“At Jonesboro? No, sir, I don’t expect we will,” McSweeney said. He could see the Confederate strongpoint without any trouble. Why not? None of the timber was tall enough to block his view, not any more. The town sprawled along the top of Crowley’s Ridge, in most places not a feature worth noticing but here in this flat country high ground to be coveted. “What’s the altitude here, sir?”
“At Jonesboro? It’s 344 feet,” Captain Schneider said. “That’s 344 too many, you ask me. And we lose even what little cover these woods-or what’s left of ’em-give us, too, because it was farming country out to three or four miles in front of the town.”
“I see that also, sir,” McSweeney answered. He raised his voice to call out to his men: “Give way to the right for the column coming back.”
The column coming back was made up of soldiers returning from the front line, soldiers for whom McSweeney’s squad, Schneider’s company, were among the replacements. They looked the way any soldiers coming away from the front line looked: dirty, haggard, exhausted seemingly past the repair of sleep, some managing grins as they thought about what they’d do now that they’d finally got relieved, others shambling along with blank stares, as if they hardly knew where they were. That happened to some men after they’d taken too much shelling. McSweeney had seen as much, though he didn’t understand. How could a man whom the Lord had spared be anything but joyful?
One of the soldiers leaving the front pointed to the tank of jellied oil he bore on his back. “Rebs catch you with that contraption, pal, they won’t bother sendin’ you to no prison camp. They’ll just cut your throat for you and leave you for the buzzards.”
“They shall not take me alive.” McSweeney spoke with great assurance. He generally spoke with great assurance. The soldier who’d presumed to remark on the flamethrower stared, shrugged, and kept on marching.
Noncoms left behind guided the company into the section of trench they would inhabit till taken out of line themselves. “I don’t like this for hell,” Captain Schneider said. “Not for hell I don’t. We’re right out in the open, with whatever guns the Rebs have up on that ridge looking straight down our throats.”
“And the men who were here before us were not careful enough about that, either,” McSweeney said. For once, he needed to give his squad no orders. Seeing the same thing he did, every man jack of them had taken out his entrenching tool and was busy improving the shelter with which they had been provided. McSweeney turned to Schneider. “I would wager the barbed wire will be as weak.”
“You’re likely right, Sergeant,” Schneider answered, “but I’m not going to stick my head up to find out, not in broad daylight I’m not. Come tonight, we’ll send out a wiring party-if there’s any wire to be had.”
“Yes, sir,” McSweeney said. “I sometimes think Philadelphia cares not at all whether the war on this side of the river is won or lost. Utah mattered to the powers that be, because it was on the rail line to the Pacific. Here-” He shook his head. “Out of sight, out of mind.”
“You’ll get a lot of people who do the real fighting to tell you the fools back in Philadelphia are out of their minds,” Schneider said with a grin. When McSweeney didn’t grin back, the captain frowned. McSweeney wondered why.
The wiring party did not go out that night: a wiring party without wire was nothing but wasted effort. Ben Carlton cooked up a stew inedible even by his own standards, which were low. “The enemy seeks to wound us,” McSweeney told him. “You should not.”
Carlton gave him a resentful stare. “Ain’t like you could do better.”
“I admit it,” McSweeney said.
“You do?” The cook stared again, this time in a different way. “Ain’t never heard you admit nothin’ before.”
“However,” McSweeney went on implacably, as if Carlton had not spoken, “I was not assigned to cook. You were.” Resentment returned to Carlton’s face. McSweeney ignored it, as he always did, confident in his own rightness and righteousness.
No new wire came up to the front. Captain Schneider swore. McSweeney sent Carlton out to see if he could come up with any: the man was a menace as a cook, but an inspired scavenger. When Carlton had no luck, McSweeney concluded there truly was no wire to be had. He went up and down the line, making sure the machine guns were well sited. Only after that was done did he wrap himself in his blanket and go to sleep.
Rebel artillery made sure he did not sleep late. Those guns up on top of Crowley’s Ridge started shelling the U.S. position a couple of hours before dawn. “Gas!” somebody screamed in the middle of the unholy din. McSweeney donned his gas helmet as calmly and quickly as if he were practicing in front of a mirror.
“Be ready!” he yelled as soon as the first light showed in the sky. Not five minutes later, Confederate machine guns added their racket to the crashes from the artillery.
Shouts rose up and down the trench: “Here they come!” “Here come the goddamn motherfucking sons of bitches!” Beneath the gas helmet, McSweeney’s face set in disapproving lines. He’d never find out who had committed the obscene blasphemy. And then a shout rose that made him forget to worry about discipline and propriety: “Barrel! Jesus, the Rebs have a stinking barrel!”
He stuck his head up over the top of the parapet. Sure enough, one of those tracked traveling fortresses was slowly rumbling and clanking straight toward the U.S. line-straight toward him, it looked like. The U.S. machine guns went from raking the soldiers in butternut advancing with the barrel to aiming their fire exclusively at it, trying to knock it out of action before it could get into the trenches.
It was a British-style machine, with cannon mounted in sponsons on either side. One of those cannon spat fire. A machine gun fell silent. The barrel clattered forward once more. Its own machine guns sprayed bullets at the U.S. soldiers.
The glass portholes in McSweeney’s gas helmet were fogged on the inside and streaked with dust on the outside. That did not keep him from noticing a couple of men running away from the barrel. “Halt!” he roared at them. It did no good. At last, the men had discovered something they feared worse than they feared him.
Boom! The barrel fired again. Another machine gun abruptly stopped shooting at it. Ricochets whined off the steel armor, striking sparks but failing to penetrate. McSweeney wondered how many more barrels that he could not see were moving forward.
He shrugged. If he couldn’t see them, he couldn’t do anything about them. He could see this one. He bent and, careful not to disturb his gas helmet, shrugged over his shoulders the straps to the metal tank that fueled his special weapon. Then he waited. Bullets seemed unable to hurt the barrel.
Here it came, grinding its way through and over the few strands of wire protecting the U.S. trenches. Having thicker belts out there wouldn’t have stopped it. More soldiers in green-gray fled the machine they could not stop.
It crushed the parapet and stood poised up there above the edge of the trench, triumphant, like a great bull elephant. As it began its plunge into the U.S. works, McSweeney sent a stream of flame in through one of the machine-gun ports. An instant later, he did the same with the other port on the right side of the barrel, thereby making sure neither of those guns would bear on him.
Through the shelling, through the firing going on all around, through the coughing roar of the barrel’s engine, he heard screams inside the metal hull. Hatches flew open on top of the barrel. Men started scrambling out. Smiling behind the canvas of the mask, McSweeney burned them down. They tumbled back into the machine, black and shrunken and flaming, like insects that had flown into the flame of a gaslight.
Smoke poured from the barrel. Ammunition started cooking off in it. McSweeney regretfully moved away, that hard, tight grin still on his face. A Confederate soldier sprang onto the parapet. He fired from the hip at McSweeney-and missed. He never got a second chance. A tongue of flame licked over him. He tumbled back, burning, burning.