Drive to the East Page 5

  Rohde looked at him. “You don’t like it in beautiful, romantic Syracuse?”

  “Now that you mention it, no.”

  “And if I turn you loose, how do I know you won’t head straight for the front? That’s the reputation you’ve got.”

  The reputation was well deserved. Morrell knew as much. He said, “I could sign a pledge, but you probably wouldn’t believe me. Or you could take your chances and let me take mine. I’m a big boy, Doc. I can take my own chances if I think I ought to and if I think the country needs me.”

  “Part of my job, General, is to see that you don’t endanger yourself without good reason,” Dr. Rohde replied. “And do you really think you’re as indispensable to the United States as all that?”

  “As a matter of fact, yes,” Morrell said. “Go call Philadelphia and find out what the War Department thinks. They wouldn’t have given me stars if they didn’t think I was good for something. Call them. If they say I can sit on the shelf a while longer, I’ll sit. I’ll even stop bitching about it. But if they say they need me . . .”

  He was rolling the dice. Not everybody in the War Department loved him. He also had a reputation for being right in spite of people. High-ranking officers were supposed to be right. They weren’t supposed to rub their superiors’ noses in it, as Morrell had done. But if even the Confederates thought him worth killing, his own side ought to be able to figure out he was worth a little something. That was how he’d got promoted to general’s rank.

  “I’ll take you up on that—sir.” Dr. Rohde lumbered out of the room.

  He didn’t say anything to Morrell about the War Department for the next several days. With some men, that would have made Morrell suspect he hadn’t got on the horn to Philadelphia at all. The barrel officer didn’t believe that of Rohde. The doctor struck him as honest, if stuck in a rut. And the War Department never had been, wasn’t, and probably never would be an outfit that could make up its mind in a hurry—which was part of the reason the United States were in the current mess.

  I’ll give him a week. Then I’ll ask him, Morrell thought. Nobody could get huffy about his asking after a week. And if Rohde hadn’t made the call or if the War Department was still twiddling its thumbs, well, at least he would know what was what.

  Come the day, he got ready to beard Rohde. But the doctor forestalled him. Wearing an uncommonly sour expression, the big blond man said, “Pack your bags—sir. Philadelphia is dying to have you, and I don’t suppose you’ll die if you go there.”

  “Thanks, Doc!” Morrell grinned as if he’d just stuck in his thumb and pulled out a plum. “Uh—what bags? All I came here with was the uniform I got shot in, and that’s never going to be the same.”

  “A point,” Dr. Rohde said. “Nothing to flabble about, though. I’m sure we can fix you up. This sort of thing happens now and again.”

  The hospital proved to have a good selection of uniforms for both officers and enlisted men. Some of them bore signs of being repaired; others seemed as fresh as the day they were made. Morrell didn’t care to think about how they’d been obtained, or about what had happened to the men who’d formerly worn them. He chose an officer’s tunic and trousers that fit well enough, and pinned his stars on his shoulder straps and the Purple Heart with oak-leaf cluster above his left breast pocket. He got his own shoes back. The hospital had cleaned off whatever blood he’d got on them, and polished them to a higher gloss than he usually achieved himself.

  Getting dressed was tougher and more painful than he’d thought it would be. It left him feeling worn as a kitten, and without the kitten’s sharp claws and teeth. He did his best not to show Dr. Rohde weakness. The doctor didn’t say a word, but Morrell doubted he was fooling him.

  A driver took him to the train station in an ordinary auto. He’d wondered if Rohde would stick him in an ambulance and gain a measure of revenge for getting overruled by Philadelphia. Maybe the doctor was too nice a man to do something like that. On the other hand, maybe it just hadn’t occurred to him.

  Coming down from upstate New York brought Morrell back to the war a little at a time. It hadn’t touched Syracuse. The farther east and south the train went, the more bomb damage he saw. Before long, the train started sitting on sidings or just on the tracks when it should have been moving. He wondered whether that was bomb damage or sabotage. Whatever it was, it slowed him to a crawl.

  A sergeant waited for him on the platform when he finally pulled into Philadelphia in the middle of the night. The man wasn’t standing there in plain sight. He dozed on a bench near the far wall. Morrell shook him awake.

  Horror spread over the noncom’s face when he saw a general looming over him. “I’m sorry, sir!” he cried, and sprang to his feet.

  “It’s all right. Don’t blow a gasket.” Morrell returned a rather frantic salute. “You weren’t on sentry duty. Nobody’s going to shoot you for sacking out. How late was I, anyway?”

  Before answering, the sergeant looked at his watch. “Uh—just over three and a half hours, sir.”

  “That’s about what I thought,” Morrell said. “Are things always that bad around here?”

  “Well . . .” The sergeant didn’t want to admit it. “They’re not what you’d call real good.” Whether he wanted to admit it or not, he didn’t seem to have much choice. Reality spoke for itself.

  “Take me to the War Department,” Morrell said.

  “Yes, sir.” The sergeant did. The short journey was slow and roundabout. Philadelphia had a battered look. Months of bombing hadn’t knocked it out of action, though. Traffic still moved, even if it had to detour around craters in the street. Repairmen swarmed over damaged buildings, even if the next raid might hit them again. Men and women filled the sidewalks and the shops: Philadelphia ran around the clock. They didn’t seem beaten or intimidated, just determined to get on with the job no matter what.

  Antiaircraft guns were everywhere, their snouts poking up from vacant lots and street corners and roofs. Searchlight batteries would do what they could to find the guns’ targets. Signs pointed the way to air-raid shelters.

  The War Department was one of the buildings under repair. That didn’t surprise Morrell. It was a big target, and the Confederates knew where it was. Even bombing by night, they were bound to score some hits.

  “Here we go, sir.” The sergeant jumped out of the auto and held the heavy bronze doors that led inside for Morrell. The barrel officer was gladder of that than he cared to admit. He wasn’t sure he could have opened them with his right hand, though his left would have done the job.

  Even in the War Department, brigadier generals were uncommon birds. Morrell got whisked to the offices of the assistant to the chief of the General Staff, a much more senior one-star general named Edward McCleave. “How are you feeling?” McCleave asked.

  “Sir, I’ll do,” Morrell answered. “That’s why I wanted to get out of the damn hospital. I wasn’t doing anybody any good there.”

  “Except yourself,” McCleave pointed out.

  Morrell shrugged. It didn’t hurt—too much. “Sitting on the shelf was worse than getting shot. Can you send me to Virginia, sir? If we’re going to make a real run at Richmond, I want to be part of it.”

  “Your attitude does you credit,” the older man said. “Although General MacArthur has forced a crossing of the Rappahannock, he does not anticipate an immediate armored assault on the Confederates. The terrain is not conducive to such movements.”

  “You’re telling me he’s stuck,” Morrell said.

  “That’s not what I said.” Brigadier General McCleave sounded prim.

  “It’s what you meant, though,” Morrell said, and McCleave didn’t deny it. Morrell went on, “Do you want me to take over the barrels down there and see what I can shake loose?”

  “MacArthur has not requested your presence,” McCleave said. “If, however, the War Department were to order you to the Virginia front . . .” He waited. Morrell nodded. The two men exchanged smiles
that were downright conspiratorial. And so much for staying behind the lines, Morrell thought.

  ****

  Lieutenant-Colonel Tom Colleton knew his regiment helped hold an important position. His soldiers defended Confederate positions east of Sandusky, Ohio, on the southern shore of Lake Erie. As long as the Confederate States held a corridor from the Ohio River to the lake, they cut the United States in half. The damnyankees couldn’t ship anything or anybody by rail or road from east to west or west to east within their own territory. They had to take the long way around, through occupied Canada—and Canada didn’t have nearly so many lines or roads as the USA did.

  No matter how true that was, though, Tom Colleton wasn’t happy. He didn’t like standing on the defensive. He’d reveled in the push north from the border. That was what war was supposed to be about. He’d fought in Virginia the last time, and hated stalemates with the grim and bitter passion of a man who’d seen too many of them. Barrels meant soldiers didn’t have to huddle in trenches this time around. They didn’t have to, no—but too often they did anyway.

  Fortunately, the Yankees were as preoccupied with Virginia these days as the Confederates had been with Ohio and Indiana at the start of the war. Even more fortunately, U.S. forces weren’t doing as well in Virginia as the Confederates had here farther west. In Sandusky, Tom couldn’t help hearing both C.S. and U.S. wireless reports. When both sides told the same story, it was probably true. When they diverged, he had to try to figure out who was lying and who wasn’t.

  No matter what his sister had thought about Jake Featherston, Tom had no great love or admiration for him. His mouth tightened. Anne had died in the opening days of the war. If she hadn’t been down in Charleston when that damnyankee carrier raid hit the town . . . But she had, and nobody could do anything about it now.

  His own wife and boys were safe in St. Matthews, not far from Columbia, the capital of South Carolina. The last of the Colletons, he thought. He’d never felt that way while Anne was alive, even though she’d been childless. She’d bossed the family ever since their parents died. Now everything rode on his shoulders.

  He laughed as he looked east toward the damnyankees’ lines. The Colletons were a family with a fine future behind them. Before the Great War, Marshlands was one of the leading plantations in South Carolina, with hundreds of colored hands working in the cotton fields. The mansion went up in flames in the Negro uprising in 1915, and not even Anne could make a go of cotton after the war.

  Up ahead, the Yankees and some of Tom’s men started banging away at one another. Telling which side was which by ear was easy. The U.S. soldiers used bolt-action Springfields, rifles much like the Tredegars C.S. troops had carried in the last war. In this fight, soldiers in butternut had either automatic rifles or submachine guns. The damnyankees were always going to outnumber them, so each Confederate soldier needed to have more firepower than his U.S. counterpart.

  The only trouble was, rifles and submachine guns weren’t the sole weapons involved. U.S. and C.S. machine guns were as near identical as made no difference. So were the two sides’ artillery, barrels, and aircraft. Add all that in and what had been a good-sized edge for the Confederate foot soldier shrank considerably.

  Sure as hell, machine guns from both sides joined the conversation within a couple of minutes. Mortar rounds didn’t make much noise leaving their tubes—soldiers on both sides called them stove pipes—but the harsh, flat crump! of the bursting bombs was unmistakable.

  Colleton shouted for his wireless man. When the small soldier with the large pack on his back came up, Tom said, “What the hell’s going on there? This was a pretty quiet sector up until a few minutes ago. Get me one of the forward company command posts.”

  “Yes, sir.” The wireless man did his job without fuss or feathers. “Here’s Captain Dinwiddie, sir—A Company, First Battalion.”

  “Dinwiddie!” Tom called into the mouthpiece. “Who went and pulled on the damnyankees’ tails?”

  “Other way round, sir,” the captain answered. “Yankee sniper potted Lieutenant Jenks. He’s not dead, but he’s hurt pretty bad. Some of our boys spotted the muzzle flash up in a tree. They started shooting at him, and some of those green-gray fuckers shot back, and now it’s hell’s half acre up here.”

  “You want artillery? You want gas?” Tom asked. He hated gas, as every Great War veteran did, which didn’t mean he wouldn’t use it in a red-hot minute. God only knew the damnyankees weren’t shy about throwing it around.

  “Not right now, sir,” Dinwiddie said. “They’re just shooting. There’s no real attack coming in. If we stir ’em up, though, Lord only knows what they might try.”

  “All right.” Colleton wasn’t particularly sorry about the response. His job now was to keep the USA out of Sandusky, no matter what. If that meant not stirring up the enemy, he didn’t mind. He didn’t much feel like getting stirred up himself. It was a cold, miserable day, and he would sooner have stayed inside by a nice, hot fire.

  The firefight lasted about half an hour. Well before then, Confederate medics with Red Cross armbands and Red Crosses on their helmets went up to the front to bring back the wounded. A couple of medics came back on stretchers themselves. Tom swore, but without particular fury. He’d never yet seen the Yankees make a habit of picking off medics, any more than the Confederates did. But neither machine-gun bursts nor mortar bombs were fussy about whom they maimed.

  After the shooting eased, a U.S. captain came across the line under flag of truce. An officer at the front sent him back to Tom. The Yankee gave him a stiff little nod. “I’d like to ask you for a two-hour truce, Lieutenant-Colonel, so the corpsmen on both sides can bring in the dead and wounded.”

  “Do you think they’ll need that long?” Tom asked.

  “Been a lot of shooting going on up there,” the U.S. captain answered. He had a flat, harsh Midwestern accent, far removed from Colleton’s South Carolina drawl. They spoke the same language—they had no trouble understanding each other—but they plainly weren’t from the same country.

  Tom considered, then nodded. “All right, Captain. Two hours, commencing at”—he looked at his watch—“at 0945. That gives you half an hour to get back to your own line and pass the word that we’ve agreed. Suit you all right?”

  “Down to the ground. Two hours, starting at 0945. Thank you, Lieutenant-Colonel. You’re a gentleman.” The captain stuck out his hand. Tom hesitated, but shook it. The man was an enemy, but he was playing by the rules—was, in fact, making a point of playing by the rules.

  As the U.S. officer left, Tom had his wireless man tell the forward positions that the truce was coming. He sent runners up to the front, too, to make sure no platoon with a busted wireless set failed to get the word. Once the truce started, his men would probably swap cigarettes with the damnyankees for some of the ration cans the U.S. Army issued. Tom didn’t intend to issue an order forbidding it: less than no point in issuing an order bound to be ignored. Like everybody on both sides of the front, he knew the USA made horseshit cigarettes but had rations better than their C.S. counterparts.

  It won’t make a dime’s worth of difference who wins the war, he consoled himself. That same sort of illicit trading had gone on in the Great War and in the War of Secession, too. Then it was tobacco for coffee. That wasn’t a problem these days, not with the Caribbean a Confederate lake.

  At 0945, the guns on both sides fell silent. The sudden quiet made Tom jumpy. He didn’t feel he could trust it. But the truce held. Confederate medics brought back more bodies and pieces of bodies than wounded men, though they did save a couple of soldiers who might have died if they’d been stuck where they were. Graves Registration—usually called the ghouls—took charge of the remains. Colleton was damned if he knew how they would figure out just whose leg came back in a stretcher, especially since it had no foot attached. That, thank God, wasn’t his worry.

  Sure as hell, he saw men in butternut chowing down on corned-beef hash and cream
ed beef and something tomatoey called goulash, all from cans labeled with the U.S. eagle in front of crossed swords. The only thing he wished was that he had some of those cans for himself.

  At 1130, both sides started shouting warnings to their opposite numbers. At 1145, firing picked up again. Neither side shot as ferociously as it had earlier in the morning, though. Tom thought the gunfire was as much an announcement that the truce was over as anything else.

  That didn’t turn out to be quite right. At about 1205, the Yankees started shelling his front—not just with the mortars they’d been using before but with real artillery, too. Shouts of, “Gas!” rang out through the chilly air. Dismayed wireless calls came in from the front and from his reserves. The U.S. guns seemed to know just where to hit.

  Tom started swearing horribly enough to startle his wireless man, who asked, “What’s the matter, sir?”

  “I’ll tell you what’s the matter, goddammit,” Colleton ground out, furious at himself. “I’m an idiot, that’s what. That Yankee son of a bitch who came back here to dicker the truce—to hell with me if the bastard didn’t spy out our dispositions on the way here and back. Nothing in the rules against it, of course, but fuck me if I like getting played for a sucker.”

  U.S. forces followed the bombardment with an infantry push, and drove Tom’s regiment from several of the positions it had been holding. He got on the field telephone with division HQ in Sandusky, warning them what had happened and how.

  “Sneaky bastards,” was the comment he got from the major to whom he talked. “How much ground have they gained?”

  “Looks like about a mile,” Tom said ruefully. He’d be kicking himself for weeks over this one. He hadn’t thought he was a trusting soul, but that Yankee captain had sure made a monkey out of him.

  The major back in Sandusky didn’t seem all that upset. “Don’t get your balls in an uproar, Lieutenant-Colonel,” he said. “We’ll see what we can do about it.”