Walk in Hell (2 page)

After a while, the bombardment stopped. The gunners came out on deck. It had probably been hell inside the turret, too. They stripped off their sweat-soaked uniforms and jumped naked into the river, where they proceeded to try to drown one another. It was, George Enos thought, a strange way to fight a war.

Anne Colleton gunned the Vauxhall Prince Henry up the Robert E. Lee Highway from Charleston, South Carolina, toward her plantation, Marshlands, outside the little town of St. Matthews. The motorcar hit a pothole. Her teeth came together in a sharp click. The so-called highway, like all roads outside the cities, was nothing but dirt. Even with a lap robe and a broad-brimmed hat with a veil, Anne was caked with red-brown dust. She supposed she should count herself lucky she hadn’t had a puncture. She’d already repaired two since leaving Charleston.

“Punctures?” She shook her head. “Punctures are nothing.” She counted herself lucky to be alive. With a dashing submersible commander, she’d been at a rather seedy hotel near the edge of one of Charleston’s Negro districts when the riot or uprising or whatever it was broke out. They’d piled into the Vaux-hall and escaped just ahead of the baying mob. She’d delivered Roger Kimball back to the harbor and then, not bothering to get the bulk of her belongings out of the much finer hotel where she was registered, she’d headed for home.

Down the road toward her, filling up most of it, came a wagon pulled by a horse and a mule and filled to overflowing with white men, women, and children—several families packed together, unless she missed her guess. She stepped on the brake, hard as she could. The Vauxhall came to a shuddering stop. Its sixty-horsepower engine could hurl it forward at a mile a minute—though not on the Robert E. Lee Highway—but slowing down was another matter.

Some of the whites wore bandages, some of those rusty with old blood. Over the growl of the motorcar’s engine, Anne called, “What’s it like up ahead?”

“It’s bad, ma’am,” the graybeard at the reins answered, tipping his battered straw hat to her—he could see she was a person of consequence, even if he didn’t know just who she was. “We’re lucky we got out alive, and that’s a fact.”

The woman beside him nodded vehemently. “You ought to turn around your ownself,” she added. “Niggers up further north, they gone crazy. They got guns some kind of crazy way and they got red flags flyin’ and sure as Jesus they’re gonna kill any whites they can catch.”

“Red flags,” Anne said, and heads bobbed up and down again in the wagon. Her lips moved in a silent curse. Her brother Tom, a Confederate major, had said earlier in the year there were Red revolutionaries among the Negro laborers in the Army. She’d scoffed at the idea that such radicals might also have gained a foothold at Marshlands. Now fear clawed her. Her other brother, Jacob, was back at the mansion, an invalid since the Yankees had gassed him within an inch of his life. She’d thought it surely safe to leave him for a few days.

The fellow in the straw hat tipped it again, then guided his mismatched team off the road so the wagon could get around the automobile. As soon as she had the room, she put the Vauxhall in gear and zoomed forward again. Along with other innovations, she’d had a rearview mirror installed on the motorcar. Looking into it, she saw faces staring after her from the wagon as she drove toward trouble rather than away from it.

Every so often, trees shaded the road. Something dangled from an overhanging branch of one of them. She slowed down again. It was the body of a lynched Negro. A placard tied round his neck said,
THIS IS IF WE KETCH YOU
. He wore only a pair of ragged drawers. What had been done to him before he was hanged wasn’t pretty.

Anne bit her lip. She prided herself on being a modern woman, on being able to take on the world straight up and come out ahead, regardless of her sex. Outdealing men had made her rich—well, richer, since she was born far from poor. But business was one thing, this brutality something else again.

And what were the Negroes, the Reds, doing in whatever lands—not Marshlands, surely—they’d seized in their revolt? How many old scores, going back how many hundred years, were they repaying?

As much to escape questions like that as to get away from the tormented corpse (around which flies were already buzzing), Anne drove off fast enough to press herself back into the seat. Perhaps a mile farther up the road, she came to another tree with dreadful fruit. The first had shocked her because of its savagery. The second also shocked her, mostly by how little feeling it roused in her.
This is how men get used to war,
she thought, and shivered though the day was warm and muggy: more like August than late October.

She drove past a burnt-out farmhouse from which smoke was still rising. It hadn’t been much of a place; she wondered whether blacks or poor whites had lived there. Nobody lived there now, or would any time soon.

More traffic coming south slowed her progress. The road wasn’t wide; whenever her motorcar drew near someone coming in the opposite direction, somebody had to go off onto the shoulder to get around. Wagons, buggies, carts, occasional motorcars came past her, all of them loaded with women, children, and old men: most of the young men were at the front, fighting against the USA.

Anne needed a while to wonder how widespread in the Confederacy the uprising was, and what it would do to the fight against the United States. Confederate forces had been hard-pressed to hold their ground before. Could they go on holding, with rebellion in their rear?

“We licked the damnyankees in the War of Secession,” she said, as if someone had denied it. “We licked ’em again in the Second Mexican War, twenty years later. We can do it one more time.”

She came up behind a truck rumbling along toward the north, its canvas-canopied bed packed with uniformed militiamen. Some wore butternut, some the old-fashioned gray that had been banished from frontline use because it was too much like Yankee green-gray. A lot of the militiamen wore beards or mustaches. All of those were gray—except the ones that were white. But the men carried bayoneted rifles, and looked to know what to do with them. Against a rabble of Negroes, what more would they need?

They waved to her when she drove past. She waved back, glad to do anything to cheer them. Then she had to slow almost to a crawl behind a battery of half a dozen horse-drawn cannons. Those couldn’t have come close to matching her Vauxhall’s speed under the best of circumstances, and circumstances were anything but the best: the guns had to fight their way forward against the stream of refugees fleeing the revolt.

Some of the southbound wagons and motorcars had Negroes in them: a scattering of black faces, among the white. Anne guessed they were servants and field hands who’d stayed loyal to their employers (
masters
wasn’t the right word, though some people persisted in using it more than a generation after manumission). She was glad to see those few black faces—they gave her hope for Marshlands—but she wished she’d spotted more.

Truck farms abounded all around the little town of Holly Hill, about halfway between Charleston and St. Matthews. The farms seemed to have come through pretty well. Not much was left of the town. A lot of it had burned. Bullet holes pocked the surviving walls. Here and there, bodies white and black lay unburied. A faint stench of meat going bad hung in the air; buzzards wheeled optimistically, high overhead.

Anne wished she could have got out of Holly Hill in a hurry, but rubble in the road made traffic pack together. A gang of Negro laborers was clearing the debris. That was nothing out of the ordinary. The uniformed whites covering them with Tredegar rifles, though…

A couple of miles north of Holly Hill, a middle-aged white man whose belly was about to burst the bounds of his butternut uniform stepped out into the road, rifle in hand, and stopped her. “We ain’t lettin’ folks go any further north’n this, ma’am,” he said. “Ain’t safe. Ain’t nowhere near safe.”

“You don’t understand. I’m Anne Colleton, of Marshlands,” she said, confident he would know who she was and what that meant.

He did. Gulping a little, he said, “I’d like to help you, ma’am,” by which he undoubtedly meant,
I don’t want to get into trouble with you, ma’am
. But he went on, “I got my orders from Major Hotchkiss, though—no civilians goin’ up this road. Them niggers, they got a regular front set up. They been plannin’ this a long time, the sons of bitches. Uh, pardon my French.”

She’d been saying a lot worse than that herself. “Where do I find this Major Hotchkiss, so I can talk some sense into him?” she demanded.

The Confederate militiaman pointed west down a rutted dirt track less than half as wide as the Robert E. Lee Highway. “There’s a church up that way, maybe a quarter mile. Reckon he’ll be up in the steeple, trying to spot what the damn niggers is doin’.”

She drove the Vauxhall down the road he’d shown her. If she didn’t find the church, she intended to try to make her way north by whatever back roads she could find. This Major Hotchkiss might have banned northbound civilian traffic from the highway, but maybe he hadn’t said anything about other ways of getting where she still aimed to go.

But there stood the church, a white clapboard building with a tall steeple. White men in butternut uniforms and old gray ones milled around outside. They all looked her way as she drove up. “I’m looking for Major Hotchkiss,” she called.

“I’m Jerome Hotchkiss,” one of the men in butternut said; sure enough, he wore a single gold star on each collar tab. He didn’t look too superannuated. Then Anne saw he had a hook in place of his left hand. That would have left him unfit for frontline duty, but not for an emergency like this. He nodded to her. “What is it you want?”

“I’m Anne Colleton,” she said again, and caused another stir. She went on, “Your sentry back by the highway said you were the man who could give me permission to keep going north toward Marshlands, my plantation.”

“If any man could do that, I would be the one,” Major Hotchkiss agreed. “I have to tell you, though, it’s impossible. You must understand, we are not trying to put down a riot up ahead. It is a war, nothing less. The enemy has rifles. He has machine guns. He has men who will use them. And he has a fanatical willingness to die for his cause, however vile it is.”

“No, you don’t understand,” Anne said. “I have to get back to the plantation. My brother is an invalid: the damnyankees gassed him this past spring. Do you know if Marshlands is safe? I tried to telephone from Charleston, but—”

“Specifically, no,” Hotchkiss answered. “And most telephone lines are down, as you will have found. I can tell you this, though: it’s not safe to be white—unless you’re also a Red, and there are a few like that, the swine—between here and Columbia. Like I say, ma’am, we have ourselves a war here. In fact—” He stopped looking at her and started looking at the Vauxhall. “I’m going to ask you to step out of that motorcar, if you don’t mind.”

“What? I certainly do mind.”

“Ma’am, I am confiscating your motorcar in the name of the Confederate States of America,” Hotchkiss said. “This is a military area; I have that right. The vehicle will be returned to you at the end of this emergency. If for any reason it cannot be returned, you will be compensated as required by law.” When Anne, not believing what she was hearing, made no move to get out, the major snapped, “Potter! Harris!” Two of his men trained rifles on her.

“This is an outrage!” she exclaimed. The soldiers’ faces were implacable. If she didn’t get out, they would shoot her. That was quite plain. Quivering with fury, she descended to the ground.

Major Hotchkiss pointed farther up the road. “There’s a crossroads general store up there. We’ve got a fair number of folks in tents already. It’s about half a mile. You go on, Miss Colleton. They’ll take care of you best they can. We smash this Colored Socialist Republic or whatever the niggers are calling it, then we can get on with the fight against the damnyankees.”

“Give me a rifle,” Anne said suddenly. “I’m a good shot, and I’m a lot less likely to fall over dead than half your so-called soldiers here.”

But the Confederate major shook his head without a word. She knew she was right, but what good did that do her if he wouldn’t listen? The answer tolled in her mind: none. Dully, she began walking up the road. When war reached out its hand, what did wealth and power matter? A fool with a gun could take them away. A fool with a gun had just taken them away.

Major Irving Morrell and Captain John Abell took off their caps when they went into Independence Hall to see the Liberty Bell. Philadelphia, being the headquarters of the War Department, was full of U.S. military men of all ranks and branches of service. Only someone very observant would have noted the twisted black-and-gold cords on the caps that marked these two as General Staff officers.

Abell, who had a bookish look to him, fit the common preconception for the appearance of a General Staff man. Morrell, though, was more weathered, his face lined and tanned, though he was only in his mid-twenties. He wore his sandy hair cropped close to his head, as field officers commonly did. He felt like a field officer. He’d been a field officer: he’d almost lost a leg in the U.S. invasion of Confederate Sonora, and then, after a long recuperation, he’d led a battalion in eastern Kentucky. What he’d done there had impressed his division commander enough to get him sent to Philadelphia.

Intellectually, he knew what a plum this was. It didn’t altogether fill him with joy, though. He wanted to be out in the forest or the mountains or tramping through the desert—somewhere away from the city and close to the foe.

“Come on, let’s get moving,” he said now, and hurried ahead of Abell to get a good look at the Liberty Bell. His thigh pained him when he sped up like that, and would probably go on paining him the rest of his life. He ignored it. You could let something like that rule you, or you could rule it. Morrell did not aim to let anything keep him from doing what he wanted to do.

“It’s been here a long time, Major,” Abell said. “It’s going to be here for a long time yet.”