Despite its quaint name, Tom Colleton found himself liking Beaver, Pennsylvania. The town sat in the middle of a mining and industrial belt near the border with Ohio, but was itself pleasant and tree-shrouded. He’d commandeered the ivy-covered Quay House, former home of a prominent Socialist politician, for his regimental headquarters.
The runner from division HQ, a few miles farther south, caught up with him there. After saluting, the corporal said, “Sir, I have a special order for you.”
It must have been special, or his superiors would have sent it by wireless or field telephone, enciphering it if they thought they had to. Tom nodded. “Give it to me, then.”
He expected the messenger to pull out a piece of paper for him to read and then destroy. Instead, it came orally. The powers that be really didn’t want anything that had to do with it falling into U.S. hands. “Sir, you are ordered to allow a special unit to pass through your lines, and to make sure the troops under your command do nothing to interfere with this special unit in any way.”
That said just enough to leave Lieutenant-Colonel Colleton scratching his head. “Of course I’ll obey, but I’d like to know a little more about what I’m obeying,” he said. “Why would my men want to interfere with this special unit, whatever it is? How can I tell them not to if I don’t know why it’ll cause trouble?”
“Sir, I was told you’d likely ask that question, and that I was allowed to answer it,” the corporal said seriously. “The answer is, this special unit is made up of men who can talk like damnyankees. They wear Yankee uniforms and act like U.S. soldiers.”
“Son of a bitch!” Colleton exclaimed. Whatever he’d expected, that wasn’t it. After a moment, he wondered why not. Troops like that could raise merry hell behind enemy lines. Of course, they’d have a short life and not a merry one if they got captured. But that was their lookout, not his. He asked, “How will they get up here without having some overeager kid in butternut shoot their asses off?”
He won a smile from the runner. “They’ve come this far, sir,” the corporal said. “They’ll have escorts who look the way they’re supposed to. And they’ll move up at night, when they’re less likely to be noticed.”
“All right. Makes sense.” Tom wondered if the special unit had come up from the CSA entirely by night, lying quiet and hidden by day. He couldn’t think of any better way to keep his own side from trying to kill them. He asked, “Can you tell me anything about what they’ll be doing?”
“No, sir,” the messenger answered. “They didn’t tell me, so I couldn’t tell the damnyankees in case I got caught.”
“Fair enough-that makes sense, too,” Tom said. “What time can I expect ’em? My men will need some warning.”
“They should get here about eleven o’clock,” the messenger said. “Please don’t brief your men too soon. If they get captured, or if they just start bragging to damnyankee pickets…”
“I understand.” What Tom understood was that he was between a rock and a hard place. His men did need warning, or they would do their best to murder the ersatz Yankees. If he had to hold off till the last minute for fear of breaching security, some of them might not get the word. “I’ll do what needs doing.”
“Yes, sir.” The corporal saluted. “If you’ll excuse me…” He headed back toward division HQ, presumably bearing word that the special unit could come ahead.
Tom shook his head in wonder. Then he got on the field telephone with his company commanders, trying to find out where U.S. lines in front of him were most porous. “What’s cooking, sir?” one of his captains asked. “We going to sneak raiders through?”
“You might say so, Bobby Lee,” Tom answered. “You’ve got the quiet sector, so you win the cigar. Alert your men that the infiltrators will have escorts, and that they are to follow the orders they get from those escorts. Got it?”
“Well enough to do what I’m told,” the captain answered plaintively. “Something funny’s going on, though, isn’t it?”
“You don’t know the half of it.” Tom didn’t want to go into detail on the telephone. The damnyankees were better than he wished they were at tapping telephone lines. He didn’t know some U.S. noncom with earphones was listening to every word he said, but he didn’t want to elaborate on what was going to happen, not when his own superiors had gone out of their way to keep from sending anything on the air or over the wires.
With his own curiosity aroused, he waited impatiently for nightfall. Somewhere off to the north, artillery rumbled. His own area stayed pretty quiet. He supposed his superiors wanted it that way. If the Confederate soldiers dressed as Yankees were going to cause the most trouble, they ought to go in where the real enemy wasn’t keyed up and ready to start shooting at anything that moved.
Trucks rumbled into Beaver a few minutes past eleven. A Confederate major in proper uniform alighted from the first one and came looking for Tom. After being directed to the Quay House, he said, “Here we are, sir. You’ve been warned about us?”
“I sure have,” Tom Colleton answered.
“Good,” the major said. “Please bring some men with you to form a screen around the, ah, special soldiers as they go forward. We don’t want to have any unfortunate accidents.”
We don’t want the ordinary soldiers shooting up the special men, he meant. Tom nodded. “I understand, Major. I agree one hundred percent.”
Nobody had got out of the trucks a couple of blocks away. Tom rounded up a couple of squads’ worth of clerks and technicians and other rear-echelon troops and had them surround the silent vehicles. “What’s up, sir?” one of them asked, reasonably enough.
“Don’t be surprised and don’t start shooting when you see who gets out of these trucks,” Tom answered. “No matter what these men look like, they aren’t real damnyankees. They’re infiltrators. They’re going to cause trouble behind the enemy’s lines. If this goes well, it’ll make the advance on Pittsburgh a hell of a lot easier.” He turned to the major. “All right?”
“Couldn’t be better, sir. Thanks.” The major raised his voice: “You can come out now, boys!”
Tom’s men swore softly as the faux Yankees emerged. He couldn’t blame them; he muttered under his breath, too. They looked much too much like the real thing. Their uniforms and helmets were the ones he’d been shooting at for more than a year. They wore U.S. shoes and carried U.S. weapons. And, when they spoke, they sounded like damnyankees, too. That really made the hair on his arms and at the back of his neck want to stand on end.
One of his men said, “Sir, you sure these bastards is on our side?”
“If I was a real Yankee, I’d shoot you for that, you son of a bitch,” one of the men said. He wore a sergeant’s uniform, and sounded like a cocky noncom… a cocky noncom from New York City. He could have taken his act to the stage. In fact, he was taking it to the stage-and a bad review would cost him his neck.
“Come on,” Tom said. “I’ll take you up to the line. One of my companies is facing a sector where the enemy doesn’t really have much of a line in place against us-that’s what happens sometimes when you push hard.”
“Good,” the major said. “Can you start a little firefight somewhere else to distract the Yankees some more?”
The request made sense, even if it would get some of his men wounded or killed. “I’ll take care of it,” he said, and sent the order over the field telephone. A machine gun and some riflemen opened up off to the right. The enemy returned fire. Springfields sounded very different from automatic Tredegars. Machine guns differed, too. The U.S. weapons were closely related to their Great War ancestors. The C.S. model was lighter, cooled by air rather than a clumsy water jacket, and designed to put out absolutely as much lead as possible. It sounded like nothing so much as a giant tearing up an enormous sheet of cloth: the individual rounds going off blended into an almost continuous roar.
“All right, Major,” Tom told the officer in charge of the imitation Yankees when they got to the perimeter. “I
’ve done what I can do. The rest is up to you and your boys. Good luck.”
“Thank you kindly, sir.” The major, at least, sounded like a proper Confederate. He turned to the men in his charge. “Come on. Y’all know the drill.”
“Yeah.” “Sure thing.” “No problem.” Those laconic grunts sounded as if they came from the wrong side of the border. One of the men muttered, “Goddamn cowflop cigarettes from now on.” Tom sympathized with that. Everybody knew how eager Yankees were for Confederate tobacco.
A few at a time, the Confederates in U.S. uniform slipped off into the night. Tom waited tensely. If gunfire erupted right in front of him, something had gone wrong up there. But everything stayed quiet. Could they have the passwords for this sector? If the enemy had any brains, he would change those every day. Tom knew his own side wasn’t perfect at that. He supposed the Yankees also were unlikely to be.
Everything stayed quiet. However the infiltrators were doing it, they were doing it. The company commander said, “If that doesn’t buy us a breakthrough, nothing will.”
Even talking about breakthroughs made a Great War veteran nervous. “We’ll see what happens, that’s all, Bobby Lee,” Tom answered. “And I reckon we’d better tighten up our own procedures.”
“What do you mean, sir?” Bobby Lee asked.
“What goes around comes around,” Tom answered. “You don’t suppose the damnyankees have men who sound like they come from the CSA? You don’t suppose they can get their hands on our weapons and uniforms? Like hell they can’t. I think we came up with this one first-I hope to God we did-but we’re liable to be on the receiving end one day.”
“Son of a bitch,” the young captain said. “My hat’s off to you, sir.” He took himself literally, doffing his helmet.
Tom snorted. “Never mind that. Just have our men ready to move fast if the order comes.”
“Yes, sir. They will be, sir,” Bobby Lee promised.
By the time Tom got back to Beaver, the buses that brought in the phony U.S. soldiers had gone. But Confederate barrels-with, he devoutly hoped, real Confederates inside them-were rumbling into town.
The storm broke the next afternoon. The barrels slammed into the shaky U.S. position, and it turned out to be even shakier than anybody would have expected. Enemy reinforcements showed up late, showed up in the wrong places, or didn’t show up at all. Unlike a lot of people, Tom Colleton had a pretty good notion of why that was so. He wondered what it was costing the Confederates in U.S. green-gray. We’d better make it worthwhile, he thought, and pushed his own men forward without mercy.
Jonathan Moss mooched back toward the barracks at the Andersonville POW camp from the latrine trenches. Nick Cantarella was coming the other way. He gave Moss a sour nod. “They still have guys looking up your ass when you take a crap?” he asked.
“Just about,” Moss answered. They both rolled their eyes. Ever since that downpour made part of the U.S. escape tunnel fall in on itself, the Confederates had been as jumpy as mice at a cat’s wedding. Moss knew they had every reason to be. Knowing it didn’t make him like it any better.
“Such fun,” Cantarella said. The Confederates still didn’t know who’d built the tunnel. That Cantarella kept on walking around proved as much. If the guards had had any idea what was what, he would have been in solitary confinement or manacles or leg irons or ball and chain or whatever else they thought up to keep POWs from absquatulating.
“I wonder if anyone has anything else going on,” Moss remarked.
“You never can tell,” said the captain from New York. “One of these days, the guards are liable to wake up and find out we’ve all flown the coop. What do they do then? Jump off a cliff? Here’s hoping.”
“Yeah. Here’s hoping.” Moss knew his own voice sounded hollow. He wanted out. He wanted out so bad he could taste it. He wasn’t the only POW who did, of course. The guards knew as much, too. They’d known that even before the tunnel collapsed. Now, with their noses rubbed in it, they tried to keep an eye on everybody all the time.
Wrinkling his own nose, Captain Cantarella walked on toward the latrine trenches. Jonathan Moss ambled back to the barracks. Other POWs nodded to him as he went by. He was one of the boys by now, not a new fish who drew dubious glances wherever he went and whatever he did. Having the enemy suspicious of you was one thing. It came with being a prisoner of war. Having your own side suspicious of you felt a lot worse.
“ ’Day, Major,” First Lieutenant Hal Swinburne said.
“Hello, Hal.” Moss hid a smile at his own thoughts of a moment before. Hal Swinburne hadn’t been at Andersonville very long, but nobody suspected him of being a Confederate plant. For one thing, three officers already incarcerated vouched for him. For another, he was a Yankees’ Yankee: he came from Maine, and spoke with such a thick down-East accent, half his fellow POWs had trouble following him. Moss couldn’t imagine a Confederate plant talking like that.
“Hot today,” Swinburne said mournfully.
“Hot yesterday. Hot tomorrow. Hot the day after, too.” Moss kicked at the red dirt. Dust rose from under his foot. He pointed up into the sky, where big black birds circled. “See those?”
Swinburne looked, shielding his eyes with the palm of his hand. He was about six-one, on the skinny side, with dark blond hair and a thin little mustache that almost disappeared if you looked at it from the wrong angle. “Ravens?” he asked.
Did you see ravens soaring over the Maine woods? Moss wouldn’t have been surprised. He wasn’t sure he’d ever seen one, but he was no birdwatcher. He did know the birds he was watching now weren’t ravens. “Vultures,” he said solemnly. “Waiting for something to fall over dead from the sun so they can come down and have dinner.”
“Vultures.” The way Swinburne said it, it sounded like vuhchaaz. He nodded. “Ayuh. Seen ’em on the field, time or two. Nasty birds.” He stretched out the a in nasty and swallowed the r in birds. After wiping his forehead with the back of his hand, he went on, “How do folks live in weather like this all the time, though?”
People wondered the same thing about Maine, of course, for opposite reasons. Moss said, “I’m from Chicago. I don’t think there’s any kind of weather in the world you don’t see there.”
“That’s not so bad,” Swinburne said. “That’s variety, like. But this here every day?” He shuddered. “I’d cook.”
There was a variation on this theme. When it wasn’t hot and muggy and sunny, it was hot and muggy and pouring rain. Moss didn’t bother pointing that out. He doubted the other POW would find it an improvement.
With another nod, Hal Swinburne went on his way. He didn’t move any faster than he had to. In this heat and humidity, nobody moved any faster than he had to. Sweat coated Moss’ skin, thick and heavy as grease. It welded his shirt and even his trousers to his body.
Coming into the shade inside the barracks hall was a small relief, but only a small one. “A little warm out there,” Moss remarked.
That made even the men in the unending corner poker game look up. “Really?” one of them said.
“Never would have guessed,” another added.
“Come on, Major,” a third poker player put in. “You knew hell was supposed to be hot, right?”
Moss laughed. A moment later, he wondered why. If this wasn’t hell, it had to be one of the nastier suburbs of purgatory. He went over to Colonel Summers. “Could I talk with you for a moment, sir?” he asked.
The senior U.S. officer in the camp nodded. “Certainly.” He closed the beat-up paperbound mystery he’d been reading. “I already know who done it, anyhow.” Moss knew who done it in that one, too. The camp library didn’t hold enough books. Anyone who’d been here for a while and liked to read had probably gone through all of them at least once. Monty Summers got to his feet. “What’s on your mind, Major?”
Till they walked outside again, Moss kept it to small talk. Summers didn’t seem surprised or put out. When Moss was sure neither guards nor fellow pr
isoners could overhear, he asked, “Are we still working on an escape?”
“Officially, I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Colonel Summers answered. “Officially, I had no idea there was a tunnel under these grounds till the rain showed it. I was shocked-shocked, I tell you-to learn that some men here were planning to break out. The Confederates couldn’t prove any different, either. I’m glad they couldn’t. It would have been troublesome if they could.”
He wouldn’t admit a damn thing. That was bound to be smart. The less he said, the less the Confederates could make him sorry for. The less Moss heard, the less the enemy could squeeze out of him. All the same… “I do believe I’m going to go smack out of my mind if I stay cooped up here much longer.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t,” Summers said. “They’ll put you in a straitjacket, and those things are uncomfortable as the devil, especially in this weather.”
“Yes, sir,” Moss said resignedly. He should have known he wouldn’t get a straight answer. As a matter of fact, he had known it, or had a pretty good idea. That he’d squawked anyhow was a telling measure of how fed up and cooped up he was feeling.
Voice far drier than the dripping air they both breathed, Summers said, “Believe me, Major, you aren’t the only one incompletely satisfied with the accommodations around here.”
“No?” Moss’ spirits revived, or tried to. “Is there anyone in particular I should talk to? Is anybody besides me especially unhappy about them?”
“If someone is, I’m sure he’ll get in touch with you,” Colonel Summers said, which again told Moss nothing. “Was anything else troubling you? As I say, you’re not the only one who doesn’t like it here. Remember that and you may keep from winning one of the guards a furlough.”
“Bastards,” Moss muttered. The POWs didn’t know for a fact that their guards got time off for shooting a prisoner who’d set foot on the smoothed ground just inside the barbed wire-or, sometimes, for shooting a prisoner who looked as if he was about to do such a thing. They didn’t know it, but they believed it the way a lot of them believed in the divinity of Jesus Christ.
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