Harry Turtledove - Marching Through Peachtree

And then, just when things finally seemed to have got back to normal, the roads opened out on a little northern town-one that wouldn’t have existed if it weren’t for a crossroads-called Dareton. Joseph the Gamecock had left a brigade of men behind there to skirmish with the southrons.

Colonel Andy, Doubting George’s adjutant, was indignant. “What can he hope to accomplish with that?” he demanded rhetorically. “He can’t possibly hope to hold us back.”

“To hold us? No, not when his whole army couldn’t at Borders or Caesar,” Doubting George said. “To delay us? To give him more time to settle in at Fat Mama farther north and make it tougher to crack? That’s what he’s got in mind, sure as I’m looking at those works ahead.”

“Not chivalrous,” Andy sniffed. “Not sporting, either.”

Peering at the fieldworks in front of Dareton, Lieutenant General George was inclined to agree. Red earth ramparts sheltered soldiers and made catapults and repeating crossbows harder for the southrons’ engines to reach. “He’ll try to do us as much harm as he can and then pull back,” George predicted.

“Let’s just mask his position and then go on,” Andy said.

But it wouldn’t be that easy or that cheap. By the way Joseph the Gamecock’s artificers had sited their wards, they’d made sure the southrons couldn’t pass on the open ground between Dareton and the forest to the east without coming in range of their weapons.

“Do you know what I am going to do?” Doubting George said, a certain bleak amusement in his voice.

“No, sir.” Andy didn’t sound amused at all. He sounded thoroughly indignant at Joseph the Gamecock.

“I am going to get rid of a cockroach by dropping an anvil on it.”

“Sir?” Andy didn’t get it. When the gods were passing out imagination, he’d been in line for a second helping of diligence. That made him an excellent adjutant, and would surely have made him a disaster as a commander.

“Never mind, Colonel,” George said soothingly. “I’ll show you.” He began giving orders.

The southrons’ siege engines rumbled forward on their wheeled carts. They started heaving stones and darts and firepots at the entrenchments in front of Dareton. The catapults in the fieldworks answered back as best they could, but Doubting George had ordered far more engines into action than Joseph the Gamecock had left with the defenders.

And George threw more men at Dareton than Joseph had left behind to hold the place-many, many more. The whole Army of Franklin might have held his assaulting force out of the town. Then again, it might not have. A single lonely brigade, however feisty, had not a chance.

Its commander soon realized as much. He left one regiment in the field to hold up the southron army for as long as it could, but got the rest of his men out of the trenches and marching through Dareton and on to the north. Here and there along the line, columns of smoke rising into the sky marked burning siege engines the traitors couldn’t take away with them.

All in all, it was a minor triumph of delay. Glum prisoners came trudging back through the southrons’ lines. They cursed the men who’d caught them, they doubly cursed every blond they saw in a gray tunic, and they cursed Doubting George when they saw him.

“Freeze in the seven hells!” some shouted, at the same time as others were yelling, “Fry in the seven hells!”

George turned to Colonel Andy. “If half of me freezes while the other half fries, on average I ought to be pretty comfortable.”

“Er, yes,” his adjutant replied, and George stifled a sigh. He’d long since realized Andy had not a dram of whimsy concealed anywhere about his person. That being so, why was he disappointed now? Because nobody likes to make a joke and have it fall flat, he thought.

“Forward!” he shouted once more, and forward the soldiers went. But the stubborn defense at Dareton had cost them three hours of marching time, at the very least. Joseph the Gamecock’s army was surely using that time to good advantage. George thought about marching his men into the night to make up for the time they’d lost.

He thought about that-and then dismissed the notion after one section of the army followed a looping country track through the woods that proved to double back on itself, so they took their comrades in flank. If they’d been northerners, his force would have been in trouble. As things were, straightening out the traffic jam and getting everybody on the right road took almost as long as smashing through the entrenchments in front of Dareton had.

Could we do this at night? George wondered. He shook his head. It struck him as unlikely. Weariness wasn’t the only reason armies halted when darkness fell.

And so the army encamped at sunset well short of Fat Mama. Campfires sent savory smoke into the sky, smoke made more savory by the meat roasting above a good many of those fires. Some of the meat came from cattle the army had brought along. Some, George was sure, came from local beasts that had met an untimely demise thanks to southron foragers. That was against the rules of war King Avram had set forth. To the king, the northerners remained his subjects and were not to be despoiled. The reality was that the northerners hated Avram and his soldiers, and those soldiers returned the disfavor. If they were hungry, they would eat whatever they could get their hands on.

Some commanders discouraged them. Doubting George looked the other way. The harder the time the north had, the sooner the war would end-that was how he thought of things.

And, as always happened when southron armies penetrated into a new part of the north, blonds on the run from their liege lords started coming into camp. Some were men alone, others whole families together. The army had plenty of use for laborers and washerwomen, and the liege lords who had to do without the labor of their serfs would, with luck, contemplate the cost of rebellion against their rightful sovereign.

Taking in blonds also had costs, though. George remembered the one who’d murdered his wife and the officer who’d been trifling with her, though he’d also died, at the officer’s hands. That had been a nasty business all the way around.

George grunted and shook his head. That was a nasty business on a small scale. The nasty business coming up would be much larger and much worse. One way or the other, this campaign and Marshal Bart’s in Parthenia would say who won the war, and why. “It had better be us,” George said, and rode on toward the north.

Captain Gremio found the little town of Fat Mama remarkable in no way but its name. It held a couple of thousand people, taking Detinans and blonds together, and had a main street full of shops, a few streets full of houses, the local baron’s keep, and not much else. Lesser nobles’ manor houses dominated the countryside, with the serfs’ shacks usually close by.

Except for the glideway path that ran through Fat Mama and the low hills to the east and south of the town, Joseph the Gamecock never would have stopped there. Gremio was sure of that. As things were, his company, along with the rest of Colonel Florizel’s regiment, filed into trenches already waiting for them, trenches Joseph had had the local serfs dig ahead of time.

“I’m sick of earthworks,” Florizel grumbled. “I’m sick to death of them, as a matter of fact.”

“But, your Excellency, it’s a lot easier to catch your death outside of earthworks,” Gremio said.

In the Karlsburg circles he’d frequented before the war, such wordplay would have got the groan it deserved, whereupon everyone would have gone about his business. But Florizel gave Gremio a look straight out of a Five Lakes blizzard and then limped on down the trench. Gremio wondered what he’d done wrong. Figuring that out, unfortunately, took but a moment. You just contradicted the regimental commander .