Breakthroughs (41 page)

The force of nature joined Scipio and a couple of other men in a battered rowboat and glided north through the swamps of the Congaree. Several other boats followed. Cassius knew the ways through the maze of twisting channels. Starlight was all he needed. Each of the other boats carried at least one man who knew the swamps almost as well.

Something floated by overhead. Scipio’s blood ran cold. The part of his mind that the Colletons had spared no trouble or expense to educate insisted it was only an owl. The part of him that had grown up in one of those clapboard cabins a world away from the Marshlands mansion by which they sat said it was something worse, something ghostly, something that would lure them all into the heart of the swamp and never let them escape.

Then it hooted, and he felt foolish. More often than not, the educated part of his mind did have some notion of what it was talking about. But the other part was older, with roots that went down deeper. Education ruled his brain. His belly, his heart, his balls? No.

“Do Jesus!” one of the oarsmen said, his voice a shaky whisper. “I reckoned that were one o’ they bad hants, the kind that don’t never let you come out o’the swamp no more.” Scipio hadn’t been the only one frightened, then.

Cassius said, “Ain’t no hant can stand up against dialectical materialism.” His new beliefs had overpowered the older ones. Almost, Scipio envied him for that. Almost. Cassius’ new beliefs had overpowered his good judgment, too, and these tattered remnants of the Congaree Socialist Republic the Reds had hoped to establish were the proof of that.

Cassius did not, would not, see defeat, only a setback on the inevitable road to revolution. He could no more deny that inevitability than a devout Christian could the inevitability of the Second Coming.

Trees and bushes began to thin out as the boats full of Reds neared the edge of the swamp. Ahead, across fields once full of tobacco and cotton and rice that now held mostly weeds, the lights of Gadsden shone: a few houses bright with electricity, more showing the softer, yellower light of burning gas. Most of the houses showed no lights at all; most people, like most people all over the world, had to get up and go to work in the morning.

Cassius waved. The men at the oars brought the rowboat up against the bank of the creek that fed into the Congaree. It grounded softly on mud. The other boats came up alongside. Black men with rifles clambered out of them. “Let’s go, comrades,” Cassius said in a low but penetrating voice. “Time fo’ de buckra to learn some more o’de price de ’pressors pay.”

He left one man behind to guard the boats. Scipio wished he could have been that man, but knew better than to show it. The revolutionaries did not trust him enough to let him out of their sight. Cassius might have, but he did not try to override the opinion of the others. Since they were right and he wrong, that was as well for their cause, if not for Scipio’s.

A motorcar chugged along the road toward town. The driver never saw Cassius and his men, for he led them along paths he knew through the overgrown fields. They went past a couple of mansions, both dark and silent and deserted. Few great landowners around the Congaree dared live among the dozens of Negro servants and field hands needed to make a plantation and mansion live, not these days they didn’t.

Militiamen—the too old and the too young—stumped along the streets of Gadsden. One of them was rash enough to carry a kerosene lantern. Cassius let out a soft chuckle. “Look at that damnfool buckra goin’ roun’ like he a night watchman sayin’, ‘Twelve o’clock, an’ all’s well!’ It ain’t no twelve o’clock, an’ it ain’t well, neither.”

He raised his Tredegar to his shoulder in one fluid motion, aimed, and fired. The militiaman dropped the lantern with a shriek. The burning puddle of kerosene set fire to the boards of the sidewalk.

Another militiaman fired at the sound of Cassius’ shot, and perhaps at the muzzle flash. His bullet didn’t come close. Three Negroes fired at the flash from his rifle. He screamed, too; one of those rounds must have struck home. “Come on!” Cassius said. He advanced on Gadsden in long, loping, ground-eating strides.

Black shadows in the black night, the Reds ran after him. Scipio panted along with the rest, doing his best to keep up. The factory work he’d done had hardened him. He wasn’t the swiftest here, nor anywhere close to it, but he wasn’t the slowest, either.

A bell began clanging in the center of town: probably a fire alarm turned to a new purpose. Here and there, lights came on in upper stories as people got ready to come out and fight or simply tried to find out what was going on. The raiders fired whenever those lights gave them targets. More screams rose.

Slower than it should have came a cry that made sense: “Niggers! It’s the Red niggers!”

Militiamen and whoever else could lay hands on a rifle or shotgun or pistol started banging away, sometimes at the Negroes who ran through the streets but as often at one another. The townsfolk had not been raided for a while, and so did not put up the kind of energetic, organized defense the whites of St. Matthews, for instance, might have shown.

Scipio darted along Market Street toward the corner of Williams. A white-bearded militiaman dashed from Williams out onto Market just as Scipio got to the corner. They both stared in horror. Scipio shot first, before the old man’s rifle had quite come to bear on him. The militiaman fired as he fell. The bullet cracked past Scipio’s head.

Seeing the militiaman still trying to work the bolt on his rifle, Scipio shot him again, in the head. He didn’t move after that. He wasn’t the first white man Scipio had killed, but Scipio hadn’t wanted to shoot him. He’d got in the way; that was all. At the corner of Williams and Market stood a cast-iron mailbox. Scipio threw his note to Anne Colleton into it, then ran on.

The men of the Congaree Socialist Republic shot whomever they could shoot, started half a dozen fires, and then, at Cassius’ shouted command, melted away into the night. Some of the younger and more intrepid militiamen and townsfolk tried to pursue, but the Negroes knew where they were going and the whites did not. Escape proved easy enough.

“Don’t lose a man, not one!” Cassius exulted when they got back to the boats. “We tears that town to hell and gone”—he pointed back toward the leaping flames—“and we don’t lose a man. Is that a great raid, or is it ain’t?”

“That a great raid, Cass,” Scipio said solemnly. “A great raid.”

“Nashville is ours, and fairly won!” Lieutenant General George Armstrong Custer exulted, standing in front of the badly damaged State Capitol of Tennessee. Correspondents again hung on his every word, and he had plenty of words to keep them hanging. “We smashed their line north of the Cumberland when no one thought we could. We crossed the Cumberland when no one thought we could. And now, more than half a century after an unjust and ignominious peace forced us to evacuate Nashville, the Stars and Stripes wave over it once more.”

As he had on the other side of the Cumberland, Major Abner Dowling listened with mixed emotions to the general commanding First Army. Custer’s bombast always gave him the pip. But now, by God, Custer had plenty to be bombastic about. He’d gained two smashing victories over the Confederates in the space of a month. People with greater reputations had done less.

“Where do we go from here, General?” one of the scribes asked.

“Forward against the foe,” Custer said grandly. Before Dowling could spoil the proceedings by throwing up on his superior’s shoes, Custer did something most unusual for him—he gave a sensible reason for one of his rhetorical flights of fancy: “More than that, I am not at liberty to say, lest the Rebels learn in our papers what their spies could not tell them.”

“How long can the Rebs stand up under this kind of pounding, sir?” another reporter said.

“You need to ask that question in Richmond, Jack, not here,” Custer said. Chuckling, he added, “As long as the Rebs still own Richmond, anyhow. If they start using barrels back East the way we’ve taught them here, the Confederate States may not keep their capital very long.”

“With Russia in revolution, with France tottering and French soldiers throwing down their guns or turning them on their own officers, with England stretched to the breaking point and the CSA hammered on several fronts, how long can the Entente go on? How long can the war go on?” Jack asked.

“Until the United States and Germany win their rightful places in the sun, and until those places are recognized by all the powers in the world,” Custer said. “It could be tomorrow. It could be five years hence. However long it takes, we shall persevere.” He struck one of his poses.

“If the Rebs do throw in their hand, General, what sort of peace would you recommend imposing on them?” somebody asked.

Before Custer could get started on that one, Abner Dowling stepped in: “Boys, that’s not the sort of question you ask a soldier. That’s a question for the president or the secretary of state or for Congress.” Part of his job—no small part of his job—was keeping the general commanding First Army from embarrassing not only himself but his country.

Given General Custer’s nature, it wasn’t an easy job. With a laugh, Custer said, “Don’t worry, Major. They know I’m not one of the boys in the morning coats and striped trousers. All they asked was what I would recommend, and I’m happy to tell them that much.”

“Sir, I don’t really think you—” Dowling began.

It was hopeless. Custer rolled over him like a barrel smashing barbed wire into the mud. “If it were up to me, I would impose upon the Confederate States a peace that would prevent them from ever again threatening the peace and security of the United States. Twice now they have rubbed our faces in the dirt. They came too close to doing it once more in this great war. They should never, ever have another chance.”

On the whole, Dowling agreed with him (which made Custer’s adjutant want to reexamine his own assumptions). But there were dangers with a punitive peace, too, as one of the correspondents recognized: “What if our terms are so harsh, the Confederates would sooner take their chances on the battlefield than accept them?”

“Bully!” Custer boomed. “So much the better. In that case, I confidently believe the restoration of the Union by force of arms, which unfortunately failed when first attempted under the inept leadership of Abraham Lincoln, would now, in God’s good time, at last come to pass.”

He did give good copy. The newspapermen jotted phrases in their notebooks. Abner Dowling was of the opinion that his boss had to be suffering from a touch of the sun. Crossing the Cumberland had been a splendid feat of arms, no doubt about it. Even so, a hell of a lot of ground lay between Nashville and Mobile.

Dowling said, “I think that’s about enough, boys. Remember that you’re asking these questions inside Nashville. If that doesn’t speak for itself, I don’t know what does.”

“I don’t mind answering questions,” Custer said. “I could stand here all day and enjoy every minute of it.”

Dowling knew how true that was. Every question Custer answered meant another line, maybe another paragraph, in the papers. Seeing his name in print was meat and drink to the general commanding First Army. But his insistence on his own stamina reminded the correspondents that he had considerably surpassed his Biblical threescore and ten. They drifted away by ones and twos to file their stories.

Custer gave his adjutant a sour look. “I was just warming to the subject, Major. Why did you go and cut me off at the knees?”

“They already know you’re a hero, sir,” Dowling said. He smiled to himself, watching Custer lap that up like a kitten with a pitcher of cream. After a couple of seconds, though, that inner smile slipped. Custer really
was
a hero, and, Dowling reluctantly admitted to himself, really deserved to be. The portly major went on, “Besides, sir, we truly do have to plan the axis of First Army’s next attack.”

After lighting a cigar, Custer blew smoke in Dowling’s face. “I suppose so, Major,” he said with poor grace, “but blast me if I know why we’re bothering. The geniuses in Philadelphia will tell us what to do, delivering their orders in a chariot of fire from on high, as if from the hand of God Himself—and it will work as well as their doctrine on barrels, you mark my words.”

Having vented steam, he let his adjutant lead him back into the capitol. The southern wing was more nearly intact than the northern; First Army headquarters had been established there. In the map room, an enormous chart of Tennessee was thumbtacked to one wall. Two red arrows projected out from Nashville, one southeast toward Murfreesboro, the other southwest toward Memphis, better than two hundred miles away.

As far as Dowling was concerned, that second line was madness, an exercise in hubris. But it attracted Custer as much as a pretty housekeeper did. “By pushing in that direction, Major, we can lend aid to the attack on Memphis that’s been developing in Arkansas,” he insisted.

Keeping Custer connected with reality was Dowling’s main assignment. “Sir, the Tennessee River is in the way,” he said, as diplomatically as he could. “Not only that, the attack from Arkansas has been developing since 1915, and it hasn’t developed yet.”

“Jonesboro has fallen,” Custer said.

“Yes—at last,” Dowling said, certain the sarcasm would fly over the head of the general commanding First Army, as indeed it did. Stubbornly, Custer’s adjutant went on, “Expecting anything from a campaign west of the Mississippi is whistling in the dark, sir. We just don’t have the forces over there to do all we want. If the Rebs weren’t shy of men west of the river, too, we’d be in worse shape there than we are.”

“We’ll draw off their defenders,” Custer said. “They haven’t got enough men on this side of the river, either.”

That held just enough truth to make it tempting, but not enough to make it valuable. In thoughtful tones, Dowling said, “Well, you may be right, sir. I’ve heard Brigadier General MacArthur find some good reasons for the advance in the direction of Memphis.”

He’d gauged that about right. Custer’s peroxided mustache twitched; he screwed up his mouth as if he’d bitten into a lemon. “The only direction of advance Daniel MacArthur knows anything about is the one in the direction of the newspapers,” he sneered.

Takes one to know one,
Dowling thought. Brigadier General MacArthur, with his trademark cigarette holder, courted publicity the way stockbrokers courted chorus girls. Did Custer refuse to admit to anyone else that he did the same thing, or did he refuse to admit it to himself, too? Despite his long association with the general commanding First Army, Dowling hadn’t ever been able to decide.

Custer said, “I wonder what Lieutenant Colonel—no, Colonel: you did send in that promotion, didn’t you?—Morrell’s view is?”

“I did send in that promotion, yes, sir,” Dowling said.

“Good,” Custer said. “Good. I wonder what Morrell thinks, yes I do. Now there is a man with a good head on his shoulders, who thinks of his country first and his own glory second. He’s not a grandstander like some people I could name. A very solid man, Morrell.”

“Yes, sir,” Dowling said. Custer approved of him because his plan had brought Custer fame, but it had brought Custer fame because it worked. Dowling didn’t think Morrell so unselfishly patriotic as Custer did, but he didn’t mind ambition in a man if it didn’t consume him.

“And,” Custer muttered, more than half to himself, “I had better find out in which direction Libbie thinks we should go.”

“That would be a good idea, sir,” Dowling said enthusiastically—so enthusiastically, Custer gave him a dirty look. Dowling didn’t care that Libbie kept the general commanding First Army from rumpling serving women. He did care that Libbie had shown herself to be the brains of the Custer family. Whenever she shared living quarters with the general, First Army fought better.

Custer said, “Whether we move against Murfreesboro or Memphis, we have to strike hard.”

His adjutant nodded. Custer’s one great military virtue was aggressiveness. That aggressiveness had cost the lives of thousands of men, because it meant Custer kept trying to ram his head through the stone walls the CSA kept building against him. But, when barrels finally gave him the means to do some real ramming, he made the most of them, as a more subtle general might have been unable to do.

“We have to strike hard,” he repeated. “If we but strike hard, the whole rotten edifice of the Confederate States of America will come tumbling down.”

A year earlier, Dowling would have reckoned that the statement of a madman. Six months earlier, he would have thought it the statement of a fool. Now he nodded solemnly and said, “Sir, I think you may be right.”

Reggie Bartlett’s hospital gown was of a washed-out butternut, not a pale green-gray like those of most of the inmates of the military hospital outside St. Louis. For good measure, the gown had
PRISONER
stenciled across the chest in bloodred letters four inches high.

He could get around pretty well with one crutch these days, which was a good thing, because the shoulder that had taken a machine-gun bullet was still too tender to let him use two crutches. The doctors kept insisting the wound infection was clearing up, but it wasn’t clearing up anywhere near fast enough to suit him.

He made it to the toilets adjoining the room where he and his companions spent so much time on their backs, eased himself, and slowly returned to his bed. “Took you long enough,” one of the Yankees said. “I figured you were trying to escape, the way you keep bragging that you did before.”

“Pretty soon, Bob, pretty soon,” Reggie answered. “Just not quite yet, is all.”

“Shoot, Bob, didn’t you know?” said another wounded U.S. soldier, this one named Pete. “Reggie started escaping day before yesterday, but he’s so damn slow, this is as far as he’s gotten.”

“You go to hell, too, Pete,” Reggie said. He took care not to sound too angry, though; Pete’s left leg was gone above the knee, blown off by a Confederate shell somewhere in Arkansas.

Bartlett sat on the edge of his bed and leaned his crutch against the wall next to it. That was the easy part. What came afterwards wasn’t so easy. He used his sound right arm to help drag his wounded right leg up onto the mattress. The leg was getting better, too. But, while it was on the way, it hadn’t arrived yet.

Once he was sitting with both legs out before him, he eased himself down flat onto his back. That hurt worse; the shoulder felt as if it had a toothache in there, a dull pain that never went away and sometimes flared to malevolent heights. Sweat sprang out on his forehead at the wound’s bite. After he lay still for a while, it dropped back to a level he could bear more easily.

“You all right, Reggie?” Bob asked, tone solicitous as if Bartlett had been from Massachusetts or Michigan himself. Pain was the common foe here.

“Not too bad,” Reggie said. “I’ll tell you, though, this whole business of war would be a hell of a lot more fun if you didn’t get shot.”

That drew loud agreement from the Yankees on the other beds in the room. “They made the old fools who ordered this war go out and fight it, it never would’ve lasted five minutes,” Bob said. “Tell me the truth, boys—is that so or isn’t it?”

Again, most of the wounded men in the ward agreed. But Pete said, “I don’t know about that. Roosevelt fought in the Second Mexican War when he was our age.”

“Well, that’s a fact—he did,” Bob allowed. “He fought one medium-sized battle against the limeys, licked ’em, and they went home. That was plenty to make him a hero back then. We fight the Rebs or the Canucks, do they go home with their tails between their legs on account of we lick ’em once? We all know better’n that, don’t we?”