“Come on!” Jake shouted to the men of his own gun. “Pound those Yankee trenches! They’re gonna swarm like bees any minute.”
Even when he did shout, his words sounded hollow and muffled. The gas helmets Confederate soldiers were wearing these days did a better job of protecting lungs and especially eyes from poison gas than had the chemical-soaked gauze pads that had been the original line of defense against the new and horrid weapon. But wearing a helmet of rubberized burlap that covered your entire head and neck was a torment in its own right, the more so as days got ever hotter and muggier.
Jake rubbed at the glass portholes of the helmet with a scrap of rag. That didn’t help; the round windows weren’t so much dirty as they were steamy, and the steam was on the inside of the gas helmet. He could have taken off the helmet. Then the portholes would have been clean. Of course, then he would have been poisoned, but if you were going to worry about every little thing…
The Yankee barrage dropped back into the front-line trenches. “Be ready, y’all!” Featherston shouted. “They’re going to be coming out any-”
He didn’t even get the chance to finish the sentence. The U.S. soldiers swarmed out of their trenches and rushed toward the Confederate lines. The U.S. bombardment didn’t ease off till they were within fifty yards of those lines; Jake gave the enemy reluctant credit for a very sharp piece of work there.
Even before the damnyankees’ guns stopped pounding the Confederate trenches, though, men in butternut were pouring machine-gun fire into their foes. The barrage was liable to kill them, but, if they didn’t keep the U.S. soldiers out of their trenches, they were surely dead.
The battery poured shrapnel into the Yankees advancing across no-man’s-land, shortening the range as the soldiers in green-gray drew closer to the Confederate line. Shell casings lay by the breech of the gun in the same way that watermelon seeds were liable to lie by a Negro sleeping in the sun: signs of what had been consumed.
Dirt fountained up from every explosion. Men fountained up, too, or pieces of men. Others dove for the shelter of shell holes old and new. For a moment, the attack faltered. Jake had watched a lot of attacks, both Yankee and Confederate, falter: generals had a way of asking men to do more than flesh and blood could bear. “Be ready to lengthen range in a hurry,” he called to his gun crews. “When they run, we want to hurt ’em as bad as we can so they don’t try this shit again in a hurry.”
But then a cry of alarm and despair rose, not from the ranks of the Yankees but from the Confederates’ trenches. Men started running away from the front, straight toward Jake Featherston’s guns.
“Barrels!” Michael Scott shouted. With the gas helmet he had on, Jake couldn’t see his face, but he would have bet it was as pale as whey. “The damnyankees got barrels!”
There were only three of them, belching out gray-black clouds of exhaust as they lumbered forward with a clumsy deliberation that put Featherston in mind of fat men staggering out of a saloon. But, like fat men not so drunk as to fall down, they kept on coming no matter how clumsy they looked.
Machine-gun bullets struck sparks from their armored hides, but did not penetrate them. They had machine guns, too, and poured a hail of bullets of their own on Confederate positions that kept on resisting. Where those machine-gun bullets proved inadequate, they used their cannon to pound the foes into silence.
They were, Jake saw, deadly dangerous weapons of war. They were also even more deadly dangerous weapons of terror. Rumors about them had raced through the Confederate Army weeks before this, their first appearance on the front here. Seeing that they were nearly as invulnerable as rumor made them out to be, most of the men thought flight the best if not the only answer.
“That armor of theirs, it doesn’t keep shells out,” Jake said. “They’re not going any faster than a man can walk, and every damn one of ’em’s as big as a battleship. We don’t fill ’em full of holes, we don’t deserve to be in the First Richmond Howitzers.”
He felt the sting of that himself. As far as the powers that be were concerned, he didn’t deserve to he an officer in the First Richmond Howitzers. When his life lay on the line, though, pride took second place. At his shouted orders, all the guns in the battery took aim at the barrels.
Despite the encouraging words he’d used, he quickly discovered hitting a moving target with an artillery piece was anything but easy. Shell after shell exploded in front of the barrels or far beyond them. “If I was a nigger, I’d swear they were hexed,” Michael Scott growled.
“If you were a nigger-” Featherston began, and then stopped. He didn’t know how to finish the thought. He’d fought that very gun with two Negro laborers, up in Pennsylvania, after a Yankee bombardment had killed or wounded everyone in the crew but him. The fire he and Nero and Perseus delivered had helped drive back a U.S. assault on the trenches in front of the battery.
Yet the two blacks had sympathized with the Red revolt enough to desert the battery when it began, and he hadn’t seen them since. He wondered if they’d managed to get their hands on any guns and turn them against their Confederate superiors. He doubted he’d ever know.
But he was sure that, if not for the Negro uprising, the war against the USA would be going better now. Blacks were mostly back to work yes, but you couldn’t turn your back on them, not the way you had before. That made them only half as useful as they had been before the red flags started flying-and that meant the war against the United States was still feeling the effects of the uprising.
“We’ll pay ’em back one of these days,” Jake said. He had no more time in which to think about it. One of the barrels was clumsily turning so that its cannon bore on his gun. Barrels couldn’t stand hits from artillery. He’d told his gun crew as much, and hoped for the sake of his own neck he was right. He didn’t need anyone to tell him guns out in the open couldn’t do that, either.
Flame spurted from the muzzle of the cannon inside the traveling fortress. The shell was short. Fragments clattered off the splinter shield that was all the protection his gun crew had. Nothing got through. Nobody got hurt. He knew perfectly well that that was luck.
“Left half a degree!” he shouted, and the muzzle of the howitzer swung ever so slightly. He yanked the lanyard. The gun roared. So did he: “Hit! We hit the son of a bitch!”
Smoke poured out of the barrel. Hatches popped open all over the ungainly machine. Men, some carrying machine guns and belts of ammunition, dove out of the hatches and into whatever cover they could find. The gun crew raked the area where they were cowering. “I hope we kill ’em all, and I hope they take a long time dying,” Michael Scott said savagely.
At Featherston’s orders, his gunners also sent several more rounds into the burning barrel, to make sure the damnyankees couldn’t salvage it. Another barrel had stopped on the open ground between two trenches. Jake didn’t know why it had stopped. He didn’t care, either. What difference whether it had broken down or its commander was an idiot? It made an easy target. Nothing else mattered. Soon it was burning, too.
Seeing the seemingly invincible barrels going up in flames put fresh heart into the Confederate infantry that had been on the point of breaking. The men in butternut stopped running and started shooting back at the U.S. soldiers in their trenches. The last surviving barrel made a slow, awkward turn-the only kind it could make-and lumbered away from the battery of field guns that had treated its comrades so roughly.
Its tail carried a two-machine-gun sting, but Jake had never been so glad to see the back of anything. All the guns in the battery sent shells after the barrel. No one was lucky enough to score a hit on it.
“It’s going,” Featherston said. “That’s good enough for now, far as I’m concerned. If it comes back tomorrow, we’ll worry about it tomorrow. Meantime, let’s see if we can make the damnyankees sorry they ever made it into our trenches.”
Before long, the U.S. soldiers in the Confederate positions were very unhappy; the battery showered them with both g
as and shrapnel. The troops they’d driven back counterattacked aided by reinforcements hurrying across the Monocacy on bridges the Yankees hadn’t been able to knock down.
The U.S. soldiers did hold on to the first couple of lines of trenches, but that wasn’t enough of an advance to make the battery change site. Glum-looking Yankee prisoners filed back toward the Monocacy bridges, their hands high in the air.
Once the fighting had eased, officers came out to examine the burned-out hulks of the barrels. One of them was Major Clarence Potter. On his way back to Army of Northern Virginia headquarters, he stopped for a couple of minutes at Jake Featherston’s battery. “I’m given to understand we have your guns to thank for those two ruined behemoths,” he said.
“Yes, sir, that’s right.” Featherston dropped his voice. “They won’t promote me for it, but I did it.”
“Any way you could have gotten us a barrel in working order, not one that’s been through the fire?” Potter asked. He held up a hand. “That won’t get you promoted, either, Sergeant, but it will help our cause.”
“Sir, if those barrels had kept running, they’d be visiting you about now, not the other way round,” Jake answered. “We got any more men back of the line, sir? One more attack and we can push the Yankees all the way back where they started from.”
But the intelligence officer shook his head. “Lucky we were able to throw in as much as we did.” Now he was the one who spoke quietly: “If we don’t get more men in arms, be they white or black, we’ll be reduced to standing on the defensive all along the line, and that’s no way to win a war.”
“Black soldiers.” Featherston’s lip curled.
“You know they can fight,” Potter said. “You of all people should know that.” He’d heard about the use to which Jake had put Perseus and Nero.
“Yes, sir, I do know that,” Jake said. “But I’ll be damned if I think they ought to get any kind of reward for trying to overthrow the government in the middle of the war. That’s what giving ’em guns and giving ’em the vote would be. They stabbed us in the back. Somebody-anybody-does that to me, I’ll make him pay.” Some of the faces in his mind when he said that were black. Some were white and plump and prosperous, the faces of soldiers and bureaucrats in the War Department in Richmond.
XII
Jonathan Moss peered down at the battlefield in dismay. The advance through Ontario toward Toronto had been slow and brutally expensive, but it had been a continuous advance. One enemy defensive line after another had been stormed and overwhelmed. Now, for the first time, American troops were in headlong, desperate retreat. From the air, they looked like ants fleeing a small boy’s shoe.
That was, in effect, what they were. A handful of bigger shapes moved on the ground, grinding through American barbed wire and into the U.S. trenches. “Son of a bitch,” Moss said, and the wind blew his words away. “The limeys and Canucks have barrels of their own.”
They looked different from American barrels, of which he’d seen one or two. He flew lower for a better look, figuring that the more he could put in his report, the better it would be. That battalions of American infantrymen were getting much more intimately acquainted with the barrels advancing on them than he could in an aeroplane never once crossed his mind.
The lower he flew, the stranger the enemy barrels looked. They were forward-leaning rhomboids, with tracks going all the way around the outside of their hulls. He wondered why the Canucks-or was it the limeys? — had settled on such a stupid design till he saw a barrel climb almost vertically out of a trench into which it had fallen. However odd the setup seemed, it had its merits.
Instead of mounting a cannon in the nose like U.S. barrels, the ones currently pushing back the American infantry carried two, one on each side, mounted in sponsons whose design-if not the actual pieces of forged iron themselves-had been taken from the secondary armament of warships. Some of the barrels mounted machine guns in one or both sponsons instead of cannon.
“I wonder whose are better, theirs or ours,” Moss said. He had no way to tell at the moment. American barrels still being thin on the ground, and used mostly to spearhead long-planned attacks, none was anywhere nearby to challenge the machines the enemy was hurling at the poor bastards down in the trenches.
Moss dove on the barrels, machine gun blazing. He walked his tracers across one, another, a third. As far as he could tell, they did the massive machines no harm. He cursed himself for a fool. American barrels were armored to hold out enemy machine-gun fire. Whatever you could say about the Canadians and the British, they weren’t stupid. They’d do unto the USA as they’d been done by themselves.
He cursed his stupidity for another reason as well. The advancing foe loosed a storm of lead at his Martin one-decker. Ground fire had shot him down once already. Now again he heard the thrumming pop of bullets tearing through canvas.
Clang! That bullet hadn’t torn through canvas-it had hit something metal. His eyes flicked over the instrument panel. Everything looked all right. If he was lucky, the bullet had ricocheted off the side of the engine block without breaking anything. If he wasn’t lucky, he’d find out soon enough-most likely at the moment he could least afford to.
That clang, though, was an urgent reminder that he couldn’t afford to linger indefinitely down here. He pulled back on the stick. The nose of his fighting scout rose.
As Moss gained altitude, Tom Innis made his own firing run on the advancing enemy. Perhaps profiting from his flightmate’s experience, he didn’t try to shoot up the barrels. Men were always more vulnerable. Banking toward the American lines-or what had been the American lines before the attack-Moss watched men in khaki dive for cover. He whooped with glee and shook his fist in the slipstream.
But not all the British and Canadians tried to shelter themselves from Innis’ gun. They shot back at him as ferociously as they had at Moss. And a streak of smoke began streaming back from Tom’s engine cowling.
“Get out of there!” Moss shouted-uselessly, of course. “Get out of there while you can!” He looked around for Dud Dudley and Phil Eaker-they’d have to shepherd Innis back toward the aerodrome. He’d be a sitting bird if the Canadians or British pounced on his crippled bus.
He swung the one-decker back toward the west. The smoke wasn’t getting better. It was getting worse. “Climb, damn you!” Moss yelled to him, as if he could hear. The more altitude he gained, the farther he’d be able to glide when his engine quit. Moss knew all about that, the hard way.
Innis had to know it, too. But the Martin didn’t get any higher off the deck. The only reason for that, Moss figured, was that it couldn’t get any higher off the deck. And that meant his flightmate was in trouble.
Moss bared his teeth in an anguished grimace-it wasn’t just smoke streaming back from the engine now, it was flame, too. The slipstream blowing in Moss’ face made it hard for him to close his mouth again. The slipstream also blew the flames back toward Tom Innis.
He beat at them with his fist and arm. They spread faster than he could knock them down. “Land it!” Moss screamed. “Land it, God damn you!” He wasn’t cursing his friend. He was cursing fate, without a doubt the most dreadful fate any airman could face. Better to yank out your pistol and put one through your head than go down in a burning crate, as far as he was concerned.
That was especially true if you were going down in a burning crate from, say, fifteen thousand feet. If you were only a couple of hundred feet off the ground when your aeroplane caught fire, you had a chance to put it down and get the hell out before you roasted, too.
You had a chance…. The trouble was, every yard of territory here abouts was as cratered as the surface of the moon: the USA had had to blast the Canucks off the land before advancing through it, and then, even after having had it taken from them, the Canadians and the limeys had shelled it to a faretheewell to make sure the Americans didn’t enjoy owning it.
With a healthy aeroplane, Tom Innis would have had more choices. Of course
, with a healthy aeroplane, he wouldn’t have needed to land in the first place. He did the best he could, steering for a meadow that still had some green grass mingled with the brown of earth thrown up from shell blasts.
“Come on. Come on,” Moss whispered, his hand trying to move on the joystick as if he were landing his own aeroplane. Despite smoke and flames and what had to be mortal fear, Innis got the Martin down. You didn’t need much in the way of ground to kill all the speed and hop out. “Come on,” Moss said again as he buzzed overhead. “Taxi, taxi…”
The Martin nosed down into a shell hole and flipped over. It kept right on burning. Nobody came out of it. Nobody was going to come out. Moss knew that. If the fire hadn’t killed Tom, getting the engine and machine gun slammed back into his chest would have done the job.
Infantrymen in green-gray ran toward the crash. Moss and his flightmates kept circling above it. Some of the infantrymen, their faces small pale ovals, looked up at them and shook their heads. No luck. It was over.
Moss felt empty inside as he flew back toward the aerodrome. It could have been me echoed in his mind again and again. It nearly had been him, not so long before. What was the difference between the way he’d put his damaged aeroplane down and how Tom Innis had done it? Luck, nothing more. You didn’t like to think you were alive for no better reason than dumb luck. Was he an ace by dumb luck, too?
When only three returned where four had set out, the mechanics on the ground didn’t need a handbook to figure out what had happened. “What went wrong?” one of them asked quietly. Dud Dudley was the flight leader. That meant he had the delightful job of telling them.
The surviving fliers went into Shelby Pruitt’s tent. The squadron commander looked up from his paperwork. His mouth twisted. “Dammit,” he said, and then, mastering himself, “All right, give me the details.”
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