He went back to his bunk. Lying down seemed a luxury after his time on the train. He fell asleep, or passed out-which hardly mattered. He would have slept through supper-he would have slept the clock around-if somebody didn’t shake him back to consciousness. He wasn’t sure the man did him a kindness. He was almost as weary as he was hungry.
Standing in line in someone else’s clothes, in shoes that didn’t quite fit, was a displeasure all its own. What he got when they fed him was another displeasure: grits and beans and greens. All in all, it wasn’t enough to keep a four-year-old alive. His pants felt a little tight. He didn’t think he’d need to worry about that for long.
After supper came the evening roll call. “Line up in rows of ten!” a guard yelled. Scipio wondered how often he would hear that command in the days to come. More often than he wanted to; he was sure of that.
The count went wrong. For one thing, there’d been the influx of new prisoners. For another…The scrawny Negro standing next to Scipio muttered, “These ofays so fuckin’ dumb, they can’t count to twenty-one without playin’ with themselves.”
In spite of everything, Scipio snorted. “Thank you,” he whispered-he’d already seen making noise during roll call could win you a beating.
“Fo’ what?” the other black man said. “Ain’t nothin’ to thank nobody for, not here. I’s Vitellius. Who you be?”
The real Vitellius, if Scipio remembered straight, had been a fat man. This fellow didn’t live up to the name. “I’s Xerxes,” Scipio replied. That was funny, too, in the wrong kind of way. He’d used Xerxes for years, fearing his own handle might get him sent to a camp. Well, here he was. What more could they do to him? One way or another, he’d find out.
Major General Abner Dowling’s guns pounded Lubbock, Texas. Confederate artillery in and behind the city sent high-explosive death northwest toward Dowling’s Eleventh Army. Back East, the Eleventh Army wouldn’t even have made a decent corps; it had about a division and a half’s worth of men. But the war out here in the wide open spaces ran on a shoestring, as the last one had. Dowling’s men outnumbered the Confederates defending Lubbock.
Jake Featherston’s soldiers were fighting with everything they had, though. He couldn’t push them out of Lubbock, and he couldn’t flank them out, either. Up till recently, it hadn’t mattered. As long as he kept them too busy to send reinforcements east to help rescue their army in Pittsburgh, he was doing his job.
But now Pittsburgh wouldn’t fall to the CSA. Now Lubbock became valuable for its own sake, or as valuable as a city of 20,000 in the middle of nowhere could be. Dowling’s headquarters lay in Littlefield, the last town northwest of Lubbock. He studied the map. He’d tried outflanking the Confederates to the south. Maybe if he swung around to the north this time…
His adjutant stuck his head into the map room. “I’ve got some new aerial recon photos, sir,” Major Angelo Toricelli said. Toricelli was young and handsome and spry. Dowling was in his sixties, built like a breakfront, and wore a large, unstylish gray mustache. Even when he was young, he hadn’t been spry. He’d played in the line at West Point just before the turn of the century. No, he hadn’t been spry, but he’d been tough.
Several chins wobbled as he nodded to Toricelli. “Let’s see ’em,” he said. Both sides here were short on airplanes, too. Both sides here were short on everything under the sun, as a matter of fact.
“These are the deep-penetration photos, sir,” Toricelli said as he spread out the prints on top of the map. “They go all the way down to Snyder, and to that…thing outside it.”
Snyder lay southeast of Lubbock. It was a bigger town than Littlefield, but not a whole lot bigger. Normally, Dowling wouldn’t have worried about it, not where he was now. It was too small, and too far away.
Snyder was too small, yes. The…thing was another story altogether. It was called Camp Determination-so Intelligence said, anyhow. And it was not small at all. “How many niggers have they got crammed in there?” Dowling asked.
“Many, many thousands. That’s the best Intelligence is willing to do, sir,” Toricelli said. Dowling thought he put it an interesting way, but didn’t push him. The younger officer went on, “There’s a lot of incoming train traffic, too.”
“If there is, then this place must get fuller all the time, right?” Dowling said. Toricelli shook his head. Dowling raised an eyebrow. “Not right?”
“No, sir.” His adjutant pointed to another photo. “Looks like the overflow goes here.”
Dowling studied the picture. Trucks-they looked like ordinary C.S. Army trucks-stood next to a long, wide trench. The scale they provided gave him some notion of just how long and wide the trench was. It seemed to be full of bodies. Dowling couldn’t gauge its depth, but would have bet it wasn’t shallow.
The photo also showed several similar trenches covered over with dirt. The trenches went out of the picture on either side. Dowling couldn’t tell how many filled-in trenches it wasn’t showing, either.
“They go there, huh?” His stomach did a slow lurch. How many corpses lay in those trenches? How many more went into them every day? “Any idea how they get from the camp to the graveyard?”
“How they get killed, you mean?” Toricelli asked.
“Yes, dammit.” Dowling usually despised the language of euphemism that filled military and bureaucratic life. Here, though, the enormity of what he saw made him unwilling to come out and say what he meant.
“Intelligence isn’t quite sure of that,” his adjutant said. “It doesn’t really matter, does it?”
“It does to them.” Dowling jerked a thumb at that photo with the trenches. “Lord knows I’m no nigger-lover, Major. But there’s a difference between not loving somebody and setting up a factory to turn out deaths like shells for a 105.”
“Well, yes, sir,” Major Toricelli said. “What can we do about it, though? We aren’t even in Lubbock, and this Snyder place is another eighty miles. Even if Lubbock falls, we’ll be a long time getting there. Same with our artillery. And what good would bombers do? We’ll just be killing spooks ourselves if we use ’em.”
“I know what I’m going to do,” Dowling said. “I’m going to send these photos back to Philadelphia, and I’m going to ask for reinforcements. Now that Pittsburgh’s ours again, we ought to have some men to spare. We need to advance on this front, Major. We need it a lot more than we do some other places.”
“Yes, sir. I think you’re right,” Toricelli said. “But will they listen to you back East? They see things funny on the other side of the Mississippi. We found out about that when we were trying to hold the lid down on the Mormons.”
“Didn’t we just?” Dowling said. “Tell you what-let’s light a fire under the War Department’s tail. Can you get another set of those prints made?”
“I’m sure I can, sir.”
“Bully!” Every once in a while, Dowling still came out with slang whose best days lay back before the Great War. Toricelli loyally pretended not to notice. Dowling went on, “Send the second set of prints to Congresswoman Blackford. She’s been up in arms about how the Confederates are treating their niggers ever since Jake Featherston took over. If she starts squawking, we’re likelier to get those troops.”
“That’s…downright byzantine, sir.” Major Toricelli’s voice held nothing but admiration.
Dowling resolved to look up the word to see whether it carried praise or blame. He nodded to his adjutant. “Get me those extra prints. I’ll draft the letter to the General Staff. We’ll want to encrypt that before we send it.”
“Oh, yes,” Toricelli said. When you were fighting a war with somebody who spoke the same language you did, you had to be extra careful about what you said openly. The only good news there was that the enemy had to be as careful as you were. Sometimes he slipped, and you could make him pay. Sometimes he pretended to slip, and you could outsmart yourself in a hurry if you weren’t careful.