A considerable silence followed. Then Kinder said, “A major does not speak that way to a general officer.”
“So sue me,” Dover said. “All I know is, the damnyankees are building up like you wouldn’t believe on the other side of the Ohio. We’re lagging, on account of we can’t get what we need where we need it. And one of the reasons we can’t is that you guys won’t turn loose of your trucks. If we get swamped, you reckon anybody in Richmond’s going to give a rat’s ass that you’ve got all your fucking trucks?”
The silence lasted even longer this time. “I could have your head, Major,” General Kinder said at last. “Can you give me one good reason why I shouldn’t?”
“I can give you two, sir,” Dover said. “You give me the boot, you’ll get somebody up here who doesn’t know what the hell he’s doing, and that’ll screw up the war effort. There’s one. And two is, ten minutes after that new sucker gets here, he’s gonna be on the horn screaming his head off to you, wondering how come you’re not shipping him the shit he needs.”
“You can’t possibly be a Regular,” Major General Kinder said after yet another pause.
“Not me,” Jerry Dover agreed cheerfully. “I come out of the restaurant business. But I’m mighty goddamn good at what I do. Which counts for more…sir?”
“The restaurant business, eh? No wonder you’re such a foulmouthed son of a bitch,” Kinder said, proving he’d had at least one other restaurant manager serve under him. “All right, Major. We’ll see what we can do.”
“Thank you very much, sir.” Dover’s respect for military courtesy rose in direct proportion to how much his superiors were inclined to do what he wanted.
“You almost pushed it too far, Major,” Barton Kinder said. “I wouldn’t try that again if I were you.” He hung up before Dover could answer, which might have been lucky for all concerned.
One of the other logistics officers, who couldn’t possibly have heard what Major General Kinder said, told Dover, “Boy, you like to walk close to the edge, don’t you?”
“The damnyankees can blow me up. The damnyankees will blow me up if we give ’em half a chance-maybe even if we don’t,” Dover answered. “If a brass hat on my own side wants to throw me in the stockade or take the uniform off my back, what the hell do I care? The worst thing my own people can do to me is leave me right where I’m at.”
“I wish I could look at it that way.” The other man had a VMI class ring on the third finger of his right hand, so he was a career officer. That meant he was missing…
“Freedom!” Dover said. He was no Party stalwart, but the slogan rang true here. “Isn’t that what this damn war’s all about? If we aren’t free to do what we want and tell everybody else to piss up a rope, what’s the point?”
Before the VMI graduate could answer, the world blew up. Alarms started howling and screeching. Bombs started dropping. Shells started bursting. Men started screaming, “Gas! Gas!”
“Fuck!” Jerry Dover said, with much more passion than he’d used to say, Freedom! He had to rummage in his desk for a gas mask. As he fumbled it on, he knew what this was. He knew what it had to be. The Yankees had been building up for a long time. They weren’t building any more. They were coming.
Invasion! No word could rouse greater dread in the CSA. For the first two summers of the war, the Confederates had had everything their own way. The United States had a lot of debts to pay. Now it looked as if they were laying their money on the table.
“Out!” somebody shouted. “Out and into the trenches!”
That struck Jerry Dover as some of the best advice he’d ever heard. He flew out through the tent flap-not that he was the first man gone, or even the second. The trenches weren’t far away, but one of the men who got out ahead of him stopped a shell and exploded into red mist. Dover tasted blood on his lips as he ran by. He spat and spat, feeling like a cannibal.
He jumped into the trench feetfirst, as if going into a swimming hole when he was a kid. Then he looked around for something to dig with. Being merely a logistics officer, he had no entrenching tool on his belt. A board was better than nothing. He started scraping his own dugout from the side of the trench.
Shell fragments screeched past above his head. A wounded man shrieked. Not everybody made it to the trench on time. Some Confederate guns started firing back. The noise of shells going out was different from the one they made coming in.
Bombs whistled down out of the sky. They were what really scared Dover. If one of them burst in this stretch of trench, that was it. He was safe enough from artillery here, but not from bombs.
Somebody punctuated a momentary lull by screaming, “This is it!”
“Make it stop!” someone else added a moment later, his voice high and desperate and shrill.
Jerry Dover wished it would stop, too, but it didn’t. It went on and on, till it reminded him of one of the unending bombardments from the Great War. He was convinced whoever’d let out that first cry was dead right-or, with better luck, still alive and right. This had to be it. If the damnyankees weren’t coming over the Ohio right here, this was the biggest bluff in the history of the world.
More Confederate guns boomed, but the noise they made seemed almost lost in the thunder of the Yankee barrage. Officers and sergeants shouted for men to move now here, now there. Dover wouldn’t have left his hole for all the money in the world, or for all the love in it. Moving about up there was asking to be obliterated.
Overhead, U.S. airplanes droned south. Dover swore as he listened to them. The Yankees weren’t just going after front-line C.S. troops. They were trying to tear up roads and railroads, too. The better the job they did, the more trouble the Confederacy would have bringing up men and materiel to beat them back.
And the better the job they did, the more trouble Jerry Dover would be in, not only from the U.S. soldiers but also from his own superiors. They wouldn’t believe any disaster that befell the CSA was their fault. God forbid! Easier to blame the major who used to manage a restaurant.
A four-engine bomber fell out of the sky, its right wing a sheet of flame. It smashed down less than a quarter of a mile from where Dover huddled. Its whole bomb load went off at once. The ground shook under him. Blast slammed him into the side of the trench. He tasted blood again. It was his own this time.
“Corpsman!” “Medic!” the shouts rose again and again, from all directions. God help these poor bastards, Dover thought. Riflemen and machine gunners-mostly-turned their weapons away from the soldiers who wore Red Crosses. Shells and bombs didn’t give a damn.
After four and a half hours that seemed like four and a half years (Dover kept checking his watch every three months and being amazed only fifteen minutes had gone by), the gunfire let up. He waited for shouts of, Here they come! He was surprised he hadn’t already heard those shouts. The damnyankees could have carved out a formidable bridgehead under cover of that barrage.
Then, just when he started to wonder if it was a bluff after all, more shells came in, these close by the river. “Smoke!” Again, the shout came from everywhere at once. U.S. light airplanes buzzed along the southern bank of the Ohio, spraying more smoke behind them. They got away with it, too. They made perfect targets, but the Confederates near Covington were simply too battered and rattled to shoot back.
Slowly, slowly, the smoke screen cleared. Jerry Dover started to look up, but the rattle of machine-gun fire made him duck back into the trench again. Those small airplanes came back and sprayed more smoke. The sound of machine guns and rifles roared from it.
“Reinforcements!” someone bawled. “We got to get us reinforcements, before they break out and go hog wild!”
“Fuck me!” That shout of despair came from close by Dover. “They’ve got barrels over the river!”