Walk in Hell (20 page)

As he often did, he sighed with pleasure on walking into the farmhouse. Not only was it warm, it was also full of the good smells of cooking. “Is that chicken stew?” he called in the direction of the kitchen.

Marie’s voice floated resignedly out: “Yes, Lucien—chicken stew. One day, I swear, I shall buy a zebra or a camel, so I can roast it in the oven and not have you know at first sniff what it is.”

“Zebra would probably taste like horse,” their son Georges said, and then, exercising his gift for the absurd, “although it could be the meat would have stripes.”

“Thank God we have not been hungry enough to have to learn the taste of horse,” Lucien said. “Thank Him twice, for the beast we have is so old, he would surely be tough.”

Charles said, “I have read in a book on the French Foreign Legion that the roasted hump of a camel is supposed to be a great delicacy.”

“Since a man has to be a fool—a brave fool, yes, but a fool—to join the Foreign Legion, I do not think he is to be trusted in matters of taste,” Galtier said. “And I do not think a camel would do well in the snow.”

“You do not have reason, Papa,” Charles said, glad to show off knowledge at his father’s expense. “Not only are there camels that live in the desert, there are also others—Bactrians, they are called—that live in cold countries.”

“But not in Quebec,” Lucien said firmly. He caught the evil gleam in Georges’ eye and forestalled him: “Nor, for that matter, have we any great herds of zebras here.” Georges pouted; he hated having his father anticipate a joke.

Over the supper table, they talked of camels and zebras and of more practical matters like the price chickens were bringing in Rivière-du-Loup, whether the kerosene ration was likely to be cut again, and what a good bunch of applejack this latest one from their neighbor was. “Warms you better than the fire does,” Charles said, sipping the potent, illegal, popular stuff.

And Nicole, as had become her habit, talked about the work she did at the hospital. “The officer had a wounded leg full of pus, and I helped drain it,” she said. “I did not do much, of course, as I am so new, but I watched with great care, and I think I will be able to do more next time.” Her nose wrinkled. “The smell was bad, but not so bad that I could not stand it.”

Susanne screwed up her face into a horrible grimace. “That’s disgusting, Nicole,” she exclaimed, freighting the word with all the emphasis she could give. The rest of her sisters, older and younger, nodded vehemently.

Gently, Marie said, “Perhaps not at supper, Nicole.”

“It is my work,” Nicole said, sounding as angry as Lucien had ever heard her. “We all talk about what we do in the day. Am I to wear a muzzle because I do not do what everyone else does?” She got up and hurried away from the table.

Lucien stared after her. When he had hesitated over letting her take the job at the hospital, it had been because he feared and disliked the company into which she would be thrown there. He had never thought that, simply by virtue of doing different things from the rest of the family, she might become sundered from it—and might want to become sundered from it.

He knocked back his little glass of applejack and poured it full again. The problems he had expected with Nicole’s job had for the most part not arisen. The problems he had not expected…“Life is never simple,” he declared. Maybe it was the applejack, but he had the feeling of having said something truly profound.

“Gas shells,” Jake Featherston said enthusiastically. “Isn’t that fine? The damnyankees have been doing it to our boys, and now we get to do it right back.”

Michael Scott grinned at him. “Chokes me up just thinkin’ about it, Sarge,” he said, and did an alarmingly realistic impression of a man trying to cough chlorine-fried lungs right out of his chest. After the laughter at the gallows humor subsided, he went on, “When they going to have ’em for the big guns?”

“God knows,” Jake said, rolling his eyes. “Best I can tell, we got our factories stretched like a rubber band that’s about to break and hit you a lick between the eyes. There’s a war on, case you haven’t noticed, so they got to make more stuff than they ever reckoned they could. They got to do that with most of the men who were workin’ in ’em before totin’ guns now. And they got to do it with half the niggers, maybe, up in arms instead of doin’ the jobs they’re supposed to be doin’. Damn lucky the Yankees ain’t ridden roughshod over us.”

That produced a gloomy silence. It also produced several worried looks toward the north. The first U.S. attacks after the Red uprising had been beaten back, and the damnyankees, as if taken by surprise that they hadn’t easily overwhelmed the Confederates, seemed to have paused to think things over. Signs were, though, that they were building up to try something new. Whenever the weather was decent, U.S. aeroplanes buzzed over the Confederate lines, spying out whatever they could. Confederate reconnaissance reported more activity than usual in the Yankee trenches.

Featherston added one thing more, the artilleryman’s tipoff: “Their guns been firing a lot of registration shots lately.” When a few shells came over, falling around important targets, you started worrying. That usually meant the other side’s artillery was taking exact ranges. Before too long, a lot more than a few shells would be dropping thereabouts.

“Sarge, we got these gas shells to go with the rest of what we shoot,” Michael Scott said. He glanced around. Nobody was in earshot of the gun crew. Even so, he lowered his voice: “With things like they are with Captain Stuart and all, we gonna be able to get enough of ’em to shoot to do any good?”

“That’s a damn fine question,” Jake told him. “Wish to Jesus I had me a damn fine answer for it. Way things used to be, we had shells the way a fellow been eatin’ green apples gets the runs—they were just fallin’ out of our ass, on account of Jeb Stuart III was Jeb Stuart III, and that was plenty to get him everything he wanted. Nowadays…” He sighed. “Nowadays I reckon I’d sooner have me Captain Joe Doakes in charge of the battery, or somebody else no one ever heard of. We might not get a whole raft o’ shells, but we wouldn’t get shortchanged, neither. And I got the bad feeling we’re gonna be from here on out.”

Everybody in the gun crew sighed. Jeb Stuart III wasn’t Richmond’s fair-haired boy any more. Now he was under a dark cloud, and that meant the whole battery had to go around carrying lanterns. Sooner or later, Stuart would pay the price for not having kept a better eye on Pompey. Trouble was, the rest of the battery would pay it along with him.

Featherston filled his coffee cup from the pot above the cook-fire. The coffee was hot and strong. Once you’d said those two things, you’d said everything good about it you could. Nothing was as good as it had been before the Negroes rose up against their white superiors, not the chow, not the coffee, not anything.

“Damn niggers,” Jake muttered. “If we lose this damn war, it’s their fault, stabbing us in the back like they done. We could have licked the damnyankees easy, wasn’t for that.”

As if to contradict him, U.S. artillery opened up in earnest then. As soon as he saw the flashes to the north, as soon as he heard the roar of explosions and the scream of shells in the air, Jake knew the enemy guns weren’t doing registration fire this time. They meant it.

The howitzer he commanded had a splendid view north. “Come on!” he shouted, pointing toward the gun. “Let’s give it back to ’em!”

He didn’t think any of his men could have heard him, not through the blasts of shells landing close by and the whine and hiss of shrapnel balls and flying fragments of shell casing. But they’d been bombarded before. They knew what to do. In less than a minute, they were flinging shells—gas and shrapnel both—back at the U.S. lines.

Those lines were working, vomiting out men the way an anthill vomited ants after you kicked it. Featherston whooped when shells burst among the damnyankees swarming toward the Confederate lines, whooped when men flew through the air or sprawled bonelessly on the ground or threw themselves flat and stopped moving forward.

But a godawful lot of damnyankees kept right on toward the Confederate trenches, which were taking a fearful pounding. The infantry in the trenches couldn’t do any proper shooting at the advancing Yanks, not with tons of metal coming down on their heads. So much dust and dirt flew up from the Confederate lines, Jake had trouble spotting targets at which to aim his piece. “They’re gonna get in!” he yelled. If the U.S. troops didn’t just get into the Confederate lines but also through them—if that happened, the Confederate position in north-central Maryland was going to come unglued in a hurry.

Back in his training days, he’d learned that the three-inch howitzer, with its muzzle brake to keep recoil short and not fling the carriage backwards at every shot, could in an emergency fire twenty rounds a minute. Most of the time, that was only a number; the normal rate of fire was less than half as fast. No picky drillmaster was standing over the crew with a stopwatch now, as had been so back on the firing range. But if Jake and his men didn’t smash every firing-range record ever set, he would have eaten his hat—had he had any idea where the damn thing was.

In spite of the shells falling on them, the other guns of the battery matched his round for round, or came close enough as to make no difference. And in spite of all they did, the damnyankees kept coming. Men started emerging from the Confederate trenches up ahead—men in butternut, at first. Some of them looked for new firing positions from which to shoot back at the U.S. soldiers who had forced them out of what had been the safety of their lines. Others were running, nothing else but.

Then Featherston spotted men in green-gray. “Shrapnel!” he shouted, and depressed the barrel of the howitzer till he was all but firing over open sights. He yanked the lanyard. The shell roared. Again, he watched men tumble. They were closer now, and easier to see. He could even spy the difference in shape between their roundish helmets and the tin hats some of the Confederate troops were wearing.

A rifle bullet cracked past the gun’s splinter shield, and then another. He shook his head in dismay. He’d done a lot of shooting at enemy infantry during the war—that was what the three-incher was for. Up till now, though, he’d never been in a spot where enemy infantry could shoot back at him.

“Running low on ammunition!” somebody shouted in the chaos—he wasn’t sure who. Shells from the guns of the battery still in action tore great holes in the ranks of the oncoming U.S. soldiers, but they kept coming nonetheless, on a wider front than the field guns could sweep free.

“Bring the horses up to the gun and to the limber!” Jake shouted. He looked around for the Negro laborers attached to the gun. They were nowhere to be seen. He wasted a few seconds cursing. Nero and Perseus, who had been with the battery from the day the war started, would have done as he told them no matter how dangerous the work was. He’d seen that. But Nero and Perseus had been infected by the Red tide, too, and had deserted when the uprising broke out. God only knew where they were now.

“If the niggers won’t do it, reckon we got to take care of it our own selves,” Will Cooper said. Along with a couple of other men, he went back to the barn nearby and brought out the horses. The animals were snorting and frightened. Jake Featherston didn’t worry about that. He was plenty frightened himself, thank you very much. And if they didn’t get the howitzer out of there in a hurry, he’d be worse than frightened, and he knew it. He’d be dead or captured, and the gun lost, a disgrace to any artilleryman.

“God damn it to hell, what the devil do you think you’re doing?”
It wasn’t a shout—it was more like a scream. For a moment, Featherston didn’t recognize the voice, though he’d heard it every day since before the war. His head snapped around. There stood Jeb Stuart III, head bare, pistol in his hand, eyes blazing with a fearful light.

“Sir—” Featherston pointed ahead, toward the advancing Yankees. “Sir, if we don’t pull back—” He didn’t think he needed to go on. The Confederate front was dissolving. A bullet ricocheted off the barrel of the cannon. If they didn’t get out, they’d be picked off one by one, with no chance of doing anything to affect the rest of what was plainly a losing battle.

Jeb Stuart III leveled the pistol at his head. “Sergeant, you are not going anywhere. We are not going anywhere—except forward. There is the enemy. We shall fight him as long as we have breath in us. Is that clear?”

“Uh, yes, sir,” Jake said. The barrel of the pistol looked as wide to him as that of his howitzer.

“Call me naive, will they? Call me stupid? Say my career is over?” Stuart muttered, not to Featherston, maybe not even to himself—more likely to some superior who wasn’t there, perhaps to his father. He had, Jake realized, decided to die like a hero rather than living on in disgrace. If he took a gun crew to glory with him, so what?

They unhitched the horses and fired a couple of shells at the damnyankees. Stuart made no effort whatever to seek shelter. On the contrary—he stood in the open, defying the Yankees to hit him. In short order, he went down, blood spurting from a neck wound. The gun crew got the horses hitched again in moments. Under Featherston’s bellowed orders, they got the howitzer out of there—and Captain Stuart, too. They saved the gun. Stuart died before a doctor saw him.