Harry Turtledove - Drive to the East

As if to underscore that, MacArthur said, “See you in Richmond, then,” and slammed down the telephone. Dowling slowly replaced his own handset in its cradle. See you in Richmond? MacArthur would either make good on the boast or an awful lot of young men would die trying.

Dowling knew which way he would bet. He couldn’t say anything about that, not to anybody, not without being accused of deliberately damaging morale. He couldn’t even get on the telephone to Philadelphia, the way he had when MacArthur proposed the amphibious operation aimed at the mouth of the James. That had been madness. This might work. Dowling didn’t think it would, but he had to give his superior the benefit of the doubt.

He said something filthy. However much he’d longed for combat posts, he’d spent much of his career either as Custer’s adjutant or on occupation duty in Utah-his main job there, in fact, had been to keep that from turning into a combat post, and he’d done it. Now he had what he’d always wanted. He had it, and he hadn’t covered himself with glory in it. Maybe he wasn’t cut out to be a hero. Or maybe he should have been more careful about what he wished for, lest he get it.

Jake Featherston peered down from Marye’s Heights over the town of Fredericksburg toward the Rappahannock and the damnyankees on the other side. He turned to Nathan Bedford Forrest III, who stood by his side. “I was right about here when the last war ended,” the President of the CSA said.

“Yes, sir,” replied the chief of the Confederate General Staff, who’d been too young to fight in the Great War.

“Well, I was, goddammit,” Featherston said. “When the order to cease fire came, I waited till the very last minute. Then I took the breech block out of my piece and chucked it in that creek over yonder.” He pointed. “I was damned if the United States were gonna get anything they could use from me.”

“Yes, sir,” Forrest repeated, adding, “That sounds like you.”

“Good. It ought to,” Jake said, more than a little smugly. “Maybe what pissed me off most about having to quit, though, was that I could have killed every damnyankee in the world from right here, if the bastards kept coming at me and my ammo held out.”

“It’s a good position,” Forrest allowed. “Not as good as it would have been in the Great War-artillery’s better now than it was then, and barrels and bombers are a hell of a lot better. But it’s still mighty good.”

“I know it is,” Jake said. “That’s how come I was more than half disappointed we didn’t let the enemy get into Fredericksburg and then try to storm these heights. We’d have been shooting ’em till they got sick of trying.”

Nathan Bedford Forrest III frowned. “Conventional wisdom says you don’t want to let them have a bridgehead if you can help it. You can get around conventional wisdom a lot of the time, but not always. That foothold they’ve got south of the Rapidan in the Wilderness still worries me.”

One of the reasons Forrest headed the General Staff was that he wasn’t afraid to speak his mind, even to the President of the Confederate States. Jake asked, “Are you telling me they might break through if they cross the river here? We couldn’t hold ’em and drive ’em back?”

Forrest scratched his mustache with his right thumb. “Odds are we could, but it’s not a sure thing. Remember, sir, they kept fighting after we thought they wouldn’t.”

After you thought they wouldn’t, he meant. Featherston couldn’t even swear at him, not when he wasn’t wrong. Because Forrest spoke his mind, Jake handled him more carefully than he would have dealt with some Party yes-man. “What’s your judgment, then, General? If you reckon the risk is too high, we won’t take it. But if you don’t, this looks like a dandy place to bleed the damnyankees white.”

“If everything goes well, sir, we ought to be able to do that,” Forrest said at last. “If things go wrong, though… If things go wrong, we’ve given ourselves a lot of trouble that we didn’t have to. And remember, Mr. President-we’ll need more men here to bleed the Yankees than we would if we just kept ’em on the north bank of the Rappahannock. Those are men we wouldn’t be able to use for other operations. The one thing the Yankees always have is more men than we do. So which is more important to you?”

Featherston smiled. He almost laughed out loud. He’d put the burden on Forrest’s shoulders, and the chief of the General Staff had put it right back on his. And Forrest’s question was a serious one. Jake hated nothing worse than being deflected from any purpose of his-indeed, he’d made a hallmark of being impossible to deflect. Here, though, Nathan Bedford Forrest III was speaking plain good sense, much too plain to ignore. “All right, dammit,” Jake said grudgingly. “Hold ’em on the other side of the Rappahannock if you can.”

He didn’t fail to note how relieved Forrest looked. “We’ll do that, sir, or we’ll do our best to do it, anyhow,” the general said. “If they try to force another crossing, they may get over whether we want them to or not. In that case, we’ll do our best to give you the killing ground you have in mind.”

He’s trying to let me down easy. Again, Jake almost laughed. He said, “All right, that’s how we’ll do it, then. Make your orders out that way. And make sure the other thing, Coal-scuttle, is going forward the way it’s supposed to. I want to make the United States feel the pinch, goddammit.”

“Things are moving into place on that one, Mr. President,” Forrest said. “Keeping a smaller presence here will help that, too. I don’t think you’d find anyone who’d disagree there.”

“All right. All right. You made your point.” No, Jake didn’t like being balked. It didn’t happen very often, not when he was both President of the Confederate States and head of the Freedom Party. He’d thought he knew just how Al Smith’s mind worked, but then the son of a bitch decided to go on with the war. And now this…

“Mr. President, we simply aren’t big enough to do two big things at once,” Forrest said. “That’s a nuisance, but it’s the truth. If we try to pretend we are, we’ll end up in trouble.”

“If you try to teach your grandma how to suck eggs, you’ll end up in trouble,” Jake said. Nathan Bedford Forrest III chuckled, though Jake hadn’t been joking. The President went on, “Let’s get back to Richmond, then.” He all but spat out the words. He’d wanted to take off his shirt and serve a gun, the way he had in the Great War. Things were simple then. With the enemy right in front of you, you went ahead and blew him up. You didn’t need to worry about anything else.

These days, enemies were everywhere: not just the damnyankees, not just the niggers who tormented the CSA, but fools and bunglers who wouldn’t go along and traitors who wanted to see him fail just because that would mean they were right and he was wrong. I’ll settle them all-every last one of them, Jake thought. By the time I’m through, this country will look the way it’s supposed to, the way I want it to.

As usual, he went back to Richmond in an ambulance. If U.S. airplanes appeared overhead, the Red Crosses on the vehicle ought to keep the Yankees from shooting it up. Also as usual, he had an ordinary-although armored-motorcar take him the last leg of the journey so no Yankee reconnaissance aircraft or spies on the ground would spot an ambulance going into the Gray House.

Bomb craters turned the grounds around the Presidential residence into a lunar landscape. And repairmen swarmed over the building itself. “Jesus!” Jake exclaimed. “How come nobody told me it got hit again?”