"Damn niggers," Jake muttered. "If we lose this damn war, it's their fault, stabbing us in the back like they done. We could have licked the damnyankees easy, wasn't for that."
As if to contradict him, U.S. artillery opened up in earnest then. As soon as he saw the flashes to the north, as soon as he heard the roar of explosions and the scream of shells in the air, Jake knew the enemy guns weren't doing registration fire this time. They meant it.
The howitzer he commanded had a splendid view north. "Come on!" he shouted, pointing toward the gun. "Let's give it back to 'em!"
He didn't think any of his men could have heard him, not through the blasts of shells landing close by and the whine and hiss of shrapnel balls and flying fragments of shell casing. But they'd been bombarded before. They knew what to do. In less than a minute, they were flinging shells-gas and shrapnel both-back at the U.S. lines.
Those lines were working, vomiting out men the way an anthill vomited ants after you kicked it. Featherston whooped when shells burst among the damnyankees swarming toward the Confederate lines, whooped when men flew through the air or sprawled bonelessly on the ground or threw themselves flat and stopped moving forward.
But a godawful lot of damnyankees kept right on toward the Confederate trenches, which were taking a fearful pounding. The infantry in the trenches couldn't do any proper shooting at the advancing Yanks, not with tons of metal coming down on their heads. So much dust and dirt flew up from the Confederate lines, Jake had trouble spotting targets at which to aim his piece. "They're gonna get in!" he yelled. If the U.S. troops didn't just get into the Confederate lines but also through them-if that happened, the Confederate position in north-central Maryland was going to come unglued in a hurry.
Back in his training days, he'd learned that the three-inch howitzer, with its muzzle brake to keep recoil short and not fling the carriage backwards at every shot, could in an emergency fire twenty rounds a minute. Most of the time, that was only a number; the normal rate of fire was less than half as fast. No picky drillmaster was standing over the crew with a stopwatch now, as had been so back on the firing range. But if Jake and his men didn't smash every firing-range record ever set, he would have eaten his hat-had he had any idea where the damn thing was.
In spite of the shells falling on them, the other guns of the battery matched his round for round, or came close enough as to make no difference. And in spite of all they did, the damnyankees kept coming. Men started emerging from the Confederate trenches up ahead-men in butternut, at first. Some of them looked for new firing positions from which to shoot back at the U.S. soldiers who had forced them out of what had been the safety of their lines. Others were running, nothing else but.
Then Featherston spotted men in green-gray. "Shrapnel!" he shouted, and depressed the barrel of the howitzer till he was all but firing over open sights. He yanked the lanyard. The shell roared. Again, he watched men tumble. They were closer now, and easier to see. He could even spy the difference in shape between their roundish helmets and the tin hats some of the Confederate troops were wearing.
A rifle bullet cracked past the gun's splinter shield, and then another. He shook his head in dismay. He'd done a lot of shooting at enemy infantry during the war-that was what the three-incher was for. Up till now, though, he'd never been in a spot where enemy infantry could shoot back at him.
"Running low on ammunition!" somebody shouted in the chaos-he wasn't sure who. Shells from the guns of the battery still in action tore great holes in the ranks of the oncoming U.S. soldiers, but they kept coming nonetheless, on a wider front than the field guns could sweep free.
"Bring the horses up to the gun and to the limber!" Jake shouted. He looked around for the Negro laborers attached to the gun. They were nowhere to be seen. He wasted a few seconds cursing. Nero and Perseus, who had been with the battery from the day the war started, would have done as he told them no matter how dangerous the work was. He'd seen that. But Nero and Perseus had been infected by the Red tide, too, and had deserted when the uprising broke out. God only knew where they were now.
"If the niggers won't do it, reckon we got to take care of it our own selves," Will Cooper said. Along with a couple of other men, he went back to the barn nearby and brought out the horses. The animals were snorting and frightened. Jake Featherston didn't worry about that. He was plenty frightened himself, thank you very much. And if they didn't get the howitzer out of there in a hurry, he'd be worse than frightened, and he knew it. He'd be dead or captured, and the gun lost, a disgrace to any artilleryman.
"God damn it to hell, what the devil do you think you're doing?" It wasn't a shout-it was more like a scream. For a moment, Featherston didn't recognize the voice, though he'd heard it every day since before the war. His head snapped around. There stood Jeb Stuart III, head bare, pistol in his hand, eyes blazing with a fearful light.
"Sir-" Featherston pointed ahead, toward the advancing Yankees. "Sir, if we don't pull back-" He didn't think he needed to go on. The Confederate front was dissolving. A bullet ricocheted off the barrel of the cannon. If they didn't get out, they'd be picked off one by one, with no chance of doing anything to affect the rest of what was plainly a losing battle.
Jeb Stuart III leveled the pistol at his head. "Sergeant, you are not going anywhere. We are not going anywhere-except forward. There is the enemy. We shall fight him as long as we have breath in us. Is that clear?"
"Uh, yes, sir," Jake said. The barrel of the pistol looked as wide to him as that of his howitzer.
"Call me naive, will they? Call me stupid? Say my career is over?" Stuart muttered, not to Featherston, maybe not even to himself-more likely to some superior who wasn't there, perhaps to his father. He had, Jake realized, decided to die like a hero rather than living on in disgrace. If he took a gun crew to glory with him, so what?
They unhitched the horses and fired a couple of shells at the damnyankees. Stuart made no effort whatever to seek shelter. On the contrary-he stood in the open, defying the Yankees to hit him. In short order, he went down, blood spurting from a neck wound. The gun crew got the horses hitched again in moments. Under Featherston's bellowed orders, they got the howitzer out of there-and Captain Stuart, too. They saved the gun. Stuart died before a doctor saw him.
Chester Martin wished he'd had a bath any time recently. He wished the same thing about the squad he led. Of course, with so many unburied corpses in the neighborhood-so many corpses all up and down the Roanoke front-the reek of a few unwashed but live bodies would be a relatively small matter.
Turning to the distinguished visitor (without whose presence he wouldn't have cared nearly so much about the bath), he said, "You want to be careful, sir. We're right up at the front now. You give the Rebel snipers even the littlest piece of a target, and they'll drill it. They won't know you're a reporter, not a soldier-and the bastards probably wouldn't care much if they did know."
"Don't you worry about me, Sergeant," Richard Harding Davis answered easily. "I've been up to the front before."
"Yes, sir, I know that," Martin answered. Davis had been up to the front in a good many wars over the past twenty years or so. "I've read a lot of your stuff."
Davis preened. He wasn't a very big man, but extraordinarily handsome, and dressed in green-gray clothes that were the color of a U.S. uniform but much snappier in cut-especially when compared to the dirty, unpressed uniforms all around him. "I'm very glad to hear it," he said. "A writer who didn't have readers would be out of work in a hurry-and then I might have to find an honest job."
He laughed. So did Martin, who asked, "Are you all right, sir?" Handsome or not, Davis was an old geezer-well up into his fifties-and looked a little the worse for wear as he strode along the trench.