American Front (31 page)

Her father looked back and forth again. “What you have to tell me, it isn’t good news,” he said after a moment.

Flora nodded. That was true. While she was trying to find the best way to break the news, Sophie blurted, “Oh, Papa, I’m going to have a baby!” and burst into tears all over again.

Flora waited for the sky to fall. Sophie looked as if she wanted to sink through the iron floor. Their father stood quiet for a moment. Then, slowly, he said, “I wondered. There’s a look women have in that condition, and you have it. And you’re tired all the time, the way your mother was when she carried you. So yes, I wondered.” He sighed. “I hoped not, but—”

“Will you tell Mother?” Flora asked, breathing more easily on finding his reaction was what she’d hoped it would be.

“She already knows, or wonders, too.” her father said, which made Flora and Sophie both stare. He coughed a couple of times before he went on, “Remember, Sophie, she does your laundry, and—” He stopped, most abruptly, and coughed some more. After a moment, Flora understood why. Her face heated. Of all the things her father had never expected to do, discussing intimate bodily functions with his daughters had to rank high on the list.

Again, though, without some other intimate bodily functions, the discussion would not have arisen. And if their mother had known, or at least suspected, and kept quiet about it, that said there was more to her than Flora had suspected.

“What am I going to do?” Sophie wailed. “What are we going to do?”

Benjamin Hamburger stood silent again. “The best we can,” he answered. “I don’t know what else to say to you right now. The best we can.” Flora had been worried a few minutes before, but now she began to hope that best might be good enough.

Abner Dowling escaped First Army headquarters with the air of a man leaving the scene of a crime. That was how he felt. Providence, Kentucky, was less than ten miles away from the front lines; the pounding of U.S. guns—and answering fire from Confederate artillery—was a never-ending rumble from the east, irksome like a low-grade headache.

Dowling pulled his cap lower over his face so the brim would keep the rain and occasional spatters of snow out of his eyes. General Custer liked being up as close to the front as he could get. In the stables, the grooms kept his saddle ready to be slapped onto his horse at a moment’s notice, so he could lead the charge that would tear the Rebel position wide open.

“He doesn’t understand,” Dowling muttered, half to himself, half to the God who had so far paid remarkably little attention to any of his petitions. The major went on, still half prayerfully, “Even a blind man should be able to see that slamming forward in the middle of winter isn’t going to get you anywhere.”

One of the things serving under Custer had taught him was the difference between
should be able to
and
can
. The general kept feeding men and shells into the fight. Every furlong of bloody advance was hailed as the beginning of a breakthrough, every time the Confederates held seen as their last gasp.

“They’ve had more gasps than a brothel,” Dowling said. His belly shook as he laughed at his own wit. Custer didn’t laugh at anything. No, that wasn’t true. When he heard about a squad of Rebs machine-gunned as they foolishly broke cover, he’d chortled till his upper plate fell out of his mouth.

A train chugged into Providence out of the west: another reason the little town was currently First Army headquarters was that the railroad tracks came under Confederate artillery fire when you got a little closer to the front line. Doors opened. Soldiers in green-gray, their uniforms clean and neat, their faces open and naive, spilled out of the cars and formed up into columns under the profane instructions of their noncoms.

Mud spattered their boots and puttees and breeches. The main streets of Providence had been paved with bricks, but the Confederates had fought for the town before finally retreating from it; the U.S. bombardment and, later, Confederate shellfire from the east had torn great gaps in the paving. The soldiers stared down anxiously at the dirt they were picking up, as if expecting the corporals and sergeants to start screaming about that.

Unblooded troops
, Dowling thought with a sigh. They conscientiously marched in step as they tramped toward the front. They wouldn’t worry about dirt there, not even a little bit. They’d be blooded, and bloodied, all too soon. “Meat for the meat grinder,” Custer’s adjutant said sadly.

Another engine got up steam and moved slowly along a side track till it switched onto the one down which the troop train had come. Then it backed up and coupled to the rear of that train Meanwhile, as soon as the troops the train had disgorged marched off toward the front, other soldiers began refilling the long chain of cars.

They were meat on which the grinder had already done its work. Some of them, the ones with arms in slings or with bandages on their faces, climbed aboard under their own power, and some of those seemed pretty cheerful. Why not? They’d been wounded, yes, but they were probably going to get better, and they were going back to hospitals well away from the front. Nobody would be shooting at them, not for a while.

But after the ambulatory patients came the great many who had to be carried onto the train in litters. Some of them moaned as their bearers moved them. Some didn’t, but lay very still. None of them—none of the walking wounded, either—wore fresh uniforms. Theirs were tattered and dirty, and their faces, even those of the men who seemed chipper, were a study in contrast to the way the raw troops looked. They’d seen the elephant, and he’d stepped on them.

Dowling wished Custer would come and take a look at what soldiers who had been through the grinder were like. But that didn’t interest the general. He saw the glory he’d win with victory, not the price he was paying for advances that looked not the least bit victorious to anyone but him.

Down the street about a block and a half from First Army headquarters stood a nondescript brick building that hadn’t been too badly shelled. Providence was supposed to be a dry town, but if you needed a drink you could find one. Dowling needed one now.

The Negro behind the bar poured whiskey over ice and pushed the glass across to him. “Here y’are, suh,” he said.

“Thanks, uh—what’s your name, anyhow? Haven’t seen you here before.”

“No, suh. I’m new hereabouts. Name’s Aurelius, suh.”

“You could do worse. You’re named after a great man,” Dowling said. By the bartender’s smile, polite but meaningless, he didn’t know anything about Marcus Aurelius. Dowling gulped down the whiskey and shoved the glass back for a refill. He didn’t know why he’d expected a Southern Negro to know anything about the Roman Empire; from everything he’d seen, the Rebs did everything they could to keep their Negroes ignorant. He asked, “How do you like it in the United States?”

The bartender gave him a hooded look, of the sort he was used to getting from soldiers who’d been caught with dirty rifles. “Don’t seem too bad so far, suh,” the fellow answered. “Ain’t easy nowheres, though, you don’t mind me sayin’ so.”

And that was probably—no, certainly—nothing but the truth. Dowling thanked his rather deaf God he’d been born with a nice, pink skin. Niggers had it tough, USA, CSA, any old place. “Maybe you should go to Haiti,” he remarked. “That’s nigger heaven if ever there was one.”

“No, suh.” The bartender sounded very sure of himself. “Only difference ’tween Haiti and anywhere else is, in Haiti it’s black folks doin’ it to black folks, ’stead o’ whites like it is here.”

“You may be right,” Dowling said, and sipped his drink. What he knew about Haiti was what a soldier of the United States needed to know: that the Confederates hated and despised the place because the Negroes there, no matter what they did to one another, were free and independent, and that Teddy Roosevelt had reaffirmed—loudly reaffirmed—President Reed’s pledge to protect that independence.

One of the things he didn’t know was how TR would go about making good on that pledge if the Confederates invaded Haiti. With Confederate Cuba so close by, with the long stretch of Southern coastline past which the U.S. Navy would have to steam, it wouldn’t be easy. Or had TR intended to invade the CSA if the Rebs attacked Haiti? He shrugged. Trying to read Teddy’s mind was always risky. Anyway, the USA had invaded the CSA without a Confederate attack on Haiti.

As he raised the whiskey glass to his lips, the rumble of artillery fire outside got louder. Dowling’s head came up like a hunting dog’s at a scent. The new roar of the big guns wasn’t coming from the east, but from the south.

He slammed the glass down onto the bar. Whiskey sloshed over the side. He slammed down a couple of coins to pay for his drinks, and then, as an afterthought, an extra dime as well. “Here, buy yourself a drink,” he told Aurelius. “It’s the one I would have had in a minute.” He rushed out of the bar and back toward First Army headquarters. The Rebel counterattack, the one between Hopkinsville and Cadiz—and the one Custer had insisted all along was impossible—had finally started. Dowling wondered how far the U.S. forces would have to retreat, and how fast.

A lieutenant clad in butternut spun on his heel and stomped away from the field telephone, muttering unsweet nothings under his breath. That meant it was Jake Featherston’s turn to confront the marvel of the electrified age. To the corporal in charge of the care and feeding of the mechanical beast, he said, “Put me through to the main artillery dump, back toward Red Lion.”

“I’ll give it a shot,” the corporal said, showing less than perfect faith in the gadget with which he’d been entrusted. He turned the crank and shouted into the mouthpiece: “Hello, Central?” When nobody shouted back at him, he muttered something that made what the lieutenant had said sound like an endearment. He cranked again. “Hello, Central, goddammit!”

Waiting for the connection—waiting to see if the corporal could make the connection—Featherston wished he’d sent a runner back to Red Lion. It was only a few miles southwest of Martinsville; the runner wouldn’t have needed more than two hours—three at the outside—to make it there and back again.

But Captain Stuart was hellbent for leather about using the very latest thing. Sometimes, Featherston admitted to himself, that was because the very latest thing was better than what had gone before. His battery of French-inspired three-inch guns certainly fell into that class. But sometimes the very latest thing was just newfangled confusion replacing old-fashioned stupidity—or, worse, replacing something that worked well even if it had been around for a long time.

“Hello. Central!” the corporal screamed. Featherston was about to give it up as a bad job and walk off—he could tell the captain he’d tried to use the phone, but it hadn’t wanted to work—when the operator said, in reverent tones. “I’ll be a son of a bitch.” He turned to Jake. “Who’d you say you wanted to talk to again? Been so long, I plumb forgot.”

“The main artillery dump,” Jake answered, and the corporal relayed his words to the central switchboard. Now, if the wire between there and the ammunition dump wasn’t broken, he might be able to save some time after all. But even when, as they sometimes did, Negro laborers buried phone lines as they laid them, shell hits would dig them up and break them. And water soaked through insulation, and…

But, to his amazement, after a couple of minutes, the corporal handed him the earpiece and said, “Go ahead.”

“Main ammo dump?” he bawled into the mouthpiece; he’d had botched connections before, too, even when everything was supposed to be working perfectly. Sometimes you were better off sending Morse over the line.

But, now, a thin, scratchy voice sounded in the earpiece: “That’s right. Who’re you and what d’you need?”

“Jake Featherston, First Richmond Howitzers.” Jake didn’t say he was just a lowly sergeant. If the fellow on the other end of the line wanted to assume he was the battery commander, that was all right with him. It was better than all right, in fact, because he was more likely to be taken seriously that way. “We’re giving the damnyankees on the other side of the Susquehanna tarnation, or we would be, ’cept we’re mighty low on shells.”

“Whole army’s mighty low on shells,” that disembodied voice answered. “We can maybe get you a few up there, but not a whole lot. Sorry.” The soldier back in safe, comfortable Red Lion didn’t sound sorry. As best Jake could make out over this infernal apparatus, he sounded bored. Saying no was a lot easier over a wire than face to face.

“The Yankees get time to consolidate, they’re gonna hit us back hard,” Featherston said. These past few weeks, every mile forward had been gained only by wading through blood. The Confederates stood on the Susquehanna. Featherston wondered if they’d ever stand on the Delaware.

The telephone reproduced a sigh. “Featherstitch or whatever your name is, I can’t give you what I ain’t got. Some of the shells we were supposed to be gettin’, they went to Kentucky instead, for the big push there.”

“We don’t got enough to do two things both at once?” Jake demanded. “Jesus Christ, is this an army or a man who’s too stupid to fart while he walks?”