Walk in Hell (35 page)

“You’re right about that,” Briggs said, although hiking through the water soaked his feet and did his shoes more harm than it did to Bartlett’s taller boots.

Here and there in the woods, sometimes by themselves, sometimes in small clusters, sometimes in whole groves, dead or dying trees stood bare-branched, as if in winter, under the warm spring sun. Reggie pointed. “What’s wrong with them?” he asked, having developed considerable respect for how much Bartlett knew.

And the Navy man did not disappoint him. “Chestnut blight,” he answered. “Started in New York City ten, maybe twelve years ago. Been spreading ever since. Way things are going, won’t be a chestnut tree left in the USA or the CSA in a few years’ time. Damnyankees let all sort of foreign things into their country.” He spat in disgust.

“Chestnut blight,” Reggie echoed. Now that Briggs mentioned it, he remembered reading something about it in the newspapers a couple of years before. “So these are chestnuts?” He wouldn’t have known it unless Briggs had told him.

“These
were
chestnuts,” Briggs corrected him now. “The Yankees got the blight, and now they’re giving it to us.” He scowled. “Chestnuts, the war—what’s the difference?”

Reggie’s stomach rumbled. It had been doing that right along, but this was a growl a bear would have been proud to claim. Reggie went through his trouser pockets. He came up with half a square of hardtack: the last of the painfully saved food he’d brought out of camp. Even more painful was breaking the fragment in two and offering Briggs a piece.

“We don’t get our hand on some more grub, we’re not going to make it out of West Virginia whether the damnyankees catch up with us or not,” Reggie said.

“You’re right.” Briggs sounded as if he hated to admit it. “We’re going to have to kill something or steal something, one or the other.”

They tramped on through the woods. Bartlett’s nostrils twitched. “That’s smoke,” he said. At first, he thought it came from Shady Spring, but they’d gone west to skirt the town, and the breeze was blowing into their faces, not from their backs. “That’s a farm up ahead somewhere,” he added.

Briggs was thinking along with him. “Lots of chances to get food from a farm.” He sniffed. “That’s not just smoke, either. Smells like they’re smoking meat—venison, or maybe ham. Hell, in these back woods, maybe even bear, for all I know.”

Reggie knew nothing about bears. The thought of there being bears in these woods hadn’t occurred to him till the Navy man mentioned it. He looked around, as if expecting to see black, shaggy shapes coming out from behind every tree. Then he sniffed again. Smelling meat after months on camp rations made him ready to fight every bear in the USA for a chance at some—or to eat one if the farmer had done the fighting for him. “Let’s follow our noses,” he said.

Carved out of the middle of the woods were some tiny fields full of corn and tobacco. A couple of children fed chickens near a barn. A woman bustled between that barn and the farmhouse. No man was visible. “He’s probably in the Army,” Briggs whispered as he and Bartlett stared hungrily from the edge of the forest at the hollow log mounted upright over smoldering hickory chips. From the top of the log issued the wonderful smell that had drawn them here.

“We’ll wait till dark, till they’ve all gone to bed,” Reggie said. “Then we grab it and get the hell out.”

“Liable to be a dog,” Briggs said. “Meat’s liable not to be smoked all the way through, either.”

“I don’t see any dog. I don’t hear any dog. Do you?” Bartlett asked, and Ralph Briggs shook his head. Reggie went on, “And I don’t care about the meat, either. Hell, I don’t care if it’s raw. I’ll eat it. Won’t you?” When Briggs didn’t answer, he presumed he’d won his point.

And the thievery went off better than he’d dared hope. A couple of kerosene lanterns glowed inside the farmhouse for half an hour or so after sundown, then went out. That left the night to the moon and the stars and the lightning bugs. Reggie and Briggs waited for an hour, then sauntered forward. No dog went crazy. No rifle poked out of a window. They stole the hollow log and carried it away with nobody inside the farmhouse any the wiser.

It proved to be pork in there, ribs and chops and all sorts of good things. “Don’t eat too much,” Briggs warned. “You’ll make yourself sick, you were empty so long.”

He was an officer, so Reggie didn’t scream
Shut up!
at him. He ate till he was deliciously full, a feeling he hadn’t known for a long time.

Carrying the smoked pork they couldn’t finish, the two of them headed south again. They’d done a deal of traveling by night, when they could use the roads with less risk of being recognized for what they were. And every foot they gained was a foot their pursuers would have to make up in the morning.

Since the war started, the USA had punched a railroad south and east from Beckley through Shady Spring and Flat Rock to join the lines already going into eastern Virginia. “The damnyankees are throwing everything they’ve got into this war,” Reggie said, pointing to the new bright rails gleaming in the moonlight close by the road.

“I know.” Briggs’ voice was bleak. “It worries me.”

Half an hour later, a southbound train came by. Reggie and Briggs hid by the side of the road till it passed. To Bartlett’s surprise, it had only a few passenger cars; behind them came a long stretch of flatcars carrying big shapes shrouded in canvas. Each flatcar also carried a couple of armed guards.

“They’re singing something.” Now Ralph Briggs sounded indignant, as if U.S. soldiers had no business enjoying themselves. “What in blazes are they singing?”

“I know that tune,” Reggie told him. “It’s ‘Roll out the Barrel.’”

A couple of officers from the Corps of Engineers came up to the stretch of trench on the Roanoke front Chester Martin’s squad called their own. “What are you up to?” Martin called to them, curious about the strips of white cloth they were tying to pegs.

“Setting up the approach,” replied one of the engineers: a stocky, bald, bullet-headed fellow with a close-cropped fringe of gray hair above his ears and at the back of his neck. The answer didn’t tell Chester anything much, but it didn’t anger him, either; the engineer sounded like a man who knew his own business so well, he forgot other people didn’t know it at all. Martin approved of people who knew what they were doing. He’d seen too many who hadn’t the foggiest notion.

Sunshine glinted off the wire frames of Captain Orville Wyatt’s glasses. Martin worried about his captain, another competent man he didn’t want to lose: those spectacles might make him easier for a sniper to spot. Wyatt said, “Don’t joggle Lieutenant Colonel Gross’ elbow, Sergeant. This has to do with what was discussed in the briefing yesterday.”

Martin shook his head, annoyed at himself. “I’m sorry, sir. I should have figured that out.” He looked around to see how many of his men were paying attention. He hated looking dumb in front of them.

“Don’t worry about it,” Lieutenant Colonel Gross said. He seemed younger when he smiled. “This is new for everybody, and we have to work out what needs doing as we go along. The real point is, this’ll be new for the Rebs, too.” He pointed over past the U.S. barbed wire, past no-man’s-land, past the C.S. wire, to the trenches beyond.

“If everything goes according to Hoyle,” Captain Wyatt said, “we’ll take a big bite out of the Rebs’ real estate tomorrow morning.”

Specs Peterson was standing not far from Martin. He pitched his voice so the sergeant could hear but the captain couldn’t: “Yeah, and if it doesn’t work, they’re going to bury us in gunnysacks, on account of the Rebs’ll blow us all over the landscape.”

“I know,” Martin said, also quietly. “You got any better ideas, though, Specs? This duking it out in the trenches is getting us nowhere fast.”

“Hey, what are you talkin’ about, Sarge?” Paul Andersen said. “We’ve moved this front forward a good ten miles, and it hasn’t taken us two years to do it. At that rate, we ought to be in Richmond”—the corporal paused, calculating on his fingers—“oh, about twenty minutes before the Second Coming.”

Everybody laughed. Everybody pretended what Andersen had said was only funny, not the gospel truth. Specs Peterson liked an argument as well as the next guy, and wasn’t shy about arguing with his superiors, but he didn’t say boo. He just made sure he had the full load of grenades everybody was supposed to carry over the top.

Darkness fell. This sector of the front had been pretty quiet lately. Every so often, a rifle shot would ring out or somebody on one side or the other would spray the foe’s trenches with a couple of belts of machine-gun fire, but the artillery didn’t add its thunder to the hailstorm effects from both sides’ small arms. Martin knew that wouldn’t last. He rolled himself in his blanket and got what sleep he could. He wouldn’t be sleeping much tomorrow, not unless he slept forever.

At 0200, the barrage began. Martin didn’t sleep any more after that; the noise, he thought, was plenty to wake half the smashed-up dead whose corpses manured the Roanoke River valley.

Some of his men, though, did their damnedest to sleep right through the bombardment. He made sure everybody was up and ready to move. “Listen, this is my neck we’re talking about, Earnshaw,” he growled to one yawning private. “If you’re not there running alongside me, it’s liable to mean some damn Reb gets a chance to draw a bead on me he wouldn’t have had otherwise. You think I’m going to let that happen so you can sleep late, you’re crazy.”

Captain Wyatt was up and prowling the trench, too. “Where the hell are the barrels?” he said about half past three. “They were supposed to be here at 0300. Without them, we don’t have a show.”

That wasn’t quite true. The infantry, no doubt, would assault the Confederate lines with or without barrels. Without them, the foot soldiers were sure to be slaughtered. With them, they were…less sure to be slaughtered.

Two barrels came rumbling up at 0410. “Where the devil have you been?” Wyatt demanded, his voice a whiplash of anger. Chester Martin didn’t say anything. This was the first time he’d actually seen barrels. Their great slabs of steel, spied mostly in silhouette, put him in mind of a cross between a battleship and a prehistoric monster.

“Sorry, sir,” one of the men riding atop a barrel said through the unending thunder of the barrage and the flatulent snarl of the machines’ engines. “We got lost about six times in spite of the tape, and we broke down a couple times, too.”

“That’s where
Bessie McCoy
is now,” somebody else added. “The engine men said they thought they could get her running again, though.”

Martin approached the barrel. “You fellows better get inside, if that’s what you do,” he said. “You’re at the front now. The Rebs figure out you’re here, a few machine-gun bursts and you won’t be any more.”

With obvious reluctance, the soldiers climbed down off the roofs of the barrels and into their places inside the contraptions. It had to be hotter than hell in there, and stinking of gasoline fumes, too. Maybe the steel kept bullets out, but it kept other things in.

Bessie McCoy
limped into place at 0445, fifteen minutes before the attack was due to start. As twilight brightened toward dawn, Martin made out the names painted on the other barrels:
Vengeance
and
Halfmoon
, the latter with an outhouse under the word. He still didn’t know whether to be encouraged all three barrels had made it or dismayed they’d had so much trouble doing it. If
dismayed
turned out to be the right answer, he figured he’d end up dead.

At 0500 on the dot, the barrage moved deeper into the Confederate trench system, to keep the Rebels from bringing up reinforcements. Captain Wyatt blew his whistle. The barrels rumbled forward at about walking pace, treads grinding and clanking. The cannon each one of them carried at its prow sent shells into the Confederate trenches.

From across no-man’s-land, Chester Martin heard the shouts of fear and alarm the Rebs let out. Rebel rifles and machine guns opened up on the barrels. They might as well have been shooting at so many ambulatory boulders. Sedate but deadly, the barrels kept coming. They rolled through the U.S. barbed wire. They went down into shell holes and craters and came up the other side, still pounding the Rebel trenches. They flattened the Confederate barbed wire.

“Let’s go, boys!” Captain Wyatt shouted. “That Bessie, she
is
the McCoy!”

Chester Martin and his squad scrambled out of the trench and sprinted toward the Confederate lines. Only light fire came their way; most of what the Rebs had was focused on the barrels. It wasn’t doing much good, either. All three machines kept moving forward, firing not just cannon now but the machine guns on their sides, too.

Bessie McCoy
rumbled up to the foremost Rebel trench and poured enfilading fire down its length.
Vengeance
and
Halfmoon
were only a few yards behind.
Vengeance
went right over that first trench and positioned itself to enfilade the second.
Half-moon
blazed away at Confederate soldiers who were—Martin rubbed his eyes to make sure he saw straight—running for their lives.

Half a mile to the north, a couple of more barrels had forced their way into the Confederate position. Half a mile to the south, two others had done the same, though a third sat burning in the middle of no-man’s-land.

Martin noticed the other barrels only peripherally. He scrambled over the parapet and leaped down into the Confederate trenches. A lot of men in butternut lay in them, some moving, some not. He threw a grenade over the top into a traverse and then dashed into it, ready to shoot or bayonet whomever he’d stunned.

“Don’t kill us, Yank!” several men cried at once. They threw down their rifles and threw up their hands. “We give up!”

“Go on back there, then,” Martin growled, pointing toward the U.S. position from which he’d come. The new-caught prisoners babbled thanks and obeyed.

“What are those horrible things?” one of them asked, pointing toward the barrels, which were systematically raking trench line after trench line, concentrating most of all on machine-gun nests.