“Keep moving!” Whenever Morrell ducked down into the turret, he spread his gospel over the wireless. “Always keep moving. Once we get in among ’em, once we get behind ’em, they’ll go to pieces. And then we’ll be able to move even faster.”
And he had the pleasure of watching his prophecy come true. Till the early afternoon, the enemy soldiers in front of his barrels and infantry did everything they could to stop them and even to throw them back. After that… After that, it was like watching ice melt when spring came to a northern river. Once the rot started, it spread fast. By that first nightfall, he was seeing the enemy’s backs.
He didn’t want to stop for the darkness. He kept going till his driver couldn’t see any farther. He sent infantry ahead even after that. And he had the barrels moving again as soon as the first gray showed in the east.
The Mexicans kept trying to fight back early in the second day. But when they saw barrels coming at them out of the swirling snow, a lot of them lost their nerve. Morrell would have lost his nerve, too, trying to stand up against barrels with no more than rifles. Some of the men in the yellowish khaki ran away. Others dropped their rifles and raised their hands. A lot of them looked miserably cold. They didn’t have greatcoats, and probably didn’t have long johns, either. Down in the Empire of Mexico, they wouldn’t have needed them. They were a long way from home.
By the end of that second day, Morrell’s barrels had smashed through the crust of enemy resistance. Behind it lay… not much. Morrell had a gruesomely good time shooting up a Confederate truck convoy. The big butternut trucks rolled right up to his barrel, sure it had to be on their side even if it was the wrong color.
They found out how wrong they were in a hurry. At Morrell’s orders, Frenchy Bergeron wrecked the first truck in the convoy with a well-aimed cannon shell. The second truck tried to go around it. Bergron blasted that one, too, effectively blocking the road. Then he and the bow gunner used their machine guns to shoot up the rest of the trucks. More U.S. barrels came up and joined the fun.
It wasn’t much fun for the poor bastards on the receiving end. Soldiers spilled out of some of the trucks and tried to find shelter from the storm of bullets wherever they could. Other trucks carried munitions, not men. When they burned, they sent tracers flying every which way. Standing up in the cupola again, Morrell whooped. Corporal Bergeron got the view through his gunsight. He pounded Morrell gently on the leg, which also amounted to a whoop.
Desperate to escape the trap, some of the trucks went off the road and into the fields on either side. Like their U.S. counterparts, they had four-wheel drive. That gave them some traction on the wet ground, but only some. Great gouts of mud flew from their tires as they struggled forward. While they did, the green-gray barrels went right on shooting at them, and they couldn’t shoot back. Without antibarrel cannon, the only weapons foot soldiers had against armor were grenades through the hatches and Featherston Fizzes. They couldn’t get close enough to use anything like that here.
Once he’d smashed the column of trucks, Morrell got on the wireless circuit to the barrels closest to his: “Let’s get rolling again. We’ve got to keep moving.” He popped up again and cast a wary eye at the sky. So far, the promised storm was still rolling through. When the weather got better, the Confederates were going to throw anything that could fly at his armored forces. From what he could see, air strikes had the best chance of slowing him down-if anything could. Now that he’d broken through the C.S. line, he saw nothing in the rear that had much chance of doing the job.
As his armored column pushed south and west from Meadville, another, slightly smaller, U.S. force was driving north from Parkersburg, West Virginia. If everything went according to plan, Morrell’s men and the troops advancing from West Virginia would clasp hands somewhere in eastern Ohio. And if they did, the Confederate Army infesting Pittsburgh would find itself in a very embarrassing position indeed.
Surrounded. Cut off from reinforcements, except perhaps by air. Cut off from resupply, with the same possible exception. Could Featherston’s men fly in enough fuel and ammo to keep a modern army functioning? Morrell didn’t know, but this whole two-pronged attack was based on the assumption that it was damned unlikely. And even if the Confederates could at first, would they be able to build transports as fast as U.S. fighters shot them down? He didn’t think so.
What would he do if he were Jake Featherston? Try to pull out of Pittsburgh and save what he could? Try to break the ring around the city from the outside? Try to do both at once? Did the CSA have the men and machines to do both at once? With every mile his barrels advanced, Irving Morrell doubted that more and more. At the front, Confederate armies remained formidable, even fearsome. But they were like an alligator that went, “I’ve been sick,” in an animated cartoon: all mouth, with no strength anywhere else. If you concentrated on the puny little legs and tail instead of the big end that chomped… “Well, let’s see how Jake likes this,” Morrell murmured, and he rolled on.
During the Great War, Chester Martin would never have imagined hitching a ride on a barrel. For one thing, there hadn’t been so many of the lumbering monstrosities in the last fight. For another, a Great War barrel going flat out was faster than a man, but not by a whole hell of a lot.
Here at the end of 1942, though, things had changed. Most of Chester’s new platoon had attached itself to a platoon of barrels. They rumbled through Pennsylvania-or maybe they were in Ohio by now. One state didn’t look a whole lot different from another, especially when you were crashing along at fifteen or twenty miles an hour.
Every once in a while, the platoon had to fight. Sometimes the men would drop down from the barrels and shoot at startled Confederates. Sometimes they wouldn’t bother descending. A PFC from Chicago carried a captured Confederate submachine gun and sprayed bullets around from the back of a barrel. Chester kept thinking he should have been called Vito or something like that, but he was a big blond Pole named Joe Jakimiuk.
What really amazed Chester was the speed of the U.S. advance. “It wasn’t like this in the Great War, I’ll tell you,” he said as he sat by a campfire the second night and ate something alleged to be beef stew out of a can. It bore as much resemblance to what Rita called beef stew as boiled inner tube in motor-oil gravy, but it filled him up. “Back then, even in a breakthrough we only made a few miles a day, and nobody figured out how to do even that much till 1917.”
“Better barrels and better trucks now.” That was Second Lieutenant Delbert Wheat, the platoon commander. He spoke with the flat vowels and harsh consonants of Kansas. Odds were he hadn’t been born in 1917. Even so, he wasn’t an obnoxious twerp like the other shavetails Chester had met since reenlisting. He actually seemed to have some idea of what he was doing-and when he wasn’t sure, he didn’t act as if asking questions would cost him a couple of inches off his cock. If he lived and didn’t get maimed, he wouldn’t stay a second lieutenant long. Chester could see a big future ahead of him.
For now, Wheat paused and lit a cigarette. Chester’s nostrils twitched at the fragrant smoke. “You lifted a pack off of one of Featherston’s fuckers, sir,” he said. “The smokes we get with our rations don’t smell that good.”
“Right the first time, Sergeant.” Wheat grinned. His looks were as corn-fed as his accent: he was a husky blond guy, good-sized but not quite so big as Joe Jakimiuk, with a narrower face and sharper features than the PFC’s. He held out the pack to Chester. “Want one?”
“Sure. Thanks a lot, sir,” Chester answered. A lot of lieutenants would have gone right on smoking the good stuff themselves without a thought for their noncoms. Some officers acted as if they were a superior breed of man just because of their metal rank badges. Wheat didn’t have that kind of arrogance-another sign he’d do well for himself if he stayed healthy.
“Sentries all around our position tonight,” he told Chester. “No telling which way the Confederates will come at us. We’re really and truly in their rear, so they could
come from any direction at all.”
“Yes, sir,” Chester said. “I’ll take care of it.” In the enemy rear! He didn’t think that had ever happened in the Great War: not to him, anyway. You could beat back the Confederates, but get behind them? Retreating troops had always been able to fall back faster than advancing troops could pursue them through the wreckage of war. Now… Now this armored thrust had pierced the zone of devastation and found nothing much behind it.
“You men will want to sleep while you can,” Lieutenant Wheat told his soldiers. “I don’t know how much we’re going to get from here on out.”
“Listen to him, guys,” Chester said. “He knows what he’s talking about.”
He curled up in his own bedroll not long after he stubbed out the mild, flavorful Confederate cigarette. Exhaustion blackjacked him moments later. He forgot the chilly air and the hard, damp ground and everything else. He wished he could have slept for a week. What was hard on the young guys was a hell of a lot harder for somebody of his vintage.
Instead of a week, he got till the end of the wee small hours. Jakimiuk shook him awake, saying, “Sorry, Sarge, but we’re gonna move out.”
“Coffee,” Chester croaked, like a man in the desert wishing for water. The instant coffee that came with rations was nasty, but it did help pry his eyelids open. And it was hot, which was also welcome.
Ham and eggs out of a tin can made the beef stew from the night before seem delicious by comparison. Chester shrugged. The ration would keep him going another few hours. Maybe he’d eat something better then. The really scary thing was, the soldiers who wore butternut had it worse.
As the sky grayed toward dawn, the barrels the platoon had been riding roared to life. Chester clambered aboard the one he’d ridden the past two days. The barrel’s commander popped out of his cupola like a jack-in-the-box. He was a sergeant, too, though a younger man than Chester. “We going to give them another boot in the balls today?” he asked cheerfully.
“Here’s hoping, anyway.” Chester wasn’t about to commit the sin of optimism. Justifiably or not, he feared it would jinx everything.
No one would see the sun even when it rose. Clouds filled the sky. They couldn’t seem to make up their mind whether to give rain or snow or sleet. Since they couldn’t decide, they spat out a little of each at random. Even when nothing was coming down, the wind out of the northwest had knives in it. Chester would have disliked the weather much more than he did if it hadn’t kept C.S. Asskickers from diving on him.
“Here we go!” Lieutenant Wheat shouted when the barrels moved out. He might have been a kid on a Ferris wheel at a county fair. Chester suspected he wouldn’t take long to lose that boyish enthusiasm. Once you’d been through a few fights, once you’d seen a few horrors, you might be ready to go on with the war, but you weren’t likely to be eager anymore.
A train ahead chugged east. On its way to Pittsburgh? Chester wondered. He couldn’t think of any other reason why an engine pulling a lot of passenger cars should be on its way through what had been territory firmly under the Confederate thumb.
The barrel commander evidently decided the same thing. The big, snorting machine stopped. The turret-one of the massive new models, with a bigger gun-slewed to the left, till it bore on the locomotive. When the cannon fired, the noise was like the clap of doom. Hearing it, a man with a hangover might have his head fall off-and if he didn’t, he might wish he did. The shot was perfect. It went right through the boiler. Great clouds of steam rose from the engine. Only momentum kept it moving after that; it wasn’t going anywhere under its own power.
Other barrels started shelling and shooting up the passenger cars. Chester had an abstract sympathy for the soldiers in butternut who tumbled out like so many ants when their hill was kicked. The Confederates had been going toward battle, yes. They’d been thinking about it, worrying about it, no doubt. But they hadn’t expected it, not yet. Too bad for them. Life was what you got, not what you expected.
“Come on, boys,” Chester said to the men on the barrel with him. “Let’s make them even happier than they are already.”
They got down and started shooting at the dismayed Confederates from behind the barrels and whatever other cover they could find. The machine guns in the turret and at the bow of each barrel raked the scattering soldiers in butternut, too. Every so often, for variety’s sake, a cannon would lob a high-explosive shell or two into the Confederates.
A few bullets came back at the U.S. barrels and foot soldiers, but only a few. A lot of the Confederates probably hadn’t even been able to grab their weapons before they spilled from the train. Some of the ones who had were bound to be casualties. And others, instead of returning fire, were doing their best to disappear, keeping the battered railroad cars between themselves and their tormentors as they ran for the woods.
Chester wasn’t so sure he wouldn’t have done the same thing. Sometimes going forward, or even staying where you were, was asking to be killed. He’d retreated more than once in the Great War, and by Fredericksburg not so long ago. He wouldn’t have been surprised if he did it again before too long.
Now, though, he was going forward. That was better. He didn’t suppose even the Confederates could disagree with him. They’d done more advancing than retreating in this war. He hoped they enjoyed going the other way.
The sergeant in charge of the barrel he rode popped out of the cupola again. “We’ve got orders to get moving,” the other noncom said. “Faster we put a ring around Pittsburgh, faster we can pound Featherston’s fuckers inside to pieces.”
Somebody was driving the U.S. forces as if a pack of wolves ran right behind them. Chester didn’t mind. They probably needed driving. If they weren’t driven, they wouldn’t do what needed doing. Even if they were, they might not.
On they went. Every so often, Confederate soldiers would shoot at them. That caused a few casualties, but only slight delays. Machine-gun and small-arms fire didn’t make the barrels slow down. They had somewhere important to go, and they wanted to get there in a hurry. More foot soldiers would be coming along behind them, and artillerymen, too. People like that could deal with the odd set of holdouts.
From everything Chester heard, Featherston’s men and barrels fought that way when they stormed through Ohio to Lake Erie, and then again this summer when they smashed east to Pittsburgh. He didn’t think the United States had ever done anything like this before. He wondered why not.
The barrels and the men who rode them and the men who tried to keep up with them did have to slow down when they passed through towns. That usually wasn’t because Confederate soldiers made stands there. Most towns held hardly any Confederates. But the people who hadn’t fled ahead of the advancing Confederate tide came out in droves to welcome the U.S. Army’s return.
Chester got handed eggs, an apple pie, a chunk of home-cured ham, and a pouch of pipe tobacco. He got snorts of booze ranging from good Scotch to raw corn liquor. He got his hand shook and his back slapped. Several pretty girls kissed him. What Rita didn’t know wouldn’t hurt her. If he could have stayed in any one place for a little while… But the speed of the advance helped hold him to the straight and narrow.
Locals hauled down the Stars and Bars and burned it. Up went the Stars and Stripes in its place. Chester hoped the CSA didn’t retake any of these towns. People would catch it if the Confederates did. They didn’t seem to care. “Them bastards would just as soon shoot you as look at you,” an old man said. “My pa, he fought ’em in the War of Secession. He always said they fought fair then. No more. They hanged one poor son of a bitch for thumbing his nose at ’em when they rode down the street. Hanged him from a lamppost, like he was a nigger.”
In the field, the Confederates played by the rules most of the time. Up till now, Chester hadn’t seen what they did behind the lines. It didn’t make him like them any better. It did make him think the atrocity stories he heard were more likely to be true.
Lafayette, Ohio, was a littl
e town notable only for the red-brick tavern in the middle of it-the place looked older than God. As Chester’s barrel paused in the village square, more green-gray machines rumbled up from the south. Barrel crews and the infantrymen with them exchanged backslaps and cigarettes. “Lafayette,” Chester said happily. “Here we are!” They’d encircled the Confederates. Now-would the ring hold?
XVIII
Mr. President, sir, we have got to break out from Pittsburgh,” Nathan Bedford Forrest III said. “We have got to do it right now, right this minute, the sooner the better, while the machines still have enough gas to go at least partway.”
Jake Featherston scowled at the head of the Confederate General Staff. “We’re doing all right in there,” he said.
“We are now, Mr. President,” Forrest said. “We’ve still got ammo. We’ve still got fuel. When we start running low…” He shook his head. “And it won’t be long, either. They’ve cut the supply routes, same as we cut the USA in half last summer.”
“If we can’t get the shit in by road or railroad, we’ll damn well fly it in,” Jake said. “That’ll keep the men fighting.”
“Sir, we’ve got a whole army in there,” Forrest replied, shaking his head. “No offense, sir, but no way in hell we can bring in enough by air to keep that many men going.”
“That isn’t what the flyboys tell me,” Jake said. “I’ve talked with ’em. They say they’re up for the job.”
“They’re lying through their teeth, Mr. President, on account of they’re scared to tell you you truth,” Nathan Bedford Forrest III declared. “You tell me who you talked to, and I’ll personally go punch the son of a bitch in the nose.”
“You’ll do no such thing. They had diagrams and everything-showed just what they could do,” Featherston said. “Long as they can do it, the boys up there can keep fighting, right? And you can work out some kind of way to break through to ’em. How many damnyankees can there be in that ring, anyhow?”
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