“Th-Th-Thank you,” the guy with combat fatigue got out.
“Don’t worry about it, buddy,” Sergeant Blackledge said. “That fancy-pants asshole comes up here for half an hour, so he reckons he’s hot shit. Let him stay in the line for weeks at a stretch like us and see how he likes it. Being brave is one thing. Staying brave when all kinds of shit comes down on you day after day, that’s a fuck of a lot tougher.”
“I-I’ll try and go forward,” the shellshocked soldier said.
Blackledge only laughed. “Don’t worry about it,” he repeated. “We ain’t doin’ any more advancing, not for a while.” He raised his voice: “Everybody dig in! Damnyankees are gonna hear we’re getting frisky in this sector, so they’ll hit us with everything but the kitchen sink.”
“You forget something, Sergeant,” Jorge said.
“Yeah? What’s that?” The sergeant bristled at the idea he could have overlooked anything.
“Any second now, our own side, they gonna start shelling us, too,” Jorge answered.
Sergeant Blackledge stared at him, then grudged a chuckle. “That’d be a good joke if only it was a joke, you know what I mean? Fucking Patton’s probably ciphering out how to get us all killed right this minute.”
“Shoulda scragged him when we had the chance,” Gabe Medwick said. Dirt flew from his entrenching tool as he scraped out a foxhole. Jorge was also doing his best to imitate a mole.
“Nah.” Reluctantly, Blackledge shook his head. “Somebody woulda blabbed, and we’d all be in deep shit then. Deeper shit, if there is shit deeper’n this. Besides, who says the next jerk with stars and a wreath’d be any better? Oh, chances are he wouldn’t grandstand so much, but he’d still do his best to get us killed. Generals get their reputations for getting guys like us killed. Some’re smart assholes and some’re dumb assholes, but they’re all assholes, pretty much.”
“Good thing the enemy, he’s got assholes for generals, too,” Jorge said.
Before Blackledge could answer, U.S. artillery started coming in. The sergeant called that one right on the button. Jorge hoped the Yankees didn’t have barrels to follow up the bombardment. If they did, he knew damn well the outfit would have to retreat. He didn’t think they could hold the line they’d been in before Patton brought them forward, either. If they’d had armor of their own, maybe, but one general in a chromed helmet didn’t make up for what was missing.
Barrels painted green-gray did come clanking south. Jorge retreated, machine-gun bullets nipping at his heels. His other choice was dying. Patton would have approved of that for him. For himself, he didn’t like it for beans.
Irving Morrell’s barrel rattled forward. The Confederates had done everything they could to fortify the ground in front of Chattanooga. He was doing his best to show them that everything they could do wasn’t nearly enough.
“Time to make some more of those poor sorry bastards die for their country, Frenchy,” he told the gunner.
Sergeant Bergeron nodded. “Long as I don’t have to die for mine, sir, that sounds real good to me.”
“You’ve got the right attitude.” Morrell knew there were times when a soldier didn’t have much choice about dying for his country. Sometimes you had to lay down your life to keep lots of your buddies from losing theirs. Frenchy Bergeron knew that, too; Morrell had seen him in enough action to be sure of it. Only a man who did know about it could joke about it. But you could also get killed from stupidity or plain bad luck. You not only could, it was much too easy. That was the kind of thing Frenchy was talking about.
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?”