When the bombardment abruptly ended, whistles blew up and down the American line, piping like insistent sparrows. Martin scrambled to his feet, ignoring the pack that weighed him down like a mule. "Come on, you lugs!" he shouted to his men. "Let's go get 'em!"
Fear made his feet light as he rushed toward the Confederate line. That hadn't been a very long pounding, and the little mountain howitzers that were the only guns able to move up through this god-awful country hardly threw any kind of shell at all. Plenty of Rebels would be left to draw beads on the oncoming men in green-gray. Maybe one of them was drawing a bead on his brisket right now.
Roger Hodges, light on his feet as a gandy dancer, sped past Martin. Then he tripped and staggered and started to fall, but was arrested by something just above waist high. "Wire!" he wailed in despair.
That was the last thing he ever said. As he hung there writhing, trying to twist free of the iron barbs that snagged him, two bullets smacked home in quick succession. They sounded like fists. He still hung after that, but no longer writhed.
Martin cautiously approached the area where his squadmate had found the wire the hard way. The Confederates hadn't made a real belt of it, just two or three strands to slow up their attackers. That had been all they needed to pot poor Roger Hodges.
If you knew the wire was there, a few snips with a cutter and you were through it. Martin ran on. Now he could see the Rebels' firing pits, and the flames that spurted from the muzzles of their rifles whenever they pulled trigger. All those flashes seemed aimed right at him. The Confederates were much more readily visible than his own comrades, who took advantage of every bit of cover they could find.
For the last few yards, there was no cover. Yelling like fiends, U.S. troopers were crossing those yards and routing out the Confederates with rifle fire and with bayonet. Chester Martin yelled, too. It helped, not much but a little. He sprinted toward the nearest hole he saw. He was almost there when a big fellow in butternut popped up in it and started to bring his rifle to his shoulder.
Martin shot from the hip. Drill sergeants said you never hit anything that way. He proved them right, because he missed. But he didn't miss by much, and he did rattle the Rebel enough to make him miss, too. The man never got a chance for a second shot; Martin's bayonet punched into his throat while he was still working the bolt to his rifle.
Blood sprayed into Martin's face. The Confederate made a horrible gobbling noise and clutched both hands to his neck. He swayed, tottered, and fell. In dozens of little fights like that one, the U.S. soldiers cleared the Rebels from their line. The Confederate machine guns fell silent. The men who fought under the Stars and Bars were brave enough and to spare; most of them died rather than retreating. A few plunged back into the trees and made for their next line, up closer to the crest of Catawba Mountain.
Martin looked around for his squad, trying to keep some order as the Americans advanced. Roger Hodges he didn't need to worry about; he already knew that. He was jolted, though, to find he had only five men with him. Another soldier was dead besides Hodges, he heard, and three more wounded.
As they formed up, one of his privates, a tall blond kid named Andersen, said, "If we lose half our guys every time we attack, how long till nobody's left any more?"
He'd probably meant it for a joke, the kind of graveyard humor that came naturally in the middle of a battle. But Chester Martin had the sort of mind that figured things out. Lose half the squad in the next attack and you'd have three left. Do it again and you'd have one and a half-say two, if you were lucky. Do it one more time after that and you'd be down to your last guy. No law said that guy had to be Corporal Martin, either.
By the looks on the soldiers' faces, they were working through the same calculation, and not liking what they came up with any more than he did. He paused to roll himself a cigarette and then, after he'd lighted it, to go through the pockets and pack of the Rebel he'd killed for whatever tobacco he had on him. The little cloth sack in which the fellow had carried his fixings had blood on it, but there was nothing wrong with the fine Virginia weed inside. Martin stuck it in his own pocket.
Handling the enemy's corpse gave him the answer, or part of it. He pointed to the body, and then to all the other sprawled corpses in the defense line the American troops had stormed. "Cost us a good bit to get here, yeah," he said, "but it cost them plenty, too, trying to hold us back. And we did what we were supposed to, and the Rebels didn't. Besides"-he pointed back the way he'd come-"we've got replacements moving up behind us, to help on the next push. Won't be us right on the shit end of the stick all the damn time."
That seemed to satisfy his men. And, sure enough, reinforcements were coming up, soldiers whose green-gray uniforms were less draggled than his own and who stared, mouths and eyes open wide, at bodies and pieces of bodies lying on blood-soaked grass and dirt. The sight of a few glum Confederate prisoners, some of them wounded, being hustled off to the rear did not seem an adequately glorious compensation.
"Come on, you birds," Martin called; the second-line soldiers' sergeants looked to be as stunned as any of the men they were supposed to be leading. "This is what it looks like; this is what they pay us for. Ain't you glad you was drafted?"
"That's telling them, Corporal," said Captain Orville Wyatt, the company commander.
Martin hadn't seen him since the attack started. "Glad you're okay, sir," he said.
"Now that you mention it, so am I," Wyatt said offhandedly. He was about thirty-five, with a little thin mustache instead of the more common Kaiser Bill. It suited his long, thin, pale face better than a Kaiser Bill would have; Martin had to admit as much. He didn't know how the devil the captain would get through the war with a pair of steel-framed spectacles riding his nose, but that was Wyatt's problem, not his. The company commander knew his business, which was what counted most.
Some of the Rebs who'd run off into the woods hadn't run all the way back to their next line after all. Instead, they started sniping at the U.S. troops who'd taken away their firing pits and trenches. A couple of groups of cursing Americans turned the captured machine guns around and fired long bursts at the trees upslope. That reduced the enemy fire but didn't stop it.
Somewhere- probably on the reverse slope of the mountain- the Confederates had a battery of their quick-firing three-inch howitzers. Martin had already come under fire from them, and didn't like them worth a damn. Now shells started landing in and around the captured line- not a lot of shells, and not very accurately delivered, but not the sort of greeting he wanted, either. As with fire from your own guns, you were just as dead from a lucky hit as you were if somebody drew a bead on you and drilled you through the chest.
Captain Wyatt, as if annoyed at untimely rain, remarked, "We're not going back, and I don't much fancy staying here. Only thing left to do is advance."
Martin tossed the tiny butt of his cigarette into the dirt and ground it out with his heel. "You heard the man," he told his squad-or what was left of it. "Into the woods we go, off to Grandmother's house. Keep your eyes open and watch where you set your feet. We already know there's wolves in there."
His men chuckled. If you laughed, you could let on that you weren't scared. Your buddies would believe it, or make like they did. If you got lucky, you might even believe it yourself.
They'd gone a couple of hundred yards farther up the mountain, trading shots with Confederates they couldn't see and who- God willing- had trouble seeing them, too, when they came to a clearing, an oval meadow maybe two hundred yards wide and a hundred across. It would have been the most inviting place in the world, except for the machine gun hammering away from the far side of it.