Breakthroughs (18 page)

“I don’t reckon it’s that bad, Sarge,” Scott said. “Remember how you were all up in arms about the niggers going into line in front of us? They haven’t done so bad, and the damnyankees haven’t exactly given ’em a big kiss on the cheek to say good morning, neither.”

“Rifles,” Jake said scornfully, and then, a little less so, “Well, hell, all right, machine guns, too. But they ain’t seen real artillery, and they ain’t seen gas, and they ain’t seen barrels. Till they do, God damn me to hell if I think they’ll make anything like proper soldiers.”

“You’re a stubborn cuss, Sarge,” the loader said with a laugh.

“Bet your ass I am,” Featherston said. “If I wasn’t, I’d have given up long since. But I pay all my bills, and I got a hell of a lot of bills to pay.”

“Uh-huh.” Scott took a last drag on the cigarette, threw it down, and crushed the butt under his heel. He headed off, perhaps a little faster than he had to.

Featherston sighed with relief to see him go. He opened the tablet and began to write again:
—officers are fools because they won’t see what’s in front of their faces. The country doesn’t need officers like that, but what other kind has it got? They can’t see that the n—

“Featherston.” The voice was sharp and precise, so much so that it almost seemed a Yankee voice. Jake jumped and slammed the tablet shut.

He whirled, jumped to his feet, and saluted. “Major Potter, sir!” he said. “I’m sorry, sir. I didn’t hear you come up.” He would have had to show respect for any officer. He actually felt some for Clarence Potter.

“At ease, Sergeant,” the bespectacled major from Intelligence said. He pointed north, toward the U.S. lines, the lines that still bubbled and seethed like a pot boiling atop a stove but that, to Featherston’s surprise, had not yet boiled over. “What do you make of the quiet?”

“Funny you should ask, sir,” Jake said. “My loader and I were just talking about that very same thing. Last time they were this quiet this long was before they hit us that first big lick up in Pennsylvania.”

“So it was.” Potter rubbed his chin. “That’s very well reasoned—reasoned like an officer, I would say, if I didn’t think it’d make you pick up that barrel and break it over my head.”

“Sir, I reckon your head is harder than this barrel ever dreamed of being,” Featherston answered, intending it as a compliment. “Reckon your head is as hard as one of the damnyankees’ iron barrels with treads.”

“Heh,” Potter said. “No, those really hard heads are the ones down in the War Department in Richmond. It’d take about an eight-inch gun, maybe a twelve-inch, to blow a hole through one of them and let in some light.”

“Yes, sir,” Jake said. One of the reasons he thought Potter superior to the general run of officer in the Army of Northern Virginia was the boundless contempt they shared for the hidebound aristocrats who held so many important posts in Richmond.

Potter said, “Now that the colored troops have been in the line for a bit, what do you think of them?”

“Don’t like ’em for hell,” Featherston said promptly. “Not for hell. They’re in the line, yeah, but what happens when they really get hit? We haven’t seen it yet. Like I told Scott, I’ll believe they can stand it when I see ’em do it.”

Potter’s jaws worked as if he were chewing tobacco, but he didn’t have a plug in one cheek. “Here’s another question for you, then, Sergeant—which would you rather have in front of you, those full colored units or white units somewhere between a quarter and half strength? Those are your choices. We’ve squeezed out about all the white manpower in the CSA there is to squeeze.”

“I don’t know the answer to that,” Jake said. “I just don’t know. I have a notion of what understrength white units can do. These niggers—who can guess? Might be better. Might be a hell of a lot worse.”

In musing tones, Major Potter said, “Some white units without the proper experience will break and run the first time they come under truly heavy fire, or the first time they have to face barrels. If the black soldiers don’t perform as well as veteran troops, you need to remember it may be because they’re raw, not because they’re black.”

“Yes, sir, I understand what you’re telling me,” Featherston said. “But then again, it may be because they’re niggers, too. Hell of a choice we’ve got, ain’t it, sir? We can lose the war without ’em, or we can put ’em in the line and pray to Jesus they don’t turn their guns on us or go over to the damnyankees in droves.”

Fussily neat, Potter took out a clasp knife and scraped dirt from under a thumbnail. He said, “You know, the United States have a holiday called Remembrance Day coming up next month. They’ve been keeping a list of everything we’ve done to them since we fired on Fort Sumter to start the War of Secession. By now, it’s a long list. If they do lick us, they’re going to pay it all back and make us start a list of our own.”

“You’re saying they’d better not lick us,” Jake said slowly.

“We won’t be happy if they do,” Clarence Potter agreed. Behind his spectacles, his eyes missed very little. He pointed to Featherston’s Gray Eagle notebook. “Are you keeping a list of your own, Sergeant?”

Jake’s ears got hot. He was indeed keeping a list of his own. If anyone besides him saw it, he’d be lucky to escape hard labor. If Major Potter asked—or demanded—to see it, he didn’t know what he’d do. Keeping his voice as light as he could, he answered, “Maybe I’ll do me up a book once the war is over.
Over Open Sights,
I’ll call it, or somethin’ like that. What do you think, sir?”

“Better be a good book,” Potter said. “They’ll be a drug on the market when the fighting’s done—provided anyone’s left alive to read them.” He had on a tin hat, and tipped it as if it were a real felt derby. “Good morning to you, Sergeant.” On down toward the front he went, a businesslike man who might have been a businessman were it not for his helmet and puttees.

Featherston let out a silent sigh of relief. He’d got away with not having to show what he was writing. Not only that, he’d found a title for what he was setting down in the tablet.
OVER OPEN SIGHTS,
he printed above the writing on the first page.

He wished he had the War Department over open sights, close enough to blast them all without even having to bother reading the range. He wished he had the Negro troops in front of him over open sights, too. He scowled. If they did run like rabbits, the way he figured they were likely to do, he would have them over open sights. He’d blast them, too.

The only trouble was, that would be too late.

Something buzzed like an early mosquito, but the sound came from farther away than a mosquito’s infernal whine. Jake looked up. Tiny as a mosquito in the sky, an aeroplane sauntered along above the defensive line of the Army of Northern Virginia. Featherston knew what that meant: the damnyankees were taking photographs. When they had all they wanted, when everything was set up the way they wanted, hell would break loose.

No Confederate aeroplanes rose to challenge the Yankee spy. Belatedly, antiaircraft guns over toward Purcellville, east of Round Hill, opened up on the intruder. The hammering of the guns—the only cannon in the Confederate arsenal that were quicker-firing than the three-inchers Jake served—shattered the quiet of the late-winter morning.

Puffs of smoke, round and black as iron soup pots, flecked the sky like smallpox scars on the face of an unvaccinated man. The observation aeroplane flew through them, straight as if it were on rails. From his own observations, Jake knew what that meant: the photographer was taking his pictures.

He knew the exact instant when the photographer was through taking pictures, too. At that instant, the aeroplane stopped behaving like a locomotive on rails and started acting like a staggering drunk, lurching every which way through the air to throw off the aim of the gunners on the ground.

Wearily, Featherston cursed as the U.S. observation aeroplane escaped. He’d seen too many others escape to be more than a little disgusted. His sole consolation was that the Yankees had every bit as much trouble hitting C.S. observation aeroplanes.

As if the aeroplane’s getaway were some kind of signal, firing from the U.S. trenches, which had been very light, suddenly picked up. Rifles and machine guns hammered away. And then, as Jake was about to call his men to ready themselves for the Yankee onslaught, the small-arms fire slackened again. He let out a sigh of relief and went back to filling pages of the Gray Eagle tablet.

Leading a charging column of barrels would have been more impressive if Lieutenant Colonel Irving Morrell could have seen the column he was leading. He could see next to nothing. The louvered vision slits were shut as tight as they could be and still let any light at all into the interior of the barrel. Had they been open any wider, they would have let in bullets along with the light.

Morrell kept wondering if he’d died and gone to hell. The reek wasn’t of fire and brimstone; it was fire and automotive exhaust, which struck him as a reasonable approximation. The two roaring truck engines in the compartment below let out enough bellows and screams and groans for an entire regiment of lost souls. It was hot as hell in the barrel, too. This was March. What the inside of the barrel would be like on a muggy August afternoon was something Morrell did his best not to contemplate.

Nor was he alone, or even close to alone, in his mechanical damnation. Along with the driver and the two engineers who labored to keep the hot metal parts working as they should, he had for company the dozen machine gunners and the two artillerymen at the nose cannon: an apartment building’s worth of people jammed into an ugly metal box half the size of a small flat.

He peered ahead. He stuck his nose too close to the louvers, and tried to flatten it against them when the barrel lurched over the scarred and battered ground. He clutched the wounded member, which, fortunately, was neither bleeding nor broken.

He peered again, as closely as before. If his nose got smashed again, it got smashed, that was all. Peering was rewarded. “Shell hole!” he screamed. “Big shell hole! Steer right!”

What with the din of the two engines and the rattle and clanks of the tracks and all the other ancillary racket inside the barrel, the driver never heard him. He cursed himself for an idiot; he’d found out, the very first time he got into a barrel, that nobody could hear anything inside.

He remembered to use hand signals just as the barrel nosed down into the crater. The driver shifted to his lowest gear. The engines screamed even louder than they had before. Morrell wondered if the barrel’s pointed nose would get stuck in the dirt at the bottom of the shell hole. That was its worst disadvantage when set against its British and Confederate counterparts, which were tracked around their entire rhomboidal hulls: those babies could climb out of anything, and a U.S. barrel couldn’t, quite.

This particular U.S. barrel, though, could and did climb out of this particular shell hole. Beyond it stood a fat man waving a large blue flag. Morrell held up his right hand, palm out, to the driver. Obediently, the man hit the brakes, took the barrel out of gear, and turned off the motors. Everyone inside the steel hull who could reach the handle of an escape hatch opened it, to let in air and light—and the rumble of other barrels behind Morrell.

One by one, the rest of the machines in the column also halted. Hatches and louvers also came open on them. More than a few started disgorging their crews, as the men seized the first chance they got to escape.

Irving Morrell wasted very little time in getting out of his barrel, either. He clambered down to the ground. The fat man stabbed the flagpole into the ground. “That wasn’t so bad,” he said. “Looked like the end of the world, coming straight at me.” He stuck a finger in one ear. “Sounded that way, too.”

“You had a better view of it than I did, Major Dowling,” Morrell answered. He outranked General Custer’s adjutant, but treated him as he would have treated a superior officer. His oak leaves might have been silver while Dowling’s were gold, but the major more than made up in influence what he lacked in rank. Morrell went on, “It’s noisier inside a barrel than outside, though. Far as I can tell, it’s noisier inside a barrel than anywhere.”

“Yes, I think so, too,” Dowling said. “Astounding experience, riding in one of those damn things. Appalling experience, too.” He looked over his shoulder. “Here comes the general. Let’s see what he thought of the exercise.”

Lieutenant General Custer picked his way through the mud with slow, mincing steps. He wore fancy black cavalry boots, and plainly didn’t want to get them dirty. With him came Colonel Ned Sherrard. Sherrard had served for a good while on the General Staff, and General Staff officers were notorious among their counterparts in the field for their aversion to filth. But Sherrard looked to be turning into a real, live field soldier himself, for he took no more notice of the chewed-up terrain than he might have if he’d been in the field since 1914.

“Bully!” Custer said. “This column—or rather, an even grander column than this—will simply pulverize the defenses the Confederates have in front of Nashville. When they do, the infantry goes forward, sweeps up what the barrels have broken loose, and we have ourselves a breakthrough.”

“Yes, sir,” Morrell said. “I think that’s exactly what will happen. I want to be at the sharp end of the wedge.”

“I think we’ll break through, too,” Sherrard said. “I really and truly do.” He sounded surprised at himself, as if still unsure how Custer had managed to seduce him away from the doctrine he himself had helped formulate.

“And once the barrels have broken the way,” Custer went on, “we can also send in the cavalry, to complete the enemy’s demoralization and sweep up his shattered, flying remnants.”

Morrell, Dowling, and Sherrard looked at one another. None of them said a word. Every army east of the Mississippi had a division or two of cavalry based a little behind the front, waiting to exploit a breakthrough. The few times the horsemen got into action, they and their mounts died in droves. They were up above the level of the trenches, and their horses made big targets. Morrell didn’t think that would be any different even after the barrels went in.