Maybe nobody could. Jerry Dover was inclined to believe that, which was another reason he hadn’t sent the telegram. Before he could say so, air-raid sirens started howling. Somebody clanged on a shell casing with a hammer, too, which was the emergency substitute for the sirens.
“Head for shelter!” Dover said. He heard U.S. airplane engines overhead even before he got out of the tent. The dugout into which he and Pete scrambled was as fancy as any he’d known in the Great War. It had all the comforts of home-if your home happened to be getting bombed.
“Maybe they aren’t after us,” Pete said.
“Here’s hoping,” Dover agreed. Northwestern Georgia had plenty of targets. Then explosions started shaking the ground much too close. The supply dump was one of those targets.
Something on the ground blew up-a roar different from the ones bombs made. Jerry Dover swore. He hoped the secondary explosion didn’t take too much with it. He was as careful with ordnance as he knew how to be. He didn’t store much of it in any one place, and he did build earth revetments around each lot. That minimized damage, but couldn’t stop it.
Another secondary explosion proved as much, as if proof were needed. Dover swore some more. A couple of other soldiers in the bombproof laughed, as much from nerves as for any other reason. A lucky hit and the bombproof might not be; it might turn into a tomb.
“Sometimes the bastards get lucky, that’s all,” Pete said.
“I don’t want them to get lucky, goddammit,” Dover said. “What if they’re starting the big push now? The guys at the front will need everything we can send ’em.”
“And if the damnyankees break through, we’ll be the guys at the front,” Pete said.
That made Dover wish he hadn’t already used up so much good profanity. Then, instead of cussing, he started to laugh himself, which made Pete send him a fishy stare. He still thought it was funny. Here he’d gone and turned down a combat command, but he was liable to get one whether he wanted it or not.
A big explosion sent dirt trickling down between the planks on the shelter’s roof. “I hope to God that was one of their bombers crashing,” Pete said.
“Me, too,” Dover said. “Why don’t they go away and bother somebody else?” He knew why perfectly well. That didn’t keep him from wishing anyway.
The bombers stayed overhead for more than two hours. That had to mean several waves of them were pounding Confederate positions. Now that the United States had airstrips down in southern Tennessee, they were only a short hop away. And they were making the most of it, too.
After no bombs had fallen for fifteen minutes or so, Dover said, “Well, let’s see what’s left upstairs.” He hoped something would be. He also hoped he wouldn’t come out when a new wave of enemy bombers appeared overhead. That’d be just my luck, wouldn’t it? he thought sourly.
The passage out from the bombproof’s outer door had a dogleg to keep blast from getting in. It also had several shovels stashed near that outer door, in case the men inside needed to dig their way out. But Jerry Dover could see daylight when he got the door open.
He could see daylight, yes. He could also see smoke, and smell it: smoke from burning rubber and explosives and wood and paint and several other things. His eyes stung. He coughed again and again.
Behind him, Pete said, “How bad is it?” He was coughing, too. Dover wished he were wearing a gas mask. He hoped the Yankees hadn’t blown up any gas shells, or he might really need one.
“I don’t think it’s good,” he answered. Getting out of the trench was easy. A near miss had built a nice, convenient ramp. If that one had burst a hundred feet to the left…No, you didn’t have to fight at the front to see combat these days.
He and Pete and the other soldiers hurried up to ground level and looked around. “Fuck,” Pete said softly, which summed things up pretty well.
Enemy air strikes had pounded Jerry Dover’s supply dumps before. That was part of the cost of doing business in a war. He didn’t think one of his depots had ever taken a beating like this before, though. Eight or ten fires raged. Yes, one of them was an enemy bomber’s pyre-he could see the airplane’s tail sticking up. But the damnyankees had done a lot more damage here than they’d taken doing it.
Hoses were already playing on some of the worst blazes. Dover felt proud of his men. They knew what they had to do, and they did it. And in doing it, they took chances front-line soldiers never had to worry about.
Of course, the men at the front had worries of their own. Pete cocked his head to one side, listening. “Firing’s picked up-fuck me if it hasn’t.”
Dover listened, too. He said the worst thing he could think of: “Yeah, I think you’re right.”
“They’re trying to break out.” Pete found something bad to say, too.
“Sure sounds that way,” Dover allowed.
“Think they can do it, sir?” Any time Pete used an officer’s title, he needed reassurance.
Right now, Dover longed for reassurance, too. “Hope to hell they can’t.”
A telephone rang. He would have bet the bombardment had blown up the instrument or broken the lines that made it work, but no. He ran over to it and admitted he was there and alive.
“Dover, you’ve got to send me everything, fast as you can!” He recognized the voice of the brigadier general who’d offered him a regiment. “They’re coming at me with everything they’ve got. If you have a division’s worth of dehydrated infantry, pour water on ’em quick and get ’em up here.”
In spite of everything, Dover smiled. But he had to say, “Sir, I don’t know what the hell we’ve got right this second. They just bombed hell out of the dump, too.”
The general’s opinion of that violated all the Commandments with the possible exception of the one against graven images. “We’re doing all we can, dammit, but how can we hang on if we don’t have enough bullets and shells?” he said.
“I’ll get you what I have, sir.” Dover slammed down the handset and yelled orders. He had to interrupt himself when the telephone rang again. “Dover here,” he said.
“Rockets! Antibarrel rockets!” another harried officer screamed in his ear. “Damnyankee armor’s tearing holes in my lines! They’ve got these goddamn flail barrels to clear mines, and they’re going through us like a dose of salts. If we don’t stop ’em quick, we are dead meat, you hear me? Fucking dead meat!”
Dover didn’t know what a flail barrel was. He didn’t know how many antibarrel rockets had escaped the Yankee bombs. He didn’t even know who was yelling at him. He managed to find that out. He rapidly figured out one other thing, too: the United States were pushing hard here. If they did break through…If they break through, we’ve lost the damn war for sure, Dover thought. He dashed off to do what he could to stop them.
Signs with skulls and crossbones on them warned the world a minefield lay ahead. Lieutenant Michael Pound was pretty sure the signs and the field were genuine. When the Confederates bluffed, they usually slanted the bones and the word MINES. These stood straight.
He was a hard charger, but he didn’t want to tear across that field and blow a track or maybe get the bottom blasted out of his barrel. And he didn’t have to. “Here comes a flail,” he said happily, ducking down into the turret to relay the news to his gunner and loader and to get on the wireless to the other machines in his platoon. He’d had to make himself remember to do that when he first became an officer. Now he did it automatically.
Sergeant Mel Scullard grinned. “Those bastards sure are funny-looking,” he said.
“Well, I won’t argue with you,” Pound told the gunner. “But who gives a damn? They do the job, and that’s what counts.”
Some engineer must have been smoking funny cigarettes when he came up with the flail barrel. He mounted a rotor drum on a couple of horizontal steel bars out in front of the barrel’s chassis. The barrel’s engine powered the contraption. Lengths of heavy chain came off the drum. As it rotated, the chains spanked the ground ahead of the oncoming machine. They hit hard enough to touch off mines before the barrel itself got to them. And other barrels could follow the path the flail cleared.