American Front (14 page)

Still yelling, their blood up, the soldiers followed him and other officers on past the wrecked Confederate line. And, sure enough, another couple of hundred yards took them to the crest. Martin looked east toward the Roanoke River, toward the iron town of Big Lick on this side of it, toward the smoke rising from it and from the mines close by, toward the other stream of smoke from the train chugging out of the station: Big Lick was a major railroad junction. Once the U.S. Army fought its way down the mountain and to the river, it would badly hurt the Confederacy here.

A shot rang out, seemingly from nowhere. Not twenty feet from Martin, a private clutched at his throat and fell. “They’ve got snipers in the trees, the sneaky bastards!” somebody shouted.

“We’ll get ’em out,” Martin said grimly. Only a few miles separated him from Big Lick. He wondered how long it would take to get there.

Lucien Galtier clucked to his horse and flicked the reins. The horse snorted reproachfully, twitching its ears in annoyance. “I mean it, you old fraud,” Galtier told it in his Quebecois French. “Do you want me to get out the whip and show you I mean it?”

The horse snorted again and got the wagon moving a little faster. Galtier chuckled under his breath. He and the horse had been playing this game for the past ten years. He hadn’t used the whip since summer before last. He didn’t expect to need it for another year or two more. They understood each other, the horse and he.

Drizzle slid down out of a leaden sky. He pulled his hat lower over his face—dark heavy eyebrows, swarthy skin, deep-set brown eyes, a goodly nose above a mouth that was almost a rosebud, dimpled chin in need of shaving—and wished he’d put on oilskins like the sailors wore. His shrug might have come from Paris. Not even a farmer could guess right about the weather all the time.
Not even a saint can do that
, he thought.

He couldn’t see far through the rain. He didn’t need to see far, though. He knew where he was—a couple of miles outside Rivière-du-Loup on the St. Lawrence River. The countryside was the same here as everywhere else in the neighborhood—farmland with wooden houses painted white, with the beams of the red-painted roofs projecting forward to create a veranda. Because of the drizzle, he couldn’t see the tin spires of the churches in St.-Modeste and St.-Antonin, but he knew they were there. To look at things, all was as it might have been 250 years before.

And then, as he drew nearer to Rivière-du-Loup, things changed. The land grew pocked with shells, and the neat farmhouses and outbuildings were neat no more, but many of them charred ruins. The Canadians and British had made a stand, trying to keep the damned Americans from reaching the St. Lawrence. They’d failed.

“It is a terrible thing, war,” Galtier told his horse. He and his ancestors hadn’t seen the thing close up in a century and a half, not since the days when the British took Quebec away from France. It was here now, though. His nostrils twitched. Even through the rain, he could smell the sickly sweet odor of dead horses—and maybe dead men, too.

His horse also knew the odor for what it was, and made a nervous, snuffling noise. “Go on,” Lucien told it. “Go on, my old. It cannot be helped and must be endured.” How many times had his father said that to him and his brothers and sisters? How many times had he said it to his two sons and four daughters?

Boom!
With a snort of fright, the horse stopped dead. Galtier wondered if he’d have to use the whip after all.
Boom! Boom!
Having reached the St. Lawrence, the Americans had put a battery of field guns with their wheels right on the edge of the bank. Now they were shooting at merchant ships on their way down to Montreal, ships whose captains hadn’t got the word that the southern bank was in enemy hands.
Boom! Boom!

Just when Lucien was reaching for the whip, the horse let out a human-sounding sigh and went on. Before long, the church spires of Rivière-du-Loup loomed out of the mist ahead. The town, which sat on a spur of rock that projected out into the St. Lawrence, was bigger than St.-Modeste and St.-Antonin put together, big enough to boast several churches, not just one. When Father Pascal had had perhaps a glass of wine too many, he talked about Rivière-du-Loup’s being a bishopric one day. Like everyone else, Lucien listened and smiled and nodded and didn’t hold his breath.

Boom! Boom!
Now the sound of the artillery mingled with the plashing roar of the waterfall that plunged off the rock of Rivière-du-Loup and down ninety feet into the great river below.
Boom!
Like every other man his age, Galtier had done his time in the Army. He’d been an infantryman, like most conscripts, but he knew a little something about artillery. He wondered how the devil the fool of an American could find a target, let alone hit it, in this wretched weather.

Houses grew closer together as he came into town. Artillery had wrecked some of them. Once, a whole block was nothing but burnt-out wreckage. The stench of death lingered here, too. Some of the telegraph poles that had connected Rivière-du-Loup to the outside world were down, some leaning drunkenly, some standing but with the wires tangled at their bases.

Posters, now turning soggy in the drizzle, had been nailed or pasted to a lot of the telegraph poles.
FREE AT LAST FROM BRITISH TYRANNY
, some of them said in French, and showed Quebec’s fleur-de-lis banner side by side with the Stars and Stripes. “I, for one, did not feel myself tyrannized,” Lucien Galtier said—softly, for he was not alone on the road now. He leaned forward and asked his horse, “Did you feel yourself tyrannized?” The horse did not answer, which he took for agreement.

The poles that did not have the
FREE AT LAST
poster mostly bore another, this one printed in red and in both French and English:
CURFEW
: 8
P.M. TO
6
A.M. VIOLATORS WILL BE SHOT ON SIGHT
. “Ah, this is what freedom means,” Galtier murmured. “I am so glad the Americans educate us in it.”

A newsboy stood on a corner with a box of papers covered by a paint-smeared chunk of canvas tarpaulin. “Read
Ce-Soir
!” he called to Lucien. “Hear of the great victories of the Americans over the Confederates and of Germany over Russia and the English.”

“No, thank you,” Galtier answered, and rode on toward the market.
Ce-Soir
had experienced a remarkable change in content since the Americans came to Rivière-du-Loup. Before then, it had trumpeted of Confederate, Russian, and French triumphs against the USA, Austria, and Germany.

It all depends on how you look at things
, Galtier thought. To hear the newspaper talk now, you would never know that Germany had invaded France, or that the Englishmen there were defending their ally from the
Boches
. That wasn’t bad propaganda, but it would have been better had the townsfolk not enjoyed the memories God gave to normal, intelligent human beings.

FREE AT LAST
, another poster shouted. Several American soldiers, bayonets fixed on their Springfields, stood on a street corner keeping an eye on people. They were almost invisible in the mist till Lucien got right up close to them. Their green-gray was even better than khaki at blending into the background here.

But Lucien had known they were there long before he saw them. The harsh sounds of English filled his ears. He’d learned some of the language in the Army, but not used it much since: some fishermen who came into town from the Maritimes spoke it, but he had little to do with them beyond passing the time of day in a tavern. Now, like the Americans, it had invaded Rivière-du-Loup. And they spoke of freeing the area from British tyranny! English-speaking Canadians for the most part had had the courtesy to stay away.

The hens in the back of the wagon clucked. That drew the American soldiers’ eyes to Lucien Galtier. “Hey, buddy!” one of them called. “You want to sell me one of them birds?”

“Hell with that, Pete,” another soldier said. “Just take one—take a couple—from the damn Frenchy, and if he don’t like it, give him some .30 caliber persuading.” The fellow laughed, showing bad teeth.

Galtier licked his lips. If they wanted to rob him, they could. What would he do afterwards? Complain to their officer? He did not think he would get far. He hadn’t heard that the Americans were looting. Had he heard that, he would have stayed on his farm instead of venturing into town.

But the soldier who’d spoken first—Pete—shook his head. “Can’t get away with that kind of stuff here in town—too many people watching. We’d wind up in Dutch, and I got some money in my pocket.” He turned to Lucien. “How much for a chicken, hey?
Combien?
”

That he’d tried a word of French made Galtier dislike him a little less. He answered with a high price, as he would have in the marketplace, haggling with a housewife. “Fifty cent’,
monsieur
.” He knew how rusty his English was, and hoped the American soldier would understand.

To his amazement, the American, instead of offering half that or less, reached into his pocket, pulled out a silver coin, and tossed it to him. It was a half-dollar: a U.S. half-dollar, of course, with President Reed’s plump profile on one side and the American eagle in front of crossed swords on the other. But fifty cents was fifty cents; Canada, the USA, and the CSA all coined to the same standard. Carefully keeping his face blank, Galtier stuck the coin in his own trouser pocket and pulled a chicken out of the latticework traveling coop for Pete.

“Obliged,” the soldier said, holding the chicken by the feet with its head down toward the ground. He’d come off the farm, then, odds were.

“Here, lemme buy one, too,” said the soldier who’d proposed robbing Lucien.

He sold five birds in the space of a couple of minutes, at half a dollar apiece. He was delighted. So were the soldiers. One of them said, “Pal, if you’d been eating hardtack and canned beast ever since the damn war started, you’d know how much we crave real grub for a change.”

Was he supposed to sympathize with them? If they hadn’t come over the border into his country, they could have been eating whatever they pleased back in New York. His only answer, though, was a shrug. He had his wife to think of, and his children. He could not take chances, not when he was one farmer with nothing more dangerous than a folding knife in his pocket and they soldiers with rifles and bayonets. He reminded himself of that, a couple of times.

When it became clear none of the rest of them wanted more chickens, he went on to the town market square, where he did not get nearly the price the Americans had given him for the birds. Another U.S. soldier walked by, but he was not interested in poultry. He had his arm around the waist of one of the girls who served drinks at the Loup-du-Nord, the best tavern in town—Angelique, her name was. The respectable wives of Rivière-du-Loup saw that, too, and clucked like the chickens Lucien was trying to sell.

And here came Father Pascal, almost as close to a heavyset American major (Galtier knew what the gold oak leaves on the officer’s shoulder boards meant) as Angelique was to her soldier. The major was speaking French—clear Parisian French, which stood out almost as much as English did from the Quebecois dialect. English-speaking Canadian soldiers said Quebecois French sounded like ducks making love, a claim always good for starting a fight when you were bored.

Galtier couldn’t make out much of what the major was saying. Whatever it was, Father Pascal was listening hard. That worried the farmer a little. Father Pascal was a good man, but ambitious—witness his desire for Rivière-du-Loup’s becoming a bishopric. If the Americans fed his ambitions, he was liable to go further with them than he should.

Well, one Lucien Galtier couldn’t do much about that. Having sold his chickens—and made more for them than he’d expected, thanks to Americans too stupid to bargain—he got into his wagon and started for home.
Boom! Boom! Boom!
The American field guns south of town, which had fallen silent, opened up on another ship out in the St. Lawrence. Galtier looked back over his shoulder. Yes, there was a dim shape moving on the river.

And then, to his surprised delight, that dim shape answered with booms of its own, booms attenuated by traveling over some miles of water but plainly of much larger caliber than the three-inch popguns that had fired at them. Explosions followed almost instantly thereafter, in the place from which the field guns had been firing. Some of the housewives jumped up and crossed themselves. Galtier waited to hear if the field guns could reply to what had to be at least a cruiser out there. They remained silent. He drove home, a contented man.

IV

Paul Mantarakis wished he had a chaplain of his own faith with whom he could pray. He’d heard there were a few Orthodox priests in uniform, but he’d never seen one. Protestant ministers, yes. Catholic priests, yes. Rabbis, even—yes. But none of his own.

He fingered his amber worry beads and murmured, “
Kyrie eleison. Christe eleison
.” Lord, have mercy. Christ, have mercy.

“Leave off your Latin and your rosary,” declared Gordon McSweeney, a dour Scotsman in his platoon. “They are the road to hell.”

“It’s not Latin,” Mantarakis said wearily, for about the hundredth time. McSweeney just glared at him with pale, angry eyes. If you prayed in a language that wasn’t English, it was Latin to him. He even thought Jews prayed in Latin. Mantarakis would have liked to give him a good kick, but McSweeney made two of the little Greek, both of the two armored in cement-hard muscle.

“Shut up, both of you,” Sergeant Peterquist said. “Come on, get moving onto the damn barge.”

Onto the damn barge they moved, each man weighed down with pack and ammunition and rifle. If you went into the Ohio before you made it ashore on the Kentucky side, you’d surely drown.
Theou thelontos
—God willing—that wouldn’t happen.

A couple of shells went by overhead and crashed down behind the small town badly misnamed Metropolis, Illinois. The Rebs were still shooting, but U.S. artillery had beaten down their guns to the point where General Custer thought the invasion of the Confederacy could begin. Mantarakis wasn’t nearly sure he agreed with that, but he was just a private, so who cared what he thought?

Metropolis had already given him a taste of the South, with its rolling lawns and its magnolias. The South Philadelphia neighborhood where he’d cooked
dolmades
and cheese steaks hadn’t been anything like this, not even close. But the little town had its own slums, down by the bridge the Rebs had dynamited when the war broke out: Brickbat Ridge, they called it.

“Come on, pack in tight, you birds!” Peterquist yelled in his raspy-foghorn voice. “Come on, come on, come on!” All over the barge, noncoms and officers said the same thing in a lot of different ways.

Mantarakis already felt like one anchovy in a whole tin. Anchovies and sardines, you packed the fish in tight as you could, because the oil that went in with ’em was worth more than they were. Finding out stuff like that was the only bad part of being a cook, as far as he was concerned: sometimes, because you were in the business, you learned things you’d rather not know.

Well, now he was in the business of killing people, and he had the feeling he was going to learn all kinds of things he’d rather not know. At the moment, what he was trying to learn was how to breathe without moving his chest.

“We’re tight enough now, don’t you think?” Paddy O’Rourke said in his musical brogue. “If I was jammed up against the pretty girls, now—but faith! It’s all you ugly bastards.”

The men around him laughed. When everyone exhaled at once, it did seem to give more room. Mantarakis said, “You’re pretty ugly your own self, Paddy.”

“Ah, but I can’t see me,” the Irishman answered.

What seemed like all the artillery shells in the world opened up then, on the Illinois side of the river. The roar of the guns, large and small, was music to Mantarakis’ ears. The more shells that came down on the Rebels’ heads, the fewer of the sons of bitches would be left to try and shoot him. He stood on tiptoe, trying to get a look at just what kind of hell the Kentucky side of the river was catching, but he couldn’t see over the shoulders of his bigger comrades.

The steam engine that powered the barge started up, making the timbers tremble under his feet. “Cast off!” somebody yelled; Mantarakis heard the order through the thunder of the artillery. Somebody must have obeyed because, ever so slowly, the barge crawled away from the landing and out into the Ohio.

If he turned his head to one side, Mantarakis could see the river and catch glimpses of other barges wallowing across the current toward Kentucky. Something came down with a splash between his barge and the one closest to it. Cold water fountained up and splashed down on him.

“That came too damn close to hitting us,” somebody behind him said. Only then did Paul realize the something had been a Confederate shell. If a shell did hit a barge packed with soldiers—He dug in his pocket and started working the worry beads again. If that happened, it would be like an explosion in a slaughterhouse, with young men playing the role of raw meat.

More shells landed in the river. Mantarakis got splashed again, and then again. Somewhere off to his left, he heard a shell hit a barge, and then heard a clamor of anguish from it. When you headed for battle this way, you were as helpless as a cow being driven along the chute to the fellow with the sledgehammer. You couldn’t even fire back, the way you could when you got to solid ground.

How long to cross the river? It seemed like forever, though it couldn’t have taken above fifteen minutes, twenty at the most. The soldiers in the front rows, who could see where they were going, passed word back that they were nearing the enemy side of the Ohio. One of them said. “Hope the Rebs don’t have no machine guns down by the bank, or we ain’t ever gonna make it onto dry land.”

“You don’t shut up, Smitty,” somebody else said fiercely, “I’m gonna shove you in the river and
you
sure as hell won’t make it to dry land.”

Paul fingered the worry beads harder than ever. His sympathies were with the soldier who’d threatened to push Smitty overboard. The very idea of machine-gun bullets stitching through men who couldn’t even duck was enough to make his testicles try to crawl up into his belly.

A big shell landed in the river, all too close to the barge. Mantarakis, who’d already been wet, was now soaked to the skin. Most of the shell fragments and shrapnel balls, fortunately, went into the water, though a couple of unlucky soldiers howled as they were wounded. The barge itself dipped and then recovered, almost as if it were a buggy jouncing over a pothole in the road.

Mixed in with the racket of artillery came the sharper discharges of rifles and, off in the distance, sure enough, the endless death-rattle bark of machine guns. A couple of men at the front of the barge started shooting, too. Mantarakis didn’t know whether he liked that or not. It was liable to draw Confederate fire onto men who couldn’t shoot back—him, for instance.

The barge lurched again. Paul didn’t hear any explosions especially close by; no more upthrown water drenched him. Before he had time to think about what that might mean, whistles started squealing at the front of the barge and men screamed. “Out, you bastards!
Move!
Run! We’ve gone aground!”

All at once, Paul could move. Along with his squadmates, he ran forward and jumped off the bow of the barge. He got splashed then; the water into which he’d leaped came up past his knees. The mud on the bottom of the Ohio tried to pull his boots off his feet.

The water got shallower fast. Ahead of him, soldiers were running up onto dry land and then fanning out as they moved away from the bank. Now he saw what the artillery had done to the local landscape. It had probably been pleasant before the war started. It wasn’t pleasant any more. Whatever grass and bushes had grown here were churned out of existence. He could tell that there had been trees down along the riverbank, but they were stumps and toothpicks now.

Beyond the trees—beyond what had been trees—the ground looked as if a chunk of hell had decided to take up residence in the Confederate States. He hadn’t imagined anything could be so appalling as that cratered landscape. The U.S. guns had done their work well. Surely nothing could have survived the bombardment they’d laid down.

He made it up to the riverbank himself. His feet squelched dankly in his boots as he pounded inland. He reminded himself to put on dry socks if he ever got the chance. You let your feet stay soaked, all sorts of nasty things happened to them. He had cousins who worked on the wharfs in Philadelphia who’d made that mistake. Demetrios was still trying to get cured.

Up ahead, something moved, or Paul thought it did. Then, for a split second, he thought he’d made a mistake. And then, as flame spat from a rifle muzzle, he realized he hadn’t; it was just that the Confederates’ uniforms made them almost impossible to spot when they were in the dirt.

The rifle spat fire again. Ten or fifteen feet to Mantarakis’ left, a man went down clutching at his leg. Paul went down, too, landing heavily enough to jolt half the wind from him. He brought his Springfield to his shoulder and drew a bead on the shell hole where he’d spotted the Reb. Was that movement? He fired, then crawled away on his belly. His own uniform, especially smeared with mud and dirt, gave pretty good concealment, too.

He found out how good the concealment was a moment later, when an American soldier he hadn’t even seen got up, peering into the hole at which he’d shot, and waved everyone on. Paul got up and started to run before realizing he’d just killed a man.
I should be feeling something
, he thought. The only thing he felt was fear.

He stumbled in a hole in the ground and fell, counting himself lucky he didn’t twist an ankle. When he got back to his feet, he looked behind him. He’d intended to see how the men on the barge were doing and whether it was all unloaded, but he kept staring, heedless of the occasional bullets still flying, at the grand spectacle of the Ohio River.

The river was full of barges and ferries of every size and age, with all the vessels laden to the wallowing point, almost to the capsizing point, with men in green-gray. Smoke billowed from scores, hundreds, of stacks, a deep black smoke different from the kind artillery explosions kicked up. Paul cheered like a madman at the display of the might the United States were putting forth. With that great armada, with the stunning artillery the gunners were laying down to ease the way for the Americans, how could the Confederate States hope to resist?

The plain answer, Paul thought, was that they couldn’t. He cheered again, seized for a moment by war’s grandeur instead of its terror.

And then, without warning, most of the barrage still descending on the Confederates ahead ended. “What the hell?” Paul said when the shelling eased up. He’d been in combat half an hour at most, but he’d already learned a basic rule: if anything strange happens, hit the dirt.

But he kept looking back over his shoulder—and, to his horror, he spotted a gunboat flying the Stars and Bars steaming west toward the lumbering vessels struggling across the Ohio. The engineers were supposed to have put mines in the river to keep Rebel craft away from the defenseless barges, but something had gone wrong somewhere and here this one was, a tiger loose among rabbits.

The river monitor—Mantarakis knew the Rebs didn’t call them that, but he did—carried a turret like those aboard armored cruisers out on the ocean. Shooting up barges at point-blank range with six-inch guns was like killing roaches by dropping an anvil on them: much more than the job required. But the job got done, either way.

When a six-inch shell hit a barge, it abruptly ceased to be. You could, if you were so inclined, watch men and pieces of men fly through the air. They flew amazingly high. Then the monitor’s turret would revolve a little, pick another target, and blow it out of the water. If that kept on for very long, it wouldn’t have any targets left to pick.

Shells rained down around the gunboat, too, and on it—that was why the U.S. artillery had stopped its covering fire for the landing. If the guns didn’t knock it out in a tearing hurry, there wouldn’t be a landing, or not one with any chance of success. All at once, Paul realized he was in enemy country. Behind him, the Ohio looked uncrossably wide. He wondered if he’d ever see the other side of it again if the gunboat wasn’t destroyed. Then he wondered if he’d ever see the other side of it if the gunboat
was
destroyed.

A shell slammed into the armored turret holding the monitor’s big guns—slammed into it and bounced off. Those turrets were armored to keep out projectiles from naval guns; shells from field pieces they hardly noticed. But the rest of the Confederate riverboat was more vulnerable. The stacks were shot away; so was the conning tower. Rifle and machine-gun fire from the shore and from the barges kept the Rebels from putting anyone on deck to make repairs. Then the rudder went. The monitor slewed sideways. At last, a shell penetrated to the boiler. The monitor blew up even more spectacularly than the barges it had wrecked.

The barges it hadn’t wrecked kept on coming across the Ohio. More loaded up and left the U.S. side of the river. The United States had a lot more manpower than did the Confederacy. Paul Mantarakis wondered if they had enough manpower to compensate for the mistakes their generals were bound to make.

He rose, grunting under the weight of his pack, and moved forward, deeper into Kentucky. One way or another, he’d find out.

Jefferson Pinkard always got the feeling he’d died and gone to hell on the job. Flame and sparks were everywhere. You couldn’t shout over the triphammer din; no point in even trying. If you got accustomed to it, you could hear people talking in their ordinary voices under it. You could even hear a whisper, sometimes.

Steel poured from a crucible into a cast-iron mold. The blast of heat sent Pinkard reeling. “Godalmightydamn,” he said in the harsh-soft accent of a man who’d grown up on an Alabama farm, bringing up a gloved hand to shield his face. “I don’t care how long you work iron, you don’t never get used to that. And doin’ it in summertime just makes it worse.”

“You think I’m gonna argue with you, Jeff, you’re even crazier than I know you are,” Bedford Cunningham answered. They’d worked side by side at the Sloss Furnaces for going on ten years now, and were like as two peas in a pod: broad-shouldered, fair-haired men with pale skins that turned red from any sun and even redder from the furnace atmosphere in which they labored.

The big crucible from which the molten metal had come swung away, not so smoothly as Pinkard would have liked. “New kid handlin’ that thing don’t know what the hell he’s doin’,” he observed.