Two of the men in green-gray stomped up to Murray, who looked comically amazed. One of them grabbed him by the arm. “Come on, you,” he snapped. Murray perforce came.
Straubing’s gaze traveled over the other new drivers. “Anyone else?” he asked in a voice that held nothing but ice. A couple of drivers stirred where they stood. “Vasilievsky, Heintzelman, you are under arrest, too. Same charges as Murray.”
“Come on, you two lugs,” one of the soldiers Straubing had brought said when neither driver moved for a moment. “You won’t like it if we have to come and get you, I promise.”
Numbly, their eyes wide with shock, the two white men obeyed. “Anyone else?” Lieutenant Straubing said again. None of the new drivers moved or spoke. As Cincinnatus had seen other soldiers do, they tried to disappear while standing in plain sight. Straubing nodded. “Very well.” He turned to the men he’d called. “Take those three to the stockade. Murray-this fellow here-is the ringleader. I will prefer formal written charges when I have the time, which I don’t right now. These shenanigans are liable to make me late, and I won’t stand for that.”
Saluting, the soldiers led Murray, Heintzelman, and Vasilievsky out of the depot. The three drivers looked as if they were standing in front of White trucks bearing down on them at thirty miles an hour. None of them could have been more astonished than Cincinnatus. He’d associated Lieutenant Straubing’s uncommon easiness on matters of race with a certain weakness. Evidently he’d been wrong.
Straubing glanced over toward the new truck drivers who hadn’t been arrested. As if they were puppets controlled by the same puppeteer, they stiffened to attention. “If this sort of nonsense happens again,” Straubing said pleasantly, “it will make me angry. Do you gentlemen want to find out what happens when I get angry?”
“No, sir,” the drivers chorused.
“Good,” Straubing said. “Now that we understand that, I am going to give you the idea behind what we’re doing here. What we’re doing here is moving supplies from the riverside here down to the fighting front. Anything that helps us do that is good. Anything that hurts is bad. If a man does his job, I don’t care-and you won’t care-if he is black or white or yellow or blue. If he can’t or won’t, I will run him out of here. If you are white and I order you to work with a Negro who is doing his job, you will do it. If you are white and I order you to work beside a trained unicorn who is doing his job, you will do that, too. Again, do you understand me?”
“Yes, sir,” the new drivers said in unison.
“Then let’s get on with it,” Lieutenant Straubing said. “We are going to have to press harder than we would have, thanks to this idiocy. You would be safer blaspheming the Holy Ghost than you would, tampering with my schedule.”
As the drivers went off to their vehicles, Cincinnatus approached Straubing and said, “Thank you kindly, suh.”
The white man looked almost as nonplused as Murray had when he was arrested. “I suppose you’re welcome, Cincinnatus,” he answered after a moment, “but I didn’t do it for you.”
“Sir, I understand that,” Cincinnatus said. “I-”
“Do you?” Straubing broke in. “I wonder. I did it for the sake of the United States Army. You Negroes have shown you can do this job, and if you do it, white men don’t have to, and we can put rifles in their hands. I would sooner have taken on more of you, but this new contingent got sent to me instead. We’ll see what we can make of them.”
“Uh, yes, sir,” Cincinnatus said. Straubing was indeed a good deal less sentimental, more hardheaded than he’d reckoned.
The lieutenant went on, “And no one who deserves to keep his rank badges will let himself be disobeyed, even for an instant. Is there anything else before you get to work?”
“No, suh,” Cincinnatus said. Maybe, instead of being kindly and sentimental, Straubing was the most cold-blooded human being he’d ever met, so cold-blooded that he didn’t even get excited about matters of race, matters Cincinnatus had thought guaranteed to stir the passions of every man, white or black, Yankee or Confederate.
Cincinnatus went out to tend to his truck. There a couple of vehicles over stood Herk, fiddling with the driver’s-side acetylene lamp on his own machine. He nodded to Cincinnatus, then went back to getting the reflector the way he wanted it.
He didn’t even notice he hadn’t backed Cincinnatus and the other colored drivers when Murray started running his mouth. Cincinnatus couldn’t help scowling. And then, slowly, his anger faded. Herk did his job. He let Cincinnatus do his job, too, and didn’t fuss about that. If he did so much, did Cincinnatus have any business expecting more?
“I can hope,” Cincinnatus mumbled. That made Herk look up from what he was doing, but only for a moment. Cincinnatus sighed. He might hope white men would treat him the same as they treated one of their own, but a lifetime had taught him he had no business expecting it.
Black roustabouts hauled crates from the wharves toward the line of trucks. With them came Lieutenant Kennan, raving at them to work harder, harder. Nobody put Kennan under arrest for abusing blacks. But he was following U.S. orders, not disobeying them as Murray had done. If he might have got more work from his crew without the abuse…who cared? No one in authority, that was certain.
With another sigh, Cincinnatus cranked his White’s motor into rumbling life. Lieutenant Straubing let him do his job, too. In the scheme of things, that wasn’t so bad. It could have been worse, and he knew it.
XVII
Private Ulysses Hansen looked around. “Once upon a time, probably, this was real pretty country,” he said.
“Not any time lately,” another private-Sergeant Gordon McSweeney couldn’t see who-answered. The whole squad, with the exception of McSweeney, chuckled.
“Silence in the ranks,” McSweeney said, and silence he got: all proper and according to regulation. He looked around at what had been a northeastern Arkansas pine forest and was now a wasteland of jagged stumps and downtumbled branches. That it might once have been beautiful hadn’t occurred to him. He hadn’t particularly noticed how hideous it was at the moment, either. It was country that had once held the enemy but was now cleared of him, that was all. No, not quite alclass="underline" it was country that led to land the enemy still infested.
Captain Schneider came bustling along past the company as the soldiers trudged south and east. Schneider nodded toward Gordon McSweeney. “Not so pretty as it used to be, is it, Sergeant?” he said.
“No, sir,” McSweeney answered stolidly. The company commander outranked him, and so could say whatever he pleased, as far as McSweeney was concerned.
Schneider went on, “Trouble is, the damn Rebs knew we were coming, so they baked us a cake. A whole bunch of cakes, as a matter of fact.”
“Sir?” McSweeney said: when his superior spoke directly to him, he had to answer. He regretted the necessity. Ever since their clash over the need to enforce all regulations to the fullest-gospel to him, but evidently not to Schneider-he’d feared the captain was trying to seduce him away from the straight and narrow path he had trodden all his life.
“Toward Memphis,” Schneider amplified. “They fortified all this delta country in eastern Arkansas to a fare-thee-well, and so here it is two years after the damn war started and we’re only getting to Jonesboro now.”
“Oh. Yes, sir,” McSweeney said. Matters military he would willingly discuss with his superior, even if Schneider was sometimes profane. “And, of course, since we stand on the far side of the Mississippi, we get half the resources of those east of the river. General Custer’s First Army, I recall-”
“Don’t talk about any of that,” Schneider broke in. “It hurts too much when I think about it. We’re not going to have an easy time up ahead, either.”