He wished he had not cursed such news where Bishop Pascal could hear him.
The bishop waved to the newsboys, who raced to get to him. He bought a paper from the one who ran fastest. He blessed them all: some consolation, but probably not much. As they went off, one happy, two disappointed, he turned to Galtier. “I understand how you feel, my friend,” he said, “and I, I feel this pain as well. It is the country from which our forefathers came, after all, and we remain proud to be French, as well we should. Is it not so?”
“Yes. It is so,” Galtier said. To hear that his homeland had gone down to defeat at the hands of the
But Bishop Pascal said, “The France that is beaten today is not the France that sent our ancestors to this land. The France that was beaten today is a France that has turned its back on the holy mother Catholic Church, a France that embraced the godless Revolution. This is a France of absinthe-drinkers and artists who paint filthy pictures no sensible man can understand or would want to understand, a France of women who care nothing for their reputations, only that they should have reputations. It is not ours. If it is beaten, God has meant for it to be beaten, that it may return to the right and proper path.”
“It could be that you are right.” Lucien spread his hands. “I am but an ignorant man, and easily confused. Right now I feel torn in two.”
“You are a good man-that is what you are. Here, let us see what has happened.” Bishop Pascal read rapidly through the newspaper, passing sentences to Galtier as he did so: “The Republic of France, unable any longer to withstand the weight of arms of the Empire of Germany, requests a cease-fire…. All English troops to leave France within seven days, or face combat from French forces…. The German High Seas Fleet and the U.S. Navy to have fueling and supply privileges at French ports, the Royal Navy to be denied them…. The new border between France and Germany to be fixed by treaty once the war ends everywhere. Thus the atheists and their mistresses are humbled and brought low.”
No doubt there were some in France who met Bishop Pascal’s description. But, since France was a nation of men and women like any other, Lucien was sure it also held a great many more folk who did not. And they too were humbled and brought low. A meticulous man, Galtier had trouble seeing the justice in that.
Had Germany been conquered instead of conquering, what would have happened to the ordinary Germans? Much the same, he suspected. Did that make it right? Was he God, to know the answers to such questions?
Bishop Pascal said, “How much longer can the war on this side of the Atlantic go on now? How much longer before all of Quebec joins our Republic of Quebec? I assure you, this cannot now long be delayed.”
“I think you are likely to be right.” Lucien recalled the men in blue-gray uniforms at the antiaircraft guns outside of town.
“The killing shall cease,” Bishop Pascal said. “Peace shall be restored, and, God willing, we shall never fight such a great and mad war again.”
“I hope we do not,” Galtier said. “I shall pray that you are right.” But he spent a lot of time talking to his horse on the way home from Riviere-du-Loup. When he got there, he still felt torn in two.
XVI
Colonel Irving Morrell stood up in the cupola of his barrel as it pounded through the rough and hilly country just north of Nolensville, Tennessee. He did that more and more often these days, and more and more of the commanders in the Barrel Brigade were imitating him. Some of them had stopped bullets. The rest were doing a better job of fighting their machines.
He grinned. He had a toy the other fellows didn’t, or most of them didn’t, anyhow. When First Army infantry got light machine guns to give them extra firepower as they advanced, he’d commandeered one and had a welder mount the tripod in front of the hatch through which he emerged. When the Rebels shot at him now, he shot back.
They were shooting. They’d been shooting, hard, ever since the drive on Murfreesboro opened two days before. But First Army had already come better than ten miles, and the advance wasn’t slowing down. If anything, the barrels were doing better today than they had the day before.
A bullet ricocheted off the front of the barrel. Just one round-that meant a rifleman. A moment later, another one snapped past Morrell’s head. His lips skinned back from his teeth in a ferocious grin. He’d spotted the muzzle flash from the middle of a clump of bushes. He swung his own-his very own-light machine gun toward the bushes and ripped off a burst. No one shot at the barrel from that direction again.
“We’ve got them!” he said. Once, playing chess, he’d seen ten moves ahead: a knight’s tour that threatened several of his opponent’s pieces on the way to forking the fellow’s king and rook. It had been an epiphany of sorts, a glimpse into a higher world. He was at best a medium-good player; he’d never known such a moment before or since…till now.
He’d had a taste of that feeling when First Army crossed the Cumberland. This was different, though. This was better. There, the Confederates had been fooled. Here, they were doing everything they could do, as the soldier across the chessboard from him had done everything he could do-and they were losing anyhow.
They did not have enough men. They did not have enough aeroplanes. No sooner had that thought crossed his mind than a U.S. fighting scout zoomed past the waddling barrel. Morrell waved, though the pilot was gone by then. He almost wished it had been a Confederate aeroplane; he longed to try out the light machine gun as an antiaircraft weapon and give some Reb a nasty surprise.
The Confederate States did not have enough barrels, either, nor fully understand what to do with the ones they had. Every so often, a few of their rhomboids would come forward to challenge the U.S. machines. Individually, theirs were about as good as the one Morrell commanded. But what he and Ned Sherrard and General Custer had grasped and the Confederates had not was that, with barrels, the whole was greater than the sum of its parts. A mass of them all striking together could do things the same number could not do if committed piecemeal.
A shell whine in the air sent Morrell ducking back inside his steel turtle’s shell. Even as he ducked, a shell burst close to the barrel. Fragments hissed past him and clattered off its plating. None bit his soft, tender, vulnerable flesh, though.
More shells burst close by. A battery of C.S. three-inchers was doing its best to knock out his barrel and any others close by. Except at very short range, field guns hit barrels only by luck, but the hail of splinters from the barrage forced Morrell to stay inside for a while.
It was like dying and going to hell, except a little hotter and a little stickier. July in Tennessee was not the ideal weather in which to fight in a barrel. The ideal weather, for men if not for engines, would have been January in Labrador. The barrel generated plenty of heat on its own. When its shell trapped still more…Morrell was coming to understand how a rib roast felt in the oven.
And the rest of the crew suffered worse than he did. When he stood up, he got a breeze in his face: a hot, muggy breeze, but a breeze even so. They got only the whispers of air that sneaked in through louvered vision slits and the mountings of the cannon and machine guns. The engineers, down below Morrell in the bowels of the barrel, got no air at all, only stinking fumes from the twin truck engines that kept the traveling fortress traveling.
Morrell stood up again. Shells were still falling, but not so close. There was Nolensville, only a few hundred yards ahead. Infantrymen and machine-gun crews were firing from the houses and from barricades in the street, as they did in every little town. As Morrell watched, a shell from the cannon of another U.S. barrel sent chunks of a barricade flying in all directions. A moment later, that barrel started to burn. Soldiers leaped from it. Morrell hoped they got out all right. He sprayed a few rounds in front of them to make the defenders keep their heads down.
Infantrymen in green-gray and barrels converged on Nolensville. U.S. aeroplanes strafed the Confederates in the town from just above chimney height. Morrell did not order his barrel into Nolensville, where it might easily come to grief moving along any of the narrow, winding streets. He poured machine-gun fire and cannon shells onto the Rebels from just outside, where the barrel could move as freely as…a barrel could move.
Some of the defenders died in Nolensville. Some, seeing they could not hold the town, broke and ran. Morrell’s barrel rumbled past Nolensville. He took potshots at fleeing men in butternut, some white, some colored. Some of them, probably, had been brave for a long time. Under endless hammering, though, even the hardest broke
