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Confederate shells crashed down on the factories and steel mills ahead. The bursts sent up smoke that joined the horrid stuff belching from the tall stacks. Air in Pittsburgh was already poisonous even without phosgene and mustard gas and the nerve agents. They called the thick brown eye-stinging mix smog, jamming together smoke and fog. What they got was more noxious than the made-up word suggested, though.
Tom wouldn’t have wanted to work in one of those places with shells bursting all around. But the factories kept operating till they burned or till the Confederates overran them. Trucks and trains took steel and metalware of all kinds east. Barges took them up the Allegheny, too. Confederate artillery and dive bombers made the Yankees pay a heavy price for what came out of the mills and factories. Some of it got through, though, and they must have thought that was worthwhile.
Barrels painted butternut ground forward. Telling streets from blocks of houses wasn’t so easy anymore. Confederate-occupied Pittsburgh was nothing but a rubble field these days. The whole town would look like that by the time Tom’s countrymen finished driving out the damnyankees… if they ever did.
A machine gun fired at the barrels from the cover of a ruined clothing store. Bullets clanged off the snorting machines’ armor. Tom didn’t know why machine gu
Traversing turrets had a ponderous grace. Three swung together, till their big guns bore on that malevolently winking eye of fire. The ca
All they got for their courage was another volley, and then another. After that, the gun stayed quiet. Had the barrels put it out of action, or was it playing possum? Tom hoped his men wouldn’t find out the hard way.
And then, for a moment, he forgot all about the machine gun, something an infantry officer hardly ever did. But a round from a U.S. barrel he hadn’t seen slammed into the side of one of the butternut behemoths. The Confederate barrel started to burn. Hatches popped open. Men dashed for cover. The U.S. barrel was smart. It didn’t machine-gun them and reveal its position. It just waited.
The other two C.S. barrels turned in the general direction from which that enemy round had come. If the U.S. barrel was one of the old models, their sloped front armor would defeat its gun even at point-blank range. But it wasn’t. It was one of the new ones with the big, homely turret that housed a bigger, nastier ca
He sent men forward to keep the enemy from bringing barrels into that spot again. He was only half surprised when the machine gun in the ruined store opened up again. His men were quick to take cover, too. He didn’t think the machine gun got any of them. He hoped not, anyway.
The Confederate barrel sent several more rounds into the haberdashery. The machine gun stayed quiet. Ever so cautious, soldiers in butternut inched closer. One of them tossed in a grenade and went in after it. Tom wished he had a man with a flamethrower handy. The last fellow who’d carried one had got incinerated along with his rig a few days earlier, though. No replacement for him had come forward yet.
Not enough replacements of any kind were coming forward. Little by little, the regiment was melting away. Tom didn’t know what to do about that, except hope it got pulled out of the line for rest and refit before too long. However much he hoped, he didn’t expect that would happen soon. The Confederates needed Pittsburgh. They’d already put just about everybody available up at the front.
After a minute or so, the soldier came out of the wreckage with his thumb up. There was one damnyankee machine gun that wouldn’t murder anybody else. Now-how many hundreds, how many thousands, more waited in Pittsburgh? The answer was too depressing to think about, so Tom didn’t.
One thing he hadn’t seen in Pittsburgh: yellowish khaki Mexican uniforms. The Mexicans hadn’t done badly in Ohio and Pe
A rifle shot rang out. A bullet struck sparks from the bricks just behind the head of the soldier who’d thrown the grenade. He hit the dirt. Three other Confederates pointed in three different directions, which meant nobody’d seen where the shot came from. The machine gun might be gone, but the Yankees hadn’t given up the fight for this block. It didn’t seem as if they would till they were all dead.
Down in the CSA, some people-mostly those who hadn’t been through the Great War-still believed U.S. soldiers were nothing but a pack of cowards. Tom laughed as he ducked down into a shell hole to shed his mask and smoke a cigarette-he didn’t turn blue and keel over, so it was safe enough. And much better not to let the match or the coal give the damnyankee sniper a target. He just wished Confederate propaganda were true. Pittsburgh would have fallen long since.
A ru
“Sir, there’s a Yankee with a flag of truce right up at the front,” the ru
The last time a U.S. officer proposed something like that, he’d scouted out the C.S. positions as he moved with his white flag. The damnyankees kept the truce, but they knew just where to strike after it ended. Tom threw down the half-finished smoke. “I’ll meet the son of a bitch at the line,” he growled.
He made his own flag of truce from a stick and a pillowcase, then went up with the ru
A U.S. captain in a dirty uniform waited for Tom. “I could have come to you,” the man remarked.
Colleton smiled a crooked smile. “I bet you could,” he said, and explained why he didn’t want the Yankee back of his lines.
“I wouldn’t do a thing like that,” the U.S. officer said, much too i
“Who, me?” Tom said with another smile like the first. The U.S. captain matched it. They’d been through the mill, all right. Tom got down to business: “Is an hour long enough, or do you want two?”
“Split the difference?” the damnyankee suggested, and Tom nodded. The captain looked at his watch. “All right, Lieutenant-Colonel. Truce till 1315, then?”
“Agreed.” Tom stuck out his hand. The U.S. captain shook it. They both turned back to their own men and shouted out the news. Corpsmen from both sides came forward. Ordinary soldiers did some more trading. Somebody had a football. C.S. and U.S. soldiers tossed it back and forth. Tom remembered the 1914 Christmas truce, when the Great War almost unraveled. He knew that wouldn’t happen here. Both sides meant it now.