American Front (50 page)

Paul Andersen crawled up beside him. “Ain’t this fun?” he said, also pausing to reload.

“Now that you mention it,” Chester said, “no.”

Andersen’s grin was wry. “Let me ask it a different way. Ain’t this fun, next to leave back in White Sulphur Springs?”

Martin considered that fine philosophical point. “Nobody’s trying to kill you back there,” he said at last. “Other than that, though, you got a point.”

“Nobody’s trying to kill you back there?” Andersen exclaimed. “You mean you didn’t think they were trying to bore you to death?”

“Hmm,” Martin said, and then, “Yeah, maybe they were. I mean, if you don’t like lemonade and you don’t like hot water that stinks like somebody cut the cheese in it, not a hell of a lot to do back there.”

“I hear they got saloons—hell, I hear they got whorehouses—in leave towns on what used to be Confederate territory,” Andersen said. “The Army has charge there, and the Army knows what soldiers want to do when they get away from the front for a while. But White Sulphur Springs, that’s back in the USA, and it ain’t the Army in charge. It’s the damn preachers.”

“No whiskey,” Chester Martin agreed. “No women, except the Red Cross girls handing out the lemonade. A couple of them were pretty, but once I’m back there and cleaned up, I want to do more than look at a woman, you know what I’m saying?”

“You bet I do,” Andersen answered. “Me, too. Hell, looking is harder, some ways, than not being around ’em at all.”

“I think so, too,” Martin said. “I—” He shut up then, and flattened himself out among the bricks, because the Rebs started throwing whizz-bangs into the neighborhood. The shells burst all around, throwing deadly fragments every which way.

The barrage—mostly those damned three-inchers that seemed to fire almost as fast as machine guns, but some bigger cannon, too—went on for about half an hour. Stretcher-bearers hauled groaning, thrashing U.S. soldiers back toward the doctors. Some men didn’t need stretcher-bearers. If all that was left of you was your leg from the knee down, your foot still in your boot, doctors wouldn’t do you any good.

As soon as the bombardment stopped, Martin and Andersen popped up like a couple of jack-in-the-boxes. Sure as hell, here came the Rebs, dashing forward through the ruins of Big Lick. They ran low and bent over, not wanting to expose themselves any more than they had to.
Veteran troops
, Martin thought; new fish had less sense.

He was a veteran, too. The more you let the other guys take advantage of a bombardment, the worse off you’d be. The time to smash them was as soon as they jumped out of their holes. If you could pot a couple then, the rest lost enthusiasm for the work they’d been assigned.

He squeezed the trigger. The Springfield slammed against his shoulder. A Reb pitched over on his face. Martin worked the bolt and fired again. Another Confederate soldier fell, this one grabbing at his arm. Martin seemed to have all the time in the world to swing his rifle toward a third figure clad in butternut, to squeeze the trigger, to watch the fellow topple.

Beside him, Paul Andersen was also banging away. Somewhere not far off, a machine gun started hammering. A lot of Rebels went down. But a lot of them kept coming, too. They pitched improvised grenades at the U.S. soldiers. Martin didn’t like the idea of carrying those damn things around—if a bullet hit one, it would blow a hole in you they could throw a dog through. But he didn’t like being on the receiving end of grenades, either. It was as if the infantry started having its own artillery.

Shouts of alarm from the left made him whip his head around. The Confederates were in among the U.S. trenches and foxholes, trying to drive the Americans back to White Sulphur Springs without benefit of leave.

Martin ran toward the battling, cursing men. In a fight like that, you used anything you had: rifle, bayonet, knife, the sawed-off spade you carried to dig yourself in. The question was brutally simple: would enough Rebs get past the U.S. rifle and machine-gun fire to overwhelm the defenders and make this wrecked stretch of suburb their own once more, or would the men who were in place and whatever reinforcements who could get forward blunt the attack and throw it back?

Butternut smeared with mud and grass stains didn’t look much different from similarly dirty green-gray. Being sure of who was who was anything but easy. You didn’t want to go after the wrong man by mistake, but you didn’t want to hesitate and get yourself killed, either.

An unmistakable Rebel leaped out from behind a pile of rubble and swung one of those short-handled shovels at Chester Martin’s head. He threw up his rifle just in time to fend off the blow. The force of it staggered him even so. The Confederate, intent on his work, drew back the shovel for another blow. Before he could deliver it, a bullet—from a U.S. soldier or a Rebel, Martin never knew—caught him in the shoulder. The spade spun from his hands. “Ahh, shit,” he said loudly. “You got me now, Yank.”

Martin dashed past him. If he’d stayed there an instant longer, he would have shot the wounded Rebel in the head. Accepting the surrender of a man who’d been doing his best to kill you till he got hurt himself felt fiercely unnatural. A lot of such attempted surrenders never got made. Machine gunners, in particular, had a way of dying heroically at their posts.

Yells from the rear told of fresh U.S. troops coming up. The Confederates still battling in among their foes weren’t getting reinforcements; their barrage hadn’t made the U.S. defenders say uncle. “Give up!” Martin shouted to the Rebs. “We got you outnumbered, and you ain’t gonna make it back to your own lines. You want to keep breathin’, throw down what you got.”

For a few seconds, he thought that call would do no good. The Rebs were stubborn bastards; he’d seen them die in place before. But then a sergeant in butternut said, “Hell with it,” and threw up his hands. His example was enough for his comrades, who dropped their rifles and whatever other lethal hardware they were holding.

The U.S. soldiers stripped their prisoners of ammunition, grenades, and knives, and of their pocket watches and cash, too. None of the Confederates said a word about that. Several of them had U.S. coins and bills in their pockets, which argued they’d stripped a prisoner or two themselves.

“Hammerschmitt, Peterson, take the Rebs back to where they can deal with ’em,” Martin said. The rest of the U.S. soldiers looked enviously at the two men their sergeant had chosen: they’d get away from the front and the fighting, if only for a little while.

“Hear tell the food in Yankee prisoner camps ain’t too bad,” the Confederate sergeant who’d been first to throw down his Tredegar said hopefully.

As Specs Peterson and Joe Hammerschmitt gestured with their bayoneted rifles to get the prisoners of war moving, Chester Martin answered, “Listen, Rebs, I’ll give you one warning: whatever you do, don’t let ’em ship you to White Sulphur Springs.”

The sergeant nodded, grateful for the advice, then looked puzzled when the U.S. soldiers started laughing. “Come on, you lugs,” Peterson said, sounding as fierce as any man with glasses could. Hands still high, the Confederates shuffled off into captivity.

“You’re a regular devil, Sarge, you are,” Paul Andersen said as the U.S. soldiers shared out the weapons and other loot they’d got from the Rebels. Four men all wanted a knife with a brass handle made as a knuckle-duster; they had to go down on their knees and roll dice to decide who got to keep it.

“Who, me?” Martin said. “Listen, how much difference is there really between a prisoner camp and where they sent us? You can’t do what you want either place, now can you?”

“Hadn’t looked at it like that,” the corporal admitted after a little thought.

“And I’ll tell you another thing,” Martin said, warming to his theme: “we can joke however goddamn much we want, but they’re both better than being at the front.” This time, Paul Andersen nodded at once.

XIII

Usually, Scipio or one of the lesser servants looked out from the front windows to see who was coming. This time, Anne Colleton did the job herself. It would not give the Negroes any wrong ideas about her place and theirs in the Marshlands scheme of things, not when the motorcar she was waiting for had her brother in it.

She wondered whether she ought to give Tom a sisterly hug and a kiss or box his foolish ears for him. The first clue she’d had that he was anywhere but up in Virginia was a telephone call from Columbia less than an hour before. He’d just got off the train, he’d said, and was on his way.

Scipio came up to her, tall, imposing, perfectly formal. “Have you any special suggestions on how we may make your brother’s stay as comfortable and pleasant as possible?” he asked in his pipe-organ voice.

Anne waved him away. “I leave it in your hands, Scipio. I can’t think now. Maybe I’ll have some ideas later. If I do, I’ll tell you.” The butler bowed and withdrew. Since the start of the war, he’d pulled back even further than usual into the shell of service he wore around himself like armor. He’d always been a private person, even before his training for high service, but now it was as if he didn’t want anyone having the slightest inkling of what he was thinking or feeling.

Stinking war—it oppresses everyone
, she thought.
Sometimes I wish I were a simple field nigger, so I wouldn’t have to think about it
. But even the plantation hands were thinking about the war, thinking how they could make money from it by going to work in the factories instead of staying here where they belonged and raising cotton. Anne sighed. Even for a field nigger, life wasn’t simple any more.

She drew herself straighter. All right. Life wasn’t simple. Up till now, she’d always reveled in complication, and profited from it, too. Nostalgia belonged to the last century. If you didn’t look ahead, you were in trouble.

Then all such worries vanished from her head. Here came the motorcar, kicking up a cloud of dust from the red-dirt path that led up to the mansion. The Negro driver stopped the automobile, leaped out of it, and got out Tom Colleton’s bags. Then he opened the door to the rear seat and let out Tom, who handed him a silver coin that sparkled in the sun. Tom picked up his own bags and carried them to Marshlands’ front door.

He wouldn’t have done that before the war started
, Anne thought, and then, an instant later, with concern more maternal than sisterly,
He’s gotten so thin
.

She hurried to the door. Scipio somehow got there ahead of her; he shared with cats the ability to leave later than you did but to arrive sooner anyhow, and without seeming to have crossed the intervening space. He opened the door, letting in the warm May air, and said, “Welcome home, Captain Colle—” He stopped, for a moment looking quite humanly surprised. Tom Colleton wore a single star on each collar tab. Scipio corrected himself: “Welcome home,
Major
Colleton.”

Anne threw herself into her brother’s arms. He dropped his bags and squeezed her tight. After the joyous hellos and I-love-yous and good-to-see-yous, Anne said indignantly, “You didn’t tell me you’ve been promoted again.”

Tom shrugged. “We’ve seen a lot of casualties. Somebody has to step up and do the work.” When he’d joined the Army, bare days after war broke out, he’d put a fancy plume in his hat and gone off gaily, like a knight heading out on a Crusade. Now he sounded both tired and altogether matter-of-fact about his business, more like a cabinetmaker than a cavalier.

He looked tired, too. His forehead had lines that hadn’t been there the year before—he was eighteen months younger than Anne—and he carried dark circles under his eyes. His cheeks were hollow; a long, pink scar seamed one of them. Hesitantly, Anne reached up to touch it. “You didn’t tell me about this, either.”

Her brother shrugged again. “Got kissed by a shell fragment. Battalion doctor’s assistant sewed it up. I didn’t lose any duty time, so I didn’t think it was worth talking about.”

“You’ve changed,” Anne said, perhaps more wonderingly than she should have. The young man who’d gone off to war had been the little brother she’d always known: witty, easygoing, not too effectual—certainly not effectual enough to want to put in any work at operating Marshlands when his sister seemed happy enough doing it all. And that had suited Anne fine; she rejoiced in the power it gave her. But when she looked into the eyes of the lean near-stranger who was her own flesh and blood, she didn’t know what she saw. It flustered her. Tom had always been so easy to read, so predictable.

Scipio scooped up the bags. “I shall put these in your room, sir,” he said.

“My room,” Tom echoed, as if the phrase were in a foreign language. Slowly, he nodded. “Yes, go ahead and do that, Scipio.” The butler carried the bags into the mansion. Tom took one step to follow him, then stopped, still outside. “Very strange,” he murmured. “Unbelievable.”

“What is?” Anne asked. She wasn’t used to being unable to follow his train of thought.

“That all this”—Tom waved at the Marshlands mansion—“and all this”—the next wave encompassed the many square miles of the Marshlands estate—“is mine—part mine; excuse me, dear sister. And excuse me for sounding not quite like my old self. For most of the past nine months, my horizons have been limited to a hole in the ground and whether there’d be enough beans in the pot for my men and me. Coming back to this is like falling asleep and dreaming you’ve gone to heaven.”

“It should be like waking from a nightmare,” Anne said. “This is where you live. This is where you belong.”
At least for as long as you don’t get in my hair while you’re here. You never used to. Will you now? Harder to tell
.

Her brother’s mouth set in a hard line: another expression she’d never seen on his face till now. “I’m going back to the front in three days’ time,” he said, his voice flat. “Till the war is done, this is the dream. And when the war is done, it’s liable to disappear like a dream, too.”

“What
are
you talking about?” Of all the people in the world, Anne should have been able to keep up with—to keep ahead of—her brother. Ever since they were tiny, she’d been the clever one, the dominant one, in the family. She’d taken that so much for granted, it had never occurred to her things might change.

“Never mind.” Tom stepped past her, into the hallway. His grin was more like the one she’d known, though not quite the same. “Feels good to get out of the sun.” He kept on walking, and looked up toward the second-floor galleries. Like the grin, his chuckle had something new in it—restraint, maybe. Pointing, he said, “Still got the funny pictures hanging on the walls, do you?”

“Some of them,” Anne said; he’d teased her about the exhibition ever since she’d had the idea for it. “Marcel Duchamp is still here, too.”

“Is he?” Tom’s lips thinned again. “Do we have any liquor left, and how many yellow babies are due?” That wasn’t teasing, it was cold contempt, one more thing she wasn’t used to hearing from him. That it matched her own feelings about the Frenchman was, next to the unaccustomed harshness, a small thing.

She decided taking Tom literally might be the best way to defuse the situation: “There’s enough whiskey left for you to have a drink, if you want one.” When her brother nodded, she called for Scipio. As usual, he answered the call faster than should have been possible. “Two whiskeys over ice,” she told him. He bowed and disappeared again.

“Ice,” Tom said. “Saw plenty of that this past winter. Not in my drink, though.” He shook himself, as if realizing at last he really was away from the trenches of the Roanoke valley. “I heard from Jacob not long before I hopped on the train down here. He’s well, or was then.”

“I got a letter from him just the other day,” Anne answered. “He said it looks like the Yankees are up to something in Kentucky, but nobody seems to know what it is or when the storm breaks.”

“Won’t be long now,” Tom said. “Roads should all be dry. They can build their supply dumps up to as big as they want them, put their reserves in place. As soon as they’re ready, they’ll hit us.” He spoke again like someone discussing the ins and outs of a business he knew well. Musingly, he went on, “Show probably would have started there already if they hadn’t had to pull men to deal with the revolt in Utah.”

Anne nodded. “Between the Mormons and the Socialists, they have so much trouble inside their own borders, it hurts them when they try to fight us.” She spoke with vindictive relish. Scipio returned then, two tumblers full of amber whiskey gleaming on a silver tray. Ice clinked gently. Anne took one drink, Tom the other. She said, “It’s not like that here, thank God. We all stand behind the cause.”

To her amazement, her brother threw back his head and laughed. “This is the dream, all right,” he said, and knocked back his whiskey with a flick of the wrist. “You’re not living in the real world, that’s certain.”

Being the object of her brother’s scorn angered her. “Who in the Confederate States throws bombs and rises up against the government?” she demanded, and then answered her own question: “No one, that’s who.”

“No?” Tom set the tumbler down hard on the tray Scipio still held. “These past few months, they’ve executed a couple of dozen niggers in my division alone. Reds, every last one of ’em, out-and-out Reds. Worse than plain old Socialists and Mormons put together, if you ask me.”

“That’s not the same as—” Anne began.

Her brother cut her off, one more thing he wouldn’t have done—wouldn’t have dared do—before the war. “And that’s just in my division alone. Others, it’s been worse. And God only knows how deep the rot has spread, away from the front.”

“I’ve heard that. I don’t believe it,” Anne said firmly. “It’s not a problem here, I can tell you that much.”

When she used that tone of voice, it was supposed to make Tom shut up and knuckle under. It always had in the past. It didn’t any more. “Everybody says the same thing—till they get their noses rubbed in it,” he told her. “A plantation this size, if there’s not a Red cell somewhere on it, I’ll eat my hat.” He pointed to the brown felt he’d hung just inside the door, and turned a hard and thoughtful gaze on Scipio.

That was too much for Anne. “Tom, stop this at once, or you’ll make me sorry you’ve come home,” she said. “Scipio has raised both of us since we were babies. The idea that he could be a Red—it’s disgusting. That’s the only word I can find for it.”

“Things change.” Tom Colleton swung back toward her. He leaned forward a little. The implied threat of attack made Anne take half a step back before she realized what she’d done. And her brother did attack, though only with words: “You’re the one who’s always going on about change. It’s not as much fun as you make it out to be, not all the time it isn’t. And if you think it can’t happen right here at Marshlands, you’re deliberately blinding yourself.”

Anne stared, first at him, then at Scipio. Her brother’s face was grim and intent. Scipio showed nothing of what he thought, but then, he never did. Anne finished her whiskey, then, even harder than her brother had done, slammed the tumbler down onto the tray the butler was holding. A chunk of ice jumped out, leaving a little wet trail as it skidded across the polished silver surface.

“Get me another drink, Scipio.” She kept her voice low, but it was brittle with fury even so. The butler hurried away. When he came back a moment later with the second whiskey, she drank it fast, too. She could feel the liquor building a transparent wall between her and the world, but even that numbing could not disguise the fact that her kid brother’s homecoming, far from being the celebration she’d expected, looked more like a disaster.

Percy Stone was dressed in his flying togs and had his camera by his side, but that hadn’t kept him from sitting in on a poker game while he waited for Jonathan Moss to finish getting ready to fly. By the expression on his face, it hadn’t kept him from losing money to Lefty the mechanic, either. He was in good company there; almost everybody rash enough to sit down with Lefty ended up sadder, if not necessarily wiser.

“Oh, thank God—duty calls,” Stone said when Moss came in. “I think I’d sooner go up there and get shot at than stay here and get skinned.” Amid laughter, he studied his cards, then tossed a big silver coin into the pot. “Raise a dollar.”

“And other one.” The mechanic named Byron tossed in a folded bill.

Two other players threw in their hands with various noises of disgust. Lefty said, “I’ll see those and bump it another three.” He made his five dollars with a gold half-eagle.

“That’s enough for me,” Stone said, and folded. Byron looked harassed, but called—and promptly regretted it. Chuckling, Lefty scooped up the pot.

“I could have told you not to play cards with Lefty,” Moss said as Stone picked up the camera and the two fliers walked out to their Wright 17. “As a matter of fact, I
have
told you not to play cards with Lefty.”

“It’s the Socialist in me,” Stone answered. Moss let out a questioning grunt. The observer explained: “I make more money than Lefty does, but at the poker table we redistribute the wealth.” He shook his head. “I wouldn’t mind it so much if the redistribution went my way a little more often.”

Moss blew air out through his lips with a snuffling noise, like a horse. “I’m a Democrat,” he said. “Always have been, probably always will be. If I earn something, I figure it’s mine, and I want to keep it. I don’t much like riots, either, so Socialism was a hard sell for me even before the Remembrance Day horrors.”

“That was pretty bad, if you believe what you read in the newspapers,” Stone agreed. He lifted the camera into his cockpit, then climbed in after it. Once he’d set it in the mount, though, he added, “Of course, if you believe what you read in the newspapers, we’ve already won the war four or five times by now, which does make me wonder what the two of us are doing, going up in this contraption.” He slapped the doped linen fabric covering the side of the fuselage. It was taut, and thumped like a drum.

He had such a disarming manner to him that even political arguments that could have turned hot and heavy in a hurry got defused. “Earning our salaries, so you can give yours to the groundcrew,” Moss replied, scrambling into the forward cockpit.