“I…see,” Wade said in slightly strangled tones. Officers often used those tones when talking to or about Michael Pound. Wade aimed a forefinger at him. “If you were there then, Lieutenant, why in God’s name aren’t you a major or a colonel by now?”
“I liked being a noncom.” Pound spread his hands, as if to say, There! Isn’t that simple? “I’ve turned down more promotions than you can shake a stick at. If you gave me any chance to do it, I would have turned this one down, too.”
“My God,” John Wade muttered. He’d never even dreamt of turning down a promotion. No one who aspired to high rank ever did. “Didn’t you ever want to use your expertise on a wider scale?”
“My expertise is barrel gunnery, sir-and everything that has to do with keeping a barrel running, too, but anybody who’s been in barrels a while gets good at that,” Pound said. “But I can only shoot one cannon at a time, and the gun doesn’t care whether I’m a sergeant or an officer. Besides, now that I’m going to be commanding a platoon, I won’t get the chance to do my own shooting any more.”
“My God,” Wade said again. “You’re an unusual man, Lieutenant. Don’t let anyone tell you any different.”
“I’ll shoot the next so-and-so who tries,” Pound agreed, which only seemed to fluster the division commander more. He went on, “When do we go into Kentucky and start chewing up the Confederates? Soon, I hope, so they don’t have much time to strengthen their defenses. We push southeast, maybe we can cut them in half.”
If General Wade gaped before, he downright goggled now. Pound had seen that expression on officers’ faces before. They often didn’t believe men in the ranks-or, in his case, just up from the ranks-could think on their own. Wade managed a ragged laugh. “I put bars on your shoulders, and you think you’re ready for the General Staff.”
“Oh, no, sir.” That might have sounded suitably modest had Pound left it there. But he didn’t: “I was wondering about this when I was still a sergeant. As long as we’ve got the initiative, we need to use it. Jake Featherston is the world’s biggest son of a bitch, but he understands that. Do we?”
John Wade gave him a wry grin. “If I tell you that, I tell you things I haven’t told some members of my own staff. You tend to your knitting there, and I’ll tend to mine. I don’t think you’ll end up disappointed.”
Michael Pound ended up disappointed with most of what his superiors did. Even he could see that saying so wouldn’t win him any points. And he did have new knitting to tend to. He saluted and said, “Yes, sir.” This time, Wade’s smile wasn’t wry. Pound smiled, too, if only to himself. Yes, they always liked that.
But the general wasn’t wrong. Without waiting for permission, Pound started crawling all over the new barrel. He eyed the driver’s seat and the bow gunner’s spot next to it. Then he went into the turret. He sat in the gunner’s seat, then got up from it with a sigh of real regret. Up till now, U.S. barrels were always outgunned. A U.S. machine’s main armament could defeat a C.S. barrel most of the time (though taking on a new-model C.S. barrel’s frontal armor with the 1?-inch gun on the oldest U.S. barrels was an invitation to suicide-you had to hit them from the flank to have any kind of chance). Now, though, he would have the advantage. This gun would penetrate enemy armor at ranges from which the Confederates couldn’t hope to reply.
He shook his head. He wouldn’t have the advantage. His gunner would. He’d be stuck telling other people what to do.
With another sigh, he sat down in the commander’s seat. He stood up so he could look out of the cupola. Seeing what was going on mattered more than maybe anything else on the battlefield. Sometimes, though, you would get killed if you tried to look out. He closed the cupola’s lid and peered through the built-in periscopes. The view wasn’t nearly so good, but it wasn’t hopeless, either.
This barrel happened to have a platoon commander’s wireless set like the one he’d be using. He studied that with extra care. He would have to keep track of four machines besides his own. They would have to become extensions of his will, all working together to give the bastards in butternut a good kick in the teeth.
He frowned thoughtfully. He’d never tried anything like this before. Maybe officers earned their money after all.
He climbed out of the turret with a certain sense of relief. Brigadier General Wade eyed him with amusement. “You’re thorough,” Wade said.
“Sir, it’s my neck,” Pound answered. Again, were he speaking to a less exalted personage, some other part of his anatomy would have occurred to him.
Yes, escaping the turret did bring relief with it. He felt as if he were leaving a platoon commander’s responsibilities behind. Logically, that was nonsense, but logic and feelings had little to do with each other. He peered down through the engine louvers at the powerplant. “Anything special I should know about the motor, sir?” he asked. “Have they found any gremlins?”
“Some growing pains with the fuel pump, I’ve heard,” Wade answered. “Engine seems fairly well behaved, though-it’s a scaled-up model of the one we’ve been using in the older barrels.”
“I thought so from the look of it,” Pound said. “Well, we’ll see how it goes. How soon will we see how it goes?” One more probe couldn’t hurt.
It also didn’t help much. Chuckling, General Wade said, “It won’t be too long,” and Pound had to make what he could of that.
Armstrong Grimes still had his platoon. No eager young second lieutenant had come out of the repple-depple to take his place. He would have bet the replacement depot had no eager young second lieutenants. He was still very young himself, but not very eager. Nobody who’d been in Utah for a while was eager any more except the Mormons. They were getting pounded to bits a block at a time, but they had no give in them.
A commendation letter sat in Armstrong’s file for capturing the corporal who turned out not to be a corporal. They’d promoted Yossel Reisen to sergeant for his part in that. Armstrong didn’t flabble about not getting bumped up to staff sergeant. For one thing, he cared more about coming out in one piece than he did about rank. And, for another, getting promoted up to sergeant was pretty easy. Adding a rocker to your stripes wasn’t.
His whole regiment was out of line for R and R, or what passed for R and R in Utah: real beds, food that didn’t come out of cans, hot showers, and a perimeter far enough out to make it hard for the Mormons to snipe at you or drop mortar bombs on your head. No women, but there was an NCOs’ club where Armstrong could buy beer. Rank did have its privileges. He enjoyed them while he could.
Now he couldn’t any more. In a clean uniform, he trudged back up toward the fighting. The dirty, ragged, unshaven men coming south for R and R of their own eyed him and his comrades with the scorn veterans gave to anybody who looked new and raw. “Does your mama know you’re here?” one of them jeered-the oldest gibe in the world.
“Ah, fuck you,” answered one of the privates in Armstrong’s platoon. It wasn’t even a challenge-more an assertion that the man who’d spoken wasn’t worth challenging.
The vet coming back understood that tone. “Sorry, buddy,” he said. “You didn’t look like you’d been through it before.”
“Yeah, well, fuck you anyway,” the private said. This time, he did smile when he said it.
“Come on, keep moving,” Armstrong said. “We’ve got so much to look forward to.”
“Funny,” Yossel said.
“Tell me about it,” Armstrong said. “I’m gonna grow a long blue beard and join the Engels Brothers.” That made his buddy shut up. Armstrong could see the wheels going round in Yossel’s head. He would be thinking that Armstrong had to know the Engels Brothers dyed their beards all the colors of the rainbow…didn’t he? He would also be wondering how Armstrong intended to grow a blue beard. Since Armstrong was wondering the same thing himself, he let it go there.