“Marietta’s gonna fall, isn’t it?” Jorge asked. The sergeant didn’t answer. For a second, Jorge thought he didn’t hear. Then he realized the noncom didn’t want to say yes. If Marietta fell, Atlanta was in deep trouble. If Atlanta fell, the Confederate States were in deep trouble. And Marietta would fall, which meant…
Purple martins perched in the shattered trees in the park square at the center of Marietta. The birds were flying south for the winter; they didn’t care that the trees had taken a beating. There were still plenty of bugs in the air. All the artillery in the world couldn’t kill bugs.
Chester Martin, in green-gray, didn’t care that the trees were burned and scarred, either. As far as he was concerned, the Confederate States were getting what was coming to them. And he hoped he was going south for the winter. Atlanta wasn’t that far away. How much did the enemy have between here and there? Enough? He didn’t think so.
A man with a white mustache hung from a lamppost. A sign around his neck said, I SHOT AT U.S. SOLDIERS. He’d been there a couple of days, and was starting to swell and stink. Chester hardly looked at him. Maybe he’d do a little good; maybe he wouldn’t. Confederate bushwhackers and diehards and holdouts and red-ass civilians kept on harrying the occupiers all the way back to the Ohio River. Hostages kept dying because of it. Which side would run out of will first remained unclear.
The trees in the park weren’t all that had been shattered in Marietta. The Confederates fought hard to hold it. Not many houses were whole. Glassless windows might have been the eye sockets of skulls. Scorch marks scored clapboard. Chunks of walls and chunks of roofs bitten by shellfire gave the skyline jagged edges.
And Marietta’s people seemed as ravaged as the town. They were skinny and dirty, many of them with bandages or simply rags wrapped around wounds. They stared at the U.S. troops trudging south through their rubble-strewn streets with eyes that smoldered. Nobody said anything much, though. As Chester had seen in other Confederate towns, his buddies were quick to resent insults. A man with a rifle in enemy country could make his resentment felt.
A scrawny woman whose hair flew every which way cocked a hip in a pose meant to be alluring. “Sleep with me?” she called.
“Jesus!” said one of the soldiers in Chester’s squad. “I’ve been hard up before, but not that hard up.”
“Yeah.” Chester nodded. “I think she’s a little bit cracked. Maybe more than a little bit.”
An old man whose left sleeve hung empty scowled at him. Chester nodded back, more politely than not. He understood honest hate, and could respect it. He wondered if the respect he showed might change the Confederate’s mind. It didn’t, not by the look on the man’s face. Chester didn’t suppose he should have been surprised.
A burnt-out C.S. barrel sat inside the ruins of a brick house. The last few feet of the barrel’s gun poked out through a window. The gun tube sagged visibly. Eyeing it, Chester said, “Must’ve been a hell of a fire.”
“Yeah, well, it couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch of guys,” said the soldier who didn’t want the scrawny woman.
Chester grunted. He didn’t love Confederate barrelmen. What U.S. soldier did? Those enemies were too good at killing his pals. But he didn’t like to think of them cooking like beef roasts in a fire so hot it warped solid steel. That was a bad way to go, for anybody on either side. He wanted the enemy barrel crew dead, sure. Charred to black hideousness? Maybe not.
“Come on, step it up!” Lieutenant Lavochkin yelled. “We aren’t camping here. We’re just passing through, heading for Atlanta.”
Chester looked forward to fighting for Atlanta the way he looked forward to a filling without novocaine. Atlanta was a big city, bigger than Chattanooga. The United States couldn’t take it by surprise, the way they had with the Tennessee town. If U.S. forces tried smashing straight into it, wouldn’t the Confederates do unto them as the USA had done to the Confederacy in Pittsburgh? Fighting one house at a time was the easiest way Chester knew to become a casualty.
Maybe the brass had a better plan. He hoped like hell they did. But if so, nobody’d bothered passing the word down to an overage retread first sergeant.
A kid wearing what looked like his big brother’s dungarees said, “Get out of my country, you damnyankee.”
“Shut up, you lousy brat, or I’ll paddle your ass.” Chester gestured with his rifle. “Scram. First, last, and only warning.”
To his relief, the kid beat it. You didn’t want to think a nine-year-old could be a people bomb, but he’d heard some ugly stories. Boys and girls didn’t fully understand what flicking that switch meant, which made them more likely to do it. And soldiers sometimes didn’t suspect children till too late.
“Hell of a war,” Chester muttered.
Some of his men liberated three chickens to go with their rations. They didn’t have time to do anything but roast poorly plucked chicken pieces over a fire. The smell of singeing feathers took Chester back half a lifetime. He’d done the same thing in the Great War. Then as now, a drumstick went a long way toward making your belly stop growling.
He was smoking a cigarette afterwards when a grenade burst not far away. Somebody screamed. A burst of fire from a submachine gun was followed by another shriek.
“Fuck,” said a soldier named Leroy, who was more often called the Duke.
“Never a dull moment,” Chester agreed. “We’re licking these bastards, but they sure haven’t quit.”
As if to prove it, the Confederates threw in a counterattack the next day. Armor spearheaded it: not barrels, but what seemed more like self-propelled guns on tracked chassis. They weren’t mounted in turrets, but pointed straight ahead. That meant the enemy driver had to line up his machine on a target instead of just traversing the turret. The attack bogged down south of Marietta. A regiment of U.S. barrels made the C.S. barrelbusters say uncle.
Chester examined a wrecked machine with a professional’s curiosity. “What’s the point of these, sir?” he asked Captain Rhodes. A U.S. antibarrel round had smashed through the side armor. He didn’t want to think about what the crew looked like. You could probably bury them in a jam tin.
“These things have to be cheaper to build than barrels, and quicker to build, too,” the company commander answered. “If you’ve got to have as much firepower as you can get, and if you need it yesterday, they’re a lot better than nothing.”
“I guess,” Chester said. “Ugly damn thing, isn’t it?”
“Now that you mention it, yes-especially if you’re on the wrong end of it,” Rhodes said. “Get used to it, Sergeant. You can bet your ass you’ll see more of them.”
He was bound to be right. And if they were cheap and easy to make…“What do you want to bet we start cranking ’em out, too?”
Captain Rhodes looked startled, but then he nodded. “Wouldn’t be surprised. Anything they can do, we can do, too. We’re lucky we’ve kept our lead in barrels as long as we have. Maybe the Confederates were too busy with these things to pay as much attention to those as they should have.”
“Breaks my heart,” Martin said dryly.
The company commander laughed-but not for long. “Be ready for a push of our own, soon as we can move more shit forward. When the Confederates hit us, they use stuff up faster than they can resupply. Might as well kick ’em while they’re down.”
“Mm?” Chester weighed that, then nodded. “Yeah, I bet you’re right, sir. I’ll get the men ready. You think we’re going into Atlanta?”
“Christ, I hope not!” Rhodes blurted, which was about what Chester was thinking himself. Rhodes went on, “We do try to go straight in there, a lot of us’ll come out in a box.”
“Looks like that to me, too. So what do we do instead?” Chester asked. “Just bomb it flat? Or maybe try and flank ’em out?”