Walk in Hell

behind him. No one said boo.

He was about to cross Franklin Street, a good way down from Capitol Square, when military policemen blocked the way. He felt like cursing them, too, but that would land him in jail, and he still had a couple of days’leave before he had to go back to the Maryland front. So he stood and watched as a long column of soldiers tramped past.

Farther up the street, people were laughing and cheering. A hell of a racket was coming from somewhere up there, too. Jake craned his neck. A moment later, he laughed and cheered, too. Four barrels-nobody who’d faced the Yankee version said tanks-rumbled toward him, battle flags painted on the front and sides. They looked different from the ones the USA manufactured; Featherston wondered whether the CSA had built them or they’d somehow been imported from England.

However that was, he was damn glad to see them. “Give ’em hell!” he shouted, and a soldier riding on top of one of them waved his way. He yelled again: “Let the damnyankees know what it’s like, by Jesus!” Had he been in the infantry, he probably would have shouted even louder.

The barrels were so heavy, their wraparound tracks tore up the concrete surface of the street. They’d probably come through town to build morale. Sure built mine, Jake thought. More soldiers followed, young, serious-looking men intent on keeping step. They’d learn what was important and what wasn’t pretty damn quick. Jake knew that.

Having been born and raised in Richmond, he also knew which railroad station the men and barrels were heading for: the Richmond and Danville. He wished they’d been coming up to Maryland, but the Roanoke front was probably the next best place for them. Grudgingly, he admitted to himself that the Roanoke front might have been the best place to send them. The Yanks were in Virginia there, as opposed to fighting them on their own soil farther north and east.

To celebrate the chance of throwing the damnyankees out of his own state, Jake went into a saloon and poured down whiskey. To celebrate that whiskey, he had another one, and then another. When he came out of the saloon, he’d spent a good piece of the note that Navy man had given him. And, when he came out, he didn’t need to turn his head sharply to make the world revolve.

Off in the distance, he heard, or thought he heard, a low-pitched, droning rumble. More barrels? He shook his head, and almost fell over. The troop trains pulling out? No, this wasn’t a train noise. It was real, though. He hadn’t been sure of that before, but he was now.

It sounded like…aeroplanes. His face twisted in slow-witted puzzlement. “If it is aeroplanes, it’s a hell of a lot of ’em,” he said, thinking out loud. He wondered why the Confederacy would put so many aeroplanes in the sky so late at night. “Damn foolishness,” he mumbled.

The part of his mind that functioned at a level below conscious thought came up with the answer. “Sweet suffering Jesus, it’s the Yankees!” he exclaimed, a moment before the first antiaircraft gun outside the Confederate capital began pounding away at the intruders.

He knew too well how futile antiaircraft fire often turned out to be. At night, hitting your target was even harder. And the United States had put a hell of a lot of aeroplanes in the air. They’d bombed the front. They’d bombed Confederate-occupied Washington. Till now, they hadn’t done much to Richmond. All that, evidently, was about to change. Featherston dove under a bench at a trolley stop, the first shelter he spied.

With so many lights on in the Confederate capital, the bombers had targets to dream of. Most of the explosions sounded as if they were close to Capitol Square-most, but not all. The damnyankees seemed to have plenty of bombing aeroplanes to carpet the whole city.

From under the bench, Featherston watched a sea of feet and legs, men’s and women’s both, running every which way. “Like chickens with their heads cut off,” he said, and then raised his voice to a shout: “Take cover, dammit!”

They didn’t listen to him. Nobody listened to him. Civilians paid him no more mind than soldiers ever had. And, when the bombs started falling all around, the civilians of Richmond found out that they should have paid attention, just as the Confederate brass should have listened when he tried to tell them Pompey was no damn good.

Crummp! Crummp! For him, the bombing of Richmond was like being under a medium-heavy artillery bombardment, except it didn’t last so long. It wasn’t that he had no fear-anybody who wasn’t afraid when things were blowing up nearby was crazy, and Mrs. Featherston had raised no fool. But he, like most of the soldiers in town, had faced such horrors before. His chiefest wish was to be able to shoot back.

For civilians, though-for Negroes, for women, for the old and the young-the raid had to seem like the end of the world. Screams rose into the night, those of the panicked side by side with those of the injured. Then secondary screams went up as the panicked discovered the injured, and the dismembered, and the dead. Civilians had no notion of what high explosives and sharp-edged fragments of flying metal could do to the human body. Courtesy of the Yankees, they were learning.

Bombs or no bombs, somebody had to do something to help. Jake got out from under his bench as if he were leaving a dugout to serve his howitzer under fire. He passed by a groaning black man to bandage a cut on a white woman’s head.

More bombers roared past up above. He could hear them, but couldn’t see them. No-he could see one, for smoke and fire were trailing from it, getting brighter every second. The antiaircraft guns ringing Richmond weren’t entirely useless, then: only pretty much so.

The stricken bomber nosed down and dove. It seemed to be coming right at him. He flattened himself out on the street, absentmindedly knocking down the woman he’d just bandaged, too. The bombs the aeroplane hadn’t had the chance to drop exploded when it crashed a block away.

He got picked up and slammed down again, right on top of the woman. It wasn’t anything erotic. He scrambled off her. The houses where the bomber had crashed were burning furiously.

Through the chaos, he heard the fire alarm bell from Capitol Square. It made him throw back his head and laugh. “Thanks for the news!” he shouted. “Thanks for the goddamn news! Never would have known it without you!”

XV

“I don’t like it,” Paul Andersen said, peering across no-man’s-land toward the Confederate lines. “Those bastards are too damn quiet.”

“Yeah.” Chester Martin took out his entrenching tool and knocked some bricks that had probably been part of a chimney out of the way. If he had to flatten out in a hurry, he didn’t want to land on them. “One thing about the Roanoke front is, they never give anything up cheap and they always hit back any way they can.”

“You got that right.” Andersen nodded emphatic agreement.

“This past while, though,” Martin went on, “they haven’t been counterattacking, they haven’t been shelling us…much-they’ve just been sitting there. Whenever they do things they haven’t done before, I don’t like it. It’s liable to mean they’ll do something else they haven’t done before, and that’s liable to mean yours truly gets his ticket punched.”

Andersen nodded again. “Two years o’ this shit and hardly a scratch on either one of us. Either I’m leading a charmed life and you’re all right, too, on account of you hang around with me-or else it’s the other way round. You know what? I don’t want to find out which.”

“Yeah, me neither,” Martin said. “We’ve seen a hell of a lot of people come and go.” He scowled. He didn’t want to think about that. Too many men dead in too many horrible ways.

Somebody’s observation aeroplane buzzed overhead. It was too high up for Martin or anyone else on the ground to tell whether it belonged to the USA or the Rebels. That didn’t stop Specs Peterson from raising his Springfield to his shoulder and squeezing off a couple of rounds at it.

“What the hell you doing?” Martin demanded. “What if it’s on our side?”

“Who gives a damn?” Peterson retorted. “I hate all those flyboy bastards. War’d be a lot cleaner if they weren’t up there spying on us. If it’s a Reb, good riddance. If it’s one of our guys-good riddance, too.”

Martin reminded himself the aeroplane was too high for rifle fire to have any chance of hitting it. If Specs