The terrain south of Delphi didn’t need long to turn into the sort of lunar landscape Chester had known and loathed during the Great War. The stench of death hung over it: something even uglier than the view, which wasn’t easy. Soldiers sheltered in craters and foxholes. Trench lines and barbed wire were thinner on the ground than they had been a generation earlier, mostly because barrels could breach them.
Nobody liked this kind of fighting, going back and forth over the same few miles of ground. “When do we break out, Sarge?” Frankie asked one day. He was scooping up pork and beans from a can. “We go somewhere new, maybe it won’t smell so bad.”
“Maybe.” Chester’s ration can was full of what was alleged to be beef stew. The grayish meat inside might have been boiled tire tread. Chester had never found a piece with GOODYEAR stamped on it, but that didn’t mean he wouldn’t. And the Confederates thought Yankee chow was better than what their own quartermasters dished out! That was a scary thought. He went on, “I asked Captain Rhodes the other day. He didn’t know, either.”
“Well, if he don’t, chances are nobody does. He’s a hell of a smart man, the captain is,” Frankie said.
“That’s a fact,” Chester said.
They were still eating when a Confederate junior officer came forward with a white flag. He asked for a two-hour truce for both sides to pick up their wounded. Martin greeted him with a glare. “Yeah? Suppose you get some of our guys? You gonna shoot ’em once you take ’em back behind the lines?”
“Good God, no!” the C.S. lieutenant said. “We don’t do things like that!”
“Except maybe to niggers,” Chester said.
He watched the enemy soldier turn red. But the man didn’t even waste his breath denying it. “We don’t do that to soldiers in a declared war,” was all he said.
“Sounds like bullshit to me, buddy,” Chester said. “What about that goddamn leaflet you’ve been spreading all over creation?”
The C.S. lieutenant blushed again. “That wasn’t soldiers who did that. It was Freedom Party guys from the Director of Communications’ office.”
“How the hell are we supposed to tell the difference? You’ve even got Freedom Party Guards coming into the line along with regular soldiers. What are we supposed to do? Kill all of you bastards and let God worry about it afterwards?”
“I don’t have anything to do with ordering that stuff,” the Confederate said. “If they come up here, they’re soldiers. They perform like soldiers, don’t they?” He waited. Martin couldn’t very well deny that. Seeing that he couldn’t, the officer went on, “Honest to God, Sergeant, if we find your people, we’ll take ’em prisoner. If we start doing things to ’em and you people find out, you’ve got our POWs to get even with.”
That made a certain brutal sense to Chester. He nodded. “All right, Lieutenant. Two hours. Your medics and ours-and probably a little bit of trading back and forth. Got any coffee?” Not much came up into the USA. The Army got most of what there was and stretched it as far as it would go, which made it pretty awful.
“Swap you some for a couple cans of deviled ham. That’s the best damn ration around,” the lieutenant said.
Before talking to him, Chester had made sure he had some. He would have bet the Confederate wanted it. The lieutenant gave him a cloth sack full of whole roasted beans. Just the smell, the wonderful smell, was enough to pry his eyelids farther apart. “Yeah, that’s the straight goods, sure as hell,” Chester said reverently.
“I got me some eggs,” the lieutenant said. “Got me some butter, too. Gonna scramble ’em up with this ham…” For a moment, they both forgot about the war.
Then the Confederate officer turned and waved to his men. Chester also turned. “Cease-fire!” he yelled. “Two hours! Medics, forward!” He nodded to the lieutenant. “You can head on back now.”
“Thanks.” The officer raised his hand in what wasn’t quite a wave and wasn’t quite a salute. Away he went.
From both sides of the line, men with Red Cross smocks and with the Red Cross painted on their helmets moved up to gather casualties-and to share cigarettes and food and coffee and maybe an unofficial nip or two from a canteen. Men on both sides stood up and stretched and walked around without fear of getting shot. If they were smart, they tried not to show exactly where their hiding places were. Snipers had a nasty habit of remembering stuff like that.
Corpsmen brought back a soldier with a wound dressing on his leg. “How you doing, Miller?” Chester asked.
“I’m out of the fucking war for a while, anyway.” Miller didn’t sound sorry he’d got hit. A lot of people who caught hometowners felt the same way.
Chester kept smelling that wonderful coffee. He wanted to smash up the beans with the hilt of his belt knife or find a hammer to do it and to make himself three or four cups’ worth of joe right then. The enemy lieutenant had probably brought it forward the same way he’d carried the cans of deviled ham. The fellow had to know what a damnyankee would want.
Another wounded man came in, this one with a blood-soaked bandage on his head. The medics looked grim. “Bad?” Chester said.
“About as bad as it gets,” one of the medics answered. “Head wound, in one side and out the other. God knows how he’s still breathing, with half his brains blown out. Take a miracle for him to get better.”
“Take a miracle for him to still be breathing this time tomorrow,” another medic said. The man who’d spoken first didn’t tell him he was wrong. Shaking their heads, the stretcher team carried the wounded soldier back towards an aid station.
“Fuck,” Chester Martin said softly. Krikor Hartunian-hell of a name-didn’t belong to his platoon. But he came from Captain Rhodes’ company. He was a baby when his folks were lucky enough to escape from the Ottoman Empire. An awful lot of Armenians hadn’t been so lucky. Some people said the massacres the Turks pulled off helped give Jake Featherston the idea for getting rid of the CSA’s Negroes.
Chester had no idea if that was true. All he knew was that a Confederate bullet had slaughtered Krikor-usually called Greg. The kid’s folks had a farm somewhere in central California nowadays. Pretty soon, a Western Union messenger would deliver a Deeply Regrets telegram from the War Department. People didn’t want to see Western Union messengers these days. Chester remembered his folks talking about that during the last war. These days, they called the poor kids-who were only doing their job-angels of death. Wasn’t that a hell of a thing?
Here in southern Tennessee, death came without angels. When the truce ran out, both sides fired a few warning shots. Anybody still up and around and out in the open ran for cover. Then they got back to the business of murder.
XIV
Gracchus’ band of black guerrillas kept growing. At first, Cassius thought that was wonderful. Then he noticed how worried the rebel leader looked. “What’s the matter?” he asked.
Gracchus eyed him with something less than joy. “How’m I gonna keep all you sons of bitches fed?” he burst out.
“Oh.” Cassius had no answer for that. He’d eaten well his whole life in Augusta. He’d gone on eating well, or as well as any Negro could, after the Freedom Party enclosed the Terry in barbed wire. Only after he escaped did he discover what living with his belly bumping his backbone was like. A full stomach was better. How his father, his old, fussy, precise father, would have laughed at him for that brilliant discovery! He hoped Scipio, wherever he was, still could laugh. What he hoped and what he feared were very different things.
“Oh,” Gracchus echoed sardonically. “Yeah. You kin say, ‘Oh.’ But you only gots to say it. I gots to do somethin’ about it.”