Breakthroughs (69 page)

And Custer wasn’t finished. Custer wasn’t anywhere close to finished. “How dare you inflict this indignity on First Army, Mr. President? How
dare
you?” he demanded. “Whatever you may think of me, the brave soldiers who have given so much to the cause deserve to be in at the kill.”

Many of those soldiers would have agreed with him, too, though being in at the kill might have meant their dying. Dowling knew as much; complaints from the front kept flooding into Nashville.

Roosevelt said, “Either the Confederates will yield on all fronts in a week’s time, General, or you will be moving forward again. That I promise you. Maybe you will be able to aim toward Chattanooga after all.”

“Why the devil did you halt me in the first place?” Custer said, anything but mollified. “Even more to the point, why did you halt me and no one else? You do not serve your country well by bearing a grudge across so many years.”

If that wasn’t the pot complaining of the kettle’s complexion, Dowling had never heard any such. But Roosevelt didn’t rise to the bait. Instead, walking over to the map on the wall, he pointed to the ground First Army had seized south of the Cumberland. “I stopped First Army, General, because you have done something no other U.S. force has accomplished.”

“You halted us
because
we did better than any other force you have?” Custer howled. “You admit it?”

“That’s not what I said, General,” Roosevelt answered sharply. “Your unique achievement is easy to describe: in moving south of the Cumberland, yours is the only force to have captured territory I am willing to return to the Confederate States in exchange for concessions elsewhere. We go from the realm of war into the realm of diplomacy here—do you see?”

“Ahh.” That wasn’t Custer; it was Abner Dowling. He wasn’t sure he agreed with what Roosevelt was doing (not that the president would lose any sleep if he didn’t), but he was profoundly relieved Roosevelt was doing it for some other reason besides (or at least in addition to) pique against Custer.

Custer himself did not give over sputtering and fuming. “Why on earth should we give any land we’ve taken back to the Rebs? When I was a lad, this was all part of the United States, and so it should be again.”

“In principle, General, I agree with you,” Roosevelt answered. “In practice, the line we occupy—and what we can reasonably hope to take—will not give us a neat, defensible frontier everywhere along it. We’ll do some horse trading at the table, and this stretch south of the Cumberland I can trade without a second thought.”

“You won’t have to do much trading, sir,” Dowling said. “We hold the whip.”

“That’s true, Major, but I can’t wipe the Confederate States from the face of the earth, however much I might want to,” the president answered. “Kaiser Bill can’t make France go away, either. If we weaken them, though, and make them pay, they won’t trouble us for a long while.”

“Then, by thunder, when we do fight them again, we’ll put paid to them once and for all,” Custer said. He rubbed his age-gnarled hands together. “Damned if I don’t look forward to reuniting the country at last.”

He sounded as if he looked forward to commanding U.S. soldiers in the next war against the CSA. If, as Roosevelt hoped, the Confederates would have to lie quiet for a long time, the wait would put him up into his nineties—or beyond. Maybe he didn’t think about that. Maybe he thought about it and didn’t care: having gone on for so long, he might believe he could go on forever.

Major Dowling asked, “Mr. President, for what land might you want to swap what we’ve taken south of the Cumberland?”

“What I have in mind getting is the little chunk of southeastern Kentucky the Confederates still hold,” Roosevelt answered. “Lord knows it’s not worth much as far as land goes, but having the whole state in our hands will make life simpler after the shooting stops. The Confederates won’t be able to keep Kentucky in their Congress then, or to go on electing senators and a congressman or two who’ll spend all their time speechifying about how the Confederacy needs to take back their home state. I want it gone from their minds, altogether gone, and that will be that.”

“That makes a…good deal of sense,” Dowling said slowly. Because of his bulldog aggressiveness, Roosevelt didn’t get the credit he deserved either as a politician or as a statesman. “The Germans had no end of trouble from France when they took part of Lorraine after the Franco-Prussian War but let the froggies keep some, too. Better they should have grabbed it all, to make the break clean.”

Roosevelt beamed at him. “The very example I had in mind, as a matter of fact, Major.” Dowling beamed, too; looking smart in front of your boss never hurt. The president went on, “Our allies will correct that omission in the forthcoming peace, I assure you.”

Custer coughed, one of those coughs loosed for no other purpose than to draw attention to oneself. “This is all very well, your Excellency, I have no doubt, but why do it at the expense of what First Army has achieved? If you must trade the Confederates land for land, why not give them back some of the vast worthless stretches we’ve captured west of the Mississippi, in Arkansas and Sequoyah and Texas and Sonora?”

“Not all that land out there is worthless, General,” Roosevelt answered. “The stretch of Arkansas we hold puts Memphis under our guns, which emphatically is worth doing. Sequoyah is full of oil and gas, and we can use them: motorized machines grew ever more important as this war moved along. And as for the land that
is
largely worthless—that being so, why would the CSA want it back?”

“It still strikes me as unjust that my forces should be singled out for this halt,” Custer said. “We deserve better than that.”

I deserve better than that,
he meant. Dowling had no trouble understanding as much, and neither did Theodore Roosevelt. He blew air out through his mustache before replying, “General, would you not say that, in your long and distinguished military career, you have already been treated better than you deserve?”

“I haven’t the faintest idea what you are referring to, Mr. President,” Custer said, bristling, “and I resent the imputation.”

“Resent all you like,” Roosevelt growled. Abner Dowling did his best to seem a large, corpulent fly on the wall. He listened avidly as Roosevelt continued, “When we were taking our position north of the Teton, you were the one who wanted to move back the Gatling guns that chopped the British infantry to dog-meat. If we had moved them, the limeys probably would have overrun us. The only reason you ever got to be a hero, you pompous fraud, is that Colonel Welton and I talked you out of it.”

“That’s a damned lie!” Custer shouted.

“The hell it is!” Roosevelt shouted back. “And if your brother hadn’t got himself shot, he would have said the same thing.”

“Another lie!” Custer turned a dusky shade of purple that had to, surely had to, portend an apoplexy. “Tom and I were two sides of the same coin.”

“Both tails, or maybe blockheads,” Roosevelt said.

“Damn you, you know why I always wanted to lead in Canada. You’ve always known, and you’ve always ignored my requests for transfer. Is it any wonder I resent that?” Custer said.

Instead of answering, Roosevelt shrugged off his coat. Custer cocked his fist and glared a challenge. The two men, one nearing sixty, the other nearing eighty, looked ready to swing at each other. “Gentlemen, please,” Dowling said, reluctantly reminding them of his existence. Even more reluctantly, he stepped between them. “If the two of you quarrel, the only gainers live in Richmond.”

Roosevelt recovered his temper as fast as he lost it. He’d always been volcanic, but his eruptions quickly subsided. With a nod—almost a bow—to Dowling, he said, “You’re right, of course.” He also nodded to Custer. “General, I apologize for my hasty words.” As if to prove he meant it, he put the coat back on. “I also assure you that, as I said before, I accepted this cease-fire for reasons of state, ones that have nothing to do with personal animus against you, with the memory of your brother, or with disrespect for the sterling fighting qualities the men of First Army have displayed.”

“Slander. Nothing but slander,” Custer muttered under his breath. Unlike Roosevelt, he stayed angry a long time. But, when the president affected not to hear him, he muttered something else and then said, “I must accept the assurances of my commander-in-chief.” From him, that was an extraordinary concession.

It wasn’t what most interested his adjutant, though. For years, Dowling had heard whispers about the combat in Montana Territory that said what Roosevelt had said out loud. It did not strike him as improbable. Where sound military judgment required pushing straight ahead, Custer could be relied upon to exercise such judgment. Where sound military judgment required anything else, Custer could be relied upon to push straight ahead.

“General, we’ve won the damn war,” Roosevelt said. “As your adjutant so wisely put it, Richmond laughs if we disagree among ourselves. I do recognize what you have done here. To prove it, when I get back to Philadelphia I shall propose to Congress your elevation to the rank of full general, and I am confident Congress will confirm that promotion.”

Where minutes before Custer had been ready to punch the president, now he bowed as deeply as his years and his paunch permitted. “You honor me beyond my deserts, your Excellency,” he said. By his expression, though, he did not for a moment believe he was being too highly honored. Dowling was inclined to agree with the modest self-appraisal Custer gave to Roosevelt, but then wondered if
he
might not be promoted, too.
A rising tide lifts all boats,
he thought, and the U.S. tide rose higher day by day.

Chester Martin was no longer in command of B Company, 91st Regiment, and did his best to feel resigned about it. Out of some replacement depot had come Second Lieutenant Joshua Childress, who might possibly have been nineteen years old, but might well not have, too.

“We hit the Rebels one more good lick tomorrow morning,” he declared to the weary veterans in the hastily dug trench north of Stafford, Virginia. “That will take us all the way down to the Rappahannock. Won’t it be bully?” His voice broke with excitement at the prospect.

Corporal Bob Reinholdt chuckled softly. “Somebody better oil the lieutenant, Sarge,” he whispered to Martin. “He squeaks.”

“Yeah,” Martin whispered back. “We’ve got to keep an eye on him. He’ll get some good men killed if we don’t.”

“Ain’t that the sad and sorry truth?” Reinholdt said with a nod. If he still resented Chester for taking over his section—and for coldcocking him—he didn’t show it. Too much water, to say nothing of blood, had gone under the bridge since.

“We must finish the punishment we have given the Confederate States since 1914,” Childress was saying. “We are all heroes in this fight, and we must not fear martyrdom in our country’s cause.”

Reinholdt and Martin both rolled their eyes. This couldn’t be anything but Childress’ first combat duty. Firing had been light in the couple of days since he’d come down to the front. People who’d served longer were apt to be less enthusiastic about the prospect of martyrdom when the war was visibly won. People who, like Martin, had won Purple Hearts were apt to be least enthusiastic of all.

“Be bold,” Childress said. “Be resolute. Be fearless. Now when the enemy totters is the time to strike the fiercest blows.”

“Christ,” Reinholdt muttered. “Wish you was still in charge of us, Sarge. That stupid prick is going to have us charging machine-gun nests with our bare hands.” He got out a tobacco pouch and began to roll a cigarette. “Well, one thing—he ain’t likely to last long. Then it’s your turn again.”

“Yeah,” Martin said. “If he doesn’t get me shot, too. Thank God for barrels, is all I can say. Without ’em, most of us’d be dead about five times over.”

“God knows that’s true.” Reinholdt’s big head bobbed up and down. “If I stay in the Army after the Rebs quit, I figure I’m going to try and get into barrels myself. That way, I’ll have some iron between me and the fuckers we’re fighting.”

Martin considered. “Only trouble I can see with that is, the other guys go after barrels with everything they’ve got. You’ll get in the way of a lot more cannon shells than you would if you stayed out in the open.”

“Well, yeah,” Reinholdt allowed. “The thing of it is, though, you get in the way of even one shell when you’re out in the open and it ain’t what you call your lucky day.” He stuck the handmade cigarette in his mouth and brought it to life with a lighter made from a Springfield cartridge case.

In the background, Lieutenant Childress droned on and on. Some of the men in B Company—replacements, mostly—hung on every word he said. The soldiers who’d been in the trenches for a while either took no notice of him or quietly made fun of him the way Martin and Reinholdt did. They didn’t need him to tell them how to fight; had he been willing to listen instead of banging his gums, he might have learned a good deal.

The Army of Northern Virginia had taken a hell of a beating, but it hadn’t quit. The Rebs interrupted Childress’ disquisition with a mortar barrage. Martin hated mortars; they dropped bombs right down into the trenches, which regular artillery had a lot more trouble doing. He was damned if he could figure out where the valor lay in cowering and hoping a spinning fragment wouldn’t turn him from a man into an anatomy lesson.

When the barrage eased, Childress picked up where he’d left off without seeming to miss a word. As Chester Martin got to his feet and tried to brush damp earth from the front of his uniform, he hoped that meant the new company commander had some guts. The other choice was that Childress was so full of himself, he hardly noticed what went on around him. Remembering how he’d been at nineteen or so, Martin knew that was possible.

U.S. artillery didn’t let the Confederates mortar the forward trenches without paying them back. The USA had more guns and bigger guns than the CSA did; the bombardment went on long into the night. That puzzled Martin, who’d grown used to sharp, short barrages. In the middle of the din, Lieutenant Childress exulted: “See how we thrash the stubborn foe!”

“He makes more noise’n the guns do,” Bob Reinholdt said disgustedly.

That gave Martin the answer, or he thought it did. He snapped his fingers. “Bet they’re making a racket to keep the Rebs from hearing the barrels coming forward.”

“Huh,” Reinholdt said, a noise that could have meant anything. After a bit, he went on, “Maybe I never should have given you no trouble, Sarge. Sure as hell, you’re smarter’n I am. That’s got to be it.”

“Nothing’s got to be anything.” Martin spoke with the deep conviction of a man who had seen almost everything. “It’s a pretty fair bet, though.”

“Yeah.” It was too dark for Martin to watch Reinholdt nod, but the pause before the corporal spoke again was about right. “Last time, they kept the machine guns banging all night long. You don’t want to do the same thing twice in a row, or the Rebs’ll get wise to you.”

“I hadn’t thought of it that way, but you’re right.” Martin swatted at a mosquito. He didn’t think he got it. Scratching, he continued, “Maybe I’m the dummy.” If Reinholdt finally was getting used to having him in charge, he wanted to help that along as much as he could. Ignoring occasional shells from overmatched Confederate batteries trying to reply to the U.S. barrage, he rolled himself in his blanket and went to sleep.

To Lieutenant Childress’ credit, he went through the trenches an hour before the attack was set to begin, making sure everybody in the company was awake and alert. When he recognized Martin in the predawn gloom, he said, “Remember, Sergeant, we are to form behind the barrels and follow them toward the enemy’s position.”

“Yes, sir.” Martin hid a smile. “I’ve done this before, sir.” The last big attack, he’d done it as a company commander. He let out a silent sigh.

Lieutenant Childress might as well not have heard him. “We have to stay close to the barrels, to take full advantage of what they can do for us.” He could have been reciting something he’d learned by rote. He didn’t understand what it meant, not really, but at least he had it right.

As he was speaking, U.S. artillery came to life again, making the Confederates stay under cover in the key minutes just before the attack went in. Through the booming of the guns and of their shells, Martin caught the sound he was listening for: the rumble of truck engines and the rattle and clank of iron tracks. Sure enough, the barrels were moving up to their jumping-off places.

Darkness slowly yielded to morning twilight. Martin got a glimpse of a couple of barrels not far away, the big boxy steel shapes putting him in mind of prehistoric monsters looming out of the mist. But these monsters were friendly to him and his. Only the Confederates would find them horrid.

And then the note of the engines grew harsher, louder. The barrels waddled forward at their best speed, somewhere between a fast walk and a slow trot, toward the men of the Army of Northern Virginia. Lieutenant Childress’ almost beardless cheeks puffed out like a chipmunk’s as he blew and blew the whistle that ordered his company forward. He was first out of the trench himself: he would do what he could by personal example.

“Come on, you lazy bastards!” Chester Martin shouted. “If the Rebs shoot you, your family picks up a nice check from Uncle Sam. So you’ve got nothing to worry about, right?” He suspected that wouldn’t hold up if anybody took a long, logical look at it. But so what? It got the men moving, which was what he’d had in mind.

Machine guns winked balefully from the Confederate positions ahead. No, the Army of Northern Virginia hadn’t quit, however much Martin wished it would. U.S. machine gunners did their best to make their C.S. counterparts keep their heads down. The barrels began firing on the Confederate machine-gun nests, too. They also began smashing down the wire in front of the Confederate trenches, though those belts weren’t nearly so thick as some Martin had seen.

“Forward!” Lieutenant Childress shouted. “Stay close to the barrels!” He trotted on, doing his best to make sure he was applying what he’d learned in school.

It did him no good. One thing his training hadn’t taught him was how to keep from catching three or four machine-gun bullets with his chest. He let out a brief, bubbling wail and crumpled. Martin was only a few feet behind the company commander. He threw himself flat and crawled up to him. Childress’ eyes were wide and staring. Blood poured from his wounds and from his mouth and nose. He was still twitching a little and still trying to breathe, but he was a dead man.

That meant B Company belonged to Martin again. He scrambled to his feet. “Come on!” he shouted again. “We can take ’em! Let ’em try and stop us, hard as they want. We can still take ’em.”

Talk like that on the Roanoke front in 1915 would have got him laughed at. Taking such talk seriously back then would have got him—and whoever listened to him—killed. Now…Now he was right. The Army of Northern Virginia lacked the men and the guns and, most of all, the barrels to halt the vengeful forces of the United States. Each barrel the CSA did get into the fight had to fight off two or three or four U.S. machines.

Also, at last, even the white Confederate soldiers seemed to have despaired of the fight. Instead of battling in the trenches with bayonet and sharpened spade, more and more of them threw down their rifles and threw up their hands and went into captivity pleased with themselves for having outlasted the war. Here and there, in the trenches and behind them, diehards still fought till they were killed in place, but the tide of war flowed past them and over them and washed them away.

Now, finally, everything was going as the generals and politicians had predicted it would go back in 1914. Martin passed through the little town of Stafford—a few homes and shops clustered around a brick courthouse—hardly noticing it till it was behind him. U.S. artillery had reduced most of the buildings to rubble. The Confederates no longer defended every hamlet as if it were land on which Jesus had walked.

“Come on!” he shouted to the men who advanced with him. “Eight miles to the Rappahannock! If we push these bastards, we’ll be there by sundown.” And if, on the Roanoke front in 1915, he’d heard himself say anything like that, he’d have known he was either shellshocked or just plain crazy.

But only a few Rebs contested the way south of Stafford. Save for those rear guards, most of the Confederates seemed intent on getting to the southern bank of the river, perhaps to make a stand there, perhaps simply to escape. A couple of miles north of the Rappahannock, shells from the far side of the river began landing uncomfortably close to Martin and his men.

Then the shells stopped falling. The rifle and machine-gun fire from the few men in butternut still north of the Rappahannock died away. A Confederate soldier—an officer—came out from behind a ruined building. He was carrying a white flag. “Hold your fire!” Chester Martin shouted to his men. The hair at the back of his neck and on his arms tried to stand on end.

“It’s over,” the Confederate officer shouted. “It’s done. You sons of bitches licked us.” Standing there defeated before the soldiers of the United States, he burst into tears.

Jake Featherston had the surviving guns of his battery in the best position he’d found for them since the war began. Back of Fredericksburg, Virginia, up in Marye’s Heights, a stone wall protected a sunken road. If the Yankees swung down along the curve of the Rappahannock and tried to force a crossing at Fredericksburg, he could look down on them and slaughter them for as long as his ammunition held out. They would be able to hit him only by luck—by luck or by aeroplane. He kept a wary eye turned toward the sky.

At the moment, he had the guns turned toward the north rather than the east, though—the U.S. soldiers seemed to be heading straight for Falmouth instead of Fredericksburg. That was what he gathered from the beaten men in butternut streaming past, anyhow. He’d given up shooting at Confederate soldiers fleeing the enemy. He couldn’t kill them all. He couldn’t even make them stop their retreat. And the more rounds he wasted on them, the fewer he’d be able to shoot at the damnyankees.

He climbed up on top of the stone wall and peered north through field glasses. Sure as hell, here came the U.S. soldiers, trailing the barrels that smashed flat or blasted out of existence any strongpoints in their path. U.S. fighting scouts swooped low over the front, further harrying the men of the Army of Northern Virginia.

“Come on, boys,” Jake said. “They’re inside seven thousand yards. Let’s remind ’em they have to pay for their tickets to get in. God damn me to hell and fry me for bacon if anybody else is going to do the job. Infantrymen? Christ on His cross, all the good infantry we used to have’s been dead the last two years.”