In at the Death Read Free Page A

Others stopped to return fire. Having expended three rounds from this spot, Pound figured it was time to move. They would have a good idea where he was, the same as if he’d lit three cigarettes on a match. He ordered the barrel back and to the left to a secondary firing position he’d marked out ahead of time.
    Nobody ever said the Confederates lacked guts. They pressed the attack hard. Pound could see only his little part of it, like any soldier at the front. Thanks to the mines and the machine guns and the barrels and the fighter-bombers that swooped down on the enemy, the men in butternut never made it across the open ground and into the pine woods. They tried three different times, which only meant they paid a higher price for failure than if they’d left well enough alone after the first time.
    When they sullenly pulled back late that afternoon, Pound said, “We ought to go after them. We might be able to walk right into Atlanta.”
    “Easy to walk
into
Atlanta, sir,” Scullard said. “If we do, though, how many of us’ll walk out again?”
    Pound grunted. Having seen what the fighting in Pittsburgh was like, he didn’t want to wind up on the other end of that. But watching the enemy get away went against all his instincts.
    Then rockets started screaming down on the open ground in front of the woods and on the trees as well. Blast made even the heavy barrel shudder on its tracks. The Confederates were doing everything they could to discourage pursuit. He feared the foot soldiers were catching it hard.
    Even so…“They won’t take Lawrenceville away from us like that,” he said.
    “No, sir,” Scullard agreed. “We’ll likely try a flanking move from there, I bet. If we can make them leave Atlanta without us going in and taking it away from them, that sounds goddamn good to me.”
    “To me, too,” Pound said. “The cheaper, the better.”
    The order to move forward came early the next morning. The axis of the advance was southeast: not straight towards Atlanta, but deeper into central Georgia. That warmed the cockles of Michael Pound’s heart. It also told him that General Morrell, whom he’d known for many years, still had what it took. Morrell was all but inviting the Confederates in Atlanta to strike at his flank again. If they did, he would give them lumps.
    They didn’t. Watching their first counterattack fail must have taught them something. Pound didn’t—wouldn’t—believe they’d lost too many men and too much equipment for another try. They’d counterattacked again and again, all the way down from the Ohio River—usually before they should have. And it had cost them a lot more than standing on the defensive and making U.S. forces come to them would have done. Maybe they were finally wising up.
    But if they were, it was liable to be too late. If they didn’t come out of Atlanta, men and barrels in green-gray would curl around and cut them off from the east and south as well as from the north. And what would stop Irving Morrell’s armor from slashing across the rest of Georgia to Savannah and the Atlantic and cutting the Confederacy in half?
    Nothing Second Lieutenant Pound could see.
    Here and there, the Confederates still fought hard. The Freedom Party Guard units, in their mottled uniforms, had the best gear the CSA could give them and a vicious determination to use it. They took few prisoners, and mostly didn’t let themselves get captured. And their fanatical resistance got them…
    Not very much. Jake Featherston didn’t have enough Guard outfits to go around. He didn’t come close. In between the towns they defended and the strongpoints they manned lay…again, not very much. Most Confederate soldiers, like most soldiers most places, weren’t so enthusiastic about dying for their country. Militias of beardless boys and old men mixed bolt-action Tredegars from the last war with hunting rifles and shotguns. Some of them were brave. It hardly mattered. They didn’t have