“Yeah.” Armstrong knew he’d lived through his opening brushes with combat as much by dumb luck as for any other reason. After that, he’d started to have a better idea of what went into staying alive when Featherston’s fuckers or Mormon fanatics tried to do him in. That gave him no guarantee of living through the war, something he knew but tried not to think about. But it did improve his chances.
Replacements got killed and wounded in large numbers, just because they didn’t know how not to. They didn’t dig in fast enough. They didn’t recognize cover when they saw it. They didn’t know when to stay down and when to jump up. They couldn’t gauge whether incoming artillery bursts were close enough to be dangerous. And that wasn’t the worst of it. The worst was that they got veterans killed, too, because they gave things away without even knowing they were doing it.
Most veterans tried to stay away from them those first couple of weeks. That wasn’t fair. It meant even more replacements became casualties than might have been otherwise. But it saved veterans’ lives—and it saved the pain of getting to know somebody who wasn’t likely to stick around long anyway.
A swarm of soldiers waited at the makeshift bus depot to go from the line back to some of the comforts of civilization: hot showers, hot food, clean clothes, real beds. Armstrong surveyed the swarm with a jaundiced eye. “Something’s fucked up somewhere,” he predicted.
“Bet your ass, Sarge.” That was one of the men already milling around. “Goddamn Mormons snuck a machine gun somewhere down the highway. They shot up a bus like you wouldn’t believe. Now everybody’s trying to hunt ’em down.”
“Christ, I hope so,” Armstrong said. “That’d be what everybody needs, wouldn’t it?—getting your goddamn head blown off when you’re on your way to R and R?”
“Sooner we kill all the Mormons, happier I’ll be,” the other soldier said. “Then we can get on with the real war. Finally starting to go our way a little, maybe.”
“Maybe, yeah. Depends on how much you believe of what they tell you.” Armstrong knew damn well the wireless didn’t tell the truth all the time. When he was in Ohio, it had gone on and on about U.S. victories and advances while the Army got bundled back and back and back again. He couldn’t prove it wasn’t doing the same thing about what was going on in Ohio and Pennsylvania now.
The other soldier spat a stream of brown tobacco juice. “There is that,” he allowed. Armstrong had thought about chewing tobacco himself. You could do it where the sight of a match or a glowing coal or even the smell of cigarette smoke would get you killed.
An officer called, “The route south has been resecured. Boarding will commence in five minutes.”
Do I want R and R enough to risk getting shot on the way? Armstrong wondered. He must have, because he got on the bus when his turn came.
W hen Cincinnatus Driver walked into the Des Moines Army recruiting station, the sergeant behind the desk looked up in surprise from his paperwork. Cincinnatus eyed him the same way: the sergeant held his pen between the claws of a steel hook.
“What can I do for you?” the sergeant asked.
“I want to join up,” Cincinnatus answered.
“Sorry, pal. We don’t use colored soldiers,” the sergeant said. “Navy takes colored cooks and stewards. If you want to, you can talk to them. You don’t mind my saying so, though, you’re a tad overage. That cane won’t do you any good, either.”
“You got a uniform on even though you got a hook,” Cincinnatus said.
“I was in the last one,” the recruiting sergeant said. “That’s where I got it. I’m no damn good at the front, but I can do this.”
“Well, I was in the last one, too,” Cincinnatus said. “Drove a truck haulin’ men an’ supplies in Kentucky and Tennessee. Been drivin’ a truck more’n thirty years now. Sure as hell can do it some more. Put me in a deuce-and-a-half and you got one more white boy can pick up a rifle and shoot at Featherston’s fuckers.”
“Ah.” The sergeant looked more interested. “So you want to be a civilian auxiliary, do you?”
“If that’s what you call it these days,” Cincinnatus answered. “Last time around, I was just a truck driver.” He eyed the man behind the desk. “They pay any better on account of the fancy name?”
“Oh, yeah, pal—and then you wake up,” the sergeant said. Cincinnatus chuckled; he hadn’t expected anything different. The veteran reached into his desk drawer and pulled out a fresh form. He did that with his left hand, which was still flesh and blood. Then he poised the pen over the blank form. “Name?”
“Cincinnatus Driver.”
After the sergeant wrote it down, he glanced over at Cincinnatus. “Heard of you, I think. Didn’t you get exchanged from the Confederates not so long ago?”
“Yes, suh, that’s right,” Cincinnatus said.
“You don’t call me ‘sir.’ You call me ‘Sergeant.’ ” The noncom scribbled a note. He handled the pen very well. As he wrote, he went on, “Just so you know, they’re gonna check you seven ways from Sunday on account of you were in the CSA.”
“They can do that,” Cincinnatus agreed. “They reckon a colored man’d help Jake Featherston, though, they’re pretty goddamn stupid.”
“Yeah, you’d think so, wouldn’t you? But it all depends,” the sergeant said. “Maybe they got your wife an’ kids down there, and they’ll feed ’em to the alligators unless you play along.”
“My wife an’ kids are right here in Des Moines,” Cincinnatus said.
“Good for you. Good for them,” the sergeant said. “You know what I mean, though. They’ll check. Now—you say you drove an Army truck in the Great War? What was your base? Who commanded your unit?”
“I drove out of Covington, Kentucky, where I come from,” Cincinnatus replied. “Fella who ran things was a lieutenant name of Straubing.”
The sergeant raised his right eyebrow. “Think he’d remember you?”
Straubing had shot a Confederate diehard dead on Cincinnatus’ front porch. With a jerky nod, Cincinnatus said, “Reckon he would. He still in the Army?”
“Oh, you might say so.” The sergeant wrote another note. “There’s a Straubing who’s a brigadier general in logistics these days. Might not be the same man, but you don’t hear the name every day, and the specialization’s right. You know what logistics is?”
Are you a dumb nigger? he meant. But Cincinnatus did know the answer to that one: “Gettin’ men and stuff where they’re supposed to go when they’re supposed to get there.”
“Right the first time.” The sergeant nodded. “Bet you did drive a truck in the last war. Where else would you have heard the word?”
“I done said I did.” Cincinnatus paused. “But I bet you hear a lot o’ lies, sittin’ where you’re sittin’.”
“Oh, you might say so,” the sergeant repeated, deadpan. “You sure you want to go through with this, Mr. Driver?”
“Yes, suh—uh, Sergeant—an’ I tell you why,” Cincinnatus answered. The sergeant raised a polite eyebrow. Cincinnatus went on, “You just called me Mistuh. Ain’t no white man anywhere in the whole CSA call a colored man Mistuh. Call him boy, call him uncle if his hair’s goin’ gray like mine is. Mistuh? Never in a thousand years. An’ if you don’t respect a man, you don’t have no trouble killin’ him off.”
“Uh-huh.” The sergeant wrote something else on Cincinnatus’ papers. Cincinnatus tried to read what it was, but he couldn’t, not upside down. The man with the hook looked across the desk at the man with the cane. “Thanks for coming in, Mr. Driver. Like I told you, we’re going to have to look at you harder because the Confederates turned you loose. You have a telephone?”
“No, suh,” Cincinnatus answered.
“All right. We’ll send you a letter, then,” the sergeant said. “Probably be ten days, two weeks, something like that. We’ll see what General Straubing has to say about you.”
“Thank you, Sergeant.” Cincinnatus did it right this time. “When he was in Covington, he a
lways treated the colored fellows who drove for him like they was men. Reckon he was the first white man I ever knew who did.”
Cincinnatus went home, not so happy as he’d hoped but not so disappointed as he might have been. He felt as if he were cluttering up the apartment. That was another reason he’d visited the recruiting station. But his urge to get even with the Confederates counted for more.
“Don’t want to jus’ sit here playin’ with my grandbabies,” he told Elizabeth. “I love my grandbabies, but I got some doin’ in me yet.”
“I didn’t say nothin’, dear,” his wife answered.
“I love you, too,” Cincinnatus said, mostly because she hadn’t said anything. They’d been married a long time. Despite the separations they’d gone through, she knew him better than anybody.
The letter from the recruiting station came eight days later. That was sooner than the sergeant had said. Cincinnatus didn’t know whether the quick answer meant good news or bad. He opened the letter—and still didn’t know. It just told him to come back to the station two days hence.
“Why couldn’t that blamed man say one way or the other?” he asked when he took it upstairs.
“You find out then, that’s all,” Elizabeth said. She was calmer than he was—and she wasn’t trying to find out what she’d be doing for the rest of the war.
Cincinnatus took a trolley to the recruiting station bright and early on the appointed day. He got there before it opened, and went across the street to a diner to get out of the cold. The guy behind the counter who served him a cup of coffee gave him a fishy look, but took his five cents without saying anything.
The one-handed sergeant got to the station when Cincinnatus was about halfway through the cup. He left it on the counter and limped over to find out what was what. The sergeant was getting his own pot of coffee going on a hot plate. He looked up without much surprise when the bell above the door jingled.
“Good morning, Mr. Driver,” he said. “You didn’t waste any time, did you?”
“No, suh—uh, no, Sergeant,” Cincinnatus said, and the noncom smiled at the self-correction. Cincinnatus wished he’d got it right the first time. He went on, “You gonna let me drive a truck, or shall I see what I can do in a war plant? Gotta do my bit some kind o’ way.”
Reaching into the top desk drawer, the recruiting sergeant pulled a sheet of Army stationery. “Here’s what Brigadier General Straubing has to say about you, Mr. Driver.” He set a pair of reading glasses on his nose. “ ‘I remember Cincinnatus well. He was a solid driver, clever and brave and resourceful. I have no doubts as to his loyalty or devotion to the United States.’ How’s that?”
“That’s—mighty fine, Sergeant. Mighty fine,” Cincinnatus said. “So you let me drive again?”
“We’ll let you drive,” the sergeant answered. “You said it yourself—if you go behind the wheel, a younger man gets to pick up a Springfield.”
“Ain’t quite what I said.” Cincinnatus knew he ought to leave it there, but he couldn’t. “What I said was, a white man gets to pick up a Springfield. I still don’t reckon that’s fair. Do Jesus, in the last war the Confederates let some o’ their colored men carry guns.”
“Yeah, and they’ve been regretting it ever since,” the sergeant said dryly. He held up his hook. “You can say it wouldn’t be like that here. You can say it, and I wouldn’t give you any grief about it, Mr. Driver, ’cause I think you’re likely right. But I don’t make the rules, and neither do you. The War Department says we’ll play the game like this, so we will. Do you want to do it, or don’t you? If you do, you’ve got about a million forms to fill out. If you don’t, well, thanks for stopping by.”
He had no give in him. He didn’t need to; the government backed him straight down the line. Cincinnatus sighed. “Let me have the damn forms. You ain’t what you oughta be, but you’re a damn sight better’n Jake Featherston.”
The sergeant had to go back to a filing cabinet to get the papers. “You’re a sensible man, Mr. Driver. The difference between bad and worse is a lot bigger than the difference between good and better.”
Cincinnatus started to answer, then stopped before he said anything. That would give him something to think about when he had the time. Now . . . paperwork. The recruiting sergeant had exaggerated, but not by much. Cincinnatus filled out forms till he got writer’s cramp—not an ailment he worried about very often.
Officially, he wasn’t joining the Army. Officially, he was becoming a civilian employee of the U.S. government. The undersigned agrees, acknowledges, and accepts that his duties may require him to enter areas not definitively known to be safe. He wasn’t sure what definitively meant, but he signed anyway. He knew he wasn’t going to be driving from Idaho to Minnesota.
For purposes of self-protection, employees hired for the aforementioned duty may be permitted to carry firearms, another form told him. He looked at the recruiting sergeant. “The Confederates catch me with a gun, they gonna shoot my ass,” he said.
“Don’t worry about it,” the sergeant answered. “If they catch you without a gun, they’ll shoot your ass anyway.” Since Cincinnatus couldn’t very well argue with that, he signed again.
At last, only one sheet of paper was left: a loyalty oath. Cincinnatus signed that, too, then set down the pen and shook his hand back and forth to work out the kinks. “Lot o’ paper to go through,” he said. “What do I do next?”
“Go home,” the sergeant told him, which caught him by surprise. “Bring a suitcase—a small suitcase—with you Monday morning. You report to the State Capitol, room . . . 378. After that, you do what they tell you.”
“All right. Thank you kindly, Sergeant,” Cincinnatus said.
“Thank you, Mr. Driver. You said it—you’re doing your bit.” The sergeant looked down at his hook for a moment, then up at Cincinnatus again. “And if you have to use a gun, make it count.”
“I do that, Sergeant,” Cincinnatus promised. “Yes, suh. I do that.”
A clear predawn morning in mid-January. When Irving Morrell looked west, he saw red flares in the sky—Confederate recognition signals. When he looked east, he saw more red flares. The Confederates to the east and west could probably see each other’s flares, too. Only twenty or thirty miles separated them, twenty or thirty miles and the force Morrell commanded.
So far, the C.S. rescue force pushing east hadn’t been able to reach the men trapped in and around Pittsburgh. Morrell didn’t intend that they should, either. He turned to his wireless man. “Send ‘Rosebud’ to Philadelphia, Jenkins,” he said.
“ ‘Rosebud.’ Yes, sir.” The wireless operator didn’t know what the code phrase meant. He sent it anyway. A moment later, he nodded to Morrell. “Received, sir.”
“Good,” Morrell said. “Now we see how they like that.”
“Yes, sir,” Jenkins repeated. “Uh, what’s it all about, sir?”
Morrell didn’t think the wireless man could be a Confederate plant. He didn’t think so, but he didn’t take any chances, either. “It means Featherston’s fuckers are going to have some tough sledding, that’s what,” he said. That seemed safe enough—the younger man still didn’t know where or how.
He could have meant sledding literally. Snow blanketed eastern Ohio and western Pennsylvania. Everywhere he looked, everything was white—except for the soot smears that marked burnt-out barrels, wrecked strongpoints, and other works of man.
Artillery boomed, off to the north. Those were U.S. guns, throwing death at the Confederates pushing in from the west. The men in butternut who hung on around Pittsburgh hadn’t pushed west to try to join them. Maybe they were too short of fuel to move. By now, Featherston’s transport aircraft had taken a devil of a beating. And they were flying in from farther and farther away, too, as U.S. bombers plastered their fields.
Had Morrell been running the Confederates’ show, he would have ordered the C.S. troops in Pittsburgh to break out no matter what. Yes, they would have given up the city.
Yes, they would have taken losses. But if they’d done it soon enough, they would have saved most of their men and some—maybe a lot—of their equipment. Now they were in real trouble.
That didn’t break Morrell’s heart. For the first year of the war, everything Jake Featherston tried seemed golden. He’d jumped on the United States with both feet. He’d held the USA down, too, even though he ran a smaller country. That had really alarmed Morrell. Featherston didn’t just intend to lick the United States. He intended to conquer them. Morrell wouldn’t have believed it was possible—till the Confederates cut the USA in half.
After that, it was hang on tight and try to survive. Looking back on things, the U.S. counteroffensive in Virginia was ill-conceived. Sure, charge right into the teeth of the enemy’s defenses. Featherston had known the United States were coming, and he’d baked a cake—a reinforced-concrete cake. Fredericksburg? The Wilderness? Nobody in his right mind would want to attack in places like those.
That didn’t stop Daniel MacArthur, of course. He attacked, and paid for it, and attacked again, and got another bloody nose. He hurt the CSA, too, but not in proportion.
“Sir, there’s enemy pressure near Cambridge,” Jenkins reported.
“Is there?” Morrell said. The men and barrels in butternut would be coming along the east-west highway that went through the manufacturing town. A north-south road also ran through Cambridge. Morrell and the couple of dozen barrels he personally commanded were in bivouac along it, a few miles south of the place. Charging to the attack was a major’s job, not a one-star general’s. All at once, Morrell didn’t care. “Then let’s hit them, shall we?”
Within twenty minutes, his barrels were rolling north. The sun came up as they got moving. Infantrymen accompanied them, some riding barrels, some in trucks, some in half-tracked troop carriers that could cross ground where even a four-wheel-drive truck bogged down. When the fighting started, the foot soldiers would jump out and go to work.
The Confederates had stalled just outside of Cambridge. Morrell could see why: it was a tough nut to crack. It sat on a rise, and dominated the ground on which Featherston’s men had to approach. Several butternut barrels burned. But there was already fighting just outside the town. The chatter of automatic weapons made Morrell grind his teeth. The Confederates had plenty of firepower.
Drive to the East Page 68