The Great War: Breakthroughs

by Harry Turtledove

  “Trouble?” Nellie shook her head. “Not a bit. That soup smells good.”

  “Make you thirsty as all get-out,” Edna said.

  “I know. It still smells good.” Nellie had a big bowl. The soup did make her thirsty, so she drank a glass of boiled river water. She went down to the cellar to sleep, and had a better night than she’d enjoyed in years.

  Artillery started thundering before dawn, but didn’t wake her right away. Neither she nor anyone else left in Washington would have got any sleep at all if they’d let shellfire unduly disturb them. When she did wake, she gauged the bombardment with a practiced ear. So did Edna, who said, “They’re pounding the front line right now.”

  Half an hour or so later, though, the pattern of the shelling abruptly changed. Rounds began falling inside Washington, along the routes the Confederates used to move reinforcements through the city toward the front. “I wonder if the Army is trying to break through the Rebs’ trenches right now,” Nellie said.

  “Do you really think they can?” Edna asked. “The Confederates have been digging and putting in concrete and wire ever since they got here, and that’s going on three years now.”

  “Would they try if they didn’t think they could do it, anyway?” Nellie asked in return. Her daughter only shrugged in return, which was, when you got down to it, a reasonable enough answer. From the perspective of a coffeehouse, who could know what the U.S. General Staff had in mind?

  But then, a couple of hours later, Nellie heard a rattle of small-arms fire, rifles and machine guns, off to the north. Edna recognized it for what it was, too. She let out a soft whistle. “Haven’t hardly heard that since the Confederates drove the USA out of here.”

  “Sure haven’t,” Nellie agreed. “As long as we have water and fuel, I think we’d better stay right where we’re at. If it was bad outside before, it’s going to be worse now, with both sides shelling the city and with bullets flying around along with the shells.”

  They did sneak out for water one night. Other than that, they stayed inside the coffeehouse all the time for the next several days, and down in the cellar whenever they weren’t at the stove. The battle for Washington raged around them. They saw almost none of it, which suited Nellie. If she’d seen the battle, the soldiers fighting it would have seen her, with consequences ranging from unpleasant to lethal.

  A couple of times, barrels rumbled up the street. Nellie thought they belonged to the CSA, but she didn’t go outside to look. Two days later, somebody—she didn’t know who, and again didn’t care to find out—set up a machine-gun post just down the street and fired off belt after belt of ammunition, the gun roaring like a demented jackhammer. Then came rifle fire and running, shouting men. After that, the racket of small arms sounded from the south, not the north.

  Several hours of relative calm were shattered when somebody pounded on the cellar door with a rifle butt. “You the Semphrochs down there?” a deep voice shouted. “Nellie and, uh, Edna?” He sounded as if he might be reading the names from a list.

  “Yes,” Nellie said, and went up the stairs and pushed the door open.

  She found herself staring down a rifle barrel. The soldier holding the rifle wore a green-gray uniform that was familiar and a pot-shaped helmet that wasn’t. “Nellie Semphroch,” he said—sure enough, he had a list. “You and your daughter are the ones who had the coffeehouse where the damn Rebs came all the damn time.”

  “But—” Nellie began.

  He talked right through her: “Come out, both of you. You’re under arrest. Charges are collaboration and treason.”

  “Come on, men,” Gordon McSweeney called as his company trudged wearily down an Arkansas dirt road. “Come on. I will not have you go any place I will not go myself in front of you. What I can do, you can also do. What I can do, you will also do—or you will answer to me.”

  Nobody argued with him. Nobody had argued with him since the day Captain Schneider fell in the Craighead Forest. Schneider, McSweeney feared, had been translated to a clime warmer than this one. That was a warm climate indeed; as both summer and the edge of the Mississippi delta grew closer with every passing moment, the muggy heat made McSweeney feel as if his uniform tunic and trousers had been pasted to his hide.

  He’d remained in command of the company since the fight in the Craighead Forest. He’d also remained a second lieutenant. A sergeant was commanding one of the other companies in the regiment, and nobody seemed to be making any noise about replacing him, either. Officers didn’t grow on trees, especially not west of the Mississippi they didn’t.

  “Pick ’em up,” McSweeney called to the troopers shambling along under the weight of helmet and Springfield and heavy pack and entrenching tool and clodhopper boots and however much mud clung to the boots. “If God grant that we pierce their forces but once more, we can bring Memphis and the Mississippi River under our guns. That would be a great blow to strike, and a sore hurt to the wicked cause of the Confederate States.”

  “You talk like something right out of the Bible, sir,” said a private named Rogers who had not been in the section or platoon McSweeney led before getting the whole company.

  “It is the word of God,” McSweeney answered. “Is a man not wise to shape his words in the pattern of those of his Father?”

  Rogers didn’t answer. He just kept marching. That suited Gordon McSweeney fine. Even if he had the words of the Good Book on which to model his own, he was more comfortable doing than talking. Men could easily argue what he said. No one could argue about what he did.

  Spatters of gunfire off to the right said the Confederates were trying to slow down the U.S. advance any way they could. The gunfire wasn’t close enough for him to swing his men out of their line of march to respond to it, so he kept them going. After U.S. forces finally forced the Rebs out of Jonesboro, the front had grown fluid for a change. The more ground he made his men cover, the closer they would be to Memphis.

  Up ahead, one of those Rebel copies of a French 75 started banging away. McSweeney muttered something under his breath that would have been a curse had he permitted himself to take the name of the Lord in vain. Like every U.S. infantryman who had ever advanced against them, he hated those quick-firing field guns. This one, fortunately, was shooting long, over the heads of his company. Officers who hadn’t pushed their men so hard would have to worry about explosives and shrapnel balls and shell fragments.

  The road led out of the woods and into a clearing, near the center of which stood a farmhouse. Rifle fire came from the farmhouse. McSweeney’s smile was broad and welcoming. “All right, men,” he said. “If they want to play, we can play with them. Let’s see how they like the game then.”

  Past that, he needed to give very few orders. The men knew what needed doing, and did it without undue fuss or bother. Fire-and-move tactics that had taken them through the heavily fortified forest were perhaps wasted against a farmhouse with a few diehards in it, but the U.S. soldiers used them even so. Some went left, some went right. Before long, they had worked in close enough to pitch grenades through the windows of the house.

  McSweeney wished for his flamethrower. How the faded pine timbers of this place would have burned! Then a fire started anyhow, whether from grenades or bullets he could not tell. A couple of men in butternut burst out the front door. They weren’t surrendering; they came out shooting. A fusillade of lead stretched them lifeless in the dust.

  One of them was white, the other colored. McSweeney looked down at the Negro’s bleeding corpse and shook his head. “If black men will fight for the government that for so long has mistreated their kind, they deserve whatever that government gives them,” he said. “When they rose in revolt against their masters, I admired them. If they fight for those masters…they will pay the price, as this one has.”

  After the brief interruption, the company moved on. A few Confederates fired at them from out of the bushes. They hunted the Rebs, though McSweeney, to his disgust, thought a couple of them got
away.

  Then came an interruption of a different sort. McSweeney had long since grown used to shells from field guns screeching their way through the sky. It had been a long time, though, since he’d heard a roar of cloven air like this one. Altogether without conscious thought, he threw himself flat.

  The great shell burst fifty yards off to the left. Even as dirt thudded down onto his back and fragments hissed malevolently through the air, another shell thundered home, this one striking about twenty-five yards to the right of the road.

  Some men were down as McSweeney was, to gain what little shelter they could from those enormous rounds. Others were down and screaming or wailing, clutching arms or legs or bellies. Others were down and not moving at all, nor would they ever move again.

  “They aren’t supposed to have this kind of firepower way the hell out here!” somebody shouted. “Those have to be eight-inch, maybe ten-inch, shells.” Even as he spoke, two more of the big shells thundered in. More screams rose.

  Busy with his entrenching tool, McSweeney forgot to reprove the soldier for cursing. Suddenly, the answer blazed in him. “River monitors!” he exclaimed. “They shelled us when we crossed the Ohio. This must be another one. If our own boats could get down as far as Memphis, we wouldn’t have been fighting our way through Arkansas all these months.”

  Another pair of shells burst not far away. “What can we do, sir?” a soldier cried.

  “Pray,” McSweeney answered. He would have said that under most circumstances. It seemed particularly fitting here. “What else can we do, when no guns of ours are able to reach those aboard the Confederate river monitor?”

  As he spoke, he dug himself deeper into the soft, dark brown soil. The unwounded men in the company did the same. So did some of the wounded men. After almost three years of war, digging entrenchments was altogether natural. McSweeney had known men safe behind their own lines to dig foxholes before settling down to sleep for the night. He’d done it himself a couple of times.

  Up ahead, a Confederate machine gun started barking. If the river monitor hadn’t halted McSweeney’s troops, they would have run into it in short order—and it would have done them about as much damage as the big guns on the Mississippi were doing.

  Most company commanders would have sent scouts forward to examine the enemy machine-gun position. That never entered Gordon McSweeney’s mind. He scrambled out of the foxhole he had dug just as another pair of shells from the river monitor landed near the position his company had taken. More dirt rained down on him. Even after he stuck a finger in one ear, it didn’t hear so well as it should have.

  He wriggled forward. One thing was different now that the U.S. Army had finally pushed the Rebs out of their lines in front of Jonesboro: not so much barbed wire on the ground to hamper movement. Grass and shrubs gave plenty of cover, too, and his muddy green-gray uniform made him hard to spot as he scooted toward the machine gun.

  No concrete emplacement here. The Rebs were set up in a nest of sandbags. All the same, McSweeney bit his lip in frustration. Even if he picked off all the gunners, who seemed to have no idea he was anywhere close by, more Confederates would take over the weapon. He shrugged a tiny shrug. That might do. The new Rebels at the machine gun wouldn’t be a regular crew, and wouldn’t shoot so effectively.

  He was just bringing his rifle up to his shoulder when firing off to his right made the Confederates turn the gun in that direction and start blazing away at his countrymen who were trying to advance over there. With the Rebs thus distracted, McSweeney put a bullet through the head of one of them. When the other one, the one who fed belts into the machine gun, half rose to check his friend, McSweeney drilled him, too. Both Confederate soldiers slumped down. He thought they were both dead.

  His member throbbed. Save for an annoyed mutter too low to make sense even to himself, he ignored it. He waited for more Confederates to come forward and take over the gun. They didn’t. It sat there, silent. He muttered again, this time intelligibly: “Fools.”

  He crawled to within sixty or seventy yards of it, where the cover petered out. Then he wasn’t crawling. He was running, in great bounding leaps. A couple of startled shouts rose. A few bullets cracked past him. None bit, though. He dove over the wall of sandbags, knocked the Confederate corpses out of the way, and manhandled the machine gun around so that it bore on the surviving Rebs farther east. Grinning from ear to ear, he gave them a taste of their own medicine.

  Before long, his own men came hurrying up to support him. “Good to see you,” he said, not intentionally ironic.

  Ben Carlton shook his head. “When that machine gun turned around, uh, sir,” the cook said, “I knew you’d got to it some kind of way. You’ve done it too damn often for me even to be real surprised about it any more.”

  “Do not blaspheme,” McSweeney said, almost automatically. “I do my duty. And here, if not in your cookery, you have done yours. Let us push on against the foe. With God’s help, victory shall indeed be ours at last.”

  Sergeant Jake Featherston cursed a blue streak. The surviving guns of his battery, along with the rest of those belonging to the First Richmond Howitzers, perched on Sudley Mountain, a little east of Centreville, Virginia. From those low hills, they could have wreaked fearful havoc on the Yankees farther west, over near the small stream called Bull Run—if they’d had any ammunition.

  A runner came up to Featherston. “Sir, uh, Sergeant, I mean, the wagons will be here in an hour or so, headquarters says.”

  Could looks have killed, the messenger would have been deader than if a twelve-inch shell from a battleship had gone off under his feet. “They should have been here this morning, God damn it,” Featherston ground out. “What the fucking hell happened to them?”

  The runner stared. He took a lot of abuse: a big part of his job was telling people of superior rank they couldn’t have what they wanted and what they thought they were entitled to. Featherston’s words were nothing out of the ordinary. The icy vitriol of the tone was. It might have come from an irate colonel, not a sergeant running a battered battery.

  “Sergeant, they got tangled up with a division of infantry on the march, so after that they needed a good long while to get unraveled again.”

  “Do you think the damnyankees don’t care that the Army of Northern Virginia doesn’t know what in Christ’s name it’s doing?” Jake snapped. “Maybe they do care—enough to send us a big thank-you bouquet.”

  “I’ve given you the news I have, Sergeant,” the runner said, and went on his way. Having other duty let him escape Featherston’s fury; it wasn’t as if Jake were his commanding officer.

  Out came the Gray Eagle scratch pad and Over Open Sights. The white-bearded fools in Richmond are doing their best to make sure that we lose this war, Featherston wrote, though we had victory straight ahead of us. Now they give the niggers guns to try to put their own blundering to rights, even though it was the niggers who helped stick us in this mess in the first place. And white troops would never have let themselves get fouled up with ammunition wagons like that. The messenger hadn’t said whether the troopers who’d cause his problem were white or black. He drew his own conclusions.

  “When you first started keeping those notes, Sergeant,” someone said behind Featherston, “I never thought you would keep on with them. I seem to have been mistaken.”

  Automatically, Jake closed the cover of the notebook. What he wrote in there was his, nobody else’s. “Major Potter, sir,” he said now, “I got nothing better to do than write, on account of I can’t go pasting the damnyankees the way I want to, on account of God may know where the ammunition is, but I sure don’t.”

  Clarence Potter sighed. “I wish you could paste them, but that you can’t may matter less than you think. They are building up for another large push against us. If you have the ammunition you’ll need to help stop that, well and good. If not…” He didn’t go on.

  “If not, we’re in too much trouble for anything to matter. That�
��s what you’re saying, isn’t it, sir?”

  “That’s what I’m saying.” Potter studied him. “I never have figured out exactly how smart you are, Featherston, but you’ve made it plain you’re shrewd enough and to spare. If you hadn’t made the fatal mistake of being right at the wrong time, we might have the same rank by now.”

  Maybe he meant that to console Jake. It didn’t; it made him furious. “Best way to save the country I can think of, sir, would be for a Yankee bomber to put three or four heavy ones right on top of the War Department. That might do it. Can’t think of anything else that would.”

  The intelligence officer shook his head. “All things considered, they’ve done about as well as anyone could have expected.”

  “God help us if that’s so,” Featherston said. “We’d better make peace in a hurry, before the damn fools do something even worse than they have already. Don’t know what that could be, but I reckon they’d come up with something.”

  “You are shrewd.” Behind their metal-rimmed spectacles, Major Potter’s eyes widened slightly. “There are people in the Army and people in the government beginning to say the same thing. If Britain is forced to leave the war, if we have to face not just the whole U.S. Army but the whole U.S. Navy, less whatever part keeps fighting Japan in the Pacific—if that happens, the odds against us grow very long.”

  “Odds were long during the War of Secession, too,” Jake said. “We licked the Yankees twice over by Manassas Gap. We’d lick ’em again if only that damned ammunition would ever get here.”

  “We had help then,” Potter said. “Without it, I think we should have lost.”

  “One way or another, we’d have licked them.” Featherston didn’t know whether that was likely to be true or just his own stubbornness talking. “We’d be licking them now if the damn niggers hadn’t risen up and stabbed us in the back.”