The Grapple sa-2

by Harry Turtledove

  “Shitfire!” Gracchus cried in a mix of awe and outrage. “Ain’t even nothin’ left fo’ us to steal!”

  “Hell you say,” Pyrrhus answered, and paused to shoot a dazed and bloodied Confederate truck driver who staggered toward him. As the white man fell, the guerrilla went on, “Almost got myself squashed by a big old crate of rations-landed in these bushes here.”

  “Well, that’s somethin’.” Gracchus sounded as if he didn’t know how much it was. Cassius didn’t, either. You could eat Confederate rations and you wouldn’t be hungry afterwards. Past that, he had nothing good to say for them. He’d heard even Confederate soldiers traded cigarettes or coffee with the enemy to get food better than their own.

  “Mother!” a dreadfully wounded Confederate screamed. “Motherrr!” Cassius drew a bead on him and shot him through the head.

  “Why you go an’ do dat?” a Negro asked. “Shoulda let the damn ofay suffer.”

  “I’d shoot a dog,” Cassius said.

  “Yeah, but a dog, he wouldn’t shoot you,” the other rebel said.

  After a moment, Cassius decided he had a point. Instead of admitting it, he changed the subject, calling out to Gracchus, “You gonna let that Jeroboam loose?”

  “Reckon I better,” the guerrilla leader said. “He wasn’t lyin’, that’s fo’ damn sure. An’ we ought to write a nice thank-you to them Yankees. They done a lot of work fo’ us.” He laughed. “Reckon they done mo’ work than we coulda did our ownselves.”

  He wasn’t wrong. “Wonder how many of us those U.S. pilots hit,” Cassius said, and laughed at himself. He was sure he was the only rebel in the band-maybe in the state-who would have said those pilots. To the other Negroes, it would have been them pilots. Like it or not, Cassius was his father’s son.

  The guerrillas had lost one man dead and two more wounded, neither seriously. “Watch what happen to them trucks, an’ do Jesus! I don’t hardly mind gettin’ shot,” one of the injured men said. The dead guerrilla had stopped a 20mm cannon shell with his chest. Chances were he wouldn’t have agreed.

  Carrying the rations and other small bits of loot, the black rebels made their getaway. Behind them, the shattered convoy sent up great dark plumes of smoke. Before long, whites would come out from Madison to see what had happened-not that they could be in much doubt-and do what they could for anyone left alive.

  Cassius smiled as he trotted away. God hadn’t come down from the heavens to give the guerrillas a hand, but the next best thing had.

  Jorge Rodriguez wondered how long he could go on. He wondered how long the Confederate States could go on, too. If the damnyankees kept pounding on them the way they had been, it wouldn’t be much longer. Autumn or no autumn, rain or no rain, the United States were driving on Atlanta, and Jorge didn’t see how the Confederacy could stop them.

  He didn’t worry about it all that much, either. He worried about staying alive. With everything the damnyankees were throwing at his regiment, that was plenty all by itself.

  Kennesaw Mountain was heavily wooded country. U.S. artillery was firing shells fused for air bursts. If you didn’t have a good foxhole, the fragments knifing down from above would cut you to ribbons. Jorge did. He was proud of the hole, which he’d dug himself. He could fire from it when enemy soldiers drew near. But it also had a small shelter strengthened with boards-what they would have called a bombproof in the Great War-scraped out under the forward lip. When the shelling got bad, he’d duck under there and stay fairly safe.

  Right this minute, there was a lull. He could get out of his hole, ease himself behind a tree, smoke a cigarette. He could, yes, as long as he stayed wary as a cat at a coon-hound convention. Things had a way of picking up with no warning. If you didn’t dive back into your hole in a hurry, you’d be a casualty.

  “Stay alert, men!” Captain Malcolm Boyd called. “They’re liable to throw paratroops at us like they did in Tennessee.”

  If the United States tried an air drop here, they had to be crazy. It looked that way to Jorge, anyhow. Too many paratroops would get stuck in trees and die before they could start fighting.

  “We’ve got to hang on to Marietta no matter what, too,” the company commander added. “We don’t hang on to Marietta, how the hell can we hold Atlanta?”

  There he made more sense to Jorge. Marietta was the cork in the bottle-probably the last cork in the bottle in front of Atlanta. If it fell, Atlanta almost had to. And if Atlanta fell, the Confederate States were in a hell of a lot of trouble. So everybody said, anyhow. Jorge knew things everybody said weren’t always right, but this one felt too likely to laugh off.

  He wished he wouldn’t have heard so many things like, We’ve got to hang on to Chattanooga no matter what. The Confederates couldn’t hang on to Chattanooga. Now they were paying for losing it.

  An automatic rifle rattled up ahead. When Jorge first went into the Army, that would have meant the man with the rifle wore butternut. No more, not necessarily. The Yankees had captured a lot of C.S. automatic weapons on their long drive south. They’d captured the ammo the rifles used, too-or maybe they were making their own. Jorge didn’t know about that. He did know he had to wait and hear more before he could be sure who was out there.

  Sure as hell, the bangs that followed came from U.S. Springfields. In the CSA, nobody but home guards and Mexican soldiers used bolt-action rifles these days. The damnyankees were still a long step behind when it came to small arms. Some Confederate soldiers wondered what the enemy was doing in Georgia if that was so.

  To Jorge, the answer looked clear enough. Yes, Yankee soldiers carried Springfields. But whole great swarms of Yankee soldiers carried them. U.S. artillery matched anything the Confederacy turned out. So did U.S. airplanes, and the United States had more of them than the Confederate States did. As for barrels…Jorge didn’t want to think about barrels. The USA’s new monsters outclassed everything the CSA made.

  He peered down the forward slope of Kennesaw Mountain. He couldn’t see the enemy troops, but he had a pretty good idea where the gunfire was coming from. The damnyankees were probing in front of his regiment, trying to find a way through. He could have done without the compliment, if that was what it was.

  The automatic rifle chattered again. Right about…there, Jorge judged. If the fellow who carried it kept coming forward, he’d probably show himself somewhere near those two pines.

  And, a couple of minutes later, he did-not for very long, but long enough. Jorge fired a short burst from his own automatic rifle. The U.S. soldier threw up his hands and toppled. Jorge didn’t think he’d get up again. He looked around for a new target.

  Easier to think of what he’d just done as hitting a target. If he thought of that figure in green-gray as a soldier, as a man, then he had to think about everything shooting his fellow soldier, his fellow man, might mean. But a target was only a target. You could shoot at a target for fun, if you felt like it.

  Almost as much to the point, targets didn’t shoot back.

  Jorge wondered if another U.S. soldier would try to retrieve the automatic rifle. If a man in green-gray did, it would be his last mistake. But the rifle lay where it fell. The damnyankees seemed confident they could drive the Confederates back and then retrieve it. Jorge had to hope they were wrong.

  He waited for the next artillery barrage or armored assault or gas attack or air raid or whatever the enemy had in mind. Instead, a U.S. officer waved a white flag from behind a tree and shouted, “Can I come forward?”

  Firing on both sides died away. Sergeant Blackledge shouted back: “Yeah, come ahead. What do you want?”

  The Yankee emerged, still holding the flag of truce. As he approached the Confederate lines, he answered, “Want to try to talk you people into surrendering, that’s what. You keep fighting, we’ll squash you flat.”

  “Yeah, now tell me another one,” Blackledge jeered. “You want to win one on the cheap, that’s all.”

  “Not this time,” said the man in green-gray.
“We’ll take some of your guys behind our lines, show you what we’ve got. I don’t believe you can stop us, or even slow us down very much.”

  “You’ll do what?” The sergeant sounded as if he couldn’t believe his ears. Jorge didn’t blame him. The damnyankees had never said anything like that, not where he could hear it. He’d never heard of anything like it, either.

  Calmly, the U.S. officer repeated himself. He went on, “Will you take me back? This is what they’d call a limited-time offer on the wireless. If you don’t take me up on it pretty damn quick, you’ll find out whether I’m lying or not. Oh, yeah-better believe you will.”

  If he was acting, he could go out on the road. The confidence that filled his voice seemed frighteningly convincing. Maybe Sergeant Blackledge thought the same thing, because he said, “Come on up, damn you. I’m gonna put a blindfold on you before you go back of the line, though. You won’t do any spying under flag of truce.”

  “Have it your way,” the Yankee said. “Like I told you, you can look at what we’ve got.” He walked forward. The sergeant put a rag over his eyes and led him back toward C.S. officers. Nobody on either side fired. A few U.S. soldiers came out and swapped rations for smokes and coffee. Jorge just sat tight and waited.

  After about twenty minutes, the blindfolded U.S. officer returned, three worried-looking Confederates in his wake. He took off the rag and nodded to Sergeant Blackledge. “Cease-fire will last till these gentlemen come back,” he said. “After that, it’s up to them.”

  “We won’t open up unless your guys do,” the noncom replied.

  Away they went, the one man in green-gray and the three in butternut. Jorge was sure the Confederates would see only what their enemies wanted to show them. That was liable to be plenty. He waited. He smoked. He climbed out of his hole to take a leak. He didn’t want to be a POW; one of his brothers already languished in a camp. He didn’t want to get killed, either.

  An hour and a half later, the C.S. officers returned. Their U.S. guide stopped between the lines. “You can still change your minds,” he said. “This is your last chance, but you can. You’ll spare your men a lot of grief.”

  “We’re obliged to defend this position, Major,” a Confederate colonel said. “We will do so to the best of our ability.”

  “You’ll be sorry,” the Yankee said. “Your men will be sorrier. I can’t answer for what will happen to them when we cut loose.”

  “We have to take the chance, sir,” the Confederate replied. “We have our duty, as you have yours. With our country in danger, our personal safety is of small concern.”

  “That sounds very pretty. You’ll find out what it means. You’re sure?” The U.S. officer waited. No one said anything more. The major shrugged and returned to his own lines. One of the Confederates used a field telephone to tell their headquarters what they’d done. All three of them stayed on the front line. Jorge admired that. They could have retreated to safety. Instead, they were sticking it out.

  Somewhere between five and ten minutes went by. Then the United States opened up with everything they’d shown the Confederate officers and more besides. Jorge didn’t think he’d ever gone through a bombardment like this. Fighter-bombers stooped on the C.S. line and added their weight of hellfire to the mix. He heard shrieks through the thunder of exploding ordnance. Jorge carried a rosary in his pocket, and fingered the beads to thank God and the Virgin that his own shrieks weren’t among them.

  Wise in the Yankees’ ways, he popped up from his hole the instant the barrage lifted. Sure as the devil, soldiers in green-gray scrambled forward. He shot one of them. Another alert Confederate nailed a different one. The rest hit the dirt or ducked behind trees. But they weren’t giving up. That would have been too much to ask for. They kept on coming. They just didn’t think it would be a walkover any more.

  More shells and some mortar bombs started dropping on the Confederates. Shouts and curses off to the left warned that enemy troops had reached and were probably piercing the line there. A moment later, enfilading fire made the probability a sure thing.

  “Back!” Sergeant Blackledge yelled. Jorge might have known nothing the USA fired at the Confederates could hurt him. “They’ll cut us off if we stay!”

  “The sergeant’s right!” Captain Boyd added, perhaps relieved Blackledge spoke up before he had to. “We need to save ourselves!”

  Jorge didn’t want to get out of his hole, any more than a mouse wanted to come out into the middle of the floor. Bullets and flying fragments did dreadful things to soft, tender flesh. But he’d get captured or killed if he stayed here. Out he came, and ran up the north slope of Kennesaw Mountain toward one of the two crests.

  A bullet slammed into a tree trunk just to his left. A big shell burst behind him-at least a six-incher. None of the fragments tore into him, but blast-a St. Bernard puppy the size of a building-picked him up and shook him and dropped him on his face. He scrambled up again, knowing he was lucky to be able to. Blast could kill all by itself. Had that shell come down a little closer…

  Best not to think of such things. He ducked behind another tree to see how close the damnyankees were. Two or three were too damn close for comfort. He fired at them. They went down, though he didn’t think he’d hit them. But he would have done the same thing in their boots. Why take chances when you were winning?

  “Way to go, Rodriguez,” Sergeant Blackledge said from behind another tree. He seemed to be everywhere at once. “Make ’em earn it, by God. They won’t come on like their pants are on fire now, the bastards.”

  “Sure, Sarge.” Jorge hadn’t thought of anything more than saving his own skin. He still wasn’t sure he could do that. The U.S. major hadn’t been kidding. The United States put a rock in their fist before they hit Kennesaw Mountain. More shells came down. He huddled in what wasn’t enough shelter. “?Madre de Dios!” When he got scared into Spanish, things were pretty bad. “What can we do?”

  “Try and stay alive.” As usual, Blackledge was relentlessly pragmatic. “Try and find some place where we can make a stand, slow the shitheels down. Try and hit back when they give us the chance. Sooner or later, they will-I hope.” He swore, plainly wishing he hadn’t tacked on the last two words.

  “Marietta’s gonna fall, isn’t it?” Jorge asked. The sergeant didn’t answer. For a second, Jorge thought he didn’t hear. Then he realized the noncom didn’t want to say yes. If Marietta fell, Atlanta was in deep trouble. If Atlanta fell, the Confederate States were in deep trouble. And Marietta would fall, which meant…

  Purple martins perched in the shattered trees in the park square at the center of Marietta. The birds were flying south for the winter; they didn’t care that the trees had taken a beating. There were still plenty of bugs in the air. All the artillery in the world couldn’t kill bugs.

  Chester Martin, in green-gray, didn’t care that the trees were burned and scarred, either. As far as he was concerned, the Confederate States were getting what was coming to them. And he hoped he was going south for the winter. Atlanta wasn’t that far away. How much did the enemy have between here and there? Enough? He didn’t think so.

  A man with a white mustache hung from a lamppost. A sign around his neck said, I SHOT AT U.S. SOLDIERS. He’d been there a couple of days, and was starting to swell and stink. Chester hardly looked at him. Maybe he’d do a little good; maybe he wouldn’t. Confederate bushwhackers and diehards and holdouts and red-ass civilians kept on harrying the occupiers all the way back to the Ohio River. Hostages kept dying because of it. Which side would run out of will first remained unclear.

  The trees in the park weren’t all that had been shattered in Marietta. The Confederates fought hard to hold it. Not many houses were whole. Glassless windows might have been the eye sockets of skulls. Scorch marks scored clapboard. Chunks of walls and chunks of roofs bitten by shellfire gave the skyline jagged edges.

  And Marietta’s people seemed as ravaged as the town. They were skinny and dirty, many of them
with bandages or simply rags wrapped around wounds. They stared at the U.S. troops trudging south through their rubble-strewn streets with eyes that smoldered. Nobody said anything much, though. As Chester had seen in other Confederate towns, his buddies were quick to resent insults. A man with a rifle in enemy country could make his resentment felt.

  A scrawny woman whose hair flew every which way cocked a hip in a pose meant to be alluring. “Sleep with me?” she called.

  “Jesus!” said one of the soldiers in Chester’s squad. “I’ve been hard up before, but not that hard up.”

  “Yeah.” Chester nodded. “I think she’s a little bit cracked. Maybe more than a little bit.”

  An old man whose left sleeve hung empty scowled at him. Chester nodded back, more politely than not. He understood honest hate, and could respect it. He wondered if the respect he showed might change the Confederate’s mind. It didn’t, not by the look on the man’s face. Chester didn’t suppose he should have been surprised.

  A burnt-out C.S. barrel sat inside the ruins of a brick house. The last few feet of the barrel’s gun poked out through a window. The gun tube sagged visibly. Eyeing it, Chester said, “Must’ve been a hell of a fire.”

  “Yeah, well, it couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch of guys,” said the soldier who didn’t want the scrawny woman.

  Chester grunted. He didn’t love Confederate barrelmen. What U.S. soldier did? Those enemies were too good at killing his pals. But he didn’t like to think of them cooking like beef roasts in a fire so hot it warped solid steel. That was a bad way to go, for anybody on either side. He wanted the enemy barrel crew dead, sure. Charred to black hideousness? Maybe not.

  “Come on, step it up!” Lieutenant Lavochkin yelled. “We aren’t camping here. We’re just passing through, heading for Atlanta.”

  Chester looked forward to fighting for Atlanta the way he looked forward to a filling without novocaine. Atlanta was a big city, bigger than Chattanooga. The United States couldn’t take it by surprise, the way they had with the Tennessee town. If U.S. forces tried smashing straight into it, wouldn’t the Confederates do unto them as the USA had done to the Confederacy in Pittsburgh? Fighting one house at a time was the easiest way Chester knew to become a casualty.