American Front (20 page)

“This whole business of war is a lot more entertaining to read about than to be a part of,” he complained. “All the writers who go on about the Revolution and the Secession and the Second Mexican War leave out the parts that have no glory in them.”

“And when they do talk about glory, they’re talking about the fellows who lived,” Corporal McCorkle added. “The poor bastards who died, yeah, they wave good-bye to them, you might say, but that’s all.”

Bartlett didn’t want to think about that, and wished he’d kept his mouth shut. The Confederacy was mowing down damnyankees the way a steam-powered threshing machine mowed down wheat at harvest time. All the papers said so, and so did every military briefing Bartlett had heard since he’d showed up at the recruiting office. But the papers also printed hideously long casualty lists every day, and the maps showed that most of the fighting was on Confederate soil. Things weren’t so easy as he’d thought they would be when he joined up.

Just when he finally managed to doze off, the troop transport started down the grade on the western slope of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Couplings bumped and jolted—the weight of the train had shifted from the back end to the front. Bartlett jerked bolt upright. His start woke the soldier next to him, who cursed foully. He’d heard more blasphemy and obscenity in a few weeks of soldiering than he had in all his civilian life—but he remembered that from a few years before, when his birth class had been conscripted.

Iron wheels screamed on iron rails as the train slowed to a stop. “This here must be Vinton,” McCorkle said. “This is where we get out.”

Bartlett peered through the window. He couldn’t see anything. If they were at a station, it was news to him. The doors at either end of the railroad car opened, though, and his companions stumbled out into the night. When his turn came, he went, too.

“This way! This way! This way!” Captain Dudley Wilcox shouted, waving around an electric torch so his men could see which way
this way
was. Bartlett was glad to be reminded the company commander existed; he’d neither seen nor heard him since the troop train pulled out of Richmond.

Captain Wilcox led them down a path full of pungent horse manure to a field where campfires were already burning. “We’ll bivouac here tonight,” he declared. “Bedrolls only—no tents. Get what rest you can—tomorrow we go into action.”

As Bartlett spread his blanket on the ground and wrapped himself in it, a mutter of distant thunder came from the west. He looked up into the sky. The stars of early autumn twinkled down on him. The trees would be changing color, though he couldn’t see that in the darkness. The thunder came again—only it wasn’t thunder, it was artillery. Somewhere over there, gunners were launching shells into the dark—and when those shells came down, they probably killed people. That didn’t strike Bartlett as glorious. He was too tired to care. He fell asleep almost at once.

Corporal McCorkle woke him with a boot in the seat of the pants. It was still dark. He sat up, stiff from lying on the ground and feeling he needed another two or three or six hours of sleep to turn himself into a properly functioning human being. He rolled up the blanket and put it away. No more sleep today.

“Listen here, you birds!” Captain Wilcox sounded indecently alert and indecently cheerful for whatever the hour was. “The damnyankees want to take Big Lick away from us, take away the mines, take away the railroad junction. There’s so damn many of ’em, they’ve made it over the Alleghenies and they’re coming down toward the city. That’s why we’re here—to keep ’em from taking it. The company—the regiment—the division—we all go across the Roanoke at ten this morning and we drive the Yankees back into the mountains. Sooner or later, we drive ’em out of Virginia. Any questions? I know you’ll fight hard. We’ll get us some breakfast and then we’ll get us some damnyankees.”

Negro cooks passed out commeal muffins and bacon. Bartlett wolfed his down. He filled the screw-on cup that doubled as a canteen lid with chicory-laced coffee. It made him feel more nearly alive.

He was gulping a second cup when the artillery barrage opened up. The noise was brutal, appalling, overwhelming. He loved every second of it. “More of that racket there is,” he shouted to anyone who would listen, “more damnyankees the Devil’s dragging down to hell, the fewer of ’em there are left up here to shoot at me.”

“Amen to that,” said one of his squadmates, a skinny, bespectacled fellow named Clarence Randolph. He’d been a preacher before the war started, and could have joined the Army as a chaplain, but he hadn’t wanted to be a noncombatant. If he wasn’t the best shot in the company, Bartlett didn’t know who was.

Captain Wilcox blew a whistle. Its shrill screech cut through the roar of the barrage and the occasional blasts from shells the U.S. gunners threw back in reply. “Let’s go,” Wilcox said, waving his arm. Along with the rest of the regiment, along with the rest of the division, the company moved forward.

Under cover of darkness, Confederate engineers and colored laborers had run pontoon bridges across the Roanoke. The planks they’d laid over the pontoons rumbled under Bartlett’s feet. He wanted to get across before day broke enough to give the fellows who manned the Yankees’ cannon a good shot at the improvised bridges.

Horses snorted in a field as he marched past. The shadows in that field were centaurlike. “We punch the hole in the Yankee lines,” Corporal McCorkle said gladly, “then the cavalry rides through, gets into their rear, and chases ’em to hell and gone.”

“Good place for ’em,” Clarence Randolph said. “I am a man brimming over with Christian charity, but I don’t believe in wasting it on damnyankees.”

As light gained on darkness, Bartlett saw how barrages by both sides had chewed the land to ruins. The Confederacy still held about half the valley between the Alleghenies and the river; the Stars and Bars floated over Big Lick, a couple of miles to the south, but nobody was working the mines these days.

A shell fell short and landed among a knot of soldiers off to Bartlett’s left. Some of the screams that rose from them were those of injured men, others of sheer fury at wounds inflicted by friend rather than foe.

“Come on up.” A corporal in a grimy uniform waved Captain Wilcox’s company into the firing pits and connecting trenches that made up the Confederate line. “Come on up, new fish, come on up.”

The soldiers already in line greeted the newcomers with nasty grins and even nastier questions: “Does your mother know you’re here?” “Ever see guts all over everywhere?” “How loud can you scream, new fish? No, don’t bother answerin’—you’ll find out.”

Their looks shocked Bartlett. It wasn’t just that their uniforms and persons were filthy, though that was what he noticed first. The look in their eyes said more. They’d seen things he hadn’t. Some of them—the ones who took obvious delight in those questions—knew a malicious glee that he and his comrades were about to see those things, too.

Some gave good advice: “You go forward, stay low. Zigzag a lot—don’t let ’em draw a bead on you. Get down on your belly and crawl like a snake.”

Bartlett wanted to see what the bombardment was doing to the Yankee lines, but when somebody stuck his head over the front edge of a firing pit, he slumped down dead a moment later, a bullet in his forehead just above the right eye, the back of his head blown out. One of the men who’d been in the line for a while shoved the body out of the path the newcomers were taking, as if it were an inconvenient log. Gulping, Bartlett stepped past the corpse. He decided he wasn’t curious any more.

Here and there among the firing pits, steps made of dirt and sandbags led up to the ground ahead. The company halted by some of those steps. “When the barrage stops, we go,” Captain Wilcox said.

Maybe the barrage would go on forever. Maybe the artillery would kill all the damnyankees and leave nothing for the infantry to do. Maybe staying behind a pharmacy counter back in Richmond hadn’t been such a bad thing. Maybe Bartlett should have waited for his old regiment to be called up instead of volunteering in a new one. Maybe—

As suddenly as it had begun, the barrage stopped. Captain Wilcox blew that damned whistle again. Bartlett wished he’d lose it or, better yet, swallow it.

Soldiers started surging up over the steps. Somebody gave Bartlett a shove. He stumbled forward. His feet hit the first step and climbed all by themselves, regardless of what his mind was telling them. Then he was up on level if battered ground. He ran toward the even more battered firing pits and trenches ahead.

He could hardly see them because of all the smoke and dust the barrage had kicked up. Men in butternut trotted ahead of him, alongside him, behind him. He was part of the thundering herd. As long as he did what everyone else did, he’d be all right. A little more than a quarter of a mile—surely less than half a mile—and what had been Yankee lines would belong to the Confederacy once more.

Through the smoke of dust—
the fog of war
, he thought with the small part of his mind that was thinking—evil yellow lights began winking and flashing. The bombardment hadn’t killed all the U.S. soldiers, then. Men started falling. Some crawled ahead. Some thrashed and twisted and screamed. Some didn’t move.

Bartlett leaned forward, as if into a gale. He wasn’t the only one. Lots of the soldiers still on their feet had that forward lean, as if bracing against a bullet’s anticipated impact. Then, rifles and machine guns (he turned to tell Clarence Randolph that machine guns were satanic tools, but Clarence wasn’t there, wasn’t anywhere nearby—had, in fact, taken only a few steps before a bullet tore out his throat, but Bartlett didn’t know that) tearing at them, they struggled through the Yankee wire and, screeching, threw themselves at the men in green-gray who had invaded their nation.

There were too many Confederate soldiers and too few Yankees, and those too shaken by the barrage to fight as well as they might have. Bartlett leaped down into a firing pit and pointed his rifle at an enemy. The man dropped his weapon and threw his hands in the air. Bartlett almost shot him anyhow—his blood was up—but checked himself, gesturing brusquely with the bayoneted muzzle of his Tredegar:
over that way
. The U.S. soldier went, a grin of doglike submission on his face.

“Come on!” Captain Wilcox shouted. “Spread out and move forward. They’ll counterattack as soon as they can. We want to take back as much ground as we’re able, then hold it against anything they can do to us.”

Maybe the damnyankees had had trenches leading up into their forward positions, as had been true in the Confederate lines. If they had, the Confederate bombardment had destroyed them. Going deeper into the U.S.-held territory was a matter of scrambling from one shell hole to the next. Enemy fire picked up all the time.

There next to Bartlett was Corporal McCorkle. Wide as he was, he’d kept up with the assault and hadn’t stopped a bullet. Turning to him, Bartlett said, “Aren’t you glad we’ve won this land back for our dear country?” He waved—cautiously, so as not to expose his arm to a bullet—at the shell-pocked desolation all around.

McCorkle stared, then started to laugh.

The postman came to the coffeehouse, delivered a couple of advertising circulars, and went on his way. Nellie Semphroch glanced at the circulars. She didn’t throw them away, as she might have before the war. Crumpled up, the papers would make good kindling.

Edna Semphroch came to the doorway to stand beside her mother. She looked after the postman, who was going on down the street whistling some new ragtime tune Nellie didn’t recognize. “Doesn’t seem right to see old Henry coming around every day, same as he did before the Rebs jumped on us,” Edna said.

“Well, he does only come once a day now, instead of twice,” Nellie said, “but yes, I know what you mean. He’s—normal—and everything else has gone straight to the devil, hasn’t it?”

Nellie had only to look at her own shop to see the truth of that. The front window, blown out in the earliest Confederate bombardment of Washington, D.C., was covered over with boards, and she was glad she had those. You couldn’t get glass for love nor money: literally. One glazier she’d talked to had said, “I had a lady offer me an indecent proposal if I’d get her windows repaired.” The fellow had chuckled. “Had to turn her down—couldn’t find the goods for her any which way.”

Nellie didn’t know whether to believe him or to think he was trying to trick her into making an indecent proposal in exchange for glass. Men were like that. If he was, it hadn’t worked. So many places were boarded up these days, Nellie didn’t feel either embarrassed or at a competitive disadvantage for being without glass.

She looked up and down the block. Not a shop, far as the eye could see, still kept its original glazing. Some buildings were rubble; they’d taken direct hits from shellfire. Some weren’t boarded up, but looked out on the street with empty window frames like the eye sockets of a skull: their owners had fled Washington before the Rebs crossed the Potomac. Bums—and people who wouldn’t have been bums had their homes and businesses not been wrecked—sheltered in them, and sometimes came out to beg or steal. Nellie thanked heaven she wasn’t living like that.

Rubble had been pounded down into the holes Confederate shells had torn in the street. U.S. prisoners had done that, under the eyes and guns of laughing Rebel guards. It had rained several times since the bombardment, but some of the bloodstains, brown and faded now, were still all too plain to the eye.

“The Rebs are having themselves a fine old time here,” Nellie said to Edna in a low voice. You had to use a low voice if you called them Rebs. They’d tolerate Rebels, but preferred Confederates or even—travesty!—Americans.

Her daughter nodded. “Far as they’re concerned, it might as well be
their
capital.” She bared her teeth in what someone who didn’t know her might have taken for a friendly smile.

From behind the two women, a Southern voice called, “Another cup here, if y’all’d be so kind.”

Nellie put a smile on her own face as she walked back into her coffeehouse. It was akin but not identical to the grimace Edna had worn a moment before: the smile any business person gives a customer, a smile aimed at the billfold rather than the person who was carrying it. “Yes, sir,” she said. “You were drinking the blend from the Dutch East Indies, weren’t you?”