“Reckon you’re right,” Reinholdt answered, “but to hell with me if I know what it is. I’m going to enjoy this while it lasts.”
“Yeah, me, too,” Martin said. He didn’t enjoy it long, because the Army of Northern Virginia did have something up its sleeve. It had put fewer men into the forward trenches than usual, its generals perhaps aware that, no matter what they did, they could not withstand the first U.S. blow.
Once the first line was pierced, though…The Confederates had machine guns cunningly concealed in every cornfield. They had snipers in every other pine and oak. The ground south of their front line was more stubbornly defended than Martin remembered from earlier fights. He tried to think strategically. In those earlier fights, the Rebs defending open country had been men forced from their trenches. Here, the Confederates had planned from the beginning to fight in the open, and they showed a nasty talent for it.
Martin got to hate cornfields in a hurry. The plants stood taller than a man. You couldn’t see more than one row at a time. Anything might be lurking among them. All too often, it was. Machine guns, trip wires, foxholes…anything at all.
His company managed to bypass the fighting for Manassas itself, skirting it to the west. Before long, by the sound of things, the town was cut off and surrounded, but the Confederates inside showed no signs of quitting: they kept banging away at the U.S. soldiers with whatever they had.
“Come on!” Martin yelled as a Wright two-decker, which could see better than he could, poured fire on the Rebs in a field ahead. The objective lines on Major Adkins’ map had seemed insanely optimistic. They were. The soldiers weren’t going to reach those set for the first day, even if Manassas would fall soon. Martin rolled himself in a blanket when night came and wearily thanked God he was still breathing.
The next day was another grim blur, as the Rebs brought reinforcements forward and tried to counterattack. The U.S. soldiers, glad to play defense for a little while, took savage pleasure in mowing them down. By that evening, the Confederates couldn’t find any more troops who would press home a counterattack. Their raw recruits would make a halfhearted lunge, then fall back in disorder and dismay when rifle and machine-gun bullets began to bite.
By noon the next day, a day behind the preordained schedule but far ahead of Chester Martin’s fondest dreams, he stood atop Independent Hill—a knob barely deserving the name—and peered south, wondering where the next push would take him.
Somewhere north of Independent Hill, Jake Featherston and what was left of his battery—what was left of the First Richmond Howitzers, what was left of the Army of Northern Virginia—tried to hold back the tide with bare hands. He was filthy; he couldn’t remember the last time he’d had leisure even to splash in a creek. His butternut uniform, aside from being out at the knees and elbows, had enough green splotches on it to make him look halfway like a damnyankee.
The real damnyankees were forcing their way across Cedar Run. He’d expected they would be any time now, and had taken the range for his guns. “Let’s give it to them, boys,” he shouted, and the four surviving guns of the battery began banging away. Peering through field glasses, he watched the explosions a couple of miles to the north. The shells were falling right where he wanted them to: on the leading Yankees and trailing Confederates.
He was the man with the binoculars. The rest of his gun crews couldn’t tell exactly where the rounds were coming down. That wasn’t their job; it was his. If the Confederate stragglers caught a little hell from their own side, too damn bad. Odds are they’re niggers anyway, he thought.
Retreating infantry streamed past the battery to either side. Some of the men falling back were indeed colored. Others, to Jake’s disgust, were white. “Why don’t you fight the goddamn sons of bitches?” he shouted at them.
“Fuck you,” one of the infantrymen shouted back. “Got your damn nerve yellin’ at us when you lousy bastards ain’t never been up in a trench in all your born days. Hope the damnyankees run right over you, give you a taste of what real for-true soldierin’ is like.”
Featherston’s temper went up like an ammunition dump. “Canister!” he shouted, fully intending to turn his gun on the infantryman who’d talked back to him—and on the fellow’s pals, too. “Load me a round of canister, damn your eyes. I’ll teach that asshole to run his mouth when he don’t know what he’s talkin’ about.”
“Sorry, Sarge, don’t reckon we got any more canister,” Michael Scott said. That was a damn lie, and Featherston knew it was a damn lie. He cussed his loader up one side and down the other. By the time he was through, the offending soldiers were around a stand of trees and out of sight. Scott probably thought that meant they were forgotten, but he underestimated Jake, who never forgot a slight, even when he could do nothing about it.
This was one of those times. Regardless of his shelling, the Yankees kept right on crossing Cedar Run. A few aeroplanes emblazoned with the Confederate battle flag swooped down on them. But more U.S. fighting scouts raked the soldiers in butternut who were trying to hold them back.
Despite the aeroplanes, despite the Yankees’ numbers, Featherston thought for a while that the Army of Northern Virginia would be able to hold them not too far south of Cedar Run. From his own position on slightly higher ground, he was able to watch U.S. assaults crumple in the face of fire from the machine guns the Confederates had posted in cornfields and woods.
“Those fields’ll raise a fine crop of dead men,” he said with a chuckle, turning the elevation screw to shorten the range on his own field piece.
But the men in green-gray did not give up, despite the casualties they took. In almost three years of war, Jake had come to know the enemy well. The Yankees made more stolid soldiers than the men alongside of whom he’d gone to war. They weren’t quite so quick to exploit advantages as were their Confederate counterparts. That coin had two sides, though, for they kept coming even after losses that might have torn the heart out of a C.S. attack.
As usual these days, they had barrels leading the way, too. Featherston whooped with glee when one of the guns from his battery set a traveling fortress on fire. “Burn now and burn in hell, you sons of bitches!” he shouted. He hoped they did burn. That would hurt the damnyankees, for every barrel carried inside it a couple of squads’ worth of men.
For every U.S. barrel Confederate artillery or Confederate tanks—Jake still sneered whenever the term crossed his mind—knocked out, though, two or three more kept waddling forward. And the Yankees’ front-line troops seemed to have an ungodly number of machine guns, too. Featherston recognized the muzzle flashes that went on and on as the guns fired burst after burst at the C.S. troops resisting them.
In disgust, he turned to Michael Scott. “There’s somethin’ else we’ll get around to trying in six, eight months—maybe a year—or we would, ’cept the goddamn war’ll be lost to hell and gone by then,” he said.
“Those can’t be regular machine guns,” the loader replied. “They’re keeping up with the rest of the damnyankee infantry way too good for that. Yankees must’ve turned out some lightweight models.”
“So why the hell ain’t we?” Featherston asked, a good question without a good answer. Not long before, he’d reckoned U.S. soldiers stolid in the way they fought. There was, unfortunately, nothing stolid about their War Department. He spat in disgust. “Those white-bearded fools down in Richmond shouldn’t ever have started this here fight if they didn’t reckon they could whip the USA.”
“They did reckon that.” Steady as if he were attacking New York instead of defending Richmond, Scott loaded yet another shell into the breech of the quick-firing three-inch. Featherston made a minute adjustment to the traversing screw, then nodded. Scott yanked the lanyard. The gun bellowed. Scott opened the breech. Out fell the shell casing, to land with a clank on one of the many others the piece had already fired. As he placed the next shell in the breech, the loader went on, “Maybe they weren’t quite right this time.”
“Y
eah—maybe.” A rattlesnake might have carried more venom in its mouth than Jake Featherston did, but not much more. He fiddled with the traversing screw again—the Yankee machine gun at which he’d aimed the last shell was still blazing away. When he was satisfied, he yelled, “Fire!” The field gun roared again. He took off his tin hat and waved it in the air when that lightweight gun—Scott had made a shrewd guess there—abruptly fell silent.
Darkness slowed the carnage, but didn’t stop it. Featherston slept by his gun, in fitful snatches when the firing died down for a while. Ammunition did come forward to his guns, but U.S. bombing aeroplanes kept thundering by low overhead and dropping their loads deep behind the Confederate line. Troops and munitions would have a harder time moving up in the morning.
When the skirmishing along the front line picked up, he fired a few rounds at where he thought the damnyankees were. Michael Scott wasn’t so sure. “Haven’t you shortened the range so much, those’ll be dropping on our own boys?” he asked.
“Don’t reckon so,” Jake answered. “Yanks’ll likely have moved up a bit since we could see where they were at. And if they haven’t, well, what the hell? Odds are I’m just blowing up some coons.”
Fighting grew heavy before sunrise. As soon as black turned to gray, the two armies started going at each other—or rather, the U.S. forces started going at the Army of Northern Virginia, which fought desperately to hold back the onslaught. The damnyankees had brought soldiers and supplies forward during the night, too, and threw everything they had into the fight.
For a couple of hours, in spite of his gibes about the fools in Richmond and his contempt for the Negroes surely manning a large part of the line in front of him, Featherston dared hope that line would hold. The Yankees crept within a couple of thousand yards of his position—close enough that occasional rifle and machine-gun bullets whistled by—and stalled.
But then, no doubt saved for just such an emergency, fifteen or twenty barrels painted green-gray rumbled over pontoon bridges thrown across Cedar Run and straight at the outnumbered, outgunned men in butternut. Jake looked wildly in all directions. Where were the Confederate barrels that could blunt the slow-moving charge of the U.S. machines?
He saw none. There were none to see. He shouted to his gun, to his battery: “It’s up to us. If we don’t stop them fuckers, nobody does.”
They did what they could do. Three or four barrels went up in flames, sending pillars of black smoke high into the sky to mark their funeral pyres. But the rest kept coming, through the woods, through the fields, straight at him—and straight through what was left of the Army of Northern Virginia’s line.
And the line gave way. He’d seen that up at Round Hill: a sea of panic-stricken men in butternut streaming back toward him. He’d hoped he’d never see anything like it again. But here it was. These soldiers—some white, more colored—had had all the fighting they could stand. The only thing left in their minds was escaping the oncoming foe.
They might have had a better chance if they’d stayed and tried to hold back the U.S. soldiers. Infantrymen in green-gray and barrel crews were not the least bit shy about shooting fleeing Confederates in the back.
Featherston would cheerfully have shot them in the back, too. He didn’t have that choice, since they were coming his way. “Fight!” he shouted to the infantrymen. “Turn around and fight, God damn you!” They didn’t. They wouldn’t. As he had at Round Hill, as he had when the soldier cursed him the day before, he shouted, “Canister! If I can’t do it any other way, I’ll send ’em back on account of they’re more afraid of me than they ever dreamt of being afraid of the damnyankees.”
Michael Scott objected again: “Sarge, God only knows how come we didn’t get crucified the last time we did that. If we do it again—”
Featherston did not intend to let his loader balk him, not now. He drew his pistol. “I’ll load and fire it myself if I have to,” he snarled. Then, over open sights, he aimed the gun at the Confederate soldiers heading his way. Scott could have drawn his own weapon. Instead, white-faced, he loaded the round Jake had demanded. Jake pulled the lanyard himself. He shrieked out a Rebel yell when the worthless, cowardly scum in butternut vanished from before the gun as if swept aside by a broom. He might have hit some of the Yankees close on their heels, too.
But the canister rounds—he fired several—did not, could not, stem the rout, any more than they had at Round Hill. The infantry would run, and he could not stop them. Save for the ones he killed and maimed, the men in butternut fled past him. Black soldiers and white cried out in amazement that he did not flee, too.
“Cowards!” he shouted at them in turn. “Filthy, stinking, rotten cowards! Stand and fight, damn you all. You’re stabbing your country in the back.”
And then the Yankees were well within canister range. He gave them several rounds, too, to make them go to ground. That bought him time to limber up his guns and abandon his own position. He could not hold if everything around him fell. All four guns got out.
“Backstabbers,” he muttered as he trudged south past Independent Hill. “Nothing but filthy backstabbers. I’ll pay them all back one day, every goddamn one of them, so help me Jesus I will.”
Sam Carsten shoveled in beans and smoked sausage and sauerkraut alongside dozens of other men in the galley. The USS Dakota rolled as he ate, but the tables were mounted on gimbals. The rolling wasn’t nearly enough to make his food end up in his lap.
Across the table from him, Vic Crosetti grinned and poured down coffee. “Well, you were right, you lucky son of a bitch—we’re still down here and it’s turning into winter. You don’t toast for a while longer yet.”
“Oh, come on,” Sam said mildly. “Yeah, it’s winter, but it’s not winter, if you know what I mean. Just kind of gray and gloomy, that’s all. It’s like San Francisco winter, kind of. That’s not so bad.”
“Yeah, that’s not so bad,” Crosetti said, with the air of a man granting a great and undeserved favor, “but it ain’t so goddamn good, neither. If we was back in the Sandwich Islands now, I’d be laying under a palm tree with one of those what-do-you-call-’em flowers in my hair—”
“Hibiscus?” Carsten said.
“Yeah, one of them,” Crosetti agreed. “With a hibiscus flower in my hair and with my arm around a broad. I’d be suckin’ up a cold drink, or maybe she’d be suckin’ up somethin’ else. But no, it’s winter out in the goddamn South Atlantic, and you, you son of a bitch, you’re happy about it.”
“You bet I am,” Carsten said. “For one thing, back at Pearl Harbor we might get leave once in a while, yeah, but they’d work our tails off the rest of the time, harder’n they’re working us now when we aren’t fighting. That’s one thing, mind you. You know damn well what the other one is.”
“Sure as hell do.” Crosetti cackled like a hen just delivered of an egg. “Layin’ under a palm tree wouldn’t do you one single, stinking, solitary bit of good. Everybody’d reckon you were the roast pig they was supposed to eat for supper, ’cept maybe you wouldn’t have an apple in your mouth. God help you if you did, though.”
“Jesus!” Sam had been swigging coffee himself. He had everything he could do to keep it from coming out his nose. “Don’t make me laugh like that again. Especially don’t make me laugh like that and want to deck you at the same time.” He put down the coffee mug and made a fist—a pale, pale fist.
Vic Crosetti grinned again, no doubt ready with another snappy comeback. Damn smartmouth wop, Carsten thought with wry affection, bracing himself to laugh and get furious at the same time again. But instead of sticking the needle in him one more time, Crosetti jumped from his seat and sprang to attention. So did Sam, wondering why the devil Commander Grady was coming into the galley.
“As you were, men,” the commander of the starboard secondary armament said. “This isn’t a snap inspection.”
“Then what the hell is it?” Crosetti mumbled as he sat down again. Carsten would have said the same thin
g if his bunkmate hadn’t beaten him to it. Several sailors let out quiet—but not quite quiet enough—sighs of relief.
“I have an announcement to make,” Grady said, “an announcement that will affect the Dakota and our mission. We have just received word by wireless telegraph that the Empire of Brazil has declared war on the United Kingdom, the Republic of France, the Confederate States of America, and the Republic of Argentina.” He grinned now, an expression of pure exultation. “How about that, boys?”
For a few seconds, the big compartment was absolutely still. Then it erupted in bedlam. At any other time, a passing officer would have angrily broken up the disturbance and assigned punishment to every man jack in there. Now Commander Grady, showing his teeth like a chimpanzee in the zoo, pounded on the bulkhead and whooped louder than anybody else.
“Dom Pedro knows whose ship is sinking, and it isn’t ours!” Carsten shouted.
“Good-bye, England!” Crosetti yelled, and waved at Sam as if he were King George. “So long, pal! Be seein’ you—be seein’ you starve.”
“Hell of a lot longer run from Buenos Aires to west Africa than it is from Pernambuco,” Sam said through the din, as if he were seeing things from Rear Admiral Bradley Fiske’s cabin. “And with Brazil in the war on our side, we’ll be able to use their ports, and they’ll have some ships of their own they’ll throw into the pot.” As he weighted the sudden, enormous change, his smile got wider and wider. “Near as I can see, the limeys are a lobster in the pot, and the water’s starting to boil.”
“Near as I can see, you’re right.” Vic Crosetti nodded emphatically. Then he leered at Carsten. “And you know what else?”
“No, what?” Sam asked.
The Great War: Breakthroughs Page 52
