The Guns of the South Read online

  Along with all the officers and noncommissioned officers was one private: Ben Whitley of Company A. As usual, the teamster perched on his wagon. With him sat another man, a stranger, whose cap, coat, and trousers looked to be made of nothing but patches, some the color of dirt, some of grass, some of mud. Slung on the stranger’s back was a carbine of unfamiliar make.

  Excitement ran through Caudell. The cavalry had got itself new rifles the past couple of weeks. So had Major General Anderson’s infantry division, whose winter quarters were even closer to Orange Court House than those of Henry Heth’s division, of which the 47th North Carolina was a part. If half—if a tithe—of the stories about those rifles were true.

  Colonel George Faribault limped around from the far side of the wagon. He moved slowly and with the aid of a stick; he’d been wounded in the foot and in the shoulder at Gettysburg and was just back to the regiment. By his pallor, even standing was not easy for him. He said, “Gentlemen, it is as you may have guessed: our brigade and our division are next to receive the new repeater, the AK-47 they call it. Here”—he pointed to the stranger in the suit of many muddy colors—”is Mr. Benny Lang, who will show you how to operate the rifle, so you can go on and teach your men. Mr. Lang.”

  Lang jumped lightly down from the wagon. He was about five-ten, dark, and on the skinny side. His clothes bore no rank badges of any sort, but he carried himself like a soldier. “I usually get two questions at a time like this,” he said. “The first one is, why don’t you teach everyone yourself? Sorry, but we haven’t the manpower. Today, my friends and I are working with General Kirkland’s brigade: that’s you people, the 11th North Carolina, the 26th North Carolina, the 44th North Carolina, and the 52d North Carolina. Tomorrow we’ll be with General Cooke’s brigade, and so on. You’ll manage. You have to be more than stupid to screw up an AK-47. You have to be an idiot, and even then it’s not easy.”

  Listening to him, Caudell found himself frowning. Camp rumor said these fellows in the funny clothes were not merely from North Carolina but from his own home county, Nash. Lang didn’t sound like a Carolina man, though, or like any kind of Southerner. He didn’t sound like a Yankee, either; in the past two years, Caudell had heard plenty of Yankee accents. The first sergeant kept listening:

  “The other question I hear is, why bother trying anything new when we’re happy with our regular rifles? I’d sooner show you why than tell you. Who’s your best chap with Springfield or Enfield or whatever you use?”

  All eyes swung to the regimental ordnance sergeant. He was a polite, soft-spoken man; he looked around to see if anyone else would volunteer. When no one did, he took a step forward out of line. “Reckon I am, sir. George Hines.”

  “Very good,” Lang said. “Would you be so kind as to fetch your weapon and ammunition for it? And while he’s doing that, Private Whitley, why don’t you move the wagon so we don’t frighten the horses?”

  “Sure will.” Whitley drove the team perhaps fifty feet, then jumped down and walked back over to watch what was going on.

  Ordnance Sergeant Hines returned a minute or so later, rifle musket on his shoulder. He carried the piece like a part of him, as befit any man who wore a star in the angle of his sergeant’s stripes. Benny Lang pointed to a tall bank of earth that faced away from the soldiers’ huts. “Is that what you use for target practice?”

  “Yes, sir, it is,” Hines answered.

  Lang trotted over, pinned a circular paper target to the bank. He trotted back to the group, then said, “Ordnance Sergeant Hines, why don’t you put a couple of bullets in that circle for us, fast as you can load and fire?”

  “I’ll do that,” Hines said, while the men who stood between him and the target moved hastily out of the way.

  Watching the ordnance sergeant handle his rifle, Nate Caudell thought, was like being back on the target range at Camp Mangum outside of Raleigh, hearing the command, “Load in nine times: load!” Hines did everything perfectly, smoothly, just as the manual said he should. To load, he held the rifle upright between his feet, with the muzzle in his left hand and with his right already going to the cartridge box he wore at his belt.

  Caudell imagined the invisible drillmaster barking, “Handle cartridge!” Hines brought the paper cartridge from the box to his mouth, bit off the end, poured the powder down the muzzle of his piece, and put the Minié ball in the muzzle. The bluntly. pointed bullet was about the size of the last joint of a man’s finger, with three grooves around its hollow base which expanded to fill the grooves on the inside of the rifle barrel.

  At the remembered command of “Draw rammer!” the long piece of iron emerged from its place under the rifle barrel. Next in the series was “Ram,” which the ordnance sergeant did with a couple of sharp strokes before returning the ramrod to its tube. At “Prime,” he half-cocked the hammer with his right thumb, then took out a copper percussion cap and put it on the nipple.

  The next four steps went in quick sequence. “Shoulder” brought the weapon up. At “Ready” it went down again for a moment, while Hines took the proper stance. Then up it came once more, with his thumb fully cocking the hammer. “Aim” had him peering down the sights, his forefinger set on the trigger. “Fire,” and the rifle roared and bucked against his shoulder.

  He set the butt end of the piece on the ground, repeated the process without a single changed motion. He fired again. Another cloud of fireworks-smelling smoke spurted from his rifle. The two shots were less than half a minute apart. He scrubbed at the black powder stain on his chin with his sleeve, then turned with quiet pride to face Lang. “Anything else, sir?”

  “No, Ordnance Sergeant. You’re as good with a rifle musket as any man I’ve seen. However—” Lang brought up his own rifle, blazed away at the white paper target. The sharp staccato bark, repeated again and again and again, was like nothing Caudell had ever heard. Silence fell again in less time than Hines had needed to fire twice. Lang said, “That was thirty rounds. If I had this weapon and the ordnance sergeant that one, whose chances would you gentlemen like better?”

  “Goddam,” somebody behind Caudell said softly, stretching the word out into three syllables. It seemed as good an answer as any, and better than most.

  Benny Lang drove the point home anyhow: “If you had this weapon and the Federals that one, whose chances would you gentlemen like?”

  For a long moment, no one replied. No one needed to. Privates came dashing onto the parade ground, drawn as if by magnets to learn what sort of rifle had fired like that. Then somebody cut loose with a rebel yell. In an instant, the shrill, hair-raising cry rose from every throat.

  Caudell yelled with the rest. Like most of them, he had come back from Pickett’s charge. Far too many of their one-time comrades hadn’t, not in the face of the barrage the Federals poured down on them. He was all in favor of having the firepower on his side for a change.

  Colonel Faribault waved the private soldiers off the drill field. “Your turn will come,” he promised. The men withdrew, but reluctantly.

  While that was going on, Benny Lang walked over to the wagon, lowered the tailgate, and began taking out repeaters like the one he had reslung. Nate Caudell’s palms itched to get hold of one. Lang said, “I have two dozen rifles here. Why don’t you men form by companies, two groups to a company, and Private Whitley and I will pass them out so I can show you what you need to know.”

  “A few minutes of milling about followed, as men joined with others from their units. Caudell and his messmates—Sergeants Powell, High, Daniel, and Eure—naturally gravitated together. That left the Invincibles’ two corporals who were present for duty grouped with Captain Lewis and his pair of lieutenants. “It’s all right,” Lewis said. “We’re all new recruits at this business.”

  ““Here you go, First Sergeant.” Ben Whitley handed Caudell a repeater. He held it in both hands, marveling at how light it was compared to the Springfield that hung from pegs on the wall back in his cabin. He slung it as Lang h
ad done. It seemed to weigh next to nothing on his shoulder. Toting this kind of rifle, a man might march forever before he got sore.

  “Let me have a turn with it, Nate,” Edwin Powell said. With a twinge of regret, Caudell passed him the carbine. He brought it up to firing position, looked down the barrel. “Fancy kind of sight,” he remarked. His grin turned rueful. “Maybe I can nail me a Yankee or two without get tin’ hit my own self.”

  “Goin’ up to the firin’ line without your ‘shoot me’ sign’d probably be a good idea, too, Edwin,” Dempsey Eure said. The sergeants all laughed. So far as anybody knew, Powell was the only man in the regiment who’d been wounded at three different fights.

  Ben Whitley came by again a few minutes later. This time, he gave Caudell a curved, black-painted metal object. Caudell had no idea what it was until he turned it and saw that it held brass cartridges. “Talk about your fancy now, Edwin,” he said, handing it on to Powell. “This looks to beat Millie balls all hollow.”

  “Sure does, if there’s enough of these here bullets so as we don’t run out halfway through a battle,” Powell answered—anybody who’d been shot three times developed a certain concern about such things.

  “Does every group have an AK-47 and a banana clip?” Lang asked. He waited to see if anyone would say no. When no one did, he continued: “Turn your weapon upside down. In front of your trigger guard, you’ll see a catch. It holds the clip in place.” He pointed to it on his own carbine. “Everyone finger that catch. Pass your weapon back and forth. Everyone needs to put hands on it, not just watch me.”

  When the AK-47 came back to him, Caudell obediently fingered the catch. Lang had the air of a man who’d taught this lesson many times and knew it backwards and forwards. As a teacher himself, Caudell recognized the signs.

  The man in the patchwork-looking clothes went on, “Now everyone take turns clicking the clip into place and freeing it. The curved end goes toward the muzzle. Go ahead, try it a few times.” Caudell inserted the clip, released the catch, took it away. Lang said, “This is one place where you want to be careful. Warn your other ranks about it, too. If the lips of the magazine are bent, or if you get dirt in there, it won’t feed rounds properly. In combat, that could prove embarrassing.”

  He let out a dry chuckle. The laughs that rose in answer were grim. A rifle that wouldn’t shoot hundreds of rounds a minute was less use than one that would shoot two or three.

  In the group next to Caudell, his captain stuck up his hand. “Mr. Lang?”

  “Yes, Captain, ah—?”

  “I’m George Lewis, sir. What do we do if the lips of this—banana clip, you called it?—somehow do get bent? I’ve been shot once, sir”—he was only recently back to the regiment himself—”and I don’t care a damn to be, ah, embarrassed again.”

  “Don’t blame you a bit, Captain. The obvious answer is, switch to a fresh clip. If you haven’t but one good one left, you can load cartridges into it one at a time, in two staggered rows, like this. As I said when I fired, the clip holds thirty rounds.” He pulled a clip and some loose cartridges from his haversack and demonstrated. “We’ll come back to that later. You’ll all have a chance to do it. Now, though, let whoever’s holding the gun put that magazine in place.”

  Caudell was holding the AK-47. He carefully worked the banana clip into position, listened for the click that showed it was where it belonged. “Good,” Lang said. “Now you’re ready to chamber your first round. Here, pull this handle all the way back.” Again, he demonstrated. Caudell followed suit. The action worked with a resistant smoothness that was unlike anything he had ever felt before.

  “Very good once more,” Lang said. “All of you with rifles come forward and form a firing line. Take aim at your target and fire.” Caudell pulled the trigger. Nothing happened. No one else’s carbine went off, either. The instructor chuckled. “No, they’re not defective. Look at the short black lever under the handle you just pulled. See how it’s parallel to the muzzle. That little lever is called the change lever. When it’s in the top position, it’s on safety, and the weapon can’t fire. That’s how you’ll carry it on march, to avoid accidents. Now move it down two positions—make sure it’s two, mind—then aim and fire again.”

  Caudell peered down the sights. They seemed close together; he was used to a longer weapon. He squeezed the trigger. The rifle barked and spat out a cartridge case. Compared to what he was used to, the kick was light. “Lordy,” someone halfway down the line exclaimed, “I could fire this piece right off my nose.” The kick wasn’t that light, but it wasn’t far away, either.

  “Fire another round,” Lang said. “You don’t have to do anything but pull the trigger again.” Caudell pulled. The repeater fired. Intellectually, he had expected it would. Intellectually expecting something, though, was different from having it happen. The chorus of whistles and low-voiced exclamations of wonder that went up from the firing line showed he was not alone.

  “Thirty rounds to this thing?” somebody said. “Hell, just load it on Sunday and shoot it all week long.”

  Lang said, “Each time you fire, the spring in the magazine pushes up another round, so you have one in the chamber again. Take off the magazine, why don’t you, then fire that last round to empty the weapon and pass it to someone in your group so he can have his three practice rounds.”

  Caudell moved the lever up, thumbed the catch that held the magazine where it belonged. When it separated from the carbine, he did not know what to do with it, for a moment. Finally he thrust it inside the front of his trousers. He aimed the weapon, felt the light jolt of its kick when he fired.

  “My turn now,” Allison High said, tapping him on the shoulder.

  High was half a dozen years younger than Caudell, two inches taller, and several inches wider through the chest. Not only that, it was his turn. Even so, Caudell said, “I don’t want to give it to you, Allison. I want to keep it to myself.”

  “It ain’t your wife, Nate. It’s only a gun,” High said reasonably. “ ‘Sides, from what this Lang feller’s been sayin’, we’ll each get one all our own ‘fore long.”

  A little embarrassed, Caudell surrendered the rifle and the banana clip. High clicked the magazine back into place. The sound reminded Caudell of a faithless lover’s laugh as she slipped into the arms of someone new. He laughed, too, at himself.

  Benny Lang took the new firing line through the drill of working the change lever, chambering a round, and firing the rifle. The instructor had the knack of repeating his lessons without sounding bored. Caudell listened just as hard without the carbine in his hand as he had when he held it. Soon enough, he’d be teaching privates. He wanted to make sure he could stay ahead of them.

  Lang kept at it until everyone had had a turn shooting an AK-47. Then he said, “This weapon can do one other thing I haven’t shown you yet. When you move the change lever all the way down instead of to the middle position, this is what happens.” He stuck a fresh clip in the repeater, turned toward the target circle, and blasted away. He went through the whole magazine almost before Caudell could draw in a startled breath.

  “Good God almighty,” Rufus Daniel said, peering in awe at the brass cartridge cases scattered around Lang’s feet “Why didn’t he show us that in the first place?”

  He was not the only one to raise the question; quite a few shouted it. Caudell kept quiet. By now, he was willing to assume Lang knew what he was doing.

  The weapons instructor stayed perfectly possessed. He said, “I didn’t show you that earlier because it wastes ammunition and because the weapon isn’t accurate past a few meters—yards—on full automatic. You can only carry so many rounds. If you shoot them all off in the first five minutes of a battle; what will you do once they’re gone? Think hard on that, gentlemen, and drill it into your private soldiers. This weapon requires fire discipline—requires it, I say again.”

  He paused to let the point sink in. Then he grinned. It made him look like a boy. When he was se
rious, his thin, sallow features showed all his years, which had to be as many as Caudell’s own thirty-four. He said, “Now we’ve done the exciting things with the weapon. Time to get on to the boring details that will keep it working and you alive—cleaning and such.”

  A groan rose from his audience, the sort of groan Caudell was used to hearing when he started talking about subtracting fractions. Benny Lang grinned again. He went on, “I warned you it wasn’t glamorous. We’ll get on with it Just the same. Watch me, please.”

  He held up his repeater so everyone could see it.” Look here at the top of the weapon, all the way back toward you from the sight. There at the end of the metal part is a little knob. It’s called the recoil spring guide. Do you see it?” Edwin Powell had the rifle in Caudell’s group. Caudell looked it over with his fellow sergeants. Sure enough, the knob was there.

  Lang waited until he saw everyone had found it. “Now,” he said, “every chap with a weapon, push in on that knob.” Powell pushed, a little hesitantly. Caudell didn’t blame him for being cautious. After all the marvels the AK-47 had displayed, he would not have been surprised to find that pushing that knob made it sing a chorus of “The Bonnie Blue Flag.” Nothing so melodramatic happened. Lang was also pushing the knob on his repeater; as he did so, he went on, “Lift up the receiver cover and take it off the receiver.”

  More clumsily, his students imitated him. Caudell peered curiously into the works of the weapon thus revealed. “Never saw a rifle with so many guts,” Dempsey Eure observed.

  “I never saw a rifle with guts at all,” Caudell said, to which the other sergeants nodded. A rifle was a barrel and a lock and a stock, plus such oddments as sight and ramrod and bayonet. It had no room for guts. But this one did. Caudell wondered what the unschooled farmers who made up the bulk of the Castalia Invincibles would think of that.

  “Don’t panic,” Lang said. Caudell remembered that the instructor had seen other soldiers’ reactions to the complicated interior of an AK-47. Lang continued to take the carbine apart, lecturing all the while: “We’ve already taken off the receiver cover, right? Next thing to do is push the recoil spring guide in as far as it will go and then lift it up and take it out along with the spring itself. Then slide the bolt carrier, the bolt, and the piston back and lift them out.”