Cincinnatus had been on his hands and knees. The blast knocked him facedown into the mud. Shell fragments and shrapnel balls slashed the air around him. Some of them fell hissing into puddles of rainwater close by.
As other trucks began exploding, he tried desperately to put more distance between himself and them. He heard screams from drivers who hadn't been able to get away, and Rebel yells from the raiders still shooting up the convoy. The explosions, though, kept the raiders from coming after him.
Or so he thought, till a shape wallowed toward him. He grabbed for his little knife, knowing it would do no good against a rifle, but then stopped. "That you, Herk?" he asked, not sure he recognized the filthy, dripping driver.
But the white man nodded. "Yeah. How the hell do we get out of this?"
"Dunno," Cincinnatus answered. He started laughing. Herk stared at him, eyes wide and shining in his dirty face. Cincinnatus explained: "We got us the chance to find out, though." Very solemnly, Herk nodded again.
Very solemnly, Abner Dowling peered south through his field glasses, toward the wooded hills north of the little Tennessee town called White House. He stood under a green-gray canvas awning, so the hot August rain didn't splash down onto his lenses. But the rain cut down on visibility nonetheless, masking those hills from clear observation. What little he could see, he didn't like.
He turned to General Custer. "Sir, the Rebs have that line as fortified as all get-out. They're not going to be easy to shift, not even a little bit."
"Yet shift them we must, and shift them we shall," Custer said, as usual mixing desire and ability. He raised his field glasses to his face, holding them with one shaky, liver-spotted hand. "That line in front of White House is the last one they can hold to keep our artillery out of range of Nashville. Once it goes down, we commence bombarding the city." He let the binoculars fall down on the leather strap holding round his neck so he could rub his hands in anticipation.
"I understand that, sir," Dowling said. "The trouble is, I'm very much afraid the Confederates understand it, too. That is a formidable position they have there-not only high ground, but wooded high ground, so we have trouble pinpointing their dispositions."
He had no trouble pinpointing Custer's disposition: it was petulant. The general commanding First Army said, "I intend to bombard that area until every tree in it has been made into toothpicks and matchsticks. Toothpicks and matchsticks," he repeated, relishing the rhyme.
"Yes, sir," Dowling said, working to remind Custer of reality. "We lost a good deal of ammunition when that convoy was ambushed last week."
"True," Custer said. "You will of course note that, although those munitions were intended for my force, that shocking breach of security occurred in an area under General Pershing's jurisdiction, not mine."
"Of course, sir," his adjutant agreed: where self-preservation was concerned, Custer had a keen enough grasp on reality. Dowling went on, "However that may be, though, the ammunition is not here. And"-he pointed toward the dark, tree-clad, rolling hills-"that's not good country for barrels. No country is good country for barrels in this rain."
"We'll send them in anyhow," Custer said, which was just like him: he'd found a weapon that worked once, so he'd keep right on using it, regardless of whether circumstances warranted such use. He continued, "And we have plenty of ammunition, even without that which was lost. And, no doubt, our soldiers will make up with their courage any minor deficiencies in the preliminaries."
Translated into English, that meant a hell of a lot of young Americans were about to get shot, a good many of them unnecessarily. Custer had already fought a lot of battles like that in western Kentucky, and advanced at a snail's pace: the pace of a snail whose trail was blood, not slime. Dowling said, "It might be wiser to hold off a bit, sir, until the weather's more favorable and we have better reconnaissance."
"Major, we have been fighting for two years and more now," Custer replied. "Would you not say we have already seen a sufficiency of delay?" Without giving Dowling a chance to answer, he said, "I expect the bombardment to commence tomorrow morning and to continue until the Rebel positions are pulverized, at which point we advance, barrels and infantry both."
What Custer expected, Custer got. That was the advantage of being a lieutenant general. The next day, the guns began to roar. Dowling didn't envy the artillerymen serving them in the mud. Again, no one asked his opinion. He watched explosions wrack the Confederate hilltop lines. First Army had a lot of guns and a lot of ammunition even without what the raiders had blown up. They pounded the positions north of White House with high explosive and shrapnel and gas.
Custer watched, too, with the delight of a small boy at a fireworks show. "Give it to 'em," he said hoarsely. "Give it to 'em, by jingo!"
As Dowling had foreseen, the Confederates understood perfectly well what the unending barrage implied. Their own guns pounded the U.S. trenches. In the wretched weather, accurate counterbattery fire was next to impossible, because the U.S. artillery had and could gain no exact notion of the Rebel guns' positions.
The U.S. artillery preparation went on for five days. By the end of that time, as Custer had desired, the hills were no longer tree-covered. Seen through Dowling's field glasses, they resembled a close-up photograph of an unshaven man who'd survived a bad case of smallpox: all over craters and old eruptions, with now and then, as if by afterthought, something straight sticking up from one of them. It was easy to imagine that every Confederate in those hills had been blown to kingdom come.
It was especially easy for Custer to imagine as much. "We've got 'em now," he told Dowling in the middle of it, preening like a cock pheasant. "The Lord has delivered them into our hands, and our soldiers have only to storm forward and capture whatever demoralized wretches chance to remain alive."
"I hope you're right, sir," Dowling said, "but in the big fights in Pennsylvania and Maryland, and even the ones First Army had in western Kentucky, the defenders ended up with an advantage all out of proportion to their numbers."
"That's why we're laying on the artillery preparation." Custer looked at his adjutant as if he'd just crawled out from under a flat rock. "Never in the history of the planet had any place on the face of the earth been bombarded like those hills there. Only a wet blanket would think otherwise."
Dowling sighed. Custer had reckoned him a wet blanket since the earliest days of their association. That he'd proved right more often than not had done nothing to endear him to the general commanding First Army-on the contrary. This was one of the times Dowling devoutly hoped he was wrong. Custer had laid on one hell of a bombardment, and maybe it would be good enough to wipe out the foe. Maybe.
It went on for two more days, till the artillerymen were as near deaf as made no difference. Even when the U.S. soldiers swarmed out of their trenches and rushed for the ruined woods, the barrage kept on, now dropping down on where Intelligence thought the Rebels had their front-line trenches. Some of the Americans unrolled telephone wire as they advanced. Others carried signal flags, in case the wires broke as they so often did.
From under that camouflaged awning, Custer and Dowling watched the troops. Dowling saw sparklike points of light begin to spurt here and there in the woods. "We didn't get quite everyone, sir," he said.
"Leftover dust to be swept away by the broom of the infantry," Custer said grandly. "A broom five miles wide, Major."