toward the enemy trenches, but also gave the Rebel machine gunners a notion of what the way was. If they'd zeroed their weapons on it… He tried not to think about that, as he tried not to think of any of the disasters that might befall him.
Here and there, the bombardment had knocked down the posts that sup ported the barbed wire, leaving it sprawled in snaky coils on the rubble-strewn ground of what had probably been a suburb of Big Lick, Virginia.
When Chester Martin saw relatively clear stretches of that sort, he used them to move forward. The Rebs wouldn't have so many guns pointed there as they would at the paths.
He blew out through the thick, wet gauze pad he wore over his mouth. The first couple of gas attacks had let U.S. forces gain and consolidate their positions east of the Roanoke River. Now, though, the Rebs had learned how to defend themselves against the new American weapon, and pushing them back had turned into another hard job.
He wasn't more than halfway toward their trenches, and already the Rebels were shooting back at him and his men, the muzzle flashes of their rifles seeming bright as the sun. Machine guns started up a moment later. Somewhere not far away, he heard the wet smack of a bullet striking flesh. Whoever was hurt there, he hoped it wasn't too bad and he hoped they'd be able to get the fellow to a doctor before he bled to death. That also made him hope nobody would get hurt picking up the wounded man. Nobody was supposed to shoot at people wearing Red Cross armbands, but bullets, as he'd learned too well, weren't fussy about whom they hit.
One of the machine guns, traversed by what their crews matter-of-factly called a two-inch tap, sent bullets kicking up dirt not far from his feet. He dove headlong into a shell hole in front of him. A horrid stench rose. Part of it came from the pool of noisome, stagnant water at the bottom of the hole. More was from the body, or rather fragments of body, entombed under dirt and shattered bricks. U.S. forces were advancing, so the dead man was presumably a Confederate. But he would have smelled just as bad had he been born in Michigan.
Martin wished the gauze mask he wore were as good at neutralizing stenches as it was at keeping chlorine from searing his lungs. That, though, wasn't why it had been designed. He tried to keep his unruly stomach under control. If he took off the mask to puke, who could guess how much poison gas he'd breathe in after every retch?
The hail of machine-gun bullets passed on beyond the shell hole. Crawling through muck of a sort he didn't care to contemplate, Martin peered out over the forward lip of the hole. Whatever else he did he couldn't stay there. Grunting under the weight of his pack, he heaved himself upright again and ran on.
Here came the trenches. He could see murky spots up and down their length, spots where chlorine gas still lingered. The Confederate defenders wore masks like his. A lot of them had goggles, too. They were either bareheaded or in caps, though: no one had yet issued them helmets.
One of the Rebs raised a rifle to shoot at Martin. He shot first, though, on the run and from the hip. As much by luck as anything else, the Confederate howled and dropped his weapon to clutch at his chest.
Yelling, Martin leaped down into the trench. He used his bayonet to make sure the Confederate wasn't going anywhere, then pulled a grenade improvised from nails and a half-pound block of explosive out of one of his equipment pouches and flung it into the next trench back. Somebody screamed a moment after it exploded, so he supposed he'd done that right.
He looked around, collected a couple of his soldiers by eye, and headed down the trench toward the next traverse. Like U.S. forces, the Confederates sensibly did not dig their trenches as long, straight gashes in the earth. Had they been so foolish, any foes who got into them could have delivered a deadly enfilading fire. Unfortunately, the game was harder than that.
Firebays like the one he and his companions were in led to other firebays advanced or recessed from them by a short stretch of perpendicular trench, a traverse, so that the line, if viewed from an aeroplane, took on the look of a postage stamp perforated with insane regularity. Just because your side held a firebay didn't mean the enemy wasn't still lurking in the next traverse.
Finding out who was in the next traverse — or the next firebay, if you were in a traverse-was not a job for the faint of heart. Neither was getting rid of those people, if they happened to be wearing butternut while you were in green-gray. One way was to go up out of the trenches and crawl along the ground between them. Doing that, though, was a lot like a snail's jumping out of its shell to run faster: the poor creature was all too likely to get squashed.
Charging round a corner was not recommended, either. The other fellow had had too much time to prepare nasty surprises for you. Nearing a corner of the firebay, Martin called, 'Give up, you Rebs!'
The only answer he got back was a grenade flying through the air. It was thrown too far, and detonated on the level ground beyond the firebay. His own men knew how to reply to it. Several grenades, tossed with better effect, rained down on the Confederates. Grenades, Martin reflected, were handy things: they gave an infantryman a little artillery of his own. And, like artillery, they didn't have to wound to be effective. Even a near miss could leave a soldier shaken and stunned.
Martin bet his life the grenades had stunned the Rebs in the traverse for a couple of vital seconds. He charged round the corner of the trench. One Reb had been stationed there to deal with any such unwelcome newcomers, but he was down and thrashing, blood pouring from his belly out between his fingers. Followed by the men he'd gathered, Martin ran past him and around the next bend. Another Confederate was down there, and still others on their feet. 'Hands up, you Rebs!' he screamed.
Reggie Bartlett could barely hear the screamed order to surrender. One of the grenades the damnyankees had thrown had gone off only a few feet away from him. He looked down at his trouser leg. He was bleeding. Neither the pain nor the flow of blood was too bad, though, so he guessed whatever fragment or nail had hit him had drilled straight through muscle without getting stuck there or slamming into bone.
'Hands up!' the Yankee sergeant yelled again. Reggie let his rifle fall to the mud of the trench floor and raised his hands over his head. He knew he and his companions were lucky to get a chance to surrender after they'd tried to fight back. A lot of times, in situations like that, the side winning the fight in the trenches left only the losers' corpses.
The U.S. soldiers swarmed over him, Jasper Jenkins, and the other privates who hadn't been hurt-or not badly hurt, anyway, as a couple of them bore minor wounds not much different from Bartlett's. Corporal McCorkle lay on the ground, moaning. The U.S. soldier shook his head. 'Poor bastard must have taken most of a grenade's worth, right in the gut,' he said.
'He had a lot of gut to take it in,' the sergeant answered, truthfully but unkindly. He frisked Reggie with thorough haste, depriving him of his pocket watch, his wallet, and whatever loose change he had in his pockets. Bartlett made no move to stop him, understanding it would be the last move he ever made if he did. Confederate troops plundered Yankee prisoners just as enthusiastically when they got the chance.
Off toward either side and back deeper in the Confederate position, the sound of fighting was picking up. The U.S. sergeant peered ever so cautiously over the parados at the rear of the trench, treating it as if it were the parapet at the front, which, from his point of view, it was.
He fired a couple of rounds at whatever he saw back there, then shook his head. The iron kettles he and his men wore gave them a look as if out of another time, old and fierce and sullen. What with helmet, goggles, and mask, hardly any of his face was actually visible. One of his men, who wore ordinary glasses instead of goggles and whose eyes were red and teary, said, 'We ain't gonna be able to hold these trenches, Sarge.'
'Yeah, I think you're right,' the sergeant answered regretfully after gauging the noise again. 'We're bringing back prisoners, so the brass can't grouse too bad.' He turned to Bartlett and the other captured Confederates. 'All right, you lugs, up over the top and back to the American lines. Don't try anything cute or you'll find out how cute dead is.'
Reggie had gone over the top a good many times, but never before with out a rifle in his hands. He felt very naked, very much exposed as he awk wardly got up into no-man's-land and scrambled back through the barbed wire toward the forwardmost U.S. trenches. A few of the damnyankees in those trenches shot at him and his comrades. He was glad they quit when they saw the Yankee soldiers coming along behind the men in butternut.
He'd hoped he'd have a chance to jump in a shell hole and have the sergeant and the rest of the Yankees go on by so he could sneak back to his own lines. It didn't happen. One reason it didn't was that the Confederates whose positions hadn't been overrun were shooting at the damnyankees, who bunched up close to their prisoners to discourage that. How were you sup posed to escape a man who kept stepping on your bootheels?
