He was about as far removed from the chain of command as a soldier could be. That didn’t necessarily mean he was wrong. If, say, Morrell got hit standing up in the cupola, which could happen easily enough, somebody who knew what things were like at the front might have to do some talking to keep an attack moving smoothly till Brigadier General Parsons could take over. It would be highly unofficial. Chances were it wouldn’t show up in the after-action reports. It could be important, though.
“You’re going to be an officer before this war is done,” Morrell said.
How many times had he tried to promote Michael Pound? How many times had Pound said no? Now Pound was a lieutenant himself, and proving he deserved his rank. Morrell hadn’t expected anything different. As for Frenchy Bergeron, he said, “I hope so, sir.”
“I’ll promote you right now if you want,” Morrell said. “Only thing I don’t like about the deal is that I’ll have to break in a new gunner.”
“Thank you, sir!” Bergeron said. “You want to wait till we get past Nashville, then? I figure there’ll be a lot of fighting up to there, and you’ll need me.”
“Deal,” Morrell said at once. “And I think you’re right. Getting over the Cumberland won’t be fun. But if we made it across the Ohio, we can do that, too.”
The U.S. spearhead broke out of Bowling Green heading south three days later. Air strikes took out a battery of Confederate rockets before they could salvo. Hearing that cheered Morrell no end. Those damn things could hamstring an advance before it really got going.
As usual, Morrell’s place was at the front. He wanted to see what happened, not hear about it later from somebody else. Officers who served on the General Staff didn’t understand that. To them, war was arrows on a map. To Morrell, it was shells going off and machine guns hammering and barrels brewing up and sending pillars of noxious black smoke into the sky and prisoners staggering out of the fight with shell shock on their faces and with their hands in the air. It was exhaust fumes and cordite and the sharp stink of fear. To the men of the General Staff, it was chess. They didn’t understand both sides were moving at once-and trying to steal pieces and knock over the board.
Morrell’s barrels raced by-raced through-a column of refugees U.S. fighter-bombers had hit from above. In 1941, the Confederates gleefully strafed Ohioans who didn’t care to live under the Stars and Bars. Refugees clogged roads. Refugees who’d just been hammered from the air clogged them even better. So the Confederates taught.
And now they were learning the same lesson for themselves. Kentuckians-or maybe they were Tennesseans by now-who didn’t want to live under the Stars and Stripes fled south as people from Ohio had fled north and east two years earlier. When they got hit by machine guns and cannon fire and bombs from above, it was as horrible as it had been in the USA.
Dead and wounded children and women-and a few men, mostly old-lay in the roadway. Children with dead parents clutched corpses and screamed grief to the uncaring sky. People’s most precious possessions were scattered everywhere. Automobiles burned.
A woman standing by the body of a little girl stared at Morrell with terrible eyes as his barrel rattled past. The shoulder was wide here-the oncoming barrels didn’t need to plow straight through what was left of the refugee column. The woman picked up a rock and threw it at Morrell. It clanged off the barrel’s side. “What the hell?” Frenchy Bergeron said.
“It’s all right.” Morrell ducked down into the turret. “Just a dissatisfied customer. If that was me out there and all I had was a rock, I expect I’d throw it, too.”
He straightened up and looked out again. The Confederates didn’t try to hold back the advancing U.S. troops till they got to a hamlet called Westmoreland. Morrell looked for it on his Kentucky maps, didn’t find it, and checked the sheets for northern Tennessee. That was how he was sure he’d crossed the state line. A sign said, WESTMORELAND-STRAWBERRY CAPITAL OF THE WORLD. Here as May passed into June, the crop was no doubt coming to full, sweet ripeness…or it would have been, anyhow. The treads of Morrell’s barrel and all the others speeding south with it churned the strawberries into jam.
Was that motion, there behind a farmhouse by Hawkins, the street leading into Westmoreland from the northwest? Morrell brought up his binoculars. “Front!” he sang out. “In back of that yellow clapboard house.”
“Identified!” Bergeron said, and then, “Clapboard? That house go to a whorehouse?”
Morrell snorted and wheezed. He had to try twice before he could ask, “What’s the range?”
“Just over a mile, sir.”
“Can you hit it?”
“Bet your ass. I’ll kill the fucker, and he won’t dare open up on us till we get closer.”
“Do it, then.” Morrell ordered the barrel to a halt. The gunner traversed the turret till the long 3?-inch cannon bore on the C.S. barrel. The roar almost took Morrell’s head off. He used the field glasses again. “Hit!” he yelled. “Way to go, Frenchy! Son of a bitch is burning!”
“Damn straight,” Bergeron said. “They got any others hanging around, they’ll know they better clear out.” Other U.S. barrels started finding targets and setting them afire at a range the Confederates couldn’t hope to match. Sullenly, the surviving C.S. machines did pull back. They had to hope for wooded terrain where they had a better chance to strike from ambush. U.S. foot soldiers and barrels pushed into Westmoreland. The streets proved to be mined. That slowed them up, but not for long.
U.S. bombers left two major dams in northern Tennessee untouched-the one by Carthage and the one farther east near Celina. They didn’t do it out of the goodness of their hearts: they didn’t want the floods downstream to disrupt their own advance. The Confederates, desperate to slow U.S. ground forces however they could, blew both dams as they fell back over the Cumberland.
Michael Pound was not pleased. The floodwaters washed over the banks of the river and flowed across what had been fertile farmland. They turned it into something that more closely resembled oatmeal.
The new U.S. barrels had wide tracks. That meant each part of the track carried less weight than was true in older machines. It also meant they could keep going where older barrels would bog down. It didn’t mean they had an easy time.
Here and there, Confederate antibarrel guns and holdouts with rocket launchers lingered north of the Cumberland. “I hate those damn stovepipes,” Sergeant Mel Scullard said, using the name the men in green-gray had hung on the launchers. “Doesn’t seem fair, one miserable infantry son of a bitch able to take out a whole barrel all by his lonesome.”
“Especially when it’s your barrel-and your neck,” Pound observed dryly.
“You bet,” the gunner said.
“They always could, with a Featherston Fizz,” Pound said.
“That’s different,” Scullard insisted. “You could see those assholes coming, and you had a chance to kill ’em before they got to you. These guys, they stay hidden, they fire the lousy thing, and then they run like hell.”
“I know,” Pound said. “We’ve got to get something just like that so our guys can give the Confederates what-for.” Had he been as mouthy to his superiors when he was a noncom? He smiled reminiscently. He was sure he had.
That evening, he got summoned to an officers’ conclave. This was the sort of thing he’d always had to find out about from his own superiors till he finally couldn’t evade promotion. It proved less impressive than he’d imagined it would. A dozen or so officers, ranging up from his lowly second lieutenanthood to a light colonel, gathered in a barn that smelled maddeningly delicious: the former owners had used it for curing tobacco.
The lieutenant colonel lit a U.S. cigarette, whose nasty smoke seemed all the viler by comparison with the aroma of choice burley. “Intelligence says the Confederates have some Freedom Party Guards units in the neighborhood,” he announced. “You want to watch out for those guys.”