The Grapple (60 page)

“Incoming!” Gabriel Medwick shouted—he wasn’t hurt after all. Then he added, “Hit the dirt, General!” Jorge hit the dirt. He knew what that rising, hateful scream in the air was, whether George Patton did or not.
My namesake,
he realized. Patton would be one dead namesake if he didn’t get down.

He didn’t. The shell burst not far away. Smoke and dirt fountained up. Splinters knifed out in all directions. None of them touched Patton. Certain madmen were supposed to be able to walk through the worst danger without getting scratched. As far as Jorge was concerned, Patton qualified. You had to be
loco
to stay on your feet when you heard artillery coming in.

But if you did it, and if by some accident you lived through it, you could pull a lot of soldiers with you. Jorge and the men near him had started forward to try to keep General Patton from getting himself killed. When they saw he didn’t, they kept going forward to share his luck—and they drove the startled U.S. soldiers back before them. The men in green-gray hadn’t dreamt that the battered, pressured Confederates owned this kind of resilience. Jorge couldn’t blame them. He hadn’t dreamt any such thing himself.

And then the spell broke. Patton ran up to a soldier crouched behind a rock. “Come on, son!” he roared. “We’ve got Yankees to kill! Up and at ’em!”

The soldier didn’t move. Jorge was close enough to see he was gray and shaking.
Shellshock,
he thought, not without sympathy. Sometimes too many horrible things could happen to a man all at once, or a bunch of smaller things could accumulate over time. Then he’d be worthless for a while, or only good for light duty. If you let him take it easy, he usually snapped out of it after a while. If you tried to make him perform while he was at low ebb, chances were you wouldn’t have much luck.

Patton didn’t. His face darkened with anger. “Get up and fight, you shirking son of a bitch!” he bellowed.

“I’m sorry, sir,” the private said. “I’m doing the best I can, but—”

“No buts,” Patton growled. “I’ll boot your butt, that’s what!” And he did, with a jackboot almost as shiny as his helmet. “Now
fight
!”

Tears ran down the young soldier’s cheeks. His teeth chattered. “I’m sorry I’m not at my—”

He got no further. Patton slapped him in the face, forehand and then backhand. When that still didn’t get the kid moving, the general raised his fancy six-shooter.

“Hold it right there, General!” The shout came from Sergeant Blackledge. But his wasn’t the only automatic weapon pointed somewhere near Patton’s midriff. “Sir, you don’t shoot a man with combat fatigue. You do, you’ll have yourself a little accident.”

“You wouldn’t dare,” Patton said.

“Sir, you pull that trigger, it’d be a pleasure,” Blackledge replied. Jorge listened in astonished admiration. He’d known Blackledge wasn’t afraid of the enemy. Knowing he wasn’t afraid of his own brass, either…That took a rarer brand of courage.

Jorge waited for Patton to demand the sergeant’s name. He didn’t know whether the general would want to know to arrest Blackledge or to promote him on the spot. But Patton did neither. “All right, then. If you want to stick with a lousy, stinking coward, you can,” he ground out. “But you’ll see what it gets you.” As if there weren’t U.S. soldiers no more than a hundred yards away, he turned on his heel and stalked off. His gait put Jorge in mind of an affronted cat.

Blackledge called, “Freedom!” after the departing general. Patton’s back stiffened. He kept walking.

“Th-Th-Thank you,” the guy with combat fatigue got out.

“Don’t worry about it, buddy,” Sergeant Blackledge said. “That fancy-pants asshole comes up here for half an hour, so he reckons he’s hot shit. Let him stay in the line for weeks at a stretch like us and see how he likes it. Being brave is one thing. Staying brave when all kinds of shit comes down on you day after day, that’s a fuck of a lot tougher.”

“I—I’ll try and go forward,” the shellshocked soldier said.

Blackledge only laughed. “Don’t worry about it,” he repeated. “We ain’t doin’ any more advancing, not for a while.” He raised his voice: “Everybody dig in! Damnyankees are gonna hear we’re getting frisky in this sector, so they’ll hit us with everything but the kitchen sink.”

“You forget something, Sergeant,” Jorge said.

“Yeah? What’s that?” The sergeant bristled at the idea he could have overlooked anything.

“Any second now, our own side, they gonna start shelling us, too,” Jorge answered.

Sergeant Blackledge stared at him, then grudged a chuckle. “That’d be a good joke if only it was a joke, you know what I mean? Fucking Patton’s probably ciphering out how to get us all killed right this minute.”

“Shoulda scragged him when we had the chance,” Gabe Medwick said. Dirt flew from his entrenching tool as he scraped out a foxhole. Jorge was also doing his best to imitate a mole.

“Nah.” Reluctantly, Blackledge shook his head. “Somebody woulda blabbed, and we’d all be in deep shit then.
Deeper
shit, if there is shit deeper’n this. Besides, who says the next jerk with stars and a wreath’d be any better? Oh, chances are he wouldn’t grandstand so much, but he’d still do his best to get us killed. Generals get their reputations for getting guys like us killed. Some’re smart assholes and some’re dumb assholes, but they’re all assholes, pretty much.”

“Good thing the enemy, he’s got assholes for generals, too,” Jorge said.

Before Blackledge could answer, U.S. artillery started coming in. The sergeant called that one right on the button. Jorge hoped the Yankees didn’t have barrels to follow up the bombardment. If they did, he knew damn well the outfit would have to retreat. He didn’t think they could hold the line they’d been in before Patton brought them forward, either. If they’d had armor of their own, maybe, but one general in a chromed helmet didn’t make up for what was missing.

Barrels painted green-gray
did
come clanking south. Jorge retreated, machine-gun bullets nipping at his heels. His other choice was dying. Patton would have approved of that for him. For himself, he didn’t like it for beans.

I
rving Morrell’s barrel rattled forward. The Confederates had done everything they could to fortify the ground in front of Chattanooga. He was doing his best to show them that everything they could do wasn’t nearly enough.

“Time to make some more of those poor sorry bastards die for their country, Frenchy,” he told the gunner.

Sergeant Bergeron nodded. “Long as I don’t have to die for mine, sir, that sounds real good to me.”

“You’ve got the right attitude.” Morrell knew there were times when a soldier didn’t have much choice about dying for his country. Sometimes you had to lay down your life to keep lots of your buddies from losing theirs. Frenchy Bergeron knew that, too; Morrell had seen him in enough action to be sure of it. Only a man who did know about it could joke about it. But you could also get killed from stupidity or plain bad luck. You not only could, it was much too easy. That was the kind of thing Frenchy was talking about.

The Confederates weren’t crumbling, the way Morrell had hoped they would. They were fighting hard even as they fell back. They knew where he was headed, and they had a pretty good notion of how he would try to get there. That made for slow, expensive combat, not what Morrell wanted at all.

John Abell warned me slicing them up might take two campaigning seasons,
Morrell remembered. He hadn’t wanted to believe it. He still didn’t. But there was a pretty fair chance the General Staff officer knew what he was talking about.

“Sir, an infantry counterattack just pushed us back a few hundred yards in Sector Blue-7,” someone said in his earphones.

“Blue-7. Roger that,” Morrell said. “I’ll pass the word on to the people who can do something about it.” Thanks to the fancy wireless gear that crowded the turret of his barrel, he could. The artillerymen at the other end of the connection promised him 105mm fire and brimstone would start dropping on that map sector in a couple of minutes. The Confederates wouldn’t enjoy the little gains they’d made. Satisfied, Morrell went back to commanding his barrel.

It was plowing through what had been the last major land defenses in front of the Tennessee River. Crossing the river and getting into Chattanooga itself would be another adventure, but just getting to it would give the war effort a kick in the pants. From the north side of the river line, the 105s now punishing Sector Blue-7 would be able to knock Chattanooga flat and leave it useless to the Confederate States.

A lot of U.S. generals would have been delighted to do that much. Morrell was a different kind of officer, and always had been. Doing what most people expected and no more didn’t interest him. He didn’t want to wound the Confederates here. He wanted to ruin them. Chattanooga wasn’t a goal in itself, not to him. It was a gateway. With it in his hands, with communications over the Tennessee secured, he could plunge his armored sword into the Confederacy’s heart.

Unfortunately, somebody on the Confederate General Staff, or maybe Jake Featherston himself, had seen that as plainly as Morrell had. The depth of these trench lines; the barbed wire; the minefields—now marked by signs painted with skull and crossbones—and the concrete pillboxes, some of them sporting antibarrel cannon, told the story very clearly. So did the stench of death. The fancy filters that were supposed to keep the barrel’s interior free of poison gas if it was buttoned up tight were powerless against the stink.

The barrel clattered past a dead pillbox. Scorch marks around the slit that let a machine gun traverse in there told what had happened. Morrell was a brave soldier, an aggressive soldier. Not for all the money in the world would he have strapped the fuel and gas cartridges for a flamethrower on his back. The men who did were either a little bit nuts—sometimes more than a little bit—or didn’t know the odds against them.

Along with disposing of unexploded bombs, lugging a flamethrower was one of the military specialties where the average soldier lasted a matter of weeks, not months. Using men who didn’t know as much seemed unfair. That didn’t stop the Army. Maybe ignorance was bliss—for a little while.

A U.S. helmet sat on top of a rifle stock. The rifle’s bayonet had been plunged into the ground above a hastily dug grave. Did the flamethrower man lie there? Morrell wouldn’t have been surprised. He saw two other pillboxes that covered the burned-out one. Of course the Confederates would have interlocking fields of fire; they weren’t amateurs. An armor-piercing round had put paid to one of those pillboxes. He couldn’t make out what happened to the other one, but a U.S. soldier leaned against it eating from a ration can, so it was under new management.

A salvo of rockets screamed in from the south. The soldier dove into a hole. Morrell hoped that would keep him safe. Sometimes blast from the screaming meemies killed even if shrapnel didn’t. As the explosives in the rockets’ noses burst, Morrell’s barrel shook like a ship on a stormy sea. He hoped he would stay safe himself. Those damn things could flip a fifty-ton barrel like a kid’s toy.

“Fun,” Frenchy Bergeron said when the salvo ended.

Morrell looked at him. “
How
many times did your mother drop you on your head when you were little?”

The gunner grinned. “Oh, enough, I expect…sir.”

“I guess so,” Morrell said with feeling, and the gunner laughed out loud.

Were Morrell in Patton’s shoes, he would have pulled back over the Tennessee and made the U.S. commander figure out how to get at him on the south bank. Patton seemed to want to fight it out as far forward as he could. Some of the things Morrell was hearing from Intelligence suggested Patton had to worry about political pressure from Richmond: or, in plain English, Jake Featherston was screaming his head off.

Fighting the enemy was hard enough. Fighting the enemy and your own leaders had to be ten times worse. Morrell had had his arguments and squabbles with the War Department himself. The suspicion with which he and John Abell had watched each other ever since the middle of the last war proved that—as if it needed proving. But when a president ran the war himself, something was bound to get screwed up somewhere.

Being sure of that made Morrell keep his eyes open in a special way. If Patton goofed, or even if he didn’t but a U.S. attack threw his men north of the river into disarray, Morrell’s troops might be able to get over the Tennessee before the Confederates knew they’d done it. And if they could, Chattanooga would fall.

How angry would that make Jake Featherston? Angry enough to sack General Patton? Morrell hoped so. Patton made no bones about having learned armored warfare from him. Morrell could have done without the compliment, because the Confederate officer made much too good a pupil. The drive into Ohio was a small masterpiece. The one into Pennsylvania almost worked, too. And the counterattack through the mountains in eastern Kentucky and Tennessee was well conceived; Patton just didn’t have the men and matériel to bring it off.

Through a cupola periscope, Morrell watched a U.S. barrel commander leading a platoon of new-model barrels toward the hottest fighting. The sergeant or lieutenant or whatever he was stood head and shoulders out of his cupola. Morrell knew a stab of jealousy. He wanted to fight the same way. Only a cold calculation of his own value to the advance kept him buttoned up in here. That fellow out ahead of him had the freedom insignificance could bring.

“Son of a bitch,” Morrell muttered.

“What’s cookin’, sir?” Sergeant Bergeron asked.

“Nothing,” Morrell said. It wasn’t quite a lie—it was nothing that would matter to Frenchy. But damned if the broad shoulders on that barrel commander didn’t remind Morrell of Michael Pound. He knew they’d finally dragged his old gunner up into officer country, kicking and screaming all the way. Pound was on this front, too. So why wouldn’t he be in charge of a platoon of barrels? No reason. No reason at all.

That barrel stopped and fired. Something too far away for Morrell to make it out very well burst into flames. Morrell slowly nodded. He wouldn’t want to be Michael Pound’s gunner, not for anything. Pound knew the business too well. Chances were he made an impossibly demanding commander. But the gunner in that machine had scored a hit. Pound couldn’t complain there.