Breakthroughs

XI

“Nashville is ours, and fairly won!” Lieutenant General George Armstrong Custer exulted, standing in front of the badly damaged State Capitol of Tennessee. Correspondents again hung on his every word, and he had plenty of words to keep them hanging. “We smashed their line north of the Cumberland when no one thought we could. We crossed the Cumberland when no one thought we could. And now, more than half a century after an unjust and ignominious peace forced us to evacuate Nashville, the Stars and Stripes wave over it once more.”

As he had on the other side of the Cumberland, Major Abner Dowling listened with mixed emotions to the general commanding First Army. Custer’s bombast always gave him the pip. But now, by God, Custer had plenty to be bombastic about. He’d gained two smashing victories over the Confederates in the space of a month. People with greater reputations had done less.

“Where do we go from here, General?” one of the scribes asked.

“Forward against the foe,” Custer said grandly. Before Dowling could spoil the proceedings by throwing up on his superior’s shoes, Custer did something most unusual for him-he gave a sensible reason for one of his rhetorical flights of fancy: “More than that, I am not at liberty to say, lest the Rebels learn in our papers what their spies could not tell them.”

“How long can the Rebs stand up under this kind of pounding, sir?” another reporter said.

“You need to ask that question in Richmond, Jack, not here,” Custer said. Chuckling, he added, “As long as the Rebs still own Richmond, anyhow. If they start using barrels back East the way we’ve taught them here, the Confederate States may not keep their capital very long.”

“With Russia in revolution, with France tottering and French soldiers throwing down their guns or turning them on their own officers, with England stretched to the breaking point and the CSA hammered on several fronts, how long can the Entente go on? How long can the war go on?” Jack asked.

“Until the United States and Germany win their rightful places in the sun, and until those places are recognized by all the powers in the world,” Custer said. “It could be tomorrow. It could be five years hence. However long it takes, we shall persevere.” He struck one of his poses.

“If the Rebs do throw in their hand, General, what sort of peace would you recommend imposing on them?” somebody asked.

Before Custer could get started on that one, Abner Dowling stepped in: “Boys, that’s not the sort of question you ask a soldier. That’s a question for the president or the secretary of state or for Congress.” Part of his job-no small part of his job-was keeping the general commanding First Army from embarrassing not only himself but his country.

Given General Custer’s nature, it wasn’t an easy job. With a laugh, Custer said, “Don’t worry, Major. They know I’m not one of the boys in the morning coats and striped trousers. All they asked was what I would recommend, and I’m happy to tell them that much.”

“Sir, I don’t really think you-” Dowling began.

It was hopeless. Custer rolled over him like a barrel smashing barbed wire into the mud. “If it were up to me, I would impose upon the Confederate States a peace that would prevent them from ever again threatening the peace and security of the United States. Twice now they have rubbed our faces in the dirt. They came too close to doing it once more in this great war. They should never, ever have another chance.”

On the whole, Dowling agreed with him (which made Custer’s adjutant want to reexamine his own assumptions). But there were dangers with a punitive peace, too, as one of the correspondents recognized: “What if our terms are so harsh, the Confederates would sooner take their chances on the battlefield than accept them?”

“Bully!” Custer boomed. “So much the better. In that case, I confidently believe the restoration of the Union by force of arms, which unfortunately failed when first attempted under the inept leadership of Abraham Lincoln, would now, in God’s good time, at last come to pass.”

He did give good copy. The newspapermen jotted phrases in their notebooks. Abner Dowling was of the opinion that his boss had to be suffering from a touch of the sun. Crossing the Cumberland had been a splendid feat of arms, no doubt about it. Even so, a hell of a lot of ground lay between Nashville and Mobile.

Dowling said, “I think that’s about enough, boys. Remember that you’re asking these questions inside Nashville. If that doesn’t speak for itself, I don’t know what does.”

“I don’t mind answering questions,” Custer said. “I could stand here all day and enjoy every minute of it.”

Dowling knew how true that was. Every question Custer answered meant another line, maybe another paragraph, in the papers. Seeing his name in print was meat and drink to the general commanding First Army. But his insistence on his own stamina reminded the correspondents that he had considerably surpassed his Biblical threescore and ten. They drifted away by ones and twos to file their stories.

Custer gave his adjutant a sour look. “I was just warming to the subject, Major. Why did you go and cut me off at the knees?”

“They already know you’re a hero, sir,” Dowling said. He smiled to himself, watching Custer lap that up like a kitten with a pitcher of cream. After a couple of seconds, though, that inner smile slipped. Custer really was a hero, and, Dowling reluctantly admitted to himself, really deserved to be. The portly major went on, “Besides, sir, we truly do have to plan the axis of First Army’s next attack.”

After lighting a cigar, Custer blew smoke in Dowling’s face. “I suppose so, Major,” he said with poor grace, “but blast me if I know why we’re bothering. The geniuses in Philadelphia will tell us what to do, delivering their orders in a chariot of fire from on high, as if from the hand of God Himself-and it will work as well as their doctrine on barrels, you mark my words.”

Having vented steam, he let his adjutant lead him back into the capitol. The southern wing was more nearly intact than the northern; First Army headquarters had been established there. In the map room, an enormous chart of Tennessee was thumbtacked to one wall. Two red arrows projected out from Nashville, one southeast toward Murfreesboro, the other southwest toward Memphis, better than two hundred miles away.

As far as Dowling was concerned, that second line was madness, an exercise in hubris. But it attracted Custer as much as a pretty housekeeper did. “By pushing in that direction, Major, we can lend aid to the attack on Memphis that’s been developing in Arkansas,” he insisted.

Keeping Custer connected with reality was Dowling’s main assignment. “Sir, the Tennessee River is in the way,” he said, as diplomatically as he could. “Not only that, the attack from Arkansas has been developing since 1915, and it hasn’t developed yet.”

“Jonesboro has fallen,” Custer said.

“Yes-at last,” Dowling said, certain the sarcasm would fly over the head of the general commanding First Army, as indeed it did. Stubbornly, Custer’s adjutant went on, “Expecting anything from a campaign west of the Mississippi is whistling in the dark, sir. We just don’t have the forces over there to do all we want. If the Rebs weren’t shy of men west of the river, too, we’d be in worse shape there than we are.”

“We’ll draw off their defenders,” Custer said. “They haven’t got enough men on this side of the river, either.”

That held just enough truth to make it tempting, but not enough to make it valuable. In thoughtful tones, Dowling said, “Well, you may be right, sir. I’ve heard Brigadier General MacArthur find some good reasons for the advance in the direction of Memphis.”

He’d gauged that about right. Custer’s peroxided mustache twitched; he screwed up his mouth as if he’d bitten into a lemon. “The only direction of advance Daniel MacArthur knows anything about is the one in the direction of the newspapers,” he sneered.

Takes one to know one, Dowling thought. Brigadier General MacArthur, with his trademark cigarette holder, courted publicity the way stockbrokers courted chorus girls. Did Custer refuse to admit to anyone else that he did the same thing, or did he refuse to admit it to himself, too? Despite his long association with the general commanding First Army, Dowling hadn’t ever been able to decide.

Custer said, “I wonder what Lieutenant Colonel-no, Colonel: you did send in that promotion, didn’t you? — Morrell’s view is?”

“I did send in that promotion, yes, sir,” Dowling said.

“Good,” Custer said. “Good. I wonder what Morrell thinks, yes I do. Now there is a man with a good head on his shoulders, who thinks of his country first and his own glory second. He’s not a grandstander like some people I could name. A very solid man, Morrell.”

“Yes, sir,” Dowling said. Custer approved of him because his plan had brought Custer fame, but it had brought Custer fame because it worked. Dowling didn’t think Morrell so unselfishly patriotic as Custer did, but he didn’t mind ambition in a man if it didn’t consume him.

“And,” Custer muttered, more than half to himself, “I had better find out in which direction Libbie thinks we should go.”

“That would be a good idea, sir,” Dowling said enthusiastically-so enthusiastically, Custer gave him a dirty look. Dowling didn’t care that Libbie kept the general commanding First Army from rumpling serving women. He did care that Libbie had shown herself to be the brains of the Custer family. Whenever she shared living quarters with the general, First Army fought better.

Custer said, “Whether we move against Murfreesboro or Memphis, we have to strike hard.”

His adjutant nodded. Custer’s one great military virtue was aggressiveness. That aggressiveness had cost the lives of thousands of men, because it meant Custer kept trying to ram his head through the stone walls the CSA kept building against him. But, when barrels finally gave him the means to do some real ramming, he made the most of them, as a more subtle general might have been unable to do.

“We have to strike hard,” he repeated. “If we but strike hard, the whole rotten edifice of the Confederate States of America will come tumbling down.”

A year earlier, Dowling would have reckoned that the statement of a madman. Six months earlier, he would have thought it the statement of a fool. Now he nodded solemnly and said, “Sir, I think you may be right.”

Reggie Bartlett’s hospital gown was of a washed-out butternut, not a pale green-gray like those of most of the inmates of the military hospital outside St. Louis. For good measure, the gown had PRISONER stenciled across the chest in bloodred letters four inches high.

He could get around pretty well with one crutch these days, which was a good thing, because the shoulder that had taken a machine-gun bullet was still too tender to let him use two crutches. The doctors kept insisting the wound infection was clearing up, but it wasn’t clearing up anywhere near fast enough to suit him.

He made it to the toilets adjoining the room where he and his companions spent so much time on their backs, eased himself, and slowly returned to his bed. “Took you long enough,” one of the Yankees said. “I figured you were trying to escape, the way you keep bragging that you did before.”

“Pretty soon, Bob, pretty soon,” Reggie answered. “Just not quite yet, is all.”

“Shoot, Bob, didn’t you know?” said another wounded U.S. soldier, this one named Pete. “Reggie started escaping day before yesterday, but he’s so damn slow, this is as far as he’s gotten.”

“You go to hell, too, Pete,” Reggie said. He took care not to sound too angry, though; Pete’s left leg was gone above the knee, blown off by a Confederate shell somewhere in Arkansas.

Bartlett sat on the edge of his bed and leaned his crutch against the wall next to it. That was the easy part. What came afterwards wasn’t so easy. He used his sound right arm to help drag his wounded right leg up onto the mattress. The leg was getting better, too. But, while it was on the way, it hadn’t arrived yet.

Once he was sitting with both legs out before him, he eased himself down flat onto his back. That hurt worse; the shoulder felt as if it had a toothache in there, a dull pain that never went away and sometimes flared to malevolent heights. Sweat sprang out on his forehead at the wound’s bite. After he lay still for a while, it dropped back to a level he could bear more easily.

“You all right, Reggie?” Bob asked, tone solicitous as if Bartlett had been from Massachusetts or Michigan himself. Pain was the common foe here.

“Not too bad,” Reggie said. “I’ll tell you, though, this whole business of war would be a hell of a lot more fun if you didn’t get shot.”

That drew loud agreement from the Yankees on the other beds in the room. “They made the old fools who ordered this war go out and fight it, it never would’ve lasted five minutes,” Bob said. “Tell me the truth, boys-is that so or isn’t it?”

Again, most of the wounded men in the ward agreed. But Pete said, “I don’t know about that. Roosevelt fought in the Second Mexican War when he was our age.”

“Well, that’s a fact-he did,” Bob allowed. “He fought one medium-sized battle against the limeys, licked ’em, and they went home. That was plenty to make him a hero back then. We fight the Rebs or the Canucks, do they go home with their tails between their legs on account of we lick ’em once? We all know better’n that, don’t we?”

“None of us’d be here if the bastards on the other side ran away quick,” Pete said. He grinned. “Well, Reggie would, I reckon, but he don’t count anyway.”

“You damnyankees don’t run, either, the way you did the last couple of times we fought you,” Bartlett said, returning verbal fire. “Wish to Jesus you did. I wouldn’t have these damn holes in me, and I’ll tell you, I liked life a lot better before I got ventilated.”

Out in the hallway, a faint squeak of wheels and rattle of crockery announced the coming of the lunch cart. As the wounded soldiers from both sides were united in their struggle against pain, so they were also united in their loathing of what the hospital fed them.

Reggie gagged down yet another meal of medium-boiled egg, beef broth, stewed prunes, and a pudding that tasted as if it were made from four parts library paste and one part sugar. When the nurse took away his dishes, she clicked her tongue between her teeth in reproof. “How do you expect to get better if you don’t eat more?”

“Ma’am, if you give me beefsteak, I will eat a slab the size of this mattress and ask you kindly for seconds. If you give me fried chicken, I will build you a new wing to this hospital from the bones. If you give me pork chops, I will gobble them down till I grow a little curly tail. But ma’am, if you feed me slops you wouldn’t give the pigs you got the pork chops from, I will waste away and perish.”

“That’s telling her, Reb!” one of the wounded U.S. soldiers said. Several others clapped their hands.

The nurse looked furious. “You are getting a nourishing meal suited to your digestion, and you ought to be grateful the United States are giving it to you instead of letting you starve the way you deserve.”

“We have Yankee prisoners, too, ma’am,” Bartlett said. “They get doctors. They get food, same as I do here. If they don’t get better food than I do here, why, I’m sorry for ’em, and that’s a fact.”

He hadn’t made a friend. The nurse set hands on hips. “You are getting exactly the same meal as wounded American soldiers,” she said coldly.

“I’m an American,” Bartlett said. “What do you think I am, a Chinaman?”

“A troublemaker,” the nurse answered. By her expression, that was worse than a Chinaman, and by a good distance, too. She rolled the cart away from Reggie’s bed. Her back still radiated outrage.

“Don’t nobody hook the Reb’s pudding tomorrow,” Pete said when she was gone, “not unless you want to eat the glass ground up in it, too.”

“Only thing ground-up glass would do for that pudding is make it better,” Reggie said, and nobody seemed inclined to tell him he was wrong.

The next morning, Bob got promoted to a different ward, one a step closer to eventual release. In his place, an attendant wheeled in another Confederate prisoner-a Negro with a bandaged stump where his left foot should have been. He grunted with pain as he got into Bob’s bed.

Nobody knew what to do or what to say. The wounded U.S. soldiers looked in Reggie Bartlett’s direction. The U.S. Army still did not allow Negroes to serve, though they’d been able to join the U.S. Navy for years. In the CSA, the very idea of black men in uniform remained strange, though the pressure of fighting a larger, more populous foe had forced it on the ruling whites.

Reggie found one question he could safely ask: “Where did you get hit?” He had trouble figuring out what sort of tone to use. A lifetime’s experience had taught him he was superior to any black man ever born. But this Negro was a fellow soldier, and they were both prisoners of the Yankees: hardly an exalted status.

“Outside o’ Jonesboro, Arkansas,” the newly arrived black answered. He also spoke cautiously. “How about you?”

“Over in Sequoyah, in the Red River bottomlands.” Bartlett hesitated, then gave his name and said, “Who’re you?”

“Rehoboam, my ma and pa called me, out o’the Good Book,” the Negro said. He was very, very black, with a low, flat nose and small ears. Before he was wounded, he’d probably been strong and muscular; now his skin sagged, as it did on men who’d lost a lot of flesh in a hurry. After another moment’s thought, he added, “Had me a stripe on my sleeve ’fore I got shot.”

He said it in a way that made Bartlett believe him. It also made Reggie smile. “Can’t pull rank on me, Rehoboam,” he said. “I had one, too.”

“We got the same rank now,” Rehoboam said. “We’s prisoners.”

“Yeah, I was thinking the same thing,” Reggie said, nodding. When he’d been in prison camp before, over in West Virginia, the Yankees had used captured Negro laborers to lord it over their white prisoners of war, and to spy on them, too. The blacks there had taken savage pleasure in doing just that, enjoying being on top instead of on the bottom.

Rehoboam didn’t seem inclined to act like that. But he didn’t act submissive, either, the way he surely would have back in the CSA. Bartlett didn’t know what to make of him. The idea of simple equality with a Negro had never crossed his mind.

“Outside of Jonesboro, eh?” Pete said. “Craighead Forest?”

“Sure as the devil,” Rehoboam answered. He looked over toward the U.S. soldier. “You?” After Pete nodded, the Negro went, “This great big old damnyankee officer was screamin’ about God and Jesus an’ I don’t know what all else, an’ he went an’ shot me. He was runnin’ way the hell out in front of his men-balls like an elephant, I reckon, but he was crazy, you ask me.”

“I even think I know about the guy you mean,” Pete said. “McSwenson, something like that. From what I’ve heard about him, you’re right-he’s nuts. Leastways you know who got you. That’s something. Me, shell went off and the next thing I knew I was shy a pin.” He patted his short stump.

One of the other wounded U.S. soldiers asked Rehoboam, “Were you a Red before you put on a Confederate uniform?”

“Maybe I was,” Rehoboam answered, “but maybe I wasn’t, too.” He gave Reggie a sidelong look. “Nobody asked me nothin’ about that when I went into the Army, so I don’t reckon I got to talk about it now.”

“Let’s say you were,” the Yank persisted. “How could you try and shoot the Rebs one day and then fight for ’em the next?”

“If I was-and I ain’t sayin’ I was, mind you-I would have been tryin’ to make the CSA a better place for me an’ black folks to live in either which way,” Rehoboam said. “Maybe that’s why nobody asked me nothin’ about none o’ that when I walked into the recruitin’ office.”

Pete turned to Bartlett. “How about it, Reggie? How do you like havin’ a smoke like Rehoboam fightin’ on your side once you Rebs ran out of white men you could throw at us?”

“Hey, I’ll tell you this much,” Reggie said. “I’d sure as hell sooner have him shooting at you damnyankees than at me.”

Now Rehoboam gave him a measuring stare. “That’s fair,” the Negro said. “I ain’t got no trouble with that.”

He spoke as if his opinion had as much weight as Reggie’s. In terms of law in the Confederate States, Reggie realized, Rehoboam’s opinion did have as much weight as his, or would. The black man would surely get an honorable discharge when repatriated, and that would make him a citizen of the CSA, not just a resident.

“How you feelin’?” Rehoboam asked Reggie.

“Leg’s getting better,” he answered. “They say the shoulder is, too, but damned if I can see it. How about you?”

“My damn toes itch,” Rehoboam said, pointing to where they would be if still attached to the rest of him. “They ain’t there, but they itch anyways.”

“Oh, Lord, I know what you mean,” Pete said. “I reach down to scratch sometimes, and I’m scratching air.”

As a Negro, Rehoboam might not have fit into the ward. As a wounded man, he fit fine. Reggie Bartlett pondered that. He had a lot of time in which to ponder it, too. He wasn’t going anywhere, certainly not very fast.

General Leonard Wood appeared before the House’s Transportation Committee to testify about the difficulties in civilian railroad transport caused by the enormous demands the Army was putting on the rail system of the United States. As the chief of the U.S. General Staff droned on about millions of man-miles traveled, Flora Hamburger jotted the occasional note. Wood was forceful and intelligent, but she found his subject matter distinctly uninspiring.

She wished the Speaker of the House had assigned her to some other committee, but, since she was a Socialist without seniority, nobody-least of all the Speaker-cared about what she wished. But Transportation wasn’t the worst committee, because so many types of legislation involved its subject in one way or another. She could have ended up on the Forestry Committee. That would have been a choice assignment for a representative from New York’s Lower East Side!

Being the most junior member of the committee, and of a minority party to boot, she had to wait a long time for her turn to question General Wood. When at last it came, her first question was different from those the chief of the General Staff had been getting from other congressmen: “Why are the U.S. forces in the East so slow to adopt the mass use of barrels that has proved so effective in Tennessee?”

The chairman rapped loudly for order. “That question is not germane at this time, Miss Hamburger,” he said. “It falls under the purview of the Military Affairs Committee, not our own.”

“Mr. Taft, the question may not be germane to you, but it is very important to me,” Flora answered. “My brother is a private, and he asked me in a letter to ask that question if I ever had that chance. I can introduce the letter into the record, if you like.”

William Howard Taft’s round, plump face-not at all suited to the upthrust Kaiser Bill mustache he wore-turned red. Flora hid a smile. If the chairman silenced her now, he would also be silencing a man in uniform, a man whom the Democrats’ policies had put into uniform. That would give the Socialists all sorts of lovely ammunition; Flora could already imagine speeches on how the Democrats, not content with starting the war, were now concealing mistakes in how it was being fought.

Taft had been in Congress almost as long as Flora had been alive; he could figure out the angles, too. He turned to Wood. “If the general pleases, he may answer the question,” he said unhappily.

“I will answer,” Wood said, scratching at his gray mustache. “They have pioneered a new way of using barrels out in Tennessee. We had formerly employed a different doctrine throughout the Army. Now that the western way has shown itself to give better results, we are extending its use to other fronts. These things do take a certain amount of time, though, ma’am.”

“So it would seem,” Flora said. “Otherwise, you wouldn’t have kept the-is mistaken too strong a word? — doctrine for the past year. Can you estimate how many men have died because of it?”

Congressman Taft looked unhappier still that he’d allowed the first question. Having allowed it, though, he could hardly shield Wood from the question. Jowls quivering, he nodded to the chief of the General Staff. “No, I cannot give any firm answer to that, ma’am,” Wood said. “I can only tell you that we have, from the beginning, prosecuted this war to the best of our ability. We are but men. We have made mistakes. When we discover a better way of using any equipment, we take advantage of it. I regret the extra casualties we surely suffered because we did not know so much then as we do now. My training was as a physician. I regret any and all human suffering, believe me.”

To her surprise, Flora did believe him. His long, mournful face and slow, deep voice made her have a hard time picturing him as a liar. Still, she persisted in her own line of questioning: “How did they happen to be right in Tennessee when all the best thinkers in the War Department were gathered together here in Philadelphia to come up with…the wrong answer?”

“Let me give you a comparison I think you’ll understand, ma’am,” General Wood said. “Suppose you’re in a kitchen, and-”

Patronizing Flora Hamburger was not a good idea. “I’ve spent most of my time in factories and offices,” she snapped. “I fear I don’t know so much about kitchens.” That was stretching a point; she’d helped her mother every day after getting home from work. But she was not about to let him treat her like a housewife instead of a U.S. Representative. “Please answer the question without kitchen comparisons.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Wood said crisply. If her pinning his ears back angered him, he didn’t show it. “We designed the doctrine at the same time as we were designing the machines themselves. Any time you do something like that, you take the chance of not getting everything perfectly right. General Custer tried something different, it proved to work better than anything we’d done with the doctrine we had before, and we will take advantage of that from now on.”

Flora nodded reluctantly. It was a good answer. Wood had spent a lot of time testifying before Congress. Representative Taft beamed with relief. “If the distinguished lady from New York has no further questions, we can-”

“I do have one more,” Flora said. Taft sighed. Since members of his own party had droned on and on over matters less consequential than those concerning barrels, he could hardly shut her off without raising howls from the Socialists. He held out his hand to her, palm up, fingers spread, to show she could go on. “Thank you, Mr. Chairman,” she told him. “General Wood, if all that you say is so, why did General Custer have to violate War Department orders against using barrels in any way except that prescribed by Philadelphia in order to prove that his ideas were better than yours?”

She hoped he would deny any such orders existed. She knew they did. Not many Socialists worked in the War Department, but the ones who did had a way of keeping their Congressional delegation well informed about the department’s inner workings-and its dirty laundry.

But Leonard Wood was too canny to let himself be caught in a lie. He said, “Ma’am, we had done the best we could in Philadelphia. Do please recall, we did win victories with barrels used as we suggested. Maybe we would have done better using them from the start as General Custer did, but there are many other possible ways to use them, too, most of which are likely to have done worse than ours. The main reason we tried to forbid all experimentation with barrels is that, by the very nature of things, most experiments fail. General Custer’s happened to succeed, and he deserves the credit for it, as he would deserve the blame had it gone wrong.”

By his tone, he thought Custer deserved blame anyhow. But he could have plausibly denied that, and she had no documents to make him out a liar there. “Anything else, Miss Hamburger?” Congressman Taft asked. Flora shook her head. The fat Democrat got in a dig of his own: “Nothing actually pertaining to trains?”

“Mr. Chairman, if the choice is between asking questions that have to do with how crowded trains are and how safe my brother is, I know which questions I want to ask,” Flora said.

“I hope your brother stays safe, Miss Hamburger,” General Wood said. “Despite our gains, the fighting in Virginia has been very hard.”

“Thank you,” she said. For a moment, she was surprised he knew where David had been sent, but only for a moment. Soldiers who happened to be related to members of Congress no doubt had special files high-ranking officers could check at need.

“Any further questions from anyone?” Taft asked. No one spoke. The chairman of the Transportation Committee asked another question: “Do I hear a motion to adjourn?” He did, and gaveled the session to a close.

Later, in her office, Flora was answering letters from constituents when her secretary came in and said, “General Wood would like to see you for a few minutes, ma’am.”

“Send him right in, Bertha,” Flora said. “I wonder what he wants.” She wondered if she’d struck a nerve with her questions about barrels. If he complained about those, she’d send him away with a flea in his ear.

Into the inner office he strode, erect, soldierly. The first words out of his mouth surprised her: “You did a good job of raking me over the coals there earlier this afternoon. One of these days, we’ll sift all the Socialist sneaks out of the War Department, but it isn’t likely to be any time soon.”

She didn’t want to thank him, but he’d succeeded in disarming some of the hostility she felt. “You didn’t come here just to tell me that,” she said.

“No, I didn’t,” he answered. “I came here to tell you again that I wish all the best for your brother. The 91st is a good unit, and they’ve compiled a record that will stand up against anyone’s.”

“I wish they’d never had to compile that kind of record-or any other kind of record, for that matter,” Flora said.

“I understand,” General Wood answered. Flora must have raised an eyebrow, for he went on, “I do. Soldiers fight wars; they know what goes into them. Glory is what happens afterwards, what civilians make up.”

“Not much glory will come out of this war, even afterwards,” Flora said. “Hard to squeeze glory out of mud and lice and bullets and shells flying every which way.”

Wood surprised her again by nodding. “Maybe that means we won’t fight another one for a long time. I hope to heaven it does.” He paused, rubbed at his mustache, and finally went on, “Your brother-David, isn’t it? — yes, David, has already made more than an honorable contribution to our cause and to our ultimate victory. If he were to request a transfer to, say, a clerical position or one of the supply services, I think that request would be likely to receive favorable attention.”

“More favorable than if a seamstress’ daughter put in the same request?” Flora asked. The chief of the General Staff did not answer, which was an answer in itself. Almost despairingly, Flora said, “You put me in an impossible position, you know. If I keep him safe, I take unfair advantage of who I am. If I don’t, and anything happens to him…I think you had better go.”

General Wood got to his feet. “I am sorry, Miss Hamburger,” he said. “I hoped to ease your mind, not to upset you. Good day.”

Out he strode, shoulders back, spine straight. Flora stared after him. She didn’t believe him. He was too intelligent not to have understood every bit of what he was doing. He’d done it anyhow. Why? Just to upset her? Or to gain whatever advantage he could if she asked him to help David? “Damn you, General Wood,” she muttered. “Damn you.”

Anne Colleton crouched in the brush that had advanced from the woods toward the ruins of the Marshlands mansion. With her crouched not only a squad of local militiamen but also a machine-gun team from somewhere down by Charleston. She’d almost had to go down on her knees in front of the governor to get them, but they were here. If he’d asked her to go down on her knees in front of him when they were all alone, she’d have thought about doing that, too. That was how much she wanted to make sure her trap slammed shut hard.

In a back pocket of her mannish trousers, she had a torn, dirty scrap of paper with a few words written in a crisp, elegant hand that did not match its stationery. If what Scipio told her was true…

If it wasn’t true, she was either wasting her time here or walking into a trap rather than setting one. Just for a moment, her hand fell to the barrel of the scope-sighted Tredegar beside her. Any trap that tried closing on her would take some damage first.

Off on the left of the little line, Sergeant Willie Metcalfe stiffened and let out a low hiss. As if afraid that wouldn’t be enough, he turned his head so that he presented the ruined left half of his face to his comrades. “Here they come,” he said in a hoarse whisper.

“Don’t open up too soon,” Anne ordered the militiamen. She’d said it before. She would say it again: “Let them get close. Let them get busy. And then…” Her voice, still soft, turned savage. “Let them have it.”

She stared avidly through the brush, north toward the Congaree. The ground-the ground that should have been covered with cotton instead of overrun by weeds-steamed as the sun rose higher and burned down on it. Through that thin, shimmering mist, she too made out the Negroes heading for the mansion.

They were a ragged lot, ragged and filthy, but they carried themselves like fighting men. Their strides were quick and wary. Their heads never stopped moving. She froze whenever they looked toward her, and hoped her companions had the sense to do the same. The militiamen, she feared, weren’t in the same class as the men of the Congaree Socialist Republic. If they kept the advantage of surprise, they wouldn’t need to be.

Some of the Negroes carried spades, some rifles, most both. One in particular stalked along like a beast of prey in spite of the Tredegar on his shoulder. His shoulder? Anne took a longer look at that Red rebel.

“Cherry,” she whispered. Her lips drew back from her teeth in a smile so ferocious that Linus Ashforth, who crouched beside her, involuntarily flinched away, as from a wild beast. Anne never noticed the white-bearded militiaman. Her attention remained altogether focused on the Negro woman who had been first her brother’s lover and then, as the Red revolt began, the instrument of Jacob Colleton’s death.

She didn’t need long to realize that, as she led the militiamen, Cherry bossed the Negroes. She bossed them imperiously, bullying them into doing exactly as she required. Bitch. Hateful bitch, Anne thought, never noticing how much Cherry’s style resembled her own.

“We done tried over yonder, dat side o’the mansion.” Cherry’s voice floated across a hundred yards of open ground. “Now we tries on dis side.” She led the Reds over toward the side where Anne and the militiamen waited. “Dig, you damn lazy niggers. Dig!” She set down the rifle and grabbed a spade herself.

They dug with her. Few would have been bold enough to argue. Cassius would have, but Cassius wasn’t here. Anne let out a silent sigh. Had Scipio handed her Cherry and Cassius both, she might even have thought about forgiving him. But Cherry by herself was no small prize.

“At my signal,” Anne whispered to Linus Ashforth and to the man to her left. “Pass it along the line.” They did. She picked up her rifle. She didn’t aim at Cherry, not yet. The militiamen stirred, picking their own targets.

Cherry was as alert as a beast of prey, too. She caught some tiny motion in the brush and let out a cry of alarm.

At the same instant, Anne shouted, “Now!” She fired at one of the men who’d just thrown down a shovel and was turning to grab for his rifle. The turn only half completed, he slumped bonelessly to the ground, blood pouring from a wound in his flank.

All along the line of militiamen, rifles barked. The machine gun hammered away like a mad thing. A couple of the Reds managed to fall flat, get hold of their rifles, and fire back. Their fire did not last long. Methodical as factory workers, the machine gunners traversed the muzzle of their weapon back and forth. Nothing on the ground in front of them could stay unhit for long.

Seeing how things were, Cherry turned and ran. Anne had run once, too, when revolution broke out around her in Charleston. She’d escaped. Cherry was not so lucky. Anne peered through the telescopic sight, which made her target seem even closer than it was-and Cherry would have been an easy shot for someone less handy with a rifle than she was. She exhaled. She pulled the trigger. The Tredegar kicked against her shoulder. Cherry toppled with a shriek.

Anne started to break cover, then hesitated. One or more of the Negroes the militiamen had shot down were liable to be shamming. Beside her, Linus Ashforth did stand up. Sure as hell, a bullet cracked past his head. It could as easily have shattered his skull like a dropped flowerpot. He dove for cover. The machine gun hosed down the Reds. When Willie Metcalfe got to his feet, no one fired at him.

“Let’s see what we’ve got,” Anne said coldbloodedly. Now she rose.

“That one ain’t finished yet, ma’am.” Sergeant Metcalfe pointed in the direction of Cherry, who was still trying to crawl away with a shattered lower leg. He started to raise his own rifle.

“No!” Anne’s voice was sharp. “I want her alive. You men!” She waved to the rest of the squad, then pointed in the direction of the Reds who had been digging. “See to them. If any of them are still breathing, finish them off.”

She loped toward Cherry. Behind her, a couple of short, flat cracks rang out. Nodding in satisfaction, she trotted on. She had a round in the chamber of her Tredegar, and was ready and more than ready to fire if the colored woman had a pistol tucked in the pocket or waistband of her tattered dungarees.

Cherry snarled hatred at her, but made no move to reach for a weapon. “White debbil bitch,” she said. “They was right all along, damn them. You never was nothin’but a goddamn liar.”

“You know all about lies, don’t you?” Anne said evenly. “You told enough of them, back before the rebellion.”

“I ain’t never told lies like you ’pressors tell de niggers and de poor stupid buckra and your ownselves,” Cherry retorted. She gathered herself, though blood was puddling around her right calf.

“Don’t try it,” Anne advised her. “I’m too far away for you to reach me, and I won’t shoot you in the head. I’ll try for somewhere that hurts more and takes longer. Kidney, maybe, or one in each shoulder.”

To her surprise, Cherry nodded. “Ain’t a patch on what I do to you, I had you down shot on de ground.”

The longing in the black woman’s voice made Anne shiver, though she was the one with the rifle. She said, “After what you did to Marshlands, after what you did to my brother, you’ve had your turn already.”

“Ain’t.” Cherry shook her head. “Ain’t come close. Cain’t pay back three hundred years o’ ’pression in a day. Done whipped we and ’sploited we and sold we like we was horses and fucked we till we gots so many yaller niggers it’s a cryin’ shame. No, we ain’t come close.”

Anne heard the words. She heard the accusations. They didn’t register, not in any way that mattered. She shook her head. “You rose up against us,” she said. “You stabbed us in the back while we were fighting the damnyankees. And you-you-” When she tried to say what Cherry in particular had done, words failed her for one of the rare times in her life.

Despite the pain from her ruined lower leg, Cherry smiled. “I knows what I done, Miss Anne. I was fuckin’ and suckin’ your brother, and I was puttin’ on airs on account of it. And you knows what else?” The smile got wider. “All the time that goddamn skinny little white dick was in me, Miss Anne, I never feel one thing. Never oncet.”

Without conscious thought, ahead of conscious thought, Anne’s finger squeezed the trigger. The Tredegar roared. The back of Cherry’s head exploded, splashing blood and brains and pulverized bone over her and the ground around her. She twitched and shuddered and lay still. But, below the neat hole in her forehead, her face still held that mocking smile.

“To hell with you,” Anne whispered, and two tears ran down her face, half sorry for Jacob, half fury at the black woman and the way she’d duped him and used him. And Cherry had got the last word, too, and goaded Anne into giving her a quick end at the same time. Anne kicked at the dirt. Automatically, she worked the bolt and chambered a fresh round.

Linus Ashforth came up to her. The elderly militiaman spat a stream of tobacco juice into Cherry’s puddled blood. “This here was right good, ma’am,” he said. “Them murderin’ devils done took the bait you left ’em, and there ain’t a one of ’em going back to the swamps. Yes, ma’am, this here was pretty blame fine.”

“It wasn’t good enough,” Anne said, as much to herself as to the old man. “It wasn’t enough.”

“What more could you want?” Ashforth asked reasonably. “Every single nigger stuck his nose out of the swamp is dead now. Can’t do much better’n a clean sweep, now can you?”

“But there are still Reds in the swamps,” Anne answered. “When they’re all hunted down and killed, that will be-” She started to say enough, but shook her head before the word passed her lips. That wouldn’t be enough. Nothing could be enough to repair the damage the Negroes had done to the Confederate cause, the damage they had done to the Confederate States. She ended the sentence in a different way: “That will be a start, anyhow.”

Linus Ashforth’s whistle was soft and low and wondering. “Ma’am, don’t sound to me like you’ll ever be satisfied.”

“I would have been,” Anne said. “I could have been. God, I was. But it will be a long time before I’m satisfied again; you’re right about that. It will be a long time before this is a country anyone can be satisfied with.”

“Jesus God, Miss Anne, I’m sure as the dickens glad you ain’t mad with me.” The militiaman spat again, then wiped his mouth on his sleeve.

“You ought to be,” Anne Colleton said. She weighed the words, then nodded. “Yes, you ought to be, because if I’m angry at something, I’ll hunt it down and kill it.” She looked north, toward the Congaree. Silently, her lips shaped a name. Cassius.

Like so many small, hunted creatures, Nellie Semphroch had learned to stay laired up in her burrow, and to come out at night to forage. The occupying Confederates hardly bothered to patrol Washington, D.C., any more. Hal Jacobs said they’d given up because every man they had, they needed at the front. Nellie didn’t know about that. She did know that getting water from the Potomac or firewood from a wrecked building, she worried more about a chance U.S. shell than she did about men in butternut. Even at night, the bombardment from the north did not halt. It only slowed a little.

She was far from the only one prowling the night. If she passed close enough to Jacobs and a few others to recognize them, she would nod. When she saw others, she shrank back into the shadows, and that though she never ventured forth without a long, sharp kitchen knife. Still others shrank from her. That made her feel oddly strong and fierce.

Sometimes Edna would come out with her, sometimes not. When they needed water, they generally went down to the river together. Stove wood was easier to come by close to home. One of them would usually go out for it, or else the other.

“I wish we could find some coal,” Nellie said, not for the first time. “The grate isn’t really right for wood, and the stove pipe will get all full of soot and creosote. It’s liable to catch on fire.”

“If you’re going to wish, Ma, don’t waste your time wishing for coal, for God’s sake,” Edna said. “Wish for a couple days without shells falling all the damn time. That’d be somethin’ really worth having.”

“I think we may get that wish before too long,” Nellie said. “How much longer do you suppose the Confederate lines north of town are going to be able to stand the pounding the Army is giving them? They’ll have to crack pretty soon, and then the United States will have Washington back again.”

“Oh, bully!” Edna loaded her voice with sarcasm. “Even if you’re right, Ma, it’ll only take ’em a hundred years to build it all back up the way it was. And the Rebs’ll fight hard to keep the place, too.”

“I know they will-it’s about the only part of the line where they’re still on our soil instead of the other way round,” Nellie said. “But when you look at the way the war is going everywhere else, it’s hard to see how they’re going to be able to do it.”

“Well, what if the United States do come in?” Edna said. “Then the Rebs will pound the city to pieces from the other side of the Potomac. The only difference will be which way the guns are pointed.”

Nellie sighed and nodded in the candlelit dimness of the cellar under the coffeehouse. Her daughter’s guess held an unpleasant feel of truth.

After it got dark outside as well as down in the cellar, Nellie went out to see what she could find and to discover what the bombardment had knocked flat since the last time she came up above ground. One of the things that wasn’t flat any more was the street down the block from the coffeehouse. A big shell had dug an enormous crater in it. Time was when such wounds had been rare and the Confederates patched them as soon as they were made. Now the Rebs kept a few roads to the front open and forgot the rest.

Half a block farther along the street, another couple of shells had landed, converting several houses and shops to rubble. In among the bricks would be lumber, much of it already broken into convenient lengths. Nellie tossed them into a large canvas duffel bag.

She had the bag nearly ready to drag back to the coffeehouse when Bill Reach’s voice spoke from out of the darkness close by: “Evenin’, Little Nell.”

Ice ran through Nellie, though the night was warm and humid. “You’re drunk again,” she said quietly. “If you were sober, you’d know better than to call me that.” Her head went back and forth, back and forth. Where was he?

He laughed. “Maybe I am. Maybe I would. And maybe I’m not, and maybe I wouldn’t. What do you think of that?”

There. Behind that pile of bricks, out of which stuck a couple of legs from an upended cast-iron stove. Her fingers closed around the handle of the kitchen knife. “Go away,” she said, still looking around as if she hadn’t found him. “Can’t you just leave me in peace?”

“I sure as hell would like a piece,” he said, and laughed again. “I liked it when I had it before, and I know I’d like it again. Oh, you were a hot number in between the sheets, Little Nell, and I don’t figure God ever gave another woman in the whole wide world a nastier mouth. Things you used to do…”

If she’d writhed with grunting, sweating customers pounding away atop her, it was only to make them finish faster, get off her, and leave the cheap little room where she worked. She’d always hated sucking on men’s privates. It seemed filthy, even when they didn’t squirt vile-tasting jism into her mouth-usually after promising they wouldn’t.

“Go away,” she repeated. “Those days are long gone, thank God. I’m a respectable woman now-or I was till you walked into my coffeehouse, anyways. Go back into the gutter, go back to spying, go wherever you want, just as long as you leave me alone. I don’t want anything to do with you, do you hear?”

He stood up. In his black coat and black derby, he was still hard to see. He swayed a little, then brought a bottle to his lips. Oddly, the whiskey seemed to steady him instead of making him keel over. “But I want somethin’ to do with you, Little Nell,” he said. “You haven’t given it to me, so it looks like I’m just gonna have to go and take it.” He smashed the fat end of the bottle on the bricks. A little whiskey spilled out-not much. Jagged edges glittered under the stars. “Just gonna have to go ahead and take it,” he repeated.

“Go away,” Nellie whispered once more.

“You take what’s coming to you, and everything will be fine.” Bill Reach waved the bottle around. “You give me any trouble, and you’ll be real sorry. Yes, you will. Real sorry. Now get down on the ground and take it. Once it’s in there, you’ll love it. Hell, you always did.”

“No.” Nellie held the knife behind her back so Reach wouldn’t be able to see it.

The acrid fumes of the whiskey, some from his breath, some from the inside of the bottle, made her nostrils twitch as he came closer. “You ain’t runnin’,” he said. “You ain’t screamin’. See? You know you want it. I’m the man to give it to you, too. If you’re good, I’ll even pay you, same as old times.”

“No,” Nellie said again. Either he didn’t hear her or he didn’t listen. He took a couple more steps toward her, then extended his left hand to push her to the ground.

He still held the neck of the bottle, but he didn’t think he’d have to do anything with it. He’d surely made a lot of mistakes in his time, but that was the last and the worst. Nellie had no experience as a knife fighter, but Bill Reach couldn’t have stopped a two-year-old swinging a wooden spoon right then. The knife went deep into the left side of his chest. Its edge grated against a rib when Nellie yanked it out and rammed it home again.

He let out a brief, bubbling shriek, then toppled. Nellie wiped the knife clean on his coat while he was still feebly kicking. “Once it’s in there, you’ll love it,” she said. Then she grunted as she picked up the duffel full of chunks of wood, slung it over her shoulder, and headed for home.

When she got back, Edna was mixing salt pork into canned soup. “That looks like a good load, Ma,” her daughter said. “You were gone a while longer than I thought you would be, though. You have any trouble out there?”

“Trouble?” Nellie shook her head. “Not a bit. That soup smells good.”

“Make you thirsty as all get-out,” Edna said.

“I know. It still smells good.” Nellie had a big bowl. The soup did make her thirsty, so she drank a glass of boiled river water. She went down to the cellar to sleep, and had a better night than she’d enjoyed in years.

Artillery started thundering before dawn, but didn’t wake her right away. Neither she nor anyone else left in Washington would have got any sleep at all if they’d let shellfire unduly disturb them. When she did wake, she gauged the bombardment with a practiced ear. So did Edna, who said, “They’re pounding the front line right now.”

Half an hour or so later, though, the pattern of the shelling abruptly changed. Rounds began falling inside Washington, along the routes the Confederates used to move reinforcements through the city toward the front. “I wonder if the Army is trying to break through the Rebs’ trenches right now,” Nellie said.

“Do you really think they can?” Edna asked. “The Confederates have been digging and putting in concrete and wire ever since they got here, and that’s going on three years now.”

“Would they try if they didn’t think they could do it, anyway?” Nellie asked in return. Her daughter only shrugged in return, which was, when you got down to it, a reasonable enough answer. From the perspective of a coffeehouse, who could know what the U.S. General Staff had in mind?

But then, a couple of hours later, Nellie heard a rattle of small-arms fire, rifles and machine guns, off to the north. Edna recognized it for what it was, too. She let out a soft whistle. “Haven’t hardly heard that since the Confederates drove the USA out of here.”

“Sure haven’t,” Nellie agreed. “As long as we have water and fuel, I think we’d better stay right where we’re at. If it was bad outside before, it’s going to be worse now, with both sides shelling the city and with bullets flying around along with the shells.”

They did sneak out for water one night. Other than that, they stayed inside the coffeehouse all the time for the next several days, and down in the cellar whenever they weren’t at the stove. The battle for Washington raged around them. They saw almost none of it, which suited Nellie. If she’d seen the battle, the soldiers fighting it would have seen her, with consequences ranging from unpleasant to lethal.

A couple of times, barrels rumbled up the street. Nellie thought they belonged to the CSA, but she didn’t go outside to look. Two days later, somebody-she didn’t know who, and again didn’t care to find out-set up a machine-gun post just down the street and fired off belt after belt of ammunition, the gun roaring like a demented jackhammer. Then came rifle fire and running, shouting men. After that, the racket of small arms sounded from the south, not the north.

Several hours of relative calm were shattered when somebody pounded on the cellar door with a rifle butt. “You the Semphrochs down there?” a deep voice shouted. “Nellie and, uh, Edna?” He sounded as if he might be reading the names from a list.

“Yes,” Nellie said, and went up the stairs and pushed the door open.

She found herself staring down a rifle barrel. The soldier holding the rifle wore a green-gray uniform that was familiar and a pot-shaped helmet that wasn’t. “Nellie Semphroch,” he said-sure enough, he had a list. “You and your daughter are the ones who had the coffeehouse where the damn Rebs came all the damn time.”

“But-” Nellie began.

He talked right through her: “Come out, both of you. You’re under arrest. Charges are collaboration and treason.”

“Come on, men,” Gordon McSweeney called as his company trudged wearily down an Arkansas dirt road. “Come on. I will not have you go any place I will not go myself in front of you. What I can do, you can also do. What I can do, you will also do-or you will answer to me.”

Nobody argued with him. Nobody had argued with him since the day Captain Schneider fell in the Craighead Forest. Schneider, McSweeney feared, had been translated to a clime warmer than this one. That was a warm climate indeed; as both summer and the edge of the Mississippi delta grew closer with every passing moment, the muggy heat made McSweeney feel as if his uniform tunic and trousers had been pasted to his hide.

He’d remained in command of the company since the fight in the Craighead Forest. He’d also remained a second lieutenant. A sergeant was commanding one of the other companies in the regiment, and nobody seemed to be making any noise about replacing him, either. Officers didn’t grow on trees, especially not west of the Mississippi they didn’t.

“Pick ’em up,” McSweeney called to the troopers shambling along under the weight of helmet and Springfield and heavy pack and entrenching tool and clodhopper boots and however much mud clung to the boots. “If God grant that we pierce their forces but once more, we can bring Memphis and the Mississippi River under our guns. That would be a great blow to strike, and a sore hurt to the wicked cause of the Confederate States.”

“You talk like something right out of the Bible, sir,” said a private named Rogers who had not been in the section or platoon McSweeney led before getting the whole company.

“It is the word of God,” McSweeney answered. “Is a man not wise to shape his words in the pattern of those of his Father?”

Rogers didn’t answer. He just kept marching. That suited Gordon McSweeney fine. Even if he had the words of the Good Book on which to model his own, he was more comfortable doing than talking. Men could easily argue what he said. No one could argue about what he did.

Spatters of gunfire off to the right said the Confederates were trying to slow down the U.S. advance any way they could. The gunfire wasn’t close enough for him to swing his men out of their line of march to respond to it, so he kept them going. After U.S. forces finally forced the Rebs out of Jonesboro, the front had grown fluid for a change. The more ground he made his men cover, the closer they would be to Memphis.

Up ahead, one of those Rebel copies of a French 75 started banging away. McSweeney muttered something under his breath that would have been a curse had he permitted himself to take the name of the Lord in vain. Like every U.S. infantryman who had ever advanced against them, he hated those quick-firing field guns. This one, fortunately, was shooting long, over the heads of his company. Officers who hadn’t pushed their men so hard would have to worry about explosives and shrapnel balls and shell fragments.

The road led out of the woods and into a clearing, near the center of which stood a farmhouse. Rifle fire came from the farmhouse. McSweeney’s smile was broad and welcoming. “All right, men,” he said. “If they want to play, we can play with them. Let’s see how they like the game then.”

Past that, he needed to give very few orders. The men knew what needed doing, and did it without undue fuss or bother. Fire-and-move tactics that had taken them through the heavily fortified forest were perhaps wasted against a farmhouse with a few diehards in it, but the U.S. soldiers used them even so. Some went left, some went right. Before long, they had worked in close enough to pitch grenades through the windows of the house.

McSweeney wished for his flamethrower. How the faded pine timbers of this place would have burned! Then a fire started anyhow, whether from grenades or bullets he could not tell. A couple of men in butternut burst out the front door. They weren’t surrendering; they came out shooting. A fusillade of lead stretched them lifeless in the dust.

One of them was white, the other colored. McSweeney looked down at the Negro’s bleeding corpse and shook his head. “If black men will fight for the government that for so long has mistreated their kind, they deserve whatever that government gives them,” he said. “When they rose in revolt against their masters, I admired them. If they fight for those masters…they will pay the price, as this one has.”

After the brief interruption, the company moved on. A few Confederates fired at them from out of the bushes. They hunted the Rebs, though McSweeney, to his disgust, thought a couple of them got away.

Then came an interruption of a different sort. McSweeney had long since grown used to shells from field guns screeching their way through the sky. It had been a long time, though, since he’d heard a roar of cloven air like this one. Altogether without conscious thought, he threw himself flat.

The great shell burst fifty yards off to the left. Even as dirt thudded down onto his back and fragments hissed malevolently through the air, another shell thundered home, this one striking about twenty-five yards to the right of the road.

Some men were down as McSweeney was, to gain what little shelter they could from those enormous rounds. Others were down and screaming or wailing, clutching arms or legs or bellies. Others were down and not moving at all, nor would they ever move again.

“They aren’t supposed to have this kind of firepower way the hell out here!” somebody shouted. “Those have to be eight-inch, maybe ten-inch, shells.” Even as he spoke, two more of the big shells thundered in. More screams rose.

Busy with his entrenching tool, McSweeney forgot to reprove the soldier for cursing. Suddenly, the answer blazed in him. “River monitors!” he exclaimed. “They shelled us when we crossed the Ohio. This must be another one. If our own boats could get down as far as Memphis, we wouldn’t have been fighting our way through Arkansas all these months.”

Another pair of shells burst not far away. “What can we do, sir?” a soldier cried.

“Pray,” McSweeney answered. He would have said that under most circumstances. It seemed particularly fitting here. “What else can we do, when no guns of ours are able to reach those aboard the Confederate river monitor?”

As he spoke, he dug himself deeper into the soft, dark brown soil. The unwounded men in the company did the same. So did some of the wounded men. After almost three years of war, digging entrenchments was altogether natural. McSweeney had known men safe behind their own lines to dig foxholes before settling down to sleep for the night. He’d done it himself a couple of times.

Up ahead, a Confederate machine gun started barking. If the river monitor hadn’t halted McSweeney’s troops, they would have run into it in short order-and it would have done them about as much damage as the big guns on the Mississippi were doing.

Most company commanders would have sent scouts forward to examine the enemy machine-gun position. That never entered Gordon McSweeney’s mind. He scrambled out of the foxhole he had dug just as another pair of shells from the river monitor landed near the position his company had taken. More dirt rained down on him. Even after he stuck a finger in one ear, it didn’t hear so well as it should have.

He wriggled forward. One thing was different now that the U.S. Army had finally pushed the Rebs out of their lines in front of Jonesboro: not so much barbed wire on the ground to hamper movement. Grass and shrubs gave plenty of cover, too, and his muddy green-gray uniform made him hard to spot as he scooted toward the machine gun.

No concrete emplacement here. The Rebs were set up in a nest of sandbags. All the same, McSweeney bit his lip in frustration. Even if he picked off all the gunners, who seemed to have no idea he was anywhere close by, more Confederates would take over the weapon. He shrugged a tiny shrug. That might do. The new Rebels at the machine gun wouldn’t be a regular crew, and wouldn’t shoot so effectively.

He was just bringing his rifle up to his shoulder when firing off to his right made the Confederates turn the gun in that direction and start blazing away at his countrymen who were trying to advance over there. With the Rebs thus distracted, McSweeney put a bullet through the head of one of them. When the other one, the one who fed belts into the machine gun, half rose to check his friend, McSweeney drilled him, too. Both Confederate soldiers slumped down. He thought they were both dead.

His member throbbed. Save for an annoyed mutter too low to make sense even to himself, he ignored it. He waited for more Confederates to come forward and take over the gun. They didn’t. It sat there, silent. He muttered again, this time intelligibly: “Fools.”

He crawled to within sixty or seventy yards of it, where the cover petered out. Then he wasn’t crawling. He was running, in great bounding leaps. A couple of startled shouts rose. A few bullets cracked past him. None bit, though. He dove over the wall of sandbags, knocked the Confederate corpses out of the way, and manhandled the machine gun around so that it bore on the surviving Rebs farther east. Grinning from ear to ear, he gave them a taste of their own medicine.

Before long, his own men came hurrying up to support him. “Good to see you,” he said, not intentionally ironic.

Ben Carlton shook his head. “When that machine gun turned around, uh, sir,” the cook said, “I knew you’d got to it some kind of way. You’ve done it too damn often for me even to be real surprised about it any more.”

“Do not blaspheme,” McSweeney said, almost automatically. “I do my duty. And here, if not in your cookery, you have done yours. Let us push on against the foe. With God’s help, victory shall indeed be ours at last.”