But the din had also kept the Rebs from noticing the noise of a whole great whacking lot of barrels moving toward the front line-or so the brass hoped. So Chester Martin devoutly hoped, too.
He turned to David Hamburger. “Next time you write to your sister, tell her thanks,” he bawled in the kid’s ear. “Looks likely they’ve got a really big force of barrels here, like they’ve been doing it in Tennessee.”
“I don’t know how much she had to do with any of that,” Hamburger shouted-in effect, whispered-back. “You’ve got to remember, Sarge, she hates the war and anything that has anything to do with it.”
“Hey, she’s not the only one,” Martin said. “You think I like getting shot, you’re crazy. But if we’ve got to have the goddamn thing, we’d better win it. The only thing worse than having a war is losing one. The United States know all about that.”
Before Hamburger could reply, U.S. artillery, which had been pretty quiet, opened up with a thunderous roar. Short and sweet-that was how they did it these days. None of the week-long bombardments that Martin had seen on the Roanoke front, enormous cannonadings that did more to tell the Rebs where the attack was going in than anything else.
Artillery or no artillery, Bob Reinholdt kept right on sleeping. Martin went over and shook him, then had to leap back as Reinholdt lashed out with a trench knife. “Naughty,” Martin said; the corporal always woke up at maximum combat alertness. “Show’s about to start.”
“Yeah?” Reinholdt said. “All right.” He grunted, rolled up his blanket, and got to his feet. He hadn’t given Martin any trouble since absorbing both fist and steel reinforcement with his chin. Maybe he’d learned his lesson. Maybe he was biding his time. Martin still kept an eye on him, in case he was.
Captain Cremony strode along the trench. “All right, boys,” he said. “Now we’re driving nails in their coffin. We’ve cleared ’em out of Washington. We need a buffer, so they can’t shell it whenever they choose. Our granddads fought on this ground. They won some fights in Virginia, too, even if they didn’t win the war. We get to make up for what they couldn’t quite manage.”
“ My grandfather didn’t fight here,” David Hamburger said after Cremony was out of earshot, which didn’t take long. “He was still on the other side of the Atlantic, wondering if the Czar would put him in the Russian Army for twenty-five or thirty years. When the Czar said go, he went-here.”
“Conscription-dodger, eh?” Martin grinned. “Somewhere down at the roots of my family tree is a poacher who got out of England a short hop ahead of the sheriff. That’s what my old man says, anyway. How about you, Bob?”
“Me?” Reinholdt seemed surprised at the question. “I’m a son of a bitch from a long line of sons of bitches. You don’t believe me, ask anybody.”
Martin wouldn’t have argued with him for the world. He didn’t get the chance, anyhow. When the barrels’ engines went from low power to high, not all the machine-gun fire and artillery in the world could have concealed the racket. The traveling fortresses clanked and rumbled toward the Confederate line, their own machine guns blazing away at the enemy positions ahead.
All along the front lines of the U.S. works, officers blew whistles to urge their men over the top. Cremony tweeted away till his face turned red. U.S. soldiers scrambled up ladders and sandbag stairways and followed the barrels toward the Confederate trenches.
“Stay close!” Captain Cremony shouted.
“Stay close!” Martin echoed. “Those big iron critters may be ugly, but they’re our best friends.” Even as he spoke, the barrel behind which he advanced began smashing its way over and through the wire the Rebels had strung to protect their position. Between the last wire belt and their forwardmost trenches, the Confederates’ Negro laborers had dug a great ditch, too wide for the barrels to cross and deep enough to be sure to bog them down.
But U.S. observation aeroplanes or balloonists must have spotted the digging, for some of the barrels bore on their forward decks great bundles of sticks and logs bound with chains and ropes. They dumped them into the ditch, then ground their way across over them.
Captain Cremony, who was fond of Shakespeare, shouted out in high glee: “Birnam Wood comes to Dunsinane!”
Martin didn’t know about that. He did know the bundles of wood made it easier for him and his men to cross the ditch, too, though some of them used bites the artillery had taken out of its front and rear walls to scramble down and then up. “Stay close to your barrel!” Martin yelled again. “Stay close!”
The barrels were bludgeoning the Army of Northern Virginia into submission. These were new positions for the Rebs, hastily run up after the retreat from Aldie. They lacked much of the reinforced concrete of lines built more slowly and held longer. Machine-gun nests of sandbags could not stand up to the barrels’ nose cannons. One after another, the barrels cleared them out.
Tilden Russell shouted something into Martin’s ear. Martin had trouble making out what he said amidst the rattle of gunfire, the thunder of artillery, and the dyspeptic roar of the barrels. Obligingly, the private shouted it again: “Breakthrough!” He stuffed a cigar into his mouth, got it going with a bronze-cased flint-and-steel lighter, and puffed out happy clouds of smoke.
Was it a breakthrough? Martin wasn’t sure, not here, not now, though on the Roanoke front he would have been ecstatic at the ground he and his comrades were gaining. A day’s advance here could be measured in miles, not yards. If that wasn’t a breakthrough, what was it?
But, if a breakthrough required the Rebs to throw down their rifles and quit in carload lots, that didn’t happen. Soldiers in butternut, white and colored, kept fighting till the barrels and the U.S. infantry rolled over them. If anything, the colored Confederate soldiers fought harder than they had when the U.S. troops broke out of their bridgeheads south of the Potomac. Maybe that was because the whites had given them dire warnings about what would happen to them if they didn’t fight. Maybe, too, and more likely, the Negro soldiers were steadier now simply because they’d seen some action.
East of the infantry trenches and the village of Centreville, the ground rose. The Rebel batteries on those hills-maps called them mountains-hadn’t given up and gone home, either. Shells from U.S. guns kept falling among them, but they went right on giving the advancing men in green-gray a hell of a hard time. They reserved their chiefest fury for the barrels. The traveling forts were not easy targets, principally because they could travel, but every so often a shell would slam home with the noise of a man beating an iron pot with a pick handle.
Worse noises commonly followed-ammunition cooking off, engines and gas tanks going up in flames, men screaming as they cooked. Barrels’ armor plate held out machine-gun bullets, but three-inch shells, when they hit, pierced it like so much pasteboard.
And the CSA had barrels of their own in the field. They were fewer and more widely scattered than those of the USA, but they were there, and some of them gave a good account of themselves. When not fighting for his own life, Martin watched in fascination as barrel battled barrel. The fights put him in mind of the dinosaurs struggling in swamps he’d read about in the Sunday supplements.
One particular Confederate barrel-tanks, the Rebs called them, aping the British as they so often did-was altogether too good at making its U.S. opponents extinct. It set two green-gray barrels afire in quick succession. The second victory let it bear down on Martin and his section.
“Hit the dirt!” he shouted, and dove behind a pile of rubble that had been a Rebel’s chimney once upon a time. Machine-gun bullets from the Confederate barrel chewed up the dirt around him and snarled off the bricks in front of him. If the barrel kept coming straight ahead, it would squash him into a redder smear in the red-brown dirt. Shouts and screams from around him said only too plainly that some of his men hadn’t been so lucky in finding cover as he had.