Harry Turtledove - Drive to the East

That took some of the wind out of Morrell’s sails, but only some. “I’m not a fire brigade all by myself,” he pointed out. “Where are my fire engines? Where are my firemen? Where’s my… hook and ladder?” At the last possible instant, he left off the participle.

“Come with me, sir,” Abell said, still mildly. “We’ll give you our estimate of the situation in Ohio, and then we’ll send you West to-”

“Make bricks without straw,” Morrell broke in. The General Staff officer looked pained. How he looked wasn’t a patch on how Morrell felt. “I’ve already tried that in Ohio, thank you very much. Are you going to see if history can repeat itself? And are you setting me up to take the fall if it does? It can’t be your fault, after all.”

By you he didn’t mean Abell’s alone, but all the officers in Philadelphia who thought of war as theory and maps and not as cordite and burning barrels and mangled men. They were good at what they did. Because they were, they thought they knew everything there was to know about the business of organized slaughter. Morrell had a different, and lower, opinion.

“We’re both on the same side, sir,” Abell said. “We’ve flushed out several traitors-some of them planted long, long ago-and more no doubt remain in place. But no one has ever questioned your loyalty or patriotism.”

“That’s white of you, by God,” Morrell said.

“Making things as difficult as possible is another story,” Abell snapped, his iron control rusting a little at last. “Will you come with me to the War Department, please? We can’t hash things out here on the platform.”

“I’ll come,” Morrell replied, and he did.

He and Abell had little to say to each other on the short ride through central Philadelphia. The de facto capital looked more battered every time Morrell saw it. The War Department had taken several hits since the last time he was there. Abell remarked, “Much of what we do these days is underground. We dig like moles.”

“You’ve had your heads in the ground for a long time,” Morrell observed, and bright patches of red burned on Abell’s sallow cheeks. Morrell went on, “Tell me about the new Confederate barrels. How long will we have to wait before we’ve got anything like that?”

The General Staff officer got redder. Amazingly lifelike, Morrell thought. “Production of an improved model is expected to begin within the next few weeks,” Abell said stiffly.

That was better than Morrell expected. He’d feared the USA would have to design anything new from scratch. Even so, he asked, “How late will the improved model be if the Confederates take Pittsburgh away from us? How much of our steel production would that cost?”

“We are hoping… sir… that that will not happen,” Abell answered. “We are hoping you will help keep that from happening. That’s why we’re sending you to Ohio.”

“Why you’re sending me back to Ohio,” Morrell corrected, and had the somber satisfaction of seeing John Abell flinch. To rub it in, he murmured, “Youngstown. Akron. Cleveland.”

“They haven’t taken Cleveland this past year!” Now Abell sounded truly furious. “What makes you think they can take it now?”

“They weren’t trying before,” Morrell said. “They wanted to split us, and they did. Now they want to cripple us.”

“If you’re telling me this is hopeless, General, someone else will be appointed. Your resignation will be accepted. You will be permitted to return home to your wife and daughter. Not just permitted-encouraged.”

Will be appointed. Will be accepted. Will be permitted. Abell didn’t say who would do any of those things. He probably didn’t even think about it. In his world, things just happened, without any particular agency. That made him a good bureaucrat. Whether it made him a good soldier was a different question.

Morrell wanted to go home to Agnes and Mildred-but not that way. “Sorry, no. If you want to get rid of me, you’ll have to throw me out. I’m telling you it would have been a lot easier if we’d started getting ready when the Confederates did.”

“Hindsight…” But Abell’s voice lacked conviction. Morrell had been saying the same thing when it was foresight. Abell gathered himself. “We’re almost to the map room. You’ll see what we’re up against there.”

Except for lacking windows, the map room could have been three stories above ground instead of two stories below it. A haze of tobacco smoke hung in the air. It also smelled of coffee that had been perking for too long and bodies that had gone unwashed for too long. That last odor pervaded the front, too, so Morrell nodded, as at an old friend, when he recognized it here. The stench of death, at least, was mercifully absent.

Officers were poring over large-scale maps of Virginia and Ohio. John Abell led Morrell to one that covered the eastern part of the latter state. Morrell let out a tuneless note of dismay when he saw where the pins with the red heads were. “They’ve come that far this fast?”

“I’m afraid it looks that way,” John Abell answered.

“Jesus,” Morrell said. “They’re already inside Cleveland. I thought you told me they couldn’t take it.”

“They must have revised this since I went to meet you at the station,” Abell said unhappily.

“Are the Confederates moving that fast?” Morrell asked.

“They can’t be.” Abell spoke with less conviction than he might have liked. “It’s just signal lag, I’m sure.”

“It had better be,” Morrell said. “Well, what do you expect me to do about it? Have we got armor here?” He pointed. “If we do, we can thrust toward the lake and try to cut through their advancing column-do to their supply lines what they’ve done to us.”

“I don’t believe we have enough equipment in place there to give us much hope of success,” Abell replied.

“Why am I not surprised?” Morrell didn’t bother to keep his voice down. Several officers studying other maps looked up at him. He scowled back at them, too furious to care. They looked away. Fury wasn’t an emotion they were used to seeing here. Too bad, Morrell thought savagely. He turned back to John Abell. “Well, if we can’t do that, our next best move is pretty obvious.”

“Is it?” The General Staff officer raised an almost colorless eyebrow. “It hasn’t seemed that way here.”

Morrell almost asked why he wasn’t surprised again. Then, remembering the old saw about flies and honey and vinegar, he didn’t. He pointed again instead, this time along the lakeshore, from Cleveland over to Erie, Pennsylvania. “We’ll have to fight like hell here. We’ll have to fight like hell in all the built-up places-barrels aren’t really made for street fighting in the middle of towns.”

“They can do it,” Abell said.

“Sure they can,” Morrell agreed. “Dogs can walk on their hind legs, too, but it’s not what they’re for, if you know what I mean. Send barrels through a few good-sized towns and you won’t see very many come out the other end.”

“Suppose they bypass them.” Abell might have been back at West Point, trying to solve a tactical problem. “That’s what they did last year. They didn’t go into Columbus with armor. They got it in a pocket and attacked with infantry and artillery.”

“That’s why we defend the towns along the lake like mad bastards,” Morrell said. “They can’t surround them the way they surrounded Columbus. They have to take them instead, and that’s more expensive. If they don’t, we can resupply and reinforce by water, maybe break out and get into their rear. They’ll know that-they can read maps.” Unlike some people I could name.