The Guns of the South

by Harry Turtledove

  “We shall in the end defeat them, though?” Gartrell pressed anxiously.

  “If we defeated the United States, sir, we shall surely overcome a small band of insurrectionists.” Lee wished he were as certain as he sounded.

  Bullets snapped past a few feet over Caudell’s head, the stream sweeping first left to right, then back from right to left. The wash in which he lay was only about a hundred yards from the gunner. Getting this close had taken him all day. Now that he was here, he didn’t know what to do next. Firing a few shots at random was likelier to alert the gunner than to kill him. And the Rivington men still had the rifle grenades they’d used in the trenches outside Washington City. Caudell didn’t want them raining down on him.

  He turned to Henry Pleasants, who sprawled beside him in the gully. “We can’t go forward, not anymore,” he said, waving. Pleasants nodded; if they showed themselves, they were dead men. Caudell waved in the other direction. “We can’t go back either, not hardly.” Eight or nine soldiers lay in the gully with them, the survivors of twice that many or more. Pleasants nodded again. Caudell said, “Well, what does that leave us? I’m looking for ideas, damn it.”

  “I wish I had one,” Pleasants said. “Maybe when night comes—” He broke off with a grimace. By the way they shot at night, the Rivington men could see in the dark like cats. And even if that weren’t so, with the brute of a repeater up ahead, if one bullet didn’t get you, the next one would, or the next.

  Flopped down a couple of feet away, Mollie Bean said, “Can’t go forward, can’t go back.” She wiped her forehead with her sleeve. Since the one was as dirty as the other, that helped her not at all. She still looked good to Caudell. The only way she could have looked better was far away from the fighting. If something happened to her—But she hadn’t let Caudell send her away.

  He said, “We can’t go over ‘em: not enough trees, and they’d shoot us out of ‘em like boys with squirrel guns. And we can’t go under ‘em, because we aren’t a pack of moles.”

  He’d been talking as much to hear the sound of his own voice as for any other reason. He almost jumped when Henry Pleasants rolled over and whacked him in the shoulder. Jumping, here, was dangerous. Pleasants’s eyes blazed in his filthy face. “The hell we can’t go under ‘em,” he said. His voice shook with excitement.

  “Huh? What are you talking about?” Caudell said.

  “Going under ‘em,” Pleasants repeated impatiently, as if to a stupid child. When Caudell still looked blank, he realized he had to explain further: “Nate, I used to be a mining engineer, remember? If we could run a tunnel from here to under that big repeater, set a charge of powder, and light it off—We can do it, I swear we can, and blow ‘em high as the sky. The ground around here is soft, the side of the wash will keep the Rivington men from spying what we’re up to…I’m not crazy, Nate; I swear by almighty God I’m not.”

  “You mean it,” Caudell said slowly, wonderingly. The stream of bullets was right overhead now. Advancing farther against the gun that spat them was only a fancy way to commit suicide, unless…Caudell had a sudden vision of gun and gunner both flying through the air. He liked it better than anything else he’d imagined since being so rudely returned to combat.

  Pleasants sensed he’d hooked his fish. “I sure do mean it, Nate. If we can bring Lloyd and Andrew up here, and some other men who’ve dug—you must have some in this state—and their tools, and the timber we’d need to shore up the tunnel as we dig—” He started ticking off on his fingers exactly what he’d need, as if he were sitting comfortably in a mining office instead of hunkered down in a dry wash.

  Finally, to dam the flow of ideas, Caudell held up a hand. “All right, I surrender—you’ve convinced me. But I’m just a sergeant, remember?” He pointed at the stripes on his sleeve. “I can’t get you everything you’re talking about. We’ll head back to Captain Lewis. If you sell him your scheme, too, you’ll likely get a chance to try it.”

  “Let’s go.” Pleasants turned and started to crawl down the gully.

  Caudell grabbed him by the ankle. “Henry, you just swore to me you weren’t crazy, and here you go making yourself out a liar. If you want to live to see Captain Lewis, you won’t just march off and do it, not from here you won’t. Think about where you are. When night comes, we’ll try getting out. Till then, we sit tight.” Pleasants looked mutinous. Caudell went on, “How much digging did you plan on doing today, anyhow?”

  His friend managed a shamefaced laugh. “Sorry. You’re thinking straighter than I am, that’s plain. But when I see something like this in my mind, I go all on fire to get started on it, no matter what’s in my way.”

  “I know you do.” Caudell remembered that that driving eagerness to get the job done, and the matching blindness to anything not directly related to getting it done, had cost his friend his railroad job. After a couple of years as a first sergeant, practicality was his own middle name. He plucked at his beard as he thought. After a couple of minutes, he asked, “If you’re not here, can one of your Welshmen oversee this job?”

  “Andrew could,” Pleasants answered at once. “Lloyd works well enough, but he likes his whiskey too well to make a proper chief.”

  “Fair enough. Here’s what we’ll do, then. After it gets dark, you and I and Melvin here will all head back to Nashville. We’ll go separately, and—”

  “Wait a minute,” Mollie Bean interrupted. “What’re y’all sendin’ me back for?”

  “You’ve spent the last however long listening to Henry and me,” Caudell answered. “You know as much about this notion of his as I do, anyway. Captain Lewis needs to hear it. Even at night, it’s no sure bet one of us, or even one out of two, will make it back safe out of the range of that damned gun up there. But if I send three, somebody ought to get back.”

  She nodded, warily.” All right, Nate. Reckon that makes sense.” In front of other people, a good deal had to stay unsaid between them. If she’d thought he was sending her back just to get her out of danger—which he very much wanted to do—she’d surely have refused to go. But her pride could accept an order with military reason behind it.

  Shadows shifted, lengthened, began to blend into the one great purple shadow of twilight. When full dark came, Caudell turned to Mollie and Pleasants. “I’ll go first,” he said. “First one through is likeliest to draw fire. Henry, you’re next—give me fifteen minutes or so before you start. M-Melvin, you go last, fifteen minutes behind Henry. We’ll all meet”—I hope, he thought—”at Captain Lewis’s.”

  “Luck, Nate,” Pleasants said.

  “Luck,” Mollie echoed, so softly he hardly heard her.

  He wanted to hug her, to kiss her, to be with her anywhere but this miserable spot. All he could do was nod a nod she might well not have seen in the darkness, then scuttle off down the dry wash. His mouth was dry, too; he remembered too well the terrifying confusion of the night fight outside Washington City. Then the Rivington men and their fancy weapons had been allies. Now they were trying to kill him.

  The wash got shallower and shallower as it curved away from the endless repeater. He rolled out of it and behind a hollow stump. Doing his best to keep the stump between himself and the gunner, he crawled, scrambled, crawled again. He’d gone several hundred yards before bullets came snarling after him. He threw himself flat—better than flat, actually, for he landed in a hole in the ground. He waited a few minutes, then crawled on. When he decided the pine woods screened him away from the Rivington man at the gun, he got up and walked, steering by the stars till he came to a road he knew.

  He’d started only six or eight miles outside Nashville, but the town clocks were chiming midnight when he came into town. Lewis made his headquarters at the courthouse. A sentry gave Caudell, now even filthier than he had been before, a dubious look. “You sure this won’t wait, soldier?”

  “I’m sure.” Caudell put bite in his voice. He discovered he still had his wartime prejudice against anyone in a clean unifo
rm. His growl sufficed to get the sentry to step aside. He went into the courthouse, found Lewis snoring on a pallet, “Captain Lewis, sir? Captain?”

  Lewis grunted, then rolled over and sat up. “Who—?” He rubbed his eyes. The torches outside the doorway let him see who. “What the devil is it, Nate?”

  As Caudell started to explain what it was, several horsemen rode into the town square, their harness jingling. A man with cavalry spurs on his boots strode into the courthouse. Caudell kept on talking to Lewis: let the damned courier wait his turn, he thought. Most of that breed were arrogant, eager to get their ever-so-precious words in first, but this one stood quietly until Caudell was through.

  Captain Lewis yawned till his jaw gave an audible pop. Then he said, “If this Pleasants knows what he’s doing—and he sounds like he does—tell him to go ahead. Sounds like a good chance to get rid of that damned repeater, and we haven’t had much luck with it any other way.”

  As Caudell saluted, the man behind him spoke for the first time: “Captain, Sergeant, the hell with one repeater. When you’re holdin’ four kings, you better not just raise a dime.”

  Caudell whirled. He knew that voice, though he’d not expected to hear it in the Nashville courthouse. George Lewis sprang out of bed and to his feet. He was wearing his makeshift captain’s tunic, but only drawers beneath it. He came to attention and saluted anyhow. “General Forrest, sir!”

  “At ease, Captain—and put on your pants,” Nathan Bedford Forrest added with a chuckle. “I rode in to see how things were on this part of the line around that goddam Rivington place, on account of they’d been pretty quiet till now. Reckon they’re gonna liven up some.” He rounded on Caudell. “Where is this mining engineer of yours, First Sergeant?”

  “He ought to be along any time now, sir,” Caudell said uncomfortably. He told again how he, Pleasants, and Mollie Bean—though he remembered to call her Melvin—had set out at fifteen-minute intervals.

  Forrest nodded. “Best you could have done, I expect. But if that engineer stops a bullet—Wait. He said one of those other miners could do the job, too, didn’t he?”

  “Yes, but—” Caudell hopelessly spread his hands. Henry Pleasants was his friend. Mollie was a great deal more than that. Forrest might understand his feelings, but the man was—had to be, by the wreathed stars on his collar—a soldier first. Now that he had an idea, he would carry it forward with or without the person who first proposed it. To Caudell, the people mattered more than the idea. He waited and worried, waited more, worried more.

  About three in the morning, when worry was turning to despair, Mollie and Pleasants came into the courthouse together. Caudell let out a rebel yell that likely bounced half of Nashville out of bed. He hugged Henry Pleasants first, which gave him all the excuse he needed to hug Mollie too, longer and more closely. “What the devil happened to you two?” he demanded.

  “We got lost,” Mollie said in a small, sheepish voice. “My fault. I—”

  “I don’t care a damn about all that,” Nathan Bedford Forrest broke in. He paused a moment to let himself, or at least his rank, be recognized, then said, “Which one of you is Pleasants?”

  “I am, sir.” Pleasants drew himself stiff and straight. “Private Henry Pleasants, 47th North Carolina, formerly Lieutenant Colonel Henry Pleasants, 48th Pennsylvania.”

  “Is that a fact?” Forrest took a longer, closer look at the mining engineer. “Decided you liked it better down here, did you?”

  “Some ways,” Pleasants said, and let it go at that.

  Forrest did not press him; he had things other than politics on his mind. “Caudell here tells me you think you can run a mine under that big repeater up in front of you.”

  “I can blow that goddamned gun just as high as you want it, sir,” Pleasants said positively.

  “The hell with one repeater,” Forrest said, as he had to Caudell and Lewis before. “I want that mine. I want it bad enough to taste it, Colonel.” Pleasants beamed to hear his old rank used; Captain Lewis glared a little. Forrest plowed ahead: “About how long would you need to dig it?”

  Pleasants’s eyes went far away; his lips moved silently as he calculated. He stayed in that brown study for several minutes. When his face cleared, he answered, “Give me the men, tools, and shoring timbers I’ll need—and a pump, in case the shaft is wet—and I’ll have it done in three weeks to a month.”

  Forrest clapped him on the back. “You’ll get ‘em, by God,” he promised.” And you’ll have your old U. S.rank back as part of my staff, if that suits you.”

  Now George Lewis glared more than a little. Pleasants grinned from ear to ear. “Thank you, sir! Maybe I should have voted for you after all.”

  Caudell gulped, wondering how the notoriously hotheaded Forrest would take that. But the general’s answer, when it came, was low-voiced and serious: “Sir, if I’d known then what I know now, I wouldn’t have voted for myself. I was fooled into thinking America Will Break had the South’s best interests at heart, not its own.” He shook his head, plainly angry at being deceived. Then he grinned, too, an expression half mischievous, half savage. “Now I aim to fool those Rivington bastards right back.”

  “How are you going to do that, sir?” Caudell, Mollie, and George Lewis asked at the same time.

  “We’ve just been tapping at America Will Break down here south of Rivington,” Forrest answered, still with that predatory grin. “I aim to swing a good deal around to here, start pounding ‘em right about where that repeater is. The more men and guns we throw at ‘em, the more they’ll have to bring in to keep us from crackin’ ‘em. I’ll throw in more, and they’ll bring more, and by the time three weeks or a month have gone by, gentlemen, they’ll need a sight more than one repeater to hold us back. I’ll make them make that spot the linchpin of their whole position.”

  It was as if someone had struck a match right in front of Caudell’s eyes. Dazzled, he exclaimed, “They can bring up all the fancy guns they want, because while they’re doing that, we’ll be digging. And when we’re done—”

  “—we’ll blow every one of those fancy guns straight to hell,” Nathan Bedford Forrest finished for him. “That’s right, First Sergeant. Then we’ll smash through the gap and go straight for Rivington.” Forrest’s grin suddenly slid off his face, leaving him looking very grim indeed.” And if the Rivington men get word of what we’re up to because somebody blabs, I’ll kill the bigmouthed son of a bitch with my own hands. Does everyone understand me?”

  The courthouse got quiet for a moment. Even without knowing Forrest’s reputation, no one who heard him could have doubted he meant exactly what he said.

  Perhaps seeking to ease the tension that blunt threat had left in the air, Henry Pleasants said, “You know, Melvin, you’re the spit and image of Nate’s lady friend Mollie Bean. Just how close a relative of hers are you?”

  Caudell choked and wished he could sink through the floor. Mollie, though, must have anticipated getting asked that sooner or later, for she answered lightly, “We’re right close, Henry—excuse me, I mean Colonel Henry, sir. Lots o’ people say we look alike.”

  “You certainly do,” Pleasants said.

  General Forrest told Nate and Mollie, “You two go get some sleep; you’ve earned it. My thanks for coming back with word of this here plan.” He turned to Pleasants. “You stay here with me, sir. Sounds like we got ourselves a whole mess o’ talking to get through.”

  “Yes, sir,” Henry Pleasants said. “I think we do…”

  * XVIII *

  Lee wondered how Jefferson Davis had ever managed to inveigle him into accepting the Confederate Presidency. Even without counting the armed guards who surrounded the presidential residence on Shockoe Hill, he found himself a prisoner of his position. To do everything that needed doing, he should have been born triplets. The one of him available was not nearly enough: whenever he did anything, he felt guilty because he was neglecting something else.

  He drank coffee as he
waded through the morning’s stack of reports. General Forrest was shifting the main effort of his attack to southwest of Rivington, a telegram said. Lee glanced at a map of North Carolina on a stand by his desk, then shrugged. That direction of assault looked no more promising to him than any other, but Forrest usually had a reason for the things he did, even if the reason was not obvious. Often it wasn’t; being without any formal military training, Forrest made up his own rules as he went along. And if Lee couldn’t see what he was up to, likely the Rivington men couldn’t, either. Lee hoped they couldn’t.

  The telegram also reported that Forrest had appointed a new officer to his staff, a Colonel Pleasants. The name was vaguely familiar to Lee, but he couldn’t place it. He reached for a book taken from the AWB sanctum: Lee’$ Colonels, by a certain Robert Krick, a man still a lifetime away from being born. It was a better, more comprehensive list of the higher officers of the Army of Northern Virginia than any from Lee’s own time.

  It did not, however, mention Colonel Pleasants. Lee looked at the far wall of his office without seeing it as he tried to remember in what connection he’d noticed the colonel’s name. He pulled out the Picture History of the Civil War, a volume that over the past few months had come to seem like an old friend. Sure enough, Pleasants’s name appeared in the index. Lee flipped to page 472.

  Reading about the grinding campaign that had not happened in 1864 still made him want to shiver, as if he were going through one of Poe’s frightening tales instead. Hard to imagine his incomparable Army of Northern Virginia trapped within siege lines round Petersburg, with the Federals using every expedient they could think of to break those lines.

  He read of the mine Henry Pleasants had proposed; of the tons of powder going off beneath the Confederate trenches; of the Battle of the Crater that the Union forces seemed to have bungled beyond belief, for otherwise how could they have lost? Having read all that, he idly wondered how Pleasants had ended up in the South rather than Pennsylvania.