Harry Turtledove - Drive to the East

He blocked Pound’s escape and the loader’s. Swearing, Pound heaved his body up again so he himself could get at the escape hatch on the far side of the turret. His hands left blood on the steel as he undogged the hatch. “Come on!” he shouted to the man who sat below him and to his left.

“What about the lieutenant?” asked the loader-his name was Jerry Fields.

“He’s gone. Get moving, goddammit! Next one hits right here.” Pound hauled himself out of the turret with his muscular arms. He crouched on the stricken barrel’s chassis, then dropped to the ground. The loader was right behind him. They used the barrel as cover against enemy fire from the flank. Flame and black smoke boiled up from the engine compartment. That would help hide them from Confederates trying to do them in.

A hatch opened at the front of the barrel. Tor Svenson and the bow gunner tumbled out one after the other. Pound shouted and waved to them. That enemy machine gun blew off the top of the bow gunner’s head. Svenson’s dash turned into a limp, and then a crawl.

As Pound crouched to bandage the driver’s leg, another armor-piercing round slammed into the barrel, just as he’d known it would. Ammunition started cooking off inside, the cheerful pop-pop-pop of machine-gun cartridges-like a string of firecrackers on the Fourth of July-mingling with the deeper roars of the shells for the main armament. The explosions blew what was left of Lieutenant Poffenberger’s body off the turret. More flames and smoke burst from the cupola-including a perfect smoke ring, as if Satan were puffing on a stogie.

“How is it, Svenson?” Pound asked.

“Hurts like a bastard,” the driver answered with the eerie matter-of-factness of a just-wounded man.

Pound nodded. The bullet had taken a nasty bite out of Svenson’s calf. Pound gave him a shot of morphine, then yelled for a corpsman.

“Feel naked outside the machine,” the loader said.

“No kidding,” Pound replied with feeling. He felt worse than naked-he felt like a snail yanked out of its shell. The infantrymen around him knew how to be soft-skinned slugs, but he had no idea. The.45 on his belt, a reasonable self-defense weapon for a barrel crewman, suddenly seemed a kid’s water pistol.

The war went on without him. Nobody cared that his barrel had been smashed, or that Lieutenant Poffenberger was nothing but torn, burnt, bleeding meat and the bow gunner’d had his brains blown out. Other U.S. barrels kept grinding towards Akron. For all he knew, some of them were hunting the C.S. machine that had put him out of action. Foot soldiers loped past. None of them stopped for the deshelled snails; as proper slugs, they had worries of their own.

A couple of corpsmen did come up. “All right-we’ll take charge of him,” one of them said. “Looks like you done pretty good.”

“Thanks,” Pound said. He turned to Jerry Fields. “Come on. Let’s get moving.”

“Where to?” the loader asked reasonably.

“Wherever we can find somebody who’ll put us back in another barrel, or at least give us something to do,” Pound answered. “We can’t stay here, that’s for damn sure.”

He couldn’t have been righter about that. The Confederates on the U.S. flank ripped into the advancing men in green-gray. A shell from a C.S. barrel slammed into the turret of a U.S. machine, letting him see what he’d been afraid of a couple of minutes earlier. The high-velocity round almost tore the turret right off the barrel. The men inside never had a chance. They had to be hamburger even before their ammo started cooking off.

“Jesus,” Fields said beside him. “That could’ve been us.”

“Really? That never occurred to me,” Pound said. The loader, for whom sarcasm was a foreign language, gave him a peculiar look.

In the face of concentrated automatic-weapons fire, U.S. foot soldiers went down as if to a reaper. A reaper is right-a grim one, Pound thought. All he knew about infantry combat was to stay low. That didn’t seem to be enough. He pulled out the.45, in case any Confederate soldiers got close enough to make it dangerous. It didn’t seem to be enough, either.

The attack unraveled. It quickly grew obvious the U.S. soldiers weren’t going to make it to Portage Lake, let alone into Akron. Instead of going northwest, they started going southeast as fast as they could. The question became whether they would be able to hang on to Canton, and the answer looked more and more like no.

Pound hated retreats. He wanted to do things to the enemy, not have those nasty bastards on the other side do things to him. But one of the things he didn’t want them to do was kill him. He fired several rounds from the.45. He had no idea whether he hit anybody. With luck, he made some Confederates keep their heads down. Without luck… No, luck was with him, for he got back to Canton-still in U.S. hands-alive and unhurt. And as for what the powers that be came up with next-he’d worry about that later.

Although the newspapers the Confederates let into the Andersonville prison camp boasted of C.S. victories and U.S. disasters, Major Jonathan Moss didn’t throw them away. That was not to say he believed them. Confederates in Cleveland? Ridiculous. Confederates in Canton? Preposterous. Confederates in Youngstown? Absurd.

And the news from more distant lands struck him as even less likely. The Japs threatening to take away the Sandwich Islands? The Russians driving toward Warsaw? He shook his head. Whoever came up with those headlines had a warped sense of humor. Only on the Western Front in Europe, where the papers admitted that Germany still had soldiers fighting, did even the tiniest hint of reality emerge.

Like the rest of the U.S. officers in the camp, though, Moss did hold on to the newspapers he got. Since the Confederates didn’t issue toilet paper and Red Cross packages held only a little, the product of Jake Featherston’s propaganda mills made the best available substitute.

He wasn’t the only one dubious about what sort of leaves Confederate headline writers loaded into their pipes. An indignant-looking captain named Ralph Lahrheim came up to him one breathlessly hot and muggy afternoon and waved a copy of a rag called the Augusta Constitutionalist in his face. “What do you think of this, Major?” Lahrheim demanded in irate tones. “What do you think ?”

“That one? I don’t much like it,” Moss answered gravely. “It’s scratchier than most of the Atlanta papers.”

“No, no, no-that isn’t what I meant,” Lahrheim said. “I was talking about the story. ”

“Oh, the story. Haven’t seen this one yet,” Moss said. The younger man-there weren’t a lot of older men in the camp-handed him the newspaper. He read the story Lahrheim pointed out, then made a reluctant clucking noise. “Well, Captain, a lot of Canucks don’t much like the USA.”

“Yeah, I know what. But could they throw us out of Winnipeg? Could they cut the east-west railroads?”

“I’m sure they could cut some of them,” Moss answered. “All? I don’t know about that. I don’t know how strong the rebels are in Winnipeg. I suppose they could drive us out for a while.”

“We’re busy a lot of other places,” Captain Lahrheim said, as if to declare that the Canadians couldn’t hope to cause the USA trouble if that weren’t so. That was true. It was also rather aggressively irrelevant.

It was, in fact, irrelevant enough that Moss couldn’t resist mocking it: “Really? I hadn’t noticed.”

Lahrheim turned red. “You’re making fun of me.” He had a rubbery face that conveyed indignation even better than his voice.

“Not of you, Captain, not personally,” Moss said. The Andersonville camp was crowded; you had to be able to get along with people if you possibly could. Again, though, lawyer’s instinct or perhaps plain cussedness made him add, “You did say something silly.”