With obvious reluctance, the soldiers climbed down off the roofs of the barrels and into their places inside the contraptions. It had to be hotter than hell in there, and stinking of gasoline fumes, too. Maybe the steel kept bullets out, but it kept other things in.
Bessie McCoy limped into place at 0445, fifteen minutes before the attack was due to start. As twilight brightened toward dawn, Martin made out the names painted on the other barrels: Vengeance and Halfmoon, the latter with an outhouse under the word. He still didn’t know whether to be encouraged all three barrels had made it or dismayed they’d had so much trouble doing it. If dismayed turned out to be the right answer, he figured he’d end up dead.
At 0500 on the dot, the barrage moved deeper into the Confederate trench system, to keep the Rebels from bringing up reinforcements. Captain Wyatt blew his whistle. The barrels rumbled forward at about walking pace, treads grinding and clanking. The cannon each one of them carried at its prow sent shells into the Confederate trenches.
From across no-man’s-land, Chester Martin heard the shouts of fear and alarm the Rebs let out. Rebel rifles and machine guns opened up on the barrels. They might as well have been shooting at so many ambulatory boulders. Sedate but deadly, the barrels kept coming. They rolled through the U.S. barbed wire. They went down into shell holes and craters and came up the other side, still pounding the Rebel trenches. They flattened the Confederate barbed wire.
“Let’s go, boys!” Captain Wyatt shouted. “That Bessie, she is the McCoy!”
Chester Martin and his squad scrambled out of the trench and sprinted toward the Confederate lines. Only light fire came their way; most of what the Rebs had was focused on the barrels. It wasn’t doing much good, either. All three machines kept moving forward, firing not just cannon now but the machine guns on their sides, too.
Bessie McCoy rumbled up to the foremost Rebel trench and poured enfilading fire down its length. Vengeance and Halfmoon were only a few yards behind. Vengeance went right over that first trench and positioned itself to enfilade the second. Half-moon blazed away at Confederate soldiers who were-Martin rubbed his eyes to make sure he saw straight-running for their lives.
Half a mile to the north, a couple of more barrels had forced their way into the Confederate position. Half a mile to the south, two others had done the same, though a third sat burning in the middle of no-man’s-land.
Martin noticed the other barrels only peripherally. He scrambled over the parapet and leaped down into the Confederate trenches. A lot of men in butternut lay in them, some moving, some not. He threw a grenade over the top into a traverse and then dashed into it, ready to shoot or bayonet whomever he’d stunned.
“Don’t kill us, Yank!” several men cried at once. They threw down their rifles and threw up their hands. “We give up!”
“Go on back there, then,” Martin growled, pointing toward the U.S. position from which he’d come. The new-caught prisoners babbled thanks and obeyed.
“What are those horrible things?” one of them asked, pointing toward the barrels, which were systematically raking trench line after trench line, concentrating most of all on machine-gun nests.
“I think,” Martin said, “I think they’re called victory.”
All along the line, Rebs were giving up in numbers greater than he ever remembered seeing, and they were running away, too, unwilling to die to no purpose trying to halt the invincible barrels. In all the time he’d spent at the front line, he’d never seen Confederate soldiers run like that. He’d dreamt of it, but he’d never seen it.
Paul Andersen shouted another word of which he’d dreamt: “Breakthrough!”
For much of the rest of that morning, Martin thought his buddy was right. They stormed through the Confederate trench system. Whenever a machine gun or some holdouts in a strong position gave them trouble, one barrel or another waddled over to it and poured bullets or shells into it until the diehards either surrendered or died.
“I don’t believe it,” Captain Wyatt said, over and over. “We’ve come a good mile since daybreak.” No wonder he sounded disbelieving; on this front, mobility was more often measured in yards. “We keep it up, we’ll be out of the trenches and into their rear by nightfall.”
“Yes, sir,” Martin said. He had trouble believing it, too. A deep-throated rumble behind him made him turn his head. “Here comes Bessie McCoy, over another trench.”
The barrel, by then, had crossed so many of them that he’d come to take its ability for granted. The lip of this one, though, was soft and muddy, and gave way under the weight of the massive machine. It went into the trench at an awkward, nose-down angle. Martin saw at a glance that it couldn’t move forward any more. Its engine roared as it tried reverse. That didn’t help, either.
One of the side machine-gunners opened up a hatch and shouted, “We’re stuck! You’re going to have to dig us out if you want us to keep moving.” More hatches opened, and barrel crewmen came out to help with the digging and to escape the heat and fumes in which they’d been trapped for hours. Some of them simply sprawled in the dirt and sucked in great long breaths of fresh air.
Now Captain Wyatt looked worried. “That’s the second barrel we’ve lost. Halfmoon broke down back there, and they still haven’t been able to get it going again. If anything happens to Vengeance-”
The barrel in question fired its cannon. The men who’d pushed farthest into the Confederate works started shooting, too, and kept it up even though not much answering fire came back. Martin stuck his head up to see why everybody was excited.
Here came a battery of those cursed Confederate quick-firing three-inch guns. They sensibly stopped outside of rifle range, in such cover as they could find, and started firing over open sights at Vengeance. The barrel returned fire, but it had only one cannon, and that far slower between rounds than the Rebel pieces. Vengeance was armored against rifle and machine-gun bullets, but not against shells. If you let a sledgehammer fall onto an iron floor from a building a hundred stories high, you might get a noise like the one the shells made slamming into armor plate.
Vengeance started burning. Hatches popped open. Crewmen dove out. The Confederate guns shelled them, too. Rebel yells announced the arrival of reinforcements for the enemy. Now U.S. troops, thin on the ground and without barrels to support them, were the ones who had to fall back. Bessie McCoy’s crew salvaged her guns and set her afire to deny her to the Confederates, then joined the retreat.
When night fell, Martin was still in what had been Confederate trenches, but not very far in; the Rebs had taken back about two-thirds of what they’d lost in the morning. He turned to Paul Andersen and let out a long, weary sigh. “Not quite a breakthrough.”
“No, I guess not,” Andersen allowed. “We got more work to do.” He started rolling a cigarette. “Not quite a breakthrough, but goddamn-you could see one from where we were.”
“Yeah.” Martin sighed again. “And I wonder how long it’ll be before we see another one.”
Arthur McGregor rode his wagon toward Rosenfeld, Manitoba. Maude sat on the seat beside him, her back ramrod straight, hands clasped tightly in her lap. They both wore seldom-used Sunday best; the wing collar and cravat seemed to be trying to strangle McGregor, who couldn’t remember the last time he’d put on a jacket with lapels.