Breakthroughs (31 page)

“This here is sad, ma’am,” Sergeant Willie Metcalfe said. “This here is really sad.” Just for a moment, he raised a hand to the black cord that held his patch. “This here place got hurt the same way I did.”

“Yes, it did,” Anne said. She would not—she
would
not—let him hear the tears in her voice.

And then she forgot about tears, because something moved up ahead. She was on the ground, her rifle aimed, before she knew how she’d got there. A couple of the young militiamen stood gaping for a few seconds. The others, the men who had seen combat of one sort or another, were on their bellies like her, offering targets as small as they could.

“Come out!” Metcalfe shouted. “Come out right now or you’re dead!”

Anne wasn’t even sure she’d seen a human being. Motion where nothing had any business moving had been plenty to send her diving to the ground. She wondered if they’d have to go hunting through the field hands’ cottages. If the Reds had come back for some reason, that might not be any fun at all.

But why would the Reds come back to Marshlands?
she thought, trying to reassure herself. It wasn’t as if she had any treasure buried on the plantation to tempt them. If she’d had anything like that, she would long since have dug it up herself.

Then anticlimax almost made her burst out laughing. From around the corner of the nearest cabin came a pickaninny, a Negro girl ten or eleven years old. After a moment, Anne recognized her. “What are you doing sneaking around this place, Vipsy?” she demanded. “You almost got shot.”

“I’s jus’ lookin’ fo’ whatever I kin find,” Vipsy answered artlessly—so artlessly, Anne’s suspicions kindled.

“Where are you staying these days, Vipsy?” she asked. “There’s nothing for your father and mother to do at Marshlands now.”

Vipsy pointed northward, toward the Congaree: “Over yonder where I’s at,” she answered.

How far over yonder?
Anne wondered.
All the way into the swamp? Are your father and mother Reds?
If they were…She looked down at the ground so the colored girl would not see her smile. “All right, go on your way,” she said when she looked up again. “I’m just glad you weren’t coming around sniffing after the treasure. If you were, we would have had to shoot you.”

“Don’ know nothin’ ’bout no treasure,” Vipsy said, and strolled off with as much dignity as if she wore a gingham frock rather than a dress cut from a grimy burlap bag.

The next trick, of course, would be convincing the militiamen she had no treasure buried here at Marshlands. If she couldn’t do that, half the people in St. Matthews would be out here by day after tomorrow at the latest, all of them armed with picks and shovels. But if she could persuade the militiamen—well, something useful might come from that.

Gordon McSweeney walked up to Captain Schneider. After saluting the company commander, he said, “Sir, I wish you wouldn’t have done what you did.”

Schneider frowned. “I’m sorry, McSweeney, but I don’t see that you left me any choice in the matter.”

“But—” Except when discussing matters of religion, McSweeney was not a particularly eloquent man. He touched the top of his shoulder, and the new shoulder strap sewn onto his tunic. No insigne marked the strap, but its mere presence disturbed him. “Sir, I don’t
want
to be an officer!” he burst out.

“Believe me, second lieutenants barely deserve the name,” Captain Schneider answered with a wry chuckle.

“I was comfortable as a sergeant, sir,” McSweeney said. “I was—I was happy as a sergeant.” It was, as far as he could recall, the first time in his life he’d ever admitted being happy about anything.

“If you go on with this,
Lieutenant
McSweeney”—Schneider bore down on the title—“you will make me angry—but not angry enough to bust you back to sergeant, if that’s what’s on your mind.” He paused to roll a cigarette. Once he’d sucked in smoke, he went on, “God damn it, McSweeney, look at it from my point of view. What the hell am I supposed to do with you?”

“Sir, you could have—you should have—left me where I was,” McSweeney answered. “That was all I expected. That was all I wanted.”

For some reason he did not fathom, Captain Schneider looked exasperated. Seeing he did not fathom it, Schneider spelled it out in words of one syllable: “You are wearing the ribbon for one Medal of Honor. God knows you deserve an oak-leaf cluster to go with it for what you did to that machine-gun position, but the War Department would think I was shell-shocked if I put you up for it twice, no matter how much you deserve it. Any lesser medal fails to do you justice. What choice did I have but promoting you?”

“I didn’t do what I did for glory, sir,” McSweeney answered, deeply embarrassed. “I did it because it was my duty.”

Schneider studied him. Slowly, slowly, the company commander blew out a long, gray cloud of smoke. “You mean that,” he said at last.

“Of course I do.” McSweeney was embarrassed again, in a different way. “I always mean what I say.”

After another long pause, Captain Schneider said, “You may be the most frightening man I have ever met.”

“Only to the enemies of God and the United States of America, sir.”

Schneider suddenly snapped his fingers. “I know part of what’s troubling you, damn me to hell if I don’t.” If he kept talking like that, McSweeney was sure God would damn him to hell. But, however harsh he was to those under him, McSweeney could not and never would reprove his superiors. Schneider continued, “You don’t want to give your flamethrower to anybody else.”

McSweeney looked down at the muddy ground under his feet. He hadn’t thought Captain Schneider would be able to read him so well. Now it was his turn to hesitate. Finally, he said, “When I carry it, I feel myself to be like the fourth angel of the Lord in Revelations 16, who pours out his bowl on the sun and scorches the wicked with fire.”

“Hmm.” Schneider scratched his chin. Stubble rasped under his fingernails. “Tell you what, McSweeney. Think of it like this: you’re not the only one in this war. We’re all scorching the Rebs together, and it doesn’t matter whether we’ve got rifles or .45s or flamethrowers. How’s that?”

“Sir, when the Good Book speaks of searing those who curse God’s name, I believe it means what it says—no more, no less,” McSweeney replied.

“Of course you do,” Schneider muttered. He paused to sigh and to stamp the butt of his cigarette into the dirt. “Well, we’re going to make it hot for the Rebs, all right. They’re going to take us out of the line here and put fresh troops in our place, to hold. We shift to the right, about five miles over.”

“And do what, sir?” McSweeney asked.

“There’s about a square mile of woods there—it’s called Craighead Forest on the map,” Schneider answered. “If we can push the Confederates out of it, we outflank ’em and we may be able to shove ’em clean out of Jonesboro.”

“So long as we’re fighting, sir, it suits me,” McSweeney said.

“Well, it doesn’t suit me, not for hell it doesn’t,” the company commander told him. “We haven’t got the barrels to go in there and do the dirty work for us, the way they do on the other side of the Mississippi. We have to take that forest the old way, the hard way, and it’s going to be expensive as the devil.”

“Where I go, my men will follow, and I will go into that wood,” McSweeney said positively. Schneider looked at him, shook his head, and went off down the trench still shaking it.

Replacements began filing into the line that afternoon, under desultory Confederate shelling. They were clean-faced, neatly shaven men in clean uniforms. They seemed present in preposterous numbers, for action had not thinned their ranks faster than replacements could refill them. They stared at the lean, grimy veterans whose trenches they were taking over. Gordon McSweeney was far from the only veteran to stare back in cold contempt.

He led the platoon he did not want down a series of winding tracks shielded—but not too well—from enemy observation. A few shells fell around them. A couple of men were wounded. Stretcher-bearers carried them back toward dressing stations. But for the wounded men, nobody thought it anything out of the ordinary.

Up through the zigzags of communications trenches they went. McSweeney stared ahead, toward the wood of pine and oak. Fighting there hadn’t been heavy, not till now. Most of the trees were still standing, not lying smashed and scattered like a petulant giant’s game of pick-up-sticks. Under those trees, men in butternut waited in foxholes and in trenches much like these. Between the U.S. line and the edge of the wood lay a few hundred yards of low grass and bushes, all bright green. Tomorrow morning…

“Tomorrow morning, uh, sir,” Ben Carlton said to McSweeney, “a lot of us are going to end up dead.”

McSweeney gave the cook a cold look. “Take it up with the Lord, not with me. I am going forward. So are you. God will choose who lives and dies.” Carlton went off muttering to himself. McSweeney checked his rifle, read his Bible, rolled himself in his blanket, and slept the sleep of an innocent man.

The U.S. bombardment blasted him awake a little before dawn. He nodded his approval. Short and sharp—that was the way to do it. A week-long bombardment only gave the Rebs a week to get ready, and didn’t kill nearly enough of them to be worth that.

Whistles blew, up and down the line. “Come on, you lugs!” McSweeney shouted. “Follow me. I’ll be the one they shoot at first, I promise you.”

With that encouragement, he led his platoon over the parapet and through the grass toward the edge of the now more battered wood, from which little winking lights—the muzzle flashes of machine guns and Tredegars—began to appear. Bullets clipped leaves from bushes and stirred the tall blades of grass almost as a stick might have done.

“By sections!” McSweeney yelled. “Fire and move!”

Half the men he led went down, though only a few had been shot. The ones on their knees and bellies blazed away to cover the advance of the rest. After a rush, the men ahead hit the dirt and fired while the former laggards rose and dashed past them.

They took casualties. Had it not been for their tactics—and for the artillery still falling in the woods, knocking over trees fast enough to make Paul Bunyan jealous—they would have taken more. But the survivors kept going forward in ragged waves. Several bullets cracked past Gordon McSweeney close enough for him to feel the wind of their passage. One brushed at his sleeve, so that he looked over to see if a comrade close by was tugging his arm. Seeing no one close by, he realized what must have happened. “Thank you, Lord, for sparing me,” he murmured, and ran on.

Then he was in among the trees. The covering barrage moved deeper into Craighead Forest, leaving it up to the men in green-gray to finish dealing with the men in butternut it had not killed or maimed. The Confederates were there in distressing numbers; they knew, as U.S. soldiers knew, how to lessen the damage artillery did.

That left hard, hot work to do. Many—not all—of the C.S. machine-gun crews stayed at their guns even after U.S. soldiers had got by them on either flank, lingering to do their foes as much harm as they could before they were slain. They were brave men, brave as any in green-gray.

McSweeney knew as much. He’d known as much since the day he crossed the Ohio into Kentucky. “The Egyptians who followed Pharaoh into the opening in the Red Sea after the children of Israel surely were brave men,” he muttered. “The Lord let the Red Sea close on them even so, because they were wicked.”

Confederates fired from behind and from under trees. Snipers fired from in the trees. The Rebels fought from their trenches. They popped up out of foxholes. Sometimes they hid till several U.S. soldiers had passed them, then turned around and fired at their backs.

McSweeney had blood on his bayonet before he was a hundred yards into the woods. He’d been changing clips when a Confederate soldier lunged at him. How the Reb had screamed when the point went into his belly! He would scream like that forever in hell.

“Schneider’s down!” somebody shouted. McSweeney waited for one of the other lieutenants, all of them senior to him, to start directing the company. None of them did. Maybe they were down, too. He shouted orders, driving the men on. He was loud and sounded sure of what he was doing, the next best thing to being sure of what he was doing.

Forming any firm line in the forest was impossible. The Confederates kept filtering past the U.S. forward positions and raising Cain. They knew the woods better than their foes—some of them had probably hunted squirrels and coons through these trees—and did not mean to lose them.

“Here!” McSweeney threw aside the bodies of two Rebs from the machine gun at which they’d fallen. He grabbed a couple of his own men and turned the machine gun around. “If you see any of those miscreants, shoot them down.”

“Miscre-whats, sir?” one of them shouted at him.

“Confederates,” he answered, which satisfied the soldier. He and his pal wouldn’t be so good as a properly trained crew, but they would be better than nothing for as long as their ammunition held out. McSweeney did that several more times, getting firepower any way he could.

U.S. machine guns started coming forward into Craighead Forest, too. By nightfall, most of it was in U.S. hands, though Confederate cannon kept shelling the woods their side had held when day began. Maybe the men in green-gray would be able to mount a flank attack on Jonesboro afterwards, maybe not. McSweeney couldn’t tell. He didn’t care, not too much. He’d done his job, and done it well.

Scipio squatted on his heels in the mud by the Congaree River, reading a newspaper one of the black fighters of what still called itself the Congaree Socialist Republic had brought back from a Fort Motte park bench. Going into a town was dangerous; actually buying a newspaper from a white man would have been suicidally dangerous.

“Do Jesus!” Scipio said, looking up from the small print that gave him more trouble than it had a few years before. “Sound like the Yankees is kickin’ we where it hurt the most.”

Cassius was gutting catfish he’d pulled out of the muddy river. When they were fried, they would taste of mud, too. Cassius threw offal into the river before cocking his head to one side and giving Scipio a glance from the corner of his eye. “Them Yankees ain’t kickin’ we, Kip,” he said at last.