In at the Death

by Harry Turtledove

  “Beats me,” Jorge answered. “We just gotta wait and find out.” If that didn’t sum up a lot of soldiering, what did?

  The Dixie Princess changed course and followed the smaller craft toward the low-lying coast ahead. Her guide zigged and zagged in a way that made no sense to Jorge. And whatever the guide did, the Dixie Princess did, too.

  Then somebody said, “We better not hit one of them damn mines, that’s all I got to say. That’d be worse’n getting torpedoed.”

  A light went on in Jorge’s head. They had to be heading towards a port, one warded by mines to keep out U.S. warships. And the small boat knew the way through the floating death traps. Jorge hoped like hell it did, anyhow.

  WELCOME TO BEAUFORT, a sign said. Jorge would have guessed the name was pronounced Bofort. What his guess was worth, he found out when a man with bushy white side whiskers called, “Welcome to Bew-fort, y’all! Where d’you go from here?”

  Jorge hadn’t the faintest idea. Somebody—probably an officer—called, “Where’s your train station?”

  “Mile outside o’ town,” the old-timer said, pointing west. “We like our peace and quiet, we do. Ain’t but one train a day anyways.”

  “Jesus H. Christ!” the officer exploded. “This is as bad as it would’ve been before the War of Secession!”

  “No, sir.” The white-whiskered man shook his head. “We had the hurricane back in ’40, and the really bad one back in ’93, an’ we came through both o’ them. And besides, we was full o’ niggers in the old days. Ain’t hardly got no more coons around now, though. Don’t hardly miss ’em, neither. More room for the rest of us, by God.”

  Odds were the Negroes had done most of the hard work. Sailors had to jump down from the Dixie Princess and grab the mooring lines that bound her to the pier. Gangplanks thudded onto the rickety planking.

  “Disembark! Form up in column of fours!” an officer shouted. “We will proceed to the railroad station and board transportation for Virginia!”

  “Well, now we know what we’re doing, anyway,” Gabe Medwick said.

  “Sí.” Jorge nodded. “But one train a day? How big a train is it gonna be? How long we gonna have to wait?” He looked up at the sky, which was sunny and blue. “We ain’t that far from Savannah, even now. What if a damnyankee airplane sees us? They come and drop bombs on our heads, that’s what.”

  “Better not happen, that’s all I’ve got to say.” Medwick shivered at the idea, though the day felt more like spring than winter.

  Down the gangplanks went the soldiers. As corporals, Jorge and Gabe tried to gather their squads together, but they didn’t have much luck. The soldiers had got too mixed up in the desperate boarding in Savannah. “Hell with it,” Sergeant Blackledge said—he was trying to gather a whole section, and having no more success than the squad leaders. “We’ll sort things out when we get wherever the hell we’re going.”

  They marched through Beaufort. Though it wasn’t at all far from Savannah, the war might have forgotten all about it. Only some small, shabby houses with broken windows and with doors standing open spoke of the blacks who’d lived here till not long before.

  Old men and those too badly maimed to fight—and a few women, too—crewed fishing and oystering boats. Truck gardens grew all around the town. Women and kids and the old and injured tended them, too.

  At the station, the railroad agent stared at the long butternut column in unabashed horror. “What in God’s name am I supposed to do with y’all?” he said.

  “Get on the telegraph. Get trains down here, dammit,” an officer answered. “We got out of Savannah. They want us up in Virginia. Fuck me if we’re gonna walk.”

  “Well, I’ll try,” the agent said doubtfully.

  “You better.” The officer—he was, Jorge saw, a colonel, with three stars on each side of his collar—didn’t even bother disguising the threat.

  The agent clicked away on the telegraph. A few minutes later, an answer came back. “They’ll be here in two-three hours,” he reported.

  Jorge would have bet that the time promised would stretch, and it did. The trains didn’t get there till midafternoon. He had enough food in his pockets and pouches to keep from getting hungry before then, but he wondered if anybody would feed the soldiers on the way north. He wondered how bad the fighting would be, too. He’d served in Virginia before coming down to Tennessee. Wherever things get tough, that’s where they send me. He was surprised at how little he resented that. It wasn’t as if he were the only one in the same boat.

  On the train, his two stripes won him a seat, even if it was hard and cramped. What with all the men standing in the aisles, he counted himself lucky. No matter how uncomfortable he was, he didn’t stay awake long.

  His eyes opened again when the train rolled through the town of St. Matthews. Except for a good many women wearing widow’s weeds, the place seemed as untouched by the war as Beaufort. Jorge wasn’t used to landscapes that hadn’t been torn to bits. A town with all its buildings intact, without barricades and foxholes and trenches, seemed unnatural.

  “It does, doesn’t it?” Gabe Medwick said when he remarked on that. “It’s like the place isn’t important enough to blow up, almost.”

  Jorge hadn’t looked at it quite like that, which didn’t make Gabe wrong. He turned to ask one of the soldiers in the aisle what he thought, only to discover that the man was sound asleep standing up, much deeper under than Jorge had been on the Dixie Princess. How exhausted did you have to be to lose yourself so completely while you were upright?

  After that, the train passed into North Carolina. There was a sign by the tracks that said so. The license plates on the autos went from white with blue letters and numbers to orange with black. Other than that, he couldn’t see any difference. If the Confederate States had a safe haven, he was rolling through it.

  Somebody at the front of the car dished out ration tins from a crate. They weren’t good, but they were better than nothing. Drinks were bottles of Dr. Hopper, warm and fizzy. Jorge belched enormously.

  Virginia was another sign at the border, and motorcar license plates with yellow characters on a dark green background. It was also, before long, the cratered, shattered, bombed-out landscape Jorge had grown used to. He nodded to himself. He knew what he’d be doing here.

  R and R. Armstrong Grimes had gone out of the line in hostile country before. Did the people in Utah hate U.S. soldiers even more than the people here in Georgia did? He wouldn’t have been surprised. But the locals here had nastier weapons with which to make their lack of affection known.

  That meant Camp Freedom—the name had to be chosen with malice aforethought—had maybe the most extensive perimeter Armstrong had ever seen. Foxholes and barbed-wire emplacements and machine-gun nests and entrenchments gobbled up the fields for a couple of miles around the camp on all sides.

  “Shit on toast,” Squidface said as Armstrong’s weary platoon made its way through the maze of outworks. “What all’s inside here, the fucking United States mint?”

  “They don’t have soldiers, the bad guys go and take the mint away,” Armstrong said.

  “Well, yeah, Sarge, sure.” Squidface spoke in calm, reasonable tones. “But they care about money, and they mostly don’t care about us.”

  Armstrong grunted. It wasn’t as if the PFC were wrong. Soldiers got the shitty end of the stick every day of the week, and twice on Sundays. If the other side didn’t screw you, the assholes in green-gray who stayed safe behind the line would. The only people he trusted these days were smelly, dirty men in ragged uniforms that said they actually did some fighting. They knew what was what, unlike the jerks who campaigned with typewriters and telephones.

  He didn’t love MPs, either, not even a little bit. One of the snowdrops—he wore a white helmet and faggy white gloves—pointed and said, “Delousing station and showers are over that way. Where’s your officer, anyway?”

  “In the hospital.” Armstrong jabbed a thumb at his own chest.
“This is my outfit now.”

  The MP sniffed. A platoon with a sergeant in command couldn’t be anything much, his attitude said. Somebody from the back of the platoon said, “Boy, Featherston’s fuckers’d send him to Graves Registration in nothing flat.”

  “Who said that, goddammit?” the MP shouted. “I’ll kick the crap out of you, whoever you are.”

  “Don’t worry, Sergeant. I’ll deal with him,” Armstrong promised. All right, so the snowdrop wasn’t yellow. But he didn’t realize combat troops wouldn’t fight fair. They’d ruin him or kill him, and then laugh about it. Getting away in a hurry was the best plan.

  Back in the Great War, Armstrong’s father said, delousing meant baking your clothes and bathing in scalding water full of nasty chemicals, none of which kept the lice down for long. The spray that a bored-looking corporal turned on the men now was nothing like that. But it had one advantage over the old procedure: it really worked.

  There was nothing wrong with showering under scalding water. “Wish I had a steel brush, to get all the dirt off,” Squidface said, snorting like a whale.

  “Yeah, well, if you didn’t have a goddamn pelt there, you could get clean easier,” Armstrong said. Squidface was one of the hairiest guys he’d ever seen—he had more hair on his back than a lot of guys did on their chest. “If the Confederates ever kill you, they’ll tan your hide for a rug.”

  “Ahh, your mother,” Squidface said. Only somebody who’d saved Armstrong’s bacon plenty of times could have got away with that. Squidface qualified. So did several other guys from the platoon.

  After the shower, food. Along with canned rations, Armstrong had eaten a lot of fried and roasted chicken in the field—plenty of henhouses around, and you didn’t need much more than a skillet or, in a pinch, a sharp stick to do the cooking. But this was fried chicken done right, not half raw and half burnt. The hash browns were crisp and just greasy enough, too. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen a regular potato that didn’t come out of a can. Yams and sweet potatoes were all right for baking, but they just didn’t cut it when you sliced them up and put them in hot lard.

  And apple pie! And vanilla ice cream on top! “Goddamn!” Squidface said reverently. “I think I just came in my pants.”

  “I know what you mean.” The size of the bite Armstrong took would have made a boa constrictor jealous.

  “I want a slice of cheese to put on my pie, not ice cream,” Herk said. The replacement was a veteran now, entitled to a veteran’s gripes—and entitled to get razzed like a veteran, too.

  “Herk wants to cut the cheese.” Squidface held his nose.

  “You were the one who came in your pants,” Herk retorted. “Me, I want a broad.”

  Up and down the long table, soldiers nodded solemnly, Armstrong among them. This camp had everything for giving soldiers a good time except a whorehouse. Bluenoses made sure the U.S. Army didn’t officially sponsor any such thing. If you wanted a woman, you had to find your own—which could get you killed if you picked the wrong one, and could easily leave you with a disease that would land you in big trouble when the Army found out you’d caught it.

  Squidface had several suggestions on how Herk could satisfy himself, each more alarming than the one before. “Shut up already,” Armstrong said after a while. “You’re making me lose my appetite.”

  “You better show up for sick call in the mornin’, Sarge,” Squidface said. “Something’s sure as shit wrong with you.”

  The line for the nightly movie was almost as long as the one for a brothel would have been. Armstrong got a seat just before they showed the newsreel. “Here is the first film from ruined Petrograd!” the announcer said importantly.

  Armstrong had seen plenty of ruined cities. He’d seen Provo and Salt Lake City, and you couldn’t ruin a place any worse than they got ruined. Or he thought you couldn’t, till the camera panned across what was left of Petrograd. The Russian town was leveled, all the way out to the horizon. When the camera got to something that stuck up from the devastation, it moved in for a closer look.

  It was an enormous bronze statue of a man on horseback—or it had been. Now it looked melted, melted from the top down. Armstrong tried to imagine what kind of heat could have done such a thing.

  “This was the statue of Peter the Great, who founded Petrograd,” the announcer said. “Now he demonstrates the power of our allies’ scientific accomplishments.”

  “Fuck our allies,” Squidface said. “We don’t get one of those ourselves pretty damn quick, the goddamn Kaiser’ll drop one on Philly next.”

  That struck Armstrong as a pretty good guess. He made a guess of his own: “What do you want to bet Featherston’s got guys in white lab coats working on one, too? With his fucking rockets, he could throw one anywhere in the USA.”

  “Shit.” Squidface looked around, as if expecting one of those rockets to crash down any second now. “You’re right.”

  As a matter of fact, Armstrong was wrong. The most powerful Confederate rockets reached only a couple of hundred miles. That meant they couldn’t touch most of the USA, especially since the areas C.S. soldiers actually controlled shrank by the day. But, with a bomb like that, worry outran reality with ease.

  “On our side of the Atlantic…” the newsreel announcer said. The screen showed the charred wreckage of gracious homes that had to date back to long before the War of Secession. It showed sunken ships in a bombed-out harbor district. It showed dirty, unshaven Confederate soldiers shambling off into captivity.

  “We was there. We seen that,” Squidface said.

  “Better believe it,” Armstrong agreed.

  “On our side of the Atlantic, the capture of Savannah cuts the Confederate States in half,” the announcer said proudly. “This on the heels of the loss of Richmond…”

  The Stars and Stripes flew over the wreckage of the Confederate Capitol. U.S. soldiers prowled the cratered grounds of the Gray House, walking past twisted and overturned antiaircraft guns. Scrawny civilians got meals at a U.S. field kitchen.

  “How long can the enemy hope to keep up his useless resistance in the face of overwhelming U.S. might?” the announcer asked, as if the soldiers watching the newsreel would be able to tell him.

  The answer they were supposed to give him was, Not very long. Armstrong had seen enough propaganda to understand that. But this time the newsreel had outsmarted itself. The fearsome bomb that leveled Petrograd made you think twice. It made Armstrong think twice, anyhow. If the Confederates came up with one of those, or more than one, before the United States could, they were liable to win the war in spite of losing their capital and getting their country cut in half. Drop something like that on Philadelphia and New York and Boston, and the United States would really have something to worry about.

  Drop one on Birmingham, Armstrong thought savagely. Drop one on New Orleans. Drop one on fucking Charleston. Like most people from the USA, he particularly despised the city where the War of Secession broke out.

  After the newsreel came a short feature, with the Engels Brothers involved with an actor plainly meant to be Jake Featherston. “I’ll reduce your population!” he yelled, which made the Brothers get into a ridiculous brawl to see which of them would be eliminated. That was all propaganda, too, but it was funny. Armstrong and Squidface grinned at each other in the darkness.

  And the main feature was a thriller, with the Confederates after the secret of a new bombsight and the heroine thwarting them at every turn. She was pretty and she had legs up to there, which might have made Armstrong root for her even if she saluted the Stars and Bars.

  After the feature, he got to lie down on a real bed. He hadn’t done much of that lately—oh, a few times, when he flopped in a house some Georgians had vacated, but not very often. With snoring soldiers all around him, he could relax and sleep deep. Out in the field, he might as well have been a wild beast. The least little noise would leave him not just awake but with his heart pounding and with a rifle or a
knife in his hand.

  Bacon and eggs and more hash browns and halfway decent coffee the next morning were wonderful, too. So was eating them without peering this way and that, afraid of holdouts and snipers and his own shadow if it caught him by surprise.

  “You know, this is pretty damn good. I could really get used to this.” He was surprised at how surprised he sounded.

  “It is, isn’t it?” Squidface sounded surprised, too. Had he been in the war from the start? Armstrong didn’t know. But he’d sure been in it long enough to turn into a vet.

  “I think this is called peace. We used to have it all the time.” Armstrong didn’t think about those days very often. He’d gone from high school almost straight into the Army. He’d been a boy then. If he wasn’t a man now, he didn’t suppose he ever would be.

  “Not quite peace,” Squidface said. “No pussy around. We went through that when we got here.”

  “Well, yeah, we did,” Armstrong admitted. “All right, it isn’t quite peace. But it beats the shit outa where we were at before.” Squidface solemnly nodded and stuffed another slice of bacon into his mouth.

  They gave George Enos shore leave after he helped bring the Tierra del Fuego back to New York City. They gave it to him, and then they forgot about him. He grabbed a train up to Boston, had a joyous reunion with Connie and the boys, and set out to enjoy himself till the Navy decided what the hell to do with him next.

  The Navy took so long, George wondered whether he ought to look for a slot on a fishing boat going out of T Wharf. He could have had one in a minute; the Navy had sucked in a lot of first-class fishermen. But he had plenty of money as things were, with so much back pay and combat pay in his pocket. And if he was out a few hundred miles from shore when he got called back to active duty, there would be hard feelings all around. His wouldn’t matter. The Navy’s, unfortunately, would.

  He was back from church one Sunday morning when the telephone in his apartment rang. He’d found he liked Catholic services. He’d converted for Connie’s sake, and never expected to take the rigmarole seriously. But the fancy costumes and the Latin and the incense grew on him. If you were going to have a religion, shouldn’t you have one with tradition behind it?