Breakthroughs (40 page)

“Yes, Pa,” Mary said demurely, so demurely that McGregor could only hope she’d paid some attention—a little attention—to what he’d told her.

The big guns rumbled and roared. The bombardment of Nashville itself hadn’t stopped since the U.S. guns got close enough to reach the city. Lieutenant Colonel Irving Morrell had long since got used to that rumble from the western horizon.

Closer, but still west of his position on the northern bank of the Cumberland, another bombardment lay its thunder over the more distant rumble. For the past six days, U.S. artillery had been hammering the Confederate positions south of the river with high explosives and gas. Bombing aeroplanes had added the weight of their munitions to the unending gunfire. Fighting scouts swooped low, strafing the Rebel’s trenches with their machine guns.

General Custer could hardly have made it more obvious where he intended to throw First Army across the Cumberland. He had even been rash enough to let them get glimpses of the barrels he was gathering for his frontal blow.

And the Confederates, having such generosity bestowed upon them, were not slow to take advantage of it. Though the U.S. artillery hampered their movements, they brought reinforcements forward. Their own guns pounded away at the force Custer had assembled. Their aeroplanes were outnumbered, but still stung the U.S. soldiers waiting on Custer’s order to cross the river.

Irving Morrell looked west with benign approval.

Beside him, Colonel Ned Sherrard pulled out his watch. Morrell imitated the gesture. Together, they said, “Five minutes to go.”

Sherrard put his watch back into its pocket. He said, “How does it feel to have the whole First Army moving to a scheme you thought up?”

“Ask me in a few days,” Morrell answered. “If it goes the way I hope, it’ll feel great. If it doesn’t, I’ll be so low a deep dugout will look like up to me.”

As he watched the second hand of his own watch sweep into its final minutes before the curtain went up, he realized how much he had riding on the next few days. He would soon know the answer to a question so many men ask themselves:
are you really as smart as you think you are?
If he was, he’d be wearing a colonel’s eagles himself soon, or maybe even a brigadier general’s single stars. If he wasn’t, he’d be a lieutenant colonel if he stayed in the Army for the next fifty years, and no one would pay any attention to him during all that time.

Compared to failure, dying on the battlefield had its attractions.

“Fifteen sec—” he started to say, and then the guns behind him, the guns that had stayed hidden under canvas and branches, the guns that had remained silent for so long while their brethren pounded the Confederates to the west, opened up with everything they had against the thinned Rebel line just east of Lakewood, Tennessee. On the far side of the Cumberland, earth leapt and danced and quivered in agony.

A flight of bombers added their explosives to the attack, as they were doing farther west. Under the cover of the bombardment, Army engineers rushed to the bank of the Cumberland and began building half a dozen pontoon bridges across the river. Everything depended on the sappers. If they could get those bridges built fast enough, the rest of Morrell’s plan would unfold as he’d designed it. If they failed, he failed with them.

He wanted to stay and watch them work. He knew what was riding on their shoulders. Already a few of them had fallen, from machine-gun fire and from shells falling too near. The rest kept on. That was their job.

Colonel Sherrard reminded him of his job: “Into the barrel, Irv. As soon as those bridges get across, we go.” Sherrard shouted at the top of his lungs, right into Morrell’s ear. Morrell barely heard him. He thought about pretending he didn’t hear him so he could keep on watching the sappers, but knew Sherrard was right. He trotted off toward his barrel.

Like all the others waiting to cross the Cumberland, it had come here by night, to keep prying Rebel observation aeroplanes from spotting it. Like the artillery concentrated by similarly stealthy means, it had hidden under canvas since arriving. Now the canvas was off. The columns of barrels were ready to go forward if they could. And Irving Morrell’s would go first.

He nodded to the driver, reached down and slapped the right-side engineer on the back, and then, unable to bear being cooped up in this great iron box, opened the top hatch and stood up in the cupola. He
had
to watch the engineers at work. He
had
to watch the bridges snake across the Cumberland.

If one was wrecked, he could go with five. If two were wrecked, he could go with four. If three were wrecked, he had orders not to go, but thought he might disobey them. But all six bridges still pushed forward toward the southern bank of the spring-swollen river. General Custer’s ostentatious preparation had pulled the Confederate defenders closer to Nashville. Not many men, not many guns, were left to contest what would be the real crossing.

Riflemen and machine-gun crews in green-gray rushed to the ends of the extending bridges as they neared the far bank of the Cumberland. They started blazing away at the Confederates closest to the river, men who already risked their lives thanks to U.S. artillery fire.

A green flare—one of the bridges had reached the southern bank. A moment later, another one burned in the sky. The rest of the engineering crews worked like madmen. The sappers were as fiercely competitive as any soldiers God ever made. A third green flare blazed from the southern bank of the Cumberland.

Morrell ducked down into the cupola. “Fire ’em up!” he shouted. “We’re going.” The twin White truck engines bellowed to life. The iron deck, patterned to keep feet from slipping, shivered and rattled and shook under his boots. Maybe he was jumping the gun, but he didn’t think so. One of those last three bridges would surely succeed in making it across, and even if it didn’t…He stood up again, to stare across the Cumberland.

There! The fourth green flare. Now he could go with no reservations whatever. Some of the other barrel commanders were also standing up in their cupolas. He waved to them. They waved back. He’d also detailed a soldier with a hammer to run down each line of barrels and give the side of every machine in it a good, solid clang to signal that action was at hand.

More engines coughed and belched and caught. Even as Morrell stooped down into the cupola once more, the sixth and last green flare rose into the sky. He grinned. So far, everything was perfect. The way to keep it perfect was to push hard, never let the Confederates have a chance to build a defensive line of the sort they’d held so well for so long north of Nashville.

“Off balance,” he muttered to himself, not that anyone else in the barrel could have heard him even had he shouted. “Got to keep them off balance.” He pointed straight ahead, index finger extended.
Forward.

Forward the barrel went, adding the clatter and rattle of the tracks to the engines’ flatulent roar. Morrell stood up again. The driver had his louvers open. He could see as much as he ever could, which wasn’t a great deal. But it was enough to let him get onto the bridge over which he would cross the Cumberland.

The bridge dipped and swayed a little under the weight of the barrel, but held. At the machine’s best pace—about that of a trotting soldier in full kit—it waddled over the bridge. Barrels also crossed on two more bridges. On the other three, infantry marched at double time.

A jolt, and the barrel clattered off the bridge and onto the soft dirt of the southern bank of the Cumberland. For a bad moment, Morrell thought the dirt would be soft enough to make the barrel bog down, but, engines screaming, the machine moved ahead, and onto ground better able to support its weight.

Machine-gun bullets clattered off the barrel’s armored carapace. The two left-hand machine guns returned fire. The Confederate gun fell silent. Maybe they’d knocked it out. Maybe its crew had been so busy shooting at the barrel, U.S. infantry were able to rush them. Morrell had seen that before: barrels were machine-gun magnets, attracting fire that might have been more profitably aimed against foot soldiers.

Now Morrell had the vision louvers down to slits. Through those slits, he saw Confederate soldiers moving forward now that the barrage had passed them by to punish targets farther behind the line.
Halt,
he signaled, and reached forward with a length of dowling to tap one of the artillerymen at the nose cannon on the shoulder.

They had no trouble figuring out the target he had in mind. The cannon snarled once, then again. The noise wasn’t too much worse than everything else going on inside the barrel. Through the slits, Morrell watched oncoming Rebs get flung aside as if they were paper dolls. The men in butternut who came through unhurt had to dive for cover.

Forward,
Morrell signaled again. Forward they went, through the Confederate defensive system. The Rebs had a lot of trench lines, but not very many men in them. The barrel crews concentrated on wrecking machine-gun positions; those guns could tear the heart from an infantry attack, and had torn the heart from many. One after another, the barrels put them out of action.

Then, quite suddenly—or so it seemed—the barrels had traversed all the Confederate trenches, and reached the level ground behind them. A few C.S. artillery pieces were still firing. More had been pulled back and out of the pits from which they had shelled U.S. forces.

And quite a few were wrecked. Morrell’s traveling fortress rumbled past a quick-firing three-inch gun whose barrel had burst not far from the breech. U.S. shells had wrecked the carriage; most of the crew lay dead by the piece. At the end of the trail sat one of the gunners, his head in his hands, a picture of despair. His war was over. Soon the infantry advancing with the barrels would scoop him up.

Southwest,
Morrell signaled. He stood up in the cupola again, to compare the field to the map he carried inside his head. If anything, what he saw looked better than what he had imagined and presented to General Custer.

“Open country!” he said exultantly. “We’ve got the Rebs out of their holes at last. They know how to fight from trenches, but now we’re playing a different game.”

There ahead, a railroad line ran toward Nashville. Along it chugged a train full of soldiers, the engineer blissfully unaware the United States Army had broken through. A cannon shell through the boiler brought him the news. Gleefully, the machine gunners in Morrell’s barrel raked the train.

Forward,
he signaled again. He intended his thrust to cut off and outflank the Rebs who were defending Nashville from the rest of First Army. “Keep going,” he muttered. “We’ve got to keep going. You don’t get what you want by doing things halfway. I don’t want to scare these bastards. I want to wreck ’em.”

On rumbled the barrel. For the moment, the CSA seemed to have little with which to stop it.

Cassius tossed Scipio a Tredegar. Automatically, Scipio caught it out of the air. Automatically, he checked the chamber. It had a round in it. He pulled off the clip. By its weight, it was full.

“You is one o’ we, Kip,” Cassius said, and tossed him a couple of more ten-round boxes. “When we fights de feudal ’pressors, you fights wid we.”

The men of the Congaree Socialist Republic hadn’t trusted him with a rifle in his hands since he’d returned to the swamps by the river that gave the Republic its name. He looked around. “Cherry ain’t here,” he remarked.

Cassius’ expression turned sour. “She still huntin’ dat damnfool treasure Miss Anne never hid no kind of way.”

“She kin hunt till she git all old an’ shriveled up,” Scipio said. “If they ain’t nothin’ there, she ain’t gwine find it.”

“She keep huntin’, she don’ live to git all old an’ shriveled up,” Cassius answered. “Miss Anne, she put de militia round Marshlands. Dey catch Cherry an’ de poor fools she got with she.”

I hope they do,
Cassius thought.
Dear God, I hope they do.
Cherry knew him for the cold heart, for the weak spirit, he was. She knew he had no true revolutionary fire in his belly, knew and despised him for it. If Anne Colleton caught her, Scipio would do nothing but rejoice.

In one pocket of his tattered dungarees, he had a letter addressed to Anne Colleton in St. Matthews. Getting hold of paper and pencil hadn’t been too hard. Even laying his hands on an envelope hadn’t been too hard. Finding a postage stamp, though…

Finally, he’d seen a dice game where one of the raiders was tearing stamps off a sheet a few at a time to cover his losses. Scipio had had almost no money in his own pockets, but he got down on one knee as fast as he could. Luck was with him; he’d rolled a seven his first try out and then made his point—it was four, which made it tougher—so that, before long, several small, red portraits of James Longstreet took up residence alongside his pocket change. One of them was on the envelope now.

Cassius said, “We’s gwine up to hit Gadsden a lick tonight. We ain’t done no fightin’ no’ th o’ the Congaree in a while. Them fat white bastards up there, they reckons they’s safe from de force o’ revolutionary justice. I aims to show they that they is mistooken.”

“You goes up there, you draws the militia up there after you,” Scipio said. “Not so many white sojers around Marshlands after dat. Cherry, she can dig all she like.”

“I knows it,” Cassius said. “Cain’t be helped.” He was by no means enamored of Cherry or her search for the treasure both he and Scipio were convinced did not exist. Then Cassius turned his gaze on Scipio. He still had a hunter’s eyes—or maybe they were sniper’s eyes. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t need to say anything. His expression spoke more plainly than words.
Yes, you’ve got a rifle in your hands,
it declared.
You don’t dare use it against me or any of the other revolutionary fighters here. You’d have only one shot sent in the wrong direction, and then you’d be mine—because you and I both know that if that one shot is at me, you’ll miss. And I won’t.

Scipio sighed. He’d always been a halfhearted Red at best. He wasn’t even that any more. He was a man trapped in a nightmare with enemies on all sides and no way out. He saw no way to take Cassius with him when he fell, as he surely would fall. He did have hopes of bringing down Cherry—or, if Cherry got extraordinarily lucky, of bringing down Miss Anne. But Cassius? Cassius was a force of nature.