When he went into Madison, kids would ask, "Got any rations? Got any candy?"
No. Starve, you little ofay bastards. That was always the first thought that went through his head. But hating children didn't come easy. They hadn't done anything to him. And some of them looked hungry. He knew what being hungry was all about.
Then one of them called, "Hey, nigger! Got any candy?"
He didn't shoot the boy, who must have been about eight. That would have got him talked about. He did say, "You call me a nigger, brat, you can damn well starve for all I care."
The kid looked at him as if he were crazy. "Well, what are you if you ain't a nigger?"
"A colored fellow, or a Negro, or even a black man," Cassius answered. "Call somebody a nigger, it's an insult, like."
"You're a nigger, all right, an' you suck the damnyankees' cocks," the brat squeaked. He didn't get a handout from Cassius, or a lesson. He also still didn't get shot, but he came much closer to that than to either of the other two.
He'd likely feel the way he did till the day he died. So would countless others just like him. In the face of hate like that, what were the surviving Negroes in the CSA supposed to do? After the war ended, how could they settle down and make a living? If U.S. soldiers didn't back them, how long would they last? Not long-that seemed only too obvious.
And if U.S. soldiers did back them, the white majority-much larger now than before the murders started-would hate Negroes more than ever…assuming such a thing was possible.
"We is fucked," Cassius said sorrowfully. "We is so fucked."
"What? On account o' that ofay kid?" Gracchus said. "Little shithead run his mouth like that, he get hisself killed goddamn quick, an' nobody be sorry, neither."
"No, not on account o' him," Cassius said, which wasn't exactly true. "On account of everything." He started to explain, then gave up. What was the use? Once upon a time, he would have found a place in Augusta-not the place he would have had if he were white, but a place. He would have fit in. Now?
Now he carried a Tredegar, and he was ready to kill any white who got in his way. That too was a place…of sorts.
Chester Martin smoked a cigarette outside of Monroe, Georgia, and waited for the next raiding party to head east. The company-strength expedition had proved what the brass thought before-the Confederates hadn't had anything worth mentioning to oppose a U.S. thrust. Why not try it again, in greater strength?
To Chester, the answer seemed obvious enough. If you hit them there once, wouldn't they get ready to make sure you couldn't do it again?
Lieutenant Boris Lavochkin looked at him-looked through him-with those cold, pale Slavic eyes. "You're welcome to stay behind when we go, Sergeant," he said.
"You know I don't want to do that, sir," Chester said. "But I don't want to get my tit in a wringer, either, not when I don't have to."
"No guarantees in this business," Lavochkin said.
He wouldn't listen. Everything had come his way for a long time now. He thought it would keep right on happening. And he wasn't the only one. The brass never would have signed off on a raid if they didn't think it would fly. Maybe they were right. Chester could hope so, anyhow.
He did talk to Captain Rhodes, who, he was sure, knew his ass from his end zone. "If they're laying for us, sir, we'll be all dressed up with no place to go," he said.
"What do you think the odds are?" the company commander asked.
"Well, sir, we sure as hell won't take 'em by surprise twice," Martin answered.
"No, but how much can they do about it?" Rhodes said.
"Don't know, sir," Chester said. "I bet we find out, though. If I wanted to be a goddamn guinea pig, I would've bought myself a cage."
That made Captain Rhodes grin, but he didn't change his mind. "We've got our orders," he said. "We're going to go through with them. If we run into trouble, I expect we'll have backup. But I think we have a decent chance to bang on through, same as we did the last time around."
"Hope you're right, sir." Chester didn't believe it. Nobody above him cared what he believed. To the men in his platoon, he was God the Father to Lavochkin's Son and Rhodes' Holy Ghost. To the officers above him, he was just a retread with a big mouth. And the fellows with shoulder straps were the ones whose opinions mattered.
Two mornings later, the long, muscular armored column rolled down the road from Monroe to Good Hope, the same road the smaller raiding band had traveled not long before. Chester thought that might surprise whoever was in charge of the Confederate defenders. They wouldn't believe anybody could be dumb enough to hit them the same way twice running. Chester had trouble believing it himself.
They didn't run into any traffic on the way to Good Hope. They also didn't run into any ambushes, for which Chester was duly grateful. Maybe the C.S. brass really couldn't believe their foes would try the same ploy twice.
Good Hope looked like holy hell. Only a couple of people were on the street when the U.S. command cars and armored vehicles rolled in. The Confederate civilians didn't think the green-gray machines were on their side this time. They took one horrified look, screamed, and ran for their lives.
Maybe that did them some good; maybe it didn't. Machine guns and cannon cut loose as soon as the U.S. column came into the little town, and didn't let up till it rolled through. Martin looked back over his shoulder after he was outside of Good Hope. Clouds of smoke announced that raiders were on the loose. If the enemy had telephone and telegraph lines back up from the last assault, people were already letting C.S. military authorities know about the new one.
If there were any C.S. military authorities in this part of Georgia…Perhaps there weren't. Perhaps the Confederate States really were falling into ruin. Chester could hope so, anyhow.
Trouble came between Good Hope and Apalachee. The road went through some pine woods. The column stopped because a barricade of logs and rocks and overturned wrecked vehicles blocked it. Getting barrels up to knock the obstruction aside wasn't quick or easy, not with trees of formidable size alongside the narrow, badly paved road.
And as soon as the column bogged down, C.S. troops in the woods opened up with automatic weapons, mortars, and stovepipe rockets. Chester didn't think there were a whole lot of them, which didn't mean they didn't do damage. Several soft-skinned vehicles and a halftrack caught fire. Wounded men howled.
U.S. soldiers hit back with all the firepower they'd brought along: heavy machine guns and cannon on their vehicles, along with the rifles and automatic rifles and submachine guns the men carried. Nobody could come close to the column and live, which didn't help all that much when it wasn't going anywhere.
After half an hour or so, U.S. barrels did shoulder the roadblock out of the way. The column went on, minus the vehicles put out of action. When the soldiers got to Apalachee, they tore into it even more savagely than they had at Good Hope. Not much was left of the hamlet when they came out the other side.
Chester hoped they wouldn't duplicate the whole route from the last raid. That would give the Confederates more chances to bushwhack them, and would also mean they were tearing up more stuff they'd already wrecked once. He nodded in approval when they left the road and started cross-country, heading as close to due east as made no difference.
Whenever they came to a farmhouse, they shot it up. If the people who lived there made it very plain they were giving up-if they came out with hands high-the soldiers let them flee with the clothes on their backs. If they showed fight or even if they just stayed inside, they got no second chances.
A startling number of rural Georgians seemed to think a few rounds from a squirrel rifle or a shotgun would set the U.S. Army running. They paid for their education. None of them would ever make that mistake, or any mistake, again. Often, their families died with them.
"That's kind of a shame, sir," Chester said as a woman trapped in a burning farmhouse and likely wounded shrieked her life away.
"Think of it as survival of the fittest," Captain Rho
des replied. "If they're dumb enough to fire on us, they're too dumb to deserve to live."
"She probably didn't have a gun," Martin said.
The company commander shrugged. "She was dumb enough to marry somebody who did. We aren't here to talk to these people, Sergeant. We're here to teach 'em that fucking with the United States is as dumb as it gets."
Inside the farmhouse, cartridges started cooking off. The woman's shrieks mercifully faded. "I'd say she's got the point, sir," Chester said. "Fat lot of good it'll do her from here on out."
Before Rhodes could answer, Chester and he both heard airplane motors overhead. They expected U.S. fighter-bombers to pound whatever lay ahead of them. Then a fearsome scream rose with the rumble. Chester had heard that noise too many times, though not so often lately.
"Asskickers!" he yelled, and threw himself flat.
Anybody who could get to an automatic weapon opened up on the vulture-winged C.S. dive bombers. The Mules ignored the ground fire and planted their bombs in the middle of the thickest concentrations of vehicles they could find. One landed right on a halftrack. The fireball caught a couple of nearby soldiers and turned them into torches. The Asskickers came back again to strafe the U.S. soldiers. Machine-gun bullets stitched the ground much too close to Chester. He scraped away with his entrenching tool, not that it would do a hell of a lot of good.
And then the dive bombers were gone. Captain Rhodes looked around at the damage they'd done. "Fuck," he said softly. "You all right, Chester?"
"Yeah." Martin scrabbled in his pockets for a cigarette. "Boy, I forgot how much fun that was."
"Me, too," Rhodes said. "We've got used to dishing it out. That's a lot more fun than taking it."
"Bet your ass-uh, sir." Chester needed three tries before he could strike a match; his hands were shaking. Then he held out the pack to Rhodes. The company commander didn't waste time trying to light one on his own. He just leaned close to Chester and started his the easy way.
Lieutenant Lavochkin came up. "We ought to push on, sir," he said. "We can do a lot more damage before nightfall."
He didn't care about the air attack. All he wanted to do was keep hitting the Confederates. That was either admirable or slightly insane, depending. Captain Rhodes sighed and blew out a ragged plume of smoke. "We'll see to the dead and wounded, and then we'll go on," he said.
Some of the dead didn't leave enough remains to bury. Maybe the Confederates would tear up the graves the men in green-gray quickly dug, but Chester could hope they wouldn't. Plenty of C.S. soldiers lay in U.S. soil, for the most part quietly.
When the war was over, they would probably sort all of that out. They'd done the same thing after the Great War. By all the signs, this war was bigger and nastier than the one that had lasted from 1914 to 1917. What would they call it when it was done? The Greater War? The Worse War? Right now, it was just the War, commonly with an obscene adjective stuck on in front.
They did roll on after an hour or so, and took a would-be Confederate ambush from behind. The enemy soldiers seemed highly offended at that-those who lived through the encounter, anyhow. U.S. soldiers took prisoners, as much to keep their intelligence officers happy as because they really wanted to. One of the men in butternut complained, "Y'all weren't suppose to come where you did."
"That's what she said," Chester answered, which left his buddies laughing and the POW shaking his head.
Home guards and Mexicans tried to make a fight in Stephens and Hutchings, two little towns in front of Lexington. They got blasted out of the way in short order in both places. They were brave, but bravery and small arms and a few mines didn't go very far against halftracks and barrels. The two villages went up in flames.
Lexington was a tougher nut to crack. The defenders had a couple of quick-firing three-inch guns, leftovers from a generation earlier. For all Chester knew, they'd been sitting on the courthouse lawn ever since. If they had, somebody'd kept them well greased. And some old-timer-probably a guy a lot like me, Chester thought-knew what to do with them. Shells rained down on the advancing U.S. soldiers.
But the Confederates didn't seem to have any armor-piercing ammunition. Those three-inchers weren't made for barrel busting, anyway. They did hurt some men on foot and in soft-skinned vehicles, but that was enough to make the soldiers in green-gray angry without being enough to stop them. As the December sun went down, Lexington got the same treatment as the two smaller towns in front of it.
The U.S. soldiers camped in the ruins. "See?" Lieutenant Lavochkin said. "Piece of cake."
"Expensive piece of cake…sir," Chester said woodenly.
Lavochkin shrugged. "They paid more than we did. And we can afford it better than they can."
Both those things were probably true. In the cold calculus of war, they were also probably the only things that mattered. A guy who'd just stopped shrapnel with his belly cared about none of that. Chester lit a Raleigh and thanked God he hadn't.
O ne of the first things Dr. Leonard O'Doull found out about Sergeant Goodson Lord was that he hated his name. "My mother's maiden name, and I've got it for my first one," the new medic said. "If I had a dime for every time I got called Good Lord, I'd be a goddamn millionaire."
"I believe it," O'Doull said. "Didn't your folks realize what they were doing?"
"I doubt it," Lord replied. "Neither one of 'em's got much of a sense of humor, I'm afraid."
"How about you?" O'Doull asked.
"Me, sir?" Sergeant Lord gave him a wry grin. "I earned mine the hard way. It was either laugh or murder some yokking asshole before I was twelve years old."
"Well, I spent a couple of years working with a guy who answered to Granny," O'Doull said. "If I say Good Lord every once in a while, I may not be talking to you."
"Can't ask for more," Lord said.
"And I'll tell you one more time-careful about the women around here."
"Hey, I like screwing-who doesn't?" the noncom said. "I hope I'm not too dumb about going after it."
He didn't seem to swish now, even if O'Doull had wondered before. He was on the young side of thirty. Most guys his age would have said the same thing-unless they came out and admitted that they thought with their dick. "Try not to get murdered," O'Doull said earnestly. "I hate breaking in a new guy every couple of months, you know what I mean?"
"Sir, I will do my best," Sergeant Lord said.
He did his best with the wounded, too. He was at least as good as Vince Donofrio had been, and he was plainly a better anesthetist. O'Doull still missed Granville McDougald, but Lord would definitely do.
And the wounded kept coming in as U.S. forces cut off one road into and out of Atlanta after another. O'Doull worked like a maniac to keep the hurt men from dying or getting worse right away, then sent them off to field hospitals farther back of the line.
He spent quite a bit of time patching up a sergeant's left hand, which had taken a bullet through the palm. "I think he'll have pretty good function there," he said when the surgery was done. "Hope so, anyway."
"I bet he will, Doc," Goodson Lord said. "You really do pay attention to the little stuff, and it matters. I've seen some guys just stitch up a wound like that and let it go. They figure the doctor in the rear'll take care of it, and sometimes they're right and sometimes they're wrong. Myself, I always thought it was a lazy, shitty thing to do."
"I'm with you. The more you do right the first time, as soon as you can, the less you have to be sorry for later," O'Doull said.
Sometimes you couldn't do much. The corpsmen brought in a soldier in the mottled camouflage uniform of a Freedom Party Guard; he'd been shot through the head. "Why did you bother?" Lord said after one look at the wound.
"Well, you never can tell," Eddie answered.
That was true. Every once in a while, O'Doull got a surprise. But he didn't think he would this time. The wounded man was barely breathing. His pupils were of different sizes and unresponsive to light, his pulse reedy and fading. Brains and blood a
nd bits of bone dribbled out of a hole the size of O'Doull's fist.
"I can clean things up a little, but that's it," O'Doull said. "He's in God's hands, not mine." He didn't think God would hang on tight, either.
The Confederate died halfway through the cleanup. He gave a couple of hitching last breaths and then just-stopped. "That's a mercy," Sergeant Lord said. "Other mercy is, he never knew what hit him. How many bad burns have you seen, Doc?"
"One is a million too many," O'Doull answered, and the senior medic nodded. When O'Doull thought of those, he didn't think of seeing them, though. The smell, like pork left too long in the oven, rose up in his mind as vividly as if a burned barrelman lay on the table in front of him.
And they got themselves a different kind of casualty, one brought in not by the medics but by an irate platoon commander. "Sir, this sorry son of a bitch has the clap," the lieutenant said in a voice that seemed barely done changing. "Isn't that right, Donnelly?"
"'Fraid so," Donnelly said. "Hurts like hell when I piss."
"Well, we can do something about that," O'Doull said; guys with VD were just as much out of the fight as if Jake Featherston's men had plugged them. "Drop your pants, Donnelly, and turn the other cheek."
"You gonna give me a shot?" the soldier asked apprehensively.
"Yup." O'Doull readied the needle-a big one.
"I thought you got pills for the clap." Donnelly might well be fearless in the field, but he sure wasn't here.
"You used to. This penicillin clears it up faster and better, though," O'Doull said. "Now bend over."
"You fuck around, Donnelly, I'll have you bend over and I'll kick your sorry ass-I won't stick it," the kid lieutenant said.
By the expression on Donnelly's face, he would rather have got a kicking than a shot. But he saw he had no choice. He yelped when the needle went home. O'Doull pushed in the plunger with a certain malicious glee. "For Chrissake, wear a rubber next time," he said.
"It's like screwing in socks," Donnelly whined.
"Well, your sweetheart sure gave you something to remember her by," O'Doull said. "What did you give her?"
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