Harry Turtledove: The Grapple

Travis W.W. Oliphant scratched his head. He looked like a British cavalry colonel, or what Jerry Dover imagined a British cavalry colonel would look like. “See here, Dover, are you trying to mock me?” he said.

“Mock you? No, sir.” Dover scratched his head, too. “Why would you say that? I’m just trying to do my job.”

“You’re not a Regular,” the senior officer said.

“No, sir,” Dover agreed. “So what? I can still see what needs doing. I can still get people to do it, or else do it myself.”

“There are people in this unit who think you’re trying to show them up,” Colonel Oliphant said.

Dover scratched his head again. He blew out another stream of smoke. “Sir, don’t the Yankees give us enough trouble so we haven’t got time to play stupid games with ourselves? I work hard. I want everybody else to work hard, too.”

“We won’t get the job done if we wonder about each other-that’s for sure,” Oliphant said. “We’ve all got to pull together.”

“What am I supposed to do when I see some people who won’t pull?” Dover asked. “You know some won’t as well as I do, sir. Plenty of men in the Quartermaster Corps who like it here because they’re in the Army, so nobody can complain about that, but they aren’t what you’d call likely to see a damnyankee with a piece in his hand and blood in his eye.”

“You’re in the Quartermaster Corps,” Colonel Oliphant pointed out.

“So are you, sir.” Dover stamped out the latest cigarette and lit a replacement. “You want to send me up to a line battalion, go right ahead. I happen to think I help the country more where I’m at, on account of I really know what the fuck I’m doing here. But if you want to ship me out, go on and do it. I was in the line last time around. Reckon I can do it again. Where were you…sir?”

Travis W.W. Oliphant didn’t answer right away. He turned red, which told Dover everything he needed to know. Had Oliphant ever fired a rifle, or even an officer’s pistol, in anger? Dover didn’t believe it, not even for a minute.

“You are insubordinate, Major,” Oliphant said at last.

“About time somebody around here was, wouldn’t you say?” Dover saluted and walked away. If the high and mighty colonel wanted to do something about it, he was welcome to try. Jerry Dover laughed. What was the worst Oliphant could do? Get him court-martialed? Maybe they’d drum him out of the Army, in which case he’d go back to the restaurant business in Augusta. Maybe they’d throw him in a military prison, where he’d be housed and fed and out of the war. About the worst thing the goddamn stuffed shirt could do was leave him right where he was.

Did Oliphant have the brains to understand that? Did the colonel know his ass from his end zone? Dover only shrugged. He didn’t really care. Oliphant would do whatever he did. In the meantime, Dover would do what he had to do.

As soon as he stepped out of the butternut tent, a cold breeze from the northwest started trying to freeze his pointed nose off his face. “Fuck,” he muttered. He hadn’t been up in Ohio long, but the weather was really and truly appalling. Augusta got a cold snap like this maybe once in five years. Ohio could get them any time from November to March, by what he’d seen. He wondered why the hell the CSA wanted to overrun country like this in the first place.

Not all the trucks into which cursing Confederates were loading crates of shells had started life down in Birmingham. Some were captured U.S. machines, with slightly blunter lines, slightly stronger engines, and suspensions that would shake a man’s kidneys right out of him on a rough road. They had butternut paint slapped on over the original green-gray. They had butternut paint slapped on their canvas canopies, too. Rough use and rough weather were making it peel off. Dover hoped that wouldn’t get some luckless driver shot by somebody on his own side.

The drivers were safe if those trucks didn’t get moving. Dover rounded on a quartermaster sergeant. “What’s the slowdown about?” he demanded.

“Sir, we were suppose to get a couple dozen military prisoners to help us load, and they ain’t showed up,” the sergeant said stolidly. “We’re doin’ what we can with what we got. Ain’t like the last war-no nigger labor gangs up here.”

Jerry Dover muttered discontentedly. He’d never been a big Freedom Party man; he thought Jake Featherston was more a blowhard than anything else. Without Negroes, the Huntsman’s Lodge either couldn’t have operated at all or would have had to charge three times as much. Negroes had done a lot for the Army in the Great War. Not this time around. Featherston didn’t trust them-and he’d given them abundant good reason not to trust him.

Before saying anything, Dover eyed the quartermaster sergeant’s hands. They were muddy and battered, with a couple of torn fingernails. He’d been humping crates just like everybody else. Nobody could complain about effort. “All right, Sergeant. Do the best you can. I’ll track those damn convicts for you.”

“Thank you, sir,” the noncom said.

The convicts wouldn’t work the way Negroes would have in the last war. They’d know they were doing nigger work, and they’d do it badly just to remind people they weren’t niggers and the work was beneath their dignity. That they might get their countrymen killed because they worked badly wouldn’t bother them. That they might get themselves killed wouldn’t bother them, either. Showing they were good and proper white men counted for more.

Were Dover a convict, he knew he would act the same way. No less than the men who’d fallen foul of military justice, he was a Confederate white man. He’d probably had more experience with Negroes than any white since the days of overseers. That had nothing to do with the price of beer. There were some things a Confederate white man wasn’t supposed to do.

Of course, one of the things Confederate white men weren’t supposed to do was lose a war to the USA. If not losing meant they had to do some other things they wouldn’t normally, then it did, that was all. So Dover thought, anyhow. Some of his countrymen seemed to prefer death to dirtying their hands.

Shells burst a few hundred yards away. Dover didn’t flinch, didn’t duck, didn’t dive for cover. They’d have to come a lot closer than that before he started flabbling. Back in the last war, he’d learned to gauge how dangerous incoming artillery was. The knack came back in a hurry this time around.

Most of the older men working with these crates had it. Some of the younger ones didn’t. What did worry Dover was that the damnyankees’ guns were close enough to strike what should have been the Confederates’ safe rear in Ohio. That showed how badly things had gone wrong. With so many men dead or captured in and around Pittsburgh, the defenses farther west were crumbling. One U.S. thrust was coming west from Pennsylvania and eastern Ohio, the other southeast from northern Indiana and northwestern Ohio. If they met, they would enfold even more irreplaceable Confederate troops in a pocket.

Dover went over to the field telephone station. The state of the art there had improved a lot since the Great War. Then people used Morse more often than they shouted into field telephones, just to make sure their message got through. Now you knew the guy on the other end of the line would hear you.

Whether he felt like listening to you might be a different story. For years, Dover had battled people who tried to palm off lower-quality meat and seafood and vegetables on him and to give him what he needed later than he needed it. Now he turned all his suavity and charm on the Confederate military policemen who hadn’t delivered the promised convicts on time.