Once out of their earthworks, the Rivington men were vulnerable. The Confederates knew how to attack mere riflemen, and their numbers counted for more than their foes’ armor and helmets. Some men in gray rushed forward in small groups, while others fired to cover their advance. Then the groups reversed roles, leapfrogging past one another as they fanned out to get around the handful of defenders.
“So long, Piet.” Caudell leaped to his feet and, hunched low, dashed toward a broken tree fifty yards away. Bullets whipped past him as he ran. He sprawled behind the scanty protection the tree trunk gave him, fired to support a double handful of men moving up on his right. Then he was running again, in the direction of a tall clump of grass.
Behind him and to his left, one of the Rivington men’s endless repeaters fell silent. A minute later, so did the one on the other side. Rebel yells rang through the continuing racket of rifle fire. Caudell whooped as loud as anyone. With those murderous repeaters out of action, the Rivington men could not hope to keep the whole Confederate army from going not only through Henry Pleasants’s crater but around it to either side.
Nathan Bedford Forrest saw that, too. “Forward, boys, with me! They ain’t got a prayer of holdin’ us back now.” He was normally soft-spoken; Caudell had noticed that back in Nashville and in the trenches. But at need, on the stump or in the middle of a fight, his voice swelled to carry as far as he wanted. He pointed north and east. “We’re an hour from Rivington. Let’s go!” The soldiers cheered like madmen.
Cheers or no, though, Rivington proved more than an hour away. If the Confederates knew how to advance against rifle fire, the Rivington men were artists on defense. They gave ground only grudgingly, in a reverse of the leapfrog pattern their opponents used to move forward. They made stand after stand, stalling the Confederates again and again, surely inflicting far more casualties than they suffered.
But the Confederates had soldiers to spend and the Rivington men did not. The gray line grew ever wider, flanking the Rivington men out of one position after another. Forrest did not, would not, let the advance flag. Whenever a handful of Rivington men held out against everything the Confederates could throw at them, he cried, “Come on, boys, we’ll go around. Pull the weed up by the roots and the leaves are bound to wither.”
“Nate!”
He whirled where he lay, his AK-47 swinging almost of its own accord to bear on the person who’d startled him. He jerked the barrel down in a hurry. “Jesus God, Mollie, I damn near shot you. Are you all right?”
“‘Cept for you just now havin’ your gun on me, sure. you?”
“Yup. How much farther to Rivington?”
She frowned as she thought. Such a serious, involuted, almost harsh expression should have made her face seem more than usually masculine, especially in this warlike setting. But instead she reminded Nate of a girl trying to remember where she’d put her pincushion. He wanted to carry her back to Nashville, a notion as tender as it was impracticable.
“Three, four miles, I reckon,” she answered at last. Then she brought her rifle up to her shoulder, fired a couple of quick shots. “Thought I saw somethin’ movin’ in them bushes up there. Reckon not, though. Come on.”
Caudell looked ahead for the next likely piece of cover. He pointed toward a thick stand of pine saplings. He went first, with Mollie ready to open fire on anyone who shot at him. When nobody did, he got down on one knee and covered her advance.
They were still near the foaming crest of the Confederate wave, for they could hear Nathan Bedford Forrest loudly and profanely urging his men on. He was also yelling something new: “We get into Rivington, don’t you go burning any houses, you hear me, not even if there’s some of these muddy green boys shootin’ from ‘em. Anybody burns a house and I catch him, he’ll wish a Rivington man put a bullet through his head instead, God damn me to hell if I lie.”
“What do you suppose that’s all about?” Caudell asked. While wanton arson was not a legitimate tool of war, he’d never heard it so specifically and vehemently forbidden.
“Nate, you got to remember I been in them houses.” Mollie hesitated. Nate grimaced, recalling how and why she’d been in them. When she saw he would do no more than grimace, she hurried on,” Ain’t nothin’ like ‘em nowheres else. The books, the lights, the cool air that blows—”
“The books!” he exclaimed. The Picture History of the Civil War had come out of one of those Rivington houses. If they held more volumes of that ilk, the Confederate authorities had good reason to want them preserved.
“Makes sense to me,” Mollie said when he quickly explained his reasoning. “Marse Robert, he was plumb took with the one you had me bring him.”
For the next few minutes, neither of them had much chance to talk. The Rivington men did their best to rally. They seemed to be in somewhat greater numbers now, reinforced by their fellows rushing down from the town. Rifle grenades bursting among the Confederates created brief consternation, but after weeks of intermittent mortar fire the small bombs were not so terrifying. And, now that they were forced from their fortified positions, the Rivington men, even reinforced, lacked the troops to halt determined attackers. Determined the Confederates were. The advance resumed.
Someone moaned from behind a clump of beggarweeds. Caudell and Mollie hurried over, ready to help a wounded comrade. But the man back there was not a comrade; his mottled tunic and trousers proclaimed his allegiance to America Will Break. Blood from a wound above the knee soaked one leg of those trousers, turning dark green and brown to black.
“Got you!” Caudell yelled.
Distracted from his pain, the Rivington man whipped his head around. It was Benny Lang. He was utterly defenseless; his rifle, lay several feet away. Caudell’s finger tightened on the trigger of his AK-47. “Don’t,” Mollie exclaimed, guessing what was in his mind. “He ain’t one of the real bad ones, Nate.”
“No?” Caudell remembered George Ballentine. But that memory wasn’t nearly all of why he wanted to put a bullet through Benny Lang. It wasn’t exactly as if Mollie had been unfaithful with the Rivington man…not exactly, but pretty close. But after a few seconds, Nate lowered the rifle a little. If he’d killed Lang here in the bushes, man against man and gun against gun, that was war, and fair enough. Try as he would, though, he couldn’t make himself think of blowing out the back or a wounded man’s head as anything but murder.
“Thanks,” Lang said when he no longer looked straight down the muzzle of the AK-47. “Help me cut my trouser leg off so I can get a bandage” He was half stunned from his injury and, no doubt, he didn’t remember seeing Mollie Bean in uniform, just as Caudell had never seen her in properly feminine clothes until that morning in church. But her voice must have registered at last, for he blurted,” Jesus Christ, Moll, is that you?”
Moll. The pet name made Nate ready to shoot him again. Mollie ground her teeth before she answered, almost inaudibly, “It’s me all right, Benny. I soldiered before—I’m sorry I lied to you when you ast me how I got shot. And this here”—she raised her chin, looked defiantly at Caudell, as if daring him to deny it—”this here’s my intended, Nate Caudell.”
The wounded man got out part of a laugh before it turned into a hiss. “Caudell. Christ, I remember you—I taught you the AK, didn’t I? Small bloody world, what?” Caudell, numb with suddenly having to be sociable on the battlefield, managed “a nod. Lang had both hands on his wound. Where his trousers looked black, those hands were red. He said, “I’m going to reach for my knife. I’ll do that very slowly, and I give you my word of honor I won’t throw the knife once I have it—there are two of you, after all, and only the one blade.”