He hadn’t been at the front very long. He could still think about—could still talk about—inevitable victory, the way Confederate wireless broadcasts did. Tom knew better. He thought the Confederates still had a good chance of doing what they wanted, but a good chance wasn’t a sure thing. Anyone who’d ever lost a hand with a flush knew all about that.
“We’ll see pretty soon,” he said.
Lieutenant—Jackson?—said, “How can we lose?”
Colleton put a hand on his shoulder. “I said the same damn thing when I came to the front at the start of the last war. I would have been a little older than you are now, I suppose, and then I spent all the time that came afterwards finding out how we could lose. I just hope like hell that doesn’t happen to you.”
“It won’t.” Jackson sounded supremely confident. “We got stabbed in the back last time. Niggers won’t have the chance to do that now. The Party’s going to take care of ’em, but good.”
He really believed that. To a certain extent, Tom did, too, but only to a certain extent. He said, “We would have had a better chance if they hadn’t risen up—sure. But there’s something you’ve got to remember, or you’ll go home in a box and never find out how the latest serial ends: the damnyankees can fight some, too.”
“Yes, sir.” Jackson’s tones were those of a well-brought-up young man too polite to correct an elder who’s said something obviously foolish. “But they’re just doing it on account of their government makes ’em.”
“Where did you hear that?” Tom asked, sending him a curious stare.
“In school. Everybody knows it.”
Is this what they’re teaching my children, too? Tom wondered. God help us if it is. Gently, he asked, “Haven’t you ever noticed that not everything they teach you in school is true, and that a lot of things ‘everybody knows’ aren’t true at all?”
“No, sir, can’t say that I have,” Jackson answered after serious, earnest, and very visible consideration.
He meant that, too. For the first time, Tom found himself frightened for the younger generation in the CSA. If this was what they learned . . . “Lieutenant, there’s something you have to understand, because it’s the Lord’s truth. The Yankees don’t like us any better than we like them. They don’t need the government to make them fight. They’d do it anyhow, on account of we jumped them. Next time we interrogate some prisoners, you listen in. You’ll see.”
“I’ll do that,” Jackson said. “But they’ll just spout the nonsense their higher-ups told them. They’re—what’s the word? They’re indoctrinated, that’s it.” He looked pleased with himself for remembering.
And you’re not? Tom wondered. He couldn’t ask, though. Jackson might see other people’s indoctrination. His own was to him like the air under its wings to a butterfly. He didn’t think about it. He didn’t notice it. He just floated on it and let it support him.
Not far behind them, artillery rumbled. Things were starting to pick up. The Confederate gunners fired barrages to east and west, to keep the U.S. soldiers posted in front of them from guessing which way they would move when the time came. Tom wished the men in green-gray didn’t know the time was coming. Wish for a million dollars while you’re at it, he thought. The Yankees weren’t blind men. The Confederate buildup had been as subtle as the soldiers with wreathed stars on their collars could make it, but you couldn’t hide everything no matter how hard you tried.
The Confederates were doing their best. As Tom walked up toward the front, he passed barrels—both the older model and the new—crouching under camouflage netting with leaves and sod applied to make them as nearly invisible as possible. They’d moved up under cover of darkness; the orders against moving by daylight were explicit to the point of bloodthirstiness. More C.S. artillery fire had masked the sound of their advance. The damnyankees had used that trick in the last war. Imitation was the sincerest form of flattery. With luck, it would be the best revenge, too.
“Get low, you damn fool, before somebody shoots you!” The raucous advice came from a foxhole by the side of the path. Only the two stars on each side of Tom’s collar that marked his rank showed he was an officer. He’d deliberately dulled them, so the Yankees’ snipers wouldn’t single him out. Evidently his own men couldn’t single him out, either.
And getting low was good advice almost any time. Tom hit the dirt and crawled toward the foxhole. U.S. artillery started coming in before he got there. The crawl turned into an undignified scramble.
“Jesus!” The private already in it sounded disgusted. “This fucker ain’t big enough for two.” Then he noticed Tom’s rank badges. “Uh, sir.”
He wasn’t wrong, even if he was rude. Tom took his entrenching tool off his belt and started digging like a mole after forty cups of coffee. “Just have to make it bigger,” he said. He added the dirt from his excavation to the breastwork in front of the hole.
“Huh,” the soldier said in surprise. “Didn’t know officers knew how to handle one o’ them things.”
“If I didn’t, I would have got killed when I was your age,” Tom answered, glad to pause and pant. “Ever hear of the Roanoke front?”
“Sure as hell did. Uncle Lucas came back without most of his arm on account of he was there.” The soldier paused, taking longer than he should have to make the connection. “You was there, too?”
“That’s right. I’m sorry about your uncle. I never got more than a few scratches myself—I was lucky.”
“Better believe you was.” The private might have said more, but the scream of an incoming shell warned it would come down somewhere close. He and Tom both ducked. The explosion was close enough to make the ground shake. Fragments maliciously whined and screeched overhead. A few clods of dirt pattered down into the hole, but nothing worse.
On the Roanoke front, that one shell would have been the harbinger of many more, and only extraordinary luck and a hole better than this one would have kept a man from getting maimed or killed. Things were quieter here. The damnyankees had shifted a lot of their weight to Virginia. What was left was good enough to hold the Confederates in place and harass them, but not to work the wholesale slaughter that had been so common in the Great War.
The United States didn’t seem to have figured out that the Confederate States were shifting men out of Virginia and sliding them back over here. Nothing made Tom happier than their continued ignorance. The more the Yankees fussed and fumed in the East, the less attention they’d pay to anything out here. If they stayed ignorant till morning after next . . .
They did. The real Confederate barrage started an hour before sunrise. It was thunderous enough to wake Tom. After all the gunfire he’d slept through at the front in two wars—and in fighting the Negroes after the first one—that was no mean feat. Freight-train noises traveled the rails of the sky from west to east.
Yankee counterbattery fire started almost at once. The U.S. soldiers weren’t fools. He’d said as much to Lieutenant Jackson. (Absently, he wondered whether Jackson still lived. He thought so, but he hadn’t had any reports from that company for most of a day.) They knew trouble when they walked into it. One after another, though, their guns fell silent, battered into submission by a heavier weight of metal.
The Confederate barrage let up precisely at sunrise. Its purpose was to stun, not to kill everything on the U.S. side of the line. Three years of bloody experience had taught the CSA and the USA that they couldn’t kill all their enemies, or even enough of them, with big guns alone. And a really heavy artillery preparation, one that went on for days, ruined the ground over which attackers would advance and slowed them down. Less gunnery amounted to more.
Confederate barrels rumbled and rattled and clanked forward. Tom scrambled up out of his hole. He had an officer’s brass whistle, and blew a long, shrill blast on it. “Come on, you lazy sons of bitches!” he yelled. “We’ve caught ’em by surprise, and now we’ll make ’em pay. Watch your buddies and follow me!”
An officer who t
old his men to follow him could almost always get them to obey. An officer who told troops to advance but sat tight himself had a lot more trouble. The only thing wrong with officers of the first sort was that they got shot a lot more often than the others.
If you thought about things like that . . . Tom resolutely didn’t. If everybody thought about things like that instead of being afraid to act like a coward in front of his buddies or his men, war would become impossible. The machine-gun fire in front of him said this war remained altogether too possible. Not all the damnyankees were stunned—far from it.
Asskickers screamed down out of the sky to bomb strongpoints the C.S. artillery hadn’t silenced. For the moment, the dive bombers—and the Confederates—had it all their own way. Dazed U.S. soldiers threw up their hands and hoped the advancing men in butternut would let them surrender instead of just shooting them and moving on. Just like last year, Tom thought, and wondered if that was good or bad.
****
When Brigadier General Irving Morrell’s train pulled into the Broad Street Station in Philadelphia, he couldn’t have been in a worse mood if he’d tried for a week. The endless delays on the trip north from Virginia did nothing to improve his temper. Between bomb damage and rail sabotage, the trip took three times as long as it should have. All he missed was getting the train strafed from the air. But he could have flown up in the Army’s fastest fighter and still arrived ready to bite nails in half.
Colonel John Abell met him at the station. That didn’t make him any happier, even if the colorless General Staff officer was the one who’d let him know he’d finally earned stars on his shoulder straps.
“Goddammit, Colonel, I’m not a Ping-Pong ball, you know!” Morrell exploded. He almost said, God damn you, Colonel. He suspected Abell was responsible for getting him pulled out of Virginia, and he intended to raise Cain about it.
For the moment, Abell was imperturbable. “Consider it a compliment, sir,” he answered, his voice—an unmemorable baritone—never rising. “We always try to send you where the country needs you most.”
That took some of the wind out of Morrell’s sails, but only some. “I’m not a fire brigade all by myself,” he pointed out. “Where are my fire engines? Where are my firemen? Where’s my . . . hook and ladder?” At the last possible instant, he left off the participle.
“Come with me, sir,” Abell said, still mildly. “We’ll give you our estimate of the situation in Ohio, and then we’ll send you West to—”
“Make bricks without straw,” Morrell broke in. The General Staff officer looked pained. How he looked wasn’t a patch on how Morrell felt. “I’ve already tried that in Ohio, thank you very much. Are you going to see if history can repeat itself? And are you setting me up to take the fall if it does? It can’t be your fault, after all.”
By you he didn’t mean Abell’s alone, but all the officers in Philadelphia who thought of war as theory and maps and not as cordite and burning barrels and mangled men. They were good at what they did. Because they were, they thought they knew everything there was to know about the business of organized slaughter. Morrell had a different, and lower, opinion.
“We’re both on the same side, sir,” Abell said. “We’ve flushed out several traitors—some of them planted long, long ago—and more no doubt remain in place. But no one has ever questioned your loyalty or patriotism.”
“That’s white of you, by God,” Morrell said.
“Making things as difficult as possible is another story,” Abell snapped, his iron control rusting a little at last. “Will you come with me to the War Department, please? We can’t hash things out here on the platform.”
“I’ll come,” Morrell replied, and he did.
He and Abell had little to say to each other on the short ride through central Philadelphia. The de facto capital looked more battered every time Morrell saw it. The War Department had taken several hits since the last time he was there. Abell remarked, “Much of what we do these days is underground. We dig like moles.”
“You’ve had your heads in the ground for a long time,” Morrell observed, and bright patches of red burned on Abell’s sallow cheeks. Morrell went on, “Tell me about the new Confederate barrels. How long will we have to wait before we’ve got anything like that?”
The General Staff officer got redder. Amazingly lifelike, Morrell thought. “Production of an improved model is expected to begin within the next few weeks,” Abell said stiffly.
That was better than Morrell expected. He’d feared the USA would have to design anything new from scratch. Even so, he asked, “How late will the improved model be if the Confederates take Pittsburgh away from us? How much of our steel production would that cost?”
“We are hoping . . . sir . . . that that will not happen,” Abell answered. “We are hoping you will help keep that from happening. That’s why we’re sending you to Ohio.”
“Why you’re sending me back to Ohio,” Morrell corrected, and had the somber satisfaction of seeing John Abell flinch. To rub it in, he murmured, “Youngstown. Akron. Cleveland.”
“They haven’t taken Cleveland this past year!” Now Abell sounded truly furious. “What makes you think they can take it now?”
“They weren’t trying before,” Morrell said. “They wanted to split us, and they did. Now they want to cripple us.”
“If you’re telling me this is hopeless, General, someone else will be appointed. Your resignation will be accepted. You will be permitted to return home to your wife and daughter. Not just permitted—encouraged.”
Will be appointed. Will be accepted. Will be permitted. Abell didn’t say who would do any of those things. He probably didn’t even think about it. In his world, things just happened, without any particular agency. That made him a good bureaucrat. Whether it made him a good soldier was a different question.
Morrell wanted to go home to Agnes and Mildred—but not that way. “Sorry, no. If you want to get rid of me, you’ll have to throw me out. I’m telling you it would have been a lot easier if we’d started getting ready when the Confederates did.”
“Hindsight . . .” But Abell’s voice lacked conviction. Morrell had been saying the same thing when it was foresight. Abell gathered himself. “We’re almost to the map room. You’ll see what we’re up against there.”
Except for lacking windows, the map room could have been three stories above ground instead of two stories below it. A haze of tobacco smoke hung in the air. It also smelled of coffee that had been perking for too long and bodies that had gone unwashed for too long. That last odor pervaded the front, too, so Morrell nodded, as at an old friend, when he recognized it here. The stench of death, at least, was mercifully absent.
Officers were poring over large-scale maps of Virginia and Ohio. John Abell led Morrell to one that covered the eastern part of the latter state. Morrell let out a tuneless note of dismay when he saw where the pins with the red heads were. “They’ve come that far this fast?”
“I’m afraid it looks that way,” John Abell answered.
“Jesus,” Morrell said. “They’re already inside Cleveland. I thought you told me they couldn’t take it.”
“They must have revised this since I went to meet you at the station,” Abell said unhappily.
“Are the Confederates moving that fast?” Morrell asked.
“They can’t be.” Abell spoke with less conviction than he might have liked. “It’s just signal lag, I’m sure.”
“It had better be,” Morrell said. “Well, what do you expect me to do about it? Have we got armor here?” He pointed. “If we do, we can thrust toward the lake and try to cut through their advancing column—do to their supply lines what they’ve done to us.”
“I don’t believe we have enough equipment in place there to give us much hope of success,” Abell replied.
“Why am I not surprised?” Morrell didn’t bother to keep his voice down. Several officers studying other maps looked up at him. He scowled back at them, to
o furious to care. They looked away. Fury wasn’t an emotion they were used to seeing here. Too bad, Morrell thought savagely. He turned back to John Abell. “Well, if we can’t do that, our next best move is pretty obvious.”
“Is it?” The General Staff officer raised an almost colorless eyebrow. “It hasn’t seemed that way here.”
Morrell almost asked why he wasn’t surprised again. Then, remembering the old saw about flies and honey and vinegar, he didn’t. He pointed again instead, this time along the lakeshore, from Cleveland over to Erie, Pennsylvania. “We’ll have to fight like hell here. We’ll have to fight like hell in all the built-up places—barrels aren’t really made for street fighting in the middle of towns.”
“They can do it,” Abell said.
“Sure they can,” Morrell agreed. “Dogs can walk on their hind legs, too, but it’s not what they’re for, if you know what I mean. Send barrels through a few good-sized towns and you won’t see very many come out the other end.”
“Suppose they bypass them.” Abell might have been back at West Point, trying to solve a tactical problem. “That’s what they did last year. They didn’t go into Columbus with armor. They got it in a pocket and attacked with infantry and artillery.”
“That’s why we defend the towns along the lake like mad bastards,” Morrell said. “They can’t surround them the way they surrounded Columbus. They have to take them instead, and that’s more expensive. If they don’t, we can resupply and reinforce by water, maybe break out and get into their rear. They’ll know that—they can read maps.” Unlike some people I could name.
John Abell drummed his fingers on the side of his thigh—from him, the equivalent of another man’s jumping up and down and waving his arms and yelling his head off. “This would involve cooperation with the Navy,” he said at last. By the way he said it, he might have been talking about eating with his fingers. The Army always had the feeling that the Navy didn’t quite pull its weight. Here, though . . .
Morrell shrugged. He had that feeling himself. There’d been no great naval coups in this war, nothing like the capture of the Sandwich Islands. Indeed, the Navy seemed to be losing those islands a few at a time. Even so, he said, “This is something they can do,” and hoped he told the truth.
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