He wondered what else the Yankees were bombarding. Front-line trenches? Ammunition dumps? It mattered in theory, but not in practice, not right now. He couldn't do anything about it any which way. All he could do was lie flat and scrabble at the ground with the knife he wore on his belt, trying to dig a shallow hole in which he could shelter from the storm of steel- the storm of hate, the infantry called it-raging all around.

Blast from a near miss picked him up and slammed him back down to the ground, the way you might throw a kitten you didn't want against a brick wall to get rid of it. "Oof!" he said, and then, as he got more air back into his lungs, several less printable remarks.

How long the bombardment went on, he never knew exactly. When at last it lifted, it went down into the trenches even nearer the river than the battery was. Dazedly, Jake Featherston sat up. His hands shook. He tried to make them steady, and discovered he couldn't.

His gun, for a miracle, was still upright. Nobody else from the crew was sitting up, though. A couple of people were down and moaning, a couple of others down and not moving. The rest of the battery's howitzers had been tossed every which way, as if they were jackstraws.

He looked toward the smoke and dirt rising from the front-line trenches. Through that haze, he saw Yankees coming out of their own trenches and rushing toward the Susquehanna. They were going to try to force a crossing right now.

He ran to the howitzer. His head swivelled wildly. He had a target artillerymen dreamed of-but if he had to handle the three-incher by himself, he couldn't possibly fire often enough to do the CSA any good. He spied motion. Somehow, Nero and Perseus had come through the bombardment with as little damage as he had.

"You niggers!" he shouted. "Get your black asses up here on the double!" The labourers obeyed. If they hadn't, he would have drawn his pistol and shot them both. As things were, he barked, "You've seen the crew serve this gun often enough. Reckon you know how to do it your own selves?"

The two Negroes looked at each other. "Mebbe we do, Marse Jake," Perseus said at last, "but-"

"No time for buts." Featherston pointed toward the Susquehanna. "Every damnyankee in the world is headin' straight this way. They get this far, they're gonna kill you the same as me. Only way to keep 'em from gettin' this far I can think of is to blow 'em up first. Now-you gonna serve the gun?"

He didn't know whether his logic or his hand on the butt of his pistol was the more convincing. But the Negroes, after glancing at each other again, both nodded. "I kin load, I reckon," Nero said, "an' Perseus, he kin tote the shells. You got to do the rest, Marse Jake. We don't know nothin' 'bout how to aim."

"I'll handle that," Featherston promised. He looked around for Jethro Bixler, then wished he hadn't. The loader was spread out over the ground like an anatomy lesson. He hoped Nero wasn't lying to him, the way blacks did sometimes when they wanted to impress a white man.

Nero wasn't. He waited while Jake frantically worked the elevation screw to lower the muzzle of the gun and shorten range, then opened the breech, slammed in a shell, and dogged it shut almost as fast as poor dead Jethro could have done.

With a whoop, Featherston yanked the firing lanyard. The howitzer bellowed. A couple of seconds later, the shell burst among the swarming Yankees. They were close enough for Jake to watch the ones near the burst going down like ninepins. He whooped again and traversed the piece a little to the left.

Nero worked the breech. Out came the old shell casing. In went the new round. Jake jerked the lanyard. More U.S. soldiers fell. Methodically, he kept pumping shells into them. Despite the Yankee bombardment, not all the Confederate machine gunners were blasted out of their positions. They too began scything the U.S. attackers with bullets. Some of the Yankees did manage to ford the river and get into the Confederate trenches. The only ones who went any farther than that came to the rear as prisoners.

Seeing the glum, bloodied men in green-gray, Nero howled like a wolf. "We done it!" he shouted. "Jesus God almighty, we done it!"

They hadn't done it all by themselves-some guns from other batteries had spread death through the Yankee ranks, too-but they had done it. The eastern bank of the Susquehanna was littered with corpses tossed at every possible angle, and at too many impossible ones. A few last U.S. soldiers were scuttling back to their own trenches, like dogs fleeing with tails between their legs.

"We really did do it." Featherston knew he sounded stunned and shaky. He didn't feel bad about it; he was stunned and shaky. He slapped Nero on the back, and then Perseus. "You boys can serve my gun any time you please, and that's a fact. For a while there, I figured we'd be fightin' off the damn-yankees with pistols."

"Ain't got no pistol, Marse Jake," Nero pointed out. He looked in the direction of a dead artilleryman. "Them Yankees break through an' come this way, though, reckon I woulda had me one."

"Yeah," Jake said abstractedly. Except when Negroes were doing things like hunting for the pot, they weren't supposed to have firearms. You let black men get their hands on guns and you were sitting on a keg of powder with the fuse lighted and heading your way.

And Nero and Perseus hadn't just got their hands on a pistol, or even a Tredegar. They'd served an artillery piece, and they'd done a hell of a job at it, too. You couldn't make them forget how to do it, or that they'd done it. If there ever was a black rebellion, they could do it again, provided they got themselves a field piece.

But if Featherston hadn't put them on the gun, he almost certainly wouldn't have been alive to worry about things like that. If Major Potter ever found out he'd turned them into impromptu artillerymen, he was liable to order them dragged off somewhere and shot. Part of Jake said that was a good idea. Hell, part of him wanted to yank out his pistol and use it now, so nobody would know what he'd done.

He couldn't. They'd saved his neck along with their own. He would never have yelled for their help if he could have yelled for white men instead, but there hadn't been any white men to yell for. He'd done what he'd had to do, and he'd got away with it.

Now he said what he said to say: "It's over, boys. You got to go back to bein' niggers again. You know what I'm tellin' you?"

He wondered if they could obey, even if they wanted to. They'd just been soldiers, after all. One of the reasons you didn't let a Negro get a gun in his hands was that, if he did some fighting with it, he'd start feeling like a man, not like a servant. A Negro who felt like a man was liable to be a dangerous Negro.

But Nero and Perseus understood what Jake meant. Perseus said, 'Yes, suh, Marse Jake, we be your niggers again, till the next time y'all need us to be somethin' different." He sounded almost as if he was inviting Featherston to share a joke.

"All right," Jake answered, not knowing what else he could say. Eventually, the battery would get replacements: young white men, eager-or at least willing-to serve the guns. And, eventually, they'd get slaughtered, too. So would Jake, like as not. He carried on about his business with a grim fatalism; the Yanks could throw more metal at him than he could easily throw back.

And who would serve the guns in 1917, or 1919, or 1921, or however long the war lasted? Negroes? He shook his head. It couldn't happen, not really. He glanced over at Perseus and Nero. Could it?

"Breakthrough!" George Armstrong Custer pounded the desk. "That's what I want, nothing less!" In an old-fashioned dark blue uniform, the fringe on his epaulets would have shaken back and forth. Modern U.S. uniforms didn't have epaulets. He had to make do with shaking jowls instead. "I want to run riot through the Rebels, and by God that's what I'm going to do."