He pulled out a pack of Raleighs, gave one to Donofrio, and lit another for himself. After the first drag, he said, “Getting away from the smell in there is good, too.”
“Bet your ass,” Donofrio said. “That’s another thing smoke is good for.” He inhaled, held it, and then blew out a blue-gray cloud. Even after that, he made a face. “You know what it reminded me of? Like there’s spare ribs in the oven and the telephone rings, you know, and it’s the gal’s sister, and she gets to yakking and doesn’t look at the clock till she smells stuff burning-and then it’s too damn late.”
“That sounds about right,” O’Doull said. “I wonder why they call them spare ribs. I bet the pig didn’t think so.”
Donofrio laughed. “Good one, Doc! I bet I steal it.”
“You better not,” O’Doull said, so seriously that the medic looked surprised. He went on, “You’ll cut into my royalties if you do.”
“Royalties?” Donofrio snorted. “You want royalties, go to Mexico or France or England.”
“Sure, tell an Irishman to go to England for the king,” O’Doull said. “You know how to win friends, don’t you?”
“In a poker game, right?” Donofrio could be even loopier than Granny McDougald.
“Poker game.” O’Doull shook his head. He couldn’t get the wounded barrelman out of his thoughts. “That poor son of a bitch sure had the cards stacked against him.”
“Yeah.” The medic scowled, too. “One good thing-his face came through pretty good. He won’t have to go through life like that guy in the book-The Phantom of the Catacombs, that’s what the name of it was. You ever see the movie they made from it? Scared the crap outa me when I was a kid.”
“I was grown up by then, but I know what you mean,” O’Doull said. “They ought to do a talking version now. They have for a lot of the old silents, but not that one-not yet, anyway.”
“Who do you suppose they’d get to play the Phantom?” Donofrio asked. “You could put anybody in one of the other parts, but the Phantom? Everybody who saw the movie would be comparing him to Lon Chaney.”
“Not everybody,” O’Doull said. “The silent version’s more than twenty years old now. Most people younger than you never saw it. They would have stopped showing it as soon as talking came along. When was the last time you saw a silent movie?”
“Been a while,” Donofrio admitted after a little thought. “You don’t even worry or wonder about crap like that, but it disappears when you aren’t looking. Like Kaiser Bill mustaches, you know? Now it’s just a few stubborn old farts who wear ’em, but my old man sure had one in the last war. Everybody did. Hell, I think even my mother did.”
O’Doull laughed. “You said it-I didn’t.”
“My mother’s a nice lady,” Donofrio said. “She heard me going on about her like that, she wouldn’t beat me up…much.”
A green-gray truck pulled up. “You guys get ready to take your aid station forward,” the driver said. “Front’s moving up again. You’re too far behind the line.”
He sounded as if he came from Kansas or Nebraska. All the same, O’Doull said, “I don’t know you from a hole in the ground. Give me the password.” Confederates in Yankee clothing remained a nuisance. O’Doull hoped U.S. soldiers with drawls were also making the enemy sweat.
“Oh-Sequoyah!” The truck driver couldn’t sing worth a damn, but that was the opening for a hot new Broadway show, and the day’s password. He pointed at O’Doull. “Now give me the countersign, or I’ll figure you’re one of Featherston’s fuckers in disguise.”
Fair was fair. “Away we go!” O’Doull said dutifully. The driver nodded. O’Doull turned to Donofrio. “Time to pack up and leave our home sweet home.”
“Leave, my ass-we take it with us,” Donofrio said, and then, with a shrug, “What the hell? It’s not like we never did it before.”
“I’d rather go forward than back,” O’Doull said, and the medic nodded.
As Donofrio said, they’d had practice knocking down the aid station. And it was designed to fit inside the rear compartment of a deuce-and-a-half. Military engineering extended to things besides rifles and barrels. Making aid stations go into the trucks that had to move them fit the bill, and the people who’d put things together knew what they were doing. Even the operating table folded up for a smooth fit.
“Let’s roll,” the driver said.
Roll they did, down past Dalton, Georgia, toward Resaca. O’Doull and Donofrio rode in the cab with the driver; Eddie and the other corpsmen who gathered casualties stayed in the back of the truck. Several bodies hung in the Dalton town square. HE SHOT AT SOLDIERS, said the placard tied around the neck of one of them. The others bore similarly cheery messages.
“They love us down here,” Donofrio said, eyeing the bodies.
“Who gives a damn if they love us?” the driver said. “Long as they know they better not screw with us, that’s all that counts.”
Oderint dum metuant. An ancient Roman playwright had put that into three words. Let them hate as long as they fear. English was a less compact language than Latin. O’Doull didn’t suppose he could expect a truck driver to match a poet’s concision.
War’s wreckage littered the landscape: burnt-out barrels from both sides, crashed airplanes, smashed houses and barns, hastily dug graves with helmet-topped rifles taking the place of headstones. O’Doull nodded to himself. The aid station had got too far behind the front. Smelling death again reminded him what war was like.
Brakes squealed when the driver stopped. Small-arms fire came from up ahead. “This about right?” the man asked.
“Should do,” O’Doull answered. Vince Donofrio’s head bobbed up and down.
They got out and started setting up what they’d taken down not long before. The corpsmen wrestled with canvas and ropes and tent pegs. As soon as they had the tent up, O’Doull and Donofrio put in the operating table and medical supplies. Before long, the doctor and senior medic were ready for business again. Eddie and his pals headed up toward the front to see what kind of business they could bring back.
“Hope we don’t see them for a while,” O’Doull said.
“That’d be nice, wouldn’t it?” Donofrio cocked his head to one side, listening to the gunfire up ahead. “You really think all that shit’s flying around and nobody’s getting hurt?”
“No,” O’Doull admitted. “But you’re right. It would be nice.”
They had a respite of most of an hour. That was about how long the corpsmen would have needed to walk up to the fighting, find someone wounded and give him emergency first aid, and then lug him back to the relocated aid station.
The first wounded man came back cussing a blue streak. A bandage swathed his left hand. Another one soaked up blood from his left buttock. “Same fucking bullet clipped off a finger and a half and got me in the ass,” he growled.
“Could’ve been worse,” Donofrio said. “Could’ve been your other hand.”
“Up yours, Jack,” the wounded man told him. “I’m a lefty.”
“Oh.” For a moment, the medic looked as foolish as he sounded. “Sorry. How was I supposed to know?”
“You coulda kept your goddamn mouth shut.”
“Let’s get you on the table,” O’Doull said. “I’ll do what I can for your hand, and I’ll see if I can dig out the bullet.”
“Hot damn! So I get to turn the other cheek, huh?” the soldier said.
O’Doull winced. Donofrio reached for the mask attached to the ether cylinder with nothing but relief. Putting this guy under would shut him up, anyway.
XIX
Rain poured down from a leaden sky. Off in the distance, lightning flashed. Irving Morrell counted hippopotamuses-or was it hippopotami? Whichever, he counted twelve of them before the dull boom shook his barrel. The stroke was more than two miles away. But the rain, dammit, was here, there, and everywhere.
The barrel squelched forward through mud that was starting to look like tomato soup. U.S. armor a
ll over northern Georgia was squelching-except in the places where it was flat-out stuck. The low ceiling grounded fighter-bombers. Even regular artillery was less accurate in godawful weather like this, and shell bursts spent themselves in the mud instead of spreading as they did most of the time.
“Dammit, we need to keep rolling,” Morrell muttered. But how? He’d broken out of the bridgehead south of Chattanooga. No way in hell the Confederates could drive U.S. forces back into the bottle and pound down the cork.
But Morrell didn’t think small. He wanted Atlanta. He wanted it so bad he could taste it. He wanted to see Jake Featherston try to fight a war with the Stars and Stripes flying over the chief Confederate junction between east and west. And he thought he could take Atlanta-as long as his men kept moving, kept pushing, didn’t let up on the bastards in butternut, didn’t give them a chance to regroup, reorganize, catch their breath.
October wasn’t listening to him. The summer had been drier than usual. Fall seemed to be making up for it all at once. “Unfair,” Morrell said. The enemy couldn’t stop him. The enemy had a devil of a time even slowing him down. Why was the weather doing the Confederacy’s dirty work for it?
Dirty work it was. Plowing through this gunk, the command barrel kicked up a bow wave like a destroyer at flank speed. But seawater was clean, not mixed with mud. Anyone this bow wave splashed would turn the color of rust-if he hadn’t already from trying to make his own way through the muck.
More lightning flashed. After a dozen or so hippos, thunder boomed. The rain came down harder than ever. Swearing under his breath, Morrell ducked down into the turret and closed the hatch behind him.
“Thank you, sir,” the new gunner said. Clark Ashton had an infectious grin. “Wondered if I’d have to start bailing there.”
“Not that wet,” Morrell said, though it didn’t miss by much. Frenchy Bergeron had shoulder straps with gold bars on them now, and a platoon somewhere around here. So did Michael Pound, if he hadn’t got hurt since Morrell saw him last. My gunners-a substitute for OCS? Morrell thought with a wry grin.
“No forty days and forty nights?” Ashton said. “Sure coming down like it. If you see a big boat with giraffes and elephants and a guy with a beard, you better watch out.”
“The Ark came down on Mount Ararat,” Morrell said. “That’s in Armenia, not Georgia. The Turks and the Russians have to worry about it. Not us, thank God.”
“Isn’t there a Georgia right next to Armenia?” Ashton asked. “Maybe we’ve floated over from this one to that one.”
“Maybe you’ve floated clean out of your skull,” Morrell said. The gunner took a seated bow, which wasn’t easy in the crowded turret. Morrell rolled his eyes. That only made Ashton bow again.
Word coming in on the command circuits made Morrell do worse than roll his eyes. Unit after unit reported that it couldn’t go forward. Artillery was bogging down too far behind the line to give any kind of worthwhile support. Armored cars couldn’t leave the roads to scout; their tires made them more prone to getting stuck in the mud than barrels or armored personnel carriers. Even infantry units were having heavy going…and soldiers hated nothing worse than flooded trenches and foxholes.
At last, Morrell decided struggling to go forward would cost more than it was worth. He ordered all front-line units to hold in place to give the artillery and logistics train a chance to catch up. He wanted to be ready to reopen the attack when the rains let up-if they ever did.
“You don’t think we’ll sink in the mud if we stop here, sir?” Ashton asked.
Morrell muttered under his breath. That didn’t just strike him as possible; it struck him as likely. He ordered the driver forward till they came to a paved road. That also had its drawbacks. The barrel was too exposed to make him happy. But the curtain of rain drumming down hid the machine almost as well as a smoke screen. And he didn’t want to have to summon an armored recovery vehicle to rescue him if he did bog down. His reputation would be a long time recovering from something like that.
“Here we are,” Ashton said. “The middle of nowhere. Isn’t it lovely this time of year?”
“This isn’t the middle of nowhere,” Morrell said. The gunner raised an eyebrow, as if to say he was too well-bred to argue but it sure looked that way to him. “It isn’t,” Morrell insisted. “Where we are right now, this has to be the southern end of nowhere. Down a little farther, you’ve got Atlanta, and Atlanta’s definitely somewhere.”
Clark Ashton thought for a bit, then nodded. “Somewhere we can’t get to right now,” he said.
“Well, no. Thanks for reminding me,” Morrell said. “When this barrel rolls into Atlanta, the war’s just a long spit from being over.”
Ashton listened to the rain pounding on the barrel’s metal skin. “Seems to me God’s got the long spit right now.”
Morrell grunted. “Seems that way to me, too, and I wish to hell it didn’t.” He patted the front pocket of his coveralls. “And I wish I could have a cigarette.”
“Good luck, sir,” the gunner said. Morrell’s chuckle was distinctly halfhearted. He wasn’t about to light up inside the turret. Barrelmen did that every once in a while, but you had to be really desperate for a butt to take the chance. He would have growled like an angry bear if Ashton or the loader smoked in here, which meant he couldn’t do it himself. Normally, he would have just stood up in the cupola if he wanted a nicotine buzz. With water coming down in buckets, that wouldn’t work, either.
“Won’t kill me to go without,” he said mournfully, and patted that front pocket again.
“How long do you think it’ll be before we can start advancing again?” Ashton asked.
Laughing, Morrell said, “What is it about gunners? You guys can’t stand not to know about anything, can you?”
“I don’t know about anybody else, but I sure can’t,” Ashton said.
“Tell you what,” Morrell said. “Talk to God. If you can make the sun come out and dry up the mud, we’ll roll. Till somebody does…we won’t.”
“If God listened to me, sir, I wouldn’t be in a turret with you-no offense. I’d be in bed with a blonde-or a brunette, or a redhead. I’m not a fussy guy. Any kind of girl would do.”
“Blonde,” the loader said. “If you’re gonna ask, don’t be shy, for Chrissake. With big jugs, too.” He gestured.
“There you go,” Ashton said. “That’d work for me.” He glanced over at Morrell. “What about you, sir?”
“One of these days, I wouldn’t mind leave to go back to Kansas,” Morrell said. “That’s where my wife and daughter are.”
“Yes, sir,” the gunner said. “But you’re here now, and there’s plenty of broads around, and some of ’em’ll put out even if you’re a damnyankee.”
“I don’t need it that bad,” Morrell said. “Agnes isn’t fooling around on me back there, and I don’t feel right about cheating on her.”
Ashton and the loader looked at each other. He could read their minds, though they said not a word. Poor old guy, they had to be thinking. If he had more get up and go in him, he’d nail some of these Confederate bitches any which way. Maybe they were right. Morrell hoped not, but he recognized the possibility. A man in his twenties was a hard-on with legs. A man in his fifties damn well wasn’t, and never looked or acted more idiotic than when he pretended he was.
His earphones crackled with a new report: “Sir, our forward scouts say there’s a Confederate buildup centered on map square Red-14.”
“Have you called artillery in on it?” Morrell asked, maneuvering the map so he could see where the devil Red-14 was. Folding and unfolding the damn thing inside the turret reminded him of a crowded flat with laundry drying on lines strung across the front room. The square lay south and east of Resaca, not too far from where he was himself.
“Yes, sir,” said the voice on the wireless. “Doesn’t seem to be enough to break ’em up. Sure could use a spoiling attack.”
“Well, I believe you,” Morrell said.
“Haven’t got a whole lot to spoil with, though. And this damn rain…”
“How much trouble can they cause if they break through there?” the voice asked.
Morrell looked at the map again. He did some more muttering. If everything went precisely wrong, the Confederates could retake Resaca. That would complicate his life. It would mean Atlanta wouldn’t fall any time soon. And it would put him in hot water with the War Department, where you were only as good as what you did yesterday.
“How big a buildup is it?” he asked. If it was brigade strength, maybe even division strength, he would put in a spoiling attack. He wouldn’t just put it in, either-he’d lead it himself. He knew he couldn’t put his hands on anywhere near a division’s worth of men and materiel, but he didn’t care. The Confederates wouldn’t be so sure of that. When barrels came at them out of a curtain of rain, wouldn’t they think twice before they tried attacking? He thought so-they couldn’t afford to get too intrepid. On the other hand, they couldn’t afford not to get too intrepid, either. How did you judge?
He knew how he judged. If they were there in corps strength, he’d have to receive an attack instead of delivering one. That was where he drew the line between aggressiveness and stupidity.
“Sir, best estimate is division strength,” said the man at the other end of the wireless connection.
“Heigh-ho,” Morrell said. “Let’s go.” He thumbed the TRANSMIT button. “Well, we’ll see if we can knock ’em back on their heels. Out.” Then he started calling the armored and infantry in the neighborhood. He wondered if their COs would groan and fuss and flabble and say they couldn’t possibly move in this downpour. Nobody did. They wanted to hit the Confederates. “We’ve been thumping ’em like a big bass drum from Pittsburgh down to here,” an infantry colonel said. “Let’s do it some more.”
Clark Ashton beamed at him when the command barrel squelched forward. “Frenchy told me to expect action when I rode with you,” he said. “He wasn’t blowing smoke, was he?”
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