Men of War Read online

  "A CIVIL WAR SERIES WITH A TWIST."

  —Washington Post

  The Lost Regiment #1: RALLY CRY The Lost Regiment #2: UNION FOREVER The Lost Regiment #3: TERRIBLE SWIFT SWORD The Lost Regiment #4: FATEFUL LIGHTNING The Lost Regiment #5: BATTLE HYMN The Lost Regiment #6: NEVER SOUND RETREAT The Lost Regiment #7: A BAND OF BROTHERS

  Praise for William R. Forstchen and The Lost Regiment series “One of the most intriguing writers today in the field of historical military science fiction.”

  —Harry Turtledove, bestselling author of Guns of the South “A terrific adventure that’s as good as anything I’ve read in more years than I can remember. First-rate storytelling.”

  —Raymond E. Feist, New York Times bestselling author of Krondor, the Betrayal “The label ‘science fiction’ hardly describes this series as a whole, merely the premise. The Lost Regiment series is better described as a Civil War series with a twist.”

  —Washington Post ‘Science fiction lovers will cheer.’

  -Boy’s Life

  THE LOST REGIMENT

  MEN OF WAR

  William R. Forstchen

  ROC Published by New American Library, a division of Penguin Putnam Inc., 375 Hudson Street,

  MEN OF WAR

  New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

  Penguin Books Ltd, 27 Wrights Lane, London W8 5TZ, England Penguin Books Australia Ltd, Ringwood, Victoria, Australia Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2

  Penguin Books (N.Z.) Ltd, 182-190 Wairau Road, Auckland 10, New Zealand Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices:

  Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England , First published by Roc, an imprint of New American Library, a division of Penguin Putnam Inc.

  First Printing, December 1999 10 98765 432 1

  Copyright © William R. Forstchen, 1999 All rights reserved Cover art by San Julian RoC REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA Printed in the United States of America Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  For the men of all the Lost Regiments of the American Civil War, North and South, who gave the last full "measure of devotion and, in so doing, set an undying example of dedication and valor.

  This series has spun its web around me for more than a decade and it is now difficult to part from it. The desire to write a story in this genre with a Civil War theme formed over fifteen years ago, and I am eternally grateful to John Silbersack, my first editor with Penguin, for embracing an idea that other editors thought a bit mad. My sincere thanks must go as well to my agent, Eleanor Wood. When I became her client twelve years ago the Lost Regiment was the first thing I dropped on her desk, and it was she who saved it and moved it forward.

  This series started just as I entered graduate school and is now finished after obtaining tenure at Montreat College, so it has been a constant companion through a lot of changes in my life. My most humble thanks must go to Professor Gunther Rothenberg. Gunther was, and still is, my mentor, and it was an honor to study under him. Dennis Showalter, President of the Society of Military Historians, was a hero of mine years ago, and thus my shock when he called me one day, me a lowly graduate student, to express his delight in Rally Cry. Dennis’s input ever since has been invaluable and his studies of technology, logistics, and wdt are an inspiration. Mention must be made of Professor David Flory as well, a professor second to none. Another inspiration was the role model of L. Sprague de Camp when it came to combining history with science fiction and fantasy.

  Numerous friends were advisors and of tremendous help on this project and others, and are deserving of thanks, especially John Mina, Kevin Malady, Maury Hurt, Bill Fawcett, Elizabeth Kitsteiner, Monica Walker, Donn Wright, Tom Sesy, Tim Kindred, Dr. David Delle-croce for discussions on the finer points of the “Moon Fest,” Newt Gingrich, and Jeff Ethell. Any relation to those who served in the 35th is purely coincidence. The community of Montreat College, students, faculty, and administration has been remarkably tolerant of my idiosyncrasies and story writing. It is a rare college today that indulges its professors thus, and I am thankful for their understanding and support.

  Of course there is my family, who had to live through all of this, Sharon, Meghan (who learned to sing the “Battle Cry of Freedom” before she was three), and lay parents, who encouraged my interest in history from the start.

  There are numerous other names to mention, but publishers are not into acknowledgments that run for pages, nor as a reader do I often take the time to check them out, so we shall close it here. So if you are reading this, my thanks, but it is time to move on with the tale!

  —William R. Forstchen Montreat, NC June 1999

  Chapter One

  Colonel Andrew Lawrence Keane reached up and reverently touched the silken folds of the flag of the 35th Maine. Aged and bloodstained, the fabric was as fragile as the wings of a dying butterfly.

  A hundred nameless fields of strife, he thought wistfully. My own blood on that standard, my brother’s, all my comrades. How many of us left? Less than a hundred now. He slowly let his hand drop.

  It was early morning, the air heady with the scent of late spring. The grass was up, thick, a lush green, sprinkled with a riot of flowers—blue, yellow, and strange purple orchids unique to this alien world that was now home.

  Nature was already hard at work covering over the scars of the bitter winter battle. The deep trenches cut by the besieging Bantag were beginning to erode away, collapsing in on themselves under the incessant drumbeat of the heavy spring rains. Scattered wreckage of battle, discarded cartridge boxes, broken caissons, shell casings, tattered bits of uniform, and even the bones of the fallen were returning to the soil.

  His gaze swept across the field, fingering for a moment at the great city of the Roum, looking like a vision of an empire lost to his own world far more than a millennium ago. Pillared temples adorned the hills, the new triumphal arch commemorating the great victory already half-raised in the center of the old forum. Even in the city the scars of the bitter winter battle were beginning to disappear, new buildings rising up out of the wreckage, the distant sound of sawing, hammering; a city being reborn echoed across the fields.

  He turned his mount, nudging Mercury with his knees, shifting his gaze to the long lines deployed out behind him, a full corps drawn up for review before heading to the front. It was the glorious old 9th Corps, so badly mauled in the siege. The corps was deployed in battle formation, three divisions, with brigades in column, colors to the fore, occupying a front of more than half a mile. The formation was obsolete for battle use; in an open field it would be torn to shreds by modern firepower. But old traditions died hard, a
nd such a formation could still inspire the ranks, giving them a sense of their strength and numbers.

  “They’re starting to look better,” Hans Schuder announced. Andrew looked over to his old friend and nodded, urging Mercury to a slow canter, the flag bearer of the 35th following, as he paraded down the length of the line, saluting the shot-torn standards of the regiments, carefully eyeing the men.

  Most of the wear and tear of the winter fight, at least on the exterior, had been repaired … new uniforms to replace the rags that had covered the men by the end of the winter, rifles repaired and well polished, cartridge boxes and haversacks bulging with eighty rounds per man, and five days’ rations.

  Here and there the ranks had been replenished with new recruits, but most of the men were veterans: rawboned, tough, lean, eyes dark and hollow. Far too many of the regiments were pitifully small, sometimes down to fewer than a hundred men. Andrew had considered combining units and cutting the corps down to two divisions, but there had been a howl of protest. Regimental pride was as strong on this world as with any army back on the old world, so he had let the formation stand.

  Reining in occasionally, he paused to chat, making it a point to single out men who wore the coveted Medals of Honor. Eighteen had been awarded for the siege of Roum, and another five for the units that had flanked the Bantags with Hans Schuder. Self-consciously he looked down at his own medal, given to him personally by President Abraham Lincoln. It still made him feel somewhat guilty that he had thus been singled out. Taking command of the old 35th at Gettysburg after the death of Colonel Estes, he had simply held the line, refusing to budge, the same way the other regiments deployed along Seminary Ridge had fought on that terrible first day of the battle. He had bled the 35th white, lost his only brother, and awakened in the hospital minus an arm. And for that they gave me a medal. He looked over at Hans riding beside him. It wasn’t fair, he thought again. If anyone deserved the medal for that day, it was Hans.

  His gaze shifted to a color sergeant from the 14th Roum who had won his medal the hard way, killing over a dozen Bantags in hand-to-hand fighting. Andrew nodded to the sergeant and, as tradition demanded, saluted first in recognition of the medal. The sergeant, really not much more than a boy, grinned with delight and snapped off a salute in return.

  “Sergeant, ready to go back up to the front?” Andrew asked, still stumbling over the Latin.

  “I think we’re ready, sir.”

  Andrew smiled and continued on.

  “I think we’re ready,” Andrew said in English, looking over at Hans. “They’ll fight, but they’re worn out.”

  “Who isn’t, Andrew?” Hans replied laconically. “The years pass, the fighting continues, the faces keep changing in the ranks. They just keep seem to be getting younger; that boy with the Medal of Honor couldn’t be nineteen.”

  “Actually just turned eighteen,” Andrew replied. He looked back again at the boy with the old eyes, and saw the looks of admiration from the others in his company, for Keane had singled him out.

  The old game, Andrew thought, “with such baubles armies are led,” Napoleon had once said. Two new awards had been created at the end of the Battle of Roum, and many of the men now wore them, a dark purple stripe on the left sleeve denoting a battle wound, and a silver stripe, also on the same sleeve, for having killed a Bantag in hand-to-hand combat or for a conspicuous display of gallantry. A good third of the corps wore the purple stripe, and several hundred the silver. It just might motivate a frightened boy to stand while others ran.

  Coming to the head of the formation Andrew reined in and returned the salute of Stan Bamberg, commander of the 9th Corps and an old gunner of the 44th New York Light Artillery, who today was relinquishing command to head south and take over the 3rd Corps in front at Tyre. Jeff Frady, a redheaded gunner from the 44th had been promoted to take command, and in part this ceremony was the pomp and circumstance for a change of leaders.

  “Nice day to be heading up to the front,” Stan announced, looking at the pale blue morning sky. “This is a good corps, Andrew.”

  Andrew caught the undercurrent of concern in Stan’s voice. The 9th had been shredded at Roum, and some said the unit had simply broken. The survivors, including Stan, felt that something had to be proven.

  “How’s the arm?” Andrew inquired. Stan smiled, flexing it with barely a grimace, a souvenir of the last minutes of the battle for Roum, when the corps commander had gotten a little too enthusiastic, ridden to the front lines, and received a Bantag bullet as a result.

  “Ready to head south?”

  Stan smiled. “I’ll miss these boys.” He was staring at Jeff, who had been his second for well over a year. “Take good care of them.”

  Jeff nodded, not replying.

  A steam whistle echoed in the distance, interrupting their thoughts. Looking past Stan, Andrew saw a train coming down the broad open slope, its flatcars empty after delivering half a dozen land ironclads to the front. The corps would need thirty trains to take the ten thousand men and their equipment up to the front lines. Once they were in position everything would be in place for what he prayed would be the blow that cracked the Bantag position wide-open.

  He had taken the trip up there only a week before, to see the situation in front of Capua and arrange the final plans for the next offensive. The Bantag withdrawal back to the destroyed town, ninety miles east of Roum, had been thorough and brutal, not a single building, barn, hovel, bridge, or foot of track had been left intact by the retreating Horde. Over the last four months his railroaders had worked themselves to exhaustion, repairing, as well, the damage done by the two umens that had raided between Hispania and Kev.

  Even with the reconnected line, Pat O’Donald, up at the front, could barely keep five corps supplied, and though he was screaming for the 9th to move up as quickly as possible, Andrew half wondered if their arrival would be more of a burden than a help.

  They were at a stalemate, and he feared that this was a stalemate the Human forces would eventually lose. Though the Battle of Roum, in a tactical sense, had been a victory, in an overall strategic sense he feared it might very well have proven to be a dark turning point of the war.

  He remembered his old war back home, the summer and autumn of 1864, when Sherman and Sheridan had laid waste to Georgia and the Shenandoah Valley, crippling the breadbasket of the Confederacy. That, perhaps far more than the bitter siege in the trenches around Petersburg and Richmond, had truly broken the back of the Rebel cause.

  Here, in the present, the Bantag ravagings were a blow so severe that he had been forced temporarily to demobilize nearly twenty thousand Roum infantry who had been farmers. If they didn’t get some kind of crops in, the Republic would starve the following winter.

  Beyond the physical devastation of the Bantag winter offensive there was the human toll as well. Another forty thousand casualties for the army, more than a hundred thousand civilians lost and a million more homeless. The war was wearing them down, even as they continued to win on the battlefield.

  He sensed this new Bantag leader understood that far better than any foe he had ever faced across all the wars with the three hordes. The others had always perceived victory as a prize to be won on the battlefield. Yet in the reality of war that was only one component.

  What was needed now was not just a victory but a shattering and overwhelming triumph, an annihilating blow on the battlefield that broke the back of the Bantag Horde. He hoped that the forthcoming offensive would be that blow.

  “Sir, are you all right?” Jeff asked.

  Andrew stirred, realizing he had been gazing off in silence.

  He smiled, saying nothing for a moment. He was still weak, a hollow fluttery feeling inside, as if his heart, his body had gone as brittle as glass. The pain, thank God, was gone, though the dark craving for that terrible elixir, morphine, still lingered, the memory of its soothing touch drifting like a fantasy for a forbidden lover.

  “Just fine, Jeff, let’s not
keep the boys standing hefe. Reviews might be grand fun for generals, but they can be a hell of a bore for privates.”

  “Yes sir. I’ll see you up at the front, sir.”

  Jeff snapped off another salute and turned his mount, barking out a command. The fifers and drummers deployed behind him started in, commands echoing across the field as the densely packed columns wheeled about to pass in review and from there deploy out to the depot where the trains waited.

  The “Battle Hymn of the Republic” echoed across the open fields as the long sinuous columns marched past, the bayonet-tipped rifles gleaming in the morning sun.

  Stan, obviously moved by sentiment for his old command, cantered back and forth along the ranks, reaching down to shake hands and wish the boys well.

  “This has got to be the last campaign,” Hans announced. Andrew shifted in his saddle, looking over at his old friend.

  “Another battle like the last and it’s over with; either they will break us, or Roum will crack, or maybe even our own government. Andrew, you’ve got to find a way to end -it now.”

  Andrew looked away, watching as the ranks passed. There had been a time when this army, his army, so reminded him of the old Army of the Potomac. No longer. It had the look, the feel of the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia. The men were lean, too lean. His army was beginning to unravel from having fought one too many battles and knowing it would be forced to continue to fight, the only escape being dismemberment or death.

  It was evident all across the Republic, not just here, or at the front, but back in Suzdal, and to the smallest village hamlet. The vast infrastructure he had attempted to build to support this war was stretched like a bowstring and beginning to fray.

  “You see it, too?” Andrew asked.

  The columns swayed past, dust swirling up so that they looked like shadows passing even though it was noon. He could sense the lack of enthusiasm, the almost boyish excitement that went through an army when it finally broke camp and headed back up. No, these were grim veterans who would fight like hell, but the enthusiasm was dampened by the knowledge of reality.