“We just about ready, sir?” asked his gunner, a dark, and darkly clever, corporal named Al Bergeron. He was a good soldier and a good gunner; Morrell missed Michael Pound all the same, and hoped the veteran underofficer was safe. Wherever Pound was, he’d be acting as if he wore three stars, not three stripes.
But Morrell would have to worry about him later, too. “Just about, Frenchy,” he answered. During the Great War, more than a few people with French names changed them to German-sounding ones so their neighbors wouldn’t suspect them. That kind of hysteria hadn’t come again. The Confederate States were the only enemies people flabbled hard about now.
Morrell put on his earphones. This barrel had a fancier wireless setup than any of the rest. He could link up not only to other barrels but also to artillery, infantry, and aviation circuits. He wondered whether being able to talk to so many people at once was part of the privilege of his rank or part of the price of it.
He connected to the artillery web. “Ready at 0730?” he asked. If he got a no, somebody’s head would roll-H-hour was only fifteen minutes away.
But the answer came back at once: “Ready, sir.” The officer who replied sounded young and excited. Morrell wondered if he’d seen action before. Whether he had or not, he would now.
Those fifteen minutes, like the last fifteen minutes before every attack, seemed to crawl by on their bellies. Corporal Bergeron said, “Almost seems a shame to do this to those damn greasers.”
“Almost-but not quite,” Morrell said dryly. The gunner chuckled. Morrell’s mouth stretched in a grin of savage anticipation. No, he didn’t think it was a shame, not even slightly. If Jake Featherston was stretched so thin that he needed to use second-grade troops from the Empire of Mexico to hold part of his line, he had only himself to blame if the USA tried to stomp the stuffing out of them.
No sooner had that thought crossed Morrell’s mind than the artillery opened up. Even here inside the turret, the thunder was cataclysmic. He’d been hoarding guns as hard as he’d been hoarding barrels. The Mexicans would like things even less.
The barrage went on for a precise hour and a half. As soon as the guns let up, Morrell spoke into the intercom to the driver and then over the webs connecting him to the rest of the barrels and to the infantry. He said the same thing every time: “Let’s go!”
Engine roaring, his barrel rumbled forward. Morrell stuck his head out of the cupola so he could see better. That was a splendid way to get shot. He knew as much. It was the chance he took. If he got another oak-leaf cluster for his Purple Heart, then he did, that was all. He needed to see what was going on, as much as he could. And if he stopped one with his face… Well, a general officer’s pension would leave Agnes and Mildred without many worries about money.
Along with the rest of the barrels, his pushed southwest out of Meadville. Some foot soldiers loped along among the big, noisy machines. Others rode in trucks or in lightly armored carriers to keep up more easily. A few infantrymen clambered up onto barrels and let them do the work. That was highly unofficial. Doctrine handed down from on high-which is to say, from Philadelphia-frowned on it. Riding barrels left soldiers vulnerable to the fire they inevitably drew. But it also got them where they were going faster and fresher than marching would have done. No matter what doctrine the War Department laid down, Morrell liked that.
He knew just when they broke into the Mexicans’ lines. The U.S. barrage had come down right on the button. Only a few soldiers in that yellowish khaki were in any shape to fight. Scattered rifle fire and a handful of machine guns greeted the advancing U.S. forces, but that was all. Francisco Jose’s soldiers didn’t carry the automatic rifles that made C.S. infantrymen so formidable. They had bolt-action Tredegars, pieces much like U.S. Springfields.
They didn’t have barrels. They didn’t have much artillery. They didn’t have armored personnel carriers. And they didn’t have a chance. Morrell had loaded up with a rock in his fist. Now he swung it with all his might.
Here and there, the Mexicans fought bravely. Knots of them held up Morrell’s forces wherever they could. Stubborn men who would die before they yielded a position were an asset to any army, and the Empire of Mexico’s had its share. But the Mexicans didn’t have enough men like that, and the ones they did have couldn’t do what they might have done with better equipment. More often than not, the U.S. advance flowed past those stubborn knots to either side. They could be cleaned up at leisure. Meanwhile, the push went on.
“Keep moving!” Whenever Morrell ducked down into the turret, he spread his gospel over the wireless. “Always keep moving. Once we get in among ’em, once we get behind ’em, they’ll go to pieces. And then we’ll be able to move even faster.”
And he had the pleasure of watching his prophecy come true. Till the early afternoon, the enemy soldiers in front of his barrels and infantry did everything they could to stop them and even to throw them back. After that… After that, it was like watching ice melt when spring came to a northern river. Once the rot started, it spread fast. By that first nightfall, he was seeing the enemy’s backs.
He didn’t want to stop for the darkness. He kept going till his driver couldn’t see any farther. He sent infantry ahead even after that. And he had the barrels moving again as soon as the first gray showed in the east.
The Mexicans kept trying to fight back early in the second day. But when they saw barrels coming at them out of the swirling snow, a lot of them lost their nerve. Morrell would have lost his nerve, too, trying to stand up against barrels with no more than rifles. Some of the men in the yellowish khaki ran away. Others dropped their rifles and raised their hands. A lot of them looked miserably cold. They didn’t have greatcoats, and probably didn’t have long johns, either. Down in the Empire of Mexico, they wouldn’t have needed them. They were a long way from home.
By the end of that second day, Morrell’s barrels had smashed through the crust of enemy resistance. Behind it lay… not much. Morrell had a gruesomely good time shooting up a Confederate truck convoy. The big butternut trucks rolled right up to his barrel, sure it had to be on their side even if it was the wrong color.
They found out how wrong they were in a hurry. At Morrell’s orders, Frenchy Bergeron wrecked the first truck in the convoy with a well-aimed cannon shell. The second truck tried to go around it. Bergron blasted that one, too, effectively blocking the road. Then he and the bow gunner used their machine guns to shoot up the rest of the trucks. More U.S. barrels came up and joined the fun.
It wasn’t much fun for the poor bastards on the receiving end. Soldiers spilled out of some of the trucks and tried to find shelter from the storm of bullets wherever they could. Other trucks carried munitions, not men. When they burned, they sent tracers flying every which way. Standing up in the cupola again, Morrell whooped. Corporal Bergeron got the view through his gunsight. He pounded Morrell gently on the leg, which also amounted to a whoop.
Desperate to escape the trap, some of the trucks went off the road and into the fields on either side. Like their U.S. counterparts, they had four-wheel drive. That gave them some traction on the wet ground, but only some. Great gouts of mud flew from their tires as they struggled forward. While they did, the green-gray barrels went right on shooting at them, and they couldn’t shoot back. Without antibarrel cannon, the only weapons foot soldiers had against armor were grenades through the hatches and Featherston Fizzes. They couldn’t get close enough to use anything like that here.
Once he’d smashed the column of trucks, Morrell got on the wireless circuit to the barrels closest to his: “Let’s get rolling again. We’ve got to keep moving.” He popped up again and cast a wary eye at the sky. So far, the promised storm was still rolling through. When the weather got better, the Confederates were going to throw anything that could fly at his armored forces. From what he could see, air strikes had the best chance of slowing him down-if anything could. Now that he’d broken through the C.S. line, he saw nothing in the rear that had much chance of doing the job.