Walk in Hell (30 page)

“And when we finally take this one, they’ll go on up to Yellow-head Pass,” Hall said. “This war is a slower business than anyone dreamt when we first started fighting.”

“If we drive enough nails into their coffin, eventually they won’t be able to pull the lid up any more,” Morrell said.

“I like that.” Hall’s face was better suited for the grin it wore now than for its earlier grimace. A couple of Morrell’s other company commanders joined them then: Captain Karl Spadinger, who for looks could have been Charlie Hall’s cousin; and First Lieutenant Jephtha Lewis, who would have seemed more at home behind a plow on the Great Plains than in the Rockies of Alberta. With them came Sergeant Saul Finkel, who had a dark, quiet face and the long, thin-fingered hands of a watchmaker—which he had been before joining the Army.

“Here’s what we’re going to do,” Morrell said, pointing to the Canadian position ahead of them and then to the map he took from a pouch on his belt. The view was better on the map; the snow didn’t obscure it. “We’ve got this fortified hill ahead of us. I will lead the detachment advancing to the west. Sergeant Finkel!”

“Sir!” the sergeant said.

“You and one machine-gun squad from Lieutenant Lewis’ company will cover the ridge road up there”—he showed what he had in mind both through the blowing snow and on the map—“and block the Canadians from coming down and getting in our rear. I rely on you for this, Sergeant. If I had to make do with anyone else, I’d leave two guns behind. But your weapon always works.”

“It will keep working, sir,” Finkel said. Morrell looked at his hands again. Anyone who could handle the tiny, intricate gearing of watches was unlikely to have trouble keeping a machine gun operating, and Finkel, along with being mechanically ept, was also a brave, cool-headed soldier.

Morrell pointed to Captain Spadinger. “Karl, you’ll take the rest of your company and open the hostile position on the eastern side of the slope. Hold your fire as long as you can.”

“Yes, sir,” Spadinger said. “As you ordered, we’ll be carrying extra grenades for when actual combat breaks out.”

“Good,” Morrell said. Spadinger’s efficiency pleased him, which was why he’d given him the secondary command for the attack. He went on, “Captain Hall, your rifle company and Lieutenant Lewis’ machine-gun company, less that one squad I’m leaving with Sergeant Finkel, will accompany me on the main flanking thrust. If we can chase the Canucks off this hill, we’ve gone a long way toward clearing the path to Banff. Any questions, gentlemen?” Nobody said anything. Morrell nodded. “We’ll try it, then. We advance as rapidly as possible. Keep speed in your minds above all else. We move at 0900.”

In the fifteen minutes before they began to move, he checked his men, especially the teams manhandling the machine guns across country. They were good troops; in grim Darwinian fashion, most of the soldiers who didn’t make good mountain troops were dead or wounded by now.

He felt the men’s eyes on him, too. This would be the first real action they’d faced with him commanding them. He didn’t suppose they knew about his having had to leave the General Staff—he hoped they didn’t, anyhow—but they had to be wondering about what he and they would be able to do together. Well, they were finding out he didn’t care to huddle in trenches.

“Let’s go,” he said.

Spruce and fir and swirling snow helped screen the men in green-gray from the Canadians above. No firing broke out off to the right, which relieved Morrell to no small degree. He grinned, imagining Spadinger’s men rounding up sentries and poking bayoneted rifles into dugouts, catching the Canucks by surprise.

His own men scooped up a fair number of prisoners, too. One of them, brought back to Morrell, glared at him and said, “What the devil are you bastards doing so far from where the fighting is?”

“Why, moving it someplace else, of course,” he answered cheerfully, which made the Canuck even less happy.

Morrell’s leg tried to protest when he pushed up to the very head of his force, but he ignored it.
It’s only pain,
he told himself, and, as he usually did, managed to make himself believe it. He reached the lead just in time to help capture a machine-gun position the Canadians had blasted out of the living rock of the hill, again without firing a shot.

“This is wonderful, sir!” Captain Hall exclaimed. “We’ve got the drop on the Canucks for sure this time.”

“So far, so—” Morrell began. Before
good
got out of his mouth, a burst of fire made him whip his head back toward the direction which Captain Spadinger and his company had gone. It sounded as if they were heavily engaged. “We appear to have lost the advantage of—” Morrell didn’t get to finish that sentence, either. Machine guns from atop the hill opened up on his detachment before he could say
surprise
. That was a surprise to him, and not a pleasant one.

“Dig in!” he shouted. “Do it now! Sweat saves blood!” As the riflemen began to obey, he turned to Lieutenant Lewis. “Get those machine guns set up. We’ve got to neutralize that fire.”

The machine-gun crews mounted their heavy weapons on top of the even heavier tripods in time that would have kept a drill sergeant happy on the practice field. It wasn’t for prestige here; it was for survival.

Morrell cursed as one of his men slumped over, briefly kicking in a way suggesting he’d never get up again. “Advance on them!” he yelled. “Shift to the northeast, so we can take that hilltop and support Captain Spadinger’s company. Move, move, move!”

It wasn’t the fight he’d wanted, but it was the fight he had. Now he had to make the best of it. Keeping everything as fluid as possible would also keep the Canucks confused about how many men he had and what he intended to do with them. Since he suspected he was outnumbered, that was all to the good.

Back where this movement had originated, Sergeant Finkel’s machine gun started hammering. Morrell nodded to himself. The Canucks wouldn’t be getting into his rear. Now he had to see if he could get into theirs. “Hold fire as much as you can as you advance,” he called to the riflemen. “Let them think Spadinger has the main force. If they concentrate on him, we’ll make them regret it.”

“Aren’t you telling the men more than they need to know?” Captain Hall shouted as the two of them ran to a boulder and flopped down behind it side by side. Bullets whined away from the other side of the stone, then went elsewhere in search of fresh targets.

“Just the opposite, Captain,” Morrell answered. “This way, if I go down, the attack will go forward, because they’ll know what I expect of them.” Hall didn’t look convinced, but he didn’t argue with his commanding officer, either. If Morrell’s methods didn’t work, odds were he’d end up dead and so beyond criticism. Morrell raised his voice: “Keep the machine guns well forward, Lieutenant Lewis!”

Lewis and his machine gunners, bless their hearts, didn’t need that order. They treated the machine guns almost like rifles, advancing at a stumbling run from one patch of cover to the next they saw—or hoped they saw.

Even so, Morrell was worried, and worse than worried. From the sound of the fighting off to the east, Spadinger’s men weren’t withholding fire. On the contrary; it sounded as if every man was in the line, fighting desperately to stay alive. If the forces they’d run into could crush them, those forces would swing back on him and smash him up, too. “Hold on, Karl!” he whispered fiercely. “Make them pay the price.”

One of the Canuck machine guns up at the crest of the hill fell silent. Morrell whooped as he ran forward. The Canadians were used to facing slow, carefully set up attacks, not to this sort of lightning strike with things hitting them all at once from every which way.

And then he whooped again, for men in khaki scrambled out of their trenches and ran down—to the southeast, toward Captain Spadinger’s embattled company. They gave Morrell’s men the kind of target soldiers dreamt about. “Now!” he shouted. “Give ’em everything we’ve got.”

Again, the men did not need the order. They loosed a storm of lead at the Canadians, who shouted in dismay at taking such fire from the right flank and rear. Yelling with glee, the U.S. soldiers dashed forward to take out the foes giving their comrades so much trouble.

Half an hour later, Morrell stood on the height he’d intended to bypass. A long file of dejected prisoners, many of them roughly bandaged, stumbled back toward what had been the U.S. line. “You don’t fight fair,” one of them shouted to Morrell.

“Good,” Morrell answered. The Canuck scowled. His own men laughed. They felt like tigers now. For that matter, he felt on the tigerish side himself. Things hadn’t gone exactly as he’d thought they would, but they seldom did. One thing both real war and the General Staff had taught him was that no plan long survived contact with the enemy.

He looked around. The view was terrific. He’d taken the objective. He hadn’t taken crippling casualties doing it.
How
he’d taken it didn’t matter.
That
he’d taken it did. He looked around again. A new question burned in his mind—what could he do next?

Jefferson Pinkard looked down at himself. His butternut uniform was so full of stains from the red dirt of southern Georgia, it might as well have started out mottled. He smelled. By the way his head itched, he probably had lice. Emily would have thrown him in a kettle, boiled him, and shampooed him with kerosene before she let him into the house, let alone into her bed.

He didn’t care. He was alive. He’d seen too many different kinds of horrible death these past few weeks—he’d dealt out too many different kinds of horrible death these past few weeks—to worry about anything past that. The Black Belt Socialist Republic was dying. When he’d set out, he’d supposed that would make everything worthwhile. Did it? He didn’t know. He didn’t care much, either.

He detached the bayonet from his Tredegar and methodically cleaned it. It was clean already, but he wanted it cleaner. It had had blood on it, a couple of days before. He couldn’t see that blood, not now, but he knew it was there.

“Damn niggers ought to give up,” he muttered under his breath.

“What you say?” That was Hip Rodriguez, a recruit from down in Sonora. He didn’t speak a whole lot of English. Most of what he did speak was vile. Up till the Conscription Bureau nabbed Jeff Pinkard, he’d thought of Sonorans and Chihuahuans as one step above Negroes, and a short step to boot. But Rodriguez had saved his life. If that didn’t make him a good fellow, nothing ever would.

And so, instead of barking, Jeff repeated himself, adding, “They’re licked. They damn well ought to know it.”

Rodriguez shrugged. “We keep licking they, they quit—one way or t’odder.” He carried a thoroughly nonregulation knife on his belt, and a whetstone to go with it. When he honed that blade, it made a vicious little grinding sound. He smiled, enjoying it.

“That’s true,” Pinkard admitted. “No two ways around it, I guess. Question that keeps comin’up in my mind, though, is what happens afterwards. They gonna be pullin’ knives like yours out o’ their hip pockets and stabbin’ white men twenty years from now when they think they got the chance? That’s a hell of a way to try and run a country, you know what I’m sayin’?”

Rodriguez shrugged again. “They try that, they get killed. Is no big never-mind to me.” He flashed a big, shiny grin at Jeff. “In Sonora, we don’t have no
mallates
—no niggers—till you Confederates, you buy us from Mexico. You bring in the problem. You should ought to fix it, too.”

With some amusement, Pinkard noted that Rodriguez looked down his nose at Negroes, too. In a way, it made sense: if not for them, he would have been on the bottom himself. But the blacks
were
on the bottom. That made putting them down harder, because they had so little to lose from their rebellion.

Off to one side, a field piece began barking, throwing shells into Albany, Georgia. Captain Connolly looked up from his tin cup of coffee and said, “All right, boys, now we go and take their capital away from ’em. About time, I’d say. And doing that’ll just about put the last nail in the coffin. Can’t hardly claim they’ve got a country when they haven’t got a capital any more, can they?”

“Damnyankees do,” Stinky Salley said.

Connolly didn’t catch him opening his mouth. He looked around. “All right, who’s the smart bird?” he demanded. Nobody said anything. He gulped down the rest of the coffee—heavily laced with chicory and God only knew what all else, if it was anything like Jeff’s. Pinkard didn’t care. It was hot and strong and made his heart beat faster. The captain said, “Come on, boys. Time to do it.”

He didn’t tell them what to do and sit back on his duff. He went out with them and helped them do it. Pinkard had appreciated that in a foundry foreman. He appreciated it even more in an officer. After patting himself to make sure he had plenty of spare clips for the Tredegar, he scrambled to his feet and trudged on toward Albany.

The front hereabouts was too wide, with too few men covering too many miles, for proper entrenchment. You dug foxholes where you happened to be, fought out of them, and advanced some more. The survivors of the new regiment to which he belonged weren’t advancing in neat files of men now. They’d learned better. They moved forward in open order, well spread out.
More space for the bullets to pass between,
Pinkard thought.

A shot rang out—behind him. One of his comrades went down, clutching at the back of his left thigh. Half a dozen men close by went down, too, hitting the dirt at the first sound of gunfire. Pinkard was one of them. He’d developed a tremendous respect for the horrid things flying lead could do to the human body.

Another shot kicked up red dirt and spat it in his face. “It’s another one of those hideout sons of bitches,” he said unhappily. As their strength faltered, the Reds had formed the nasty habit of digging in with concealed foxholes facing not toward their Confederate foes but away, and holding their fire till the soldiers had gone past them. They’d done considerable damage that way. This fellow looked to have added to it.

Stalking him through the pine woods was a deadly game of hide and seek. He wounded another man before Rodriguez flushed him out of his hole with a grenade and three other soldiers shot him from three different directions. He wasn’t quite dead, even after that. Jeff put a round through his head at close range, which made him stop thrashing and moaning.