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.
17
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."
"At Jonesboro? No, sir, I don't expect we will," McSweeney said. He could see the Confederate strongpoint without any trouble. Why not? None of the timber was tall enough to block his view, not any more. The town sprawled along the top of Crowley's Ridge, in most places not a feature worth noticing but here in this flat country high ground to be coveted. "What's the altitude here, sir?"
"At Jonesboro? It's 344 feet," Captain Schneider said. "That's 344 too many, you ask me. And we lose even what little cover these woods-or what's left of 'em-give us, too, because it was farming country out to three or four miles in front of the town."
"I see that also, sir," McSweeney answered. He raised his voice to call out to his men: "Give way to the right for the column coming back."
The column coming back was made up of soldiers returning from the front line, soldiers for whom McSweeney's squad, Schneider's company, were among the replacements. They looked the way any soldiers coming away from the front line looked: dirty, haggard, exhausted seemingly past the repair of sleep, some managing grins as they thought about what they'd do now that they'd finally got relieved, others shambling along with blank stares, as if they hardly knew where they were. That happened to some men after they'd taken too much shelling. McSweeney had seen as much, though he didn't understand. How could a man whom the Lord had spared be anything but joyful?
One of the soldiers leaving the front pointed to the tank of jellied oil he bore on his back. "Rebs catch you with that contraption, pal, they won't bother sendin' you to no prison camp. They'll just cut your throat for you and leave you for the buzzards."
"They shall not take me alive." McSweeney spoke with great assurance. He generally spoke with great assurance. The soldier who'd presumed to remark on the flamethrower stared, shrugged, and kept on marching.
Noncoms left behind guided the company into the section of trench they would inhabit till taken out of line themselves. "I don't like this for hell," Captain Schneider said. "Not for hell I don't. We're right out in the open, with whatever guns the Rebs have up on that ridge looking straight down our throats."
"And the men who were here before us were not careful enough about that, either," McSweeney said. For once, he needed to give his squad no orders. Seeing the same thing he did, every man jack of them had taken out his entrenching tool and was busy improving the shelter with which they had been provided. McSweeney turned to Schneider. "I would wager the barbed wire will be as weak."
"You're likely right, Sergeant," Schneider answered, "but I'm not going to stick my head up to find out, not in broad daylight I'm not. Come tonight, we'll send out a wiring party-if there's any wire to be had."
"Yes, sir," McSweeney said. "I sometimes think Philadelphia cares not at all whether the war on this side of the river is won or lost. Utah mattered to the powers that be, because it was on the rail line to the Pacific. Here-" He shook his head. "Out of sight, out of mind."
"You'll get a lot of people who do the real fighting to tell you the fools back in Philadelphia are out of their minds," Schneider said with a grin. When McSweeney didn't grin back, the captain frowned. McSweeney wondered why.
The wiring party did not go out that night: a wiring party without wire was nothing but wasted effort. Ben Carlton cooked up a stew inedible even by his own standards, which were low. "The enemy seeks to wound us," McSweeney told him. "You should not."
Carlton gave him a resentful stare. "Ain't like you could do better."