American Front gw-1

by Harry Turtledove

  He fired a couple of rounds at whatever he saw back there, then shook his head. The iron kettles he and his men wore gave them a look as if out of another time, old and fierce and sullen. What with helmet, goggles, and mask, hardly any of his face was actually visible. One of his men, who wore ordinary glasses instead of goggles and whose eyes were red and teary, said, "We ain't gonna be able to hold these trenches, Sarge."

  "Yeah, I think you're right," the sergeant answered regretfully after gauging the noise again. "We're bringing back prisoners, so the brass can't grouse too bad." He turned to Bartlett and the other captured Confederates. "All right, you lugs, up over the top and back to the American lines. Don't try anything cute or you'll find out how cute dead is."

  Reggie had gone over the top a good many times, but never before with out a rifle in his hands. He felt very naked, very much exposed as he awk wardly got up into no-man's-land and scrambled back through the barbed wire toward the forwardmost U.S. trenches. A few of the damnyankees in those trenches shot at him and his comrades. He was glad they quit when they saw the Yankee soldiers coming along behind the men in butternut.

  He'd hoped he'd have a chance to jump in a shell hole and have the sergeant and the rest of the Yankees go on by so he could sneak back to his own lines. It didn't happen. One reason it didn't was that the Confederates whose positions hadn't been overrun were shooting at the damnyankees, who bunched up close to their prisoners to discourage that. How were you sup posed to escape a man who kept stepping on your bootheels?

  The unhappy answer was, you couldn't. Bartlett had jumped down into U.S. trenches, too, but this time the Yankees had rifles and he didn't. "Well done, Sergeant," said one of them — an officer, by his demeanor.

  "Thank you, Captain Wyatt," the sergeant answered. "Long as you're back here, I don't suppose I'm in trouble for not holding onto that stretch of Rebel entrenchment."

  "No, nothing to worry about there, Martin," the officer-Wyatt-said. "Sometimes we manage to advance a few yards, sometimes we don't. They're more ready to face gas than they used to be." He pointed to the mask on Reggie's face.

  "Yes, sir." Sergeant Martin shed his own mask and goggles. He rounded on Bartlett. "All right, Reb, let's have it."

  "Reginald Bartlett, private, Confederate States Army," Reggie answered, and recited his pay number.

  "What unit, Bartlett?" Sergeant Martin asked.

  "I don't have to tell you that," Bartlett said.

  The sergeant glanced over to his captain. Like one of Martin's soldiers, Captain Wyatt wore spectacles. Behind them, his eyes were not only reddened by chlorine but thoroughly grim. "I'm only going to tell you this once, Bartlett, so you'd better listen hard — the rest of you Rebs, too. Do you know how many thousand miles this godforsaken chunk of Virginia is from the Hague?"

  It wasn't a geography question, although, from the way Jasper Jenkins frowned and scowled, he thought it was. Reggie knew better. What Wyatt had just given him was a warning: no matter what the formal laws of war said about forcing information out of prisoners, he was going to ask whatever he was going to ask, and he expected answers.

  "Let's try again, Bartlett," Martin said, proving Reggie had been right. "What unit?"

  If he didn't talk, he knew exactly what would happen to him. He didn't want to die in a Yankee trench, without even a chance to hit back at the enemy. He wished the U.S. sergeant had picked someone else on whom to start the questioning. He wouldn't have been so ashamed had he been the second or third man to open up rather than the first.

  "Seventh Virginia Infantry," he said rapidly. There. It was done.

  Captain Wyatt turned to the rest of the Confederates. "How about you boys?" The other men fairly fell over themselves agreeing. Reggie wondered if Wyatt had called them boys to stress that they were as much his inferiors as Negroes were whites' inferiors in the CSA. If so, the captain was one devious fellow. Bartlett covertly studied him. That seemed likely.

  "Who's your battalion commander?" Wyatt demanded.

  "Major Colleton." Jasper Jenkins got it out a split second ahead of Reg gie. As if to make up for that, Reggie added, "I don't think he was there when you all raided us-he was back at Division HQ."

  "Was he?" Wyatt said in an interested voice. "What was he doing there?"

  "Don't know, sir," Bartlett answered truthfully. He didn't like the expres sion on the Yankee captain's face. It spoke of bodies forgotten in shell holes. He touched his sleeve and said, "I'm just a private, sir. The only time officers tell me anything is when they tell me what to do." A chorus of agreement rose from his fellow prisoners.

  "It could be." Wyatt's face went from grim to thoughtful. "It might even be true with us — and you Rebs, your officers are a pack of damned aristocrats, aren't they?" Somehow, he contrived to look languid and effete for a moment before turning to Sergeant Martin. "Next time we hit them, we have to catch some bigger fish than privates. These boys don't know anything."

  "Raids like this, sir, you take what you can grab," Martin said, which matched Bartlett's experience in the trenches.

  "Maybe." From the way Wyatt acted, that seemed to mean he was yielding the point. Sure enough, he jerked his head toward the opening to a communication trench. "All right, Sergeant, take 'em back. We'll let the chaps from Intelligence see if they have any — intelligence, I mean."

  "Yes, sir," Martin said. He picked out a couple of his own men with quick hand gestures. "Specs, Joe, come on along with me. These desperate charac-ters'd probably knock me over the head and run off to assassinate TR in a red-hot minute if I was with 'em all by my lonesome." His grin said he was not to be taken seriously.

  Reggie Bartlett felt like a desperate character, but not in the way the Yankee sergeant meant. If you were a prisoner of war, you were supposed to try to escape. That much he knew. How you were supposed to try was another question. He didn't have time to think about it. Martin gestured with his bayonet-tipped rifle. The Confederate prisoners got moving.

  "Keep those hands high," warned the damnyankee with the glasses — Specs. Guys with glasses were supposed to be mild-mannered. He wasn't, not even close.

  Confederate shells — a belated response to the gas barrage and trench raid- fell not far away as they went out of the front line. Reggie swore. He'd almost been killed a couple of times by short artillery rounds. What irony, though, to end his days on the receiving end of a perfectly aimed Confederate shell.

  Martin and his comrades turned the Confederate prisoners over to other men farther back, then returned to their position. The grilling Reggie got from U.S. Intelligence seemed perfunctory — occupation before the war, name, rank, pay number, unit, a few questions about what they'd been doing and what they might do, and a few more questions, just as casual, about the state of morale of the Negro laborers attached to their units.

  "Who pays attention to niggers?" Jasper Jenkins said. "You tell 'em what to do, they do it, and that's that." The man recording the answers, a wizened little fellow who looked like a born clerk, wrote down the words without comment.

  When he was through with the interrogation, the wizened fellow said, "All right. You're going back to a holding camp now. Don't forget your pay number. We'll keep track of you with it. I expect you'll be bored. Can't help that." He nodded to a couple of guards in green-gray.

  Almost, it was like going out of the line. Almost. The prisoners were marched back toward a railhead out of artillery range of Confederate guns. That felt familiar, even if nobody boasted about the havoc he aimed to wreak in saloons or brothels. Waiting for a train was familiar, too. Getting into a stinking boxcar that had once held horses was less so, although not unknown.

  The train fought its way up over the Blue Ridge Mountains. That line hadn't existed before the war started. The Yankees had built it to haul supplies to the Roanoke front. It was a two-track line; several eastbound trains growled past the one on which Bartlett unhappily rode. "Damnyankees do a lot of haulin', don't they?" Jasper Jenkins said, hi
s voice mournful.

  Somewhere on the downhill grade — or rather, one of the downhill grades-they passed out of Virginia and into its breakaway cousin, West Virginia. When the train hissed to a stop, armed guards threw open the doors and shouted, "Everybody out! Move, move, move, you damn Rebs!"

  Again, Bartlett might almost have been back in a rest camp. He went through the same surely useless delousing process he had then. He also had his hair clipped down to his scalp. The uniform he drew on completion of all that, though, was not his own. The tunic was tight, the trousers and boots too large. He complained about it. The fellow handing out clothes looked at him as if he were insane. "Shut up," he said flatly. Reggie shut up.

  Prisoner barracks were of rough, unpainted wood, with spaces showing between boards. Reggie didn't look forward to that in winter. Bunks were similarly rough, and stacked on top of one another not double, not triple, but quadruple. He found a third-level one to call his own and climbed into it. "Home," he said sadly.

  Evening was coming to Hampstead, Maryland. As far as Jake Featherston was concerned, it looked like a pretty good evening. The Yankees out in front of the Confederate lines had been quiet, and the battery had needed to fire only a few rounds at them. Some of those had been gas shells, too.

  "About time," Featherston muttered to himself. The United States had been using gas against the Confederacy for months. Being able to respond in kind felt good. "Let those bastards worry about masks and goggles when we want 'em to, not the other way round."

  He got his mess kit and went over to the stew pot Perseus had bubbling. Some damnyankee farmer was short a chicken. Jake found himself imperfectly sympathetic, especially when the Negro ladled a drumstick into his mess tin. He smacked his lips. Sure as hell, things were looking up.

  He sat around shooting the breeze with his gun crew. It wasn't the same as it had been back in the old days, with the veterans who'd served beside him before the shooting started. But the new fish weren't virgins any more, either. "We've got us a pretty good gun here," Featherston said, looking back at the howitzer.

  "The best," Michael Scott said. The loader was probably right, at least as far as the battery went. By their smug grins, the rest of the gun crew agreed with him. "We got us the best niggers in the battery, too," he added in the fond tones a man might use about a child of whom he is proud: the typical tones of a Confederate white talking about the achievements of a Confederate Negro. He patronized so automatically, he had no idea he was doing it.

  "That they are," Jake Featherston said. His tone of voice was a little different: he'd used Nero and Perseus as men, however uncomfortable that had made both him and them. He shook his head. He neither particularly liked nor particularly trusted Negroes, and the principal reason for that was his certainty that they had more capacity than they showed. As an overseer's son, that worried him. The surprise you got if you kept thinking a man a boy was apt to be dreadful.

  He didn't mention that the two Negroes had helped him fight the gun. The crew he had now knew it, but they seemed intent on pretending they didn't. He understood that; he tried to pretend it hadn't happened, too. Doing anything else tore a hole in the fabric of the Confederate way of life. He was glad Nero and Perseus hadn't turned uppity on account of their exploit. They would have been sorry for that, and some of the blame would have stuck to him, too.

  He wandered over to see if anything was left in the stew pot, and came back with a couple of potatoes. The rest of the chicken seemed to have walked with the Lord, or more likely with the cooks. He shrugged. You had to expect that. Who ever heard of a cook's going hungry?

  After he'd disposed of the potatoes, he washed his mess tin in a bucket of water and scrubbed it with a rag till the metal took on a dull gleam. He made sure the rest of the gun crew did the same. Nothing gave you food poisoning faster than eating out of a dirty mess tin.

  Scott broke out a deck of cards. Jake declined to get into a poker game, saying, "My luck's been lousy lately." That was, if anything, an understatement; he'd lost most of a month's pay a week before, betting a full house against four artfully concealed nines.

  He walked out onto Hampstead's main street and peered north. The fall air was cool against his cheek. He couldn't see anything much in the deepening twilight, and told himself that was just as well. If he had seen something, it would have been Yankee artillery flashes lighting up the horizon, which would have meant Yankee shells paying the battery a visit. This past year, he'd had all the glory and drama and excitement of combat he'd needed to prove to him that the best thing to hope for in the middle of a war was a nice, quiet day-or two or three of them in a row.

  Since he didn't feel like sleeping, he went back to check on the horses. Perseus and Nero had done their usual capable job of taking care of the animals. He patted the gray gelding on the nose, then headed out of the barn where the animals were resting.

  A cricket chirped. Somewhere off in the middle distance, an owl let loose with a mournful hoot. From the front came the occasional crack of rifle fire. It was only occasional, though, not the continuous, almost surflike roar it became when the action heated up. He looked up to the rather cloudy heavens and thanked God he wasn't an infantryman.

  Captain Stuart's tent was pitched not far from Jake's gun. A lot of officers, instead of living under canvas, would have commandeered a house and made themselves comfortable there. That would have been all right with Feather- ston; what point to being an officer if you couldn't take advantage of it? But Stuart, despite his fancy dinners and such, still affected a pose as just another artilleryman — except when he needed something from his father. The hypocrisy irked Jake.

  He heard a low murmur of voices from beyond the battery commander's tent. He frowned. What was going on back there? The voices grew quiet as he approached. He found Nero and Perseus, along with the Negro laborers from the rest of the guns in the battery and even with Captain Stuart's servant Pom-pey, gathered in a circle around a tiny fire. Walls all around made it impossible for any Yankee to spot from the ground; they could smother it in an instant if aeroplanes came over.

  Near the fire lay a pair of dice and some money. "Evenin", Sergeant," Pompey said in his mincing voice when he recognized Jake. "We is just spreadin' the wealth around, you might say." He grinned. His teeth were very white in his dark face.

  "Yeah, well, I done spread my wealth around lately," Featherston said. Perseus and Nero laughed. They'd heard him grouse about losing his shirt with that full house. When Pompey reached for the dice, Jake shrugged and left.

  His own gun crew had their poker game going strong. He watched for a while, then pulled out what money he had left and sat in with them. He won a couple of little hands, lost a couple, then lost with a flush to a full house. That cost him a big piece of the anemic bankroll he'd brought to the game. He quit in disgust and went off to wrap himself in his blanket.

  Some time in the middle of the night, somebody gently shook him awake. He looked up to find Perseus squatting beside his bedroll. In a voice not much above a whisper, the laborer said, "We ain't actin' like niggers no more, Marse Jake. Figured I'd tell you, on account of you know we don't got to. You want to be careful fo' a while, is all I got to say." He slipped away.

  Featherston looked around, not altogether sure he hadn't been dreaming. He didn't see Perseus. He didn't hear anything. He rolled over and went back to sleep.

  A little before dawn, Captain Stuart's angry voice woke him: "Pompey? Where the hell are you, Pompey? I call you, you bring your black ass over here and find out what I want, do you hear me? Pompey!"

  Stuart's shouts went on and on. Wherever Pompey was, he wasn't coming when called. And then Michael Scott hurried up to Jake, a worried look on his face. "Sarge, you seen Nero or Perseus? Don't know where they're at, but they sure as hell ain't where they're supposed to be."

  "Jesus," Featherston said, bouncing to his feet. "It wasn't a dream. Sure as hell it wasn't." Scott stared at him, having no idea what he meant.
He wasn't altogether sure himself. One thing seemed clear: trouble was brewing.

  The policeman at the corner of Beaufain and Meeting Street-a pudgy, white-mustached fellow who might have fought in the War of Secession-threw up his right hand, halting north-south traffic on Meeting so trucks and wagons on Beaufain could continue making their way to and from the Charleston railroad lines and harbor.

  Anne Colleton snarled something distinctly unladylike and stomped on the brakes of her Vauxhall Prince Henry. The motorcar groaned and squeaked to a stop, its radiator grill projecting slightly out onto Beaufain. She'd bought the Vauxhall because it could go fast, not for its ability to stop in a hurry. The brakes were a good deal weaker than the sixty-horsepower engine.

  A man in a battered Ford was stopped alongside her. He gave her a look halfway between curious and rude. She'd long since grown used, if not resigned, to that look. Even in the USA, lady automobilists were a small mi nority. In the more conservative Confederacy, they were rare. She smiled back at the man. He might have thought it a sweet smile… if he were an imbecile.

  Rather nervously, he tipped his straw hat. "Sure you know what you're doing in the car"-he proved himself a Charleston native by pronouncing it cyar — "little lady? Wouldn't you rather have a chauffeur drive you around?"

  Anne smiled again, even more savagely than before. "I had to fire my last two chauffeurs," she answered. "They went too slow to suit me."

  The policeman halted traffic on Beaufain and let the waiting vehicles on Meeting Street move. Anne put the potent Vauxhall — with three times the power of the Ford next to it-through its paces. She left the Ford's driver choking on her exhaust.

  She was almost sorry the Charleston Hotel lay only a couple of blocks south of Beaufain. The sensation of speed in the Vauxhall exhilarated her far more than the same speed would have in a train. Here she was the engineer, her foot on the throttle. Freedom, she thought.

  A pair of Negro servants came dashing out from under the columned portico of the hotel. One of them handed her down to the sidewalk. Then both of them grabbed her suitcases and followed her inside. The doorman, a fat col ored fellow in a getup that made him look like a Revolutionary soldier, threw wide the door to allow the procession to enter.