Walk in Hell

"All right, boys," he called to the gun crews. "Let's show the people why they brought us to the dance."

The machine gun on top of the co

He got the response for which he'd been hoping: the Negroes turned a machine gun of their own, either captured from Confederate forces or donated by the damnyankees, on the Bonefish. As soon as it started firing, he and Brearley ducked down the hatch into the co

But, in firing, the Negroes' machine gun revealed its position. The Bonefish's machine guns were not the only weapons that opened up on it: so did the deck gun, at what was point-blank range for a ca

Kimball, who was closer to the top than Brearley, gri

"Yes, sir," Brearley said. "The Negroes can't have a whole lot of trained fighting men. The more of those we eliminate, the faster the rebellion as a whole will fall apart."

"That's right," Kimball said. "Hell, these niggers haven't been through conscription. Where are they going to come by the discipline they need to stand up against some of the best fighting men in the Confederate States?"

"Don't know, sir," Brearley answered. Then he went on, perhaps unwisely, "I never thought they had the discipline to stand up against whites any kind of way. If I'd known they could fight the way they've already shown, I'd have been for conscripting them along with us and letting 'em kill some Yankees."

Kimball shook his head, so sharply that he almost smacked it against the inside of the co

"Yes, sir," Brearley answered. He sounded like a puppy that doesn't understand why it's just been paddled.

Normally, Roger Kimball would have felt some sympathy for him. Not now. He continued, "All right, the war is over, we whipped the Yankees, and we got, say, five divisions of nigger soldiers coming on home. What the hell do we do with 'em, Mr. Brearley? They've been up at the front. They've been killing white men. Hell, we've been payin' 'em to kill white men. What are they go

The junior lieutenant didn't answer right away. When at last he did, he said, "Seems to me, sir, if they fight for us, it'd be mighty hard to make 'em go back to being what they were before the war started. Thing of it is, though, it's already gotten to be hard to put 'em back where they were. So many of 'em have gone to factories and such, making 'em into field hands again is going to be like putting Humpty-Dumpty back together again."

"Yeah, well, it'd be a lot worse if they were toting guns," Kim-ball insisted. The executive officer's response hadn't been what he'd expected or what he'd wanted. "Hell, one of the reasons we fought the War of Secession-not the only one, but one-was so we could do what we wanted with our niggers, not what anybody else wanted us to do."

"Yes, sir, that's true," Brearley said. "When we decided to manumit them twenty years later, after the Second Mexican War, we did it on our own. And if we wanted to reward them for fighting for us, would it be so bad, sir?"

Kimball stared down at the i

He might have accused Brearley of eating with his fingers, or perhaps of practicing more exotic, less speakable perversions. The executive officer bit his lip, but answered, "Sir, if they fought for us, how could we keep from making them into citizens? And if it's a choice between having them fight for us or against us, which would you sooner see?"

That wasn't the way the argument was supposed to go. "They're niggers," Kimball said flatly. "They can't fight whites, not really."

"Yes, sir," Brearley said, and said no more. He needed to say no more. If Negroes couldn't fight, why was the Bonefish coming up the Pee Dee for a second run against them? Even more to the point, why hadn't the Congaree Socialist Republic and the other Red rebel outfits the blacks had set up collapsed weeks before?

Would all this have been prevented had the Confederacy let blacks join the Army and, strange as the notion felt, let them vote? Kimball shook his head. "The Army laborers are Reds, too. And if the black bastards voted, they'd have elected that damn lunatic Arango last year."

This time, Brearley didn't say anything at all. When your commanding officer had expressed his opinion and you didn't agree with it, nothing was the best thing you could say.

Clang! A bullet hit the outside of the co

Boom! Boom! Boom! The deck gun roared out its reply. Kim-ball looked down at Brearley again. The exec still didn't say anything. But a silent reproach was no less a reproach because it was silent.

A portly colonel sporting the little medal that said he'd fought in the Second Mexican War looked down his nose at Irving Morrell. "Not as smart as we thought we were, eh, Major?" he said. Instead of a Kaiser Bill mustache, he sported white wraparound whiskers that, with his bald head, gave him a striking resemblance to Franz Joseph, the elderly Austro-Hungarian Emperor.

"No, Colonel Gilbert," Morrell answered tonelessly. Longtime General Staff officers had been saying things like that to him ever since the Mormons exploded their mines south of Ogden. The only safe response he had was agreeing with them, and also the only truthful one. The Mormons had done a hell of a lot of damage with those mines, and he hadn't anticipated them.

He looked glumly at the situation map for Utah. The drive toward Ogden, the last major rebel stronghold, no longer proceeded nearly north, with east and west ends of the line parallel to each other. The eastern end of the line was still about where it had been, anchored against the Wasatch Mountains, but now the line ran back on a ragged slant, the western end touching the Great Salt Lake a good ten miles farther south than it had been. Only frantic reinforcement had kept the disaster from being even worse than it was.

Colonel Gilbert studied the map, too. "If we hadn't had to pull those troops out of Sequoyah and Kentucky, Major, our progress against the Confederates would have been a good deal greater than it is."

"Yes, sir," Morrell said. The USA should have been taking advantage of the uprising within the enemy's territory, not quelling an uprising of its own. He knew that as well as the white-whiskered colonel. Knowing it and being able to do anything about it, unfortunately, were two different things.