Martin shook his head, annoyed at himself. “I’m sorry, sir. I should have figured that out.” He looked around to see how many of his men were paying attention. He hated looking dumb in front of them.
“Don’t worry about it,” Lieutenant Colonel Gross said. He seemed younger when he smiled. “This is new for everybody, and we have to work out what needs doing as we go along. The real point is, this’ll be new for the Rebs, too.” He pointed over past the U.S. barbed wire, past no-man’s-land, past the C.S. wire, to the trenches beyond.
“If everything goes according to Hoyle,” Captain Wyatt said, “we’ll take a big bite out of the Rebs’ real estate tomorrow morning.”
Specs Peterson was standing not far from Martin. He pitched his voice so the sergeant could hear but the captain couldn’t: “Yeah, and if it doesn’t work, they’re going to bury us in gunnysacks, on account of the Rebs’ll blow us all over the landscape.”
“I know,” Martin said, also quietly. “You got any better ideas, though, Specs? This duking it out in the trenches is getting us nowhere fast.”
“Hey, what are you talkin’ about, Sarge?” Paul Andersen said. “We’ve moved this front forward a good ten miles, and it hasn’t taken us two years to do it. At that rate, we ought to be in Richmond”-the corporal paused, calculating on his fingers-“oh, about twenty minutes before the Second Coming.”
Everybody laughed. Everybody pretended what Andersen had said was only funny, not the gospel truth. Specs Peterson liked an argument as well as the next guy, and wasn’t shy about arguing with his superiors, but he didn’t say boo. He just made sure he had the full load of grenades everybody was supposed to carry over the top.
Darkness fell. This sector of the front had been pretty quiet lately. Every so often, a rifle shot would ring out or somebody on one side or the other would spray the foe’s trenches with a couple of belts of machine-gun fire, but the artillery didn’t add its thunder to the hailstorm effects from both sides’ small arms. Martin knew that wouldn’t last. He rolled himself in his blanket and got what sleep he could. He wouldn’t be sleeping much tomorrow, not unless he slept forever.
At 0200, the barrage began. Martin didn’t sleep any more after that; the noise, he thought, was plenty to wake half the smashed-up dead whose corpses manured the Roanoke River valley.
Some of his men, though, did their damnedest to sleep right through the bombardment. He made sure everybody was up and ready to move. “Listen, this is my neck we’re talking about, Earnshaw,” he growled to one yawning private. “If you’re not there running alongside me, it’s liable to mean some damn Reb gets a chance to draw a bead on me he wouldn’t have had otherwise. You think I’m going to let that happen so you can sleep late, you’re crazy.”
Captain Wyatt was up and prowling the trench, too. “Where the hell are the barrels?” he said about half past three. “They were supposed to be here at 0300. Without them, we don’t have a show.”
That wasn’t quite true. The infantry, no doubt, would assault the Confederate lines with or without barrels. Without them, the foot soldiers were sure to be slaughtered. With them, they were…less sure to be slaughtered.
Two barrels came rumbling up at 0410. “Where the devil have you been?” Wyatt demanded, his voice a whiplash of anger. Chester Martin didn’t say anything. This was the first time he’d actually seen barrels. Their great slabs of steel, spied mostly in silhouette, put him in mind of a cross between a battleship and a prehistoric monster.
“Sorry, sir,” one of the men riding atop a barrel said through the unending thunder of the barrage and the flatulent snarl of the machines’ engines. “We got lost about six times in spite of the tape, and we broke down a couple times, too.”
“That’s where Bessie McCoy is now,” somebody else added. “The engine men said they thought they could get her running again, though.”
Martin approached the barrel. “You fellows better get inside, if that’s what you do,” he said. “You’re at the front now. The Rebs figure out you’re here, a few machine-gun bursts and you won’t be any more.”
With obvious reluctance, the soldiers climbed down off the roofs of the barrels and into their places inside the contraptions. It had to be hotter than hell in there, and stinking of gasoline fumes, too. Maybe the steel kept bullets out, but it kept other things in.
Bessie McCoy limped into place at 0445, fifteen minutes before the attack was due to start. As twilight brightened toward dawn, Martin made out the names painted on the other barrels: Vengeance and Halfmoon, the latter with an outhouse under the word. He still didn’t know whether to be encouraged all three barrels had made it or dismayed they’d had so much trouble doing it. If dismayed turned out to be the right answer, he figured he’d end up dead.
At 0500 on the dot, the barrage moved deeper into the Confederate trench system, to keep the Rebels from bringing up reinforcements. Captain Wyatt blew his whistle. The barrels rumbled forward at about walking pace, treads grinding and clanking. The cannon each one of them carried at its prow sent shells into the Confederate trenches.
From across no-man’s-land, Chester Martin heard the shouts of fear and alarm the Rebs let out. Rebel rifles and machine guns opened up on the barrels. They might as well have been shooting at so many ambulatory boulders. Sedate but deadly, the barrels kept coming. They rolled through the U.S. barbed wire. They went down into shell holes and craters and came up the other side, still pounding the Rebel trenches. They flattened the Confederate barbed wire.
“Let’s go, boys!” Captain Wyatt shouted. “That Bessie, she is the McCoy!”
Chester Martin and his squad scrambled out of the trench and sprinted toward the Confederate lines. Only light fire came their way; most of what the Rebs had was focused on the barrels. It wasn’t doing much good, either. All three machines kept moving forward, firing not just cannon now but the machine guns on their sides, too.
Bessie McCoy rumbled up to the foremost Rebel trench and poured enfilading fire down its length. Vengeance and Halfmoon were only a few yards behind. Vengeance went right over that first trench and positioned itself to enfilade the second. Half-moon blazed away at Confederate soldiers who were-Martin rubbed his eyes to make sure he saw straight-running for their lives.
Half a mile to the north, a couple of more barrels had forced their way into the Confederate position. Half a mile to the south, two others had done the same, though a third sat burning in the middle of no-man’s-land.
Martin noticed the other barrels only peripherally. He scrambled over the parapet and leaped down into the Confederate trenches. A lot of men in butternut lay in them, some moving, some not. He threw a grenade over the top into a traverse and then dashed into it, ready to shoot or bayonet whomever he’d stunned.
“Don’t kill us, Yank!” several men cried at once. They threw down their rifles and threw up their hands. “We give up!”
“Go on back there, then,” Martin growled, pointing toward the U.S. position from which he’d come. The new-caught prisoners babbled thanks and obeyed.
“What are those horrible things?” one of them asked, pointing toward the barrels, which were systematically raking trench line after trench line, concentrating most of all on machine-gun nests.
“I think,” Martin said, “I think they’re called victory.”
All along the line, Rebs were giving up in numbers greater than he ever remembered seeing, and they were running away, too, unwilling to die to no purpose trying to halt the invincible barrels. In all the time he’d spent at the front line, he’d never seen Confederate soldiers run like that. He’d dreamt of it, but he’d never seen it.
Paul Andersen shouted another word of which he’d dreamt: “Breakthrough!”
For much of the rest of that morning, Martin thought his buddy was right. They stormed through the Confederate trench system. Whenever a machine gun or some holdouts in a strong position gave them trouble, one barrel or another waddled over to it and poured bullets or shells into it until the d
iehards either surrendered or died.
“I don’t believe it,” Captain Wyatt said, over and over. “We’ve come a good mile since daybreak.” No wonder he sounded disbelieving; on this front, mobility was more often measured in yards. “We keep it up, we’ll be out of the trenches and into their rear by nightfall.”
“Yes, sir,” Martin said. He had trouble believing it, too. A deep-throated rumble behind him made him turn his head. “Here comes Bessie McCoy, over another trench.”
The barrel, by then, had crossed so many of them that he’d come to take its ability for granted. The lip of this one, though, was soft and muddy, and gave way under the weight of the massive machine. It went into the trench at an awkward, nose-down angle. Martin saw at a glance that it couldn’t move forward any more. Its engine roared as it tried reverse. That didn’t help, either.
One of the side machine-gunners opened up a hatch and shouted, “We’re stuck! You’re going to have to dig us out if you want us to keep moving.” More hatches opened, and barrel crewmen came out to help with the digging and to escape the heat and fumes in which they’d been trapped for hours. Some of them simply sprawled in the dirt and sucked in great long breaths of fresh air.
Now Captain Wyatt looked worried. “That’s the second barrel we’ve lost. Halfmoon broke down back there, and they still haven’t been able to get it going again. If anything happens to Vengeance-”
The barrel in question fired its cannon. The men who’d pushed farthest into the Confederate works started shooting, too, and kept it up even though not much answering fire came back. Martin stuck his head up to see why everybody was excited.
Here came a battery of those cursed Confederate quick-firing three-inch guns. They sensibly stopped outside of rifle range, in such cover as they could find, and started firing over open sights at Vengeance. The barrel returned fire, but it had only one cannon, and that far slower between rounds than the Rebel pieces. Vengeance was armored against rifle and machine-gun bullets, but not against shells. If you let a sledgehammer fall onto an iron floor from a building a hundred stories high, you might get a noise like the one the shells made slamming into armor plate.
Vengeance started burning. Hatches popped open. Crewmen dove out. The Confederate guns shelled them, too. Rebel yells announced the arrival of reinforcements for the enemy. Now U.S. troops, thin on the ground and without barrels to support them, were the ones who had to fall back. Bessie McCoy’s crew salvaged her guns and set her afire to deny her to the Confederates, then joined the retreat.
When night fell, Martin was still in what had been Confederate trenches, but not very far in; the Rebs had taken back about two-thirds of what they’d lost in the morning. He turned to Paul Andersen and let out a long, weary sigh. “Not quite a breakthrough.”
“No, I guess not,” Andersen allowed. “We got more work to do.” He started rolling a cigarette. “Not quite a breakthrough, but goddamn-you could see one from where we were.”
“Yeah.” Martin sighed again. “And I wonder how long it’ll be before we see another one.”
Arthur McGregor rode his wagon toward Rosenfeld, Manitoba. Maude sat on the seat beside him, her back ramrod straight, hands clasped tightly in her lap. They both wore seldom-used Sunday best; the wing collar and cravat seemed to be trying to strangle McGregor, who couldn’t remember the last time he’d put on a jacket with lapels.
“Maybe we should have brought the girls,” Maude said, her voice under tight rein. Only her mouth moved; she did not turn her head to look at her husband.
He shook his head. “No-better we left them with the Lang-dons.” His own harshly carved face got harsher yet. “The Yanks won’t take pity on us because we’ve got ’em along, Maude. Next Yank officer who knows what pity’s about will be the first. If we’re going to persuade them to let Alexander go, we’ll have to make a case, like we were in court.”
She nodded once, jerkily, and then sat still again. The wagon jounced on toward Rosenfeld. The ruts in the road didn’t fit the width of the wheels any more; U.S. trucks had cut their own ruts. Outside of town, U.S. soldiers inspected the wagon as carefully as they had when the whole McGregor clan came into Rosenfeld the day Alexander was seized. Finding nothing, the soldiers let the wagon go on.
As usual these days, Yankees far outnumbered Canadians on Rosenfeld’s few streets. Their traffic-wagons, trucks, a swarm of honking Fords-took priority over civilian vehicles, too. McGregor hitched the wagon as soon as he could, put a feed bag on the horse’s head, and walked toward what had been the sheriff’s office and jail but now confined not drunks and burglars but men guilty of nothing worse than wanting to be free of the smothering embrace of the United States.
Outside the entrance stood two armed sentries in green-gray. One of them patted down McGregor. The other spoke to Maude: “Come with me, ma’am. We have a woman next door to search you.” When she made as if to balk, the sentry said, “Ma’am, if you aren’t searched, you don’t go in. Those are the orders I have, and I can’t change ’em.” Back quivering with indignation, she followed him.
“You aren’t trying very hard to make friends for yourselves, are you?” McGregor said to the remaining sentry.
The fellow shrugged. “Better safe than sorry.”
Maude returned in a couple of minutes, looking even more furious coming than she had going. She must have satisfied the searcher, though, for the sentries opened the door and stood aside to let her and her husband make their petition to the occupying authorities.
Captain Hannebrink sat at a desk, filling out forms. But for his uniform, he might have been a postmaster like Wilfred Rokeby, or perhaps a bank teller. But he’d seemed soldierly enough and to spare out at McGregor’s farm. He set down his pen now and got to his feet. “Mr. and Mrs. McGregor,” he said, polite enough even if his minions weren’t.
“Good morning, Captain,” Arthur McGregor said. He hated having to crawl before any man. He’d worked like a plow horse-he’d worked harder than his plow horse-before the war, but he’d been free.
No. He’d thought he’d been free. It was just that the government-the government he’d frequently despised-had held trouble at arm’s length from him. Then it couldn’t do that any more, and the regime under which he now lived made trouble as close as a punch in the eye.
He might not have crawled for himself. For Alexander, for his only son, he would crawl. What was pride worth, set against your boy? He began again: “Captain Hannebrink, sir, by now you must know Alexander didn’t have anything to do with that bomb on the train tracks.”
“I must know it?” The American officer shook his head. “Here, sit down, both of you. I’ll hear what you have to say.” The chairs to which he pointed were hard, angular, and functional: U.S. Army issue, as out of place in the office as his sharp American accent. He let Arthur McGregor do the fussing for his wife, accurately surmising she would not want him pushing the chair about for her. When she was as comfortable as she could be, he sat back down himself. “All right, tell me why I must know that.”
“Because of what you done to the other boys you caught,” McGregor blurted. His lips skinned back from his teeth in a snarl of anger at himself: he hadn’t meant to say it like that. Saying it like that made him think about how harsh the occupying authorities really were.
Captain Hannebrink steepled his fingers. “The penalty for sabotage against the United States Army is death, Mr. McGregor,” he said. “We have made that very plain. It cannot come as a surprise to anyone, not now.”
“Boys,” McGregor said thickly. “You shot boys.”
“They were playing a man’s game, I’m sorry to say. If they’d succeeded, what they would have done to our train would have been no different because they were young,” Hannebrink said. “This way, perhaps, other boys here in Manitoba will come to understand that this is not a bully, romantic lark. This is a war, and will be waged as such.”
He didn’t look particularly fearsome. He was on the lean side, with sa
ndy hair, mild gray eyes, and a long, thoughtful face. Only his uniform and his waxed Kaiser Wilhelm mustache said he wasn’t a Canadian. Somehow, that very plainness made him more frightening, not less.
Licking his lips, Arthur McGregor said, “But you didn’t shoot Alexander. That must mean you know he didn’t have anything to do with it, because-” Because if you had even the slightest suspicion, you would have dragged him out against a wall, given him a blindfold, and sent him home to me in a pine box for burial. But he couldn’t say that to the American.
“Your son’s case is not clearcut: I admit as much,” Hannebrink said. “It is possible he did not know about this particular explosive device.” He held up one finger, as if expecting McGregor to interrupt. “Possible, I say. By no means proven. There appears to be no doubt he associated with these subversives and saboteurs.”
“They’re his friends,” Maude McGregor burst out. “Captain, they’re boys he’s known as long as he’s been on this earth. And besides, where in Canada will you find any boys that age who don’t-”
Conversations with Captain Hannebrink had a way of breaking down in midsentence. This one should have broken down a few words sooner. Hannebrink fiddled with one point of that absurd, upjutting mustache, then finished for Maude: “Where will I find Canadian boys that age who don’t despise the United States and everything they stand for? There are some, Mrs. McGregor, I assure you of that.”
His matter-of-fact confidence was more chilling than bluster would have been. And Arthur McGregor feared he was right. Some people had to be on the winning side, no matter what, and the USA looked like the winning side right now. Bootlickers, McGregor thought.
But that did not help Alexander. McGregor said, “You can’t blame him for what these others tried to do.”
“Why can’t I?” Hannebrink returned. “Canadian law recognizes the concepts of an accessory before the fact and of concealment of knowledge of a crime to be committed.”
“You’ve never claimed you had anyone who said Alexander knew about this, only that he knew some of the boys you say did it,” Arthur McGregor said stubbornly. “Is that enough to go on holding him?”
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