Nero and Perseus came-at a faster clip than they'd used when the war first broke out. Then, they might have been picking cotton for a plantation owner they despised. They'd come to realize, though, that keeping their crew in shells was liable to mean keeping themselves alive. As with the soldiers they served, survival was a powerful incentive toward good performance.
Each crate held twelve shells. Counting the weight of the wood in the crate itself, the weight the blacks were hauling was up close to a couple of hundred pounds each go. Grunting with effort, they unloaded crates as the driver and the gun crew watched. Then, sweat running down their faces, they went back to the animals they'd been watching.
"Lazy," the driver repeated. He flicked the reins. The horses strained in harness. The driver tipped his hat to the artillerymen and headed southwest down the dirt track called School Road toward the division supply dump.
Jethro Bixler attacked the tops of the ammunition crates with a pry bar. Nails squealed as the tops came up. Bixler flung each aside in turn. He would have made two of either Nero or Perseus: a big blond broad-shouldered fellow with the look of a blacksmith to him. When one of the ammunition crates wasn't close enough to the howitzer to suit him, he picked it up single-handed and set it where he wanted it. Then he struck a circus strongman pose, as if to proclaim to the world that that had been a deliberate demonstration of prowess, not a white man stooping to do nigger work.
Other wagons turned off from School Road for the rest of the guns in the battery. The Negroes attached to the artillery unit stopped what they were doing to unload the shells. Through the roar of guns that kept firing, Featherston listened to the artillerymen screaming at the blacks to hurry.
"Flip those lids over, Jethro," Featherston said when Bixler was through opening up the new crates. "Don't want anybody stepping on a nail. He'd miss all the fun." He let out a wry chuckle.
"Right y'are, Sergeant," Bixler said. "I tell you, I done had just about all the fun I can stand, thank you kindly.' Fore we started, wasn't nobody said it'd be like this here. The damnyankees, they're tougher'n Paw an' Granddad made 'em out to be."
Several of the other men nodded agreement to that, Jake Featherston among them-it was hardly something you could deny. Featherston said, "If everything went the way it was supposed to, we'd be over the Susquehanna by now, drivin' for the Delaware River."
"Yeah." Jethro Bixler slammed a meaty fist into an equally meaty thigh in his enthusiasm. "My family, we had kin in Baltimore, back before the War of Secession. Hellfire, for all I know, we still do, but nobody on our side o' the border's heard from 'em in fifty years. We should have taken Maryland away from the damnyankees after we made peace with 'em the first time."
"And Delaware," added Pete Howard, one of the shell carriers. "All that country is ours by rights, by Jesus."
"Before it's ours, we got to take it," Featherston said, which drew more nods from the rest of the crew. "We ain't even in Baltimore yet."
"Ain't supposed to be in it," answered Bixler, who fancied himself a strategist. "Supposed to wheel around and cut it off so it damn well falls."
"Yeah, but we ain't done that yet, is the problem," Featherston retorted. "The damnyankees still got that railroad goin' through down alongside Chesapeake Bay. We can't wheel round an' cut that line, they're liable to do some cuttin' of their own and leave us stranded up here."
The wheel was supposed to have taken them to the west bank of the Delaware by Wilmington, and to have cut off the area south of the front from any possible support by the United States. It might still do that; Jake hoped to God it would still do that. But every day they fell farther behind their planned advance line, and that was another day the U.S. forces could ship more men and munitions down from Philadelphia. The Confederate army still had to cross the Susquehanna. Lee had done it, after hammering McClellan outside of Camp Hill. But Lee hadn't had to face machine guns that could melt a regiment down to platoon size in a matter of minutes if you tried attacking them head on-and how else were you going to attack them if you were forcing a river line?
Featherston looked back over his shoulder, down School Road. It hadn't been much of a road to begin with. It was even less now, after Yankee artillery had chewed it up-and Confederate artillery, too, before the men in butternut advanced so far. Half a mile back from the battery, mechanics worked on a couple of motor trucks that had broken down trying to bring supplies forward. The front demanded a flood of materiel. Thanks to the miserable roads, it got a trickle.
"No wonder the Yanks are givin' us such a hard time," Jake muttered.
Captain Jeb Stuart III trotted up to Featherston's gun. "Get the team hitched to your piece," the battery commander called. "We're moving forward, maybe a mile." He pointed northeast. "The damnyankees are holed up in a couple of stone farmhouses out that way, and they've got a whole regiment stalled on its track-haven't been able to clear 'em out with rifles and machine guns, so they want us to knock the houses down."
"You hear that, Nero, Perseus?" Featherston called as Stuart went off to give the order to the rest of the battery. The two Negroes nodded and brought the horses over. Hitching the animals to the gun trail was a matter of a few minutes, for they were already in harness. Hitching the other team to the supply wagon that followed the gun was also quickly done. Then, swearing and sweating, Nero and Perseus lifted the crates of shells they'd just unloaded from one wagon up onto another.
"Move 'em out!" Captain Stuart was shouting, and waving his cap in his hand to urge the men on. Pompey brought him a glass of something cool to drink. He upended it, gave it back to the servant, and went on shouting to the gun crew and to the laborers without whom they wouldn't have been nearly so efficient.
It hadn't rained for several days, so the road-or rather, track-to the new position wasn't muddy. When a howitzer bogged down hub-deep in muck, everybody, blacks and whites together, put shoulders to it to keep it moving. Leaves on some of the trees were beginning to go from green to gold and red. They wouldn't have started turning this early in September back in the CSA.
Since the dirt track was dry, they got dust instead of mud. By the time they reached the new position, everyone was the same shade of grayish brown, Featherston no less than Nero. The artillery sergeant peered through the field glasses at the farmhouses Captain Stuart wanted the battery to destroy.
"Range about thirty-five hundred yards, I'd make it," he said, and worked the elevation screw to lower the field gun's barrel to accommodate the shorter range. Stuart had been right; the Confederates had advanced past the farmhouses to either side, but were halted in front of them. Even through field glasses, corpses were tiny at two miles, but Featherston saw a lot of them.
He studied the gunsight again, then traversed the barrel slightly to the left. "Load it and we'll fire for effect," he said.
Jethro Bixler set a shell in the breech, then closed it with a scrape of metal against metal. He bowed to Featherston as if they were a couple of fancy gentlemen-say, Jeb Stuart III and one of the Sloss brothers-at an inaugural ball in Richmond. "Would you care to do the honors?"
"Hell yes," Jake said with a laugh, and pulled the lanyard. The field gun barked. He got the field glasses up to his eyes just as the shell hit three or four seconds later. "Miss," he said, and clucked to himself in annoyance. "Long and still off to the right."