"Come on!" Jake Featherston called to the gun crews of his battery. "We've got to keep moving." Rain poured down out of the sky. The southern Maryland road, already muddy, began turning to something more like glue, or maybe thick soup. "Come on!"
A whistle in the air swelled rapidly to a scream. A long-range shell from a Yankee gun burst about a hundred yards to Featherston's left. A great fountain of muck rose into the air. None splattered down on him, but that hardly mattered. He'd long since got as muddy as a human being could.
More U.S. shells descended, feeling for the road down which the First Richmond Howitzers were retreating. The damnyankee gunners couldn't quite find it. The barrage, instead of swinging west from where the first one hit, went east. That meant they'd probably find another road and hurt a different part of the Army of Northern Virginia. Jake didn't care. If he got out in one piece, he'd settle for that.
"Hey, Sarge!" Michael Scott said. With the shelling and the rain, the loader had to call two or three times to get Featherston's attention. When he finally had it, he asked, "What do we do when we get to the Potomac?"
"You think I'm the War Department, God damn them to hell?" Featherston answered. The War Department, and especially its upper echelons, did not contain his favorite people. "If the damnyankees' aeroplanes haven't bombed all the bridges to hell and gone, I reckon we cross over 'em and go back into Virginia."
"But what are we gonna do there?" Scott persisted.
"I told you, I'm not the goddamn War Department," Jake said. He shook his head, which made cold rainwater drip down the back of his neck. They wouldn't make him an officer, they didn't have the brains to notice when the niggers were going to rise up, and they were still in charge of running the war? Where was the justice in that? And his own men expected him to think like a fancy-pants Richmond general? Where was the justice in that?
"But, Sarge-" the loader said, like a little boy complaining when his mother wouldn't let him do what he wanted.
"All right," Featherston said wearily. "Here's what we do, you ask me. We cross the bridge, if it's still up there. All the artillery we've got goes into battery on the south bank. Soon as the last man from the Army of Northern Virginia comes out of Maryland, we drop the bridge right into the middle of the river, bam. Soon as the damnyankees get in range of our guns, we start plastering them, hard as we can. Those sons of bitches are already in the western part of the state. Sure as the devil don't want 'em getting a toehold anywhere else, do we?"
"Nope." Scott sounded-not happy now, but contented. He'd got Jake to tell him what he could have worked out for himself if he'd had an ounce of sense. Featherston shook his head again. More rainwater ran down his neck. What difference did that make, when he was already so soaked?
He cursed the Yankees, he cursed the mud, and he cursed the War Department, the last more sulfurously than either of the other two. "Christ, no wonder we're losing," he told the unheeding sky. "If the damn fools can't do the little things right, how are they supposed to do the big ones?" He supposed the United States Army was afflicted with a War Department, too, but somehow it seemed to be overcoming the handicap.
To make his joy with the world complete, the lead gun went into a puddle and bogged to the hubs. The horses strained in their harness, but it did no good. That gun wasn't going anywhere any time soon, not with just the team trying to get it out. And the others piled up in back of it.
Along with the rest of the gun crew, he lent his own strength to the work, pushing from behind as the horses pulled. The gun remained stuck. Jake spotted Metellus, the cook, lounging on the limber that traveled behind the gun. "Get your black ass up here and do something to help, damn you," he snarled. "The Yankees do find this here road with their guns, the shells won't care what color you are. They'll blow you up, same as me." His grin was ferocious. "If that ain't nigger equality, I don't know what the hell is."
Metellus got down and got as dirty as any of the white men, but the gun wouldn't budge. "Sarge, the horses are gonna founder if we work 'em any more right now," Michael Scott said. "They'll plumb keel over and die."
"Shit." Featherston looked around, feeling harassed by too many things at once. The whole battery would bog down if he didn't move the rest of the three-inchers around the lead gun. But if he had to abandon it, the higher-ups would crucify him. The only way he'd kept his head above water was by being twice as good as anybody else around. If he showed he was merely human, they'd cook his goose in jig time.
Here came a battalion of infantry, marching through the mud by the side of the road because the guns were occupying the mud in the middle of the road. "Give us some help, boys!" Jake called to the foot soldiers. "Can't afford to lose any guns."
Some of the infantrymen started to break ranks, but the lieutenant in charge of the company shouted, "Keep moving, men. We have our own schedule to meet." He gave Featherston a hard stare. "You have no business attempting to delay my men, Sergeant."
"Yes, sir. Sorry, sir," Jake said, as he had to: he was just a sergeant, after all, not one of God's anointed officers. How he hated that smug lieutenant. Because of his arrogance, the Confederate States would lose a gun they could have kept, a gun they should have kept.
"What's going on here?" someone demanded in sharp, angry tones. An officer on horseback surveyed the scene with nothing but disapproval.
Featherston kept quiet. He was only a sergeant, after all. The lieutenant answered, "Sir, this, this enlisted man is trying to use my troops to get out of his trouble."
"Then you'd better let him, hadn't you?" Major Clarence Potter snapped. The lieutenant's jaw dropped. He stared up at Potter with his mouth wide open, like a stupid turkey drowning in the rain. The intelligence officer went on, "Break out some ropes, get your men on that gun, and get it moving. We can't afford to leave it behind."
"But-" the infantry lieutenant began.
Major Potter fixed him with the intent, icy stare that had impressed Jake on their first meeting up in Pennsylvania-and how long ago that seemed. "One more word from you, Lieutenant, and I shall ask what your name is."
The lieutenant wilted. Featherston would have been astounded had he done anything else. Twenty men on a rope and more on the hubs and carriage got the three-inch gun up out of the morass into which it had sunk. On more solid ground, the horses could move it again.
"Thank you, sir," Jake said, waving the rest of the guns from the battery around the bad spot in the road.
"My pleasure," Potter said, crisp as usual. "We've done a pretty fair job of fighting the enemy in this war, Sergeant, but God deliver us from our friends sometimes."
"Yes, sir!" Jake said. That put his own anger into words better than he'd been able to do for himself.
"Keep struggling, Sergeant," Potter said. "That's all you can do. That's all any of us can do."
"Yes, sir." Jake stared furiously after the now-vanished infantry lieutenant. "He could have been heading up a labor brigade, and if he was, he wouldn't have let me use any niggers, either."
"I'd say you're probably right," Potter said. "Some people get promoted because they're brave and active. Some people get promoted for no better reason than that all their paperwork stays straight."
"And some people don't get promoted at all," Featherston said bitterly.
"We've been over this ground before, Sergeant," Potter said. "There's nothing I can do. It's not up to me."
Jake would not hear him. "That damn lieutenant-beg your pardon, sir-wouldn't pay me any mind, on account of I wasn't an officer. I command this battery, and I damn well deserve to command it, but he treated me like a nigger, on account of I'm just a sergeant." He glanced over to the intelligence officer. "It's true, isn't it? They are going to give niggers guns and put 'em in the line?"