Breakthroughs (28 page)

Perhaps unnerved by his lumbering charge, the crew of the Confederate barrel’s other cannon also missed their shot. His own gunners waved again. The barrel halted. They fired. Smoke and flame spurted from the enemy. “Hit!” Morrell screamed. “We got him!” Hatches on the sides and top of the Confederate machine flew open. The crew began bailing out. Morrell swung his own barrel sideways, so his machine gunners could give them a broadside.

And then the command was
Straight
again. He stood up once more to look around, this time for only a moment. Fewer U.S. barrels were near than before. More had been hit or bogged down or broken down. But the survivors—and there were many—still advanced, and the U.S. infantry with them.

Maybe they would go on all the way to the Cumberland. Maybe the Confederates, with the advantage of moving on un-wrecked ground, would patch together some kind of line and halt them short of the river. In a way, it hardly mattered. The big U.S. guns would move forward, miles forward. From their new position, they’d pound Nashville to pieces.

“Breakthrough,” Irving Morrell said, and ducked down into the barrel again.

Gas shells didn’t sound quite like shrapnel or high explosive. They gurgled as they flew through the air, and burst with a report different from those of other rounds. “Get your gas helmets on!” Sergeant Jake Featherston screamed as the shells began raining down around the guns of his battery.

He threw on his own rubberized-burlap gas helmet and stared through its murky glass windows toward the line above Round Hill, Virginia, the line that had been quiet for so long but was quiet no more. Here came barrels, a few, widely spaced, rumbling toward and then through the belts of barbed wire in front of the trenches of the Army of Northern Virginia. Yankee machine guns blazed away, making the soldiers in those trenches, black and white, keep their heads down. Men in green-gray swarmed like ants in the barrels’ wake, and between them as well.

“Range is 4,500 yards, boys,” Featherston shouted, the gas helmet muffling his voice. “Now we make ’em pay their dues.”

Normally, the three-inch field guns fired half a dozen rounds a minute. In an emergency, they could triple that for a little while. They could triple it for a little while with the gun crews unencumbered, anyhow. In the stifling gas helmets, they didn’t come close. Even keeping up the normal rate of fire was a strain while wearing the helmets. Featherston felt he couldn’t breathe. His head pounded. Sweat fogged the glass portholes through which he had to watch the world.

All the guns in the battery were firing, though. Jake got a blurrier view than he wanted, but he shouted with glee to watch shells rain down on the damnyankees now that they’d come out of their trenches. The range was too long for him to be able to see individual U.S. soldiers ripped and torn and thrown aside like rag dolls, but he could watch the shells burst and imagine the butchery they were meting out. He had seen enough battlefields to know all too well what artillery did to soft human flesh.

He could also see that his battery and the rest of the Confederate guns on Round Hill and farther to the rear were not going to be able to keep the damnyankees from going forward. Already, barrels were in among the trenches of the Army of Northern Virginia, lashing them with machine-gun fire at close range. Hitting something as small as a barrel at a range of two and a half miles wasn’t a matter of precise aiming. Dumb luck had a lot more to do with it.

Reserves started going forward to help stem the tide. But Yankee artillery was chewing up the ground behind the trenches, too. Reinforcements took casualties long before they got close enough to the front to do any good. Featherston couldn’t tell whether they were white troops or colored. Whoever they were, they suffered.

And the U.S. artillery hadn’t forgotten about Round Hill, either. Along with the gas shells, the Yankees flung around high explosive and shrapnel as if they’d have to pay for what they didn’t use up. One of Jake’s shell-jerkers collapsed with a shriek, clutching at his belly.

The leftmost piece of the six-gun battery fell silent. Featherston dashed over to its emplacement to find out why. If a hit had taken out the crew but left the gun intact, he’d yank a man or two off the rest of the guns in the battery and keep all of them in action.

He discovered the crew was down, but so was the gun. The carriage was wrecked; it had taken a direct hit from what, by the size of the crater, had to be a six- or eight-inch shell. Cursing fate—and the U.S. heavy artillery that overmatched its Confederate counterpart—he dashed back to his own gun.

Stretcher-bearers had carried away the wounded crewman. Jake had to stop and rest before he could do anything else. His heart pounded like a sledgehammer in his chest. He wanted to yank off the gas helmet, but didn’t dare; gas shells were still falling, releasing their deadly contents in bursts of oily vapor.

Like furious machines, the gun crews of his battery kept hitting the Yankees as hard as they could. They shortened the range again and again, as the green-gray infantry forced its way into and past one trench line after another.

“Bastards are going to be coming up the hill at us,” Jake snarled, trying to suck enough air into his lungs to satisfy him.

“We’ll give ’em shrapnel, Sarge,” Michael Scott said, slamming home another shell. “Hell, we’ve got a few rounds of case shot. We’ll give ’em that.” The thin-walled shells of case shot were filled with lead balls. In effect, they converted a field piece to a giant shotgun.

A great roar off to the right meant a Yankee shell had found the limber that carried ammunition for one of the guns there. Jake was a stickler for making sure his crews didn’t park the limbers too close to the guns, and also that they built sandbag barricades between the ones and the others. In case the shells went up, such precautions did only so much good.

He hurried over, panting like a dog. The gun remained intact. So did the loader and the assistant gun layer. The rest of the crew was down, dead or wounded. “We’ve still got enough men to fight this piece, even if we have to haul ammo from the dump.” He looked around. “Where’s the niggers who take care of the horses and do your cookin’? They can carry shells.”

“Titus!” the gun layer shouted. “Sulla!” No black men emerged. He shook his head. “Maybe they got it, too, or maybe they’re hidin’ somewheres and they ain’t comin’ out, or else they took off runnin’ when the shelling started.”

“Worthless bastards,” Featherston snarled, ignoring the possibility that the black men might be hurt or dead. He pointed north, toward the front. “Niggers up there’ll run, too. You wait.”

He would have elaborated—it was a theme on which he was always ready to elaborate—but more gas shells came in just then. He smelled something horrible. Whatever it was, the absorbent cartridge in his gas helmet did absolutely nothing to keep it out. His guts knotted. He gulped. A moment later, he tore off the gas helmet and was down on his hands and knees heaving as if he’d drunk too much bad whiskey.

He wasn’t the only one, either—both the loader and the gun layer from the shattered crew vomited beside him. “Puke gas,” the loader moaned between spasms. “Damnyankees are shootin’ puke gas at us.”

Featherston’s reply meant,
Really? I hadn’t noticed,
but was rather more pungently phrased.

Another salvo of gas shells burst on Round Hill. Jake spat foul-tasting slime from his mouth, then sucked in a long, painful breath. The breath proved painful not only because he’d just puked his guts up and felt as if he’d heave some more. His lungs burned. He coughed and gagged and started to choke.

“That’s phosgene!” he wheezed, and yanked the gas helmet over his head again. But then he did have to vomit again. He couldn’t do it inside the gas helmet, so he took it off. If he inhaled enough phosgene to kill him while he was heaving…well, he felt like dying, anyhow.

He might have smoked a hundred packs of cigarettes in a minute and a half. He gasped and choked and wondered if he would fall over right there. The gun layer had. His eyes were wide and staring; his face went from purple toward black as he fought for air his lungs couldn’t give him.

Jake threw on the gas helmet. He started to puke again, but made himself keep things down even though he thought he would explode. The gas helmet did hold out the phosgene, and the Yankees didn’t send over any more shells full of vomiting gas, or none that hit near him.

The loader on the gun with the wrecked limber was also down, choking. He wasn’t so bad off as the gun layer, but he was in no shape to fight, either. Slowly, staggering as he walked, Jake went back to his own piece.

A couple of its crewmen were heaving and choking, too, but the rest, no matter what sort of anguish in which they found themselves, kept on fighting the gun. The range had shortened again, too; if the Yankees hadn’t gained a mile of ground since the attack started, Featherston would have been astonished.

And they were still coming on, too. Some of their barrels had bogged down. Some were on fire. But the ones that survived still moved like broad-shouldered behemoths among the advancing infantry, hunting out pockets of resistance and blasting them out of existence. U.S. artillery kept on pounding not only Confederate guns but also the ground across which C.S. reserves had to come.

Here and there along the line, men in butternut were moving back, not forward. Flesh and blood could bear only so much. As the Confederate troops retreated, they entered the zone the U.S. artillery was pounding behind the line. They took casualties there. “Serves you right, you bastards,” Featherston growled. But the disorder and fear spreading through the retreating soldiers also infected the reserves who had been going forward. Whatever chance there might have been for a counterattack dissolved.

In growing horror and fury, Jake realized the front was not going to hold. The Army of Northern Virginia wouldn’t lose a few hundred yards of ground, to be regained later with bayonet and grenade. This was going to be a bad defeat, so bad, probably, that the battery would not be able to stay on Round Hill.

He went over to the two guns that were out of action and removed their sights and breech blocks, which he threw into the limber for his own gun. The Yanks would get no use from the weapons they captured. Then he checked the horses that would have to pull away the four surviving cannon. They’d come through everything better than he’d dared hope. If they’d gone down, he would have had to disable all six field guns in the battery before withdrawing.

Up Round Hill came the Confederates who’d run farthest and fastest. Most of those faces, close enough now for him to see the fright on them, were black. Behind the shield of the gas helmet, his own face twisted into a savage grin. “Canister!” he shouted.

Scott loaded the round into the gun. Jake twisted the elevation screw to lower the piece as far as it would go. He peered over open sights at the men in butternut heading his way.

“What are you doing, Sarge?” Scott asked.

“Fire!” Featherston screamed, and the loader obediently yanked the lanyard. Jake whooped to watch the colored cowards blown to bits. “Another round of the same!” he cried, and then, “Fire!” He shook his fist at the black soldiers still on their feet in front of him. “You won’t fight the damnyankees, you shitty coons, you got to deal with me!”

He brought out the four surviving guns from the battery, brought them out and brought them back to the new line the Army of Northern Virginia was piecing together behind Round Hill. As the day ended, he shelled the first Yankees coming over the hill. He set two barrels on fire. The U.S. infantry drew back. When fighting ebbed with the light, he sat by a little fire, too keyed up to sleep, writing and writing in the Gray Eagle notebook.

Lieutenant General George Custer stood at the top of the ridge in front of White House, Tennessee, the ridge the Confederates had defended so long and so tenaciously. Back in the distant days of peace, the ridge had been wooded. Now…now God might have intended it as a toothpick and splinter farm. Custer struck dramatic poses as automatically as his heart beat. He struck one now, for the benefit of the military correspondents who hovered close to hear what pearls of wisdom might drop from his lips.

“From here, gentlemen, I can see the waters of the Cumberland, and Nashville across the river from them,” he declared bombastically. “From here, gentlemen, I can see—victory.”

The correspondents scribbled like men possessed. Major Abner Dowling turned away so no one would have to see his face.
From here, gentlemen,
he thought,
I can see a fat, pompous old fraud who’s ever so much luckier than he deserves and who hasn’t the faintest inkling how lucky he is.

He turned back toward the general commanding First Army. He still felt little but scorn for Custer’s generalship, but he was having a certain amount of trouble holding on to that scorn. For the sake of his own peace of mind, he worked at it, but it wasn’t easy.

Truth was, Custer had gone far out on a limb—and taken Dowling with him—backing a doctrine directly contrary to the one coming out of the War Department. Truth was, he had won a sizable victory here by going his own way. Truth was, he
could
see Nashville from where he stood, and the guns of First Army could hit Nashville from near where he stood. Truth was, the CSA had left on this side of the Cumberland only battered units falling back toward their crossings.

Truth was, Custer, as he had done in the War of Secession and the Second Mexican War, had somehow managed to make himself into a hero.

“General, we’ve been using barrels for a year now,” a reporter said. “Why haven’t they done so well for us up till this latest battle?”

“They are a new thing in the world,” Custer answered. “As with any new thing, figuring out how best to employ them took a bit of doing.” He strutted and preened, like a rooster displaying before hens. “I came up with the notion of using them as a mass rather than in driblets, tried it out, and the results were as you have seen.”