"Can't just charge that," Martin said, almost as if someone had asked him to do it. "We'd have dead piled up higher out there than they did at Camp Hill." His grandfather had been wounded in that fight. He'd worn a peg leg ever afterwards, and counted himself lucky to come out alive.
"We'll have to flank it out," Captain Wyatt agreed, and the corporal let out a silent sigh of relief. In spite of knowing what he was doing, Wyatt was a West Point man, and sometimes they got funny ideas about being duty-bound to die for their country. Chester Martin was more in favor of living for his country.
Captain Wyatt sent him and his squad around to the left of the clearing and another one off to the right. Martin and his men never made it to the machine gun. A couple of Rebels in the woods held them up and wounded one of them before they finally got flushed out and killed. Private Andersen didn't say anything, but his gloomy features had I told you so written all over them.
A fusillade of rifle fire put an end to the machine gun's deadly chatter. "Wonder what that cost," Andersen said glumly.
"Ahh, shut up, Paul," Martin told him. "If you aren't demoralizing the rest of the guys, you're sure as hell demoralizing me."
They swarmed on up toward the top of Catawba Mountain. The forest was full of men in green-gray now, with just enough Rebels in butternut lurking and shooting from concealment to make everybody jumpy and trigger-happy and to make sure that, every so often, a U.S. soldier got shot by his own buddies instead of the Confederates. Martin would have sworn that a couple of near misses came from behind him, not ahead, but what could you do except hope you didn't draw the short straw?
This time, he and his men found the Confederate barbed wire before it found them. Cutters clicked; the wire went twangg! as the tension on it was released. As before, the Rebs had run up only a couple of strands, not enough to impede troops who were alert for it-and a lot of men who hadn't been alert before were dead now.
Martin crawled and snaked forward till he could see the earth the Confederates-or rather, their Negro laborers- had thrown up in front of their firing pits. More and more U.S. soldiers joined him in the bushes, blazing away at the Southerners in the firing pits. Whistles sounded, up and down the line. Screaming like fiends, Martin and his comrades sprang to their feet and rushed the Confederate position.
As before, the fight was sharp but short; the U.S. forces had brought enough men forward that the advantage fighting from cover gave their foes wasn't enough to check them. "Come on!" Captain Wyatt shouted, even before the last Rebels in the line had been slain. "We're almost at the top of the mountain."
Still yelling, their blood up, the soldiers followed him and other officers on past the wrecked Confederate line. And, sure enough, another couple of hundred yards took them to the crest. Martin looked east toward the Roanoke River, toward the iron town of Big Lick on this side of it, toward the smokes rising from it and from the mines close by, toward the other stream of smoke from the train chugging out of the station: Big Lick was a major railroad junction. Once the U.S. Army fought its way down the mountain and to the river, it would badly hurt the Confederacy here.
A shot rang out, seemingly from nowhere. Not twenty feet from Martin, a private clutched at his throat and fell. "They've got snipers in the trees, the sneaky bastards!" somebody shouted.
"We'll get 'em out," Martin said grimly. Only a few miles separated him from Big Lick. He wondered how long it would take to get there.
Lucien Galtier clucked to his horse and flicked the reins. The horse snorted reproachfully, twitching its ears in annoyance. "I mean it, you old fraud," Galtier told it in his Quebecois French. "Do you want me to get out the whip and show you I mean it?"
The horse snorted again and got the wagon moving a little faster. Galtier chuckled under his breath. He and the horse had been playing this game for the past ten years. He hadn't used the whip since summer before last. He didn't expect to need it for another year or two more. They understood each other, the horse and he.
Drizzle slid down out of a leaden sky. He pulled his hat lower over his face-dark heavy eyebrows, swarthy skin, deep-set brown eyes, a goodly nose above a mouth that was almost a rosebud, dimpled chin in need of shaving- and wished he'd put on oilskins like the sailors wore. His shrug might have come from Paris. Not even a farmer could guess right about the weather all the time. Not even a saint can do that, he thought.
He couldn't see far through the rain. He didn't need to see far, though. He knew where he was-a couple of miles outside Riviere-du-Loup on the St. Lawrence River. The countryside was the same here as everywhere else in the neighborhood-farmland with wooden houses painted white, with the beams of the red-painted roofs projecting forward to create a veranda. Because of the drizzle, he couldn't see the tin spires of the churches in St.-Modeste and St.-Antonin, but he knew they were there. To look at things, all was as it might have been 250 years before.
And then, as he drew nearer to Riviere-du-Loup, things changed. The land grew pocked with shells, and the neat farmhouses and outbuildings were neat no more, but many of them charred ruins. The Canadians and British had made a stand, trying to keep the damned Americans from reaching the St. Lawrence. They'd failed.
"It is a terrible thing, war," Galtier told his horse. He and his ancestors hadn't seen the thing close up in a century and a half, not since the days when the British took Quebec away from France. It was here now, though. His nostrils twitched. Even through the rain, he could smell the sickly sweet odor of dead horses-and maybe dead men, too.
His horse also knew the odor for what it was, and made a nervous, snuffling noise. "Go on," Lucien told it. "Go on, my old. It cannot be helped and must be endured." How many times had his father said that to him and his brothers and sisters? How many times had he said it to his two sons and four daughters?
Boom! With a snort of fright, the horse stopped dead. Galtier wondered if he'd have to use the whip after all. Boom! Boom! Having reached the St. Lawrence, the Americans had put a battery of field guns with their wheels right on the edge of the bank. Now they were shooting at merchant ships on their way down to Montreal, ships whose captains hadn't got the word that the southern bank was in enemy hands. Boom! Boom!
Just when Lucien was reaching for the whip, the horse let out a human-sounding sigh and went on. Before long, the church spires of Riviere-du-Loup loomed out of the mist ahead. The town, which sat on a spur of rock that projected out into the St. Lawrence, was bigger than St.-Modeste and St.-Antonin put together, big enough to boast several churches, not just one. When Father Pascal had had perhaps a glass of wine too many, he talked about Riviere-du-Loup's being a bishopric one day. Like everyone else, Lucien listened and smiled and nodded and didn't hold his breath.
Boom! Boom! Now the sound of the artillery mingled with the plashing roar of the waterfall that plunged off the rock of Riviere-du-Loup and down ninety feet into the great river below. Boom! Like every other man his age, Galtier had done his time in the Army. He'd been an infantryman, like most conscripts, but he knew a little something about artillery. He wondered how the devil the fool of an American could find a target, let alone hit it, in this wretched weather.
Houses grew closer together as he came into town. Artillery had wrecked some of them. Once, a whole block was nothing but burnt-out wreckage. The stench of death lingered here, too. Some of the telegraph poles that had connected Riviere-du-Loup to the outside world were down, some leaning drunkenly, some standing but with the wires tangled at their bases.