The Grapple

Cassius smiled as he trotted away. God hadn’t come down from the heavens to give the guerrillas a hand, but the next best thing had.

Jorge Rodriguez wondered how long he could go on. He wondered how long the Confederate States could go on, too. If the damnyankees kept pounding on them the way they had been, it wouldn’t be much longer. Autumn or no autumn, rain or no rain, the United States were driving on Atlanta, and Jorge didn’t see how the Confederacy could stop them.

He didn’t worry about it all that much, either. He worried about staying alive. With everything the damnyankees were throwing at his regiment, that was plenty all by itself.

Ke

Right this minute, there was a lull. He could get out of his hole, ease himself behind a tree, smoke a cigarette. He could, yes, as long as he stayed wary as a cat at a coon-hound convention. Things had a way of picking up with no warning. If you didn’t dive back into your hole in a hurry, you’d be a casualty.

“Stay alert, men!” Captain Malcolm Boyd called. “They’re liable to throw paratroops at us like they did in Te

If the United States tried an air drop here, they had to be crazy. It looked that way to Jorge, anyhow. Too many paratroops would get stuck in trees and die before they could start fighting.

“We’ve got to hang on to Marietta no matter what, too,” the company commander added. “We don’t hang on to Marietta, how the hell can we hold Atlanta?”

There he made more sense to Jorge. Marietta was the cork in the bottle-probably the last cork in the bottle in front of Atlanta. If it fell, Atlanta almost had to. And if Atlanta fell, the Confederate States were in a hell of a lot of trouble. So everybody said, anyhow. Jorge knew things everybody said weren’t always right, but this one felt too likely to laugh off.

He wished he wouldn’t have heard so many things like, We’ve got to hang on to Chattanooga no matter what. The Confederates couldn’t hang on to Chattanooga. Now they were paying for losing it.

An automatic rifle rattled up ahead. When Jorge first went into the Army, that would have meant the man with the rifle wore butternut. No more, not necessarily. The Yankees had captured a lot of C.S. automatic weapons on their long drive south. They’d captured the ammo the rifles used, too-or maybe they were making their own. Jorge didn’t know about that. He did know he had to wait and hear more before he could be sure who was out there.

Sure as hell, the bangs that followed came from U.S. Springfields. In the CSA, nobody but home guards and Mexican soldiers used bolt-action rifles these days. The damnyankees were still a long step behind when it came to small arms. Some Confederate soldiers wondered what the enemy was doing in Georgia if that was so.

To Jorge, the answer looked clear enough. Yes, Yankee soldiers carried Springfields. But whole great swarms of Yankee soldiers carried them. U.S. artillery matched anything the Confederacy turned out. So did U.S. airplanes, and the United States had more of them than the Confederate States did. As for barrels…Jorge didn’t want to think about barrels. The USA’s new monsters outclassed everything the CSA made.

He peered down the forward slope of Ke

The automatic rifle chattered again. Right about…there, Jorge judged. If the fellow who carried it kept coming forward, he’d probably show himself somewhere near those two pines.

And, a couple of minutes later, he did-not for very long, but long enough. Jorge fired a short burst from his own automatic rifle. The U.S. soldier threw up his hands and toppled. Jorge didn’t think he’d get up again. He looked around for a new target.

Easier to think of what he’d just done as hitting a target. If he thought of that figure in green-gray as a soldier, as a man, then he had to think about everything shooting his fellow soldier, his fellow man, might mean. But a target was only a target. You could shoot at a target for fun, if you felt like it.

Almost as much to the point, targets didn’t shoot back.

Jorge wondered if another U.S. soldier would try to retrieve the automatic rifle. If a man in green-gray did, it would be his last mistake. But the rifle lay where it fell. The damnyankees seemed confident they could drive the Confederates back and then retrieve it. Jorge had to hope they were wrong.

He waited for the next artillery barrage or armored assault or gas attack or air raid or whatever the enemy had in mind. Instead, a U.S. officer waved a white flag from behind a tree and shouted, “Can I come forward?”

Firing on both sides died away. Sergeant Blackledge shouted back: “Yeah, come ahead. What do you want?”

The Yankee emerged, still holding the flag of truce. As he approached the Confederate lines, he answered, “Want to try to talk you people into surrendering, that’s what. You keep fighting, we’ll squash you flat.”

“Yeah, now tell me another one,” Blackledge jeered. “You want to win one on the cheap, that’s all.”

“Not this time,” said the man in green-gray. “We’ll take some of your guys behind our lines, show you what we’ve got. I don’t believe you can stop us, or even slow us down very much.”

“You’ll do what?” The sergeant sounded as if he couldn’t believe his ears. Jorge didn’t blame him. The damnyankees had never said anything like that, not where he could hear it. He’d never heard of anything like it, either.

Calmly, the U.S. officer repeated himself. He went on, “Will you take me back? This is what they’d call a limited-time offer on the wireless. If you don’t take me up on it pretty damn quick, you’ll find out whether I’m lying or not. Oh, yeah-better believe you will.”

If he was acting, he could go out on the road. The confidence that filled his voice seemed frighteningly convincing. Maybe Sergeant Blackledge thought the same thing, because he said, “Come on up, damn you. I’m go

“Have it your way,” the Yankee said. “Like I told you, you can look at what we’ve got.” He walked forward. The sergeant put a rag over his eyes and led him back toward C.S. officers. Nobody on either side fired. A few U.S. soldiers came out and swapped rations for smokes and coffee. Jorge just sat tight and waited.

After about twenty minutes, the blindfolded U.S. officer returned, three worried-looking Confederates in his wake. He took off the rag and nodded to Sergeant Blackledge. “Cease-fire will last till these gentlemen come back,” he said. “After that, it’s up to them.”

“We won’t open up unless your guys do,” the noncom replied.

Away they went, the one man in green-gray and the three in butternut. Jorge was sure the Confederates would see only what their enemies wanted to show them. That was liable to be plenty. He waited. He smoked. He climbed out of his hole to take a leak. He didn’t want to be a POW; one of his brothers already languished in a camp. He didn’t want to get killed, either.

An hour and a half later, the C.S. officers returned. Their U.S. guide stopped between the lines. “You can still change your minds,” he said. “This is your last chance, but you can. You’ll spare your men a lot of grief.”