Trouble was, they knew it. They didn't want to retreat those last eight miles. If the Confederates got into Grove City, they could bring up artillery here and add to the pounding Columbus and its defenses were taking. U.S. forces were doing their best to make sure that didn't happen.
Grove City lay in the middle of a fertile farming belt. Now, though, shells and bombs were tearing those fields, not tractors and plows. Barrel tracks carved the most noticeable furrows in the soil. The smell of freshly turned earth was sweet in Colleton's nostrils; he crouched in a foxhole he'd just dug for himself, though the craters pocking the ground would have served almost as well.
More shells churned up the dirt. The U.S. soldiers had an artillery position just behind Grove City, and they were shooting as hard and as fast as they could. Somewhere not far away, a Confederate soldier started screaming for his mother. His voice was high and shrill. Tom Colleton bit his lip. He'd heard screams like that in the last war as well as this one. They meant a man was badly hurt. Sure enough, these quickly faded.
Tom cursed. He was in his late forties, but his blond, boyish good looks and the smile he usually wore let him lie ten years off his age. Not right now, not after he'd just listened to a soldier from his regiment die.
And when bombs or shells murdered his men, he couldn't help wondering whether his sister had made those same noises just before she died. If Anne hadn't been in Charleston the day that goddamn carrier chose to raid the city… If she hadn't, the world would have been a different place. But it was what it was, and that was all it ever could be.
"Wireless!" Tom shouted. "God damn it to hell, where are you?"
"Here, sir." The soldier with the wireless set crawled across the riven ground toward the regimental commander. The heavy pack on his back made him a human dromedary. "What do you need, sir?"
"Get hold of division headquarters and tell 'em we'd better have something to knock down those Yankee guns," Colleton answered. "As best I can make out, they're in map square B-18."
"B-18. Yes, sir," the wireless operator repeated. He shouted into the microphone. At last, he nodded to Tom. "They've got the message, sir. Permission to get my ass back under cover?"
"You don't need to ask me that, Duffy," Tom said. The wireless man crawled away and dove into a shell hole. Soldiers said two shells never came down in the same place. They'd said that in the Great War, too, and often died proving it wasn't always true.
Within a few minutes, Confederate shells began falling on map square B-18. The bombardment coming down on the Confederate soldiers south of Grove City slowed but didn't stop. Tom Colleton shouted for Duffy again. The wireless man scrambled out of the shell hole and came over to him, his belly never getting any higher off the ground than a snake's. Duffy changed frequencies, bawled into the mike once more, and gave Tom a thumbs-up before wriggling back to what he hoped was safety.
Dive bombers screamed out of the sky a quarter of an hour later. Screamed was the operative word; the Mules (soldiers often called them Asskickers) had wind-powered sirens built into their nonretractable landing gear, to make them as demoralizing as possible. They swooped down on the U.S. artillery so fast and at so steep an angle, Tom thought they would surely keep going and crash, turning themselves into bombs, too.
He'd watched Mules in action before. They always made him worry that way. He'd seen a couple of them shot down-if Yankee fighters got anywhere near them, they were dead meat. But they didn't fly themselves into the ground, no matter how much it looked as if they would. One after another, they released the bombs they carried under their bellies, pulled out of their dives, and, engines roaring, raced away at not much above treetop height.
Mules aimed their bombs by aiming themselves at their target. They were far more accurate than high-altitude bombers-they were, in effect, long-range heavy artillery. Counterbattery fire hadn't put the U.S. guns out of action. A dozen 500-pound bombs silenced them.
"Let's go, boys!" Colleton yelled, emerging from his foxhole and dashing forward. His men came with him. If he'd called for them to go forward and hung back himself, they wouldn't have moved nearly so fast. He'd discovered that in the Great War. He was one of the lucky ones. He'd had only minor wounds, hardly even enough to rate a Purple Heart. An awful lot of brave Confederate officers-and damnyankees, too-had died leading from the front.
Even without their artillery, the U.S. soldiers in Grove City didn't intend to leave. Tracer rounds from several machine guns sketched orange lines of flame across the fields. Men went down, some taking cover, others because they'd been hit. The volume of fire here was less than it had been on the Roanoke front; this was a war of movement, and neither side got the chance to set up defenses in depth the way both had a generation earlier. But even a few machine guns could take the starch out of an attacking infantry regiment in a hurry.
"Goddammit, where the hell are the barrels?" somebody shouted.
Whoever that fellow was, noncom or more likely private, he thought like a general. Barrels-a few stubborn Confederates called them tanks, the way the British did-were the answer to machine-gun fire. And here they came, five-no, six-of them, as if the bellyaching soldier really had summoned them. The U.S. machine guns started blazing away at them. You needed a bigger door knocker than a machine-gun round to open them up, though. The bullets sparked off their butternut-painted armor.
The barrels also carried machine guns. They started shooting up the U.S. position at the southern edge of Grove City. And the barrels' cannon spoke, one by one. One by one, the Yankees' machine guns stopped shooting back. Rifle fire still crackled, but rifle fire couldn't wreck advancing foot soldiers the way machine guns could.
"Let's go!" Tom Colleton yelled again. He panted as he dashed forward. He'd been a kid during the Great War. He wasn't a kid any more. He flinched when a bullet whined past him. Back then, he'd been sure he would live forever. Now, when he had a wife and kids to live for, he knew all too well that he might not. He didn't hang back, but part of him sure as hell wanted to.
Young soldiers on both sides still thought they were immortal. A man in U.S. green-gray sprang up onto a Confederate barrel. He yanked a hatch open and dropped in two grenades. The barrel became a fireball. The U.S. soldier managed to leap clear before it blew, but Confederate gunfire cut him down.
Five trained men and a barrel, Tom thought glumly. The damnyankee had thrown his life away, but he'd made the Confederates pay high.
Another barrel hit a buried mine. Flames spurted up from it, too, but most of the crew got out before the ammunition inside started cooking off. The remaining barrels and the Confederate infantry pushed on into Grove City. Tom waited for barrels painted green-gray to rumble down from the north and stall the Confederate advance. He waited, but it didn't happen. The USA didn't seem to have any barrels around to use.
They're bigger than we are, Colleton thought as he peered around the corner of a house whose white clapboard sides were newly ventilated with bullet holes. They're bigger than we are, but we're a lot readier than they are. If we'd waited much longer, we'd be in trouble.
But the Confederate States hadn't waited, and their armies were going forward. In the last war, they'd thrust toward Philadelphia, but they'd fallen short and been beaten back one painful mile at a time. Other than that, they'd fought on the defensive all through the war. Tom had been part of it from first day till last, and he'd never once set foot on U.S. soil.
Here he was in Ohio now. Jake Featherston had always said he would do better than the Whigs had when it came to running a war against the United States. Tom had had his doubts. He'd never sold his soul to the Freedom Party, the way he often thought his sister had. You couldn't argue with results, though. A couple of weeks of fighting had taken the Confederacy halfway from the banks of the Ohio River to the shores of Lake Erie. If another two or three weeks could take the CSA the rest of the way…