Not far from the command car lay the corpse of a soldier who’d been running for the trees when a cannon round caught him in the middle of the back. The corpse was in two pieces-top half and bottom half. They lay several feet apart. “Running’s not guaranteed to keep you safe,” Potter said. Standing your ground and shooting back at the enemy didn’t guarantee it, either. A bomb had landed right by one of the brigade’s antiaircraft guns. The blast blew the gun itself ass over teakettle. Not much was left of the men who’d served it.
“Can we still go forward?” the driver asked.
“We have to,” Potter said. The question and the automatic answer helped get his brain working again. He hopped down from the command car and started adding orders of his own to the ones that came from his subordinates. Fighting fires, getting the wounded and the dead off to one side, clearing wrecked vehicles from the roadway…It all took time, time the brigade should have used to travel. They were going to be late getting where they were supposed to go.
And they wouldn’t get there at better than two-thirds strength. The Great War was a war of attrition, a war the CSA lost. Attrition had just fallen out of the sky and jumped on his brigade. A few minutes of air strikes, and it was barely combat-worthy. It wouldn’t be able to do the things planners assumed a fresh brigade of reinforcements could do. It couldn’t come close.
How many other Confederate units were in the same boat? And which boat was it, anyway? One that just stopped a torpedo? It sure looked that way to Clarence Potter.
He did the best he could, praying all the while that U.S. fighter-bombers wouldn’t come back. He was agnostic leaning toward atheist, but he prayed anyhow. It can’t hurt, he thought. And enemy aircraft did stay away. The brigade, or what was left of it, got moving again. The men could still do their best…however good that turned out to be.
Lieutenant Michael Pound was not a happy man. He’d been happy driving the Confederates from Pittsburgh back into Ohio and then down into Kentucky and Tennessee. Forcing the CSA to dance to the USA’s tune made him happy.
Now, instead of pushing on toward Chattanooga, he and his armored platoon had to leave the front line and shift to the east. If they didn’t, the Confederates were liable to drive in the U.S. flank. If that happened, very bad things would follow. Pound could see as much. He took it as a personal affront.
“We’ll make them pay-you see if we don’t,” he growled when his platoon stopped to rest and-at his orders-to maintain their barrels. “If they think they can sidetrack us-”
“They’re right, aren’t they?” Sergeant Frank Blakey asked. The barrel commander had a large wrench in his hands. He was tightening the links in his barrel’s left track.
Pound approved of a commander who could do his own maintenance. He also approved of a noncom who talked back to officers. He’d done plenty of that when he had stripes on his sleeve instead of these silly gold bars on even sillier shoulder straps. A lot of men who became officers late in their careers did their best to ape the style and ambitions of those who’d gained the privilege sooner. Not Michael Pound. He still thought like a top sergeant, and didn’t labor under the delusion that those little gold bars turned him into a little tin god.
So he just laughed and nodded. “Yeah, they are-right this minute, anyhow. But when we get through with them, they’re going to be worse off than if they never tried this attack in the first place.”
“How do you figure, sir?” That was Mel Scullard, his own gunner. His crew had learned even faster than the others that he didn’t get pissed off when people spoke their minds.
“We’ve got air superiority. We’ve got more barrels than they do, and better ones now. We’ve got more artillery than they do, too, in spite of their damn rockets,” Pound answered. “If they come out and slug toe-to-toe with us, they just make themselves better targets. They’re harder to get rid of when they hang back and make us come at them. It worked like that in the Great War, and it still does.”
Sergeant Scullard grunted. “Well, that makes sense.” He gave Pound a crooked grin. “How did you come up with it?”
“Accidents will happen,” Pound said dryly, and everyone laughed. Pound went on, “What we have to do is, we have to clobber the Confederates for coming out in the open to bang with us, and then we have to get back down to the real front and push on to Chattanooga.” Everything always sounded easy when he started talking about it. It sometimes didn’t turn out like that for real, but he was convinced that was never his fault.
“We’ll put a lot of driving miles on our barrels,” Sergeant Blakey pointed out.
“Sure.” Pound nodded. Barrels were complex machines that performed right at their limits all the time. This war’s models were less prone to breakdowns than the lumbering monsters of a generation earlier, but they still failed much more often than he wished they would. He said, “The better we take care of them while we’re on the road, the less trouble they’ll give us.”
All the men he led nodded at that. A barrel crew that took care of its machine spent a lot more time in combat than one that let things slide. Barrels were the logical successors to horsed cavalry. Back in the old days, Pound had heard, a mounted trooper took care of his horse before he worried about himself. The same rule held good with armored units, though Pound would sooner have used a curry comb on his barrel than a screwdriver. He was old enough to remember the way horses responded when you groomed them. Barrels never would do anything like that.
But, in an age of mechanized warfare, horsed cavalry couldn’t hope to survive. Soldiers in barrels stayed alive and hurt the enemy. That was what the game was all about.
“Are we ready to get rolling?” Pound asked. Nobody said no. The soldiers got back into their steel shells and rumbled northeast.
Before long, they passed a barrel whose men were busy replacing a track. “We hit a mine,” one of the soldiers in coveralls said in response to Pound’s shouted question. “Lucky this is all that happened to us.”
“You’d better believe it,” Pound said. “Well, hurry along-we’ll need everybody we can get our hands on before long.” The other barrelman waved in agreement and returned to his backbreaking work.
The northeast road ran from Dalton toward Pikeville, at the head of the Sequatchie Valley, where the Confederates were trying to break out. Pikeville was a county seat-a sign still standing near the edge of town so declared. All the same, the place couldn’t have held much more than 500 people before the fighting started. Michael Pound doubted it had half that many now. The locals, like most people with half an ounce of sense, didn’t want to stick around while bullets chewed up their houses and bombs and shells came down on their heads. They’d lit out for the tall timber, wherever the tall timber was-probably in the mountains to the east.
U.S. artillery was set up south and west of Pikeville, throwing shells at the Confederates as they tried to push forward. The gun bunnies, most of them naked to the waist, nodded to Pound as he and his barrels rattled past. U.S. fighter-bombers roared past overhead. Pound smiled to hear bombs going off not too far away. The harder the enemy got hit before he made it to Pikeville, the less trouble he’d be when he finally did.
Bomb craters said Confederate aircraft were hitting back as best they could. A burnt-out Hound Dog had crashed in a field just outside of town. The front half of the fighter was a crumpled wreck. The Confederate battle flag on the upthrust tail was as much of a grave marker as the pilot was likely to get.
Houses on the east side of Pikeville faced the mountains from which the enemy would come. Pound’s barrel pushed its way into one of those houses-literally, knocking down the western wall and poking the gun out through a window on the east side. The other machines in his platoon deployed close by, behind fences and piles of wreckage. They weren’t the only barrels taking up positions there. If the Confederates wanted Pikeville and what lay beyond, they would have to pay.