Harry Turtledove - Drive to the East

Tom stumbled back to the next line of trenches and foxholes. If he hadn’t fallen back, the damnyankees would have flanked him out and killed him. Oh, maybe he could have surrendered, but maybe not, too. U.S. soldiers treated prisoners all right-when they took them. They didn’t always. Sometimes they were too busy to be bothered. Then would-be POWs ended up dead. It wasn’t anything the Confederates didn’t do, just… part of the game.

Another weary, unshaven Confederate soldier-a corporal-crouched in a hole a few feet from Tom’s. The noncom managed a smile. “Ain’t this fun?” he said.

“As a matter of fact,” Tom said, “no.”

“Reckon we’ll win the war anyways?” the corporal asked.

“I stopped worrying about it a while ago,” Tom answered after a moment’s thought. “Whatever happens in the rest of it, I think it’ll happen without me.” He popped up and snapped off a shot at what might have been motion. It stopped. Maybe he’d cut down a damnyankee. Maybe he’d fired at nothing.

“Freedom!” the corporal said. “That’s what it’s all about, ain’t it? Fighting so the Confederate States can be what they want and do whatever they please?”

“I never thought about it much,” said Tom, who avoided Jake Featherston’s slogan whenever he could. “All I know is, I never liked the damnyankees. They gassed my brother and they bombed my sister, and I owe ’em plenty. I’ve paid back a lot, but I want to get some more.”

Mortar rounds started falling. Tom pulled in his head like a turtle, and wished he had his own hard shell. Machine-gun bullets snarled overhead. Yes, this was going to be a big push. “Here they come!” the corporal yelled. “Freedom!” He fired-once, twice, three times.

Tom fired, too, at the Yankees coming from the front. But more were slipping around the right flank. He turned and got off a couple of quick shots at them. Then he had to slap a fresh clip into the Springfield. An automatic Tredegar took a twenty-round magazine, not a five-round box. Of course, you could empty it faster, too.

If he and the corporal didn’t fall back again, they were dead. The men in green-gray would surround them and hunt them down. “I’ll cover you,” Tom said. The corporal ran for a hole deeper in the pocket. He made it, then waved for Tom to follow him.

Up. Run like hell. Hunch over to make yourself a smaller target. How many times had Tom done it before?

This was once too often. The bullet caught him in the back. He spun and toppled. His chin hit the snowy, rubble-strewn ground. His legs didn’t want to work. He reached for the Springfield. One more shot. “Oh, no, you don’t,” a Yankee said. He fired from no more than ten feet away. And Tom Colleton didn’t.

Awan early-February sun shone on the snowy, soot-streaked disaster that had been Pittsburgh. The last Confederate pocket on the North Side had surrendered, or was supposed to have surrendered, an hour earlier. Sergeant Michael Pound hadn’t made it this far by being trusting. He had a round of HE in the barrel’s cannon. If any of the men going into captivity felt like getting cute, he would do his damnedest to make sure they couldn’t.

Lieutenant Griffiths stood up in the cupola. He had a much broader view of the devastation than Pound did. He said something in a language that wasn’t English. “What was that, sir?” Pound asked.

The barrel commander laughed self-consciously. “Latin, Sergeant. From Tacitus, the Roman historian. ‘They make a desert and they call it peace.’ ”

“Oh.” Pound weighed that. He approved of the sentiment, taken all in all. But he was not the sort of man to resist discordant details: “It’s sure as hell a desert out there, sir, but we don’t have peace.”

“Not everywhere,” Griffiths agreed. “But nobody’s shooting at anybody in Pittsburgh anymore.”

After another moment of judicious consideration, Michael Pound nodded. “Well, no, sir. Nobody’s shooting right here.” And if anybody in butternut tried shooting right here, Pound intended to shoot first.

“Here they come!” Griffiths squeaked in excitement.

Pound peered through the gunsight, his reticulated window on the world while he was in the barrel. The Confederates were a sorry-looking lot. Out they came, a long, draggling column of them, from the last few square blocks of Pittsburgh they’d held. Their breath smoked in the chilly air. None of them was smoking a cigarette, though. The U.S. infantrymen guarding them had no doubt already relieved them of their tobacco. Lucky bastards, Pound thought without rancor.

The Confederates were skinny and dirty and hairy. They’d been living mostly on hope the past few weeks. Pound had heard of raids with the sole aim of stealing U.S. rations. If that wasn’t desperation, he didn’t know what was. When you were empty, any food looked good.

A lot of the Confederates looked miserably cold. Their issue greatcoats were thinner than U.S. models. Some of the men were all lumpy and bumpy, because they’d stuffed crumpled newspapers under the greatcoats for a little extra warmth. Others wore a variety of captured civilian coats on top of or instead of their greatcoats. They didn’t have good winter boots, either. Those needed to be oversized, to allow for extra padding. They needed to be, but the Confederates’ weren’t.

“There they are,” Lieutenant Griffiths said. “Jake Featherston’s supermen. They don’t look so tough, do they?”

“Sir, if they aren’t tough, what have we been doing here since November?” Pound asked. Griffiths didn’t answer.

A newsreel crew cranked away, filming the enemy soldiers’ trudge into captivity. Maybe the Confederates would look like beaten men on the Bijou screen in St. Paul. Well, they were beaten men-now. If Michael Pound knew the way propagandists’ minds worked, the newsreels would make the Confederates out to be weaklings and cowards. If they were, though, how had they fought their way into Pittsburgh in the first place? The newsreels wouldn’t talk about that. And most people, unless Pound was wildly wrong, would never think to ask.

“I wonder where we’ll go from here,” Griffiths said.

“Wherever it is, I don’t think it’ll be as tough as this,” Pound answered. It had better not be, or there’s no way in hell I’ll live through it.

How many Confederates were holed up in that pocket? More than he’d figured. Some of them helped wounded men along. Others carried stretchers. How many unburied dead lay in the pocket?

“Good thing we fought through the winter,” Griffiths said, thinking along with him. “Can you imagine what this battlefield would be like in August?”

“Yes, sir, I can,” Pound answered. That probably wasn’t what the barrel commander expected to hear. But Pound had gone through the Great War. The stench of those fields soaked into your clothes, soaked into your lungs, soaked into your skin. You thought you’d never be rid of it. Pound still sometimes smelled it in his nightmares, so maybe he wasn’t even now.

The young barrel commander sighed. “I sometimes forget you’re on your second go-round.”

“Wish I could, sir,” Pound said. Was that strictly true? A lot of what he’d learned the last time around helped keep him alive here. Some of it helped keep Lieutenant Griffiths alive, too, whether Griffiths knew it or not. That wasn’t the main thing on the gunner’s mind, though. “Those damned foot soldiers will plunder the bodies. We won’t get a crack at ’em, and we’ll have to pay through the nose for good tobacco and whatever else they’ve got.”

“Won’t be much of that stuff left,” Griffiths said. “They weren’t quite eating their boots when they gave up, but they weren’t far from it, either.”