The Great War: Breakthroughs

by Harry Turtledove

  Everything was going so well, she wondered what would happen to break the lucky streak. She found out when she got to the school. He wasn’t in the kindergarten classroom. “You’ll have to get him at the front office,” his teacher, Miss Hammaker, told Sylvia.

  “What did he do?” she gasped. “Is he all right?”

  “You’ll have to get him at the office,” the dyspeptic-looking spinster repeated. Sylvia snarled at her and hurried away.

  When she saw George, Jr., she knew right away what the trouble was. A clerk clacking away at a typewriter spelled it out in two well-chosen words: “Chicken pox.” Then she went on, “I’m afraid you’re going to have to keep him home until the scabs come off the pox.”

  “But that will be two weeks from now,” Sylvia exclaimed in horror.

  “I’m sorry, Mrs. Enos, but we can’t very well let him go spreading a contagious disease, now can we?” the clerk said primly.

  “But my job!” Sylvia said. “What am I supposed to do about my job?”

  “I really don’t know what to tell you about that, ma’am,” the clerk answered. “We do have the other children to look out for, too, you know.”

  Sylvia put a hand on her son’s shoulder. “Come on, George,” she said wearily. “Let’s go get your sister and take the two of you home and then try to figure out what to do next.” She had no idea what to do next. Once she got home, she could start worrying about it. The clerk started typing again. Now that George, Jr., was leaving, she didn’t have to worry about him any more. Sylvia did.

  When she got to Mrs. Dooley’s, the woman looked at her with the same disapproval Miss Hammaker had shown. “Mrs. Enos,” she said pointedly, “your daughter will not be welcome here—”

  “Until she gets over the chicken pox,” Sylvia finished for her. Mrs. Dooley’s eyebrows rose. Sylvia said, “Just a wild guess, of course.” She kept her arm around George, Jr. The longer he had to stay on his feet, the more pale and sick he looked—and the redder his spots got by comparison.

  “I can’t have her here till she’s better,” Mrs. Dooley said. “The other women whose children I mind would have a fit if I let her stay, and I wouldn’t blame them one bit.” She turned. “Go on, Mary Jane. Go home with your mother. When you’re well, you can come back again.”

  “All right,” Mary Jane said meekly. That she offered no mischief or snippy talk was a telling indication she didn’t feel right. She too was starting to break out in the red spots that would soon turn into blisters.

  Cautiously, Mrs. Dooley asked, “She is vaccinated, isn’t she?”

  “What?” Sylvia needed a moment to understand what the question meant. “Oh. Yes. She and her brother both. It’s only chicken pox—it can’t be smallpox.”

  “All right.” The older woman nodded. “Most children are vaccinated these days, but you never know. Well, that’s a relief. You take them home now, Mrs. Enos, and bring your daughter back when she’s well.”

  Nodding, Sylvia turned away and led the children back to the trolley stop. They didn’t frisk ahead of her, the way they usually did. She urged them to hurry, but they lacked the energy to do it. She counted herself lucky they didn’t make her miss a streetcar.

  They had no appetite at supper, which also didn’t surprise her. After they were done picking at their food, she gave them aspirins and put them to bed early. “This itches, Mama,” George, Jr., said. “It itches a lot.”

  “Try not to scratch,” Sylvia answered. “If you do, it’ll leave scars.”

  “It itches!” he said.

  Remembering her own bout of chicken pox—she’d been nine or ten—she knew how fiercely they itched. “Do your best,” she said. She had a pockmark on the side of her jaw, one between her breasts, several on her arms and legs, and one or two in other places she hadn’t known about till her husband found them. That had amused George no end, though she’d been embarrassed.

  By the time she finished the supper dishes, the children were asleep. She went down the hall and knocked on Brigid Coneval’s door. When the Irishwoman opened it, she was in mourning black. “Mrs. Enos,” she said, and stepped aside. “Do come in. What might I do for you today?”

  Her apartment looked more battered than Sylvia’s, and smelled of cooking grease and cabbage. Her children, three boys ranging from George, Jr.’s, size on down, ran around raising hell. Through their racket, Sylvia said, “I was wondering if I could pay you enough to watch my children, just long enough to let them get over the chicken pox.”

  Brigid Coneval shook her head. “That I cannot, and that I will not,” she answered. “For one thing, I’m taking in other people’s wee ones no more, as you know. And for another, Patrick has not had the chicken pox himself, nor has Michael, nor Billy, neither. I’ll be just as well pleased without them having ’em, too, sure and I will.”

  “But what am I going to do?” Sylvia exclaimed. She’d been saying the same thing to anyone who would listen ever since she’d first seen George, Jr., covered with spots. “How am I going to go to work?”

  “Well, if you do, you do—and if you don’t, you don’t,” Mrs. Coneval said airily. “Tell ’em you’ll not be in while the babes are after being sick, that’s all. What else can you do?”

  “They’ll fire me.” Sylvia stated the obvious.

  “Will you starve while you miss a couple weeks’ pay?” Brigid Coneval asked. Reluctantly, Sylvia shook her head. The new widow went on, “Then be damned to the job. You’ll get another soon enough—plenty to be had, with so many men off getting killed. You’ll have no trouble at all, at all.”

  “I’ve worked there a long time.” Sylvia sighed. “But you’re right. In the end, you’re right. If they fire me for staying home, then they do, that’s all. I don’t want to leave that job, but I can if I have to. Thank you, Mrs. Coneval. You’ve made me see things clear.”

  “Any time at all, dearie,” Brigid Coneval said.

  Behind Private First Class Reginald Bartlett, artillery thundered: not a lot of artillery, not by the standards of the Roanoke front, but more than he’d heard on the Confederate side of the line here in Sequoyah. “Let the damnyankees keep their heads down for a change,” he said.

  Pete Hairston nodded. “Only trouble is, once the guns stop, we get to go forward and push ’em out,” the veteran sergeant said. He paused and shrugged. “Us and the niggers do. Goddamned if I like that.”

  Joe Mopope said, “You people are crazy, giving niggers guns. Wouldn’t never catch us Kiowas giving niggers guns.”

  “If those colored regiments hadn’t come over the river, we never would have got enough men to attack the Yanks,” Reggie said.

  Hairston nodded again. “That’s a fact. We’d be holding on tooth and toenail, same as we have been. Now we got a chance to take back some of this here state. We better see that we don’t waste it, on account of I don’t reckon we’ll ever see another one.”

  Whistles blew, up and down the reinforced Confederate line. Lieutenant Nicoll shouted, “Come on, boys, now it’s our turn!” Out of the trenches came his company. Howling the Rebel yell, they trotted forward. “Go!” Nicoll roared to them. “Go on! They aren’t doing so well back East—we’ve got to show them how to play the game.”

  “We’ll get ’em!” Napoleon Dibble said. “They can’t mess with the Belgians, and they can’t mess with us.”

  Reggie said nothing. He didn’t waste his breath yelling. Every time he came up above ground, he felt like a turtle coming out of its shell. He was vulnerable up here. His time in the close-quarters fighting of the Roanoke front had taught him how hideously vulnerable a man was when he came up out of his trench.

  He wasn’t afraid, though, not in the ordinary sense of the word. Whatever was going to happen would happen. It was largely out of his hands. If he let it worry him, he’d be letting his pals down, and he couldn’t stand that, not after they’d been through and suffered so much together.

  On they came. Some dropped into cover to shoot wh
ile others advanced, then leapfrogged past when the other group hit the dirt. The bombardment hadn’t taken out all the Yankees; bombardments never did. Rifles and machine guns stuttered to life. Men in butternut began falling not of their own volition.

  Some of those men were black, the new units going forward along with the white troops who had been in the field for years. The Negro soldiers charged straight at the U.S. trenches; they weren’t skilled in the fire-and-move tactics the veterans had learned by painful experience. And they went down in gruesome numbers. When they screamed, Bartlett couldn’t tell their voices from those of white men.

  He lay in a shell hole, fired a couple of rounds toward the Yankee line ahead, and then got to his feet and ran by the men he’d been supporting. He dove behind a stump and started shooting again. Once his buddies had dashed past him and found cover, he scrambled up and ran on.

  He was about thirty yards from the Yankee trench when a traversing machine gun turned its balefully winking eye upon him.

  His first feeling was nothing but surprise. One moment, he’d been sprinting forward, his eyes fixed on the Yankees in their ugly cooking-pot helmets who were shooting at him and his countrymen. The next, he slammed to the ground on his face.

  Somebody punched me, he thought. Somebody punched me twice. God damn that Joe Mopope anyhow—this is no time for practical jokes.

  Then he tried to move. What had been impact turned to pain, stunning pain, in his left shoulder and right leg. Someone very close by was screaming at the top of his lungs. Only when Reggie needed to inhale did he realize those cries belonged to him.

  Machine-gun and rifle fire kept right on stitching past him. In what was more a roll and a wriggle than a crawl, he made it into a hole in the torn-up ground, pulled out his wound dressing, and wondered what the hell he should bandage first.

  Blood was turning the outside of his right trouser leg blackish red. His left arm didn’t want to do what he told it to do. Awkwardly, one-handedly, he got a sort of a bandage around his thigh and stuffed a pad of gauze into the hole in his shoulder. The world kept going gray as he worked, but he persevered.

  “Stretcher-bearer!” he shouted. “Stretcher-bearer!” His voice was hoarse and raw-edged. No one came. The Yanks didn’t usually shoot stretcher-bearers on purpose, any more than the CSA did, but bullets weren’t fussy, either.

  Reggie got out his canteen and drank it dry. The day was hot and muggy. Before very long, the anguish of thirst joined the agony from his wounds. The sun beat down on him out of a brassy sky. His bandages went from white to red and soggy.

  Every so often, when the pain backed off a little, he wondered how the attack was going. He occasionally saw men in butternut going forward. Nobody flopped down in his shell hole. He didn’t think that was fair.

  More screams rose. This time, they didn’t come from Reggie. After a while, those screams stopped. They never started up again. Bartlett got the idea that the fellow who’d been making them wasn’t breathing any more.

  Up ahead, the firing hesitated, then broke out anew, louder and fiercer than ever. Shells from the damnyankees’ field artillery whistled overhead. Some, no doubt aimed to impede the Confederates’ advance, dropped down near Reggie. He halfway—more than halfway—hoped one would land square on him. He’d never know what hit him then. He knew exactly what had hit him now. He moaned through dry lips.

  Slowly, ever so slowly, the scorching sun slid across the sky. As it sank toward the western horizon, men in butternut started coming back past the shell hole where Reggie Bartlett lay. He called out to them, but his voice was a dry husk of what it had been. No one heard him. No one saw him reach out imploringly with his good hand. His comrades retreated.

  In their wake, the soldiers of the U.S. Army advanced. They fired and moved, as their Confederate counterparts had done during the morning. The sun was going more orange than gold when one of them jumped down into Reggie’s hole.

  The Yankee had fired twice before he realized the body in there with him was not dead. He had it in his power to change that on the instant. Reggie got a good, long, close look at him: he was in his late twenties or early thirties, dark, in need of a shave, and wearing what the Yanks called a Kaiser Bill mustache. It had a couple of white hairs in it. Reggie thought it looked stupid. Two stripes on the fellow’s sleeve: a corporal.

  He said, “I ought to blow your fuckin’ head off, Reb.” Reggie shrugged a one-shouldered shrug. The U.S. corporal suddenly looked thoughtful. “If I bring you in, though,” he went on, thinking out loud, “your pals miss a chance to blow my fuckin’ head off, and that don’t make me even a little bit sorry, I got news for you.”

  Reggie forced a word out through parched throat: “Water?”

  “Yeah,” the corporal said, and held a canteen to his lips. The water was warm and stale and tasted ambrosial. Then the Yankee heaved him up onto his back with a bull’s strength, ignoring his cries of pain. The U.S. soldier started toward his own line, shouting, “Stretcher-bearers! Got a wounded Reb prisoner here!”

  A couple of U.S. soldiers with red crosses on their helmets and on armbands took charge of Bartlett. “How you feelin’, Reb?” one of them asked, not unkindly.

  “Shitty,” he answered.

  “Stick him, Louie,” the other stretcher-bearer said. “We don’t want him yellin’ at us all the way to the field hospital.”

  “Sure as hell don’t,” Louie agreed, and stuck a needle in Reggie’s arm. Reggie sighed as relief washed over him. The pain remained, but now he floated over it instead of being immersed. The relief must have shown on his face, for Louie chuckled. “That morphine’s great stuff, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah,” Reggie breathed.

  The stretcher-bearers hauled him through zigzagging communications trenches similar to the ones behind his own front line. Then they put his stretcher in the back of an ambulance. “Daniel brought in this here Reb,” the one who wasn’t Louie told the driver. “Thought he’d be worth patching. Might even be right—he ain’t pegged out on us while we were lugging him back here.”

  “Hate to waste the sawbones’ time on a Rebel,” the ambulance driver said, “but what the hell?” The ambulance’s motor was already turning over. He put the machine in gear and headed back toward the field hospital, whose tents were out of range of artillery from the front.

  When Bartlett got there, another pair of stretcher-bearers took him out of the ambulance and laid him on the ground outside a green-gray tent with an enormous red cross on it. Most of the men there were U.S. soldiers, but a few others wore butternut. Attendants gave him water and another shot.

  Presently, a doctor in a blood-spattered white coat came by and looked him over. “That leg’s not too bad,” he said after cutting away bandages and trouser leg. He examined the shoulder. “We’re going to have to take you into the shop to repair this one, though. What’s your name, Reb?” He poised a pencil over a clipboard.

  “Reggie Bartlett. I broke out of one Yankee prisoner-of-war camp. Reckon I can do it again.” With two shots of morphine in him, Reggie didn’t care what he said.

  He didn’t impress the Yankee doctor, either. After recording his name, the fellow said, “Son, you’re going to be a good long while healing up. I don’t care whether you escaped before. By the time you think about flying the coop again, this war’ll be over. And we’ll have won it.”

  Bartlett laughed in his face—the morphine again.

  Captain Jonathan Moss looked down on the tortured Canadian landscape from on high, as if he were a god. He knew better, of course. If one of the shells the Americans aimed at the Canadian and British troops who had blocked their way for so long happened to strike his Wright two-decker, he would crash. The same, assuredly, was true of the shells the enemy hurled back at the U.S. forces, and of the Archie their antiaircraft guns sent up.

  Spring was at last in full spate. The land was green, where shellfire hadn’t turned it to mucky brown pulp. All the streams flowed freely; the ice
had melted. And the line was beginning to move, too, though it had been frozen longer than any Canadian river.

  Below Moss, U.S. troopers advanced behind a large contingent of barrels that battered their way through the defenses the Canucks and limeys had built with such enormous expenditure of labor. The Canadians had barrels, too, though not so many. They dueled with the American machines in a slow, ugly, two-dimensional version of the war Moss and his friends—and his foes as well—fought in the air.

  He spied a flight of enemy fighting scouts down near the deck. They were shooting up the advancing Americans, who grew vulnerable when they came up out of their trenches to attack. But the Entente aeroplanes were vulnerable, too. Moss pointed them out to his own flightmates, then took his American copy of a German Albatros into a dive better suited to a stooping falcon. Percy Stone, Hans Oppenheim, and Pete Bradley followed.

  Wind screamed in Moss’ face. It tried to tear the goggles off his eyes, and peeled lips back from teeth in an involuntary grin. The grin would have been on his face anyhow, though. His gaze flicked back and forth from the unwinding altimeter to the enemy aeroplanes. The British or Canadian pilots were having such a high old time shooting up American infantry, they made the mistake of not checking the neighborhood often enough. Moss intended to turn it into a fatal mistake if he could.

  His thumb came down on the firing button. The twin machine guns roared, spitting bullets between the two wooden blades of the prop. If the interrupter gears didn’t function properly, as, every so often, they didn’t…but contemplating that kind of misfortune gave no better profit than thinking about one’s own path intersecting that of a shell.

  Tracers let him direct his fire onto the rearmost enemy fighting scout. He must have hit the pilot, for the Sopwith Pup slammed into the ground an instant later and burst into flame.