The Grapple

XIII

Dr. Leonard O’Doull finished the amputation. “There we go,” he said. “All things considered, the poor bastard’s lucky.”

“Just losing a foot? I should say so.” Granville McDougald nodded. “Sometimes you lose a leg when you step on a mine. Sometimes it just plain kills you. Or if you step on one of those new bouncing bastards the Confederates are using, it pops up in the air and blows your nuts off. Some fun.”

“Yeah.” O’Doull hated the bouncing mines with a fierce and terrible passion. They were designed to make the ghastliest wounds they could. Some C.S. engineer had probably won himself a bonus for coming up with the idea. He looked at the patient etherized upon the table. “He should do pretty well, though. He just found an ordinary one.”

Pretty well. It was true. The man would live. He probably wouldn’t get a wound infection. Once he healed enough to wear a prosthesis, he’d be able to get around without too much trouble. How much agony lay between the moment of stepping on the mine and that reasonably favorable prognosis, though? How much had he gone through before he was carried back to the aid station? No way in hell to measure such things, but he’d already tasted his share of hell, his share and then some.

“Let’s get him off the table,” McDougald said. “We’re bound to have more business before long. Ain’t life grand?”

“Mauvais tabernac,” O’Doull said, and added, “’Osti!” for good measure. Granny McDougald laughed, the way he always did when O’Doull swore in Quebecois French. Sometimes, though, the blasphemy of the French curses felt more powerful than the blunt Anglo-Saxon obscenities O’Doull had gone back to using more often than not.

They did get more business, too, but not the kind they expected. Mortar bombs started bursting not far away. “Shit!” McDougald said, and Leonard O’Doull wasn’t inclined to argue with him. They both grabbed the wounded man and lugged him along as they hurried out of the tent. They would have to rebandage him later, but that was the least of their worries. Leaving him there for shrapnel to slice up would have been worse.

“Careful with him, Granny,” O’Doull said as they slid him down into the trench near the tent, the trench they always hoped they wouldn’t have to use.

“I’m trying,” McDougald said. Another mortar round burst nearby. Fragments screeched past O’Doull. McDougald gasped. Then he said, “Shit,” again, this time in an eerily calm tone of voice.

“You hit?” O’Doull had heard that tone too many times to have much doubt.

“Afraid so,” McDougald answered. “Two wars up at the front, and my very first Purple Heart. Lucky me.” Then he said, “Shit,” again, most sincerely now. “Son of a bitch is starting to hurt.”

“Get down in here,” O’Doull told him. “I’ll do what I can for you, and I’ll get you on the table as soon as they stop landing things on us.”

“Right,” the medic said tightly. “Well, nice to know I’m in good hands.” Like any other soldier, he carried a morphine syrette in the aid kit on his belt. As soon as he flopped down into the trench, he stuck himself. His left trouser leg was dark and soggy with blood.

Most soldiers would have used a belt knife or a bayonet to cut away the heavy fabric and get a look at the wound. O’Doull had a scalpel. It didn’t do a better job than any other sharp blade would have, but it felt natural in his hand. He found a long, nasty tear in McDougald’s thigh. “Not too bad, Granny,” he said. “We can patch it up-that’s for damn sure.”

“You’re the doctor,” McDougald said through clenched teeth. “When is that morphine going to kick in? How long does it take, anyway?” He’d injected himself only a minute or so before. When he was caring for someone else, he could gauge exactly how long the painkiller needed. He wasn’t objective about his own wound, his own torment. Who could be?

“Won’t be long,” O’Doull promised, as soothingly as he could. “I don’t have my needles and suture material with me. I’m going to pinch off a couple of bleeders in there and safety-pin you together till I can get you under the gas for a proper job.”

“You’re the doc,” McDougald said again. He braced himself as O’Doull got to work. On anyone else, he would have watched what his friend was doing. Why not? For a wound like this, he could have done just as well himself. When he was the wounded party, though, he looked anywhere and everywhere except at his injury. In a macabre way, it was funny. He even laughed when O’Doull remarked on it. But he swore savagely when O’Doull pinned the wound’s lips together. Then he laughed again, shakily. “Crazy how much that little crap hurts, isn’t it?”

“Yeah. Crazy.” O’Doull started bandaging the gash. “You’re going to have yourself a hell of a scar, you know?”

“Oh, boy. Just what I always wanted.” But then McDougald let out a sigh. “Ah, there’s the dope. Christ, that feels good. Almost worth getting hit for, you know? Somebody said it was like kissing God. Now I know what he meant.”

“Don’t like it too much.” O’Doull had known a few doctors who did like morphine too well. Army medics weren’t immune from using the stuff for their own pleasure, either. The powers that be landed on them like a rockslide when they got caught, but a lot of them were sly and careful. People who used drugs weren’t always the crazed addicts in melodramas. A lot of them used just enough to stay happy, and lived more or less normal lives aside from their habit.

More shell fragments whistled and screeched overhead. Even staying in the trench didn’t necessarily do O’Doull and McDougald and the anesthetized soldier with a missing foot any good. If a mortar bomb came down on top of them, that was it. End of story-or the start of a new and horrible one.

Far back of the line-well north of Delphi-U.S. artillery started thundering. The mortar fire stopped as suddenly as it had begun. Did that mean the C.S. mortar crews were casualties? O’Doull hoped so. He didn’t like people shooting at him, not even a little bit.

Eddie the corpsman stared down into the trench. “Jesus, Doc, what the hell happened here?” he asked.

“What do you think happened? I was elected Queen of the May, and I’m about to go into my dance,” Granville McDougald said before O’Doull could get a word out. Morphine might have dulled his pain, but not his sarcasm.

“Granny got his leg sliced when we were moving the wounded guy on account of the mortar fire,” O’Doull said. “Can you help me get him up and out so I can work on him?”

“Let me round up a couple more guys. It’ll go better if I do.” Eddie disappeared before O’Doull could say yes or no. Nobody’s paying any attention to me today, O’Doull thought aggrievedly. He hoped the Confederates wouldn’t get their mortars upright and shooting while Eddie was looking for help.

They didn’t. Maybe the U.S. artillery really had knocked out the enemy crews. Three more corpsmen jumped into the trench with O’Doull. They got the man with an amputated foot up onto a stretcher and then, grunting, lifted him out of the trench. “What’s going on?” he said vaguely-he was starting to come out from under the anesthesia. He wouldn’t feel pain for a while, though; O’Doull had shot him full of morphine while he was still out.

Once the corpsmen got him off the stretcher, it was Granville McDougald’s turn. “Take it easy, Granny,” Eddie said as they lifted him.

“Well, how else am I going to take it?” McDougald answered.

He rolled off the stretcher once they got it up to the level of the top of the trench. Morphine or not, that made him say several pungent things. They got out of the trench themselves, put him back on the stretcher, and carried him into the aid tent.

Sharp, jagged steel fragments had done a good job of ventilating the tent. A big one was stuck in one of the operating table’s front legs. It was only about a foot from the cylinder of ether and oxygen up there. If it had punched into that…O’Doull was just as glad it hadn’t. Maybe the tent would have gone up in flames, or maybe it would have just gone up-halfway to the moon.

“Well, Granny, I’m going to put you under so I can do a proper job on this,” O’Doull said, reaching for the mask connected to the cylinder.

“Sure, Doc. Do what you gotta do.” McDougald had anesthetized God only knew how many men himself. But when the mask came down over his nose and mouth, he tried to fight it, the way a lot of wounded soldiers did. It was reflex, nothing more; O’Doull knew as much. Eddie and another corpsman held McDougald’s hands till he went to sleep.

O’Doull cleaned the wound, closed off some more bleeders, and then sutured things firmly and neatly. He nodded to himself. “He’ll be all right, won’t he, Doc?” Eddie asked. “He’s a good guy.”

“You bet he is,” O’Doull answered. “And yes, he ought to do fine. But he’ll need at least a couple of months before he’s back on the job.”

“We’ll be getting a new number-one medic, then.” Above the mask he’d put on, Eddie blinked. “That’s gonna be weird.”

“Boy, no kidding.” O’Doull had come to take Granny McDougald’s unflustered competence very much for granted. Now he’d have to break in somebody else, somebody who’d probably be half his age and who wasn’t likely to know anywhere near as much as McDougald did. O’Doull muttered under his breath. He and McDougald had got on fine living in each other’s pockets for most of two years. It wasn’t a marriage, but it was intimate enough in its own way. Could he do the same with a new guy? He’d damn well have to.

They took McDougald away, still unconscious. O’Doull washed his hands and his instruments. He shook his head all the time he was doing it. He’d imagined himself getting hurt plenty of times. McDougald? He shook his head again. No, not a chance-he’d thought. The veteran noncom seemed enduring as the Rockies.

Which only went to show-you never could tell. O’Doull was still fine, not a scratch on him, and McDougald was lucky he hadn’t lost a leg. O’Doull thought about that, then shook his head. The medic was unlucky to have been wounded at all. But it could have been worse. With all O’Doull had seen himself, he knew how much worse it could have been.

U.S. fighter-bombers roared by overhead, flying south to pound the Confederate positions outside of Chattanooga. O’Doull didn’t look forward to that fight. He couldn’t imagine how taking the enemy bastion would be easy or cheap. More work for me, he thought. But he could do without more work. His ideal day was one where he sat outside the aid tent reading a book and smoking cigarettes. He hadn’t had an ideal day since putting the uniform back on. He didn’t expect to have one till the war finally ended. But every man, even a military doctor, deserved his dreams.

One way not to have to patch up wounded soldiers was to get hit himself. He looked down at his hands. He didn’t have Granville McDougald’s blood on them any more. He thought about the replacement medic or a surgeon farther behind the front trying to patch him up. He’d seen too many wounds. He didn’t want one of his own.

What he wanted might not have anything to do with the price of beer. Only fool luck Granny stopped that fragment and he didn’t. He wondered how-and whether-to tell Nicole that McDougald was injured. He talked about Granny in every letter he wrote. She would notice if he suddenly stopped. But she would flabble if he came right out and said his friend and colleague had got hurt. If it happened to Granville McDougald, she would say, it could happen to him, too.

And she would be right.

O’Doull knew he couldn’t admit that to her. He didn’t want to admit it to himself. The more you thought about things like that, the less you slept, the more likely you were to get an ulcer, the more likely your hand was to shake when it shouldn’t…

But how were you supposed to not think about something? If someone said, Don’t think about a blue rabbit, of course nothing else would fill your mind. “You just have to go on,” O’Doull murmured. “You just have to go on.”

On the bridge of the Josephus Daniels, Sam Carsten said, “I guess maybe we won that fight with the limeys and the frogs after all.”

Pat Cooley nodded. “Yes, sir. I guess maybe we did,” the exec said. “We wouldn’t be trying to take Bermuda back if we didn’t, would we?” He didn’t sound a hundred percent convinced-more as if he was trying to convince himself, and Sam, too.

“Well, I hope we wouldn’t, anyway.” Carsten had been aboard the Remembrance when a British attack on U.S. fishing boats lured the carrier north-and left Bermuda vulnerable to amphibious assault. Now the United States were trying to return the favor, if that was the word.

U.S. surface ships and airplanes and submersibles kept the British from reinforcing or resupplying the outpost in the western Atlantic. But the British garrison wasn’t ready to throw in the sponge. Lots of Royal Marines and soldiers were on the ground. The British had plenty of artillery-some of the heavy pieces big enough to damage a battleship or blow a destroyer escort like the Josephus Daniels clean out of the water. And they had fighters and dive bombers at least as good as the Americans could throw at them, and enough fuel to keep their airplanes flying at least for a while.

Along with carriers and battlewagons and smaller escort vessels like the Josephus Daniels, troopships and landing craft wallowed toward Bermuda. Sam watched them with a reminiscent smile on his face. “It looked like this in 1914,” he said, “when we landed on the Sandwich Islands.”

“You were there for that?” Cooley asked.

“You bet. I was still an able seaman in those days-hadn’t even made petty officer,” Sam answered. “I was on the Dakota. My battle station was at one of her five-inch guns.” He chuckled. “Secondary armament, right? Sure. Bigger guns than we’ve got on this tin can.”

“We can do what we need to do.” The exec patted the destroyer escort’s wheel, as if to say the ship shouldn’t listen to her skipper’s insults. But he couldn’t help adding, “You’ve seen a lot of action.”

“I’ve got a lot of miles on me, you mean,” Sam said with another laugh.

Airplanes roared off the carriers’ decks and flew south and east toward the island. They hadn’t had strike forces like that in the old days. The Dakota had carried a catapult-launched biplane scout that seemed to be made of sticks and baling wire. When it came back-if it came back-it landed on the sea, and the battleship fished it out with a crane. Nowadays, fleets didn’t even see each other. Airplanes did the heavy lifting.

He hoped they would do the heavy lifting against Bermuda. If they plastered the runways on the island so the British fighters and bombers couldn’t take off…If they did that, his own life expectancy would go up. He’d been lucky in war so far. He’d had a battleship hit and a carrier sunk under him, but he’d barely got scratched. He hoped that would go on-he liked his carcass the way it was.

Most of the time, Navy men were lucky compared to their Army counterparts. They slept in bunks, or at least in hammocks, not wrapped in a blanket in the mud. They ate pretty good chow, not the canned rations soldiers had to put up with. Most of the time, they were in transit from here to there; except for lurking submersibles, nothing put them in danger minute by minute for days or weeks at a stretch.

But…There was always a but. When things went wrong for sailors, they went wrong in a big way. If a ship went down to the bottom, she could take hundreds of men-even a couple of thousand on a carrier-down with her.

He wished he hadn’t had that thought. He reached out and rapped his knuckles on the wheel. Pat Cooley sent him a quizzical look. “What’s up, sir?”

“Nothing, not really. Just snapping my fingers to keep the elephants away.”

The exec looked around. “Nothing but the Atlantic for miles and miles,” he said. “I didn’t know the enemy was issuing heavy-duty water wings.”

“Gotta watch out for those water elephants,” Sam said gravely. “Next time you see something sticking out of the Atlantic, it won’t be a periscope-it’ll be one of their trunks instead.”

“No doubt, sir,” Cooley answered. “And the trunk’ll probably be packed, too-with explosives or with bushwah, depending.”

“Bushwah-no doubt about it,” Sam said, his face still straight. “An essential wartime ingredient.”

“Wouldn’t surprise me a bit,” the exec said.

Carsten studied the charts of the waters around Bermuda. The one thing he was sure of was that he didn’t want to get too close without a pilot aboard who knew them like the back of his hand. There were too many reefs marked, too many names like Cow Ground Flat and Brackish Pond Flats. There were also too many wrecks charted, some from the eighteenth century, some of blockade runners during the War of Secession, and ungodly numbers from the days of the Great War. He wondered how many wrecks weren’t marked. He didn’t want to add the Josephus Daniels to that number.

“Sir, we’ve got airplanes outbound from Bermuda,” the Y-ranging officer said. “They don’t intend to sit there and take it.”

“And we’re still a hundred miles offshore,” Carsten said. “Well, we already knew the limeys have their own Y-ranging gear.”

“Sure looks that way, sir,” Lieutenant Walters said. “Seems like they’re trying to keep us from doing too much to the island.”

“Can they?” Sam and his executive officer asked the same thing at the same time.

“No way to tell yet,” Walters answered. He watched the screens for another couple of minutes, then grunted. “That’s funny.”

“What’s up?” Sam asked.

“I’m picking up incoming aircraft with a bearing of about 250-a little south of west.” The Y-ranging officer laughed. “Gadget must have the hiccups. It does that once in a while.”

Sam didn’t think it was funny, not one little bit. He looked at Pat Cooley. The exec was looking back at him, similar consternation in his eyes. “How far is it from Cape Hatteras to Bermuda, Pat?” Sam asked.

“About six hundred miles, sir,” Cooley answered.

“That’s what I thought,” Sam said. “If the Confederates wanted to try bombing us, they could, in other words.” He didn’t wait for a reply this time. He just snapped out an order: “Bring the ship to general quarters. Signal the rest of the fleet what we’ve spotted and what we think it means.” Other Y-ranging sets would pick up those airplanes, too, but would the men eyeing the screens know what they were seeing?

Klaxons hooted. Sailors dashed to their battle stations as if someone had tied torches to their tails. “If the limeys can put up airplanes at the same time as the Confederates, things are liable to get interesting,” Lieutenant Cooley remarked, sounding calmer than he had any business being.

“Interesting. Yeah,” Sam said tightly. “And I hear that the ocean is wet, and Jake Featherston doesn’t always tell the truth, and you’re liable to get hurt if a.50-caliber slug hits you.”

Cooley gave an uncertain chuckle, plainly having trouble making up his mind whether the skipper was being sardonic or had just flipped his lid. The blinker on the closest cruiser started sending Morse. Cooley and Carsten both turned field glasses toward the signal. CONFIRM C.S. AIRCRAFT, it said, one letter at a time. PREPARE TO DEFEND. AIR COVER LIMITED.

That was all, no matter how much Sam waited and longed for more. “Happy day,” he said, and whistled something without much tune. He went to the speaking tube that connected the bridge to the engine room: “Be ready to give me flank speed at my order. We’re facing air attack any minute now.”

“Flank speed at your order. Aye aye, sir.” Nobody down in the black gang sounded ruffled. They never did down there. They did all they could do, and they didn’t worry about anything beyond the noise and heat of their province. Sam envied them their simplicity. It was the one thing he missed from his days as a rating. Now he had to think about the whole ship and the tactical situation at the same time.

“One thing,” Cooley said. “The Confederates probably won’t throw Asskickers at us. They don’t have the range to come out this far and make it back to the mainland. That means medium bombers hitting from high altitude, and they aren’t nearly so accurate.”

“Can Asskickers dive-bomb us and then land on Bermuda?” Sam asked.

His exec looked quite humanly surprised for a moment. “I hadn’t thought of that.” Cooley sounded less self-assured than usual. He checked some reference books, and didn’t look happy when he closed them. “Probably, sir. They may not be able to carry a full bomb load, but I think they can get here.”

“One more piece of good news,” Sam said.

The cruiser that had signaled them opened fire with her five-inch guns. A moment later, the Josephus Daniels’ pair of four-inchers opened up, too, and then the twin 40mm guns, and then the.50-caliber machine guns. The racket was terrific, astonishing, deafening. Sam knew he didn’t hear as well as he would have liked. Artilleryman’s ear, soldiers called it. This wouldn’t help.

Sure as hell, a gull-winged Confederate Mule stooped on the cruiser. Sam saw the dive bomber release the bomb it carried under its belly a split second before a big shell connected with it. The airplane turned into a fireball. Fragments rained down into the Atlantic. But the bomb caught the cruiser just abaft the bridge. The big ship staggered in the water. A great plume of smoke rose from her.

“Pilot’s a damn fool,” Cooley said. Sam made a questioning noise. The exec explained: “They should be going after the troopships and the carriers. In a fight like this, escorts are chump change.”

He’d just called his own ship chump change, which didn’t necessarily mean he was wrong. Another burning Asskicker plunged into the sea. The combat air patrol over the fleet was doing something, anyhow. And the guys at one of the forward 40mm mounts started whooping and dancing like men going out of their heads. They’d shot down an enemy airplane, or they sure as hell thought they had.

More Asskickers pulled out of their parabolic dives and fought for altitude. They were most vulnerable then, since they weren’t moving very fast as they climbed. Several of them got hacked out of the sky. But other ominous smoke pillars rose from the fleet.

“It’s a big game,” Sam said. “I wish I knew what the score was.”

“If we get troops ashore on Bermuda, we’re winning,” Pat Cooley said. “If we don’t…If we don’t, the Navy Department had a lousy idea.”

No sooner had he said that than another destroyer signaled them-the damaged cruiser was no longer close. ADVANCE WITH US TO BOMBARD ISLAND, the other ship’s signal lamp flashed.

“Acknowledge and tell ’em we’re on the way,” Sam said to Cooley.

“Aye aye, sir.”

Bermuda was actually made up of several low-lying islands linked by bridges and causeways. The Josephus Daniels’ fire went in against the airstrip in the northeast. The gunners worked their pieces with furious haste, knowing that the more damage they did, the less chance British and C.S. airplanes would have of getting off the ground and striking back.

Landing boats waddled forward from troopships that stayed out of the artillery range. Hidden gun emplacements opened up on them. Here and there, a boat was hit and went up in flames or simply sank. But most of the landing craft made it to the beach. U.S. bombers and fighters pounded all the enemy positions they could find. U.S. Army men and Marines swarmed forward. Sam hoped for the best.

Till Armstrong Grimes got wounded, he’d never been in upstate New York in his life. But a lot of U.S. military hospitals were in that part of the country, because Confederate bombers had to fly a long way to get there. The one where he was recuperating lay somewhere between Syracuse and Rochester. Since he wasn’t sure which town was which, he would have had trouble nailing it down any better than that.

Lying around doing nothing with nobody to yell at him for it felt strange, almost unnatural. Not worrying about snipers or machine guns felt even stranger. He got plenty of chow-not wonderful chow, but better than the canned stuff he’d been eating most of the time. He got all the cigarettes he wanted, even if they were U.S. barge scrapings instead of Confederate tobacco.

And the nurses were…nurses. Women. Some of them were tough old battleaxes who’d been taking care of people since the Great War. Others, though, were young and cute and friendly. Armstrong hoped some of them would prove more than friendly. Guys who’d been there a while told stories about nurses who helped soldiers recuperate by hopping into bed with them. But soldiers always told stories about women. Armstrong didn’t see anything like that, no matter how much he wished he would.

Even so, he couldn’t remember the last time he’d been around women who didn’t want to blow his brains out. It reminded him there was a bigger world out there than the one that involved storming the next apartment building full of Mormons or Canucks.

So did reading newspapers and listening to the wireless. Oh, they were full of things like the reconquest of Bermuda and the U.S. drive aimed at Chattanooga. But that wasn’t all. They didn’t go on about the war twenty-four hours a day. There were stories about crime and scandal and films and a lady in Schenectady who’d had quadruplets.

That one impressed the nurses more than it did Armstrong. “Men!” one of them sniffed when she found out Armstrong didn’t get it. “Can you imagine trying to take care of four little tiny babies all at once? Can you imagine trying to take care of four two-year-olds all at once? My God!” She rolled her eyes.

Armstrong couldn’t imagine anything like that. But, since Susan was young and cute instead of being a battleaxe, he did his best. “Bad?” he asked.

“My God!” she repeated. “My kids are almost two years apart, and they still drive me nuts. But four of them doing the same things, making the same messes, getting into the same trouble all at the same time? I hope she’s got lots of people helping her, that’s all I can tell you.”

She wore a wedding ring. Armstrong hadn’t even noticed before. Damn, he thought. “Where’s your husband stationed?” he asked.

“He’s in west Texas right now,” Susan answered. “He’s been lucky so far.” She reached out and knocked on the nightstand by his iron-framed cot. “But when I see what can happen to you guys…” She grimaced.

“I’m getting better,” said Armstrong, not the least self-centered young man around. But then he realized that might need something more with it. He did his best: “Most of us are getting better.”

He won a smile from the nurse. “I know,” she said. “But I still worry. How can I help it?”

“I guess you can’t, but it doesn’t do you any good,” Armstrong said. “It doesn’t do your husband any good, either. What’s his name, anyway?” He didn’t give a rat’s ass what the guy’s name was, but asking might make Susan like him better, and who could say where that would take him?

Her smile got bigger-she did appreciate the question. “He’s Jerry,” she said. “He’s so sweet…” Her face went all mushy. If she’d looked at Armstrong that way, he would have been in business. Since she was thinking about Jerry instead, he just lay there and smiled himself and nodded. He didn’t hope the guy would stop an antibarrel round with his face, but he didn’t exactly love him, either.

He watched Susan’s perky behind as she went to check on the wounded man in the next bed. He wasn’t the only recovering soldier watching her. The guys in this ward were wounded, yeah, but they were a long way from dead.

That afternoon, Susan bustled up to him with a different kind of smile on her face. She was pleased for him. “You’ve got visitors,” she announced, then turned and said, “You can come in now.”

In walked his father and mother. His mother gave him a big hug and a kiss. His father squeezed his hand hard and said, “I’m proud of you, son.”

“What? For getting shot?” Armstrong said. “I’m not proud of that. It was just bad luck.”

“No, not for getting shot.” Merle Grimes’ left hand stayed on the head of his cane. “For being brave enough to fight in the front line, and for doing it well.”

His old man had done his fighting a generation earlier, and he must have forgotten how things worked. You didn’t go to the front line because you were brave. You went there because some slob with stars on his shoulder straps decided your regiment could do a particular job-or maybe because you drew the short straw. And if you didn’t go forward when the other guys did, the Army made sure you caught hell. If you did go forward, you had a chance of coming through, anyway.

“You’re going to be all right,” his mother said. “The nurse told us so.”

“Yeah, Mom,” Armstrong said. “I probably won’t even have a limp.” They were talking about putting him back on duty once he healed up, so he figured the chances he’d be able to walk straight were pretty fair.

“That’s good,” Edna Grimes said. “Not that it would be the end of the world,” she added hastily, looking at her husband.

“I understood what you meant,” Merle Grimes said. “I’m not ashamed of my limp or anything-I earned it honestly. But I wouldn’t be sorry if I didn’t have it.”

“Thanks for coming, both of you. You didn’t have to do anything like this,” Armstrong said.

“Oh, yes, we did,” his mother and father said together.

“Who’s taking care of Annie?” he asked. His little sister was getting big these days; she didn’t need as much care as she would have a few years earlier.

“Your Aunt Clara has her,” his mother answered. “She says she hopes you get better soon-Clara does, I mean. So does Annie, of course.”

“That’s nice,” Armstrong said, as politely as he could. He didn’t like his aunt, and it was mutual. Clara was his mom’s half sister, and only a couple of years older than he was. They hadn’t been able to stand each other ever since they were little kids. He was surprised Clara didn’t hope he’d got his dick shot off.

His mother always tried to pretend things weren’t as bad as they really were. His father, who didn’t, chuckled. “She doesn’t want to see you dead, Armstrong,” he said. “Not unless she does it herself, anyway.”

“Merle!” By her tone, Edna Grimes would make Dad pay for that, no matter how true it was.

“Oh, come on, Edna. I was joking,” he said. At the same time, though, he tipped Armstrong a wink. He wasn’t joking a bit, but he didn’t feel like fighting with his wife. He looked at the bandages on Armstrong’s leg. “How did it happen?”

“We were pushing north toward Winnipeg. The Canucks had a strongpoint in a farmhouse,” Armstrong answered. “I was one of the guys moving up, and the damn machine gun got me. Bad luck, that’s all, like I said before.” He paused. “How did you get wounded, Dad?” He’d never felt able to ask before. Now they both belonged to the same fraternity. He’d had himself a.30-caliber initiation.

“It was a trench raid,” Merle Grimes answered without the slightest hesitation. “We used to pull them all the time, to grab a few prisoners and see what the guys on the other side were up to. The front didn’t move then the way it does nowadays. We got in, we threw some grenades around, we caught some Confederates, and we were on our way back when some son of a bitch-excuse me, Edna-nailed me from behind. Stinky Morris and Herm Cassin got me back to our side of the line, and it was off to an aid station after that. It hurt like a…Well, it hurt like anything.”

“Yeah. I found out about that. For the first little bit, it was just like somebody knocked me down. But not for long.” Armstrong shook his head. “No, not for long.” He didn’t want to remember that, so he asked, “How are things back in D.C.?”

“Well, we aren’t occupied,” his mother said. “It was bad when the Confederates took the town last time around, and it was really bad when the USA took it back. I wasn’t much older than you are now when that happened. But in between there was a long stretch that was pretty quiet, when the front was too far north to let guns reach us. Bombers weren’t so much back then.”

“They are now,” his father said. “The Confederates still come over us two or three nights a week. We’re not far from their fields, so they can really load up. We go to the cellars when the sirens start howling, and we hope for the best. You can’t do much else. It’s almost like being in the line, except you don’t get to shoot back yourself.”

“I guess.” Armstrong had no idea what civilian life in wartime was like. He’d been a conscript when the shooting started. “You have enough to eat and everything?”

“That’s better than it was the last time around,” his mother said.

“I was in the service the last time around, so I can’t compare,” his father said, “but it’s not too bad. Not much meat-there’s this horrible chopped ham that comes in cans.” He and Armstrong’s mother both made faces. He went on, “What we get mostly isn’t exciting, and a lot of the fruits and vegetables are canned, too. But nobody’s going hungry. Your rations sound like they’re better than what we ate in the trenches. Boy, I never wanted to see another bean after I got out.”

“We always bitch about what we get,” Armstrong said.

His father laughed. “King David’s soldiers probably did the same thing.”

“Yeah, probably,” Armstrong said. “But the biggest thing I don’t like is that you get bored. There aren’t that many different kinds of rations, and some guys won’t like some of them, so that cuts it down more. You’re always happy when you can scrounge some chickens or a pig. Once in Utah, we ate a goat.”

His mother made a disgusted noise. His father just sounded interested as he asked, “How was it?”

“Better than I expected,” Armstrong answered. “Kinda tough and kinda gamy, but we had this Polack in the squad-Eyechart, we called him, ’cause his name looked really weird with all those s’s and z’s and w’s-who stewed it and stewed it, and it ended up so it was better than rations, anyway.”

“Sounds like he had some practice in the old country,” his father said.

“Him or his folks-I think he was born here,” Armstrong said. “But the coffee’s lousy and the cigarettes are worse. That’s the, uh, dirty end of the stick.”

Merle Grimes chuckled at the just-in-time censorship. Then he said, “Close your eyes.” Armstrong did. When his father said he could open them, he found himself looking at three packs of Raleighs. “These are for you.”

“Wow, Dad! Thanks!” Armstrong knew he would have to share them with his wardmates. He didn’t care. They were wonderful anyhow. “Where’d you get ’em?”

“A friend of mine has a son who captured a Confederate truck crammed full of them,” his father answered.

“Wow,” Armstrong said again. Short of nabbing Jake Featherston, he couldn’t think of anything better. “That guy should’ve won the Medal of Honor.” He hadn’t thought a visit from his parents could turn out so well. A truckload of Raleighs! That was almost better to think about than Susan.

Nothing official ever came of Cincinnatus Driver’s run-in with Sergeant Cannizzaro. He hadn’t thought it would. Technically, he was a civilian, so they couldn’t even court-martial him. The most they could do was take away his gun and ship him home. That would have pissed him off, but it wouldn’t have broken his heart. He knew he had a better chance of living to a ripe old age in Des Moines than he did hauling supplies through the CSA.

But there were more kinds of results than official ones. The way he handled himself when the Confederates hit the supply column and the way he stood up to the jerk of a U.S. quartermaster sergeant won him respect from his fellow drivers.

“You’re all right, you know?” Hal Williamson sounded half surprised when he said it as they dug into ration cans somewhere in central Tennessee. “Never had much to do with colored fellows before. Ain’t a whole lot of ’em in Manchester, New Hampshire. You kinda believe what folks say. But like I said, you’re all right. You’re just-a guy.”

“What did you expect?” Cincinnatus paused to light a Raleigh. The Confederate from whom he’d taken the pack wouldn’t be smoking again, unless he smoked down in hell. “I ain’t got horns. I ain’t got a tail.” He was thinking about hell, all right.

“Not what I meant.” Williamson cast about for a way to say what he did mean. He was about Cincinnatus’ age, with steel-rimmed bifocals and with three fingers gone from his left hand. He gestured with that mutilated hand to make his point. “I didn’t figure you people’d have the balls to do some of the things you done.”

“Niggers’re like any other folks.” Cincinnatus used the word on purpose. He could use it, though he would have slugged Williamson had he heard it from the white man’s lips. “Some’s smart, some’s dumb. Some’s brave, some’s cowards. Some’s good-lookin’, some’s mullions.” Hal Williamson blinked at that bit of black slang, but he followed it. Cincinnatus went on, “Maybe I got balls, maybe I don’t. But even if I do, that don’t say nothin’ about what niggers’re like. It only goes to show what I’m like. You see what I mean?”

“Maybe.” Williamson lit a cigarette of his own. “It’s like sayin’ all Jews are cheap or all Mexicans’ll pull a knife on you if you look at ’em sideways.”

He probably knew even less about Mexicans than he did about Negroes. There might be a Negro or two in Manchester, but Cincinnatus would have bet there were no Mexicans. Still, he got the point. “That’s what I’m sayin’,” Cincinnatus told him. “Biggest difference between black folks and white folks is, you’re white and we’re black. Next biggest difference is, you been on top. If we was on top, you bet we’d treat you just as shitty as you treated us.”

Williamson blinked again behind those glasses. Cincinnatus chuckled silently; the idea that Negroes could be on top plainly had never occurred to the other driver. “Son of a bitch,” Williamson said after a moment, and then, “Well, I bet you would. It’s…What do you call it? Human nature, that’s what.”

“Reckon so,” Cincinnatus said. “Tell you some more human nature: I ever get my hands on Jake Featherston…Do Jesus!”

“Yeah,” the white man said. “But for me it’s on account of he jumped my country. It’s personal for you, ain’t it?”

“You might say so.” Cincinnatus stubbed out his cigarette and twisted his hands as if he were wringing a chicken’s neck-or a man’s. “Yeah, you just might say so.”

They got rolling again a few minutes later, carrying this, that, and the other thing down past Delphi to where the United States were building up for the attack on Chattanooga. Armored cars accompanied the column. So did a couple of half-tracks full of soldiers. The powers that be probably cared very little about the truck drivers’ safety. What they were hauling? That was another story. Here in Tennessee, the column needed all the protection it could get. The only land the United States really held here was land their men were standing on. Everything else belonged to the Confederates.

Even shot-up autos by the side of the road could be deadly dangerous. One of them blew up with an enormous roar as an armored car went by. The vehicle got two flat tires and a dent, but otherwise withstood the blast. Whoever set off the auto bomb would have done better to wait for a soft-skinned truck.

U.S. machine guns sprayed the woods, but that was a forlorn hope. They also fired at other roadside wrecks, which turned out to be a good idea. One burnt-out command car exploded while the closest U.S. vehicle was still a quarter of a mile away. Cincinnatus whooped when it did. “One of Featherston’s fuckers cussin’ his head off now!” he said jubilantly.

The jubilation didn’t last. It never did. Infiltrators or holdouts started shooting at the trucks. A deuce-and-a-half lurched off the road with a driver wounded or dead. Another coughed to a stop when it took a bullet through the engine block. A couple had tires flattened and had to change them. An armored car stayed behind with them to obstruct the snipers and to shoot at them if they broke cover. Along with most of the other drivers, Cincinnatus went on.

Night was falling when they got to the supply dump. Soldiers holding dim red flashlights guided them to the unloading point. More men waited there with wheelbarrows and dollies. Off in the distance, artillery rumbled.

“Come on, youse guys! Move it!” a familiar voice shouted. Cincinnatus swore under his breath. If that wasn’t Sergeant Cannizzaro, he was a blond. “Took youse long enough to get here!” the quartermaster sergeant complained.

Telling him where to go and how to get there was bound to be more trouble than it was worth. Cincinnatus just sat in the cab of his truck and wished he could have a cigarette. Signs all over the dump screamed NO SMOKING! at the top of their printed lungs.

“Here you go, Jack.” Somebody handed him a sandwich through the open window.

“Why, thank you kindly,” Cincinnatus said in glad surprise. He was even more surprised-and even gladder-when he bit into it. That thick slab of ham had never lived in a U.S. Army ration can. He didn’t know where the soldier came up with it, but it was mighty good.

He wished for a bottle of beer to go with it. No sooner had he wished than another soldier came along and gave him a bottle of…Dr. Hopper. Soda pop wasn’t the same, but it wasn’t bad, either. It had to be plunder, same as the ham. The taste reminded him he was back in the CSA. Dr. Hopper didn’t come over the border-at least, he’d never seen it up in Des Moines. He hoped they dropped a bomb on the factory that made the stuff…maybe after he’d got hold of a couple of cases for himself for old time’s sake.

Swearing soldiers unloaded his truck. He thought the cussing in this war was even worse than it had been the last time around. People then sometimes seemed faintly embarrassed at what came out of their mouths. Nowadays, men didn’t even notice they were turning the air blue. They swore as automatically as they breathed-and profanity seemed as necessary as air.

“Hey, Sergeant!” somebody called. “You got beds for us?”

“What? You ain’t goin’ back right away?” Cannizzaro sounded genuinely amazed.

A volley of curses-purposeful, not automatic-washed over him. Cincinnatus added his two cents’ worth to the barrage. The idea of crawling along in the dark with useless taped-up headlights, waiting for raiders he couldn’t see to open up, was less than appealing.

Sergeant Cannizzaro knew when he was outgunned. “Awright, already!” he said. “Stay here.” He might have been outgunned in the literal sense. Cincinnatus had traded in his.45 for a captured Confederate submachine gun. Other drivers carried Springfields or even C.S. automatic rifles-although U.S. infantrymen in the line grabbed most of those. “Like I said, ain’t got no beds,” Cannizzaro went on. “Youse can spread out bedrolls on the ground, or youse can sleep in your trucks. Ain’t nobody gonna give you no trouble till morning, honest to God.”

Cincinnatus slept under his truck. More men stayed in their cabs, but he couldn’t stretch out at full length in there. With his battered carcass, sleeping all scrunched up mostly meant not sleeping. A crumpled-up jacket made a good enough pillow. Cincinnatus’ battered bones creaked as he turned and twisted to get as comfortable as he could. All that wiggling might have kept him awake for-oh, an extra thirty seconds.

He came back to himself the next morning when somebody gave him a shake and said, “You fuckin’ die under there, Pop?”

“I was restin’,” Cincinnatus said with as much dignity as he could manage around a yawn.

“Yeah, well, you’ll be arrested if you don’t get your ass in gear,” the other soldier said, and he went off to torment somebody else.

Breakfast was scrambled eggs and more slices of that terrific ham. Wherever it came from, Cannizzaro and his merry men had a lot of it. “You ever see anybody skinny in the Quartermaster Corps?” Bruce Donovan asked.

“Yeah, well, what the hell?” Most of the time, Cincinnatus would have been as eager as the other driver to slander Sergeant Cannizzaro and his ilk. Since the guys at the supply dump were sharing their bounty this morning, he was willing to let them off easy.

He wasn’t jumping up and down at the idea of going back up north to get more supplies. Oh, the Army needed them-no doubt about it. But running the gauntlet again, even with armored escorts, didn’t thrill him.

That hardly crossed his mind before Donovan said, “To think I volunteered for this shit.” Cincinnatus couldn’t have put it better himself. Since he couldn’t, he finished his coffee and limped back to his truck.

The convoy hadn’t gone far before it had to stop. The Confederates must have sent bombers over in the night, and a couple of them had scored direct hits on the highway. The bombs must have been big ones, too-the craters were thirty or forty feet wide and at least half that deep. Nobody was going anywhere on that road, not for a while, especially since similar craters pocked the fields to either side.

Army engineers with bulldozers were busy repairing the damage. Soldiers in green-gray went through the bushes to clear out snipers so the engineers could work without harassing fire. That made Cincinnatus jealous, but the engineers weren’t even moving targets. They were sitting ducks.

More engineers were stretching lengths of steel matting-the kind used to make emergency airstrips-across the field to serve as a makeshift road while the real one was getting fixed. After about half an hour, the job was done well enough to suit them. They waved the lead truck forward.

Cincinnatus was glad he wasn’t driving lead. But where the deuce-and-a-half ahead of him went, he followed. The matting was a little higher than an ordinary curb would have been. His truck didn’t like climbing up onto the stuff, but it could. He bumped along, then jounced down, then climbed up onto another strip of matting. Skirting the bomb craters went slowly, but it went. And those soldiers out there beating the bushes were keeping him safe along with the engineers. He tipped his cap to them, though they couldn’t see him do it.

Everybody stepped on the gas once he got back onto the paved highway. Cincinnatus was happy to mash the pedal down to the floorboard. He knew he might be rushing toward danger, not away from it. All the same, he’d felt like a sitting duck himself back there. He was glad to get away.

Nobody got hurt on the run north from Delphi, which made it a good one. Only three or four shots were fired at the column. They sounded like.22 rounds to Cincinnatus. Those wouldn’t come from Confederate soldiers, who had better weapons, but from some civilian with a squirrel gun and a grudge. U.S. authorities had confiscated all the firearms they could. The penalties for holding on to rifles and pistols were bloodthirsty. The Confederate citizenry didn’t seem to care. Cincinnatus wished he were more surprised.

Halfway to Camp Determination. That was how Abner Dowling looked at it. He wished he’d come farther. He wished his men could have moved faster. But he’d been stalled in front of Lubbock too damn long. The Eleventh Army-such as it was-was moving again. How much anybody back East cared…might be a different story.

He hadn’t got the reinforcements he hoped for. Everything the U.S. Army could lay its hands on was going into the drive toward Chattanooga. Dowling didn’t much like that, but he understood it.

One reason he wasn’t going as fast or as far as he wished he could was that the Confederates were bringing in reinforcements: Freedom Party Guard outfits that fought as if there were no tomorrow. They made Dowling scratch his head for all kinds of reasons.

“They’ve got fewer men in Tennessee and Kentucky than we do, right?” he asked his adjutant one hot, sticky summer morning.

“Certainly seems so,” Major Angelo Toricelli agreed.

“They’re in trouble over there and we’re not, right?” Dowling persisted.

“Unless our newspapers and wireless people are lying even harder than Featherston’s, yes, sir,” Toricelli said. “Possible, I suppose, but not likely.”

“Bet your ass it’s not,” Dowling said, which made the younger officer blink. “All right, then. We keep saying we can’t afford to send anything out here to the ass end of nowhere. But Featherston’s sending people, sending equipment, out here like it’s going out of style. I know he’s a son of a bitch, but up till now I never thought he was a dumb son of a bitch, you know what I mean?”

“Yes, sir,” Toricelli said. “I can only think of one thing.”

“Well, you’re one up on me if you can. Spit it out.” Dowling had always enjoyed feeling smarter than George Custer. Now he watched his own adjutant feeling smarter than he was.

“To the Confederates, sir, this isn’t the ass end of nowhere,” Toricelli said.

“Well, yes, but why not?” Dowling asked. “You can’t really mean they think killing off Negroes as fast as they can is more important than keeping us out of Chattanooga?”

The words hung in the air after he said them. The oppressive humidity might have borne them up. Major Toricelli nodded. “That’s it, sir. That is what I think. Nothing else makes sense to me.”

“Then Featherston really is off the deep end,” Dowling exclaimed.

“Could be, sir. I don’t know anything about that. I’m no head-candler. But whether he’s nuts or not, he’s still running the CSA, and nobody’s trying to stop him that I know of. When he yells, ‘Jump, frog!’ they all ask, ‘How high?’ on the way up.”

“Good God,” Dowling murmured. “If you’ll let your country go down the drain so you can do this instead…I’m not sure a head-candler can help you.”

“I hope nobody can help him,” Toricelli said. “But he’s been at war with Negroes about as long as he’s been at war with the USA. Don’t they say he had a chance to stop the uprisings in the last war, only his superior wouldn’t let him take a servant in for questioning? Something like that, anyway.”

“I think you’re right, or close enough,” Dowling said. “But if he beats us, he can do what he wants with the Negroes later. If he goes on killing them and we lick him…”

“They’re gone, and he dies happy,” Toricelli said.

“He sure as hell dies,” Dowling said. “Send the War Department a report showing the reinforcements we’ve run up against. Send them a summary of what we’ve been talking about, too. They should know we think he thinks that way. Don’t be shy about giving yourself credit, either. You were there ahead of me.”

“Thank you, sir.” Major Toricelli sounded as if he meant that. Dowling understood why. When he served under Custer, nothing was ever the great man’s fault. Anything good accrued to the great man’s credit. Here, Dowling consciously tried not to imitate his old boss.

He sent an armored probe forward-and got it bloodied. Yes, the Confederates finally were reinforced. They had new armor of their own, and that meant trouble. They’d go nipping in after his supply line next. He had the feeling he’d come about as far as he could, or maybe a little farther.

One thing the enemy didn’t have was much air power. Dowling summoned Colonel DeFrancis. “I want you to go after those barrels and self-propelled guns, Terry,” he said. “Go after their fuel dumps, too. Let’s see how much we can slow ’em down.”

“I’ll do my goddamnedest, sir,” DeFrancis said. “We’ve got some new inch-and-a-half guns mounted under dive bombers. Turns ’em into barrel busters. They dive, fire from close range, pull up and climb, then do it again. Engine decking hasn’t got a prayer of standing up to an armor-piercing round like that.”

“Sounds good to me,” Dowling told him. “Turn ’em loose. Let ’em hunt. Let’s see what they can do. Let’s see if they can keep those bastards off our necks.”

“Yes, sir!” Terry DeFrancis sounded enthusiastic. He often did, especially when Dowling was turning him loose on a new and exciting hunt. For most officers, as for most other people in executive positions, what they did was a job. Some of them were better at it than others, but for the able and not so able alike it was work. DeFrancis was different. He enjoyed what he did. He had a good time doing it. Maybe he got a hard-on watching things blow up. Dowling didn’t know-he didn’t ask. But the colonel’s enjoyment made him a better combat officer. He constantly looked for new ways to put the enemy in trouble. Chances were he grinned when he found them, too.

West Texas made good barrel country. It was nice and flat-you could see for miles. There weren’t a lot of forests for barrels to hide in, either. That made for a wide-open fight, and also for a fair fight. But if barrels had trouble hiding from one another, they also had trouble hiding from airplanes. The USA controlled the skies hereabouts. Abner Dowling aimed to make the most of it.

His headquarters wasn’t close enough to the airstrip to let him hear DeFrancis’ dive bombers and fighter-bombers take off. Why put all your eggs anywhere near the same basket when the prairie was so wide? He stayed where he was, strengthened his flanks in case the aircraft didn’t do as much as he hoped they would, and waited to see what happened next.

Custer wouldn’t wait, he thought. Custer would charge ahead regardless. And no doubt he was right, because Custer always aimed to get the bit between his teeth and charge ahead regardless. About four times out of five, he ended up wishing he hadn’t. The fifth time…The fifth time left him with his reputation as a great general, because the fifth time he charged the other side shattered instead of his own.

Dowling knew he wouldn’t go down in the history books as a great general. The two likeliest candidates this time around were Irving Morrell and George Patton. Patton got off to a fast start in Ohio, but Morrell was making up ground-literally as well as metaphorically-in Kentucky and Tennessee. Who held higher honors in the books would probably depend on who won the war.

Some men who realized they weren’t going to be great generals turned into failures instead. They drank too much, or they became sour martinets, or they forgot about discipline for themselves and everybody under them. Dowling tried not to commit those particular sins. If he couldn’t be a great general, he could be a pretty good one, and that was what he aimed at.

He awaited developments, then. A great general probably would have forced them. A pretty good general could decide he was in no position to force them, which seemed plain as a punch in the nose to Dowling. He consoled himself by deciding it would take a great general to beat him, and so far his Confederate counterpart had shown no signs of greatness. If anything, the fellow on the other side seemed to have more trouble making up his mind than Dowling did.

The awaited developments…didn’t develop. No column full of Freedom Party Guards and enemy armor crashed into Dowling’s flank from the wide open spaces to the north or south. Dowling briefly wondered whether his opposite number had had his imagination surgically removed when he was only a lad.

Then the aerial reconnaissance photos came in. Terry DeFrancis came in with them-and with a spring in his step and a cigar in his mouth. “Will you look at these, sir?” he said. “Will you just look at them?”

“If you quit waving them around, I will,” Dowling said.

“Sorry, sir.” DeFrancis set them on his desk.

Dowling spread them out so he could look at several at once. They all seemed to feature vehicles on fire and pillars of smoke mounting up to the sky. Some of the burning vehicles were trucks, but quite a few were barrels. “You hit them hard,” Dowling said.

“Sir, we fucking pulverized them, pardon my French,” DeFrancis said. “They were driving along without a care in the world, right out in the open, and we caught ’em naked with their legs spread. We screwed ’em, too. We screwed ’em to the wall.”

“With news like that, you can speak French to me any old day,” Dowling said.

“Thank you, sir.” Colonel DeFrancis grinned around the cigar. He grew a little more serious as he went on, “Air power matters here. It really matters. We’ve got it, and the other guys don’t. That gives them just as much trouble approaching us as a fleet of battleships has approaching an airplane carrier.”

“Don’t get carried away,” Dowling warned. “They can do things battleships can’t. They can camouflage themselves. They can spread out, so you don’t catch so many of them together. I suppose they can even use dummies and hit with their real force while you attack those.”

DeFrancis eyed him. “Sir, I’m glad we’re on the same side. You’ve got an evil, nasty, sneaky mind.”

“You say the sweetest things, Colonel.” Dowling batted his eyelashes at the younger man. Watching a portly, sixtyish general simper and flirt was almost enough to make DeFrancis swallow his stogie. As his air commander had before, Dowling quickly sobered. “You’re doing a terrific job, Terry. I just don’t want you to get too confident.”

“Fair enough, sir,” DeFrancis said. Dowling hoped he meant it. When you were winning, when things were going your way, it was easy to think victory was meant to be. Custer always did. Hell, Custer thought victory was meant to be even when he’d just taken a shellacking. His confidence made his troops pay a fearful butcher’s bill.

In the end, Custer made his vision of victory real. Dowling wanted DeFrancis to do that without causing his own side the misery Custer had. “What’s the next thing you can do that would hurt the enemy most?” Dowling asked.

“Catch another column flatfooted,” DeFrancis replied at once.

Dowling tried again: “What’s the next thing you can do that would hurt the enemy most, assuming he’s not an idiot?”

Colonel DeFrancis took longer to answer this time. At last, he said, “Well, the more we pound his supply lines, the more trouble he’ll have hitting us.”

“Fine,” Dowling said. “Do it. Even if the War Department won’t send us more men, they don’t seem constipated about shipping us ordnance. As long as we’ve got it, we might as well drop it on the Confederates’ heads.”

“I like the way you think, sir,” DeFrancis said.

“I just hope the bastards in butternut don’t,” Dowling answered. “Keep hammering them. If we can soften ’em up enough, we will drive on Camp Determination.” He spoke with no small determination of his own.

“Hey, Sarge!” one of the soldiers in Chester Martin’s platoon called to him.

“What’s up, Frankie?” Martin asked.

“Found this out on patrol. Figured I better bring it in so you could see.” Frankie held out a piece of paper.

“Thanks-I think.” Chester took it. It was cheap pulp, not much better than newspaper grade. The printing was cheap, too: letters blurred, ink smeary. The message, though, was something else again. YANKEE MURDERERS! it began, and went downhill from there.

The gist was that U.S. soldiers who’d shot hostages couldn’t expect to be treated as prisoners of war. We shoot mad dogs, it read, and anyone who slaughters innocent Confederate civilians puts himself forever beyond the pale of civilized warfare.

“What do you think, Sarge?” Frankie asked.

“Me? I think there’s no such thing as an innocent Confederate civilian, except maybe in his left ear,” Chester answered. “You tell anybody else about this little love letter?”

Frankie shook his head. “No, Sarge. Not me.”

“Don’t flabble about it if you did-bound to be lots more copies out there,” Martin said. “But don’t go yelling it from the housetops, either. You did good, bringing it to me. I’m going to let Captain Rhodes have a look at it.”

Rhodes studied the flyer, then looked up at Chester. “Thanks for showing this to me, Sergeant. I’ll kick it up to Intelligence, let the boys there check it out. I’d say we hit a nerve.”

“Sir?” Chester said. “How do you mean?”

“Looks to me like the Confederates are saying they can’t protect their own, and they’re trying to scare us into being nice little boys and girls,” Rhodes answered. “Or do you think I’m wrong? You’ve been around the block a few times-you know what’s what.”

“I don’t know my ass from a hole in the ground half the time.” Chester thought about it. “You may be right. I don’t know that you are, but you may be.”

“Fair enough,” Captain Rhodes said. “We’ll see what the Intelligence johnnies think. Hell, they won’t pay any attention to me-I’m just a dumb line officer, so what the fuck can I know?”

“You’re a damn good company commander, sir,” Martin said. “I’ve been around that block-I ought to know.”

“Thanks. When you say something like that, I know you’re not blowing smoke up my ass, ’cause you don’t need to,” Rhodes said. “I know damn well we’ve got more good company-level officers than first sergeants.”

He wasn’t wrong. The worst thing he could do to Chester was take away his platoon. And if he did, if some baby-faced shavetail started commanding it instead, who would really be running things any which way? Chester and Hubert Rhodes both knew the answer to that one.

“Do we have any notion when we’re going after Chattanooga, sir?” Chester asked.

“I’m sure we do, if we counts the big brains back in Philly,” Rhodes answered. “If you mean, do I have any notion, well, no.”

“Can’t be too much longer…can it?” Martin said.

“I wouldn’t think so. Both sides are building up as fast as they can,” the company commander said. “As long as we keep building faster than the Confederates, everything’s fine. And I think we are. We’ve got air superiority here-we’ve got it just about everywhere except between Richmond and Philadelphia. We can smash them when they try to move men and supplies forward, and they can’t do that to us.”

“We’ve got more men to start with, too,” Chester said. “Their small arms make up for some of that, but not for all of it.”

“Now our barrels are better than theirs, too-till they run out their next model, anyway,” Rhodes said. “We can lick ’em, Sergeant. We can, and I think we will.”

“Sounds good to me, sir,” Chester said.

If the Confederates thought their U.S. opponents could beat them, they did a hell of a job of hiding it. Chester had seen that in the last war. You could beat the bastards in butternut, but most of them kept their peckers up right till the end. They kept fighting with everything they had.

Maybe they didn’t have as much as they would have if U.S. airplanes weren’t bombing the crap out of their supply lines. Chester didn’t know about that. They still seemed to have plenty of artillery ammunition. Their automatic rifles and submachine guns didn’t run short of cartridges, either. They had enough fuel to send barrels and armored cars forward when they counterattacked-and they counterattacked whenever they thought they saw a chance to take back some ground.

The terrain south of Delphi didn’t need long to turn into the sort of lunar landscape Chester had known and loathed during the Great War. The stench of death hung over it: something even uglier than the view, which wasn’t easy. Soldiers sheltered in craters and foxholes. Trench lines and barbed wire were thinner on the ground than they had been a generation earlier, mostly because barrels could breach them.

Nobody liked this kind of fighting, going back and forth over the same few miles of ground. “When do we break out, Sarge?” Frankie asked one day. He was scooping up pork and beans from a can. “We go somewhere new, maybe it won’t smell so bad.”

“Maybe.” Chester’s ration can was full of what was alleged to be beef stew. The grayish meat inside might have been boiled tire tread. Chester had never found a piece with GOODYEAR stamped on it, but that didn’t mean he wouldn’t. And the Confederates thought Yankee chow was better than what their own quartermasters dished out! That was a scary thought. He went on, “I asked Captain Rhodes the other day. He didn’t know, either.”

“Well, if he don’t, chances are nobody does. He’s a hell of a smart man, the captain is,” Frankie said.

“That’s a fact,” Chester said.

They were still eating when a Confederate junior officer came forward with a white flag. He asked for a two-hour truce for both sides to pick up their wounded. Martin greeted him with a glare. “Yeah? Suppose you get some of our guys? You gonna shoot ’em once you take ’em back behind the lines?”

“Good God, no!” the C.S. lieutenant said. “We don’t do things like that!”

“Except maybe to niggers,” Chester said.

He watched the enemy soldier turn red. But the man didn’t even waste his breath denying it. “We don’t do that to soldiers in a declared war,” was all he said.

“Sounds like bullshit to me, buddy,” Chester said. “What about that goddamn leaflet you’ve been spreading all over creation?”

The C.S. lieutenant blushed again. “That wasn’t soldiers who did that. It was Freedom Party guys from the Director of Communications’ office.”

“How the hell are we supposed to tell the difference? You’ve even got Freedom Party Guards coming into the line along with regular soldiers. What are we supposed to do? Kill all of you bastards and let God worry about it afterwards?”

“I don’t have anything to do with ordering that stuff,” the Confederate said. “If they come up here, they’re soldiers. They perform like soldiers, don’t they?” He waited. Martin couldn’t very well deny that. Seeing that he couldn’t, the officer went on, “Honest to God, Sergeant, if we find your people, we’ll take ’em prisoner. If we start doing things to ’em and you people find out, you’ve got our POWs to get even with.”

That made a certain brutal sense to Chester. He nodded. “All right, Lieutenant. Two hours. Your medics and ours-and probably a little bit of trading back and forth. Got any coffee?” Not much came up into the USA. The Army got most of what there was and stretched it as far as it would go, which made it pretty awful.

“Swap you some for a couple cans of deviled ham. That’s the best damn ration around,” the lieutenant said.

Before talking to him, Chester had made sure he had some. He would have bet the Confederate wanted it. The lieutenant gave him a cloth sack full of whole roasted beans. Just the smell, the wonderful smell, was enough to pry his eyelids farther apart. “Yeah, that’s the straight goods, sure as hell,” Chester said reverently.

“I got me some eggs,” the lieutenant said. “Got me some butter, too. Gonna scramble ’em up with this ham…” For a moment, they both forgot about the war.

Then the Confederate officer turned and waved to his men. Chester also turned. “Cease-fire!” he yelled. “Two hours! Medics, forward!” He nodded to the lieutenant. “You can head on back now.”

“Thanks.” The officer raised his hand in what wasn’t quite a wave and wasn’t quite a salute. Away he went.

From both sides of the line, men with Red Cross smocks and with the Red Cross painted on their helmets moved up to gather casualties-and to share cigarettes and food and coffee and maybe an unofficial nip or two from a canteen. Men on both sides stood up and stretched and walked around without fear of getting shot. If they were smart, they tried not to show exactly where their hiding places were. Snipers had a nasty habit of remembering stuff like that.

Corpsmen brought back a soldier with a wound dressing on his leg. “How you doing, Miller?” Chester asked.

“I’m out of the fucking war for a while, anyway.” Miller didn’t sound sorry he’d got hit. A lot of people who caught hometowners felt the same way.

Chester kept smelling that wonderful coffee. He wanted to smash up the beans with the hilt of his belt knife or find a hammer to do it and to make himself three or four cups’ worth of joe right then. The enemy lieutenant had probably brought it forward the same way he’d carried the cans of deviled ham. The fellow had to know what a damnyankee would want.

Another wounded man came in, this one with a blood-soaked bandage on his head. The medics looked grim. “Bad?” Chester said.

“About as bad as it gets,” one of the medics answered. “Head wound, in one side and out the other. God knows how he’s still breathing, with half his brains blown out. Take a miracle for him to get better.”

“Take a miracle for him to still be breathing this time tomorrow,” another medic said. The man who’d spoken first didn’t tell him he was wrong. Shaking their heads, the stretcher team carried the wounded soldier back towards an aid station.

“Fuck,” Chester Martin said softly. Krikor Hartunian-hell of a name-didn’t belong to his platoon. But he came from Captain Rhodes’ company. He was a baby when his folks were lucky enough to escape from the Ottoman Empire. An awful lot of Armenians hadn’t been so lucky. Some people said the massacres the Turks pulled off helped give Jake Featherston the idea for getting rid of the CSA’s Negroes.

Chester had no idea if that was true. All he knew was that a Confederate bullet had slaughtered Krikor-usually called Greg. The kid’s folks had a farm somewhere in central California nowadays. Pretty soon, a Western Union messenger would deliver a Deeply Regrets telegram from the War Department. People didn’t want to see Western Union messengers these days. Chester remembered his folks talking about that during the last war. These days, they called the poor kids-who were only doing their job-angels of death. Wasn’t that a hell of a thing?

Here in southern Tennessee, death came without angels. When the truce ran out, both sides fired a few warning shots. Anybody still up and around and out in the open ran for cover. Then they got back to the business of murder.