The veterans in the platoon all dug in as fast as he did. New replacements stood around gaping and wondering what the hell was going on. Nobody’d had time to show them the ropes, and they didn’t own enough combat experience to do what needed doing without having to think about it. The extra few seconds they stayed upright cost them.
One was gruesomely killed. Two more went down wounded, both screaming their heads off. “Corpsman!” other soldiers shouted. “Over here, corpsman!” A veteran scrambled out of his hole to help a wounded rookie, and another fragment bit him. He howled in pain and howled curses at the same time.
In due course, U.S. artillery thundered. The mortars fell silent. Biding their time, Martin thought gloomily. But he was one of the first ones out of those newly enlarged and improved holes. “Come on!” he called to the rest of the men. “We’ve got a job to do.”
It was a nasty, unpleasant job. The ground over which they advanced offered little cover. To the Confederates in Hillsboro, they had to look like bugs walking across a plate. Smoke rounds helped, but only so much. If Featherston’s boys had one of those rocket launchers up there, they could put a hell of a crimp in anybody’s morning.
U.S. barrels rattled forward. Chester always liked to see them. They could do things infantry simply couldn’t. And they always drew enemy fire away from foot soldiers. He wasn’t the only one who knew they were dangerous-the Confederates did, too.
One of the things the barrels could do was lay down more smoke. That helped shield the advancing men in green-gray from the Confederates on the high ground. The Confederates kept shooting, but now they had trouble finding good targets. Chester trotted on, ducking and throwing himself into shell holes whenever he thought he had to.
Out of the smoke loomed a man in the wrong uniform: dirty butternut instead of dirty green-gray, a helmet of not quite the right shape. Chester’s Springfield swung toward the Confederate’s chest. The enemy soldier dropped-in fact, violently cast away-his submachine gun and threw up his hands. “Don’t shoot, Yankee!” he moaned. “You got me!”
“What do we do with him, Sarge?” one of Martin’s men asked.
Chester thought, but not for long. They didn’t really have time to deal with POWs… “Take him on up the road,” he said.
“Right,” the U.S. soldier said. He gestured with his Springfield. “Come on, you.” Pathetically eager, the prisoner came. Martin went on advancing. A shot rang out behind him, and then another one. He swore softly. It was too bad, but they just didn’t have the time. If he’d told his men to take the Confederate to the rear, that would have removed at least one of them from the fight. And so he used the other phrase, and the man was dead. At least he wouldn’t have known he was about to die till it happened. That was something, though not much.
Martin was sure the Confederates played the game the same way. It was too bad, but what could you do? If taking a prisoner didn’t inconvenience or endanger you, you’d do it. Why not? But if it did…It was a tough war, and it didn’t get any easier.
Shame he didn’t have one of their automatic rifles-submachine-gun cartridges don’t matter so much, Martin thought. Well, the guy who plugged him will get his cigarettes and whatever else he has that’s worth taking. And that was what a man’s life boiled down to: cartridges and cigarettes. Yeah, it sure was a tough war.
Artillery and the barrels pounded the Confederates ahead. The gun bunnies were in good form; hardly any rounds fell short. More soldiers in butternut came out of their holes with hands high. Chester did let them surrender. When men gave up in a group, it was too easy to have something go wrong if you tried to get rid of all of them at once.
Hillsboro fell that afternoon. The enemy pulled back when U.S. barrels threatened to cut off his line of retreat to the Ohio. He did a professional job of it, moving his guns out hitched to trucks and commandeered motorcars. He even paused to fire a few Parthian shots as he went south.
“We licked him here,” Private Rohe said, inspecting what was left of Hillsboro. “We licked him, yeah, but he ain’t licked yet.”
Chester was thinking about the same thing. “As long as we keep licking him, the rest doesn’t matter. Sooner or later, he’ll be licked whether he likes it or not.”
“Yeah?” Rohe weighed that, then nodded. “Yeah. Sounds right, Sarge. So when do we go over the Ohio?”
“Beats me,” Chester said. “Let’s bundle the other guys across first. Then we can worry about us, right?” Rohe nodded again.
Major Jerry Dover watched from the south bank of the Ohio as trucks and infantrymen crossed the bridge back into Kentucky. The span was laid about a foot below the surface of the river. The damnyankees still hadn’t figured out that trick. When no one was on the bridge, it was invisible from the air. U.S. bombers didn’t keep coming over and trying to blow it to hell and gone.
The foot soldiers on the bridge looked like men walking on water. Dover turned to Colonel Travis W.W. Oliphant and said, “If we keep it up, sir, we can start our own religion.”
“What’s that?” Colonel Oliphant didn’t get it. I might have known, Dover thought with a mental sigh. Then the light dawned on his superior. Oliphant scowled. “I don’t find that amusing, Major. I don’t find that amusing at all,” he said. “I find it the next thing to blasphemous, as a matter of fact.”
“Sorry, sir,” Dover lied. Damned stuffed shirt. It wasn’t as if he didn’t know as much. He did. Any man who got huffy over not one initial but two couldn’t be anything but a stuffed shirt.
Colonel Oliphant went on trumpeting and wiggling his ears and pawing the ground. After a little while, Dover stopped listening to him. He was watching the stream of men and machines to make sure all the field kitchens safely returned to the CSA. Oliphant was supposed to be doing the same thing. He was too busy ranting.
“If we make God turn His face away from us in disgust, how can we prevail?” he demanded.
Dover thought about Negroes disappearing in Atlanta. He thought about the people he lost from the Huntsman’s Lodge in cleanouts. He wondered what was going on since he put on the uniform and went away. Was Xerxes still there? He could hope, but that was all he could do. “Sir, do you know about the camps?” he asked Colonel Oliphant in a low voice.
“What?” The other officer stared at him as if he were suddenly spouting Choctaw. “What are you talking about?”
“The camps,” Dover repeated patiently. “The camps where niggers go in but they don’t come out.”
He wondered if Travis W.W. Oliphant would deny that any such things existed. A little to his surprise, Oliphant didn’t. “Yes, I know about them. So what?” he said.
“Well, sir, if God will put up with those, I don’t think He’ll get too disgusted about a bad joke of mine,” Dover said.
Oliphant turned red. “The one has nothing to do with the other, Major,” he said stiffly. “The Negroes deserve everything that we’re giving them. Your so-called joke, on the other hand, was completely gratuitous.”
“God told you the Negroes have it coming, did He?” Jerry Dover asked.
“See here, Dover, you don’t have the right attitude,” Colonel Oliphant said. “Whose side are you on, anyway?”
“I’m on the Confederacy’s side…sir,” Dover answered. “If you think a stupid joke will put us in bad with God, I’m not so sure you are, though.” He’d managed the Huntsman’s Lodge too damn long. He wasn’t inclined to take guff from anybody, even if the guff-slinger wore three stars on either side of his collar while Dover had only one.
“I will write you up for this insubordination, Major,” Oliphant said in a low, furious voice. “You’ll get a court-martial, by God-yes, by God!”