the Ohio tried to pull his boots off his feet.
The water got shallower fast. Ahead of him, soldiers were running up onto dry land and then fanning out as they moved away from the bank. Now he saw what the artillery had done to the local landscape. It had probably been pleasant before the war started. It wasn't pleasant any more. Whatever grass and bushes had grown here were churned out of existence. He could tell that there had been trees down along the riverbank, but they were stumps and toothpicks now.
Beyond the trees-beyond what had been trees-the ground looked as if a chunk of hell had decided to take up residence in the Confederate States. He hadn't imagined anything could be so appalling as that cratered landscape. The U.S. guns had done their work well. Surely nothing could have survived the bombardment they'd laid down.
He made it up to the riverbank himself. His feet squelched dankly in his boots as he pounded inland. He reminded himself to put on dry socks if he ever got the chance. You let your feet stay soaked, all sorts of nasty things happened to them. He had cousins who worked on the wharfs in Philadelphia who'd made that mistake. Demetrios was still trying to get cured.
Up ahead, something moved, or Paul thought it did. Then, for a split second, he thought he'd made a mistake. And then, as flame spat from a rifle muzzle, he realized he hadn't; it was just that the Confederates' uniforms made them almost impossible to spot when they were in the dirt.
The rifle spat fire again. Ten or fifteen feet to Mantarakis' left, a man went down clutching at his leg. Paul went down, too, landing heavily enough to jolt half the wind from him. He brought his Springfield to his shoulder and drew a bead on the shell hole where he'd spotted the Reb. Was that movement? He fired, then crawled away on his belly. His own uniform, especially smeared with mud and dirt, gave pretty good concealment, too.
He found out how good the concealment was a moment later, when an American soldier he hadn't even seen got up, peering into the hole at which he'd shot, and waved everyone on. Paul got up and started to run before realizing he'd just killed a man. I should be feeling something, he thought. The only thing he felt was fear.
He stumbled in a hole in the ground and fell, counting himself lucky he didn't twist an ankle. When he got back to his feet, he looked behind him. He'd intended to see how the men on the barge were doing and whether it was all unloaded, but he kept staring, heedless of the occasional bullets still flying, at the grand spectacle of the Ohio River.
The river was full of barges and ferries of every size and age, with all the vessels laden to the wallowing point, almost to the capsizing point, with men in green-gray. Smoke billowed from scores, hundreds, of stacks, a deep black smoke different from the kind artillery explosions kicked up. Paul cheered like a madman at the display of the might the United States were putting forth. With that great armada, with the stunning artillery the gunners were laying down to ease the way for the Americans, how could the Confederate States hope to resist?
The plain answer, Paul thought, was that they couldn't. He cheered again, seized for a moment by war's grandeur instead of its terror.
And then, without warning, most of the barrage still descending on the Confederates ahead ended. 'What the hell?' Paul said when the shelling eased up. He'd been in combat half an hour at most, but he'd already learned a basic rule: if anything strange happens, hit the dirt.
But he kept looking back over his shoulder- and, to his horror, he spotted a gunboat flying the Stars and Bars steaming west toward the lumbering vessels struggling across the Ohio. The engineers were supposed to have put mines in the river to keep Rebel craft away from the defenseless barges, but something had gone wrong somewhere and here this one was, a tiger loose among rabbits.
The river monitor- Mantarakis knew the Rebs didn't call them that, but he did- carried a turret like those aboard armored cruisers out on the ocean. Shooting up barges at point-blank range with six-inch guns was like killing roaches by dropping an anvil on them: much more than the job required. But the job got done, either way.
When a six-inch shell hit a barge, it abruptly ceased to be. You could, if you were so inclined, watch men and pieces of men fly through the air. They flew amazingly high. Then the monitor's turret would revolve a little, pick another target, and blow it out of the water. If that kept on for very long, it wouldn't have any targets left to pick.
Shells rained down around the gunboat, too, and on it- that was why the U.S. artillery had stopped its covering fire for the landing. If the guns didn't knock it out in a tearing hurry, there wouldn't be a landing, or not one with any chance of success. All at once, Paul realized he was in enemy country. Behind him, the Ohio looked uncrossably wide. He wondered if he'd ever see the other side of it again if the gunboat wasn't destroyed. Then he wondered if he'd ever see the other side of it if the gunboat was destroyed.
A shell slammed into the armored turret holding the monitor's big guns- slammed into it and bounced off. Those turrets were armored to keep out projectiles from naval guns; shells from field pieces they hardly noticed. But the rest of the Confederate riverboat was more vulnerable. The stacks were shot away; so was the conning tower. Rifle and machine-gun fire from the shore and from the barges kept the Rebels from putting anyone on deck to make repairs. Then the rudder went. The monitor slewed sideways. At last, a shell penetrated to the boiler. The monitor blew up even more spectacularly than the barges it had wrecked.
The barges it hadn't wrecked kept on coming across the Ohio. More loaded up and left the U.S. side of the river. The United States had a lot more manpower than did the Confederacy. Paul Mantarakis wondered if they had enough manpower to compensate for the mistakes their generals were bound to make.
He rose, grunting under the weight of his pack, and moved forward, deeper into Kentucky. One way or another, he'd find out.
Jefferson Pinkard always got the feeling he'd died and gone to hell on the job. Flame and sparks were everywhere. You couldn't shout over the triphammer din; no point in even trying. If you got accustomed to it, you could hear people talking in their ordinary voices under it. You could even hear a whisper, sometimes.
Steel poured from a crucible into a cast-iron mold. The blast of heat sent Pinkard reeling. 'Godalmightydamn,' he said in the harsh-soft accent of a man who'd grown up on an Alabama farm, bringing up a gloved hand to shield his face. 'I don't care how long you work iron, you don't never get used to that. And doin' it in summertime just makes it worse.'
'You think I'm gonna argue with you, Jeff, you're even crazier than I know you are,' Bedford Cunningham answered. They'd worked side by side at the Sloss Furnaces for going on ten years now, and were like as two peas in a pod: broad-shouldered, fair-haired men with pale skins that turned red from any sun and even redder from the furnace atmosphere in which they labored.
The big crucible from which the molten metal had come swung away, not so smoothly as Pinkard would have liked. 'New kid handlin' that thing don't know what the hell he's doin',' he observed.
Cunningham nodded. 'He's gonna kill somebody 'fore they take him off- and it ain't likely it'll be hisself. God don't usually work things out that neat.' He spat into the new pig of steel, as if quenching it. His spittle exploded into steam the instant it touched the metal. Meditatively, he added, 'Wish ol Herb hadn't got hisself called to the colors.'
'Yeah.' Pinkard spat, too, in disgust with the world. 'How the hell they gonna fight a war, Bedford, if they take all the men who know how to make things and stick 'em in the Army? If they don't turn out guns and shells, what the hell they gonna shoot at the damnyankees?'
'You don't need to go preachin' to the choir,' Cunningham said. 'I already believe, I surely do. Bunch o' damn fools runnin' things up in Richmond, dogged if they ain't.' Then he paused again. He was more given to contemplation than his friend. ''Course, the other thing is, if they ain't got enough soldiers, they can't fight the war, neither.'
'They want more soldiers, they should oughta pull 'em off clerkin' jobs and such like that, not the ones we do here,' Jefferson Pinkard said stubbornly. 'Folks like us, we should be the last ones chose, not the first.'
'Reckon there's somethin' to that,' Cunningham admitted. 'I think maybe-' Jeff never did find out what he thought maybe, because a steam whistle blew then, the shrill screech cutting through even the insensate racket of the foundry. Cunningham grinned. 'I think maybe I'm goin' home.'
When Pinkard turned around, he found his replacement and Bedford Cunningham's waiting to take over for them. After a couple of minutes of the usual chatter- half Sloss Furnace gossip, half war news- the two men going off work grabbed their dinner pails and let the evening shift have the job. Another steelworker, Sid Williamson,
