotting the site.

  His men grumbled at the extra work. That ticked him off. “Look,” he said. “The name of the game is being able to hang on to our shit till we have to move it up to the front. If the damnyankees drop bombs on the wrong place, we’ve got a better chance of doing that. Or do you want the bastards to plaster us here?”

  Nobody said yes to that. He would have got rid of any man who did. A lot of officers would have given a man like that a rifle and sent him up to the forwardmost positions to see how he liked things there. As Dover had shown at the Huntsman’s Lodge, though, he was more vindictive toward superiors than toward subordinates. He would have palmed reluctant enlisted men off on some other supply officer; sending them up to the front to get shot didn’t cross his mind.

  U.S. reconnaissance aircraft buzzed above Chattanooga almost every hour of the day. Antiaircraft fire didn’t discourage them. There weren’t enough Confederate fighters to drive them away. West of the Appalachians, the United States had air superiority. The Confederates could harry and harass, but they couldn’t stop the Yankees from doing most of what they wanted to do.

  Bombs rained down on the dummy depot, smashing it to hell and gone. “You see?” Dover said to anybody who would listen. “You see? We fooled the sons of bitches!” He got busy repairing the dump, just as if it were the real one. He was proud of his realism. He’d even had a few barrels of waste oil at the dummy site so they could send up convincing plumes of greasy smoke.

  Enemy bombers hit the fake depot again two days later, even harder. Jerry Dover was so pleased with himself, he could hardly even breathe. He felt like dancing because he’d done such a good job of fooling the damnyankees. How many tons of bombs had they thrown away, smashing up worthless tents and empty crates? Enough to make some of their supply officers very unhappy if they found out about the waste—he was sure of that.

  Again, he had his crew run around as if trying to set things to rights. After two wasted U.S. raids, they’d found some enthusiasm for trying to trick U.S. fliers. Antiaircraft guns sprouted like toadstools around the dummy depot. Only a handful of the guns were real. The rest were Quaker cannons: logs trimmed and painted to look like the real thing, on mounts made from whatever junk the soldiers could scrounge. Close up, they were jokes. From a couple of miles in the air, or from a fighter-bomber streaking by as fast as it could go, they seemed damned convincing.

  When he heard the thrum of U.S. bomber engines overhead yet again, Jerry Dover smiled: a smug, complacent grin. The good humor behind that smile went up in smoke—literally—when the Yankees blasted the kapok out of his genuine dump. All the antiaircraft guns around the real installation were in good working order. They knocked down a few bombers, but not nearly enough. The USA clearly won the exchange.

  “How?” he shouted, even as firemen poured streams of water on the smoking wreckage. “How the fuck did they know where we were at?”

  “I bet some goddamn nigger tipped ’em off that we w
ere running a bluff,” a sergeant answered.

  Dover started to say that was ridiculous, but he stopped with the words unspoken. It wasn’t ridiculous, not one bit. Every black man—and woman—in the CSA had to hate the present government as much as the government hated blacks. Not many Negroes were left in these parts. Even one would have been plenty if he reached the damnyankees.

  “I bet you’re right,” was what came out of his mouth.

  “Fucking black bastards,” the noncom said. “Freedom Party should’ve done a better job of cleaning ’em out. What did we elect those assholes for, anyway?”

  Politics didn’t rear its head so often in this war as it had in the last. A lot of people in the CSA were afraid to talk politics these days. They worried—and with reason—that they could end up in camps if they said the wrong thing to the wrong person. Anything that criticized the government or the Freedom Party was too likely to be the wrong thing, although Jerry Dover hadn’t expected anybody to come down on the Party for not doing enough to get rid of blacks.

  “You want to kind of watch your mouth, Pete,” Dover told the sergeant. “Some of these Party people, they don’t take things the right way.”

  “Yeah, well, I didn’t figure you for a stalwart or anything like that,” Pete answered. “You don’t sound like you’re ready to come when you go, ‘Freedom!’”

  “No, huh?” Dover said dryly.

  “Nope.” The sergeant shook his head. He stuck a chaw of Red Man in his mouth. His jaw worked; he might have been a cow chewing its cud. But a cow wouldn’t have spat a stream of brown the way he did. He winked at Dover. “Besides, sir, if you turn me in, you’ll get stuck with some dumb shithead who doesn’t know his ass from the end zone. You like people with a little something upstairs. Me, I like broads with a little something upstairs.” He held his hands in front of his chest.

  Dover laughed. “Go on, get out of here,” he said. “You’ve got other things to do besides driving your CO crazy.”

  With a sketched salute, Pete ambled off. Jerry Dover stared after him. No wonder people didn’t talk politics any more. Whenever you did, you felt you were suddenly part of a plot. Say anything bad about the powers that be—even listen to someone else saying bad things about the powers without denouncing him on the instant—and you were complicit in indiscretion. You had a hold on the other guy, and he had a hold on you.

  “Shit,” Dover muttered. “It shouldn’t be this way.” He felt that very strongly. Not being able to speak your mind had to hurt the war effort. Having people go after people who did speak their minds had to hurt the war effort, too. All the labor wasted in chasing down grumblers could have been turned against the damnyankees instead.

  The effort used in chasing down Negroes? Dover wasn’t like Pete; he didn’t think the Freedom Party wasn’t doing enough. But the question of whether the Party should be doing anything at all along those lines never crossed his mind. He might despise the numskulls set over him, but he was still a man of his country and his time and his color.

  XIII

  Dr. Leonard O’Doull finished the amputation. “There we go,” he said. “All things considered, the poor bastard’s lucky.”

  “Just losing a foot? I should say so.” Granville McDougald nodded. “Sometimes you lose a leg when you step on a mine. Sometimes it just plain kills you. Or if you step on one of those new bouncing bastards the Confederates are using, it pops up in the air and blows your nuts off. Some fun.”

  “Yeah.” O’Doull hated the bouncing mines with a fierce and terrible passion. They were designed to make the ghastliest wounds they could. Some C.S. engineer had probably won himself a bonus for coming up with the idea. He looked at the patient etherized upon the table. “He should do pretty well, though. He just found an ordinary one.”

  Pretty well. It was true. The man would live. He probably wouldn’t get a wound infection. Once he healed enough to wear a prosthesis, he’d be able to get around without too much trouble. How much agony lay between the moment of stepping on the mine and that reasonably favorable prognosis, though? How much had he gone through before he was carried back to the aid station? No way in hell to measure such things, but he’d already tasted his share of hell, his share and then some.

  “Let’s get him off the table,” McDougald said. “We’re bound to have more business before long. Ain’t life grand?”

  “Mauvais tabernac,” O’Doull said, and added, “’Osti!” for good measure. Granny McDougald laughed, the way he always did when O’Doull swore in Quebecois French. Sometimes, though, the blasphemy of the French curses felt more powerful than the blunt Anglo-Saxon obscenities O’Doull had gone back to using more often than not.

  They did get more business, too, but not the kind they expected. Mortar bombs started bursting not far away. “Shit!” McDougald said, and Leonard O’Doull wasn’t inclined to argue with him. They both grabbed the wounded man and lugged him along as they hurried out of the tent. They would have to rebandage him later, but that was the least of their worries. Leaving him there for shrapnel to slice up would have been worse.

  “Careful with him, Granny,” O’Doull said as they slid him down into the trench near the tent, the trench they always hoped they wouldn’t have to use.

  “I’m trying,” McDougald said. Another mortar round burst nearby. Fragments screeched past O’Doull. McDougald gasped. Then he said, “Shit,” again, this time in an eerily calm tone of voice.

  “You hit?” O’Doull had heard that tone too many times to have much doubt.

  “Afraid so,” McDougald answered. “Two wars up at the front, and my very first Purple Heart. Lucky me.” Then he said, “Shit,” again, most sincerely now. “Son of a bitch is starting to hurt.”

  “Get down in here,” O’Doull told him. “I’ll do what I can for you, and I’ll get you on the table as soon as they stop landing things on us.”

  “Right,” the medic said tightly. “Well, nice to know I’m in good hands.” Like any other soldier, he carried a morphine syrette in the aid kit on his belt. As soon as he flopped down into the trench, he stuck himself. His left trouser leg was dark and soggy with blood.

  Most soldiers would have used a belt knife or a bayonet to cut away the heavy fabric and get a look at the wound. O’Doull had a scalpel. It didn’t do a better job than any other sharp blade would have, but it felt natural in his hand. He found a long, nasty tear in McDougald’s thigh. “Not too bad, Granny,” he said. “We can patch it up—that’s for damn sure.”

  “You’re the doctor,” McDougald said through clenched teeth. “When is that morphine going to kick in? How long does it take, anyway?” He’d injected himself only a minute or so before. When he was caring for someone else, he could gauge exactly how long the painkiller needed. He wasn’t objective about his own wound, his own torment. Who could be?

  “Won’t be long,” O’Doull promised, as soothingly as he could. “I don’t have my needles and suture material with me. I’m going to pinch off a couple of bleeders in there and safety-pin you together till I can get you under the gas for a proper job.”

  “You’re the doc,” McDougald said again. He braced himself as O’Doull got to work. On anyone else, he would have watched what his friend was doing. Why not? For a wound like this, he could have done just as well himself. When he was the wounded party, though, he looked anywhere and everywhere except at his injury. In a macabre way, it was funny. He even laughed when O’Doull remarked on it. But he swore savagely when O’Doull pinned the wound’s lips together. Then he laughed again, shakily. “Crazy how much that little crap hurts, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah. Crazy.” O’Doull started bandaging the gash. “You’re going to have yourself a hell of a scar, you know?”

  “Oh, boy. Just what I always wanted.” But then McDougald let out a sigh. “Ah, there’s the dope. Christ, that feels good. Almost worth getting hit for, you know? Somebody said it was like kissing God. Now I know what he meant.”

  “Don’t like
it too much.” O’Doull had known a few doctors who did like morphine too well. Army medics weren’t immune from using the stuff for their own pleasure, either. The powers that be landed on them like a rockslide when they got caught, but a lot of them were sly and careful. People who used drugs weren’t always the crazed addicts in melodramas. A lot of them used just enough to stay happy, and lived more or less normal lives aside from their habit.

  More shell fragments whistled and screeched overhead. Even staying in the trench didn’t necessarily do O’Doull and McDougald and the anesthetized soldier with a missing foot any good. If a mortar bomb came down on top of them, that was it. End of story—or the start of a new and horrible one.

  Far back of the line—well north of Delphi—U.S. artillery started thundering. The mortar fire stopped as suddenly as it had begun. Did that mean the C.S. mortar crews were casualties? O’Doull hoped so. He didn’t like people shooting at him, not even a little bit.

  Eddie the corpsman stared down into the trench. “Jesus, Doc, what the hell happened here?” he asked.

  “What do you think happened? I was elected Queen of the May, and I’m about to go into my dance,” Granville McDougald said before O’Doull could get a word out. Morphine might have dulled his pain, but not his sarcasm.

  “Granny got his leg sliced when we were moving the wounded guy on account of the mortar fire,” O’Doull said. “Can you help me get him up and out so I can work on him?”

  “Let me round up a couple more guys. It’ll go better if I do.” Eddie disappeared before O’Doull could say yes or no. Nobody’s paying any attention to me today, O’Doull thought aggrievedly. He hoped the Confederates wouldn’t get their mortars upright and shooting while Eddie was looking for help.

  They didn’t. Maybe the U.S. artillery really had knocked out the enemy crews. Three more corpsmen jumped into the trench with O’Doull. They got the man with an amputated foot up onto a stretcher and then, grunting, lifted him out of the trench. “What’s going on?” he said vaguely—he was starting to come out from under the anesthesia. He wouldn’t feel pain for a while, though; O’Doull had shot him full of morphine while he was still out.