American Front (13 page)

“Captain said do it, so we do it.” Hodges sighed.

With a chuckle, Chester slapped him on the back. “You’ve got the right attitude, that’s for damn sure.” He wasn’t supposed to let a soldier know he liked him—that was bad for discipline. But he had a hard time hiding it when he was around Roger Hodges. The West Virginian took to the business of war the way a duck took to water. He was always ready, always resourceful, and groused as if he’d been in the Army for thirty years: when he complained, it was about things that mattered, not the little stuff that couldn’t be helped or didn’t count anyhow.

Smiling still, Martin grunted and slid forward another few feet toward the top of Catawba Mountain. He wasn’t mountain man himself—he’d been working in a steel mill in Toledo when his regiment was mobilized—but even these early days of the war had impressed on him the need to be careful with every move you made. The Confederates didn’t have anywhere near the numbers of the U.S. force that had entered enemy territory from West Virginia, but the men they did have in the Alleghenies might all have been born there by the way they used the rough country to bushwhack one unit after another, then fell back to the next high ground and did it all over again.

“This here’s the last piece of high ground they got to play with for a while, though,” he muttered to himself, wiping his face with a sleeve. He wasn’t altogether sorry so much of the fighting had been under the trees. He had the pale, freckled skin that went with green eyes and sandy hair, and sunburned easy as you please.

His wasn’t the only squad looking for Rebel positions on Catawba Mountain. When the U.S. forces found those positions, they found them all at once. A rifle shot or two rang out, and then the deadly hammering of machine guns. Martin threw himself flat as bullets stitched through the trees, clipping leaves and twigs and men. The smell of mud and mold was thick in his nostrils. Better that, he thought, than the latrine stink of somebody with a belly wound. He’d been watching friends die ever since the Army crossed the border. He didn’t want to do it again. He didn’t want anybody watching him die, either. He didn’t want that at all.

“See any of the bastards?” he called to Hodges.

“Nope,” the West Virginian answered. Martin smacked a fist into the ground in frustration. Hodges lived in country like this. If he couldn’t tell what was going on, how was a city boy supposed to manage? Hodges went on, “Reckon they dug themselves holes to hide in, make it harder for we-uns to find ’em.”

“You’re probably right,” Martin said, scowling. “They probably had niggers up here, too, diggin’ those holes for ’em. Probably took ’em out of the iron mines around Big Lick, brought ’em to work while we were fighting our way up this far, then took ’em back down again.”

“I expect that’s how it went, all right,” Hodges agreed. “They don’t give niggers guns, but they’re worth almost as much as soldiers, way they free up white men to fight.”

Messengers from the squad that had first developed the Confederate position must have got back to the artillery, because shells began whistling down on the enemy line. Some of them fell short; one burst only a dozen yards or so from Martin, showering him with clods of dirt and sending shrapnel balls whistling malignantly above his head.

“Sons of bitches!” Hodges shouted through the din. “They’re more dangerous to us than they are to the damned Rebels!”

The barrage went on for half an hour. More shells fell short. Not far away, somebody screamed like a lost soul. You got hurt just as bad if your own side nailed you as you did from an enemy shell.

When the bombardment abruptly ended, whistles blew up and down the American line, piping like insistent sparrows, Martin scrambled to his feet, ignoring the pack that weighed him down like a mule. “Come on, you lugs!” he shouted to his men. “Let’s go get ’em!”

Fear made his feet light as he rushed toward the Confederate line. That hadn’t been a very long pounding, and the little mountain howitzers that were the only guns able to move up through this godawful country hardly threw any kind of shell at all. Plenty of Rebels would be left to draw beads on the oncoming men in green-gray. Maybe one of them was drawing a bead on his brisket right now.

Roger Hodges, light on his feet as a gandy dancer, sped past Martin. Then he tripped and staggered and started to fall, but was arrested by something just above waist high. “Wire!” he wailed in despair.

That was the last thing he ever said. As he hung there writhing, trying to twist free of the iron barbs that snagged him, two bullets smacked home in quick succession. They sounded like fists. He still hung after that, but no longer writhed.

Martin cautiously approached the area where his squadmate had found the wire the hard way. The Confederates hadn’t made a real belt of it, just two or three strands to slow up their attackers. That had been all they needed to pot poor Roger Hodges.

If you knew the wire was there, a few snips with a cutter and you were through it. Martin ran on. Now he could see the Rebels’ firing pits, and the flames that spurted from the muzzles of their rifles whenever they pulled trigger. All those flashes seemed aimed right at him. The Confederates were much more readily visible than his own comrades, who took advantage of every bit of cover they could find.

For the last few yards, there was no cover. Yelling like fiends, U.S. troopers were crossing those yards and routing out the Confederates with rifle fire and with bayonet. Chester Martin yelled, too. It helped, not much but a little. He sprinted toward the nearest hole he saw. He was almost there when a big fellow in butternut popped up in it and started to bring his rifle to his shoulder.

Martin shot from the hip. Drill sergeants said you never hit anything that way. He proved them right, because he missed. But he didn’t miss by much, and he did rattle the Rebel enough to make him miss, too. The man never got a chance for a second shot; Martin’s bayonet punched into his throat while he was still working the bolt to his rifle.

Blood sprayed into Martin’s face. The Confederate made a horrible gobbling noise and clutched both hands to his neck. He swayed, tottered, and fell. In dozens of little fights like that one, the U.S. soldiers cleared the Rebels from their line. The Confederate machine guns fell silent. The men who fought under the Stars and Bars were brave enough and to spare; most of them died rather than retreating. A few plunged back into the trees and made for their next line, up closer to the crest of Catawba Mountain.

Martin looked around for his squad, trying to keep some order as the Americans advanced. Roger Hodges he didn’t need to worry about; he already knew that. He was jolted, though, to find he had only five men with him. Another soldier was dead besides Hodges, he heard, and three more wounded.

As they formed up, one of his privates, a tall blond kid named Andersen, said, “If we lose half our guys every time we attack, how long till nobody’s left any more?”

He’d probably meant it for a joke, the kind of graveyard humor that came naturally in the middle of a battle. But Chester Martin had the sort of mind that figured things out. Lose half the squad in the next attack and you’d have three left. Do it again and you’d have one and a half—say two, if you were lucky. Do it one more time after that and you’d be down to your last guy. No law said that guy had to be Corporal Martin, either.

By the looks on the soldiers’ faces, they were working through the same calculation, and not liking what they came up with any more than he did. He paused to roll himself a cigarette and then, after he’d lighted it, to go through the pockets and pack of the Rebel he’d killed for whatever tobacco he had on him. The little cloth sack in which the fellow had carried his fixings had blood on it, but there was nothing wrong with the fine Virginia weed inside. Martin stuck it in his own pocket.

Handling the enemy’s corpse gave him the answer, or part of it. He pointed to the body, and then to all the other sprawled corpses in the defense line the American troops had stormed. “Cost us a good bit to get here, yeah,” he said, “but it cost them plenty, too, trying to hold us back. And we did what we were supposed to, and the Rebels didn’t, Besides”—he pointed back the way he’d come—“we’ve got replacements moving up behind us, to help on the next push. Won’t be us right on the shit end of the stick all the damn time.”

That seemed to satisfy his men. And, sure enough, reinforcements were coming up, soldiers whose green-gray uniforms were less draggled than his own and who stared, mouths and eyes open wide, at bodies and pieces of bodies lying on blood-soaked grass and dirt. The sight of a few glum Confederate prisoners, some of them wounded, being hustled off to the rear did not seem an adequately glorious compensation.

“Come on, you birds,” Martin called; the second-line soldiers’ sergeants looked to be as stunned as any of the men they were supposed to be leading. “This is what it looks like; this is what they pay us for. Ain’t you glad you was drafted?”

“That’s telling them, Corporal,” said Captain Orville Wyatt, the company commander.

Martin hadn’t seen him since the attack started. “Glad you’re okay, sir,” he said.

“Now that you mention it, so am I,” Wyatt said offhandedly. He was about thirty-five, with a little thin mustache instead of the more common Kaiser Bill. It suited his long, thin, pale face better than a Kaiser Bill would have; Martin had to admit as much. He didn’t know how the devil the captain would get through the war with a pair of steel-framed spectacles riding his nose, but that was Wyatt’s problem, not his. The company commander knew his business, which was what counted most.

Some of the Rebs who’d run off into the woods hadn’t run all the way back to their next line after all. Instead, they started sniping at the U.S. troops who’d taken away their firing pits and trenches. A couple of groups of cursing Americans turned the captured machine guns around and fired long bursts at the trees upslope. That reduced the enemy fire but didn’t stop it.

Somewhere—probably on the reverse slope of the mountain—the Confederates had a battery of their quick-firing three-inch howitzers. Martin had already come under fire from them, and didn’t like them worth a damn. Now shells started landing in and around the captured line—not a lot of shells, and not very accurately delivered, but not the sort of greeting he wanted, either. As with fire from your own guns, you were just as dead from a lucky hit as you were if somebody drew a bead on you and drilled you through the chest.

Captain Wyatt, as if annoyed at untimely rain, remarked, “We’re not going back, and I don’t much fancy staying here. Only thing left to do is advance.”

Martin tossed the tiny butt of his cigarette into the dirt and ground it out with his heel. “You heard the man,” he told his squad—or what was left of it. “Into the woods we go, off to Grandmother’s house. Keep your eyes open and watch where you set your feet. We already know there’s wolves in there.”

His men chuckled. If you laughed, you could let on that you weren’t scared. Your buddies would believe it, or make like they did. If you got lucky, you might even believe it yourself.

They’d gone a couple of hundred yards farther up the mountain, trading shots with Confederates they couldn’t see and who—God willing—had trouble seeing them, too, when they came to a clearing, an oval meadow maybe two hundred yards wide and a hundred across. It would have been the most inviting place in the world, except for the machine gun hammering away from the far side of it.

“Can’t just charge that,” Martin said, almost as if someone had asked him to do it. “We’d have dead piled up higher out there than they did at Camp Hill.” His grandfather had been wounded in that fight. He’d worn a peg leg ever afterwards, and counted himself lucky to come out alive.

“We’ll have to flank it out,” Captain Wyatt agreed, and the corporal let out a silent sigh of relief. In spite of knowing what he was doing, Wyatt was a West Point man, and sometimes they got funny ideas about being duty-bound to die for their country. Chester Martin was more in favor of living for his country.

Captain Wyatt sent him and his squad around to the left of the clearing and another one off to the right. Martin and his men never made it to the machine gun. A couple of Rebels in the woods held them up and wounded one of them before they finally got flushed out and killed. Private Andersen didn’t say anything, but his gloomy features had
I told you so
written all over them.

A fusillade of rifle fire put an end to the machine gun’s deadly chatter. “Wonder what that cost,” Andersen said glumly.

“Ahh, shut up, Paul,” Martin told him. “If you aren’t demoralizing the rest of the guys, you’re sure as hell demoralizing me.”

They swarmed on up toward the top of Catawba Mountain. The forest was full of men in green-gray now, with just enough Rebels in butternut lurking and shooting from concealment to make everybody jumpy and trigger-happy and to make sure that, every so often, a U.S. soldier got shot by his own buddies instead of the Confederates. Martin would have sworn that a couple of near misses came from behind him, not ahead, but what could you do except hope you didn’t draw the short straw?

This time, he and his men found the Confederate barbed wire before it found them. Cutters clicked; the wire went
twangg!
as the tension on it was released. As before, the Rebs had run up only a couple of strands, not enough to impede troops who were alert for it—and a lot of men who hadn’t been alert before were dead now.

Martin crawled and snaked forward till he could see the earth the Confederates—or rather, their Negro laborers—had thrown up in front of their firing pits. More and more U.S. soldiers joined him in the bushes, blazing away at the Southerners in the firing pits. Whistles sounded, up and down the line. Screaming like fiends, Martin and his comrades sprang to their feet and rushed the Confederate position.

As before, the fight was sharp but short; the U.S. forces had brought enough men forward that the advantage fighting from cover gave their foes wasn’t enough to check them. “Come on!” Captain Wyatt shouted, even before the last Rebels in the line had been slain. “We’re almost at the top of the mountain.”