wanted to work out some anger by blasting away at it, why not?
And, evidently, it belonged to the CSA anyhow. U.S. antiaircraft guns opened up on it. Puffs of black smoke filled the air all around the biplane. Like every other small boy ever made, Martin had tried catching butterflies in flight with his bare hands. The antiaircraft rounds had about as much luck with Confederate aeroplanes as he’d usually had going after butterflies.
Every once in a while, though, every once in a while he’d caught one. And, every once in a while, antiaircraft guns knocked down an aeroplane. He let out a yell, thinking this was one of those times-something red and burning came out of the aircraft and hung up there in the sky. Then he swore in disappointment.
So did Paul Andersen. “It’s only a flare,” the corporal said.
“Yeah,” Martin said ruefully. “I really thought they’d nailed the son of a bitch.” He eyed the observation aeroplane with sudden suspicion. “What the hell are they doing shooting off flares? They’ve never done anything like that before.”
A moment later, the Confederates gave him the answer. The eastern horizon exploded with a roar that, he thought, would have made the famous Krakatoa volcano sound like a hiccup. One second, everything was quiet, as it had been for so long. The next, hell came down on earth.
Along with everybody else in the trenches, he scrambled for the nearest bombproof he could find. Some limey cartoonist had drawn one where a soldier was saying to his buddy, “Well, if you knows of a better ’ole, go to it.” The Rebs had got the slogan from the limeys, and U.S. soldiers from the Rebs. For anybody on either side who’d ever been in a trench, it summed up what life under fire was like.
Men started banging on empty shell casings, which meant the Rebs were throwing gas along with all their other lovely presents. Trying to fumble a gas helmet out of its canvas case when he was jammed into a dugout with twice as many soldiers as it should have held was not one of the things Chester Martin enjoyed most, but he managed. Somebody who couldn’t manage started coughing and choking and drowning for good air, but Martin couldn’t do anything about that except curse the Confederates. He couldn’t even tell who the poor bastard getting poisoned was.
The bombardment went on for what felt like forever. It covered miles of the front. The Rebs didn’t stick to the trenches right up against the barbed wire, either. They gave it to the U.S. positions as far back as they could reach, and they had more heavy guns firing along with their damned three-inchers than had been so during the first year of the war.
During a lull-which is to say, when the Rebs were going after U.S. guns rather than front-line troops-Martin shouted to Paul Andersen, “Well, now we know why they were so goddamn quiet for so long.”
Andersen nodded mournfully. “They were savin’ it up to shoot off at us all at once.” A couple of miles to the west, something blew up with a thunderous roar loud even through the surrounding din. “There went an ammo dump-stuff we ain’t gonna be able to shoot back at ’em.”
“Yeah, and it’s a shame, too.” Martin frowned. “Next question is, are they just shelling the hell out of us, or are they going to come over the top when all this lets up?”
“That’s a good one,” Andersen said. “No way to know till we find out.”
Before long, Martin became sure in his own mind the Confederates were coming. They’d never laid on a bombardment like this one before. He heartily hoped they’d never lay on another one, either.
Andersen reached the same conclusion. “Get ready for the hundred and forty-first battle of the Roanoke, or whatever the hell this one is,” he said. They both laughed. Back when the war was new, they’d joked about how many battles this valley had seen. They’d seen all of them, small and big alike. Martin had the feeling this was going to be one of the big ones.
Sneaky as usual, the Rebels halted their barrage several times, only to resume a few minutes later, catching U.S. defenders out of their shelters and slaughtering them. The real attack, though, was marked by long bursts of machine-gun fire from the Confederate trenches, supporting the soldiers who were moving on the U.S. lines.
“Up!” Martin screamed. “Up! Up! Let’s get ’em!” He’d come up before, and counted himself lucky not to have been killed. Now he stood in the wreckage of the trench line, blinking like a mole or some other animal not used to the light of day. The barrage had blown most of the parapet to hell and gone, and a lot of the wire that had stood in front of it, too. He could look out across no-man’s-land at the Confederate soldiers running toward him.
If he could see them, they could see him. He dropped to one knee and started shooting. Specs Peterson did the same thing beside him, but then pointed off to the left and hollered, “Barrel!”
A barrel it was, but not a U.S. barrel. Martin hadn’t known the Rebs had any of their own. They were picking a good time to spring the surprise, too. He watched the ungainly contraption go into a trench and climb out the other side. It looked to climb even better than the ones made in the USA, though it seemed to carry fewer guns.
As far as he could tell, the one Specs had spotted was the only one close by. He wondered how many of the stinking machines the Confederates had altogether. Getting up and trying to find out didn’t strike him as the best idea he’d ever had. He shoved a fresh clip into his Springfield, peered over the sights to find a Reb to shoot at, and-
The bullet caught him in the left arm, just below the shoulder. “Aww, shit!” he said loudly. Without that hand supporting it, the muzzle of the Springfield dropped; he fired a round into the dirt almost at his feet.
“Sarge is hit!” Specs Peterson shouted. He quickly wrapped a bandage around the wound, then tugged Martin’s good arm over his shoulder. “Let’s get you the hell out of here, Sarge.”
“Yeah.” Martin knew he sounded vague. Everybody said a wound didn’t hurt when you first got it. As far as he was concerned, everybody lied. His arm felt as if he’d had molten metal poured on it. He knew too many people in Toledo to whom that had happened. He tried to wriggle the fingers of his left hand, but couldn’t tell whether he succeeded or not.
Getting him the hell out of there turned out to be hell of its own kind. The Confederate bombardment had pasted the communications trenches along with everything else. Plenty of other wounded men were trying to get to the rear, too, and plenty of men who weren’t wounded as well. “Jesus,” Peterson said, struggling through the chaos all around. “The whole fucking line is coming to pieces.”
Martin was less interested than he might have been. Putting one foot in front of the other so he wasn’t a dead weight took all the concentration he had. The bandage Specs had slapped on him was red and dripping.
Somewhere back toward the rear, a couple of men with Red Cross armbands took charge of him. “Go back to your unit, Private,” one of them said to Peterson.
“If I can find it,” Specs answered. “If there’s anything left of it. Good luck, Sarge.” He turned around and trotted toward the sound of the fighting before Martin could answer.
He spoke to the stretcher-bearers-who bore no stretcher-instead: “How is it?”
He’d meant his wound, but they had other things on their mind. “It’s a hell of a mess, Sergeant,” one of them answered as they helped him stumble westward, away from the firing. “They drove a hell of a lot of barrels through up to the north and down south of us, too. With those bastards on their flanks, a lot of our infantry just caved in.”
As if to demonstrate the truth of that, several unwounded soldiers trotted past them. A military policeman shouted a challenge. Several shots rang out. Martin didn’t see the panicked soldiers coming back his way, which meant they’d shot first or best and were still running.
“It’s a disaster, is what it is,” the second stretcher-bearer said. “They’re liable to push us all the way back to the river-maybe over it, for God’s sake.” Even through the blazing agony of his wound, that got through to Martin. The USA had spent two years and lives uncounted to drive the Confederates back to the Roanoke River and then over it. If they lost all that in one battle…
He stumbled just then, jarring his arm. He’d only thought he hurt before. The battered landscape turned gray before his eyes. He tasted blood, from where his teeth had bitten down too hard on a scream. Whatever he’d been about to say disappeared, burned away by shrieking nerves.
When they got him to the field hospital, the stretcher-bearers exclaimed in dismay, because it was dissolving like Lot’s wife in the rain. “Evacuation!” somebody yelled. Somebody else added, “We’re gettin’ the hell out before the Rebs overrun us.”
By luck-and maybe because, since he wasn’t on a stretcher, he didn’t take up much room-Martin got shoved aboard an ambulance. Jouncing west over the shell-pocked track toward the river was a special hell of its own. He couldn’t look out, only at the other wounded men shoehorned in with him. Maybe that was a blessing of sorts. He
