Harry Turtledove - Drive to the East

“Wouldn’t be surprised,” Chester agreed. After a moment, he added, “I wonder how much truth there is in the talk you hear.”

“You mean about Confederates running around in U.S. uniforms and raising Cain?” the lieutenant asked. Chester nodded. After some thought, Thayer Monroe said, “I don’t know for sure, but I wouldn’t be surprised. It’s the sort of bastardly trick Featherston’s people would pull.”

Was it? It struck Martin as the sort of trick anybody with half an ounce of brains would pull, especially in a war where both sides spoke what was for all practical purposes the same language. He said, “I hope we’re doing the same thing to them, that’s all.”

Lieutenant Monroe looked astonished. “It goes dead against the Geneva Convention, Sergeant. If you’re caught in the enemy’s uniform, you get a blindfold and a cigarette. That’s too far to go for a good smoke.”

Chester dutifully chuckled, though he had Confederate cigarettes in his pocket. Plundering enemy corpses-and, here in Fredericksburg, plundering shops-kept front-line infantrymen supplied with better tobacco than they could get from their own country. Front-line service had few advantages, but that was one of them.

Freight-train noises filled the air. Monroe might not have been able to get through to U.S. artillery, but someone had. High explosives thundered down on the heights behind Fredericksburg. How much good they would do…

Through the din, the lieutenant said, “At least we don’t have any orders to get out of our holes and attack as soon as the barrage lets up.”

“Thank you, Jesus,” Chester Martin said, most sincerely.

His platoon commander nodded. Monroe could learn. The company, and the regiment of which it was a part, were in the line because so many men had tried to take the high ground in back of Fredericksburg: tried and bloodily failed. The Confederate gunners on those heights could murder every U.S. soldier in the world if the Army chose to come at them there. Machine guns and artillery swept the rising ground. Not even barrels had a chance of forcing their way forward.

Martin drew in a breath and made a face. Most of the time, you could forget about the stench of death on the battlefield-oh, not forget about it, maybe, but shove it down to the back of your mind. He’d thought about it, though, and that brought it up in his mind again. His guts did a slow lurch. Too many unburied bodies lay out there, bloating in the sun.

When the company went back into reserve, he would bring that stench with him-in his clothes, in his hair, on his skin. It took a long time to go away. And he’d smelled it in plenty of nightmares between the wars. Bad as it was here, it had been worse in the trenches on the Roanoke front, where the line went back and forth over the same few miles of ground for a couple of years, and where every square yard of ground was manured with a corpse or two.

Keeping his head down-he didn’t know whether the Confederates had any snipers close enough to draw a bead on him, and didn’t care to find out the hard way-he lit one of those smooth Confederate cigarettes and held the pack out to Lieutenant Monroe. “Thanks, Sergeant,” Monroe said. He leaned close for a light.

The smoke in Chester’s mouth and in his nose masked the smell of death. For that, one of the stables-scrapings cigarettes the USA turned out would have done as well. If you were going to go this way, though, why not go first class?

“I pity those poor bastards who don’t smoke,” Chester said out of the blue.

“Why’s that?” The lieutenant, not unreasonably, couldn’t follow his train of thought.

“On account of they can’t ever get out from under the goddamn smell.”

“Oh.” Thayer Monroe considered, then nodded. “Hadn’t looked at it like that, but you’re right.” He started to add something else, probably on the same theme, but all of a sudden he ducked down deep in the foxhole instead. “Incoming!”

“Aw, shit!” Martin got right down there with him. The Confederates were doing something sneaky-something gutsy, too. They couldn’t huddle in reinforced-concrete gun emplacements to serve their mortars. They had to come out into the firing pits to use them. But the nasty little bombs flew at Fredericksburg almost silently. With all the big stuff roaring by overhead, nobody was going to notice the mortars till they started bursting, which would be too late for some luckless soldiers.

And sometimes even being right on the money didn’t do you a damn bit of good. One of the reasons soldiers hated mortars was that the bombs went up at a steep angle and came down at an even steeper one. Plunging fire, the boys with the high foreheads called it. A foxhole didn’t protect you from a round that came right down in there with you.

Chester heard the boom. Next thing he knew, he was grabbing at his leg and bawling for a corpsman. Absurdly, the first thing that went through his mind was, Rita’s gonna kill me. When he could think of anything past his own pain, he got a look at Lieutenant Monroe-and wished he hadn’t. The platoon commander was the only reason Chester was still breathing. He’d been between Chester and the mortar round, and he’d taken almost all of it. There wasn’t a hell of a lot of him left, and what there was wasn’t pretty.

“That you, Sarge?” one of the stretcher bearers called.

“Yeah.” Chester forced out the word through clenched teeth.

The corpsman jumped down into the hole. He swore softly when he saw what had happened to Monroe, then turned to Chester. “How much of that blood is yours and how much is the other poor bastard’s?”

“Beats me.” Chester looked down at himself. He was pretty well drenched in the lieutenant’s mortal remains. He didn’t want to let go of the leg, though, or more of what soaked him would be his. He was much too sure of that. “Can you stick me and bandage me or put on a tourniquet or whatever the hell you’re gonna do? This hurts like a son of a bitch.”

“Right.” The corpsman jabbed Chester with a morphine syrette, then said, “Lemme see what you caught.” Blood flowed faster when Chester took his hand away from his calf, but it didn’t spurt. Frowning, the corpsman went on, “I think we can get by without a tourniquet.” He bandaged the wound, watched how fast the gauze turned red, and nodded to himself. “Hey, Elmer! Gimme a hand here, will ya? Let’s get the sarge outa this hole.”

“Sure.” The other corpsman hopped down in there, too. “Fuck,” he said when he got a look at the platoon commander’s ruined corpse. “Who was that, anyways?”

“Lieutenant Monroe,” Chester answered, a certain dreamy wonder in his voice. The painkiller hit hard and fast.

“He got it quick, anyhow,” Elmer said, about as much of a eulogy as anyone ever gave Thayer Monroe.

Despite the morphine, Martin howled when the grunting corpsmen got him up on flat ground. Mortar rounds were still landing not far away. A few fragments whistled by. Chester didn’t want to get hit again. But he didn’t want to stay at the front, either. With another grunt, the corpsmen carried the stretcher on which he lay, back toward the Rappahannock.

A white powerboat with big Red Crosses took him and the medics over the river. The Confederates weren’t supposed to shoot at such vessels, any more than they were supposed to shoot at ambulances. Accidents did happen, though.

When he got back to the field hospital, the first thing a doctor did was give him a shot. “Tetanus,” the man said. By then, Martin wouldn’t have cared if it was French dressing; he was feeling very woozy indeed. The doctor cut away his trouser leg and the bandage and looked at the wound. He nodded thoughtfully. “Not too bad, Sergeant. If it heals clean, you’ll be back on duty in a few weeks.”