The driver turned left onto the bridge so sharply, Pound thanked the God in Whom he only sporadically believed for not letting the barrel throw a track. One of the machines behind him fired a round from its main armament. He couldn’t see what it was shooting at-he had his eyes on the forward-facing periscopes that showed the far end of the bridge and the village of Rumsey beyond.
“Stop just at the end of the bridge,” he told the driver.
“At the end of the bridge-yes, sir.” No sooner had the driver stopped than soldiers in butternut started running toward the barrel. The bow machine gun chattered. The Confederate soldiers went down, some dead or wounded, others diving for cover. Civilians appeared in the streets, too, but they were running for cover.
After the first impromptu charge from Rumsey failed, the Confederates paused to put together a proper attack. Whoever led it was plenty smart. He had plenty of people with automatic rifles and submachine guns going forward in front of the men with Featherston Fizzes and the Confederates’ newfangled antibarrel rockets. If the troops making the racket with the small arms could distract the barrel crew…
But the Confederate commander reckoned without canister. Pound waited till the closest enemy soldiers were very close indeed before he shouted, “Fire!”
Even he was awed by the carnage a 3?-inch canister shell could cause. Men and pieces of men lay and writhed, broken, in front of the barrel. Several dropped Featherston Fizzes added flames to the horror. “Shall I give ’em another round, sir?” Scullard asked.
“By all means,” Pound answered.
The second round of canister, when added to the steady rattle of death from the bow machine gun, convinced the handful of Confederates still on their feet to get away if they could. “Give me one more round,” the gunner told the loader.
“Hold up on that.” Pound overrode him. “Use HE instead, and start knocking down the houses closest to us. I don’t want one of those bastards with a rocket to be able to get off an easy shot at us.”
“I’ll do it, sir,” Scullard said, and he did, with the peculiar gusto a man has when destroying property that belongs to the other side. A secondary explosion from inside one of those houses in Rumsey made Pound think he’d barely beaten the Confederates to the punch: if that wasn’t a rocket blowing up, what was it?
Sergeant Blakey’s barrel came up alongside Pound’s. The other three in the platoon held the north end of the bridge against the Confederates in Calhoun. Their cannon and machine guns thundered and barked. Pound hoped the U.S. foot soldiers in the woods north of Calhoun were pressing down into the town. Squeezed between them and the barrels on the bridge, what could Featherston’s men do but get out?
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.”