Pound peered out through the now glassless window, waiting. He would have been happier if the enemy never made it as far as Pikeville. If the artillery and fighter-bombers could stop Featherston’s columns in their tracks, so much the better. It would let him turn around and head back toward important fighting-fighting that led to advances into the heart of the Confederacy.
But no such luck. Less than an hour after Pound got to Pikeville, U.S. infantrymen who’d been screening the way ahead fell back into the little town. “Up to us now, I’d say,” Pound remarked. Without the foot soldiers and the artillery and the airplanes, the Confederates would have been in Pikeville ahead of him, and probably spilling out to the west. He didn’t think about that, only about what needed doing next.
“Front!” he called as a Confederate barrel rolling through the cornfields made itself plain.
“Identified!” the gunner sang out. “Range just over a mile, sir.”
“Can you hit the son of a bitch?” Pound asked.
“Hell, yes!” Scullard sounded confident as could be, the way a good gunner should.
“Then fire when ready.” Pound almost nagged Scullard about leading his target-at that range, the shell had a flight time of a second and a half, and the enemy barrel could move enough to make remembering it matter. But in the end he kept his mouth shut. The gunner knew what he was doing. He’d remember to lead the barrel…or if he didn’t, Pound would come down on him after he screwed up.
The gun swung slightly. Then it roared. Michael Pound thought his head would come off. He was head and shoulders out of the turret but still in an enclosed space, and the noise was cataclysmic.
Was it a hit or…? Smoke spurted from the enemy barrel. “Got him!” Pound yelled. “Good shot! You led him just right!” He laughed at himself. He was going to get the lesson in come hell or high water, wasn’t he?
Other barrels opened up on the advancing Confederates. Several more enemy barrels brewed up. The longer U.S. barrelmen used the 3?-inch gun on the new models, the better they liked it. It fired a flat, fast round that could kill anything it could reach. And the improved gunsight made hits more likely. Pound wished he were shooting it himself.
Little by little, he’d decided he might be able to do more good as an officer than he had as a noncom. Coordinating five barrel crews wasn’t the piece of cake he’d thought it was till he tried it himself. He kept shouting into the wireless, finding out what was going on with all the others and making sure they did what he wanted them to do. And he had to fight his own barrel, too. It was enough to give the one-armed paperhanger a galloping case of the hives.
And the Confederates wanted Pikeville. They needed Pikeville. And they were doing their damnedest to take it back from the U.S. soldiers inside it. Their barrels didn’t swarm forward to be massacred in the open, the way Pound hoped they would. Instead, smoke rounds from C.S. artillery back in the mountains came down between the advancing Confederate forces and the defenders in the little town. Before long, the streamers came together in a ragged fogbank that hid most of what lay behind it.
Out of the fogbank came…trouble. Confederate foot soldiers armed with antibarrel rockets and launching tubes ran through the smoke, flopped down behind the closest cover, and started working their way forward. U.S. machine-gun fire picked off some of them, and more of the riflemen who protected them, but they kept coming in the little rushes experienced troops used.
Before long, rockets trailing tails of fire flew toward Pikeville. More than one U.S. barrel that had stayed too long in its original firing position got hit. Michael Pound’s platoon came away unscathed; he’d ordered the machines back to secondary firing positions in the lull the smoke screen gave them.
A rocket slammed into the house where his barrel had been hiding. The house started to burn. Pound smiled to himself. The Confederates would think they’d killed the barrel. They might make some embarrassing mistakes if they thought their mischief-makers had done more than they really had.
And sure enough, a few minutes later a couple of platoons of C.S. barrels charged through the thinning smoke ready to break into Pikeville or die trying. Michael Pound earnestly preferred the second alternative. He was standing in the cupola of a machine that could make his preferences felt. The leading barrels were the latest Confederate modeclass="underline" excellent in their own right, but half a step behind his. They were out in the open. He had cover. It hardly seemed fair. But then, he didn’t want a fair fight. He wanted a fight he’d win.
“Front!” he shouted.
“Identified!” Sergeant Scullard continued with the ritual.
Three shots from Pound’s barrel killed two Confederate machines, and they were the leading two. One turned into a fireball. A couple of men got out of the other barrel. Machine-gun bullets reached for them, but they might have made cover. Part of Pound hoped they did. He’d bailed out of a stricken barrel himself. He knew what it was like. They were enemies, but they were also men doing the same job he was.
The Confederates kept coming. Another U.S. barrel set the last of theirs on fire less than a hundred yards outside of Pikeville. Several more green-gray barrels were also burning by then, some from enemy cannon fire, others from those damnable antibarrel rockets.
But the Confederates didn’t get into the town. They didn’t get around it, either. U.S. reinforcements poured in to make sure they couldn’t. Pound was only half glad to see them. He wished they’d stayed farther south and stormed toward Chattanooga.
Lieutenant-Colonel Jerry Dover had the ribbon for the Purple Heart. He didn’t much want it. Nobody on either side much wanted a Purple Heart, but Dover didn’t think he’d earned his. A chunk of shrapnel had torn a bloody line across his forearm. As far as he was concerned, it wasn’t worth fussing about. But the rule was that you got a medal if you bled. And so he had one.
Not a lot of officers in the Quartermaster Corps owned a decoration that said they’d been in combat. In a way, it was handy: it made line officers-and even line noncoms-take him seriously. But the wound was so trivial, the decoration embarrassed him.
It did when he had time to think about it, anyway. More often than not, he barely had time to breathe, let alone eat. He smoked like a chimney. As long as he kept breathing, he could do that. It didn’t keep him from doing the usual seventeen other things at the same time.
He knew before almost anyone else that the Confederate thrust from the east wasn’t going as well as the planners back in Richmond wished it were. As soon as the front just north of Chattanooga got its supply priority restored, he realized the Confederates either had an extravagant success and would soon swarm up from the south or had failed and would soon need to hold on for dear life here. The shipments of barbed wire and land mines said they wouldn’t be advancing.
He sent out the supplies as front-line units shouted for them. In the meantime, he quietly swore under his breath. A generation earlier, he’d seen what a losing war looked like. Now he stared another one in the face. He hadn’t thought Jake Featherston would land the Confederacy in a mess like this. Who had? Surely Featherston himself hadn’t. And a whole fat lot of good that does anybody, Dover thought.
Confederate gunboats came up the Tennessee River as far as Chattanooga and fired big shells at U.S. forces to the north. Then they turned around again and scooted south as fast as they could go, for U.S. airplanes struck at them whenever they got the chance. Land-based guns couldn’t be as big or move as fast as the ones the gunboats carried. But the boats had trouble moving fast enough to stay safe.