Drive to the East sa-2

by Harry Turtledove

Pittsburgh then and Pittsburgh now. Pittsburgh now was cold and smoke and blood and fear. Pittsburgh now was that Yankee yelling, “Awright, then, you ast for it!” Most of the time, letting your enemy know you were going to hit him would be stupid-idiotic, even. If you already held all the aces, though, what difference did it make?

  Artillery and mortar fire came first. Dive bombers followed a few minutes later. The U.S. airplanes didn’t scream in a dive like Confederate Mules. They didn’t have an impressive nickname like Asskickers; nobody ever called them anything but Boeing 17s. The damnyankees made war as romantically as a bunch of insurance salesmen. But their uninteresting bombers did a fine job of blowing holes in the landscape where they needed them most.

  “Barrels!” somebody yelled.

  U.S. barrels weren’t as good as their C.S. counterparts. They had more of them than the Confederates did, though. In this pocket of Pittsburgh, that was all too painfully true. And after a while, quantity took on a quality of its own.

  The leading U.S. barrel commander rode with his head and shoulders out of the cupola. He was brave and smart. He wanted to see more of what was going on than he could all buttoned up.

  He didn’t see Tom draw a bead on him and fire two quick shots. He crumpled as if made from paper when they both struck home. Tom had long since forgotten about his sidearm. He carried a captured Springfield himself. In a battlefield full of artillery and machine guns, even a rifle seemed pitifully inadequate.

  Tom worked the bolt and chambered a new round. Springfields didn’t measure up to automatic Tredegars, either. But they were good enough, or more than good enough. Despite losing its commander, the barrel still came on. Tom hadn’t expected anything else. The gunner would run the behemoth now. But it wouldn’t fight so well as it had with a full crew.

  A machine next to it hit a mine and threw a track. That barrel slewed sideways and stopped. The five men inside stayed where they were. They could still use the turret and the bow gun, but they weren’t going forward anymore. The barrel’s steel skin protected them from small-arms fire. If a cannon started shooting at the crippled machine, they were in trouble. The Confederates in the Pittsburgh pocket were as short on guns and shells as they were on everything else, though. The Yankees in there might make it.

  There weren’t enough mines to stop the rest of the barrels, either. The U.S. machines really were ugly compared to the sleek, elegant Confederate new models. It wasn’t a beauty contest, though. The damnyankees could do the job, which was the only thing that mattered.

  If they kept coming, they would tear a hole in the C.S. line. Tom knew only too well what lay behind it: not much. He didn’t know what anybody in the line could do about it.

  Some men were ready to give up their lives to try to stop them. Two soldiers ran out with Featherston Fizzes, wicks alight. A Yankee foot soldier cut down one of the Confederates before he got close enough to throw his. As he fell, the burning gasoline gave him his own pyre. Tom hoped he was already dead; if he wasn’t, that was a hard way to go.

  But the other soldier flung his Fizz. Fire spread across a barrel’s turret and dripped down into the engine compartment. Paint and grease made barrels vulnerable to fire anyway. When the engine started to burn, too…

  Hatches popped open as the crew bailed out. Tom Colleton wasn’t the only man who fired at them. One barrelman might have reached the shelter of a pile of bricks. The rest lay dead.

  But all that only put off the inevitable. The Yankees had the firepower, and the Confederates didn’t. The Yankees threw reinforcements into the battle. The Confederates didn’t have enough men to begin with. Fight as the men in filthy butternut would, the pocket shrank.

  Tom stumbled back to the next line of trenches and foxholes. If he hadn’t fallen back, the damnyankees would have flanked him out and killed him. Oh, maybe he could have surrendered, but maybe not, too. U.S. soldiers treated prisoners all right-when they took them. They didn’t always. Sometimes they were too busy to be bothered. Then would-be POWs ended up dead. It wasn’t anything the Confederates didn’t do, just… part of the game.

  Another weary, unshaven Confederate soldier-a corporal-crouched in a hole a few feet from Tom’s. The noncom managed a smile. “Ain’t this fun?” he said.

  “As a matter of fact,” Tom said, “no.”

  “Reckon we’ll win the war anyways?” the corporal asked.

  “I stopped worrying about it a while ago,” Tom answered after a moment’s thought. “Whatever happens in the rest of it, I think it’ll happen without me.” He popped up and snapped off a shot at what might have been motion. It stopped. Maybe he’d cut down a damnyankee. Maybe he’d fired at nothing.

  “Freedom!” the corporal said. “That’s what it’s all about, ain’t it? Fighting so the Confederate States can be what they want and do whatever they please?”

  “I never thought about it much,” said Tom, who avoided Jake Featherston’s slogan whenever he could. “All I know is, I never liked the damnyankees. They gassed my brother and they bombed my sister, and I owe ’em plenty. I’ve paid back a lot, but I want to get some more.”

  Mortar rounds started falling. Tom pulled in his head like a turtle, and wished he had his own hard shell. Machine-gun bullets snarled overhead. Yes, this was going to be a big push. “Here they come!” the corporal yelled. “Freedom!” He fired-once, twice, three times.

  Tom fired, too, at the Yankees coming from the front. But more were slipping around the right flank. He turned and got off a couple of quick shots at them. Then he had to slap a fresh clip into the Springfield. An automatic Tredegar took a twenty-round magazine, not a five-round box. Of course, you could empty it faster, too.

  If he and the corporal didn’t fall back again, they were dead. The men in green-gray would surround them and hunt them down. “I’ll cover you,” Tom said. The corporal ran for a hole deeper in the pocket. He made it, then waved for Tom to follow him.

  Up. Run like hell. Hunch over to make yourself a smaller target. How many times had Tom done it before?

  This was once too often. The bullet caught him in the back. He spun and toppled. His chin hit the snowy, rubble-strewn ground. His legs didn’t want to work. He reached for the Springfield. One more shot. “Oh, no, you don’t,” a Yankee said. He fired from no more than ten feet away. And Tom Colleton didn’t.

  Awan early-February sun shone on the snowy, soot-streaked disaster that had been Pittsburgh. The last Confederate pocket on the North Side had surrendered, or was supposed to have surrendered, an hour earlier. Sergeant Michael Pound hadn’t made it this far by being trusting. He had a round of HE in the barrel’s cannon. If any of the men going into captivity felt like getting cute, he would do his damnedest to make sure they couldn’t.

  Lieutenant Griffiths stood up in the cupola. He had a much broader view of the devastation than Pound did. He said something in a language that wasn’t English. “What was that, sir?” Pound asked.

  The barrel commander laughed self-consciously. “Latin, Sergeant. From Tacitus, the Roman historian. ‘They make a desert and they call it peace.’ ”

  “Oh.” Pound weighed that. He approved of the sentiment, taken all in all. But he was not the sort of man to resist discordant details: “It’s sure as hell a desert out there, sir, but we don’t have peace.”

  “Not everywhere,” Griffiths agreed. “But nobody’s shooting at anybody in Pittsburgh anymore.”

  After another moment of judicious consideration, Michael Pound nodded. “Well, no, sir. Nobody’s shooting right here.” And if anybody in butternut tried shooting right here, Pound intended to shoot first.

  “Here they come!” Griffiths squeaked in excitement.

  Pound peered through the gunsight, his reticulated window on the world while he was in the barrel. The Confederates were a sorry-looking lot. Out they came, a long, draggling column of them, from the last few square blocks of Pittsburgh they’d held. Their breath smoked in the chilly air. None of them was smoking a cigarett
e, though. The U.S. infantrymen guarding them had no doubt already relieved them of their tobacco. Lucky bastards, Pound thought without rancor.

  The Confederates were skinny and dirty and hairy. They’d been living mostly on hope the past few weeks. Pound had heard of raids with the sole aim of stealing U.S. rations. If that wasn’t desperation, he didn’t know what was. When you were empty, any food looked good.

  A lot of the Confederates looked miserably cold. Their issue greatcoats were thinner than U.S. models. Some of the men were all lumpy and bumpy, because they’d stuffed crumpled newspapers under the greatcoats for a little extra warmth. Others wore a variety of captured civilian coats on top of or instead of their greatcoats. They didn’t have good winter boots, either. Those needed to be oversized, to allow for extra padding. They needed to be, but the Confederates’ weren’t.

  “There they are,” Lieutenant Griffiths said. “Jake Featherston’s supermen. They don’t look so tough, do they?”

  “Sir, if they aren’t tough, what have we been doing here since November?” Pound asked. Griffiths didn’t answer.

  A newsreel crew cranked away, filming the enemy soldiers’ trudge into captivity. Maybe the Confederates would look like beaten men on the Bijou screen in St. Paul. Well, they were beaten men-now. If Michael Pound knew the way propagandists’ minds worked, the newsreels would make the Confederates out to be weaklings and cowards. If they were, though, how had they fought their way into Pittsburgh in the first place? The newsreels wouldn’t talk about that. And most people, unless Pound was wildly wrong, would never think to ask.

  “I wonder where we’ll go from here,” Griffiths said.

  “Wherever it is, I don’t think it’ll be as tough as this,” Pound answered. It had better not be, or there’s no way in hell I’ll live through it.

  How many Confederates were holed up in that pocket? More than he’d figured. Some of them helped wounded men along. Others carried stretchers. How many unburied dead lay in the pocket?

  “Good thing we fought through the winter,” Griffiths said, thinking along with him. “Can you imagine what this battlefield would be like in August?”

  “Yes, sir, I can,” Pound answered. That probably wasn’t what the barrel commander expected to hear. But Pound had gone through the Great War. The stench of those fields soaked into your clothes, soaked into your lungs, soaked into your skin. You thought you’d never be rid of it. Pound still sometimes smelled it in his nightmares, so maybe he wasn’t even now.

  The young barrel commander sighed. “I sometimes forget you’re on your second go-round.”

  “Wish I could, sir,” Pound said. Was that strictly true? A lot of what he’d learned the last time around helped keep him alive here. Some of it helped keep Lieutenant Griffiths alive, too, whether Griffiths knew it or not. That wasn’t the main thing on the gunner’s mind, though. “Those damned foot soldiers will plunder the bodies. We won’t get a crack at ’em, and we’ll have to pay through the nose for good tobacco and whatever else they’ve got.”

  “Won’t be much of that stuff left,” Griffiths said. “They weren’t quite eating their boots when they gave up, but they weren’t far from it, either.”

  Michael Pound grunted, more in annoyance than anything else. The shavetail saw something he’d missed. It was supposed to be the other way around. Most of the time, it was-most of the time, but not always. “Well, sir, you’re right,” Pound said.

  “You’re a strange man, Sergeant,” Griffiths said.

  “Me, sir? How come?” Pound thought himself normal enough, or as normal as anyone could be after close to thirty years in the Army.

  “Well, for starters, you just say, ‘Well, you’re right,’ ” Griffiths answered. “Most people would want to argue and fuss.”

  “What’s the point?” Pound said, genuinely puzzled. “You are right. I said something silly, and you called me on it. You should have. If I tried to tell you it wasn’t silly, I’d just make a bigger fool of myself.” Clinging to a position that was bound to fall seemed as senseless to him as Jake Featherston’s failure to pull his troops out of Pittsburgh while he still had the chance. Being stubborn just cost you more in the long run.

  At last, the stream of Confederates slowed up. There were bound to be stragglers heading west and south, hoping to link up with other units in butternut or simply to get away. But for them, though, Pennsylvania was clear of Confederates. And if half of what people said on the wireless was true, Confederate control in Ohio was crumbling, too.

  “He’s not going to win, not anymore,” Pound said, thinking aloud.

  “I’m sorry, Sergeant,” Lieutenant Griffiths said. “What was that?”

  “Jake Featherston,” Pound answered. “He’s not going to win the war. I don’t see how he can now. Only question left is, can he still get a draw?”

  “Nice to know you’ve got it all worked out,” Griffiths said dryly. “Takes a lot of the strain off Philadelphia.”

  Pound laughed. “Good shot, sir. But I still think it’s true.”

  “Well, I hope you’re right,” the barrel commander said. “With this damn war, though, you never can tell. They’ve done some awfully surprising things. And so have we, now. The move that pinched off Pittsburgh was as pretty as you’d ever want to see.”

  “General Morrell knows what’s what,” Pound said.

  Griffiths started to rise to that, then caught himself. “No, wait. You were his personal gunner for a while. How did that stop?”

  “He got wounded, sir,” Michael Pound answered, remembering Morrell’s weight on his back when he carried the armor commander general to cover after a Confederate sniper hit him. “They didn’t think I deserved that long a vacation.”

  “And so now you’re stuck with me,” Griffiths said, his voice still dry.

  “You’ve got a pretty good idea of what you’re doing, sir.” From Michael Pound, that was highest praise. By the barrel commander’s quiet snort, he realized as much. Pound went on, “I hope we get a vacation after this. We’re way, way overdue for rest and refit.”

  “I know,” Griffiths said. “I haven’t got any more say over that than you do, though. We’ll go where they tell us to go and we’ll do what they tell us to do.”

  “Anybody would think we were in the Army or something,” Pound said.

  “Wonder why that is.” Lieutenant Griffiths grew intense. “Here come their big shots.”

  Pound peered through the gunsight. A few days earlier, he would have loved to put a couple of rounds of HE-or, better yet, shrapnel-on that group of eight or ten Confederate officers. All the men had three stars on the collar tabs of their greatcoats. All but two or three had those stars enclosed in wreaths, which meant they were generals, not colonels. They all looked to be in their late thirties or early forties, younger than most U.S. officers of similar grade.

  And they all looked as if they’d just watched a bulldozer run over their kitten. “They really didn’t think this could happen to them,” Pound said. “They’ve been whipping us for a year and a half. They figured it would go on forever.”

  “Too damn bad,” Griffiths said.

  One of the U.S. soldiers guarding the high-ranking Confederate officers carried an automatic Tredegar rifle, another a captured C.S. submachine gun. Pound wondered whether the colonels and generals in butternut appreciated the compliment. He was inclined to doubt it.

  “They get off easy,” Griffiths said. “They stay in a camp away from the fighting for the rest of the war, and the U.S. government pays their salary. The rest of us still have to go on out here.”

  Some of the C.S. officers looked as if they would rather be dead. If they were smart, though, they wouldn’t say anything about that to the men in green-gray who herded them along. The U.S. soldiers might oblige them.

  “If we get a refit, where do you suppose we’ll go next?” Pound asked.

  Lieutenant Griffiths ducked down into the turret to favor him with a wry grin. “I said that be
fore, Sergeant. I thought you’d have a better idea than I did.”

  “Not me, not now.” Pound shook his head. “General Morrell would tell me what was up sometimes. Far as everybody else is concerned, I’m just a damn noncom.” He spoke without heat.

  “Can’t imagine why that would be,” Griffiths said, and Pound chuckled. The young lieutenant went on, “Well, all I can tell you is, we’ll go wherever they need us most once we get our refit-if we get our refit.”

  “Sounds about right.” Pound pictured a map. He pictured what was likely to happen over the next few weeks. “Virginia or Ohio,” he said. “Whichever heats up fastest, I guess.”

  “I wouldn’t bet against either one of them,” Lieutenant Griffiths said. “I hope it’s Ohio, to tell you the truth.”

  “Me, too-we have a better chance of hurting them bad there, I think,” Pound said. “But wherever it is, by God, we’ll get the job done.”

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