The Great War: Breakthroughs

by Harry Turtledove

A bullet ricocheted off the front of the barrel. Just one round—that meant a rifleman. A moment later, another one snapped past Morrell’s head. His lips skinned back from his teeth in a ferocious grin. He’d spotted the muzzle flash from the middle of a clump of bushes. He swung his own—his very own—light machine gun toward the bushes and ripped off a burst. No one shot at the barrel from that direction again.

  “We’ve got them!” he said. Once, playing chess, he’d seen ten moves ahead: a knight’s tour that threatened several of his opponent’s pieces on the way to forking the fellow’s king and rook. It had been an epiphany of sorts, a glimpse into a higher world. He was at best a medium-good player; he’d never known such a moment before or since…till now.

  He’d had a taste of that feeling when First Army crossed the Cumberland. This was different, though. This was better. There, the Confederates had been fooled. Here, they were doing everything they could do, as the soldier across the chessboard from him had done everything he could do—and they were losing anyhow.

  They did not have enough men. They did not have enough aeroplanes. No sooner had that thought crossed his mind than a U.S. fighting scout zoomed past the waddling barrel. Morrell waved, though the pilot was gone by then. He almost wished it had been a Confederate aeroplane; he longed to try out the light machine gun as an antiaircraft weapon and give some Reb a nasty surprise.

  The Confederate States did not have enough barrels, either, nor fully understand what to do with the ones they had. Every so often, a few of their rhomboids would come forward to challenge the U.S. machines. Individually, theirs were about as good as the one Morrell commanded. But what he and Ned Sherrard and General Custer had grasped and the Confederates had not was that, with barrels, the whole was greater than the sum of its parts. A mass of them all striking together could do things the same number could not do if committed piecemeal.

  A shell whine in the air sent Morrell ducking back inside his steel turtle’s shell. Even as he ducked, a shell burst close to the barrel. Fragments hissed past him and clattered off its plating. None bit his soft, tender, vulnerable flesh, though.

  More shells burst close by. A battery of C.S. three-inchers was doing its best to knock out his barrel and any others close by. Except at very short range, field guns hit barrels only by luck, but the hail of splinters from the barrage forced Morrell to stay inside for a while.

  It was like dying and going to hell, except a little hotter and a little stickier. July in Tennessee was not the ideal weather in which to fight in a barrel. The ideal weather, for men if not for engines, would have been January in Labrador. The barrel generated plenty of heat on its own. When its shell trapped still more…Morrell was coming to understand how a rib roast felt in the oven.

  And the rest of the crew suffered worse than he did. When he stood up, he got a breeze in his face: a hot, muggy breeze, but a breeze even so. They got only the whispers of air that sneaked in through louvered vision slits and the mountings of the cannon and machine guns. The engineers, down below Morrell in the bowels of the barrel, got no air at all, only stinking fumes from the twin truck engines that kept the traveling fortress traveling.

  Morrell stood up again. Shells were still falling, but not so close. There was Nolensville, only a few hundred yards ahead. Infantrymen and machine-gun crews were firing from the houses and from barricades in the street, as they did in every little town. As Morrell watched, a shell from the cannon of another U.S. barrel sent chunks of a barricade flying in all directions. A moment later, that barrel started to burn. Soldiers leaped from it. Morrell hoped they got out all right. He sprayed a few rounds in front of them to make the defenders keep their heads down.

  Infantrymen in green-gray and barrels converged on Nolensville. U.S. aeroplanes strafed the Confederates in the town from just above chimney height. Morrell did not order his barrel into Nolensville, where it might easily come to grief moving along any of the narrow, winding streets. He poured machine-gun fire and cannon shells onto the Rebels from just outside, where the barrel could move as freely as…a barrel could move.

  Some of the defenders died in Nolensville. Some, seeing they could not hold the town, broke and ran. Morrell’s barrel rumbled past Nolensville. He took potshots at fleeing men in butternut, some white, some colored. Some of them, probably, had been brave for a long time. Under endless hammering, though, even the hardest broke in time.

  Another Confederate came out from behind a large, dun-colored rock. Morrell swung the light machine gun toward him. He was on the point of opening fire when he saw the man was holding a flag of truce.

  Bullets from one of the barrel’s hull machine guns stitched the ground near the Confederate officer’s feet. He stood still and let the flag be seen. The machine gun stopped firing. All over the field, firing slowed to a spatter and stopped.

  Morrell ducked down into the cupola. Halt, he signaled urgently. Then, like a jack-in-the-box, he popped up again. Even before the barrel had fully stopped, he scrambled down off it and ran toward the Confederate with the white flag. “Sir, I am Colonel Irving Morrell, U.S. Army. How may I be of service to you?”

  Courteously, the Rebel, an older man, returned the salute. The three stars on each side of his stand collar showed his rank matched Morrell’s. “Harley Landis,” he said. He said nothing after that for close to half a minute; Morrell saw tears shine in his eyes. Then, gathering himself, he resumed: “Colonel, I—I am ordered to seek from the U.S. Army the terms you will require for a cease-fire, our own forces having proved unable to offer effectual resistance any longer.”

  Joy blazed in Morrell. To let his opposite number see it would have been an insult. Sticking to business would not. “How long a cease-fire do you request, sir, and on how broad a front?”

  “A cease-fire of indefinite duration, along all the front now being defended by the Army of Kentucky,” Landis answered. Again, he seemed to have trouble finding words. At last, he did: “I hope you will forgive me, sir, but I find this duty particularly difficult, as I was born and reared outside Louisville.”

  “You have my sympathies, for whatever they may be worth to you,” Morrell said formally. “You must understand, of course, that I lack the authority to grant a cease-fire of any such scope. I will pass you back to First Army headquarters, which will be in touch with our War Department. I can undertake to say that troops under my command will observe the cease-fire for so long as they are not fired upon, and so long as they do not discover C.S. troops improving their positions or reinforcing—or, of course, unless I am ordered to resume combat.”

  “That is acceptable,” Colonel Landis said.

  “A question, if I may,” Morrell said, and the Confederate officer nodded. Morrell asked, “Are the Confederate States requesting a cease-fire along the whole front, from Virginia to Sonora?”

  “As I understand it, no, not at the present time,” Harley Landis replied.

  Morrell frowned. “I hope you see that the United States may find it difficult to cease fighting along one part of the front while continuing in another?”

  “Way I learned it, fighting in the War of Secession went on a while longer out here than it did back East, on account of the United States kept trying to hold on to Kentucky,” Landis said.

  That was true. Whether it made a binding precedent was another question. Morrell shrugged. “Again, that’s not for me to say, sir. Let’s head back toward Nashville till I can flag down a motorcar and put you in it. The sooner the fighting does stop, the better for both our countries.”

  “Yes, sir. That’s a fact.” As Landis stalked past the barrel from which Morrell had emerged, he glowered in its direction. “You Yankees hadn’t built these damn things in carload lots, we’d have whipped you again.”

  “I don’t know,” Morrell said. “We’d stopped you before we began using them. Breaking your lines would have been a lot harder without them, though; I will say that.” Landis didn’t answer. He kept on glaring. But he kept on walking, too, north
and west toward Nashville and First Army headquarters. The white flag in his hand fluttered in the breeze.

  Every soldier in green-gray who saw the Confederate officer inside U.S. lines with a flag of truce stared and stared, then burst into cheers. Off in the distance, gunfire still rattled here and there. It fell silent, one pocket after another. The Rebels had to be sending more men forward under flag of truce to let U.S. forces know they were seeking a cease-fire.

  Before Morrell spotted a motorcar, he found something even better: a mobile field-telephone station, the men still laying down wire after them as their wagon tried to keep up with the advance. “Can you put me through to Nashville?” he demanded of them. They nodded, eyes wide with wonder as they too gaped at Harley Landis and the flag he bore. Morrell said, “Then do it.”

  They did. In a few minutes, Morrell and General Custer’s adjutant were shouting back and forth at each other through the hisses and pops and scratching noises that made field telephones such a trial to use. “They want what, Colonel?” Major Abner Dowling bawled.

  “A cease-fire on this front,” Morrell shouted back.

  “On this front? This front only?” Dowling asked.

  “That’s what Colonel Landis says,” Morrell answered.

  “The general commanding won’t like that,” Dowling predicted. “Neither will the War Department, and neither will the president.”

  “I think you’re right, Major,” Morrell said. “Shall I turn him back?” He watched Landis’ face. At those words, the Rebel officer looked like a man who’d taken a bayonet in the guts.

  At the same time, Dowling was shouting, “Good God, no! Send him on! If they give so much without being pushed, we’ll get more when we squeeze, I wager. And come yourself, too. Only fitting you should be in at the death.”

  “Thank you, sir,” Morrell said, and hung up. He turned to Colonel Harley Landis. “They will be waiting for you, sir. If I had to make a prediction, though, I would say they will not find acceptable a proposal for a cease-fire on one front only.”

  “Sir, I have my orders, as you have yours,” Landis replied, to which Morrell could only nod.

  A Ford came picking its way up the battered road toward the front. Morrell gave a peremptory wave. The courier who had been in the automobile soon found himself on shank’s mare, while the Ford turned around and carried Landis and Morrell back through the wreckage of war toward Nashville.

  Boston was going out of its mind. The trolleyman kept ringing his bell, but inside the trolley Sylvia Enos could hardly hear it through the din of automobile and truck horns, wagon bells, church bells, steam whistles, and shouting, screaming people. The trolley had a devil of a time going forward, for people were literally dancing in the streets.

  “Rebs ask for cease-fire!” newsboys shouted at every other streetcorner. They were mobbed. “Rebs ask for peace!” newsboys shouted at the corners where the Rebs weren’t shouting for a cease-fire. They were mobbed, too. Sylvia watched a fistfight break out as two men struggled over one paper.

  Mostly, though, joy reigned supreme. Only the oldest granddads and grandmas remembered the last time the United States had beaten a foreign foe. Sylvia saw more men and women kissing and hugging in public during that slow streetcar ride to the shoe factory than she had in her life before.

  A man got on the trolley drunk as a lord before eight o’clock in the morning. He kissed two women who seemed glad to kiss him back, then tried to kiss Sylvia, too. “No,” she said angrily, and pushed him away. He might have fallen over, but the trolley was too crowded to let him. “The war’s not over yet,” Sylvia told him and whoever else might listen. As far as she was concerned, the newsboys shouting Peace! were out of their minds.

  As far as the drunk was concerned, Sylvia was out of her mind. His mouth fell open, giving her another blast of gin fumes. “Of course”—it came out coursh—“the war’s over,” he said. “Rebs’re quitting, ain’t they?”

  She’d already read the Globe. She hadn’t just listened to the boys yelling their heads off. “No,” she answered. “They haven’t surrendered, and there’s still fighting in places. And the Canadians haven’t quit fighting anywhere, and neither has England.” And George was out there somewhere in the Atlantic, and no indeed, the Royal Navy had not quit fighting, and nobody’d said anything about the Confederate Navy quitting, either.

  “So what?” the drunk said. “We’ll lick ’em. We’ll lick all them bastards.” He paused and leered. “Now how about a kiss?”

  Sylvia wondered if she would have to use a knee in a most unladylike fashion. Her expression, though, must have been fierce enough to get the message across even to a lush. He turned away, muttering things she was probably lucky not to be able to understand.

  She also wondered if she was the only person anywhere in the United States not convinced all the shooting was over as of this moment. By all appearances, she was the only person on the streetcar who thought that way. People avoided her and patted the drunk on the back. One of the women he’d kissed now kissed him in turn. She didn’t look like a slattern. She looked like a schoolteacher.

  At last, after fighting its way through endless traffic jams, the trolley got to Sylvia’s stop. Two more men, one drunk, one sober, tried to kiss her before she got to the shoe factory. She dodged the drunk and stepped on the sober man’s foot, hard. He hopped and cursed and cursed and hopped. She hurried to work.

  She clocked in almost twenty minutes late. When she went in from the front hall where the time clock stood to the great cave of a room where she worked, she expected the foreman to descend on her with fire in his eye. Despite being only an inch or so taller than she was, despite a snowy mustache, Gustav Krafft was not a man to trifle with.

  But he only nodded and said a guttural “Good morning” as she went to her sewing machine. A good third of the workers hadn’t yet made it to the factory. Sylvia let out a silent sigh of relief.

  Women and more little old men drifted in as the morning wore along. Some of them, like the drunk on the trolley, were visibly the worse for wear. Sylvia would not have wanted to come to work that way, not when she was working at a machine that could bite if she was careless. She sewed pieces of upper together and tossed them into a box. When it got full, a feebleminded young man carried it away to the workers who would join uppers to soles.

  Halfway through the morning, one of the men who looked as if he’d been born at his sewing machine let out a horrible yell and held up a hand that poured blood. Gustav Krafft dashed to his aid at a speed that belied the foreman’s years. “Ach, Max, Dummkopf!” he shouted, and then a spate of German Sylvia could not understand at all.

  After wrapping his own handkerchief around the wound, Krafft led Max out of the chamber toward first aid. The worker was still yelling, and emitting hot-sounding gutturals of his own between yells.

  Sylvia turned to the woman at the sewing machine next to hers and said, “I wouldn’t have thought he’d be one who let himself get hurt.”

  “Neither would I. Max has been here since this place opened up, I hear,” replied the other woman, whose name was Emma Kilgore. She was plump, a few years older than Sylvia, and had curly hair two shades darker than a carrot. “It’s the war news—everybody’s going crazy now that things are over.”

  “But they aren’t,” Sylvia protested. “There’s still fighting, and plenty of it.”

  “My husband’s down in that Tennessee place,” Emma said. “As long as they aren’t shooting at Jack, the war’s over as far as I’m concerned.”

  “George is in the Navy, out in the Atlantic,” Sylvia said. “It’s not over for him, not by a long shot, and that means it’s not over for me, either.”

  “That’s a tough one, dearie.” Emma’s sympathy was real but perfunctory. As she’d said, her own worries were gone. Few people, Sylvia had seen, really cared about the troubles of others unless they shared them.

  Gustav Krafft came back into the cavernous room. Max’s blood stained
the front and side of his shirt. He looked around, saw how many machines weren’t working, and scowled fiercely. “Even if the war is over, the work is not,” he said. “The devil loves idle hands. I do not.”

  “If you loved milk, it’d curdle,” Emma Kilgore muttered. Sylvia let out a strangled snort of laughter, but her head was bent over her machine, which was snarling before Krafft’s eyes could pick out from whom the sound had come. The foreman’s gaze swept on. Sylvia laughed again, this time silently. She felt as if she’d been naughty in class and got away with it.

  In a couple of hours, Max came back, his hand wrapped in bandages that had turned red here and there. “He’s crazy,” Emma Kilgore whispered.

  “Maybe he needs the money,” Sylvia whispered back.

  Emma shook her head, which made those copper curls fly about. “I hear tell he owns an apartment house, and I know for a fact he’s got one son who’s a cop and another one who’s a cabinetmaker. He ain’t broke.”

  As if to offer his own explanation, Max said, “It is not the first time the machine gets its teeth in me. It is probably not the last, either.” He sat down and went back to work. Now that he was paying attention to what he was doing, he was more deft with one good hand and one bandaged than Sylvia could dream of being with both of hers. But an absentminded moment had given him a nasty wound.

  Krafft came over, thumped Max on his bent back, and said something to him in German. He answered in the same language. The foreman thumped him again, careful not to disturb him while he was guiding leather under the needle. Then Krafft spoke in English: “Max says he is like the United States. He has been hurt many times, but he wins at the last.”

  Several people clapped their hands: on this day of all days, patriotic sentiment won applause. Sylvia kept right on working, with doggedness similar in kind if not in degree to that which Max showed. Emma muttered, “Christ, he didn’t cut his hand off.” Her patriotism, plainly, was limited to getting her husband back in one piece. Sylvia was ready to settle for having George home safe, too.