McSweeney, on the other hand, went off and found his company commander. “Permission to stage a raid on the enemy’s trenches tonight, sir?” he asked. Captain Schneider nodded. McSweeney saluted. Sometimes things were very easy to arrange.
But, to his annoyance, Schneider came up to the forwardmost trench while the men who would take part in the raid were scrambling over the parapet. The company commander frowned. “It’s usual for raiders to take along an extra sack of grenades or two,” he remarked.
“Yes, sir, so it is,” McSweeney agreed. “We have them. You must have seen.”
“I saw,” Schneider said grimly. He pointed to McSweeney. “It is highly unusual, however, for a man to go on a trench raid festooned with a flamethrower.”
“I suppose it may be, sir.” When McSweeney shrugged, the heavy tank of jellied gasoline on his back dug into his kidneys. His voice sounded more innocent than it had any business being. “Of course, there aren’t that many flamethrowers in action.”
“There aren’t that many people crazy enough to want to use the damned things, either,” Schneider said. “What the hell have you got lurking at the back of your mind this time, Sergeant?”
“Sir, if we always do the same thing when we fight the Rebels, they’ll catch on and lick us. If we do something different every now and again, that will keep them guessing,” McSweeney answered. “If they’re guessing, even the same old thing will work better, because they won’t be looking for it so much.”
Captain Schneider gave him a fishy stare. “If I’d wanted strategy, Sergeant, I’d have talked with the General Staff.” He waited to see if that would squeeze any more details out of McSweeney. When it didn’t, he grimaced. “Sergeant, if you go and get yourself killed, I shall be annoyed with you.”
“I am in God’s hands, sir,” McSweeney said. “So long as He bears me up, I shall not fall. I do not believe He is ready to abandon me yet. May I go now? I don’t want the rest of them to get too far ahead of me.”
“And why is that?” Schneider asked. McSweeney stood mute. The captain raked him with a glance almost as hot as the flame that sprang from the nozzle of his flamethrower. When that failed to have any effect, Schneider said, “Go, then.” He turned his back, as if, like Pilate, washing his hands of the whole affair.
McSweeney climbed the sandbag steps out of the trench, scrambled over the parapet, and crawled toward the Confederate lines. He could hear, or thought he could hear, the rest of the raiders ahead. Their course swung a little to the right of being a straight line. His swung a little to the left.
Getting through his own wire was harder with the flamethrower on his back. Being quiet was harder, too. The tank rattled on his shoulders and banged and clanked whenever it hit a rock. He wished he would have thought to wrap it in a blanket before he set out, but he hadn’t, and it was too late.
He made his slow, cautious way toward that machine-gun position. As he crawled forward, he chuckled silently. He had plenty of new shell holes in which to conceal himself. That was an advantage, if a small one-the bombardment had revised the landscape so that it didn’t look as familiar to the Confederate gunners as it would have before.
Rifle fire erupted, perhaps half a mile to the south: by the sound, the Confederates were raiding U.S. trenches there. Machine guns on both sides opened up. The position toward which McSweeney was advancing fired in the direction of the U.S. line. The muzzle flashes from the machine guns were stuttering bayonets of flame. Tracers scribed brief orange lines of death through the night.
None of those tracers was aimed in McSweeney’s direction. He chuckled again as he scuttled forward. He’d sent out his party to keep the machine gunners from noticing his approach, and now the Rebs’ own raiding party was doing part of the job for him.
Slithering under and through the Confederate wire was a longer and tougher piece of work than getting through the sorry entanglements in front of his lines had been. For one thing, the Confederates had a little more wire than his side did. For another, moving silently was much more important here than it had been when he was several hundred yards farther away.
He inched forward. The concrete blockhouse that held the firing slits for the Confederate machine guns was only a hundred yards off…fifty…thirty…twenty. He stopped. He could incinerate it from here, but this was not the moment. He wanted some chance of getting back to his own lines again. If God chose not to give him one…well, that was God’s affair. Meanwhile, McSweeney would wait and hope and pray.
Off to his right, two grenades banged. Several others followed in short order. Rifles barked, Springfields and, with a slightly different note, Tredegars. Shouts erupted, and a high shrill scream that had to burst from the throat of a desperately wounded man.
Through the din, McSweeney heard the machine guns scrape against the rims of their firing slits as their crews traversed them. He heard the gunners curse his country. He shook his head. The Lord punished those who did such things. “And I am His instrument,” he whispered.
The machine guns opened up. More screams rose. McSweeney hoped Confederates were doing all the screaming, but doubted that was so. He felt sorry that some of the raiders he’d sent out would be hurt or killed, but only so sorry. God had made the world so some things simply could not be done without loss.
He got to his feet, pointed the nozzle of the flamethrower in the direction of the firing slits, and pulled the trigger. The action, after he’d worked on it, was smooth as glass. Flaming gasoline leaped the gap. The machine guns fell silent. The men who had served them, though, screamed like damned souls.
McSweeney shook his head. Torments of this world were brief, not eternal, and Satan surely had fires hotter than any of mortal devising. The Scotsman dropped back into the shell hole. Bullets creased the air. Half a minute later, he rose again and gave the machine-gun nest another taste of the lash of fire.
Cartridges inside the blockhouse began cooking off. No more screams came from it; the men inside were already cooked. McSweeney dropped down once more. He thought about standing again for a third dose of flame, but in the end thought better of it. The Confederates were howling with fury. Bullets buzzed overhead, thick as bees. He wondered if the Rebs would come out of the trenches after him. They didn’t. He smiled his alarming smile. Few men in his section would have been happy about going after a foe with a flamethrower, either.
He made his slow way back across no-man’s-land to his own lines, commending his soul to God all the way. If a bullet chanced to strike the fuel tank on his back-if God willed that a bullet should strike the fuel tank on his back-he would learn what sort of death he dealt out to others.
God did not so will. He scrambled over the parapet and down into his own trenches. Hunting down Captain Schneider, he said, “Sir, I can report that that machine-gun position will not trouble us again for some time to come.”
Schneider said nothing at all. He stood there in the dark, shaking his head. Ben Carlton happened to be standing not far away. “Goddamn but you’re a crazy son of a bitch, Sergeant,” he declared.
“Don’t blaspheme,” McSweeney answered automatically, and then, when he really heard what the company cook had said, “Thank you.”
Till his latest troubles started, Cincinnatus had never set foot in the Covington, Kentucky, city hall. Before the war started, a Negro in the CSA saw the inside of a city hall only if he was in some kind of trouble. Before the war, Cincinnatus had always stayed out of trouble. But he hadn’t stayed out since, and now the Yankees were grilling him.
Actually, Luther Bliss wasn’t quite a Yankee. He was the chief of the Kentucky State Police in the readmitted administration-head of the secret police, in other words. “Now, then, boy,” he said in a mild voice, “tell me again how that Kennedy son of a bitch happened to get himself shot dead on your doorstep.”