"I know that tune," Reggie told him. "It's 'Roll out the Barrel.'"
A couple of officers from the Corps of Engineers came up to the stretch of trench on the Roanoke front Chester Martin's squad called their own. "What are you up to?" Martin called to them, curious about the strips of white cloth they were tying to pegs.
"Setting up the approach," replied one of the engineers: a stocky, bald, bullet-headed fellow with a close-cropped fringe of gray hair above his ears and at the back of his neck. The answer didn't tell Chester anything much, but it didn't anger him, either; the engineer sounded like a man who knew his own business so well, he forgot other people didn't know it at all. Martin approved of people who knew what they were doing. He'd seen too many who hadn't the foggiest notion.
Sunshine glinted off the wire frames of Captain Orville Wyatt's glasses. Martin worried about his captain, another competent man he didn't want to lose: those spectacles might make him easier for a sniper to spot. Wyatt said, "Don't joggle Lieutenant Colonel Gross' elbow, Sergeant. This has to do with what was discussed in the briefing yesterday."
Martin shook his head, annoyed at himself. "I'm sorry, sir. I should have figured that out." He looked around to see how many of his men were paying attention. He hated looking dumb in front of them.
"Don't worry about it," Lieutenant Colonel Gross said. He seemed younger when he smiled. "This is new for everybody, and we have to work out what needs doing as we go along. The real point is, this'll be new for the Rebs, too." He pointed over past the U.S. barbed wire, past no-man's-land, past the C.S. wire, to the trenches beyond.
"If everything goes according to Hoyle," Captain Wyatt said, "we'll take a big bite out of the Rebs' real estate tomorrow morning."
Specs Peterson was standing not far from Martin. He pitched his voice so the sergeant could hear but the captain couldn't: "Yeah, and if it doesn't work, they're going to bury us in gunnysacks, on account of the Rebs'll blow us all over the landscape."
"I know," Martin said, also quietly. "You got any better ideas, though, Specs? This duking it out in the trenches is getting us nowhere fast."
"Hey, what are you talkin' about, Sarge?" Paul Andersen said. "We've moved this front forward a good ten miles, and it hasn't taken us two years to do it. At that rate, we ought to be in Richmond"-the corporal paused, calculating on his fingers-"oh, about twenty minutes before the Second Coming."
Everybody laughed. Everybody pretended what Andersen had said was only funny, not the gospel truth. Specs Peterson liked an argument as well as the next guy, and wasn't shy about arguing with his superiors, but he didn't say boo. He just made sure he had the full load of grenades everybody was supposed to carry over the top.
Darkness fell. This sector of the front had been pretty quiet lately. Every so often, a rifle shot would ring out or somebody on one side or the other would spray the foe's trenches with a couple of belts of machine-gun fire, but the artillery didn't add its thunder to the hailstorm effects from both sides' small arms. Martin knew that wouldn't last. He rolled himself in his blanket and got what sleep he could. He wouldn't be sleeping much tomorrow, not unless he slept forever.
At 0200, the barrage began. Martin didn't sleep any more after that; the noise, he thought, was plenty to wake half the smashed-up dead whose corpses manured the Roanoke River valley.
Some of his men, though, did their damnedest to sleep right through the bombardment. He made sure everybody was up and ready to move. "Listen, this is my neck we're talking about, Earnshaw," he growled to one yawning private. "If you're not there running alongside me, it's liable to mean some damn Reb gets a chance to draw a bead on me he wouldn't have had otherwise. You think I'm going to let that happen so you can sleep late, you're crazy."
Captain Wyatt was up and prowling the trench, too. "Where the hell are the barrels?" he said about half past three. "They were supposed to be here at 0300. Without them, we don't have a show."
That wasn't quite true. The infantry, no doubt, would assault the Confederate lines with or without barrels. Without them, the foot soldiers were sure to be slaughtered. With them, they were…less sure to be slaughtered.
Two barrels came rumbling up at 0410. "Where the devil have you been?" Wyatt demanded, his voice a whiplash of anger. Chester Martin didn't say anything. This was the first time he'd actually seen barrels. Their great slabs of steel, spied mostly in silhouette, put him in mind of a cross between a battleship and a prehistoric monster.
"Sorry, sir," one of the men riding atop a barrel said through the unending thunder of the barrage and the flatulent snarl of the machines' engines. "We got lost about six times in spite of the tape, and we broke down a couple times, too."
"That's where Bessie McCoy is now," somebody else added. "The engine men said they thought they could get her running again, though."
Martin approached the barrel. "You fellows better get inside, if that's what you do," he said. "You're at the front now. The Rebs figure out you're here, a few machine-gun bursts and you won't be any more."
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.