Tom worked the bolt and chambered a new round. Springfields didn’t measure up to automatic Tredegars, either. But they were good enough, or more than good enough. Despite losing its commander, the barrel still came on. Tom hadn’t expected anything else. The gunner would run the behemoth now. But it wouldn’t fight so well as it had with a full crew.
A machine next to it hit a mine and threw a track. That barrel slewed sideways and stopped. The five men inside stayed where they were. They could still use the turret and the bow gun, but they weren’t going forward anymore. The barrel’s steel skin protected them from small-arms fire. If a cannon started shooting at the crippled machine, they were in trouble. The Confederates in the Pittsburgh pocket were as short on guns and shells as they were on everything else, though. The Yankees in there might make it.
There weren’t enough mines to stop the rest of the barrels, either. The U.S. machines really were ugly compared to the sleek, elegant Confederate new models. It wasn’t a beauty contest, though. The damnyankees could do the job, which was the only thing that mattered.
If they kept coming, they would tear a hole in the C.S. line. Tom knew only too well what lay behind it: not much. He didn’t know what anybody in the line could do about it.
Some men were ready to give up their lives to try to stop them. Two soldiers ran out with Featherston Fizzes, wicks alight. A Yankee foot soldier cut down one of the Confederates before he got close enough to throw his. As he fell, the burning gasoline gave him his own pyre. Tom hoped he was already dead; if he wasn’t, that was a hard way to go.
But the other soldier flung his Fizz. Fire spread across a barrel’s turret and dripped down into the engine compartment. Paint and grease made barrels vulnerable to fire anyway. When the engine started to burn, too…
Hatches popped open as the crew bailed out. Tom Colleton wasn’t the only man who fired at them. One barrelman might have reached the shelter of a pile of bricks. The rest lay dead.
But all that only put off the inevitable. The Yankees had the firepower, and the Confederates didn’t. The Yankees threw reinforcements into the battle. The Confederates didn’t have enough men to begin with. Fight as the men in filthy butternut would, the pocket shrank.
Tom stumbled back to the next line of trenches and foxholes. If he hadn’t fallen back, the damnyankees would have flanked him out and killed him. Oh, maybe he could have surrendered, but maybe not, too. U.S. soldiers treated prisoners all right-when they took them. They didn’t always. Sometimes they were too busy to be bothered. Then would-be POWs ended up dead. It wasn’t anything the Confederates didn’t do, just… part of the game.
Another weary, unshaven Confederate soldier-a corporal-crouched in a hole a few feet from Tom’s. The noncom managed a smile. “Ain’t this fun?” he said.
“As a matter of fact,” Tom said, “no.”
“Reckon we’ll win the war anyways?” the corporal asked.
“I stopped worrying about it a while ago,” Tom answered after a moment’s thought. “Whatever happens in the rest of it, I think it’ll happen without me.” He popped up and snapped off a shot at what might have been motion. It stopped. Maybe he’d cut down a damnyankee. Maybe he’d fired at nothing.
“Freedom!” the corporal said. “That’s what it’s all about, ain’t it? Fighting so the Confederate States can be what they want and do whatever they please?”
“I never thought about it much,” said Tom, who avoided Jake Featherston’s slogan whenever he could. “All I know is, I never liked the damnyankees. They gassed my brother and they bombed my sister, and I owe ’em plenty. I’ve paid back a lot, but I want to get some more.”
Mortar rounds started falling. Tom pulled in his head like a turtle, and wished he had his own hard shell. Machine-gun bullets snarled overhead. Yes, this was going to be a big push. “Here they come!” the corporal yelled. “Freedom!” He fired-once, twice, three times.
Tom fired, too, at the Yankees coming from the front. But more were slipping around the right flank. He turned and got off a couple of quick shots at them. Then he had to slap a fresh clip into the Springfield. An automatic Tredegar took a twenty-round magazine, not a five-round box. Of course, you could empty it faster, too.
If he and the corporal didn’t fall back again, they were dead. The men in green-gray would surround them and hunt them down. “I’ll cover you,” Tom said. The corporal ran for a hole deeper in the pocket. He made it, then waved for Tom to follow him.
Up. Run like hell. Hunch over to make yourself a smaller target. How many times had Tom done it before?
This was once too often. The bullet caught him in the back. He spun and toppled. His chin hit the snowy, rubble-strewn ground. His legs didn’t want to work. He reached for the Springfield. One more shot. “Oh, no, you don’t,” a Yankee said. He fired from no more than ten feet away. And Tom Colleton didn’t.
Awan early-February sun shone on the snowy, soot-streaked disaster that had been Pittsburgh. The last Confederate pocket on the North Side had surrendered, or was supposed to have surrendered, an hour earlier. Sergeant Michael Pound hadn’t made it this far by being trusting. He had a round of HE in the barrel’s cannon. If any of the men going into captivity felt like getting cute, he would do his damnedest to make sure they couldn’t.
Lieutenant Griffiths stood up in the cupola. He had a much broader view of the devastation than Pound did. He said something in a language that wasn’t English. “What was that, sir?” Pound asked.
The barrel commander laughed self-consciously. “Latin, Sergeant. From Tacitus, the Roman historian. ‘They make a desert and they call it peace.’ ”
“Oh.” Pound weighed that. He approved of the sentiment, taken all in all. But he was not the sort of man to resist discordant details: “It’s sure as hell a desert out there, sir, but we don’t have peace.”
“Not everywhere,” Griffiths agreed. “But nobody’s shooting at anybody in Pittsburgh anymore.”
After another moment of judicious consideration, Michael Pound nodded. “Well, no, sir. Nobody’s shooting right here.” And if anybody in butternut tried shooting right here, Pound intended to shoot first.
“Here they come!” Griffiths squeaked in excitement.
Pound peered through the gunsight, his reticulated window on the world while he was in the barrel. The Confederates were a sorry-looking lot. Out they came, a long, draggling column of them, from the last few square blocks of Pittsburgh they’d held. Their breath smoked in the chilly air. None of them was smoking a cigarette, though. The U.S. infantrymen guarding them had no doubt already relieved them of their tobacco. Lucky bastards, Pound thought without rancor.
The Confederates were skinny and dirty and hairy. They’d been living mostly on hope the past few weeks. Pound had heard of raids with the sole aim of stealing U.S. rations. If that wasn’t desperation, he didn’t know what was. When you were empty, any food looked good.
A lot of the Confederates looked miserably cold. Their issue greatcoats were thinner than U.S. models. Some of the men were all lumpy and bumpy, because they’d stuffed crumpled newspapers under the greatcoats for a little extra warmth. Others wore a variety of captured civilian coats on top of or instead of their greatcoats. They didn’t have good winter boots, either. Those needed to be oversized, to allow for extra padding. They needed to be, but the Confederates’ weren’t.
“There they are,” Lieutenant Griffiths said. “Jake Featherston’s supermen. They don’t look so tough, do they?”
“Sir, if they aren’t tough, what have we been doing here since November?” Pound asked. Griffiths didn’t answer.