He could see daylight, yes. He could also see smoke, and smell it: smoke from burning rubber and explosives and wood and paint and several other things. His eyes stung. He coughed again and again.

Behind him, Pete said, “How bad is it?” He was coughing, too. Dover wished he were wearing a gas mask. He hoped the Yankees hadn’t blown up any gas shells, or he might really need one.

“I don’t think it’s good,” he answered. Getting out of the trench was easy. A near miss had built a nice, convenient ramp. If that one had burst a hundred feet to the left…No, you didn’t have to fight at the front to see combat these days.

He and Pete and the other soldiers hurried up to ground level and looked around. “Fuck,” Pete said softly, which summed things up pretty well.

Enemy air strikes had pounded Jerry Dover’s supply dumps before. That was part of the cost of doing business in a war. He didn’t think one of his depots had ever taken a beating like this before, though. Eight or ten fires raged. Yes, one of them was an enemy bomber’s pyre-he could see the airplane’s tail sticking up. But the damnyankees had done a lot more damage here than they’d taken doing it.

Hoses were already playing on some of the worst blazes. Dover felt proud of his men. They knew what they had to do, and they did it. And in doing it, they took chances front-line soldiers never had to worry about.

Of course, the men at the front had worries of their own. Pete cocked his head to one side, listening. “Firing’s picked up-fuck me if it hasn’t.”

Dover listened, too. He said the worst thing he could think of: “Yeah, I think you’re right.”

“They’re trying to break out.” Pete found something bad to say, too.

“Sure sounds that way,” Dover allowed.

“Think they can do it, sir?” Any time Pete used an officer’s title, he needed reassurance.

Right now, Dover longed for reassurance, too. “Hope to hell they can’t.”

A telephone rang. He would have bet the bombardment had blown up the instrument or broken the lines that made it work, but no. He ran over to it and admitted he was there and alive.

“Dover, you’ve got to send me everything, fast as you can!” He recognized the voice of the brigadier general who’d offered him a regiment. “They’re coming at me with everything they’ve got. If you have a division’s worth of dehydrated infantry, pour water on ’em quick and get ’em up here.”

In spite of everything, Dover smiled. But he had to say, “Sir, I don’t know what the hell we’ve got right this second. They just bombed hell out of the dump, too.”

The general’s opinion of that violated all the Commandments with the possible exception of the one against graven images. “We’re doing all we can, dammit, but how can we hang on if we don’t have enough bullets and shells?” he said.

“I’ll get you what I have, sir.” Dover slammed down the handset and yelled orders. He had to interrupt himself when the telephone rang again. “Dover here,” he said.

“Rockets! Antibarrel rockets!” another harried officer screamed in his ear. “Damnyankee armor’s tearing holes in my lines! They’ve got these goddamn flail barrels to clear mines, and they’re going through us like a dose of salts. If we don’t stop ’em quick, we are dead meat, you hear me? Fucking dead meat!”

Dover didn’t know what a flail barrel was. He didn’t know how many antibarrel rockets had escaped the Yankee bombs. He didn’t even know who was yelling at him. He managed to find that out. He rapidly figured out one other thing, too: the United States were pushing hard here. If they did break through…If they break through, we’ve lost the damn war for sure, Dover thought. He dashed off to do what he could to stop them.

Signs with skulls and crossbones on them warned the world a minefield lay ahead. Lieutenant Michael Pound was pretty sure the signs and the field were genuine. When the Confederates bluffed, they usually slanted the bones and the word MINES. These stood straight.

He was a hard charger, but he didn’t want to tear across that field and blow a track or maybe get the bottom blasted out of his barrel. And he didn’t have to. “Here comes a flail,” he said happily, ducking down into the turret to relay the news to his gunner and loader and to get on the wireless to the other machines in his platoon. He’d had to make himself remember to do that when he first became an officer. Now he did it automatically.

Sergeant Mel Scullard grinned. “Those bastards sure are funny-looking,” he said.

“Well, I won’t argue with you,” Pound told the gunner. “But who gives a damn? They do the job, and that’s what counts.”

Some engineer must have been smoking funny cigarettes when he came up with the flail barrel. He mounted a rotor drum on a couple of horizontal steel bars out in front of the barrel’s chassis. The barrel’s engine powered the contraption. Lengths of heavy chain came off the drum. As it rotated, the chains spanked the ground ahead of the oncoming machine. They hit hard enough to touch off mines before the barrel itself got to them. And other barrels could follow the path the flail cleared.

Naturally, the Confederates did everything they could to blow up flail barrels before they got very far. But, after the pounding U.S. artillery and aircraft had given the defenders here, they couldn’t do as much as they wanted to. The Confederate Army remained brave, resourceful, and resilient. It wasn’t so responsive as it had been earlier in the war, though. You could knock it back on its heels and stun it if you hit it hard enough, and the USA had done that here.

“Follow the flail!” Pound commanded, and his driver did. They all wanted to get past the minefield as fast as they could. The pine woods ahead weren’t cleared yet. That meant they were bound to have Confederate soldiers-and, all too likely, Confederate barrels-lurking in them.

The other machines in Pound’s platoon followed him, as he followed the flail barrel. Every commander rode with his head and shoulders out of the cupola, the better to see trouble. He was proud of them. He hadn’t ordered them to do it. He wouldn’t have given an order like that. They got out there on their own.

Fires in the woods sent up smudges of smoke. There weren’t enough of them to drive out the lurkers, however much Pound wished there were. If they had an antibarrel cannon waiting…

They did. Sensibly, they fired at the flail barrel first. If they knocked it out, all the machines behind it would expose themselves to danger among the mines. Their AP round scored a direct hit…on the flail. The gadget fell to ruins, but the barrel kept going. Now it was as vulnerable as any of the others.

“Front!” Pound sang out-he’d seen the muzzle flash.

To his relief, Mel Scullard sang out, “Identified,” which meant he’d seen it, too. To the loader, he added, “HE!”

With a thrum of hydraulics, the turret traversed to the left. As it steadied, Pound ordered the barrel to stop to give the gunner a better shot. If the gun in the woods was drawing a bead on him at the same time…Well, that was the chance you took.

Several cannon spoke at once: the antibarrel gun and at least four barrels’ main armaments. An AP round dug a furrow in the dirt a few feet to the right of Pound’s machine. He was surprised it didn’t touch off a mine or two. The other shells all burst close to the same place in the woods.

“Gun it!” Pound yelled to the driver. If they hadn’t knocked out the gun or wounded the crew, more murderous projectiles would come flying out of there. “Stay behind the flail barrel,” he added a split second later.

“How come?” the driver asked. “He’s not gonna do any more flailing.”

“Well, no,” Pound said, and let it go at that. Some people weren’t very bright, and you couldn’t do anything about it. The lead barrel’s flail might have taken a knockout, but it could still show where at least one mine lay-the hard way.