“Do we have any notion when we’re going after Chattanooga, sir?” Chester asked.
“I’m sure we do, if we counts the big brains back in Philly,” Rhodes answered. “If you mean, do I have any notion, well, no.”
“Can’t be too much longer…can it?” Martin said.
“I wouldn’t think so. Both sides are building up as fast as they can,” the company commander said. “As long as we keep building faster than the Confederates, everything’s fine. And I think we are. We’ve got air superiority here-we’ve got it just about everywhere except between Richmond and Philadelphia. We can smash them when they try to move men and supplies forward, and they can’t do that to us.”
“We’ve got more men to start with, too,” Chester said. “Their small arms make up for some of that, but not for all of it.”
“Now our barrels are better than theirs, too-till they run out their next model, anyway,” Rhodes said. “We can lick ’em, Sergeant. We can, and I think we will.”
“Sounds good to me, sir,” Chester said.
If the Confederates thought their U.S. opponents could beat them, they did a hell of a job of hiding it. Chester had seen that in the last war. You could beat the bastards in butternut, but most of them kept their peckers up right till the end. They kept fighting with everything they had.
Maybe they didn’t have as much as they would have if U.S. airplanes weren’t bombing the crap out of their supply lines. Chester didn’t know about that. They still seemed to have plenty of artillery ammunition. Their automatic rifles and submachine guns didn’t run short of cartridges, either. They had enough fuel to send barrels and armored cars forward when they counterattacked-and they counterattacked whenever they thought they saw a chance to take back some ground.
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?