American Front

More freight-train noises filled the air, these from the east and south: Rebel artillery, striking back at U.S. guns. Because the Confederates were trying to hit the ca

Edna stood up. "Maybe we can get out of town now, Mama," she said hopefully.

"Maybe." Nellie rose, too. The air was thick with smoke and dust and a harsh odor she supposed came from explosives. Half the chairs and tables in the coffeehouse lay on their sides or upside down. The fine linen tablecloths that gave the establishment a touch of class-and that Nellie was still paying for-were rags now, torn rags.

A shell fragment had ripped into the fancy brass coffee grinder that gleamed out in front of the counter. Nellie wouldn't be grinding coffee with it again, not any time soon. She shivered and had to grasp the counter for a moment. If a fragment had done that to sturdy, machined brass, what would it have done to flesh? A few feet to one side and she would have found out. No, 1881 hadn't been like this.

She walked toward what had been her front window and was now a square opening with a few jagged shards round the edges. Out in the street- which had suddenly acquired deep pocks, like the face of a man who'd never been vaccinated-a shattered delivery wagon sat on its side, the horses that had drawn it gruesomely dead in the traces. Nellie gulped. She'd killed and plucked and gutted plenty of chickens, and even a few pigs, but artillery was a horrifyingly sloppy butcher. She hadn't imagined horses had that much blood in them, either. A scrawny stray dog came up and sniffed the pool. She shouted at it. It ran away. Behind the wagon, she could just see an outflung arm. No, the driver hadn't been luckier than his animals.

"Can we get out of town, do you think, Ma?" Edna repeated.

Nellie raised her eyes from the street to the high ground. For a moment, she did not understand what she was seeing, and thought a Midwestern dust storm had suddenly been transplanted to those low, rolling hills. Dust there was aplenty, but no wind to raise it. Instead, it came from the carpet of shells the Confederates were laying down. When she looked more closely, she spied the ugly red core of fire in each explosion. She wondered how anything could live under such bombardment, and if anything did.

Her question there was answered a moment later, for not all the flames came from landing shells. Some sprang from the muzzles of U.S. guns hurling death back at the enemy. To her amazement, she discovered she could briefly follow some of the big American shells as they rose into the sky.

She turned her head toward the Potomac. Smoke and buildings obscured most of her view there but, from what she could tell, the Virginia heights were taking as much of a pounding as those around Washington. Good, she thought savagely.

From behind her, Edna said, "Let's go, Ma."

Nellie waved her daughter up alongside her and pointed to the bombardment raining down outside of town. "I don't think we'd better," she said. "Looking at that, we're safer where we're at." Edna bit her lip but nodded.

Across the street, something moved inside a battered cobbler's shop. Nellie's heart jumped into her mouth until she recognized old Mr. Jacobs, who ran the place. He waved to her, calling, "You are still alive, Widow Semphroch?"

"I think so, yes," Nellie answered, which brought a twisted smile to the cobbler's wizened face.

Before she could say anything more, the sound of many booted men ru

"You civilians better get back under cover," one of them shouted. "The damn Rebs-beg your pardon, ma'am-they're liable to try comin' across the river. They do, we're go

The soldiers made harsh, eager grunts unlike any Nellie had heard before. Not all of them were fuzz-bearded boys; some had to be close to thirty. Mobilization had scooped up a lot of men who'd done their two years a long time ago, and put them back in the Army.

A couple of the soldiers were trundling a machine gun along on its little wheeled carriage. When they came to shell holes in the street, they either maneuvered it around them or manhandled it over. Its fat brass water jacket must have been newly polished, for it gleamed brighter than the bayonets.

One of the machine-gun handlers stared at Edna and ran his tongue over his lips as if he were a cat that had just finished a saucer of cream. Nellie glanced over to her daughter, who was filthy, bedraggled, exhausted… but young, unmistakably young.

Men, Nellie thought, a one-word indictment of half the human race. Not long ago, or so it seemed, they'd looked at her that way, and she'd looked back. She'd done more than look back, in fact. That was the start of how Edna came to be, and why her name had changed from Houlihan to Semphroch in such a tearing hurry.

She heard a fresh noise in the air, a sharp, quick whizz! A couple of soldiers looked up to see what that was. A couple of others, wiser or more experienced, threw themselves flat on the ground.

Only a couple of seconds after the whizz! first reached her ears, it was followed by a huge bang! at the head of the column. Men reeled away from the explosion, shrieking. There were more whizzes in the air now, too. The Confederates had spotted the moving infantrymen, and decided to open up on them.

Bang! Bang! Bang! Shells struck up and down the length of the battalion. Nellie didn't see all the slaughter they worked. "Get down!" she screamed to Edna, even before the second whizzing shell fell and burst. To make sure Edna listened and didn't stare back at the machine gu

More fragments whined past overhead. The shells that went whizz-bang weren't very big; the front wall of the coffeehouse stopped most of their fragments, though plenty screamed through what had been the window and scarred the plaster above the counter.

The barrage stopped as suddenly as it had begun. That didn't mean the street was silent; far from it. Cries and screams and moans and wails and sounds of pain for which Nellie had no descriptive words filled the air. She got to her feet and looked out. The street had been a sorry sight before. The slaughter now was worse than anything she'd ever imagined.

Men and pieces of men lay everywhere. The ones who were dead were less appalling than the ones who were wounded. A trooper tried to stuff spilled intestines back into his belly through a neat slit torn in his tunic. Another sat staring foolishly at his right arm, which he'd picked up off the pavement and was holding in his left hand. Quietly, without much fuss, he crumpled over and lay still.

"We have to help them, Ma," Edna said. "We have plenty of rags and things-"

Nellie hadn't noticed her daughter get up beside her. She nodded, though she knew what would happen if more shells caught them out in the open.

Stretcher bearers were taking charge of some of the wounded. They nodded gratefully, though, when they saw Nellie and Edna come out with old clothes in their hands.

The second man Nellie bandaged was the machine gu

Off to the west, rifle fire rang out. You lived in the city, you heard guns every so often; you got to know what they sounded like. But, a moment later, Nellie heard a sound she'd never known before. It was something like gunfire, something like a giant ripping a piece of canvas the size of a football field. It made the hair stand up at the back of her neck.