“You’ve found him, sir,” Martin said, and jabbed a thumb at his own chest.
The major looked surprised, but only for a moment. “All right, Sergeant. Looks like you got your job the same way I got mine.”
“Yes, sir: I’m still breathing,” Martin answered.
“Fair enough,” the major said with a laugh. “I’m Gideon Adkins. Happens that I’m the senior officer still breathing in this regiment, so the 91st is mine till they send somebody to take my place-if they ever get around to that.”
“We’re in the same boat, all right, sir,” Martin said. “Let’s get down to business. What do you need from B Company?”
Adkins studied him. He knew what was in the major’s mind-the same thing that would be in a brigadier general’s mind when he studied Adkins: can this man do the job, or do we need to replace him? If they did replace Martin, he hoped he wouldn’t be as resentful as Bob Reinholdt had been when he first joined the company.
Well, Major Adkins couldn’t complain about the question he’d asked. Indeed, the young regimental commander said, “That’s the spirit, Sergeant…”
“Oh, sorry, sir. I’m Chester Martin.”
“Thanks, Sergeant Martin. Wish I didn’t have to ask, but I’m still learning the ropes, too, no doubt about it. All right, here’s what you need to know: in three days, we go over the top. First objective is Manassas. Second objective is Independent Hill.” Adkins drew a much-folded map from his breast pocket and pointed the hill out to Martin.
After he glanced at the scale of miles, Martin raised his eyebrows. “Sir, that looks to be eight or ten miles past Manassas. If they’re setting that as an objective for this attack, they do think the Confederate States are ready to throw in the sponge.”
“If they aren’t, we’re going to make them throw it in anyhow,” Gideon Adkins declared. “That’s what this attack is all about. We’ll have plenty of barrels to throw at them, and plenty of aeroplanes, and they’ll be bringing forward some new light machine guns that’ll do a better job of keeping up with a rapid advance.”
“That all sounds good, sir.” Martin gave a wry smile. “And there’ll be plenty of us old-fashioned, garden-variety infantrymen around, to do whatever the barrels and the aeroplanes and the machine guns can’t.”
“Infantrymen?” Major Adkins made as if he’d never heard the word. Then he laughed and slapped Martin on the back. “Yes, I expect there’ll be something or other for old-fashioned critters like us to do.”
Martin spread the word to the other sergeants who commanded the platoons in his company. They had all seen a lot of fighting. One of them said, “Well, it’s been going better lately, but ain’t a one of us’d have the job he’s doing right now if it’d been going what you’d call good.” That summed up the course of the war so well, nobody tried to improve on it.
Barrels came forward under cover of night. They went into position behind the front line, shielded from snoopy Confederates by canvas when the sun rose. Even so, they were about as hard to hide as a herd of elephants in church. U.S. aeroplanes did their best to keep Rebel observers in the sky from flying over territory the United States held.
As had the other recent offensives, this one opened with a short, sharp artillery barrage, designed more to startle and paralyze than to crush. Nobody had bothered to issue Chester Martin a whistle-even if he was commanding a company, he wasn’t an officer. “Come on, boys!” he shouted. “A couple more kicks and the doors fall down.”
A lot of soldiers would fall down, too, fall down and never get up again. Martin wondered how many times he’d gone over the top now. The only answer he came up with was, too many. As machine-gun and rifle bullets whipped around him, he wondered why the hell he’d done it even once. For the life of him-literally, for the life of him-he came up with no answer.
The barrels behind which the infantry advanced forced their way through the Confederates’forward line. U.S. fighting scouts buzzed low overhead, adding their machine-gun fire to that from the barrels-and that from the light machine guns Major Adkins had talked about. Having along firepower more potent than that which Springfields could provide felt very good to a veteran foot soldier.
Here and there, Rebel machine-gun nests and knots of stubborn soldiers in butternut, some white men, some colored, held up the U.S. advance. Martin’s bayonet had blood on it before he got out of the trench system. Rebel artillery, though outgunned, remained scrappy. And the Rebels had barrels of their own, if not so many as those that bore down on them.
Yet, even though resistance was heavy in spots, the Army of Northern Virginia yielded its forward positions more readily than Chester Martin had ever seen it do before. As the soldiers in green-gray broke out of the trenches and into open country, he spotted Bob Reinholdt not far away. “This is too damn easy,” he called. “The Rebs have to have something up their sleeve.”
“Reckon you’re right,” Reinholdt answered, “but to hell with me if I know what it is. I’m going to enjoy this while it lasts.”
“Yeah, me, too,” Martin said. He didn’t enjoy it long, because the Army of Northern Virginia did have something up its sleeve. It had put fewer men into the forward trenches than usual, its generals perhaps aware that, no matter what they did, they could not withstand the first U.S. blow.
Once the first line was pierced, though…The Confederates had machine guns cunningly concealed in every cornfield. They had snipers in every other pine and oak. The ground south of their front line was more stubbornly defended than Martin remembered from earlier fights. He tried to think strategically. In those earlier fights, the Rebs defending open country had been men forced from their trenches. Here, the Confederates had planned from the beginning to fight in the open, and they showed a nasty talent for it.
Martin got to hate cornfields in a hurry. The plants stood taller than a man. You couldn’t see more than one row at a time. Anything might be lurking among them. All too often, it was. Machine guns, trip wires, foxholes…anything at all.
His company managed to bypass the fighting for Manassas itself, skirting it to the west. Before long, by the sound of things, the town was cut off and surrounded, but the Confederates inside showed no signs of quitting: they kept banging away at the U.S. soldiers with whatever they had.
“Come on!” Martin yelled as a Wright two-decker, which could see better than he could, poured fire on the Rebs in a field ahead. The objective lines on Major Adkins’ map had seemed insanely optimistic. They were. The soldiers weren’t going to reach those set for the first day, even if Manassas would fall soon. Martin rolled himself in a blanket when night came and wearily thanked God he was still breathing.
The next day was another grim blur, as the Rebs brought reinforcements forward and tried to counterattack. The U.S. soldiers, glad to play defense for a little while, took savage pleasure in mowing them down. By that evening, the Confederates couldn’t find any more troops who would press home a counterattack. Their raw recruits would make a halfhearted lunge, then fall back in disorder and dismay when rifle and machine-gun bullets began to bite.
By noon the next day, a day behind the preordained schedule but far ahead of Chester Martin’s fondest dreams, he stood atop Independent Hill-a knob barely deserving the name-and peered south, wondering where the next push would take him.
Somewhere north of Independent Hill, Jake Featherston and what was left of his battery-what was left of the First Richmond Howitzers, what was left of the Army of Northern Virginia-tried to hold back the tide with bare hands. He was filthy; he couldn’t remember the last time he’d had leisure even to splash in a creek. His butternut uniform, aside from being out at the knees and elbows, had enough green splotches on it to make him look halfway like a damnyankee.
The real damnyankees were forcing their way across Cedar Run. He’d expected they would be any time now, and had taken the range for his guns. “Let’s give it to them, boys,” he shouted, and the four surviving guns of the battery began banging away. Peering through field glasses, he watched the explosions a couple of miles to the north. The shells were falling right where he wanted them to: on the leading Yankees and trailing Confederates.