Breakthroughs

“Those fields’ll raise a fine crop of dead men,” he said with a chuckle, turning the elevation screw to shorten the range on his own field piece.

But the men in green-gray did not give up, despite the casualties they took. In almost three years of war, Jake had come to know the enemy well. The Yankees made more stolid soldiers than the men alongside of whom he’d gone to war. They weren’t quite so quick to exploit advantages as were their Confederate counterparts. That coin had two sides, though, for they kept coming even after losses that might have torn the heart out of a C.S. attack.

As usual these days, they had barrels leading the way, too. Featherston whooped with glee when one of the guns from his battery set a traveling fortress on fire. “Burn now and burn in hell, you sons of bitches!” he shouted. He hoped they did burn. That would hurt the damnyankees, for every barrel carried inside it a couple of squads’ worth of men.

For every U.S. barrel Confederate artillery or Confederate tanks-Jake still sneered whenever the term crossed his mind-knocked out, though, two or three more kept waddling forward. And the Yankees’ front-line troops seemed to have an ungodly number of machine guns, too. Featherston recognized the muzzle flashes that went on and on as the guns fired burst after burst at the C.S. troops resisting them.

In disgust, he turned to Michael Scott. “There’s somethin’ else we’ll get around to trying in six, eight months-maybe a year-or we would, ’cept the goddamn war’ll be lost to hell and gone by then,” he said.

“Those can’t be regular machine guns,” the loader replied. “They’re keeping up with the rest of the damnyankee infantry way too good for that. Yankees must’ve turned out some lightweight models.”

“So why the hell ain’t we?” Featherston asked, a good question without a good answer. Not long before, he’d reckoned U.S. soldiers stolid in the way they fought. There was, unfortunately, nothing stolid about their War Department. He spat in disgust. “Those white-bearded fools down in Richmond shouldn’t ever have started this here fight if they didn’t reckon they could whip the USA.”

“They did reckon that.” Steady as if he were attacking New York instead of defending Richmond, Scott loaded yet another shell into the breech of the quick-firing three-inch. Featherston made a minute adjustment to the traversing screw, then nodded. Scott yanked the lanyard. The gun bellowed. Scott opened the breech. Out fell the shell casing, to land with a clank on one of the many others the piece had already fired. As he placed the next shell in the breech, the loader went on, “Maybe they weren’t quite right this time.”

“Yeah-maybe.” A rattlesnake might have carried more venom in its mouth than Jake Featherston did, but not much more. He fiddled with the traversing screw again-the Yankee machine gun at which he’d aimed the last shell was still blazing away. When he was satisfied, he yelled, “Fire!” The field gun roared again. He took off his tin hat and waved it in the air when that lightweight gun-Scott had made a shrewd guess there-abruptly fell silent.

Darkness slowed the carnage, but didn’t stop it. Featherston slept by his gun, in fitful snatches when the firing died down for a while. Ammunition did come forward to his guns, but U.S. bombing aeroplanes kept thundering by low overhead and dropping their loads deep behind the Confederate line. Troops and munitions would have a harder time moving up in the morning.

When the skirmishing along the front line picked up, he fired a few rounds at where he thought the damnyankees were. Michael Scott wasn’t so sure. “Haven’t you shortened the range so much, those’ll be dropping on our own boys?” he asked.

“Don’t reckon so,” Jake answered. “Yanks’ll likely have moved up a bit since we could see where they were at. And if they haven’t, well, what the hell? Odds are I’m just blowing up some coons.”

Fighting grew heavy before sunrise. As soon as black turned to gray, the two armies started going at each other-or rather, the U.S. forces started going at the Army of Northern Virginia, which fought desperately to hold back the onslaught. The damnyankees had brought soldiers and supplies forward during the night, too, and threw everything they had into the fight.

For a couple of hours, in spite of his gibes about the fools in Richmond and his contempt for the Negroes surely manning a large part of the line in front of him, Featherston dared hope that line would hold. The Yankees crept within a couple of thousand yards of his position-close enough that occasional rifle and machine-gun bullets whistled by-and stalled.

But then, no doubt saved for just such an emergency, fifteen or twenty barrels painted green-gray rumbled over pontoon bridges thrown across Cedar Run and straight at the outnumbered, outgunned men in butternut. Jake looked wildly in all directions. Where were the Confederate barrels that could blunt the slow-moving charge of the U.S. machines?

He saw none. There were none to see. He shouted to his gun, to his battery: “It’s up to us. If we don’t stop them fuckers, nobody does.”

They did what they could do. Three or four barrels went up in flames, sending pillars of black smoke high into the sky to mark their funeral pyres. But the rest kept coming, through the woods, through the fields, straight at him-and straight through what was left of the Army of Northern Virginia’s line.

And the line gave way. He’d seen that up at Round Hill: a sea of panic-stricken men in butternut streaming back toward him. He’d hoped he’d never see anything like it again. But here it was. These soldiers-some white, more colored-had had all the fighting they could stand. The only thing left in their minds was escaping the oncoming foe.

They might have had a better chance if they’d stayed and tried to hold back the U.S. soldiers. Infantrymen in green-gray and barrel crews were not the least bit shy about shooting fleeing Confederates in the back.

Featherston would cheerfully have shot them in the back, too. He didn’t have that choice, since they were coming his way. “Fight!” he shouted to the infantrymen. “Turn around and fight, God damn you!” They didn’t. They wouldn’t. As he had at Round Hill, as he had when the soldier cursed him the day before, he shouted, “Canister! If I can’t do it any other way, I’ll send ’em back on account of they’re more afraid of me than they ever dreamt of being afraid of the damnyankees.”

Michael Scott objected again: “Sarge, God only knows how come we didn’t get crucified the last time we did that. If we do it again-”

Featherston did not intend to let his loader balk him, not now. He drew his pistol. “I’ll load and fire it myself if I have to,” he snarled. Then, over open sights, he aimed the gun at the Confederate soldiers heading his way. Scott could have drawn his own weapon. Instead, white-faced, he loaded the round Jake had demanded. Jake pulled the lanyard himself. He shrieked out a Rebel yell when the worthless, cowardly scum in butternut vanished from before the gun as if swept aside by a broom. He might have hit some of the Yankees close on their heels, too.

But the canister rounds-he fired several-did not, could not, stem the rout, any more than they had at Round Hill. The infantry would run, and he could not stop them. Save for the ones he killed and maimed, the men in butternut fled past him. Black soldiers and white cried out in amazement that he did not flee, too.

“Cowards!” he shouted at them in turn. “Filthy, stinking, rotten cowards! Stand and fight, damn you all. You’re stabbing your country in the back.”

And then the Yankees were well within canister range. He gave them several rounds, too, to make them go to ground. That bought him time to limber up his guns and abandon his own position. He could not hold if everything around him fell. All four guns got out.

“Backstabbers,” he muttered as he trudged south past Independent Hill. “Nothing but filthy backstabbers. I’ll pay them all back one day, every goddamn one of them, so help me Jesus I will.”

Sam Carsten shoveled in beans and smoked sausage and sauerkraut alongside dozens of other men in the galley. The USS Dakota rolled as he ate, but the tables were mounted on gimbals. The rolling wasn’t nearly enough to make his food end up in his lap.

Across the table from him, Vic Crosetti grinned and poured down coffee. “Well, you were right, you lucky son of a bitch-we’re still down here and it’s turning into winter. You don’t toast for a while longer yet.”

“Oh, come on,” Sam said mildly. “Yeah, it’s winter, but it’s not winter, if you know what I mean. Just kind of gray and gloomy, that’s all. It’s like San Francisco winter, kind of. That’s not so bad.”

“Yeah, that’s not so bad,” Crosetti said, with the air of a man granting a great and undeserved favor, “but it ain’t so goddamn good, neither. If we was back in the Sandwich Islands now, I’d be laying under a palm tree with one of those what-do-you-call-’em flowers in my hair-”

“Hibiscus?” Carsten said.

“Yeah, one of them,” Crosetti agreed. “With a hibiscus flower in my hair and with my arm around a broad. I’d