The Great War: Breakthroughs

by Harry Turtledove

“More Yankee lies, I expect,” Maude answered. “They don’t let any of the truth get loose. Remember how many times their papers have said Toronto has fallen, or Paris to the Germans?”

  “I don’t think it’s like that this time,” McGregor said. “Those other stories, you could tell they were made up. What we hear now—that Nashville place getting knocked to bits, and the Americans pushing ahead on the border farther east…those are the kinds of things that really do happen in a war. They’re the kinds of things you have to believe when you read them.”

  “But if you do believe them, it means we’re losing the war,” his daughter Julia said.

  “It means our allies are in trouble, anyhow,” McGregor said gravely. He bit at the inside of his lower lip before going on, “I don’t think we’re doing any too well here in Canada, either. You can hardly hear the cannon fire up north toward Winnipeg these days.”

  Ever since the Yanks had overrun his farm, McGregor had used the sound of the guns to gauge how the fighting was going. When they were far away, the Yankees were making progress. A deep rumble on the northern horizon meant an Anglo-Canadian counteroffensive. He wouldn’t have minded in the least had shells fallen on his land; that would have meant the Yanks were pushed most of the way back toward Dakota. But it hadn’t happened. He was beginning to wonder if it ever would.

  Mary, his younger daughter, spoke with great certainty: “We can’t lose the war. We’re right. They invaded us. They had no business doing that.” She was only eight years old, and still confused the way things should have been with the way they were.

  McGregor and Maude looked at each other. They both knew better. “They can, Mary,” her mother said. “We have to hope they don’t, that’s all.”

  “No, they can’t,” Mary repeated. “They shot Alexander. If they win, that means—that means—” She cast about for the worst thing she could think of. “That means God doesn’t love us any more.”

  “God does what He wants, Mary,” McGregor said. “He doesn’t always do what we want. If He did, your brother would still be here, and the Yanks would be down in the USA where they belong.”

  “If they win, they’ll try to turn us into Americans,” Julia said angrily. “They’re already trying to turn us into Americans.”

  With American coins in his pocket, with American stamps on his letters, with American lies in the schools—so many American lies, neither Julia nor Mary went any more—McGregor could hardly disagree with her. Instead, he said, “What we have to do is, we have to remember who we are and what we are, no matter what happens around us. That may be the best we can do.”

  He felt Maude’s eyes on him again. He needed a moment to understand why. When he did, his mouth tightened. Though he’d spoken indirectly, he’d never come so close to admitting Canada and her allies were losing the war.

  His wife looked as grim as he did. So did Julia, who now had nearly a woman’s years and had been thinking like an adult for a long time, anyhow. If Mary didn’t follow—maybe that was just as well. Of them all, McGregor thought she was the fiercest one, even including himself. No matter how old she got, he doubted she would ever slow down to count the cost before she acted. He had to. He hated himself for that, but he had to.

  After supper, and after the girls had gone to bed, he said to Maude, “I’m going out to the barn. I’ve got some work to take care of.”

  The only question Maude asked was, “Shall I wait up for you?” When he shook his head, she came over and kissed him on the cheek. He blinked; they seldom showed affection for each other outside the bedroom.

  He slapped at mosquitoes on the way to the barn. Crickets chirped. Frogs croaked and peeped in ponds and creeks and puddles. Spring was here. He shook his head again. Spring was here, and with it shorter nights. He could have used the long blanket of dark winter gave. But winter also gave a blanket of snow, and snow, unless it was falling hard or unless the wind was howling, meant tracks. He could not afford tracks. The family had already lost Alexander. He knew how hard a time they would have if they lost him, too.

  “Counting the cost,” he muttered. He did not fear death, not for himself. He feared it for the sake of those he loved. Mary would not have feared, period. He felt that in his bones. It shamed him. It drove him on.

  He did not light a lantern in the garage. The wooden box he sought was hidden, but he knew where. No Yankees on the road would see any light and wonder about it. He had to be careful.

  He had to be careful about that road, too. He couldn’t travel on it, not unless he wanted to be challenged. The box under his arm, he approached the road. He didn’t approach too closely, not till nobody was coming in either direction. Then he crossed in a hurry.

  His neighbors’ farm had a path leading to the road, just as his did. His neighbors’ farm also had a path leading southeast toward another road, an east-west one not so frequently traveled by Americans. If the dog stayed quiet, it would not disturb anyone in the dark, quiet farmhouse. The dog was quiet. It had known him for years, and knew him as well as it knew anyone outside its own family. Down that southeastern path he strode, and onto that east-west road.

  “East,” he muttered. He had the road to himself. Alone with his thoughts: not a safe place to be, not with the thoughts filling his mind. If he set the box down and stomped on it, he would be alone with his thoughts forever. That was tempting, but he was not the sort of man to leave a thing half done.

  Whenever he passed a farmhouse, he tensed, making sure it had no lamps burning. He did not want any wakeful soul noting the presence of a lone man on the road. No one could recognize him, not from those houses, but someone might note the time at which he walked by or the direction in which he was going. Either could prove dangerous.

  He heard a distant rattle on the road behind him. Looking back over his shoulder, he saw tiny headlamps rapidly getting larger. He stepped into the field by the roadside and lay down. A Ford whizzed past, a Ford painted some light color, not the usual black: a light color like green-gray, for instance.

  “Christ, let me be lucky,” he whispered. “Let me catch the whore and the murderer both.” He waited till the motorcar had gone a good way down the road before getting up and following it. The Americans installed rearview mirrors on most of their motorcars; he did not want whoever was in this one—Major Hannebrink’s name burned in his mind—spotting him.

  On he walked, gauging time by the wheeling stars. If he could keep on, if he did not flag or falter, he might do what he had come to do.

  The next interesting question, and one of whose answer he was not quite sure, was whether the Tooker family owned a dog. He didn’t really think so. If he was wrong, the best thing that could happen would be a long walk in the dark for nothing. Possibilities went downhill in a hurry from there.

  A lamp went out downstairs. Lamplight showed a moment later in a room upstairs. A bedroom, McGregor thought. Paulette Tooker’s bedroom. That she would do such a thing with an American major was bad enough. That she would do such a thing and watch, or even let him watch, was depravity piled on depravity. What if one of her children woke in the night? Her son, if McGregor remembered rightly, was not far from Julia’s age—old enough and to spare to despise what his mother did…unless he was a collaborator, too.

  Where was her husband? Was he dead? Was he captured? Was he still fighting for his country farther north? McGregor didn’t know. He wondered if Paulette knew, or cared.

  That light would not go out. McGregor muttered under his breath. What the devil was Hannebrink doing in there, driving railroad spikes? McGregor didn’t dare approach the house, as he’d intended doing. Hannebrink had parked the Ford a good distance away from the place, though, no doubt for discretion’s sake. McGregor wanted the man who’d ordered his son killed far more than he wanted that man’s Canadian whore.

  Cautious as a man could be, he went up to the motorcar. The night smelled of fresh, damp earth. He took a trowel from his belt and began to dig in the fresh, damp earth
in front of the Ford’s left front tire. When he’d dug enough, he set the box in the hole, covered it over, and scattered the leftover dirt its volume had displaced. Then he headed home himself.

  He got back just ahead of morning twilight. A light was burning in a room upstairs in his farmhouse, too. When he went in, he found Maude sitting up in bed sewing. Breath gusted from her when she saw him. “Is everything all right?” she demanded sharply.

  “Everything is fine,” he answered. “You should have slept.”

  “I tried,” she said. “I couldn’t.” She shrugged. “About time to get up now, anyhow. One way or another, we’ll stagger through the day. So long as everything’s all right.”

  “Yes,” he said again. Even as he said it, though, he wondered. He should have been able to hear the explosion, even if the bomb—and the Ford—blew up when he was almost back here. What the hell had Hannebrink and Paulette Tooker been doing back at her house? How long could they keep doing it?

  He did get through the day, moving like a man of ice only slightly thawed. When night came, he slept as hard as he had since he was Mary’s age.

  He wanted to go into Rosenfeld, to learn what, if anything, he’d accomplished. He refrained, not wanting to draw notice to himself. To how many people had Henry Gibbon given the name of Hannebrink’s paramour? The more, the better.

  Gossip brought word before he couldn’t hold back any more and made a trip to town. After supper, while the girls were upstairs playing with dolls, Maude said, “Della from across the road tells me Lou Tooker stepped on a bomb, and there isn’t going to be enough of him left to bury. He was—what?—fifteen, maybe sixteen.”

  “A bit younger than Alexander.” McGregor nodded. “That’s going to be hard for Paulette to bear, eh?”

  Almost as hard as it was for me, when the Yanks murdered my son, he thought. He wondered how Hannebrink had missed setting off the bomb. Maybe he’d backed the Ford up to get back onto the road. McGregor shrugged. However the U.S. major had escaped, Paulette Tooker wouldn’t be inclined to open her legs for him, not any more she wouldn’t. And, sooner or later, McGregor would get another chance at Major Hannebrink. He was in no hurry. Doing it right counted for more than doing it. No, he was in no hurry at all.

  The U.S. bombardment had been short but ferocious. Now, engines bellowing, several barrels waddled forward toward the barbed wire the men of the Army of Northern Virginia had strung out to protect their positions in front of Aldie, Virginia. The wire shone in the early-morning sun; it was so newly in place, it hadn’t even started to rust.

  Whistles blew in the U.S. trenches. “Come on, boys!” Captain Cremony shouted. “Time to give the Rebs another dose of medicine.” He was the first one out of the trench and heading toward the Confederate lines.

  Sergeant Chester Martin nodded approval as he gathered his section by eye and led them up the sandbag staircase, out of the protection of their hole in the ground, and onto the stretch of open country where bullets could easily find them. Cremony hadn’t made it sound like fun, and it wouldn’t be. But he had made it sound like something that needed doing, and he was leading the way. Hard to ask more than that of an officer.

  “Come on!” Martin shouted, echoing the company commander. He pointed to one of the barrels ahead. “Form up behind that bastard. You know the drill. You’d damn well better, by now.”

  “That’s the truth, Sarge,” Tilden Russell said. “Wasn’t for those big, ugly things, there’d be a hell of a lot fewer of us left after we went over the top in front of Round Hill.”

  Martin nodded, double-timing despite heavy gear to get as close to the barrel as he could. He’d seen too much hard fighting on the Roanoke front to have any doubts how much barrels were worth. With them, the unit had taken casualties, yes. Casualties were one of the things war was about. Without barrels, though—without them, the advance wouldn’t have got a quarter as far, and would have cost four times as much.

  Not all the Confederates in those new trenches had been silenced. Rifle bullets whipped past Martin. He wasn’t afraid. He didn’t know why, but he wasn’t. Before he went over the top, yes. When he had a chance to rest, he’d be afraid again. For the time being, he just went on, like most infantrymen. Whatever was going to happen to him would happen, and that was all there was to it.

  Confederate machine guns started yammering, too. The barrels opened up on them with cannon fire and their own machine guns. The C.S. machine guns concentrated most of their fury on the barrels. They always did that, and it was a mistake. They had very little chance of hurting the great armored machines, and withheld their fire from the soft, vulnerable men they could have harmed.

  Barbed wire underfoot—barbed wire crushed into the dirt by the barrel ahead. Since the opening days of the war, since U.S. forces first pushed their way down into the Roanoke valley, Martin had watched friends and comrades—and enemy soldiers, too, in Confederate counterattacks—trap themselves on wire like flies in a spiderweb and writhe and twist till bullets found them…and then, briefly and painfully, afterwards. That would not happen here. It would not happen now.

  There was the battered parapet, just ahead. A black man with a rifle in his hands popped up onto the firing step, ready to shoot at Martin. Martin shot first, from the hip. It was not an aimed shot, and he did not think it hit. But it did what he wanted it to do: it made the Confederate soldier duck down again without shooting at him from short range.

  A moment later, Martin was down in the trench himself. The black man wasn’t there. He’d fled from the firebay into a traverse. Martin did not charge after him. He and who could guess how many pals were waiting, fingers on the triggers of their Tredegars. Charging headlong into a traverse after the enemy was anything but smart.

  Martin pulled a potato-masher grenade off his belt, yanked off the cap at the end of the handle, and tugged on the porcelain bead inside. That ignited the fuse. He flung the grenade up over the undug ground and into the traverse.

  At the same time as his grenade went into the air, a Reb in the traverse threw one of their egg-shaped models at him and his comrades. Someone behind him yelled in pain. More grenades flew. More shouts rose. He and the men of his section couldn’t stay where they were. The attack had to move forward. That meant—

  He scowled. Even when it wasn’t smart, a headlong charge was sometimes the only choice left. “Follow me!” he shouted.

  His men did. If they hadn’t, he would have died in the next minute. As things were, that next minute was an ugly business with rifle and entrenching tool and bayonet and a boot in the belly or the balls. More U.S. soldiers came around the corner than the Rebs in the traverse could withstand. The men in butternut went down. Most of the men in green-gray went on.

  Through a zigzagging communications trench they ran, deeper into the Confederate position. Somewhere not far from the far end of that trench, a machine gun stuttered out death. The barrels had taken out a lot of machine-gun positions, but not all of them. The guns that survived could wreak fearful havoc on advancing U.S. soldiers.

  With one accord, Martin and his section went hunting that machine gun and its crew. The only soldiers who didn’t hate machine guns were those who served them. Martin’s lips skinned back from his teeth. There was the infernal machine, blazing away toward the front from a nest of sandbags. One white man fed belts of ammunition into it, the other tapped the side of the water jacket every little while to change the direction of the stream of bullets.

  The sandbags kept the Confederates from bringing the gun to bear on Martin’s men, who approached from the side. The gun crew kept firing till the last second at the U.S. soldiers they could reach. Then they threw their hands in the air. “You got us,” the trigger man said.

  “Sure as hell do,” the Reb who’d been feeding ammunition agreed.

  Chester Martin shot one of them. Corporal Bob Reinholdt shot the other one at the same instant. As the Confederates crumpled, the two men who despised each other both stared in s
urprise. Reinholdt found words first: “Those sons of bitches can’t quit that easy.”

  “Sure as hell can’t,” Martin agreed. Machine-gun crews rarely made it back to prisoner-of-war camps. For some reason, they always seemed to want to fight to the death.

  Up ahead, the barrel leading the U.S. infantry exploded into flames and smoke: a shell from a Confederate field gun had struck home. Hatches flew open. Some of the machine gunners tried to bring out their weapons and fight on the ground. Most of them, though, went down as every C.S. soldier anywhere nearby turned his rifle on the stricken traveling fortress. The Confederates loved barrel crewmen every bit as much as ordinary infantrymen on both sides loved the men who served machine guns.

  After brief but heartfelt curses, Martin said, “Things get tougher now. I wonder where the hell the next barrel is at.”

  “Not close enough,” David Hamburger said. “We should do it like they did in Tennessee, put all the barrels together, smash on through the Rebs’ lines, and then let us tear the hole wide open.”

  “Thank you, General,” Tilden Russell said. He was ragging the kid, but not too hard; Hamburger had given a good account of himself since the offensive opened. He didn’t have a veteran’s bag of tricks, but he was brave and willing and learned in a hurry.

  But Russell had left the obvious line unused. Martin used it: “Listen, David, you don’t like the way we’re doing things, you write your congresswoman and give her an earful.” He laughed.

  “I am doing that,” David Hamburger said. Martin hadn’t been serious, but he was. “We’ve pushed the Rebs back here, but we haven’t broken through. If it hadn’t been for the river they’re hiding behind in Tennessee, they’d be running yet.”

  Shells started landing around them. They dove for cover. “Jesus,” Tilden Russell shouted, holding his helmet on his head with one hand. “God damn Rebs still have soldiers of their own in this part of the trench. What the hell are they doin’, shelling us like this here?”