American Front (17 page)

Several of the other men nodded agreement to that, Jake Featherston among them—it was hardly something you could deny. Featherston said, “If everything went the way it was supposed to, we’d be over the Susquehanna by now, drivin’ for the Delaware River.”

“Yeah.” Jethro Bixler slammed a meaty fist into an equally meaty thigh in his enthusiasm. “My family, we had kin in Baltimore, back before the War of Secession. Hellfire, for all I know, we still do, but nobody on our side o’ the border’s heard from ’em in fifty years. We should have taken Maryland away from the damnyankees after we made peace with ’em the first time.”

“And Delaware,” added Pete Howard, one of the shell carriers. “All that country is ours by rights, by Jesus.”

“Before it’s ours, we got to take it,” Featherston said, which drew more nods from the rest of the crew. “We ain’t even in Baltimore yet.”

“Ain’t supposed to be
in
it,” answered Bixler, who fancied himself a strategist. “Supposed to wheel around and cut it off so it damn well falls.”

“Yeah, but we ain’t done that yet, is the problem,” Featherston retorted. “The damnyankees still got that railroad goin’ through down alongside Chesapeake Bay. We can’t wheel round an’ cut that line, they’re liable to do some cuttin’ of their own and leave us stranded up here.”

The wheel was supposed to have taken them to the west bank of the Delaware by Wilmington, and to have cut off the area south of the front from any possible support by the United States. It might still do that; Jake hoped to God it would still do that. But every day they fell farther behind their planned advance line, and that was another day the U.S. forces could ship more men and munitions down from Philadelphia. The Confederate army still had to cross the Susquehanna. Lee had done it, after hammering McClellan outside of Camp Hill. But Lee hadn’t had to face machine guns that could melt a regiment down to platoon size in a matter of minutes if you tried attacking them head on—and how else were you going to attack them if you were forcing a river line?

Featherston looked back over his shoulder, down School Road. It hadn’t been much of a road to begin with. It was even less now, after Yankee artillery had chewed it up—and Confederate artillery, too, before the men in butternut advanced so far. Half a mile back from the battery, mechanics worked on a couple of motor trucks that had broken down trying to bring supplies forward. The front demanded a flood of matériel. Thanks to the miserable roads, it got a trickle.

“No wonder the Yanks are givin’ us such a hard time,” Jake muttered.

Captain Jeb Stuart III trotted up to Featherston’s gun. “Get the team hitched to your piece,” the battery commander called. “We’re moving forward, maybe a mile.” He pointed northeast. “The damnyankees are holed up in a couple of stone farmhouses out that way, and they’ve got a whole regiment stalled on its track—haven’t been able to clear ’em out with rifles and machine guns, so they want us to knock the houses down.”

“You hear that, Nero, Perseus?” Featherston called as Stuart went off to give the order to the rest of the battery. The two Negroes nodded and brought the horses over. Hitching the animals to the gun trail was a matter of a few minutes, for they were already in harness. Hitching the other team to the supply wagon that followed the gun was also quickly done. Then, swearing and sweating, Nero and Perseus lifted the crates of shells they’d just unloaded from one wagon up onto another.

“Move ’em out!” Captain Stuart was shouting, and waving his cap in his hand to urge the men on. Pompey brought him a glass of something cool to drink. He upended it, gave it back to the servant, and went on shouting to the gun crew and to the laborers without whom they wouldn’t have been nearly so efficient.

It hadn’t rained for several days, so the road—or rather, track—to the new position wasn’t muddy. When a howitzer bogged down hub-deep in muck, everybody, blacks and whites together, put shoulders to it to keep it moving. Leaves on some of the trees were beginning to go from green to gold and red. They wouldn’t have started turning this early in September back in the CSA.

Since the dirt track was dry, they got dust instead of mud. By the time they reached the new position, everyone was the same shade of grayish brown, Featherston no less than Nero. The artillery sergeant peered through the field glasses at the farmhouses Captain Stuart wanted the battery to destroy.

“Range about thirty-five hundred yards, I’d make it,” he said, and worked the elevation screw to lower the field gun’s barrel to accommodate the shorter range. Stuart had been right; the Confederates had advanced past the farmhouses to either side, but were halted in front of them. Even through field glasses, corpses were tiny at two miles, but Featherston saw a lot of them.

He studied the gunsight again, then traversed the barrel slightly to the left. “Load it and we’ll fire for effect,” he said.

Jethro Bixler set a shell in the breech, then closed it with a scrape of metal against metal. He bowed to Featherston as if they were a couple of fancy gentlemen—say, Jeb Stuart III and one of the Sloss brothers—at an inaugural ball in Richmond. “Would you care to do the honors?”

“Hell yes,” Jake said with a laugh, and pulled the lanyard. The field gun barked. He got the field glasses up to his eyes just as the shell hit three or four seconds later. “Miss,” he said, and clucked to himself in annoyance. “Long and still off to the right.”

He lowered the barrel a little more and brought it over another few minutes of arc to the left. The second round fired for effect was straight, but still long. The third fell a few yards short. By then, the other guns in the battery had gone into action, too, so he had to hesitate before he could be sure the round he had seen really came from his gun. He turned the elevation screw counterclockwise, about a quarter of a revolution, waited a couple of seconds for a fresh load, and fired again at the farmhouse.

“Hit!” The whole gun crew shouted it together. Smoke and dust shot up from the building; through the field glasses, Featherston saw a hole in the roof.

“Now we give it to ’em!” he said, and shell after shell rained down on and around the farmhouse. Its stone walls might have been thick enough to keep out small-arms fire, but they weren’t proof against artillery. The building fell to pieces even faster than it would have under assault from a steam crane and wrecking ball.

He swung his field glasses to the other farmhouse. Half the guns in the battery had chosen that one, and it was in no better shape than the one his howitzer crew had helped to destroy. Confederate troops swarmed up out of the shallow trenches they’d dug to protect themselves from the fire coming out of those two buildings and rushed toward them. To his dismay and anger, he saw the barrage, though it had wrecked the farmhouses, hadn’t killed or driven off all the enemy soldiers in them. Men in butternut fell, not quite in the horrific numbers Featherston had seen in some assaults, but far too many all the same.

“We gotta keep hitting ’em!” he shouted to the gun crew. More shells went out, fast as the artillerymen could serve the howitzer.

Featherston kept watching the assault on the farmhouses. The Confederate infantrymen surged toward them, still taking casualties but advancing now. Featherston held fire when they reached the buildings, not wanting to hit the soldiers on his own side. When he saw tiny figures in butternut waving their comrades forward past the farmhouses, he knew the position had been carried.

“Good job, boys,” he said. It wasn’t every day you could actually see what your firing had accomplished. A lot of the time, your shells were just part of a massive bombardment aimed at targets too far away for you to tell whether you’d done any good against them or not.

Perseus pointed up into the sky. “Lookit that—it’s one o’ them aeroplane contraptions,” the Negro shouted. “Wonder whose side it’s on.”

“Reckon it’s a Yankee machine,” Featherston said, also looking up. “If it was one of ours, it wouldn’t be hangin’ up there over our lines—it’d be spyin’ on the enemy instead.”

What he wished was that he had a gun able to knock that snooping U.S. aeroplane right out of the sky. Wishing, though, didn’t magically provide him with one. As the machine passed nearly overhead, something fell out of it and sped toward the ground. For a moment, Jake hoped that meant the pilot had gone overboard, or whatever the aeronautical equivalent was.

He realized the shape was wrong. He also realized two or three somethings were falling, not just one. And, with that, he realized what the somethings were. “He’s dropping bombs on us!” he shouted indignantly.

Boom! Boom! Boom!
There were three of them. They fell a couple of hundred yards behind the battery of field guns. The noise from the explosions smote Featherston like a thunderclap. Clouds of smoke and dust rose, but the bombs didn’t seem to have done any damage.

Jethro Bixler looked back at where they’d blown up, then shook his fist at the aeroplane, which was now flying away toward the Yankee lines. But then he grinned and shrugged. “That wasn’t so much of a much,” he said. “By the sound of those things, they weren’t a whole lot bigger’n what our three-inchers throw. An’ we can put ’em just where we want ’em, and put a whole bunch of ’em there, ’stead o’ droppin’ a couple an’ runnin’ for home.”

“They can put ’em back of our lines farther than artillery can reach,” Featherston said, giving such credit as he could: the Confederacy had bombing aeroplanes of its own, after all, and he didn’t want to think they were useless. But he also took pride in what he did: “Reckon you’re right, though. Set alongside these here guns, I don’t figure aerial bombs’ll ever amount to much.”

As George Enos came into his house, his wife Sylvia greeted him with bad news: “They’re going to cut the coal ration this month, and it looks like it’s going to stay cut.”

“That’s not good,” he said, an understatement if ever there was one. He took off his cap and set it on the head of four-year-old George. Jr. Naturally, it fell down over his son’s eyes. The boy squealed with glee. The fisherman went on, “Hard enough cooking if they cut the ration any further. But winter’s coming, and this is Boston. How will we keep warm if we can’t get as much coal as we need?”

“Mr. Peterson at the Coal Board office, he didn’t say anything about that, and you can bet there were a lot of people asking him, too.” Sylvia Enos’ thin face was angry and tired and frustrated. She often looked that way when she got home from a couple of hours of fighting Coal Board paperwork, but more so today than usual. “All he said was, the factories have to have coal if they’re going to make all the things we need to fight the war, and everybody else gets what’s left over. The surtax is going up another penny a hundredweight, too.”

“I already knew that much,” George Enos said. “Some company bigwig was grousing about it when we coaled up
Ripple
before we went out last Monday.”

“Well, sit down and rest a bit,” Sylvia told him. “I haven’t seen you since then, you know, and little George and Mary Jane haven’t, either. It’s hard for them, their father gone days at a time. Supper’ll be about twenty minutes more.”

“All right,” Enos said. The pleasant smells of clam chowder and potatoes fried in lard wafted into the living room from the kitchen.

Sylvia started to head back into the kitchen, then turned with hands on her hips. “I swear to goodness, the forms they give you to fill out before you can even get a speck of coal now are worse than they ever used to be.”

“Maybe we should burn all the forms,” Enos said. “Then we wouldn’t need so much coal.”

“You think you’re making a joke,” Sylvia said. “It’s not funny. When Mrs. Coneval’s mother came over yesterday, she was complaining about them, too. She remembers back before the Second Mexican War, and she says there didn’t hardly used to be any forms like there are now.”

“That was a long time ago,” George answered, which got him a dirty look from Sylvia. After a moment, he realized he’d pretty much called her friend’s mother an old woman. Defensively, he went on, “Well, it was. From what people say, things haven’t been the same since.”

His wife nodded sadly. “Always the war scares. I don’t know how many from then till now, but a lot of them. And all the factories busy all the time, making guns and shells and ships and I don’t know what all else to use if the war came. And now it’s come. But we’d have had so much more for ourselves if we hadn’t been worrying about the war all the time.”

“But we’d probably have lost it, too, because the Rebs have been building every bit as hard as we have,” he said. “Harder, maybe; if they use their niggers in their factories, they don’t have to pay ’em anything to speak of. Same with the Canadians, except they don’t have niggers.”

Talking about niggers made him think of Charlie White. But the Cookie was somebody he worked with, a friend, who just happened to have dark brown skin and hair that grew in tight curls. It wasn’t the same, though he couldn’t have put his finger on why it wasn’t.

Sylvia said, “The Canadians, they have Frenchies instead of niggers.” She sniffed loudly, but not on account of French Canadians. “I have to turn those potatoes, or they’ll burn. And I’ll start frying the fish with them in a couple of minutes, too.”