He held up each piece as he named it so his inexperienced pupils could see what he was talking about. “Now watch how I turn the bolt—the lugs here have to line up with the grooves on the carrier. Then the bolt slides back until it comes off the carrier. You only really have to worry about the spring, the bolt carrier, and the bolt. You need to clean them every day the weapon is fired.”
Lang pulled a rod out from under the barrel of the AK-47. The carbine’s stock had a hinged compartment. He took from it a little bottle of gun oil, brushes, and cloth patches. With meticulous care, he ran a patch down the inside of the barrel, then wiped the black spring and silvery bolt and carrier clean. When he was done, he resumed his discussion.
“Reassembly procedure is the exact reverse of what we’ve just done. The bolt goes on the carrier”—he deftly matched action to words—”and they both go into the receiver. Then the recoil spring and its guide fit in back of the bolt carrier. Push ‘em forward till the rear of the guide clears the back of the receiver, then push down to engage the guide. Then you put the receiver plate in place, push in on the spring guide, and push the plate down to lock it.” He grinned at the North Carolinians. “Now you try it. Don’t bother cleaning your weapon this first time. Just get it apart and back together.”
“That don’t look too hard,” Edwin Powell said. Caudell wasn’t so sure. He didn’t trust the look on Benny Lang’s face. The last time he’d seen a look like that, Billy Beddingfield of Company F had been wearing it in a poker game. Billy had also had an extra ace stuck up his sleeve.
The spring, gleaming with gun oil, went back where it belonged with no particular argument. The bolt was something else again. Powell tried to fit it into place as Lang had. It did not want to fit. “Shitfire,” Powell said softly after several futile tries. “Far as I’m concerned, the damn thing can stay dirty.”
He was far from the only man having trouble. Lang went from group to group, explaining the trick. There obviously was a trick, for people looked happier once he’d worked with them. After a while, he came to Caudell’s group, where Powell was still wrestling with the bolt. “It goes on the carrier like—this,” he said. His hands underscored his words. “Do you see?”
“Yes, sir, I think so,” Powell answered, as humbly as if speaking to one of the Camp Mangum drill sergeants who had turned the 47th North Carolina from a collection of raw companies into a regiment that marched and maneuvered like a single living creature. Lang carried the same air of omniscience, even if he didn’t display it so loudly or profanely.
He said, “Show me.” Powell still fumbled, but at last he got the bolt into place. Lang slapped him on the back. “Good. Do it again.” Powell did, a little faster this time. Lang said, “When you get your own weapon tomorrow, you’ll practice till you can do it with your eyes closed, first try, every try.”
Powell grunted. “Been usin’ guns my whole life. Never reckoned I’d have to put puzzle pieces together to make one work.”
Oddly, that complaint cheered Nate Caudell. When he was a boy, his father had carved puzzles for him to play with. Thinking of the AK-47’s works as a toy rather than something strange, mysterious, and threatening let him attack them without feeling intimidated. When his turn came, he got the bolt back into place after only a couple of false starts.
“Do it again that fast, Nate, and I’ll believe you really can,” Allison High said. Caudell did it again, and then, just to show it was no fluke, one more time. High whistled, a long, low note of respect. “Might could even be a reason you’re wearin’ that first sergeant’s diamond to go with them stripes of yours.”
“First time we’ve seen one, if there is,” Dempsey Eure said. A grin eased the sting from the words; Eure had trouble taking anything or anyone seriously.
“To hell with both of you,” Caudell said. He and his messmates all laughed. “Wonder what Sid Bartholomew would say if he was here to get a look at this repeater,” Edwin Powell remarked. Everyone nodded. Nominally a member of Company D, Bartholomew was a gunsmith by trade, and had spent the whole war on detail in Raleigh, doing what he did best.
“Reckon he’d say good godalmighty like the rest of us,” Rufus Daniel said, and everyone nodded again. The AK-47 brought on remarks like that.
By the time everyone was able to clean and reassemble the repeater, morning had given way to afternoon. As he’d promised, Lang showed how to load cartridges into the rifle’s magazine. After the mysteries of the bolt, that was child’s play. He also showed how to open the catch at the bottom of the clip and clean the spring inside.
“That’s a once-a-month job, though, not once a day,” he said.” But do remember to see to it every so often.” He paused, looked around at his audience. “You‘ve been very patient chaps, the lot of you. Thank you for your attention; I’ve said everything I need say. Have you any questions of me?”
“Yeah, I got one,” somebody said immediately. Heads turned toward him as he took a swaggering step out of his group. “You got your fancy-pants rifle there, Mr. Benny Lang, kill anything that twitches twenty miles away; What I want to know is, how good a man are you without it?” He gazed toward Lang with insolent challenge in his eyes.
“Beddingfield!” Captain Lankford of Company F and Colonel Faribault barked the name in the same breath. Caudell said it, too, softly.
“How’d Billy Beddingfield ever make corporal?” Rufus Daniel whispered. “He could teach mean to a snapping turtle.”
“You don’t want to get on his wrong side, though,” Caudell whispered back. “If I were a private in his squad, I’d be more afraid of him than of any Yankee ever born.”
“You got that right, Nate,” Daniel said, chuckling.
“Back in ranks, Beddingfield,” Captain Lankford snapped.
“I don’t mind, Captain,” Benny Lang said. “Let him come ahead, if he cares to. This might be—instructive, too. Come on, Corporal, if you‘ve the stomach for it.” He set down his repeater and stood waiting.
“Is he out of his mind?” Edwin Powell said. “Billy’ll tear him in half.”
Looking at the two men, Caudell found it hard to disagree. Lang was taller, but on the skinny side. Built like a bull, Beddingfield had to outweigh him by twenty pounds. And, as Rufus Daniel had said, Beddingfield had a mean streak as wide as he was. He was a terror in battle, but a different sort of terror in camp.
He grinned a school bully’s nasty grin as he stepped forward to square off with Lang. “That man’s face is made for a slap,” Caudell said to Allison High.
“Reckon you’re right, Nate, but I got ten dollars Confed says Lang ain’t the one to slap it for him,” High answered.
Ten dollars Confederate was most of a month’s pay for a private. Caudell liked to gamble now and then, but he didn’t believe in throwing away money. “No thanks, Allison. I won’t touch that one.”
High laughed. Edwin Powell said, “I’ll match you, Allison. That there Lang, he looks to have a way of knowin’ what he’s doin’. He wouldn’t’ve called Billy out if he didn’t expect he could lick him.”
One of Caudell’s sandy eyebrows quirked up toward his hairline. He hadn’t thought of it in those terms. “Can I change my mind?” he asked High.
“Sure thing, Nate. I got another ten that ain’t doin’ nothin’. I—”
He shut up. Big knobby fists churning, Beddingfield rushed at Benny Lang. Lang brought up his own hands, but not to hit back. He grabbed Billy Beddingfield’s right wrist, turned, ducked, threw. Beddingfield flew over his shoulder, landed hard on the frozen ground.
He bounced to his feet. He wasn’t grinning anymore. “Bastard,” he snarled, and waded back in. A moment later, he went flying again. This time he landed on his face. His nose dripped blood onto his tunic as he got up. Lang wasn’t breathing hard.
“You fight dirty,” Beddingfield said, wiping his face with his sleeve.
Now Lang smiled, coldly. “I fight to win, Corporal. If you can’t stand it, go home to your momma.”
With a bellow of rage, Beddingfield charged. Caudell watched closely, but still didn’t see just what happened. All he knew was that, instead of flying, Beddingfield went down, hard. He moaned and tried to rise. Benny Lang stood over him; kicked him in the ribs with judiciously calculated force. He stayed down.
Still unruffled, Lang said, “Has anyone else any questions?” No one did. He smiled that cold smile again. “Colonel Faribault, Captain, I think you’ll find I didn’t damage this fellow permanently.”
“I wouldn’t have blamed you if you had, sir. He picked the fight,” Captain Lankford said. He plucked at his chin beard. “Maybe some hours bucked and gagged will teach him to save his spirit for the Yankees.”
“Maybe.” Lang shrugged. It wasn’t his problem. “Good day to you, gentlemen. Private Whitley, do you mind giving me a lift back to Orange Court House?”
“No, sir, not a bit, sir, Mr. Lang.” Whitley hadn’t sounded nearly so respectful before Lang knocked the stuffing out of Billy Beddingfield.
“Good.” Lang ambled toward the wagon. “I could walk it easily enough, I suppose—it’s only a mile and a half—but why walk when you can ride?”
“I don’t know who that Lang feller is or where he comes from,” Edwin Powell declared, “but he thinks like the infantry.”
The other sergeants from Company D solemnly nodded: Caudell said, “Talk has it, he and his people are from Rivington, right in our home county.”
“You cut out that ‘our’ and speak for your own self, Nate,” Allison High said; unlike his messmates, he was from Wilson County, just south of Nash.
Rufus Daniel said, “I don’t give a damn how talk has it; and that’s a fact. Here’s two more facts—Lang don’t talk like he’s from Nash County”—he exaggerated his drawl till everyone around him smiled—”and he don’t fight like he’s from Nash County, neither. I wish he’d learn me that fancy rasslin’ of his along with this here repeater. Old Billy Beddingfield, he never knew what hit him. Look, he’s still lyin’ there cold as a torch throwed in a snowbank.”
The wagon started out of camp, harness jingling, wheels squeaking, and horses’ hooves ringing against the ground. It swung off the camp lane onto the road north. Billy Beddingfield still did not move. Caudell wondered if Lang had hurt him worse than he thought.
So, evidently, did Colonel Faribault. He limped over to the fallen corporal, stirred him with his stick. Bedtlingfield wiggled and moaned. Nodding as if satisfied, Faribault stepped back. “Flip water in his face, somebody, till he revives. Then, Captain Lankford, along with whatever punishment details you give him, have the stripes off his sleeves. A raw brawler like that doesn’t deserve to wear them.”
“Yes, sir,” Lankford said.
“That’s fair,” Caudell said after a couple of seconds’ thought. No one in his group disagreed with him. A corporal from Company F ran off the parade ground, returned a minute later with his canteen, whose contents he poured over Beddingfield’s head. The fallen bully spluttered and swore and slowly sat up.
Colonel Faribault said, “Each of today’s groups will hold its rifle and practice as much as possible until the full regiment’s rifles arrive, which, I am told, will be tomorrow.” His phrasing drew ironic chuckles—the time of promised shipments had a way of stretching like India rubber. He went on, “Try not to actually shoot, except at our target here, for safety’s sake—especially not when the rifle is on—what did Lang call it?”
“Full automatic, sir,” someone supplied.
“That’s it.” Faribault’s mouth set in a grim line that his little mustache only accented.” A fool with an Enfield can hurt one man with an accidental shot. A fool with one of these new guns can mow down half a company if he starts with a full banana clip. Bear it in mind, gentlemen. You are dismissed.”
Dempsey Eure carried the AK-47 as the sergeants started back to their cabin. He slung it over his shoulder, then said, “I’d sooner tote this than my old rifle, any day.”
“Don’t hardly weigh nothin’, do it?” Rufus Daniel echoed.
“Stubby little thing, though,” Allison High said critically. “Wouldn’t want to get into a bayonet fight or have to swing it like it was a club.”
Daniel spat. “I leave the bayonet off my own rifle now when I’m goin’ into a fight, Allison. So do most of the boys, an’ you know it, too. You don’t hardly ever get close enough to a Yankee to use the blamed thing. With these here new guns, they ain’t goin’ to get that close to us, neither.”
As was his habit, High kept looking at the darker side of things: “If they don’t break down from use, and if Benny Lang and however many friends he’s got can keep us in cartridges. I ain’t never seen the likes of these before, not even from the Yankees.”
“That’s so,” Daniel allowed. “Well, we’ll use ‘em hard these next couple of months till we break camp. That’ll tell us what we need to know. And if they ain’t to be trusted, well, George Hines can put Minié balls in the ammunition wagons, too. We still got our old rifles. Be just like the first days of the war again, when the springfields and Enfields was the new guns, and a lot o’ the boys just had smoothbore muskets, an’ we needed t’carry bullets for both. I don’t miss my old smoothbore, and that’s a fact, though I did a heap o’ missin’ with it when I carried it.”
“You got that right,” Dempsey Eure said. “Dan’l Boone couldn’t hit the side of a barn with a goddam smoothbore, an’ anybody who says different is a goddam liar.”
“Goddam right,” Rufus Daniel said.
Before the war, Caudell would have boxed the ears of any boy who dared swear in his hearing. Now, half the time, he didn’t even notice the profanity that filled the air around him. These days he swore, too, when he felt like it, not so much to fit in as because sometimes nothing felt better than a ripe, round oath.
He said, “Can’t be sure, of course, but I have a notion we’ll get all the cartridges we need. That Benny Lang, he knows what he’s doing. Look at the way he handled Billy. Like Edwin said, he knew he could take him, and he did. If he says we’ll have repeaters here tomorrow, I’m inclined to believe him. I expect he and his people can manage cartridges, too.”
“Double or nothin’ on our bet that them guns don’t come tomorrow,” High said.
“You’re on,” Caudell replied at once.
“I want my ten now,” Edwin Powell said.
High turned around as if to punch him, then looked back to the parade ground. He pointed. “See, Nate, there’s one man who doesn’t know if you’re right about them cartridges.” Caudell turned too. George Hines was on his hands and knees, picking up spent cartridge cases.
“He’s a good ordnance sergeant,” Caudell said. “He doesn’t want to lose anything he doesn’t have to. Remember after the first day at Gettysburg, when they told off a couple of regiments to glean the battlefield for rifles and ammunition, both?”
“I remember that,” Powell said. His long face grew longer. “I wish they could have gleaned for men, too.” He’d taken his second wound at Gettysburg.
The sergeants ducked back into their cabin one by one. Rufus Daniel started building up the fire, which had died to almost cold embers while the five men took their long turn on the parade ground. Caudell sat down in a chair that had begun life as a molasses barrel. “Pass me that repeater, Dempsey,” he said. “I need to work with it more to get the proper hang of it. “
“We all do,” Eure said as he handed over the carbine.
Caudell practiced attaching and removing the magazine several times, then pushed in on the recoil spring guide and field-stripped the rifle. To his relief, he got the pieces back in the right way without too much trouble. He did it again, and again. He’d told his students that reciting over and over made each subsequent recitation easier and better. He was glad to find the same true here. His hands began to know what to do of themselves, without having to wait for the thinking part of his mind to tell them.
“Give me a go wit
h it now, Nate,” Powell said. “You’re slick as butter, and I was all fumble-fingered out there on the field.”
Not too far away, a man started banging on a pot with a spoon. “Mess call,” Allison High said. “Edwin, it’s your turn to fetch the grub. You’ll have to fiddle with that repeater later on. Who gets the water tonight?”
“I do,” Rufus Daniel said. He picked up his canteen, a wooden one shaped like a little barrel. “Give me yours too, Nate.” Caudell reached onto his bunk, tossed his canteen to Daniel. It was metal covered with cloth, taken from a Federal soldier who would never need water again. /
The two sergeants went back out into the cold. Dempsey Eure said, “Don’t hog the rifle just on account of Edwin’s gone, Nate. If wagonloads of ‘em really do show up tomorrow, we’d all best know what we’re doin’ or we’ll look like godalmighty fools in front of the “men. Wouldn’t be the first time,” he added.
Fear of embarrassment, Caudell thought as Eure ran his hand. over the chambering handle, was a big part of the glue that held the army together. Send a man alone against a firing line, with no one to watch him, and he might well run away. Why not, when going forward made getting shot all too likely? But send a regiment against that same line, and almost everyone would advance on it. How could a man who fled face his mates afterwards?
Rufus Daniel came back a few minutes later. He set the canteens down not far from the fireplace. “Reckon Edwin’ll be a bit—you don’t have to stand in line by the creek the way you do for rations,” he said. “While we’re waitin’, how about I try that there repeater?” Everyone was eager to work with the new rifle as much as he could.
The Guns of the South Page 5