Walk in Hell (55 page)

“You are a lucky man, Major,” Captain Guderian said, “to have escaped being chained behind a desk.”

“I think so, anyhow,” Morrell said. “Some people
want
to coop themselves up with stoves and electric lamps and telephones and typewriters. You need those people, too, if you’re going to win a war, but I am not any of them. This, for me, is better.”

Guderian was on the point of replying when gunfire broke out, off to the east. It was a good deal of gunfire. The German’s head went up, like a hound’s on taking a scent. “The Canadians’ attention has been drawn, I should say. Nothing like machine guns to do that, is there? Soon we see how much attention they are paying over on that side of the mountain.”

“They can’t have a whole great swarm of men themselves,” Morrell said. “They’re trying to hold off the USA all across their country, and we’re bigger than they are, even if we’re fighting the Confederacy, too.”

“One hopes they can’t,” Guderian answered. Morrell grinned. The foreigner was as dry with him as he’d been with Captain Hall. Unlike Hall, though, he was alert enough to the world around him to realize as much.

He was sure the Canadians had pickets in the woods—he would have, in their shoes. He didn’t run into any of them for quite a while, though. As the trees hid him from Pigeon Mountain, they also hid the mountain from him. That meant he had no choice but to navigate by the map, which he didn’t fully trust. If it was even close to right, he was almost to decent terrain that would take him straight toward the railroad line—and toward the last line of Canadian defenders in front of it.

Just when he’d begun to think he’d used the Indian trails so cleverly as to evade every picket the Canucks had posted, a rifle shot rang out up ahead. The bullet zipped past his head before he heard the report from the rifle that had sent it on its way. He was burying his face in those fragrant needles before a second bullet drilled through the space where his body had been.

Map and compass went flying when he dove. As he grabbed for his Springfield, he shouted, “Get ’em fast. Don’t let this look big.” He fired in the direction from which the shots had come.

His men dashed into the woods on either side of the trail. The little battle that followed was a lot like fighting Indians—running from tree to tree, ambushes, small desperate stands of resistance. After ten or fifteen minutes, no one was shooting anymore. Morrell hoped the Canucks were dead and hadn’t been able to send runners back to announce he and his soldiers were on the way.

The racket of the fight was liable to have done that for them. “Now we push it!” Morrell called as the Americans moved forward once more. “If the Canucks know we’re here, we don’t want them to have time to get ready for us.”

He’d rescued the map—that was precious. God only knew where the compass had landed. He commandeered Captain Spadinger’s. Twenty minutes later, the U.S. force burst out of the woods. There in the distance was the railroad running alongside the Ghost River. A train, tiny as a toy, chugged west. But between him and the object of his desire lay rifle pits and trenches with Canadians in them. He shouted for Sergeant Finkel.

Quiet and competent, the noncom and his crew had kept up with everyone else. Setting up the machine gun on its tripod was a matter of moments. One gun wasn’t much to cover the advance of a battalion, but it was what Morrell had. If nothing else, it would make the Canucks, however many Canucks there were, keep their heads down some of the time.

“Fire and move!” Morrell yelled. “Fire and move!”

As they often had before, his men ran toward the Canadians in small groups, flopped down and fired so their comrades could sprint past them, then moved up again when those comrades took cover. The Canucks fought hard, but, as he’d hoped, their lines weren’t so full as they might have been. Sergeant Finkel engaged at long range some men trying to rush back from the east.

When the first U.S. soldiers started jumping down into the Canadian trenches, Morrell refrained from following them long enough to shout for a runner. He told the men, “Get back to division HQ and tell ’em to send reinforcements after us. From where we are, all we have to do is hold and we can mortar that railroad line to hell and gone. Tell ’em to push it, too; the Canucks’ll try and throw us out. We’ll hold on here as long as we can.”

Bent low at the waist to make himself a small target, the runner dashed back the way he’d come. Morrell figured his men would have to hold on by themselves for most of a day. He figured they could do it, too. And then—and then the Canadians would have only one pass left through the Rockies, and that one higher and farther north and less usable through the winter than either of the two that would be lost to them.

“One more nail in the coffin,” he muttered. But that wasn’t quite right—it was one more stroke of the saw that was cutting the country in half. He nodded, as pleased with his metaphor as he was with his victory.

Brakes squealing, the train pulled into the Richmond and Petersburg Railroad depot. “Richmond!” the conductors shouted, again and again. “All out for Richmond!”

Anne Colleton shook her head in mingled scorn and bemusement. After the train had rattled over the long bridge across the James River, people would have to be idiots not to know it was coming in to the capital of the Confederate States. But then, a lot of people were idiots. She’d seen that often enough. She’d grown rich, then richer, because of it. And she’d grown poorer because of it, too, since blacks proved no more immune to the disease than whites.

“Porter!” she called, stepping out of the compartment. A Negro with a hand truck came hurrying up. Despite the black uprising, that tone of imperious command got results. The colored fellow piled her trunks—not so fine as the ones she’d had before the Marshlands burned—onto the dolly and followed her out of the Pullman coach onto the smoky, noisy platform that served as gateway between train and world. Once out there, she stuck two fingers in her mouth and let out a piercing whistle she’d learned from her brothers. “Taxi!” she yelled, imperious as ever.

Others had got there before her, but her clothes, her manner, and the way the porter followed her all said she was a person of consequence. She forced her way through the milling crowd. The porter loaded her luggage into the automobile. She gave him a quarter. He grinned and tipped his cap and went off to help someone else, his brass buttons gleaming.

“Where to, ma’am?” the taxi driver asked after handing her into the car.

“Ford’s Hotel,” she answered. He had hardly put the cab into gear before she found a question of her own: “Why aren’t you in uniform?”

“Ma’am, I got hit once in the shoulder and once here.” He took his left hand off the wheel for a moment. It was encased in a leather glove, three of whose fingers were unnaturally full and stiff. “They decided they’d had as much of me as they could use, so they let me go.”

“Very well,” she answered. As he drove north toward Capitol Square, she saw plenty of other such expended men on the street: men on crutches with one trouser leg pinned up, men who had no legs in wheelchairs, men with an empty sleeve or a hook doing duty for one hand, men with a patch over one eye, and a couple of men with black silk masks who kept a hand on a companion’s shoulder so they could find their way.

Traffic was appalling, with trucks and heavily laden horse-drawn wagons slowing things to a crawl for everyone else. The air tasted of exhaust fumes and coal smoke and horse manure and chemical stinks Anne could not name. The driver coughed a couple of times when it got particularly ripe, then spoke as if in apology: “Place stinks like one of those miserable U.S. cities, don’t it, ma’am?”

“It had better,” Anne said sharply. “We need weapons and men both, and we have to make the weapons, because the sea war won’t let us import them.”

“You know about these things,” the cabbie said respectfully.

He’d turned left on Canal Street for a block, then gone up Seventh to Grace, where he turned right and went on till he came to Ninth, which abutted Capitol Square. There he waited and waited and waited till he finally found the chance to turn left and go on for half a block, and then to turn right onto Capitol Street. When he got to Eleventh, he—slowly—turned left again, and went past the bulk of Ford’s Hotel to the entrance, which was at the corner of Eleventh and Broad.

A Negro in a uniform fancier than any a general wore took charge of Anne’s luggage. She paid the fare, adding a tip of the same size. The taxi driver took off his cap with his good hand and bowed to her. “Stay well,” she told him.

“Ma’am,” he said, “I used to cuss about traffic till the first time I got shot. Now it don’t worry me none—not even a little bit.”

“No servants, ma’am?” the desk clerk asked.

“Do you see any?” Anne demanded. Julia was not long delivered of a baby girl. No one else who remained at Marshlands seemed suitable as a traveling companion, and she had not wanted to hire a servant. She had enough trouble trusting Negroes she knew—or thought she knew.

Flushing, the clerk gave her a big bronze key with the number 362 stamped onto it. An arthritic elevator took her, the bellman, and her cases upstairs. The room was large and fancy, with thick carpets, landscapes on the walls, elaborately carved tables, and a great profusion of lacework doilies and maroon plush upholstery. It was, no doubt, intended to impress the daylights out of the prosperous businessmen and lobbyists who usually stayed here, and no doubt succeeded. The exhibition of modern art Anne had put together just before the war broke out had been the antithesis of everything the room stood for. “Looks more like a whorehouse than a hotel room,” she remarked as she tipped the bellhop. He let out a scandalized giggle and fled.

Anne unpacked—after living for months in a refugee camp, she could still see having a room to herself as a luxurious waste of space—and went downstairs for supper. The restaurant was as spectacularly overdecorated as the room. But they did a fine job on crab cakes—the boast of “Best in the CSA” on the menu didn’t seem misplaced—so she had little cause for complaint.

The bed was comfortable enough, too. After a Pullman, any bed that didn’t sway and rattle seemed splendid. The next morning, she looked at the gray linen dress she’d intended wearing and shook her head. She hadn’t seen how wrinkled it was the night before, or she would have had it pressed. She chose a maroon silk instead.

After breakfast in the hotel, she hailed a cab. “The Executive Mansion,” she said crisply. The driver, a sensible man, did not bother pointing out that the building was only two blocks north and one east from where she’d got in. What the damnyankees still disparagingly called the Confederate White House also stood near the top of Shockoe Hill; Anne had no intention of arriving there as draggled and sweaty as a housemaid. The cab labored up the hill to the corner of Clay and Twelfth, where the driver let her out. She reckoned the quarter fare and dime tip money well spent.

Armed guards patrolled the grounds of the mansion behind a wrought-iron fence whose points were not only decorative but looked very sharp. A white man who wore formal attire but carried himself with a military bearing examined her letter of invitation and checked her name off on a list before allowing her to proceed. “I am not an assassin,” she remarked, half annoyed, half amused.

“I know that, ma’am—now,” the fellow replied. Anne Colleton seldom yielded anyone else the last word, but made an exception here.

As she’d expected, she had to wait before being admitted to President Semmes’presence. A Negro servant offered her coffee and cakes dusted with powdered sugar. She ate one, then prudently checked her appearance in the mirror of her compact.
Wouldn’t do to see the president with sugar on my chin,
she thought.

After most of an hour—half an hour past the nine-thirty for which her appointment was scheduled—another servant led her into Gabriel Semmes’ office. Since the man who walked out past her was the secretary of war, she did not think the president had delayed meeting her to be inconvenient.

President Semmes certainly received her with every sign of pleasure. “So very good of you to come up from South Carolina,” he said, and moved the chair across from his desk slightly to suggest that she sit in it. “Here, please—make yourself comfortable. Can I have the staff bring you anything?”

“No, thank you,” she answered. “Let’s get straight down to business, shall we?”

“However you like, of course,” he answered. He looked like a Confederate politician, or rather the apotheosis of a Confederate politician: in his early fifties, handsome, ruddy, a little beefy, with a mane of gray hair combed straight back from his forehead, a mustache, and a little chin beard that was almost pure white. The absence of tobacco stains from that beard was enough almost by itself to place him outside the common herd. He went on, “I won’t beat around the bush with you, Miss Colleton—I need your help on this bill to arm our Negroes and use them against the USA.”

Any time a politician said he wouldn’t beat around the bush, you were well advised to keep your hand on your wallet. “You’ll have to show me things are as bad as you said in your letter inviting me here,” she told him. “The press certainly does not make them out to be so desperate.”

“Have you ever heard of any war in the history of the world where the press did not make things out to be better than they were?” Gabriel Semmes returned. “If you look at papers in the USA during the War of Secession and the Second Mexican War, you will see they thought they were winning each time until almost the moment of their overthrow.”

“As may be,” she said. “I am not yet convinced.” She did not tell him what her brother Tom kept saying in his letters. Politicians were not the only ones who learned to hold their cards close—business taught the same lesson.

President Semmes said, “A glance at the map will show you much of the trouble. We have lost ground against the USA almost everywhere, and our remaining gains in Maryland are threatened. Our latest effort to reclaim western Texas failed—there is no other word. They hammer us on every front. We do have some counterstrokes in the offing, and we have thus far managed to avoid losing anything vital, but that cannot continue forever. We are under more pressure than our allies in Europe, and have little prospect of aid from them.”