Harry Turtledove - Drive to the East

Only a couple of hundred yards from the edge of the pocket, the Allegheny rolled south towards its junction with the Monongahela. Tom Colleton felt a certain somber pride at being where he was. His regiment had pushed as far east as any Confederate outfit. They’d done everything flesh and blood could do.

They’d done it, and it hadn’t been enough.

Confederate commanders had already refused two U.S. surrender demands. Tom didn’t know who was in charge over the twitching, dying C.S. positions in Pittsburgh. A light airplane had sneaked into the city and taken out General Patton at the direct order of Jake Featherston. Patton might be useful somewhere else later on. Nobody could do much about what was going on here.

The wind picked up. Snow started to swirl. Crouched in the ruins of what had been a secondhand book shop, Tom lit a cigarette. He muttered something foul under his breath. It was U.S. tobacco, and tasted like straw. He’d taken the pack from a dead Yankee. No way to get the good stuff from home, not anymore.

U.S. barrels rattled forward. Before long, the damnyankees would take another shot at overrunning this pocket, and they just might bring it off. Few Confederate barrels were still in working order. Even fewer had fuel. Fighting enemy armor with grenades and Featherston Fizzes was a losing game.

“Give it up!” a U.S. soldier shouted across the narrow strip of no-man’s-land. “You’re dead meat if you stick it out. We play fair with prisoners.”

Tom knew some of his men had thrown down their rifles and saved their skins. They had orders to hold out, but blaming them for surrendering wasn’t easy. Still, what would happen if-no, when-the Yankees didn’t have to worry about the Confederates in Pittsburgh anymore? How many U.S. soldiers and barrels and guns and airplanes would that free up? How much would C.S. forces elsewhere have to pay?

All those things mattered. Living mattered more to a lot of people. Tom was too hungry and weary to care anymore one way or the other. And he thought like a soldier. As long as he still had bullets in his rifle, he wanted to shoot them at the damnyankees.

He wasn’t a professional. He hadn’t gone to VMI or the Citadel or one of the other schools that turned out the Confederacy’s professional officer corps. But he’d made it through the Great War and through more than a year and a half of this one. He knew what he was doing.

He hadn’t had any experience when they gave him a captain’s uniform in 1914. But he’d come from a plantation-owning family. In those innocent days, they didn’t think he needed anything else. He was innocent himself back then. He was sure he would come home, the Yankees whipped, in time for the cotton harvest.

Innocence died fast on the Roanoke front. So did soldiers, in both butternut and green-gray. The dashing war he’d imagined turned into a brutal slog of trenches and barbed wire and machine guns and gas and always, always, the stench of death.

He’d lived. He hadn’t even been badly hurt. And he’d liked spending the next twenty-odd years as a civilian. He’d gone into this second war with his eyes open. This time, he’d known from the start the Yankees would be tough.

And everything went just the way Jake Featherston said it would. Tom was part of the lightning thrust that carried Confederate troops all the way to Lake Erie. No one could have imagined the operation would go so well.

And no one could have imagined having it go well could mean so little. Maybe my eyes weren’t so wide open after all, Tom thought unhappily. He didn’t know one single Confederate who hadn’t been sure the United States would fold up once they got cut in half. But the USA-again! — proved tougher than the CSA figured.

Pittsburgh, then. Taking Pittsburgh would surely knock the damnyankees out of the fight and give the Confederates the victory they deserved. Except they didn’t take it. And if they were getting what they deserved… In that case, God had a nastier sense of humor than even Tom had imagined.

Pittsburgh then and Pittsburgh now. Pittsburgh now was cold and smoke and blood and fear. Pittsburgh now was that Yankee yelling, “Awright, then, you ast for it!” Most of the time, letting your enemy know you were going to hit him would be stupid-idiotic, even. If you already held all the aces, though, what difference did it make?

Artillery and mortar fire came first. Dive bombers followed a few minutes later. The U.S. airplanes didn’t scream in a dive like Confederate Mules. They didn’t have an impressive nickname like Asskickers; nobody ever called them anything but Boeing 17s. The damnyankees made war as romantically as a bunch of insurance salesmen. But their uninteresting bombers did a fine job of blowing holes in the landscape where they needed them most.

“Barrels!” somebody yelled.

U.S. barrels weren’t as good as their C.S. counterparts. They had more of them than the Confederates did, though. In this pocket of Pittsburgh, that was all too painfully true. And after a while, quantity took on a quality of its own.

The leading U.S. barrel commander rode with his head and shoulders out of the cupola. He was brave and smart. He wanted to see more of what was going on than he could all buttoned up.

He didn’t see Tom draw a bead on him and fire two quick shots. He crumpled as if made from paper when they both struck home. Tom had long since forgotten about his sidearm. He carried a captured Springfield himself. In a battlefield full of artillery and machine guns, even a rifle seemed pitifully inadequate.

Tom worked the bolt and chambered a new round. Springfields didn’t measure up to automatic Tredegars, either. But they were good enough, or more than good enough. Despite losing its commander, the barrel still came on. Tom hadn’t expected anything else. The gunner would run the behemoth now. But it wouldn’t fight so well as it had with a full crew.

A machine next to it hit a mine and threw a track. That barrel slewed sideways and stopped. The five men inside stayed where they were. They could still use the turret and the bow gun, but they weren’t going forward anymore. The barrel’s steel skin protected them from small-arms fire. If a cannon started shooting at the crippled machine, they were in trouble. The Confederates in the Pittsburgh pocket were as short on guns and shells as they were on everything else, though. The Yankees in there might make it.

There weren’t enough mines to stop the rest of the barrels, either. The U.S. machines really were ugly compared to the sleek, elegant Confederate new models. It wasn’t a beauty contest, though. The damnyankees could do the job, which was the only thing that mattered.

If they kept coming, they would tear a hole in the C.S. line. Tom knew only too well what lay behind it: not much. He didn’t know what anybody in the line could do about it.

Some men were ready to give up their lives to try to stop them. Two soldiers ran out with Featherston Fizzes, wicks alight. A Yankee foot soldier cut down one of the Confederates before he got close enough to throw his. As he fell, the burning gasoline gave him his own pyre. Tom hoped he was already dead; if he wasn’t, that was a hard way to go.

But the other soldier flung his Fizz. Fire spread across a barrel’s turret and dripped down into the engine compartment. Paint and grease made barrels vulnerable to fire anyway. When the engine started to burn, too…

Hatches popped open as the crew bailed out. Tom Colleton wasn’t the only man who fired at them. One barrelman might have reached the shelter of a pile of bricks. The rest lay dead.

But all that only put off the inevitable. The Yankees had the firepower, and the Confederates didn’t. The Yankees threw reinforcements into the battle. The Confederates didn’t have enough men to begin with. Fight as the men in filthy butternut would, the pocket shrank.