The Great War: Breakthroughs

by Harry Turtledove

  “Yeah, well, this here’s the next town south of Waurika, too. Ain’t nothing to speak of between there and here,” Hairston said. “The Yankees run us out of the one place, what the hell’s the point in stoppin’ till you got somewheres else worth holding on to?”

  “Mm, maybe you’ve got something there,” Bartlett admitted. “Lot of built-up land in the Roanoke valley, and what isn’t built up is good farm country. Here, there’s a lot of land just lying empty, not doing anything in particular. Seems kind of funny, when you’re used to the way things are on the other side of the Mississippi.”

  “Yeah,” Hairston agreed. A couple of three-inch field guns came by, pulled through the mud by laboring horses. “And that’s our artillery. That’s all the artillery we got, for miles and miles. Ain’t like that on the Roanoke front, is it?”

  “Lord, no,” Reggie answered. “There, the Yankees and us’d line ’em up hub to hub and whale away at each other till it didn’t seem like there was a live man anywhere the guns could reach.”

  He wished there were barbed wire to string in front of the entrenchments he and his comrades were digging. Confederate forces had been able to use some farther north in Sequoyah, but had had to abandon it when the Yankees forced them out of their positions. Nothing new had come up from Texas. From what Reggie’d heard, the defenders of Texas had their problems, too.

  He was still digging when the U.S. field guns opened up on his position. He had to throw himself down in the mud a couple of times because of near misses. After each one, he got up, brushed himself off, and went back to work.

  Joe Mopope, one of the Kiowas who’d been fighting alongside the Confederates since Waurika, asked, “How can you do that? I can fight with a rifle”—he carried a Tredegar now, not the squirrel gun he’d started with—“but it’s different when the big guns start shooting. They are too far away for me to shoot back at them, so they make me afraid.”

  Admitting fear took a kind of nerve of its own. Bartlett studied Mopope’s long, straight-nosed, high-cheekboned face. “All what you’re used to, Joe,” he said at last, more careful of the Indian’s pride than he’d thought he might be. “I’ve been under worse shellfire than this since 1914. I know what it can do and what it can’t. First few times, it damn near scared the piss out of me.”

  “Ah.” Mopope was usually a pretty serious fellow. Now he tried out a smile, as if to see whether it would fit his face. “This is good to know. A warrior can learn this kind of fighting, then, the same as any other kind.”

  “Yeah,” Reggie said. Joe Mopope’s father might have been a warrior of the traditional Indian sort, sneaking across the U.S. border on raids up into Kansas. That sort of thing had gone on for years after the Second Mexican War, finally petering out not long before the turn of the century.

  Bartlett shrugged. He came from a family of warriors, too. Both his grandfathers had served in the War of Secession. His father hadn’t fought in the Second Mexican War, but Uncle Jasper sure as hell had—and wouldn’t shut up about it, either, not to this day.

  From in back of the trenches, the Confederates’ field guns opened up. They fired faster than their Yankee counterparts. Joe Mopope’s smile got wider. “Ah, we give it back to them. That is good. Hurting them is better than sitting here and letting them hurt us.”

  “Yes, except for one thing.” Reggie set down his entrenching tool and unslung his rifle. “If we’re opening up on the damnyankees, that means they’re close enough for the gunners to spot ’em. And if they’re close enough for the gunners to spot ’em, we’re going to have company before long.”

  He looked north. Sure enough, here came the men in green-gray. They advanced much more openly than they would have in the Roanoke valley, where any man outside a trench risked immediate annihilation. That aside, the Yankee commander hereabouts seemed to assess danger by how many men the Confederates in front of him knocked over on the approach. Some generals in butternut were like that, too. Bartlett was glad he didn’t serve under any of them.

  Rifle and machine-gun fire forced the Yankees to go to earth. Dirt flew as the U.S. soldiers dug themselves in. Any man who hoped to live through the war was handy with the spade. Stretcher-bearers carried a few wounded Confederates back into Ryan. On the other side of the line, stretcher-bearers in U.S. uniforms were no doubt doing the same thing with injured damnyankees.

  “We stopped ’em!” Napoleon Dibble said happily.

  Even Joe Mopope rolled his black eyes at that. As gently as he could, Reggie said, “We stopped ’em for now, Nap. We stopped ’em for a while at Duncan, and for a while at Waurika, too. Question is, can we stop ’em when they bring up everything they’ve got?”

  “We have to,” Dibble answered. “Lieutenant Nicoll said we have to. If we don’t, the Yankees get Sequoyah, and they’ll fill it up with Germans.” He’d made that mistake before; nobody bothered correcting him about it any more.

  Dusk fell. Reggie gnawed stale cornbread and opened a tin of beans and pork. That was enough to quiet the growling in his belly, though it didn’t make much of a meal. Cold drizzle started falling. Rifle fire spattered up and down the lines, muzzle flashes looking like lightning bugs.

  When Bartlett wanted somebody to dig a trench forward toward a good post for a picket that he’d spotted, he looked around for Joe Mopope, but didn’t spot him. He wondered where the hell the Indian had got to. The Kiowas and Comanches were good enough in a fight, but they didn’t like the drudgery that went with soldiering for hell.

  He set Nap Dibble digging instead. Nap did the job without complaint. He never complained. He probably wasn’t smart enough to complain. Because he didn’t, he got more than his fair share of jobs nobody else wanted.

  Sergeant Pete Hairston launched a fearsome barrage of curses. Reggie hurried over to see what was going on. There stood Joe Mopope, knife in one hand, a couple of objects Bartlett couldn’t see well in the other. In tones somewhere between disgust and awe, Hairston said, “This red-skinned son of a bitch just brought us back two Yankee scalps.”

  Reggie stared. Then he blurted, “No wonder he wasn’t around when I needed him to dig.”

  Very quietly, Joe Mopope laughed.

  As she rode the streetcar to her job at a mackerel-canning plant, Sylvia Enos went through the inner pages of the Boston Globe with minute care. As far as she was concerned, the paper never talked enough about naval affairs. A battle on land that didn’t move the front a quarter of a mile in one direction or the other got page-one coverage. Sometimes she thought ships got mentioned only when they were torpedoed or blown to bits.

  She saw nothing about the USS Ericsson. Not seeing anything about the destroyer made her let out a silent sigh of relief. It meant—she devoutly hoped it meant—her husband George was all right.

  Most of the people on the trolley were women on the way to work, many of them on the way to jobs men had been doing before the war pulled them into the Army or the Navy. Many of them were scanning the newspaper as attentively as Sylvia was doing. Some of the ones who weren’t wore mourning black. They no longer had any need to fear the worst. They’d already met it.

  Sylvia left her copy of the Globe on the seat when the trolley came to her stop. She wished George were home. She wished he’d never gone to war. And she hoped the Ericsson was far out to sea, nowhere near a port. She loved her husband, and she thought he loved her, but she wasn’t sure, as she had been once, she could trust him out of her sight.

  She walked the short distance to the canning plant, which was no more lovely than it had to be. It wasn’t far from the harbor, and stank of fish. A skinny cat looked at her and gave an optimistic meow. She shook her head. “Sorry, pussycat. No handouts from me today.” The cat meowed again, piteously this time. Sylvia shook her head again, too, and walked on.

  She grabbed her time card and stuck it in the clock. The money wasn’t good—it wasn’t as if she were a man, after all—but, with it and her monthly allotment from George’s pay, she ma
naged well enough.

  “Good morning, Mrs. Enos,” the foreman said as she hurried toward the machine that stuck bright labels on cans of mackerel.

  “Good morning, Mr. Winter,” she answered. He nodded and limped on past her: as a young man, he’d taken a bullet in the leg during the Second Mexican War.

  A couple of minutes later, Isabella Antonelli took her place on the machine next to Sylvia’s. She wore black; her husband had been killed fighting in Quebec. She nodded shyly to Sylvia, set down her dinner pail, and made sure her machine was in good working order.

  With a rumble of motors and several discordant squeals of fan belts, the line started moving. Sylvia had to pull three levers, taking steps between them, to bring bare, bright cans into her machine, squirt paste on them, and affix the labels—which made the mackerel whose flesh went into the cans look remarkably like tuna. Being a fisherman’s wife, she knew what a lie that was. People who bought the cans in Ohio or Nebraska wouldn’t, though.

  Some days, stepping and pulling levers could be mesmerizing, so that half the morning would slip by while Sylvia hardly noticed any time passing. This was one of those mornings. The only time she got jolted out of her routine was when her paste reservoir ran dry and she had to refill it from the big bucket of paste under the machine before she could put on more labels.

  As it did sometimes, the lunch whistle startled her, jerking her out of the world in which she was almost as mechanical as the machine she tended. The line groaned to a stop. Sylvia shook herself, as she might have done coming out of the bathtub at the end of the hall in her apartment building. She looked around. There was her dinner pail, of black-painted sheet metal like the one a riveter might have carried to the Boston Navy Yard.

  Isabella Antonelli’s dinner pail might have been identical to her own. The two women sat on a bench near a wheezing steam radiator. Sylvia had a ham sandwich in her dinner pail, leftovers from the night before. Isabella Antonelli had a tightly covered bowl that also looked to hold leftovers: long noodles that looked like worms, smothered in tomato sauce. She brought them to the factory about three days out of five. Sylvia thought they were disgusting, though she’d never said so for fear of hurting her friend’s feelings.

  Mr. Winter limped by, a cigar clamped between his teeth. He was carrying his own dinner pail, looking for a place to sit down. His eyes lingered on Isabella as he walked past. “You can go with him, if you’d like,” Sylvia said.

  “I will sit with you today,” the Italian woman said. She smiled, which made her look younger and not so tired. “He should not take me too much for granted, don’t you think?”

  She and the foreman—a widower for years—had been lovers for a couple of months. They were discreet about it, both at the factory and with their own families. Winter had aimed a few speculative remarks at Sylvia since she’d started working at the canning plant; she was just as well pleased to see him attached to someone else. To his credit, he hadn’t aimed any of those remarks at her since taking up with Isabella.

  Sylvia said, “Anybody who takes anybody else for granted is a fool.”

  She didn’t realize with how much bitterness she’d freighted the remark till Isabella Antonelli, a worried look on her face, asked, “But all is well with your Giorgio, yes?”

  “He’s well, yes,” Sylvia replied, which was by no means a complete answer. Isabella obviously realized it wasn’t a complete answer. She also obviously realized it was all the answer she would get. The rest of the half-hour lunch passed in uneasy silence.

  For once, Sylvia was glad to go back to her machine, to lose herself in the routine of pulling and stepping, pulling and stepping, of watching cans bright with their tinning go into the machine and cans gaudy with their labels stream out. The machine asked no questions she would sooner not have answered. The machine asked no questions at all.

  As she had at the lunch whistle, Sylvia started when the quitting whistle screamed. It was dark when she clocked out and walked to the trolley stop, but not quite so dark as it had been earlier in the year. Twilight lingered in the west, a harbinger of spring ahead. It was the only harbinger of spring she could find; the wind cut like a knife.

  She had to stand almost all the way back to the stop by her apartment building. Except for lunch, she’d been standing since she got to the plant. Now that she’d returned from that mechanistic world, she felt how tired she was. Her legs didn’t want to hold her up any more. When she finally did get to sit down, she nearly fell asleep before the streetcar got to her stop. She’d done that once, and walked back more than a mile. This time, she didn’t, but getting up and getting off the trolley were more mind over matter than anything else.

  She checked her mailbox in the entrance hall to the apartment building. No letter from George, which meant he hadn’t come to port as of a few days before, which meant he hadn’t had the chance to get into trouble in a port. He might have got into trouble on the sea, but that was a different sort of trouble, and one over which she worried in a different sort of way.

  Circulars from the Coal Board, the Scrap Metal Collection Agency, the Ration Board, the Victory Over Waste Committee, and the War Savings and Tax Board helped fill the mailbox. So did one from an agency new to her, the Paper Conservation Authority, which informed her in the portentous bureaucratic tones of any government outfit that paper was an important war resource and should not be wasted.

  “Then why do I get so much worthless paper every day?” she muttered, tossing the multicolored sheets into the battered wastebasket there. The answer to that was only too clear: “Because one board writes this and none of the others read it, that’s why.”

  She went upstairs to reclaim her children from Brigid Coneval, who, after her husband was conscripted, had decided to take in the children of other women who got jobs in factories instead of getting a factory job herself. Each flight of stairs seemed to have twice as many as the one before, and each step twice as high.

  When she came out into the hallway, she walked down the hall to Mrs. Coneval’s flat to get George, Jr., and Mary Jane and take them back to her own apartment, where she would make supper and let them play till they were ready for bed—or, more likely, till she was ready for bed and managed to persuade them that they should lie down, too.

  They were getting harder to persuade. George, Jr., was six now, heading toward seven, and Mary Jane nearly four. Sylvia needed more sleep these days, while they needed less. It hardly seemed fair.

  With so many children in Brigid Coneval’s flat, shrieks and cries as Sylvia came up were the order of the day. But the shrieks and cries that Sylvia heard now did not come from the throats of children. Fear shot through her, sharp as if she’d seized a live electric wire. She had to will herself to knock, and then had to knock twice to make anyone inside notice her.

  The woman who opened the door was not Brigid Coneval, though she looked very much like her. Seeing Sylvia, George, Jr., and Mary Jane came running up and embraced her. Above them, Sylvia asked the question she dreaded, the question that had to be asked: “Is she—? Is it—?”

  “It is that.” The woman, doubtless Brigid’s sister, had a brogue like hers, too. “Less than an hour ago, the telegram came. Down in Virginia he was, poor man, and never coming back from there again.”

  “That’s dreadful. I’m so sorry,” Sylvia said, feeling the inadequacy of words. She knew what Brigid Coneval was feeling. She’d twice thought George lost, once when his fishing boat was captured by a Confederate commerce raider and once when his river monitor was blown out of the water. The only thing that had saved him then was that he hadn’t been aboard, but on the riverbank, drunk and about to lie down with a colored strumpet.

  She couldn’t even say she understood, for Brigid’s sister would not believe her. Then she found a new worry, different but in its own way no less urgent: while Brigid Coneval mourned, who would take care of the children when she had to go to work?

  Sam Carsten swabbed the deck of the USS Dakota w
ith a safety line tied round his waist. The battleship pitched like a toy boat in a rambunctious boy’s bathtub, chewing its way over and through waves that put to shame any others he’d ever known.

  He shouted to his bunkmate, Vic Crosetti, who plied a mop not far away: “Everything they say about Cape Horn is true!”

  “Yeah,” Crosetti shouted back, through the howl of the wind. “Only trouble is, they don’t say near enough, the tight-mouthed sons of bitches.”

  There was nothing tight-mouthed about him. He was a voluble Italian, little and swarthy and hairy and ugly as a monkey. Carsten, by contrast, was tall and muscular, with pink skin and hair so blond, it was almost white.

  Crosetti leered at him. “You sunburned yet, Sam?”

  “Fuck you,” Carsten said amiably. He’d burned in San Francisco. Christ, he’d burned in Seattle. Duty in the Sandwich Islands and the tropical Pacific had been a hell of burning and peeling and zinc oxide and half a dozen other ointments that didn’t do any good, either. “I finally find weather that suits me, and what do I get? A scrawny dago giving me a hard time.”

  Had some men called him a scrawny dago, Crosetti would have answered with a kick in the teeth or a knife in the ribs. When Sam did, he grinned. Carsten had a way of being able to talk without ticking people off. He even had trouble starting brawls in waterfront saloons.

  Another enormous swell sweeping along from west to east lifted the Dakota to its crest. For a moment, Sam could see a hell of a long way. He spotted another battleship from the U.S. force that had set out from Pearl Harbor for Valparaiso, Chile, the autumn before—except autumn meant nothing in the Sandwich Islands and was spring down in Chile. Farther off, he made out a U.S. armored cruiser and a couple of the destroyers that guarded the big battlewagons from harm.