American Front (55 page)

Here and there along the way, pieces of crates stenciled
BATTERY F
and
DISINFECTION
were used as corduroying on the floor of the trench or as pieces of lean-tos and other shelters cut into the earth of the trench wall. Custer had just started talking about them when a Confederate aeroplane came buzzing overhead.

“Shoot him down!” the general shouted, his sagging features twisting in alarm. “If the Rebs see what we’re up to, there’ll be hell to pay!”

For once, Dowling agreed completely with his commander. Yelling in the middle of the trench line, though, didn’t strike him as the best way to get the antiaircraft gunners to go to work. Fortunately, they didn’t need Custer’s encouragement. They opened up on the Confederate scout with everything they had. The air around his aeroplane filled with black puffs, as intense a barrage as Dowling had ever seen. The Reb must have felt the same way. He turned around and scooted for his own lines. The antiaircraft fire followed him till he was out of range.

Moving forward grew difficult then, because the trenches were packed with men in green-gray, their gauze masks making them all look alike, waiting to storm forward when the order was given. It wouldn’t be long now. Dowling’s bulk and the magic of Custer’s name cleared the path enough that the general, his adjutant, and Davis were able to reach the very forwardmost trenches in good time.

Resting at the front of those trenches, spaced several yards apart, were metal cylinders about as long as a man, each one painted dark blue. Alongside each cylinder stood a masked man with a wrench, ready to open the fitting and let its contents spew forth into the air.

“What is the hour, Major?” Custer demanded.

He had a pocket watch of his own, but asking Dowling the question was easier than taking it out and looking at it. “Sir, it’s 0625,” Dowling said resignedly after checking his own watch.

“Splendid!” Custer said. “Capital! Couldn’t be better. We’re scheduled to begin at 0630, provided the wind holds.” He licked a finger and stuck it up in the air. He stuck it up high enough, as a matter of fact, that he was lucky not to get shot in the hand. “Holding very nicely—straight out of the west, just as we want.”

“When the Germans used chlorine gas against the French and the English at Ypres, they made gains, but not a breakthrough,” Davis said. “How will you make sure we do better than our allies?”

That was a good question. Dowling wondered how Custer would answer it. Dowling wondered if Custer
could
answer it. The truth was that the USA, like everyone else in the war, seized eagerly on anything that might yield a small edge in the murderous struggle. Every U.S. army in Kentucky was trying chlorine gas today. Making gains without losing men by the tens of thousands looked very good, even to Custer, who normally used up soldiers as if they were so many pieces of blotting paper.

But instead of replying, Custer shouted, “Release the gas!” It was, by Dowling’s watch, still a minute early, but Custer’s watch might have run faster—not that he checked to find out.

The men at the closest chlorine cylinders gave counterclockwise twists with their wrenches. Puffs, as of pale green smoke, spurted from the cylinders. Custer had been right about one thing; the wind was out of the west. It blew the puffs of smoke into a single dirty green cloud and sent that cloud rolling and billowing toward the Confederate trenches.

“That’ll shift them!” Custer said jubilantly. He got up on the firing step to watch the progress of the gas. Davis got up beside him. If he didn’t watch the progress of the gas, he didn’t have much of a story. And Dowling got up there, too. As long as he was Custer’s adjutant, this was as close to real combat as he was likely to come.

Every now and then, little bits of high ground between the U.S. and C.S. lines would remain visible above the chlorine cloud, which, being heavier than air, stuck close to the ground except when the wind blew it up into little puffs and wisps. Despite that steady wind, the harsh, bleachlike odor of the gas made Dowling’s throat raw, his nose sore, and his eyes even more watery than Custer’s vicious onions had done.

As soon as the chlorine cloud rolled over and into the Confederate trenches, observers telephoned word back to the U.S. artillery emplacements. They opened up with a savage bombardment. Explosions sent dirt flying and made the gas jump and writhe like a plateful of gelatin.

Before long, the cylinders of chlorine gas were empty. The artillery stopped pounding the Confederates’ forwardmost trenches and moved back to the support trenches to keep reinforcements from moving up. All along the U.S. line, officers’ whistles blew. Cries of “Let’s go!” and “Get moving!” rang out. One nearby officer added, “Come on, the closer we stay to the hind end of that gas cloud, the worse shape the Rebs’ll be in when we hit ’em.” Over the top the troops went.

That would have been plenty to inspire Abner Dowling to follow close behind the chlorine. Only in books by writers who’d never smelled powder (more to the point, who’d never smelled the shit from spilled guts) did soldiers want a fair fight. What soldiers wanted was a walkover, with none of them getting hurt. They didn’t get what they wanted very often. Maybe today…

“Brave men,” Richard Harding Davis said quietly, watching the soldiers in green-gray, their uniforms fading almost to invisibility when seen against the chlorine, swarming out of the U.S. trenches and toward those of the Confederates. “Very brave men.”

Here and there, rifle and machine-gun fire greeted the Americans. Not all of the Rebels had been overcome by the poisonous gas. Men caught between the trench lines fell, sometimes one by one, sometimes in rows. But most of the U.S. soldiers moved forward. One after another, the weapons aimed at them fell silent.

“Do the Rebels know how to block the chlorine’s effect?” Davis asked.

“I wouldn’t be surprised,” Dowling said, at the same time as General Custer was snapping, “I doubt it.”

Custer glared at his adjutant. Dowling hung his head and muttered an apology. Reports from Europe, though, showed how chlorine could be countered. Even something as simple as pissing in a rag and holding it over your mouth and nose could keep most of the gas out of your lungs, though it would still burn your eyes. And the limeys and the frogs were supposed to be using the same sort of masks German and now U.S. troops had, too.

“I shan’t give any details,” Davis said, “though I doubt the Confederate States need to read my columns to garner military intelligence.” That was sure to be true; where the USA had German reports on the effects of chlorine, the CSA would have got details from Paris and London.

Whatever the reports had said, though, the Rebs hadn’t paid much attention to it. U.S. soldiers still flooded forward, and, now, Confederate prisoners, herded along by jubilant Americans—some wearing their masks, some with them hung around their necks—came stumbling back to the U.S. lines.

Some of the Rebs were ordinary captives, either men who’d surrendered in the fighting or were taken after being wounded. But others showed the effects of the poisonous gas. Some had blood running from their mouths or bubbling out of their noses. Others seemed to be doing their best not to breathe at all. From the tiny taste of chlorine Dowling had got, he tried to imagine what their throats and chests felt like. He was glad he failed. A couple of Confederates tried to scream at every breath they took, but emitted only little gasping sounds of agony.

“Not much glory here,” Dowling observed, watching the wretched prisoners.

“Defeating the enemies of my country is glory aplenty for me,” Custer declared. In his own way, he meant it, but his own way included seeing his name in the newspapers, preferably in letters several inches high.

And, by the way the attack was developing, he might get glory on his own terms. A big victory here, and Roosevelt would be hard pressed to keep from giving him the command in Canada he so desperately craved. A runner came up and said, in tones of high excitement, “Sir, we just captured a whole battery of those damn fast-firing three-inch guns the Rebs have. Not a man at ’em: most of the gunners ran, and the gas got the rest.”

“That’s first-rate,” Custer said. “Positively first-rate. We have to keep throwing men at them till they crack. Pour it on, by God! Pour it on!”

“Have you got more chlorine ready, to make another breach in their lines after they manage to plug this gap?” Davis asked.

Dowling nodded. Again, the reporter had found the right question to ask. The right answer, unfortunately, was no. The USA didn’t turn out—or hadn’t turned out—chlorine in the quantity Germany, a chemical powerhouse, did. If the thought of not having more bothered Custer, he didn’t let on. “We won’t need more,” he said grandly. “Now that we’ve got them on the run, we’ll make sure they keep running. I’ll send in the cavalry to complete their demoralization. The stalemate on this front, Mr. Davis, is over, and you can quote me.”

Davis wrote the words down. He didn’t ask any more questions. Maybe that meant Custer had convinced him. Maybe, on the other hand, it meant the reporter had seen enough war on his own to know the general commanding First Army was talking through his hat. Abner Dowling was glumly certain about which way he would have bet.

Retreat. It was an ugly word. Jake Featherston hated the sound of it. But he hated the sound of
annihilation
a lot more. If the First Richmond Howitzers hadn’t pulled back from the Susquehanna when they did, they would have been in no position to do it later.

“I knew we were in trouble when we didn’t make it to the Delaware,” he muttered as he trudged along a dirt road that coated him, the horses, the guns, and everything else nearby with a red-brown haze of dust.

He hadn’t expected to be overheard, not through the clopping of the horses’ hooves and the rattle and squeak of the gun carriage. But the new loader for the piece, a youngster named Michael Scott, said, “Why’s that, Sarge?”

Featherston scowled. He almost didn’t answer. As far as he was concerned, Nero and Perseus had manned the gun better than the kind of replacements you got nowadays. What they’d learned when they were serving their time as conscripts, God only knew. Featherston wasn’t convinced they’d learned anything. But he replied, as patiently as he could, “When we didn’t finish the big wheel to the Delaware, that let the damnyankees keep shipping supplies into Baltimore. And that let the bastards break out of Baltimore, too. If they cut us off, we’re still liable to be in a lot of trouble.”

“Never happen,” Scott declared. “Not in a million years. We’ll whip ’em, same as we’ve done twice running.”

“I figured the same thing when the fighting started,” Featherston answered. “It’s already gone on a hell of a lot longer than I figured it would. The Yankees this time, feels like they mean business, same as us.”

They crossed Codorus Creek, the gun-carriage wheels rumbling over the planks of the bridge. On the southwestern side of the creek, Negro laborers and Confederate infantry were digging in, aiming to hold back the advancing U.S. troops, at least for a while, and to hold on to the town of Hanover, a couple of miles to the west.

Featherston was glumly certain they wouldn’t keep Hanover long. With the chunk of land they’d carved out of Yankee territory being nibbled away at the base, they’d have to keep moving back toward Washington, and smartly, or the U.S. soldiers would cut them off. But they couldn’t just skedaddle, not unless they wanted endless grief from the damnyankees who’d halted them at the Susquehanna.

Scott said, “If things had gone the way they were supposed to, we’d have been in Philadelphia a long time ago.”

“Yeah, and if pigs had wings, we’d all carry umbrellas,” Featherston replied with a snort. “When you’ve been through even a little more fighting, kid, you’re going to see that things just
don’t
go the way they’re supposed to. The Yanks, they’ve got their own set of supposed-to’s, and what we get is what’s left over when ours bump up against theirs.”

The loader nodded respectfully. Not only was Featherston a sergeant, he was that even more exalted creature, a veteran. The combination gave his views an authority few mortals could claim.

More hoofbeats: here came Pompey, mounted on one of Captain Stuart’s fine horses. “Captain’s compliments, Sergeant,” he said in his syrupy voice, “an’ we gonna go into battery by that slate quarry over yonder.” He pointed off to the west of the road.

“All right,” Featherston said shortly. He still didn’t care for the way Stuart used the Negro to relay orders, but however much authority he might seem to have to Michael Scott, to the battery commander he was just another noncom who did what he was told. Pompey rode on to give the rest of the guns in the battery the word.

Jake admitted to himself that Stuart had picked a good spot in which to deploy the howitzers. They were only a couple of miles back of Codorus Creek, in good position to pound the Yankees when they approached the line the Confederates were creating. Better yet, piles of spoil from the mine offered fine cover for the guns, and Negroes were already busy digging firing pits to protect them even better.