Free The Grapple by Harry Turtledove Page A

his days as a company commander at the start of the Great War. He took the first position he ever attacked—and he got shot charging with the bayonet when he ran out of ammunition. That taught him an important lesson: like anything else, being in a hurry had its disadvantages.
    It also had its advantages, though. Massing barrels and smashing Confederate lines made the CSA say uncle in 1917. At the Barrel Works at Fort Leavenworth after the Great War, Morrell designed a machine with all the features a modern barrel needed: a reduced crew, a powerful engine, a big gun in a turret that turned through 360 degrees, and a wireless set.
    He designed it—and he found nobody in the USA much wanted it. The Great War was over, wasn’t it? There’d never be another one, would there? Being a man in a hurry sometimes put you too far ahead not only of the enemy but also of your own side.
    By the time it became clear the Great War wouldn’t be the last one after all, the state of the art all over the world had caught up with Morrell’s vision. Germany and Austria-Hungary built barrels incorporating all the features he’d envisioned more than fifteen years earlier. So did France and England and Russia. And so did the Confederate States.
    So did the United States, but belatedly and halfheartedly. When the fighting started, Morrell had to try to defend Ohio without enough machines—and without good enough machines. He failed. Even in failure, he alarmed the Confederates. A sniper gave him an oak-leaf cluster for his Purple Heart and put him on the shelf for weeks.
    Returning to duty, he didn’t have much luck in Virginia, a narrow land bristling with fortifications. But he was the architect of the U.S. thrust that cut off, surrounded, and destroyed the Confederate army that fought its way into Pittsburgh. Now the armored force he led was driving west through Ohio. He knew exactly what he wanted to do. If, somewhere south of Columbus, his force could meet up with the one pushing southeast from northwestern Ohio and Indiana, they would trap all the Confederates to the north of them in another pocket.
    He didn’t think Jake Featherston could afford to lose one army. He knew damn well the President of the CSA couldn’t afford to lose two. What could be better, then, than giving Jake exactly what he didn’t want?
    Right this minute, Morrell was bivouacked with his lead barrels atop Mount Pleasant, in Lancaster, Ohio. The 250-foot sandstone rise looked down on the whole town. It had not lived up to its name. Not being fools, the Confederates put an observation post and several artillery batteries atop the rise, and protected them with pillboxes and machine-gun nests.
    Clearing them out was a slow, bloody, expensive job. Morrell believed in bypassing enemy strongpoints wherever he could, letting slower-moving infantry clean up in the armor’s wake. Some strongpoints, though, were too strong to bypass. This, unfortunately, was one of them.
    Dive bombers helped pound it into submission. Several 105s sprawled in the snow, knocked ass over teakettle by 500-pound bombs. Dead soldiers in butternut lay there, too. Some of them wore white camouflage smocks over their uniforms, which struck Morrell as a good idea. Good idea or not, it didn’t save them. Along with soot, their blood streaked the snow.
    Crows and a couple of turkey vultures were feeding on the bodies. Standing up in his barrel’s cupola, Morrell waved his arms and yelled, “Yaaah!” A few of the birds flew away. Most of them ignored him.
    The gunner tapped him on the leg. “What the hell, sir?” Corporal Al Bergeron said plaintively. “You scared the crap out of me there.”
    “Sorry, Frenchy,” Morrell answered. Bergeron was a good man and a good gunner—maybe not quite so good as Michael Pound, who was one of a kind in several different ways, but damn good just the same. Morrell explained why he made his horrible noise.
    “Oh.” Bergeron thought about that for a little