Harry Turtledove - Drive to the East

“Three inches, sir,” the man answered, proud as if he’d said eight inches of himself. “Some of those Yankees’ll never know what hit ’em. Seventeen-pound shell.”

“Sweet Jesus!” Tom exclaimed. “Yeah, that’ll make you sit up and take notice, all right. How many of these bastards have we got?”

“Many as we need, I reckon,” the driver said.

“Oh, yeah? I’ll believe that when I see it,” Tom Colleton said. In his experience, nobody ever had as many barrels as he needed. The enemy wrecked a few, some more broke down-and then, just when they would have come in handy to take out some well-sited, well-protected machine-gun nests, there wouldn’t be any for miles around.

But the driver nodded. Why not? He could duck down inside all that lovely armor plating. He didn’t have to look longingly at it from the outside. He didn’t have to worry about machine guns, either, no matter how well protected they were. He said, “Sir, don’t you fret. This time, by God, we’re going to get the job done.”

“Here’s hoping,” Tom said. The driver-a cocky kid-just grinned at him. He found himself grinning back. It wasn’t as if barrel crewmen didn’t have worries of their own. When they were in the field, they were cannon magnets. All the enemy’s heavy weapons bore on them. The armor that kept out small-arms fire could turn into a roasting pan to cook soldiers if something did get through.

“You’ll see.” Yeah, the kid was cocky.

He also sounded like somebody who knew more than he was letting on. “What is the job we’re going to get done?” Tom asked. He commanded a regiment; nobody’d bothered to tell him anything. He should have been miffed that a noncom from another unit knew more about what was going on than he did. He should have been, but he wasn’t, or not very. He’d seen enough in both the Great War and this one to know that kind of crap happened all the time.

Before the barrel driver could answer, somebody inside the machine said something to him through the intercom. Tom heard the squawk in the kid’s earphones, but he couldn’t make out any words. The driver said, “Sorry, sir-gotta go. Orders are to push up a little closer to the front.”

“Be careful,” Tom warned. “The damnyankees have started sneaking in more and more infiltrators. They like to plant mines, and their snipers try and blow the heads off drivers and commanders who don’t stay buttoned up.”

“Sir, we’ve got us this big ol’ cannon and two machine guns. I reckon we can make any old infiltrators knuckle under,” the driver answered. He ducked down into the barrel, but didn’t close the hatch. The engine’s note deepened as the machine rattled forward with its companions.

Tom stared after them, coughing a little from the noxious exhaust fumes. He would have bet everything he owned that the kid had never seen combat. Nobody who had was that casual about snipers. If the other guy shot first, how big your gun was or how many rounds per minute you could put out didn’t matter.

“Luck,” Tom muttered. If that smiling puppy lived through his first couple of brushes with U.S. soldiers, he had a good chance of living quite a while longer. You got experience in a hurry-or, if you didn’t, they buried you somewhere up here with a helmet stuck on a stick or on a rifle to mark where you lay.

That fancy barrel the kid was driving couldn’t help but improve his odds. If we’d had these when the war started… Tom shook his head. The CSA hadn’t had them, and he couldn’t do a thing about it. The damnyankees hadn’t had them, either. How long would they need to come up with barrels that matched these? How long before both sides sported land dreadnoughts, behemoths that laughed at danger and squashed antlike mortal men under their tracks without even knowing they were there?

Tom shook his head again. Nothing he could do about it except try to make sure he wasn’t one of the poor sorry bastards who got squashed. He had no guarantees of that, either, and he knew it.

The barrels had rolled east out of Sandusky, not west. That said something, anyhow. He’d expected them to go in that direction, but nothing was carved in stone. It did look as if the CSA would have to hit the USA another lick to make the bigger country fall over. Cutting the United States in half hadn’t quite done the job.

Why hadn’t Al Smith thrown in the sponge, dammit? Everybody could have gone home. Tom would rather have been in St. Matthews than in Sandusky. He didn’t know anybody who wanted to be here. But needing to be here was a different story.

Not all the reinforcements that came in were armored units. The infantrymen Tom saw made him raise an eyebrow. They weren’t raw troops in fresh uniforms. They wore butternut frayed at the cuffs and the elbows and knees, faded by the sun, and deprived of all possibility of holding a crease by hard use. Their weapons were well tended, but a long way from factory-new. They were, in other words, just as much veterans as the men he commanded.

Where had they come from? Virginia seemed the only likely answer. Outside of Ohio, it was the only place that could have produced men like this. Fighting went on here and there in the West, but neither side put full force into that effort. The CSA and the USA both seemed sure the decision would come where they were strongest, not at the periphery. As far as Tom could see, the big brains on both sides were likely right.

But the damnyankees were still pounding away in Virginia. Could the Confederate States pull men out of there and go on holding them off? Tom had to hope so.

A day or two later, he realized that wasn’t necessarily the right question. An even more pressing one was, couldn’t the Confederate States do anything in Ohio without bleeding Virginia of men? The answer to that one looked to be no, and it wasn’t the answer Tom wanted to find. Robbing Peter to pay Paul wasn’t a good way to fight a war.

But what choice did the CSA have? None Tom could see. This was the downside of getting into a fight with a country that had a lot more manpower than you did. He called down more curses on Al Smith’s head. The whole idea of storming up through Ohio, of cutting the United States in half, had been to knock the USA out of the fight before numbers really mattered. The Confederates had tried it. They’d succeeded as well as they’d hoped to. Everything had been perfect.

Except the United States hadn’t quit.

Now the Confederate States faced the same sort of grinding struggle as they’d seen in the Great War. What should have been a one-punch KO was a no-holds-barred wrestling match now.

Airplanes droned by overhead. Tom Colleton cast a wary eye up to the heavens. He knew where he’d jump if they turned out to be U.S. airplanes. He looked for shelter as automatically as he breathed. That he looked for shelter so automatically helped keep him breathing.

But they were C.S. machines. Even when the silhouettes were tiny, he recognized them. He wondered what he’d do when his side-or the damnyankees-brought out new models. He had a pretty good notion, too: the first few times, he’d dive for cover whether he needed to or not. After that, he’d be able to tell friend from foe again.

The day was coming. It was probably coming soon. The Confederate States had new, improved barrels. Before long, they were bound to have new, improved airplanes, too. So were the United States.

Where would it end? Probably with both sides flying to the moon, with guns that could strike from five hundred miles away, and with bombs that could blow up whole counties if not whole states. Tom laughed at himself, but then he wondered why. Back in 1917, he couldn’t have imagined the weapons the CSA and the USA were using now. What would the state of the art be in 1967, or in 1992?