American Front gw-1

by Harry Turtledove

  She left the stairwell and trudged wearily down the hall to Mrs. Coneval's apartment. She stood there in front of the doorway for a moment before she knocked. It sounded as if the children were fighting a battle of their own inside, a battle about the size of some of the big ones on the Kentucky front. She wondered how Brigid Coneval put up with the noise.

  When she did knock, she needed to hammer on the door to get anyone within to notice she was there. After a while, Brigid Coneval opened the door. The racket, without wood between it and Sylvia, grew from alarming to ap palling. "A bit rowdy they are today," Mrs. Coneval said with a smile that could only be described as wan.

  "So it would seem," Sylvia agreed. She knew she would have gone crazy, cooped up in there the day around with a horde of screaming children. Given the choice between that and the factory job she had, she would have chosen factory work a hundred times out of a hundred. Her own two children were plenty to try to keep under control.

  "I'll get your wee ones," Brigid Coneval said, and disappeared back into chaos. A toddler smaller than Mary Jane started to howl. Sylvia thanked heaven she hadn't got pregnant again after George came back from the CSA. Trying to take care of a new baby by herself, along with two small children, was nothing to anticipate with glee.

  Mrs. Coneval came back holding Mary Jane by one hand and George, Jr., by the other. George, Jr., twisted in her grasp and fired an imaginary rifle at one of the other children. "I got you, Joey, you dirty Reb!"

  "No, you didn't — you missed me," Joey shouted back-the next small boy who admitted himself slain in imaginary conflict would be the first. "And I'm not the Reb-you are!"

  "Liar, liar, pants on fire," George, Jr., yelled at him, which made Mary Jane giggle. George, Jr., said, "Hello, Mama. Joey cheats."

  "I don't either!" Joey exclaimed.

  "It doesn't matter now, one way or the other," Sylvia said. By the look on his face, her son was prepared to disagree with that as eloquently as he could. She didn't give him the chance. "See you tomorrow morning," she said to Mrs. Coneval, and took her children back to their apartment.

  It seemed empty without her husband there. She was used to having him gone for days at a time; she'd even had to grow used to having him gone for much longer than that while he was a Confederate detainee. Now, though, with him in St. Louis, she had the strong sense she wouldn't see him again till the war ended, and it didn't look as if it was going to end any time soon.

  She had some good scrod in the icebox. She hadn't lost the connections she'd made down on T Wharf; as a fisherman's wife (even if her husband wasn't actually fishing right now), she could find better fish than the ordinary shopper and pay less for it. She breaded the scrod, pan-fried it in lard on top of the stove, and served it up with mashed potatoes.

  George, Jr., ate everything up and demanded more. He ate almost as much as a man, or so it seemed. She was probably wrong about that, she admitted to herself as she gave him more potatoes, but she wasn't wrong about his outgrowing all his clothes. She patted her purse. The allotment check would come in handy the next time she went shopping at Filene's.

  Mary Jane, by contrast, had to be cajoled into eating much of anything. Sylvia produced a gumdrop from a bowl on a shelf too high for the children to reach. She set it on the table. "Do you want it?" she asked her daughter.

  Eyes wide with longing, Mary Jane nodded. Having once made the dread ful error of saying no to candy, she wasn't about to repeat it.

  "All right," Sylvia said. "Eat up your supper and you can have it." Sometimes that got results, sometimes a tantrum. Today it worked. Mary Jane cleaned her plate and stretched out a hand that needed washing. "Good girl," Sylvia told her, handing her the sweet.

  After she'd scrubbed the dishes, she settled the children down on the couch, one on either side of her, and read to them from Queen Zixi of Ix. Mary Jane's attention sometimes wandered. When she got off the couch, went over to get a doll, and then came back to play with it, Sylvia didn't mind. The story held George, Jr., rapt for most of an hour. By then, it was time for Sylvia to get the children into bed. Morning came all too early.

  Then she had the apartment to herself, before she also had to go to bed. When George was home, they'd sit and talk while he smoked a pipe or cigar. When he was out fishing, she'd look forward to his return. Now… now he was gone, and the place seemed large and empty and quiet as the tomb.

  She walked around for a while with a feather duster, flicking specks from tables and gewgaws. What with the dirt and soot always in the air, things got dusty faster than they had any proper business doing. That would worsen in winter, when everyone burned more coal — always assuming the Coal Board didn't decide to let people turn to blocks of ice instead.

  She realized she was dusting a china dog for the third time. Shaking her head, she put the feather duster away. Time hung heavy when she was alone, but not that heavy. She went into the bedroom, changed into a nainsook cotton nightgown with lace at the neck and sleeves, and set out the drawers and skirt and shirtwaist she'd wear the next morning. Then she went into the bathroom, where she cleaned her teeth and gave her hair a hundred strokes with the brush in front of the mirror over the sink. Evening ritual done, she went back into the bedroom, turned off the gas lamp, and lay down.

  She sat up with a start. "Lord have mercy, I'd forget my head if it wasn't sewed on tight!" she exclaimed. Not wanting to get up and light the lamp again, she fumbled in the darkness with the alarm clock on the nightstand. Had she forgotten to set it, she would surely have been late to work, which would have got her docked at best and fired at worst. "Can't have that," she said, as if someone lying beside her was trying to talk her into sleeping as long as she wanted.

  But no one was lying beside her. The bed felt large and empty. Some nights, she was so tired she hardly noticed George was gone and would be gone God only knew how long. Others, she missed him to the point where tears ran down her face. They did no good. She knew that. Knowing didn't help.

  She lay on her back, staring at the ceiling and trying without much luck to go to sleep. She closed her eyes, which didn't seem to make the room much darker. But with her eyes closed, as they usually were when she and George made love, it was easier to imagine him on top of her, imagine his familiar weight pressing her down on the mattress, imagine his breath warming the hollow of her shoulder in quick gasps.

  Imagination, now, was all she had. She shifted restlessly on the bed. If George were there now, she'd be able to sleep pretty soon. She shifted again. The hem of her nightgown rode up past her knees. She reached down. Instead of straightening it, she hiked it up to her waist.

  A few minutes later, she rolled over onto her side. She would sleep now. She knew it. She bit her lip, not caring to remember what she'd just done. But when your man was away for months, maybe for years, what were you sup posed to do? It wasn't as good as the real thing with George (actually, that wasn't quite true — it felt as good, or maybe even better, but it was lonely at the end), but it was better than nothing.

  "Better than nothing," she muttered drowsily. With the war on, wasn't that as much as anybody had any business expecting? Her eyelids slid down over her eyes, of themselves this time. She started to say something else, but only a soft snore passed her lips.

  "Masks and goggles!" Captain Orville Wyatt ordered as the bombardment of the Confederate positions east of the Roanoke began. Chester Martin quickly tied the hyposulfite-impregnated mask over his mouth and nose. He breathed in chemical dampness. That was unpleasant, but much less so than breathing in the poison gas that shells were spreading up and down the Rebel lines. He took off his newly issued helmet to strap the goggles over his eyes. He didn't know whether to curse the weight of the thing or bless it for making his brains less likely to be splattered over the landscape.

  Beside Martin, Specs Peterson swore. "They've been usin' this damn gas more since they started loading it into shells than they did when they shot it out of those projector things, and I fucking
hate it," he said. "I can leave my glasses on and have the chlorine eat my eyes up, or I can take 'em off and fall on my damn face half a dozen times before I get to where the Rebs are at. Hell of a deal, ain't it?"

  "I'm in the same boat, Peterson," Captain Wyatt said, touching the ear-piece to his own spectacles. "I've been leaving my glasses on. My eyes get better after a couple of days, seems like."

  "Yeah, but you want to be a hero," Peterson muttered under his breath. "Me, I just want to get out of this in one piece."

  "Amen," Chester Martin said. "All I want to do is live through this damn war and go home and make steel. I used to complain about that job like no body's business. It was hot and it was dirty and it was hard and it was dangerous. And it's still every damn one of those things. And you know what else? Next to what we're doin' now, it's so fine, I'll never grouse again."

  "Nothin' worse than farm work — I always used to say that," Corporal Paul Andersen put in. "Only goes to show I didn't know what the hell I was talking about. You do your two years as a conscript and that's not so bad. You figure real soldiering works out the same way. Ha!" His wave took in the trenches, the filth, the vermin, the fear, the foe.

  Captain Wyatt said, "Once upon a time, Virginia used to belong to the USA. Now we're working to take it back. It's not the kind of job anybody wants to do, but it needs doing. If everything goes right, we keep their front trenches. No matter what happens, we bring some prisoners back for interro gation." He went up and down the trench line, checking to make sure his sol diers' masks and goggles were on securely. He was a long way from being the most good-natured of men, but he fussed over the soldiers in his company like a mother cat with a litter of kittens. As far as Martin was concerned, that made him a good officer.

  The bombardment went on and on. Every so often, the Confederates would lob a few shells back at the U.S. lines, but they were taking it a lot harder than they were dishing it out. That suited Martin fine. He'd been on the receiving end of too many barrages to suit him. Giving was better-an un- Christian thought but a true one nonetheless.

  Sharp as an axe coming down, the shelling ended. Up and down the trench line, whistles sounded. Martin scrambled up the steps made of sandbags, over the parapet, and toward the Rebel lines.

  Pioneers had cut some paths through the barbed wire between the U.S. and Confederate lines, marking them with strips of cloth tied to the wire. Martin liked that and hated it at the same time. It gave him an easier way toward the enemy trenches, but also gave the Rebel machine gunners a notion of what the way was. If they'd zeroed their weapons on it… He tried not to think about that, as he tried not to think of any of the disasters that might befall him.

  Here and there, the bombardment had knocked down the posts that sup ported the barbed wire, leaving it sprawled in snaky coils on the rubble-strewn ground of what had probably been a suburb of Big Lick, Virginia.

  When Chester Martin saw relatively clear stretches of that sort, he used them to move forward. The Rebs wouldn't have so many guns pointed there as they would at the paths.

  He blew out through the thick, wet gauze pad he wore over his mouth. The first couple of gas attacks had let U.S. forces gain and consolidate their positions east of the Roanoke River. Now, though, the Rebs had learned how to defend themselves against the new American weapon, and pushing them back had turned into another hard job.

  He wasn't more than halfway toward their trenches, and already the Rebels were shooting back at him and his men, the muzzle flashes of their rifles seeming bright as the sun. Machine guns started up a moment later. Somewhere not far away, he heard the wet smack of a bullet striking flesh. Whoever was hurt there, he hoped it wasn't too bad and he hoped they'd be able to get the fellow to a doctor before he bled to death. That also made him hope nobody would get hurt picking up the wounded man. Nobody was supposed to shoot at people wearing Red Cross armbands, but bullets, as he'd learned too well, weren't fussy about whom they hit.

  One of the machine guns, traversed by what their crews matter-of-factly called a two-inch tap, sent bullets kicking up dirt not far from his feet. He dove headlong into a shell hole in front of him. A horrid stench rose. Part of it came from the pool of noisome, stagnant water at the bottom of the hole. More was from the body, or rather fragments of body, entombed under dirt and shattered bricks. U.S. forces were advancing, so the dead man was presumably a Confederate. But he would have smelled just as bad had he been born in Michigan.

  Martin wished the gauze mask he wore were as good at neutralizing stenches as it was at keeping chlorine from searing his lungs. That, though, wasn't why it had been designed. He tried to keep his unruly stomach under control. If he took off the mask to puke, who could guess how much poison gas he'd breathe in after every retch?

  The hail of machine-gun bullets passed on beyond the shell hole. Crawling through muck of a sort he didn't care to contemplate, Martin peered out over the forward lip of the hole. Whatever else he did he couldn't stay there. Grunting under the weight of his pack, he heaved himself upright again and ran on.

  Here came the trenches. He could see murky spots up and down their length, spots where chlorine gas still lingered. The Confederate defenders wore masks like his. A lot of them had goggles, too. They were either bareheaded or in caps, though: no one had yet issued them helmets.

  One of the Rebs raised a rifle to shoot at Martin. He shot first, though, on the run and from the hip. As much by luck as anything else, the Confederate howled and dropped his weapon to clutch at his chest.

  Yelling, Martin leaped down into the trench. He used his bayonet to make sure the Confederate wasn't going anywhere, then pulled a grenade improvised from nails and a half-pound block of explosive out of one of his equipment pouches and flung it into the next trench back. Somebody screamed a moment after it exploded, so he supposed he'd done that right.

  He looked around, collected a couple of his soldiers by eye, and headed down the trench toward the next traverse. Like U.S. forces, the Confederates sensibly did not dig their trenches as long, straight gashes in the earth. Had they been so foolish, any foes who got into them could have delivered a deadly enfilading fire. Unfortunately, the game was harder than that.

  Firebays like the one he and his companions were in led to other firebays advanced or recessed from them by a short stretch of perpendicular trench, a traverse, so that the line, if viewed from an aeroplane, took on the look of a postage stamp perforated with insane regularity. Just because your side held a firebay didn't mean the enemy wasn't still lurking in the next traverse.

  Finding out who was in the next traverse — or the next firebay, if you were in a traverse-was not a job for the faint of heart. Neither was getting rid of those people, if they happened to be wearing butternut while you were in green-gray. One way was to go up out of the trenches and crawl along the ground between them. Doing that, though, was a lot like a snail's jumping out of its shell to run faster: the poor creature was all too likely to get squashed.

  Charging round a corner was not recommended, either. The other fellow had had too much time to prepare nasty surprises for you. Nearing a corner of the firebay, Martin called, "Give up, you Rebs!"

  The only answer he got back was a grenade flying through the air. It was thrown too far, and detonated on the level ground beyond the firebay. His own men knew how to reply to it. Several grenades, tossed with better effect, rained down on the Confederates. Grenades, Martin reflected, were handy things: they gave an infantryman a little artillery of his own. And, like artillery, they didn't have to wound to be effective. Even a near miss could leave a soldier shaken and stunned.

  Martin bet his life the grenades had stunned the Rebs in the traverse for a couple of vital seconds. He charged round the corner of the trench. One Reb had been stationed there to deal with any such unwelcome newcomers, but he was down and thrashing, blood pouring from his belly out between his fingers. Followed by the men he'd gathered, Martin ran past him and around the next bend. Another Con
federate was down there, and still others on their feet. "Hands up, you Rebs!" he screamed.

  Reggie Bartlett could barely hear the screamed order to surrender. One of the grenades the damnyankees had thrown had gone off only a few feet away from him. He looked down at his trouser leg. He was bleeding. Neither the pain nor the flow of blood was too bad, though, so he guessed whatever fragment or nail had hit him had drilled straight through muscle without getting stuck there or slamming into bone.

  "Hands up!" the Yankee sergeant yelled again. Reggie let his rifle fall to the mud of the trench floor and raised his hands over his head. He knew he and his companions were lucky to get a chance to surrender after they'd tried to fight back. A lot of times, in situations like that, the side winning the fight in the trenches left only the losers' corpses.

  The U.S. soldiers swarmed over him, Jasper Jenkins, and the other privates who hadn't been hurt-or not badly hurt, anyway, as a couple of them bore minor wounds not much different from Bartlett's. Corporal McCorkle lay on the ground, moaning. The U.S. soldier shook his head. "Poor bastard must have taken most of a grenade's worth, right in the gut," he said.

  "He had a lot of gut to take it in," the sergeant answered, truthfully but unkindly. He frisked Reggie with thorough haste, depriving him of his pocket watch, his wallet, and whatever loose change he had in his pockets. Bartlett made no move to stop him, understanding it would be the last move he ever made if he did. Confederate troops plundered Yankee prisoners just as enthusiastically when they got the chance.

  Off toward either side and back deeper in the Confederate position, the sound of fighting was picking up. The U.S. sergeant peered ever so cautiously over the parados at the rear of the trench, treating it as if it were the parapet at the front, which, from his point of view, it was.