Breakthroughs (77 page)

“Looking at the world from the other fellow’s side of the hill is always a useful exercise.” Morrell regretted the words as soon as they were out of his mouth. Landis was an enemy—Landis was
the
enemy. If he hadn’t figured that out for himself, why hand it to him?

Fortunately, his thoughts seemed to be elsewhere. “All we’ve tried to do is hold you back a little and keep up with you ourselves. You Yankees have got to be the
pushingest
people in the whole wide world.”

“Thank you,” Morrell said, which made his Confederate counterpart’s mouth twist: Landis hadn’t meant that as a compliment. Morrell held his smile inside. Too bad.

He took his own advice, climbing up onto a firing step that was already starting to crumble and peering toward the northwest. If he’d been a C.S. officer defending this position against a whole great swarm of barrels, what would he have done? His first thought was,
turn tail and run like hell.

Say what you would about the Rebels, he could count on the fingers of one hand the times they’d done anything like that. He turned and looked back over his shoulder, studying the earthworks he hadn’t yet explored in person. After perhaps half a minute of contemplation, he grunted softly. “You’d have mounted your guns up there,” he said, pointing, “and fired at us over open sights, or as near as makes no difference. I don’t know how many barrels you had left at the end, but you’d have put them behind that little swell of ground there”—he pointed again—“to keep us from spotting them for as long as you could.”

Harley Landis examined him the same way he’d examined the terrain. The C.S. colonel started to say something, stopped, and started again after a pause: “Has anyone ever told you, sir, that you may be too damn smart for your own good?”

“A whole raft of people, Colonel Landis,” Morrell answered cheerfully. “Once or twice, they’ve even been right.” He remembered all too well his own temporary eclipse after the Mormon rebels in Utah had hurt in a way he hadn’t anticipated the U.S. troops battling to put them down.

“Only once or twice?” Landis was still eyeing him in speculative fashion. “Well, maybe I’m not too surprised.” He took a look at the ground, too, then asked, “How do you think we would have done?”

“You’d have hurt us,” Morrell said. “No doubt about that, Colonel, not a bit. You’d have hurt us—but we would have got through. You couldn’t have had enough barrels to stop us.”

He waited for Landis’ irate disagreement. But the Confederate colonel had been the man who brought his commander’s request for a cease-fire through the U.S. lines. As well as anyone could, he knew how things stood with his army. He looked as if he’d bitten into something sour. “You’re likely right, dammit, but how I wish you weren’t.”

He got out a pack of Raleighs, scraped a match on the sole of his boot, and lit a cigarette. “Can I steal one of those from you?” Morrell asked eagerly. “You wouldn’t believe some of the dried horse manure that passes for tobacco in the United States these days.”

“Yes, I would,” Landis said. “When we’d capture Yankees, the men’d always let ’em keep their smokes. Here, keep the whole pack.”

He tossed it to Morrell. The U.S. officer tapped a cigarette against the palm of his hand, then leaned forward to get a light from Landis. He sucked the fragrant smoke deep into his lungs. At last, reluctantly, he exhaled. “Thank you, Colonel. That is the straight goods. You Rebels make better smokes than we do, and that’s the truth.”

Landis sighed. “I’d trade that for being somewhere up in Illinois right now, the way you said before.”

Morrell nodded as he took another drag. “I haven’t tasted tobacco like this in years, though. It’s bully stuff.” He walked rapidly along the firebay till he came to a communications trench. Then, Colonel Landis in his wake, he zigzagged back until he could inspect the gun position he’d spotted from the front line. He nodded to himself. Field guns there would have done some damage, but not enough to stop a major assault.

He found a question for Landis: “What’s your opinion of our barrels as compared to your—you usually call them tanks, don’t you?”

“These days, we say
barrels
more often, too,” Harley Landis answered. “My opinion? My opinion is that you had too damned many of them, no matter what name you care to use.” Past that, he declined to say anything. Morrell hadn’t expected him to say much, but had hoped.

To prod the Confederate a little more, Morrell said, “We’ll probably confiscate the ones you do have, you know, and do our damnedest to make sure you don’t build any more of them.”

Colonel Landis muttered something under his breath: “Chicken thieves.” Morrell needed a few seconds to understand it. When he did, he thought it wiser to pretend he hadn’t.

He did say, “If England and France and Russia had smashed Germany in a hurry and then helped you turn on us, I don’t think you’d have given us a big kiss when the war was over.”

“No, I reckon not,” Landis admitted, which made Morrell like him better, or at least respect him more. He went on, “But that’s the way things were supposed to work out, and they didn’t.” His chuckle had barbs. “I know you’re not thinking the same thing I am here.”

“No, not quite,” Morrell said. They both laughed then, a couple of professionals who understood each other even though they stood on opposite sides of the hill.

“Ask you something?” Landis said.

“You can ask,” Morrell said. “I don’t promise to answer.”

“Here—I’ll ply you with liquor first.” Colonel Landis took a flask from his belt. To show Morrell it was safe, he drank first. Morrell took a swig. He’d expected moonshine, or at best its more dignified cousin, bourbon. What he got was a mouthful of damn fine cognac.

“You are a man of parts, sir,” he said, bowing a little. “First the cigarettes, now this. Ask away. I’m putty in your hands.”

Landis’ snort had a skeptical ring. He put the question even so: “Suppose the war had gone on, and you did break through here. What would you have done next?”

“I’m not in command of First Army,” Morrell said, which was true but also disingenuous, considering the victories he’d helped design. He took another small sip of Landis’ brandy and added, “General Custer was talking about an advance to the Tennessee, though, if you must know.” He handed the flask back to the Confederate colonel.

Landis almost dropped it. “To the Tennessee?” His splutters had nothing to do with the second swig of cognac he took. “When were you planning on getting there, 1925? The Tennessee! The very idea! We were down, by God, but we weren’t out.”

“I think he—we—might have done it,” Morrell said. “Not a lot of natural barriers in the way, anyhow. And how many divisions of colored troops did you have in the line when the shooting stopped?”

“If you don’t know, Colonel, I’ll be damned if I’m going to tell you,” Harley Landis answered. “I will tell you this, though: they fought about as well as the new white units we were raising toward the end there.”

“Of course you’ll tell me that and not the other—it makes you look stronger,” Morrell said. Landis nodded, unembarrassed. On the whole, though, the U.S. officer thought his C.S. opposite number was right. From what he’d seen and from reports he’d read, Confederate black units
had
fought about as well as rookie Confederate white units. That surprised him, but a man who couldn’t see truth when it tried to shoot him wouldn’t live long, and didn’t deserve to. He asked, “Now that the war is over”—politer than saying,
now that you’ve lost
—“are you folks going to keep on raising Negro troops?”

“I don’t know the answer to that,” Colonel Landis answered. “We didn’t conscript niggers, the way we did with our own people. What we got were volunteers, and probably a better crop than we would have had if we’d scraped the bottom of the barrel.” He sent Morrell a hooded glance. “Other side of that coin is, there are so goddamn
many
of you Yankees.”

Morrell’s smile was bright and friendly—if you didn’t look too close. “Maybe you’ll think about that a little harder before you decide whether you’ll try picking a fight with us.”

“Picking a fight with you?” Landis shook his head. “No, sir. Teddy Roosevelt declared war on us, not the other way around.”

“After Wilson declared war on our allies,” Morrell said.

“We honored our commitments,” Landis said.

“So did we,” Morrell returned. They glared at each other. Then Morrell laughed, a sound more of bemusement than anything else. “And look what honoring our commitments got us. Better—no, worse—than a million dead on our side, likely not far from that for you, and even more wounded, and all the wreckage…They shouldn’t let civilians start wars, Colonel, because they don’t know what the hell they’re getting into and getting their countries into.”

“You may be a damnyankee, but I’m damned if I think you’re wrong,” Landis said.

“This must never happen again,” Irving Morrell said solemnly. “Never.”

“Never,” Colonel Landis said. “Never, by God.” He took the flask off his belt again. “To peace.” He drank and offered it to Morrell.

“Thank you, sir.” Morrell drank, too. “To peace.”

Jake Featherston slouched down the dirt road toward Richmond at a pace that would have made him scream curses at any soldier using it. No one would scream curses at him, not now. He still wore his uniform, but he wasn’t a soldier any more. Along with most of the rest of the Army of Northern Virginia, he’d been mustered out and paid off and sent on his way with a pat on the head.

“Threw me out,” he snarled under his breath. “Threw us all out, so the War Department wouldn’t have to fret itself about feedin’ us or payin’ us any more. Payin’ us!” He snorted and slapped a pocket. Paper inside crinkled. They’d paid him off in banknotes, not real money. He wondered how far the notes would go when he tried spending them. Not far enough. He was already sure of that.

Dust rose from the pocket when he slapped it. A lot of paid-off soldiers—no, ex-soldiers—were on the road. Every time he took a step, dust kicked up from under his battered boots. Any time any of them took a step, dust kicked up. Thousands of men, millions of steps, a hell of a lot of dust.

“You’d think they’d want to keep a good artilleryman in the Army,” he muttered. He’d been plenty good enough to command a battery. But he hadn’t been good enough—no, the War Department hadn’t thought he was good enough—to get promoted past sergeant, or good enough to keep, either. “Well, to hell with Jeb Stuart, Jr. He can go down there and toast his toes with Jeb Stuart III.”

A Negro soldier trudging along the same road turned his head at the sound of Featherston’s voice. Jake stared unwinkingly back at him. In the days before things had gone to hell in the CSA, a couple of seconds of that look from a white man would have been plenty to make any black buck lower his eyes. Now the Negro, a big, burly fellow, tried to stare him down.

It didn’t work. Featherston might have been on the wiry side, but rage had kept him going during the war, and that rage hadn’t got any smaller now that the war was lost. It blazed out of him now, almost tangibly, and the colored soldier flinched away from it. Jake laughed. Instead of trying to start a fight, the Negro flinched again. “Do Jesus!” he said softly, and let Featherston pass.

That night, Featherston slept by the side of the road wrapped in a blanket, as he had slept by a lot of different roads in several blankets during the war. He had turned in his pistol when he was paid off. Again, no: he had turned in
a
pistol when he was paid off. He took
his
pistol out of his pack and set it where he could grab it in a hurry. The precaution proved needless; he slept undisturbed.

When morning woke him, he started walking again. He took the fifty-five miles from Fredericksburg to Richmond in three medium-easy days, not the two harsh ones he would have used if still in the Army. That meant he got into the Confederate capital this side of exhausted but empty as a cave: the men who’d moved faster had got what food there was on the road.

Richmond was full of dirty scarecrows in butternut. The gray-uniformed police seemed to have not a clue about what to do with so many men odds-on to be tougher and shorter-tempered than they were. The best answer they found was,
as little as we possibly can
. That struck Jake as showing better sense than he expected from police.

He went into a saloon to take advantage of its free-lunch spread. The meal—ham and deviled eggs and pickles and salted peanuts and other thirst-inducers—was indeed free, but the mug of beer he had to buy to avail himself of it set him back a dollar, not the prewar five cents. “Christ!” he exclaimed.

“I’ll take fifteen cents in silver, if you’ve got that,” the barkeep said. “Hell, I’ll take a dime. It’s just as well the banknotes are already brown, on account of that’s what people will be using them for.”

“Don’t have enough silver to want to spend it quick,” Featherston said. “If a beer is a bean, what do I have to pay for a bed?”

“Paper? Five easy, and the bugs’ll carry your mattress in for you, you get anything that cheap,” the fat man in the black apron answered. “Why didn’t you bastards win the war instead of laying down for the damnyankees? Then they’d have to pay—”

Featherston reached across the bar and grabbed a handful of the white shirt showing above the apron. “You don’t ever want to say anything like that again, you hear me?” When the bartender didn’t say anything, he shook him, lifting his feet off the floor with no particular effort. “You hear me?”

“I hear you,” the fat man wheezed. Jake set him down on the floor. He went on, “Drink your beer and get the hell out of here.”

“I will,” Featherston said. “You ain’t crowded here. And while I’m drinking it, you keep both hands where I can see ’em, hear? You try hauling out whatever kind of persuader you got under the bar there, I promise you won’t like what happens after that.”

He took his time finishing the beer, then turned and walked toward the door. He hadn’t gone three paces before the bartender shouted, “Don’t even breathe, soldier boy!”

Featherston looked back over his shoulder and found himself staring down the barrels of a sawed-off shotgun. After gas and machine guns and Yankee traveling forts, that was not so much of a much. If the bastard did pull the triggers, it would be over in a hurry, anyway. “Fuck you,” Jake said, and kept walking.

No blast of shot tore into his back. He stood on the street for a few seconds. Five dollars for a flophouse bed? He shook his head and made for Capitol Square. Sleeping in the park was free. Maybe a congressman or a senator would come by and see what the aftermath of war looked like.

He was not the only soldier in Capitol Square—far from it. As evening fell, several campfires started flickering. That was probably against the rules, but no policemen came in to do anything about it. Jake saw them on the sidewalk and clustered around the bomb-scarred Capitol. “Cowardly bastards,” he muttered.

“Wish they
would
try and break us up,” another ragged veteran said. “Look at ’em there, fat and happy. Nobody who ain’t been through what we been through can know what it’s like, but we’d give ’em a taste, goddamn if we wouldn’t.”

“That’s right, by Jesus,” Featherston said. “Wonder who their pappies were, so they didn’t have to put on a real uniform.”

“Amen,” the other soldier said. “You can sing that in my church any old day.” He stuck out a hand. “Name’s Ted Weston. I’m in the 22nd North Carolina Infantry—or I was, anyways.”

“I’m Jake Featherston, First Richmond Howitzers.”

“I’ve heard of that outfit,” Weston said. “Pretty la-de-da, ain’t they? You might could have had a pappy of your own, get into a unit like that.”

“Hell I did,” Jake growled. “I was good at what I did, is all. Good enough to lead a battery for a year and a half, but not good enough to take the stripes off my sleeve and put a bar or two on my collar. La-de-da, my ass—hadn’t been for a la-de-da officer with a fancy pa gettin’ hisself killed…ahh, the hell with it.” He spat in disgust.

Weston eyed him in the dim, flickering light; they weren’t close to a fire. “Sounds like you got a powerful load of angry rilin’ your belly, Jake.”

“Oh, a touch,” Featherston allowed. “Just a touch. Don’t get me started, or I’ll sick it all up.” He waited to see if Weston would ask him more. He would have brought it all out; he might even have purged himself of some of it. But the infantryman from North Carolina shrugged and moved away.

Nobody gives a damn,
Featherston thought.
Nobody.
He went away himself, to the base of the great statue of Albert Sidney Johnston, the Confederacy’s chief martyr during the War of Secession. The war now ended had martyrs in plenty, but he didn’t think he would see statues to them any time soon. He wrapped himself in his blanket and went to sleep.

When morning came, he found a cheap café, the saloons not yet being open. Ham and eggs and biscuits and coffee cost him two dollars he could not afford. He fumed at the price, as he fumed at everything these days. And then he spotted a couple of neatly turned-out sentries in front of a building at the southwestern corner of Capitol Square. Those sentries drew him as a lodestone draws nails. Sure enough, that was the War Department building, the source, as he saw it, of all his miseries and all his country’s miseries as well.

One of the sentries wrinkled his nose as Featherston approached. He turned his head and spoke to his comrade: “Dogs find more rubbish to drag out these days.”

Jake didn’t think he was meant to hear that, but hear it he did, artilleryman’s battered ears or not. “You can kiss my ass, too, pal,” he said, and started past the spit-and-polish boys into the War Department.

The one who’d spoken swung his rifle down horizontally to block his way. “Where do you think you’re going, buddy?” he demanded. “State your business.”

“Kiss my ass,” Jake repeated. “I’m a citizen of this country, and I’m a real soldier, too, goddammit. I’d rather smell the way I do than be a perfumed pansy in a uniform that never once saw dirt. Now get the hell out of my way. I aim to have me a word or two to say to the bonehead generals who cost us this war.”

“I don’t think so, sonny boy,” the sentry said. “They’ve got better things to do with their time than listen to—and smell—the likes of you.”

“Like hell they do,” Featherston said. “I want to tell you—” Without a single telltale motion or glance, he kicked the sentry in the crotch, then whirled and coldcocked his chum while the other man was just beginning to raise his rifle. The only difference between them was that the first went down with a groan, the second silently.

Whistling, Jake started to walk by them and into the War Department. Then, reluctantly, he checked himself. He’d get caught in there. He was liable to get caught out here; a couple of men were coming across the street toward him.

He did what they must have expected least—he charged straight at them. Neither of them cared to try tackling him. They were middle-aged and prosperous and no doubt thought anyone who did anything out of line would politely wait around for the police afterwards. He taught them otherwise in a hurry. Then he was back in Capitol Square, one discharged soldier among hundreds. How were they supposed to find him after that?

They couldn’t. They didn’t. They didn’t even try, and the sentries, who’d got a better look at him, were in no condition to help. He stopped running and started sauntering, looking like any of the rest of the men in the square who had more time on their hands than they knew what to do with.

At least one of those soldiers had seen what he’d done. As he strolled past, the fellow said, “Damn shame you couldn’t give that bastard Semmes a good shot in the nuts, too.”

“You’d best believe it’s a damn shame,” Jake said. “One of these days, though, if this poor, miserable country ever gets back on its feet again, we’ll pay back everybody who ever did us wrong—and I mean everybody.”

“Hope that day comes soon,” the other veteran said. “Can’t come soon enough, if anybody wants to know what I think.”

“I don’t know when,” Featherston said. “We’ll have to go some to put our own house in order, I reckon. But we’ll walk tall again one of these days, and then—and then everybody better look out, that’s all.” The other soldier clapped his hands.

Not even a funeral. Sylvia Enos thought that was worst of all. When scarlet fever took her mother, when her brother died in a trainwreck, there had been an end to things, dirt thudding down on the lid of a coffin, and then a wake afterwards. Once that was done, people had been able to pick up the threads of their lives and go on.

But fish and crabs and whatever lived at the bottom of the sea in the middle of the Atlantic were giving George the only burial he would ever get. Fishermen shuddered when they talked of things like that. Along with all his friends, George had hated the idea of going down at sea. Sylvia knew men who wouldn’t eat crab or lobster because of what the shellfish might have been eating.

She stirred the dress she’d thrown in the kettle full of black dye. It would be ready pretty soon. She’d used a good deal of coal heating water to dye clothes for mourning; that was cheaper than buying new black dresses and shirtwaists. She hoped the Coal Board wouldn’t cut the ration yet again, though.

Mary Jane came into the kitchen and said, “I want to go out and play.”

“Go on, then,” Sylvia said with a sigh. Mary Jane wasn’t really mourning; how could she mourn a man she scarcely remembered? She knew Sylvia was upset, but had trouble understanding why. George, Jr., had known his father well enough to miss him, but he was also far less wounded than he would have been had George come home every night. School seemed far more real and far more urgent to him than a father long at sea.

Sylvia wished she felt the same way. Now that George was gone, she found herself far more forgiving of his flaws than she had been while he was alive. She even—almost—wished he’d gone to bed with that colored strumpet, to give him one more happy memory to hold on to when the torpedo slammed into the
Ericsson
.

“Not fair,” she muttered, stirring again. The Confederacy had already dropped out of the war, and England had been on the point of giving up. Why, how, had a British submersible chosen her husband’s ship in those waning moments of the war? Where was the sense in that?