He swore. The mask muffled the curses, too. Trust the high foreheads to come up with protection that made danger seem welcome by comparison. If that wasn’t a metaphor for the futility of war in general…

But this war in particular had better not be futile, not for the CSA. “Tell Division we need counterbattery fire, and we need it ten minutes ago!” he shouted to the wireless operator.

For a wonder, the Confederate guns woke up in short order. Some of what they threw at the Yankees was gas, too. Even when the shells flew by far overhead, you could hear the stuff sloshing inside them. Tom laughed. If anything was worse than being an infantryman under gas attack, it was trying to jerk shells with a gas mask on. Serves you right, you bastards, he thought savagely. See how you like it.

The U.S. bombardment slackened but didn’t stop. Then a flight of Mules swooped down on the Yankee gun positions. One of the Asskickers crashed in flames. Maybe it got hit; maybe the pilot didn’t pull out of his dive soon enough. What difference did it make, one way or the other? But the dive bombers did a better job of silencing the artillery than counterbattery fire had.

Some Confederate barrels clattered and crunched up to the front. Fighting inside one of them was no picnic in weather like this, either, especially when they needed to stay buttoned up tight against gas. But their guns blasted the U.S. soldiers out of the positions to which they’d withdrawn.

“Come on!” Tom shouted, running forward. “We can get to the river. Maybe we can even get over the river.” Before long, he caught up with the barrels, and then ran past them. Soldiers turned to stare at him. In their pig-snouted, portholed masks, they looked like the Martians in that Yankee film that had scared the pants off everybody a few years before the war. But he knew the magic words that would get them moving: “Follow me!”

That spell never failed. Men might balk at going forward alone, but they would go after an officer. Tom’s heart thudded in his chest. He hoped he didn’t fall over dead leading from the front. Middle-aged officers took that chance when they tried to lead young men.

To his relief, the barrels also rumbled forward. Armor and infantry working together were hard to stop. The damnyankees didn’t stop them. Tom whooped. “The river!” he yelled. There was the muddy Cuyahoga, winding its way north and west toward Lake Erie. The tail of a crashed fighter stuck up from the water near the far bank.

On that far bank, U.S. troops didn’t seem to know they had trouble. Tom ordered his men not to shoot across the river. He sent an urgent request back to Division for engineers with rubber boats. If they could cross in a hurry, set up a bridgehead on the far bank… Maybe they’d get slaughtered. Troops that tried to do too much too fast sometimes did. But maybe they’d shake the Yankees loose from the river line, too.

For a wonder, the engineers showed up in less than an hour. Soldiers piled into the boats as fast as the engineers could inflate them. The Confederates paddled like men possessed. But their foes didn’t stay bemused long enough. Heavy machine-gun fire from the east bank of the river turned them back with heavy losses.

C.S. barrels waddled forward and shelled the machine-gun nests. “Let’s try it again!” Tom shouted. This time, he scrambled into one of the black rubber boats himself. He’d get over the Cuyahoga or he’d probably die in it. He grabbed a paddle and thrust it into the muddy water.

The machine guns stayed quiet. The barrels had done their job, then. Rifle fire from the far bank was galling, but no worse than galling. Confederate machine guns, some on the barrels and others served by infantrymen, made the damnyankee riflemen keep their heads down.

A bullet cracked past Tom. When you heard that crack, the round came too damn close. He automatically ducked, not that it would have done him any good. Nobody thought anything less of him for ducking. Only a handful of nerveless people lacked that reflex.

Here came the far bank. “Let’s go!” Tom yelled, and paddled harder than ever. As soon as the rubber boat grounded on the mud, he leaped out and ran for the closest wreckage. He threw a grenade into what looked like the mouth of a cave in case any U.S. soldiers lurked there, then dove behind a burned-out truck carcass. “Stay down!” he called to his men. “If they want you, make ’em pay for you!”

More Confederates got over the Cuyahoga. U.S. soldiers rushed up to try to wipe out the bridgehead before it got established. A mortar bomb whispered down much closer to Tom than he would have liked. Fragments of hot, jagged steel snarled through the air. Not far away, somebody shrieked-some of those fragments had snarled through flesh instead.

Asskickers that stooped on the attacking men in green-gray might have been angels in camouflage paint. Tom Colleton yelled exultantly at the chance to get killed farther east in Ohio than other Confederates had before him.

Sergeant Michael Pound approved of the way Lieutenant Bryce Poffenberger’s combat education was coming. Lieutenant Poffenberger hadn’t gone and killed himself yet. Even more to the point, the barrel commander hadn’t yet gone and killed Sergeant Pound. Pound strongly approved of that.

What he didn’t approve of were the new Confederate barrels. No, that wasn’t quite true. He highly approved of them-as machines. What he didn’t approve of was that the long-snouted monsters had Confederates inside them and not U.S. barrelmen.

“We could have had barrels like that,” he told Lieutenant Poffenberger as they camped somewhere between Akron and Canton. “We could have had them more than ten years ago, but we didn’t want to spend the money.”

Incautiously, Poffenberger said, “And I suppose you were there at the creation.”

“Yes, sir,” Pound said-if the puppy forgot, he had to have his nose rubbed in it. “I was at the Barrel Works at Fort Leavenworth when General Morrell-of course, he wasn’t a general then, just a colonel-designed the prototype for the model we’re using now. If we’d had that then, we would have upgraded long since. I’m sure of it.”

Poffenberger stared at him. Firelight shone from the junior officer’s wide eyes. Not for the first time, he asked the question a lot of people had asked before him: “Why the devil aren’t you an officer, Sergeant?” What he meant by it was, Why the devil aren’t you out of my hair?

“I like what I’m doing, sir,” Pound replied in his best innocent tones. “Things are-looser this way.”

“Hrmp,” Poffenberger said, a noise that might have meant anything at all.

“If you’ll excuse me, sir…” Pound waited to be sure the lieutenant wouldn’t hold him, then walked over to the barrel. The driver, a blond from Dakota named Tor Svenson, was fiddling with the engine, wrench in one hand, flashlight in the other. Any good barrel crew did a lot of its own maintenance; the big, heavy machines operated at-or often past-the limits of engine, transmission, and suspension, and they broke down a lot even when coddled and cosseted. “What’s up, Svenson?”

The driver had been so engaged in what he was doing, he needed a moment to realize somebody was talking to him. When he looked up, a smear of grease darkened one Viking cheekbone. “Oh, it’s you, Sarge,” he said, relief in his voice. Relief that it wasn’t Second Lieutenant Bryce Poffenberger? Pound wouldn’t have been surprised. Svenson went on, “You notice how the beast doesn’t quite pick up fast enough when I goose it?”

“Uh-huh.” Pound nodded. “Figure it’s the carb?”

“Yah, but I can’t find anything wrong with the son of a bitch.”

“Let me have a look.” With a grunt, Pound heaved himself up onto the machine so he could look down on the engine. As a matter of fact, he did look down on it; it wasn’t powerful enough to let the barrel do everything he wished it could. He had a variety of wrenches and other tools in his coverall pockets. Some of them helped him adjust his beloved gun. The others clanked there because any barrelman who’d been at his trade for a while turned into a pretty fair mechanic.