A Band of Brothers

by William R. Forstchen

  He laughed and shook his head.

  “Close to thirty years of it now. The fighting’s got to stop sometime. Never thought it’d last this long. Never.”

  He fell silent, gaze fixed on the single candle, set into the wall on the socket of a bayonet, as a chilled breeze swept down into the bunker, almost snuffing the flickering light.

  Sighing, he took the jug, downed another drink, and then passed it back to Bullfinch.

  “So what’s the news up north?”

  “We’re abandoning Capua.”

  “What?”

  Bullfinch briefly explained the council of war and the plan to fall back into Roum. Hans shook his head.

  “What about us? Was there talk of pulling out my boys?”

  “Oh, that was a hot and heavy one. Andrew kept control, though, and as of right now you stay.”

  Hans smiled. He knew Andrew did not fully agree with the strategic implications of holding this outpost three hundred miles away from the main theater of operations. Hans could see his side of it. Three corps tied into what on the surface was a useless defense of a minor port on the shadowy border between Roum and Cartha. The mere taking of it had already triggered a de facto war between the two.

  But he could argue that his three corps were tying down at least eight, possibly ten umens. It was diverting, as well, resources from the main front. But it was far more. By the land route, Tyre was seven hundred miles closer to Xi’an than the overland route of Roum to Junction City, then south. And as such, it was a thorn in the side of Ha’ark, a lingering threat. A threat he obviously was concerned enough about it to put in the forces he had. On the reverse side, concede this city and if Ha’ark should ever run a rail line across from the Great Sea to this port, he’d have a base to build a navy from and threaten Roum and Suzdal from the south. Tyre was the hinge, Hans suspected, upon which the campaign might very well turn … as long as Andrew was able to hold in the north. If that line should fail, then the defense here was moot.

  “I need the support here,” Hans announced. “Tell Andrew that. If we’re to win this war I need the support here.”

  Bullfinch was silent for a moment.

  “What’s the problem?” Hans asked.

  “Well, it’s this way. When we lose Capua and fall back on Roum, the rail line into the city will be flanked and cut. That means having to support the army in Roum along with half a million civilians by sea.”

  “And?”

  “I’m not sure if the navy can both support you and support Roum. It’s going to stretch our transport capability to the limit. And remember, we have to keep an eye on Cartha as well.”

  “Blockade the bastards.”

  “We are, and that’s yet another operation to be supported. Hans, we never got the appropriations needed to build our fleet up, and what we were getting was going to the second fleet for the Great Sea.”

  “Are you saying you want me to pull out?”

  Hans struggled to control his building rage. Three months here in this damn town, the slow but steady wastage from disease, sniping and the occasional assault …

  “You want me to pull out?” he asked again.

  Bullfinch finally nodded. “Andrew said it would have to be up to the two of us. My vote is to abandon this front, Hans. I can’t promise that I can supply you through the winter. Remember, that’s a freshwater ocean behind you. It’s already starting to freeze up along the northern shore. A couple more weeks of cold and Lord knows what I’ll do. Roum must receive the higher priority for supplies. Lose Roum and we lose the war. You claim that this is the jump-off point for victory, but you’re talking a year, two years from now. I’m concerned about feeding you two weeks from now.”

  Hans grimly shook his head.

  “Damn all to hell, we stay. Do you understand me, Bullfinch? We stay.”

  Bullfinch said nothing.

  “We stay,” Hans repeated quietly. “If we abandon it they’ll fortify it and we’ll never get it back. We stay.”

  “Andrew told me you’d sort of feel this way. All right. But if things get nasty in Roum, the final decision has been placed in my hands. If I can’t support you, I’ll have to pull out.”

  Hans finally nodded.

  “If I make that decision, Hans, will you go along with it?”

  Hans smiled and then shook his head. “If it comes to that, Bullfinch, there won’t be anybody here to pull out. I’m convinced this is the pressure point. Ha’ark doesn’t know that yet, but I do, and so will you and Andrew.”

  “Andrew, you need some sleep.”

  Andrew looked up from his desk as Kathleen came into the room.

  “Me need sleep?” he chuckled sadly, and motioned for her to sit down on the chair by the side of his desk. Reaching out, he took her hand and squeezed it as she settled down and signed wearily.

  Taking off her white linen cap, she shook her head, red curls cascading down. Andrew smiled, released her hand and reached up to brush an errant wisp of hair from her eyes. The faint scent of ether and antiseptics clung to her.

  Sighing at his touch, she closed her eyes and leaned into his hand.

  “Miss you,” she whispered. “How long has it been since we’ve slept together?”

  He laughed softly. Raised in a proper household, living and teaching in very proper Bowdoin College, he had developed a very straightlaced view of such matters. Kathleen, to his occasional shock and hidden delight, was far more blunt.

  “Weeks?”

  “Three weeks and four days, Andrew Lawrence Keane, and I tell you, me darlin’, it is getting troublesome.”

  Andrew laughed softly, not quite sure how to react. The papers mounted on his desk were all urgent, all had to be dealt with immediately, and though it was past midnight he had braced himself for working through to dawn before heading up to the front to observe the final evacuation of Capua.

  “How are things at the hospital?” he asked, thinking to divert her, but also sensing that she needed to talk.

  “Nightmare as always,” she sighed. “Mostly frostbite and consumption.” She shook her head wearily, the spell of enchantment broken. “I miss the children,” she whispered.

  They were back in Suzdal, in the care of Hawthorne’s wife, something Andrew was eternally grateful for. Madison was old enough to remember the retreat from Suzdal, the scent of panic in the air, and it still troubled her nightmares. Roum was no place for them, especially now.

  It was a terrible thing to realize, but Andrew could barely remember how the children felt in his arms, their scent when they were fresh from the washtub, the simple pleasure of tucking them in and turning down the night light. It’s what I’m fighting for in the ultimate sense, he thought, to protect my family from the Pit, but if somehow we survive all this, what will their memories be of me? There might be a day when they were pointed out as the children of Andrew Lawrence Keane, but would they remember him as well as others would claim to?

  “I’m still worried about Vincent,” Kathleen said, as if in some way Vincent was almost a child of theirs after all his years of service under Andrew.

  “How so? The wound is healed, isn’t it?”

  “Not really. He’ll always have an open sore on his hip. Bits of bone are still working their way out, and that is agony, though he doesn’t show it. It’s just that he is turning into a shadow, Andrew. That look in his eyes, as if he already has one foot into the next world, or worst yet, perhaps a foot into the world of the Hordes.”

  “I can’t relieve him. We’ve lost too many good men. I need Vincent as chief of staff and to keep a handle on the research and manufacturing. At least he’s out of the fight back in Suzdal.”

  “Don’t let him get a field command again, Andrew.”

  “Why?”

  She shook her head. “I can’t really say. This war is beginning to blur the edges of what we are. I’ve heard the boys talking in the hospital about some of the things done when they capture live Bantag.”

  A
ndrew nodded. It had troubled him as well. Though it was a war of no prisoners, still he expected his army to fight cleanly. If there were wounded Bantag, dispatch them and get it over with. He had placed strict orders against anything beyond that, but as for enforcing those orders …

  “I’ll look into it. We have to keep discipline, and no, Vincent will not take the field again, especially in this weather.”

  “And what is happening with you?” she asked softly.

  Andrew nodded to the papers. “Tens of thousands of refugees, especially children and nursing mothers, had to be evacuated on the last trains out to Suzdal and relocated for the winter. Transport of supplies shifted from rail to boat in order to keep Roum alive. Production problems on the new flyers, Kal fighting with Congress, Marcus still upset about the withdraw from Capua, worried about how we’ll keep Hans’s front in operation. The usual.”

  She smiled and reached out to touch his cheek. It made him feel self-conscious. In the previous year his hair had gone to gray, and now a great shock of it was streaked from his forehead back. When he looked in the mirror to shave, he saw wrinkles about the corner of his eyes, his cheeks sinking in. Something seemed to happen, he thought, as you roll past forty. The aging speeds up. Funny, in a way he still felt in his early thirties, the age when he had first taken to the field, but his body was telling him different. How many more campaigns are still inside me? Pray God this is the last one, at least for this generation.

  And when it does end, if we win, then what? Back on Earth, when the dream had drifted of a life after the war, it had been to return to Bowdoin. Even that, however, was a dream that had paled. He had sensed that no matter what came afterward, the pivotal events of his life were unfolding on the field of battle and everything afterward would be anticlimatic.

  Never did I dream of ten more years of war, especially this kind of war, he thought. He looked at her, wondering what it would be like to live with her in a time of peace. Good, it would be good. At least the fear would be gone; and the children could grow unafraid.

  But then what? Teach, most likely. Gates, the eternal optimist, was already talking about Andrew writing his memoirs and an official history of the campaigns of the 35th Maine.

  The 35th. Even that was becoming a ghost of things past. Maybe half a dozen of the original men who served in that unit back in 1862 were still in action. The regiment was now the West Point of this world, the training unit for young men destined to higher rank in the army. The 35th was coming forward, pulled from its barracks at Suzdal to serve at the front. It would be good to see the precious colors again, a last link with Maine.

  Maine. Just thinking of it conjured again the fine scent of a summer day, rich with pine and salt air. Or up on the lake in the autumn, the haunting cries of the loons in the moonlight, the call of Canadian geese at dawn as they took wing on their southward journey. He sighed with the memory.

  Tomorrow the front again. How many times have I played chance with death and beaten it? How many more times? He sensed, of late, an exhaustion with the game, a deadening of the senses, a feeling that it would simply go on and on until finally the darkness won. Pray if that’s the case, let it be swift, not lingering under the knife, or worse, crippled, an object of pity, consigned to some chair by a window and then forgotten.

  Maine. If only that was still real. To retreat to that precious land, a land that was once his entire life …

  “Andrew?”

  Surprised, he looked up and saw her staring at him.

  “You haven’t said a word in five minutes, Andrew. Are you all right?”

  He smiled. “Just tired.”

  She leaned over and kissed him lightly on the forehead.

  “Not too tired I hope, dear,” she whispered. Extending her hand, she led him out from behind the desk.

  For a brief instant he looked back at all that still had to be done. Pat was back at the front, he was to go up tomorrow to observe, all this had to be cleared out first.

  “Tomorrow, Andrew me darlin’,” she whispered, deliberately slipping into a lilting brogue which she knew could always work its spell.

  “Tomorrow,” he whispered, glad that she would at least block out, for a few minutes, all the fears and all the memories.

  Chapter Four

  “A good day for a fight it is,” Pat announced cheerily, coming to attention and saluting as Andrew stepped down from the armored train, which was coasting to a stop. Pat, having come back up to the front immediately after the meeting, was obviously exhausted; most likely he had been up all night directing the evacuation of the line.

  Even above the sound of the venting steam Andrew could hear the sharp reports of artillery. On a low ridge, a mile to the north, he saw a battery dug in around the rubble of an abandoned villa firing at an unseen target.

  “Probing on the flank, ironclads, at least twenty of them coming down.”

  Pat pulled a burned-out cigar from his mouth and motioned toward a wooded grove to the left and rear of the villa. Half a dozen ironclads were in reserve waiting for the enemy, while a thin line of calvary were mounting up and deploying farther back to the west.

  “Been coming out in echelon since dawn.”

  “How wide a front?”

  “Five miles or so, but it looks like the main blow is shaping up here, trying to cut this rail depot before the last of the troops get out of the town.”

  Andrew said nothing. Pat was a master of the fighting withdrawal. His final sting would be the ironclads, though that tactic did worry Andrew. If the enemy came on too fast, the precious machines might have to be abandoned, since it took time to load them onto the trains.

  Straight ahead, the scene had an apocalyptic aura to it. The city of Capua was on fire, the pillar of coiling smoke rising straight up on the still morning air, mushrooming out, the image dark and sinister. The dark column blocked the morning sun, so that the landscape seemed dim, shadowy, illuminated more by the soaring flames than by the cold winter sun.

  Trains lined the sidings which had been hastily constructed in anticipation that here would be the front line. Regiments pulled out from the front under cover of darkness were wearily loading into the boxcars, men moving slowly, stiffly, gratefully holding out their tin cups and canteens as they shuffled past a commissary unit that had been boiling up hundreds of gallons of tea. Once past the tea they opened their haversacks for commissary department women who dumped in handfuls of hardtack, salted pork, and dried beans. The endless column shuffled by, oblivious to the bombardment raging along the ridgeline.

  Another train, fully loaded with three regiments of troops, started up, pulling out of the siding and onto the main track heading west. Five more trains were lined up, waiting for the last of the troops, the last division of infantry to leave the flaming city of Capua behind. The withdrawal had gone without a hitch. Two corps had disengaged and pulled out by foot two days ago. Two more corps had evacuated yesterday and were now fifteen miles to the west, while the last two corps had been pulled out during the night. After years of experience his railroaders were masters at the game, and he felt they would have beaten the old United States Military Railroad hands down when it came to operations in support of an army totally dependent on the railroad for survival.

  Even his own train was a masterpiece of design. Heavily armored, the cab in front of the engine carried two gatling guns, powered by a steam line hooked back to the engine. Two cabs behind carried six breechloading fieldpieces and two more gatlings, and a car was loaded with extra rails and tools in case they came across a break in the line.

  Andrew filtered into the group of weary infantrymen shuffling past, motioning for the men to stand at ease.

  “Which unit you boys with?”

  “16th Suzdal, sir,” a hollow-eyed boy replied.

  Andrew did a quick mental check; 3rd Division, 6th Corps, three weeks on the front line.

  “You’ll get a couple days’ relief back at Roum, son— warm food, beds, a roof over
your head.”

  The boy nodded, and for a second Andrew thought the lad was about to break down in tears.

  “Tough time up there?”

  “Lost near to half the regiment,” a sergeant interjected. “Sir, did you just say a couple of days? Rumor was we were pulling back to Hispania, maybe to Kev, and wait till spring before we fought again.”

  Andrew shook his head.

  “Sorry, sergeant. We’re building defenses around Roum. We hold there.”

  “Let Roum defend itself,” someone behind Andrew said.

  Andrew turned around and saw an angry captain, frozen bandage around his forehead, glaring defiance.

  “Captain, they’re our comrades, part of the Republic. We can’t abandon the city without a flight.”

  “Hell, we abandoned all of Rus against the Merki. The boys here figure let’s do the same again but this time let Roum carry the cost. Some folks said the Bantag won’t come any farther if they get Roum.”

  “That’s what the Bantag want us to believe.”

  “Well sir, my boys here, they’ve been out in the middle of nowhere for three months now. Every day retreating. We thought we had ’em stopped all the way up on the Shenandoah. Then it was to Port Lincoln. Then we fought at the Rocky Hill. Then on the retreat all the way back to here at Capua. Now it’s Roum. Sir, we’ll get surrounded in there, our backs to the sea. They could move on to our homes, and then where will we be?”

  “In Roum, son. They try to move on Suzdal and we cut them off from behind.”

  “Let Roum fight for Roum, sir.”

  Andrew tensed, and the captain, suddenly sensing he’d gone too far, lowered his head, waiting for the blow.

  Andrew stared at the captain, not sure for a moment how to react. It had been a long time since someone in the ranks had so openly questioned his strategy. He looked sidelong at Pat, who stood at the back of the group, arms folded, a bit of a mischievous grin lighting his features.