Free The Grapple by Harry Turtledove Page B

while. Then he said, “Yeah, those damn things are filthy, all right. Tell you one thing, though: I’m glad they’re chowing down on Featherston’s fuckers and not on us.”
    “Me, too,” Morrell said, though he knew the carrion birds didn’t care whether their suppers came wrapped in butternut or green-gray. For that matter, the crows and vultures feasted on dead civilians, too.
    “What’s it look like off to the west?” Bergeron asked.
    Before answering, Morrell scanned the way ahead with binoculars. Visibility wasn’t everything he wished it were, but he could see enough to get some idea of what was going on. “Sure looks like they’re pulling back,” he said.
    Corporal Bergeron summed up his reaction to that in two words: “Well, shit.”
    “You said a mouthful, Frenchy.” Morrell really had hoped he could cut off as many Confederates with this thrust as he had in and around Pittsburgh. Then, Jake Featherston forbade his men to withdraw. Morrell had hoped he would do it again. But evidently he was able to learn from experience.
Too bad,
Morrell thought. The Confederates were heading south in anything that would roll: truck convoys, barrels, commandeered civilian motorcars. Bombers and artillery and saboteurs did everything they could to knock the railroads out of action, but Ohio had such a dense net of tracks that it wasn’t easy. Every soldier, every barrel, every gun, every truck that got out now was a soldier, a barrel, a gun, a truck the USA would have to put out of action later on.
    Morrell scanned the horizon again. He knew he was being foolish, but he did it anyhow. If he could have seen the U.S. forces coming down from the northwest, the Confederates would have been in even worse trouble than they really were. When he sighed, the vapor threatened to cloud the field glasses’ lenses. That western column wasn’t so strong or so swift as this one. Even so…
    “We get the country put back together again,” Frenchy Bergeron said.
    You didn’t need to be a general to see that; a noncom would do just fine. The Confederates’ armored thrust had carried them all the way from the Ohio River up to Sandusky. They cut the United States in half. For more than a year and a half, goods and men moved from east to west or west to east by air (risky), on the waters of the Great Lakes (also risky, with C.S. airplanes always on the prowl), and over the Canadian roads and railroads north of the lakes (of limited capacity, and vulnerable to sabotage even before the Canucks rebelled).
    “It’ll be better,” Morrell agreed. It probably wouldn’t be a whole lot better any time soon. The Confederates were professionally competent. They would have done their best to wreck the east-west highways and railroad lines they were now sullenly abandoning. Putting the roads and railways back into action wouldn’t happen overnight, especially since C.S. bombers would go right on visiting northern Ohio.
    But now the Confederates were reacting to what Morrell and his countrymen did. For the first year of the war and more, the enemy had the United States back on their heels. The CSA called the tune. No more.
    As Morrell watched, artillery rounds began falling near the Confederate convoy. The first few shells missed the road, bursting in front of or behind it. The trucks sped up. If they could get out of trouble…But they couldn’t, not fast enough. A round hit the road. The convoy had to slow down to go onto the shoulder. And then a truck got hit, and began to burn.
    That was all Morrell needed to see. He was commanding a large, complex operation. But he was also a fighting man himself. When he saw trucks in trouble, he wanted to give them more.
    His barrel carried a large, complicated wireless set. He could talk with his fellow armored units, with artillery, with infantry, or with bombers and fighters. He didn’t want to, not here. He used the company circuit any barrel commander might have clicked to: “We’ve got a