The Confederates weren’t crumbling, the way Morrell had hoped they would. They were fighting hard even as they fell back. They knew where he was headed, and they had a pretty good notion of how he would try to get there. That made for slow, expensive combat, not what Morrell wanted at all.
John Abell warned me slicing them up might take two campaigning seasons, Morrell remembered. He hadn’t wanted to believe it. He still didn’t. But there was a pretty fair chance the General Staff officer knew what he was talking about.
“Sir, an infantry counterattack just pushed us back a few hundred yards in Sector Blue-7,” someone said in his earphones.
“Blue-7. Roger that,” Morrell said. “I’ll pass the word on to the people who can do something about it.” Thanks to the fancy wireless gear that crowded the turret of his barrel, he could. The artillerymen at the other end of the connection promised him 105mm fire and brimstone would start dropping on that map sector in a couple of minutes. The Confederates wouldn’t enjoy the little gains they’d made. Satisfied, Morrell went back to commanding his barrel.
It was plowing through what had been the last major land defenses in front of the Tennessee River. Crossing the river and getting into Chattanooga itself would be another adventure, but just getting to it would give the war effort a kick in the pants. From the north side of the river line, the 105s now punishing Sector Blue-7 would be able to knock Chattanooga flat and leave it useless to the Confederate States.
A lot of U.S. generals would have been delighted to do that much. Morrell was a different kind of officer, and always had been. Doing what most people expected and no more didn’t interest him. He didn’t want to wound the Confederates here. He wanted to ruin them. Chattanooga wasn’t a goal in itself, not to him. It was a gateway. With it in his hands, with communications over the Tennessee secured, he could plunge his armored sword into the Confederacy’s heart.
Unfortunately, somebody on the Confederate General Staff, or maybe Jake Featherston himself, had seen that as plainly as Morrell had. The depth of these trench lines; the barbed wire; the minefields-now marked by signs painted with skull and crossbones-and the concrete pillboxes, some of them sporting antibarrel cannon, told the story very clearly. So did the stench of death. The fancy filters that were supposed to keep the barrel’s interior free of poison gas if it was buttoned up tight were powerless against the stink.
The barrel clattered past a dead pillbox. Scorch marks around the slit that let a machine gun traverse in there told what had happened. Morrell was a brave soldier, an aggressive soldier. Not for all the money in the world would he have strapped the fuel and gas cartridges for a flamethrower on his back. The men who did were either a little bit nuts-sometimes more than a little bit-or didn’t know the odds against them.
Along with disposing of unexploded bombs, lugging a flamethrower was one of the military specialties where the average soldier lasted a matter of weeks, not months. Using men who didn’t know as much seemed unfair. That didn’t stop the Army. Maybe ignorance was bliss-for a little while.
A U.S. helmet sat on top of a rifle stock. The rifle’s bayonet had been plunged into the ground above a hastily dug grave. Did the flamethrower man lie there? Morrell wouldn’t have been surprised. He saw two other pillboxes that covered the burned-out one. Of course the Confederates would have interlocking fields of fire; they weren’t amateurs. An armor-piercing round had put paid to one of those pillboxes. He couldn’t make out what happened to the other one, but a U.S. soldier leaned against it eating from a ration can, so it was under new management.
A salvo of rockets screamed in from the south. The soldier dove into a hole. Morrell hoped that would keep him safe. Sometimes blast from the screaming meemies killed even if shrapnel didn’t. As the explosives in the rockets’ noses burst, Morrell’s barrel shook like a ship on a stormy sea. He hoped he would stay safe himself. Those damn things could flip a fifty-ton barrel like a kid’s toy.
“Fun,” Frenchy Bergeron said when the salvo ended.
Morrell looked at him. “How many times did your mother drop you on your head when you were little?”
The gunner grinned. “Oh, enough, I expect…sir.”
“I guess so,” Morrell said with feeling, and the gunner laughed out loud.
Were Morrell in Patton’s shoes, he would have pulled back over the Tennessee and made the U.S. commander figure out how to get at him on the south bank. Patton seemed to want to fight it out as far forward as he could. Some of the things Morrell was hearing from Intelligence suggested Patton had to worry about political pressure from Richmond: or, in plain English, Jake Featherston was screaming his head off.
Fighting the enemy was hard enough. Fighting the enemy and your own leaders had to be ten times worse. Morrell had had his arguments and squabbles with the War Department himself. The suspicion with which he and John Abell had watched each other ever since the middle of the last war proved that-as if it needed proving. But when a president ran the war himself, something was bound to get screwed up somewhere.
Being sure of that made Morrell keep his eyes open in a special way. If Patton goofed, or even if he didn’t but a U.S. attack threw his men north of the river into disarray, Morrell’s troops might be able to get over the Tennessee before the Confederates knew they’d done it. And if they could, Chattanooga would fall.
How angry would that make Jake Featherston? Angry enough to sack General Patton? Morrell hoped so. Patton made no bones about having learned armored warfare from him. Morrell could have done without the compliment, because the Confederate officer made much too good a pupil. The drive into Ohio was a small masterpiece. The one into Pennsylvania almost worked, too. And the counterattack through the mountains in eastern Kentucky and Tennessee was well conceived; Patton just didn’t have the men and materiel to bring it off.
Through a cupola periscope, Morrell watched a U.S. barrel commander leading a platoon of new-model barrels toward the hottest fighting. The sergeant or lieutenant or whatever he was stood head and shoulders out of his cupola. Morrell knew a stab of jealousy. He wanted to fight the same way. Only a cold calculation of his own value to the advance kept him buttoned up in here. That fellow out ahead of him had the freedom insignificance could bring.
“Son of a bitch,” Morrell muttered.
“What’s cookin’, sir?” Sergeant Bergeron asked.
“Nothing,” Morrell said. It wasn’t quite a lie-it was nothing that would matter to Frenchy. But damned if the broad shoulders on that barrel commander didn’t remind Morrell of Michael Pound. He knew they’d finally dragged his old gunner up into officer country, kicking and screaming all the way. Pound was on this front, too. So why wouldn’t he be in charge of a platoon of barrels? No reason. No reason at all.
That barrel stopped and fired. Something too far away for Morrell to make it out very well burst into flames. Morrell slowly nodded. He wouldn’t want to be Michael Pound’s gunner, not for anything. Pound knew the business too well. Chances were he made an impossibly demanding commander. But the gunner in that machine had scored a hit. Pound couldn’t complain there.
“Steer left a little,” Morrell called to his driver. “Follow that platoon up ahead of us. They look like they’re going places.”
“Yes, sir,” the driver said, and he did.
Sweat rivered off Morrell. He wished he were on the cool north German plain, pushing the British back through Holland. You could stand staying buttoned up in a barrel in weather like that. Doing it in late summer in southern Tennessee was a recipe for hell on earth, or possibly a New England boiled dinner. Barrelmen poured down water by the gallon and gulped salt tablets like popcorn. It helped…some.
Michael Pound’s barrel-if that was Pound in the cupola-fired again. Something else blew up. Morrell mentally apologized to that gunner. He was good enough to meet anybody’s standards.