American Front gw-1

by Harry Turtledove

  "You got to watch out for the front-line lice, boys," Jasper Jenkins said to the replacements. "Some of them babies is big enough so they have you 'stead of you havin' them." He scratched his crotch.

  One of the men going up to the line, a tall, thin, pale fellow who looked so earnest that Bartlett pegged him for a preacher's son, went paler yet and visibly gulped. Poor bastard, Reggie thought with abstract, abraded sympathy. He'd been fairly fastidious himself, back in his civilian days. Anybody who couldn't stand living like a pig — right down to wallowing in the mud- had an even worse time at the front than everyone else.

  He didn't like being in the zigzag communication trenches. They weren't deep enough, and they didn't have any shelters into which to dive if the damnyankees started throwing artillery around. The officers felt the same way he did. "Move along, boys, move along," Captain Wilcox said. "We don't want to camp here."

  Major Colleton hustled up and down the line of marching — actually, more like shambling-men to deliver the same message: "Keep it moving there, fellows." His uniform was as spruce and neat as any of the ones the replacements were wearing. With Colleton, it was no more than part of his jaunty persona. He'd have been a plumed cavalryman back in the War of Se cession. Cavalry these days wasn't what it had been, though.

  And Major Colleton's jauntiness wasn't quite what it had been, either. "Shake a leg," he said. "Sooner we're back behind the secondary trenches, sooner the Yankees won't be able to reach us any more."

  A lot of people — Colleton among them, and Reggie Bartlett, too-had gone into the war wanting nothing but the thrill of combat. Bartlett had seen plenty of combat. If he never had another thrill of that sort for the rest of his life, he'd be content.

  And he, unlike Major Colleton, was the only man of his family in the Army. "Sir, how's your brother?" he asked when the major came near.

  Colleton's face clouded. "He's back home now. From what my sister writes, he's never going to be able to do much for himself any more: a couple of more breaths of chlorine and they'd have put him under the ground. Likely that would have been a mercy." He remembered his manners; he had the virtues of the Southern gentleman. "Kind of you to ask, Bartlett."

  Reggie nodded. Colleton went on his way, still urging the men to hurry. He knew just about everyone in the battalion by name. Of course, the battalion carried only about half of its establishment strength, which made learning names easier than it would have been when the war was young.

  Machine guns poked their snouts over the parapets of the secondary trenches, ready to rake the ground ahead with fire if a U.S. attack should carry the front-line positions. In theory, Reggie approved of the precaution. In prac tice, a U.S. attack sufficient to bring those machine guns into action would likely have left him dead, wounded, or captured. He was happy they sat there quiet.

  The men in the secondary trenches were veterans: grimy, worn men much like Bartlett and his comrades. A couple of them nodded toward the troops going out of the front line. One fellow touched his butternut slouch hat in what looked like half a salute. He'd likely been up there, and knew what the regiment coming back was escaping.

  Behind the secondary trenches, Negro labourers, their uniforms dark with sweat rather than dirt, were digging positions for Confederate guns. "Nice to see those," Reggie said to Jasper Jenkins. "The Yanks have been throwing more shells at us than we've been able to give back."

  "Ain't that the sad and sorry truth?" Jenkins looked back over his shoulder toward the front line. "One good thing about havin' to pull back to this side o' the river is, we don't have the damnyankees shellin' us like they was whenever we had to cross it."

  "I've been places I liked more than some of those bridges," Bartlett agreed with a reminiscent shudder. His comrade's chuckle said Jenkins appreciated the understatement. Reggie went on, "It might not have been hell on earth, but if it wasn't, you could sure as blazes see it from there."

  "You got a good way with words," Jenkins said. "You ever try your hand at writin' or anything like that?"

  "Oh, all the time," Bartlett answered. Jasper Jenkins stared at him, maybe wondering whether he'd been serving alongside a famous author without knowing it. Jenkins could sign his name, but that was about as far as his read ing and writing took him. Reggie explained: "I worked in a drugstore in Richmond. The pharmacist would make the pills and the syrups, and I'd write 'Take four times a day' or 'Take two before meals' or 'Do not take on an empty stomach' and glue the label to the bottle. It was a wild and exciting life, I tell you that."

  "Sounds like it." Jenkins tramped on for another few paces, then said, "Bet you'd trade this for it in a red-hot minute."

  "No takers," Reggie said with considerable feeling. Both men laughed as they marched back toward the base camp.

  That was near the little town called Clearwater, a name it might once have lived up to but no longer deserved. No little town suddenly inundated by a great sea of butternut tents could hope to keep its water clear. The wonder was that it still had enough water for the men to drink. To men who had spent a turn in the trenches, the idea of sleep under canvas on veritable cots looked very attractive indeed.

  But before they could approach the earthly paradise, they had to pass through purgatory. Purgatory was guarded by stern-looking military policemen, and bore the banner, delousing station. "Peel off by squads," one of the military policemen shouted, and then, seeing how small the squads were (What does he know about the front? Reggie thought scornfully), corrected himself: "No — by sections."

  The men had been through the drill before. They didn't need the military policeman, exultant in his petty authority, to tell them what to do. Along with the rest of the men in his section, Reggie went into one of the big delousing tents. He got out of his clothes and handed them to a Negro attendant, who threw his underwear into a pile that would go back to the corps laundry farther from the front and put his outer garments into a bake oven that went by the name of a Floden disinfector, after the genius who had invented the exercise in futility.

  That done, Bartlett soaped himself at a footbath. The soap was strong and stinking. He rubbed it into his scalp, his half-grown beard, and the hair around his private parts anyhow, in the hope that it would get rid of the nits he was surely carrying. Then, along with the rest of the men in his section — and, he saw with amusement, with Major Colleton-he leaped with a splash into a great tub, almost a vat, of steaming-hot water.

  Everyone was splashing and ducking everyone else. The major joined in the horseplay with no thought for his rank. He came up spluttering by Reggie after someone else pulled him under. Saluting, Reggie said, "It's a rare honor to share an officer's lice, sir."

  "Don't know what's so damned rare about it," the battalion commander retorted. "You've been doing it in the trenches for the past year." And he ducked Reggie, holding him under till he thought he was going to drown.

  The disinfector baked the soldiers' uniforms for fifteen or twenty minutes. When they were done, more colored attendants issued fresh underwear.

  "Feels good — not itching, I mean," Reggie said, buttoning up his tunic. The laundrymen had ironed and brushed it, so he looked as smart as he was going to.

  "Enjoy it while it lasts," Jasper Jenkins said.

  They went with the rest of the unit to stake places in the tents assigned to them, and then had the rest of the afternoon to themselves. Before they even found the tents, they spotted a crowd of men listening to a tall, thin man in a black sack suit and a straw hat. Reggie's eyes widened. "That's the president!" he exclaimed.

  "I'll be a son of a bitch if you're not right," Jenkins said. "Shall we find out what the devil he's got to say for himself?"

  "Might as well," Reggie answered. "I was there in Capitol Square in Richmond when he declared war. Might as well find out how he likes it now that he's seen a year's worth." They hurried over and joined the crowd.

  Woodrow Wilson was speaking earnestly, but without the changes in tone and volume and th
e dramatic gestures that were likeliest to win his audience over. He sounded more like a professor than the leader of a nation at war: "We must continue. We must dedicate our lives and fortunes, everything that we are and everything that we have, with the pride of those who know that the day has come when the Confederate States are privileged to spend their blood and their might for the principles that gave them birth and happiness and the peace they have treasured.

  "The challenge, in fact, is to all mankind. The choice we make for ourselves must be made with a moderation of counsel and a temperament of judgment befitting our character and our motives as a nation. We must put excited feeling away. Our motive will not be revenge or the assertion of the physical might of the nation, but only the vindication of right, of which we are but a single champion in concert with our allies."

  "That's pretty fancy," Reggie murmured to Jasper Jenkins.

  "Too goddamn fancy for me," Jenkins whispered back. "What I want to do is, I want to smash those damnyankee bastards. If he'd tell me how we're going to do that, I'd be a sight happier."

  "We must stay the course," Wilson said, though a few soldiers drifted away as others came to listen. "We must not swerve suddenly in the middle of the great conflict upon which we have embarked. Giving ourselves over to foolish radicalism at a time like this would only spell disaster for our nation and for all we hold dear."

  A light dawned on Reggie. He'd wondered why Wilson had come to the base camp when speaking before soldiers was so obviously unnatural, even uncomfortable, to him. "Presidential election's less than three months off," he said. "He wants to make sure we don't go and elect the Radical Liberal."

  "He don't have a hell of a lot to worry about," Jenkins said. "We've never sent one of those crazy bastards to Richmond yet, and I don't reckon we will this time, neither."

  "Politicians take all sorts of crazy chances — don't suppose we'd be in this damn war if they didn't," Bartlett said. "But they sure as hell don't take chances about what happens to their party. Wilson can't run again himself, so he wants to make damn sure the vice president, whatever the devil his name is, gets the job."

  "Sims? Sands? Something like that," Jenkins said. "Whoever the hell he is, I'm gonna vote for him."

  "Me, too, I think," Reggie said, "but I've got better things to do than listen to speeches that tell me to do what I'm already going to do."

  "Yeah," Jenkins agreed, and they both walked off. Signboards here and there in the base camp listed attractions. "Let's go watch a boxing match," Reggie suggested.

  "White men or colored?" somebody asked.

  Bartlett ran his finger down the list of matches to see who was fighting whom. "Our division's colored champion is taking on a fellow from the Confederate Marines who's touring base camps," he said. "That's gonna be the best fight today, no doubt about it."

  Nobody argued with him. The crowd around the squared circle was al ready large by the time he got there. He and Jasper Jenkins so effectively used their elbows to get closer to the ring that they almost started a couple of fights of their own.

  They cheered Commodus, the division champion, and lustily booed the Negro from the Confederate Marines, whose name was Lysis. "Which," shouted the soldier doing duty as announcer, "means Destruction." More boos.

  Reggie bet another soldier two dollars that Commodus would win. He had to pay up depressingly soon: Lysis knocked Commodus cold in the third round. Attendants had to flip water into the fallen champion's face before he could get up and groggily stagger out of the ring.

  "That's one tough nigger," Bartlett said as Lysis swaggered around with arms upraised in victory. He gave the fellow he'd bet a two-dollar bill. Then a strange thought struck him: "I wonder how he'd do against a white man his size."

  "Bet he wonders, too," the fellow who'd won his money answered. "If he's a smart nigger, he won't let anybody know it, though. Wouldn't be much point if he did — nobody'd let a fight like that happen any which way."

  "You're right, I expect," Reggie said. "Niggers start thinking they can fight white men, we got more trouble than we need. And seeing as how we've already got more trouble than we need — "

  At that moment, as if on cue in a stage play, one leg started to itch in an all too familiar way. He scratched and swore and scratched again. The Floden disinfector was like an artillery barrage — it made the lice put their heads down, but it didn't get rid of all of them. Some nits always survived and hatched out after you'd had your clothes on for a while. He sighed and scratched still more. No matter what you did, you couldn't win.

  Anne Colleton wrote a check, computed the balance remaining in the account, and made a nasty face. Everything cost more these days — niggers' wages, their food, the manure to keep the cotton fields fertile, the kerosene for the lamps in the nigger cottages-everything. She'd got more money than usual for the latest crop she'd brought in, but the rise in prices hadn't stopped since then. If anything, it had got steeper.

  A discreet tap at the door to her office made her look up. There stood Scipio, starched, immaculate, stolid. In his deep, rumbling voice, he said, "Ma'am, as you ordered, I have brought the Negro Cassius here for your judgment at his recent abscondment."

  She nodded. Disciplining the field hands was a job she undertook from a sense of duty and necessity, not because she enjoyed it. Disciplining a top flight hand like Cassius was especially delicate. Being too lenient with him would provoke worse indiscipline from the field force. Being too harsh, though, would make another three or four or half a dozen Negroes up and leave the fields for factory work in Columbia or down in Charleston.

  But disciplining him didn't look so repugnant as it usually did, not when the alternative was paying more of the bills that made her capital flow away like the waters of the Congaree — in fact, more swiftly than the lazy waters of the river. She nodded again. "Send him in."

  "Yes, ma'am." Scipio turned and murmured to his companion in the hallway. Cassius showed himself for the first time. His shapeless cotton garments, brightened only by the blue bandanna he wore round his neck, made a sharp contrast to Scipio's formal livery.

  Anne glared at Cassius for a few seconds without saying anything. Scipio silently slipped away, not wanting to hear-or to be known to hear- whatever punishment the mistress of Marshlands meted out. He respects Cassius' position on the plantation, too, Anne thought. Yes, she had to proceed with caution.

  Cassius could not long bear up under her scrutiny. He cast his eyes down to the hardwood floor. Anne watched him intently. His gaze flicked to right and left, taking in the books that filled the office. She'd deliberately summoned him here, to add the intimidating alien environment to the moral effect of tak ing punishment from a white.

  "What do you have to say for yourself?" she asked, her voice crisp and businesslike. "It had better be good."

  He interlocked the fingers of his hands, a gesture almost prayerful in its supplication. "I is sorry, Miss Anne, I truly is," he said. "I couldn't he'p myself." The dialect of the Negroes of the Congaree district spilled thick as molasses from his lips. A white from Charleston would have had trouble understanding it; a white from, say, Birmingham would have been all at sea. So would a black from Birmingham, for that matter. Anne followed his speech as readily as she followed Scipio's formal, precise language. She'd grown up with the Negro dialect all around her. As a child, she'd spoken it half the time, till trained out of it by parents and teachers.

  She didn't think of speaking it now. Using her own brand of English helped remind Cassius who was superior, who inferior. " 'Sorry' might be enough to make amends for being gone a day or two," she snapped. "You were gone for four mortal weeks. Where did you go? What did you do? Did you think you could just show up here again one day and go on about your business as if nothing had happened? Answer me!"

  Cassius did some more hand-wringing. He was good at it — too good to be altogether convincing. He had a foxy gleam in his eye, too, one that never quite went away no matter how contrite an
d woebegone the rest of his face looked. "Whe' I was at? Miss Anne, I was up de country a ways. I was huntin'" He nodded in sudden assurance. "Dat's what I was doin'-huntin'."

  "I don't believe a word of it," she answered. "If you wanted to go on a long hunting trip, you know you wouldn't have had any trouble arranging it with me. You've done that before — never for four weeks, but you've done it."

  He hung his head again. Now she thought she recognized the expression on his face. If he'd been white, he would have blushed. After a long silence, he said, "Miss Anne, kin Ah talk to you like you was a man?"

  Not a white man, she noted, just a man. A suspicion began forming in her mind. "Go ahead," she told him.

  He twisted his hands once more, this time, she judged, in embarrassment. She wasn't a man; no one who was had any cause to doubt that. "Miss Anne," Cassius said, "what I huntin', she 'bout nineteen year ol', an' you kin put yo' han's roun' she waist" — he made a circle to show what he meant- "an' yo' fingers, dey touches theyselves. Dat's what I was huntin', fo' true."

  Since he'd been gone that long, Anne reckoned he'd bagged her, too. He was a good deal more than nineteen — he was a good deal more than twice nineteen-but those things happened. She knew those things happened. She was still angry at the hunter, but not so angry as she had been. "What's her name?" she said. "Whereabouts exactly does she live? How did you meet her?"

  "She name Drusilla, Miss Anne. She live on de Marberrys' plantation, over by Fo't Motte. She come into St. Matthews dis one time, I see she, I know I got to have she."

  "And so you just went off after her." For all her effort, Anne couldn't make herself sound as severe as she would have liked. Men had their appetites, and whether they were white or black didn't seem to matter much there. A pretty face, a nice shape, and they were off like a shot. Sounding exasperated came easier: "I don't suppose anyone bothered checking your passbook?"