Walk in Hell

believe it-“let’s put this seat back where it belongs.”

“I am godalmighty sick of troop trains,” Jefferson Pinkard announced to anybody who would listen as the one on which he was riding rumbled west through Texas toward the front line, which lay somewhere east of Lubbock.

Nobody said anything. As best Jeff could tell, nobody had the energy to say anything. It was hot and muggy outside. That meant it was hotter and muggier on the train. Every window that would open was open. The breeze that came in was like the breath of hell, the occasional cinder or tiny bit of coal blowing in with the breeze only adding to the resemblance.

Pinkard looked outside. Texas, as far as he could see, was nothing but miles and miles of miles and miles. It had been green and lush when the troop train pounded out of Arkansas. Some of the men who sounded as if they knew what they were talking about said parts of it were as swampy and wet as Louisiana, full of alligators and who could say what all else.

This part of Texas wasn’t like that. If God had taken an iron about the size of South Carolina and pressed everything here down flat, that might have given the countryside its look. It was as hot as if it had just been ironed, too. They called it prairie, but wasn’t the prairie supposed to be green with grass? This was yellow at best, more often brown.

“I never left home till they conscripted me,” Jeff went on after a while. “Way things look here, I ain’t never going to leave again once the war’s over, neither.” He sighed. “Birmingham, now, Birmingham is green all the time. Even in winter, most of the grass stays green. Does it ever even get green here?”

“I don’t know why you complain so much, amigo,” Hip Rodriguez said from the seat behind him. “This land here, this is better than what I was farming.”

“Better?” Pinkard awkwardly turned around to stare at the little Sonoran. “How in blazes could this be better than anything?”

“It is very easy.” As Rodriguez made his points, he ticked them off on his fingers. “It is good flat land, not mountains like where I come from. It has not so much calor-heat. It gets more water-you can see.”

“Maybe you can see,” Pinkard said stubbornly. “Looks dry as the desert the Israelites walked through to me.”

Rodriguez laughed in his face. “You do not know what a desert is, if you call this a desert.” Only two things kept Jeff from starting a fight then and there. One was that he was in the Army, so he’d get in trouble. The other was that he really didn’t know what a desert was like. Next to Alabama land, what they had here was pretty appalling. He tried to picture in his mind the kind of land that would make west Texas look good.

Mountains he could imagine. But land that was hotter and drier than this? If this wasn’t hell, that would have to be.

The train chugged to a stop outside a little town called Post. To Jeff Pinkard’s jaundiced eye, the town, as they rolled through it, seemed as sunbaked and defeated as the country surrounding it. The wooden buildings hadn’t been painted or whitewashed for years, and most of the timber was more nearly gray than brown or yellow. Even the bricks seemed faded from their proper, bright oranges.

When Pinkard, grunting and sweating under the weight of his kit, came out of the car in which he’d been ensconced so long and so uncomfortably, he heard artillery off in the distance. When he’d been fighting the Negroes of the Black Belt Socialist Republic, that had been an encouraging sound: his side had the guns, and the enemy didn’t. It wasn’t going to be like that here.

Captain Connolly addressed the formed-up company: “We are going to stop the damnyankees, men. Not only are we going to stop them, we are going to throw them back into New Mexico where they belong.” That got a few yips and cheers from the men, but not many. It was too hot. They were too tired.

Connolly went on, “This isn’t going to be the kind of fighting they have on the other side of the Mississippi. Too many miles for that, and not enough men filling them. If we dig trenches, they go around, and the same the other way. Not a lot of railroads around here, either. Nobody can keep big armies supplied away from the tracks. So we’re going to drive the Yankees back toward Lubbock, and we are going to have detachments out to make sure they don’t get around us while we’re doing it. That last is what the particular task of this company will be. Any questions?”

Nobody said anything. The captain didn’t even give the order to march. He just started marching, and the men followed: not only the company, but a couple of regiments’ worth. Pinkard and his companions were somewhere in the middle of the column. The dust was of a slightly redder shade than the butternut of his uniform. It got in his nose. It got in his eyes. It got in his mouth, so his teeth crunched whenever they came together.

He wasn’t sure whether this had been a road before the war started. It was a road now, a road defined by marching men and by the ruts of wagons and those of motor trucks. It led to a bridge over a river that didn’t look wide or deep enough to need bridging.

“If that poor thing was in Alabama,” he said to Stinky Salley, “they’d ship it back to its mama, on account of it’s too little to show itself in public.”

“We’re not in Alabama any more,” Salley replied with his usual annoying precision. “Or maybe you hadn’t noticed.”

“Oh, put a sock in it, Stinky,” Pinkard answered, too weary even to threaten doing any of the drastic things Salley so richly deserved. The captain came by just then, making sure everybody in the company-less a couple of men who’d passed out, overcome by the heat-was in good shape. Jeff called to him: “Sir, what river is this?”

“Unless the map they gave me is a liar-and God knows it’s possible, way the hell out here-this is the Double Mountain fork of the Brazos,” Connolly answered. Answering the next question before Pinkard could ask it, he went on, “From what they say, it’s supposed to have a lot more water in it in the wintertime.”

“Couldn’t hardly have much less,” Pinkard said.

The bridge, when he got to it, looked to have been there a while; it wasn’t a recent erection by the Confederate Army Engineering Corps. That argued the road had been there a while, too. He wondered where it ended up going. As far as he could tell, it was a road to nowhere.

They camped a little north of the Double Mountain fork. Try as he would, Jeff couldn’t see the mountains that were supposed to have given the fork its name. The ground was a little higher up ahead, but so what? He supposed that, in these parts, anything high enough to serve as a watershed got reckoned a mountain.

Night fell. It didn’t get any cooler, not so far as Pinkard could tell. He ambled over to a chow wagon. The Negro cook was serving up stale bread, tinned beef, and coffee. “Reckon I’d do just about anything for some of Emily’s fried chicken right about now,” he said mournfully, examining the unappetizing supper.

“Hey, soldier, you’ve got food,” said Sergeant Albert Cross, a veteran with the ribbon for the Purple Heart above his left breast pocket. “Believe me, time’ll come when you’re glad you’ve got anything. Ever carve a steak off a mule three days gone?”

He didn’t sound as if he was joking. He didn’t look as if he was joking, either. Sergeants seemed to have had their sense of humor surgically removed when they were children. Pinkard ate what was set before him. He unrolled his blanket and lay down on top of it. The next thing he knew, the sun was shining in his face.

The force of which he was a part resumed their march not long after sunrise. “We’ll take that high ground,” Stinky Salley declared in his best impression of the Secretary of War, “and then we’ll defend it from the damnyankees when they show up.”

From ahead, tiny in the distance, came the crackle of rifle fire. “Deploy from column into line by the left flank-move!” Captain Connolly shouted. The soldiers moved: awkwardly, because they hadn’t had enough training in such maneuvers before they got thrown into action against the Red rebels.

Out ahead, through the dust of the march, Pinkard saw men on horseback blazing away at the advancing Confederates. Yankee cavalry, he realized. As Connolly had said, the land was wide hereabouts. Cavalry had room to maneuver, as it didn’t farther east.

He didn’t see the field artillery with the horsemen, not even after it started shelling him. He heard a whistle in the air, and then a crash somewhere close by. A moment later, he heard screams. Another whistle, another crash. More screams.

“Get down!” Sergeant Cross screamed. Jeff was already on his belly, wondering how the Negroes in Georgia had fought on without guns to give as they received. At Cross’ order, he and his comrades started shooting at the U.S. cavalrymen. “Nothing to worry about-just a skirmish,” the sergeant said. Pinkard supposed he was right, and