Drive to the East (71 page)

“Ah,” Chester said. “Well, sir, since you put it that way, I wouldn’t be a bit surprised.”

“Neither would I,” Delbert Wheat said. “So I’ll worry when my superiors tell me to, but not till then.”

Chester did notice that some of the ammunition coming in for the antiaircraft guns had the black-painted tips of armor-piercing rounds. The Confederates used their antiaircraft guns against barrels with vicious effect. Imitation was the sincerest, and most deadly, kind of flattery.

Not long before Christmas, word came down from on high that the Confederates would be coming soon. The United States had taken advantage of the weather to break through in November. A new snowstorm might give the Confederates the same sort of extra concealment.

The C.S. bombardment had gas shells in it. They were less deadly in cold weather, and gas masks more nearly tolerable—unless your mask froze up. That didn’t mean Chester wanted to put on his mask. Want it or not, he did. He’d seen gas casualties in the Great War, and a few this time, too. Getting shot was bad enough. He knew just how bad it was from twofold experience. By everything he knew except that direct experience, getting gassed was worse.

As soon as the shelling let up, Lieutenant Wheat shouted, “Be ready!” Up and down the U.S. line, that same cry rang out. The troops in green-gray had the advantage of standing behind the Tuscarawas River. Chester hoped that would mean something. The Confederates had more practice crossing in the face of resistance than any Great War army had.

Where Chester’s platoon was stationed, the river, which ran mostly north and south, took an east-west bend. Instead of pressing down on that east-west length, the soldiers in butternut trundled past it to hit the next north-south stretch. “They’re giving us their flank!” Wheat exclaimed in amazement.

True, the Confederates did stay out of effective rifle range of the men on the south bank of the Tuscarawas. But several of their barrels trundled along only a few hundred yards from the antiaircraft guns that could also fire against ground targets. When the gunners got targets that artillerymen mostly only dreamt of, they made the most of them. Four or five barrels went up in flames in a few minutes’ time. U.S. machine guns and riflemen harried the crewmen bailing out of the machines. They were shooting at long range, but with enough bullets in the air some probably struck home.

Some barrels paused, presented their glacis plates to their tormentors, and fired back. Others scooted farther north, so the U.S. guns wouldn’t bear on them any more. Artillery fire fell around those antiaircraft guns. Sometimes it fell on them. Had the weather been better, Asskickers would have gone after them one by one. With clouds huddling low, though, dive bombers were liable to fly straight into the ground instead of pulling up in time.

When yet another Confederate barrel brewed up because it incautiously came too close to the U.S. antiaircraft guns, Chester yelled and pounded the dirt at the front of his foxhole. “Those butternut bastards aren’t buying anything cheap today!” he yelled.

But he could see only his little corner of the fight. Early in the afternoon, orders came to fall back to the east. “Why?” somebody said indignantly. “We’re pounding the crap out of ’em here!”

“Here, yes,” Lieutenant Wheat said. “But Featherston’s fuckers are over the Tuscarawas south of Coshocton—south and west of here. If we don’t give up some ground, they’ll hit us in the flank and enfilade us.”

Taking enfilading fire was like getting your T crossed in a naval battle: all the enemy’s firepower bore on you, but most of yours wouldn’t bear on him. It was, in other words, a damn good recipe for getting killed.

“Have we got positions farther east that face west instead of north?” Chester asked.

“Good question, Sergeant,” Del Wheat said. “We’ll both find out at the same time.” He paused. “I hope we do. We must have known this was coming. If we
didn’t
get ready for it, then we’ve got the same old muddle up at the top.”

When they came to zigzag trenches hastily dug and bulldozed out of fields, Chester felt like cheering. Somebody with stars on his shoulder straps could actually see a step or two ahead. That made Chester think things might go better than he’d expected.

The Confederates who came up against those trenches went to earth in a hurry when a fierce blast of fire met them. More than a few U.S. soldiers carried captured C.S. automatic rifles for extra firepower. They had to get ammunition from dead enemy soldiers, but there’d been a lot of them around.

Before long, Chester and his comrades needed to fall back again. Again, though, they fell back into prepared positions. In spite of retreating, he felt more confident. The Confederates could overrun any one position, but each one cost them. How many could they overrun before they started running out of men to do it?

N
ot far from Ellaville, Georgia, ran a stretch of highway locally called the Memorial Mile. Marble stelae stood by the side of the road. Brass plaques mounted on the marble commemorated Sumter County soldiers who’d served in the Great War.
WIA
by a name meant the soldier had been wounded in action;
KIA
by a name meant he’d been killed.

The Negro guerrillas who’d attached Jonathan Moss and Nick Cantarella to their number hated the Memorial Mile with a fierce and terrible passion. “How many names you reckon they be if they put up all the niggers from here they done killed?” asked their chief, who went by the name of Spartacus. Moss suspected that was a
nom de guerre;
it was, as far as he was concerned, a damn good one.

“If you’re gonna keep on playing this game, you’ll put some more crackers’ names on some kinda stones,” Nick Cantarella said. His clotted New York vowels and Spartacus’ lazy-sounding drawl hardly seemed to belong to the same language. Sometimes they had to pause so each could figure out what the other was saying. But they had something in common: they both wanted to cause the Confederates as much grief as they could.

A convoy of trucks rumbled along the road from Ellaville towards Americus. Command cars with machine guns shepherded the trucks along. Opening up on them would have invited massive retaliation. “One advantage you’ve got with these pine woods,” Moss said.

“What’s that?” Spartacus asked.

“They don’t lose their leaves this time of year,” Moss replied. “Easier to hide here than it would be in a forest full of bare-branched trees.”

“Not gonna be much snow on the ground, neither,” Cantarella said. “It’s really a bitch, tryin’ to cover your tracks in the snow.”

Spartacus pursed his lips, then slowly nodded. He was about forty-five, just going gray at the temples, with a scar that looked like a bullet crease on his right forearm. If he hadn’t been black, he would have put Moss in mind of a career noncom—he had that air of rough, no-nonsense competence about him. Suddenly, Moss asked, “Did
you
fight for the CSA the last time around?”

“Sure enough did,” Spartacus answered. “Got shot fo’ mah country—reckoned it
was
mah country in them days. Case you wonderin’, ain’t no niggers’ names on them goddamn memorials, neither. I even vote once—they let me do it in ’21, on account of they was afeared that Featherston fucker was gonna win then. But he los’, an’ I never seen the inside o’ no votin’ booth since. Ain’t seen nothin’ but trouble since the Freedom Party come in.”

A boxy, old-fashioned Birmingham with a white-haired white man at the wheel drove by. “You could nail somebody like him easy enough, make the Confederates try and go after you here, then hit somewhere else,” Cantarella said.

“Don’t want to shoot that there ofay,” Spartacus said. “That there’s Doc Thomason, an’ he been settin’ bones an’ deliverin’ babies for buckra and niggers for damn near fifty years. If you can only pay him a chicken, he take your chicken. If you can’t pay him nothin’, he set your arm anyways. Ain’t all white folks bad—jus’ too many of ’em.”

“All right. Fine. We don’t shoot the doc. He ain’t gonna be the only guy on the road, though,” Cantarella said. “Shoot somebody else. Maybe even hang around to shoot at the first fuckers who come to see what you went and did. Then when they’re all flabbling about that, kick ’em in the nuts some other place. Make them react to you.”

“We done some o’ that,” Spartacus said. “We done a couple of people bombs, too, over by Americus. Them Freedom Party assholes, they don’t like people bombs none.” He spoke with a certain grim satisfaction.

Moss looked at Cantarella. The Army captain was looking back at him. Moss didn’t need to be able to read minds to know what Cantarella was thinking. They didn’t like people bombs, either. But as weapons the weak could use against the strong, they were hard to match.

“How do you get people to volunteer to blow themselves up?” Moss asked carefully, not sure if the question would offend Spartacus.

But the guerrilla leader looked at him—looked through him, really—and answered, “Don’t gotta drug ’em none or get ’em drunk. Don’t gotta say we’s gonna kill their wives an’ chillun, neither. Dat’s what you mean, ain’t it?” Moss gave back an unhappy nod. Spartacus went on, “See—you is a white man, even if you comes from the US of A. You is happy most o’ the time, an’ you reckons everybody else happy most o’ the time. Ain’t like dat if you is a nigger in these here Confederate States. Somebody blow hisself up here, he a lucky man. Do Jesus!—he mighty lucky. He go out quick—it don’t hurt none. He make the ofays pay. And he don’t go to no goddamn camp where they let him in but he don’t come out no mo’. I got mo’ people wants to be people bombs’n I got ’splosives an’ chances to use ’em.”

“Shit,” Nick Cantarella said softly. His comment was at least as reverent as Spartacus’. He added, “That explains the Mormons up in the USA, too—to hell with me if it doesn’t.”

“We is powerful jealous o’ them Mormons,” Spartacus said.

“Because they thought of people bombs and you didn’t?” Moss asked.

“No, no.” Spartacus waved that aside. “On account o’ they is white, jus’ like the rest o’ you damnyankees. Can’t tell who a Mormon is jus’ by lookin’. He go where he please before he press the button. Nobody worry about him none till too late.”

Moss and Cantarella looked at each other again. The Negro wasn’t wrong. And he understood the difference between deaths and effective deaths. A lot of Great War generals hadn’t—their method for smothering fires was burying them in bodies. Some officers in this war had the same disease; Daniel MacArthur’s name sprang to mind. Had Spartacus worn stars on his shoulder straps instead of a collarless shirt with rolled-up sleeves and dungarees out at the knees, he might have made a formidable officer, not just a sergeant.

But the United States didn’t let Negroes enlist in the Army as privates, let alone send them to West Point to learn the art of command and the fine points of soldiering. In a troubled voice, Moss said, “You make me wonder about my own country, Spartacus, not just yours.”

“Good,” the black man rumbled. “Wonderin’s good. Ain’t nothin’ gonna change till you wonder if it oughta.”

A band of his raiders slipped south from Ellaville toward Plains, a small town west of Americus. Moss and Cantarella went along with them, bolt-action Tredegars in their hands. They were moving south and west from Andersonville: deeper into the Confederacy. In a way, that was good—the camp guards and county sheriffs and whoever else went after escaped POWs were less likely to look for them there. But they had to move cautiously. Negroes walking through peanut fields could be sharecroppers looking for work, but whites doing the same thing were bound to rouse suspicion.

Burnt cork, the staple of minstrel shows for generations, solved the problem. Up close, Cantarella and especially the fairer Moss made unsatisfactory Negroes, but they passed muster at a distance.

“What do we do when we get there?” Moss asked Spartacus.

“Much as we kin,” Spartacus replied. “Burn, kill, and then git.” That seemed to cover everything that needed covering, as far as he was concerned.

Real sharecroppers and farm laborers put the guerrillas up for the night. The way the other blacks accepted them said everything that needed saying, as far as Moss was concerned. Not all the Negroes in the CSA would fight against the Freedom Party. That took more spirit than some people owned. He couldn’t imagine a black betraying those who would fight to the authorities, though.

Negroes raised eyebrows at him and Cantarella, but relaxed when they heard the white men were escaped U.S. POWs. “Damnyankees is all right,” said an old man with only a few teeth. He didn’t seem to know any other name for people from the United States. Sowbelly, fatback, hominy, sweet potatoes, harsh moonshine—the locals fed them what they had.

“Gots to make the ofay pay.” Moss heard that again and again.

The band that approached Plains numbered about fifty—a platoon’s worth of men. Moss worried as he trudged through the night toward the little town. If the Confederates had a real garrison there, they could slaughter the raiders. “Don’t flabble about it,” Nick Cantarella said when he worried out loud. “First thing is, the smokes around here would know if they were layin’ for us. Second thing is, they don’t have enough guys to garrison every little pissant burg, not if they want to fight a war with us, too.”

Logic said he was right. Sometimes logic let you down with a thud, but. . . . “Sounds good,” Moss said.

Sentries did patrol the peanut fields around Plains. With almost contemptuous ease, the Negroes disposed of the one who might have discovered them. The gray-haired man died almost before he knew someone was drawing a knife across his throat. Only a small, startled sigh escaped him. A guerrilla threw aside his own squirrel gun and appropriated the sentry’s Tredegar. “Too good a piece to waste on a damn fool,” he said.

“Let’s go,” Spartacus said.

They trotted silently into Plains. The silence didn’t last long. They started firing into some houses and tossing Featherston Fizzes into others. Fires roared to life. Alarm bells started ringing. Volunteer firemen emerged from their houses to fight the flames. The raiders picked them off one after another.