The Confederates inside Rumsey had an antibarrel cannon: an inch-and-a-halfer from the days when the war first started. It had two virtues-it was easy to haul around, and it fired rapidly. Against one of the new U.S. barrels, though, it was hardly more than a doorknocker. Its shells had no hope of penetrating that thick, well-sloped armor.
“There it is, sir!” Scullard said. “In the bushes by that big house.”
“You’re right,” Pound said. “Do the honors, then.”
“Yes, sir,” the gunner said, and then, to the loader, “HE!” Two shells sufficed to upend the gun and send a couple of the men who served it flying. Pound nodded to himself in somber satisfaction. If the other side wanted to play the game but didn’t have good cards…well, too bad for them.
He looked through the periscopes facing back toward Calhoun. Alarm tingled through him. Soldiers were on the bridge. Could he traverse the turret fast enough to fire at them before they reached the barrel? But then he relaxed-they wore green-gray, not butternut.
“We have Calhoun,” he said happily. “And we have the bridge-intact, by God. We can keep rolling right on through Kentucky. Let’s see Featherston stop us. Let’s see anybody stop us.”
IX
In the reinforced-concrete shelter under the ruins of the Gray House, Jake Featherston fumed. He had the feeling of being a bug pinned down on a collector’s board. Wiggle as he would, the pin held him helplessly in place.
He’d had that feeling in the last war, when U.S. artillery and barrels inexorably pushed the Army of Northern Virginia back from Pennsylvania through Maryland and into the state for which it was named. He’d sworn he would never feel that way again. He’d sworn the Confederate States would never let anybody on earth do that to them again. For two years, near enough, his barrels and dive bombers made good on the boast. Now…
Now the damnyankees had barrels and dive bombers, too. Their machines were just as good as the CSA’s. From the dismayed reports from the field, their latest barrels were better than anything the Confederates had. And the United States had swarms of barrels and cannon and airplanes and men, while the Confederates had…what was left from the adventures of the past two years.
Lulu stuck her head into the office. “Mr. President, General Forrest is here to see you.”
“Thanks,” Featherston said. “Please send him in.” He could order Negroes sent to camps by the tens of thousands, by the hundreds of thousands, without batting an eye, but he was always polite to his secretary.
Nathan Bedford Forrest III came in and gave him a perfunctory salute. “Mr. President,” he said, and then, plainly with an effort, “Freedom!”
“Freedom!” Jake echoed; the Party slogan never felt stale to him. He waved the head of the General Staff to a chair. Seeing how haggard Forrest looked, he took out the bottle of whiskey that lived in his desk drawer. “Need a snort?”
“Don’t mind if I do, sir.” Forrest poured himself a healthy shot. “Mud in your eye.” He knocked it back. Jake Featherston also drank. Forrest eyed him. “That was good, but I don’t reckon I can drink enough to make me forget how much trouble we’re in.”
“You’re the fellow who’s supposed to get us out of trouble like that,” Jake said.
“With what…sir?” Forrest asked. “Talk about making bricks without straw-I feel like I’m trying to make bricks without mud out there. How can I stop the damnyankees when they’re throwing everything but the kitchen sink at me and I don’t even have the goddamn sink?”
“It can’t be that bad,” Featherston said.
“No, sir. It’s worse,” Nathan Bedford Forrest III said. “We…lost a lot of men and we lost a lot of materiel in Pittsburgh and falling back afterwards.”
“The Yankees must have lost a lot, too.” Featherston eyed the whiskey bottle. He still drank, but he couldn’t remember the last time he really drank. Getting plowed, forgetting all this crap, was an enormous temptation. But the crap wouldn’t go away, and it would get worse while he wasn’t looking at it. And so, regretfully, he looked but he didn’t grab the bottle again.
“They did, sir. No doubt about it,” the chief of the General Staff said earnestly. He’s getting ready to call me a damn fool, Featherston thought. He’ll be polite about it, but he’ll do it just the same. And sure as hell, Forrest went on, “But they’ve got more men and more factories than we do. They can build up faster than we can, and they can go on building up to a level…we have trouble matching.”
A level we can’t match-that’s what he almost said. “They’ve got more men. We can’t do much about that,” Jake said. “But we’ve got better men, by God, and we’ve got better weapons. The automatic rifles, and now the rockets…”
“All that’s true, sir, and it’s why things aren’t worse,” Forrest said. “But our artillery’s no better than theirs, and they’ve got more. Our airplanes aren’t better, and they’ve got more. That’s really starting to hurt. And when it comes to barrels-sir, when it comes to barrels, they’ve got a step up on us. That’s starting to hurt bad, too.”
“Goddammit, why can’t we keep up?” Jake Featherston snarled. “We were ahead when the war started.”
“We don’t have enough engineers, sir. We don’t have enough factory hands,” Forrest said. “Damn near every healthy white man in the country from eighteen to fifty’s in uniform.”
“Women are taking up some of the slack in the factories-more every day, in fact.” Forrest was angry he’d taken too long to see how important that was. He didn’t like giving women such jobs. In the long run, it would twist the CSA out of the shape he wanted the country to have. But if you got smashed in the short run, the long run didn’t matter. So women went to work in war plants, and he’d worry about what it all meant later-if there was a later.
“We still need more bodies in there, sir.” Forrest took a deep breath. “If there was any way we could get more use out of our niggers-”
“No,” Featherston said in a low, deadly voice. “The niggers are Party business. They’re my business. Don’t you go sticking your nose in where it doesn’t belong. We are gonna come out of this war nigger-free. Nigger-free, you hear me?”
“Mr. President, how much do we have to pay to make that happen?” Forrest asked. “We needed most of a division to clean Richmond out-a division we couldn’t use against the damnyankees. If that happens too many more times, it’ll put us in a world of trouble. I’m sorry I have to tell you such things, sir, but somebody needs to.”
He had nerve. Not many people who came before Jake Featherston told him anything but what they thought he wanted to hear. Clarence Potter did, but Potter had almost official gadfly status. Even Ferd Koenig hesitated. Forrest might be hesitant, but he was saying what he thought.
“The worst is over,” Jake said. “Most towns are cleaned out.” That still left the black belt from rural South Carolina through Louisiana largely unaffected, but he wasn’t about to split hairs with Nathan Bedford Forrest III. Besides, he had Mexican soldiers dealing with the coons there. He didn’t need to pull so many of his own men away from more urgent-not more important, but more urgent-things.
“I hope you’re right, sir,” the chief of the General Staff said. “I hope so, but…”
I haven’t convinced that man, Jake thought. He changed the subject from his own shortcomings to those of the Army: “We’ve got to stop the Yankees. They’re carving their way through Kentucky like we did through Ohio.”
“That’s what I’m trying to tell you, Mr. President,” Forrest said. “We’re using every man and every piece of machinery we can get our hands on. We can’t get our hands on enough men or machines.”