“Damnyankees.” Jefferson Pinkard made the calculation almost without conscious thought. “I bet they’re headin’ for Forth Worth and Dallas.”
“How could they?” Edith said.
“They’ve got their nerve, sending ’em out in the daytime.” Pinkard had a nasty feeling the bombers would get through. The war west of the Mississippi had been quiet. He doubted the Confederate authorities were ready for an attack on this scale. The damnyankees had pulled a fast one here.
“Will they drop bombs on us, Papa Jeff?” Frank Blades asked anxiously.
“Nah.” Now Jeff spoke with great assurance. He set a big, meaty hand on the boy’s shoulders. “Ain’t nothin’ here the Yankees would ever want to touch. Don’t you worry ’bout a thing, not as far as that goes.”
One thing Chester Martin had to give to Lieutenant Thayer Monroe: the kid could read a map. “We want to call down more fire on these emplacements in back of Fredericksburg, eh, Sergeant?” he said. “I make their positions out to be in square Green-6. That sound right to you?” There was something else Martin had to give him: he did ask the older man’s opinion, and sometimes even listened to it.
Martin looked out from the ruins of Fredericksburg toward the heights to the south and southwest. They weren’t mountains; they were hardly even hills. But they were plenty to let the Confederate field guns and mortars dug in on them make life hell on earth for the U.S. soldiers in the Virginia town.
“Yes, sir. I think Green-6 is right,” he said. The platoon commander called for the signalman with the field telephone, then shouted into it. U.S. artillery was still on the far side of the river. Chester had the nasty suspicion that the Confederates had let the U.S. Army get foot soldiers over the Rappahannock so they could bleed them white. All attempts to break out from the town had failed. None seemed likely to succeed, at least not to him.
“Goddammit!” Lieutenant Monroe hung up in disgust. “I can’t get through. Bastards must have cut the wires again.”
“Wouldn’t be surprised,” Chester agreed. After a moment, he added, “I wonder how much truth there is in the talk you hear.”
“You mean about Confederates running around in U.S. uniforms and raising Cain?” the lieutenant asked. Chester nodded. After some thought, Thayer Monroe said, “I don’t know for sure, but I wouldn’t be surprised. It’s the sort of bastardly trick Featherston’s people would pull.”
Was it? It struck Martin as the sort of trick anybody with half an ounce of brains would pull, especially in a war where both sides spoke what was for all practical purposes the same language. He said, “I hope we’re doing the same thing to them, that’s all.”
Lieutenant Monroe looked astonished. “It goes dead against the Geneva Convention, Sergeant. If you’re caught in the enemy’s uniform, you get a blindfold and a cigarette. That’s too far to go for a good smoke.”
Chester dutifully chuckled, though he had Confederate cigarettes in his pocket. Plundering enemy corpses-and, here in Fredericksburg, plundering shops-kept front-line infantrymen supplied with better tobacco than they could get from their own country. Front-line service had few advantages, but that was one of them.
Freight-train noises filled the air. Monroe might not have been able to get through to U.S. artillery, but someone had. High explosives thundered down on the heights behind Fredericksburg. How much good they would do…
Through the din, the lieutenant said, “At least we don’t have any orders to get out of our holes and attack as soon as the barrage lets up.”
“Thank you, Jesus,” Chester Martin said, most sincerely.
His platoon commander nodded. Monroe could learn. The company, and the regiment of which it was a part, were in the line because so many men had tried to take the high ground in back of Fredericksburg: tried and bloodily failed. The Confederate gunners on those heights could murder every U.S. soldier in the world if the Army chose to come at them there. Machine guns and artillery swept the rising ground. Not even barrels had a chance of forcing their way forward.
Martin drew in a breath and made a face. Most of the time, you could forget about the stench of death on the battlefield-oh, not forget about it, maybe, but shove it down to the back of your mind. He’d thought about it, though, and that brought it up in his mind again. His guts did a slow lurch. Too many unburied bodies lay out there, bloating in the sun.
When the company went back into reserve, he would bring that stench with him-in his clothes, in his hair, on his skin. It took a long time to go away. And he’d smelled it in plenty of nightmares between the wars. Bad as it was here, it had been worse in the trenches on the Roanoke front, where the line went back and forth over the same few miles of ground for a couple of years, and where every square yard of ground was manured with a corpse or two.
Keeping his head down-he didn’t know whether the Confederates had any snipers close enough to draw a bead on him, and didn’t care to find out the hard way-he lit one of those smooth Confederate cigarettes and held the pack out to Lieutenant Monroe. “Thanks, Sergeant,” Monroe said. He leaned close for a light.
The smoke in Chester’s mouth and in his nose masked the smell of death. For that, one of the stables-scrapings cigarettes the USA turned out would have done as well. If you were going to go this way, though, why not go first class?
“I pity those poor bastards who don’t smoke,” Chester said out of the blue.
“Why’s that?” The lieutenant, not unreasonably, couldn’t follow his train of thought.
“On account of they can’t ever get out from under the goddamn smell.”
“Oh.” Thayer Monroe considered, then nodded. “Hadn’t looked at it like that, but you’re right.” He started to add something else, probably on the same theme, but all of a sudden he ducked down deep in the foxhole instead. “Incoming!”
“Aw, shit!” Martin got right down there with him. The Confederates were doing something sneaky-something gutsy, too. They couldn’t huddle in reinforced-concrete gun emplacements to serve their mortars. They had to come out into the firing pits to use them. But the nasty little bombs flew at Fredericksburg almost silently. With all the big stuff roaring by overhead, nobody was going to notice the mortars till they started bursting, which would be too late for some luckless soldiers.
And sometimes even being right on the money didn’t do you a damn bit of good. One of the reasons soldiers hated mortars was that the bombs went up at a steep angle and came down at an even steeper one. Plunging fire, the boys with the high foreheads called it. A foxhole didn’t protect you from a round that came right down in there with you.
Chester heard the boom. Next thing he knew, he was grabbing at his leg and bawling for a corpsman. Absurdly, the first thing that went through his mind was, Rita’s gonna kill me. When he could think of anything past his own pain, he got a look at Lieutenant Monroe-and wished he hadn’t. The platoon commander was the only reason Chester was still breathing. He’d been between Chester and the mortar round, and he’d taken almost all of it. There wasn’t a hell of a lot of him left, and what there was wasn’t pretty.
“That you, Sarge?” one of the stretcher bearers called.
“Yeah.” Chester forced out the word through clenched teeth.
The corpsman jumped down into the hole. He swore softly when he saw what had happened to Monroe, then turned to Chester. “How much of that blood is yours and how much is the other poor bastard’s?”
“Beats me.” Chester looked down at himself. He was pretty well drenched in the lieutenant’s mortal remains. He didn’t want to let go of the leg, though, or more of what soaked him would be his. He was much too sure of that. “Can you stick me and bandage me or put on a tourniquet or whatever the hell you’re gonna do? This hurts like a son of a bitch.”