Read Online American Front by Harry Turtledove - Free Book Online Page A

moment, she did not understand what she was seeing, and thought a Midwestern dust storm had suddenly been transplanted to those low, rolling hills. Dust there was aplenty, but no wind to raise it. Instead, it came from the carpet of shells the Confederates were laying down. When she looked more closely, she spied the ugly red core of fire in each explosion. She wondered how anything could live under such bombardment, and if anything did.
    Her question there was answered a moment later, for not all the flames came from landing shells. Some sprang from the muzzles of U.S. guns hurling death back at the enemy. To her amazement, she discovered she could briefly follow some of the big American shells as they rose into the sky.
    She turned her head toward the Potomac. Smoke and buildings obscured most of her view there but, from what she could tell, the Virginia heights were taking as much of a pounding as those around Washington.
Good
, she thought savagely.
    From behind her, Edna said, “Let’s go, Ma.”
    Nellie waved her daughter up alongside her and pointed to the bombardment raining down outside of town. “I don’t think we’d better,” she said. “Looking at that, we’re safer where we’re at.” Edna bit her lip but nodded.
    Across the street, something moved inside a battered cobbler’s shop. Nellie’s heart jumped into her mouth until she recognized old Mr. Jacobs, who ran the place. He waved to her, calling, “You are still alive, Widow Semphroch?”
    “I think so, yes,” Nellie answered, which brought a twisted smile to the cobbler’s wizened face.
    Before she could say anything more, the sound of many booted men running made her turn her head. A stream of green-gray-clad American soldiers in matching forage caps pounded past the wrecked delivery van and dead horses. Sunlight glinted from the bayonets they’d fixed to the ends of their rifles.
    “You civilians better get back under cover,” one of them shouted. “The damn Rebs—beg your pardon, ma’am—they’re liable to try comin’ across the river. They do, we’re gonna give ’em what for. Ain’t that right, boys?”
    The soldiers made harsh, eager grunts unlike any Nellie had heard before. Not all of them were fuzz-bearded boys; some had to be close to thirty. Mobilization had scooped up a lot of men who’d done their two years a long time ago, and put them back in the Army.
    A couple of the soldiers were trundling a machine gun along on its little wheeled carriage. When they came to shell holes in the street, they either maneuvered it around them or manhandled it over. Its fat brass water jacket must have been newly polished, for it gleamed brighter than the bayonets.
    One of the machine-gun handlers stared at Edna and ran his tongue over his lips as if he were a cat that had just finished a saucer of cream. Nellie glanced over to her daughter, who was filthy, bedraggled, exhausted…but young, unmistakably young.
    Men
, Nellie thought, a one-word indictment of half the human race. Not long ago, or so it seemed, they’d looked at her that way, and she’d looked back. She’d done more than look back, in fact. That was the start of how Edna came to be, and why her name had changed from Houlihan to Semphroch in such a tearing hurry.
    She heard a fresh noise in the air, a sharp, quick
whizz!
A couple of soldiers looked up to see what that was. A couple of others, wiser or more experienced, threw themselves flat on the ground.
    Only a couple of seconds after the
whizz!
first reached her ears, it was followed by a huge
bang!
at the head of the column. Men reeled away from the explosion, shrieking. There were more whizzes in the air now, too. The Confederates had spotted the moving infantrymen, and decided to open up on them.
    Bang! Bang! Bang!
Shells struck up and down the length of the battalion. Nellie didn’t see all the slaughter they worked. “Get down!” she screamed to Edna, even before the second whizzing shell fell and burst. To