Walk in Hell (34 page)

It was evidently beyond Custer, too. “We aren’t even halfway back toward Bremen,” he complained. Olivia
had
been on his beady little mind, then. Libbie Custer knew her husband well.

“If you’ll just come with me, sir.” The driver got out of the automobile and handed down Custer and Dowling as if they were a couple of fine ladies. He headed for the tent. The general and his adjutant perforce followed: it was either that or be left all alone by the motorcar. At every other step, Custer snarled about what the mud was doing to his boots.

A man came out of the tent. He was wearing ordinary Army trousers, but with a leather jacket and leather helmet that put Dowling in mind of flying gear. With a wave, he hurried toward Custer. As he got nearer, Dowling saw he wore a major’s oak leaves on that jacket, and, a few steps later, that he had the eagle-on-star badge of a General Staff officer.

“General Custer?” he said, saluting. “I’m Ned Sherrard, one of the men from the Barrel Works.” The way he said it, you could hear the capital letters thudding into place. The only trouble was, Dowling had no idea whether or not whatever he was describing deserved those capitals.

Custer had evidently formed his own opinion. “And when do you and the Barrel Works go over Niagara Falls?” he inquired with acid courtesy.

Major Sherrard’s smile showed white, even teeth, as if Custer had made a good joke. “We can’t quite manage that yet with our barrels, sir, but we’re working on it.” He stuck out his hand to Dowling, a greeting of equal to equal. “Major, I’m pleased to meet you.”

“Pleased to meet you, too, Major,” Dowling returned. “So what are these barrels, anyway? I’ve heard the name a few times the past couple of weeks, and I’m curious.”

“I wish you hadn’t heard it at all,” Sherrard said. “Security, you know. But it can’t be helped, I suppose. We’ve got one inside the tent, and you can see for yourself. We’ll even put it through its paces for you. We want the commanding generals on all fronts familiar with these weapons, because they will play an increasing role on the battlefield as time goes by.”

“Newfangled foolishness,” Custer said, not bothering to keep his voice down. But Sherrard’s cheerful smile didn’t waver. He was made of stern stuff. Turning, he led Custer and Dowling toward the tent. Some of the soldiers outside came to attention and saluted. Others ducked into the tent ahead of the officers.

Sherrard held the flap open, but not wide open. “Go on in,” he said invitingly. “You can see what barrels are like better than I could explain them to you in a month of Sundays.”

Custer, of course, went first. He took one step into the enormous tent and then stopped in his tracks, so that Dowling almost ran into him. “Excuse me, sir, but I’d like to see, too,” the adjutant said plaintively.

As usual, Dowling had to repeat himself before Custer took any notice of him. When the general commanding First Army finally did move out of the way, Dowling stared in wonder at the most astonishing piece of machinery he’d ever seen.

It impressed Custer, too, which wasn’t easy. “Isn’t that bully?” he said softly. “Isn’t that just the bulliest thing in the whole wide world?”

“More like the ugliest thing in the whole wide world,” Dowling said, too startled for once to watch his tongue as well as he should have.

He got lucky. Custer didn’t hear him. Major Sherrard did, but didn’t act insulted. Custer said, “So this is what a barrel looks like, eh? Bigger than I thought. Tougher than I thought, too.”

Had Dowling named the beast, he would have called it a box, not a barrel. Big it was, twenty-five feet long if it was an inch, and better than ten feet high, too: an enormous box of steel plates riveted together, with a cannon sticking out from the slightly pointed front end, four machine guns—a pair on either flank—a driver’s conning tower or whatever the proper name was sticking up from the middle of the top deck, and, as Dowling saw when he walked around to the rear of the thing, two more machine guns there.

“You’ve got it on tracks instead of wheels,” he remarked.

“That’s right,” Sherrard said proudly. “It’ll cross a trench seven feet wide, easy as you please—climb out of shell holes, too, and keep on going.”

“How big a crew?” Custer asked.

“Eighteen,” Major Sherrard answered. “Two on the cannon—it’s a two-incher, in case you’re wondering, sir—two on each machine gun, two mechanics on the engines, a driver, and a commander.”

“Engines?” Dowling said. “Plural?”

“Well, yes.” Now the major sounded a trifle embarrassed. “
Sarah Bernhardt
here does weigh something over thirty tons. It takes a pair of White truck engines to push her along. They’re a handed pair, like gloves, one with normal rotation, one with reverse. That lets us put the exhausts, which are very hot, in the center of the hull, and the carburetors and manifolds toward the outside.”

“Thirty—tons,” Dowling murmured. “How fast will, uh,
Sarah
go?”

“Eight miles an hour, flat out on level ground,” the barrel enthusiast told him. “You must remember, Major, she’s carrying more than an inch of steel armor plate all around, to keep machine-gun fire from penetrating.”

“Are these chaps gathered here and around the tent the crew?” Custer asked eagerly. “If they are, may I see the barrel in action?”

“They are, and you may,” Sherrard said. “That’s why I brought you here, sir.” He clapped his hands and called out a couple of sharp orders. The crew scrambled into the barrel through hatches Dowling had hardly noticed till they swung wide. Major Sherrard opened the whole front of the tent, which was, Dowling realized with that, a special model itself, made to shelter barrels. The War Department was serious about barrels, all right, if it had had tents created with them in mind.

The driver and commander, up in that little box of a conning tower, opened their armored vision slits as wide as they could; no one would be shooting at them today. The engine—no, engines, Dowling reminded himself—must have had electric ignition, because they sprang to noisy, stinking life without anyone cranking them.

“Let’s step outside,” Major Sherrard said. “Even with the slits wide, the driver hasn’t got the best view of the road. Wouldn’t do to have us squashed flat because he didn’t notice we were there, heh, heh.”

Dowling’s answering chuckle was distinctly dutiful. Custer, though, laughed almost as loud as he had on learning Richard Harding Davis had dropped dead. He was enjoying himself. Dowling wasn’t. The day was hot and sticky, the worst kind of day for anyone with a corpulent frame like his. As the sun beat down on him, he wondered what it was like for the crew of the barrel inside that steel shell. He wondered what it would be like in combat, with the hatches and slits closed down tight. He decided he was glad to be on the outside looking in, not on the inside looking out.

The rumble changed note as the driver put
Sarah Bernhardt
into gear. Tracks clattering, the barrel slowly crawled out of the tent. Through the slit, Dowling heard the commander shouting at the driver. In spite of the shouting, he wondered if the driver could hear anything.

Down into a shell hole went the barrel. The engine note changed again as the driver shifted gears. Up out of the hole the barrel came, dirt clinging to its prow. Down into another hole it went. Up it came once more. It rolled over some old, rusty Confederate barbed wire as if the stuff hadn’t been there. As Major Sherrard had said, it showed no trouble crossing a trench wider than a man was tall.

“Do you know what this is, Major?” Custer said to Dowling. “This”—he gave an utterly Custerian melodramatic pause—“is armored cavalry. This, for once, is no flapdoodle. This is a breakthrough machine.”

“It may well prove useful in trench warfare, yes, sir,” Dowling agreed—or half agreed. Custer had always wanted to use cavalry to force a breakthrough. Dowling remembered thinking about armored horses, but, to his mind,
Sarah Bernhardt
didn’t measure up—the barrel struck him as more like an armored hippopotamus.

But Custer, as usual, was letting himself get carried away. “Give me a hundred of these machines on a two-mile front,” he declared, “and I’ll tear a hole in the Rebs’ lines so big, even a troop of blind, three-legged dogs could go through it, let alone our brave American soldiers.”

Major Sherrard coughed the polite cough of a junior-grade officer correcting his superior. Abner Dowling knew that cough well. “War Department tactical doctrine, sir,” Sherrard said, “is to employ barrels widely along the front, to support as many different infantry units with them as possible.”

“Poppycock!” Custer exclaimed. “Utter goo and drivel. A massed blow is what’s required, Major—nothing less. Once we get into the Rebs’ rear, they’re ours.”

“Sir,” Major Sherrard said stiffly, “I have to tell you that one criterion in the allocation of barrels to the various fronts will be commanders’ willingness to utilize them in the manner determined to be most efficacious by the War Department.”

Custer looked like a cat choking on a hairball. Dowling turned to watch
Sarah Bernhardt
climb out of yet another shell hole so his commanding officer wouldn’t see him laugh. Custer had gall, all right, if on three minutes’ acquaintance with barrels he presumed to offer a doctrine for them wildly at odds with that of the people who’d invented them in the first place. Well, Custer’s gall wasn’t anything with which Dowling had been unacquainted already.

“Very well,” the general commanding First Army said, his voice mild though his face was red. “I’ll use them exactly the way the wise men in Philadelphia say I should.”

“Good.” Major Sherrard smiled now. Of course he smiled—he’d got his way. “Progress on this front, I am sure, will improve because of them.”

“I’m sure of that myself,” Custer said. Now Dowling did look at him, and sharply. He was sure of something, too—sure his boss was lying.

Reggie Bartlett glanced over at Senior Lieutenant Ralph Briggs. Briggs no longer looked like a recruiting poster for the Confederate States Navy, as he had all through his stay in the prisoner-of-war camp near Beckley, West Virginia. What he looked like now was a hayseed; he was wearing a collarless cotton shirt under faded denim overalls he’d hooked off a clothesline while a farm wife was busy in the kitchen. A disreputable straw hat perched on his head at an even more disreputable angle.

Reggie looked down at himself. By his clothes, he could have been Briggs’ cousin. His shirt, instead of hiding under overalls, was tucked into a pair of dungarees out at the knee and held up by a rope belt in lieu of galluses. The straw hat keeping the sun out of his eyes was even more battered than the one Briggs wore.

Catching the glances, Briggs clicked his tongue between his teeth. “We’ve got to do something about our shoes,” he said fretfully. “If anyone takes a good long look at them, we’re ruined.”

“Sure are, Ralph,” Bartlett said in his not very good rendering of a West Virginia twang, an accent altogether different not only from his own soft Richmond intonations but also from the Yankee way of talking Briggs had tried to teach him. His brown, sturdy Confederate Army boots were at least well made for marching. Briggs’ Navy shoes, both tighter and less strongly made, had given him trouble after he and Reggie and several others tunneled their way out of the prisoner-of-war camp. Reggie went on, “Hard to steal shoes, though, and no promise they’ll fit once we’ve done it.”

“I know,” Briggs said, unhappy still. “Wish we could walk into a town and buy some, but—” He broke off. Reggie understood why, all too well. For one thing, they had no money. For another, in these little hill towns they were strangers with a capital S. And, for a third, showing himself in Confederate footgear was the fastest ticket back to camp Reggie could think of.

Way off in the distance behind them, hounds belled. The sound sent chills running down Reggie’s spine. He didn’t think the hounds were after Briggs and him; they’d been free for several days now, and had done everything they knew how to do to break their trail. But other pairs of Confederate prisoners were also on the loose. Every bunch the damnyankees recaptured hurt the cause of the CSA.

And besides—“Now I know what niggers must have felt like, running away from their masters with the hounds after them,” Reggie said.

“Hadn’t thought of that.” Briggs paused for a moment to take off his hat and fan himself with it. He set the straw back on his head. His expression darkened. “I’d like to set the dogs on some niggers, too, the way they rose up against us. They ought to pay for that.”

“Way they lorded it over us in camp, too,” Reggie said, full of remembered anger at the insults he’d endured.

“Damnyankees set that up,” Briggs said. “Wanted to turn us and them against each other.” Reggie nodded; he’d seen the same thing himself. The Navy man went on, “I will say it did a better job than I ever thought it would. Those niggers had no loyalty to their country at all.”

He would have said more, but a bend in the road brought a town into sight up ahead. “That’ll be—Shady Spring?” Reggie asked doubtfully.

“That’s right.” Ralph Briggs sounded altogether sure of himself. It was as if he had a map of West Virginia stored inside his head. Every so often, when he needed to, he’d pull it down, take a look, and then roll it up again. Reggie wondered how and why he’d acquired that ability, which didn’t seem a very useful one for a Navy man to have.

Whatever the name of the town was, though, they had to avoid it. They had to avoid people and towns as much as they could. U.S. forces paid a bounty on escaped prisoners the locals captured. Even had that not been so, West Virginians weren’t to be trusted. When Virginia seceded from the USA, they’d seceded from Virginia, and made that secession stick. They had no love for the Confederate States of America.

The hillsides surrounding Shady Spring weren’t too steep. Forests of oaks and poplars clothed them. So Ralph Briggs said, at any rate; Bartlett, who’d lived all his life in Richmond, couldn’t have told one tree from another to escape the firing squad.

When he and Briggs came to a rill, they stopped and drank and washed their faces and hands, then splashed along in the water for a couple of hundred yards before returning to dry land. “No point making the dogs’ lives any easier, in case they are on our trail,” Reggie remarked.