Harry Turtledove - American Front

"Who's your battalion commander?" Wyatt demanded.

"Major Colleton." Jasper Jenkins got it out a split second ahead of Reg gie. As if to make up for that, Reggie added, "I don't think he was there when you all raided us-he was back at Division HQ."

"Was he?" Wyatt said in an interested voice. "What was he doing there?"

"Don't know, sir," Bartlett answered truthfully. He didn't like the expres sion on the Yankee captain's face. It spoke of bodies forgotten in shell holes. He touched his sleeve and said, "I'm just a private, sir. The only time officers tell me anything is when they tell me what to do." A chorus of agreement rose from his fellow prisoners.

"It could be." Wyatt's face went from grim to thoughtful. "It might even be true with us — and you Rebs, your officers are a pack of damned aristocrats, aren't they?" Somehow, he contrived to look languid and effete for a moment before turning to Sergeant Martin. "Next time we hit them, we have to catch some bigger fish than privates. These boys don't know anything."

"Raids like this, sir, you take what you can grab," Martin said, which matched Bartlett's experience in the trenches.

"Maybe." From the way Wyatt acted, that seemed to mean he was yielding the point. Sure enough, he jerked his head toward the opening to a communication trench. "All right, Sergeant, take 'em back. We'll let the chaps from Intelligence see if they have any — intelligence, I mean."

"Yes, sir," Martin said. He picked out a couple of his own men with quick hand gestures. "Specs, Joe, come on along with me. These desperate charac-ters'd probably knock me over the head and run off to assassinate TR in a red-hot minute if I was with 'em all by my lonesome." His grin said he was not to be taken seriously.

Reggie Bartlett felt like a desperate character, but not in the way the Yankee sergeant meant. If you were a prisoner of war, you were supposed to try to escape. That much he knew. How you were supposed to try was another question. He didn't have time to think about it. Martin gestured with his bayonet-tipped rifle. The Confederate prisoners got moving.

"Keep those hands high," warned the damnyankee with the glasses — Specs. Guys with glasses were supposed to be mild-mannered. He wasn't, not even close.

Confederate shells — a belated response to the gas barrage and trench raid- fell not far away as they went out of the front line. Reggie swore. He'd almost been killed a couple of times by short artillery rounds. What irony, though, to end his days on the receiving end of a perfectly aimed Confederate shell.

Martin and his comrades turned the Confederate prisoners over to other men farther back, then returned to their position. The grilling Reggie got from U.S. Intelligence seemed perfunctory — occupation before the war, name, rank, pay number, unit, a few questions about what they'd been doing and what they might do, and a few more questions, just as casual, about the state of morale of the Negro laborers attached to their units.

"Who pays attention to niggers?" Jasper Jenkins said. "You tell 'em what to do, they do it, and that's that." The man recording the answers, a wizened little fellow who looked like a born clerk, wrote down the words without comment.

When he was through with the interrogation, the wizened fellow said, "All right. You're going back to a holding camp now. Don't forget your pay number. We'll keep track of you with it. I expect you'll be bored. Can't help that." He nodded to a couple of guards in green-gray.

Almost, it was like going out of the line. Almost. The prisoners were marched back toward a railhead out of artillery range of Confederate guns. That felt familiar, even if nobody boasted about the havoc he aimed to wreak in saloons or brothels. Waiting for a train was familiar, too. Getting into a stinking boxcar that had once held horses was less so, although not unknown.

The train fought its way up over the Blue Ridge Mountains. That line hadn't existed before the war started. The Yankees had built it to haul supplies to the Roanoke front. It was a two-track line; several eastbound trains growled past the one on which Bartlett unhappily rode. "Damnyankees do a lot of haulin', don't they?" Jasper Jenkins said, his voice mournful.

Somewhere on the downhill grade — or rather, one of the downhill grades-they passed out of Virginia and into its breakaway cousin, West Virginia. When the train hissed to a stop, armed guards threw open the doors and shouted, "Everybody out! Move, move, move, you damn Rebs!"

Again, Bartlett might almost have been back in a rest camp. He went through the same surely useless delousing process he had then. He also had his hair clipped down to his scalp. The uniform he drew on completion of all that, though, was not his own. The tunic was tight, the trousers and boots too large. He complained about it. The fellow handing out clothes looked at him as if he were insane. "Shut up," he said flatly. Reggie shut up.

Prisoner barracks were of rough, unpainted wood, with spaces showing between boards. Reggie didn't look forward to that in winter. Bunks were similarly rough, and stacked on top of one another not double, not triple, but quadruple. He found a third-level one to call his own and climbed into it. "Home," he said sadly.

Evening was coming to Hampstead, Maryland. As far as Jake Featherston was concerned, it looked like a pretty good evening. The Yankees out in front of the Confederate lines had been quiet, and the battery had needed to fire only a few rounds at them. Some of those had been gas shells, too.

"About time," Featherston muttered to himself. The United States had been using gas against the Confederacy for months. Being able to respond in kind felt good. "Let those bastards worry about masks and goggles when we want 'em to, not the other way round."

He got his mess kit and went over to the stew pot Perseus had bubbling. Some damnyankee farmer was short a chicken. Jake found himself imperfectly sympathetic, especially when the Negro ladled a drumstick into his mess tin. He smacked his lips. Sure as hell, things were looking up.

He sat around shooting the breeze with his gun crew. It wasn't the same as it had been back in the old days, with the veterans who'd served beside him before the shooting started. But the new fish weren't virgins any more, either. "We've got us a pretty good gun here," Featherston said, looking back at the howitzer.

"The best," Michael Scott said. The loader was probably right, at least as far as the battery went. By their smug grins, the rest of the gun crew agreed with him. "We got us the best niggers in the battery, too," he added in the fond tones a man might use about a child of whom he is proud: the typical tones of a Confederate white talking about the achievements of a Confederate Negro. He patronized so automatically, he had no idea he was doing it.

"That they are," Jake Featherston said. His tone of voice was a little different: he'd used Nero and Perseus as men, however uncomfortable that had made both him and them. He shook his head. He neither particularly liked nor particularly trusted Negroes, and the principal reason for that was his certainty that they had more capacity than they showed. As an overseer's son, that worried him. The surprise you got if you kept thinking a man a boy was apt to be dreadful.

He didn't mention that the two Negroes had helped him fight the gun. The crew he had now knew it, but they seemed intent on pretending they didn't. He understood that; he tried to pretend it hadn't happened, too. Doing anything else tore a hole in the fabric of the Confederate way of life. He was glad Nero and Perseus hadn't turned uppity on account of their exploit. They would have been sorry for that, and some of the blame would have stuck to him, too.

He wandered over to see if anything was left in the stew pot, and came back with a couple of potatoes. The rest of the chicken seemed to have walked with the Lord, or more likely with the cooks. He shrugged. You had to expect that. Who ever heard of a cook's going hungry?