The Guns of the South

by Harry Turtledove

  Captain Lewis walked down the wash. He dipped his head to Caudell and Eure. “Much to my surprise, it’s done at last,” he said. He sounded annoyed whenever he mentioned the tunnel; seeing Pleasants promoted from private to colonel in one fell swoop still rankled.

  “We’ve been ready awhile now, sir,” Caudell said. He waved to the sets of packed-earth steps that led up from the bottom of the wash to the parapet. Excavating a hundred-yard shaft produced a lot of dirt. It had to go somewhere inconspicuous to keep the Rivington men from spotting it and figuring out its source. The steps served that purpose and, when the moment came, would also let the Confederate soldiers quickly go over to the attack.

  “Pleasants will touch off the charge at sunrise tomorrow, or is supposed to, at any rate,” Lewis said. “Assuming it goes off, you know your orders?”

  “Yes, sir,” Caudell and Dempsey Eure said together. Eure amplified: “Soon as it blows, we go over. We head straight for Rivington, and we don’t stop for nothin’.” The orders had come straight from Forrest and were imbued with his driving energy.

  “That’s it,” Lewis agreed. “If it turns out to be that simple, we can get down on our knees and thank God the next time we go to church, But the general’s right—the first strike has to be right for the heart. The troops behind us can fan out and take whatever strongpoints are left from the flank and rear.”

  “What if it doesn’t blow?” Eure said.

  “Then General Forrest thinks up something new and, unless I miss my guess, Colonel Henry Pleasants turns back into a pumpkin—I mean, a private.” But, being a just man at heart, Lewis added, “He’s not stinted himself, I give him that. I hope it works as he claims; we shan’t have a better chance than this.”

  “I hope it works, too,” Caudell said fervently. If it didn’t and the attack went on anyhow, the result would be gruesome, and he would be a part of that result. He wondered whether charging a nest of endless repeaters could possibly be worse than tramping across open fields toward the massed muskets and artillery atop Cemetery Ridge. Maybe not, but it wouldn’t be much better, either.

  After darkness fell, men began moving forward in the zigzag network of trenches the Confederates had dug up to the dry wash. To help disguise that movement, long-range artillery fire started up. The fire had to be at long range; no matter how well protected cannon were, fire from the endless repeaters murdered their crews when they tried to get too near the Rivington men’s lines.

  Confederate artillery fuses were imperfectly reliable; more than one shell burst above the soldiers’ heads rather than among their foes. But enough came down near their target for the Rivington men to answer with mortar fire. “Damned if I don’t halfway hope they hit somebody,” Caudell growled to Mollie Bean. “I’m sick of my own side shooting at me.” Just then, another shell fell short and made them both throw themselves flat.

  Mollie said, “They ain’t tryin’ to kill us, Nate.”

  “Does that make it better or worse if they do?” he asked. She thought for a few seconds, then shrugged. He didn’t know the answer either, but army life was easier to take when you had something to bellyache about—for one thing, it kept you from remembering you might get killed in the next few hours.

  He broke a piece of corn bread in half, passed one chunk to Mollie. After she ate it, she rolled herself in her blanket, lay down. “I’m gonna sleep while I can—if I can. “The racket from the artillery duel made that anything but obvious.

  Caudell wished she were safe in Nashville, but telling her so seemed pointless, since she wouldn’t listen to him and, even if she had, she could hardly get back there against the tide of soldiers moving the other way. For that matter, he wished he were safe in Nashville, which was just as impossible to arrange. He took a cigar out of a tunic pocket, lit it at a tiny cook fire, smoked in quick, savage puffs. The smoke failed to soothe him as he’d hoped. He tossed the chewed butt into the dirt. By then, Mollie had succeeded in falling asleep.

  He lay down next to her, not really expecting to doze off himself. But the next thing he knew, someone was shaking him awake and saying, “Come on; get ready now.” He sat up, surprised to see the sky pale in the east. He put on his hat, grabbed his rifle and his haversack. He moved a couple of full banana clips from the latter to his trouser pockets where he could get at them easily. With that, he was as ready as he could be. Beside him, Mollie made the same sort of sketchy preparations.

  As darkness faded, he could see farther and farther up and down the wash. There stood Captain Lewis, carefully cleaning his AK-47 one last time. And there—Caudell nodded to himself. He might have known Nathan Bedford Forrest would place himself in the first rank when the fighting started.

  Henry Pleasants stood by the mouth of the tunnel he’d proposed and labored so mightily to build, a length of slow match in his hand. He looked toward General Forrest. Forrest was looking from the sky to Pleasants and back again. At last he nodded, a single abrupt motion.

  Pleasants stopped, touched the slow match to a fuse that lay on the floor of the tunnel. The fuse caught. Pleasants sighed and straightened. Caudell noticed he was holding his own breath. How long for the flame to run from this end of the tunnel to that?

  Before he could ask, Forrest beat him to it: “When will it go off?”

  “Shouldn’t be long,” Pleasants answered. A Confederate shell screamed overhead, making him raise his voice. “In fact, it should be right about—”

  Before he could say “now,” the ground shook beneath Caudell’s feet. He’d heard of earthquakes, but he’d never been in the middle of one before. A roar like fifty thunderstorms left him momentarily stunned. He saw Forrest’s lips shape the words “God damn!” but could not hear him through that echoing blast.

  He did not know whether he was the next man out of the gully after Forrest, but he was sure no more than a couple of others could have been in front of him. Two or three steps past the parapet, he stopped dead in wonder. He’d never had a good look at that strongpoint while the tunnel was being dug: peering through a firing slit only invited a bullet in the face. And the bastion wasn’t there for him to examine anymore.

  “God almighty,” he said softly. The gunpowder, brought in bag by bag, barrel by barrel, had blown the biggest hole in the ground he’d ever imagined—it had to be fifty yards across, fifty feet wide, and God only knew how deep. All around it lay broken chunks of earthwork, timbers snapped like dry twigs, guns tossed every which way, and twisted bodies in mottled green.

  Like him, most of the others emerging from the Confederate works paused to gape in wonder and disbelief. Up ahead of them, Nathan Bedford Forrest turned, gestured furiously. “Come on, you bastards! And fetch the ladders right now, do you hear me? We ain’t got time to waste.”

  That was true. Not only were the guns in the bastion itself destroyed, but the endless repeaters to either flank had fallen silent, the men at them momentarily stunned by the disaster that had befallen their comrades and doubtless wondering if the ground was about to heave up under them as well.

  Caudell dashed forward, shouting for all he was worth. He reached the edge of the crater, slid down into it on his backside. More wreckage lay strewn over the bottom, and more bodies. Some of them moved as he scrambled past. He stopped and stared again, wondering how anyone could have lived through that explosion.

  But Nathan Bedford Forrest, disdaining to wait for ladders, was already climbing the far wall of the hole and yelling, “Come on, come on, come on!” Caudell hurried after him—a general who went out ahead of his men could always pull them after him.

  Forrest, grimy now as any private soldier, reached out a hand and helped pull Caudell up onto the flat ground beyond the crater. Behind them, teams of soldiers were carrying ladders across the bottom of the hole, leaning up against the wall so others could ascend.

  Off to either side, the repeaters started their deadly stutter again. But hundreds of Confederates were almost to the crater, inside it, or coming up the
ladders. There was Captain Lewis, shouting orders and waving to get the men into a line of battle. “Keep moving!” Forrest shouted. “Come on, keep moving!”

  Bullets chewed the grass close to his feet, spat dirt into Caudell’s face. That was AK-47 fire from the bushes ahead; the Rivington men had detached fighters to try to plug the gap the Confederates had blown in their line. Caudell dove behind the closest cover he saw: a corpse wearing mottled green and brown, its head and neck twisted at an impossible angle. He fired several rounds before he realized the blank, staring face a few inches from his own belonged to Piet Hardie.

  His lips skinned back from his teeth in a savage smile. He gave the corpse a familiar thump on the shoulder. “How many more wenches did you aim to torment to death, Piet? Too bad you won’t get the chance, isn’t it? Quicker than you deserved to go, too.” Maybe not, Caudell decided once he’d said that. A noose would have been quick, and if ever a man deserved a noose, Piet Hardie did.

  Once out of their earthworks, the Rivington men were vulnerable. The Confederates knew how to attack mere riflemen, and their numbers counted for more than their foes’ armor and helmets. Some men in gray rushed forward in small groups, while others fired to cover their advance. Then the groups reversed roles, leapfrogging past one another as they fanned out to get around the handful of defenders.

  “So long, Piet.” Caudell leaped to his feet and, hunched low, dashed toward a broken tree fifty yards away. Bullets whipped past him as he ran. He sprawled behind the scanty protection the tree trunk gave him, fired to support a double handful of men moving up on his right. Then he was running again, in the direction of a tall clump of grass.

  Behind him and to his left, one of the Rivington men’s endless repeaters fell silent. A minute later, so did the one on the other side. Rebel yells rang through the continuing racket of rifle fire. Caudell whooped as loud as anyone. With those murderous repeaters out of action, the Rivington men could not hope to keep the whole Confederate army from going not only through Henry Pleasants’s crater but around it to either side.

  Nathan Bedford Forrest saw that, too. “Forward, boys, with me! They ain’t got a prayer of holdin’ us back now.” He was normally soft-spoken; Caudell had noticed that back in Nashville and in the trenches. But at need, on the stump or in the middle of a fight, his voice swelled to carry as far as he wanted. He pointed north and east. “We’re an hour from Rivington. Let’s go!” The soldiers cheered like madmen.

  Cheers or no, though, Rivington proved more than an hour away. If the Confederates knew how to advance against rifle fire, the Rivington men were artists on defense. They gave ground only grudgingly, in a reverse of the leapfrog pattern their opponents used to move forward. They made stand after stand, stalling the Confederates again and again, surely inflicting far more casualties than they suffered.

  But the Confederates had soldiers to spend and the Rivington men did not. The gray line grew ever wider, flanking the Rivington men out of one position after another. Forrest did not, would not, let the advance flag. Whenever a handful of Rivington men held out against everything the Confederates could throw at them, he cried, “Come on, boys, we’ll go around. Pull the weed up by the roots and the leaves are bound to wither.”

  “Nate!”

  He whirled where he lay, his AK-47 swinging almost of its own accord to bear on the person who’d startled him. He jerked the barrel down in a hurry. “Jesus God, Mollie, I damn near shot you. Are you all right?”

  “‘Cept for you just now havin’ your gun on me, sure. you?”

  “Yup. How much farther to Rivington?”

  She frowned as she thought. Such a serious, involuted, almost harsh expression should have made her face seem more than usually masculine, especially in this warlike setting. But instead she reminded Nate of a girl trying to remember where she’d put her pincushion. He wanted to carry her back to Nashville, a notion as tender as it was impracticable.

  “Three, four miles, I reckon,” she answered at last. Then she brought her rifle up to her shoulder, fired a couple of quick shots. “Thought I saw somethin’ movin’ in them bushes up there. Reckon not, though. Come on.”

  Caudell looked ahead for the next likely piece of cover. He pointed toward a thick stand of pine saplings. He went first, with Mollie ready to open fire on anyone who shot at him. When nobody did, he got down on one knee and covered her advance.

  They were still near the foaming crest of the Confederate wave, for they could hear Nathan Bedford Forrest loudly and profanely urging his men on. He was also yelling something new: “We get into Rivington, don’t you go burning any houses, you hear me, not even if there’s some of these muddy green boys shootin’ from ‘em. Anybody burns a house and I catch him, he’ll wish a Rivington man put a bullet through his head instead, God damn me to hell if I lie.”

  “What do you suppose that’s all about?” Caudell asked. While wanton arson was not a legitimate tool of war, he’d never heard it so specifically and vehemently forbidden.

  “Nate, you got to remember I been in them houses.” Mollie hesitated. Nate grimaced, recalling how and why she’d been in them. When she saw he would do no more than grimace, she hurried on,” Ain’t nothin’ like ‘em nowheres else. The books, the lights, the cool air that blows—”

  “The books!” he exclaimed. The Picture History of the Civil War had come out of one of those Rivington houses. If they held more volumes of that ilk, the Confederate authorities had good reason to want them preserved.

  “Makes sense to me,” Mollie said when he quickly explained his reasoning. “Marse Robert, he was plumb took with the one you had me bring him.”

  For the next few minutes, neither of them had much chance to talk. The Rivington men did their best to rally. They seemed to be in somewhat greater numbers now, reinforced by their fellows rushing down from the town. Rifle grenades bursting among the Confederates created brief consternation, but after weeks of intermittent mortar fire the small bombs were not so terrifying. And, now that they were forced from their fortified positions, the Rivington men, even reinforced, lacked the troops to halt determined attackers. Determined the Confederates were. The advance resumed.

  Someone moaned from behind a clump of beggarweeds. Caudell and Mollie hurried over, ready to help a wounded comrade. But the man back there was not a comrade; his mottled tunic and trousers proclaimed his allegiance to America Will Break. Blood from a wound above the knee soaked one leg of those trousers, turning dark green and brown to black.

  “Got you!” Caudell yelled.

  Distracted from his pain, the Rivington man whipped his head around. It was Benny Lang. He was utterly defenseless; his rifle, lay several feet away. Caudell’s finger tightened on the trigger of his AK-47. “Don’t,” Mollie exclaimed, guessing what was in his mind. “He ain’t one of the real bad ones, Nate.”

  “No?” Caudell remembered George Ballentine. But that memory wasn’t nearly all of why he wanted to put a bullet through Benny Lang. It wasn’t exactly as if Mollie had been unfaithful with the Rivington man…not exactly, but pretty close. But after a few seconds, Nate lowered the rifle a little. If he’d killed Lang here in the bushes, man against man and gun against gun, that was war, and fair enough. Try as he would, though, he couldn’t make himself think of blowing out the back or a wounded man’s head as anything but murder.

  “Thanks,” Lang said when he no longer looked straight down the muzzle of the AK-47. “Help me cut my trouser leg off so I can get a bandage” He was half stunned from his injury and, no doubt, he didn’t remember seeing Mollie Bean in uniform, just as Caudell had never seen her in properly feminine clothes until that morning in church. But her voice must have registered at last, for he blurted,” Jesus Christ, Moll, is that you?”

  Moll. The pet name made Nate ready to shoot him again. Mollie ground her teeth before she answered, almost inaudibly, “It’s me all right, Benny. I soldiered before—I’m sorry I lied to you when you ast me how I got shot. And this here
”—she raised her chin, looked defiantly at Caudell, as if daring him to deny it—”this here’s my intended, Nate Caudell.”

  The wounded man got out part of a laugh before it turned into a hiss. “Caudell. Christ, I remember you—I taught you the AK, didn’t I? Small bloody world, what?” Caudell, numb with suddenly having to be sociable on the battlefield, managed “a nod. Lang had both hands on his wound. Where his trousers looked black, those hands were red. He said, “I’m going to reach for my knife. I’ll do that very slowly, and I give you my word of honor I won’t throw the knife once I have it—there are two of you, after all, and only the one blade.”

  Caudell nodded again, now with assurance—this was business. As Lang got out the knife, he scooped up the Rivington man’s rifle. He did not relax his vigilance, not one bit; after the Richmond Massacre, could a member of America Will Break be trusted to honor a parole?

  But Benny Lang did only what he’d promised, slicing his pants leg so he could see the wound in the outside of his thigh. Had it been to the inside, he would have bled to death in short order. As it was, Caudell, who had enough experience with gunshot wounds to make a fair judge, thought he would recover if fever didn’t carry him off.

  Lang might have been reading his mind. “I carry medicine to keep wounds from going bad. I’m going to get that now, and a pressure bandage.” Again he moved with slow care. The medicine came in a little packet. He tore it open, sprinkled some powder onto his leg, and slapped on the bandage. Then he held the packet out to Caudell. “There’s some left. You may need it in a while, or—or your Mollie.”

  Caudell took the medicine packet, grunted gruffly as he stuck it in his pocket. He didn’t want to feel beholden to Benny Lang, not any which way. Gruff still, he said, “Stay here. Someone will take you back to the surgeons pretty soon.”

  “Spare me that,” Lang said. “It’s a through-and-through wound; so your doctors won’t have to dig the bullet out—not bloody likely you’ll take me to one of ours, is it? I know your men mean well, but—” He shuddered at the very idea, then shook his head. “It all went so well for us, till Lee was elected. Since then, everything’s been buggered up.” He put a hand on the bandage, as if still unwilling to believe ruination could have chosen to visit him personally.