Doors opened. Glumly, the guards climbed up and into the passenger cars. When they'd all boarded, the train chugged off. Its light was dim. Even here, lights could draw U.S. airplanes. You didn't want to take chances you didn't have to.
After the train pulled away, Jeff went to the kitchen for fried eggs, biscuits and gravy, and coffee. He'd done his duty. He wasn't happy about it, but he'd done it. Pretty soon, Camp Humble would start doing its duty again, too. Even with a reduced guard contingent, the camp would keep on working toward making the Confederate States Negro-free.
That was damned important work. Jeff was proud to have a part in it. He just wished the damnyankees and the war wouldn't keep interfering.
VI
Lieutenant-Colonel Jerry Dover didn't have Atlanta to kick around any more. The senior supply officers there couldn't make his life miserable any more. They'd either fled or died or were languishing in U.S. POW camps. The Stars and Stripes flew over the capital of Georgia. And so…
And so…Alabama. Dover had never figured he would have to try to fight the damnyankees from Alabama. Now he could scream at Huntsville for not getting him what he needed.
It was less fun than screaming at Atlanta had been. The chief quartermaster officer in Huntsville was a brigadier general named Cicero Sawyer. He sent Dover anything he had. When he didn't send it, he didn't have it. Dover could complain about that, but Sawyer complained about it, too.
'Anything that comes from Virginia and the Carolinas, forget it,' he told Dover on a crackling telephone line. 'They can't get it here.'
'Why not?' Dover demanded. 'We've still got Augusta. We've still got Savannah. We've still got shipping. Damnyankees can't sink every freighter in the goddamn country.'
'Reckon the big reason is all the shit that's going on up in Virginia right now,' Sawyer said. 'They want to hang on to every damn thing they can so they can go and shoot it at the Yankees there.'
'Yeah, well, if they forget this is part of the country, too, pretty soon it won't be any more,' Dover said. 'Let's see how they like that.'
'I know,' Sawyer said wearily. 'I've got two worries myself. I got to keep the soldiers supplied-that means you. And I've got to keep the rocket works going. We're hurting the USA with those things, damned if we're not.'
'That's nice,' Dover said. 'In the meantime, I need boots and I need raincoats and I need ammo for automatic rifles and submachine guns. When the hell you gonna get that stuff for me?'
'Well, I can send you the ammunition,' Brigadier General Sawyer answered. 'That comes out of Birmingham, so it's no problem. The other stuff…Mm, maybe I can get some of it from New Orleans. Maybe.'
'If you don't, I'm gonna have men coming down with pneumonia,' Dover said. 'Boots wear out, dammit, and they start to rot when it's wet like it is now. The guys who have shelter halves are wearing them for rain hoods, but they aren't as good as the real thing.'
Sawyer sighed. 'I'll try, Dover. That's all I can tell you. You aren't the only dumpmaster yelling his head off at me, remember.'
'Why am I not surprised?' Dover hung up with the last word.
Dumpmaster was a word that fit him much too well right now. His supply depot was small and shabby. The nearest town, Edwardsville, was even smaller and shabbier. Close to a hundred years earlier, Edwardsville had been a boom town, for there was gold nearby. Then the mother lode in California shot the little Alabama gold rush right behind the ear. Some of the fancy houses built in Edwardsville's first-and last-flush of prosperity still stood, closed and gray and grim.
'Well?' Pete asked when Dover hung up.
'He promised us the ammo,' Dover told the veteran quartermaster sergeant. 'As far as the rest of it goes, we're screwed.'
'Not us. We got the shit for ourselves,' Pete said. Supply officers and noncoms lived well. That was a perquisite of the job. Pete went on, 'It's the poor bastards a few miles east of here who get the wrong end of the stick.'
Jerry Dover nodded unhappily. In the last war, the average Confederate soldier had been about as well supplied as his Yankee counterpart. Through the first couple of years of this fight, the same held true. But the Confederate States were starting to come apart at the seams, and the men were paying for it.
'Ammo's great,' Pete went on. 'What if everybody's too damn hungry and sick to use it, though?'
'I already told you,' Dover answered. 'In that case, we're screwed.' He looked around to make sure nobody but Pete could hear before adding, 'And we're liable to be.'
Off to the northwest lay Huntsville, where the rockets came from. Off to the west lay Birmingham, where anything made of iron or steel came from. Off to the east lay damnyankees who knew that much too well. When they got ready to push west, could they go right on through the Confederates standing in their way?
Although Dover hoped not, he wouldn't have bet against it.
'How many niggers in these parts?' Pete asked, not quite out of a clear blue sky.
'Well, I don't exactly know,' Dover answered. 'I don't think I've seen any, but there could be some skulking around, like.'
'Could be, yeah. I bet there are,' Pete said. 'I bet they get one look at what all we got here, then they light out to tell the Yankees.'
'I bet you're right. We saw it often enough farther east,' Dover said. 'Maybe we ought to do some hunting in the woods around here.' He remembered too well the black raiders who'd plundered his dump in Georgia.
'Maybe we should.' Pete grinned. 'I ain't been coon hunting since I was a kid.'
'Heh.' Dover made himself grin back. He'd heard jokes like that too many times to think they were very funny, but he didn't want to hurt Pete's feelings.
The hunt was no joke. Jerry Dover feared it was also no success. He couldn't get any front-line troops to join in, which meant he had to do it with his own men, men from the Quartermaster Corps. They could fight if they had to; they were soldiers. They'd had to a couple of times, when U.S. forces broke the lines in front of them. They hadn't disgraced themselves.
But there was a big difference between a stand-up fight and hunting down Negroes who didn't want to get caught or even get seen. Regular troops probably would have had a hard time doing that. It was more than the men from the supply dump could manage. They might have made the blacks shift around. They caught no one and killed no one. The day's only casualty was a corporal who sprained his ankle.
That evening, Birmingham caught hell. The bombers came right over the supply dump, flying from east to west. When the alarms went off, Dover scrambled into a slit trench and waited for hellfire and damnation to land on his head. As the Hebrews in Egypt must have done, he breathed a silent sigh of relief when the multi-engined Angels of Death passed over him, bound for other targets.
He felt guilty about that, and angry at himself, but he couldn't help it. Yes, the Confederacy was still going to get hurt. Yes, other men-and women, and children-were still going to get blown to bits. But his own personal, precious, irreplaceable ass was safe, at least till the sun came up.
He grimaced when he realized just how many U.S. airplanes were heading west. The damnyankees had loaded up their fist with a rock this time. Alabama boasted only two targets worth that much concentrated hate. The bombers' course told him they weren't bound for Huntsville. 'Sorry, Birmingham,' he muttered.
Birmingham, without a doubt, would be, and shortly was, even sorrier. He cowered in a trench more than seventy miles east of the city. Even from there, he could hear the bombs going off: a low, deep roar, absorbed almost as much through the palms of the hands and the soles of the feet as through the ears.
'Where the hell's our fighters?' Pete howled, as if Dover had a couple of dozen stashed away in the depot.
'We don't have enough,' Dover answered. That had been true ever since the front lay up in Tennessee. It was more obviously, more painfully, true now. U.S. factories were outproducing their C.S. counterparts. Dover supposed
