"This here prisoner business, it ain't no fun a-tall," Jasper Jenkins said. He and Reggie had been captured in the same raid on Confederate trenches east of Big Lick, Virginia. A lot of men from both sides had died in the struggle for the Roanoke valley between the Blue Ridge Mountains and the Alleghenies. A lot more from both sides had been captured. But-
"You never think it's going to happen to you," Reggie agreed. "Maybe if I think real hard, I'll find out it didn't." He gave a whimsical shrug to show he didn't intend that to be taken seriously. He'd always been cheerful, he'd always been good-natured, he'd always been able to make people like him…and what had it got him? A third-tier bunk in a damnyankee prison camp. Maybe I should have been more of a bastard, he thought. Couldn't have turned out much worse, could it?
Jasper Jenkins, on the other hand, was more of a bastard, a dark, lanky farmer who looked out for himself first and everybody else later. And here he was, too. So what did that prove?
Jenkins looked around at the prisoners, almost all of them as much alike as so many sheep. "This here war's too big for people, you ask me," he remarked.
"Now why the devil do you say that?" Bartlett asked, deadpan. He and Jenkins both laughed, neither of them happily. The line in which they stood made Reggie think of nothing so much as a trail of ants heading for a sandwich that had been dropped on the ground. Compared to the size of the war in which they'd been engaged, that was about what they were.
"And to think I went and volunteered for this." Jenkins shook his head. "I was a damn fool."
"Yeah, me, too," Reggie agreed. "I was there in Capitol Square in Richmond when President Wilson declared war on the damnyankees. I went and quit my job right on the spot and joined the Army-didn't wait for the regiment I'd been conscripted into to get called up. Figured we'd win the war in a couple of months and go on home. Shows how much I knew, doesn't it?"
"Nobody who didn't live by it knew about the Roanoke then," Jasper Jenkins said. "Wish I didn't know about it now. That damn valley is going to be sucking lives till the end of the war."
"I only wish you were wrong," Bartlett answered.
They snaked toward the front of the line, moving not quite fast enough to stay warm in the chilly breeze. As they drew near the kettles that would feed them, Reggie held his mess tin in front of him with both hands. That was how the rules said you did it. If you didn't follow the rules in every particular, you didn't get fed. The cooks enjoyed finding an excuse not to give a prisoner his rations.
"Miserable bastards," Jenkins muttered under his breath, glaring at the men who wore white aprons over their baggy butternut clothes. But he made sure he kept his voice low, so low that only Bartlett could hear. If the cooks found out he was complaining about them, they'd find ways to make him sorry.
They were prisoners, too; the USA wasn't about to waste its own men to feed the Confederates it captured. But whoever had thought up the prison-camp system the United States used had been a devilishly sneaky fellow. What better way to remind soldiers in enemy hands what their status was than to make them dependent on the goodwill of the Negroes who had formerly been their laborers and servants?
White teeth shining in their dark faces as they grinned unpleasantly at the men they fed, the cooks ladled stew-heavy on potatoes and cabbage and bits of turnip, thin on meat that was probably horse, or maybe cat, anyhow-into the mess kits. If they liked you, you got yours from the bottom of the pot, where all the good stuff rested. If they didn't, you ate nothing but broth. Complaining did no good, either. The damnyankees backed up the Negroes all the time.
A few men in front of Reggie, a Confederate cursed when he saw what he'd been given. "You stinkin' niggers're tryin' to starve me to death," he snarled. "I'll git you for that if it's the last thing I ever do, so help me God I will."
"Shut up, Kirby," one of his friends told him. "You're just gonna make things worse, you keep going on like that."
That was good advice. The prisoner named Kirby didn't take it. "To hell with all of 'em," he shouted, and shook his fist at the Negro cooks. They didn't say anything. They just looked at him. Memorizing his face, Reggie thought. Mr. Kirby was going to be on short commons for a long, long time. He must have known that, too, but he didn't care. Maybe he was already too hungry to care. He went on, "You black sons of bitches think you're so great on account of the damnyankees let you lord it over us'ns. But it don't matter. You're still niggers to them, too."
His friend shoved him along to keep the line moving. If the line didn't move, the prisoners caught hell from the guards. Kirby started cussing all over again when the piece of hardtack he got was both small and full of weevils. What do you expect, you damn fool? Bartlett thought, hoping Kirby's outburst wouldn't make the cooks take out their anger on everybody anywhere near the loudmouthed prisoner.
His bowl of stew, when he got it, had a decent amount of real food in with the watery broth. He nodded to the Negro who'd dished it out. "Thanks, Tacitus," he said. The cook nodded back, soberly. Some of the prisoners tried sucking up to the cooks-acting like niggers themselves, Reggie thought with distaste-in the hopes of getting better rations. He couldn't make himself do that, and he hadn't seen that it helped, either. Treating them a little better than he would have before he got captured seemed like a good idea, though.
He took the square of hardtack another cook handed him. It wasn't too big, but it wasn't too small, either. He shrugged. It would do. He and Jenkins found a place where the wind wasn't blowing too hard, sat down there, and began to eat.
"Lettin' niggers lord it over white men just ain't right," Jenkins said. "That Kirby fellow knew what he was talkin' about. This here war's over and done with, it's time to pay back what we owe 'em."
"Wonder what it's going to be like when we get home again," Reggie said around a mouthful of potatoes. "Wonder what's going on with the Negro uprising down there."
He and Jasper Jenkins had argued about that for a while. Jenkins had refused to believe blacks could rise up against the whites who had dominated the Confederacy since its founding, and the South before that. But fresh-caught prisoners confirmed at least some of the stories the Yankee guards so gleefully told to the men who had been captured earlier.
Now Jenkins said, "We'll smash the bastards flat, and then we'll go on and smash the damnyankees, too, no matter how long it takes."
Reggie nodded. Inside, though, he wondered. He still wanted to believe everything would turn out all right, but it got harder every day. It had been getting harder since the first time he saw what machine guns did to charging men, no matter whose uniform those men wore. If the war went on long enough, he figured nobody on either side would be left alive.
When he'd finished eating, he took his mess tray over to a barrel of water, waited for his turn, and sluiced the tray around before drying it on his shirttail. He made sure he'd got all the gunk out of the corners. If you came down with food poisoning here…well, the prison camp was a bad place, but the hospital next door was worse.
"Work detail!" a Confederate officer bawled. Some men went off to chop firewood, others to clean the latrines, still others to police up the grounds of the camp.
Jasper Jenkins shook his head in bemusement. "Never thought I'd be glad of a chance to work," he said, "but it sure as hell beats standing around doing nothing like we been doin'."
"Yeah," Reggie agreed; like Jenkins, he had no duties today. And when there wasn't anything to do, you just waited for the minutes and the hours to crawl by, and every one of them moved on hands and knees. He'd never imagined the worst part of being a prisoner of war was boredom, but the damnyankees didn't care what their captives did in here, so long as they didn't try to escape and so long as they didn't try to get U.S. soldiers to do anything for them.