Breakthroughs (30 page)

There was the battered parapet, just ahead. A black man with a rifle in his hands popped up onto the firing step, ready to shoot at Martin. Martin shot first, from the hip. It was not an aimed shot, and he did not think it hit. But it did what he wanted it to do: it made the Confederate soldier duck down again without shooting at him from short range.

A moment later, Martin was down in the trench himself. The black man wasn’t there. He’d fled from the firebay into a traverse. Martin did not charge after him. He and who could guess how many pals were waiting, fingers on the triggers of their Tredegars. Charging headlong into a traverse after the enemy was anything but smart.

Martin pulled a potato-masher grenade off his belt, yanked off the cap at the end of the handle, and tugged on the porcelain bead inside. That ignited the fuse. He flung the grenade up over the undug ground and into the traverse.

At the same time as his grenade went into the air, a Reb in the traverse threw one of their egg-shaped models at him and his comrades. Someone behind him yelled in pain. More grenades flew. More shouts rose. He and the men of his section couldn’t stay where they were. The attack had to move forward. That meant—

He scowled. Even when it wasn’t smart, a headlong charge was sometimes the only choice left. “Follow me!” he shouted.

His men did. If they hadn’t, he would have died in the next minute. As things were, that next minute was an ugly business with rifle and entrenching tool and bayonet and a boot in the belly or the balls. More U.S. soldiers came around the corner than the Rebs in the traverse could withstand. The men in butternut went down. Most of the men in green-gray went on.

Through a zigzagging communications trench they ran, deeper into the Confederate position. Somewhere not far from the far end of that trench, a machine gun stuttered out death. The barrels had taken out a lot of machine-gun positions, but not all of them. The guns that survived could wreak fearful havoc on advancing U.S. soldiers.

With one accord, Martin and his section went hunting that machine gun and its crew. The only soldiers who didn’t hate machine guns were those who served them. Martin’s lips skinned back from his teeth. There was the infernal machine, blazing away toward the front from a nest of sandbags. One white man fed belts of ammunition into it, the other tapped the side of the water jacket every little while to change the direction of the stream of bullets.

The sandbags kept the Confederates from bringing the gun to bear on Martin’s men, who approached from the side. The gun crew kept firing till the last second at the U.S. soldiers they could reach. Then they threw their hands in the air. “You got us,” the trigger man said.

“Sure as hell do,” the Reb who’d been feeding ammunition agreed.

Chester Martin shot one of them. Corporal Bob Reinholdt shot the other one at the same instant. As the Confederates crumpled, the two men who despised each other both stared in surprise. Reinholdt found words first: “Those sons of bitches can’t quit that easy.”

“Sure as hell can’t,” Martin agreed. Machine-gun crews rarely made it back to prisoner-of-war camps. For some reason, they always seemed to want to fight to the death.

Up ahead, the barrel leading the U.S. infantry exploded into flames and smoke: a shell from a Confederate field gun had struck home. Hatches flew open. Some of the machine gunners tried to bring out their weapons and fight on the ground. Most of them, though, went down as every C.S. soldier anywhere nearby turned his rifle on the stricken traveling fortress. The Confederates loved barrel crewmen every bit as much as ordinary infantrymen on both sides loved the men who served machine guns.

After brief but heartfelt curses, Martin said, “Things get tougher now. I wonder where the hell the next barrel is at.”

“Not close enough,” David Hamburger said. “We should do it like they did in Tennessee, put all the barrels together, smash on through the Rebs’ lines, and then let us tear the hole wide open.”

“Thank you, General,” Tilden Russell said. He was ragging the kid, but not too hard; Hamburger had given a good account of himself since the offensive opened. He didn’t have a veteran’s bag of tricks, but he was brave and willing and learned in a hurry.

But Russell had left the obvious line unused. Martin used it: “Listen, David, you don’t like the way we’re doing things, you write your congresswoman and give her an earful.” He laughed.

“I am doing that,” David Hamburger said. Martin hadn’t been serious, but he was. “We’ve pushed the Rebs back here, but we haven’t broken through. If it hadn’t been for the river they’re hiding behind in Tennessee, they’d be running yet.”

Shells started landing around them. They dove for cover. “Jesus,” Tilden Russell shouted, holding his helmet on his head with one hand. “God damn Rebs still have soldiers of their own in this part of the trench. What the hell are they doin’, shelling us like this here?”

“Trying to kill us, I expect,” Martin answered.

“I bet their artillery don’t care a fuck if they kill a few of their own foot soldiers,” Bob Reinholdt added. “They’re all white men back there”—he pointed south, toward the Confederate guns—“but half the bastards up here in the trenches are niggers. Probably just as glad to be rid of ’em. Hell, I would be.”

“Makes sense,” Martin agreed, after a moment adding, “The other thing to remember is, there’s no guarantee those were Rebel shells. They might have been ours, falling short.”

Nobody said anything for a few seconds. All the men in filthy green-gray huddled there knew only too well that such things happened. You were just as dead if a shell fragment from one of your own rounds got you as from Confederate artillery.

Whoever had fired it, the salvo ended. “Come on,” Martin said. “Even if the barrel’s dead, we’ve got to keep going.”

They had almost reached the far end of the network of trenches when Confederate reserves—black men with white officers and noncoms—brought them to a standstill. Some of the black soldiers in butternut fired wildly and ran. Some—more than would have been true of white troops—threw down their Tredegars and surrendered first chance they got. Counting on either, though, was risky—no, was deadly dangerous. Most of the black Confederates fought as hard as white Confederates.

With the Rebel reinforcements in place, Martin didn’t need long to figure out that he and his pals weren’t going to push much farther forward today. He got the men busy with their entrenching tools, and got busy with his own, too, turning shell holes and bits of north-facing trench into south-facing trench.

Sighing, he said, “We took a bite out of their line, but we didn’t slam on through it.”

“We need more barrels,” the Hamburger kid said. “They can really smash trenches. What else can?”

“Bodies,” Martin answered. “Lots and lots of bodies.” Anyone who’d fought on the Roanoke front, whether in green-gray or butternut, would have said the same thing.

“Barrels work better,” David Hamburger said, and Martin did not disagree with him. He’d seen too many piled-up bodies.

Anne Colleton read through the
Columbia Southern Guardian
with careful thoroughness over her morning eggs and coffee. Breakfast wasn’t so good as it might have been. She’d made it herself. After having servants cook for her almost her entire life, her own culinary skills were slender. But for the time while she’d languished in a refugee camp during the Red uprising, she’d have owned no culinary skills at all.

She hardly noticed she’d got the eggs rubbery and the coffee strong enough to spit in her eye. The
Southern Guardian
took most of her attention. Despite censors’ obfuscations and reporters’ resolute optimism, the war news was bad. It had been bad ever since the damnyankees opened their spring offensives in Tennessee and Virginia and Maryland.

“Damn them,” she whispered. Then she said it out loud: “
Damn
them!” The paper wasn’t printing maps of the fighting in Maryland and Virginia any more. Anne had no trouble understanding why: maps would have made obvious how far the Army of Northern Virginia had fallen back. Unless you had an atlas, you couldn’t tell where places like Sterling and Arcola and Aldie—which had just fallen after what the
Southern Guardian
called “fierce fighting”—were.

But Anne did have an atlas, used it, and didn’t like what she was seeing. What had her brother Tom said? That there were too many damnyankees to hold back? Virginia looked to be the USA’s attempt to prove it.

Nashville, though, Nashville had been something different. The paper went on for a column and a half about the horrors the city was suffering under Yankee bombardment. Anne scowled at the small type. What was in there might well be true, but it wasn’t relevant. If the line that held U.S. guns out of range of the city hadn’t collapsed, it wouldn’t
be
under bombardment now.

But that line, which had held even under the heaviest pressure since the autumn before, went down as if made of cardboard when the Yankees hammered it with a horde of their barrels. That hammering worried Anne more than it seemed to worry the Confederate War Department. U.S. forces weren’t using their barrels like that anywhere else. But if they did…

“If they do, they’re liable to break through again, wherever it is,” Anne said. She could see that. Why couldn’t they see it in Richmond?

Maybe they could see it. Maybe they simply didn’t know what to do about it. That possibility also left her unreassured.

She looked at her plate in some surprise, realizing she’d finished the eggs without noticing. She sighed. Another day. She’d never felt so useless in all her life as she did here in St. Matthews now. Were she back at Marshlands, she would be fretting about the year’s cotton crop. But there would be no cotton crop this year. She dared not go back to the plantation that had been in her family for more than a hundred years.

Her back stiffened. No, that wasn’t true. She dared to go back, even if she would not have cared to spend the night there. In fact, she
would
go back—with militiamen, and with a Tredegar slung over her shoulder. The plantation was ravaged. It was ruined. But it was hers, and she would not tamely yield it to anyone or anything.

No sooner decided than begun. She did not officially command the St. Matthews militia, but she had enough power in this part of the country—enough power through most of South Carolina, as a matter of fact—that within an hour she and half a dozen militiamen were rattling toward Marshlands in a couple of ramshackle motorcars.

Some of the militiamen wore old gray uniforms, some new butternut. Some of the men were old, too—too old to be called into the Army even during the present crisis at the front. One, a sergeant of her own age named Willie Metcalfe, was a handsome fellow when viewed from the right. The left side of his face was a slagged ruin of scars. He wore a patch over what had been his left eye. Anne wondered why he bothered. In that devastation, who could have said for certain where his eye socket lay? A couple of his comrades were surely less than eighteen, and looked younger than Anne’s telegraph delivery boy.

Half a dozen miles made a twenty-minute ride along the rutted dirt road between St. Matthews and Marshlands. It would have been twice that long if one of the motorcars had had a puncture, but they were lucky. When Willie Metcalfe—who, predictably, was driving in the lead automobile, to avoid displaying his wrecked profile for a while—started to pull into the driveway that led to the ruins of the Marshlands mansion, Anne spoke up sharply: “No, wait. Stop the motorcar here and pull off to the side of the road.”

“Yes, ma’am.” Sergeant Metcalfe’s voice was mushy; the inside of his mouth was probably as ravaged as the rest of that side of his face. But he said the words as he would have said
Yes, sir
to a superior officer, and obeyed as promptly, too. The other motorcar followed his lead.

Because she hadn’t had to shout at him, as she’d had to shout at so many men in her life, she deigned to explain: “The only motorcars likely to come here will have white people in them—probably white soldiers in them. What better place to hide a bomb than in the driveway there?”

Metcalfe thought for a moment, then nodded. “That makes sense,” he said. “That makes a lot of sense.”

Linus Ashworth, who with his white beard looked a little like General Lee and was almost old enough to have fought under him, said, “We ain’t likely to be bringing niggers into the militia any time soon, not when we’re chasin’ ’em, and I don’t give a…hoot what the Army does.” He got out of the automobile and spat a stream of tobacco juice into the lush grass. A brown drop slid down that white beard. A yellow streak in it said that sort of thing happened to him all the time.

Anne and the militiamen advanced on the wreckage of the Marshlands mansion in what Metcalfe called a skirmish line. He unobtrusively took the left end. They all had a round in the chamber of their Tredegars. Anne didn’t expect any trouble. The Red rebels shouldn’t have known she was on the way to Marshlands. She herself hadn’t known she would be till not long before she was. But taking chances wasn’t a good idea.

Linus Ashworth spat again. “It’s a shame, ma’am,” he said, “purely a shame. I seen this place when it was like what it’s supposed to be, and there wasn’t no finer plantation in the state of South Carolina, God strike me dead if I lie.”

“Yes,” Anne said tightly. Ashworth had seen Marshlands before the war, but she’d lived here. Coming back after the men of the Congaree Socialist Republic were driven back into the riverside swamps had been hard enough. Coming back now…

Now the Marshlands plantation wasn’t ruined, as it had been then. Now it was dead. The cabin where she’d lived after the mansion burned was itself charred wreckage. The rest of the cabins that had housed the Negro field hands were deserted, glass gone from the windows, doors hanging open because nothing inside was worth stealing. One door had fallen off its hinges and leaned at a drunken angle against the clapboard wall. White bird droppings streaked the door’s green paint.

Anne looked out to what had been, and what should have been, broad acres of growing cotton. Weeds choked the fields. No crop this year. No chance of getting a crop this year, even if she could find hands who would work for her and not for Cassius and Cherry and the rest of the Reds—and good luck with that, too. No money coming in from Marshlands this year. But the money would keep right on bleeding out. War taxes…
outrageous
wasn’t nearly a strong enough word. Her investments had kept her afloat so far, but they were tottering, too.