“Look at that bastard burn,” Ben Carlton said, his voice as full of joy as if he’d never seen anything more beautiful than the flaming factory in Clearfield, Utah.
Watching the Utah Canning Plant go up in smoke felt pretty good to Paul Mantarakis, too. As they had a habit of doing, the Mormons had used the big, strongly built building to anchor their line. Now that it was a blazing wreck, they’d have to abandon it, which meant the United States Army could take one more grinding step on the road toward the last rebel stronghold in Ogden.
“Three quarters of the way there,” Mantarakis muttered under his breath. They were only nine miles from Ogden now. He could see the town from here-or he could have seen it, had the smoke from the great burning here in Clearfield not obscured the northern horizon.
“Soon all the misbelievers shall be cast into the fiery furnace and receive the punishment they deserve,” Gordon McSweeney said. He had the drum and hose of the flamethrower strapped onto his back. He hadn’t been the one who’d set the canning plant on fire, though; artillery had managed that. Had the big guns failed, Paul could easily imagine the other sergeant going out there and starting the blaze.
Pop! Pop-pop! Short, sharp explosions began sounding, deep within the bowels of the Utah Canning Plant. “Some poor dead son of a bitch’s ammo cooking off,” Ben Carlton said.
Paul shook his head. “Doesn’t sound quite right for that.”
Thump! Something slammed into the ground, hard, not ten feet from where he stood. Almost a year and a half of war had honed his reflexes razor-sharp. He was flat on his belly before he had the slightest conscious notion of what that thump was. Better by far to duck and not need to than to need to and not duck. Another thump came, this one from farther away.
Thump! A foot soldier nearby started to laugh. “What the hell’s so funny, Stonebreaker?” Paul demanded. “We’re under bombardment.”
“Yeah, I know, Sarge.” But Dan Stonebreaker was still laughing. He went on, “I damn near got killed by a can of string beans.”
“Huh?” Mantarakis looked at the missile that had landed close to him. Sure as hell, it was a tin can that must have exploded in the fire inside the plant. He examined the goop inside the can. “This one wasn’t beans. Looks more like apricots, something like that.”
In short order, the soldiers also identified beets and peas. Whenever some more cans exploded inside the factory, the men would sing out, “Vegetable attack!” and take cover more melodramatically than they did against artillery or machine-gun fire.
They took casualties from the superheated produce, too. One fellow who wasn’t wearing his helmet got a fractured skull when a one-pound can of peas landed right on his luckless, foolish head. Hot bits of metal, almost as dangerous as shrapnel or shell fragments, burned several more.
Then the U.S. guns opened up with another barrage. When it eased, the soldiers went up and over the top and drove the Mormons out of Clearfield. The men-and women-who fought under the beehive banner and the motto DESERET fought as hard as ever, but there were fewer of them in these trenches than there had been farther south.
“I think we’ve finally got them on the run,” Captain Schneider said. He looked like a Negro with a bad paint job-his face was black with soot, but smeared here and there just enough to suggest he might be a white man after all. Paul Mantarakis looked down at himself. He couldn’t see his own face, but his hands and uniform were as filthy as those of the company commander.
“Come on!” Gordon McSweeney shouted, his voice ringing over the field like a trumpet. “We have the heretics on the run. The more we push them, the greater the punishment we give. Forward!”
Mantarakis’ opinion was that McSweeney was a hell of a lot crazier than the Mormons. He didn’t say so; McSweeney was, after all, on his side. And the shouts were doing some good, pulling U.S. soldiers after the Scotsman as he singlehandedly advanced against the enemy. He would have advanced, though, had not a single man followed.
Crazy, Mantarakis thought again, and tramped north himself.
For the next mile, maybe two, the going was easy. The Mormons had no real line of solid fortifications here. Men retreating before the American advance traded shots with their pursuers, but it was hardly counted as a rear-guard action. “Maybe we do have ’em on the run,” Paul said to nobody in particular. Even the fanaticism of the Mormons had to have limits…didn’t it?
Before long, he was doubting that again. U.S. troops ran up against yet another defensive line prepared in advance and manned by still more determined warriors. Such a line called for spadework in return, and the Americans began turning shell holes into a trench line of their own.
Captain Schneider pointed west, toward some ruins not far from the horizon. “We want to be careful the enemy doesn’t pull a fast one on us. Those buildings, or what’s left of them, are the Ogden Ordnance Depot. It’d be just like the Mormons to pack ’em full of powder and touch ’em off as our forces were moving up to ’em.”
The buildings were not part of the Mormon defensive line, which only increased Mantarakis’ suspicions: the rebels fought from built-up positions till forced out of them by artillery or, more often, by the bayonet. But, before long, U.S. troops had not only occupied the Ordnance Depot buildings, they were firing from them on the Mormon defenses farther north. When an American aeroplane dropped a couple of bombs nearby-whether because it thought the enemy still held the depot or because it simply couldn’t aim worth a damn, Paul never knew-the soldiers shooting from it began waving a big Stars and Stripes to show under whose ownership it had passed.
Maybe the sight of the American flag in the ruins of the Ordnance Depot was some kind of signal. Paul never knew that, either. But, whether by plan or by coincidence, the ground rocked under his feet a couple of minutes later.
He staggered, stumbled, fell. “What the hell…?” he shouted while clods of earth rained down on him from the wall of the trench in which he’d been standing-and from on high, too, or so it seemed. He was afraid the whole trench would collapse.
Through the shaking, through the hideous din, Captain Schneider shouted, “Earthquake! I was in the Presidio in San Francisco ten years ago, and it was almost like this.” He managed to stay on his feet.
“Make it stop! Jesus, make it stop!” Ben Carlton howled. It would have taken Jesus to make it stop; that was surely beyond the power of an infantry captain, or even of Teddy Roosevelt himself.
Mantarakis succeeded in standing. The rumble had faded, leaving behind an awful silence. The sound that came through it was not one he had expected to hear in the wake of a natural catastrophe: it was cheering, and it was all coming from the Mormon lines.
Gordon McSweeney got up on the firing step, or on what was left of it after the ground had shaken. “The misbelievers are coming out of their trenches and moving forward in an attack,” he reported. His head turned to the left, so that he was looking west. For once, not even his stern rectitude was proof against merely human astonishment. “They’ve blown a hole in our lines you could drive a freight train through,” he burst out, his voice squeaking with surprise.
“What?” Paul got up there beside McSweeney. Sure enough, any resistance from the U.S. lines ended perhaps a quarter of a mile west of where he stood. A great haze of dust and smoke hung in the air west of that, but no U.S. gunfire was coming from the ground under the haze. And that ground, what little he could see of it, looked different: sagging, slumped.
Captain Schneider’s mouth fell open when he saw that. “It wasn’t an earthquake,” he said accusingly, as if angry at having been mistaken. “The filthy, stinking Mormons mined the ground under us, and touched off their charge when we got on top of it.”