The Grapple (34 page)

IX

I
n the reinforced-concrete shelter under the ruins of the Gray House, Jake Featherston fumed. He had the feeling of being a bug pinned down on a collector’s board. Wiggle as he would, the pin held him helplessly in place.

He’d had that feeling in the last war, when U.S. artillery and barrels inexorably pushed the Army of Northern Virginia back from Pennsylvania through Maryland and into the state for which it was named. He’d sworn he would never feel that way again. He’d sworn the Confederate States would never let anybody on earth do that to them again. For two years, near enough, his barrels and dive bombers made good on the boast. Now…

Now the damnyankees had barrels and dive bombers, too. Their machines were just as good as the CSA’s. From the dismayed reports from the field, their latest barrels were better than anything the Confederates had. And the United States had swarms of barrels and cannon and airplanes and men, while the Confederates had…what was left from the adventures of the past two years.

Lulu stuck her head into the office. “Mr. President, General Forrest is here to see you.”

“Thanks,” Featherston said. “Please send him in.” He could order Negroes sent to camps by the tens of thousands, by the hundreds of thousands, without batting an eye, but he was always polite to his secretary.

Nathan Bedford Forrest III came in and gave him a perfunctory salute. “Mr. President,” he said, and then, plainly with an effort, “Freedom!”

“Freedom!” Jake echoed; the Party slogan never felt stale to him. He waved the head of the General Staff to a chair. Seeing how haggard Forrest looked, he took out the bottle of whiskey that lived in his desk drawer. “Need a snort?”

“Don’t mind if I do, sir.” Forrest poured himself a healthy shot. “Mud in your eye.” He knocked it back. Jake Featherston also drank. Forrest eyed him. “That was good, but I don’t reckon I can drink enough to make me forget how much trouble we’re in.”

“You’re the fellow who’s supposed to get us out of trouble like that,” Jake said.

“With what…sir?” Forrest asked. “Talk about making bricks without straw—I feel like I’m trying to make bricks without mud out there. How can I stop the damnyankees when they’re throwing everything but the kitchen sink at me and I don’t even have the goddamn sink?”

“It can’t be that bad,” Featherston said.

“No, sir. It’s worse,” Nathan Bedford Forrest III said. “We…lost a lot of men and we lost a lot of matériel in Pittsburgh and falling back afterwards.”

“The Yankees must have lost a lot, too.” Featherston eyed the whiskey bottle. He still drank, but he couldn’t remember the last time he really
drank.
Getting plowed, forgetting all this crap, was an enormous temptation. But the crap wouldn’t go away, and it would get worse while he wasn’t looking at it. And so, regretfully, he looked but he didn’t grab the bottle again.

“They did, sir. No doubt about it,” the chief of the General Staff said earnestly.
He’s getting ready to call me a damn fool,
Featherston thought.
He’ll be polite about it, but he’ll do it just the same.
And sure as hell, Forrest went on, “But they’ve got more men and more factories than we do. They can build up faster than we can, and they can go on building up to a level…we have trouble matching.”

A level we can’t match—that’s what he almost said.
“They’ve got more men. We can’t do much about that,” Jake said. “But we’ve got better men, by God, and we’ve got better weapons. The automatic rifles, and now the rockets…”

“All that’s true, sir, and it’s why things aren’t worse,” Forrest said. “But our artillery’s no better than theirs, and they’ve got more. Our airplanes aren’t better, and they’ve got more. That’s really starting to hurt. And when it comes to barrels—sir, when it comes to barrels, they’ve got a step up on us. That’s starting to hurt bad, too.”

“Goddammit, why can’t we keep up?” Jake Featherston snarled. “We were ahead when the war started.”

“We don’t have enough engineers, sir. We don’t have enough factory hands,” Forrest said. “Damn near every healthy white man in the country from eighteen to fifty’s in uniform.”

“Women are taking up some of the slack in the factories—more every day, in fact.” Forrest was angry he’d taken too long to see how important that was. He didn’t like giving women such jobs. In the long run, it would twist the CSA out of the shape he wanted the country to have. But if you got smashed in the short run, the long run didn’t matter. So women went to work in war plants, and he’d worry about what it all meant later—if there was a later.

“We still need more bodies in there, sir.” Forrest took a deep breath. “If there was any way we could get more use out of our niggers—”

“No,” Featherston said in a low, deadly voice. “The niggers are Party business. They’re
my
business. Don’t you go sticking your nose in where it doesn’t belong. We are gonna come out of this war nigger-free. Nigger-free, you hear me?”

“Mr. President, how much do we have to pay to make that happen?” Forrest asked. “We needed most of a division to clean Richmond out—a division we couldn’t use against the damnyankees. If that happens too many more times, it’ll put us in a world of trouble. I’m sorry I have to tell you such things, sir, but somebody needs to.”

He had nerve. Not many people who came before Jake Featherston told him anything but what they thought he wanted to hear. Clarence Potter did, but Potter had almost official gadfly status. Even Ferd Koenig hesitated. Forrest might be hesitant, but he was saying what he thought.

“The worst is over,” Jake said. “Most towns are cleaned out.” That still left the black belt from rural South Carolina through Louisiana largely unaffected, but he wasn’t about to split hairs with Nathan Bedford Forrest III. Besides, he had Mexican soldiers dealing with the coons there. He didn’t need to pull so many of his own men away from more urgent—not more important, but more urgent—things.

“I hope you’re right, sir,” the chief of the General Staff said. “I hope so, but….”

I haven’t convinced that man,
Jake thought. He changed the subject from his own shortcomings to those of the Army: “We’ve got to stop the Yankees. They’re carving their way through Kentucky like we did through Ohio.”

“That’s what I’m trying to tell you, Mr. President,” Forrest said. “We’re using every man and every piece of machinery we can get our hands on. We can’t get our hands on enough men or machines.”

“If you stop retreating, if you start hitting back—”

“Sir, that’s not fair to the men fighting and dying in Kentucky. You can hang me out to dry if you want—I’ll be your scapegoat. But they’re doing everything flesh and blood can do. They’re making stands every chance they get, and they’re counterattacking every chance they get, too. We’d be in worse shape if they weren’t, and you can take that to the bank.”

His passion startled Featherston. The President of the CSA would have thrown him to the wolves without a qualm—if he’d had someone in mind to replace him. But the only officer who came to mind for the job was George Patton, and Patton was too valuable in the field to bring him back to Richmond.

So instead of canning Nathan Bedford Forrest III, Featherston said, “Let’s take a look at the map.”

“Of course, sir.” Did Forrest sound relieved? If he didn’t, he damn well should have.

But the map mattered. Jake Featherston slashed a line across it with his forefinger—almost exactly the line Irving Morrell had slashed across a map of the CSA in Philadelphia some months earlier. Whatever Featherston’s flaws, he had a gift for seeing the big picture. “This is what the sons of bitches aim to do to us.”

Nathan Bedford Forrest III blinked. He worried about trees; he hadn’t looked at the forest as a whole for a while. “You don’t think small, sir,” he said after a moment’s pause for thought.

“Neither do the damnyankees,” Jake answered without the least hesitation. The truth burned hot and clear in his mind. (Lies burned just as hot and clear, which helped make him as effective as he was. But this was no lie; he wasn’t trying to fool either himself or the chief of the General Staff.) “The damnyankees hurt us bad the last go-round, but that was all they did—they hurt us. With barrels that really haul ass, with airplanes that really bomb, they’ll fucking kill us this time. And that’s how they’ll do it—Chattanooga, Atlanta, the ocean.”

Forrest eyed the map as if a rattlesnake had crawled out from behind it. He licked his lips. “They can’t do that!” he blurted.

“They can unless we stop ’em,” Jake answered. “How do you aim to? Losing Atlanta’d be bad enough. All the oil from Louisiana and Texas comes east through there. Atlanta goes down the toilet, everything north and east of it stops running. We are screwed, blued, and tattooed.”

“They can’t possibly do all that this year,” Forrest said.

Jake would have liked the assessment much better without the qualifier—and if it didn’t so closely match his own. He asked, “How much more can we pull out of Virginia to send west?”

“If we pull more out, the United States will just waltz into Richmond, you know,” Forrest said. “I’m not sure we can stop them if they push hard now.”

“If we have to, we can keep fighting without this town, right?” Jake knew losing the capital of the CSA would hurt. It would be a psychological blow that would start people plotting against him—if they weren’t already plotting against him, which they probably were. And Richmond wasn’t just the capital. It was one of the most important industrial towns in the CSA, right up there with Birmingham and Atlanta and Dallas. But…“If it comes down to choosing between Richmond and Atlanta, we have to hold on to Atlanta, because so many other things depend on it. If the damnyankees take this place away from us, they can’t go much farther. Is that right, or do you see it different?” He meant the question. Forrest was welcome to make him change his mind—if he could.

But the chief of the General Staff kept eyeing the map, and the slash Jake had cut across it. “I’m afraid it is right.” Forrest sounded unhappy about it, which convinced Jake he was telling the truth.

And if he was, and if Jake had things straight, the answer seemed plain: “We have to stop the USA as far this side of Atlanta as we can. Stop the damnyankees, then drive ’em back. They did it to us. Let’s see how they like getting hoist with their own waddayacallit.”

“Petard,” Forrest said automatically. “I hope we
can
do it, sir. The one big difference between us and the United States is that they have more margin for error than we do. They fell all over themselves in the Ohio campaign, but we did everything we could do to get as far as we did. If things don’t go just right for us…”

“Yes, yes.” Jake Featherston had heard that too many times. One reason he’d heard it so often was that it was true. He didn’t want to think about that, and no one in the CSA could tell him he had to. He said, “We’ll just have to make things go worse for the damnyankees, that’s all. Stir up the Canucks wherever we can, try and talk Quebec into pulling its soldiers out of the rest of Canada so the United States have to send more men in, see if we can fire up the Mormons one more time…”

“Will it be enough?” Forrest asked.

“Of course it will,” Jake said. “It’s got to be.” He also didn’t want to think about what would happen if it wasn’t, and no one in the CSA could tell him he had to do that, either.

F
or a long time, Camp Determination had bustled. Load after load of Negroes came into the place. Load after load of corpses went out. It was, in a way, a factory, with death as its chief product. And it ran very efficiently.

Troop Leader Hipolito Rodriguez longed for the old days. So did all the other guards, up to Jeff Pinkard himself. The only people who liked the way things were now were the Negroes still inside the camp, and their opinions didn’t count.

Fewer and fewer Negroes were left. Thanks to the damnyankees’ air raids, trains had a hard time getting to Snyder, Texas, and the camp just beyond it. The bathhouses that weren’t bathhouses and the asphyxiating trucks went right on working, emptying barracks one by one. Blacks went to their deaths without too much fuss; the story now was that they were being moved for their own protection. They knew how many bombs fell on Snyder. They didn’t know bombs wouldn’t fall on them. And so they walked into the bathhouses and climbed onto the trucks—and they never worried about anything else after that.

All of a sudden, Camp Determination had more guards than it needed. Rodriguez and the other men from the Confederate Veterans’ Brigades didn’t worry about going anywhere else; they were useless at the front. The tough females who did most of the guarding on the women’s side didn’t need to fear trading their gray uniforms for butternut, either. But the young men, the Freedom Party Guards…

“Shows what kind of people the damnyankees are,” one of them said at supper after another day when no trains came in. “They’d sooner help niggers and blow decent white folks to hell and gone.”

Rodriguez gnawed on a barbecued pork rib. As far as he was concerned, Texans only thought they knew how to barbecue. Down in Sonora, now, they did things right. He found himself nodding to the young guard, though he was neither black nor white himself.

Another youngster said, “How long till there aren’t any niggers left here at all?”

“They aren’t shipping so many spooks out this way, I hear,” said the guard who’d spoken first. “More and more are going to camps farther east, where the U.S. bombers can’t hit the train tracks so hard.”

“That’s not good,” the second guard said. “Camp Determination was made to be the biggest and the best. Country can’t do a proper job of reducing population if this here camp isn’t doing its bit.”

“They didn’t think about no Yankees when they made it,” Rodriguez put in.

“You’re right, Troop Leader,” the first young guard said. Without three stripes on his sleeve, Rodriguez would have been just another damn greaser to him. With them, the Sonoran was a superior. Party discipline ran deep.

“We’ve got to do something,” the second guard added. “We’ve got to push the United States back into New Mexico.”