More automatic-weapons fire came from the west. Somebody not nearly far enough from Chester Martin let out a screech and then hollered for a corpsman. That was a wound, but it didn’t sound like too bad a wound. Martin knew what badly wounded men sounded like. He’d hear those shrieks in his nightmares till the day he died-which, given the way things worked, might be any day now.
From a hole in the ground not far from Chester’s, Second Lieutenant Delbert Wheat called, “Mortars! Put some bombs down on those gunners!”
Mortar rounds started dropping on the Confederate line. Mortars were handy things to have. They gave infantry platoons instant artillery support, without even adding boiling water. Lieutenant Wheat made a pretty fair platoon leader, too. Before him, Martin had served with a couple of much less satisfactory officers. One of the things a first sergeant was supposed to do was keep the shavetail set over him from making too big a jackass of himself. Most second lieutenants never understood that. They labored under the delusion that they were in charge of their platoon.
A lot of them got killed laboring under that delusion. A first sergeant was also supposed to keep them from killing too many other people on their own side. The second lieutenants who survived went on to bigger and better things. First sergeants who survived got brand-new second lieutenants to break in.
Martin saw only one thing wrong with Lieutenant Wheat’s order. Just about every Confederate soldier carried either an automatic rifle or a submachine gun. The Confederates understood right from the start that they’d be outnumbered. They used firepower to make up for it.
These days, more than a few U.S. soldiers used captured C.S. automatic rifles. The biggest problem with them was that they needed captured ammunition to stay usable. Back when the Confederates were always pushing forward, captured ammo was hard to come by. Now Martin’s countrymen often overran C.S. positions. Both rifles and cartridges were in pretty fair supply.
Lieutenant Wheat stuck his head up like a groundhog looking around to see if it cast a shadow. Another burst of Confederate fire made him duck in a hurry. He popped up again a couple of minutes later, which was asking to get his head blown off.
“You want to be careful there, sir,” Martin said. “You show yourself twice running, the bastards in butternut are liable to have time to draw a bead on you.”
He didn’t want this particular platoon commander to stop a slug with his face. Wheat had a pretty good idea of what he was doing; odds were anyone who replaced him would be worse. Or maybe nobody would replace him for a while. Officers weren’t thick on the ground, and the brass might figure a first sergeant could handle a platoon for a while.
Martin figured he could, too. He led a company for a while during the Great War, when everybody above him got killed or wounded. They lost officers even faster in that war than they were losing them in this one. But, having proved he could command a company, Martin didn’t want to take over the platoon now. They’d never make him an officer-who ever heard of a fifty-year-old second lieutenant? He had plenty to do the way things were.
“Thanks for the tip, Sergeant,” Wheat said, as calmly as if Chester advised him to lead the fourth highest from his longest and strongest suit. “I’m trying to see how we can cross the Scioto.”
“We as in the division or we as in this platoon?” Chester asked, more than a little apprehensively. Before long, U.S. forces were bound to get over the Scioto somewhere. The luckless bastards who crossed the river first would pay the price in blood, though. They always did.
“This platoon, if we can,” Wheat answered, and damned if he didn’t stand up and look around one more time. “We’re only about a mile from the river, and the Confederates are pulling back across it. They may not even notice we’ve got the bridgehead on the other side till we’re too strong to throw back.”
What have you been smoking? Martin wanted to yell. The soldiers in butternut were alert. Just because they were the enemy, that didn’t mean they were morons. Most of this war was fought on U.S. soil. That at least argued the dummies were the ones in green-gray.
Another sputter of bullets made Wheat duck down again before Chester could say anything at all. And then the Confederates threw something new at them. That screaming in the sky wasn’t any ordinary artillery Martin had ever heard. And ordinary rounds didn’t come in trailing tails of fire. You mostly couldn’t see ordinary rounds at all till they burst.
Rockets, Chester thought. Featherston’s men were firing them at barrels. These were different-much bigger and nastier. They slammed down and went off with roars like the end of the world. He didn’t know how many burst all at once. A dozen? Two dozen? Something like that. However many it was, he felt as if God stamped on the platoon with both feet.
He wasn’t ashamed to scream. Hell, he was too scared not to. Nobody heard him, not through that roar. Even if somebody did hear him, so what? He wouldn’t be the only man yelling his head off. He was sure of that.
And he didn’t even get hurt, except for being bruised and battered and half stunned by blast. He was one of the lucky ones. As his stunned ears came back to life, he heard soldiers screaming to the right and left and behind him. He scrambled over to the closest wounded man. Shrapnel had gouged a chunk out of the soldier’s leg. As Chester dusted sulfa powder onto the wound and slapped a dressing over it, the soldier said, “What the fuck was that, Sarge?”
“Beats me, Johnny,” Martin answered. “I just hope to Christ we never see it again.” He injected the soldier with a morphine syrette, knowing all too well the Confederates would play with their new toy over and over again. Why would they do anything else? Wherever that salvo of rockets came from, it did a better job of plastering a wide area with explosives than any other weapon he’d ever seen.
“Fuck,” Johnny said again, biting his lip against the pain. “When do we get something like it?”
That was another good question. “Soon, I hope,” Martin said, which was nothing but the truth. Now that his side knew the other side had something new and nasty, how long would they need to copy it or come up with something on the same order? Months, he thought glumly. Gotta be months. That meant U.S. soldiers would be on the receiving end for months, too, which was anything but a cheery idea.
Chester yelled for the medics. So did Johnny. They didn’t come right away. He wasn’t surprised. They had to be dealing with a lot of casualties. If another salvo came in…
And then one did. The incoming rockets’ shrieks put him in mind of damned souls. He did some more shrieking himself when they crashed down. Blast picked him up and smashed him into the dirt. “Oof!” he said, struggling to breathe. He tasted blood in his mouth. If the Confederates threw in a counterattack just then, they could push as far as they wanted. The platoon-hell, probably the whole damn regiment-was in no shape to stop them.
“Boy,” Johnny said, “it’s a good thing they didn’t have those a little while ago, or they’d still be in Pittsburgh.” He sounded detached, almost indifferent. The morphine was working its magic.
Chester wished he could be indifferent to the chaos and carnage around him. “You ain’t kidding,” he said. These rockets were very bad news. Somebody over in Richmond was probably kicking somebody else’s ass around the block for not thinking of them sooner or for not getting them into production fast enough.
Motion behind him made him whirl, ready to plug whoever made it. “Easy, buddy,” the soldier there said. The man wore the same uniform he did. Even that didn’t have to mean anything. The Confederates sometimes put their guys in green-gray to raise hell behind U.S. lines. But this fellow had a Red Cross on his helmet, Red Cross armbands, and a white smock with big Red Crosses front and back. “You got a wounded guy here?”