Harry Turtledove - Drive to the East

And you’re not? Tom wondered. He couldn’t ask, though. Jackson might see other people’s indoctrination. His own was to him like the air under its wings to a butterfly. He didn’t think about it. He didn’t notice it. He just floated on it and let it support him.

Not far behind them, artillery rumbled. Things were starting to pick up. The Confederate gunners fired barrages to east and west, to keep the U.S. soldiers posted in front of them from guessing which way they would move when the time came. Tom wished the men in green-gray didn’t know the time was coming. Wish for a million dollars while you’re at it, he thought. The Yankees weren’t blind men. The Confederate buildup had been as subtle as the soldiers with wreathed stars on their collars could make it, but you couldn’t hide everything no matter how hard you tried.

The Confederates were doing their best. As Tom walked up toward the front, he passed barrels-both the older model and the new-crouching under camouflage netting with leaves and sod applied to make them as nearly invisible as possible. They’d moved up under cover of darkness; the orders against moving by daylight were explicit to the point of bloodthirstiness. More C.S. artillery fire had masked the sound of their advance. The damnyankees had used that trick in the last war. Imitation was the sincerest form of flattery. With luck, it would be the best revenge, too.

“Get low, you damn fool, before somebody shoots you!” The raucous advice came from a foxhole by the side of the path. Only the two stars on each side of Tom’s collar that marked his rank showed he was an officer. He’d deliberately dulled them, so the Yankees’ snipers wouldn’t single him out. Evidently his own men couldn’t single him out, either.

And getting low was good advice almost any time. Tom hit the dirt and crawled toward the foxhole. U.S. artillery started coming in before he got there. The crawl turned into an undignified scramble.

“Jesus!” The private already in it sounded disgusted. “This fucker ain’t big enough for two.” Then he noticed Tom’s rank badges. “Uh, sir.”

He wasn’t wrong, even if he was rude. Tom took his entrenching tool off his belt and started digging like a mole after forty cups of coffee. “Just have to make it bigger,” he said. He added the dirt from his excavation to the breastwork in front of the hole.

“Huh,” the soldier said in surprise. “Didn’t know officers knew how to handle one o’ them things.”

“If I didn’t, I would have got killed when I was your age,” Tom answered, glad to pause and pant. “Ever hear of the Roanoke front?”

“Sure as hell did. Uncle Lucas came back without most of his arm on account of he was there.” The soldier paused, taking longer than he should have to make the connection. “You was there, too?”

“That’s right. I’m sorry about your uncle. I never got more than a few scratches myself-I was lucky.”

“Better believe you was.” The private might have said more, but the scream of an incoming shell warned it would come down somewhere close. He and Tom both ducked. The explosion was close enough to make the ground shake. Fragments maliciously whined and screeched overhead. A few clods of dirt pattered down into the hole, but nothing worse.

On the Roanoke front, that one shell would have been the harbinger of many more, and only extraordinary luck and a hole better than this one would have kept a man from getting maimed or killed. Things were quieter here. The damnyankees had shifted a lot of their weight to Virginia. What was left was good enough to hold the Confederates in place and harass them, but not to work the wholesale slaughter that had been so common in the Great War.

The United States didn’t seem to have figured out that the Confederate States were shifting men out of Virginia and sliding them back over here. Nothing made Tom happier than their continued ignorance. The more the Yankees fussed and fumed in the East, the less attention they’d pay to anything out here. If they stayed ignorant till morning after next…

They did. The real Confederate barrage started an hour before sunrise. It was thunderous enough to wake Tom. After all the gunfire he’d slept through at the front in two wars-and in fighting the Negroes after the first one-that was no mean feat. Freight-train noises traveled the rails of the sky from west to east.

Yankee counterbattery fire started almost at once. The U.S. soldiers weren’t fools. He’d said as much to Lieutenant Jackson. (Absently, he wondered whether Jackson still lived. He thought so, but he hadn’t had any reports from that company for most of a day.) They knew trouble when they walked into it. One after another, though, their guns fell silent, battered into submission by a heavier weight of metal.

The Confederate barrage let up precisely at sunrise. Its purpose was to stun, not to kill everything on the U.S. side of the line. Three years of bloody experience had taught the CSA and the USA that they couldn’t kill all their enemies, or even enough of them, with big guns alone. And a really heavy artillery preparation, one that went on for days, ruined the ground over which attackers would advance and slowed them down. Less gunnery amounted to more.

Confederate barrels rumbled and rattled and clanked forward. Tom scrambled up out of his hole. He had an officer’s brass whistle, and blew a long, shrill blast on it. “Come on, you lazy sons of bitches!” he yelled. “We’ve caught ’em by surprise, and now we’ll make ’em pay. Watch your buddies and follow me!”

An officer who told his men to follow him could almost always get them to obey. An officer who told troops to advance but sat tight himself had a lot more trouble. The only thing wrong with officers of the first sort was that they got shot a lot more often than the others.

If you thought about things like that… Tom resolutely didn’t. If everybody thought about things like that instead of being afraid to act like a coward in front of his buddies or his men, war would become impossible. The machine-gun fire in front of him said this war remained altogether too possible. Not all the damnyankees were stunned-far from it.

Asskickers screamed down out of the sky to bomb strongpoints the C.S. artillery hadn’t silenced. For the moment, the dive bombers-and the Confederates-had it all their own way. Dazed U.S. soldiers threw up their hands and hoped the advancing men in butternut would let them surrender instead of just shooting them and moving on. Just like last year, Tom thought, and wondered if that was good or bad.

When Brigadier General Irving Morrell’s train pulled into the Broad Street Station in Philadelphia, he couldn’t have been in a worse mood if he’d tried for a week. The endless delays on the trip north from Virginia did nothing to improve his temper. Between bomb damage and rail sabotage, the trip took three times as long as it should have. All he missed was getting the train strafed from the air. But he could have flown up in the Army’s fastest fighter and still arrived ready to bite nails in half.

Colonel John Abell met him at the station. That didn’t make him any happier, even if the colorless General Staff officer was the one who’d let him know he’d finally earned stars on his shoulder straps.

“Goddammit, Colonel, I’m not a Ping-Pong ball, you know!” Morrell exploded. He almost said, God damn you, Colonel. He suspected Abell was responsible for getting him pulled out of Virginia, and he intended to raise Cain about it.

For the moment, Abell was imperturbable. “Consider it a compliment, sir,” he answered, his voice-an unmemorable baritone-never rising. “We always try to send you where the country needs you most.”