Breakthroughs

by Harry Turtledove

  “Makes sense,” Martin agreed, after a moment adding, “The other thing to remember is, there’s no guarantee those were Rebel shells. They might have been ours, falling short.”

  Nobody said anything for a few seconds. All the men in filthy green-gray huddled there knew only too well that such things happened. You were just as dead if a shell fragment from one of your own rounds got you as from Confederate artillery.

  Whoever had fired it, the salvo ended. “Come on,” Martin said. “Even if the barrel’s dead, we’ve got to keep going.”

  They had almost reached the far end of the network of trenches when Confederate reserves—black men with white officers and noncoms—brought them to a standstill. Some of the black soldiers in butternut fired wildly and ran. Some—more than would have been true of white troops—threw down their Tredegars and surrendered first chance they got. Counting on either, though, was risky—no, was deadly dangerous. Most of the black Confederates fought as hard as white Confederates.

  With the Rebel reinforcements in place, Martin didn’t need long to figure out that he and his pals weren’t going to push much farther forward today. He got the men busy with their entrenching tools, and got busy with his own, too, turning shell holes and bits of north-facing trench into south-facing trench.

  Sighing, he said, “We took a bite out of their line, but we didn’t slam on through it.”

  “We need more barrels,” the Hamburger kid said. “They can really smash trenches. What else can?”

  “Bodies,” Martin answered. “Lots and lots of bodies.” Anyone who’d fought on the Roanoke front, whether in green-gray or butternut, would have said the same thing.

  “Barrels work better,” David Hamburger said, and Martin did not disagree with him. He’d seen too many piled-up bodies.

  Anne Colleton read through the Columbia Southern Guardian with careful thoroughness over her morning eggs and coffee. Breakfast wasn’t so good as it might have been. She’d made it herself. After having servants cook for her almost her entire life, her own culinary skills were slender. But for the time while she’d languished in a refugee camp during the Red uprising, she’d have owned no culinary skills at all.

  She hardly noticed she’d got the eggs rubbery and the coffee strong enough to spit in her eye. The Southern Guardian took most of her attention. Despite censors’ obfuscations and reporters’ resolute optimism, the war news was bad. It had been bad ever since the damnyankees opened their spring offensives in Tennessee and Virginia and Maryland.

  “Damn them,” she whispered. Then she said it out loud: “Damn them!” The paper wasn’t printing maps of the fighting in Maryland and Virginia any more. Anne had no trouble understanding why: maps would have made obvious how far the Army of Northern Virginia had fallen back. Unless you had an atlas, you couldn’t tell where places like Sterling and Arcola and Aldie—which had just fallen after what the Southern Guardian called “fierce fighting”—were.

  But Anne did have an atlas, used it, and didn’t like what she was seeing. What had her brother Tom said? That there were too many damnyankees to hold back? Virginia looked to be the USA’s attempt to prove it.

  Nashville, though, Nashville had been something different. The paper went on for a column and a half about the horrors the city was suffering under Yankee bombardment. Anne scowled at the small type. What was in there might well be true, but it wasn’t relevant. If the line that held U.S. guns out of range of the city hadn’t collapsed, it wouldn’t be under bombardment now.

  But that line, which had held even under the heaviest pressure since the autumn before, went down as if made of cardboard when the Yankees hammered it with a horde of their barrels. That hammering worried Anne more than it seemed to worry the Confederate War Department. U.S. forces weren’t using their barrels like that anywhere else. But if they did…

  “If they do, they’re liable to break through again, wherever it is,” Anne said. She could see that. Why couldn’t they see it in Richmond?

  Maybe they could see it. Maybe they simply didn’t know what to do about it. That possibility also left her unreassured.

  She looked at her plate in some surprise, realizing she’d finished the eggs without noticing. She sighed. Another day. She’d never felt so useless in all her life as she did here in St. Matthews now. Were she back at Marshlands, she would be fretting about the year’s cotton crop. But there would be no cotton crop this year. She dared not go back to the plantation that had been in her family for more than a hundred years.

  Her back stiffened. No, that wasn’t true. She dared to go back, even if she would not have cared to spend the night there. In fact, she would go back—with militiamen, and with a Tredegar slung over her shoulder. The plantation was ravaged. It was ruined. But it was hers, and she would not tamely yield it to anyone or anything.

  No sooner decided than begun. She did not officially command the St. Matthews militia, but she had enough power in this part of the country—enough power through most of South Carolina, as a matter of fact—that within an hour she and half a dozen militiamen were rattling toward Marshlands in a couple of ramshackle motorcars.

  Some of the militiamen wore old gray uniforms, some new butternut. Some of the men were old, too—too old to be called into the Army even during the present crisis at the front. One, a sergeant of her own age named Willie Metcalfe, was a handsome fellow when viewed from the right. The left side of his face was a slagged ruin of scars. He wore a patch over what had been his left eye. Anne wondered why he bothered. In that devastation, who could have said for certain where his eye socket lay? A couple of his comrades were surely less than eighteen, and looked younger than Anne’s telegraph delivery boy.

  Half a dozen miles made a twenty-minute ride along the rutted dirt road between St. Matthews and Marshlands. It would have been twice that long if one of the motorcars had had a puncture, but they were lucky. When Willie Metcalfe—who, predictably, was driving in the lead automobile, to avoid displaying his wrecked profile for a while—started to pull into the driveway that led to the ruins of the Marshlands mansion, Anne spoke up sharply: “No, wait. Stop the motorcar here and pull off to the side of the road.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” Sergeant Metcalfe’s voice was mushy; the inside of his mouth was probably as ravaged as the rest of that side of his face. But he said the words as he would have said Yes, sir to a superior officer, and obeyed as promptly, too. The other motorcar followed his lead.

  Because she hadn’t had to shout at him, as she’d had to shout at so many men in her life, she deigned to explain: “The only motorcars likely to come here will have white people in them—probably white soldiers in them. What better place to hide a bomb than in the driveway there?”

  Metcalfe thought for a moment, then nodded. “That makes sense,” he said. “That makes a lot of sense.”

  Linus Ashworth, who with his white beard looked a little like General Lee and was almost old enough to have fought under him, said, “We ain’t likely to be bringing niggers into the militia any time soon, not when we’re chasin’ ’em, and I don’t give a…hoot what the Army does.” He got out of the automobile and spat a stream of tobacco juice into the lush grass. A brown drop slid down that white beard. A yellow streak in it said that sort of thing happened to him all the time.

  Anne and the militiamen advanced on the wreckage of the Marshlands mansion in what Metcalfe called a skirmish line. He unobtrusively took the left end. They all had a round in the chamber of their Tredegars. Anne didn’t expect any trouble. The Red rebels shouldn’t have known she was on the way to Marshlands. She herself hadn’t known she would be till not long before she was. But taking chances wasn’t a good idea.

  Linus Ashworth spat again. “It’s a shame, ma’am,” he said, “purely a shame. I seen this place when it was like what it’s supposed to be, and there wasn’t no finer plantation in the state of South Carolina, God strike me dead if I lie.”

  “Yes,” Anne said tightly. Ashworth had seen
Marshlands before the war, but she’d lived here. Coming back after the men of the Congaree Socialist Republic were driven back into the riverside swamps had been hard enough. Coming back now…

  Now the Marshlands plantation wasn’t ruined, as it had been then. Now it was dead. The cabin where she’d lived after the mansion burned was itself charred wreckage. The rest of the cabins that had housed the Negro field hands were deserted, glass gone from the windows, doors hanging open because nothing inside was worth stealing. One door had fallen off its hinges and leaned at a drunken angle against the clapboard wall. White bird droppings streaked the door’s green paint.

  Anne looked out to what had been, and what should have been, broad acres of growing cotton. Weeds choked the fields. No crop this year. No chance of getting a crop this year, even if she could find hands who would work for her and not for Cassius and Cherry and the rest of the Reds—and good luck with that, too. No money coming in from Marshlands this year. But the money would keep right on bleeding out. War taxes…outrageous wasn’t nearly a strong enough word. Her investments had kept her afloat so far, but they were tottering, too.

  “This here is sad, ma’am,” Sergeant Willie Metcalfe said. “This here is really sad.” Just for a moment, he raised a hand to the black cord that held his patch. “This here place got hurt the same way I did.”

  “Yes, it did,” Anne said. She would not—she would not—let him hear the tears in her voice.

  And then she forgot about tears, because something moved up ahead. She was on the ground, her rifle aimed, before she knew how she’d got there. A couple of the young militiamen stood gaping for a few seconds. The others, the men who had seen combat of one sort or another, were on their bellies like her, offering targets as small as they could.

  “Come out!” Metcalfe shouted. “Come out right now or you’re dead!”

  Anne wasn’t even sure she’d seen a human being. Motion where nothing had any business moving had been plenty to send her diving to the ground. She wondered if they’d have to go hunting through the field hands’ cottages. If the Reds had come back for some reason, that might not be any fun at all.

  But why would the Reds come back to Marshlands? she thought, trying to reassure herself. It wasn’t as if she had any treasure buried on the plantation to tempt them. If she’d had anything like that, she would long since have dug it up herself.

  Then anticlimax almost made her burst out laughing. From around the corner of the nearest cabin came a pickaninny, a Negro girl ten or eleven years old. After a moment, Anne recognized her. “What are you doing sneaking around this place, Vipsy?” she demanded. “You almost got shot.”

  “I’s jus’ lookin’ fo’ whatever I kin find,” Vipsy answered artlessly—so artlessly, Anne’s suspicions kindled.

  “Where are you staying these days, Vipsy?” she asked. “There’s nothing for your father and mother to do at Marshlands now.”

  Vipsy pointed northward, toward the Congaree: “Over yonder where I’s at,” she answered.

  How far over yonder? Anne wondered. All the way into the swamp? Are your father and mother Reds? If they were…She looked down at the ground so the colored girl would not see her smile. “All right, go on your way,” she said when she looked up again. “I’m just glad you weren’t coming around sniffing after the treasure. If you were, we would have had to shoot you.”

  “Don’ know nothin’ ’bout no treasure,” Vipsy said, and strolled off with as much dignity as if she wore a gingham frock rather than a dress cut from a grimy burlap bag.

  The next trick, of course, would be convincing the militiamen she had no treasure buried here at Marshlands. If she couldn’t do that, half the people in St. Matthews would be out here by day after tomorrow at the latest, all of them armed with picks and shovels. But if she could persuade the militiamen—well, something useful might come from that.

  Gordon McSweeney walked up to Captain Schneider. After saluting the company commander, he said, “Sir, I wish you wouldn’t have done what you did.”

  Schneider frowned. “I’m sorry, McSweeney, but I don’t see that you left me any choice in the matter.”

  “But—” Except when discussing matters of religion, McSweeney was not a particularly eloquent man. He touched the top of his shoulder, and the new shoulder strap sewn onto his tunic. No insigne marked the strap, but its mere presence disturbed him. “Sir, I don’t want to be an officer!” he burst out.

  “Believe me, second lieutenants barely deserve the name,” Captain Schneider answered with a wry chuckle.

  “I was comfortable as a sergeant, sir,” McSweeney said. “I was—I was happy as a sergeant.” It was, as far as he could recall, the first time in his life he’d ever admitted being happy about anything.

  “If you go on with this, Lieutenant McSweeney”—Schneider bore down on the title—“you will make me angry—but not angry enough to bust you back to sergeant, if that’s what’s on your mind.” He paused to roll a cigarette. Once he’d sucked in smoke, he went on, “God damn it, McSweeney, look at it from my point of view. What the hell am I supposed to do with you?”

  “Sir, you could have—you should have—left me where I was,” McSweeney answered. “That was all I expected. That was all I wanted.”

  For some reason he did not fathom, Captain Schneider looked exasperated. Seeing he did not fathom it, Schneider spelled it out in words of one syllable: “You are wearing the ribbon for one Medal of Honor. God knows you deserve an oak-leaf cluster to go with it for what you did to that machine-gun position, but the War Department would think I was shell-shocked if I put you up for it twice, no matter how much you deserve it. Any lesser medal fails to do you justice. What choice did I have but promoting you?”

  “I didn’t do what I did for glory, sir,” McSweeney answered, deeply embarrassed. “I did it because it was my duty.”

  Schneider studied him. Slowly, slowly, the company commander blew out a long, gray cloud of smoke. “You mean that,” he said at last.

  “Of course I do.” McSweeney was embarrassed again, in a different way. “I always mean what I say.”

  After another long pause, Captain Schneider said, “You may be the most frightening man I have ever met.”

  “Only to the enemies of God and the United States of America, sir.”

  Schneider suddenly snapped his fingers. “I know part of what’s troubling you, damn me to hell if I don’t.” If he kept talking like that, McSweeney was sure God would damn him to hell. But, however harsh he was to those under him, McSweeney could not and never would reprove his superiors. Schneider continued, “You don’t want to give your flamethrower to anybody else.”

  McSweeney looked down at the muddy ground under his feet. He hadn’t thought Captain Schneider would be able to read him so well. Now it was his turn to hesitate. Finally, he said, “When I carry it, I feel myself to be like the fourth angel of the Lord in Revelations 16, who pours out his bowl on the sun and scorches the wicked with fire.”

  “Hmm.” Schneider scratched his chin. Stubble rasped under his fingernails. “Tell you what, McSweeney. Think of it like this: you’re not the only one in this war. We’re all scorching the Rebs together, and it doesn’t matter whether we’ve got rifles or .45s or flamethrowers. How’s that?”

  “Sir, when the Good Book speaks of searing those who curse God’s name, I believe it means what it says—no more, no less,” McSweeney replied.

  “Of course you do,” Schneider muttered. He paused to sigh and to stamp the butt of his cigarette into the dirt. “Well, we’re going to make it hot for the Rebs, all right. They’re going to take us out of the line here and put fresh troops in our place, to hold. We shift to the right, about five miles over.”

  “And do what, sir?” McSweeney asked.

  “There’s about a square mile of woods there—it’s called Craighead Forest on the map,” Schneider answered. “If we can push the Confederates out of it, we outflank ’em and we may be able to shove ’em clean
out of Jonesboro.”

  “So long as we’re fighting, sir, it suits me,” McSweeney said.

  “Well, it doesn’t suit me, not for hell it doesn’t,” the company commander told him. “We haven’t got the barrels to go in there and do the dirty work for us, the way they do on the other side of the Mississippi. We have to take that forest the old way, the hard way, and it’s going to be expensive as the devil.”

  “Where I go, my men will follow, and I will go into that wood,” McSweeney said positively. Schneider looked at him, shook his head, and went off down the trench still shaking it.

  Replacements began filing into the line that afternoon, under desultory Confederate shelling. They were clean-faced, neatly shaven men in clean uniforms. They seemed present in preposterous numbers, for action had not thinned their ranks faster than replacements could refill them. They stared at the lean, grimy veterans whose trenches they were taking over. Gordon McSweeney was far from the only veteran to stare back in cold contempt.

  He led the platoon he did not want down a series of winding tracks shielded—but not too well—from enemy observation. A few shells fell around them. A couple of men were wounded. Stretcher-bearers carried them back toward dressing stations. But for the wounded men, nobody thought it anything out of the ordinary.

  Up through the zigzags of communications trenches they went. McSweeney stared ahead, toward the wood of pine and oak. Fighting there hadn’t been heavy, not till now. Most of the trees were still standing, not lying smashed and scattered like a petulant giant’s game of pick-up-sticks. Under those trees, men in butternut waited in foxholes and in trenches much like these. Between the U.S. line and the edge of the wood lay a few hundred yards of low grass and bushes, all bright green. Tomorrow morning…