The Grapple

by Harry Turtledove

  He’d done what he could to get ready for air attack. He’d deployed the antiaircraft guns attached to the brigade and the heavy machine guns. He and his men weren’t caught flatfooted when the U.S. raiders struck them. Things could have been worse. As it worked out, they were only bad. Bad proved grim enough.

  The damnyankees didn’t use Asskickers or their equivalents. They just mounted bomb racks under fighters, which turned their explosives loose from not much above treetop height. They hit the trucks on the road and those to either side of it. Fireballs blossomed. Chunks of blazing metal hurtled through the air. So did chunks of blazing flesh.

  Like most, Potter’s command car carried a pintle-mounted machine gun. He banged away at the enemy airplanes. He’d gone through the whole Great War without firing a weapon at U.S. forces. Now he could hit back. The shattering noise and the stream of hot brass spitting from the breech filled him with fierce, primitive joy. Whether he hurt the damnyankees any was a different question. The unsleeping rational part of his brain knew that, even as the animal inside him whooped and squeezed the triggers and played the stream of tracers like a hose.

  A fighter slammed into the ground not far away. That fireball dwarfed the ones the trucks sent up. Splashes of burning gasoline caught running soldiers. They dropped and writhed and rolled, screaming their torment all but unheard.

  After the fighters unloaded their bombs, they came back to strafe the stalled column. The Confederates had invented the tactic two years earlier. Potter could have done without the flattery of U.S. imitation. He got more chances to use his machine gun. And the fighters, armed with four machine guns and two cannon each, got more chances to turn their weapons on him.

  They badly outgunned him. They were making better than 300 miles an hour, while he was a sitting duck. The wonder wasn’t that they kept missing him. The wonder was that all their weaponry didn’t chew him to red rags.

  Bullets cracked past his head. When bullets cracked, they came too damn close. Others kicked up puffs of dust from the dirt a few feet to the left of the command car, and then, a moment later, from the dirt a few feet to its right. He went on firing. Hardly even knowing he was doing it, he changed belts on the machine gun when the first one ran dry.

  After what had to be the longest ten or fifteen minutes of his life, he ran out of targets. The U.S. fighters roared off toward the west. He looked around to see what they’d done—and discovered that what had been a brigade was no more than a shattered mess. Not all the trucks were on fire, but about one in three was. Some of the burning trucks carried ammunition, which started cooking off. Flying rounds would cause more casualties, and likely set more fires, too.

  The stinks of cordite and burning fuel and burning rubber and burning meat filled the air. So did the cheerful pop-pop-pop! of exploding cartridges and the not so cheerful screams and moans of wounded men. Officers and noncoms shouted commands, trying to bring order out of chaos by sheer force of will. Order did not want to be born; chaos wasn’t ready to die.

  Potter’s driver looked around and summed things up in a handful of words: “Jesus, what a fucking mess!”

  “Now that you mention it, yes.” Potter sounded dazed, even to himself. He thought he’d earned the right. He’d had reports of what air strikes could do to troops. He’d read them carefully. He’d imagined he understood them. So much for that, went through his mind. The difference between reading about an air strike and going through one was about like the difference between reading about love and making love.

  “You did good, sir,” his driver said. “That took balls, standing up there and firing on those bastards. A lot of guys would’ve run for the trees fast as they could go.”

  Not far from the command car lay the corpse of a soldier who’d been running for the trees when a cannon round caught him in the middle of the back. The corpse was in two pieces—top half and bottom half. They lay several feet apart. “Running’s not guaranteed to keep you safe,” Potter said. Standing your ground and shooting back at the enemy didn’t guarantee it, either. A bomb had landed right by one of the brigade’s antiaircraft guns. The blast blew the gun itself ass over teakettle. Not much was left of the men who’d served it.

  “Can we still go forward?” the driver asked.

  “We have to,” Potter said. The question and the automatic answer helped get his brain working again. He hopped down from the command car and started adding orders of his own to the ones that came from his subordinates. Fighting fires, getting the wounded and the dead off to one side, clearing wrecked vehicles from the roadway…It all took time, time the brigade should have used to travel. They were going to be late getting where they were supposed to go.

  And they wouldn’t get there at better than two-thirds strength. The Great War was a war of attrition, a war the CSA lost. Attrition had just fallen out of the sky and jumped on his brigade. A few minutes of air strikes, and it was barely combat-worthy. It wouldn’t be able to do the things planners assumed a fresh brigade of reinforcements could do. It couldn’t come close.

  How many other Confederate units were in the same boat? And which boat was it, anyway? One that just stopped a torpedo? It sure looked that way to Clarence Potter.

  He did the best he could, praying all the while that U.S. fighter-bombers wouldn’t come back. He was agnostic leaning toward atheist, but he prayed anyhow. It can’t hurt, he thought. And enemy aircraft did stay away. The brigade, or what was left of it, got moving again. The men could still do their best…however good that turned out to be.

  Lieutenant Michael Pound was not a happy man. He’d been happy driving the Confederates from Pittsburgh back into Ohio and then down into Kentucky and Tennessee. Forcing the CSA to dance to the USA’s tune made him happy.

  Now, instead of pushing on toward Chattanooga, he and his armored platoon had to leave the front line and shift to the east. If they didn’t, the Confederates were liable to drive in the U.S. flank. If that happened, very bad things would follow. Pound could see as much. He took it as a personal affront.

  “We’ll make them pay—you see if we don’t,” he growled when his platoon stopped to rest and—at his orders—to maintain their barrels. “If they think they can sidetrack us—”

  “They’re right, aren’t they?” Sergeant Frank Blakey asked. The barrel commander had a large wrench in his hands. He was tightening the links in his barrel’s left track.

  Pound approved of a commander who could do his own maintenance. He also approved of a noncom who talked back to officers. He’d done plenty of that when he had stripes on his sleeve instead of these silly gold bars on even sillier shoulder straps. A lot of men who became officers late in their careers did their best to ape the style and ambitions of those who’d gained the privilege sooner. Not Michael Pound. He still thought like a top sergeant, and didn’t labor under the delusion that those little gold bars turned him into a little tin god.

  So he just laughed and nodded. “Yeah, they are—right this minute, anyhow. But when we get through with them, they’re going to be worse off than if they never tried this attack in the first place.”

  “How do you figure, sir?” That was Mel Scullard, his own gunner. His crew had learned even faster than the others that he didn’t get pissed off when people spoke their minds.

  “We’ve got air superiority. We’ve got more barrels than they do, and better ones now. We’ve got more artillery than they do, too, in spite of their damn rockets,” Pound answered. “If they come out and slug toe-to-toe with us, they just make themselves better targets. They’re harder to get rid of when they hang back and make us come at them. It worked like that in the Great War, and it still does.”

  Sergeant Scullard grunted. “Well, that makes sense.” He gave Pound a crooked grin. “How did you come up with it?”

  “Accidents will happen,” Pound said dryly, and everyone laughed. Pound went on, “What we have to do is, we have to clobber the Confederates for coming out in the open to bang with us, and then we
have to get back down to the real front and push on to Chattanooga.” Everything always sounded easy when he started talking about it. It sometimes didn’t turn out like that for real, but he was convinced that was never his fault.

  “We’ll put a lot of driving miles on our barrels,” Sergeant Blakey pointed out.

  “Sure.” Pound nodded. Barrels were complex machines that performed right at their limits all the time. This war’s models were less prone to breakdowns than the lumbering monsters of a generation earlier, but they still failed much more often than he wished they would. He said, “The better we take care of them while we’re on the road, the less trouble they’ll give us.”

  All the men he led nodded at that. A barrel crew that took care of its machine spent a lot more time in combat than one that let things slide. Barrels were the logical successors to horsed cavalry. Back in the old days, Pound had heard, a mounted trooper took care of his horse before he worried about himself. The same rule held good with armored units, though Pound would sooner have used a curry comb on his barrel than a screwdriver. He was old enough to remember the way horses responded when you groomed them. Barrels never would do anything like that.

  But, in an age of mechanized warfare, horsed cavalry couldn’t hope to survive. Soldiers in barrels stayed alive and hurt the enemy. That was what the game was all about.

  “Are we ready to get rolling?” Pound asked. Nobody said no. The soldiers got back into their steel shells and rumbled northeast.

  Before long, they passed a barrel whose men were busy replacing a track. “We hit a mine,” one of the soldiers in coveralls said in response to Pound’s shouted question. “Lucky this is all that happened to us.”

  “You’d better believe it,” Pound said. “Well, hurry along—we’ll need everybody we can get our hands on before long.” The other barrelman waved in agreement and returned to his backbreaking work.

  The northeast road ran from Dalton toward Pikeville, at the head of the Sequatchie Valley, where the Confederates were trying to break out. Pikeville was a county seat—a sign still standing near the edge of town so declared. All the same, the place couldn’t have held much more than 500 people before the fighting started. Michael Pound doubted it had half that many now. The locals, like most people with half an ounce of sense, didn’t want to stick around while bullets chewed up their houses and bombs and shells came down on their heads. They’d lit out for the tall timber, wherever the tall timber was—probably in the mountains to the east.

  U.S. artillery was set up south and west of Pikeville, throwing shells at the Confederates as they tried to push forward. The gun bunnies, most of them naked to the waist, nodded to Pound as he and his barrels rattled past. U.S. fighter-bombers roared past overhead. Pound smiled to hear bombs going off not too far away. The harder the enemy got hit before he made it to Pikeville, the less trouble he’d be when he finally did.

  Bomb craters said Confederate aircraft were hitting back as best they could. A burnt-out Hound Dog had crashed in a field just outside of town. The front half of the fighter was a crumpled wreck. The Confederate battle flag on the upthrust tail was as much of a grave marker as the pilot was likely to get.

  Houses on the east side of Pikeville faced the mountains from which the enemy would come. Pound’s barrel pushed its way into one of those houses—literally, knocking down the western wall and poking the gun out through a window on the east side. The other machines in his platoon deployed close by, behind fences and piles of wreckage. They weren’t the only barrels taking up positions there. If the Confederates wanted Pikeville and what lay beyond, they would have to pay.

  Pound peered out through the now glassless window, waiting. He would have been happier if the enemy never made it as far as Pikeville. If the artillery and fighter-bombers could stop Featherston’s columns in their tracks, so much the better. It would let him turn around and head back toward important fighting—fighting that led to advances into the heart of the Confederacy.

  But no such luck. Less than an hour after Pound got to Pikeville, U.S. infantrymen who’d been screening the way ahead fell back into the little town. “Up to us now, I’d say,” Pound remarked. Without the foot soldiers and the artillery and the airplanes, the Confederates would have been in Pikeville ahead of him, and probably spilling out to the west. He didn’t think about that, only about what needed doing next.

  “Front!” he called as a Confederate barrel rolling through the cornfields made itself plain.

  “Identified!” the gunner sang out. “Range just over a mile, sir.”

  “Can you hit the son of a bitch?” Pound asked.

  “Hell, yes!” Scullard sounded confident as could be, the way a good gunner should.

  “Then fire when ready.” Pound almost nagged Scullard about leading his target—at that range, the shell had a flight time of a second and a half, and the enemy barrel could move enough to make remembering it matter. But in the end he kept his mouth shut. The gunner knew what he was doing. He’d remember to lead the barrel…or if he didn’t, Pound would come down on him after he screwed up.

  The gun swung slightly. Then it roared. Michael Pound thought his head would come off. He was head and shoulders out of the turret but still in an enclosed space, and the noise was cataclysmic.

  Was it a hit or…? Smoke spurted from the enemy barrel. “Got him!” Pound yelled. “Good shot! You led him just right!” He laughed at himself. He was going to get the lesson in come hell or high water, wasn’t he?

  Other barrels opened up on the advancing Confederates. Several more enemy barrels brewed up. The longer U.S. barrelmen used the 3½-inch gun on the new models, the better they liked it. It fired a flat, fast round that could kill anything it could reach. And the improved gunsight made hits more likely. Pound wished he were shooting it himself.

  Little by little, he’d decided he might be able to do more good as an officer than he had as a noncom. Coordinating five barrel crews wasn’t the piece of cake he’d thought it was till he tried it himself. He kept shouting into the wireless, finding out what was going on with all the others and making sure they did what he wanted them to do. And he had to fight his own barrel, too. It was enough to give the one-armed paperhanger a galloping case of the hives.

  And the Confederates wanted Pikeville. They needed Pikeville. And they were doing their damnedest to take it back from the U.S. soldiers inside it. Their barrels didn’t swarm forward to be massacred in the open, the way Pound hoped they would. Instead, smoke rounds from C.S. artillery back in the mountains came down between the advancing Confederate forces and the defenders in the little town. Before long, the streamers came together in a ragged fogbank that hid most of what lay behind it.

  Out of the fogbank came…trouble. Confederate foot soldiers armed with antibarrel rockets and launching tubes ran through the smoke, flopped down behind the closest cover, and started working their way forward. U.S. machine-gun fire picked off some of them, and more of the riflemen who protected them, but they kept coming in the little rushes experienced troops used.

  Before long, rockets trailing tails of fire flew toward Pikeville. More than one U.S. barrel that had stayed too long in its original firing position got hit. Michael Pound’s platoon came away unscathed; he’d ordered the machines back to secondary firing positions in the lull the smoke screen gave them.

  A rocket slammed into the house where his barrel had been hiding. The house started to burn. Pound smiled to himself. The Confederates would think they’d killed the barrel. They might make some embarrassing mistakes if they thought their mischief-makers had done more than they really had.

  And sure enough, a few minutes later a couple of platoons of C.S. barrels charged through the thinning smoke ready to break into Pikeville or die trying. Michael Pound earnestly preferred the second alternative. He was standing in the cupola of a machine that could make his preferences felt. The leading barrels were the latest Confederate model: excellent in their own right, but half a step behi
nd his. They were out in the open. He had cover. It hardly seemed fair. But then, he didn’t want a fair fight. He wanted a fight he’d win.

  “Front!” he shouted.

  “Identified!” Sergeant Scullard continued with the ritual.

  Three shots from Pound’s barrel killed two Confederate machines, and they were the leading two. One turned into a fireball. A couple of men got out of the other barrel. Machine-gun bullets reached for them, but they might have made cover. Part of Pound hoped they did. He’d bailed out of a stricken barrel himself. He knew what it was like. They were enemies, but they were also men doing the same job he was.

  The Confederates kept coming. Another U.S. barrel set the last of theirs on fire less than a hundred yards outside of Pikeville. Several more green-gray barrels were also burning by then, some from enemy cannon fire, others from those damnable antibarrel rockets.

  But the Confederates didn’t get into the town. They didn’t get around it, either. U.S. reinforcements poured in to make sure they couldn’t. Pound was only half glad to see them. He wished they’d stayed farther south and stormed toward Chattanooga.

  Lieutenant-Colonel Jerry Dover had the ribbon for the Purple Heart. He didn’t much want it. Nobody on either side much wanted a Purple Heart, but Dover didn’t think he’d earned his. A chunk of shrapnel had torn a bloody line across his forearm. As far as he was concerned, it wasn’t worth fussing about. But the rule was that you got a medal if you bled. And so he had one.

  Not a lot of officers in the Quartermaster Corps owned a decoration that said they’d been in combat. In a way, it was handy: it made line officers—and even line noncoms—take him seriously. But the wound was so trivial, the decoration embarrassed him.

  It did when he had time to think about it, anyway. More often than not, he barely had time to breathe, let alone eat. He smoked like a chimney. As long as he kept breathing, he could do that. It didn’t keep him from doing the usual seventeen other things at the same time.