A fierce joy lit Jake. “So you want to play, do you?” he said genially, and gave the black buck a knee square in the balls. The fellow went down as if he’d been shot. Jake wished he had shot him. He wished he could shoot all of them. Brushing his hands together, he headed off down the street, leaving the Negro writhing on the pavement behind him. No one said boo.
He was about to cross Franklin Street, a good way down from Capitol Square, when military policemen blocked the way. He felt like cursing them, too, but that would land him in jail, and he still had a couple of days’leave before he had to go back to the Maryland front. So he stood and watched as a long column of soldiers tramped past.
Farther up the street, people were laughing and cheering. A hell of a racket was coming from somewhere up there, too. Jake craned his neck. A moment later, he laughed and cheered, too. Four barrels-nobody who’d faced the Yankee version said tanks-rumbled toward him, battle flags painted on the front and sides. They looked different from the ones the USA manufactured; Featherston wondered whether the CSA had built them or they’d somehow been imported from England.
However that was, he was damn glad to see them. “Give ’em hell!” he shouted, and a soldier riding on top of one of them waved his way. He yelled again: “Let the damnyankees know what it’s like, by Jesus!” Had he been in the infantry, he probably would have shouted even louder.
The barrels were so heavy, their wraparound tracks tore up the concrete surface of the street. They’d probably come through town to build morale. Sure built mine, Jake thought. More soldiers followed, young, serious-looking men intent on keeping step. They’d learn what was important and what wasn’t pretty damn quick. Jake knew that.
Having been born and raised in Richmond, he also knew which railroad station the men and barrels were heading for: the Richmond and Danville. He wished they’d been coming up to Maryland, but the Roanoke front was probably the next best place for them. Grudgingly, he admitted to himself that the Roanoke front might have been the best place to send them. The Yanks were in Virginia there, as opposed to fighting them on their own soil farther north and east.
To celebrate the chance of throwing the damnyankees out of his own state, Jake went into a saloon and poured down whiskey. To celebrate that whiskey, he had another one, and then another. When he came out of the saloon, he’d spent a good piece of the note that Navy man had given him. And, when he came out, he didn’t need to turn his head sharply to make the world revolve.
Off in the distance, he heard, or thought he heard, a low-pitched, droning rumble. More barrels? He shook his head, and almost fell over. The troop trains pulling out? No, this wasn’t a train noise. It was real, though. He hadn’t been sure of that before, but he was now.
It sounded like…aeroplanes. His face twisted in slow-witted puzzlement. “If it is aeroplanes, it’s a hell of a lot of ’em,” he said, thinking out loud. He wondered why the Confederacy would put so many aeroplanes in the sky so late at night. “Damn foolishness,” he mumbled.
The part of his mind that functioned at a level below conscious thought came up with the answer. “Sweet suffering Jesus, it’s the Yankees!” he exclaimed, a moment before the first antiaircraft gun outside the Confederate capital began pounding away at the intruders.
He knew too well how futile antiaircraft fire often turned out to be. At night, hitting your target was even harder. And the United States had put a hell of a lot of aeroplanes in the air. They’d bombed the front. They’d bombed Confederate-occupied Washington. Till now, they hadn’t done much to Richmond. All that, evidently, was about to change. Featherston dove under a bench at a trolley stop, the first shelter he spied.
With so many lights on in the Confederate capital, the bombers had targets to dream of. Most of the explosions sounded as if they were close to Capitol Square-most, but not all. The damnyankees seemed to have plenty of bombing aeroplanes to carpet the whole city.
From under the bench, Featherston watched a sea of feet and legs, men’s and women’s both, running every which way. “Like chickens with their heads cut off,” he said, and then raised his voice to a shout: “Take cover, dammit!”
They didn’t listen to him. Nobody listened to him. Civilians paid him no more mind than soldiers ever had. And, when the bombs started falling all around, the civilians of Richmond found out that they should have paid attention, just as the Confederate brass should have listened when he tried to tell them Pompey was no damn good.
Crummp! Crummp! For him, the bombing of Richmond was like being under a medium-heavy artillery bombardment, except it didn’t last so long. It wasn’t that he had no fear-anybody who wasn’t afraid when things were blowing up nearby was crazy, and Mrs. Featherston had raised no fool. But he, like most of the soldiers in town, had faced such horrors before. His chiefest wish was to be able to shoot back.
For civilians, though-for Negroes, for women, for the old and the young-the raid had to seem like the end of the world. Screams rose into the night, those of the panicked side by side with those of the injured. Then secondary screams went up as the panicked discovered the injured, and the dismembered, and the dead. Civilians had no notion of what high explosives and sharp-edged fragments of flying metal could do to the human body. Courtesy of the Yankees, they were learning.
Bombs or no bombs, somebody had to do something to help. Jake got out from under his bench as if he were leaving a dugout to serve his howitzer under fire. He passed by a groaning black man to bandage a cut on a white woman’s head.
More bombers roared past up above. He could hear them, but couldn’t see them. No-he could see one, for smoke and fire were trailing from it, getting brighter every second. The antiaircraft guns ringing Richmond weren’t entirely useless, then: only pretty much so.
The stricken bomber nosed down and dove. It seemed to be coming right at him. He flattened himself out on the street, absentmindedly knocking down the woman he’d just bandaged, too. The bombs the aeroplane hadn’t had the chance to drop exploded when it crashed a block away.
He got picked up and slammed down again, right on top of the woman. It wasn’t anything erotic. He scrambled off her. The houses where the bomber had crashed were burning furiously.
Through the chaos, he heard the fire alarm bell from Capitol Square. It made him throw back his head and laugh. “Thanks for the news!” he shouted. “Thanks for the goddamn news! Never would have known it without you!”
XV
“I don’t like it,” Paul Andersen said, peering across no-man’s-land toward the Confederate lines. “Those bastards are too damn quiet.”
“Yeah.” Chester Martin took out his entrenching tool and knocked some bricks that had probably been part of a chimney out of the way. If he had to flatten out in a hurry, he didn’t want to land on them. “One thing about the Roanoke front is, they never give anything up cheap and they always hit back any way they can.”
“You got that right.” Andersen nodded emphatic agreement.
“This past while, though,” Martin went on, “they haven’t been counterattacking, they haven’t been shelling us…much-they’ve just been sitting there. Whenever they do things they haven’t done before, I don’t like it. It’s liable to mean they’ll do something else they haven’t done before, and that’s liable to mean yours truly gets his ticket punched.”
Andersen nodded again. “Two years o’ this shit and hardly a scratch on either one of us. Either I’m leading a charmed life and you’re all right, too, on account of you hang around with me-or else it’s the other way round. You know what? I don’t want to find out which.”
“Yeah, me neither,” Martin said. “We’ve seen a hell of a lot of people come and go.” He scowled. He didn’t want to think about that. Too many men dead in too many horrible ways.
Somebody’s observation aeroplane buzzed overhead. It was too high up for Martin or anyone else on the ground to tell whether it belonged to the USA or the Rebels. That didn’t stop Specs Peterson from raising his
Springfield to his shoulder and squeezing off a couple of rounds at it.
“What the hell you doing?” Martin demanded. “What if it’s on our side?”
“Who gives a damn?” Peterson retorted. “I hate all those flyboy bastards. War’d be a lot cleaner if they weren’t up there spying on us. If it’s a Reb, good riddance. If it’s one of our guys-good riddance, too.”
Martin reminded himself the aeroplane was too high for rifle fire to have any chance of hitting it. If Specs wanted to work out some anger by blasting away at it, why not?
And, evidently, it belonged to the CSA anyhow. U.S. antiaircraft guns opened up on it. Puffs of black smoke filled the air all around the biplane. Like every other small boy ever made, Martin had tried catching butterflies in flight with his bare hands. The antiaircraft rounds had about as much luck with Confederate aeroplanes as he’d usually had going after butterflies.
Every once in a while, though, every once in a while he’d caught one. And, every once in a while, antiaircraft guns knocked down an aeroplane. He let out a yell, thinking this was one of those times-something red and burning came out of the aircraft and hung up there in the sky. Then he swore in disappointment.
So did Paul Andersen. “It’s only a flare,” the corporal said.
“Yeah,” Martin said ruefully. “I really thought they’d nailed the son of a bitch.” He eyed the observation aeroplane with sudden suspicion. “What the hell are they doing shooting off flares? They’ve never done anything like that before.”
A moment later, the Confederates gave him the answer. The eastern horizon exploded with a roar that, he thought, would have made the famous Krakatoa volcano sound like a hiccup. One second, everything was quiet, as it had been for so long. The next, hell came down on earth.
Along with everybody else in the trenches, he scrambled for the nearest bombproof he could find. Some limey cartoonist had drawn one where a soldier was saying to his buddy, “Well, if you knows of a better ’ole, go to it.” The Rebs had got the slogan from the limeys, and U.S. soldiers from the Rebs. For anybody on either side who’d ever been in a trench, it summed up what life under fire was like.
Men started banging on empty shell casings, which meant the Rebs were throwing gas along with all their other lovely presents. Trying to fumble a gas helmet out of its canvas case when he was jammed into a dugout with twice as many soldiers as it should have held was not one of the things Chester Martin enjoyed most, but he managed. Somebody who couldn’t manage started coughing and choking and drowning for good air, but Martin couldn’t do anything about that except curse the Confederates. He couldn’t even tell who the poor bastard getting poisoned was.
The bombardment went on for what felt like forever. It covered miles of the front. The Rebs didn’t stick to the trenches right up against the barbed wire, either. They gave it to the U.S. positions as far back as they could reach, and they had more heavy guns firing along with their damned three-inchers than had been so during the first year of the war.
During a lull-which is to say, when the Rebs were going after U.S. guns rather than front-line troops-Martin shouted to Paul Andersen, “Well, now we know why they were so goddamn quiet for so long.”
Andersen nodded mournfully. “They were savin’ it up to shoot off at us all at once.” A couple of miles to the west, something blew up with a thunderous roar loud even through the surrounding din. “There went an ammo dump-stuff we ain’t gonna be able to shoot back at ’em.”
“Yeah, and it’s a shame, too.” Martin frowned. “Next question is, are they just shelling the hell out of us, or are they going to come over the top when all this lets up?”
“That’s a good one,” Andersen said. “No way to know till we find out.”
Before long, Martin became sure in his own mind the Confederates were coming. They’d never laid on a bombardment like this one before. He heartily hoped they’d never lay on another one, either.
Andersen reached the same conclusion. “Get ready for the hundred and forty-first battle of the Roanoke, or whatever the hell this one is,” he said. They both laughed. Back when the war was new, they’d joked about how many battles this valley had seen. They’d seen all of them, small and big alike. Martin had the feeling this was going to be one of the big ones.
Sneaky as usual, the Rebels halted their barrage several times, only to resume a few minutes later, catching U.S. defenders out of their shelters and slaughtering them. The real attack, though, was marked by long bursts of machine-gun fire from the Confederate trenches, supporting the soldiers who were moving on the U.S. lines.
“Up!” Martin screamed. “Up! Up! Let’s get ’em!” He’d come up before, and counted himself lucky not to have been killed. Now he stood in the wreckage of the trench line, blinking like a mole or some other animal not used to the light of day. The barrage had blown most of the parapet to hell and gone, and a lot of the wire that had stood in front of it, too. He could look out across no-man’s-land at the Confederate soldiers running toward him.
If he could see them, they could see him. He dropped to one knee and started shooting. Specs Peterson did the same thing beside him, but then pointed off to the left and hollered, “Barrel!”
A barrel it was, but not a U.S. barrel. Martin hadn’t known the Rebs had any of their own. They were picking a good time to spring the surprise, too. He watched the ungainly contraption go into a trench and climb out the other side. It looked to climb even better than the ones made in the USA, though it seemed to carry fewer guns.
As far as he could tell, the one Specs had spotted was the only one close by. He wondered how many of the stinking machines the Confederates had altogether. Getting up and trying to find out didn’t strike him as the best idea he’d ever had. He shoved a fresh clip into his Springfield, peered over the sights to find a Reb to shoot at, and-
The bullet caught him in the left arm, just below the shoulder. “Aww, shit!” he said loudly. Without that hand supporting it, the muzzle of the Springfield dropped; he fired a round into the dirt almost at his feet.
“Sarge is hit!” Specs Peterson shouted. He quickly wrapped a bandage around the wound, then tugged Martin’s good arm over his shoulder. “Let’s get you the hell out of here, Sarge.”
“Yeah.” Martin knew he sounded vague. Everybody said a wound didn’t hurt when you first got it. As far as he was concerned, everybody lied. His arm felt as if he’d had molten metal poured on it. He knew too many people in Toledo to whom that had happened. He tried to wriggle the fingers of his left hand, but couldn’t tell whether he succeeded or not.
Getting him the hell out of there turned out to be hell of its own kind. The Confederate bombardment had pasted the communications trenches along with everything else. Plenty of other wounded men were trying to get to the rear, too, and plenty of men who weren’t wounded as well. “Jesus,” Peterson said, struggling through the chaos all around. “The whole fucking line is coming to pieces.”
Martin was less interested than he might have been. Putting one foot in front of the other so he wasn’t a dead weight took all the concentration he had. The bandage Specs had slapped on him was red and dripping.
Somewhere back toward the rear, a couple of men with Red Cross armbands took charge of him. “Go back to your unit, Private,” one of them said to Peterson.
“If I can find it,” Specs answered. “If there’s anything left of it. Good luck, Sarge.” He turned around and trotted toward the sound of the fighting before Martin could answer.
He spoke to the stretcher-bearers-who bore no stretcher-instead: “How is it?”
He’d meant his wound, but they had other things on their mind. “It’s a hell of a mess, Sergeant,” one of them answered as they helped him stumble westward, away from the firing. “They drove a hell of a lot of barrels through up to the north and down south of us, too. With those bastards on their flanks, a lot of our infantry just caved in.”
As if to demonstrate the truth of that, several unwound
ed soldiers trotted past them. A military policeman shouted a challenge. Several shots rang out. Martin didn’t see the panicked soldiers coming back his way, which meant they’d shot first or best and were still running.
“It’s a disaster, is what it is,” the second stretcher-bearer said. “They’re liable to push us all the way back to the river-maybe over it, for God’s sake.” Even through the blazing agony of his wound, that got through to Martin. The USA had spent two years and lives uncounted to drive the Confederates back to the Roanoke River and then over it. If they lost all that in one battle…
He stumbled just then, jarring his arm. He’d only thought he hurt before. The battered landscape turned gray before his eyes. He tasted blood, from where his teeth had bitten down too hard on a scream. Whatever he’d been about to say disappeared, burned away by shrieking nerves.
When they got him to the field hospital, the stretcher-bearers exclaimed in dismay, because it was dissolving like Lot’s wife in the rain. “Evacuation!” somebody yelled. Somebody else added, “We’re gettin’ the hell out before the Rebs overrun us.”
By luck-and maybe because, since he wasn’t on a stretcher, he didn’t take up much room-Martin got shoved aboard an ambulance. Jouncing west over the shell-pocked track toward the river was a special hell of its own. He couldn’t look out, only at the other wounded men shoehorned in with him. Maybe that was a blessing of sorts. He couldn’t see how many Confederate shells were falling on the road, how many others throwing up water from the Roanoke River as they searched for the bridge.
Engine roaring flat out, the ambulance sped across. The driver whooped triumphantly when he got to the other side: “Made it!” He, of course, was still in one undamaged piece. Martin couldn’t decide whether he was glad he hadn’t been blown up or sorry.
Flora Hamburger stood on a little portable stage in front of the Croton Brewery on Chrystie Street. The brewery was a block outside the Fourteenth Ward, but still in the Congressional district, whose boundaries didn’t perfectly match those used for local administration. She thought she would have come here even had it been outside the district. The associations the brewery called up were too perfect to ignore.
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