Breakthroughs (27 page)

“He sees the country going forward. He doesn’t see the suffering he’s creating to make it go in the direction he wants,” Blackford said slowly. “That’s the best answer I can give you, and I doubt he could give you a better one.”

Flora wondered about that. Roosevelt was a good deal more eloquent than she’d expected him to be. But he was hardly an introspective man, so perhaps Blackford had a point after all.

The clank and rattle and rumble of the barrels faded in the distance. So, more slowly, the noise of the crowd faded, too. A sort of muted thunder remained. Flora had heard it whenever things grew quiet along the parade route. She wondered what it was. It put her in mind of the roar of the sea by the oceanside, but more by its steadiness than by the sound itself.

Up at the front of the platform, President Roosevelt approached a microphone—which was, Flora thought irreverently, like a fat man approaching a chocolate cake, for the president had no more need of the one than the fat fellow did of the other.

“Listen!” Roosevelt called to the crowd. Pointing to the south, he went on, “Do you know what that is?” Flora realized the low reverberations were coming from that direction.

“Tell us!” somebody—probably a paid shill—called from the crowd.

“I will tell you,” Roosevelt said. “That is the sound of our heavy guns, shelling the forces of the Confederate States still on U.S. soil. We are also shelling them on their own territory, and the Canadians and British opposing us in the north. This is a Remembrance Day they shall remember forever, yes, remember with fear and trembling.”

How the people cheered! Listening to them sent a chill through Flora. The war was not popular in her home district, nor anything about it. The war itself was probably unpopular in Philadelphia, too. But victory, and what victory would bring—those were popular. Flora’s district was full of immigrants, newcomers to the United States, who didn’t bear the full weight of a half century’s resentment and hatred and humiliation on their shoulders.

It was different here. The Army of Northern Virginia had occupied Philadelphia at the end of the War of Secession, as it had come so close to doing in this war. The government had fled here in the Second Mexican War and the present struggle. Philadelphians didn’t merely want peace—they wanted revenge, wanted it with a brooding desire frightening in its intensity.

Lost in her own thoughts, she’d missed some of what Roosevelt was saying. “And if we have suffered,” he thundered now, “our foes have suffered more. If they have overrun some of our sacred soil, we stand in arms on more of theirs. If our cities have suffered from their bombing aeroplanes, their cities have suffered more from our mighty bombers. And we advance, my friends. We advance! Everywhere on the continent of North America, the foe is in retreat.

“So I say to you, stand fast! The enemy’s hope is that our resolve will falter. They pray in Richmond, they pray in Canada, that we shall weary of the struggle. They pray that we shall throw in our hand, our winning hand, and give them at the table what they cannot win on the field of battle. Will we fall into their trap, my fellow citizens of the United States?”

“No!” the crowd cried, a great and angry roar.

Hosea Blackford leaned toward Flora. “Now you see the danger of opposing the war effort too strongly.”

“No, I don’t,” she answered. “I only hear a lot of wind.”

Blackford shook his head. “It’s worse than that. Suppose we do everything we can to end the war…
and Teddy Roosevelt goes ahead and wins it anyhow?
Who would ever take us seriously again? If Lincoln had somehow won the War of Secession, don’t you think the Republicans would have tarred the Democrats with the brush of peace? Don’t you think Roosevelt would do the same to us—and enjoy every minute of it?”

That was a larger political calculation than Flora had ever tried to make. “Do you really imagine a victory like that is possible?” she asked as the president reached another rhetorical crescendo.

Through the bellowed applause of the crowd, Congressman Blackford gave an answer that chilled her though the day was warm and sunny: “I begin to think it may be.”

Lieutenant Colonel Irving Morrell’s barrel rumbled and clattered south across no-man’s-land toward the Confederate defenses east of White House, Tennessee. It bucked and bounced over the broken ground like a toy boat in a stormy sea, or perhaps more as if Morrell were riding a three-legged horse no one had ever bothered breaking for the saddle.

Now he used hand signals almost as automatically as he breathed.
Right, then straight,
he ordered the driver, and the ungainly vehicle steered around a shell hole that might have made it bog down.

There just ahead stood the first barbed-wire belt in front of the enemy’s trenches: an obstacle as deadly to infantry as flypaper to flies.
Straight,
Morrell signaled, and the barrel crushed the barbed wire under better than thirty tons of metal.

With a noise like heavy hail on a tin roof, machine-gun bullets started slapping the armored front of the barrel. Some of them ricocheted off the cupola, too. None, fortunately, hit the armored vision louvers. Even with those louvers closed down tight, lead splash was dangerous.

There, straight ahead, was the reinforced-concrete box from which the machine gun was spitting death.
Halt,
Morrell signaled to the driver, and the barrel stopped. “Take it out!” Morrell screamed to the two artillerymen at the nose cannon. He didn’t know whether they heard him or not. What he wanted, though, was plain enough.

The cannon bellowed. Inside the barrel, the report was hard to hear over the noise of the two White truck engines. The cordite fumes from the explosion made Morrell cough. But, peering through the vision slits, he watched the machine-gun position crumble to rubble.
Straight,
he signaled to the driver, and the barrel crushed another belt of wire.

By hook or by crook, General Custer had managed to assemble a striking column of more than three hundred barrels. Every one of them—every one of them that hadn’t broken down or bogged down before it got this far—was chewing a path through the wire for the infantry that was following.

Another, last, belt of wire surmounted, ground down into the mud, and nothing more stood between the barrel and the foremost Confederate trench. Here and there, a few brave men who had withstood the short, fierce preliminary bombardment and who were not overwhelmed by fear of the oncoming barrels popped their heads above the parapet and blazed away with their Tredegars.

Morrell needed to give no orders there. The two machine guns on either side of the barrel started chattering. They could not bear straight ahead, but the nose cannon could. And other barrels were advancing side by side with Morrell’s; their machine guns helped sweep out the space in front of his traveling fortress, just as his swept the space in front of them.

As he bore down on the Confederate soldiers, some of them broke and fled. Bullets sent most of those spinning and writhing to the ground. The rest fought on in place till they too were slain.

Over the parapet climbed the barrel. The machine gunners inside pounded enfilading fire up and down the trench, as far as each traverse. The advance had given them a target of which men of their trade could normally but dream.

Then the barrel was over the trench, almost falling into it, crushing the ground underneath the tracks, helping to level its own way down and forward. Shells had damaged the far wall of the trench. Engines screaming, the barrel climbed over onto the ground between the first trench and the second.

One of the machine gunners was holding a hurt wrist from that awkward descent. He kept feeding ammunition into the gun for his partner to fire, though. All six machine guns, even the pair in the rear, were blazing away now, making things lively for any Confederate soldiers unlucky enough to be nearby.

“Keep moving!” Morrell shouted to the driver. “We’ve got to keep moving.” The young fellow at the barrel’s complicated controls raised both eyebrows to show he didn’t understand.
Straight,
Morrell signaled resignedly. But he couldn’t keep from talking, even if he couldn’t hear himself, let alone make anyone else hear: “We’ve got to keep driving them. If we hit them hard enough now, we can crack this line, and if we crack this line, Nashville isn’t worth anything to them any more, because we’ll shell it flat.”

Left,
he signaled the driver, waggling his hand to show he didn’t need a whole lot of left. He saw a way over the next trench line, one not quite so drastic as the barrel had used in its first descent. They went down a ways, they came back up, and the machine guns kept hammering.

He wondered how the rest of the barrels were doing, and the U.S. infantry moving forward with and after them. He couldn’t tell, not stuck inside the way he was.
Wireless telegraph,
he thought.
We need barrels with wireless telegraph sets inside, so we can keep track of what’s going on all over the field.
He shrugged. If it didn’t happen in this war, it would in the next, whenever that came along.

Meanwhile, he realized he did have a way to find out what was going on around him. He undogged the roof hatch, threw it open, stood up, and looked ahead and to the rear. “Bully,” he said softly. “Oh, bully.”

A few of the barrels had bogged down in trenches and shell holes. Others had taken hits from artillery or were otherwise disabled, some pouring pillars of greasy black smoke into the sky to mark their pyres. But most, like his, were still rumbling forward—rumbling forward and driving all before them.

The artillerymen fired the barrel’s nose cannon. Out here in the open air, the noise was terrific, like a clap of doom. The high-explosive shell exploded in front of a knot of Confederate soldiers and knocked them flying. Some, Morrell saw, were colored men. That confirmed intelligence reports. The shell didn’t care. It did its damage most impartially.

He took another look over his shoulder, and pumped a fist in the air in delight. In the wake of the barrels, and coming up even with the slower ones, were infantrymen in green-gray, swarming forward and out to the flanks to take possession of the ground the barrels cleared.

Not all the Confederate troops, white or Negro, were breaking. Morrell rapidly discovered that, while standing up so his head and torso were out of the barrel gave him a far better view of the field than he could have had inside the machine, it also made him a far better target. Bullets cracked past his head. Others clanged and ricocheted off the cupola with assorted metallic sounds of fury.

After half a minute or so, he decided he’d be tempting fate if he stayed out there any longer. He ducked back into the infernal gloom and fumes inside the barrel, and slammed the hatch shut after him. The driver and the rest of the crew stared at him as if convinced he’d gone utterly mad. His grin was compounded of excitement and triumph. He stuck up a thumb to show how things were going on the battlefield as a whole, then signaled to the driver.
Straight,
his hands said. The driver, eyes wide, saluted before pressing on.

The crew cheered loud enough to be heard over the roar and rumble of engines, tracks, and guns.

How far had they come? Morrell was sure they’d made better than a mile, maybe even a mile and a half, and noon was—he checked his watch—still more than an hour away. If they could keep it up, they’d have a hole miles wide and three or four miles deep torn in the Confederate line by the time the sun set on this most spectacular Remembrance Day of all time.

“Keep going,” he muttered. “We’ve got to keep going.”

Plenty of men in butternut were inclined to disagree with him. The C.S. soldiers defending the line above Nashville understood its importance every bit as well as did the U.S. attackers. The roar off to his left was a barrel taking a direct hit from a shell. Another shell struck in front of his own machine, showering the armored chassis with fragments and lumps of earth.

Speed up,
he signaled the driver, and the barrel rattled forward. As if he were in an aeroplane, he went through random right and left turns to throw off the enemy gunners’ aim. Hitting a moving, dodging target was not something the crews of field pieces practiced. Shells burst near the barrel, but none hit. This was not like shelling infantrymen: a miss, here, was as good as a mile.

One of the two artillerymen at the nose cannon waved to him and pointed. He nodded, then signaled the driver to halt. They fired their gun once, twice in quick succession. Peering through his louvers, Morrell watched men tumble away from the carriage of one of the CSA’s nasty three-inch guns. They did not get up again.
Straight,
he signaled the driver.

A moment later, he caught sight of another barrel, a little off to the right and several hundred yards ahead. He snarled something he was glad no one else could hear. He thought he’d been one of the leaders of this assault. How had that other bastard got so far ahead of him? He was green with jealousy, greener than his uniform.

Then he took another, longer, look. Jealousy faded, replaced by hot anticipation. That wasn’t a U.S. barrel—it was one of the rhomboids the CSA built, copying the design from the British. Barrels had seldom met other barrels in combat. His mouth stretched wide in a grin. A new encounter was going onto the list.

He got the driver’s attention, then pointed southwest till the fellow spotted the Confederate barrel—
tanks,
the Rebels sometimes called them, which struck Morrell as a silly name. He clenched his fist to show the driver he wanted to engage the enemy machine. The youngster nodded and turned toward it.

The Confederate barrel had spotted him, too, and began making a ponderous turn of its own to bring both its sponson-mounted cannon to bear on him. Since neither machine could move at anything much above a walking pace, the engagement developed with the leisure, though hardly with the grace, of two sailing ships of the line.

Flame burst from the muzzle of one of the Confederate barrel’s guns. Uselessly, Morrell braced himself for the impact of the shell. It missed. The artillerymen waved to him. He signaled the driver to halt. They fired. They missed, too.
Straight,
he signaled the driver.
Speed up.