boneheads in Richmond are putting rifles in their hands and saying, ‘Yeah, you’re as good as white men. Why the hell not?’ Well, there’ll be a reckoning for that, too.” He sounded eerily certain. “You mark my words-there’ll be a reckoning for that, too.”
Shivering in a trench outside Jonesboro, Arkansas, a U.S. soldier grumbled, “Where in the goddamn hell did I leave my gloves?”
“Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord in vain, Groome,” Sergeant Gordon McSweeney said sharply.
“Uh, right, Sergeant,” Groome answered. “Sorry, Sergeant.” He was eighteen, a big, tough, beef-fed kid from the plains of Nebraska. Rank, though, had very little to do with why he backed down from McSweeney.
“You need to make your peace with God, not with me,” McSweeney answered, his voice still stern. Groome nodded hastily, placatingly. Had he been a dog, he would have rolled over on his back to expose his throat and belly.
With a grunt, McSweeney went back to making his flamethrower’s trigger mechanism more sensitive. That he took a flamethrower into combat was not the reason he got instant, unthinking obedience from the soldiers in his section. That he was the sort of man who carried a flamethrower into battle with not a thought in his mind but the harm he could wreak on his enemies had more to do with it.
He scowled as he worked. His face was made for scowling, being almost entirely vertical lines: a narrow rectangle with a hard chin, a long nose, and a vertical crease between pale eyes that didn’t seem to blink as often as they should. His hands, large and knobby-knuckled, manipulated a small screwdriver with surprising delicacy.
A shadow fell on the disassembled trigger mechanism. He looked up with a deeper scowl-who presumed to stand in his light? When he saw Captain Schneider, he relaxed. The company commander could do as he pleased, at least when it came to Gordon McSweeney. “Sir?” McSweeney asked, and started to get to his feet.
“As you were,” Schneider said.
McSweeney obediently checked himself. As far as he was concerned, Captain Schneider was too lenient with all the men in his company, McSweeney himself included. But the captain had ordered him not to come to attention, and so he did not.
“Division headquarters wants some captured Rebs tonight for interrogation,” Schneider said.
“Yes, sir, I’ll go,” McSweeney said at once.
Captain Schneider frowned. “I didn’t mean you in particular, Sergeant,” he said. “I meant for you to tell off a party to go into no-man’s-land and come back with prisoners.”
“Sir, I’ll go,” McSweeney repeated. “The men Gideon took with him to fight the Midianites chose themselves. I shall do the same. The Lord will protect me-or, if it be His will that I fall here, I shall go on to my glory, for I know in my heart that I am numbered among the elect.” He was every bit as uncompromisingly Presbyterian as his features suggested.
Schneider’s frown did not go away. “I don’t want to lose you, Sergeant,” he said. “You’re too valuable a fighting man. And your courage is not in question. It hardly could be, with that on your chest.”
Even on his combat uniform, McSweeney wore the small, white-starred blue ribbon of the Congressional Medal of Honor. He’d earned it the year before, destroying a Confederate barrel with his flamethrower and then slaying Rebel foot soldiers who’d sought to follow the barrel into the U.S. lines. “Sir,” he said now, “snaking out prisoners is a job I’m better suited for than anyone else in the company. Why endanger somebody else when I can do it right?”
“How many times have you done it, though, Sergeant?” Schneider persisted. “How long can you go on being lucky?”
“As long as God wants me to be,” McSweeney answered. He did get to his feet then, so he could look down at the company commander, whom he overtopped by several inches. “Sir, you must understand: I
Had Schneider had a good response to that, he would have given it at once. When he didn’t, McSweeney smiled at him. McSweeney knew most men did not find his smile delightful. Schneider was no exception; he flinched away from it as from the screech of an incoming Confederate shell. “Have it your way, then, Sergeant,” he muttered, and went walking down the trench in a hurry.
McSweeney’s smile changed to the somewhat softer one any successfully stubborn soldier might have worn. He squatted down and got back to work on the trigger mechanism. By the time Ben Carlton shouted that he had supper ready, the trigger was nearly as smooth as McSweeney wanted it.
He made a horrible face at his first mouthful of stew. “What is it?” he demanded. “Is it donkey or cat?”
“Dammit, it’s beef,” Carlton said, offended.
“Don’t blaspheme,” McSweeney told him. “How is it that you’ve been a cook since the war started and still do no better than this?”
“Because Paul Mantarakis did it till he got killed last summer, and he was a better cook than I’ll be if I live to be ninety-five, which ain’t what you’d call likely,” Carlton retorted. “Stinkin’ shame he’s dead, too.”
“He was a good man, for a Papist,” McSweeney admitted: from him, no small concession.
“He weren’t no Cath-o-lic,” the company cook said. “He was Greek whatever the devil you call it.”
“The Devil has him now, I fear,” McSweeney said. Mantarakis had fiddled with beads, so what else could he have been but a Papist? With grim resolution, McSweeney finished his bowl of stew. With luck, the Confederates he captured would have rations worth taking.
He didn’t crawl out over the parapet of the trench till a little before midnight. Before he went, he blacked his face and hands with mud, so that he looked like a performer in some disastrous minstrel show. He had an officer’s pistol on his belt, but hoped he wouldn’t have to use it; he put more faith in his knife and entrenching tool.
Getting under and through the few strands of barbed wire in front of the U.S. trenches was easier than it should have been. The United States didn’t take the war west of the Mississippi so seriously as he thought they should have. The U.S. advance south from the Missouri line had proceeded at a snail’s pace because too many resources went into the fighting closer to Philadelphia.
A parachute flare went off overhead, bathing the hellish chaos of no-man’s-land with a pure white light that might have come straight from heaven. McSweeney froze. As the light slowly sank and dimmed and reddened, Confederate and U.S. gunners blazed away at what they thought were targets. Bullets whined and occasionally screamed as they ricocheted from rocks. None came close to him.
McSweeney waited till darkness was complete before moving again. When he did move, he moved fast, or as fast as he could, taking advantage of the little while before men’s eyes forgot the light. By the time he flopped down in a shell hole not far from the Confederate wire-which was hardly thicker than that protecting his line-he was filthy and wet. He was also satisfied. He settled down to listen and to wait.
The Rebs were far noisier than he let the men in his charge get. They would have pickets up near the line; he knew about where the foxholes were. If all else failed, he would go in there and bring a couple of those men back through. He didn’t want to do that, being cold-bloodedly aware of the risk it entailed. But he’d been ordered out to return with prisoners, and he would.
He waited a while longer. Maybe the Confederates would send out a wiring party-although they had as much trouble getting supplies as did their U.S. opponents, so they might not have any fresh wire to string up. Wiring parties made easy meat; they were so intent on what they were doing, they paid less attention than they should have to whoever might be sneaking close to them.
Above McSweeney, stars slowly spun, now in plain sight, now hidden by scudding clouds. At about half past two, several Rebs crawled northwest toward the U.S. lines. They passed within twenty feet of him, never knowing he was there.
In a thin thread of whisper, one of them told the others, “Remember, we catch ourselves a damnyankee or three, then we get the hell back home. This ain’t the mission for foolin’ around.”
McSweeney’s smile was enormous, predatory.
Or so he thought, till their rearmost man hissed, “Hush! What’s that?” McSweeney froze, as he had for the parachute flare. After a couple of minutes in which no one seemed to breathe, the Rebel said, “Must have been a rat. Christ, I hate them fat-bellied sons of bitches. I know what they eat.” With a faint rustle of cloth, he crawled
