Before Pete could answer, Dover's field telephone jangled. The noncom sketched a salute and ducked out of Dover's tent. 'Albertville supply depot here,' Dover said as he picked up the telephone. He listened, then answered, 'I'm light on 105 shells, but I'll send you what I've got.' He yelled for Pete to come back. Would Cicero Sawyer be able to get him more artillery rounds after he sent off what he had here? He had to hope so.
'I'll get 'em moving,' Pete promised when Dover told him what he needed. 'We don't have as many as I wish we did, though.'
'Yeah, I know. I said the same thing,' Dover answered. 'Anything is better than nothing, though.'
Was anything enough better than nothing? Dover didn't know. Once more, he had to hope. The telephone rang again, and then again. The soldiers farther forward sounded more and more desperate. 'Things are falling apart up here!' one of them yelled.
'We can't hold!' another cried.
'I'll send what I can,' Dover said, and rang up Huntsville. 'Whatever you've got,' he told Sawyer. 'They're taking it on the chin here.'
'I'll do what I can,' Cicero Sawyer answered, sounding much like Dover himself. 'We aren't getting stuff as fast as I wish we would, either.'
'Great.' Dover meant anything but what he said. 'How are we supposed to fight a war if we don't have anything to fight with?'
'Good question,' Sawyer said. 'If you don't have any other good questions, class is dismissed.' He hung up.
Swearing, so did Jerry Dover. After he finished cussing, he checked to see how many clips he had for his automatic rifle. He had the bad feeling he might need it before long.
The next time he saw Pete, he noticed the noncom was carrying a submachine gun. Pete's eyes went to his weapon, too. Neither of them said anything. If you didn't talk about what worried you, maybe it would go away and leave you alone.
Or maybe it wouldn't.
As he'd learned to do in the last war, Dover tracked the battle with his ears. He didn't like what he was hearing. The Yankees seemed to be pushing forward, straight toward his dump. And they seemed to be outflanking it on both sides.
A corporal came up to him. 'Sir, shouldn't we be getting ready to pull out of here?'
'Yeah, I guess maybe we should.' He'd had to move or abandon a lot of dumps in the Confederacy's grinding retreat. He wondered why he was dicking around with this one.
A staff car-a butternut Birmingham packed to the gills with officers and men-rattled up to the supply dump. 'Get the hell out while you still can!' somebody yelled from inside. 'The damnyankees're right on our ass!' The auto jounced away. The load it carried was too much for its springs.
Maybe the load Dover carried was too much for his. But he started shouting the orders he'd used so often before: 'Set the time charges in the ammo! Start blowing up the supplies! Come on, dammit! We've got to get out of here, see where else we can make a stand.'
Shells started landing close by. Then machine-gun bullets snapped and whined past his head-not aimed fire, not yet, but they meant U.S. soldiers sure as hell were too damn close. Before long, the Yankees would see what they were aiming at, and that wouldn't be good. And the rounds were coming in from three sides, not just from the front.
'Fuck,' Dover muttered. He really had waited too long this time. He raised his voice to a shout: 'Get out, men! Save yourselves!'
He'd just gotten in a truckload of new-model field telephones, lighter and better all around than the ones that had soldiered through the war. They still sat in their crates; he hadn't had a chance to send any of them forward yet. He shot them up, one short burst at a time. If his own side couldn't use them, he was damned if he'd let the bastards in green-gray get them.
'Come on, sir! Let's get out of here!' Pete sat behind the wheel of another military Birmingham. The irony of the auto's name struck home for the first time, here much too close to the city where it was made. Dover hopped in. Pete headed northwest, toward Huntsville.
They got maybe a quarter of a mile up one of the most godawful roads Dover's kidneys had ever met when a burst of machine-gun fire off to one side made the quartermaster sergeant grunt. Pete slumped over, half his head blown off. The Birmingham started limping as if it had a flat-later, Dover found out it had two. With no one controlling it, it slewed off the bumpy asphalt and hit a pine tree. Luckily, it wasn't going very fast. Dover was bruised and shaken, but not hurt. He bailed out.
'Hold it right there, motherfucker!' somebody with a U.S. accent yelled. 'Drop that piece, or you're dead meat!'
Dover froze. He looked around wildly for somewhere to run, somewhere to hide. If he moved, the hidden Yankee could plug him before he took more than a couple of steps. Slowly and carefully, he set the automatic Tredegar on the ground. 'I've got a pistol on my belt,' he called. 'I'm going to take it out and put it with the rifle.'
'Don't get cute with it, asshole.' That was another U.S. soldier, one with a deep bass rasp. Jerry Dover couldn't see him. 'We got enough firepower to saw you in half like a fuckin' board.'
'The last person who thought I was cute was my mother,' Dover said, which won him raucous laughter from the unseen enemy troopers. Holding his.45 between thumb and forefinger, he laid it down next to the rifle. Then, without being asked, he raised his hands above his head. 'You got me.'
Not two but four U.S. soldiers cautiously came out of the bushes. Two of them had leaves and branches on their helmets, held in place with strips of inner tube. Two carried ordinary Springfields; one a heavy, clunky U.S. submachine gun; and one a captured C.S. automatic rifle. They all needed shaves. They smelled of old sweat and leather and tobacco and mud: like soldiers, in other words.
'Son of a bitch,' one of them said as they drew near. 'We got us a light colonel.' The two stars on either side of Dover's collar weren't made to be visible from very far off. Why let snipers pick out officers the easy way?
'Cough up your ammo,' said the guy with the Confederate weapon. Without a word, Dover gave him the clips he had left after shooting up the field telephones. His captors also relieved him of watch and wallet and cigarettes. He went right on keeping quiet. They weren't supposed to do that, but it happened all the time. And they didn't have to take him prisoner. He could end up dead if any one of them decided to pull the trigger.
'I guess we oughta send him back,' said the one with the deep voice. He was a corporal, and one of the pair with leaves nodding above his head. 'Officer like that, the guys in Intelligence can squeeze some good shit out of him.'
'Maybe.' The Yankee with the submachine gun aimed it at Dover's face. 'Who are you, buddy? What do you do? C'mon. Sing.'
'My name is Jerry Dover. I'm a lieutenant colonel.' Dover rattled off his pay number. 'I ran the supply dump back there by Albertville.' According to the Geneva Convention, he didn't have to say that. Self-preservation argued it would be a good idea.
'Quartermaster, huh? No wonder you got good smokes,' the one with the deep voice said. He turned to the guy with the automatic rifle. 'Take him back to battalion HQ, Rudy. Don't plug him unless he tries to bug out.'
'Gotcha,' Rudy said. He gestured with the captured weapon. 'Get movin', Pops. You run, it's the last dumbass stunt you pull.'
'I'm not going anywhere, except wherever you take me,' Dover said. He was so relieved not to get shot out of hand, he didn't even resent the Pops. He was old enough to be the damnyankee's father. 'Will you please bury my sergeant there?' he asked his captors, pointing to the Birmingham. 'He was a good man.'
'We round up some more of you butternut bastards, they can take care of it,' the corporal said. The Yankees weren't going to dig for an enemy themselves.
'Move it,' Rudy said. Hands still high, Jerry Dover trudged off into captivity.
D uring the last war, Chester Martin remembered, the Confederates had seen the writing on the wall in northern Virginia. As the summer of 1917 went on, the spirit gradually leaked out of the men in butternut. They wouldn't stand and fight till they couldn't fight any more, the way they had earlier. They would throw away their rifles and put up their hands and hope their U.S. opposite numbers didn't murder them.
The same thing was happening in Georgia now. Even some of the Freedom Party Guards had the message:
