By the way he said it, the USA would have a tough time going on if the two of them got hit. Also by the way he said it, he was the one the country would particularly miss. Dowling didn't blame him for that. Any officer who didn't think he was indispensable was too modest for his own good.
On the other hand, reality needed to puncture egotism every once in a while. "What will the United States do?" Dowling echoed. "Promote a colonel and a first lieutenant and get on with the goddamn war."
Captain Litvinoff sent him a wounded look. That was the least of his worries. As he answered, his voice had risen to a shout to make itself heard above the rapidly rising roar of the Confederate bombers. Mules, Dowling thought as the airplanes screamed down. No other machines made that horrible screech or had those graceful gull wings.
They seemed to be diving straight down. Dowling knew they weren't, knew they couldn't be, but that was how it seemed just the same. "Crash, you bastards!" he shouted. "Fly it right into the ground!"
The Mules didn't, of course, but that bellowed defiance made him feel better. He pulled his.45 out of its holster and banged away at the Confederate dive bombers. That also did no good at all. He consoled himself by thinking that it might. He wasn't the only one shooting at the airplanes. Several other soldiers were doing the same. Every once in a while, he supposed they might bring one down by dumb luck. Most of the time, they didn't.
Then the bombs fell from the Mules' bellies. The airplanes leveled off and zoomed away. Blast picked Dowling up and slammed him down on the dirt as if it were a professional wrestler with the strength of a demon. "Oof!" he said. He tasted blood. It ran down his face, too. When he raised a hand, he discovered it came from a bloody nose. It could have been worse.
A few feet away, Max Litvinoff was trying to get his feet under him. By his dazed expression, he might have taken a right to the kisser. Missing glasses accounted for some of that. Without them, he looked even more confused than he was. He also had a bloody nose, and a cut on one ear that dripped more blood down onto the shoulder of his uniform tunic.
Dowling pointed. "Your spectacles are a couple of feet to the left of your left foot, Captain."
"Thank you, sir." Litvinoff plainly had to think about which foot was his left. He groped around on the grass till he found the eyeglasses, then set them on the bridge of his beaky nose. He peered over at Dowling with a worried frown. "I'm afraid I must have suffered some sort of head injury, sir. You look clear enough through one eye, but with the other one I might as well not have the glasses on at all."
"Captain, if you check them, I think you'll discover that you've lost one lens," Dowling said.
Litvinoff raised a shaky forefinger. When he almost poked himself in the left eye, he said, "Oh," in a small, wondering voice. After a moment, he nodded. "Thank you again, sir. That hadn't occurred to me." Another pause followed. "It should have, shouldn't it? I don't believe I'm at my best."
"I don't believe you are, either," Dowling said. "Unless I'm wrong, you got your bell rung there. If that bomb had hit a little closer, the blast might have done us in."
"Yes." Litvinoff looked down at himself. He seemed to realize for the first time that he was bleeding. The damage wasn't serious, but at the moment he was unequipped to do anything about it.
Dowling plucked a handkerchief from his own trouser pocket and dabbed at the younger man's nose and at his cut ear. "That's definitely a wound, Captain. I'll write you up for a Purple Heart."
"A Purple Heart? Me?" That needed a while to penetrate, too. Dowling suspected Litvinoff's likely concussion was only part of the reason. The gas specialist had done most of his work at the War Department offices back in Philadelphia. Thinking of himself as a front-line soldier wouldn't seem easy or natural. Slowly, a smile spread across his face as the idea sank in. "That will impress people, won't it?"
"Provided you live long enough to show off your pretty medal, yes," Dowling answered. "I'll be damned if I know how good your chances are, though."
As if to underscore his words, Confederate shells began landing a few hundred yards away. The bursts walked closer. "No special weapons in any of those," Captain Litvinoff said distinctly. Concussed or not, he still knew his main business.
"Happy day," Dowling said. "They can kill us anyway, you know." Litvinoff looked astonished again. That hadn't occurred to him, either. Abner Dowling wished it hadn't occurred to him.
Properly speaking, Armstrong Grimes hadn't had enough training to go into combat. After the Confederates bombed Camp Custer, nobody seemed to worry about anything like that. He had a uniform. They gave him a Springfield all his own. True, he was still missing some of the finer points of the soldier's art. The theory seemed to be that he could pick those up later. If he lived.
Getting bombed had gone a long way toward clearing notions of immortality from his head. The first bullet that cracked past his head missed him but slew several more illusions. Bombs fell out of the sky, the way rain or snow did. That bullet had been different. That bullet had been personal. He'd dug his foxhole deeper as soon as it flew by.
West Jefferson, the town he and his fellow frightened foot soldiers were supposed to defend, lay about fifteen miles west of Columbus. It was on the south bank of Little Darby Creek, and had probably been a nice place to live before the Confederates started shelling it. Brick houses from the nineteenth century stood side by side with modern frame homes. When shells hit the brick houses, they crumbled to rubble. When shells hit the frame homes, they started to burn. Six of one, half a dozen of the other, as far as Armstrong could see.
Up ahead, something that might have been a man in a butternut uniform moved. Armstrong Grimes still had a lot to learn about being a soldier, but he understood shooting first and asking questions later. He raised the Springfield to his shoulder, fired, worked the bolt, and fired again.
Maybe he'd hit the Confederate soldier. Maybe the fellow flattened out and took cover. Or maybe there hadn't been a Confederate soldier in those bushes to begin with. Any which way, Armstrong saw no more movement. That suited him fine.
His company commander was a pinch-faced, redheaded captain with acne scars named Gilbert Boyle. "Keep your peckers up, boys!" Boyle called. "We've got to make sure Featherston's fuckers don't ford the creek."
A corporal named Rex Stowe crouched in a foxhole about ten feet from Armstrong's. He was swarthy, unshaven, and cynical. A cigarette dangled from one corner of his mouth. It jerked up and down as he said, "Yeah, keep your pecker up. That way, Featherston's fuckers can shoot it off you easier."
The mere thought made Armstrong want to drop his rifle and clutch himself right there. He'd seen a lot of horrible things since the war started. He hadn't seen that yet, for which he thanked the God in Whom he believed maybe one morning in four.
A submachine gun stuttered, somewhere not far away. Bullets stitched up dirt and grass in front of Armstrong. Then, when the burst went high the way they always did, more rounds clipped twigs from the willow tree behind him. He tried to disappear into his foxhole. It wasn't big enough for that, but he did his damnedest.
Stowe fired a couple of times in the direction from which the burst had come. More submachine-gun fire answered him. He curled up in his hole, too. "I think everybody in the whole goddamn Confederate Army carries an automatic weapon," he growled, a mixture of disgust and fear in his voice.
"Seems that way," Armstrong agreed. "There's always more of us, but they put more lead in the air."
After another burst of fire, this from a new direction, a Southern voice called, "You Yankees! y'all surrender now, get yourselves out o' the fight, make sure y'all live through the war!"
"No," Captain Boyle shouted back, and then, "Hell, no! You want us, you come get us. It won't be as easy as you think."