Drive to the East (6 page)

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 creamed 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.”

Later that afternoon, eight or ten butternut-painted barrels came rumbling up the road and across the fields to either side of it. Confederate foot soldiers loped along with them. The armored fighting vehicles started shelling the ground the U.S. forces had gained. Just seeing and hearing them was enough to make soldiers who’d been huddling in foxholes ready to get out and fight some more. The Confederates still sometimes called their battle cry the Rebel yell, though they’d been their own country, not rebels at all, for eighty years. The shrill ululation resounded now, way up here in Yankeeland. The surge that had gone west reversed course once more.

But nothing came cheap today. The Yankees had brought a couple of antibarrel cannons to the front. The sound of an armor-piercing round smashing into steel plate reminded Tom of an accident in a smithy. The stricken barrel burst into flames. A couple of men managed to get out. The other three didn’t. The blazing barrel sent up a plume of greasy black smoke. Some of what burned in there had been alive moments before.

Colleton cursed softly. “See if I give those sons of bitches another truce,” he muttered. “Just see if I do, ever.”

M
ary Pomeroy always liked driving out from Rosenfeld and visiting the farm where she’d grown up. Her mother was all alone on the Manitoba prairie these days. Maude McGregor still had her health, but she wasn’t getting any younger. Mary felt good checking up on her every so often.

The visits did remind her how much time had passed by. Mary’s mother had had hair as red as her own. No more; it was almost all gray now. As Mary neared thirty-five, the first silver threads were running through her copper, too.

She and her mother sat in the kitchen, drinking coffee and eating sweet rolls her mother had baked. “Oh, Ma,” Mary said, “the smells in here take me back to when I was a little girl. The oilcloth on the table, the coal fire, the kerosene lamps, all the cooking . . .” She shook her head, lost in a world that would never come back again, a world where her father and older brother were alive, a world where the Yanks hadn’t occupied Canada for a generation.

“It does smell different in your apartment,” her mother agreed. Quickly, she added, “Not bad—not bad at all—but not the same, either.”

“No, not the same,” Mary said. She had a gas stove and electricity; the one didn’t smell like coal, while the other didn’t smell like anything. And what she cooked just wasn’t the same as what her mother made. She couldn’t put her finger on the difference, but she knew it was there.

“How are the Frenchies?” Maude McGregor asked.

“They’re there.” Mary made a sour face. These days, the United States needed all the soldiers they could scrape up to fight the Confederate States. The men now occupying Rosenfeld and a lot of other Canadian towns came from the Republic of Quebec. They wore blue-gray uniforms, not U.S. green-gray. Mary couldn’t stand them. They should have been Canadians, too, but instead they helped the Yanks oppress their countrymen. Most of them—almost all of the young ones who’d grown up in the so-called Republic—spoke nothing but French, and jibber-jabbered in it all the time. As far as she was concerned, that added insult to injury.

“Any trouble with them?” her mother asked.

“No,” Mary said tonelessly. “No trouble at all.”

She wondered where her mother would go with that, but Maude McGregor didn’t go anywhere at all. She only nodded and got the teapot and filled her own cup. She held the pot out to Mary, who nodded. Her mother refilled it. The milk Mary added came from one of the cows in the barn.

“How’s Alec?” her mother asked.

Mary smiled. She didn’t have to consider her answers and watch every word about her son. “He’s fine, Ma. He’s growing like a weed, he raises trouble every chance he gets, and he’s doing good in kindergarten. Of course, he already pretty much knew how to read and write before he started.”

“I should hope so,” her mother said. “You and Julia and Alexander did, too.”

Alec was named for Mary’s dead older brother. Remembering him took the smile off her face. She said, “You know what the bad thing is about school these days?”

“Of course I do,” Maude McGregor said. “The Yanks pound their lies into the heads of children who aren’t old enough to know malarkey when they hear it.”

“That’s it. That’s just it.” Mary didn’t know what to do about it, either. Her mother and father had pulled her out of school when the Americans started throwing propaganda around instead of teaching about what had really happened—that was how Canadians saw it, anyhow. No one had raised a fuss back then, but rules were stricter now. And Mary didn’t want the Yanks paying attention to her for any reason.

Her mother said, “And Mort? How’s the diner doing?”

“Pretty well,” Mary answered. “One of the cooks burned his hand, so he’ll be out a few days. Mort’s filling in behind the stove.”

“Must be strange, having a man who knows how to cook,” her mother remarked.

“It is. It keeps me on my toes all the time,” Mary said. “But it’s all right. I’m glad I found anybody, and Mort and I get along real good.”

She’d had a young man courting her when her father was killed by his own bomb trying to blow up General Custer as he passed through Rosenfeld. Afterwards, the young man dropped her as if she were explosive herself. Nobody looked at her for years after that, not till Mort Pomeroy did. Was it any wonder she’d promptly fallen in love?

Her mother said, “I’m glad you do. It’s nice. Your father and I, we hardly had a harsh word between us.”

“I know, Ma.” Mary also knew why. Her mother noticed everything and said nothing. If she didn’t complain, how could Pa have found fault with her? Mary wasn’t like that. She’d never believed in suffering in silence. If something was wrong, she let the world know about it. She didn’t always restrict herself to words, either, any more than her father had. She asked, “How are things here?”

“Oh, I get along,” Maude McGregor answered. “I’ve been getting along for years and years now. I expect I’m good for a little while longer.”

The farm lacked not only electricity but also running water and indoor plumbing. Mary had never noticed what was missing when she was growing up. She’d taken the pungency of the outhouse as much for granted as the different pungency of the barn. Kerosene lamps had always seemed good enough. So had the pot-bellied coal-burning stove. Now the stinks and the inconveniences, though still familiar, jolted her when she visited. Little by little, she’d got used to an easier life in town.

Even so, she said, “I’m going out to the barn for some chores.”

“Oh, you don’t need to do that,” her mother said quickly.

“It’s all right. I don’t mind.” Mary did intend to gather eggs and feed the animals while she was out there; she wasn’t dressed for mucking out the place. That wasn’t all she would do, though. Her mother knew as much, knew and worried. But, being who and what she was, she couldn’t bring herself to say much.

A motorcar rolled along the dirt track that ran in front of the McGregor farm as Mary went from the farmhouse to the barn. The dirt road didn’t see much traffic these days, though Mary remembered endless columns of soldiers in green-gray marching along it when she was a little girl: U.S. soldiers heading for the front that had stalled between Rosenfeld and Winnipeg. Then the front wasn’t stalled anymore, the Yanks got what they’d always wanted, and hard times descended on Canada. They weren’t gone yet.