wanted.
“All right,” Featherston said wearily. “Here’s what we do, you ask me. We cross the bridge, if it’s still up there. All the artillery we’ve got goes into battery on the south bank. Soon as the last man from the Army of Northern Virginia comes out of Maryland, we drop the bridge right into the middle of the river,
“Nope.” Scott sounded-not happy now, but contented. He’d got Jake to tell him what he could have worked out for himself if he’d had an ounce of sense. Featherston shook his head again. More rainwater ran down his neck. What difference did that make, when he was already so soaked?
He cursed the Yankees, he cursed the mud, and he cursed the War Department, the last more sulfurously than either of the other two. “Christ, no wonder we’re losing,” he told the unheeding sky. “If the damn fools can’t do the little things right, how are they supposed to do the big ones?” He supposed the United States Army was afflicted with a War Department, too, but somehow it seemed to be overcoming the handicap.
To make his joy with the world complete, the lead gun went into a puddle and bogged to the hubs. The horses strained in their harness, but it did no good. That gun wasn’t going anywhere any time soon, not with just the team trying to get it out. And the others piled up in back of it.
Along with the rest of the gun crew, he lent his own strength to the work, pushing from behind as the horses pulled. The gun remained stuck. Jake spotted Metellus, the cook, lounging on the limber that traveled behind the gun. “Get your black ass up here and do something to help, damn you,” he snarled. “The Yankees do find this here road with their guns, the shells won’t care what color you are. They’ll blow you up, same as me.” His grin was ferocious. “If that ain’t nigger equality, I don’t know what the hell is.”
Metellus got down and got as dirty as any of the white men, but the gun wouldn’t budge. “Sarge, the horses are gonna founder if we work ’em any more right now,” Michael Scott said. “They’ll plumb keel over and die.”
“Shit.” Featherston looked around, feeling harassed by too many things at once. The whole battery would bog down if he didn’t move the rest of the three-inchers around the lead gun. But if he had to abandon it, the higher-ups would crucify him. The only way he’d kept his head above water was by being twice as good as anybody else around. If he showed he was merely human, they’d cook his goose in jig time.
Here came a battalion of infantry, marching through the mud by the side of the road because the guns were occupying the mud in the middle of the road. “Give us some help, boys!” Jake called to the foot soldiers. “Can’t afford to lose any guns.”
Some of the infantrymen started to break ranks, but the lieutenant in charge of the company shouted, “Keep moving, men. We have our own schedule to meet.” He gave Featherston a hard stare. “You have no business attempting to delay my men, Sergeant.”
“Yes, sir. Sorry, sir,” Jake said, as he had to: he was just a sergeant, after all, not one of God’s anointed officers. How he hated that smug lieutenant. Because of his arrogance, the Confederate States would lose a gun they could have kept, a gun they should have kept.
“What’s going on here?” someone demanded in sharp, angry tones. An officer on horseback surveyed the scene with nothing but disapproval.
Featherston kept quiet. He was only a sergeant, after all. The lieutenant answered, “Sir, this, this enlisted man is trying to use my troops to get out of his trouble.”
“Then you’d better let him, hadn’t you?” Major Clarence Potter snapped. The lieutenant’s jaw dropped. He stared up at Potter with his mouth wide open, like a stupid turkey drowning in the rain. The intelligence officer went on, “Break out some ropes, get your men on that gun, and get it moving. We can’t afford to leave it behind.”
“But-” the infantry lieutenant began.
Major Potter fixed him with the intent, icy stare that had impressed Jake on their first meeting up in Pennsylvania-and how long ago that seemed. “One more word from you, Lieutenant, and I shall ask what your name is.”
The lieutenant wilted. Featherston would have been astounded had he done anything else. Twenty men on a rope and more on the hubs and carriage got the three-inch gun up out of the morass into which it had sunk. On more solid ground, the horses could move it again.
“Thank you, sir,” Jake said, waving the rest of the guns from the battery around the bad spot in the road.
“My pleasure,” Potter said, crisp as usual. “We’ve done a pretty fair job of fighting the enemy in this war, Sergeant, but God deliver us from our friends sometimes.”
“Yes,
“Keep struggling, Sergeant,” Potter said. “That’s all you can do. That’s all any of us can do.”
“Yes, sir.” Jake stared furiously after the now-vanished infantry lieutenant. “He could have been heading up a labor brigade, and if he was, he wouldn’t have let me use any niggers, either.”
“I’d say you’re probably right,” Potter said. “Some people get promoted because they’re brave and active. Some people get promoted for no better reason than that all their paperwork stays straight.”
“And some people don’t get promoted at all,” Featherston said bitterly.
“We’ve been over this ground before, Sergeant,” Potter said. “There’s nothing I can do. It’s not up to me.”
Jake would not hear him. “That damn lieutenant-beg your pardon, sir-wouldn’t pay me any mind, on account of I wasn’t an officer. I command this battery, and I damn well deserve to command it, but he treated me like a nigger, on account of I’m just a sergeant.” He glanced over to the intelligence officer. “It’s true, isn’t it? They are going to give niggers guns and put ’em in the line?”
“It’s passed the House. It’s passed the Senate. Since President Semmes was the one who proposed the bill, he’s not going to veto it,” Major Potter said.
“You know what, sir?” Featherston said. “You mark my words, there’s gonna be a nigger promoted to lieutenant before I get these here stripes off my sleeve. Is that fair? Is that right?”
Potter’s lips twisted in what might have been a sympathetic grin or an expression of annoyance at Jake’s unending complaints. The latter, it proved, for the major said, “Sergeant, if you think you’re the only man unfairly treated in the Army of Northern Virginia, I assure you that you’re mistaken.” He squeezed his horse’s sides with his knees. The animal trotted on.
“Ahh, you’re just another bastard after all,” Jake said. Thanks to the rain, Potter didn’t hear him. Featherston turned back to the battery. “Come on. Let’s get moving.”
They bogged down again, less than half a mile in front of the bridge. This time, Jake had no trouble getting help, for a Negro labor gang was close by, and the white officer in charge of it proved reasonable. Featherston worked the black men unmercifully hard, but he and his comrades were working hard, too. The guns came free and rattled toward and then over the bridge.
The firing pits that waited for them on the south side of the Potomac were poorly dug in and poorly sited. “Everything’s going to hell around here,” Featherston growled, and went tramping around to see if he could find better positions no other guns would occupy.
He had little luck. If the artillery hadn’t had to stay close to the river to defend the crossing, he wouldn’t have wanted anything to do with the area. When the Yankees came down and got their guns in place, his crew was going to catch it.
He’d come down close by the Potomac when the engineers blew the bridge and sent it crashing into the water, as he’d predicted. Somebody near him cheered to see it fall. Featherston’s scowl never wavered. How long would the wrecked bridge keep the Yankees out of Virginia? Not long enough, he feared.
XIX
Destroyers and a couple of armored cruisers screened the
