Neither was the new barrel. It stank of gasoline and cordite and burnt paint and rubber and burnt flesh. Morrell’s nostrils tried to pinch in on themselves to hold out as much of that horrible smell as they could. His stomach lurched as soon as he recognized it. He’d smelled it too often before.

No barrel in the world could withstand a direct hit from a 105 at point-blank range. Getting hits with an artillery piece even at point-blank range was a much bigger problem, though. The best antibarrel weapon was still another barrel.

When Morrell walked around the charred corpse of this one, he got the feeling that the machines he commanded were like boys trying to stop men. The long gun with the big bore, the sloped armor, the low profile… This was what the USA should have had at the start of the war.

He turned to the lieutenant. “Can the inch-and-a-half guns on our barrels hurt these monsters at all?”

“They can penetrate the side armor, sir,” the youngster answered. “That frontal plate-I’m afraid not. Our barrels’ armor-piercing rounds mostly just bounce off.”

“Happy day,” Morrell muttered, and then, “We’ve got to upgun. That’s all there is to it.”

“Yes, sir,” the lieutenant said. “But the turret ring on our present model won’t let us mount a three-incher like these bastards have. Two and a fraction, that’s it-and even then we need a new turret to hold the larger weapon.”

“We’ve got to do it,” Morrell said, more to himself than to his guide. “Building a whole new machine from the ground up-well, we should have started a long time ago. Since we didn’t, we’ve just got to squeeze the most out of what we have for a while longer.”

“Can we?” the lieutenant asked-a question Morrell wished he didn’t have to contemplate.

After a moment’s thought, he answered, “Of course we can, son-because we’ve got to. Now where’s the map that shows our armored dispositions?”

“It’s back in town, sir,” the young lieutenant said. Morrell wished it were farther forward: one of a lot of things he wished that he wasn’t going to get. Back to Salem they went. Refugees from farther west clogged the road. Some of them tried to take shelter in Salem, even as the people who lived there cleared out.

Once upon a time, before bombs and artillery started landing on it, Salem had been a pleasant little city. It had held ten or twelve thousand people, and had boasted a flour mill, a dairy outfit, a couple of china factories, and some metalworks. It also boasted a monument to one Edwin Coppock, an abolitionist who’d raided Harpers Ferry with John Brown, and who’d been hanged with him. If the Confederates took Salem, they would blow that to hell and gone.

When Morrell actually got a look at the armored dispositions in northeastern Ohio, his own disposition soured, and his temper almost blew to hell and gone. “My God!” he burst out. “They’ve got them scattered all over the damned landscape!”

“They support the infantry, sir,” the shavetail said.

“No, no, no, no, no!” Morrell didn’t pound his head against the wall in the pleasant little clapboard house now doing duty for his headquarters. Why he didn’t, he couldn’t have said. As far as he was concerned, that restraint should have been worth a medal. “We’ve been at war for more than a year now. Hasn’t anybody learned anything about anything?”

“Sir?” The lieutenant, an earnest young man, realized he was out of his element.

Morrell didn’t try to explain. It would have taken too long. But the officer he was replacing hadn’t learned a thing from two wars’ worth of barrel tactics. The one thing you needed to do to get the most out of your armor was to mass it, to use it as the spearhead to your attack. Putting some of it here, some of it there, and some more of it in a no-account town twenty miles away was asking-begging-to get defeated in detail. And the Confederates-who, while they were manifest sons of bitches, were also capable sons of bitches when it came to handling armor-were only too happy to oblige.

The study Morrell went into was more nearly black than brown. “How the hell can I get my forces concentrated so I can do something with them?” he muttered.

“How can our infantry respond to the Confederates if they don’t have barrels to stiffen them, sir?” the lieutenant asked.

The look Morrell gave him should have left him charred worse than the burnt-out C.S. barrel. “I don’t want to respond to Featherston’s fuckers,” he ground out. The young lieutenant’s eyes widened, perhaps at the obscenity but more likely at the heresy. Morrell proceeded to spell it out: “I want to make Featherston’s fuckers respond to me. I can’t do that, can I, unless I can pull together enough barrels to get their attention?” It seemed obvious to him. Why didn’t it seem obvious to anybody else in a green-gray uniform?

“But, sir, if the infantry isn’t supported, the enemy will just slice through it, the way he has before.” The lieutenant sounded like a man trying to reason with a dangerous lunatic.

“He’s welcome to try,” Morrell said, which made the shavetail’s eyes get big all over again. “If I have a decent force of barrels of my own, though, I’ll land on his flank and cut his supply line neat as you please. Let’s see how much slicing he does without gasoline or ammo.”

He waited. The lieutenant contemplated. “Do you really think you could do that, sir?” He was too polite and too far under military discipline to call Morrell a liar in so many words, but he didn’t believe him, either.

“Would they have sent me here if they didn’t think I could?” Morrell asked. “Or don’t you think the War Department knows what it’s doing?”

“Sir, if the War Department knew what it was doing, would we be in a quarter of the mess we’re in?” the lieutenant replied.

Morrell stared at him as if he’d never seen him before. In a very real way, he hadn’t. He stuck out his right hand. When the lieutenant hesitated, Morrell grabbed his hand and pumped it up and down. “Congratulations!” he said. “That’s the first halfway smart thing I’ve heard out of you.”

“Uh, sir?” He’d bewildered the lieutenant.

“Always distrust what the people too far from the front line to hear small-arms fire tell you,” Morrell said. “Always. Most of what they think they know is going to be out of date or wrong some other way. It will have gone through too many mouths before it finally gets to them. And a lot of them won’t ever have got close enough to the front to hear small-arms fire. Half the time, they won’t understand what other people are trying to tell them even if it turns out to be the gospel truth. Sometimes it does-accidents will happen.”

The young officer eyed him. “What about you, sir?”

“There. That’s the second smart thing you’ve said.” Morrell grinned. “All I can tell you is, I’ve got an oak-leaf cluster for my damn Purple Heart. Do I pass inspection?”

“Uh, yes, sir.” The lieutenant blushed like a schoolgirl. A glance at the short row of fruit salad on his chest showed he’d never been wounded. He probably thought that made him less of a man. Morrell had had stupid notions like that till he got shot in the leg. Nothing like a wound infection to take the romance out of war.

He got down to business. “All right, then. How secure are the telephone lines out of this place?”

“Well, we do the best we can, sir, but I can’t guarantee the bastards in butternut aren’t tapping them,” the lieutenant said. “Same with the telegraph.”

“It would be,” Morrell muttered. A war between two countries that spoke the same language was harder than other kinds just about every which way. You had to assume the enemy was listening to everything you did, and that he knew what you were up to as soon as you did. You’d give him too much credit some of the time, but you didn’t dare give him too little.

You had to assume he was listening. You had to assume he knew what you were up to… “Do you know, Lieutenant, I hope he is. He’s almost bound to be, isn’t he?”