"Don't shoot me! Sweet Jesus, buddy, I don't want to die!" an unshaven corporal called to Armstrong. Another Confederate soldier near him also held his hands high.
"Waddaya think?" Armstrong asked Squidface.
"We can take 'em down the road," Squidface answered.
"'Bout what I figured," Armstrong agreed. He raised his voice: "Herk! Take these guys down the road."
"You sure, Sarge?" Herk asked.
"Yeah-go on. Go deal with 'em," Armstrong said.
"Right." Herk gestured with his captured weapon. "Come on, you two." The Confederate soldiers eagerly went with him. After he led them around behind some trees, the submachine gun stuttered out two short bursts. He came back. "It's taken care of," he said.
"Attaboy. C'mon. Let's go," Armstrong told him. If you told one of your men to take somebody back, you really meant to make a prisoner of him. If you told your guy to take him down the road…Well, it was a hard old war. Sometimes you didn't have the manpower or the time to deal with POWs. And so-you didn't, that was all.
Somebody up in the middle of the fighting was on the horn to U.S. artillery. The USA didn't have screaming meemies, but battery after battery of 105s did a hell of a job. The barrage moved in front of the advancing soldiers, and fell with terrible power on the line from which the Confederates had jumped off. They couldn't hold that line, not with the men they had left after the counterattack failed. They would have done better not to try to hit back at the U.S. forces.
Sunset found Armstrong and his men several miles farther south than they had been at daybreak. He camped in an empty sharecropper village. He'd seen a lot of those here. This was supposed to be the Black Belt, the heart of Alabama Negro life. But the heart had been ripped out of the state.
Or so he thought, till a sentry said, "Sarge, we got niggers comin' in-maybe half a dozen."
"Fuck me," Armstrong said. That didn't happen every day. "Well, go on, Snake-bring 'em in. We can spare the rations for 'em."
"Right," Snake said-he had a rearing rattler tattooed on his left forearm. He came back a few minutes later with two skinny black men, an even skinnier woman, and three kids who were nothing but skin and bones…and, in the firelight, eyeballs and teeth.
The soldiers gave them food, which got their immediate undivided attention. After the Negroes had eaten enough to blunt the edge of their hunger, Armstrong asked, "How'd you people stay alive?"
"We hid. We stole," one of the men answered. His accent was so thick, Armstrong could hardly follow him.
"Now we is free again," the woman said. "Now we kin live again."
"Long as they's sojers here. Long as they's Yankees here," the second man said. "Reckon the white folks here'd get rid of us pretty damn quick if they seen a chance."
Armstrong reckoned the Negro was right. Not many white Confederates seemed unhappy about what had happened to the blacks who'd lived alongside them. The only thing the whites were unhappy about was losing the war.
"What is we gonna do?" the first man asked, as if a kid sergeant from Washington, D.C., had answers for him.
"Hang around with soldiers as much as you can. We won't screw you," Armstrong said, although he knew some of the guys in the platoon liked Negroes no better than most Confederates did. And some of the guys would want to screw the woman. Yeah, she was skinny as a strand of spaghetti. Yeah, she was homely. Yeah, she might have VD. If she stayed around very long, somebody would make a pass at her. And trouble would follow, sure as night followed day.
They can hang around with soldiers, Armstrong decided, but they won't hang around with my platoon. I'll send 'em to the rear, let somebody else worry about 'em. He nodded to himself. That definitely sounded like a plan.
And when he put it to the Negroes, they didn't squawk a bit. "Rear sounds mighty good," the first man said. "We done seen us enough fightin' to las' us fo' always." All the other blacks solemnly nodded.
Come to that, Armstrong had seen enough fighting to last him for always, too. Maybe, he thought hopefully, I won't have to see much more.
T here was a poem about the way the world ended. Jorge Rodriguez hadn't had as much schooling as his folks wished he would have. When you grew up on a farm in Sonora, you didn't get a whole lot of schooling. But he remembered that poem-something about not with a bang but a whimper.
He knew why it came to mind now, too. He was thinking that the fellow who'd written that poem didn't know what the hell he was talking about.
Buckingham, Virginia, wasn't a whole lot more than a wide spot in the road. It didn't even have a gas station, though it did boast a couple of hotels that dated back to before the War of Secession. It lay west and a little south of Richmond, and Jorge's outfit had orders to hold it in spite of everything the damnyankees could do.
The indomitable Hugo Blackledge had charge of the company-all the new officers were either casualties or missing in action. Jorge led one platoon, Gabe Medwick another. Blackledge looked around at Buckingham. "We'll dig in," he said. "We'll fight as long as we can, and then we'll pull back and fight somewhere else. This chickenshit hole in the ground ain't worth dyin' for, and that's the God's truth."
"That's not what the high command told us." Medwick sounded worried.
"They ain't gonna kill us for moving back after we fight," Jorge assured him. "They're too fucked up for that. But I think the sergeant, he's right. We make a big stand here, the damnyankees blow us up for sure." His wave encompassed the country town. "And for what, amigo? For what?"
Gabe had no answer for that. Nobody who'd done any fighting would have. Buckingham would have fallen a while ago if the main Yankee thrust from Richmond hadn't gone southeast, through Petersburg toward Hampton Roads. But the United States had enough men to push west, too…and the Confederacy, by all the signs, didn't have enough men to stop them.
Still, if you weren't going to surrender you had to try. Somebody's rear-guard action up ahead gave the company a couple of hours to entrench and to eat whatever rations and foraged food they happened to have on them. A command car towing an antiaircraft gun came through town. Sergeant Blackledge flagged it down. "Got any armor-piercing rounds?" he asked.
"A few," one of the gunners answered.
"Good," Blackledge said. "Stay here. You'll have a better chance to use 'em than you would have wherever the hell you were going." He didn't quite aim his automatic rifle at the command car, but he looked ready to. Jorge was one of the men who stood ready to back his play.
The gunner didn't need long to figure out what was what. "You talked us into it," he said after a barely perceptible pause. "Show us where to set up."
He and his crew had just positioned the gun when U.S. 105s started landing on Buckingham. The first few fell short, but the rest came down right in the middle of town. Huddling in a foxhole, Jorge knew what that meant: the Yankees had a forward artillery observer hidden in the trees somewhere, and he was wirelessing the fall of the shot back to the batteries that were firing. Killing him would have been nice, but who could guess where he lurked?
Fighter-bombers worked Buckingham over next. They dropped bombs. They fired rockets. And they dropped fish-shaped pods of jellied gasoline, as if the town were under attack by flamethrowers from the sky. Some burned men screamed. Some, Jorge feared, never got the chance. One of the fine hotels from before the days of the War of Secession went up in flames. It had lasted for a century, but no longer.
After the damnyankees softened up the town, infantry and armor came forward. Why do things the hard way when you could take it easy? That was what the U.S. officer in charge must have thought, anyhow.
But nothing turned out to be easy for the men in green-gray. That antiaircraft gun knocked out two barrels in quick succession. The others pulled back in a hurry. Machine-gun and automatic-weapons fire sent U.S. foot soldiers diving for cover. The Confederates in Buckingham raised a defiant cheer.