But Lieutenant Pound wasn’t the only officer with a driving urge for speed. General Morrell had it, too, and had the authority to do something with it. The pontoon bridges started reaching across the river as soon as it got too dark for the Confederates on the southern bank to see what U.S. forces were up to. Morrell or someone else with a good head on his shoulders ordered an artillery barrage laid on several miles to the west. The Confederates naturally replied in kind, and fired star shells to light up the Cumberland there to discover what the men in green-gray were doing. The soldiers and engineers there weren’t doing anything much but shelling. Lulled, Featherston’s men fired back.
At a quarter to four, a captain of engineers asked Pound, “You ready to go like hell, Lieutenant?”
“Yes, sir!” Pound answered around a yawn. He’d been up all night.
The captain nodded. “Good. That’s the right answer. Won’t be long. Haul ass when you get the word.”
“I can do that, sir,” Pound said. And, ten minutes later, he and his platoon did. They weren’t quite the first U.S. barrels over the Cumberland, but not many were in front of them. Infantry in half-tracks crossed right behind them. By the time the sun came up, they’d carved out a solid bridgehead on the south bank.
“Gas!” somebody shouted as U.S.shells rained down on the Confederate positions south of the Cumberland. Jorge Rodriguez already had his mask on-he’d heard the gurgle gas rounds made flying through the air. He huddled in a hastily dug foxhole and prayed nothing would come down on his head.
Too much had landed on him in the past few weeks, not literally but metaphorically. Virginia had been fairly quiet. Getting transferred to the Tennessee front was like getting a bucket of ice water in the face. But getting word that his father had died in Texas was like getting thrown into ice water with no way out. The telegram gave no details, which only made things worse. Jorge had written to his mother down in Sonora, but he was still waiting for an answer.
He had little time to brood on it. That was the one good thing about getting thrown into combat fierce enough to give him a brush with death almost every day. He’d asked his company commander for compassionate leave. Captain Nelson Cash had looked at the telegram and shaken his head. “I’m mighty sorry, George,” he said, that being what most English-speakers called Jorge. “I’m mighty sorry, but maybe you noticed there was a war on?”
“Yes, sir.” Jorge hadn’t really expected anything different, but he had to try. He thought about going AWOL, thought about it and then thought again. He was a long way from Texas, an even longer way from Sonora. Someone at a train station was bound to check his papers. They were making examples of deserters these days.
Of course, what the Army and the Freedom Party were doing to deserters wasn’t a patch on what U.S. bombs and bullets might do to him. He was in his late twenties, older than a lot of the conscripts who filled out his company, old enough to know God didn’t have a carved stone somewhere that said he would live forever.
Even getting to the front hadn’t been easy. He’d had to go all the way down to Atlanta and then north again, traveling mostly by night. The Yankees had torn up and bombed the railroad lines going west from Virginia into Kentucky, and also the ones going west from Asheville, North Carolina, to Knoxville, Tennessee. They wanted to keep the Confederates from hitting them in the flank while they pushed south. By all the signs, they knew how to get what they wanted, too.
All that meant the C.S. reinforcements from Virginia reached the front a couple of days later than they would have with everything going smoothly. It meant the front was farther south than it would have been had they got there in good time. And it meant that the mission they’d been given when they left Virginia-throwing the U.S. bridgehead south of the Cumberland back over the river-was nothing but a pipe dream by the time they got there.
Jorge knew about all that only because of occasional grumbles from his superiors. He’d never been in Tennessee before. He wasn’t sure where the Cumberland was, let alone any of the towns south of it. The only thing he knew was that his outfit had to fight like hell whenever it got where it was going. In a way, such a state of almost blissful ignorance wasn’t bad for an ordinary soldier.
He got off the train somewhere not far south of Murfreesboro, and climbed into a truck for the journey up to the front. Jorge was sorry to change vehicles; he’d won more than two hundred dollars in the poker game that started back in Virginia. He was a good-tempered, easygoing fellow. A measure of how popular he was with his buddies was that nobody called him a goddamn greaser no matter how much he won.
Murfreesboro had taken a pounding. A lot of the places where Jorge was stationed in Virginia had taken a pounding, too, but they’d been at or near the front since 1941. Some of them had taken a pounding in the Great War, too, and even in the War of Secession.
Murfreesboro…Hell had opened up on Murfreesboro in the past few days. The ruins still had sharp edges. Smoke still curled up from them. The women and kids and old men who grubbed through them still looked stunned, astonished that such things could happen to them. The smell of death was very sweet, very strong. Jorge’s stomach turned over. He gulped, trying to keep his rations down.
The move east from Murfreesboro also came by night. The butternut trucks had most of their headlights covered over with masking tape. The slits that remained shed more light than cigarette coals, but not a whole lot more. The truck convoy had to go slow. Even so, Jorge rattled past one machine that had driven off the side of the road and into a shell hole.
“That driver, he’s gonna catch hell,” he said. His English had an accent different from those of the white men in the truck with him. Every so often, he used a word that wasn’t English anywhere except Sonora and Chihuahua. But the other soldiers understood him. His father spoke mostly Spanish when he went off to fight in 1916. His mother was still more at home in it than in English. But he and his brothers, like most of the younger generation, embraced the tongue the rest of the CSA used.
“Maybe he will,” someone else said, “but the guys he was drivin’, I bet they give him a medal for makin’ ’em late.”
“Wish our driver’d go off the road,” another soldier said. He didn’t sound like a man making a joke. On the contrary-he seemed painfully serious. His name was Gabriel Medwick. He was about six feet three, at least 200 pounds, blond, jut-jawed, and handsome. He could have posed for a Freedom Party recruiting poster, as a matter of fact. And he sounded like a man just this side of shitting himself with fear.
Jorge was afraid, too. Anybody who’d seen combat and wasn’t afraid had some screws loose somewhere. He hadn’t seen a whole lot, and what he had seen wasn’t too intense. The company was probably heading into something worse. But knowing that the all-Confederate boy sitting in the truck with him was more afraid than he was-or less able to hide his fear, which amounted to the same thing-helped steady him.
“Aw, fuck,” Medwick muttered when the truck stopped. It was getting near dawn; gray light had started leaking in through the rear-facing opening in the canvas canopy over the cargo area. That’s what we are-cargo, Rodriguez thought. They use us up, like rations or bullets or barrels. He wished that hadn’t occurred to him.
“Come on. Get out. We got to head on up to the front.” Sergeant Hugo Blackledge would never show up on a recruiting poster. He had hairy ears and more hair sticking out of his nose and a black five o’clock shadow that came out at noon. His eyebrows grew together above that beaky nose. His chin was barely there at all. He was little and skinny and mean. If he was afraid, he never showed it. He ran his squad with no pretense of fairness or justice. But he never sent anyone anywhere he wouldn’t go himself. And he could whip all of them, Gabriel Medwick included. He wouldn’t fight fair to do it, which only made the men more willing to follow his lead. They’d seen enough to know that fighting fair was for civilians and other fools.