"I am, sir. Sergeant Hugo Blackledge." Blackledge likely wasn't happy to see company command go glimmering. Jorge wasn't thrilled about losing his platoon. The good news was that he wouldn't have to listen to complaints like Ray's so much. They'd be Burch's worry, and Sergeant Blackledge's, too.
"Well, Blackledge, why don't you fill me in?" Sellars said. He'd seen enough to know he'd be smart to walk soft for a while.
The sergeant did, quickly and competently. He said a couple of nice things about Jorge, which surprised and pleased the new corporal. Then Blackledge pointed northwest. "Not really up to us what happens next, sir," he said. "The damnyankees'll do whatever the hell they do, and we've got to try and stop 'em. I just hope to God we can."
F orward to Richmond! That had been the U.S. battle cry in the War of Secession. It would have been the battle cry during the Great War, except the Confederates struck north before the USA could even try to push south. And in this fight…
In this fight, the CSA had held the USA in northern Virginia. The Confederate States had held, yes, but they weren't holding any more. Abner Dowling noted each new U.S. advance with growing amazement and growing delight. After U.S. soldiers broke out of the nasty second-growth country called the Wilderness, the enemy just didn't have the men and machines to stop them. The Confederates could slow them down, but the U.S. troops pushed forward day after day.
A command car took Dowling and his adjutant past burnt-out C.S. barrels. Even in this chilly winter weather, the stink of death filled the air. "I didn't believe I'd ever say it," Dowling remarked, "but I think we've got 'em on the run here."
"Yes, sir. Same here." Major Angelo Toricelli nodded. "They just can't hold us any more. They'll have a devil of a time keeping us out of Richmond."
"I hope we don't just barge into the place," Dowling said.
He glanced over at the driver. He didn't want to say much more than that, not with a man he didn't know well listening. His lack of faith in Daniel MacArthur was almost limitless. He'd served with MacArthur since the Great War, and admired his courage without admiring his common sense or strategic sense. He doubted whether MacArthur had any strategic sense, as a matter of fact.
"I've heard we're trying to work out how to get over the James," Major Toricelli said.
"I've heard the same thing," Dowling replied. "Hearing is only hearing, though. Seeing is believing."
A rifle shot rang out, not nearly far enough away. The driver sped up. Toricelli swung the command car's heavy machine gun toward the sound of the gunshot. He didn't know what was going on. He couldn't know who'd fired, either. The shot sounded to Dowling as if it had come from a C.S. automatic rifle, but about every fourth soldier in green-gray carried one of those nowadays-and the other three wanted one.
Toricelli relaxed-a little-as no target presented itself. "Back in the War of Secession, they would have had a devil of a time taking the straight route we're using," he remarked. "The lay of the land doesn't make it easy."
"Around here, the lay of the land's got the clap," Dowling said. His adjutant snorted. So did the driver. An adjutant was almost obligated to find a general's jokes funny. A lowly driver wasn't, so Dowling felt doubly pleased with himself.
He'd been exaggerating, but only a little. The rivers in central Virginia all seemed to run from northwest to southeast. Major Toricelli was right. Those rivers and their bottomlands would have forced men marching on foot to veer toward the southeast, too: toward the southeast and away from the Confederate capital.
But barrels and halftracks could go where marching men couldn't. And U.S. forces were pushing straight toward Richmond whether Jake Featherston's men liked it or not.
So Dowling thought, at any rate, till C.S. fighter-bombers appeared. The driver jammed on the brakes. Everybody bailed out of the command car. The roadside ditch Dowling dove into was muddy, but what could you do? Bullets spanged off asphalt and thudded into dirt. Dowling didn't hear any of the wet slaps that meant bullets striking flesh, for which he was duly grateful.
A moment later, he did hear several metallic clang!s and then a soft whump! That was the command car catching fire. He swore under his breath. He wouldn't be going forward to Richmond as fast as he wanted to.
He stuck his head up out of the ditch, then ducked again as machine-gun ammo in the command car started cooking off. Embarrassing as hell to get killed by your own ordnance. Embarrassing as hell to get killed by anybody's ordnance, when you came right down to it.
After the.50-caliber rounds stopped going off, Dowling cautiously got to his feet. So did the driver. Dowling looked across the road. Major Toricelli emerged from a ditch there. He wasn't just muddy-he was dripping. His grin looked distinctly forced. "Some fun, huh, sir?"
"Now that you mention it," Dowling said, "no."
"We'd better flag down another auto, or a truck, or whatever we can find," Toricelli said. "We need to be in place."
He was young and serious, even earnest. Dowling had been through much more. With a crooked grin, he replied, "You're right, of course. The whole war will grind to a halt if I'm not there to give orders at just the right instant."
Who was the Russian novelist who'd tried to show that generals and what they said and did was utterly irrelevant to the way battles turned out? Dowling couldn't remember his name; he cared for Russian novels no more than he cared for Brussels sprouts. With the bias that sprang from his professional rank, he thought the Russian's conclusions absurd. He remembered the claim, though, and enjoyed hauling it out to bedevil his adjutant.
"They do need you, sir," Major Toricelli said. "If they didn't, they would have left you in Texas."
"And if that's not a fate worse, or at least more boring, than death, I don't know what would be," Dowling said.
While he and Toricelli sparred, the driver, a practical man, looked down the road in the direction from which they'd come. "Here's a truck," he said, and waved for it to stop.
Maybe he was persuasive. Maybe the burning command car was. Either way, the deuce-and-a-half shuddered to a halt, brakes squealing. Over the rumble of the engine, the driver said, "You guys look like you could use a lift."
"You mean you're not selling sandwiches?" Dowling said. "Damn!"
The driver eyed his rotund form. "You look like you've had plenty already…" As his eyes found the stars on Dowling's shoulder straps, his voice trailed off. Too late, of course, and the glum look on his face said he knew it. "Uh, sir," he added with the air of a man certain it wouldn't help.
"Just get me to Army HQ in a hurry, and I won't ask who the hell you are," Dowling said.
"Pile in. You got yourself a deal." Now the driver sounded like somebody'd who'd just won a reprieve from the governor.
Before long, Dowling repented of the bargain. The trucker drove as if he smelled victory at the Omaha 400. He took corners on two wheels and speedshifted so that Dowling marveled when his transmission didn't start spitting teeth from the gears. Other traffic on the road seemed nothing but obstructions to be dodged.
"What are you carrying?" the general shouted. The engine wasn't rumbling any more-it was roaring.
"Shells-105s, mostly," the driver yelled back, leaning into another maniacal turn. "How come?"
Major Toricelli crossed himself. Dowling wondered who was more dangerous, the Confederate fighter-bomber pilot or this nut. Well, if the shells went off, it would all be over in a hurry. Then, brakes screeching now, the driver almost put him through the windshield.
"We're here," the man announced.
"Oh, joy," Dowling said, and got out of the truck as fast as he could. Toricelli and the soldier who'd driven the command car also escaped with alacrity. The truck drove off at a reasonably sedate clip. The madman behind the wheel probably felt he'd done his duty.
A sentry with a captured C.S. submachine gun came up. "I know you, sir," he said to Dowling. "Do you vouch for these two?" The muzzle swung toward Toricelli and the driver.
Never saw 'em before. The
words passed through Dowling's mind, but didn't pass his lips. The sentry was too grim, too serious, to let him get away with them, and too likely to open fire before asking questions. "Yes," was all Dowling said.
"All right. Come ahead, then." The sentry gestured with his weapon, a little more invitingly than he had before.
Familiar chaos enveloped Dowling as he stepped into the big tent. The air was gray with tobacco smoke and blue with curses. People in uniform shouted into telephone handsets and wireless sets' mikes. But they just sounded annoyed or angry, the way they were supposed to sound when things were going well.
He remembered headquarters in Columbus, back in the first summer of the war. He remembered the panic in officers' voices then, no matter how they tried to hold it at bay. They couldn't believe what the Confederates were doing to them. They couldn't believe anyone could slice through an army like a housewife slicing cheddar. They didn't know how to do it themselves, and so they'd figured nobody else knew, either.
They almost lost the war before they realized how wrong they were.
Now they knew what was what. Now they had the barrels and the bombs and the artillery and the men to turn knowledge into action. Better still, they had the doctrine to turn knowledge into effective action. Yes, they'd learned plenty of lessons from the enemy, but so what? Where you learned your lessons didn't matter. That you learned them did.
One of the men at a field telephone lifted his head and looked around. When he spotted Dowling, he called, "Message for you from General MacArthur, sir."
"Yes?" Dowling tried not to show how his stomach tightened at that handful of words. Daniel MacArthur often seemed incapable of learning anything, and the lessons he drew from what happened to him verged on the bizarre. His scheme to land men at the mouth of the James and march northwest up the river to Richmond…
I managed to scotch that one, anyhow, Dowling thought. I earned my pay the day I did it, too.
"Well done for your progress, and keep it up," the man reported. "And the general says he's over the Rapidan River east of Fredericksburg and rapidly pushing south. 'Rapidly' is his word, sir."
"Is it?" Dowling said. "Good for him!" The Confederates had given MacArthur a bloody nose at Fredericksburg in 1942. There wasn't much room to slide troops east of the town. Abner Dowling wouldn't have cared to try it himself. But if MacArthur had got away with it, and if he was driving rapidly from the Rapidan and punning as he went…"Sounds like Featherston's boys really are starting to go to pieces."
"Here's hoping!" three men in Army HQ said in one chorus, while another two or three added, "It's about time!" in another.
Dowling liked prizefights. People said of some boxers that they had a puncher's chance in the ring. If they hit somebody squarely, he'd fall over, no matter how big and tough he was. That was the kind of chance the CSA had against the USA. But when the United States didn't-quite-fall over, the Confederate States had to fight a more ordinary war, and they weren't so well equipped for that.
Did Featherston have one more punch left? Dowling didn't see how he could, but Dowling hadn't seen all kinds of things before June 22, 1941. He shrugged. If the United States seized Richmond and cut the Confederacy in half farther south, what could Featherston punch with?
"Tell General MacArthur I thank him very much, and I look forward to meeting him in front of the Gray House," Dowling said. Forward to Richmond! Things really were going that way.
A s far as Dr. Leonard O'Doull was concerned, eastern Alabama seemed about the same as western Georgia. The hilly terrain hadn't changed when he crossed the state line. Neither had the accents the local civilians used. Shamefaced U.S. soldiers caught social diseases from some of the local women, too.
This penicillin stuff knocked those down in nothing flat, though. It was better than sulfa for the clap, and ever so much better than the poisons that had been medicine's only weapons against syphilis.
"Move up, Doc!" a noncom shouted at O'Doull one morning. "Front's going forward, and you gotta keep up with it."
"Send me a truck, and I'll do it," the doctor answered. Sergeant Goodson Lord played a racetrack fanfare on his liberated trombone. The soldier who brought the news thumbed his nose at the medic. Grinning, Lord paused and returned the compliment, if that was what it was.
By now, O'Doull had moving down to a science. Packing, knocking down the tent, loading stuff, actually traveling, and setting up again went as smoothly as if he'd been doing them for years-which he had. He was proud of how fast he got the aid station running once the deuce-and-a-half stopped. And every forward move meant another bite taken out of the Confederate States.
He hadn't been set up again for very long before he got a hard look at what those bites meant. "Doc! Hey, Doc!" Eddie the corpsman yelled as he helped carry a litter back to the aid station. "Got a bad one here, Doc!"
O'Doull had already figured that out for himself. Whoever was on the litter was screaming: a high, shrill sound of despair. "Christ!" Sergeant Lord said. "They go and find a wounded woman?"
"Wouldn't be surprised, not by the noise," O'Doull answered. "It's happened before." He remembered an emergency hysterectomy after a luckless woman stopped a shell fragment with her belly. What had happened to her afterwards? He hadn't the faintest idea.
When he first saw the wounded person, he thought it was a woman. The skin was fine and pale and beardless, the cries more contralto than tenor. Then Eddie said, "Look what they're throwing at us these days. Poor kid can't be a day over fourteen."
This time, O'Doull was the one who blurted, "Christ!" That was a boy. He wore dungarees and a plaid shirt. An armband said, NATIONAL ASSAULT FORCE.
"You damnyankees here're gonna shoot me now, ain't you?" the kid asked.
"Nooo," O'Doull said slowly. He'd seen National Assault Force troops before, but they were old geezers, guys with too many miles on them to go into the regular Army. Orders were to treat them as POWs, not francs-tireurs. Now the Confederates were throwing their seed corn into the NAF, too.
"They said you'd kill everybody you got your hands on," the wounded boy said, and then he started shrieking again.
"Well, they're full of shit," O'Doull said roughly. He nodded to the stretcher-bearers. "Get him up on the table. Goodson, put him out."
"Yes, sir," Lord said. When the mask went over the kid's face, the ether made him think he was choking. He tried to yank off the mask. O'Doull had seen that before, plenty of times. Eddie and Goodson Lord grabbed the boy soldier's hands till he went under.
He'd taken a bullet in the belly-no wonder he was howling. O'Doull cut away the bloody shirt and got to work. It could have been worse. It hadn't pierced his liver or spleen or gall bladder. He'd lose his left kidney, but you could get along on one. His guts weren't too torn up. With the new fancy medicines to fight peritonitis, he wasn't doomed the way he would have been a few years earlier.
"I think he may make it." O'Doull sounded surprised, even to himself.
"I bet you're right, sir," Goodson Lord said. "I wouldn't have given a dime for his chances when you got to work on him-I'll tell you that."
"Neither would I," O'Doull admitted as he started closing up. His hands sutured with automatic skill and precision. "If he doesn't come down with a wound infection, though, what's to keep him from getting better?"
"Then we can kill him," Lord said. O'Doull could see only the medic's eyes over his surgical mask, but they looked amused. The kid had been so sure falling into U.S. hands was as bad as letting the demons of hell get hold of him.
"Yeah, well, if we don't kill him now, will we have to do it in twenty years?" O'Doull asked.
"He'll be about old enough to fight then," Sergeant Lord said.
That was one of too many truths spoken in jest. But what would stop another war between the USA and the CSA a generation down the road? After the United States walloped the snot out of the Confederates this time around, would the USA stay determined long enough to make sure the Confederacy didn't ri
se again? If the country did, wouldn't it be a miracle? And wouldn't the Confederates try to hit back as soon as the USA offered them even the smallest chance?
"Once you get on a treadmill, how do you get off?" O'Doull said.
"What do you mean, sir?" Lord asked.
"How do we keep from fighting a war with these sons of bitches every twenty years?"
"Beats me," the medic said. "If you know, run for President. I guaran-damn-tee you it'd put you one up on all the chuckleheads in politics now. Most of 'em can't count to twenty-one without undoing their fly."
O'Doull snorted. Then, wistfully, he said, "Only trouble is, I don't have any answers. I just have questions. Questions are easy. Answers?" He shook his head. "One reason old Socrates looks so smart is that he tried to get answers from other people. He didn't give many of his own."
"If you say so. He's Greek to me," Goodson Lord replied.
They sent the wounded Confederate kid off to a hospital farther back of the line-all the way back into Georgia, in fact. O'Doull, who had a proper professional pride in his own work, hoped the little bastard would live even if that meant he might pick up a rifle and start shooting at U.S. soldiers again twenty years from now…or, for that matter, twenty minutes after he got out of a POW camp.
The front ground forward. Before long, Birmingham would start catching it from artillery as well as from the bombers that visited it almost every night. O'Doull wondered how much good that would do. The Confederates might be running short of men, but they still had plenty of guns and ammunition. The bombing that was supposed to knock out their factories didn't live up to the fancy promises airmen made for it.
Featherston's followers still had plenty of rockets, too. Stovepipe rockets blew up U.S. barrels. O'Doull hated treating burns; it gave him the shivers. He did it anyway, because he had to. Screaming meemies could turn an acre of ground into a slaughterhouse. And the big long-range rockets threw destruction a couple of hundred miles.
In At the Death sa-4 Page 22