Another soldier was dead besides Hodges, he heard, and three more wounded.
As they formed up, one of his privates, a tall blond kid named Andersen, said, 'If we lose half our guys every time we attack, how long till nobody's left any more?'
He'd probably meant it for a joke, the kind of graveyard humor that came naturally in the middle of a battle. But Chester Martin had the sort of mind that figured things out. Lose half the squad in the next attack and you'd have three left. Do it again and you'd have one and a half-say two, if you were lucky. Do it one more time after that and you'd be down to your last guy. No law said that guy had to be Corporal Martin, either.
By the looks on the soldiers' faces, they were working through the same calculation, and not liking what they came up with any more than he did. He paused to roll himself a cigarette and then, after he'd lighted it, to go through the pockets and pack of the Rebel he'd killed for whatever tobacco he had on him. The little cloth sack in which the fellow had carried his fixings had blood on it, but there was nothing wrong with the fine Virginia weed inside. Martin stuck it in his own pocket.
Handling the enemy's corpse gave him the answer, or part of it. He pointed to the body, and then to all the other sprawled corpses in the defense line the American troops had stormed. 'Cost us a good bit to get here, yeah,' he said, 'but it cost them plenty, too, trying to hold us back. And we did what we were supposed to, and the Rebels didn't. Besides'-he pointed back the way he'd come-'we've got replacements moving up behind us, to help on the next push. Won't be us right on the shit end of the stick all the damn time.'
That seemed to satisfy his men. And, sure enough, reinforcements were coming up, soldiers whose green- gray uniforms were less draggled than his own and who stared, mouths and eyes open wide, at bodies and pieces of bodies lying on blood-soaked grass and dirt. The sight of a few glum Confederate prisoners, some of them wounded, being hustled off to the rear did not seem an adequately glorious compensation.
'Come on, you birds,' Martin called; the second-line soldiers' sergeants looked to be as stunned as any of the men they were supposed to be leading. 'This is what it looks like; this is what they pay us for. Ain't you glad you was drafted?'
'That's telling them, Corporal,' said Captain Orville Wyatt, the company commander.
Martin hadn't seen him since the attack started. 'Glad you're okay, sir,' he said.
'Now that you mention it, so am I,' Wyatt said offhandedly. He was about thirty-five, with a little thin mustache instead of the more common Kaiser Bill. It suited his long, thin, pale face better than a Kaiser Bill would have; Martin had to admit as much. He didn't know how the devil the captain would get through the war with a pair of steel-framed spectacles riding his nose, but that was Wyatt's problem, not his. The company commander knew his business, which was what counted most.
Some of the Rebs who'd run off into the woods hadn't run all the way back to their next line after all. Instead, they started sniping at the U.S. troops who'd taken away their firing pits and trenches. A couple of groups of cursing Americans turned the captured machine guns around and fired long bursts at the trees upslope. That reduced the enemy fire but didn't stop it.
Somewhere- probably on the reverse slope of the mountain- the Confederates had a battery of their quick- firing three-inch howitzers. Martin had already come under fire from them, and didn't like them worth a damn. Now shells started landing in and around the captured line- not a lot of shells, and not very accurately delivered, but not the sort of greeting he wanted, either. As with fire from your own guns, you were just as dead from a lucky hit as you were if somebody drew a bead on you and drilled you through the chest.
Captain Wyatt, as if annoyed at untimely rain, remarked, 'We're not going back, and I don't much fancy staying here. Only thing left to do is advance.'
Martin tossed the tiny butt of his cigarette into the dirt and ground it out with his heel. 'You heard the man,' he told his squad-or what was left of it. 'Into the woods we go, off to Grandmother's house. Keep your eyes open and watch where you set your feet. We already know there's wolves in there.'
His men chuckled. If you laughed, you could let on that you weren't scared. Your buddies would believe it, or make like they did. If you got lucky, you might even believe it yourself.
They'd gone a couple of hundred yards farther up the mountain, trading shots with Confederates they couldn't see and who- God willing- had trouble seeing them, too, when they came to a clearing, an oval meadow maybe two hundred yards wide and a hundred across. It would have been the most inviting place in the world, except for the machine gun hammering away from the far side of it.
'Can't just charge that,' Martin said, almost as if someone had asked him to do it. 'We'd have dead piled up higher out there than they did at Camp Hill.' His grandfather had been wounded in that fight. He'd worn a peg leg ever afterwards, and counted himself lucky to come out alive.
'We'll have to flank it out,' Captain Wyatt agreed, and the corporal let out a silent sigh of relief. In spite of knowing what he was doing, Wyatt was a West Point man, and sometimes they got funny ideas about being duty- bound to die for their country. Chester Martin was more in favor of living for his country.
Captain Wyatt sent him and his squad around to the left of the clearing and another one off to the right. Martin and his men never made it to the machine gun. A couple of Rebels in the woods held them up and wounded one of them before they finally got flushed out and killed. Private Andersen didn't say anything, but his gloomy features had I told you so written all over them.
A fusillade of rifle fire put an end to the machine gun's deadly chatter. 'Wonder what that cost,' Andersen said glumly.
'Ahh, shut up, Paul,' Martin told him. 'If you aren't demoralizing the rest of the guys, you're sure as hell demoralizing me.'
They swarmed on up toward the top of Catawba Mountain. The forest was full of men in green-gray now, with just enough Rebels in butternut lurking and shooting from concealment to make everybody jumpy and trigger- happy and to make sure that, every so often, a U.S. soldier got shot by his own buddies instead of the Confederates. Martin would have sworn that a couple of near misses came from behind him, not ahead, but what could you do except hope you didn't draw the short straw?
This time, he and his men found the Confederate barbed wire before it found them. Cutters clicked; the wire went twangg! as the tension on it was released. As before, the Rebs had run up only a couple of strands, not enough to impede troops who were alert for it-and a lot of men who hadn't been alert before were dead now.
Martin crawled and snaked forward till he could see the earth the Confederates-or rather, their Negro laborers- had thrown up in front of their firing pits. More and more U.S. soldiers joined him in the bushes, blazing away at the Southerners in the firing pits. Whistles sounded, up and down the line. Screaming like fiends, Martin and his comrades sprang to their feet and rushed the Confederate position.
As before, the fight was sharp but short; the U.S. forces had brought enough men forward that the advantage fighting from cover gave their foes wasn't enough to check them. 'Come on!' Captain Wyatt shouted, even before the last Rebels in the line had been slain. 'We're almost at the top of the mountain.'
Still yelling, their blood up, the soldiers followed him and other officers on past the wrecked Confederate line. And, sure enough, another couple of hundred yards took them to the crest. Martin looked east toward the Roanoke River, toward the iron town of Big Lick on this side of it, toward the smokes rising from it and from the mines close by, toward the other stream of smoke from the train chugging out of the station: Big Lick was a major railroad junction. Once the U.S. Army fought its way down the mountain and to the river, it would badly hurt the Confederacy here.
A shot rang out, seemingly from nowhere. Not twenty feet from Martin, a private clutched at his throat and fell. 'They've got snipers in the trees, the sneaky bastards!' somebody shouted.
'We'll get 'em out,' Martin said grimly. Only a few miles separated him from Big Lick. He wondered how long it would take to get there.
Lucien Galtier clucked to his horse and flicked the reins. The horse snorted reproachfully, twitching its ears in annoyance. 'I mean it, you old fraud,' Galtier told it in his Quebecois French. 'Do you want me to get out the whip and show you I mean it?'
The horse snorted again and got the wagon moving a little faster. Galtier chuckled under his breath. He and the horse had been playing this game for the past ten years. He hadn't used the whip since summer before last. He didn't expect to need it for another year or two more. They understood each other, the horse and he.
Drizzle slid down out of a leaden sky. He pulled his hat lower over his face-dark heavy eyebrows, swarthy skin, deep-set brown eyes, a goodly nose above a mouth that was almost a rosebud, dimpled chin in need of
