Read Online Breakthroughs by Harry Turtledove - Free Book Online

where he wished he led: “If we could return to planning, sir…”
    “Planning? Faugh!” Custer made a disgusted noise. “Once we smash through this line, Nashville falls, because we’ll be able to shell it to kingdom come. One more push—”
    “They’ve stopped all the pushes we’ve tried so far, sir,” Dowling reminded him: a sentence that covered thousands of dead and wounded, and burning barrels by the score. Custer’s favorite strategy, now as always in a career that stretched back to the War of Secession, was the headlong smash.
    Now the general commanding First Army looked sly, which alarmed Abner Dowling. “I think I’ve finally found a way to break through,” Custer said.
    “Really, sir?” Dowling hoped he kept all expression from his voice because, if he didn’t, the expression that would have been there was horror. Generals on both sides in America—and on both sides in Europe, too—had been chasing breakthroughs since the war began, with the same persistence and same success as men dying of thirst chasing mirages in the desert.
    Custer beamed, which made his cheeks sag and his jowls wobble. “Yes, by jingo.” He leaned forward and set a liver-spotted hand on Dowling’s knee, much as he would have liked to do with Cornelia. “And you’re going to help me.”
    “You’ll give me a combat assignment, sir?” Dowling asked eagerly. He’d longed for one since the war began. The War Department thought he was more useful as Custer’s adjutant. It was a nasty job, but someone had to do it, and Dowling, from long practice, had got good at it. But if Custer himself wanted to put his adjutant into action…
    Evidently, Custer didn’t. He shook his head, which made those lank locks of hair flip back and forth. Dowling coughed a little at the stink of the cinnamon-scented hair oil Custer liked. Nobody else Dowling knew had used the nasty stuff since the turn of the century. “No, no, no,” Custer said. “You’re going to help me keep things straight with Philadelphia.”
    “I’ll be happy to edit your correspondence, sir,” Dowling said. The general’s correspondence needed editing—more than it commonly got. Custer was a firm believer in a variation on the Ptolemaic theory: he was convinced the world revolved around him. Anything good that happened anywhere near him had to redound to his credit and no one else’s; nothing bad was ever his fault. In that as in few other things, Libbie aided and abetted him.
    He was shaking his head again. “No, no, no,” he repeated. “I have something important in mind, and I don’t want those dunderheads with gold and black piping on their caps to get wind of it and tell me I can’t do it because it runs against the way they read the Bible.”
    “Exactly what is it you have in mind, sir?” Dowling asked with a sinking feeling. Gold and black were the branch-of-service colors of the General Staff. Whatever Custer was thinking about, it was something he already knew the War Department brass in the City of Brotherly Love wouldn’t love one bit.
    “I’ll tell you what I have in mind, Major,” Custer said. “I have in mind the biggest goddamn barrel roll the world has ever seen, that’s what.”
    Well, I might have guessed,
Dowling thought. The tracked, armored, motorized forts called barrels were the best thing anyone had yet found for breaking the deadly stalemate of trench warfare. They could smash barbed wire, clearing paths for infantry, and they could bring machine-gun and cannon fire down on the enemy from point-blank range. They also broke down about every five minutes and, even when they were working, didn’t move any faster than a man could walk.
    The adjutant chose his words with care: “Sir, doctrine specifically orders that barrels be spread out evenly along the front, to assist infantry attacks wherever they may be carried out.”
    “And what a lot of poppycock that is, too,” Custer declared, as if he were the Pope speaking
ex