Drive to the East (17 page)

“I’m all ears.” Morrell liked gossip no less than anyone else.

“You ever hear of that German scientist named Einstein? You know—the Jew with the hair that looks like steel wool in a hurricane?”

Morrell nodded. “Sure. Who hasn’t heard of him? He’s the one they always make absentminded professor jokes about. What’s he got to do with the price of beer, though?”

“He’s a hell of a sharp man, no matter how absentminded he is.”

“I never said he wasn’t. You don’t get to be famous like that if you haven’t got a lot on the ball. But what about him?”

“He’s disappeared,” Dowling said portentously. “Not disappeared as in his apartment building got hit by a bomb while he was in the bathtub. Disappeared as in fallen off the map. Quite a few of the other high-forehead fellows in Germany and Austria-Hungary have quietly dropped out of sight, too.”

“They’re working on something.” Morrell didn’t phrase it as a question. He’d been in the Army a long time. He recognized the signs. When a lot of people who did the same kind of work quietly dropped out of sight, something—probably something big—was going on behind the scenes. He pointed a finger at Dowling. “Do you know what it is?”

“Not me,” Dowling said. “When I need to count past ten, I take off my shoes.”

He was sandbagging; he was nobody’s fool. Morrell paused one more time. Then he asked, “Whatever the Kaiser’s boys are working on, are we working on it, too?”

Dowling had started to light a smoke—a Confederate brand, no doubt captured or confiscated here in Virginia. He froze with the cigarette in his mouth and the match, still unstruck, in his hand. “You know, General, I asked my . . . friend the very same question.”

“And? What did he tell you?”

“He told me to mind my own goddamn business and get the hell out of his office.” Dowling did light the cigarette then. He took a long, deep drag, as if he wanted to escape the memory of his friend’s reply. “So you can take that any way you want to. Either we aren’t or we are and we don’t want to talk about it—
really
don’t want to. You pays your money and you takes your choice.”

“You sound like that colored band that got away from the Confederates,” Morrell said. “They put them on the wireless enough, don’t they?”

“Oh, you might say so.” Dowling’s voice was dry. “Yes, you just might. But propaganda is where you find it.”

“And isn’t that the sad and sorry truth?” Morrell looked west from Culpeper, the town where Dowling presently made his headquarters. The Blue Ridge Mountains sawtoothed the horizon. The mountains didn’t worry Morrell so much. What the Confederates might have lurking in them did. “Is Patton going to try to hit us from the flank again?”

“He’s welcome to, by God. He’ll have even less fun than he did the last time,” Abner Dowling growled. “But things seem pretty quiet off to the west. If what the spies say is true, the enemy’s pulled some forces away from there.”

“Where have they gone, then?” Morrell asked the immediately obvious question—not only was it obvious, it was important.

“Best guess is, to attack our salient on the other side of the Rapidan.”

“The Wilderness.” Morrell made a discontented—almost a disgusted—noise. “I’ve been down there. I’ve looked it over. You couldn’t come up with worse country for barrels if you tried for a year. What on earth possessed General MacArthur to get a foothold
there
?”

Dowling considered before answering, “Well, General, you’ll have to understand that he and I are not on the most intimate terms.” By the pained expression he bore, that was an understatement. “My guess is only a guess, then. I suppose that’s where we have the foothold because it’s the only place we could get one.”

“I see,” Morrell said—two words that covered a lot of Deeply Regrets telegrams from the War Department. After a meditative pause of his own, he added, “Do you suppose that salient does us more good than it does the Confederates?”

“I
hope
so,” Dowling answered, which wasn’t quite what Morrell had asked. “If we can ever get out of that nasty second growth, the terrain gets better. But the Confederates know that as well as we do, and they don’t want to turn us loose.”

“How many casualties are we taking down there?” Morrell asked. “They can hit us from three sides at once.”

“It’s . . . bothersome,” Dowling admitted, which meant it was probably a lot worse than that. “What we need to do is get barrels over onto the other side of the Rapidan in country where we can really use them. I’m glad you’re here—if anyone can arrange that, you’re the man.”

“Thanks,” Morrell said. “I’m just glad I’m anywhere right now.” As if to underscore that, his shoulder twinged again. “I’ve been thinking about that particular problem myself, and I’ve got a few ideas.”

“You’ll want to talk with a map in front of you,” Dowling said, proving he’d done a good deal of planning in his time, too. He waved back toward the frame house. “Shall we?”

“In a minute,” Morrell said. “Let me scrounge another one of those nice cigarettes off you, if you don’t mind.”

“Not a bit.” Dowling stuck another one in his mouth, too. “Really taste like tobacco, don’t they? Not like . . .” He paused, searching for a simile.

Morrell supplied one: “Horseshit.”

Dowling laughed. “Well, now that you mention it, yes.” He lit it; his cheeks hollowed as he inhaled. “Damn things are supposed to be hell on the wind. You couldn’t prove it by me—I never had any wind to begin with.” He patted his belly as if it were an old friend—and so, no doubt, it was.

“I don’t think they’ve hurt mine much,” Morrell said. Unlike Dowling, he was usually in good, hard shape, though his stay in the hospital had set him back. He took another drag.

Planes buzzed by overhead. Morrell automatically looked around for the closest trench, and spotted one less than ten feet away. He could jump into it in a hurry if they dove on him. But they kept going: they were U.S. fighters heading south to strafe the Confederates and shoot up C.S. dive bombers and whatever else they could find.

“Good luck, boys,” he called to the pilots once he was sure they wouldn’t come after him.

“Amen,” Abner Dowling agreed, adding, “We could use the Lord on our side. Considering what Featherston’s people are up to, He’d better be.”

“Well, yes,” Morrell said, “but you know what they say about the Lord helping people who help themselves. We’d better do some of that, too, or we’re in real trouble.” He almost wished Dowling would have told him he was wrong, but Dowling didn’t.

V

S
econd Lieutenant Thayer Monroe wasn’t even a bulge in his pappy’s pants when the Great War ended. He was just out of West Point, and so new an officer, he squeaked. He really
did
squeak; he had a thin tenor voice that often didn’t seem to have finished breaking. He went tomato-red whenever something he was saying came out especially shrill.

First Sergeant Chester Martin hadn’t expected anything different, so he wasn’t disappointed. The recruiters back in California had as much as told him this was what he’d be doing. Veteran noncoms held pipsqueak officers’ hands till the pipsqueaks either figured out what they were doing or got wounded or killed. In the first case, the blooded officers commonly won promotion. In the second, they left the platoon for less pleasant reasons. Either way, the platoon got a new, green CO, and the first sergeant’s job started all over again.

At the moment, Lieutenant Monroe’s platoon sprawled on the ground under some oaks not far outside of Falmouth, Virginia. On the other side of the Rappahannock, the Confederates held Fredericksburg. Scuttlebutt said General MacArthur’s next try at dislodging the enemy from his defenses in front of Richmond would go through the C.S. forces here.

“What do you think, Sarge?” asked Charlie Baumgartner, a corporal who led one of the squads in the platoon. “They gonna send us over the river?”

“Beats me,” Martin answered. “I hope to God they don’t. I don’t like getting shot at any better than the next guy.”

“Yeah, well, that’s on account of you’ve got your head screwed on tight,” Baumgartner said. He was more than twenty years younger than Chester, but he’d been in the Army for a while. “Some people . . .” He didn’t go on.

He didn’t need to, either. Lieutenant Monroe was telling anybody who’d listen what a howling waste they were going to make out of Fredericksburg and its Confederate defenders. Since he outranked everyone close by, people had to listen. Whether they believed him was liable to be a different story.

“Our bombardment will stun them. It will paralyze them,” Monroe burbled. “They’ll never know what hit them. We’ll get over the river without the least little bit of trouble.”

Baumgartner’s grunt was redolent of skepticism. So was Chester Martin’s. He’d seen lots of bombardments, which Thayer Monroe plainly hadn’t. Not even the fiercest one knocked an enemy out altogether. As soon as the bombing and the shelling let up, the survivors ran for their machine guns and popped up out of their holes with rifles in their hands.

The noncoms in the platoon all plainly knew as much. But rank had its privileges: no one told Monroe to shut up. Chester thought about it. He would have been more diplomatic than that if he’d decided to do it. In the end, he kept quiet with the rest. The young lieutenant was heartening new men who hadn’t been through the mill yet. That counted for something.

But when Thayer Monroe said, “We ought to be in Richmond a week after we break through at Fredericksburg,” Chester cleared his throat. For a wonder, the lieutenant noticed. “You said something, Sergeant?”

“Well, no, sir. Not exactly, sir.” Chester knew he had to be polite to the snotnose with the gold bar on each shoulder strap. He wasn’t convinced Monroe deserved such courtesy, but the military insisted on it. “Only, sir, it might be better if you don’t make promises we can’t keep.”

Monroe stared at him. Failure had plainly never crossed the shavetail’s mind. He said, “Sergeant, once we cross the river, we
will
go forward.” He might have been propounding a law of nature.

He might have been, but he wasn’t. Chester knew it too well. “Yes, sir,” he said, meaning,
No, sir.

Maybe Monroe wasn’t altogether an idiot. He heard what Martin wasn’t saying. Stiffly, he said, “When the order comes, Sergeant, we
will
go forward.”

“Oh, yes, sir,” Martin agreed—he couldn’t quarrel with that, not without ending up in big trouble himself. But he did want to persuade the lieutenant not to take on faith everything his superiors told him. “Sir, when you were at West Point, did you study the battles on the Roanoke front?”

“Sure.” Monroe chuckled. “All twelve or fourteen of them, or however many there were.”

To him, those fights were just things he’d studied in school. He could laugh about them. Chester couldn’t. His memories were too dark. “Sir, I was there for the first six or eight—till I got wounded. I was lucky. It was just a hometowner. But before every attack, they told us this would be the one that did the trick. Do you wonder that after a while we had trouble jumping up and down when they told us to go over the top?”

“I hope we’ve got better at what we’re doing since then.” By the way Thayer Monroe said it, it was a forgone conclusion that the Army had.

“So do I.” By the way Chester Martin said it, it was anything but.

The bombardment started on schedule, regardless of Martin’s opinion. It didn’t go on for days, the way it would have during the Great War. The men in charge of the guns
had
learned something. Long bombardments did more to tell the enemy where the attack was going in than they did to smash him flat. Make him keep his head down, then strike hard—that was the prevailing wisdom these days.

Martin would have liked it better if they hadn’t had to throw bridges across the Rappahannock before they could cross. He and the rest of the platoon—the rest of the regiment—waited by the river for the engineers to do their job. Martin liked and admired military engineers. They were good at their specialized trade, and when they had to they made pretty fair combat soldiers, too.

They did their damnedest on the Rappahannock, but they never had a chance. Even though U.S. artillery kept pounding Fredericksburg, Confederate machine guns and mortars started pounding the engineers right back. Guns up in the hills behind the town, guns that had stayed quiet so the U.S. cannon wouldn’t spot them and knock them out ahead of time, added their weight of metal to the countershelling.

And they added more than metal. The U.S. engineers had to try to do strenuous work in gas masks. U.S. guns had thrown poison gas at Fredericksburg along with everything else, and the C.S. artillery replied in kind. Martin was wearing his mask well before the order went out to put them on. He’d seen mustard gas the last time around. He hadn’t seen what they called nerve agents—those were new. But he didn’t want to make their acquaintance the hard way.

Confederate Mules—U.S. soldiers more often called them Asskickers—swooped down on the bridges. These days, the gull-winged dive bombers weren’t the symbol of terror they had been when the war was new. They were slow and ungainly; U.S. fighters hacked them out of the sky with ease when they ventured into airspace where the CSA didn’t have superiority. But they still had a role to play. They screamed down, put bombs on three bridges, and zoomed away at just above treetop level.

“I hate those bastards, but they’ve got balls.” Because of Corporal Baumgartner’s mask, his voice sounded distant and otherworldly.

“You want to know what I think, I think we have to be nuts to try to cross here at all,” Martin said. Baumgartner didn’t argue with him. He wished the other noncom would have.

U.S. raiders in rubber boats tried crossing the Rappahannock to quiet the mortar crews and machine gunners and riflemen on the other side. Despite smoke screens and heavy U.S. fire, a lot of the boats got sunk before they made it to the south bank of the river. The raiders who managed to cross no doubt did their best, but Chester couldn’t see that Confederate fire diminished even a little.

About every half hour, Lieutenant Monroe would say, “We’ll get the order to cross any minute now, men,” or, “It won’t be long!” or, “Be ready!” Knowing how stubborn the high brass could be, Chester feared the platoon leader was right, but kept hoping he was wrong.

The order never came. Towards evening, the units that had been pushed forward drew back out of enemy artillery range. Martin wondered how many casualties they’d taken, and how many they’d inflicted on the Confederates. He would have bet the first number was a lot bigger than the second one.

“Don’t worry, men,” Thayer Monroe said, invincibly optimistic. “We’ll get them soon, even if we didn’t get them today.”

Chester had never known a common soldier who worried about
not
going into battle. No doubt such men existed. You heard stories about them, stories often prefaced,
There was this crazy bastard who . . .
But he’d never run into one himself.

Like other lower forms of life, second lieutenants were too dumb to know better. Martin thought some more about telling this particular lieutenant to put a sock in it, but refrained. Monroe had a job, too. He was supposed to make soldiers enthusiastic about going out there and getting maimed. Having led that company in the Great War, Chester knew what a nasty job it could be.

At the moment, he worried more about whether the regiment would get its field kitchens set up after all the marching and countermarching it had done. He wasn’t especially surprised when it didn’t. “Canned rations,” he told the men in his platoon. (Thayer Monroe had a different opinion about whose it was, but what did second lieutenants know?)

“That shit again?” somebody said. It wasn’t the only grumble sullying the sweetness of the evening air. Canned rations ranged from boring to actively nasty. The labels usually peeled off, too, so you didn’t know ahead of time whether you were getting spaghetti and meatballs—tolerable—or chicken with stewed prunes—disgusting. As with men who liked combat, there were a few who liked the chicken concoction and would trade for it, but Chester didn’t think any were in his platoon.

Charlie Baumgartner plopped down beside him. “How’s that gonna look in the newspapers, Sarge? ‘U.S. Army Pulls Back from Fredericksburg! Does Not Cross!’ ” He made the headline very convincing.

Chester opened his can. It was hash—not very good, not very bad. He dug in. After the first mouthful, he said, “They can print that if they want to. I don’t care. As long as they don’t say, ‘U.S. Army Massacred at Fredericksburg!’ I’m not going to worry about it.”

“You got a good way of looking at things,” Baumgartner said. “Better’n some people I could name—that’s for damn sure.”

“He’s nothing but a puppy,” Martin said, identifying one of those unnamed people without undue difficulty.

“You know what a puppy is?” the corporal said. He waited for Chester to shake his head, then answered the rhetorical question: “Just a little son of a bitch.”

“Ouch,” Martin said. To his own surprise, he found himself defending Lieutenant Monroe: “He’s not so bad. He just needs experience.”

“He needs a good, swift kick in the ass,” Baumgartner said.

“Odds are he’ll get one. Let’s just hope he lives through it,” Chester said.

“Yeah.” Baumgartner nodded. “Let’s hope we do, too.”

A
rmstrong Grimes didn’t know where the Mormons got all their machine guns. He supposed the Confederates had sneaked some to them and they’d taken others from U.S. arsenals when they started their latest uprising. Or, for all he knew, maybe they had secret machine shops out in the desert somewhere, and men with green eyeshades working lathes to turn out their own.

Wherever the machine guns came from, they had a hell of a lot of them.

The one in front of Armstrong and his companions now was firing from the window of a house in Orem, Utah; U.S. forces had finally managed to drive the Mormons out of Provo. An enormous canning plant dominated Orem. The rebels were holed up inside the factory, too, but the Americans were going to have to clear them out of the buildings in front of the place before they could even think about attacking it.

Clearing them wouldn’t be easy. Nothing that had to do with Mormons ever was. The machine gun spitting death in front of Armstrong, for instance, hadn’t just been set in that window. As soon as it started up, Sergeant Stowe called artillery fire in on it. The guns had turned the house to rubble. They hadn’t bothered the machine gun or its crew one bit.

Crouched in a hole that didn’t feel nearly deep enough with bullets cracking past just overhead, Armstrong turned to Yossel Reisen and said, “Bastards have that thing all sandbagged.”

“Either that or there’s a real cement bunker inside the place,” Reisen answered. “Wouldn’t surprise me a bit.”

“Me, neither,” Armstrong agreed with a sour sigh. “They were probably getting ready here while they were still fighting down in Provo.”

“I bet you’re right,” Reisen said. They both swore: part of the automatic obscenity that made up the small change of any conversation between military men. To Armstrong, the idea of preparing a position long before you fell back into it felt like cheating.

A runner scrambled into the hole with the two of them. “When the whistle blows, pop up and start shooting at that machine gun as hard as you can,” he said, and then climbed out to pass the word to the next few U.S. soldiers.

“What’s going on?” Armstrong called after him. The runner didn’t answer. Armstrong did some more swearing, this time in earnest. He didn’t like orders he didn’t understand, especially when they were liable to get him killed.

Like them or not, he had them. About fifteen minutes later, an officer’s whistle shrilled. He popped up and fired a shot, then ducked down again to work the Springfield’s bolt. He felt like a jack-in-the-box after a while, or maybe like a jackass. But everybody else in front of the machine gun was doing the same thing, so the Mormons manning the piece didn’t aim all their attention—to say nothing of all their fire—at him.

“Ha!” Yossel Reisen spoke with a certain somber satisfaction. “I see what’s going on.”

“Yeah?” said Armstrong, who didn’t. “What?”

“Guy with a flamethrower sneaking up on that house,” Reisen answered.

“Is that what it is?” Armstrong said. “Well, no wonder we’re supposed to keep ’em busy, then.”

The only drawback to a flamethrower was that the fellow who used it had to get close to his target before opening up—and had to get close while he was lugging a tank of jellied gasoline on his back. Armstrong’s opinion was that the men who carried flamethrowers had to be nuts. If, say a tracer round hit that tank of fuel . . .