Walk in Hell

by Harry Turtledove

  Lieutenant Armstrong Crowder came toward the stern, a pocket watch in one hand, a clipboard with some increasingly soggy papers in the other. Seeing him thus made Enos relax inside, though he did not ease his vigilant posture. Lieutenant Crowder took notes or checked boxes or did whatever he was supposed to do with those papers.

  After he was done writing, he said, “Men, you may stand easy. This was only an exercise. Had the forces of the Entente been foolish enough to try our mettle, I have no doubt we would have sunk them or driven them off.”

  He set an affectionate hand on the depth-charge launcher. It was a new gadget; until a few months before, ashcans had been “launched” by rolling them off the stern. Crowder loved new gadgets, and depth charges from this one actually had crippled a Confederate submarine. With a fisherman’s ingrained pessimism, George Enos thought that going from one crippled boat to a sure sinking was a long leap of faith.

  Eventually, Lieutenant Crowder shut up and went away. Carl Sturtevant rolled his eyes. He had even less faith in gadgets than Enos did. “If that first torpedo nails us,” he said, “odds are we’re nothing but a whole raft of ‘The Navy Department regrets’ telegrams waiting to happen.”

  “Oh, yeah.” George nodded. The all-clear sounded. He didn’t leave the one-pounder right away even so. As long as he had reason to be here by the rail, he aimed to take a good long look at as much of the Atlantic as he could. Just because the call to battle stations had been a drill did not mean no enemy submarines lurked out there looking for a target.

  Quite a few sailors lingered by the rail, despite the rain and sleet riding the wind. “Don’t know why I’m bothering,” Carl Sturtevant said. “Half the Royal Navy could sail by within a quarter-mile of us and we’d never be the wiser.”

  “Yeah,” Enos said again. “Well, this makes it harder for the submersibles to spot us, too.”

  “I keep telling myself that,” the petty officer answered. “Sometimes it makes me feel better, sometimes it doesn’t. What it puts me in mind of is playing blind man’s buff where everybody’s got a blindfold on and everybody’s carrying a six-shooter. A game like that gets scary in a hurry.”

  “Can’t say you’re wrong,” Enos replied, riding the deck shifting under his feet with automatic ease. He was a good sailor with a strong stomach, which got him respect from his shipmates even though, unlike so many of them, he wasn’t a career Navy man. “Could be worse, though—we could be running guns into Ireland again, or playing hide-and-seek with the limeys around the icebergs way up north.”

  “You’re right—both of those would be worse,” Sturtevant agreed. “Sooner or later, we will cut that sea bridge between England and Canada, and then the Canucks will be in the soup.”

  “Sooner or later,” George echoed mournfully. Before the war, the plan had been for the German High Seas Fleet to break out of the North Sea and rendezvous with the U.S. Atlantic Fleet, smashing the Royal Navy between them. But the Royal Navy had had plans of its own, and only the couple of squadrons of the High Seas Fleet actually on the high seas when war broke out were fighting alongside their American allies. “Sooner or later,” Enos went on, “I’ll get some leave and see my wife and kids again, too, but I’m not holding my breath there, either. Christ, George, Jr., turns seven this year.”

  “It’s hard,” Sturtevant said with a sigh that made a young fog-bank grow in front of his face. He peered out at the ocean again, then shook his head. “Hellfire, I’m only wasting my time and trying to fool myself into thinking I’ll be able to spot anything anyhow.”

  That was probably true. George shook his head. No, that was almost certainly true. It didn’t keep him from staring at the sea till his eyelashes started icing up. If he saw a periscope—

  At last, he concluded he wasn’t going to see a periscope, not even if a dozen of them were out there. Reluctantly, he headed back toward the bulkhead from which he’d been chipping paint. One big difference he’d discovered between the Navy and a fishing boat was that you had to look busy all the time in the Navy, regardless of whether you were.

  Smoke poured from the Ericsson’s four stacks. No one had ever claimed beauty for the destroyer’s design. There were good and cogent reasons why no one had ever claimed beauty for it. Some people did claim she looked like a French warship, a claim that would have been vicious enough to start barroom brawls during shore leave if it hadn’t held such a large measure of truth.

  Enos picked up the chisel he’d set down when the exercise began. He went back to work—chip, chip, chip. He spotted no rust under the paint he was removing, only bright metal. That meant his work was essentially wasted effort, but he’d had no way of knowing as much in advance. He went right on chipping. He couldn’t get in trouble for doing as he was told.

  A chief petty officer swaggered by. He had less rank than any officer but more authority than most. For a moment, he beamed around his cigar at George’s diligence. Then, as if angry at letting himself be seen in a good mood, he growled, “You will police up those paint scraps from the deck, sailor.” His gravelly voice said he’d been smoking cigars for a lot of years.

  “Oh, yes, Chief, of course,” Enos answered, his own voice dripping virtue. Since he really had intended to sweep up the paint chips, he wasn’t even acting. Propitiated, the petty officer went on his way. George thought about making a face behind his back, then thought better of it. Long tours aboard fishing boats even more cramped than the Ericsson had taught him he was always likely to be under somebody’s eyes, whether he thought so or not.

  Another strip of gray paint curled against the blade of his chisel and fell to the deck. It crunched under his shoes as he took half a step down the corridor. His hands did their job with automatic competence, letting his mind wander where it would.

  It wandered, inevitably, back to his family. He smiled at imagining his son seven years old. That was halfway to man-sized, by God. And Mary Jane would be turning four. He wondered what sort of fits she was giving Sylvia these days. She’d hardly been more than a toddler when he went into the Navy.

  And, of course, he thought about Sylvia. Some of his thoughts about his wife were much more interesting than chipping paint. He’d been at sea a long time. But he didn’t just imagine her naked in the dark with him, making the mattress in their upstairs flat creak. She’d been different, distant, the last time he’d got leave in Boston. He knew he never should have got drunk enough to tell her about being on the point of going with that colored whore when his monitor got blown out of the water. But it wasn’t just that; Sylvia had been different ever since she’d got a job in the fish-packing plant: more on her own, less his wife.

  He frowned as he tapped the chisel yet again. He wished she hadn’t had to go to work, but the allotment she took from his salary wasn’t enough to keep body and soul together, especially not with the Coal Board and the Ration Board and all the other government bureaus tightening the screws on civilians harder every day to support the war.

  Then he frowned again, in a different way. The throb of the engines changed. He not only heard it, he felt it through his shoes. The Ericsson picked up speed and swung through a long, smooth turn.

  A few minutes later, the chief petty officer came back down the corridor. “Why’d we change course?” Enos asked him. “Which way are we heading now?”

  “Why? Damned if I know.” The chief sounded as if the admission pained him. “But I know which way we’re heading, by Jesus. We’re heading south.”

  Private First Class Jefferson Pinkard sat in the muddy bottom of a trench east of Lubbock, Texas, staring longingly at the tin coffeepot above the little fire burning there. The wood that made the fire had been part of somebody’s fence or somebody’s house not so long before. Pinkard didn’t give a damn about that. He just wanted the coffee to boil so he could drink it.

  A few hundred yards to the south, a couple of Yankee three-inch field guns opened up and started hitting the Confederate lines opposite them. “God damn those so
ns of bitches to hell and gone,” Pinkard said to anybody who would listen. “What the hell good do they think they’re going to do? They’ll just kill a few of us and maim a few more, and that’ll be that. They’re not going to break through. Shitfire, they’re not even trying to break through. Nothin’ but throwin’ a little death around for the fun of it, is all.”

  The nearest soldier happened to be Hipolito Rodriguez. The stocky little farmer from the state of Sonora was darning socks, a useful soldierly skill not taught in basic training. He looked up from his work and said, “This whole war, it don’t make no sense to me. Why you think any one part of it is supposed to make sense when the whole thing don’t?”

  “Damn good question, Hip,” Pinkard said. “Wish I had me a damn good answer.” He overtopped Rodriguez by nearly a head and could have broken him in half; he’d been a steelworker in Birmingham till conscription pulled him into the Army, and had the frame to prove it. Not only that, he was a white man, while Hip Rodriguez, like other Sonorans and Chihuahuans and Cubans, didn’t fit neatly into the Confederate States’ scheme of things. Rodriguez wasn’t quite black, but he wasn’t quite white, either—his skin was just about the color of his butternut uniform. What he was, Pinkard had discovered, was a fine soldier.

  The coffee did boil then, and Jeff poured some into his tin cup. He drank. It was hotter than the devil’s front porch in July and strong enough to grow hair on a little old lady’s chest, but that suited him fine. Winter in Texas was worse than anything he’d known in Alabama, and he’d never tried passing an Alabama winter in a soggy trench, either.

  Rodriguez came over and filled his cup, too. Sergeant Albert Cross paused on his way down the trench line. He squatted down by the fire and rolled himself a cigarette. “Don’t know where the dickens this war is getting to,” he remarked as he held the cigarette to the flames.

  Pinkard and Rodriguez looked at each other. Sergeant Cross was a veteran, one of the trained cadre around whom the regiment had been formed. He wore the ribbon for the Purple Heart to show he’d been wounded in action. That was about all that kept the other two men from braining him with the coffeepot. Pinkard couldn’t begin to remember how many times over the past few weeks Cross had made the same weary joke.

  Wearily, Pinkard pointed north and east. “Town of Dickens is over that way, Sarge,” he said. “Christ, I wish we’d run the damnyankees back toward Lubbock a ways, just to get us the hell out of Dickens County and make you come up with somethin’ new to say.”

  “Godalmightydamn,” Cross said. “Put a stripe on somebody’s sleeve and listen to how big his mouth gets.” But he was chuckling as he sipped his coffee. He knew how often he said the same thing. He just couldn’t stop himself from doing it.

  And then, with flat, harsh, unemphatic bangs, U.S. artillery began shelling the stretch of trench where Pinkard and his comrades sheltered. His coffee went flying as he dove for the nearest dugout. The shells screamed in. They burst all around. Blast tried to tear the air out of Pinkard’s lungs and hammered his ears. Shrapnel balls and fragments of shell casing scythed by.

  Lying next to him in the hole scraped under the forward wall of the trench, Sergeant Cross shouted, “Leastways it ain’t gas.”

  “Yeah,” Pinkard said. He hadn’t heard any of the characteristic duller explosions of gas shells, and no one was screaming out warnings or pounding on a shell casing with a rifle butt to get men to put on their masks. “Ain’t seen gas but once or twice here.”

  Even as they were being shelled, Cross managed a chuckle with real amusement in it. “Sonny boy, this front ain’t important enough to waste a lot of gas on it. And you know what else? I ain’t a bit sorry, neither.”

  Before Pinkard could answer, rifles and machine guns opened up all along the line. Captain Connolly, the company commander, shouted, “Up! Get up and fight, damn it! Everybody to the firing steps, or the damnyankees’ll roll right over us.”

  Shells were still falling. Fear held Pinkard in what seemed a safer position for a moment. But he knew Connolly was right. If U.S. troops got into the Confederate trenches, they’d do worse than field guns could.

  He grabbed his rifle and scrambled out of the dugout. Yankee bullets whined overhead. If he thought about exposing himself to them, his bowels would turn to water. Doing was better than thinking. Up to the firing step he went.

  Sure enough, here came the U.S. soldiers across no-man’s-land, all of them in the world seemingly headed straight toward him. Their green-gray uniforms were splotched with mud, the same as his butternut tunic and trousers. They wore what looked like round pots on their heads, not the British-style iron derbies the Confederates called tin hats. Pinkard reached up to adjust his own helmet, not that the damned thing would stop a direct hit from a rifle bullet.

  He rested his Tredegar on the dirt of the parapet and started firing. Enemy soldiers dropped, one after another. He couldn’t tell for certain whether he was scoring any of the hits. A lot of bullets were in the air. Not all the Yankees were falling because they’d been shot, either. A lot of them went down so they could advance at a crawl, taking advantage of the cover shell holes and bushes offered.

  Sometimes a few U.S. soldiers would send a fusillade of rifle fire at the nearest stretch of trench line. That would make the Confederates put their heads down and let the Yankees’ pals move forward. Then the pals would bob up out of whatever hiding places they’d found and start blazing away in turn. Firing and moving, the U.S. troops worked their way forward.

  Pinkard’s rifle clicked harmlessly when he pulled the trigger. He slammed in a new ten-round clip, worked the bolt to bring a cartridge up into the chamber, and aimed at a Yankee trotting his way. He pulled the trigger. The man in green-gray crumpled.

  Pinkard felt the same surge of satisfaction he did when controlling a stream of molten steel back at the Sloss Works: he’d done something difficult and dangerous and done it well. He worked the bolt. The spent cartridge casing leaped out of the Tredegar and fell at his feet. He swung the rifle toward the next target.

  In the fighting that made the headlines, in southern Kentucky or northern Tennessee, on the Roanoke front, or up in Pennsylvania and Maryland, attackers had to work their way through enormous belts of barbed wire to close with their foes. It wasn’t like that in west Texas, however much Jefferson Pinkard might have wished it were. Hereabouts, not enough men tried to cover too many miles of trenches with not enough wire. A few sad, rusty strands ran from pole to pole. They would have been fine for keeping cattle from straying into the trenches. Against a determined enemy, they did little good.

  A roar in the air, a long hammering noise, screams running up and down the Confederate line. The U.S. aeroplane zoomed away after strafing the trenches from what would have been treetop height had any trees grown within miles. Pinkard sent a bullet after it, sure the round would be wasted—and it was.

  “That ain’t fair!” he shouted to Sergeant Cross, who had also fired at the aeroplane. “Not many flying machines out here, any more’n there’s a lot of gas. Why the hell did this one have to shoot up our stretch of trench?”

  “Damned if I know,” Cross answered. “Must be our lucky day.”

  Stretcher bearers carried groaning wounded men back toward aid stations behind the line. Another soldier was walking back under his own power. “What the devil are you doing, Stinky?” Pinkard demanded.

  “Christ, I hate that nickname,” Christopher Salley said with dignity. He was a skinny, precise little pissweed who’d been a clerk before the Conscription Bureau sent him his induction letter. He was, at the moment, a skinny, precise, wounded little pissweed: he held up his left hand to display a neat bullet hole in the flesh between thumb and forefinger. Blood dripped from the wound. “I really ought to get this seen to, don’t you think?”

  “Go ahead, go ahead.” Pinkard turned most of his attention back to the Yankees. A minute or so later, though, he spoke to Sergeant Cross in tones of barely disguised envy: “Lucky
bastard.”

  “Ain’t it the truth?” Cross said. “He’s hurt bad enough to get out of the fight, but that’ll heal clean as a whistle. Shit, they might even ship him home on convalescent leave.”

  That appalling prospect hadn’t occurred to Jeff. He swore. The idea of Stinky Salley getting to go home while he was stuck out here God only knew how far from Emily…

  Then he forgot about Salley, for the U.S. soldiers were making their big push toward the trench line. The last hundred yards of savage fire proved more than flesh and blood could bear. Instead of storming forward and leaping down in among the Confederates, the soldiers in green-gray broke and ran back toward their own line, dragging along as many of their wounded as they could.

  The firefight couldn’t have lasted longer than half an hour. Pinkard felt a year or two older, or maybe like a cat that had just used up one of its lives. He looked around for his tin cup. There it was, where he’d dropped it when the shelling started. Somebody had stomped on it. For good measure, it had a bullet hole in it, too, probably from the aeroplane. He let out a long sigh.

  “Amen,” Sergeant Cross said.

  “Wonder when they’re going to start bringin’ nigger troops into line,” Pinkard said. “Wouldn’t mind seein’it, I tell you. Save some white men from getting killed, that’s for damn sure.”

  “You really think so?” Cross shook his head to show he didn’t. “Half o’ those black bucks ain’t nothin’ but the Red rebels who were trying to shoot our asses off when they rose up. I think I’d sooner trust a damnyankee than a nigger with a rifle in his hands. Damnyankees, you know they’re the enemy.”

  Pinkard shrugged. “I was one of the last white men conscripted out of the Sloss Works, so I spent a deal of time alongside niggers who were doin’ the work of whites who’d already gone into the Army. Treat ’em decent and they were all right. Besides, we got any hope of winning this war without ’em?”

  Albert Cross didn’t answer that at all.