American Front

by Harry Turtledove

  Here and there among the firing pits, steps made of dirt and sandbags led up to the ground ahead. The company halted by some of those steps. "When the barrage stops, we go," Captain Wilcox said.

  Maybe the barrage would go on forever. Maybe the artillery would kill all the damnyankees and leave nothing for the infantry to do. Maybe staying behind a pharmacy counter back in Richmond hadn't been such a bad thing. Maybe Bartlett should have waited for his old regiment to be called up instead of volunteering in a new one. Maybe—

  As suddenly as it had begun, the barrage stopped. Captain Wilcox blew that damned whistle again. Bartlett wished he'd lose it or, better yet, swallow it.

  Soldiers started surging up over the steps. Somebody gave Bartlett a shove. He stumbled forward. His feet hit the first step and climbed all by themselves, regardless of what his mind was telling them. Then he was up on level if battered ground. He ran toward the even more battered firing pits and trenches ahead.

  He could hardly see them because of all the smoke and dust the barrage had kicked up. Men in butternut trotted ahead of him, alongside him, behind him. He was part of the thundering herd. As long as he did what everyone else did, he'd be all right. A little more than a quarter of a mile—surely less than half a mile— and what had been Yankee lines would belong to the Confederacy once more.

  Through the smoke of dust—the fog of war, he thought with the small part of his mind that was thinking—evil yellow lights began winking and flashing. The bombardment hadn't killed all the U.S. soldiers, then. Men started falling. Some crawled ahead. Some thrashed and twisted and screamed. Some didn't move.

  Bartlett leaned forward, as if into a gale. He wasn't the only one. Lots of the soldiers still on their feet had that forward lean, as if bracing against a bullet's anticipated impact. Then, rifles and machine guns (he turned to tell Clarence Randolph that machine guns were satanic tools, but Clarence wasn't there, wasn't any­where nearby—had, in fact, taken only a few steps before a bullet tore out his throat, but Bartlett didn't know that) tearing at them, they struggled through the Yankee wire and, screeching, threw themselves at the men in green-gray who had invaded their nation.

  There were too many Confederate soldiers and too few Yan­kees, and those too shaken by the barrage to fight as well as they might have. Bartlett leaped down into a firing pit and pointed his rifle at an enemy. The man dropped his weapon and threw his hands in the air. Bartlett almost shot him anyhow—his blood was up—but checked himself, gesturing brusquely with the bayoneted muzzle of his Tredegar: over that way: The U.S. soldier went, a grin of dog­like submission on his face.

  "Come on!" Captain Wilcox shouted. "Spread out and move forward. They'll counterattack as soon as they can. We want to take back as much ground as we're able, then hold it against anything they can do to us."

  Maybe the damnyankees had had trenches leading up into their forward positions, as had been true in the Confederate lines. If they had, the Confederate bombardment had destroyed them. Going deeper into the U.S.-held territory was a matter of scrambling from one shell hole to the next. Enemy fire picked up all the time.

  There next to Bartlett was Corporal McCorkle. Wide as he was, he'd kept up with the assault and hadn't stopped a bullet. Turning to him, Bartlett said, "Aren't you glad we've won this land back for our dear country?" He waved—cautiously, so as not to expose his arm to a bullet—at the shell-pocked desolation all around.

  McCorkle stared, then started to laugh. The postman came to the coffeehouse, delivered a couple of adver­tising circulars, and went on his way. Nellie Semphroch glanced at the circulars. She didn't throw them away, as she might have before the war. Crumpled up, the papers would make good kindling.

  Edna Semphroch came to the doorway to stand beside her mother. She looked after the postman, who was going on down the street whistling some new ragtime tune Nellie didn't recognize. "Doesn't seem right to see old Henry coming around every day, same as he did before the Rebs jumped on us," Edna said.

  "Well, he does only come once a day now, instead of twice,"

  Nellie said, "but yes, I know what you mean. He's—normal—and everything else has gone straight to the devil, hasn't it?"

  Nellie had only to look at her own shop to see the truth of that. The front window, blown out in the earliest Confederate bombard­ment of Washington, D.C., was covered over with boards, and she was glad she had those. You couldn't get glass for love nor money: literally. One glazier she'd talked to had said, "I had a lady offer me an indecent proposal if I'd get her windows repaired." The fellow had chuckled. "Had to turn her down—couldn't find the goods for her any which way."

  Nellie didn't know whether to believe him or to think he was trying to trick her into making an indecent proposal in exchange for glass. Men were like that. If he was, it hadn't worked. So many places were boarded up these days, Nellie didn't feel either embar­rassed or at a competitive disadvantage for being without glass.

  She looked up and down the block. Not a shop, far as the eye could see, still kept its original glazing. Some buildings were rubble; they'd taken direct hits from shellfire. Some weren't boarded up, but looked out on the street with empty window frames like the eye sockets of a skull: their owners had fled Washington before the Rebs crossed the Potomac. Bums—and people who wouldn't have been bums had their homes and businesses not been wrecked—sheltered in them, and sometimes came out to beg or steal. Nellie thanked heaven she wasn't living like that.

  Rubble had been pounded down into the holes Confederate shells had torn in the street. U.S. prisoners had done that, under the eyes and guns of laughing Rebel guards. It had rained several times since the bombardment, but some of the bloodstains, brown and faded now, were still all too plain to the eye.

  "The Rebs are having themselves a fine old time here," Nellie said to Edna in a low voice. You had to use a low voice if you called them Rebs. They'd tolerate Rebels, but preferred Confederates or even—travesty!—Americans.

  Her daughter nodded. "Far as they're concerned, it might as well be their capital." She bared her teeth in what someone who didn't know her might have taken for a friendly smile.

  From behind the two women, a Southern voice called, "Another cup here, if y'all'd be so kind."

  Nellie put a smile on her own face as she walked back into her coffeehouse. It was akin but not identical to the grimace Edna had worn a moment before: the smile any business person gives a cus­tomer, a smile aimed at the billfold rather than the person who was carrying it. "Yes, sir," she said. "You were drinking the blend from the Dutch East Indies, weren't you?"

  'That's right." The Confederate major nodded. He wore the tight, high boots and yellow uniform trim of a cavalry officer. "Mighty fine it is, too, ma'am—smooth as I've ever drunk."

  "I'm glad you like it." Nellie refilled the cup from one of the pots behind the counter. Not all the cups matched any more—she'd foraged from here and there and everywhere to replace the ones broken in the fighting. "Enjoy it while you can—when it's gone, heaven knows how I'll be able to get more."

  "Life's going to be hard for a while, I reckon," the major agreed. He took the cup, then added cream and sugar and a splash from a little tin flask he wore on his belt. "Right smooth," he said with a smile as he drank. He looked from Nellie to Edna and back again. "Would you let me buy either of you charming ladies, or the two of you together, a cup while you still have it to enjoy?"

  Edna looked as if she might have said yes to that. The cavalry major was personable enough: even handsome in a florid way. But Nellie answered before her daughter could: "No, thank you. We'd best save it for the customers: can't afford to drink up our own stock in trade."

  "However you like," the officer said with a shrug. There were a lot of Confederate cavalrymen in Washington. When they went closer to the front, they had a way of getting killed in a hurry. Their own comrades in the infantry and artillery ragged them about it; the coffeehouse had seen a couple of fights. Confederate military police sw
ung billy clubs with the same reckless abandon Wash­ington city constables had used.

  After draining his augmented cup of coffee, the cavalry major got up, took a wallet out of a hip pocket, and pulled out a dollar of Confederate scrip. "I don't need any change," he said, and walked out the door.

  "Of course you don't," Nellie muttered when he was gone. "It's like play money to you." The scrip the Confederates had instituted for Washington and for the chunks of Maryland and Pennsylvania they'd taken from the United States—the dollar note the major had set down bore the picture of John C. Calhoun—was nominally at par with the U.S. and Confederate dollars. But Confederate soldiers could buy occupation scrip for twenty cents of real money on the dollar. They spent freely—who wouldn't, with a deal like that?— which drove down the value of the scrip. Prices were going up, anyway; so much scrip in circulation just made them go up faster.

  Nellie walked out to the doorway. Across the street, Mr. Jacobs' cobbler's shop had a sign tacked to the boards covering what had been his window: discount for silver. If the Rebs didn't make him take that sign down, it struck Nellie as a good idea. If you fixed the discount as you should, you'd make money whether you got scrip or cash.

  And Jacobs was doing a terrific business. You could get leather locally; it wasn't like coffee. Marching wore down boots, too, so Confederate soldiers were always going into the shop. He'd even had a general make use of his services, said worthy having arrived in a motorcar driven by a colored chauffeur with a face of such per­fect insolence, it seemed to be aching for a slap.

  Quietly—for there were still a couple of Confederate cavalry lieutenants in the coffeehouse, hashing out on the table the break­through that hadn't yet come and, God willing, never would—Edna said, "Ma, I wish there was something we could do to give the Johnny Rebs a hard time."

  "I'm not going to put rat poison in the coffee, though I've thought about it a couple of times," Nellie answered.

  "Maybe we ought to send them to the sporting house around the corner," Edna said. "If they get a dose of the clap, they can't very well fight, can they?" Her smile was wide and unpleasant.

  Nellie's ears got hot. "What is the younger generation coming to?" she exclaimed: the cry of the older generation throughout recorded history. "Radicalism and rebellion and free love—" She'd been seduced at the age of fifteen and knew more than she wanted of sporting houses, but conveniently chose not to remember that.

  Smiling still, Edna said, "If they go to the sporting house, Ma, love wouldn't be free. They don't take scrip there, neither, I hear tell."

  "Where do you hear tell such things?" Nellie demanded. Edna was with her almost all day almost every day, but you couldn't keep an eye on somebody all the time, not unless you were a jailer, you couldn't.

  Before her daughter answered, Mr. Jacobs came out of his shop along with a Confederate soldier carrying a pair of cavalry boots. The cavalryman went on his way. Jacobs called, "Lovely day, isn't it, Widow Semphroch, Miss Semphroch?"

  "Yes, it is," Edna said, in lieu of replying to her mother's question.

  "No, it isn't," Nellie declared.

  The cobbler laughed at their confusion. "Dowling!" As usual, George Custer made too much noise. The shout would have drawn his adjutant from the next county, not just the next room.

  "Coming, sir!" Abner Dowling said, also loudly, the better to overcome the commanding general's deafness—which, of course, the commanding general denied he had.

  Custer stabbed a nicotine-stained forefinger down at the map on the table before which he stood. "Major, I am not satisfied with our progress, not satisfied at all."

  "I'm sorry to hear that, General," Dowling said, taking a discreet half step backwards: Custer's breath alone was plenty to get you lit up. "I think we've made excellent progress, sir."

  He wasn't lying there, not even a little bit. The crossing of the Ohio had gone better than he'd expected—much better than he'd expected, considering that Custer was in charge of it. Facing simul­taneous thrusts aimed at Louisville and Covington, the Confeder­ates hadn't been able to put enough men into Kentucky to defend all of it. That First Army headquarters was in Marion these days proved the point.

  "Well, I don't, dammit," Custer bellowed, which made Dowling draw back another half a pace, both from volume and from fumes. "Look at the map, you overfed twit! Second and Third Armies are going to break into the bluegrass country long before we do."

  "Our advance has hurt the Rebs a lot already," Dowling said stoutly, refusing to take offense at the general's gibe. "Why, we've deprived them of all the fluor spar mines here around Marion, and—"

  "Fluor spar!" Custer sneered. "Fluor-stinking-spar! Teddy Roo­sevelt will be thrilled to get a telegram telling him we've captured a whole great pile of fluor-goddamn-spar, now won't he? He'll send me to command in Canada because of fluor spar, won't he? Oh, yes, he'll be delighted—no doubt about it." Even by Custer's standards, the sarcasm was venomous. 'The greatest horse country in the world just ahead of us, and you're babbling about fluor-fucking-spar? God preserve me from idiots!"

  "But—" Dowling gave up. If you were going to make steel by any modern process, you needed fluor spar, and you needed it in multiton lots. But Custer had been a cavalry general back in the days when cavalry was good for something more than getting mowed down by machine guns, and so horses were all he thought about. That he's a horse's ass doesn't hurt, either, Dowling thought. He usually tried to keep from thinking disloyal thoughts, but that wasn't easy when Custer rode him on account of his size.

  The general said, "I want to put paid to the Confederate cavalry once and for all."

  "Yes, sir, I understand that," Dowling said, doing his best to get across the idea that Custer might better use his men in another way without coming right out and screaming in the famous general's wrinkled, sagging face. He also understood that Custer wanted to accomplish something so spectacular, Teddy Roosevelt would have no choice but to give him the command he truly craved. If Custer held his breath waiting for that, he'd be even redder in the face than he was already.

  "I should hope you do," Custer declared. "Cavalry's done a lot of good work in this war, especially on the far side of the Mississippi."

  "Yes, sir," Dowling said again, now in resignation. Try as you would, sometimes you couldn't win. Custer was going to go after cavalry horses, and that was all there was to it. Never mind that the Rebs west of the Mississippi drew their mounts from local stock. Never mind that the reason cavalry could be dashing and bold out West was that there were miles and miles of miles and miles out there, and not enough soldiers, Yankee or Confederate, to keep raiders from breaking through every so often. Never mind that two other armies were already advancing on the bluegrass country. Never mind any of that. Custer wanted his glory, and by jingo he was going to get it.

  He said, "We'll push east past Madisonville and break through there. The Confederates can't keep throwing up lines against us indefinitely. Sooner or later, the losses they're suffering will force them to recognize they've met their match and then some in me." He struck a triumphal pose that put his adjutant in mind of a plaster-of-paris statue made by a bad artist having a worse day.

  "Our own losses have also been heavy, sir," said Dowling, whose job, after all, involved keeping some tenuous connection between Custer and military reality. "Defending prepared lines is cheaper than storming them."

  That was especially true because Custer didn't—wouldn't— allow enough time for proper artillery bombardment before he sent the poor damned infantry forward. Kentucky wasn't like the country west of the Mississippi. Here, the Confederacy had plenty of Negroes to build works and plenty of white men in butternut to man them. That was one of the reasons cavalry here didn't count for much.

  Also— "Sir, if we concentrate our main thrust along an east-west line, we can't take proper precautions against the Confederate buildup we've been watching between Hopkinsville and Cadiz, southeast of here. If they take us in flank, we'll b
e as embarrassed as our German friends were on the Marne a few weeks ago."

  "Fiddlesticks," Custer retorted. "I don't believe the Rebs can muster the sort of force they'd need to shift us, nor anything close to it. They're too heavily committed here and on too many other fronts. We have the initiative, Major, and we shall retain it."

  "But, sir—" Dowling had to protest. He went through the papers in Custer's in-basket. Sure enough, there were the reconnaissance reports he'd stamped urgent in crimson ink, and sure enough, Custer hadn't looked at any of them. 'These scouting reports from our aeroplane pilots clearly show—"

  "That those pilots are a pack of nervous Nellies," General Custer broke in. He seemed pleased with the phrase, so he repeated it: "A pack of nervous Nellies, yes indeed. You ask me, Major, what they call reconnaissance is greatly overrated anyhow."

  "But, sir—" Dowling repeated himself, too, before continuing, "back in St. Louis, you were complaining you weren't getting the reconnaissance you needed from Kentucky."

  " 'A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds,'" Custer quoted grandly. "Now let me tell you what reconnaissance can be worth. Back more than forty years ago now, this damned ragged Indian scout looked at the ground and told me all the Indians in the world—or in Kansas, anyhow—were camped along the Nin-nescah, down near the border with Sequoyah: Indian Territory, it was then. Do you know what I ordered, Major? Do you know?"

  "The whole country knows, sir," Dowling answered unhappily.

  "Yes, but do you?" Custer glowered at him. "I ordered the charge, Major, that's what I did. We sent a raft of redskins to the happy hunting grounds by suppertime, and hardly let a one get back to the Confederate side of the border." He struck his splendid pose once more. "And no one has missed them from that day to this. Now I am going to order the charge again. If the enemy is there, you must strike him."