Harry Turtledove: The Guns of the South

He was not the only one to raise the question; quite a few shouted it. Caudell kept quiet. By now, he was willing to assume Lang knew what he was doing.

The weapons instructor stayed perfectly possessed. He said, “I didn’t show you that earlier because it wastes ammunition and because the weapon isn’t accurate past a few meters—yards—on full automatic. You can only carry so many rounds. If you shoot them all off in the first five minutes of a battle; what will you do once they’re gone? Think hard on that, gentlemen, and drill it into your private soldiers. This weapon requires fire discipline—requires it, I say again.”

He paused to let the point sink in. Then he grinned. It made him look like a boy. When he was serious, his thin, sallow features showed all his years, which had to be as many as Caudell’s own thirty-four. He said, “Now we’ve done the exciting things with the weapon. Time to get on to the boring details that will keep it working and you alive—cleaning and such.”

A groan rose from his audience, the sort of groan Caudell was used to hearing when he started talking about subtracting fractions. Benny Lang grinned again. He went on, “I warned you it wasn’t glamorous. We’ll get on with it Just the same. Watch me, please.”

He held up his repeater so everyone could see it.” Look here at the top of the weapon, all the way back toward you from the sight. There at the end of the metal part is a little knob. It’s called the recoil spring guide. Do you see it?” Edwin Powell had the rifle in Caudell’s group. Caudell looked it over with his fellow sergeants. Sure enough, the knob was there.

Lang waited until he saw everyone had found it. “Now,” he said, “every chap with a weapon, push in on that knob.” Powell pushed, a little hesitantly. Caudell didn’t blame him for being cautious. After all the marvels the AK-47 had displayed, he would not have been surprised to find that pushing that knob made it sing a chorus of “The Bonnie Blue Flag.” Nothing so melodramatic happened. Lang was also pushing the knob on his repeater; as he did so, he went on, “Lift up the receiver cover and take it off the receiver.”

More clumsily, his students imitated him. Caudell peered curiously into the works of the weapon thus revealed. “Never saw a rifle with so many guts,” Dempsey Eure observed.

“I never saw a rifle with guts at all,” Caudell said, to which the other sergeants nodded. A rifle was a barrel and a lock and a stock, plus such oddments as sight and ramrod and bayonet. It had no room for guts. But this one did. Caudell wondered what the unschooled farmers who made up the bulk of the Castalia Invincibles would think of that.

“Don’t panic,” Lang said. Caudell remembered that the instructor had seen other soldiers’ reactions to the complicated interior of an AK-47. Lang continued to take the carbine apart, lecturing all the while: “We’ve already taken off the receiver cover, right? Next thing to do is push the recoil spring guide in as far as it will go and then lift it up and take it out along with the spring itself. Then slide the bolt carrier, the bolt, and the piston back and lift them out.”

He held up each piece as he named it so his inexperienced pupils could see what he was talking about. “Now watch how I turn the bolt—the lugs here have to line up with the grooves on the carrier. Then the bolt slides back until it comes off the carrier. You only really have to worry about the spring, the bolt carrier, and the bolt. You need to clean them every day the weapon is fired.”

Lang pulled a rod out from under the barrel of the AK-47. The carbine’s stock had a hinged compartment. He took from it a little bottle of gun oil, brushes, and cloth patches. With meticulous care, he ran a patch down the inside of the barrel, then wiped the black spring and silvery bolt and carrier clean. When he was done, he resumed his discussion.

“Reassembly procedure is the exact reverse of what we’ve just done. The bolt goes on the carrier”—he deftly matched action to words—”and they both go into the receiver. Then the recoil spring and its guide fit in back of the bolt carrier. Push ‘em forward till the rear of the guide clears the back of the receiver, then push down to engage the guide. Then you put the receiver plate in place, push in on the spring guide, and push the plate down to lock it.” He grinned at the North Carolinians. “Now you try it. Don’t bother cleaning your weapon this first time. Just get it apart and back together.”

“That don’t look too hard,” Edwin Powell said. Caudell wasn’t so sure. He didn’t trust the look on Benny Lang’s face. The last time he’d seen a look like that, Billy Beddingfield of Company F had been wearing it in a poker game. Billy had also had an extra ace stuck up his sleeve.

The spring, gleaming with gun oil, went back where it belonged with no particular argument. The bolt was something else again. Powell tried to fit it into place as Lang had. It did not want to fit. “Shitfire,” Powell said softly after several futile tries. “Far as I’m concerned, the damn thing can stay dirty.”

He was far from the only man having trouble. Lang went from group to group, explaining the trick. There obviously was a trick, for people looked happier once he’d worked with them. After a while, he came to Caudell’s group, where Powell was still wrestling with the bolt. “It goes on the carrier like—this,” he said. His hands underscored his words. “Do you see?”

“Yes, sir, I think so,” Powell answered, as humbly as if speaking to one of the Camp Mangum drill sergeants who had turned the 47th North Carolina from a collection of raw companies into a regiment that marched and maneuvered like a single living creature. Lang carried the same air of omniscience, even if he didn’t display it so loudly or profanely.

He said, “Show me.” Powell still fumbled, but at last he got the bolt into place. Lang slapped him on the back. “Good. Do it again.” Powell did, a little faster this time. Lang said, “When you get your own weapon tomorrow, you’ll practice till you can do it with your eyes closed, first try, every try.”

Powell grunted. “Been usin’ guns my whole life. Never reckoned I’d have to put puzzle pieces together to make one work.”

Oddly, that complaint cheered Nate Caudell. When he was a boy, his father had carved puzzles for him to play with. Thinking of the AK-47’s works as a toy rather than something strange, mysterious, and threatening let him attack them without feeling intimidated. When his turn came, he got the bolt back into place after only a couple of false starts.

“Do it again that fast, Nate, and I’ll believe you really can,” Allison High said. Caudell did it again, and then, just to show it was no fluke, one more time. High whistled, a long, low note of respect. “Might could even be a reason you’re wearin’ that first sergeant’s diamond to go with them stripes of yours.”

“First time we’ve seen one, if there is,” Dempsey Eure said. A grin eased the sting from the words; Eure had trouble taking anything or anyone seriously.

“To hell with both of you,” Caudell said. He and his messmates all laughed. “Wonder what Sid Bartholomew would say if he was here to get a look at this repeater,” Edwin Powell remarked. Everyone nodded. Nominally a member of Company D, Bartholomew was a gunsmith by trade, and had spent the whole war on detail in Raleigh, doing what he did best.

“Reckon he’d say good godalmighty like the rest of us,” Rufus Daniel said, and everyone nodded again. The AK-47 brought on remarks like that.

By the time everyone was able to clean and reassemble the repeater, morning had given way to afternoon. As he’d promised, Lang showed how to load cartridges into the rifle’s magazine. After the mysteries of the bolt, that was child’s play. He also showed how to open the catch at the bottom of the clip and clean the spring inside.