The Great War: Breakthroughs Read online

  “I’ll tell you something else you may find funny,” Sherrard said. Morrell raised a questioning eyebrow. In a half-shamefaced way, the colonel who’d served on the General Staff went on, “God damn me to hell if I haven’t started thinking he’s right, too. Which also means I think you may be right, Lieutenant Colonel. As you put it, if we’ve got a big stick, we ought to clout the bastards with it.”

  “Really, sir?” Morrell knew he was repeating himself again, but couldn’t help it. That eyebrow—both eyebrows—went up again, this time in astonishment. “Have you let the War Department know you’ve changed your mind?”

  “I’ve sent them more memoranda than you can shake a stick at.” Sherrard sighed. “Have you ever dropped a small stone off a tall cliff and waited for the sound it makes when it hits the ground to come back to your ears?”

  “Yes, sir,” Morrell replied. “The sound never comes back, not if it’s small enough and the cliff is high enough.” He paused. “Dealing with the War Department can be a lot like that.”

  “Ain’t it the truth?” The colloquialism from Sherrard surprised Morrell yet again. “That’s one of the reasons I’ve stayed in the field since I shepherded the first barrels down to this front. The cliff isn’t so tall here in the field. There’s less space between me and the enemy, if you know what I mean.”

  “Oh, yes, sir, I know exactly what you mean,” Morrell answered. “Sometimes I think our boys in the field have worse enemies in Philadelphia than they do in Richmond.”

  Again, he wished he hadn’t been so forthright. Again, it was too late. He waited to see how Colonel Sherrard would respond. Sherrard didn’t show much; he got the distinct impression Sherrard seldom showed much. After a thoughtful pause, the colonel said, “Well, you were crazy enough to want to serve in barrels, Lieutenant Colonel. Now that you’re here, don’t you think you ought to go for a ride in one so you can see how big a mistake you made?”

  “Yes, sir!” Morrell said enthusiastically. “I hear it’s quite something.”

  “So it is. A kick in the teeth is quite something, too.” Sherrard’s voice was dry. “General Custer calls it the biggest sock-dologer in the history of the world. My father, God rest his soul, used to use that word. I think it fits here. Come on. You will, too.”

  They left the tent and squelched through the mud to a barrel Sherrard happened to know was in running order. Along the way, the colonel commandeered a driver and a couple of engineers. “In case it doesn’t feel like staying in running order,” Sherrard explained. “In a real fight, we’d have two men on each machine gun—they’re from the infantry—and two artillerymen at the cannon.”

  With the barrel commander, that made a crew of eighteen, from three different branches of the Army. “Not efficient,” Morrell remarked.

  “I know that, too—now,” Sherrard said. “Here we are.” He stopped in front of a barrel done up in camouflage paint except for a fierce eagle’s head on the side and the name or motto Remembrance above it. One of the hatches was open. “Climb on up into the cupola,” Sherrard told Morrell. “You will be the commander. Drive around a square and come back here.”

  Morrell scrambled up into the small metal box atop the barrel. He took the seat forward and to the right, the one unencumbered by controls. The driver sat in the other one. When the engineers shouted that they were ready, the driver stabbed the red button of the electric starter. The engines grumbled, then came to roaring life. The driver yelled something to Morrell. He had no idea what.

  The din was terrific, incredible. If the engines had mufflers, they didn’t work. Exhaust fumes promptly filled the barrel. Morrell coughed. His eyes smarted. What combat would be like in here, with the machine guns and cannon blazing away, adding their racket and the stink of burnt smokeless powder, he didn’t want to think. Hell seemed a reasonable first approximation.

  After checking to make sure both reverse levers behind his seat were in the forward position, the driver got the barrel moving by stepping on the clutches to both engines, putting the beast in gear, and opening the throttle on the steering wheel. He knew the course he was supposed to steer. If he hadn’t, hand signals would have been the only way to give it to him; he couldn’t have heard shouted orders. The barrel rode as if its springs—if it had any—were made out of rocks. Morrell bit his tongue twice and his lower lip once. With the window slits open, he could see a little. With them closed, he could see next to nothing.

  A cough. A groan. A wheeze. Silence. Into it, the driver said, “We’re back, sir. What do you think?”

  Get me the devil out of here sprang to mind. Morrell suppressed it. He had, after all, volunteered for this. He said, “We need better controls and signals in the barrel.” The driver nodded agreement. Only a maniac would have disagreed. On the other hand, only a maniac would have wanted to climb into a barrel in the first place.

  For the first time since the summer of 1914, the Army of Northern Virginia was fighting in northern Virginia, not in Pennsylvania or Maryland. These days, instead of threatening Philadelphia, the fighting force whose ferocious onslaught had brought the Confederacy more glory than any other was reduced to defending the state for which it was named against the endless grinding pressure of the U.S. Army.

  Sergeant Jake Featherston had his battery of the First Richmond Howitzers well positioned just in front of the little town of Round Hill, about fifteen miles south of the Potomac. The hill on which Round Hill sat had looked out on prosperous farming country all around. Prosperous farming country still lay to the south. To the north lay the infernal landscape of war: shell holes and trenches and barbed wire in great thick rusting belts and shattered trees.

  A scrawny, fiercely intent man, Featherston stalked from one of the half-dozen quick-firing three-inch guns—copies of the famous French 75s—he commanded. Every other battery commander in the regiment was a lieutenant or captain. As far as Jake knew, every other battery commander in the C.S. Army was a lieutenant or captain. He’d die a sergeant, even if he died at the age of 109.

  “Bastards,” he muttered under his breath as he relentlessly checked guns and carriages and limbers and stored ammunition and horses and men. “Fucking bastards.” He’d warned against Captain Jeb Stuart III’s Negro body servant. His former superior had protected the colored man, whose main color turned out to be Red. The War Department had never forgiven Jake for being right. Now that Stuart had thrown his life away in battle to atone for the disgrace, the War Department never would, not when Jeb Stuart, Jr., Jeb III’s father, sat behind a Richmond desk with a general’s wreathed stars on his collar.

  Featherston had taken command of the battery when Jeb Stuart III died. He’d kept it because he was obviously better at the job than the officers who led the rest of the batteries in the regiment. But was that enough to get the stripes off his sleeve and a bar, or two, or three, on his collar? He spat in the mud. Not likely.

  He went back to his own gun, the one whose crew he’d led since the First Richmond Howitzers got word of the declaration of war and started throwing shells across the Potomac into Washington, D.C. It was the same gun only in the sense that George Washington’s axe was the same axe after four new handles and three new heads: it had gone through several barrels, a new breech block, and even a new elevation screw. He didn’t care. It was his.

  All the men who served it were new except for him, too. A devastating Yankee barrage up in Pennsylvania had killed or maimed everybody in the original crew but him. Nobody here was green, though, not any more. The loader, the gun layers, the shell heavers had all had plenty of time to get good at what they did—plenty of time and the not so occasional prod of the rough side of Jake’s tongue.

  Michael Scott, the loader, looked up from a cigarette he was rolling. “How’s it going, Sarge?” he asked.

  “It ain’t ever gonna be what you call great,” Featherston answered. Even in his own ears, he sounded harsh and uncultured. That was yet another reason he hadn’t been promoted: he sounded l
ike a man whose father had been an overseer till the CSA manumitted its Negroes. A proper officer, now, had an accent almost as fancy as an Englishman’s. That’s what the War Department thinks, anyway. He scowled. Far as they’re concerned, how a man sounds is more important than how he acts. Bastards.

  Scott got the cigarette rolled and struck a match. He’d been a fresh-faced kid when he came into the battery. He wasn’t a fresh-faced kid any more; he had hollow eyes and sallow cheeks and he hadn’t shaved for a couple of days. Pointing north, he said, “Looks like the damnyankees are building up for another go at us.”

  Featherston looked in that direction, too. “I see what you mean,” he said slowly. He couldn’t see as much as he would have liked, not without the fancy field glasses that were in such chronically short supply in the C.S. Army. But the naked eye was plenty to catch the bubble and stir behind the Yankee lines. Something was going on, sure as hell.

  Scott sucked in smoke. The inhalation made him look even more gaunt than he really was. “Heard anything?” he asked.

  “Nary a word.” Featherston shook his head. “You got to understand, they ain’t gonna tell me first no matter what. Only way I hear about it first is if there’s shit on the end they give me to grab.”

  “Yeah, Sarge, I know about that,” Scott allowed. The whole battery knew about that. “Still and all, though, you’ve got that pal over in Intelligence, so I was just wondering if he’d said anything.”

  “Nary a word,” Jake repeated. “And Major Potter isn’t a pal—not exactly, anyhow.” As far as he could see, the only thing he and the bespectacled major had in common was an unbounded contempt for the bluebloods who, because of who their grandfathers had been, got higher rank and a bigger arena in which to display their blunders than they deserved.

  “All right.” The loader eased off. The whole battery also knew not to get Featherston started, or he was liable to go on for hours. Scott looked around. “What worries me is that it doesn’t look like we’re building up to match ’em. Sure, the defense has an advantage, but still—”

  “Yeah.” Featherston’s voice was rough. “We kill two damnyankees for every one of us they get, that’s bully, but if they send three or four at us for every one we’ve got holdin’ ’em back, sooner or later they run us out of our position.”

  “That’s the truth,” Scott said. “They got more o’ those damn barrels than we do, too, and they scare the infantry fit to shit themselves.”

  “Wish I could see some barrels over yonder,” Jake said. “If I could see ’em, we could try hittin’ ’em, or, if we couldn’t reach, we could send word back to division HQ and let the big guns have a go at ’em.” He spat again, then asked, “Your gas helmet in good shape?”

  “Sure as hell is.” Scott slapped the ugly hood of gas-proofed canvas he wore on his left hip. “Yankees fight dirty as the devil, you ask me, throwing gas shells at us when they start a barrage and making us fight while we’re wearing these goddamn things.”

  “I ain’t gonna argue with you, on account of I reckon you’re right,” Jake said. “ ’Course, now that they went and thought of it for us, we do the same to them every chance we get. If we had any brains back there in Richmond, we’d’ve figured it out for our own selves, but you look at the way this here war’s been run and you’ll see what a sorry hope that is.”

  He would have gone on—the idiocy of the War Department roused him to repeated furious tirades—but the sound of marching men heading north up the dirt road from Round Hill toward the front made him break off and look back over his shoulder. Michael Scott looked up toward the crest of the hill, too, relief on his face. “They are giving the line some reinforcements,” the loader said. “I thank you, Jesus; I’ll sing hallelujah come Sunday.”

  Over the hill and down toward the guns of the battery came the head of the column. Jake started to look away; he’d seen any number of infantry columns moving up toward the battle line. Here, though, his head snapped back toward the oncoming soldiers. He stared and stared.

  That the troops were new and raw, that their uniforms were a fresh butternut as yet clean, as yet unfaded and unwrinkled from too many washings in harsh soap and too many delousings that didn’t work—that didn’t matter. He’d seen raw troops before, and knew the edges would rub off in a hurry. But these men, all save their officers and noncoms, had skins darker than their uniforms: some coffee with cream, some coffee without, some almost the black of midnight or a black cat.

  On they tramped, tin hats on their heads, Tredegars on their shoulders, packs on their backs, gas helmets bouncing against their hipbones. They were big, rugged men, and marched well. A couple of them turned their heads for a better look at Featherston’s field gun. Noncoms screamed abuse at them, the same sort of abuse they would have screamed at raw white troops foolish enough to turn their heads without permission.

  Only when the whole regiment had marched past could Jake bring himself to speak. Even then, he mustered nothing more than a whisper hoarse with anger and disbelief: “Jesus God, we’re going to have nigger infantry in front of us? What in blazes are they gonna do the first time a barrel comes at ’em? Shit on a plate, barrels scare white troops. Niggers’ll run so fast, they’ll leave their shadows behind, and then there won’t be nothin’ between the barrels and us.”

  “I don’t know, Sarge,” Scott said. “I don’t reckon they would’ve put ’em in the line if they didn’t reckon they’d get some fighting out of ’em.”

  “I don’t reckon they would’ve put ’em in the line if they had any white men they could use instead,” Jake retorted, to which his loader gave a rueful nod. He went on, “Oh, some of ’em’ll fight—I expect you’re right about that. Some of ’em, not so long ago, they was fightin’ under red flags. So yeah, they’ll fight. Only question is, whose side will they fight on?”

  “Do you reckon the Yankees want those black sons of bitches any more’n we do?” Scott asked.

  That gave Featherston pause, but not for long. “Anything that’ll take us down a peg’ll be fine by the Yanks, I expect,” he answered. “If we’d known it’d come down to this, we never would’ve gotten into the war in the first place, I reckon. After it’s done, those niggers’ll have the right to vote, I tell you. Did you ever imagine, in all your born days, that niggers in the Confederate States of America would have the right to vote?”

  “No, Sarge, never once,” Scott said. “War’s torn everything to hell.”

  “The war,” Featherston agreed. “The war, and the boneheads down in Richmond running the war. Oh, and the niggers, too—talk about tearing things to hell, when they rose up, they almost tore the CSA to hell. And now the boneheads in Richmond are putting rifles in their hands and saying, ‘Yeah, you’re as good as white men. Why the hell not?’ Well, there’ll be a reckoning for that, too.” He sounded eerily certain. “You mark my words—there’ll be a reckoning for that, too.”

  Shivering in a trench outside Jonesboro, Arkansas, a U.S. soldier grumbled, “Where in the goddamn hell did I leave my gloves?”

  “Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord in vain, Groome,” Sergeant Gordon McSweeney said sharply.

  “Uh, right, Sergeant,” Groome answered. “Sorry, Sergeant.” He was eighteen, a big, tough, beef-fed kid from the plains of Nebraska. Rank, though, had very little to do with why he backed down from McSweeney.

  “You need to make your peace with God, not with me,” McSweeney answered, his voice still stern. Groome nodded hastily, placatingly. Had he been a dog, he would have rolled over on his back to expose his throat and belly.

  With a grunt, McSweeney went back to making his flamethrower’s trigger mechanism more sensitive. That he took a flamethrower into combat was not the reason he got instant, unthinking obedience from the soldiers in his section. That he was the sort of man who carried a flamethrower into battle with not a thought in his mind but the harm he could wreak on his enemies had more to do with it.

  He scowled as he worked. His fa
ce was made for scowling, being almost entirely vertical lines: a narrow rectangle with a hard chin, a long nose, and a vertical crease between pale eyes that didn’t seem to blink as often as they should. His hands, large and knobby-knuckled, manipulated a small screwdriver with surprising delicacy.

  A shadow fell on the disassembled trigger mechanism. He looked up with a deeper scowl—who presumed to stand in his light? When he saw Captain Schneider, he relaxed. The company commander could do as he pleased, at least when it came to Gordon McSweeney. “Sir?” McSweeney asked, and started to get to his feet.

  “As you were,” Schneider said.

  McSweeney obediently checked himself. As far as he was concerned, Captain Schneider was too lenient with all the men in his company, McSweeney himself included. But the captain had ordered him not to come to attention, and so he did not.

  “Division headquarters wants some captured Rebs tonight for interrogation,” Schneider said.

  “Yes, sir, I’ll go,” McSweeney said at once.

  Captain Schneider frowned. “I didn’t mean you in particular, Sergeant,” he said. “I meant for you to tell off a party to go into no-man’s-land and come back with prisoners.”

  “Sir, I’ll go,” McSweeney repeated. “The men Gideon took with him to fight the Midianites chose themselves. I shall do the same. The Lord will protect me—or, if it be His will that I fall here, I shall go on to my glory, for I know in my heart that I am numbered among the elect.” He was every bit as uncompromisingly Presbyterian as his features suggested.

  Schneider’s frown did not go away. “I don’t want to lose you, Sergeant,” he said. “You’re too valuable a fighting man. And your courage is not in question. It hardly could be, with that on your chest.”

  Even on his combat uniform, McSweeney wore the small, white-starred blue ribbon of the Congressional Medal of Honor. He’d earned it the year before, destroying a Confederate barrel with his flamethrower and then slaying Rebel foot soldiers who’d sought to follow the barrel into the U.S. lines. “Sir,” he said now, “snaking out prisoners is a job I’m better suited for than anyone else in the company. Why endanger somebody else when I can do it right?”