Harry Turtledove - American Front

Firebays like the one he and his companions were in led to other firebays advanced or recessed from them by a short stretch of perpendicular trench, a traverse, so that the line, if viewed from an aeroplane, took on the look of a postage stamp perforated with insane regularity. Just because your side held a firebay didn't mean the enemy wasn't still lurking in the next traverse.

Finding out who was in the next traverse — or the next firebay, if you were in a traverse-was not a job for the faint of heart. Neither was getting rid of those people, if they happened to be wearing butternut while you were in green-gray. One way was to go up out of the trenches and crawl along the ground between them. Doing that, though, was a lot like a snail's jumping out of its shell to run faster: the poor creature was all too likely to get squashed.

Charging round a corner was not recommended, either. The other fellow had had too much time to prepare nasty surprises for you. Nearing a corner of the firebay, Martin called, "Give up, you Rebs!"

The only answer he got back was a grenade flying through the air. It was thrown too far, and detonated on the level ground beyond the firebay. His own men knew how to reply to it. Several grenades, tossed with better effect, rained down on the Confederates. Grenades, Martin reflected, were handy things: they gave an infantryman a little artillery of his own. And, like artillery, they didn't have to wound to be effective. Even a near miss could leave a soldier shaken and stunned.

Martin bet his life the grenades had stunned the Rebs in the traverse for a couple of vital seconds. He charged round the corner of the trench. One Reb had been stationed there to deal with any such unwelcome newcomers, but he was down and thrashing, blood pouring from his belly out between his fingers. Followed by the men he'd gathered, Martin ran past him and around the next bend. Another Confederate was down there, and still others on their feet. "Hands up, you Rebs!" he screamed.

Reggie Bartlett could barely hear the screamed order to surrender. One of the grenades the damnyankees had thrown had gone off only a few feet away from him. He looked down at his trouser leg. He was bleeding. Neither the pain nor the flow of blood was too bad, though, so he guessed whatever fragment or nail had hit him had drilled straight through muscle without getting stuck there or slamming into bone.

"Hands up!" the Yankee sergeant yelled again. Reggie let his rifle fall to the mud of the trench floor and raised his hands over his head. He knew he and his companions were lucky to get a chance to surrender after they'd tried to fight back. A lot of times, in situations like that, the side winning the fight in the trenches left only the losers' corpses.

The U.S. soldiers swarmed over him, Jasper Jenkins, and the other privates who hadn't been hurt-or not badly hurt, anyway, as a couple of them bore minor wounds not much different from Bartlett's. Corporal McCorkle lay on the ground, moaning. The U.S. soldier shook his head. "Poor bastard must have taken most of a grenade's worth, right in the gut," he said.

"He had a lot of gut to take it in," the sergeant answered, truthfully but unkindly. He frisked Reggie with thorough haste, depriving him of his pocket watch, his wallet, and whatever loose change he had in his pockets. Bartlett made no move to stop him, understanding it would be the last move he ever made if he did. Confederate troops plundered Yankee prisoners just as enthusiastically when they got the chance.

Off toward either side and back deeper in the Confederate position, the sound of fighting was picking up. The U.S. sergeant peered ever so cautiously over the parados at the rear of the trench, treating it as if it were the parapet at the front, which, from his point of view, it was.

He fired a couple of rounds at whatever he saw back there, then shook his head. The iron kettles he and his men wore gave them a look as if out of another time, old and fierce and sullen. What with helmet, goggles, and mask, hardly any of his face was actually visible. One of his men, who wore ordinary glasses instead of goggles and whose eyes were red and teary, said, "We ain't gonna be able to hold these trenches, Sarge."

"Yeah, I think you're right," the sergeant answered regretfully after gauging the noise again. "We're bringing back prisoners, so the brass can't grouse too bad." He turned to Bartlett and the other captured Confederates. "All right, you lugs, up over the top and back to the American lines. Don't try anything cute or you'll find out how cute dead is."

Reggie had gone over the top a good many times, but never before with out a rifle in his hands. He felt very naked, very much exposed as he awk wardly got up into no-man's-land and scrambled back through the barbed wire toward the forwardmost U.S. trenches. A few of the damnyankees in those trenches shot at him and his comrades. He was glad they quit when they saw the Yankee soldiers coming along behind the men in butternut.

He'd hoped he'd have a chance to jump in a shell hole and have the sergeant and the rest of the Yankees go on by so he could sneak back to his own lines. It didn't happen. One reason it didn't was that the Confederates whose positions hadn't been overrun were shooting at the damnyankees, who bunched up close to their prisoners to discourage that. How were you sup posed to escape a man who kept stepping on your bootheels?

The unhappy answer was, you couldn't. Bartlett had jumped down into U.S. trenches, too, but this time the Yankees had rifles and he didn't. "Well done, Sergeant," said one of them — an officer, by his demeanor.

"Thank you, Captain Wyatt," the sergeant answered. "Long as you're back here, I don't suppose I'm in trouble for not holding onto that stretch of Rebel entrenchment."

"No, nothing to worry about there, Martin," the officer-Wyatt-said. "Sometimes we manage to advance a few yards, sometimes we don't. They're more ready to face gas than they used to be." He pointed to the mask on Reggie's face.

"Yes, sir." Sergeant Martin shed his own mask and goggles. He rounded on Bartlett. "All right, Reb, let's have it."

"Reginald Bartlett, private, Confederate States Army," Reggie answered, and recited his pay number.

"What unit, Bartlett?" Sergeant Martin asked.

"I don't have to tell you that," Bartlett said.

The sergeant glanced over to his captain. Like one of Martin's soldiers, Captain Wyatt wore spectacles. Behind them, his eyes were not only reddened by chlorine but thoroughly grim. "I'm only going to tell you this once, Bartlett, so you'd better listen hard — the rest of you Rebs, too. Do you know how many thousand miles this godforsaken chunk of Virginia is from the Hague?"

It wasn't a geography question, although, from the way Jasper Jenkins frowned and scowled, he thought it was. Reggie knew better. What Wyatt had just given him was a warning: no matter what the formal laws of war said about forcing information out of prisoners, he was going to ask whatever he was going to ask, and he expected answers.

"Let's try again, Bartlett," Martin said, proving Reggie had been right. "What unit?"

If he didn't talk, he knew exactly what would happen to him. He didn't want to die in a Yankee trench, without even a chance to hit back at the enemy. He wished the U.S. sergeant had picked someone else on whom to start the questioning. He wouldn't have been so ashamed had he been the second or third man to open up rather than the first.

"Seventh Virginia Infantry," he said rapidly. There. It was done.

Captain Wyatt turned to the rest of the Confederates. "How about you boys?" The other men fairly fell over themselves agreeing. Reggie wondered if Wyatt had called them boys to stress that they were as much his inferiors as Negroes were whites' inferiors in the CSA. If so, the captain was one devious fellow. Bartlett covertly studied him. That seemed likely.