“Better be a good book,” Potter said. “They’ll be a drug on the market when the fighting’s done-provided anyone’s left alive to read them.” He had on a tin hat, and tipped it as if it were a real felt derby. “Good morning to you, Sergeant.” On down toward the front he went, a businesslike man who might have been a businessman were it not for his helmet and puttees.
Featherston let out a silent sigh of relief. He’d got away with not having to show what he was writing. Not only that, he’d found a title for what he was setting down in the tablet. OVER OPEN SIGHTS, he printed above the writing on the first page.
He wished he had the War Department over open sights, close enough to blast them all without even having to bother reading the range. He wished he had the Negro troops in front of him over open sights, too. He scowled. If they did run like rabbits, the way he figured they were likely to do, he would have them over open sights. He’d blast them, too.
The only trouble was, that would be too late.
Something buzzed like an early mosquito, but the sound came from farther away than a mosquito’s infernal whine. Jake looked up. Tiny as a mosquito in the sky, an aeroplane sauntered along above the defensive line of the Army of Northern Virginia. Featherston knew what that meant: the damnyankees were taking photographs. When they had all they wanted, when everything was set up the way they wanted, hell would break loose.
No Confederate aeroplanes rose to challenge the Yankee spy. Belatedly, antiaircraft guns over toward Purcellville, east of Round Hill, opened up on the intruder. The hammering of the guns-the only cannon in the Confederate arsenal that were quicker-firing than the three-inchers Jake served-shattered the quiet of the late- winter morning.
Puffs of smoke, round and black as iron soup pots, flecked the sky like smallpox scars on the face of an unvaccinated man. The observation aeroplane flew through them, straight as if it were on rails. From his own observations, Jake knew what that meant: the photographer was taking his pictures.
He knew the exact instant when the photographer was through taking pictures, too. At that instant, the aeroplane stopped behaving like a locomotive on rails and started acting like a staggering drunk, lurching every which way through the air to throw off the aim of the gunners on the ground.
Wearily, Featherston cursed as the U.S. observation aeroplane escaped. He’d seen too many others escape to be more than a little disgusted. His sole consolation was that the Yankees had every bit as much trouble hitting C.S. observation aeroplanes.
As if the aeroplane’s getaway were some kind of signal, firing from the U.S. trenches, which had been very light, suddenly picked up. Rifles and machine guns hammered away. And then, as Jake was about to call his men to ready themselves for the Yankee onslaught, the small-arms fire slackened again. He let out a sigh of relief and went back to filling pages of the Gray Eagle tablet.
Leading a charging column of barrels would have been more impressive if Lieutenant Colonel Irving Morrell could have seen the column he was leading. He could see next to nothing. The louvered vision slits were shut as tight as they could be and still let any light at all into the interior of the barrel. Had they been open any wider, they would have let in bullets along with the light.
Morrell kept wondering if he’d died and gone to hell. The reek wasn’t of fire and brimstone; it was fire and automotive exhaust, which struck him as a reasonable approximation. The two roaring truck engines in the compartment below let out enough bellows and screams and groans for an entire regiment of lost souls. It was hot as hell in the barrel, too. This was March. What the inside of the barrel would be like on a muggy August afternoon was something Morrell did his best not to contemplate.
Nor was he alone, or even close to alone, in his mechanical damnation. Along with the driver and the two engineers who labored to keep the hot metal parts working as they should, he had for company the dozen machine gunners and the two artillerymen at the nose cannon: an apartment building’s worth of people jammed into an ugly metal box half the size of a small flat.
He peered ahead. He stuck his nose too close to the louvers, and tried to flatten it against them when the barrel lurched over the scarred and battered ground. He clutched the wounded member, which, fortunately, was neither bleeding nor broken.
He peered again, as closely as before. If his nose got smashed again, it got smashed, that was all. Peering was rewarded. “Shell hole!” he screamed. “Big shell hole! Steer right!”
What with the din of the two engines and the rattle and clanks of the tracks and all the other ancillary racket inside the barrel, the driver never heard him. He cursed himself for an idiot; he’d found out, the very first time he got into a barrel, that nobody could hear anything inside.
He remembered to use hand signals just as the barrel nosed down into the crater. The driver shifted to his lowest gear. The engines screamed even louder than they had before. Morrell wondered if the barrel’s pointed nose would get stuck in the dirt at the bottom of the shell hole. That was its worst disadvantage when set against its British and Confederate counterparts, which were tracked around their entire rhomboidal hulls: those babies could climb out of anything, and a U.S. barrel couldn’t, quite.
This particular U.S. barrel, though, could and did climb out of this particular shell hole. Beyond it stood a fat man waving a large blue flag. Morrell held up his right hand, palm out, to the driver. Obediently, the man hit the brakes, took the barrel out of gear, and turned off the motors. Everyone inside the steel hull who could reach the handle of an escape hatch opened it, to let in air and light-and the rumble of other barrels behind Morrell.
One by one, the rest of the machines in the column also halted. Hatches and louvers also came open on them. More than a few started disgorging their crews, as the men seized the first chance they got to escape.
Irving Morrell wasted very little time in getting out of his barrel, either. He clambered down to the ground. The fat man stabbed the flagpole into the ground. “That wasn’t so bad,” he said. “Looked like the end of the world, coming straight at me.” He stuck a finger in one ear. “Sounded that way, too.”
“You had a better view of it than I did, Major Dowling,” Morrell answered. He outranked General Custer’s adjutant, but treated him as he would have treated a superior officer. His oak leaves might have been silver while Dowling’s were gold, but the major more than made up in influence what he lacked in rank. Morrell went on, “It’s noisier inside a barrel than outside, though. Far as I can tell, it’s noisier inside a barrel than anywhere.”
“Yes, I think so, too,” Dowling said. “Astounding experience, riding in one of those damn things. Appalling experience, too.” He looked over his shoulder. “Here comes the general. Let’s see what he thought of the exercise.”
Lieutenant General Custer picked his way through the mud with slow, mincing steps. He wore fancy black cavalry boots, and plainly didn’t want to get them dirty. With him came Colonel Ned Sherrard. Sherrard had served for a good while on the General Staff, and General Staff officers were notorious among their counterparts in the field for their aversion to filth. But Sherrard looked to be turning into a real, live field soldier himself, for he took no more notice of the chewed-up terrain than he might have if he’d been in the field since 1914.
“Bully!” Custer said. “This column-or rather, an even grander column than this-will simply pulverize the defenses the Confederates have in front of Nashville. When they do, the infantry goes forward, sweeps up what the barrels have broken loose, and we have ourselves a breakthrough.”
“Yes, sir,” Morrell said. “I think that’s exactly what will happen. I want to be at the sharp end of the wedge.”
“I think we’ll break through, too,” Sherrard said. “I really and truly do.” He sounded surprised at himself, as if still unsure how Custer had managed to seduce him away from the doctrine he himself had helped formulate.
“And once the barrels have broken the way,” Custer went on, “we can also send in the cavalry, to complete the enemy’s demoralization and sweep up his shattered, flying remnants.”
Morrell, Dowling, and Sherrard looked at one another. None of them said a word. Every army east of the Mississippi had a division or two of cavalry based a little behind the front, waiting to exploit a breakthrough. The few times the horsemen got into action, they and their mounts died in droves. They were up above the level of the trenches, and their horses made big targets. Morrell didn’t think that would be any different even after the barrels went in.
By the looks on their faces, neither did Sherrard nor Dowling. Under his breath, Dowling said, “That’ll be a fine plan-when they invent a bulletproof horse.”
“They did,” Morrell murmured, also
“What’s that?” Custer said. “What’s that? Speak up, dammit. People around me are always mumbling.”
“Sorry, sir,” Morrell said. Custer wasn’t deaf as a post, but he didn’t hear all that well, either, so nothing
