“You men are making a mutiny,” Lieutenant Straubing warned. “A court-martial will take a dim view of that.”
Murray, who had enough mouth for any three men, laughed out loud. “No court’s going to say anything but that white men are better than niggers, sir, and that’s the truth.”
Under the tan he’d got from going out with his trucks, Straubing turned pale. Cincinnatus’ heart sank. His guess was that Murray knew what he was talking about. Without much conscious thought, Cincinnatus and the rest of the black truck drivers bunched together. The whites with whom they’d been driving stood apart from them. Those whites didn’t go over with the new men who backed Murray, but they didn’t support their colored comrades, either.
Reds are right, Cincinnatus thought bitterly. CSA and USA, it’s the same thing-whites are so mystified, they put race ahead of class.
“That’s your last word, Murray?” Lieutenant Straubing demanded tensely. When the redheaded driver nodded, Straubing hurried out of the warehouse depot, biting his lip. A chorus of jeers rang out behind him, as if chasing him away.
“Get you black boys hauling like mules, the way God made you to,” Murray said to the Negro truck drivers. The men at his back nodded.
“Don’t know why you so down on us,” Cincinnatus said. “We just doin’ our jobs, makin’ our pay, feedin’ our families.”
“Doing white man’s work,” Murray snapped. Like Lieutenant Kennan, he looked to be one of those U.S. whites who hated Negroes more savagely than any Confederate did, not least because he was so much less familiar with them than Confederates were. Cincinnatus, who had been driving a truck in the CSA before the war broke out, thought about pointing his old job out to the damnyankee. But he didn’t think it would help, and kept quiet.
The door to the depot flew open. In strode Lieutenant Straubing, followed by a squad of soldiers carrying bayoneted Springfields. Straubing pointed to Murray. “Arrest that man,” he snapped. “Charges are insubordination and refusal to obey lawful orders.”
Two of the men in green-gray stomped up to Murray, who looked comically amazed. One of them grabbed him by the arm. “Come on, you,” he snapped. Murray perforce came.
Straubing’s gaze traveled over the other new drivers. “Anyone else?” he asked in a voice that held nothing but ice. A couple of drivers stirred where they stood. “Vasilievsky, Heintzelman, you are under arrest, too. Same charges as Murray.”
“Come on, you two lugs,” one of the soldiers Straubing had brought said when neither driver moved for a moment. “You won’t like it if we have to come and get you, I promise.”
Numbly, their eyes wide with shock, the two white men obeyed. “Anyone else?” Lieutenant Straubing said again. None of the new drivers moved or spoke. As Cincinnatus had seen other soldiers do, they tried to disappear while standing in plain sight. Straubing nodded. “Very well.” He turned to the men he’d called. “Take those three to the stockade. Murray-this fellow here-is the ringleader. I will prefer formal written charges when I have the time, which I don’t right now. These shenanigans are liable to make me late, and I won’t stand for that.”
Saluting, the soldiers led Murray, Heintzelman, and Vasilievsky out of the depot. The three drivers looked as if they were standing in front of White trucks bearing down on them at thirty miles an hour. None of them could have been more astonished than Cincinnatus. He’d associated Lieutenant Straubing’s uncommon easiness on matters of race with a certain weakness. Evidently he’d been wrong.
Straubing glanced over toward the new truck drivers who hadn’t been arrested. As if they were puppets controlled by the same puppeteer, they stiffened to attention. “If this sort of nonsense happens again,” Straubing said pleasantly, “it will make me angry. Do you gentlemen want to find out what happens when I get angry?”
“No, sir,” the drivers chorused.
“Good,” Straubing said. “Now that we understand that, I am going to give you the idea behind what we’re doing here. What we’re doing here is moving supplies from the riverside here down to the fighting front. Anything that helps us do that is good. Anything that hurts is bad. If a man does his job, I don’t care-and you won’t care-if he is black or white or yellow or blue. If he can’t or won’t, I will run him out of here. If you are white and I order you to work with a Negro who is doing his job, you will do it. If you are white and I order you to work beside a trained unicorn who is doing his job, you will do that, too. Again, do you understand me?”
“Yes, sir,” the new drivers said in unison.
“Then let’s get on with it,” Lieutenant Straubing said. “We are going to have to press harder than we would have, thanks to this idiocy. You would be safer blaspheming the Holy Ghost than you would, tampering with my schedule.”
As the drivers went off to their vehicles, Cincinnatus approached Straubing and said, “Thank you kindly, suh.”
The white man looked almost as nonplused as Murray had when he was arrested. “I suppose you’re welcome, Cincinnatus,” he answered after a moment, “but I didn’t do it for you.”
“Sir, I understand that,” Cincinnatus said. “I-”
“Do you?” Straubing broke in. “I wonder. I did it for the sake of the United States Army. You Negroes have shown you can do this job, and if you do it, white men don’t have to, and we can put rifles in their hands. I would sooner have taken on more of you, but this new contingent got sent to me instead. We’ll see what we can make of them.”
“Uh, yes, sir,” Cincinnatus said. Straubing was indeed a good deal less sentimental, more hardheaded than he’d reckoned.
The lieutenant went on, “And no one who deserves to keep his rank badges will let himself be disobeyed, even for an instant. Is there anything else before you get to work?”
“No, suh,” Cincinnatus said. Maybe, instead of being kindly and sentimental, Straubing was the most cold-blooded human being he’d ever met, so cold-blooded that he didn’t even get excited about matters of race, matters Cincinnatus had thought guaranteed to stir the passions of every man, white or black, Yankee or Confederate.
Cincinnatus went out to tend to his truck. There a couple of vehicles over stood Herk, fiddling with the driver’s-side acetylene lamp on his own machine. He nodded to Cincinnatus, then went back to getting the reflector the way he wanted it.
He didn’t even notice he hadn’t backed Cincinnatus and the other colored drivers when Murray started running his mouth. Cincinnatus couldn’t help scowling. And then, slowly, his anger faded. Herk did his job. He let Cincinnatus do his job, too, and didn’t fuss about that. If he did so much, did Cincinnatus have any business expecting more?
“I can hope,” Cincinnatus mumbled. That made Herk look up from what he was doing, but only for a moment. Cincinnatus sighed. He might hope white men would treat him the same as they treated one of their own, but a lifetime had taught him he had no business expecting it.
Black roustabouts hauled crates from the wharves toward the line of trucks. With them came Lieutenant Kennan, raving at them to work harder, harder. Nobody put Kennan under arrest for abusing blacks. But he was following U.S. orders, not disobeying them as Murray had done. If he might have got more work from his crew without the abuse…who cared? No one in authority, that was certain.
With another sigh, Cincinnatus cranked his White’s motor into rumbling life. Lieutenant Straubing let him do his job, too. In the scheme of things, that wasn’t so bad. It could have been worse, and he knew it.
XVII
Private Ulysses Hansen looked around. “Once upon a time, probably, this was real pretty country,” he said.
“Not any time lately,” another private-Sergeant Gordon McSweeney couldn’t see who-answered. The whole squad, with the exception of McSweeney, chuckled.
“Silence in the ranks,” McSweeney said, and silence he got: all proper and according to regulation. He looked around at what had been a northeastern Arkansas pine forest and was now a wasteland of jagged stumps and dow
ntumbled branches. That it might once have been beautiful hadn’t occurred to him. He hadn’t particularly noticed how hideous it was at the moment, either. It was country that had once held the enemy but was now cleared of him, that was all. No, not quite all: it was country that led to land the enemy still infested.
Captain Schneider came bustling along past the company as the soldiers trudged south and east. Schneider nodded toward Gordon McSweeney. “Not so pretty as it used to be, is it, Sergeant?” he said.
“No, sir,” McSweeney answered stolidly. The company commander outranked him, and so could say whatever he pleased, as far as McSweeney was concerned.
Schneider went on, “Trouble is, the damn Rebs knew we were coming, so they baked us a cake. A whole bunch of cakes, as a matter of fact.”
“Sir?” McSweeney said: when his superior spoke directly to him, he had to answer. He regretted the necessity. Ever since their clash over the need to enforce all regulations to the fullest-gospel to him, but evidently not to Schneider-he’d feared the captain was trying to seduce him away from the straight and narrow path he had trodden all his life.
“Toward Memphis,” Schneider amplified. “They fortified all this delta country in eastern Arkansas to a fare-thee-well, and so here it is two years after the damn war started and we’re only getting to Jonesboro now.”
“Oh. Yes, sir,” McSweeney said. Matters military he would willingly discuss with his superior, even if Schneider was sometimes profane. “And, of course, since we stand on the far side of the Mississippi, we get half the resources of those east of the river. General Custer’s First Army, I recall-”
“Don’t talk about any of that,” Schneider broke in. “It hurts too much when I think about it. We’re not going to have an easy time up ahead, either.”
“At Jonesboro? No, sir, I don’t expect we will,” McSweeney said. He could see the Confederate strongpoint without any trouble. Why not? None of the timber was tall enough to block his view, not any more. The town sprawled along the top of Crowley’s Ridge, in most places not a feature worth noticing but here in this flat country high ground to be coveted. “What’s the altitude here, sir?”
“At Jonesboro? It’s 344 feet,” Captain Schneider said. “That’s 344 too many, you ask me. And we lose even what little cover these woods-or what’s left of ’em-give us, too, because it was farming country out to three or four miles in front of the town.”
“I see that also, sir,” McSweeney answered. He raised his voice to call out to his men: “Give way to the right for the column coming back.”
The column coming back was made up of soldiers returning from the front line, soldiers for whom McSweeney’s squad, Schneider’s company, were among the replacements. They looked the way any soldiers coming away from the front line looked: dirty, haggard, exhausted seemingly past the repair of sleep, some managing grins as they thought about what they’d do now that they’d finally got relieved, others shambling along with blank stares, as if they hardly knew where they were. That happened to some men after they’d taken too much shelling. McSweeney had seen as much, though he didn’t understand. How could a man whom the Lord had spared be anything but joyful?
One of the soldiers leaving the front pointed to the tank of jellied oil he bore on his back. “Rebs catch you with that contraption, pal, they won’t bother sendin’ you to no prison camp. They’ll just cut your throat for you and leave you for the buzzards.”
“They shall not take me alive.” McSweeney spoke with great assurance. He generally spoke with great assurance. The soldier who’d presumed to remark on the flamethrower stared, shrugged, and kept on marching.
Noncoms left behind guided the company into the section of trench they would inhabit till taken out of line themselves. “I don’t like this for hell,” Captain Schneider said. “Not for hell I don’t. We’re right out in the open, with whatever guns the Rebs have up on that ridge looking straight down our throats.”
“And the men who were here before us were not careful enough about that, either,” McSweeney said. For once, he needed to give his squad no orders. Seeing the same thing he did, every man jack of them had taken out his entrenching tool and was busy improving the shelter with which they had been provided. McSweeney turned to Schneider. “I would wager the barbed wire will be as weak.”
“You’re likely right, Sergeant,” Schneider answered, “but I’m not going to stick my head up to find out, not in broad daylight I’m not. Come tonight, we’ll send out a wiring party-if there’s any wire to be had.”
“Yes, sir,” McSweeney said. “I sometimes think Philadelphia cares not at all whether the war on this side of the river is won or lost. Utah mattered to the powers that be, because it was on the rail line to the Pacific. Here-” He shook his head. “Out of sight, out of mind.”
“You’ll get a lot of people who do the real fighting to tell you the fools back in Philadelphia are out of their minds,” Schneider said with a grin. When McSweeney didn’t grin back, the captain frowned. McSweeney wondered why.
The wiring party did not go out that night: a wiring party without wire was nothing but wasted effort. Ben Carlton cooked up a stew inedible even by his own standards, which were low. “The enemy seeks to wound us,” McSweeney told him. “You should not.”
Carlton gave him a resentful stare. “Ain’t like you could do better.”
“I admit it,” McSweeney said.
“You do?” The cook stared again, this time in a different way. “Ain’t never heard you admit nothin’ before.”
“However,” McSweeney went on implacably, as if Carlton had not spoken, “I was not assigned to cook. You were.” Resentment returned to Carlton’s face. McSweeney ignored it, as he always did, confident in his own rightness and righteousness.
No new wire came up to the front. Captain Schneider swore. McSweeney sent Carlton out to see if he could come up with any: the man was a menace as a cook, but an inspired scavenger. When Carlton had no luck, McSweeney concluded there truly was no wire to be had. He went up and down the line, making sure the machine guns were well sited. Only after that was done did he wrap himself in his blanket and go to sleep.
Rebel artillery made sure he did not sleep late. Those guns up on top of Crowley’s Ridge started shelling the U.S. position a couple of hours before dawn. “Gas!” somebody screamed in the middle of the unholy din. McSweeney donned his gas helmet as calmly and quickly as if he were practicing in front of a mirror.
“Be ready!” he yelled as soon as the first light showed in the sky. Not five minutes later, Confederate machine guns added their racket to the crashes from the artillery.
Shouts rose up and down the trench: “Here they come!” “Here come the goddamn motherfucking sons of bitches!” Beneath the gas helmet, McSweeney’s face set in disapproving lines. He’d never find out who had committed the obscene blasphemy. And then a shout rose that made him forget to worry about discipline and propriety: “Barrel! Jesus, the Rebs have a stinking barrel!”
He stuck his head up over the top of the parapet. Sure enough, one of those tracked traveling fortresses was slowly rumbling and clanking straight toward the U.S. line-straight toward him, it looked like. The U.S. machine guns went from raking the soldiers in butternut advancing with the barrel to aiming their fire exclusively at it, trying to knock it out of action before it could get into the trenches.
It was a British-style machine, with cannon mounted in sponsons on either side. One of those cannon spat fire. A machine gun fell silent. The barrel clattered forward once more. Its own machine guns sprayed bullets at the U.S. soldiers.
The glass portholes in McSweeney’s gas helmet were fogged on the inside and streaked with dust on the outside. That did not keep him from noticing a couple of men running away from the barrel. “Halt!” he roared at them. It did no good. At last, the men had discovered something they feared worse than they feared him.
Boom! The barrel fired again. Another machine gun abruptly stopped shooting at i
t. Ricochets whined off the steel armor, striking sparks but failing to penetrate. McSweeney wondered how many more barrels that he could not see were moving forward.
He shrugged. If he couldn’t see them, he couldn’t do anything about them. He could see this one. He bent and, careful not to disturb his gas helmet, shrugged over his shoulders the straps to the metal tank that fueled his special weapon. Then he waited. Bullets seemed unable to hurt the barrel.
Here it came, grinding its way through and over the few strands of wire protecting the U.S. trenches. Having thicker belts out there wouldn’t have stopped it. More soldiers in green-gray fled the machine they could not stop.
It crushed the parapet and stood poised up there above the edge of the trench, triumphant, like a great bull elephant. As it began its plunge into the U.S. works, McSweeney sent a stream of flame in through one of the machine-gun ports. An instant later, he did the same with the other port on the right side of the barrel, thereby making sure neither of those guns would bear on him.
Through the shelling, through the firing going on all around, through the coughing roar of the barrel’s engine, he heard screams inside the metal hull. Hatches flew open on top of the barrel. Men started scrambling out. Smiling behind the canvas of the mask, McSweeney burned them down. They tumbled back into the machine, black and shrunken and flaming, like insects that had flown into the flame of a gaslight.
Smoke poured from the barrel. Ammunition started cooking off in it. McSweeney regretfully moved away, that hard, tight grin still on his face. A Confederate soldier sprang onto the parapet. He fired from the hip at McSweeney-and missed. He never got a second chance. A tongue of flame licked over him. He tumbled back, burning, burning.
A grenade flew down into the trench. The blast was deafening. A fragment bit McSweeney’s leg. But when a Rebel followed the grenade, he too became a torch. No more Confederate soldiers tried coming down into the U.S. trenches, not anywhere the flame could reach. The sight of the blazing barrel took the heart out of their attack.
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