Lucien had had similar fears, but held up a hand. “If we quarrel among ourselves, on whom can we rely?” he asked. Both his daughter and his son looked abashed.
“You have reason, Father,” Nicole said. Lucien had to fight to keep from crowing all the way back to the farm.
Still commanding the battery that had been Jeb Stuart III’s, still a sergeant, likely to be a sergeant till the day he died, Jake Featherston knew that day was liable to be close at hand. The Army of Northern Virginia maintained its presence on this side of the Monocacy, but that was for the most part because the Yankees had been pushing harder elsewhere in Maryland, not because Confederate defenses were strong here.
And now the United States were pounding in this sector, too. Shells burst all around the battery. A couple of men were down. The worst of it, though, wasn’t explosions or flying splinters. The worst of it was that the Yankees were firing a lot of gas shells along with their high explosives.
“Come on!” Jake shouted to the men of his own gun. “Pound those Yankee trenches! They’re gonna swarm like bees any minute.”
Even when he did shout, his words sounded hollow and muffled. The gas helmets Confederate soldiers were wearing these days did a better job of protecting lungs and especially eyes from poison gas than had the chemical- soaked gauze pads that had been the original line of defense against the new and horrid weapon. But wearing a helmet of rubberized burlap that covered your entire head and neck was a torment in its own right, the more so as days got ever hotter and muggier.
Jake rubbed at the glass portholes of the helmet with a scrap of rag. That didn’t help; the round windows weren’t so much dirty as they were steamy, and the steam was on the inside of the gas helmet. He could have taken off the helmet. Then the portholes would have been clean. Of course, then he would have been poisoned, but if you were going to worry about every little thing…
The Yankee barrage dropped back into the front-line trenches. “Be ready, y’all!” Featherston shouted. “They’re going to be coming out any-”
He didn’t even get the chance to finish the sentence. The U.S. soldiers swarmed out of their trenches and rushed toward the Confederate lines. The U.S. bombardment didn’t ease off till they were within fifty yards of those lines; Jake gave the enemy reluctant credit for a very sharp piece of work there.
Even before the damnyankees’ guns stopped pounding the Confederate trenches, though, men in butternut were pouring machine-gun fire into their foes. The barrage was liable to kill them, but, if they didn’t keep the U.S. soldiers out of their trenches, they were surely dead.
The battery poured shrapnel into the Yankees advancing across no-man’s-land, shortening the range as the soldiers in green-gray drew closer to the Confederate line. Shell casings lay by the breech of the gun in the same way that watermelon seeds were liable to lie by a Negro sleeping in the sun: signs of what had been consumed.
Dirt fountained up from every explosion. Men fountained up, too, or pieces of men. Others dove for the shelter of shell holes old and new. For a moment, the attack faltered. Jake had watched a lot of attacks, both Yankee and Confederate, falter: generals had a way of asking men to do more than flesh and blood could bear. “Be ready to lengthen range in a hurry,” he called to his gun crews. “When they run, we want to hurt ’em as bad as we can so they don’t try this shit again in a hurry.”
But then a cry of alarm and despair rose, not from the ranks of the Yankees but from the Confederates’ trenches. Men started running away from the front, straight toward Jake Featherston’s guns.
“Barrels!” Michael Scott shouted. With the gas helmet he had on, Jake couldn’t see his face, but he would have bet it was as pale as whey. “The damnyankees got barrels!”
There were only three of them, belching out gray-black clouds of exhaust as they lumbered forward with a clumsy deliberation that put Featherston in mind of fat men staggering out of a saloon. But, like fat men not so drunk as to fall down, they kept on coming no matter how clumsy they looked.
Machine-gun bullets struck sparks from their armored hides, but did not penetrate them. They had machine guns, too, and poured a hail of bullets of their own on Confederate positions that kept on resisting. Where those machine-gun bullets proved inadequate, they used their cannon to pound the foes into silence.
They were, Jake saw, deadly dangerous weapons of war. They were also even more deadly dangerous weapons of terror. Rumors about them had raced through the Confederate Army weeks before this, their first appearance on the front here. Seeing that they were nearly as invulnerable as rumor made them out to be, most of the men thought flight the best if not the only answer.
“That armor of theirs, it doesn’t keep shells out,” Jake said. “They’re not going any faster than a man can walk, and every damn one of ’em’s as big as a battleship. We don’t fill ’em full of holes, we don’t deserve to be in the First Richmond Howitzers.”
He felt the sting of that himself. As far as the powers that be were concerned, he didn’t deserve to he an officer in the First Richmond Howitzers. When his life lay on the line, though, pride took second place. At his shouted orders, all the guns in the battery took aim at the barrels.
Despite the encouraging words he’d used, he quickly discovered hitting a moving target with an artillery piece was anything but easy. Shell after shell exploded in front of the barrels or far beyond them. “If I was a nigger, I’d swear they were hexed,” Michael Scott growled.
“If you were a nigger-” Featherston began, and then stopped. He didn’t know how to finish the thought. He’d fought that very gun with two Negro laborers, up in Pennsylvania, after a Yankee bombardment had killed or wounded everyone in the crew but him. The fire he and Nero and Perseus delivered had helped drive back a U.S. assault on the trenches in front of the battery.
Yet the two blacks had sympathized with the Red revolt enough to desert the battery when it began, and he hadn’t seen them since. He wondered if they’d managed to get their hands on any guns and turn them against their Confederate superiors. He doubted he’d ever know.
But he was sure that, if not for the Negro uprising, the war against the USA would be going better now. Blacks were mostly back to work yes, but you couldn’t turn your back on them, not the way you had before. That made them only half as useful as they had been before the red flags started flying-and that meant the war against the United States was still feeling the effects of the uprising.
“We’ll pay ’em back one of these days,” Jake said. He had no more time in which to think about it. One of the barrels was clumsily turning so that its cannon bore on his gun. Barrels couldn’t stand hits from artillery. He’d told his gun crew as much, and hoped for the sake of his own neck he was right. He didn’t need anyone to tell him guns out in the open couldn’t do that, either.
Flame spurted from the muzzle of the cannon inside the traveling fortress. The shell was short. Fragments clattered off the splinter shield that was all the protection his gun crew had. Nothing got through. Nobody got hurt. He knew perfectly well that that was luck.
“Left half a degree!” he shouted, and the muzzle of the howitzer swung ever so slightly. He yanked the lanyard. The gun roared. So did he: “Hit! We hit the son of a bitch!”
Smoke poured out of the barrel. Hatches popped open all over the ungainly machine. Men, some carrying machine guns and belts of ammunition, dove out of the hatches and into whatever cover they could find. The gun crew raked the area where they were cowering. “I hope we kill ’em all, and I hope they take a long time dying,” Michael Scott said savagely.
At Featherston’s orders, his gunners also sent several more rounds into the burning barrel, to make sure the damnyankees couldn’t salvage it. Another barrel had stopped on the open ground between two trenches. Jake didn’t know why it had stopped. He didn’t care, either. What difference whether it had broken down or its commander was an idiot? It made an easy target. Nothing else mattered. Soon it was burning, too.
Seeing the seemingly invincible barrels going up in flames put fresh heart into the Confederate infantry that had been on the point of breaking. The men in butternut stopped running and started shooting back at the U.S. soldiers in their trenches. The last surviving barrel made a slow, awkward turn-the only kind it could make-and lumbered away from the battery of field guns that had treated its comrades so roughly.
Its tail carried a two-machine-gun sting, but Jake had never been so glad to see the back of anything. All the guns in the battery sent shells after the barrel. No one was lucky enough to score a hit on it.
“It’s going,” Featherston said. “That’s good enough for now, far as I’m concerned. If it comes back tomorrow,
