Breakthroughs (8 page)

Ned Sherrard set down his cup and folded his arms across his chest. “Lieutenant Colonel, I will have you know that I was one of the people involved in designing barrels, and that I am also one of the people responsible for formulating the doctrine in use for most of the past year. If I ask you that question again, will you give me a different answer?”

“No, sir,” Morrell said with a small sigh. “You asked my opinion, and I gave it to you. If you want to transfer me out of this unit, though…well, I won’t be happy, but I’ll certainly understand.” Sometimes he wished he didn’t have the habit of saying just what he thought.

Sherrard kept his arms folded, as if he’d forgotten they were. “Isn’t that interesting?” he said, more to himself than to Morrell. “Maybe I was wrong.”

“Sir?” Morrell said.

“Never mind,” Colonel Sherrard told him. “If you don’t get it, you don’t need to know; if you do get it, you already know and you’re sandbagging.”

“Sir?” Morrell said again. Now, though, he didn’t really expect to get an answer. He had a notion of what he’d stumbled over: an argument among the brass about how best to use barrels. But doctrine was doctrine, and the Army clung to it as tightly as the Catholic Church did.

Sherrard, though, turned out to be more forthcoming than Morrell had thought he would. “You may be interested to learn that you and General Custer have similar views about how barrels should be employed.”

“Really, sir?” That
was
interesting. Custer was…Morrell didn’t know how old he was, but he had to be older than God. Surprising he had any ideas of his own. Off what Morrell had seen in Philadelphia of his performance, he didn’t have many. He just went straight at the Rebs and slugged till someone eventually had to take a step back.

“I’ll tell you something else you may find funny,” Sherrard said. Morrell raised a questioning eyebrow. In a half-shamefaced way, the colonel who’d served on the General Staff went on, “God damn me to hell if I haven’t started thinking he’s right, too. Which also means I think
you
may be right, Lieutenant Colonel. As you put it, if we’ve got a big stick, we ought to clout the bastards with it.”

“Really, sir?” Morrell knew he was repeating himself again, but couldn’t help it. That eyebrow—both eyebrows—went up again, this time in astonishment. “Have you let the War Department know you’ve changed your mind?”

“I’ve sent them more memoranda than you can shake a stick at.” Sherrard sighed. “Have you ever dropped a small stone off a tall cliff and waited for the sound it makes when it hits the ground to come back to your ears?”

“Yes, sir,” Morrell replied. “The sound never comes back, not if it’s small enough and the cliff is high enough.” He paused. “Dealing with the War Department can be a lot like that.”

“Ain’t it the truth?” The colloquialism from Sherrard surprised Morrell yet again. “That’s one of the reasons I’ve stayed in the field since I shepherded the first barrels down to this front. The cliff isn’t so tall here in the field. There’s less space between me and the enemy, if you know what I mean.”

“Oh, yes, sir, I know exactly what you mean,” Morrell answered. “Sometimes I think our boys in the field have worse enemies in Philadelphia than they do in Richmond.”

Again, he wished he hadn’t been so forthright. Again, it was too late. He waited to see how Colonel Sherrard would respond. Sherrard didn’t show much; he got the distinct impression Sherrard seldom showed much. After a thoughtful pause, the colonel said, “Well, you were crazy enough to want to serve in barrels, Lieutenant Colonel. Now that you’re here, don’t you think you ought to go for a ride in one so you can see how big a mistake you made?”

“Yes, sir!” Morrell said enthusiastically. “I hear it’s quite something.”

“So it is. A kick in the teeth is quite something, too.” Sherrard’s voice was dry. “General Custer calls it the biggest sock-dologer in the history of the world. My father, God rest his soul, used to use that word. I think it fits here. Come on. You will, too.”

They left the tent and squelched through the mud to a barrel Sherrard happened to know was in running order. Along the way, the colonel commandeered a driver and a couple of engineers. “In case it doesn’t feel like staying in running order,” Sherrard explained. “In a real fight, we’d have two men on each machine gun—they’re from the infantry—and two artillerymen at the cannon.”

With the barrel commander, that made a crew of eighteen, from three different branches of the Army. “Not efficient,” Morrell remarked.

“I know that, too—now,” Sherrard said. “Here we are.” He stopped in front of a barrel done up in camouflage paint except for a fierce eagle’s head on the side and the name or motto
Remembrance
above it. One of the hatches was open. “Climb on up into the cupola,” Sherrard told Morrell. “You will be the commander. Drive around a square and come back here.”

Morrell scrambled up into the small metal box atop the barrel. He took the seat forward and to the right, the one unencumbered by controls. The driver sat in the other one. When the engineers shouted that they were ready, the driver stabbed the red button of the electric starter. The engines grumbled, then came to roaring life. The driver yelled something to Morrell. He had no idea what.

The din was terrific, incredible. If the engines had mufflers, they didn’t work. Exhaust fumes promptly filled the barrel. Morrell coughed. His eyes smarted. What combat would be like in here, with the machine guns and cannon blazing away, adding their racket and the stink of burnt smokeless powder, he didn’t want to think.
Hell
seemed a reasonable first approximation.

After checking to make sure both reverse levers behind his seat were in the forward position, the driver got the barrel moving by stepping on the clutches to both engines, putting the beast in gear, and opening the throttle on the steering wheel. He knew the course he was supposed to steer. If he hadn’t, hand signals would have been the only way to give it to him; he couldn’t have heard shouted orders. The barrel rode as if its springs—if it had any—were made out of rocks. Morrell bit his tongue twice and his lower lip once. With the window slits open, he could see a little. With them closed, he could see next to nothing.

A cough. A groan. A wheeze. Silence. Into it, the driver said, “We’re back, sir. What do you think?”

Get me the devil out of here
sprang to mind. Morrell suppressed it. He had, after all, volunteered for this. He said, “We need better controls and signals in the barrel.” The driver nodded agreement. Only a maniac would have disagreed. On the other hand, only a maniac would have wanted to climb into a barrel in the first place.

For the first time since the summer of 1914, the Army of Northern Virginia was fighting in northern Virginia, not in Pennsylvania or Maryland. These days, instead of threatening Philadelphia, the fighting force whose ferocious onslaught had brought the Confederacy more glory than any other was reduced to defending the state for which it was named against the endless grinding pressure of the U.S. Army.

Sergeant Jake Featherston had his battery of the First Richmond Howitzers well positioned just in front of the little town of Round Hill, about fifteen miles south of the Potomac. The hill on which Round Hill sat had looked out on prosperous farming country all around. Prosperous farming country still lay to the south. To the north lay the infernal landscape of war: shell holes and trenches and barbed wire in great thick rusting belts and shattered trees.

A scrawny, fiercely intent man, Featherston stalked from one of the half-dozen quick-firing three-inch guns—copies of the famous French 75s—he commanded. Every other battery commander in the regiment was a lieutenant or captain. As far as Jake knew, every other battery commander in the C.S. Army was a lieutenant or captain. He’d die a sergeant, even if he died at the age of 109.

“Bastards,” he muttered under his breath as he relentlessly checked guns and carriages and limbers and stored ammunition and horses and men. “Fucking bastards.” He’d warned against Captain Jeb Stuart III’s Negro body servant. His former superior had protected the colored man, whose main color turned out to be Red. The War Department had never forgiven Jake for being right. Now that Stuart had thrown his life away in battle to atone for the disgrace, the War Department never would, not when Jeb Stuart, Jr., Jeb III’s father, sat behind a Richmond desk with a general’s wreathed stars on his collar.

Featherston had taken command of the battery when Jeb Stuart III died. He’d kept it because he was obviously better at the job than the officers who led the rest of the batteries in the regiment. But was that enough to get the stripes off his sleeve and a bar, or two, or three, on his collar? He spat in the mud. Not likely.

He went back to his own gun, the one whose crew he’d led since the First Richmond Howitzers got word of the declaration of war and started throwing shells across the Potomac into Washington, D.C. It was the same gun only in the sense that George Washington’s axe was the same axe after four new handles and three new heads: it had gone through several barrels, a new breech block, and even a new elevation screw. He didn’t care. It was his.

All the men who served it were new except for him, too. A devastating Yankee barrage up in Pennsylvania had killed or maimed everybody in the original crew but him. Nobody here was green, though, not any more. The loader, the gun layers, the shell heavers had all had plenty of time to get good at what they did—plenty of time and the not so occasional prod of the rough side of Jake’s tongue.

Michael Scott, the loader, looked up from a cigarette he was rolling. “How’s it going, Sarge?” he asked.

“It ain’t ever gonna be what you call great,” Featherston answered. Even in his own ears, he sounded harsh and uncultured. That was yet another reason he hadn’t been promoted: he sounded like a man whose father had been an overseer till the CSA manumitted its Negroes. A proper officer, now, had an accent almost as fancy as an Englishman’s.
That’s what the War Department thinks, anyway.
He scowled.
Far as they’re concerned, how a man sounds is more important than how he acts. Bastards.

Scott got the cigarette rolled and struck a match. He’d been a fresh-faced kid when he came into the battery. He wasn’t a fresh-faced kid any more; he had hollow eyes and sallow cheeks and he hadn’t shaved for a couple of days. Pointing north, he said, “Looks like the damnyankees are building up for another go at us.”

Featherston looked in that direction, too. “I see what you mean,” he said slowly. He couldn’t see as much as he would have liked, not without the fancy field glasses that were in such chronically short supply in the C.S. Army. But the naked eye was plenty to catch the bubble and stir behind the Yankee lines. Something was going on, sure as hell.

Scott sucked in smoke. The inhalation made him look even more gaunt than he really was. “Heard anything?” he asked.

“Nary a word.” Featherston shook his head. “You got to understand, they ain’t gonna tell me first no matter what. Only way I hear about it first is if there’s shit on the end they give me to grab.”

“Yeah, Sarge, I know about that,” Scott allowed. The whole battery knew about that. “Still and all, though, you’ve got that pal over in Intelligence, so I was just wondering if he’d said anything.”

“Nary a word,” Jake repeated. “And Major Potter isn’t a pal—not exactly, anyhow.” As far as he could see, the only thing he and the bespectacled major had in common was an unbounded contempt for the bluebloods who, because of who their grandfathers had been, got higher rank and a bigger arena in which to display their blunders than they deserved.

“All right.” The loader eased off. The whole battery also knew not to get Featherston started, or he was liable to go on for hours. Scott looked around. “What worries me is that it doesn’t look like we’re building up to match ’em. Sure, the defense has an advantage, but still—”

“Yeah.” Featherston’s voice was rough. “We kill two damnyankees for every one of us they get, that’s bully, but if they send three or four at us for every one we’ve got holdin’ ’em back, sooner or later they run us out of our position.”

“That’s the truth,” Scott said. “They got more o’ those damn barrels than we do, too, and they scare the infantry fit to shit themselves.”

“Wish I could see some barrels over yonder,” Jake said. “If I could see ’em, we could try hittin’ ’em, or, if we couldn’t reach, we could send word back to division HQ and let the big guns have a go at ’em.” He spat again, then asked, “Your gas helmet in good shape?”

“Sure as hell is.” Scott slapped the ugly hood of gas-proofed canvas he wore on his left hip. “Yankees fight dirty as the devil, you ask me, throwing gas shells at us when they start a barrage and making us fight while we’re wearing these goddamn things.”

“I ain’t gonna argue with you, on account of I reckon you’re right,” Jake said. “ ’Course, now that they went and thought of it for us, we do the same to them every chance we get. If we had any brains back there in Richmond, we’d’ve figured it out for our own selves, but you look at the way this here war’s been run and you’ll see what a sorry hope that is.”