With so many lights on in the Confederate capital, the bombers had targets to dream of. Most of the explosions sounded as if they were close to Capitol Square-most, but not all. The damnyankees seemed to have plenty of bombing aeroplanes to carpet the whole city.
From under the bench, Featherston watched a sea of feet and legs, men’s and women’s both, running every which way. “Like chickens with their heads cut off,” he said, and then raised his voice to a shout: “Take cover, dammit!”
They didn’t listen to him. Nobody listened to him. Civilians paid him no more mind than soldiers ever had. And, when the bombs started falling all around, the civilians of Richmond found out that they should have paid attention, just as the Confederate brass should have listened when he tried to tell them Pompey was no damn good.
Crummp! Crummp! For him, the bombing of Richmond was like being under a medium-heavy artillery bombardment, except it didn’t last so long. It wasn’t that he had no fear-anybody who wasn’t afraid when things were blowing up nearby was crazy, and Mrs. Featherston had raised no fool. But he, like most of the soldiers in town, had faced such horrors before. His chiefest wish was to be able to shoot back.
For civilians, though-for Negroes, for women, for the old and the young-the raid had to seem like the end of the world. Screams rose into the night, those of the panicked side by side with those of the injured. Then secondary screams went up as the panicked discovered the injured, and the dismembered, and the dead. Civilians had no notion of what high explosives and sharp-edged fragments of flying metal could do to the human body. Courtesy of the Yankees, they were learning.
Bombs or no bombs, somebody had to do something to help. Jake got out from under his bench as if he were leaving a dugout to serve his howitzer under fire. He passed by a groaning black man to bandage a cut on a white woman’s head.
More bombers roared past up above. He could hear them, but couldn’t see them. No-he could see one, for smoke and fire were trailing from it, getting brighter every second. The antiaircraft guns ringing Richmond weren’t entirely useless, then: only pretty much so.
The stricken bomber nosed down and dove. It seemed to be coming right at him. He flattened himself out on the street, absentmindedly knocking down the woman he’d just bandaged, too. The bombs the aeroplane hadn’t had the chance to drop exploded when it crashed a block away.
He got picked up and slammed down again, right on top of the woman. It wasn’t anything erotic. He scrambled off her. The houses where the bomber had crashed were burning furiously.
Through the chaos, he heard the fire alarm bell from Capitol Square. It made him throw back his head and laugh. “Thanks for the news!” he shouted. “Thanks for the goddamn news! Never would have known it without you!”
XV
“I don’t like it,” Paul Andersen said, peering across no-man’s-land toward the Confederate lines. “Those bastards are too damn quiet.”
“Yeah.” Chester Martin took out his entrenching tool and knocked some bricks that had probably been part of a chimney out of the way. If he had to flatten out in a hurry, he didn’t want to land on them. “One thing about the Roanoke front is, they never give anything up cheap and they always hit back any way they can.”
“You got that right.” Andersen nodded emphatic agreement.
“This past while, though,” Martin went on, “they haven’t been counterattacking, they haven’t been shelling us…much-they’ve just been sitting there. Whenever they do things they haven’t done before, I don’t like it. It’s liable to mean they’ll do something else they haven’t done before, and that’s liable to mean yours truly gets his ticket punched.”
Andersen nodded again. “Two years o’ this shit and hardly a scratch on either one of us. Either I’m leading a charmed life and you’re all right, too, on account of you hang around with me-or else it’s the other way round. You know what? I don’t want to find out which.”
“Yeah, me neither,” Martin said. “We’ve seen a hell of a lot of people come and go.” He scowled. He didn’t want to think about that. Too many men dead in too many horrible ways.
Somebody’s observation aeroplane buzzed overhead. It was too high up for Martin or anyone else on the ground to tell whether it belonged to the USA or the Rebels. That didn’t stop Specs Peterson from raising his Springfield to his shoulder and squeezing off a couple of rounds at it.
“What the hell you doing?” Martin demanded. “What if it’s on our side?”
“Who gives a damn?” Peterson retorted. “I hate all those flyboy bastards. War’d be a lot cleaner if they weren’t up there spying on us. If it’s a Reb, good riddance. If it’s one of our guys-good riddance, too.”
Martin reminded himself the aeroplane was too high for rifle fire to have any chance of hitting it. If Specs wanted to work out some anger by blasting away at it, why not?
And, evidently, it belonged to the CSA anyhow. U.S. antiaircraft guns opened up on it. Puffs of black smoke filled the air all around the biplane. Like every other small boy ever made, Martin had tried catching butterflies in flight with his bare hands. The antiaircraft rounds had about as much luck with Confederate aeroplanes as he’d usually had going after butterflies.
Every once in a while, though, every once in a while he’d caught one. And, every once in a while, antiaircraft guns knocked down an aeroplane. He let out a yell, thinking this was one of those times-something red and burning came out of the aircraft and hung up there in the sky. Then he swore in disappointment.
So did Paul Andersen. “It’s only a flare,” the corporal said.
“Yeah,” Martin said ruefully. “I really thought they’d nailed the son of a bitch.” He eyed the observation aeroplane with sudden suspicion. “What the hell are they doing shooting off flares? They’ve never done anything like that before.”
A moment later, the Confederates gave him the answer. The eastern horizon exploded with a roar that, he thought, would have made the famous Krakatoa volcano sound like a hiccup. One second, everything was quiet, as it had been for so long. The next, hell came down on earth.
Along with everybody else in the trenches, he scrambled for the nearest bombproof he could find. Some limey cartoonist had drawn one where a soldier was saying to his buddy, “Well, if you knows of a better ’ole, go to it.” The Rebs had got the slogan from the limeys, and U.S. soldiers from the Rebs. For anybody on either side who’d ever been in a trench, it summed up what life under fire was like.
Men started banging on empty shell casings, which meant the Rebs were throwing gas along with all their other lovely presents. Trying to fumble a gas helmet out of its canvas case when he was jammed into a dugout with twice as many soldiers as it should have held was not one of the things Chester Martin enjoyed most, but he managed. Somebody who couldn’t manage started coughing and choking and drowning for good air, but Martin couldn’t do anything about that except curse the Confederates. He couldn’t even tell who the poor bastard getting poisoned was.
The bombardment went on for what felt like forever. It covered miles of the front. The Rebs didn’t stick to the trenches right up against the barbed wire, either. They gave it to the U.S. positions as far back as they could reach, and they had more heavy guns firing along with their damned three-inchers than had been so during the first year of the war.
During a lull-which is to say, when the Rebs were going after U.S. guns rather than front-line troops-Martin shouted to Paul Andersen, “Well, now we know why they were so goddamn quiet for so long.”
Andersen nodded mournfully. “They were savin’ it up to shoot off at us all at once.” A couple of miles to the west, something blew up with a thunderous roar loud even through the surrounding din. “There went an ammo dump-stuff we ain’t gonna be able to shoot back at ’em.”