“You talk like something right out of the Bible, sir,” said a private named Rogers who had not been in the section or platoon McSweeney led before getting the whole company.
“It is the word of God,” McSweeney answered. “Is a man not wise to shape his words in the pattern of those of his Father?”
Rogers didn’t answer. He just kept marching. That suited Gordon McSweeney fine. Even if he had the words of the Good Book on which to model his own, he was more comfortable doing than talking. Men could easily argue what he said. No one could argue about what he did.
Spatters of gunfire off to the right said the Confederates were trying to slow down the U.S. advance any way they could. The gunfire wasn’t close enough for him to swing his men out of their line of march to respond to it, so he kept them going. After U.S. forces finally forced the Rebs out of Jonesboro, the front had grown fluid for a change. The more ground he made his men cover, the closer they would be to Memphis.
Up ahead, one of those Rebel copies of a French 75 started banging away. McSweeney muttered something under his breath that would have been a curse had he permitted himself to take the name of the Lord in vain. Like every U.S. infantryman who had ever advanced against them, he hated those quick-firing field guns. This one, fortunately, was shooting long, over the heads of his company. Officers who hadn’t pushed their men so hard would have to worry about explosives and shrapnel balls and shell fragments.
The road led out of the woods and into a clearing, near the center of which stood a farmhouse. Rifle fire came from the farmhouse. McSweeney’s smile was broad and welcoming. “All right, men,” he said. “If they want to play, we can play with them. Let’s see how they like the game then.”
Past that, he needed to give very few orders. The men knew what needed doing, and did it without undue fuss or bother. Fire-and-move tactics that had taken them through the heavily fortified forest were perhaps wasted against a farmhouse with a few diehards in it, but the U.S. soldiers used them even so. Some went left, some went right. Before long, they had worked in close enough to pitch grenades through the windows of the house.
McSweeney wished for his flamethrower. How the faded pine timbers of this place would have burned! Then a fire started anyhow, whether from grenades or bullets he could not tell. A couple of men in butternut burst out the front door. They weren’t surrendering; they came out shooting. A fusillade of lead stretched them lifeless in the dust.
One of them was white, the other colored. McSweeney looked down at the Negro’s bleeding corpse and shook his head. “If black men will fight for the government that for so long has mistreated their kind, they deserve whatever that government gives them,” he said. “When they rose in revolt against their masters, I admired them. If they fight for those masters…they will pay the price, as this one has.”
After the brief interruption, the company moved on. A few Confederates fired at them from out of the bushes. They hunted the Rebs, though McSweeney, to his disgust, thought a couple of them got away.
Then came an interruption of a different sort. McSweeney had long since grown used to shells from field guns screeching their way through the sky. It had been a long time, though, since he’d heard a roar of cloven air like this one. Altogether without conscious thought, he threw himself flat.
The great shell burst fifty yards off to the left. Even as dirt thudded down onto his back and fragments hissed malevolently through the air, another shell thundered home, this one striking about twenty-five yards to the right of the road.
Some men were down as McSweeney was, to gain what little shelter they could from those enormous rounds. Others were down and screaming or wailing, clutching arms or legs or bellies. Others were down and not moving at all, nor would they ever move again.
“They aren’t supposed to have this kind of firepower way the hell out here!” somebody shouted. “Those have to be eight-inch, maybe ten-inch, shells.” Even as he spoke, two more of the big shells thundered in. More screams rose.
Busy with his entrenching tool, McSweeney forgot to reprove the soldier for cursing. Suddenly, the answer blazed in him. “River monitors!” he exclaimed. “They shelled us when we crossed the Ohio. This must be another one. If our own boats could get down as far as Memphis, we wouldn’t have been fighting our way through Arkansas all these months.”
Another pair of shells burst not far away. “What can we do, sir?” a soldier cried.
“Pray,” McSweeney answered. He would have said that under most circumstances. It seemed particularly fitting here. “What else can we do, when no guns of ours are able to reach those aboard the Confederate river monitor?”
As he spoke, he dug himself deeper into the soft, dark brown soil. The unwounded men in the company did the same. So did some of the wounded men. After almost three years of war, digging entrenchments was altogether natural. McSweeney had known men safe behind their own lines to dig foxholes before settling down to sleep for the night. He’d done it himself a couple of times.
Up ahead, a Confederate machine gun started barking. If the river monitor hadn’t halted McSweeney’s troops, they would have run into it in short order-and it would have done them about as much damage as the big guns on the Mississippi were doing.
Most company commanders would have sent scouts forward to examine the enemy machine-gun position. That never entered Gordon McSweeney’s mind. He scrambled out of the foxhole he had dug just as another pair of shells from the river monitor landed near the position his company had taken. More dirt rained down on him. Even after he stuck a finger in one ear, it didn’t hear so well as it should have.
He wriggled forward. One thing was different now that the U.S. Army had finally pushed the Rebs out of their lines in front of Jonesboro: not so much barbed wire on the ground to hamper movement. Grass and shrubs gave plenty of cover, too, and his muddy green-gray uniform made him hard to spot as he scooted toward the machine gun.
No concrete emplacement here. The Rebs were set up in a nest of sandbags. All the same, McSweeney bit his lip in frustration. Even if he picked off all the gunners, who seemed to have no idea he was anywhere close by, more Confederates would take over the weapon. He shrugged a tiny shrug. That might do. The new Rebels at the machine gun wouldn’t be a regular crew, and wouldn’t shoot so effectively.
He was just bringing his rifle up to his shoulder when firing off to his right made the Confederates turn the gun in that direction and start blazing away at his countrymen who were trying to advance over there. With the Rebs thus distracted, McSweeney put a bullet through the head of one of them. When the other one, the one who fed belts into the machine gun, half rose to check his friend, McSweeney drilled him, too. Both Confederate soldiers slumped down. He thought they were both dead.
His member throbbed. Save for an annoyed mutter too low to make sense even to himself, he ignored it. He waited for more Confederates to come forward and take over the gun. They didn’t. It sat there, silent. He muttered again, this time intelligibly: “Fools.”
He crawled to within sixty or seventy yards of it, where the cover petered out. Then he wasn’t crawling. He was running, in great bounding leaps. A couple of startled shouts rose. A few bullets cracked past him. None bit, though. He dove over the wall of sandbags, knocked the Confederate corpses out of the way, and manhandled the machine gun around so that it bore on the surviving Rebs farther east. Grinning from ear to ear, he gave them a taste of their own medicine.