Walk in Hell (54 page)

Or so he thought, till a shape wallowed toward him. He grabbed for his little knife, knowing it would do no good against a rifle, but then stopped. “That you, Herk?” he asked, not sure he recognized the filthy, dripping driver.

But the white man nodded. “Yeah. How the hell do we get out of this?”

“Dunno,” Cincinnatus answered. He started laughing. Herk stared at him, eyes wide and shining in his dirty face. Cincinnatus explained: “We got us the chance to find out, though.” Very solemnly, Herk nodded again.

Very solemnly, Abner Dowling peered south through his field glasses, toward the wooded hills north of the little Tennessee town called White House. He stood under a green-gray canvas awning, so the hot August rain didn’t splash down onto his lenses. But the rain cut down on visibility nonetheless, masking those hills from clear observation. What little he could see, he didn’t like.

He turned to General Custer. “Sir, the Rebs have that line as fortified as all get-out. They’re not going to be easy to shift, not even a little bit.”

“Yet shift them we must, and shift them we shall,” Custer said, as usual mixing desire and ability. He raised his field glasses to his face, holding them with one shaky, liver-spotted hand. “That line in front of White House is the last one they can hold to keep our artillery out of range of Nashville. Once it goes down, we commence bombarding the city.” He let the binoculars fall down on the leather strap holding round his neck so he could rub his hands in anticipation.

“I understand that, sir,” Dowling said. “The trouble is, I’m very much afraid the Confederates understand it, too. That is a formidable position they have there—not only high ground, but wooded high ground, so we have trouble pinpointing their dispositions.”

He had no trouble pinpointing Custer’s disposition: it was petulant. The general commanding First Army said, “I intend to bombard that area until every tree in it has been made into toothpicks and matchsticks. Toothpicks and matchsticks,” he repeated, relishing the rhyme.

“Yes, sir,” Dowling said, working to remind Custer of reality. “We lost a good deal of ammunition when that convoy was ambushed last week.”

“True,” Custer said. “You will of course note that, although those munitions were intended for my force, that shocking breach of security occurred in an area under General Pershing’s jurisdiction, not mine.”

“Of course, sir,” his adjutant agreed: where self-preservation was concerned, Custer had a keen enough grasp on reality. Dowling went on, “However that may be, though, the ammunition is not here. And”—he pointed toward the dark, tree-clad, rolling hills—“that’s not good country for barrels. No country is good country for barrels in this rain.”

“We’ll send them in anyhow,” Custer said, which was just like him: he’d found a weapon that worked once, so he’d keep right on using it, regardless of whether circumstances warranted such use. He continued, “And we have plenty of ammunition, even without that which was lost. And, no doubt, our soldiers will make up with their courage any minor deficiencies in the preliminaries.”

Translated into English, that meant a hell of a lot of young Americans were about to get shot, a good many of them unnecessarily. Custer had already fought a lot of battles like that in western Kentucky, and advanced at a snail’s pace: the pace of a snail whose trail was blood, not slime. Dowling said, “It might be wiser to hold off a bit, sir, until the weather’s more favorable and we have better reconnaissance.”

“Major, we have been fighting for two years and more now,” Custer replied. “Would you not say we have already seen a sufficiency of delay?” Without giving Dowling a chance to answer, he said, “I expect the bombardment to commence tomorrow morning and to continue until the Rebel positions are pulverized, at which point we advance, barrels and infantry both.”

What Custer expected, Custer got. That was the advantage of being a lieutenant general. The next day, the guns began to roar. Dowling didn’t envy the artillerymen serving them in the mud. Again, no one asked his opinion. He watched explosions wrack the Confederate hilltop lines. First Army had a lot of guns and a lot of ammunition even without what the raiders had blown up. They pounded the positions north of White House with high explosive and shrapnel and gas.

Custer watched, too, with the delight of a small boy at a fireworks show. “Give it to ’em,” he said hoarsely. “Give it to ’em, by jingo!”

As Dowling had foreseen, the Confederates understood perfectly well what the unending barrage implied. Their own guns pounded the U.S. trenches. In the wretched weather, accurate counterbattery fire was next to impossible, because the U.S. artillery had and could gain no exact notion of the Rebel guns’ positions.

The U.S. artillery preparation went on for five days. By the end of that time, as Custer had desired, the hills were no longer tree-covered. Seen through Dowling’s field glasses, they resembled a close-up photograph of an unshaven man who’d survived a bad case of smallpox: all over craters and old eruptions, with now and then, as if by afterthought, something straight sticking up from one of them. It was easy to imagine that every Confederate in those hills had been blown to kingdom come.

It was especially easy for Custer to imagine as much. “We’ve got ’em now,” he told Dowling in the middle of it, preening like a cock pheasant. “The Lord has delivered them into our hands, and our soldiers have only to storm forward and capture whatever demoralized wretches chance to remain alive.”

“I hope you’re right, sir,” Dowling said, “but in the big fights in Pennsylvania and Maryland, and even the ones First Army had in western Kentucky, the defenders ended up with an advantage all out of proportion to their numbers.”

“That’s why we’re laying on the artillery preparation.” Custer looked at his adjutant as if he’d just crawled out from under a flat rock. “Never in the history of the planet had any place on the face of the earth been bombarded like those hills there. Only a wet blanket would think otherwise.”

Dowling sighed. Custer had reckoned him a wet blanket since the earliest days of their association. That he’d proved right more often than not had done nothing to endear him to the general commanding First Army—on the contrary. This was one of the times Dowling devoutly hoped he was wrong. Custer had laid on one hell of a bombardment, and maybe it would be good enough to wipe out the foe. Maybe.

It went on for two more days, till the artillerymen were as near deaf as made no difference. Even when the U.S. soldiers swarmed out of their trenches and rushed for the ruined woods, the barrage kept on, now dropping down on where Intelligence thought the Rebels had their front-line trenches. Some of the Americans unrolled telephone wire as they advanced. Others carried signal flags, in case the wires broke as they so often did.

From under that camouflaged awning, Custer and Dowling watched the troops. Dowling saw sparklike points of light begin to spurt here and there in the woods. “We didn’t get quite everyone, sir,” he said.

“Leftover dust to be swept away by the broom of the infantry,” Custer said grandly. “A broom five miles wide, Major.”

Confederate artillery started falling in no-man’s-land. U.S. troops got hung up in the belts of barbed wire not even the titanic American barrage had been able to tear up. More and more Confederate machine guns, muzzle flashes winking like malign eyes filled with horrible amusement, opened up on the U.S. soldiers stuck out in the open.

Every so often, a runner or a staff officer would bring news of the progress the attack was making. By the time the news reached Custer and Dowling, it was old and stale. “What’s the slowdown?” Dowling demanded.

“Too many phone lines broken by the Rebel artillery, sir,” answered a lieutenant who didn’t seem to realize he was bleeding from a wound in his upper arm. “Too many runners getting shot before they can make it back, too. And the goddamn Rebel snipers are concentrating on our signalers. It’s worth your life to stick up a banner.”

Custer moved blue counters on a map. “We
are
making progress,” he insisted. “We need to send in the reserves, to take advantage of the gains the first wave has carved out.”

In went the reserves. For all they gained, the ground might as well have swallowed them up. The ground had swallowed too many of them up, and they would never rise from it again. Toward evening, Custer committed more reserves. “Once we break the hard crust and reach the softness it protects, they are ours,” he said.

The third wave of reserves went in the next morning, a couple of hours slower than they might have. The Rebs had been dislodged from most of their forward trenches, and from some of the secondary trenches as well. The line, though, still held. And the cost! “Sir,” Dowling said late that second afternoon, “we’ve lost almost a division’s worth of dead, and twice that many wounded. How long can we go on like this?”

“As long as it takes,” Custer replied. “All summer, if we need to.”

By the end of summer, Dowling feared, First Army would be down to battalion size. The question, he supposed, was whether the Confederates opposing them would have any men left at all. Even if they didn’t, was that a victory? Could the U.S. survivors go on and take Nashville, which was, after all, the point of this entire exercise?

Custer seemed to entertain no doubts. “If you hammer the anvil long enough, Major, it breaks.”

Dowling didn’t answer. He had blacksmiths in his family, and knew what Custer might not: if you hammered the anvil long enough, it broke, all right, but
it
was the hammer, not the anvil. He wondered if he should try explaining that to the general commanding First Army. After a moment, he shook his head. General Custer hadn’t been in the habit of listening to him before. Why would he start now?

Major Irving Morrell said, “What we’ve got going now is the big push toward Banff. The last thing we want to do is go straight at the place. The Canucks are set up and waiting for us to try it. If we do, they’ll slaughter us. We have to make them watch the cape, the way the bullfighters do in the Empire of Mexico. If they keep their eyes on the cape, they won’t notice the sword.”

Captain Heinz Guderian nodded. “This is sound doctrine, Major. Deception. Deception by all means.” He spoke in German, which not only Morrell but also his officers understood.

“Thanks, Captain.” Morrell turned an ironic eye on the German staff officer. “I thought you’d have headed back to Philadelphia along with Major Dietl.”

Guderian shrugged. “Dietl goes back to a real war, so he has no compunctions about leaving this one. If I go back to Germany, I go back to fighting at a desk, with machine pencil and large-caliber typewriter.” His eyes sparkled. “If I am to make my life as a soldier, I intend to
be
a soldier, not a clerk in a field-gray uniform.”

“Fair enough.” Morrell took a map from one of his pockets. “Let’s have a look at exactly what we’ve got here.”

Guderian and Morrell’s own company-grade officers huddled close to him. Captain Karl Spadinger pointed to the map. “What do these ‘I.T.’ markings stand for?” he asked.

“The abbreviation means ‘Indian trail,’” Morrell answered. “Shows what kind of country we’re operating in. And we’ll have the devil’s own time doing anything with the Canadians watching us—they’re bound to have observers here on this peak”—he pointed toward Pigeon Mountain—“and it’s almost two miles high.”

“How are we going to fool them, then?” Captain Charlie Hall asked. “If they know we’re coming, they’re going to bake us a cake.”

He had a gift for the obvious; Morrell had long since seen that. But what was obvious to him would also be obvious to the Canadians. “What’s obvious,” Morrell observed, “isn’t always true.”

Guderian’s head bobbed up and down. He got it. So did Captain Spadinger. So, for that matter, did Lieutenant Jephtha Lewis. Hall’s tanned, handsome face was still blank. Rather sourly, Morrell decided that made him perfect for leading half the attack he had in mind: if its own commander didn’t understand it, the Canadians were sure to be fooled.

But no, he decided after a brief hesitation. Sending Hall in blind would surely get him killed. He was liable to get killed anyway; his role would be expensive. And so Morrell condescended to explain: “You’ll take your company and most of the machine guns around to the east of the mountain there. Don’t do anything in particular to keep from drawing attention to yourself. As soon as you get opposition, I want you to plaster it with rifle fire and those machine guns—make it seem as if you’re in charge of the whole battalion. While you’re keeping the Canucks busy, the rest of us are going to be sneaking up one of these Indian trails to see if we can slide past the observer without getting observed.”

Captain Hall’s eyes widened. “What a good idea, sir!” he exclaimed.

“I’m glad you like it.” Morrell knew his voice was dry, but he couldn’t help it. It didn’t matter. Hall no more noticed the tone than he had figured out what lay in Morrell’s mind before the battalion commander put it in words of one syllable for him.

Morrell kept Sergeant Finkel’s machine-gun squad; the rest went on the diversionary move. Since he was leaving himself with only one gun, he chose the best. Guderian had seen that, too. “The sergeant there should be an officer,” he observed quietly. “Is he held back because he is a Jew?”

“Maybe a little,” Morrell answered. “He holds himself back, too, though: he’d rather deal with the machine guns himself than with men who would be dealing with machine guns, if you know what I mean.”

“I know exactly what you mean,” Guderian said, nodding. “Those are indeed the ones who make the best noncommissioned officers.”

Once he judged Captain Hall’s force well begun on its diversionary move, Morrell led the rest of the battalion north and west on narrow trails through the thickest woods he could find. He strung the men out so that, even if the Canadians up on Pigeon Mountain should spot them, they would have a hard time judging how many U.S. soldiers were on the march.

He tramped along at the head of the column, map in one hand, compass in the other, hoping the two of them could guide him. His boots scuffed almost soundlessly through a carpet of needles fallen from the tall, dark conifers all around. Their resinous, aromatic scent filled his nostrils.