“Probably enough so that, if we start ourselves a counterattack, the Yankees won’t have enough reinforcements left to be able to hold us back,” Jeff said.
Sergeant Cross laughed louder than the joke deserved. “That’s good, Pinkard, that’s right good,” he said, but then gave the game away by adding, “Ain’t heard you say nothin’ that funny in a while now.”
“World hasn’t been a funny place lately, and that’s a fact,” Jeff said. “The Yankees have been pushin’ us back every place there is to push, and livin’ in the trenches wouldn’t be my notion of a high old time even if we was winnin’. Other thing is, way it sounds is that everybody else on our side is about to fall over dead, too. Don’t know about you, Sarge, but none of that makes me want to do a buck and wing.”
Hip Rodriguez looked at Pinkard with his large, dark eyes and didn’t say anything. He was still convinced Jeff had more urgent reasons for not making jokes these days. He was right, of course, but also too polite to push it.
Sergeant Cross lacked Sonoran manners. Not only that, he outranked Pinkard, which Hip didn’t. He said, “I don’t reckon it’s fretting over whether we’re goin’ to lose the damn war that’s made you try to get yourself killed every time we sent raiders out the past couple months.”
“Haven’t been trying to get myself killed,” Pinkard protested, which, at least as far as the top part of his mind went, was true. “Want to kill me as many damnyankees as I can, is all.”
“You used to have better sense than to volunteer to do it all the damn time,” Cross said. “You go across no-man’s-land often enough, sooner or later you don’t come back.”
If he could have shot Emily and Bedford first, Pinkard might have been content to turn his Tredegar on himself. One of the reasons he shook his head now was that he hadn’t shot the damned bitch. Give her the satisfaction of outliving him? He shook his head again.
Then, from the other side of no-man’s-land, the Yankees started firing trench mortars. The bombs whistled cheerily as they fell. As he’d almost done for the leaflet, Pinkard threw himself flat. “Hijos del diablo!” Hip Rodriguez shouted as he dove down to the bottom of the trench, too.
Sons of the devil, that meant, and Pinkard couldn’t have agreed more. Mortar bombs flew right down into a trench, as conventional artillery, with its flatter trajectory, often could not. Along the line, somebody shrieked as fragments pierced him.
Machine guns started to rattle, both from the Yankees’ entrenchments and from the Confederate line under attack. “They’re coming!” someone yelled.
Cursing, Jeff scrambled up. That made him more vulnerable to the mortar bombs, which kept on falling. Lying down and waiting for damnyankees to jump into the trench and shoot him or bayonet him was the worse side of that bargain, though.
Just as he gained his feet, a soldier in green-gray did leap down into the trench. Jeff thought he shot him before the Yankee’s feet hit the dirt. As the fellow crumpled, Jeff shot him again. He groaned. His Springfield slipped from fingers that could hold it no longer. Blood poured from the wounds in his chest and from his mouth and nostrils. He was a dead man, even if he didn’t quite know it yet.
His pals were intent on making Jefferson Pinkard a dead man, too. Jeff shot another Yankee just before the man could shoot him. The U.S. soldiers shouted to one another in their sharp accents. They seemed dismayed that the Confederates should be so alert and ready to fight. “How the hell we supposed to bring back prisoners like the lieutenant wants?” one of them called to another.
“Shit, I don’t know,” his friend answered. “I only hope to Jesus I bring myself back in one piece.”
Here and there, parties of damnyankees were getting into the Confederate trenches. Then it became a stalking game, rushing out of traverses and into firebays, flinging grenades, and fighting vicious little battles with bayonet and entrenching tool.
Jefferson Pinkard didn’t think he was trying to get himself killed. But he was at the fore of the party that swarmed out of a traverse to beat down the last U.S. squad still holding a length of firebay. He swung an entrenching tool with savage abandon, reveling in the resistance the flesh and bones of a Yankee’s head gave to the edge of the tool, reveling also in the way the soldier in green-gray moaned and dropped his rifle and clutched at himself and toppled, all in the space of a couple of seconds.
Then the Yankees, those few who hadn’t been shot or stabbed or otherwise put out of action, were fleeing over the parapet and back toward their own lines. “Have fun in the state of Houston, boys!” Pinkard shouted, taking a couple of potshots at the retreating U.S. soldiers. He thought he hit one of them; the others kept on running.
A couple of U.S. soldiers still lay groaning and wounded in the trench. Sergeant Albert Cross examined their injuries with experience gained in a lot of war. “They ain’t gonna make it back to field hospitals still breathing,” he said. “Christ, Pinkard, looks like you took off half this poor bastard’s face with that damn shovel of yours.”
“He wasn’t there to give me a kiss, Sarge,” Jeff answered.
“Didn’t say he was,” Cross replied equably. He pointed down the length of the firebay. “Might as well put these sons of bitches out of their misery.”
Nobody moved for a few seconds. There wasn’t a Confederate soldier in the trench who didn’t hope somebody, regardless of whether friend or foe, would do him that favor if he ever lay in agony, horribly wounded. That didn’t mean many men were eager to do the job. Killing in cold blood, even for the sake of mercy, was different from killing in battle.
“I’ll take care of it,” Pinkard said at last. He loaded a new clip into his Tredegar and walked slowly down the trench line. Whenever he came across a U.S. soldier who was still breathing, he shot him in the head. One of the Yankees, whose guts spilled out onto the ground from a dreadful bayonet wound, thanked him as he pulled the trigger.
“They didn’t buy anything cheap today,” Sergeant Cross said.
“No,” Jeff answered, “but they’re in Texas and we ain’t in New Mexico. What the hell have we bought?” Cross didn’t say another word.
TheGreatWar: Breakthroughs
Lieutenant Gordon McSweeney peered across the Mississippi from the bushes on the low, swampy Arkansas bank to the bluffs on which sat Memphis, Tennessee. U.S. guns, painfully moved forward over roads that would have had to improve to be reckoned miserable, pounded away at the Confederate bastion.
Nor were the Confederates in the least shy about pounding back. They had a lot of guns in Memphis, and a lot of shells, too. Rail lines up from Mississippi made it easy for them to keep those guns supplied with munitions. Farther east, the course of the Tennessee River shielded Memphis from attack by the U.S. First Army.
And C.S. river gunboats dominated not only the course of the Tennessee but also this stretch of the Mississippi. The mines upstream remained too thick for U.S. monitors to make their way down and challenge the Confederate boats. That meant that, wherever the CSA wanted large-caliber guns to deliver their fire, they could-and they did. They’d hurt U.S. forces on the west bank of the river too many times already.
A U.S. field gun down by the riverbank not far from where McSweeney was standing presumed to fire on one of the river monitors flying the Confederate naval ensign. It hit the monitor square on the turret. The C.S. boat, though, was armored to withstand the shells of others of its kind. A hit from a three-inch gun got its attention but did no damage to speak of-the worst of both worlds.
Ponderously, the turret swung so that the pair of eight-inch guns inside bore on the field piece. Flame and great clouds of gray smoke belched from the muzzles of those eight-inch guns. A couple of seconds later, McSweeney heard the roar as the sound traveled across the water to his ear. An instant after that-or perhaps an instant before-the two shells launched from the guns blew the U.S. field piece and its crew to kingdom come. On steamed the gunboat, smug in its invulnerability.