Walk in Hell gw-2

by Harry Turtledove

She read on: As you no doubt know, these unfortunate events have adversely affected our ability to resist the aggression of the United States of America, which seek to reduce us once more to the state of abject dependency existing before the War of Secession. To meet their challenge, we shall have to utilize every resource available to us.

  “I should hope so,” Anne said, as if the president were standing there before her. She was sure she knew what would be coming next: some sort of higher taxes, which she would be asked to support in the name of continued Confederate strength and independence.

  She looked around Marshlands. She didn’t know how she could pay higher taxes. She didn’t know how she could pay the taxes already due. One way or another, she would have to manage. She understood that. If the choice was between paying more and having the damnyankees win, she would-somehow-pay more. With the Yankees’ having gassed Jacob, and with Tom still at the Roanoke front, how could she do anything less?

  Her eyes returned to the letter: For that reason, I have introduced into the Congress of the Confederate States of America… She nodded and stopped reading for a moment. Yes, Gabriel Semmes was perfectly predictable…. a bill authorizing the recruitment, training, and employment against the United States of America of bodies of Negro troops, these to serve under white officers and noncommissioned officers, the reward for their satisfactory completion of service, or for their inability to do so because of wounds, to be the franchise and all other rights and privileges pertaining to full citizenship in the Confederate States of America, intermarriage being the sole exception thereto.

  “Good God,” Anne said. Taxes, she’d expected. This, no. She felt as if she’d been kicked in the belly. The Negroes rose up in bloody revolt, and Semmes proposed to reward them for it? He did indeed go forth and do things, and she wished to high heaven he’d been content to hold still.

  He continued, I am soliciting your support for this measure because I know that you judge the continued independence of the country we both love to be of primary importance, with all else subordinated to it. Now we are come to a crisis the likes of which we have never known, one that calls for a supreme effort from every man, woman, and child in the Confederate States, white and black alike. Anything less would be a dereliction of duty from all of us. I hope and trust you will use your not inconsiderable influence both within your circle of acquaintances and with your Congressional delegation to let us turn back the ravening hordes of American Huns. Your ob’t servant-and a florid signature.

  “Good God,” Anne said again. “I should have backed Doroteo Arango.”

  “Miss Anne?” Julia knew nothing of politics, unless perhaps Red politics, and cared less.

  “Never mind.” Anne carried the rest of the mail into the cottage. Julia followed her. She sorted through it, separating out bills; requests for money and time for charitable organizations that, these days, would have to go unanswered; advertising circulars that would make good kindling for the fireplace but were otherwise worthless; and, at the bottom of the stack, a letter from Tom.

  She opened that one eagerly. She wondered what Tom would think of having nigger troops put on Confederate butternut. No, she didn’t wonder. She was perfectly sure. She’d never credited her brother with a whole lot of sense, but how much sense did you need to see folly?

  Dear Sis, Tom wrote, Just a note to let you know I’m alive and well. Not a scratch on me-they do say that if you’re born to hang, nothing else can hurt you. Anne snorted again. Her brother was about the least likely man to go to the gallows she could imagine. She read on: It has been lively, I will say. The damnyankees have come as far as-a censor had cut out the name of the place-which we never expected them to do.

  The trouble is, they’re using these armor-plated traveling forts prisoners call-another censor’s slice denied her the knowledge of what they were called, though she could not for the life of her see why-and they’ve gained a lot of ground because of it. Artillery will take them out. So will brave soldiers, but it’s hard being brave with one of those things bearing down on you. This time, the censor, damn him, had cut out a whole sentence. When she was allowed to resume reading what her brother wrote, he said, If they keep throwing more and more machines at us, I don’t know where we’ll come up with the men to hold them back.

  I hope to get leave before too long, and will come home to have a look at Marshlands. I am sure you are whipping the old place back into shape. Tom was always sure of that. Till now, his confidence had always been justified. Now-Anne didn’t want to think about now. Her eyes went to the last couple of sentences: Who would have dreamt the damned niggers could raise so much Cain? If I’d thought they could do half so much, I’d have sooner had them shooting at the damnyankees so we could get some use out of them. But even though everything else is turned upside down from before the war, I still love you, and I’ll see you soon-Tom.

  “Miss Anne?” Julia said when Anne stood there motionless, reading the letter over several times.

  “Hush,” Anne Colleton replied absently. After a bit, she put the letter down and picked up the one from the president of the Confederacy. She read through that letter twice, too. Her breath whistled out in a long sigh.

  “You all right, Miss Anne?” Julia asked, sounding for once very much like the concerned body servant she’d been till not long before.

  “No,” Anne said. “Not even close.” She’d misjudged her brother-and if she couldn’t tell what Tom was thinking these days, how could she trust her judgment on anything else? The short answer was, she couldn’t. She sighed again, even louder this time. “Maybe Gabriel Semmes isn’t a complete utter damn fool after all. Maybe.” She tried to make herself sound as if she believed it. It wasn’t easy.

  George Armstrong Custer stood at the edge of the road, by a sign that had an arrow saying KENTUCKY pointing north and another saying TENNESSEE pointing south. A photographer snapped several pictures. “These’ll make bully halftones, General,” he said.

  “Splendid, my good man, splendid,” Custer replied grandly. Major Abner Dowling felt ready to retch. That road sign was as resurrected as Lazarus-everything hereabouts, like everything everywhere the rake of war passed, had been stomped flat. When it came to getting his name-and, better yet, his photograph-in the papers, Custer was not a man to let mere rude facts stand in his way. Dowling would have thought he’d had the sign made up special for the occasion, but that order would have gone through him, so Custer must have come up with a real one instead.

  The photographer put down the camera and pulled out a notebook and pencil; he doubled as a reporter. “To what do you attribute your success in this spring’s campaign, General?” he asked.

  Before Custer could reply, a barrel came rumbling down the road, heading south into Tennessee. Another followed, then another. Everybody except the drivers rode on top of the machines, not inside them. Men had died from heat prostration inside barrels, trying to fight in this hideous summer weather. Kentucky had been bad. Tennessee promised to be worse.

  Custer pointed to the machines. “There is your answer, sir. The barrels have filled Rebel hearts not only with fear but also with a good, healthy respect for the prowess of the American soldier and for the genius lying behind what I call with pardonable pride old-fashioned Yankee ingenuity. I have always insisted that machines as well as men will make the difference-are you all right, Major Dowling?”

  “Yes, sir. Sorry, sir,” Dowling said. “Must have been the dust the barrels kicked up, or maybe those stinking exhaust fumes. I couldn’t breathe for a second or two there.”

  “I hope you’re better now,” Custer said doubtfully. “You sounded like a man choking to death. Where was I? Oh yes, barrels. I-”

  Custer barreled on. Dowling took out a pocket handkerchief and daubed at his sweaty forehead and streaming eyes. Custer disapproved of the aeroplane. He disapproved of the machine gun, though he’d risen to prominence in the Second Mexican War because he’d had a few attached to his command. He disappro
ved of the telephone and the telegraph. He undoubtedly would have disapproved of the telescope had it not been invented before he was born.

  But barrels-he approved of barrels. Barrels, to him, remained cavalry reborn, cavalry proof against everything machine guns could do. Since he’d grown up in the cavalry, he’d transferred his affection to these gasoline-burning successors. And Custer, being Custer, never did anything by halves. When he fell in love, he fell hard.

  To prosaic Dowling, barrels were bully infantry support weapons. Past that…he failed to share Custer’s enthusiasm. Custer had any number of enthusiasms he did not share, that for Custer being perhaps the largest.

  But even Dowling was prepared to admit the barrels had done some good. The first few times the Rebs saw them, they’d panicked. They were good soldiers; as one of their sincerest foes, Dowling admitted as much. Even the best soldiers, though, would run if the alternative was dying without having the chance to hit back at their enemies.

  They weren’t panicking quite so much now. They were starting to figure out ways to blow up barrels, too. The armored machines had proved vulnerable to artillery fire, though artillery had trouble hitting moving targets even if the movement was no swifter than the barrels’ mechanized waddle. Still, Dowling had thought he’d grow old and die in Kentucky, and here he was in Tennessee, or at least on the border.

  “Next stop-Nashville!” Custer declared, waving his staff as if he were a train conductor. Dowling wished he thought it would be so easy.

  “General, what will your men do if they come up against black troops in Confederate uniform?” the reporter asked.

  “I’ll believe that when I see it,” Custer answered. Here, for once, Dowling agreed with him completely. He went on, “If it does happen, it will be only one more sign that the Rebels are scraping the bottom of the barrel-heh, heh. The frogs are padding their lines with African savages these days, so I suppose the Rebs might give their home-grown niggers guns-not that they haven’t grabbed guns of their own already, to use on the whites who now talk about using them against us.”

  “Er-yes.” The fellow with the camera and notebook hadn’t bargained for a speech. He came back to the question he’d really asked: “But how will your soldiers respond to them, if they are enlisted?”

  Custer’s drooping mustache and even more drooping jowls made his frown impressively ugly. “How will they respond to them?” he repeated, not caring for the fact that his earlier answer hadn’t satisfied the man. “I expect they’ll shoot them in great carload lots, that’s how.”

  “Great-carload-lots.” The reporter scribbled furiously. “Oh, that’s good, sir, that’s very good. They’ll like that-it’ll probably get a headline.”

  “Do you think so?” All of a sudden, the general commanding First Army was sweetness and light once more. Even Dowling thought it was a pretty good line, and he was not inclined to give his commander much credit for such things.

  The reporter asked a couple of more questions. Custer, having succeeded with one joke, tried some others, all of which fell flat. They fell so flat, in fact, that the reporter put away his notebook, picked up his camera, and departed faster than he might otherwise have done.

  Custer, as usual, was oblivious to such subtleties. Puffing out his flabby chest, he turned to Dowling and said, “I think that went very well.”

  Of course you do, his adjutant thought. It was publicity. It was, as usual, hard to go wrong with an answer of, “Yes, sir.”

  “And now back to headquarters. I want to prepare the orders for our next attack against the Rebs’ positions.”

  “Yes, sir,” Dowling said again. Custer was taking a more active interest in the campaign these days, partly, Dowling supposed, because Libbie was still with him and partly because, like a child with new Christmas toys, he was playing with the barrels to find out what all they could do.

  When he got back to the building doing duty for headquarters these days-a whitewashed clapboard structure with the legend GENERAL STORE: CAMP HILL SIMES, PROP.-orders got delayed for a while. Someone had brought in a wicker basket full of ripe, red strawberries and a bowl of whipped cream. Custer dug in with gusto, pinkish juice dribbling down his chin and bits of clotted cream getting stuck in the peroxided splendor of his mustache. Since Major Dowling wasn’t shy about enjoying the bounty either, he refrained from even mental criticism of the general.

  “Where did we come by these?” Custer asked after he’d eaten his fill.

  “Little town called Portland, sir,” said Captain Theodore Heissig, one of the staff officers. “Just south of the Tennessee line. They grow ’em in bunches.”

  “No, no,” Custer said. “Bananas grow in bunches.” Unlike the man with the notebook and camera, the staff officers were obliged to find all his jokes funny, or to act as if they did. Dowling bared his teeth in what bore at least some resemblance to a grin.

  Once the strawberries were all disposed of, Custer walked over to the map and examined it with less satisfaction than he might have shown, considering the amount of progress First Army had made since the Confederate States were distracted by their own internal turmoil, and especially since barrels had begun to make trenches something less than impregnable. “We need more help from the Navy,” he grumbled. “How long have they been stuck just past this miserable Clarksville place? Weeks, seems like.”

  “Sir, they’re saying they need Army help to go farther,” Captain Heissig said.

  “Balderdash!” Custer boomed, a fine, bouncing exclamation that sprayed little bits of cream onto the map.

  “Sir, I don’t think it is,” Abner Dowling said, gingerly trying, as he so often had to do, to lead Custer back toward some vague connection to military reality. “The Rebs have mined the Cumberland heavily, and they’ve got big artillery south of the river zeroed on the minefields. The Navy’s lost too many monitors to be very eager to push hard any more.”

  “Then what the devil good are they?” Custer demanded. “If they can’t get where we need them, they might as well not be there at all.” That conveniently ignored several facts, some small, some immense, but Custer had always been good at ignoring facts he didn’t like. He rounded on the luckless Captain Heissig. “I want you to arrange cooperation on our terms, Captain, and I want you to do it by this afternoon.”

  “I’ll do my best, sir,” the young captain said.

  “You’ll do it, Captain, or this time next week you’ll be chasing redskins and bandits through the parts of the Sonoran desert we were supposed to have pacified a year and a half ago,” Custer said. He meant it, too, as the luckless Captain Heissig had to know; his staff had the highest turnover of any commander of an army’s.

  There were times-a lot of times-when commanding a battalion in the Sonoran desert would have looked very good to Dowling. But Custer, worse luck, didn’t threaten to ship him out. He just used him as a whipping boy. Dowling sent poor Captain Heissig a sympathetic glance. Misery loved company.

  Cincinnatus’ nostrils dilated as he approached the Kentucky Smoke House. When the wind was right, you could smell the barbecue all over Covington. Even when the wind was wrong, as if was tonight, the irresistibly savory smell made spit flood into people’s mouths for miles around.

  And when you walked into Apicius’ barbecue place, you felt certain you were going to starve to death before you got your pork or your beef, smothered in the hot, spicy sauce that made the Smoke House famous and spun on a spit over a hickory fire. Even if you weren’t coming in for the food, as Cincinnatus wasn’t, you wanted some-you wanted that splendid sauce all down your shirtfront, was what you wanted.

  Blacks ate at the Kentucky Smoke House. So did Covington’s whites, unwilling to let their colored brethren have such a good thing to themselves. And so did Yankee soldiers and administrators. A man who kept his ears open there would surely learn a lot.

  Lucullus, Apicius’ son, was turning the spit in the main room. The carcass of a pig went round and round above the firepit. Ho
wever much his mouth watered, Cincinnatus ignored the prospect of barbecued pork. That Lucullus was working the spit meant Apicius had to be in one of the back rooms, and Apicius was the man he’d come to see.

  But when he headed for the back rooms, Felix, Apicius’ other son, stood in front of him to bar the way. “Pa’s already in there talkin’ with somebody,” he said. “Be a good idea if you see him later.”

  “Who’s he talkin’ to that I ain’t supposed to know nothin’ about?” Cincinnatus answered scornfully. “Be a good idea if I see him now. I been drivin’ all over creation the whole day long. I don’t got to do none o’ this, you know. I could go home to my wife and my little boy. Don’t get to see them often enough, way things are. I’m goin’in.”

  Felix was a couple of years younger than Lucullus. He hadn’t quite got his full growth, and he hadn’t quite acquired the arrogance that would have let him tell a grown man no and get away with it. He looked toward Lucullus for support, but Lucullus kept basting that pig with a long-handled brush. When Cincinnatus took a step forward, Felix scowled but moved aside. Cincinnatus knew which back room Apicius was likely to use-why not? He’d been in there himself, often enough.

  The fat Negro barbecue cook looked up in startlement when the door opened. So did the man with whom he’d been bent in intent conversation. All at once, Cincinnatus wished he’d paid attention to Felix. The man with whom Apicius had been talking was Tom Kennedy.

  “I’m gonna have to give my boy a good kick in the slack o’ his britches,” Apicius said, and then, to Cincinnatus this time, “Well, come in and shut that thing behind you, ’fore people out front start payin’more heed to what’s goin’on in here than they should ought to.” To Kennedy, he said, “Sorry, Mister Tom. Didn’t ’spect we’d get interrupted.”

  “Could be worse,” Kennedy said. “Cincinnatus and me, we’ve known each other for a long time and we’ve done a deal of work together. You know about that, I suppose.”