More shells landed in the river. Mantarakis got splashed again, and then again. Somewhere off to his left, he heard a shell hit a barge, and then heard a clamor of anguish from it. When you headed for battle this way, you were as helpless as a cow being driven along the chute to the fellow with the sledgehammer. You couldn't even fire back, the way you could when you got to solid ground.

How long to cross the river? It seemed like forever, though it couldn't have taken above fifteen minutes, twenty at the most. The soldiers in the front rows, who could see where they were going, passed word back that they were nearing the enemy side of the Ohio. One of them said, "Hope the Rebs don't have no machine guns down by the bank, or we ain't ever gonna make it onto dryland."

"You don't shut up, Smitty," somebody else said fiercely, "I'm gonna shove you in the river and you sure as hell won't make it to dry land."

Paul fingered the worry beads harder than ever. His sympathies were with the soldier who'd threatened to push Smitty overboard. The very idea of machine-gun bullets stitching through men who couldn't even duck was enough to make his testicles try to crawl up into his belly.

A big shell landed in the river, all too close to the barge. Mantarakis, who'd already been wet, was now soaked to the skin. Most of the shell fragments and shrapnel balls, fortunately, went into the water, though a couple of unlucky soldiers howled as they were wounded. The barge itself dipped and then recovered, almost as if it were a buggy jouncing over a pothole in the road.

Mixed in with the racket of artillery came the sharper discharges of rifles and, off in the distance, sure enough, the endless death-rattle bark of machine guns. A couple of men at the front of the barge started shooting, too. Mantarakis didn't know whether he liked that or not. It was liable to draw Confederate fire onto men who couldn't shoot back-him, for instance.

The barge lurched again. Paul didn't hear any explosions especially close by; no more upthrown water drenched him. Before he had time to think about what that might mean, whistles started squealing at the front of the barge and men screamed, "Out, you bastards! Move! Run! We've gone aground!"

All at once, Paul could move. Along with his squadmates, he ran forward and jumped off the bow of the barge. He got splashed then; the water into which he'd leaped came up past his knees. The mud on the bottom of the Ohio tried to pull his boots off his feet.

The water got shallower fast. Ahead of him, soldiers were running up onto dry land and then fanning out as they moved away from the bank. Now he saw what the artillery had done to the local landscape. It had probably been pleasant before the war started. It wasn't pleasant any more. Whatever grass and bushes had grown here were churned out of existence. He could tell that there had been trees down along the riverbank, but they were stumps and toothpicks now.

Beyond the trees-beyond what had been trees-the ground looked as if a chunk of hell had decided to take up residence in the Confederate States. He hadn't imagined anything could be so appalling as that cratered landscape. The U.S. guns had done their work well. Surely nothing could have survived the bombardment they'd laid down.

He made it up to the riverbank himself. His feet squelched dankly in his boots as he pounded inland. He reminded himself to put on dry socks if he ever got the chance. You let your feet stay soaked, all sorts of nasty things happened to them. He had cousins who worked on the wharfs in Philadelphia who'd made that mistake. Demetrios was still trying to get cured.

Up ahead, something moved, or Paul thought it did. Then, for a split second, he thought he'd made a mistake. And then, as flame spat from a rifle muzzle, he realized he hadn't; it was just that the Confederates' uniforms made them almost impossible to spot when they were in the dirt.

The rifle spat fire again. Ten or fifteen feet to Mantarakis' left, a man went down clutching at his leg. Paul went down, too, landing heavily enough to jolt half the wind from him. He brought his Springfield to his shoulder and drew a bead on the shell hole where he'd spotted the Reb. Was that movement? He fired, then crawled away on his belly. His own uniform, especially smeared with mud and dirt, gave pretty good concealment, too.

He found out how good the concealment was a moment later, when an American soldier he hadn't even seen got up, peering into the hole at which he'd shot, and waved everyone on. Paul got up and started to run before realizing he'd just killed a man. I should be feeling something, he thought. The only thing he felt was fear.

He stumbled in a hole in the ground and fell, counting himself lucky he didn't twist an ankle. When he got back to his feet, he looked behind him. He'd intended to see how the men on the barge were doing and whether it was all unloaded, but he kept staring, heedless of the occasional bullets still flying, at the grand spectacle of the Ohio River.

The river was full of barges and ferries of every size and age, with all the vessels laden to the wallowing point, almost to the capsizing point, with men in green-gray. Smoke billowed from scores, hundreds, of stacks, a deep black smoke different from the kind artillery explosions kicked up. Paul cheered like a madman at the display of the might the United States were putting forth. With that great armada, with the stunning artillery the gunners were laying down to ease the way for the Americans, how could the Confederate States hope to resist?

The plain answer, Paul thought, was that they couldn't. He cheered again, seized for a moment by war's grandeur instead of its terror.

And then, without warning, most of the barrage still descending on the Confederates ahead ended. "What the hell?" Paul said when the shelling eased up. He'd been in combat half an hour at most, but he'd already learned a basic rule: if anything strange happens, hit the dirt.

But he kept looking back over his shoulder- and, to his horror, he spotted a gunboat flying the Stars and Bars steaming west toward the lumbering vessels struggling across the Ohio. The engineers were supposed to have put mines in the river to keep Rebel craft away from the defenseless barges, but something had gone wrong somewhere and here this one was, a tiger loose among rabbits.

The river monitor- Mantarakis knew the Rebs didn't call them that, but he did- carried a turret like those aboard armored cruisers out on the ocean. Shooting up barges at point-blank range with six-inch guns was like killing roaches by dropping an anvil on them: much more than the job required. But the job got done, either way.

When a six-inch shell hit a barge, it abruptly ceased to be. You could, if you were so inclined, watch men and pieces of men fly through the air. They flew amazingly high. Then the monitor's turret would revolve a little, pick another target, and blow it out of the water. If that kept on for very long, it wouldn't have any targets left to pick.

Shells rained down around the gunboat, too, and on it- that was why the U.S. artillery had stopped its covering fire for the landing. If the guns didn't knock it out in a tearing hurry, there wouldn't be a landing, or not one with any chance of success. All at once, Paul realized he was in enemy country. Behind him, the Ohio looked uncrossably wide. He wondered if he'd ever see the other side of it again if the gunboat wasn't destroyed. Then he wondered if he'd ever see the other side of it if the gunboat was destroyed.

A shell slammed into the armored turret holding the monitor's big guns- slammed into it and bounced off. Those turrets were armored to keep out projectiles from naval guns; shells from field pieces they hardly noticed. But the rest of the Confederate riverboat was more vulnerable. The stacks were shot away; so was the conning tower. Rifle and machine-gun fire from the shore and from the barges kept the Rebels from putting anyone on deck to make repairs. Then the rudder went. The monitor slewed sideways. At last, a shell penetrated to the boiler. The monitor blew up even more spectacularly than the barges it had wrecked.