Drive to the East

by Harry Turtledove

  “Happy day,” Morrell muttered, and then, “We’ve got to upgun. That’s all there is to it.”

  “Yes, sir,” the lieutenant said. “But the turret ring on our present model won’t let us mount a three-incher like these bastards have. Two and a fraction, that’s it—and even then we need a new turret to hold the larger weapon.”

  “We’ve got to do it,” Morrell said, more to himself than to his guide. “Building a whole new machine from the ground up—well, we should have started a long time ago. Since we didn’t, we’ve just got to squeeze the most out of what we have for a while longer.”

  “Can we?” the lieutenant asked—a question Morrell wished he didn’t have to contemplate.

  After a moment’s thought, he answered, “Of course we can, son—because we’ve got to. Now where’s the map that shows our armored dispositions?”

  “It’s back in town, sir,” the young lieutenant said. Morrell wished it were farther forward: one of a lot of things he wished that he wasn’t going to get. Back to Salem they went. Refugees from farther west clogged the road. Some of them tried to take shelter in Salem, even as the people who lived there cleared out.

  Once upon a time, before bombs and artillery started landing on it, Salem had been a pleasant little city. It had held ten or twelve thousand people, and had boasted a flour mill, a dairy outfit, a couple of china factories, and some metalworks. It also boasted a monument to one Edwin Coppock, an abolitionist who’d raided Harpers Ferry with John Brown, and who’d been hanged with him. If the Confederates took Salem, they would blow that to hell and gone.

  When Morrell actually got a look at the armored dispositions in northeastern Ohio, his own disposition soured, and his temper almost blew to hell and gone. “My God!” he burst out. “They’ve got them scattered all over the damned landscape!”

  “They support the infantry, sir,” the shavetail said.

  “No, no, no, no, no!” Morrell didn’t pound his head against the wall in the pleasant little clapboard house now doing duty for his headquarters. Why he didn’t, he couldn’t have said. As far as he was concerned, that restraint should have been worth a medal. “We’ve been at war for more than a year now. Hasn’t anybody learned anything about anything?”

  “Sir?” The lieutenant, an earnest young man, realized he was out of his element.

  Morrell didn’t try to explain. It would have taken too long. But the officer he was replacing hadn’t learned a thing from two wars’ worth of barrel tactics. The one thing you needed to do to get the most out of your armor was to mass it, to use it as the spearhead to your attack. Putting some of it here, some of it there, and some more of it in a no-account town twenty miles away was asking—begging—to get defeated in detail. And the Confederates—who, while they were manifest sons of bitches, were also capable sons of bitches when it came to handling armor—were only too happy to oblige.

  The study Morrell went into was more nearly black than brown. “How the hell can I get my forces concentrated so I can do something with them?” he muttered.

  “How can our infantry respond to the Confederates if they don’t have barrels to stiffen them, sir?” the lieutenant asked.

  The look Morrell gave him should have left him charred worse than the burnt-out C.S. barrel. “I don’t want to respond to Featherston’s fuckers,” he ground out. The young lieutenant’s eyes widened, perhaps at the obscenity but more likely at the heresy. Morrell proceeded to spell it out: “I want to make Featherston’s fuckers respond to me. I can’t do that, can I, unless I can pull together enough barrels to get their attention?” It seemed obvious to him. Why didn’t it seem obvious to anybody else in a green-gray uniform?

  “But, sir, if the infantry isn’t supported, the enemy will just slice through it, the way he has before.” The lieutenant sounded like a man trying to reason with a dangerous lunatic.

  “He’s welcome to try,” Morrell said, which made the shavetail’s eyes get big all over again. “If I have a decent force of barrels of my own, though, I’ll land on his flank and cut his supply line neat as you please. Let’s see how much slicing he does without gasoline or ammo.”

  He waited. The lieutenant contemplated. “Do you really think you could do that, sir?” He was too polite and too far under military discipline to call Morrell a liar in so many words, but he didn’t believe him, either.

  “Would they have sent me here if they didn’t think I could?” Morrell asked. “Or don’t you think the War Department knows what it’s doing?”

  “Sir, if the War Department knew what it was doing, would we be in a quarter of the mess we’re in?” the lieutenant replied.

  Morrell stared at him as if he’d never seen him before. In a very real way, he hadn’t. He stuck out his right hand. When the lieutenant hesitated, Morrell grabbed his hand and pumped it up and down. “Congratulations!” he said. “That’s the first halfway smart thing I’ve heard out of you.”

  “Uh, sir?” He’d bewildered the lieutenant.

  “Always distrust what the people too far from the front line to hear small-arms fire tell you,” Morrell said. “Always. Most of what they think they know is going to be out of date or wrong some other way. It will have gone through too many mouths before it finally gets to them. And a lot of them won’t ever have got close enough to the front to hear small-arms fire. Half the time, they won’t understand what other people are trying to tell them even if it turns out to be the gospel truth. Sometimes it does—accidents will happen.”

  The young officer eyed him. “What about you, sir?”

  “There. That’s the second smart thing you’ve said.” Morrell grinned. “All I can tell you is, I’ve got an oak-leaf cluster for my damn Purple Heart. Do I pass inspection?”

  “Uh, yes, sir.” The lieutenant blushed like a schoolgirl. A glance at the short row of fruit salad on his chest showed he’d never been wounded. He probably thought that made him less of a man. Morrell had had stupid notions like that till he got shot in the leg. Nothing like a wound infection to take the romance out of war.

  He got down to business. “All right, then. How secure are the telephone lines out of this place?”

  “Well, we do the best we can, sir, but I can’t guarantee the bastards in butternut aren’t tapping them,” the lieutenant said. “Same with the telegraph.”

  “It would be,” Morrell muttered. A war between two countries that spoke the same language was harder than other kinds just about every which way. You had to assume the enemy was listening to everything you did, and that he knew what you were up to as soon as you did. You’d give him too much credit some of the time, but you didn’t dare give him too little.

  You had to assume he was listening. You had to assume he knew what you were up to . . . “Do you know, Lieutenant, I hope he is. He’s almost bound to be, isn’t he?”

  “Sir?” The blank look was back on the kid’s baby face.

  Morrell clapped him on the shoulder. “Never mind. Point me at a typewriter. We do have messengers we can rely on, right?” If the lieutenant told him no, he was up the well-known creek without even a canoe, much less a paddle.

  But the young officer nodded. “Oh, yes, sir. They’re very reliable, and they make sure to destroy what they’re carrying if they run into trouble.”

  “That’s what I wanted to hear,” Morrell said. “Now where’s that typewriter?”

  For the next couple of hours, he pounded away at it. He was no secretary; he typed with his two forefingers. He wasn’t fast, but he got the job done. A look at the messengers reassured him more than the lieutenant’s praise did. They were a raffish lot, men who could be counted on to get where they were going. And if they liberated booze or smokes or a steak along the way . . . well, so much the better.

  He gave them oral orders. Then he handed them the dispatches he’d written. Off they went, in command cars, on horseback, on bicycles, on shank’s mare. Before long, one-word responses started coming in by telephone and telegraph. Receive
d, Morrell heard, again and again and again. He marked the map, again and again and again.

  When he was satisfied, he got on the telephone. He called officer after officer, delivered his orders, and hung up. Maybe this would work and maybe it wouldn’t. It seemed worth a try, though.

  One thing: U.S. reconnaissance was good. Most people who lived in Ohio, especially in this northern part of it, wanted nothing to do with the Confederates. They slipped through enemy lines, risking their necks to report on what Jake Featherston’s men were up to. When Morrell heard the Confederates were assembling armor in Homeworth, a few miles west of Salem, he smiled to himself.

  Their attack on Salem went in two days later. They came loaded for bear, convinced they had a big force of barrels in front of them. Morrell showed a few and shelled the Confederates heavily to slow them down. That only made them push harder. They’d just about reached Salem’s outskirts . . . when the real U.S. barrel force, which had concentrated some miles to the north, roared down and struck them in the flank.

  The Confederates still might have made a fight of it. They had at least as many machines as the USA did, and theirs hit harder. But they were rattled, as anybody hit from a direction he didn’t expect would have been. They fell back in some disorder, and left a lot of barrels burning in front of Salem.

  “That was amazing, sir!” Now the young lieutenant looked at Morrell with something not far from hero worship.

  “That’s what we’re supposed to do, dammit,” Morrell said, wondering how—and if—he could bring off the same sort of thing again.

  ****

  Abner Dowling was the man who’d spotted the Confederates thinning their lines in Virginia so they could send more men into Ohio. He hadn’t had the chance to attack them after he caught them doing that. Oh, no. His reward was thinning his own lines so the USA could try to smash through the Confederates’ position at Fredericksburg, which hadn’t worked at all. Now he was thinning them still further to send reinforcements to the West.

  He took a half pint of whiskey out of his desk drawer and stared at it. Like most half pints, it was curved to fit the hand. He wasn’t a man who drank to excess. He remembered General Custer. With whiskey as with women, Custer could resist everything except temptation. And Custer with a snootful was even more a bull in a china shop than he had been any other time.

  No, Dowling wasn’t like that—which didn’t mean he was teetotal, either. Every once in a while, a nip was welcome. Sometimes you needed not to think about things for a little while, and whiskey was the best thought preventer this side of a blackjack. He undid the metal screw top, raised the bottle to his lips, and took a healthy slug.

  His adjutant chose that moment to walk in the door.

  Captain Angelo Toricelli had been with him since his unhappy stay as commandant in Salt Lake City—another one of the garden spots of the universe. Unlike some adjutants, Toricelli understood that he wasn’t about to end up on Skid Row just because he drank now and again. It was embarrassing all the same.

  Trying to cover that embarrassment, Dowling held out the bottle and asked, “Want some for yourself?”

  “No, thank you, sir,” Captain Toricelli answered—not primly, but not in a way that suggested he’d change his mind, either. “We have a message from General MacArthur inquiring how the pullback is going in this corps.”

  “Tell General MacArthur to—” Dowling broke off. If he went on in that vein, Toricelli would think it was the whiskey talking. That was nonsense. Dowling needed no booze to despise Daniel MacArthur. Still . . . “Tell General MacArthur to rest assured that we are complying with his orders and the War Department’s.”

  “Yes, sir. Thank you, sir. That’s well phrased.” Toricelli’s dark eyes glinted. He knew what Dowling had been on the point of saying. But Dowling hadn’t said it. Neither he nor the half pint could get the blame. Toricelli saluted and left the room.

  Dowling eyed the little bottle. It was almost as if the narrow escape gave him the license for another drink. He shook his head and put the bottle back in the desk drawer. It would be there when he really needed it. If he drank when he didn’t really need it . . . That was how trouble started.

  Off in the distance, somebody’s artillery opened up. He thought those were U.S. guns. With fewer foot soldiers on the ground, artillery had to take up some of the slack. Of course, some of his artillery was getting pulled west to try to stop the Confederates, too.

  After fifteen or twenty minutes, the guns fell silent. Dowling hoped that meant they’d smashed whatever they were aiming at. If not, some wireless man would rush in with news of a new disaster. And Dowling would have to try to put the pieces back together—and take the blame if Humpty Dumpty remained bits of eggshell.

  His eyes went to the large-scale map of Virginia on the wall. He didn’t like the way his right flank was vulnerable. He never had. General Patton, the Confederates’ answer to Irving Morrell, had roared out of the mountains trying to roll him up. Patton hadn’t managed it. Dowling took a certain amount of pride in the way he’d defended against the CSA’s armored wizard, but they didn’t pin medals on your chest for losing only a few square miles. Often that deserved a medal, but it never got one.

  If Patton or some other Confederate hotshot tried charging out of the mountains again, could Dowling’s corps hold the enemy again? He muttered unhappily. If the Confederates hit him as hard as they had the last time, he probably couldn’t. But he brightened a little a moment later. He might not have the wherewithal to defend that he’d had before, but he was pretty damn sure the boys in butternut couldn’t mount the same kind of attack as they had then. They seemed to be putting everything they had into the push through Ohio and into Pennsylvania.

  He looked at the map again, then slowly nodded to himself. Ever since the war started, people had been saying that whoever could mount two big drives at once would likely win. So far, neither side had come close. Logic said the United States had the better chance. They had more men and more resources. They also had more problems. The Confederates had a smoldering Negro uprising to worry about; their response seemed to be massacre. The United States had to flabble about the Mormons, and now the Canadians, the Japanese in the Pacific, and the really mad naval struggle in the North Atlantic. With all the sideshows, they couldn’t concentrate on the main event.

  Captain Toricelli came in again. “Yes? What is it?” Dowling asked with a sinking feeling. His adjutant could bear bad tidings at least as well as a wireless operator.

  But Toricelli only asked, “Sir, do you know a Miss Ophelia Clemens?”

  “The reporter? I should say I do,” Dowling answered. “I spoke with her outside General MacArthur’s headquarters not more than a few weeks ago, as a matter of fact. Why?”

  “Because she just pulled up in front of this building, sir,” Toricelli said. “I doubt like the dickens she’s here to talk to me.”

  “Send her in. Send her in,” Dowling said. “How subversive do you think I can be?”

  “I couldn’t begin to guess.” By Toricelli’s expression, though, he feared for the worst.

  When Ophelia Clemens marched into Dowling’s office, she looked him in the eye and said, “General, I’d murder somebody for a drink.”

  “Not me, I hope.” Dowling opened his desk drawer and, with the air of a vaudeville conjuror, produced the half pint. “Here you are, ma’am. At your service.”

  “God bless you,” Ophelia Clemens said. “I hoped I could find a St. Bernard in all these Alps.” After that rhetorical outburst, she unscrewed the cap and swigged like a man. She eyed the bottle in her hand with a certain amount of respect. “That’s what they call panther piss, isn’t it?”

  “Something like that,” Dowling allowed. “It sure isn’t sipping whiskey.”

  She handed the half pint back to him. When he put it away without drinking, she said, “Keep it around just for poisoning visitors, do you?”

  “By no means, ma’am. You misunderstand me. I’m a
bout half an hour ahead of you, that’s all. And what besides bartender duty can I do for you on this none too lovely day?”

  “Well, I’ve got my own cigarettes,” she replied, and lit one to prove it. “I don’t suppose you could spare me some truth?”

  Dowling snorted. “You don’t ask for much, do you?”

  “If you had it, I think you might give it to me,” Ophelia Clemens told him. “That’s more than I can say about most of the people in your line of work I know.”

  “You flatter me,” he said. “Keep it up. I love it.”

  “I’ll give you the reporter’s ultimate flattery, then,” she said. “How would you like to be ‘a reliable source’?”

  Dowling knew what that meant: somebody who shot off his mouth without getting called to account for it. At his age and station, such a chance tempted him more than a twenty-two-year-old virgin—more than a twenty-two-year-old professional, come to that. “Go ahead and ask,” he said, “and we’ll see how reliable I am.”

  “All right.” Ophelia Clemens took out a spiral-bound notebook, opened it to a blank page, and poised a pencil above it. “How bad do things look in Ohio and Pennsylvania?”

  “You just named Pennsylvania. Right there, that says we aren’t doing as well as we ought to be.” Dowling shook his head. “No, I take it back. That’s not fair. I don’t know what things are like on the ground over there. I have my own troubles, Lord knows. You can say things aren’t going as well as we wish they were.”

  Her pencil scratched across the page. “Do you think Featherston’s going after Pittsburgh?”

  “Too early to be sure, but that’s how it looks right now,” Dowling said.

  “Uh-huh.” Ophelia Clemens wrote some more. “Do you know, they wouldn’t give me a straight answer in the War Department? You never heard so many variations on ‘No comment’ in all your born days. Franz Liszt couldn’t write variations like that.”

  “Heh,” Dowling said doubtfully as the allusion flew over his head. Had he been up in the War Department, he would have played it cagey, too—he knew that. You could get in trouble for saying yes and being right, for saying yes and being wrong, and conversely with no as well. No comment looked pretty good under those circumstances.