"Barrels!" Michael Scott shouted. With the gas helmet he had on, Jake couldn't see his face, but he would have bet it was as pale as whey. "The damnyankees got barrels!"
There were only three of them, belching out gray-black clouds of exhaust as they lumbered forward with a clumsy deliberation that put Featherston in mind of fat men staggering out of a saloon. But, like fat men not so drunk as to fall down, they kept on coming no matter how clumsy they looked.
Machine-gun bullets struck sparks from their armored hides, but did not penetrate them. They had machine guns, too, and poured a hail of bullets of their own on Confederate positions that kept on resisting. Where those machine-gun bullets proved inadequate, they used their cannon to pound the foes into silence.
They were, Jake saw, deadly dangerous weapons of war. They were also even more deadly dangerous weapons of terror. Rumors about them had raced through the Confederate Army weeks before this, their first appearance on the front here. Seeing that they were nearly as invulnerable as rumor made them out to be, most of the men thought flight the best if not the only answer.
"That armor of theirs, it doesn't keep shells out," Jake said. "They're not going any faster than a man can walk, and every damn one of 'em's as big as a battleship. We don't fill 'em full of holes, we don't deserve to be in the First Richmond Howitzers."
He felt the sting of that himself. As far as the powers that be were concerned, he didn't deserve to he an officer in the First Richmond Howitzers. When his life lay on the line, though, pride took second place. At his shouted orders, all the guns in the battery took aim at the barrels.
Despite the encouraging words he'd used, he quickly discovered hitting a moving target with an artillery piece was anything but easy. Shell after shell exploded in front of the barrels or far beyond them. "If I was a nigger, I'd swear they were hexed," Michael Scott growled.
"If you were a nigger-" Featherston began, and then stopped. He didn't know how to finish the thought. He'd fought that very gun with two Negro laborers, up in Pennsylvania, after a Yankee bombardment had killed or wounded everyone in the crew but him. The fire he and Nero and Perseus delivered had helped drive back a U.S. assault on the trenches in front of the battery.
Yet the two blacks had sympathized with the Red revolt enough to desert the battery when it began, and he hadn't seen them since. He wondered if they'd managed to get their hands on any guns and turn them against their Confederate superiors. He doubted he'd ever know.
But he was sure that, if not for the Negro uprising, the war against the USA would be going better now. Blacks were mostly back to work yes, but you couldn't turn your back on them, not the way you had before. That made them only half as useful as they had been before the red flags started flying-and that meant the war against the United States was still feeling the effects of the uprising.
"We'll pay 'em back one of these days," Jake said. He had no more time in which to think about it. One of the barrels was clumsily turning so that its cannon bore on his gun. Barrels couldn't stand hits from artillery. He'd told his gun crew as much, and hoped for the sake of his own neck he was right. He didn't need anyone to tell him guns out in the open couldn't do that, either.
Flame spurted from the muzzle of the cannon inside the traveling fortress. The shell was short. Fragments clattered off the splinter shield that was all the protection his gun crew had. Nothing got through. Nobody got hurt. He knew perfectly well that that was luck.
"Left half a degree!" he shouted, and the muzzle of the howitzer swung ever so slightly. He yanked the lanyard. The gun roared. So did he: "Hit! We hit the son of a bitch!"
Smoke poured out of the barrel. Hatches popped open all over the ungainly machine. Men, some carrying machine guns and belts of ammunition, dove out of the hatches and into whatever cover they could find. The gun crew raked the area where they were cowering. "I hope we kill 'em all, and I hope they take a long time dying," Michael Scott said savagely.
At Featherston's orders, his gunners also sent several more rounds into the burning barrel, to make sure the damnyankees couldn't salvage it. Another barrel had stopped on the open ground between two trenches. Jake didn't know why it had stopped. He didn't care, either. What difference whether it had broken down or its commander was an idiot? It made an easy target. Nothing else mattered. Soon it was burning, too.
Seeing the seemingly invincible barrels going up in flames put fresh heart into the Confederate infantry that had been on the point of breaking. The men in butternut stopped running and started shooting back at the U.S. soldiers in their trenches. The last surviving barrel made a slow, awkward turn-the only kind it could make-and lumbered away from the battery of field guns that had treated its comrades so roughly.
Its tail carried a two-machine-gun sting, but Jake had never been so glad to see the back of anything. All the guns in the battery sent shells after the barrel. No one was lucky enough to score a hit on it.
"It's going," Featherston said. "That's good enough for now, far as I'm concerned. If it comes back tomorrow, we'll worry about it tomorrow. Meantime, let's see if we can make the damnyankees sorry they ever made it into our trenches."
Before long, the U.S. soldiers in the Confederate positions were very unhappy; the battery showered them with both gas and shrapnel. The troops they'd driven back counterattacked aided by reinforcements hurrying across the Monocacy on bridges the Yankees hadn't been able to knock down.
The U.S. soldiers did hold on to the first couple of lines of trenches, but that wasn't enough of an advance to make the battery change site. Glum-looking Yankee prisoners filed back toward the Monocacy bridges, their hands high in the air.
Once the fighting had eased, officers came out to examine the burned-out hulks of the barrels. One of them was Major Clarence Potter. On his way back to Army of Northern Virginia headquarters, he stopped for a couple of minutes at Jake Featherston's battery. "I'm given to understand we have your guns to thank for those two ruined behemoths," he said.
"Yes, sir, that's right." Featherston dropped his voice. "They won't promote me for it, but I did it."
"Any way you could have gotten us a barrel in working order, not one that's been through the fire?" Potter asked. He held up a hand. "That won't get you promoted, either, Sergeant, but it will help our cause."
"Sir, if those barrels had kept running, they'd be visiting you about now, not the other way round," Jake answered. "We got any more men back of the line, sir? One more attack and we can push the Yankees all the way back where they started from."
But the intelligence officer shook his head. "Lucky we were able to throw in as much as we did." Now he was the one who spoke quietly: "If we don't get more men in arms, be they white or black, we'll be reduced to standing on the defensive all along the line, and that's no way to win a war."
"Black soldiers." Featherston's lip curled.
"You know they can fight," Potter said. "You of all people should know that." He'd heard about the use to which Jake had put Perseus and Nero.
"Yes, sir, I do know that," Jake said. "But I'll be damned if I think they ought to get any kind of reward for trying to overthrow the government in the middle of the war. That's what giving 'em guns and giving 'em the vote would be. They stabbed us in the back. Somebody-anybody-does that to me, I'll make him pay." Some of the faces in his mind when he said that were black. Some were white and plump and prosperous, the faces of soldiers and bureaucrats in the War Department in Richmond.
Jonathan Moss peered down at the battlefield in dismay. The advance through Ontario toward Toronto had been slow and brutally expensive, but it had been a continuous advance. One enemy defensive line after another had been stormed and overwhelmed. Now, for the first time, American troops were in headlong, desperate retreat. From the air, they looked like ants fleeing a small boy's shoe.