A barrel rumbled up the road toward him. He wouldn't have wanted to try sending barrels anywhere except along roads right now. The rain had turned an awful lot of dirt into mud. He'd seen a couple of bogged-down barrels. They needed specialized recovery vehicles to get them out of their wallows.
The man commanding the barrel rode with his head and shoulders out of the cupola. Tom approved of that, especially in this weather. A lot of people would have stayed buttoned up and dry and comfortable inside the turret-and if they couldn't see quite as much that way, well, so what? If you took care of your job first and yourself second, you were more likely to live to keep on doing your job.
As the barrel drew near, the commander ducked down into the turret. He must have given an order, for the machine stopped, engine still noisy even while idling. The commander popped up out of the cupola again like a jack-in-the-box. He waved to Tom. "What's going on up here?" he called, pitching his voice to carry over the engine and through the rain.
Probably a lieutenant or a sergeant himself, he had no idea he was talking to a lieutenant-colonel. Tom gave the same answer any foot soldier who'd seen some action would have: "Not a hell of a lot, thank God."
"Sounds good to me," the barrel commander said. By his accent, he came from Texas, or possibly Arkansas-somewhere west of the Mississippi, anyhow. He wiped the back of his hand across his face. "I don't mind the rain one goddamn bit, let me tell you."
"Because of the lull, you mean?" Tom asked. As if to belie the word, an automatic rifle not too far away stuttered out a short burst. Several shots from Springfields answered. Tom waited to see if anything big would flare up.
So did the barrel commander. When the firing died away instead, his smile showed nothing but relief. "Partly the lull, yeah," he said. "But there's one thing more: weather like this here, all the poison gas in the world ain't worth shit."
"You've got a point," Tom said. He didn't want to think about wearing a gas mask in a driving rain like this. All his thoughts about eyeglasses came back, doubled and redoubled. With a gas mask's portholes, you couldn't even peer over the tops if the lenses got spattered. You were stuck trying to see through drip-filled glass.
"Damnyankees throw that stuff around like it's going out of style." The barrel commander patted the cast steel of the cupola. "Sometimes inside here, we don't know they've done it till too late."
"Hadn't thought of that," Tom admitted. He imagined rattling along inside the noisy barrel, maybe firing its cannon and machine guns to add to the din. If gas shells started bursting near you, how would you know? Likely by getting a lungful of the stuff, which wasn't the best way. Colleton asked, "Haven't you got any filters to keep it out?"
"Yeah, but we have to seal everything up for 'em to work at all, and you don't want to do that most of the time, on account of you can't see out so good," the man standing in the cupola replied, illustrating his own point. "Besides, it's cooled down now, but in the summertime you purely can't stand getting all cooped up in here. They throw some potatoes in with us, they could serve us up for roast pork."
Tom's stomach did a slow lurch. In the last war and this one, he'd smelled burnt human flesh. It did bear a horrid resemblance to pork left too long on the fire. Would it taste the same way? He didn't want to know.
The barrel commander disappeared down into the turret again. As he emerged, the engine noise picked up. The barrel started forward. "Don't go too far into the woods, or you'll run into the Yankees," Tom shouted. The commander cupped a hand behind his ear. Tom said it again, louder this time. The barrel commander waved. Tom hoped that meant he understood, not that he was just being friendly.
A few minutes later, two more Confederate barrels rattled down the road after the first one. Tom Colleton frowned. Had some kind of push been ordered, one nobody'd bothered to tell him about? He wouldn't have been surprised; that kind of thing happened too often. On the other hand, maybe the barrels' crews thought something was going on when it really wasn't. In that case, they were likely to get a nasty surprise.
Frowning, Tom shouted for a wireless man. The soldier with the heavy pack on his back seemed to materialize out of thin air. One second, he was nowhere around. The next, he stood in front of Colleton, asking, "What do you need, sir?"
"Put me through to division HQ in Sandusky," Tom answered. "I want to find out what the hell's going on up here."
When the wireless man wanted to, he had a wicked laugh. "What makes you think they'll know?"
That held more truth than Tom wished it did. "Somebody has to," he said. "They're as good a bet as any, and better than most. Come on, get on the horn with them."
"Right." The wireless man got busy. Before he could raise Sandusky, though, an antibarrel cannon went off in the direction the Confederate barrels had taken. It fired several rounds. Those weren't big guns; a crew could serve them lickety-split. A machine gun started to answer, undoubtedly trying to shoot down the gunners, but fell silent all at once. A moment later, Tom heard ammunition start to cook off. At least one of those barrels was history.
He muttered a curse and set a hand on the wireless man's shoulder. "Never mind. I just got my answer." Pulling his pistol from its holster, he ran forward to see what he could do for the luckless barrel men.
Some of them came running or staggering back toward him. Most were wounded. A couple of the soldiers in butternut coveralls turned around and went with him. The others kept going. Tom didn't suppose he could blame them, not after what had just happened.
And it turned out not to matter any which way. All three barrels were burning. Tom couldn't get close to any of them. Several men, including the commander of that first barrel, lay dead near the dead machines. Tom swore again. They'd walked into a buzzsaw. He hoped the end had come quickly for them. Sometimes, in war, that was as much as you could hope for.
A burst of machine-gun fire chewed up the fallen leaves not far from his feet. He dove for cover and swore one more time, now at himself. He hadn't come up here to be a target. Of course, the poor bastards in the barrels hadn't, either, and what had happened to them?
The damnyankee behind the machine gun squeezed off another burst. Hunting me, the son of a bitch, Tom thought as he rolled and scrambled toward and then behind the thickest tree he could find. The U.S gunner's fire went a little wide. Tom lay there panting for a couple of minutes. In the last war, he might have laughed at himself for getting into and out of a scrape like that. He didn't feel like laughing any more.
Careful not to draw the machine gunner's notice again, he crawled off to the west, putting as many trees between himself and the enemy as he could. Only when he was sure he could do it without getting shot did he climb to his feet. By then, he was so wet, he might as well not have bothered with the rain slicker. He felt like a cat that had fallen into a pond.
To add insult to injury-or, here, almost to add injury to insult-some Confederate soldiers hurrying into the woods came close to shooting him for a Yankee. No good deed goes unpunished, he thought as he finally made it back out into open country.
His wireless man looked him over. "Sir, you're a mess."
"Thanks. Thanks a hell of a lot, Rick," Tom said. "I never would have figured that out without you."
Rick took his canteen off his belt. "Here you go, sir. Have a knock of this." This turned out to be a good deal more potent than water. Tom swigged gratefully.
"Ahhh," he said when the fire in his gullet had faded a little. "That hit the spot. Now get on the horn to divisional headquarters. They need to know the damnyankees have got antibarrel guns and all sorts of other little delights lurking in those woods."