Harry Turtledove - Drive to the East

Michael Pound grunted, more in annoyance than anything else. The shavetail saw something he’d missed. It was supposed to be the other way around. Most of the time, it was-most of the time, but not always. “Well, sir, you’re right,” Pound said.

“You’re a strange man, Sergeant,” Griffiths said.

“Me, sir? How come?” Pound thought himself normal enough, or as normal as anyone could be after close to thirty years in the Army.

“Well, for starters, you just say, ‘Well, you’re right,’ ” Griffiths answered. “Most people would want to argue and fuss.”

“What’s the point?” Pound said, genuinely puzzled. “You are right. I said something silly, and you called me on it. You should have. If I tried to tell you it wasn’t silly, I’d just make a bigger fool of myself.” Clinging to a position that was bound to fall seemed as senseless to him as Jake Featherston’s failure to pull his troops out of Pittsburgh while he still had the chance. Being stubborn just cost you more in the long run.

At last, the stream of Confederates slowed up. There were bound to be stragglers heading west and south, hoping to link up with other units in butternut or simply to get away. But for them, though, Pennsylvania was clear of Confederates. And if half of what people said on the wireless was true, Confederate control in Ohio was crumbling, too.

“He’s not going to win, not anymore,” Pound said, thinking aloud.

“I’m sorry, Sergeant,” Lieutenant Griffiths said. “What was that?”

“Jake Featherston,” Pound answered. “He’s not going to win the war. I don’t see how he can now. Only question left is, can he still get a draw?”

“Nice to know you’ve got it all worked out,” Griffiths said dryly. “Takes a lot of the strain off Philadelphia.”

Pound laughed. “Good shot, sir. But I still think it’s true.”

“Well, I hope you’re right,” the barrel commander said. “With this damn war, though, you never can tell. They’ve done some awfully surprising things. And so have we, now. The move that pinched off Pittsburgh was as pretty as you’d ever want to see.”

“General Morrell knows what’s what,” Pound said.

Griffiths started to rise to that, then caught himself. “No, wait. You were his personal gunner for a while. How did that stop?”

“He got wounded, sir,” Michael Pound answered, remembering Morrell’s weight on his back when he carried the armor commander general to cover after a Confederate sniper hit him. “They didn’t think I deserved that long a vacation.”

“And so now you’re stuck with me,” Griffiths said, his voice still dry.

“You’ve got a pretty good idea of what you’re doing, sir.” From Michael Pound, that was highest praise. By the barrel commander’s quiet snort, he realized as much. Pound went on, “I hope we get a vacation after this. We’re way, way overdue for rest and refit.”

“I know,” Griffiths said. “I haven’t got any more say over that than you do, though. We’ll go where they tell us to go and we’ll do what they tell us to do.”

“Anybody would think we were in the Army or something,” Pound said.

“Wonder why that is.” Lieutenant Griffiths grew intense. “Here come their big shots.”

Pound peered through the gunsight. A few days earlier, he would have loved to put a couple of rounds of HE-or, better yet, shrapnel-on that group of eight or ten Confederate officers. All the men had three stars on the collar tabs of their greatcoats. All but two or three had those stars enclosed in wreaths, which meant they were generals, not colonels. They all looked to be in their late thirties or early forties, younger than most U.S. officers of similar grade.

And they all looked as if they’d just watched a bulldozer run over their kitten. “They really didn’t think this could happen to them,” Pound said. “They’ve been whipping us for a year and a half. They figured it would go on forever.”

“Too damn bad,” Griffiths said.

One of the U.S. soldiers guarding the high-ranking Confederate officers carried an automatic Tredegar rifle, another a captured C.S. submachine gun. Pound wondered whether the colonels and generals in butternut appreciated the compliment. He was inclined to doubt it.

“They get off easy,” Griffiths said. “They stay in a camp away from the fighting for the rest of the war, and the U.S. government pays their salary. The rest of us still have to go on out here.”

Some of the C.S. officers looked as if they would rather be dead. If they were smart, though, they wouldn’t say anything about that to the men in green-gray who herded them along. The U.S. soldiers might oblige them.

“If we get a refit, where do you suppose we’ll go next?” Pound asked.

Lieutenant Griffiths ducked down into the turret to favor him with a wry grin. “I said that before, Sergeant. I thought you’d have a better idea than I did.”

“Not me, not now.” Pound shook his head. “General Morrell would tell me what was up sometimes. Far as everybody else is concerned, I’m just a damn noncom.” He spoke without heat.

“Can’t imagine why that would be,” Griffiths said, and Pound chuckled. The young lieutenant went on, “Well, all I can tell you is, we’ll go wherever they need us most once we get our refit-if we get our refit.”

“Sounds about right.” Pound pictured a map. He pictured what was likely to happen over the next few weeks. “Virginia or Ohio,” he said. “Whichever heats up fastest, I guess.”

“I wouldn’t bet against either one of them,” Lieutenant Griffiths said. “I hope it’s Ohio, to tell you the truth.”

“Me, too-we have a better chance of hurting them bad there, I think,” Pound said. “But wherever it is, by God, we’ll get the job done.”