Harry Turtledove - Walk in Hell

“Who are these? Why sit they here in twilight? Wherefore rock they, purgatorial shadows, Drooping tongues from jaws that slob their relish, Baring teeth that leer like skulls’ teeth wicked? Stroke on stroke of pain, — but what slow panic, Gouged these chasms round their fretted sockets? Ever from their hair and through their hands’ palms Misery swelters. Surely we have perished Sleeping, and walk in hell; but who these hellish?”

— Wilfred Owens, “Mental Cases”

George Enos looked across the Mississippi toward Illinois. The river was wide, but not wide enough to let him forget it was only a river. Here in St. Louis, he was, beyond any possible doubt, in the middle of the continent.

That felt very strange to him. He’d lived his whole life, all twenty-nine years of it, in Boston, and gone out fishing on the Atlantic ever since he was old enough to run a razor over his cheeks. He’d kept right on going out to fish, even after the USA went to war with the Confederate States and Canada: all part of the worldwide war with Germany and Austria battling England, France, and Russia while pro-British Argentina fought U.S. allies Chile and Paraguay in South America and every ocean turned into a battle zone.

If a Confederate commerce raider hadn’t intercepted the steam trawler Ripple and sunk it, George knew he’d still be a fisherman today. But he and the rest of the crew had been captured, and, being civilian detainees rather than prisoners of war, eventually exchanged for similar Confederates in U.S. hands. He had joined the Navy then, partly in hopes of revenge, partly to keep from being conscripted into the Army and sent off to fight in the trenches.

They’d even let him operate out of Boston for a while, on a trawler that had gone hunting for enemy vessels with a submarine pulled on a long tow. He’d helped sink a Confederate submersible, too, but the publicity that came from success made any future success unlikely. And so, instead of his being able to see his wife and children when he wasn’t at sea and to work like a fisherman when he was, they’d put him on a train and sent him to St. Louis.

He called up to the deck officer aboard the river monitor USS Punishment : “Permission to come aboard, sir?”

“Granted,” Lieutenant Michael Kelly said, and Enos hurried up the gangplank and onto his ship. He saluted the thirty-four-star flag rippling in the breeze at the stern of the Punishment . Kelly waited till he had performed the ritual, then said, “Take your station, Enos. We’re going to steam south as soon as we have the full crew aboard.”

“Aye aye, sir,” Enos said. Because he was still new to the Navy and its ways, he hadn’t lost the habit of asking questions of his superiors: “What’s going on, sir? Seems like everybody’s getting pulled on board at once.”

From some officers, a query like that might have drawn a sharp reprimand. Kelly, though, understood that the expanded Navy of 1915 was not the tight-knit, professional force it had been before the war began. The formal mask of duty on his face cracked to reveal an exuberant grin that suddenly made him look much younger: like Enos, he was tanned and lined and chapped from endless exposure to sun and wind. He said, “What’s up? I’ll tell you what’s up, sailor. The niggers down in the CSA have risen up against the government there, that’s what. If the Rebs don’t put ’em down, they’re sunk. But while they’re busy doing that, how much attention can they pay to us? You see what I’m saying?”

“Yes, sir, I sure do,” Enos answered.

“Mind you,” Kelly said, “I haven’t got any great use for niggers myself-what white man does? And if the scuttlebutt is the straight goods, a lot of these niggers are Reds, too. And you know what? I don’t care. They foul up the Rebels so we can lick ’em, they can fly all the red flags they want.”

“Yes, sir,” George said again. After the commerce raider snagged him, he’d been interned in North Carolina for several months. He’d seen the kind of treatment Negroes got in the CSA. Technically, they were free. They’d been free for more than thirty years. But-“If I was one of those Negroes, sir, and I saw a chance to take a shot at a Confederate-a white Confederate, I mean-I’d grab it in a second.”

“So would I,” Kelly said. “So would anybody with any balls. Who would have thought niggers had balls, though?” He turned away from Enos as a couple of other sailors reported back aboard the Punishment .

The river monitor was, in the immortal words that had described the first of her kind, a cheesebox on a raft. She carried a pair of six-inch guns in an armored turret mounted on a low, wide ironclad hull. She also had several machine guns mounted on deck for land targets not worth the fury of guns that could have gone to sea aboard a light cruiser.

Enos had been a fisherman, which meant he was adept at dealing with lines and nets and steam engines, even if the one the Ripple had carried was a toy beside the Punishment ’s power plant. Having made use in his first assignment of the things he knew, the Navy plainly figured it had done its duty and could now return to its normal mode of operation: his station on the Punishment was at one of those deck machine guns.

He minded it less than he’d thought he would. Any New England fisherman worthy of the name was a born tinker and tinkerer. He’d learned to strip and clean and reassemble the machine gun till he could do it with his eyes closed. It was an elegantly simple means of killing large numbers of men in a hurry, assuming that was what you wanted to do.

At Kelly’s shouted orders, sailors unfastened the ropes binding the Punishment to the pier. Black coal smoke pouring from her twin stacks, the monitor edged out into the Mississippi. The first hundred miles or so of the journey down the river, as far as Cairo, Illinois, were a shakedown through country that had always belonged to the USA.

Nobody got to relax, though, shakedown or no. Kelly shouted, “Keep your eyes peeled, dammit! They say Rebs sneak up from Arkansas and dump mines in the river every so often. Usually they’re full of malarkey when they say something, but we don’t want to find out the hard way, now do we?”

Along with everyone else, George Enos peered out at the muddy water. He was used to the idea of mines; Boston harbor had been surrounded by ring upon ring of minefields, to make sure no Canucks or Rebs or limeys paid an unexpected and unwelcome visit. He didn’t see any mines now, but he hadn’t seen any then, either.

A little north of Cairo, they took a pilot on board. The Spray , the steam trawler that had acted as a decoy for Entente warships, had done the same thing coming back into Boston after a mission. Here as there, the pilot guided the vessel through a U.S. minefield. The Confederacy had gunboats of its own on the Mississippi (though it didn’t call them monitors), which had to be kept from steaming upstream and bombarding U.S. positions and supply lines.

When sunset came, the Punishment anchored on the river, the Missouri Ozarks on one side, Kentucky on the other. Kentucky was a Confederate state, but most of it, including that part lying along the Mississippi, lay in U.S. hands.

Over fried catfish and beans belowdecks, Enos said, “When I got transferred here, I thought we’d be going down the river looking for Rebel ships heading up, and we’d have a hell of a fight. That’s what you read about in the newspapers back in Boston, anyway.”