Walk in Hell (47 page)

“Is that what I do?” Morrell said, faintly bemused. He was a man without strong philosophical bent; his chief concern was to hit the enemy as hard as he could and as often as he could, until he didn’t need to hit him any more.

Someone on the Canuck side of the line had the same idea. Canadian artillery, which had been quiet for the previous several days, suddenly sprang to life. Morrell threw himself flat on the ground. So did Dietl. So did Guderian; he might have spent most of his time in amongst the maps, but he knew how to handle himself in the open air, too.

Along with the bombardment came a great crackle of rifle fire off to Morrell’s right. Trained on the British model, the Canucks made formidable riflemen. They were quick and accurate, and every shot of theirs counted. And, by the sound of what was going on over there, they had found the weak spot in Morrell’s line. He’d posted one company rather thinly over a long stretch of woods he’d reckoned almost impassable. The Canadians seemed intent on showing why
almost
was a word that didn’t belong in war-planners’ dictionaries.

Guderian and Dietl were both looking at him.
All right, we have come into the field to observe the American Army and to observe this man:
he could all but hear what they were thinking.
He now finds himself in difficulty. How does he respond?

“Runners!” Morrell shouted, and the men came over to him: some running, some crawling along the ground, for shells were still dropping thick and fast. An American machine gun started banging away, there on the right, and he let out the briefest sigh of relief. That was where he’d posted Sergeant Finkel’s squad, and the Canadians would have a devil of a time shifting him if he didn’t feel like being shifted. And sure enough, shouts of dismay said the Canuck advance had suddenly run into a roadblock.

Morrell snapped orders: “Half of Captain Spadinger’s company to pull out of line and contain the damage. The same for the machine-gun company from Captain Hall’s company. The rest of the units not under immediate assault will counterattack, aiming to pinch off the neck of the Canadian advance. I will lead this counterattack personally.” The runners hurried away. Morrell smiled gaily at the observers. “Will you join me, gentlemen?”

Neither of them hesitated. Running doubled-over, ignoring his bad leg, Morrell got to Hall’s company bare moments after the runner he’d sent. The machine-gun men were already on their way off to the east, to shoot up any Canadians who burst out of those not quite impassable woods. Dietl and Guderian, both breathing hard, flopped into foxholes.

Captain Hall said, “I don’t think we’ll have any trouble holding them, sir. They can’t come too far.”

“Ich will nicht nur zu—”
Morrell snarled in exasperation and switched from German to English: “I don’t want to hold them. I want to drive them back, to hurt them.” He pointed northeast.

“If their artillery is alert, they’ll slaughter us, sir,” Hall said.

“I don’t think they will be,” Morrell answered.
They’d better not be
. “They’ve got this bombardment laid on to cover an attack. Who’d be cuckoo enough to move forward when they’re putting pressure on us?” He didn’t give the company commander any chance to argue. He also didn’t give himself any chance to think twice. “Let’s go!” He scrambled to his feet and ran for the Canadian lines, Springfield in his hands.

His men followed, whooping like Red Indians. He’d gained them a couple of major advances toward Banff by all-out audacity; they were willing to believe he could buy them one more. For close to thirty seconds, the Canucks left behind in their trenches were too intent on their comrades’ push to pay much attention to what the Americans were doing off to the west. That was about fifteen seconds too long. Before a machine gun started mowing down the oncoming men in green-gray, they were within grenade range of its position. It fell silent. More grenades flew into the Canadian trenches. The Americans followed.

As Morrell leaped over the parapet, a Canadian aimed at him from point-blank range. He braced himself for another wound.
Christ, not that leg again,
he thought.
I don’t want to be on crutches or in a wheelchair for the rest of my life. Blow my brains out and get it over with
.

The Canuck fired. The bullet went wild, for the fellow in khaki had taken a wound of his own in the instant that he pulled the trigger. Morrell finished him with the bayonet, then looked over his shoulder to find Major Dietl there with a pistol in his hand.
“Danke schön,”
he said.

“Bitte,”
the Austrian answered, with such Hapsburg formality that Morrell expected him to click his heels. He didn’t. He leaped down into the trench instead. Cleaning it of Canadians was the ugly business it always seemed to be. Dietl held his own. At one point, though, he observed, “These foes of yours are in greater earnest than the Russians and have discipline of a sort the Serbs have never imagined.”

“The Canadians are good soldiers,” Morrell agreed. “The Confederates, too, come to that.”

Having driven the Canucks back, his men turned their fire on the Canadian detachment that had gone ahead. Caught between two forces, some of the Canadians went down, some threw down their rifles and threw up their hands in surrender, and some, the hard cases, dug in among the pines and firs and spruces to make the Americans pay a high price for them.

Morrell paid the price, having made the cold-blooded judgment that he could afford it. When the fighting had died away to occasional rifle shots, the Americans were still holding the trenches from which the Canadian attacking party had jumped off. “Very nicely done,” Captain Guderian said. “You used the enemy’s aggressiveness against him most astutely.”

“Coming from an officer of the Imperial General Staff, that’s quite a compliment,” Morrell said.

“You have earned it, Major. It will be reflected in my report.”

“And mine,” Dietl agreed. Morrell grinned, more pleased with the day’s work itself than with the praise it had garnered, but not despising that, either.
I wonder if favorable action reports from German and Austro-Hungarian observers cancel out the Utah fiasco,
he thought, and looked forward to finding out.

Reggie Bartlett examined the trench line just outside of Duncan, Sequoyah, with something less than awe and enthusiasm. “Lord,” he said feelingly, “don’t they teach people around here anything about digging in?”

“You listen good, Bartlett,” said Sergeant Pete Hairston, his new squad leader. “Just on account of they gave you a pretty stripe on your sleeve for bustin’out o’the damnyankees’prisoner camp, that don’t mean you know everything there is to know. Where were you fighting before the Yankees nabbed you?”

“I was on the Roanoke front,” Bartlett answered.

Hairston’s lantern-jawed face, the face of a man who’d acquired three stripes on his own sleeve more by dint of toughness than any other military virtue, changed expression. More cautiously, he asked, “How long you put in there?”

“From a few weeks after the war started till the Yanks got me last fall,” Bartlett said with no small pride. Anybody who’d spent almost a year and a half fighting between the Blue Ridge Mountains and the Alleghenies could hold his head high among soldiers the world over.

Hairston knew that, too. “Shitfire,” he muttered, “all the fighting in Sequoyah’s nothin’ but a football game in the park, you put it next to the clangin’ and bangin’ back there.” He hadn’t bothered asking about Reggie’s previous experience till now. After a moment’s thought, he went on, “But I reckon that’s why this here ain’t like you expected it would be. We ain’t got the niggers to dig all the fancy trenches like I hear tell they got back there, and even if we did, we ain’t got the soldiers to put in ’em.”

“I see that,” Bartlett said. “I surely do.”

It horrified him, too, though he saw no point in coming out and saying so. The sergeant was right—there weren’t enough trenches, not by his standards. A lot of what they called trenches here were only waist-deep, too, so you might not get shot while you crawled from one foxhole to another. Then again, of course, you might. There wasn’t that much barbed wire out in front of the lines to keep the U.S. troops away, either. And, as Hairston had said, there weren’t that many Confederate soldiers holding the position, such as it was.

The sergeant might have picked that thought out of Reggie’s mind. “Ain’t that many damnyankees up here, neither,” he said. “They put four or five divisions into a big push, reckon they’d be in Dallas week after next.” He laughed to show that was a joke, or at least part of a joke. “’Course, they ain’t got four or five spare divisions layin’ around with dust on ’em, any more’n we do. An’if they did, they’d use ’em in Kentucky or Virginia or Maryland, just like we would. This here’s the ass end o’ nowhere for them, same as it is for us.”

“Not quite the ass end of nowhere,” Reggie said, liking the sound of the phrase. “I saw those oil wells when I came up through Duncan.”

“Yeah, they count for somethin’, or the brass reckons they do, anyways,” Hairston admitted. “You ask me, though, you could touch a match to this whole goddamn state of Sequoyah, blow it higher’n hell, an’ I wouldn’t miss it one goddamn bit.”

On brief acquaintance with Sequoyah, Bartlett was inclined to agree with the profane sergeant. To a Virginian, these endless hot burning plains were a pretty fair approximation of hell, or at least of a greased griddle just before the flapjack batter came down. Somewhere high up in the sky, an aeroplane buzzed. Reggie’s head whipped round in alarm. For the briefest moment, half of him believed he wouldn’t see any man-made contraption, but the hand of God holding a pitcher of batter the size of Richmond.

Hairston said, “We’ll take you out on patrol tonight, start gettin’ you used to the way things are around here. It ain’t like Virginia, I’ll tell you that. Ain’t nothin’ like Georgia, neither.”

His voice softened. Reggie hadn’t been sure it could. He asked, “That where you’re from?”

“Yeah, I’m off a little farm outside of Albany. Hell.” The sergeant’s face clouded over. “Probably nothin’ left of that no more anyways. By what I hear tell, them niggers tore that part o’ the state all to hell and gone when they rose up. Bastards. You think about things, it ain’t so bad, not havin’ that many of ’em around.”

“Maybe not.” Reggie had been in the Yankee camp all through the Red Negro uprising. The U.S. officers had played it up, and the new-caught men had gone on and on about it, but it didn’t feel real to him. It was, he supposed, like the difference between reading about being in love and being in love yourself.

Hairston stuck his head out of the foxhole and looked around in a way that gave Bartlett the cold shivers. Do that on the Roanoke front and some damnyankee sniper would clean your ear out for you with a Springfield round. But nothing happened here. The sergeant finished checking the terrain, then squatted back down again. “Yanks are takin’it easy, same as us.”

“All right, Sarge.” Reggie shook his head. “I am going to have to get used to doing things different out here.” He didn’t think he’d ever get used to exposing any part of his precious body where a Yankee could see it when he wasn’t actually attacking.

As promised, Hairston took him out into no-man’s-land after the sun went down. No-man’s-land hereabouts was better than half a mile wide; he’d counted on a couple of hundred yards of it back in Virginia, but seldom more than that.

Going on patrol did have some familiar elements to it; he and his companions crawled instead of walking, and nobody had a cigar or a pipe in his mouth. But it was also vastly different from what it had been back in the Roanoke valley. For one thing, some of the prairie and farmland north of Duncan hadn’t been cratered to a faretheewell.

For another…“Doesn’t stink so bad,” Bartlett said in some surprise. “You haven’t got fourteen dead bodies on every foot of ground. Back in Virginia, seemed like you couldn’t set your hand down without sticking it into a piece of somebody and bringing it back all covered with maggots.”

“I’ve done that,” said Napoleon Dibble, one of the privates in the squad. “Puked my guts out, too, I tell you.”

“I puked my guts out, too, the first time,” Bartlett agreed. But it wasn’t quite agreement, not down deep. By the way Nap Dibble talked, he’d done it once. Reggie had lost track of how many times he’d known that oozy, yielding sensation and the sudden, stinking rush of corruption that went with it. By the time the damnyankees captured him, having it happen again hadn’t been worth anything more than a mild oath.

Something swooped out of the black sky and came down with a thump and a scrabble only a few yards away. Hissing an alarm, Reggie swung his rifle that way. To his amazement, Sergeant Hairston laughed at him. “Ain’t nothin’ but an owl droppin’ on a mouse, Bartlett. Don’t they got no owls up on the Roanoke front?”

“I don’t hardly remember seeing any,” Reggie answered. “They’ve got buzzards, and they’ve got crows, and they’ve got rats. Don’t hardly remember seeing mice—rats ran ’em out, I guess. Hated those bastards. They’d sit up on their haunches and look at you with those beady little black eyes, and you’d know what they’d been eating, and you’d know they were figuring they’d eat you next.” Napoleon Dibble made a disgusted noise. Ignoring him, Bartlett finished, “The one good thing about when the Yankees would throw gas at us was that it’d shift the rats—for a little while.”

“Gas,” Hairston said thoughtfully. “Haven’t seen that more than a time or two out here. Haven’t missed it any, neither, and that’s a fact. You run up against any of those what-do-you-call-’ems—barrels?”

“No, I’ve just heard about those, and seen ’em on a train after I got out of the Yankee camp,” Bartlett answered. “They hadn’t started using them by the time I got captured. They have ’em out here?”

“Ain’t seen any yet,” the sergeant said. “Like I told you, this is the ass end of the war. Those armored cars, now, I’ve seen some of those, but a trench’ll make an armored car say uncle.”

“Don’t like ’em anyways,” Nap Dibble said, to which the other members of the squad added emphatic if low-voiced agreement.