American Front (79 page)

Martin wished the gauze mask he wore were as good at neutralizing stenches as it was at keeping chlorine from searing his lungs. That, though, wasn’t why it had been designed. He tried to keep his unruly stomach under control. If he took off the mask to puke, who could guess how much poison gas he’d breathe in after every retch?

The hail of machine-gun bullets passed on beyond the shell hole. Crawling through muck of a sort he didn’t care to contemplate, Martin peered out over the forward lip of the hole. Whatever else he did he couldn’t stay there. Grunting under the weight of his pack, he heaved himself upright again and ran on.

Here came the trenches. He could see murky spots up and down their length, spots where chlorine gas still lingered. The Confederate defenders wore masks like his. A lot of them had goggles, too. They were either bareheaded or in caps, though: no one had yet issued them helmets.

One of the Rebs raised a rifle to shoot at Martin. He shot first, though, on the run and from the hip. As much by luck as anything else, the Confederate howled and dropped his weapon to clutch at his chest.

Yelling, Martin leaped down into the trench. He used his bayonet to make sure the Confederate wasn’t going anywhere, then pulled a grenade improvised from nails and a half-pound block of explosive out of one of his equipment pouches and flung it into the next trench back. Somebody screamed a moment after it exploded, so he supposed he’d done that right.

He looked around, collected a couple of his soldiers by eye, and headed down the trench toward the next traverse. Like U.S. forces, the Confederates sensibly did not dig their trenches as long, straight gashes in the earth. Had they been so foolish, any foes who got into them could have delivered a deadly enfilading fire. Unfortunately, the game was harder than that.

Firebays like the one he and his companions were in led to other firebays advanced or recessed from them by a short stretch of perpendicular trench, a traverse, so that the line, if viewed from an aeroplane, took on the look of a postage stamp perforated with insane regularity. Just because your side held a firebay didn’t mean the enemy wasn’t still lurking in the next traverse.

Finding out who was in the next traverse—or the next firebay, if you were in a traverse—was not a job for the faint of heart. Neither was getting rid of those people, if they happened to be wearing butternut while you were in green-gray. One way was to go up out of the trenches and crawl along the ground between them. Doing that, though, was a lot like a snail’s jumping out of its shell to run faster: the poor creature was all too likely to get squashed.

Charging round a corner was not recommended, either. The other fellow had had too much time to prepare nasty surprises for you. Nearing a corner of the firebay, Martin called, “Give up, you Rebs!”

The only answer he got back was a grenade flying through the air. It was thrown too far, and detonated on the level ground beyond the firebay. His own men knew how to reply to it. Several grenades, tossed with better effect, rained down on the Confederates. Grenades, Martin reflected, were handy things: they gave an infantryman a little artillery of his own. And, like artillery, they didn’t have to wound to be effective. Even a near miss could leave a soldier shaken and stunned.

Martin bet his life the grenades had stunned the Rebs in the traverse for a couple of vital seconds. He charged round the corner of the trench. One Reb had been stationed there to deal with any such unwelcome newcomers, but he was down and thrashing, blood pouring from his belly out between his fingers. Followed by the men he’d gathered, Martin ran past him and around the next bend. Another Confederate was down there, and still others on their feet. “Hands up, you Rebs!” he screamed.

Reggie Bartlett could barely hear the screamed order to surrender. One of the grenades the damnyankees had thrown had gone off only a few feet away from him. He looked down at his trouser leg. He was bleeding. Neither the pain nor the flow of blood was too bad, though, so he guessed whatever fragment or nail had hit him had drilled straight through muscle without getting stuck there or slamming into bone.

“Hands up!” the Yankee sergeant yelled again. Reggie let his rifle fall to the mud of the trench floor and raised his hands over his head. He knew he and his companions were lucky to get a chance to surrender after they’d tried to fight back. A lot of times, in situations like that, the side winning the fight in the trenches left only the losers’ corpses.

The U.S. soldiers swarmed over him, Jasper Jenkins, and the other privates who hadn’t been hurt—or not badly hurt, anyway, as a couple of them bore minor wounds not much different from Bartlett’s. Corporal McCorkle lay on the ground, moaning. The U.S. soldier shook his head. “Poor bastard must have taken most of a grenade’s worth, right in the gut,” he said.

“He had a lot of gut to take it in,” the sergeant answered, truthfully but unkindly. He frisked Reggie with thorough haste, depriving him of his pocket watch, his wallet, and whatever loose change he had in his pockets. Bartlett made no move to stop him, understanding it would be the last move he ever made if he did. Confederate troops plundered Yankee prisoners just as enthusiastically when they got the chance.

Off toward either side and back deeper in the Confederate position, the sound of fighting was picking up. The U.S. sergeant peered ever so cautiously over the parados at the rear of the trench, treating it as if it were the parapet at the front, which, from his point of view, it was.

He fired a couple of rounds at whatever he saw back there, them shook his head. The iron kettles he and his men wore gave them a look as if out of another time, old and fierce and sullen. What with helmet, goggles, and mask, hardly any of his face was actually visible. One of his men, who wore ordinary glasses instead of goggles and whose eyes were red and teary, said, “We ain’t gonna be able to hold these trenches, Sarge.”

“Yeah, I think you’re right,” the sergeant answered regretfully after gauging the noise again. “We’re bringing back prisoners, so the brass can’t grouse too bad.” He turned to Bartlett and the other captured Confederates. “All right, you lugs, up over the top and back to the American lines. Don’t try anything cute or you’ll find out how cute dead is.”

Reggie had gone over the top a good many times, but never before without a rifle in his hands. He felt very naked, very much exposed as he awkwardly got up into no-man’s-land and scrambled back through the barbed wire toward the forwardmost U.S. trenches. A few of the damnyankees in those trenches shot at him and his comrades. He was glad they quit when they saw the Yankee soldiers coming along behind the men in butternut.

He’d hoped he’d have a chance to jump in a shell hole and have the sergeant and the rest of the Yankees go on by so he could sneak back to his own lines. It didn’t happen. One reason it didn’t was that the Confederates whose positions hadn’t been overrun were shooting at the damnyankees, who bunched up close to their prisoners to discourage that. How were you supposed to escape a man who kept stepping on your bootheels?

The unhappy answer was, you couldn’t. Bartlett had jumped down into U.S. trenches, too, but this time the Yankees had rifles and he didn’t. “Well done, Sergeant,” said one of them—an officer, by his demeanor.

“Thank you, Captain Wyatt,” the sergeant answered. “Long as you’re back here, I don’t suppose I’m in trouble for not holding onto that stretch of Rebel entrenchment.”

“No, nothing to worry about there, Martin,” the officer—Wyatt—said. “Sometimes we manage to advance a few yards, sometimes we don’t. They’re more ready to face gas than they used to be,” He pointed to the mask on Reggie’s face.

“Yes, sir.” Sergeant Martin shed his own mask and goggles. He rounded on Bartlett. “All right, Reb, let’s have it.”

“Reginald Bartlett, private, Confederate States Army,” Reggie answered, and recited his pay number.

“What unit, Bartlett?” Sergeant Martin asked.

“I don’t have to tell you that,” Bartlett said.

The sergeant glanced over to his captain. Like one of Martin’s soldiers, Captain Wyatt wore spectacles. Behind them, his eyes were not only reddened by chlorine but thoroughly grim. “I’m only going to tell you this once, Bartlett, so you’d better listen hard—the rest of you Rebs, too. Do you know how many thousand miles this godforsaken chunk of Virginia is from the Hague?”

It wasn’t a geography question, although, from the way Jasper Jenkins frowned and scowled, he thought it was. Reggie knew better. What Wyatt had just given him was a warning: no matter what the formal laws of war said about forcing information out of prisoners, he was going to ask whatever he was going to ask, and he expected answers.

“Let’s try again, Bartlett,” Martin said, proving Reggie had been right. “What unit?”

If he didn’t talk, he knew exactly what would happen to him. He didn’t want to die in a Yankee trench, without even a chance to hit back at the enemy. He wished the U.S. sergeant had picked someone else on whom to start the questioning. He wouldn’t have been so ashamed had he been the second or third man to open up rather than the first.

“Seventh Virginia Infantry,” he said rapidly. There. It was done.

Captain Wyatt turned to the rest of the Confederates. “How about you boys?” The other men fairly fell over themselves agreeing. Reggie wondered if Wyatt had called them
boys
to stress that they were as much his inferiors as Negroes were whites’ inferiors in the CSA. If so, the captain was one devious fellow. Bartlett covertly studied him. That seemed likely.

“Who’s your battalion commander?” Wyatt demanded.

“Major Colleton.” Jasper Jenkins got it out a split second ahead of Reggie. As if to make up for that, Reggie added, “I don’t think he was there when you all raided us—he was back at Division HQ.”

“Was he?” Wyatt said in an interested voice. “What was he doing there?”

“Don’t know, sir,” Bartlett answered truthfully. He didn’t like the expression on the Yankee captain’s face. It spoke of bodies forgotten in shell holes. He touched his sleeve and said, “I’m just a private, sir. The only time officers tell me anything is when they tell me what to do.” A chorus of agreement rose from his fellow prisoners.

“It could be.” Wyatt’s face went from grim to thoughtful. “It might even be true with us—and you Rebs, your officers are a pack of damned aristocrats, aren’t they?” Somehow, he contrived to look languid and effete for a moment before turning to Sergeant Martin. “Next time we hit them, we have to catch some bigger fish than privates. These boys don’t know anything.”

“Raids like this, sir, you take what you can grab,” Martin said, which matched Bartlett’s experience in the trenches.

“Maybe.” From the way Wyatt acted, that seemed to mean he was yielding the point. Sure enough, he jerked his head toward the opening to a communication trench. “All right, Sergeant, take ’em back. We’ll let the chaps from Intelligence see if they have any—intelligence, I mean.”

“Yes, sir,” Martin said. He picked out a couple of his own men with quick hand gestures. “Specs, Joe, come on along with me. These desperate characters’d probably knock me over the head and run off to assassinate TR in a red-hot minute if I was with ’em all by my lonesome.” His grin said he was not to be taken seriously.

Reggie Bartlett felt like a desperate character, but not in the way the Yankee sergeant meant. If you were a prisoner of war, you were supposed to try to escape. That much he knew. How you were supposed to try was another question. He didn’t have time to think about it. Martin gestured with his bayonet-tipped rifle. The Confederate prisoners got moving.

“Keep those hands high,” warned the damnyankee with the glasses—Specs. Guys with glasses were supposed to be mild-mannered. He wasn’t, not even close.

Confederate shells—a belated response to the gas barrage and trench raid—fell not far away as they went out of the front line. Reggie swore. He’d almost been killed a couple of times by short artillery rounds. What irony, though, to end his days on the receiving end of a perfectly aimed Confederate shell.

Martin and his comrades turned the Confederate prisoners over to other men farther back, then returned to their position. The grilling Reggie got from U.S. Intelligence seemed perfunctory—occupation before the war, name, rank, pay number, unit, a few questions about what they’d been doing and what they might do, and a few more questions, just as casual, about the state of morale of the Negro laborers attached to their units.

“Who pays attention to niggers?” Jasper Jenkins said. “You tell ’em what to do, they do it, and that’s that.” The man recording the answers, a wizened little fellow who looked like a born clerk, wrote down the words without comment.

When he was through with the interrogation, the wizened fellow said, “All right. You’re going back to a holding camp now. Don’t forget your pay number. We’ll keep track of you with it. I expect you’ll be bored. Can’t help that.” He nodded to a couple of guards in green-gray.

Almost, it was like going out of the line. Almost. The prisoners were marched back toward a railhead out of artillery range of Confederate guns. That felt familiar, even if nobody boasted about the havoc he aimed to wreak in saloons or brothels. Waiting for a train was familiar, too. Getting into a stinking boxcar that had once held horses was less so, although not unknown.

The train fought its way up over the Blue Ridge Mountains. That line hadn’t existed before the war started. The Yankees had built it to haul supplies to the Roanoke front. It was a two-track line; several eastbound trains growled past the one on which Bartlett unhappily rode. “Damnyankees do a lot of haulin’, don’t they?” Jasper Jenkins said, his voice mournful.

Somewhere on the downhill grade—or rather, one of the downhill grades—they passed out of Virginia and into its breakaway cousin, West Virginia. When the train hissed to a stop, armed guards threw open the doors and shouted, “Everybody out! Move, move, move, you damn Rebs!”

Again, Bartlett might almost have been back in a rest camp. He went through the same surely useless delousing process he had then. He also had his hair clipped down to his scalp. The uniform he drew on completion of all that, though, was not his own. The tunic was tight, the trousers and boots too large. He complained about it. The fellow handing out clothes looked at him as if he were insane. “Shut up,” he said flatly. Reggie shut up.