Harry Turtledove - Drive to the East

As the weather heated up, the POW camp near Andersonville, Georgia, did an increasingly good impression of hell. With the heat came humidity. With the humidity came thunderstorms that awed Jonathan Moss. The red dirt in the camp turned to something not a great deal thicker than tomato soup after one of those downpours.

And the mosquitoes came. Moss had known mosquitoes up in Canada, too. These seemed a larger and more virulent breed. He slapped and swore and itched. He was anything but the only one. Nick Cantarella said, “This one I smashed last night, you could hang machine guns under its wings and go to war in it.”

“Who says they don’t?” Moss answered. “That would account for the size of some of the bites I’ve got.”

The other officer laughed. “You’re a funny guy, Major.”

“Funny like a crutch,” Moss said, and then, “Colonel Summers ought to do something about it. We could all come down with yellow fever.”

“Do what?” Cantarella asked in reasonable tones. “Moses parted the Red Sea, but all he did was plague the Egyptians with bugs. God was the one who had to call ’em off.”

Patiently, Moss answered, “Moses couldn’t ask for bug repellent and Flit. Come to think of it, Pharaoh couldn’t, either. But Summers damn well can.”

“Oh.” Cantarella looked foolish. “Well, yeah.”

Moss didn’t ask him how escape efforts were going. He assumed they were still going. He also assumed that much rain did tunnels no good. He looked out the window, out beyond the barbed wire. Even if the prisoners did get out of the camp, could they cross several states and get back to the USA? They spoke with an accent very different from the locals’. They would be pursued-he pictured bloodhounds straight out of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. And the people they met-the white ones, anyhow-would be Freedom Party fanatics. Put that all together and staying in the camp started to seem the better bargain.

But life here was no picnic, either. And prisoners of war had a duty to escape. Moss knew he’d run if and when he found a chance. As for what would happen after that… He’d worry about such things when he had to, not before.

In due course, citronella candles appeared in the prisoners’ barracks. They filled the air with a spicy, lemony scent as they burned. The odor was alleged to discourage mosquitoes. Maybe Moss got bitten a little less often after that. On the other hand, maybe he didn’t. He wasn’t convinced, one way or the other.

Guards went through the camp with spray pumps. The mist that came out of them smelled something like mothballs and something like gasoline. Moss had no idea what it did to mosquitoes. It made him want to wear a gas mask. Since he didn’t have one, he just had to put up with it.

Again, he wasn’t sure how much difference the spraying made. The bugs didn’t disappear, however much he wished they would. Of course, nobody was spraying outside the camp. Even if mosquitoes died by the thousands inside the barbed wire, plenty of replacements flew on in to sample the flavor delights of prisoner of war on the hoof.

Colonel Summers, once prodded, kept right on complaining, both to the Confederate authorities and to his fellow prisoners. “What they really need to do is spray a thin film of oil over every pond and puddle they can find,” he said. “That would kill the mosquito larvae, and then we really might get some relief.”

“Well, why don’t they?” Moss said. “It wouldn’t just benefit us. Their own health would get better, too.” He thought like the attorney he was, weighing advantages and disadvantages.

Summers only shrugged. “They say they haven’t got the manpower for it.”

“In a way, that’s good news,” Moss said. “If they’re stretched too thin to take care of important things behind the lines, pretty soon they’ll be stretched too thin to take care of things at the front.” Like a lawyer-and like a prisoner-he bent reality so it looked better than it really was.

“That hasn’t happened yet.” Colonel Summers brought him back to earth with a dose of the current news.

“Are you sure, sir?” Moss asked. “Anything you see in the papers the guards give us is just so much Freedom Party garbage.”

“I’m sure.” And Summers sounded very sure indeed. Moss knew there were a couple of clandestine wireless sets in the camp. He knew no more than that, which was a good thing for all concerned. He looked around the barracks. Two or three of the men were new fish, new officers for whom nobody here could vouch. They probably came from the United States. They talked as if they did. But good Confederate spies would sound like Yankees. The less Summers said while they were around, the better.

Machine-gun fire woke Moss in the middle of the night not quite a week later. His first reaction was fury. They’d pulled off an escape attempt, and they hadn’t included him. His second reaction was despair. If the guards were shooting, the attempt couldn’t have amounted to much. Was this the best his countrymen could do?

He got very little sleep the rest of the night.

At roll call the next morning, the Confederate guards swaggered and strutted like pouter pigeons. “Damn niggers came sniffin’ round the camp last night,” one of them said. “We drove ’em off, though-you better believe it.”

However proud of themselves they were, their posturing only filled Moss with relief. Nothing inside here had gone wrong. If the guards wanted to jump up and down because they’d beaten back a few sorry guerrillas, they were welcome to, as far as he was concerned.

Later that day, he found an excuse to amble around the grounds with Nick Cantarella. As casually as he could, he asked, “Do we have any way of getting in touch with those colored men on the other side of the barbed wire?”

Cantarella took a couple of steps without saying anything. What he did say, at last, was, “I ought to tell you I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Why?” Moss asked. “They could do us a lot of good if we ever happened to get on the other side of the wire ourselves.”

“Maybe.” Cantarella paused to light a cigarette. It was one of the lousy U.S. brands that came in Red Cross packages from the north. Prisoners could sometimes get the much better Confederate tobacco from the guards. Quiet little deals like that happened every now and again. After the first drag, Cantarella made a face. “Tastes like straw and horseshit.” A moment later, he added, “Want one?”

“Sure.” Moss took one, then leaned close to get a light. The tobacco was bad, but bad tobacco beat the hell out of no tobacco. He blew out smoke and then asked, “How come just maybe?”

The other officer looked around before answering. Satisfied nobody else was in earshot, he said, “For one thing, if the Confederates catch us with them, we’re dead. No ifs, ands, or buts. Dead.”

That was probably true. Moss shook his head-no, that was bound to be true. The Confederate States played by the usual international rules when they fought the United States. They played by no rules at all when they fought their own Negroes. By all the signs, the Negroes returned the favor-if that was the word. Moss said, “But if we’ve got a better chance of not getting caught at all…”

“Maybe,” Nick Cantarella said again, even more dubiously than before. “But why should they help us get back to the USA?”

As if to a child, Moss answered, “Because we’re fighting Featherston, too.”

“Terrific,” the younger man said. “Doesn’t that make them more likely to give us rifles and enlist us? You want to be a guerrilla yourself? I don’t, or not very much. It’s not what I was trained for, but I wouldn’t have a Chinaman’s chance of convincing the smokes of that.” He’d been an artilleryman before he got caught.