“What a shitty excuse for a human being,” Toricelli said.
Gwynn puked again. He didn’t try denying things any more, though. Maybe that was progress.
“And do you know what the best part is?” Major Toricelli said. “Once your smokes here were dead, the guards had people who went into their mouths with pliers or whatever the hell and yanked out all their gold fillings. Waste not, want not, I guess.”
Gwynn looked revolted in a new and different way. “You’re making that up. Nobody would do such a thing.”
“It’s the God’s truth, Mr. Gwynn.” Abner Dowling held up his right hand as if taking an oath. “So help me. We had Graves Registration people put on gas masks and look at the bodies up close. They didn’t find any dental gold. None-not a crown, not a filling, not a bridge. Nothing. What they did find was lots of dead colored people with teeth yanked out or teeth broken to get the gold from them. And how do you like that?”
Had Gwynn looked any greener, Dowling would have been tempted to mow him. The mayor of Snyder said, “I swear on my mother’s name, General, and by our Lord Jesus Christ, I never knew nothin’ about that. Nothin’. Pulling teeth? That’s…just sick.” He bent over and retched some more. This time, he had nothing in his stomach to bring up.
The dry heaves were nasty. Dowling watched without sympathy till Gwynn’s spasm finally ended. “So you really did know they were killing off Negroes at the camp, then?” he said.
“Well, I had a pretty good notion they were,” Jethro Gwynn admitted in a ragged whisper. “I didn’t ask any questions, though. None of my business, I reckoned.”
“You passed by on the other side of the road, like the priest in the Good Book,” Dowling said in a voice like iron.
By then, Gwynn was in no shape to quarrel. “I guess maybe I did.”
“I’ve got one more question for you. Then I’ll take you back to town,” Dowling said. “Why don’t you like grubbing gold out of Negroes’ mouths once they’re dead? They don’t need it any more then. Isn’t killing ’em what’s really wrong?”
“You know, I never looked at it that way,” the mayor of Snyder said seriously. “I mean, they’re just a pack of rebels and troublemakers. But this…” He gulped. “It’s different when you see it with your own eyes.”
“You liked the idea. You didn’t want to know what it meant, that’s all. Or have you got the nerve to tell me I’m wrong?” Dowling asked.
“No, that’s a fact, a true fact,” Gwynn said. “You think about gettin’ rid of niggers and you think, Hell, country’d be better off without ’em. You don’t reckon they’re-people, or anything.”
“Well, what the hell are they, then?” Dowling demanded. When Jethro Gwynn didn’t answer the question, he did it himself: “They’re dead, that’s what. And I bet the worst of ’em has a better hope of heaven than you do, Mr. Gwynn. Come on, damn you.” He shoved the mayor of Snyder toward the command car.
Gwynn didn’t say anything as Clancy drove him back to town. The U.S. soldier let him off in front of his real-estate agency. The mayor fled inside and slammed the door behind him, as if that would keep Dowling and his men from coming back.
Having shown Jethro Gwynn what Camp Determination was all about, Dowling grabbed Snyder’s leading (and only) banker, two attorneys, an accountant, and a doctor. With a happy-for him, anyhow-afterthought, he also grabbed their wives. He took them out to the camp together in a deuce-and-a-half. They all denied they’d had any idea what it was doing.
“I thought you might say that,” he told them.
The truck driver drove them to the mass graves. They turned pale even before the stink started filling the back of the truck. All but one of them vomited at the first trench. Two women fainted. So did one of the lawyers. The doctor passed out when he heard about taking dental gold from the corpses.
“We ought to bring the whole town through here, sir,” Major Toricelli said on the way back to Snyder.
“By God, I’m tempted,” Dowling said. “Maybe I will.”
His own headquarters were well upwind from the mass grave. He bathed and bathed that night, and still smelled, or thought he smelled, the stench of death clinging to him.
His telephone rang early the next morning. The accountant in Snyder had shot his wife and three children, then turned the pistol on himself. Another call came in a few minutes later: the banker’s wife had swallowed rat poison. Then the telephone rang again: Mayor Gwynn had hanged himself from the chandelier in his real-estate office.
“Maybe they’ve got consciences after all, if you kick ’em hard enough,” Dowling said, not altogether without satisfaction. “Who would have imagined that?”
Sergeant Armstrong Grimes hadn’t been in the big fight since the Confederates came north into Ohio. He liked fighting on enemy turf much better. He liked facing the real enemy much better, too. Utah, Canada…It wasn’t that they weren’t dangerous places. His leg still pained him in wet weather like they were having now. No, the point was that he’d got shot in a fight that didn’t matter, a fight that said nothing about who would win the war.
Lieutenant Bassler pointed to a wooded hill in front of Hollysprings, Georgia: a nowhere town that never would have mattered to anyone more than five miles away if it didn’t lie on a road leading south toward Atlanta. “The Confederates are dug in there,” he said. “We’re going to be part of the force that takes the high ground away from them.”
“Yes, sir,” Armstrong said. Cautiously-Confederate snipers were loose in front of the hill-he peered forward. After ducking down again, he added, “Don’t hardly see ’em. They’re probably just waiting for us there under the trees.”
“Afraid you’re right,” the company commander said. “Nothing we can do about it, though.”
“I hope they pound the crap out of the place before they send us in,” Armstrong said. “Will we have a lot of armor support?” He assumed they’d have some, which wouldn’t have been a sure bet in the sideshows where he’d fought before.
“They say we will,” Bassler told him. “Maybe they’re blowing smoke up my ass, but I don’t think so. Softening-up is supposed to start tomorrow at 0500. We go in two hours later.”
“Yes, sir,” Armstrong repeated. He probably wouldn’t have slept late tomorrow anyhow, but now he knew damn well he wouldn’t.
He took the news back to his squad. The men greeted it with the enthusiasm he’d expected. “Hot shit,” Squidface said. “Featherston’s fuckers get another chance to blow my dick off. Just what I’ve been waiting for-yeah, you bet.”
“I wish one of these Confederate broads would blow my dick off,” Woody said. The other soldiers laughed. Then they went back to studying the hill. They might not be strategists, but they’d learned tactics the hard way.
Cal Henderson summed it up: “Taking that place out is liable to be expensive as shit if they’re laying for us under those pines.”
“Air bursts. Lots of air bursts,” Squidface said. Armstrong found himself nodding. You could fuse a shell so it went off as soon as it touched anything at all-a branch, for instance. Air bursts like that slashed the ground below with fragments. Unless you were in a bunker dug into a trench wall, you’d catch hell.
“Grab as many Z’s as you can now,” Armstrong said. “Artillery opens the show at five tomorrow morning. We go in a couple of hours later.”
No, he didn’t get much sleep himself. Having nerves was silly-he couldn’t do anything about whatever would happen soon-but he did all the same. Because he was awake at least as much as he was asleep through the night, he heard barrels rattling up to the start line under cover of darkness. Lieutenant Bassler had got that right, anyhow.
The bombardment started at five on the dot. Star shells lit up the hill bright as day. High-altitude bombers droned overhead, dropped loads of death, and kept on going. They’d blast Atlanta or some other C.S. town, then fly north and land, after dawn let them see what they were doing.