Straubing said, “Damned if I can figure out who’s playing games with us, either. Maybe it’s the Reds”-he didn’t say anything about niggers, as most whites, U.S. or C.S., would have done-“or maybe it’s Confederate diehards. Whoever it is, he’ll pay when he gets caught.”
“Yes, suh,” Cincinnatus said again. “He deserve it.” He shut up after that, not wanting to draw the U.S. lieutenant’s attention to himself. Part of that, of course, was simple self-preservation. Part of it, too, was not wanting the one white man who’d ever treated him like a human being to be disappointed in him. If the United States had produced more men like Lieutenant Straubing, Cincinnatus never would have worked to harm them. As things were…
“I’m letting everyone know,” Straubing said. “If you’ve seen anything, if you do see anything, don’t be shy.”
“I won’t, suh.” Cincinnatus wondered if he could buy his own safety by betraying the Confederate underground. The trouble was, the only man whose whereabouts he knew for certain was Conroy. No, that was one trouble. The other was that, here in Covington, Confederates and Reds worked hand in hand. He’d betray Apicius and his sons along with the men who waved the Stars and Bars. Some things cost more than they were worth.
More drivers, white and black, came dripping into the shed. Straubing spoke to them all. Cincinnatus wondered how good an idea that was. Everyone would be eyeing everyone else now. And anyone who had a grudge against anyone else would likely seize the chance to have the occupation authorities put the other fellow through the wringer.
“Let’s move out,” the lieutenant said at last. “We’ve got a cargo of shells the artillery is waiting for.”
“Weather like this, they’re going to be waiting a while longer,” said one of the drivers, a white man Cincinnatus knew only as Herk.
Lieutenant Straubing was a born optimist. A man who treated blacks and whites the same way had to be a born optimist-or a damn fool, Cincinnatus thought darkly. Even the Yankee soldier did not contradict Herk. All he said was, “We’ve got to give it our best shot.”
Out they went. Cincinnatus was glad he hadn’t had to buck the heavy crates of shells into the bed of the White truck himself. He wondered when he’d get home again: not as in at what time, but as in on what day. The front kept moving south. That meant an ever-longer haul from Covington. If he was lucky, the roads would be terrible and not too crowded. If he wasn’t lucky, they’d be terrible and packed, and he might not get home for a week.
Right from the start, he had the feeling he wouldn’t be lucky. The truck’s acetylene headlamps didn’t want to light, and, once they finally did, hissed and sputtered as if about to explode. He had to crank the engine half a dozen times before it turned over. One of those fruitless tries, it jerked back on him, and he yanked his hand off the crank just in time to keep it from breaking his arm.
Unlike some, the truck had a windshield and a wiper for it. It thrashed over the glass like a spastic man’s arm, now two or three times quickly, now all but motionless. The idea was good. As far as Cincinnatus was concerned, it needed more work.
Even on the paved streets of Covington, the White seemed to bang unerringly into every pothole. Nor was Cincinnatus the only one with that complaint: a couple of trucks limped toward the curb with punctures. Changing an inner tube in the rain was not something he looked forward to with delight.
So thick were the clouds, it seemed more like twilight than advancing morning. Cincinnatus stuck close to the rear of the truck in front of him, and saw in his mirror the headlamps of the next White to the rear just behind him. He thought of elephants in a circus parade, each grasping the tail of the one in front with its trunk.
Paved road ended about twenty-five miles south of Covington. Before the war, it had ended at the city limits: Yankee engineers were pushing it on toward the front for reasons of their own. The difference between pavement and dirt was immediate and appalling. Muck flew up from the back tires of the White in front of Cincinnatus, coating his truck’s headlamps and splattering the windshield. The wiper blade smeared more than it removed.
Swearing, Cincinnatus slowed down. Spacing between trucks got wider as other drivers did the same thing. Then they came upon what had to be at least a division’s worth of infantry heading south along the road. Drivers in the lead trucks squeezed the bulbs on their horns for all they were worth. That was supposed to be the signal for the infantrymen to get out of the way. Even in good weather, the soldiers in green-gray didn’t take kindly to moving onto the shoulder. With the rain, they barely seemed to move at all. The Whites splattered them as readily as one another. Curses rang in Cincinnatus’ ears as he crawled past and through the marching men.
The trucks sped up again once they finally got beyond the head of the infantry column. A little farther along, they had to go onto the shoulder: a pair of bogged barrels plugged the road tight as a cork in a bottle. Cincinnatus hoped he’d reach the next fuel depot before his truck ran out of gas.
A noise like a gunshot made him jump in his seat. The truck slewed sideways. It wasn’t Confederates or Reds. “Puncture,” he said resignedly, and pulled off the road to fix it.
By the time he scrambled back into the cab of the truck, he was soaked from head to foot and all over mud. He felt as if he’d been wrestling somebody three times his size. He’d put a board under the jack before he tried using it. It had done its level best to sink into the ooze board and all. The ordeal was almost enough to make him wish he were back at the docks.
He shook his head. “I ain’t that stupid,” he said, gunning the engine to try to catch up with the rest of the convoy.
He did, too, soon enough; no one could make any sort of time through the mud. He managed to get more gasoline before he stopped dead. Putting everything together, the trip wasn’t so bad as he’d expected. Only goes to show I don’t expect much, he thought.
The raiders hit the convoy a little south of Berea. One moment, Cincinnatus was contentedly chugging along not far from the rear-other fellows who’d had to stop for one breakdown or another had fallen in behind him. The next, an explosion up ahead made him stamp on the brake. As the truck skidded to a stop, rifle and machine-gun fire rang out from the side of the road, stitching down the convoy toward him.
He had no gun. He carried nothing more lethal than a clasp knife. Without a moment’s hesitation, he dove out of the cab and away from the White as fast as he could go. That proved smart. Flames started licking up from under the hood in spite of the rain: a bullet or two must have smashed up the motor. Cincinnatus just watched those flames for a moment. Then, with a moan of fright, he crawled farther away from the truck, not to escape the bullets still flying, but to get away from the-
The flames spread rapidly. With a soft whoomp, the gas tank went up, setting the whole truck ablaze. A minute or so after that, the fire reached the artillery rounds in the bed. At first, a couple of them exploded individually. And then, with a great roar, the whole truckload went up.
Cincinnatus had been on his hands and knees. The blast knocked him facedown into the mud. Shell fragments and shrapnel balls slashed the air around him. Some of them fell hissing into puddles of rainwater close by.
As other trucks began exploding, he tried desperately to put more distance between himself and them. He heard screams from drivers who hadn’t been able to get away, and Rebel yells from the raiders still shooting up the convoy. The explosions, though, kept the raiders from coming after him.
Or so he thought, till a shape wallowed toward him. He grabbed for his little knife, knowing it would do no good against a rifle, but then stopped. “That you, Herk?” he asked, not sure he recognized the filthy, dripping driver.
But the white man nodded. “Yeah. How the hell do we get out of this?”
“Dunno,” Cincinnatus answered. He started laughing. Herk stared at him, eyes wide and shining in his dirty face. Cincinnatus explained: “We got us the chance to find out, though.” Very solemnly, Herk nodded again
.
Very solemnly, Abner Dowling peered south through his field glasses, toward the wooded hills north of the little Tennessee town called White House. He stood under a green-gray canvas awning, so the hot August rain didn’t splash down onto his lenses. But the rain cut down on visibility nonetheless, masking those hills from clear observation. What little he could see, he didn’t like.
He turned to General Custer. “Sir, the Rebs have that line as fortified as all get-out. They’re not going to be easy to shift, not even a little bit.”
“Yet shift them we must, and shift them we shall,” Custer said, as usual mixing desire and ability. He raised his field glasses to his face, holding them with one shaky, liver-spotted hand. “That line in front of White House is the last one they can hold to keep our artillery out of range of Nashville. Once it goes down, we commence bombarding the city.” He let the binoculars fall down on the leather strap holding round his neck so he could rub his hands in anticipation.
“I understand that, sir,” Dowling said. “The trouble is, I’m very much afraid the Confederates understand it, too. That is a formidable position they have there-not only high ground, but wooded high ground, so we have trouble pinpointing their dispositions.”
He had no trouble pinpointing Custer’s disposition: it was petulant. The general commanding First Army said, “I intend to bombard that area until every tree in it has been made into toothpicks and matchsticks. Toothpicks and matchsticks,” he repeated, relishing the rhyme.
“Yes, sir,” Dowling said, working to remind Custer of reality. “We lost a good deal of ammunition when that convoy was ambushed last week.”
“True,” Custer said. “You will of course note that, although those munitions were intended for my force, that shocking breach of security occurred in an area under General Pershing’s jurisdiction, not mine.”
“Of course, sir,” his adjutant agreed: where self-preservation was concerned, Custer had a keen enough grasp on reality. Dowling went on, “However that may be, though, the ammunition is not here. And”-he pointed toward the dark, tree-clad, rolling hills-“that’s not good country for barrels. No country is good country for barrels in this rain.”
“We’ll send them in anyhow,” Custer said, which was just like him: he’d found a weapon that worked once, so he’d keep right on using it, regardless of whether circumstances warranted such use. He continued, “And we have plenty of ammunition, even without that which was lost. And, no doubt, our soldiers will make up with their courage any minor deficiencies in the preliminaries.”
Translated into English, that meant a hell of a lot of young Americans were about to get shot, a good many of them unnecessarily. Custer had already fought a lot of battles like that in western Kentucky, and advanced at a snail’s pace: the pace of a snail whose trail was blood, not slime. Dowling said, “It might be wiser to hold off a bit, sir, until the weather’s more favorable and we have better reconnaissance.”
“Major, we have been fighting for two years and more now,” Custer replied. “Would you not say we have already seen a sufficiency of delay?” Without giving Dowling a chance to answer, he said, “I expect the bombardment to commence tomorrow morning and to continue until the Rebel positions are pulverized, at which point we advance, barrels and infantry both.”
What Custer expected, Custer got. That was the advantage of being a lieutenant general. The next day, the guns began to roar. Dowling didn’t envy the artillerymen serving them in the mud. Again, no one asked his opinion. He watched explosions wrack the Confederate hilltop lines. First Army had a lot of guns and a lot of ammunition even without what the raiders had blown up. They pounded the positions north of White House with high explosive and shrapnel and gas.
Custer watched, too, with the delight of a small boy at a fireworks show. “Give it to ’em,” he said hoarsely. “Give it to ’em, by jingo!”
As Dowling had foreseen, the Confederates understood perfectly well what the unending barrage implied. Their own guns pounded the U.S. trenches. In the wretched weather, accurate counterbattery fire was next to impossible, because the U.S. artillery had and could gain no exact notion of the Rebel guns’ positions.
The U.S. artillery preparation went on for five days. By the end of that time, as Custer had desired, the hills were no longer tree-covered. Seen through Dowling’s field glasses, they resembled a close-up photograph of an unshaven man who’d survived a bad case of smallpox: all over craters and old eruptions, with now and then, as if by afterthought, something straight sticking up from one of them. It was easy to imagine that every Confederate in those hills had been blown to kingdom come.
It was especially easy for Custer to imagine as much. “We’ve got ’em now,” he told Dowling in the middle of it, preening like a cock pheasant. “The Lord has delivered them into our hands, and our soldiers have only to storm forward and capture whatever demoralized wretches chance to remain alive.”
“I hope you’re right, sir,” Dowling said, “but in the big fights in Pennsylvania and Maryland, and even the ones First Army had in western Kentucky, the defenders ended up with an advantage all out of proportion to their numbers.”
“That’s why we’re laying on the artillery preparation.” Custer looked at his adjutant as if he’d just crawled out from under a flat rock. “Never in the history of the planet had any place on the face of the earth been bombarded like those hills there. Only a wet blanket would think otherwise.”
Dowling sighed. Custer had reckoned him a wet blanket since the earliest days of their association. That he’d proved right more often than not had done nothing to endear him to the general commanding First Army-on the contrary. This was one of the times Dowling devoutly hoped he was wrong. Custer had laid on one hell of a bombardment, and maybe it would be good enough to wipe out the foe. Maybe.
It went on for two more days, till the artillerymen were as near deaf as made no difference. Even when the U.S. soldiers swarmed out of their trenches and rushed for the ruined woods, the barrage kept on, now dropping down on where Intelligence thought the Rebels had their front-line trenches. Some of the Americans unrolled telephone wire as they advanced. Others carried signal flags, in case the wires broke as they so often did.
From under that camouflaged awning, Custer and Dowling watched the troops. Dowling saw sparklike points of light begin to spurt here and there in the woods. “We didn’t get quite everyone, sir,” he said.
“Leftover dust to be swept away by the broom of the infantry,” Custer said grandly. “A broom five miles wide, Major.”
Confederate artillery started falling in no-man’s-land. U.S. troops got hung up in the belts of barbed wire not even the titanic American barrage had been able to tear up. More and more Confederate machine guns, muzzle flashes winking like malign eyes filled with horrible amusement, opened up on the U.S. soldiers stuck out in the open.
Every so often, a runner or a staff officer would bring news of the progress the attack was making. By the time the news reached Custer and Dowling, it was old and stale. “What’s the slowdown?” Dowling demanded.
“Too many phone lines broken by the Rebel artillery, sir,” answered a lieutenant who didn’t seem to realize he was bleeding from a wound in his upper arm. “Too many runners getting shot before they can make it back, too. And the goddamn Rebel snipers are concentrating on our signalers. It’s worth your life to stick up a banner.”
Custer moved blue counters on a map. “We are making progress,” he insisted. “We need to send in the reserves, to take advantage of the gains the first wave has carved out.”
In went the reserves. For all they gained, the ground might as well have swallowed them up. The ground had swallowed too many of them up, and they would never rise from it again. Toward evening, Custer committed more reserves. “Once we break the hard crust and reach the softness it protects, they are ours,” he said.
The third wave of reserves went in the next morning, a couple of hours slower than they might have.
The Rebs had been dislodged from most of their forward trenches, and from some of the secondary trenches as well. The line, though, still held. And the cost! “Sir,” Dowling said late that second afternoon, “we’ve lost almost a division’s worth of dead, and twice that many wounded. How long can we go on like this?”
“As long as it takes,” Custer replied. “All summer, if we need to.”
By the end of summer, Dowling feared, First Army would be down to battalion size. The question, he supposed, was whether the Confederates opposing them would have any men left at all. Even if they didn’t, was that a victory? Could the U.S. survivors go on and take Nashville, which was, after all, the point of this entire exercise?
Custer seemed to entertain no doubts. “If you hammer the anvil long enough, Major, it breaks.”
Dowling didn’t answer. He had blacksmiths in his family, and knew what Custer might not: if you hammered the anvil long enough, it broke, all right, but it was the hammer, not the anvil. He wondered if he should try explaining that to the general commanding First Army. After a moment, he shook his head. General Custer hadn’t been in the habit of listening to him before. Why would he start now?
Major Irving Morrell said, “What we’ve got going now is the big push toward Banff. The last thing we want to do is go straight at the place. The Canucks are set up and waiting for us to try it. If we do, they’ll slaughter us. We have to make them watch the cape, the way the bullfighters do in the Empire of Mexico. If they keep their eyes on the cape, they won’t notice the sword.”
Captain Heinz Guderian nodded. “This is sound doctrine, Major. Deception. Deception by all means.” He spoke in German, which not only Morrell but also his officers understood.
“Thanks, Captain.” Morrell turned an ironic eye on the German staff officer. “I thought you’d have headed back to Philadelphia along with Major Dietl.”
Guderian shrugged. “Dietl goes back to a real war, so he has no compunctions about leaving this one. If I go back to Germany, I go back to fighting at a desk, with machine pencil and large-caliber typewriter.” His eyes sparkled. “If I am to make my life as a soldier, I intend to be a soldier, not a clerk in a field-gray uniform.”
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