Breakthroughs

by Harry Turtledove

  “Philadelphia is what makes me wake up sweating of nights,” said General Patrick, who had just come down from Canada.

  Morrell stared at Wood in a kind of horror he’d never known on the battlefield. “Sir, as long as Teddy Roosevelt is president—”

  “That gives us till March 4, 1921,” Wood broke in. “March 4, 1925, if he decides he wants a third term, and if the people remember to be grateful. After TR isn’t president any more…what then? We spent a generation twiddling our thumbs after the War of Secession. We could do it again.”

  “All the more reason to punish the Rebels now, sir,” Morrell said. “The farther they have to climb, the harder it’ll be for them.”

  “Bully!” Brigadier General Patrick clapped his hands together. “General Wood, this pup said it better than I could.”

  “He’s a bright lad,” Wood said, and Morrell felt as if he’d been given the accolade. But the chief of the General Staff went on, “The harder we hold the Confederates down, the more we make them hate us and want to get their own back.”

  “I honestly don’t see the problem, sir,” Morrell said. “They already hate us, the same way we hated them before the war. Somebody licks you, of course you hate him. What we have to do is make sure they can’t hurt us no matter how much they hate us.”

  General Wood sighed again. “I’ve been in touch with General Ludendorff in Berlin. If it makes you gentlemen feel any better, our friends the Germans are having these same sorts of arguments about how rough they should be on France.”

  “The CSA will have an easier time cheating than France will, though,” Morrell said.

  “How’s that?” Wood said. “I don’t follow.”

  “France isn’t even as big as Texas,” Morrell said.

  “It is now,” General Patrick said. “We carved a good chunk off Texas when we made the state of Houston.”

  “How much will Germany carve off France?” Morrell gave the man he thought was his ally an annoyed look: this was not the time for nitpicking precision. Having got the glare out of his system, he resumed: “Be that as it may, the Confederate States are a lot larger than France even after they’ve lost Houston and Sequoyah and Kentucky. They have more room to hide armaments than the frogs do.”

  “And they could go down into the Empire of Mexico, too,” Mason Patrick said. “The only way we’d hear about anything down there is by luck. Hell, half the time the damn greasers don’t know what’s going on inside their own country, so how are we supposed to?”

  “We have more ways than you’d think, as a matter of fact,” General Wood said. “But never mind that; I take the point. So you gentlemen agree we should squeeze the Rebels till their eyes pop, do you?”

  “Yes, sir,” Morrell and Brigadier General Patrick said in the same breath.

  “Well, I’m hearing that from the Navy Department, too, I will admit,” Wood said. “They want to go and bombard Charleston and Habana and New Orleans if the Rebels ever even think of building submersibles again.”

  “That sounds good to me,” Morrell said.

  Wood looked grim. “As a matter of fact, it sounds good to me, too. We had a destroyer, the Ericsson, torpedoed the night after the CSA quit the war. The Royal Navy swears up and down that they had no boats anywhere near her. If I had to guess, I’d say a Rebel skipper thought he could get away with one—but I can’t prove it, mind, and the Confederates deny everything.”

  “I hadn’t heard that before, sir,” Morrell said slowly.

  “We’re keeping it under wraps,” the chief of the General Staff said. “Don’t see what else to do. Can’t prove it, as I say.”

  “Filthy piece of business.” Morrell realized his right hand had folded into a fist. He made it open. “They ever catch that Reb—if it was a Reb—they ought to hang him.”

  “You get no arguments from me,” Wood said. “But back to the matter at hand. In your view, we allow the Rebs enough in the way of guns to keep order inside their borders and put up a halfway decent fight in case Mexico decides to invade them?”

  Morrell let out a wry snort. “If Mexico invades them, sir, they can shout for help, as far as I’m concerned.”

  As he spoke, he worried at the thought General Wood had put in his mind. How long could any country, especially a republic like the USA, keep watch on a neighbor? Sooner or later, the voters would tire of the effort vigilance took. When they did, or maybe even before they did, the one-time enemy would begin to rebuild and become an enemy once more.

  “We have to do the best we can,” he said at last. “We have to do the best we can for as long as we can. If we drop the ball later on, or if our kids do, that’s one thing. But if we drop the ball now, we don’t deserve to have won the war.”

  “That’s the way it looks to me, too,” Mason Patrick said. “The day the Confederate States start building aeroplanes with machine guns in them again, you’ll be able to see the next war from there.”

  “Very well. Thank you for your thoughts, General, Colonel. They will go into our recommendations to President Roosevelt, I assure you,” Wood said. Morrell and Patrick stood up to go. Casually, Wood went on, “Colonel, could you give me another minute or so of your time?”

  “Of course,” Morrell answered. He waited till the aviation officer had gone, then asked, “What’s up, sir?”

  “Colonel, President Roosevelt has asked me to give you a choice of assignments, in recognition of your outstanding service to your country,” Wood said. “You may, if you like, remain in the field; the president is keenly aware of how much you enjoy the strenuous life, as he does himself.”

  “Yes, sir, I do,” Morrell said. “I can’t imagine a choice that would be preferable to staying in the field.”

  “Let me see if I can give you one,” Wood said with a smile. “How would you like to have charge of what we might as well call the Barrel Works? It’s plain the machines aren’t everything they ought to be. It’s just as plain nobody has a sounder notion of doctrine for them or more experience with them in the field than you do. What do you say to a free hand at making them better?”

  “What do I say?” Morrell asked the question as much of himself as of Leonard Wood. He glared at the chief of the General Staff. “Sir, with all due respect, I say damn. That’s a job that needs doing. It’s a job I can do. It’s a job I should do, because, as you say, I can do it well.” He hesitated, grasping at a straw. “Unless you’d rather have Colonel Sherrard?”

  “He recommended you,” Wood said. “His opinion was that you had a better feel for all the issues involved than he did. He said he never could have conceived, much less brought off, the crossing of the Cumberland. You did, and that makes you the man for the slot.”

  “He’s extraordinarily generous.” Morrell scowled; he’d never known this mix of elation and disappointment. When would he ever get away to the woods and the mountains again? “Sir, you’re right. It’s such an important position that, if you believe I’m the best man to fill it, I don’t see how I can possibly decline.”

  “I was hoping you would say that, Colonel,” General Wood replied. “The more work we do on barrels while we’re holding the Confederate States down—holding them down as best we can, I should say—the further ahead of them we’ll be, and the harder the time they’ll have catching up with us.”

  “Yes, sir,” Morrell said enthusiastically. “I’ve got some ideas I want to try. And if we get far enough ahead of them, maybe they’ll never be able to catch up again.”

  “You’re reading my mind,” Leonard Wood said. “That’s just what I’m hoping for.” Solemnly, the two men shook hands.

  Every train that pulled into St. Matthews, South Carolina, brought a few more soldiers home, some from Virginia, some from Tennessee, some from the distant battlefields west of the Mississippi. The men in beat-up butternut tunics and trousers got off the trains and looked around the station, looked around the slowly rebuilding town, in worn wonder, as if amazed even so much peace as St. Matthe
ws provided was left in the world.

  Anne Colleton saw a lot of the returning soldiers, for she spent much of her time at the station waiting for her brother to get off one of those trains: she didn’t trust Tom to wire ahead, letting her know he was coming. And, sure enough, one morning he stopped down from a passenger car looking about as battered, about as bewildered, as any other soldier Anne had seen.

  He looked even more bewildered when she threw herself into his arms. “What the devil are you doing here?” he demanded. “I wanted to surprise you.”

  “Didn’t work this time,” Anne said. “I wanted to surprise you, and I got what I wanted.” She kissed him on the cheek. Some of the whiskers in the scar that seamed it were coming in white.

  “You generally do,” Tom said after a moment, with more of an edge to his voice than would have been there before the war. Then he sighed and shrugged. “We—the CSA, I mean—generally got what we wanted, too. Not this time.”

  “Come back to my rooms with me,” Anne said. “There’s one more thing I want, and you can help me get it.”

  “Can I?” Her brother shrugged again. “I’ll come with you, though. Why not? With Marshlands burned, I haven’t got anywhere else to stay.”

  He walked through the streets of St. Matthews with his shoulders slumped but his eyes darting now here, now there, ever alert, waiting and watching for shooting to start. “It’s not that bad,” Anne said quietly. “We hit the niggers a good lick not so long ago. One more good lick and they’re done, I think.”

  “Wasn’t worrying about Reds,” Tom Colleton answered with an embarrassed chuckle. “I was worrying about damnyankees.” When they got back to her apartment, Anne poured him some whiskey, hoping to ease him. He drank it down, but still seemed nervous as a cat. Pointing at her, he asked, “What’s this other thing you want, Sis?”

  “Another good lick against the Reds,” Anne said at once. “When we hit them from this side, they go deeper into the swamp, over by Gadsden. The militia on the other side of the Congaree are worthless. The Reds—Cassius and his pals, mind—whip them every time they bump together.”

  “Get me another drink, will you?” Tom said, and Anne rose. While she was pouring, her brother went on, “How do I help you get it? I figure I do, or you wouldn’t have mentioned it to me.”

  “Why, Lieutenant Colonel Colleton, of course you do,” she said, handing him the drink. “And it’s because you’re Lieutenant Colonel Colleton that you do. I want you to recruit as many veterans as you can, arm them, and take most of them across to the north side of the Congaree. Don’t you think they’d be able to clean out the nest of Reds that’s been in the swamp the past year and a half?”

  “If they can’t, the Confederate States are in even more trouble than I reckoned they were.” Whiskey hadn’t fuzzed Tom’s wits; he asked, “What happens to the soldiers I don’t take over to Gadsden?”

  “They stay on this side of the swamp,” Anne answered. “You drive the niggers into them, and they finish off any you don’t get.”

  Tom considered, then slowly nodded. “And who commands the stay-at-homes?”

  “I do,” his sister told him.

  She waited for him to pitch a fit. He didn’t. “Odds are you’d be better at the job than any man I can think of,” he said slowly. “Are you sure you wouldn’t rather have the post you just assigned me?—driving, I mean, instead of catching.”

  Anne shook her head. “You have much more real combat experience than I do,” she answered, “and you’ll be leading men who won’t know so much about what I’ve done since the uprising, because they haven’t been here to see it. I’ll keep a lot of militiamen, too. They’re used to doing what I tell them, and it should rub off on the soldiers.”

  “You’ve got it all figured out, don’t you?” Tom raised his glass. “Have one yourself, Sis. Seems to me you’ve earned it.”

  Anne got a glass of whiskey, too, but stared moodily at it instead of drinking right away. “The one thing I don’t have figured out is how to be sure we kill Cassius. He killed Jacob and he almost killed me—and he wrecked Marshlands. He’s kept the Reds a going concern since we drove them back into the swamp, and he knows the place better than anybody. If we don’t get him, we’ll only have to go back again later on.”

  “Kill the head and the body dies,” Tom said. Anne nodded. She knocked back the whiskey. It snarled its way down her throat. Tom spoke with a certain grim anticipation: “Kill enough of the body and the head won’t live, either.”

  He went about recruiting with both skill and persistence he wouldn’t have shown before he’d joined the Army. Nor did he have any trouble gathering followers. The ex-soldiers hardly seemed to think of themselves as ex-; they obeyed his orders as readily as they would have done if still serving under the Stars and Bars. Anne couldn’t help noting that with a touch of resentment when she thought of the cajolery she’d had to use to get the militiamen to go along with her ideas even though they’d had none of their own.

  A few Negro soldiers came back to St. Matthews, too. Tom Colleton did not recruit them—who could guess which of them had fought for the Congaree Socialist Republic? No one quite knew what to make of them or how to behave toward them. Anne vowed to worry about that later. For now, she hoped none of St. Matthews’ blacks was bringing the rebels in the swamp word of the move against them.

  She and the militia and some of Tom’s recruits headed in the direction of Marshlands (and the swamps beyond) as ostentatiously as they could, hoping to draw as much attention to themselves as they could. Once at the edge of the ruined cotton fields, the veterans automatically began to entrench. She didn’t argue; in such matters, she was willing to assume they knew what they were doing.

  Some of them laughed at the beat-up old aeroplane buzzing above the swamp. “Jesus, I wish the damnyankees had been flying crates like that,” a sergeant said.

  “If the other side hasn’t got any aeroplanes, ours doesn’t have to be up to date,” Anne answered coolly. No one, she noted, laughed at the pair of three-inch guns that deployed behind the infantry. One veteran, in fact, respectfully tipped his tin hat to them, as to a couple of old friends.

  Veterans and militiamen were still deploying when a brisk crackle of small-arms fire broke out to the north. Although Anne knew she’d chambered a round in her own Tredegar, she checked again to make sure the weapon was ready. The aeroplane flew in the direction of the shooting. A couple of minutes later, the militiamen at the field guns began banging away, presumably at instruction they got from the wireless telegraph the flying machine carried.

  Perhaps fifteen minutes after that, a couple of ragged Negroes, a man and a woman, emerged from the swamp a few hundred yards from Anne. Both carried rifles; both looked around to find the best road for escape. They did not look long. They found no escape. A volley from the men in the new trenches knocked them over. The man never moved after he fell. The woman twitched for a little while, then lay still.

  Before long, another pair of Negroes, both men this time, came trotting south as if they had not a care in the world. The veterans and militiamen let them approach to near point-blank range before shooting them down. A savage smile stretched across Anne Colleton’s face. The Reds had never met a trap with jaws on both north and south before.

  “Come on, Cassius,” she crooned quietly. “Come on.” Some of the Negro rebels in the swamp, seeing the last bastion of the Congaree Socialist Republic crumbling, would fight to the death defending it. Having known Cassius all her life (not so well as she’d thought she did, but even so), she did not believe he would be one of them. His eye was always on the main chance. As long as he lived, he would figure, the revolution lived, too. That held an unpleasant amount of truth. He would try to escape.

  A few more Reds blundered out of the undergrowth and died before the rest realized the sort of trap they were in. That was too late. By then, from the sounds of the gunfire, Tom’s men had drawn a good semicircle around them. The only way ou
t lay to the south—and that was no way out, either.

  Anne felt like Alexander the Great or Julius Caesar or Robert E. Lee. The whole design was hers, and it was working. Paint a picture? Write a book? She shook her head. Using men, not paint or words, to create…that beat everything.

  But the men of the Congaree Socialist Republic had tried to create using men’s lives as their canvas, too. Now, realizing what sort of obstruction barred them from breaking free of their pursuers, they tried once more.

  In their own way, they were also veterans, and veteran bushwhackers to boot. That made them too wily to charge headlong at their foes’ position. But they had to get through it, or they would never go anywhere again. At a shouted word of command—was that Cassius’ voice?—they attacked the trench line.

  “Damnyankees couldn’t have done it better,” a veteran said admiringly, once the shooting was over. The Negroes advanced by rushes, one group firing from cover to let another leapfrog past them, then moving forward in turn.

  A man next to Anne staggered back with a gurgling croak, clutching at his throat. She spared him not a glance—she was drawing a bead on a Red. The Tredegar slammed against her shoulder. The back of the black man’s head blew out. She worked the bolt and fired again.

  For a few minutes, the fighting was very hot. The Red rebels battled for escape with desperate courage. Anne’s men had skill, anger, and position on their side. The Negroes got into the trenches even so. That was a worse business than she’d ever imagined, screams and shouts and bullets whipping—several right past her head—and the iron smell of blood and the outhouse stink of guts spilled in the mud.