He sent men forward to keep the enemy from bringing barrels into that spot again. He was only half surprised when the machine gun in the ruined store opened up again. His men were quick to take cover, too. He didn’t think the machine gun got any of them. He hoped not, anyway.
The Confederate barrel sent several more rounds into the haberdashery. The machine gun stayed quiet. Ever so cautious, soldiers in butternut inched closer. One of them tossed in a grenade and went in after it. Tom wished he had a man with a flamethrower handy. The last fellow who’d carried one had got incinerated along with his rig a few days earlier, though. No replacement for him had come forward yet.
Not enough replacements of any kind were coming forward. Little by little, the regiment was melting away. Tom didn’t know what to do about that, except hope it got pulled out of the line for rest and refit before too long. However much he hoped, he didn’t expect that would happen soon. The Confederates needed Pittsburgh. They’d already put just about everybody available up at the front.
After a minute or so, the soldier came out of the wreckage with his thumb up. There was one damnyankee machine gun that wouldn’t murder anybody else. Now-how many hundreds, how many thousands, more waited in Pittsburgh? The answer was too depressing to think about, so Tom didn’t.
One thing he hadn’t seen in Pittsburgh: yellowish khaki Mexican uniforms. The Mexicans hadn’t done badly in Ohio and Pennsylvania, but they weren’t the first team, and everybody knew it. They held the flanks once the Confederates went through and cleared out the Yankees. They were plenty good enough for that, and it let the Confederates pile more of their own troops into the big fight.
A rifle shot rang out. A bullet struck sparks from the bricks just behind the head of the soldier who’d thrown the grenade. He hit the dirt. Three other Confederates pointed in three different directions, which meant nobody’d seen where the shot came from. The machine gun might be gone, but the Yankees hadn’t given up the fight for this block. It didn’t seem as if they would till they were all dead.
Down in the CSA, some people-mostly those who hadn’t been through the Great War-still believed U.S. soldiers were nothing but a pack of cowards. Tom laughed as he ducked down into a shell hole to shed his mask and smoke a cigarette-he didn’t turn blue and keel over, so it was safe enough. And much better not to let the match or the coal give the damnyankee sniper a target. He just wished Confederate propaganda were true. Pittsburgh would have fallen long since.
A runner came skittering back to him, calling his name. “Here I am!” he shouted, not raising his head. “What’s up?”
“Sir, there’s a Yankee with a flag of truce right up at the front,” the runner replied. “Wants to know if he can come back and dicker a truce for the wounded.”
The last time a U.S. officer proposed something like that, he’d scouted out the C.S. positions as he moved with his white flag. The damnyankees kept the truce, but they knew just where to strike after it ended. Tom threw down the half-finished smoke. “I’ll meet the son of a bitch at the line,” he growled.
He made his own flag of truce from a stick and a pillowcase, then went up with the runner. The truce already seemed to be informally under way. Firing had stopped. Confederates were swapping packs of cigarettes for U.S. ration cans. Both sides deplored that. Neither could do anything about it. Commerce trumped orders. The Yankees had better canned goods and worse tobacco, the Confederates the opposite.
A U.S. captain in a dirty uniform waited for Tom. “I could have come to you,” the man remarked.
Colleton smiled a crooked smile. “I bet you could,” he said, and explained why he didn’t want the Yankee back of his lines.
“I wouldn’t do a thing like that,” the U.S. officer said, much too innocently. “And I’m sure you wouldn’t, either.”
“Who, me?” Tom said with another smile like the first. The U.S. captain matched it. They’d been through the mill, all right. Tom got down to business: “Is an hour long enough, or do you want two?”
“Split the difference?” the damnyankee suggested, and Tom nodded. The captain looked at his watch. “All right, Lieutenant-Colonel. Truce till 1315, then?”
“Agreed.” Tom stuck out his hand. The U.S. captain shook it. They both turned back to their own men and shouted out the news. Corpsmen from both sides came forward. Ordinary soldiers did some more trading. Somebody had a football. C.S. and U.S. soldiers tossed it back and forth. Tom remembered the 1914 Christmas truce, when the Great War almost unraveled. He knew that wouldn’t happen here. Both sides meant it now.
Corpsmen poked around through rubble. They called outside of smashed houses. Sometimes they got answers from smashed people trapped inside. Soldiers helped move wreckage so the medics could do their job. When U.S. corpsmen found wounded C.S. soldiers, they gave them back to the Confederates. Corpsmen in butternut returned the favor for the Yankees.
Tom and the officer in green-gray-his name was Julian Nesmith-hadn’t agreed to that, but neither of them tried to stop it. “Won’t change how things end up one way or the other,” Nesmith remarked.
“I was thinking the same thing about smokes and grub a little while ago,” Tom agreed. He’d handed Captain Nesmith a couple of packs of Raleighs, and was now the proud possessor of two cans of deviled ham, a delicacy esteemed on both sides of the front. His mouth watered. If he could scrounge up some eggs… Even if he couldn’t, the ham would be a treat.
“We might as well be comfortable as we can while we slaughter each other,” Nesmith said.
“We’re enemies,” Tom said simply. “You won’t make me believe the United States wants to do anything but to squash my country, and I don’t expect I can persuade you the Confederate States aren’t full of villains.”
“It wouldn’t matter if you did,” Nesmith answered. “As long as you’ve got villains at the top, all they have to do is shout loud enough to make everybody else go along.”
That came close to hitting below the belt. Tom hadn’t much cared to listen to Jake Featherston on the wireless at all hours of the day and night. But Jake Featherston had got Kentucky and Houston back into the CSA after the damnyankees stole them at gunpoint in 1917. The Whigs hadn’t come close to managing that. Featherston was doing something about the Negroes in the Confederate States, too. The Whigs hadn’t known what to do. And so…
“Who’s a villain and who isn’t depends on how you look at things,” Tom said.
“Sometimes,” Julian Nesmith replied.
They shook hands again when the truce ended. Corpsmen disappeared. Men got back under cover. Almost ceremoniously, a U.S. soldier fired a Springfield to warn anybody who hadn’t got the word. In that same spirit, a Confederate soldier answered with one round from a Tredegar.
Then another Confederate squeezed off a burst from his automatic rifle. A U.S. machine gun opened up. Tom sighed. The little peace had been nice while it lasted.
Salt Lake City wasn’t hell, but you could see it from there. Armstrong Grimes peered toward the rubble of the Mormon Temple-twice built and now twice destroyed. He peered very cautiously. All the Mormons still fighting were veterans. Some of them were veterans of two uprisings. Show any body part, and they’d put a bullet through it faster than you could say Jack Robinson.