Harry Turtledove - Drive to the East

“Yeah.” Armstrong knew he’d lived through his opening brushes with combat as much by dumb luck as for any other reason. After that, he’d started to have a better idea of what went into staying alive when Featherston’s fuckers or Mormon fanatics tried to do him in. That gave him no guarantee of living through the war, something he knew but tried not to think about. But it did improve his chances.

Replacements got killed and wounded in large numbers, just because they didn’t know how not to. They didn’t dig in fast enough. They didn’t recognize cover when they saw it. They didn’t know when to stay down and when to jump up. They couldn’t gauge whether incoming artillery bursts were close enough to be dangerous. And that wasn’t the worst of it. The worst was that they got veterans killed, too, because they gave things away without even knowing they were doing it.

Most veterans tried to stay away from them those first couple of weeks. That wasn’t fair. It meant even more replacements became casualties than might have been otherwise. But it saved veterans’ lives-and it saved the pain of getting to know somebody who wasn’t likely to stick around long anyway.

A swarm of soldiers waited at the makeshift bus depot to go from the line back to some of the comforts of civilization: hot showers, hot food, clean clothes, real beds. Armstrong surveyed the swarm with a jaundiced eye. “Something’s fucked up somewhere,” he predicted.

“Bet your ass, Sarge.” That was one of the men already milling around. “Goddamn Mormons snuck a machine gun somewhere down the highway. They shot up a bus like you wouldn’t believe. Now everybody’s trying to hunt ’em down.”

“Christ, I hope so,” Armstrong said. “That’d be what everybody needs, wouldn’t it? — getting your goddamn head blown off when you’re on your way to R and R?”

“Sooner we kill all the Mormons, happier I’ll be,” the other soldier said. “Then we can get on with the real war. Finally starting to go our way a little, maybe.”

“Maybe, yeah. Depends on how much you believe of what they tell you.” Armstrong knew damn well the wireless didn’t tell the truth all the time. When he was in Ohio, it had gone on and on about U.S. victories and advances while the Army got bundled back and back and back again. He couldn’t prove it wasn’t doing the same thing about what was going on in Ohio and Pennsylvania now.

The other soldier spat a stream of brown tobacco juice. “There is that,” he allowed. Armstrong had thought about chewing tobacco himself. You could do it where the sight of a match or a glowing coal or even the smell of cigarette smoke would get you killed.

An officer called, “The route south has been resecured. Boarding will commence in five minutes.”

Do I want R and R enough to risk getting shot on the way? Armstrong wondered. He must have, because he got on the bus when his turn came.

When Cincinnatus Driver walked into the Des Moines Army recruiting station, the sergeant behind the desk looked up in surprise from his paperwork. Cincinnatus eyed him the same way: the sergeant held his pen between the claws of a steel hook.

“What can I do for you?” the sergeant asked.

“I want to join up,” Cincinnatus answered.

“Sorry, pal. We don’t use colored soldiers,” the sergeant said. “Navy takes colored cooks and stewards. If you want to, you can talk to them. You don’t mind my saying so, though, you’re a tad overage. That cane won’t do you any good, either.”

“You got a uniform on even though you got a hook,” Cincinnatus said.

“I was in the last one,” the recruiting sergeant said. “That’s where I got it. I’m no damn good at the front, but I can do this.”

“Well, I was in the last one, too,” Cincinnatus said. “Drove a truck haulin’ men an’ supplies in Kentucky and Tennessee. Been drivin’ a truck more’n thirty years now. Sure as hell can do it some more. Put me in a deuce-and-a-half and you got one more white boy can pick up a rifle and shoot at Featherston’s fuckers.”

“Ah.” The sergeant looked more interested. “So you want to be a civilian auxiliary, do you?”

“If that’s what you call it these days,” Cincinnatus answered. “Last time around, I was just a truck driver.” He eyed the man behind the desk. “They pay any better on account of the fancy name?”

“Oh, yeah, pal-and then you wake up,” the sergeant said. Cincinnatus chuckled; he hadn’t expected anything different. The veteran reached into his desk drawer and pulled out a fresh form. He did that with his left hand, which was still flesh and blood. Then he poised the pen over the blank form. “Name?”

“Cincinnatus Driver.”

After the sergeant wrote it down, he glanced over at Cincinnatus. “Heard of you, I think. Didn’t you get exchanged from the Confederates not so long ago?”

“Yes, suh, that’s right,” Cincinnatus said.

“You don’t call me ‘sir.’ You call me ‘Sergeant.’ ” The noncom scribbled a note. He handled the pen very well. As he wrote, he went on, “Just so you know, they’re gonna check you seven ways from Sunday on account of you were in the CSA.”

“They can do that,” Cincinnatus agreed. “They reckon a colored man’d help Jake Featherston, though, they’re pretty goddamn stupid.”

“Yeah, you’d think so, wouldn’t you? But it all depends,” the sergeant said. “Maybe they got your wife an’ kids down there, and they’ll feed ’em to the alligators unless you play along.”

“My wife an’ kids are right here in Des Moines,” Cincinnatus said.

“Good for you. Good for them,” the sergeant said. “You know what I mean, though. They’ll check. Now-you say you drove an Army truck in the Great War? What was your base? Who commanded your unit?”

“I drove out of Covington, Kentucky, where I come from,” Cincinnatus replied. “Fella who ran things was a lieutenant name of Straubing.”

The sergeant raised his right eyebrow. “Think he’d remember you?”

Straubing had shot a Confederate diehard dead on Cincinnatus’ front porch. With a jerky nod, Cincinnatus said, “Reckon he would. He still in the Army?”

“Oh, you might say so.” The sergeant wrote another note. “There’s a Straubing who’s a brigadier general in logistics these days. Might not be the same man, but you don’t hear the name every day, and the specialization’s right. You know what logistics is?”

Are you a dumb nigger? he meant. But Cincinnatus did know the answer to that one: “Gettin’ men and stuff where they’re supposed to go when they’re supposed to get there.”

“Right the first time.” The sergeant nodded. “Bet you did drive a truck in the last war. Where else would you have heard the word?”

“I done said I did.” Cincinnatus paused. “But I bet you hear a lot o’ lies, sittin’ where you’re sittin’.”

“Oh, you might say so,” the sergeant repeated, deadpan. “You sure you want to go through with this, Mr. Driver?”

“Yes, suh-uh, Sergeant-an’ I tell you why,” Cincinnatus answered. The sergeant raised a polite eyebrow. Cincinnatus went on, “You just called me Mistuh. Ain’t no white man anywhere in the whole CSA call a colored man Mistuh. Call him boy, call him uncle if his hair’s goin’ gray like mine is. Mistuh? Never in a thousand years. An’ if you don’t respect a man, you don’t have no trouble killin’ him off.”

“Uh- huh. ” The sergeant wrote something else on Cincinnatus’ papers. Cincinnatus tried to read what it was, but he couldn’t, not upside down. The man with the hook looked across the desk at the man with the cane. “Thanks for coming in, Mr. Driver. Like I told you, we’re going to have to look at you harder because the Confederates turned you loose. You have a telephone?”