Walk in Hell (67 page)

Several well-modulated paragraphs of rhetoric later, Morrell asked, “Did you need any soldiers to make sure things went the way you had in mind?”

Davis Lee Vidals waxed indignant, eloquently indignant, at the very idea. He didn’t, however, say no. He also didn’t say yes. He did
say
, and say, and say. Presently, he paused again, this time to light a cigar. In that brief interval of silence, Bliss got another chance to open his mouth. “Couple regiments,” he said, and fell silent again.

Morrell nodded. That told him everything he thought he needed to know about the new state government of Kentucky: without massive help from the U.S. Army, it wouldn’t exist. But Heinz Guderian spoke up, in German: “This is not so bad as it may sound, Major. When, forty-five years ago, we annexed Alsace and Lorraine from France, many of the people there resented and resisted us. There remain some who do, but those provinces also remain a part of the German
Reich
, and grow more accustomed to our rule with each passing day.”

Vidals’ eyes got wider with every guttural he heard, and wider still when Morrell answered in German. He might have been bringing Kentucky back into the USA, but he was also bringing a lot of ideas from the Quadruple Entente with him. Luther Bliss, by contrast, listened quietly. Morrell wouldn’t have bet against his understanding every word that was said.

The only thing that finally slowed Vidals down was sleep. No matter that he was sitting in a seat that didn’t recline. He set his homburg in his lap, put his head back, and snored like a thunderstorm in training. That he was so aggressively asleep meant everyone else in the crowded car had trouble joining him.

Outside, the countryside was dark as the tomb. That hadn’t been so farther west, but here in Ohio and Pennsylvania, Confederate bombing aeroplanes remained a nuisance. The enforced darkness after sunset made it harder for them to find worthwhile targets.

Morrell had finally drifted into a fitful doze when the train pulled into Philadelphia at a little before four in the morning. He grunted and groaned and rubbed his eyes. Across the aisle, the lieutenant governor of Kentucky kept on snoring till the conductor shouted out the arrival. Luther Bliss didn’t look to have slept a wink, or to have needed sleep, either.

When the doors opened, a brass band started blaring “The Star-Spangled Banner.” There on the platform stood President Roosevelt. When the Kentuckians got out, he folded them into a bearhug. “Welcome back, prodigal sons!” he cried, while photographers’ flash trays went off with almost as much smoke and noise as an artillery bombardment. “A new star joins the flag; a new star shines in the firmament!” The band switched to “My Old Kentucky Home.”

Let’s see what Senator Debs can do to match that,
Morrell thought; bringing Kentucky back into the USA before the election had to be worth thousands of votes. Soldiers weren’t supposed to have politics. Such politics as Morrell did have were Democratic.

Waiting for him and Guderian was not the president of the United States but Captain John Abell of the General Staff. “Welcome, Captain Guderian,” the clever, almost bloodless officer said in excellent German. He turned to Morrell and returned to English: “General Wood has ordered me to extend his personal greetings to you, Lieutenant Colonel.”

“Lieut—” Morrell didn’t get any further than that, because Guderian was pounding him on the back. Cutting off the Canadian railroad that ran through Banff had earned him a promotion, and evidently got him forgiven for the difficulties the USA had had in Utah. If Captain Abell was pleased at that, he hid it very well.

He said, “As you know, you are assigned to duty here in Philadelphia once more, Lieutenant Colonel. I assure you, I look forward to working with you in every way.”

A liar, but a polite liar, Morrell judged. Guderian said, “See, my friend? You have won a victory, and they have put you back behind a desk. It almost tempts one to lose, doesn’t it?”

“Yes,” Morrell said. “Almost.”

“Lord, I wish Emily was here.” Jefferson Pinkard stabbed himself with a needle, about the fourth time he’d done that.

Hipolito Rodriguez gave him an amused look. “Most of the time,
amigo,
you say you wish you was with your
esposa
. Now you want her here with you. You no can make up your mind?” He waved around at the bleak west-Texas prairie. “I think she rather you home with her.”

Pinkard snorted. “Yeah, I’d rather I was home with her, too. But she can do
this
a hell of a lot easier’n I can.” Stubbornly, he kept sewing the single chevron to the sleeve of his uniform tunic. “If I’d known it was gonna be so blame much trouble, maybe I wouldn’t have let ’em promote me.”

“
Sí,
life is easier when you have only yourself to worry about,” Rodriguez agreed with obvious sincerity.

“Hell, Hip, if they reckon you can do the job, how you gonna tell ’em no?” Jeff asked. He could complain about making private first class after the fact; he hadn’t complained when Captain Connolly told him he’d done it. He fought through another couple of stitches, then surveyed his handiwork and found something else over which to complain: “That stripe’s pretty light, isn’t it? Make it easier for those Yankee sons of bitches to spot me.”

“Wait till it rains again and you go through the mud,” Rodriguez told him. “Then your whole uniform the same color again.”

“Yeah, you’re right.” Pinkard dug out some cornbread he hadn’t finished at breakfast. It had got hard. He didn’t care. Even when it was fresh, it hadn’t been a patch on what Emily made. Her cornbread and her skill with the needle weren’t what he really missed about her, though. He wanted to be back home in Birmingham to warm her bed—and to make sure nobody else was warming it for him.

He stood up in the trench to put on the tunic to which he’d affixed his new chevron—and a bullet cracked past his head. He threw himself—and the tunic—down flat into the trench. “Got to dig it deeper,” Hip Rodriguez said seriously. “They shouldn’t see you when you get up like that.”

“Yeah,” Jeff said again. “They wouldn’t see
you
, I don’t guess.” He was several inches taller than the littler Sonoran. This time, he donned the fresh tunic sitting down. It wasn’t so fresh any more; he’d smeared dirt over a good part of it, including the sleeves. He stopped worrying about sharpshooters’ spotting him on account of one stripe.

A few more bullets flew from the U.S. trenches. Here and there, Confederates along the line east of Lubbock shot back. Pinkard didn’t hear any of his countrymen cry out in pain. He didn’t know whether they got any Yankees, either. And if they had hit somebody, so what? Did that mean they would run the U.S. Army out of Texas? He knew too well it didn’t. That was what his regiment had come here to do. How many lives were gone, without the line’s moving one way or the other? Too many, that was sure.

As if to underscore the point, a Confederate machine gun opened up, maybe at a Yankee out of his nice, safe burrow, maybe just for the sake of using up some ammunition. Half a minute later, a U.S. machine gun answered. A couple of hundred yards away from Pinkard, somebody started screaming for his mama.

“Shit,” Hip Rodriguez said, and crossed himself. He shook his head, then got a tobacco pouch out of his pocket and began rolling a cigarette.

After a while, both machine-gun crews decided they’d made their pointless points. They quit firing. Rifles kept banging a few minutes longer, nervous, excited men shooting at what they thought were targets. At last, quiet returned.

“You know what all this here reminds me of?” Jeff said, by then having seen a lot of meaningless fire fights that conformed to the same general pattern. When Rodriguez shook his head, Pinkard went on, “It’s like a rainstorm, ain’t it? First you get a few drops, then it comes down hard for a while, then it tapers off, and it’s all quiet and the sun’s out again.”

“That is clever, what you say.” Rodriguez nodded now. “This time, we don’t get no—” The noise he made could have been thunder rolling or artillery going off. It fit either way.

Up the communications trench into the front line came Stinky Salley. Most times, Pinkard would have been as glad to see him as to encounter a new kind of louse, but Salley had somehow used his civilian career as a clerk to convince Captain Connolly that no one else could possibly match him as the man to pick up and distribute the mail. He carried a butternut canvas bag labeled
CSAMPO
. “Letters!” he called. “I’ve got letters!”

He needed more than being the bearer of news from home to make him popular with his fellow soldiers, but that didn’t hurt. Men came hurrying over to him, arms outstretched, smiles on their faces. “Come on, Stinky,” somebody said. “Cough ’em up!” But even that wasn’t so peremptory as it would have been had Salley not borne letters.

He took them out of the sack and started reading off names: “Burroughs! Dalton! Pinkard!” Jeff took the envelope with an enormous grin; he recognized Emily’s handwriting. “Captain Connolly, one for you, sir.” To officers, Salley was painfully obsequious. “Pratt! Ambrose! Pinkard again—you lucky dog.” Jeff’s promotion hadn’t quite sunk in on his fellow Alabaman.

“Two in one mail call!” Pinkard exclaimed joyfully as he carried both letters—the second, he saw, also from his wife—away from the crowd around Salley. He sat down beside Hip Rodriguez. Rodriguez never got mail; as far as Jeff could tell, the little Sonoran didn’t know anyone who could read or write, and had only started learning those arts himself since he’d joined the Army. He liked listening to other soldiers read their mail, though, as did anybody who’d drawn a blank in the distribution.

Jeff looked to see which letter had the earlier postmark, and opened that one first. “‘Dear Jeff,’” he read aloud, “‘I am fine. I wish you was home with me, so I could give you a kiss and—’” He skipped most of the next paragraph, at least with his voice, though his eyes lingered on it. Every once in a while, Emily would do something like that. It made him more anxious than ever to get home. Rodriguez grinned at him, probably guessing what he was leaving out.

Coughing a little, he resumed where the spice left off: “‘I am fine, and working hard. I hope so much you are well and have not got yourself hurt. Fanny got herself a telegram from the War Department yesterday that says poor Bedford got wounded, and she is frantic.’”

Turning to Rodriguez, Jeff explained, “I worked with Bedford Cunningham, and him and his wife live next door to me.”

“This is hard,” the Sonoran said. “This is very hard.” He sounded altogether sincere; he had a good deal more sympathy in him than the run-of-the-mill Confederate soldier. “For you, my
amigo
, and for your, your wife”—he remembered the English word—“and more for your
amigo
’s wife, and most of all for him. How
peligroso
—how dangerous—is the wound?”

“Letter doesn’t say,” Pinkard answered. “Reckon Fanny didn’t know, so Emily wouldn’t’ve, either.” Rodriguez pointed to the other envelope. Nodding, Jeff tore it open. He didn’t read it out loud all the way though, but rapidly skimmed through it, looking for news of Bedford Cunningham.

When he found it, his face gave him away. “It is very bad?” Hip Rodriguez asked quietly.

“Right arm”—Jeff held up his own, partly to help Rodriguez’s uncertain English, partly to remind himself he still owned that precious piece of flesh—“gone above the elbow, Emily says. Bedford’s on his way home now. He’ll get better. What’s he going to do, though, with a wound like that? Never get on the floor at the Sloss Works again, that’s certain, and iron’s about the only thing he knew.”

Rodriguez closed his right hand into a fist. He watched it carefully as he did so. Pinkard watched, too: all the marvelous, miraculous interplay of muscle and tendon and bone beneath a sheath of wonderfully unbroken skin.
Gone in an instant,
Jeff thought.
Wonder if a bullet got him, or if a shell came down right next door. Wonder if he knows. Wonder if he cares
.

“If this happen to me,” Rodriguez said, “I take whatever money I have, I go to the
cantina
, and I don’t do nothing but drink from then on. What else am I good for, without my right hand?”

“Don’t know,” Pinkard said. “You couldn’t farm one-handed, any more than you could go back to the foundry. It’s funny,” he went on after a little while. “Just reading this here letter about Bedford hits me harder than seeing some of the people from the company get hurt right in front of my eyes. Is that crazy, or what?”

“No,” Rodriguez answered. “This is a good friend, almost like your
hermano
, your brother. We are still some of us like strangers.”

“Yeah, maybe.” That still tasted wrong, but it was closer than any explanation Jeff had come up with. “God damn the war,” he muttered. Rodriguez nodded solemnly. A Yankee machine gun started up, the gunner spraying bullets over a wide arc to see what he could hit. “God damn the war,” Jeff said again, and checked to make sure his Tredegar had a full clip.

From under the awning, Lieutenant General George Armstrong Custer stared gloomily at the hills above White House, Tennessee. “We have to have a victory,” he said. “We have to. The war requires it, and politics require it, too.”

Cautiously, Major Abner Dowling said, “Joining battle for the sake of politics is a recipe for getting licked, sir. We learned that in the War of Secession, and all over again during the Second Mexican War.”

Custer’s pouchy stare swung from the stalled battlefield toward his adjutant. “Most times, Major, I would agree with you,” he said after what was for him an unusual pause to reflect. “Now, though—do you want that wild-eyed lunatic Debs sitting in the White House come next March? He’s already said he’ll treat for peace with the Rebels and the Canucks if he gets elected. Is that what you want, Major?
Is
it?”

“No, sir,” Dowling said at once; he was as good a Democrat as Custer.

He might as well not have spoken; once the general commanding First Army got rolling, he kept rolling till he ran down. “God in heaven, Major!” Custer burst out, a rheumy thunderer. “We’re winning on every front—on every front, I tell you—and that crackbrained maniac wants to give it up? And for what? For an honorable peace, he calls it. Honorable!” With his age-loosened, wrinkled skin and enormous mustache, Custer had a formidable sneer when he turned it loose, as he did now.