IWW2 Dispatches

My unit pulled into Norcross on July 8. This was pretty good time, considering that no cylinder patrol had mobilized in a dozen years, not counting what was going on in Minnesota. There was a sense of urgency but not worry, not yet. The brass decided to stage out of Norcross ’cause it was the last stop on the Southern Railroad before you reached Atlanta. According to scuttlebutt, the governor of Georgia had appealed to the President direct that we roll into Atlanta and “save the city”. Lucky for us that Prescott had been a CP man back when that meant something. He knew better than to run headlong into those things, and that carried down the line.

Anyway, with all respect for the position of the governor, it wasn’t our city and we knew we had time on our side. It’d probably be bad in Atlanta, proper, but we could just wait it out, track the walkers while they scouted the area. Wait for Grace, just like the handbook said. We were about to discover, the handbook needed rewriting.

I’d only been in the Army for a little under a year, but I’d already done my share of walker drills. ‘Course, they were only drills. No one in the States had seen a walker in a dozen years, maybe more. We had it all down on paper, but it was a little comical, really. We go out to the corn fields or wherever and chase around a pickup truck with a telephone pole sticking straight up and a sign in red, “Walker”. The officers were always trying to innovate new tactics to go with the new weaponry that’s been developed, but we only practiced “live” once, and the gear hardly worked then. Sometimes we didn’t even get Springfields and practiced with broomsticks.

In the event, the one was about as useful as the other, compared to heat rays and black clouds.

Tags: Gwinnett, biography, campaigns by dmacelroy
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I don’t really see the point of this, but if Captain Atherton says to do it, I do it. Seems some high brass in the Service thinks it’s a good idea to record a “soldier’s-eye view” for the benefit of our future posterity. And who knows? Maybe it makes sense, now that it looks like we’ll have one.

This war and me, we go way back. My ma brought me into this world the night before the Grace. Well, to be more exact, G-Day in Brooklyn. So you might say I was getting started just as the walkers were winding down. Like any boy I kept an ear peeled for whenever someone’d report another lone cylinder. They weren’t scary then, more like pathetic. The papers would follow it for the seven or days it lasted, almost like following the ball game. People needed that, I guess, something that helped them forget how close we’d come. But I always knew in my bones they’d be back in strength eventually.

I signed up right after St. Petersburg. It’d been in my head since they announced the discovery of the Red Weed Field; I knew what was coming, but I didn’t want to admit it even to myself. But that changed when we started getting reports out of Russia — and when we stopped getting news from Russia, my mind was made up. So I was in the Service before there was a Service. Regular Army, back then, understaffed and underpaid. A fine American tradition.

Anyway, that meant I was under arms even before Minnesota and Georgia. My unit was mobilized after Minneapolis fell but we didn’t get moving before the cylinders came down near Atlanta. They boosted us down that way right quick. [laughs] I guess the brass in Washington looked at a map and saw it was only half as far to Georgia as it was to Minnesota. Anyway, we got down there a day after the cylinder opened. We had our new equipment but the really big stuff hadn’t made it yet. Some of that you had to move by rail; the old Zeds couldn’t lift it.

Things didn’t go the way they had in training. I’ll give you the full story some other time, but suffice it to say it was a combination of a hidebound Army and innovation on the part of the Martians. We got stomped, but we did withdraw in good order, trading ground slowly, doing it by the book. Hell, some of the less-bright types treated it like a game. We fell back on Norcross, in Gwinnett County, and waited for the Martians to be struck down by Grace.

Then we got the reports out of Minnesota. It was more than ten days past planetfall and the Martians weren’t dying…

Tags: biography by dmacelroy
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