Breakthroughs (42 page)

“None of us’d be here if the bastards on the other side ran away quick,” Pete said. He grinned. “Well, Reggie would, I reckon, but he don’t count anyway.”

“You damnyankees don’t run, either, the way you did the last couple of times we fought you,” Bartlett said, returning verbal fire. “Wish to Jesus you did. I wouldn’t have these damn holes in me, and I’ll tell you, I liked life a lot better before I got ventilated.”

Out in the hallway, a faint squeak of wheels and rattle of crockery announced the coming of the lunch cart. As the wounded soldiers from both sides were united in their struggle against pain, so they were also united in their loathing of what the hospital fed them.

Reggie gagged down yet another meal of medium-boiled egg, beef broth, stewed prunes, and a pudding that tasted as if it were made from four parts library paste and one part sugar. When the nurse took away his dishes, she clicked her tongue between her teeth in reproof. “How do you expect to get better if you don’t eat more?”

“Ma’am, if you give me beefsteak, I will eat a slab the size of this mattress and ask you kindly for seconds. If you give me fried chicken, I will build you a new wing to this hospital from the bones. If you give me pork chops, I will gobble them down till I grow a little curly tail. But ma’am, if you feed me slops you wouldn’t give the pigs you got the pork chops from, I will waste away and perish.”

“That’s telling her, Reb!” one of the wounded U.S. soldiers said. Several others clapped their hands.

The nurse looked furious. “You are getting a nourishing meal suited to your digestion, and you ought to be grateful the United States are giving it to you instead of letting you starve the way you deserve.”

“We have Yankee prisoners, too, ma’am,” Bartlett said. “They get doctors. They get food, same as I do here. If they don’t get better food than I do here, why, I’m sorry for ’em, and that’s a fact.”

He hadn’t made a friend. The nurse set hands on hips. “You are getting exactly the same meal as wounded American soldiers,” she said coldly.

“I’m an American,” Bartlett said. “What do you think I am, a Chinaman?”

“A troublemaker,” the nurse answered. By her expression, that was worse than a Chinaman, and by a good distance, too. She rolled the cart away from Reggie’s bed. Her back still radiated outrage.

“Don’t nobody hook the Reb’s pudding tomorrow,” Pete said when she was gone, “not unless you want to eat the glass ground up in it, too.”

“Only thing ground-up glass would do for that pudding is make it better,” Reggie said, and nobody seemed inclined to tell him he was wrong.

The next morning, Bob got promoted to a different ward, one a step closer to eventual release. In his place, an attendant wheeled in another Confederate prisoner—a Negro with a bandaged stump where his left foot should have been. He grunted with pain as he got into Bob’s bed.

Nobody knew what to do or what to say. The wounded U.S. soldiers looked in Reggie Bartlett’s direction. The U.S. Army still did not allow Negroes to serve, though they’d been able to join the U.S. Navy for years. In the CSA, the very idea of black men in uniform remained strange, though the pressure of fighting a larger, more populous foe had forced it on the ruling whites.

Reggie found one question he could safely ask: “Where did you get hit?” He had trouble figuring out what sort of tone to use. A lifetime’s experience had taught him he was superior to any black man ever born. But this Negro was a fellow soldier, and they were both prisoners of the Yankees: hardly an exalted status.

“Outside o’ Jonesboro, Arkansas,” the newly arrived black answered. He also spoke cautiously. “How about you?”

“Over in Sequoyah, in the Red River bottomlands.” Bartlett hesitated, then gave his name and said, “Who’re you?”

“Rehoboam, my ma and pa called me, out o’the Good Book,” the Negro said. He was very, very black, with a low, flat nose and small ears. Before he was wounded, he’d probably been strong and muscular; now his skin sagged, as it did on men who’d lost a lot of flesh in a hurry. After another moment’s thought, he added, “Had me a stripe on my sleeve ’fore I got shot.”

He said it in a way that made Bartlett believe him. It also made Reggie smile. “Can’t pull rank on me, Rehoboam,” he said. “I had one, too.”

“We got the same rank now,” Rehoboam said. “We’s prisoners.”

“Yeah, I was thinking the same thing,” Reggie said, nodding. When he’d been in prison camp before, over in West Virginia, the Yankees had used captured Negro laborers to lord it over their white prisoners of war, and to spy on them, too. The blacks there had taken savage pleasure in doing just that, enjoying being on top instead of on the bottom.

Rehoboam didn’t seem inclined to act like that. But he didn’t act submissive, either, the way he surely would have back in the CSA. Bartlett didn’t know what to make of him. The idea of simple equality with a Negro had never crossed his mind.

“Outside of Jonesboro, eh?” Pete said. “Craighead Forest?”

“Sure as the devil,” Rehoboam answered. He looked over toward the U.S. soldier. “You?” After Pete nodded, the Negro went, “This great big old damnyankee officer was screamin’ about God and Jesus an’ I don’t know what all else, an’ he went an’ shot me. He was runnin’ way the hell out in front of his men—balls like an elephant, I reckon, but he was crazy, you ask me.”

“I even think I know about the guy you mean,” Pete said. “McSwenson, something like that. From what I’ve heard about him, you’re right—he’s nuts. Leastways you know who got you. That’s something. Me, shell went off and the next thing I knew I was shy a pin.” He patted his short stump.

One of the other wounded U.S. soldiers asked Rehoboam, “Were you a Red before you put on a Confederate uniform?”

“Maybe I was,” Rehoboam answered, “but maybe I wasn’t, too.” He gave Reggie a sidelong look. “Nobody asked me nothin’ about that when I went into the Army, so I don’t reckon I got to talk about it now.”

“Let’s say you were,” the Yank persisted. “How could you try and shoot the Rebs one day and then fight for ’em the next?”

“If I was—and I ain’t sayin’ I was, mind you—I would have been tryin’ to make the CSA a better place for me an’ black folks to live in either which way,” Rehoboam said. “Maybe that’s why nobody asked me nothin’ about none o’ that when I walked into the recruitin’ office.”

Pete turned to Bartlett. “How about it, Reggie? How do you like havin’ a smoke like Rehoboam fightin’ on your side once you Rebs ran out of white men you could throw at us?”

“Hey, I’ll tell you this much,” Reggie said. “I’d sure as hell sooner have him shooting at you damnyankees than at me.”

Now Rehoboam gave him a measuring stare. “That’s fair,” the Negro said. “I ain’t got no trouble with that.”

He spoke as if his opinion had as much weight as Reggie’s. In terms of law in the Confederate States, Reggie realized, Rehoboam’s opinion did have as much weight as his, or would. The black man would surely get an honorable discharge when repatriated, and that would make him a citizen of the CSA, not just a resident.

“How you feelin’?” Rehoboam asked Reggie.

“Leg’s getting better,” he answered. “They say the shoulder is, too, but damned if I can see it. How about you?”

“My damn toes itch,” Rehoboam said, pointing to where they would be if still attached to the rest of him. “They ain’t there, but they itch anyways.”

“Oh, Lord, I know what you mean,” Pete said. “I reach down to scratch sometimes, and I’m scratching air.”

As a Negro, Rehoboam might not have fit into the ward. As a wounded man, he fit fine. Reggie Bartlett pondered that. He had a lot of time in which to ponder it, too. He wasn’t going anywhere, certainly not very fast.

General Leonard Wood appeared before the House’s Transportation Committee to testify about the difficulties in civilian railroad transport caused by the enormous demands the Army was putting on the rail system of the United States. As the chief of the U.S. General Staff droned on about millions of man-miles traveled, Flora Hamburger jotted the occasional note. Wood was forceful and intelligent, but she found his subject matter distinctly uninspiring.

She wished the Speaker of the House had assigned her to some other committee, but, since she was a Socialist without seniority, nobody—least of all the Speaker—cared about what she wished. But Transportation wasn’t the worst committee, because so many types of legislation involved its subject in one way or another. She could have ended up on the Forestry Committee.
That
would have been a choice assignment for a representative from New York’s Lower East Side!

Being the most junior member of the committee, and of a minority party to boot, she had to wait a long time for her turn to question General Wood. When at last it came, her first question was different from those the chief of the General Staff had been getting from other congressmen: “Why are the U.S. forces in the East so slow to adopt the mass use of barrels that has proved so effective in Tennessee?”

The chairman rapped loudly for order. “That question is not germane at this time, Miss Hamburger,” he said. “It falls under the purview of the Military Affairs Committee, not our own.”

“Mr. Taft, the question may not be germane to you, but it is very important to me,” Flora answered. “My brother is a private, and he asked me in a letter to ask that question if I ever had that chance. I can introduce the letter into the record, if you like.”

William Howard Taft’s round, plump face—not at all suited to the upthrust Kaiser Bill mustache he wore—turned red. Flora hid a smile. If the chairman silenced her now, he would also be silencing a man in uniform, a man whom the Democrats’ policies had put into uniform. That would give the Socialists all sorts of lovely ammunition; Flora could already imagine speeches on how the Democrats, not content with starting the war, were now concealing mistakes in how it was being fought.

Taft had been in Congress almost as long as Flora had been alive; he could figure out the angles, too. He turned to Wood. “If the general pleases, he may answer the question,” he said unhappily.

“I will answer,” Wood said, scratching at his gray mustache. “They have pioneered a new way of using barrels out in Tennessee. We had formerly employed a different doctrine throughout the Army. Now that the western way has shown itself to give better results, we are extending its use to other fronts. These things do take a certain amount of time, though, ma’am.”

“So it would seem,” Flora said. “Otherwise, you wouldn’t have kept the—is
mistaken
too strong a word?—doctrine for the past year. Can you estimate how many men have died because of it?”

Congressman Taft looked unhappier still that he’d allowed the first question. Having allowed it, though, he could hardly shield Wood from the question. Jowls quivering, he nodded to the chief of the General Staff. “No, I cannot give any firm answer to that, ma’am,” Wood said. “I can only tell you that we have, from the beginning, prosecuted this war to the best of our ability. We are but men. We have made mistakes. When we discover a better way of using any equipment, we take advantage of it. I regret the extra casualties we surely suffered because we did not know so much then as we do now. My training was as a physician. I regret any and all human suffering, believe me.”

To her surprise, Flora did believe him. His long, mournful face and slow, deep voice made her have a hard time picturing him as a liar. Still, she persisted in her own line of questioning: “How did they happen to be right in Tennessee when all the best thinkers in the War Department were gathered together here in Philadelphia to come up with…the wrong answer?”

“Let me give you a comparison I think you’ll understand, ma’am,” General Wood said. “Suppose you’re in a kitchen, and—”

Patronizing Flora Hamburger was not a good idea. “I’ve spent most of my time in factories and offices,” she snapped. “I fear I don’t know so much about kitchens.” That was stretching a point; she’d helped her mother every day after getting home from work. But she was not about to let him treat her like a housewife instead of a U.S. Representative. “Please answer the question without kitchen comparisons.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Wood said crisply. If her pinning his ears back angered him, he didn’t show it. “We designed the doctrine at the same time as we were designing the machines themselves. Any time you do something like that, you take the chance of not getting everything perfectly right. General Custer tried something different, it proved to work better than anything we’d done with the doctrine we had before, and we will take advantage of that from now on.”

Flora nodded reluctantly. It was a good answer. Wood had spent a lot of time testifying before Congress. Representative Taft beamed with relief. “If the distinguished lady from New York has no further questions, we can—”

“I do have one more,” Flora said. Taft sighed. Since members of his own party had droned on and on over matters less consequential than those concerning barrels, he could hardly shut her off without raising howls from the Socialists. He held out his hand to her, palm up, fingers spread, to show she could go on. “Thank you, Mr. Chairman,” she told him. “General Wood, if all that you say is so, why did General Custer have to violate War Department orders against using barrels in any way except that prescribed by Philadelphia in order to prove that his ideas were better than yours?”

She hoped he would deny any such orders existed. She knew they did. Not many Socialists worked in the War Department, but the ones who did had a way of keeping their Congressional delegation well informed about the department’s inner workings—and its dirty laundry.

But Leonard Wood was too canny to let himself be caught in a lie. He said, “Ma’am, we had done the best we could in Philadelphia. Do please recall, we did win victories with barrels used as we suggested. Maybe we would have done better using them from the start as General Custer did, but there are many other possible ways to use them, too, most of which are likely to have done worse than ours. The main reason we tried to forbid all experimentation with barrels is that, by the very nature of things, most experiments fail. General Custer’s happened to succeed, and he deserves the credit for it, as he would deserve the blame had it gone wrong.”