Walk in Hell

XIV

Achilles smiled at Cincinnatus, a smile that showed one new tooth in a wide, wet mouth. The baby said something wordless but joyful. Cincinnatus smiled back. To Elizabeth, he said, “He’s in a happy mood this mornin’, ain’t he?”

His wife smiled back, wanly. “Why shouldn’t he be happy? He can sleep as long as he wants, an’ he can wake up whenever he please. An’ he’s still too little to know his ma can’t do likewise.”

“I heard him there in the middle of the night,” Cincinnatus said, digging into the ham and eggs Elizabeth had made. “He sounded happy then, too.”

“He was happy,” she said, rolling her eyes, which were still streaked with red. “He was so happy, he wanted to play. He didn’t want to go back to bed, not for nothin’ he didn’t. Did you?” She poked Achilles in the ribs. He thought that was the funniest thing in the world, and squealed laughter. When he did, his mother visibly melted. All the same, she said, “What I wanted to do was give him some laudanum, so he’d go back to sleep and I could, too.” She yawned. Achilles squealed again-everything was funny this morning.

No sooner had Cincinnatus shoveled the last fluffy scrambled egg into his mouth than someone knocked on the door. He grabbed for his mug of coffee and gulped it down while hurrying to let in his mother. “How’s my little grandbaby?” she asked.

Cincinnatus was still swallowing. From the kitchen, Elizabeth answered, “Mother Livia, he must be sleepin’ while you got him, on account of he sure don’t do none o’ that in the nighttime.”

“He jus’ like his father, then,” Cincinnatus’ mother said. She turned to him. “You was the wakinest child I ever did hear tell of.” Without taking a breath, she went on in a different tone of voice: “Looks like it’s fixin’ to storm out there, storm somethin’ fierce.”

“Does it?” Cincinnatus looked outside himself. His mother was right. Thick, dark clouds were boiling up in the northwest, over Ohio, and heading rapidly toward Covington. The air felt still and heavy and damp. He reached into the pocket of his dungarees and pulled out a nickel. “Gonna ride me the trolley down to the docks.”

“Gettin’ pretty la-de-da, ain’t you?” his mother said. “Trolley here, trolley there, like you got all the money is to have. Pretty soon you gwine buy youself a motorcar, ain’t that right?”

“Wish it was,” Cincinnatus said, and gave her a kiss as he hurried out the door. When the CSA had ruled Covington, a motorcar for a black man would have been out of the question, unless he wanted to be branded as uppity-and, perhaps, literally branded as well. Under the USA…maybe such a thing would be possible, if he got the money together. Maybe it wouldn’t, too.

The rain began just before he got to the trolley stop, which wasn’t particularly close to his house. One stop served the entire Negro district near the Licking River. He remembered the complaints he’d heard about routing the track even so close to his part of town.

When the trolley car rattled up, he threw his nickel into the fare box and sat down in the back. The Yankees hadn’t changed the rules about that sort of thing; they had rules of their own, not quite so strict as those of the Confederacy but not tempered by intimate acquaintance, either. He sighed. If your skin was dark, you had trouble finding a fair shake anywhere.

Lightning flashed. Thunder boomed. Rain started coming down in sheets. The trolley filled up in a hurry, as people who usually would have walked to work decided against it today. Whites started moving back into the Negro section. One by one, Cincinnatus and his fellow blacks gave up their seats and stood holding the overhead rail. None of them complained, not out loud. Men down from the USA ousted them as casually as did native Covingtonians.

Water sprayed up from the trolley’s wheels as it slid to a stop near the wharves. Cincinnatus and several other Negro men leaped down and ran for their places. The others were all roustabouts; they’d be drenched by the time the day was through. Cincinnatus didn’t expect to be much better off. For one thing, it was almost as wet inside the cab of a White truck as it was outside. For another, he’d be outside a good deal of the time, certainly while loading and unloading his snarling monster, and probably while fixing punctures as well.

“Morning, Cincinnatus,” Lieutenant Straubing said when he splashed into the warehouse that served as headquarters for the transportation unit. “Wet enough out there to suit you?”

“Sure enough is, suh,” Cincinnatus answered. As usual, his color seemed not to matter to Straubing. He still had trouble believing that could be true, but had seen no evidence to make him suppose it was an act, either.

The lieutenant looked troubled. “Cincinnatus, we have a problem, and I think we could use your help to solve it.”

“What kind of problem you talking about, sir?” the Negro asked, expecting it to be something to do with the bad weather and what it was doing to the schedule and to Kentucky’s miserable roads.

Lieutenant Straubing looked even less happy. “A sabotage problem, I’m afraid,” he answered. Just then, an enormous clap of thunder gave Cincinnatus an excuse for jumping, which was just as well, because he would have jumped with an excuse or without one. Straubing went on, “An unhealthy number of fires have broken out in areas we’ve served. Please be on the alert for anything that seems suspicious.”

“Yes, suh, I’ll do that,” Cincinnatus said, knowing everyone would be on the alert for him, a distinctly alarming notion.

Straubing said, “Damned if I can figure out who’s playing games with us, either. Maybe it’s the Reds”-he didn’t say anything about niggers, as most whites, U.S. or C.S., would have done-“or maybe it’s Confederate diehards. Whoever it is, he’ll pay when he gets caught.”

“Yes, suh,” Cincinnatus said again. “He deserve it.” He shut up after that, not wanting to draw the U.S. lieutenant’s attention to himself. Part of that, of course, was simple self-preservation. Part of it, too, was not wanting the one white man who’d ever treated him like a human being to be disappointed in him. If the United States had produced more men like Lieutenant Straubing, Cincinnatus never would have worked to harm them. As things were…

“I’m letting everyone know,” Straubing said. “If you’ve seen anything, if you do see anything, don’t be shy.”

“I won’t, suh.” Cincinnatus wondered if he could buy his own safety by betraying the Confederate underground. The trouble was, the only man whose whereabouts he knew for certain was Conroy. No, that was one trouble. The other was that, here in Covington, Confederates and Reds worked hand in hand. He’d betray Apicius and his sons along with the men who waved the Stars and Bars. Some things cost more than they were worth.

More drivers, white and black, came dripping into the shed. Straubing spoke to them all. Cincinnatus wondered how good an idea that was. Everyone would be eyeing everyone else now. And anyone who had a grudge against anyone else would likely seize the chance to have the occupation authorities put the other fellow through the wringer.

“Let’s move out,” the lieutenant said at last. “We’ve got a cargo of shells the artillery is waiting for.”

“Weather like this, they’re going to be waiting a while longer,” said one of the drivers, a white man Cincinnatus knew only as Herk.

Lieutenant Straubing was a born optimist. A man who treated blacks and whites the same way had to be a born optimist-or a damn fool, Cincinnatus thought darkly. Even the Yankee soldier did not contradict Herk. All he said was, “We’ve got to give it our best shot.”

Out they went. Cincinnatus was glad he hadn’t had to buck the heavy crates of shells into the bed of the White truck himself. He wondered when he’d get home again: not as in at what time, but as in on what day. The front kept moving south. That meant an ever-longer haul from Covington. If he was lucky, the roads would be terrible and not too crowded. If he wasn’t lucky, they’d be terrible and packed, and he might not get home for a week.

Right from the start, he had the feeling he wouldn’t be lucky. The truck’s acetylene headlamps didn’t want to light, and, once they finally did, hissed and sputtered as if about to explode. He had to crank the engine half a dozen times before it turned over. One of those fruitless tries, it jerked back on him, and he yanked his hand off the crank just in time to keep it from breaking his arm.

Unlike some, the truck had a windshield and a wiper for it. It thrashed over the glass like a spastic man’s arm, now two or three times quickly, now all but motionless. The idea was good. As far as Cincinnatus was concerned, it needed more work.

Even on the paved streets of Covington, the White seemed to bang unerringly into every pothole. Nor was Cincinnatus the only one with that complaint: a couple of trucks limped toward the curb with punctures. Changing an inner tube in the rain was not something he looked forward to with delight.

So thick were the clouds, it seemed more like twilight than advancing morning. Cincinnatus stuck close to the rear of the truck in front of him, and saw in his mirror the headlamps of the next White to the rear just behind him. He thought of elephants in a circus parade, each grasping the tail of the one in front with its trunk.

Paved road ended about twenty-five miles south of Covington. Before the war, it had ended at the city limits: Yankee engineers were pushing it on toward the front for reasons of their own. The difference between pavement and dirt was immediate and appalling. Muck flew up from the back tires of the White in front of Cincinnatus, coating his truck’s headlamps and splattering the windshield. The wiper blade smeared more than it removed.

Swearing, Cincinnatus slowed down. Spacing between trucks got wider as other drivers did the same thing. Then they came upon what had to be at least a division’s worth of infantry heading south along the road. Drivers in the lead trucks squeezed the bulbs on their horns for all they were worth. That was supposed to be the signal for the infantrymen to get out of the way. Even in good weather, the soldiers in green-gray didn’t take kindly to moving onto the shoulder. With the rain, they barely seemed to move at all. The Whites splattered them as readily as one another. Curses rang in Cincinnatus’ ears as he crawled past and through the marching men.

The trucks sped up again once they finally got beyond the head of the infantry column. A little farther along, they had to go onto the shoulder: a pair of bogged barrels plugged the road tight as a cork in a bottle. Cincinnatus hoped he’d reach the next fuel depot before his truck ran out of gas.

A noise like a gunshot made him jump in his seat. The truck slewed sideways. It wasn’t Confederates or Reds. “Puncture,” he said resignedly, and pulled off the road to fix it.

By the time he scrambled back into the cab of the truck, he was soaked from head to foot and all over mud. He felt as if he’d been wrestling somebody three times his size. He’d put a board under the jack before he tried using it. It had done its level best to sink into the ooze board and all. The ordeal was almost enough to make him wish he were back at the docks.

He shook his head. “I ain’t that stupid,” he said, gunning the engine to try to catch up with the rest of the convoy.

He did, too, soon enough; no one could make any sort of time through the mud. He managed to get more gasoline before he stopped dead. Putting everything together, the trip wasn’t so bad as he’d expected. Only goes to show I don’t expect much, he thought.

The raiders hit the convoy a little south of Berea. One moment, Cincinnatus was contentedly chugging along not far from the rear-other fellows who’d had to stop for one breakdown or another had fallen in behind him. The next, an explosion up ahead made him stamp on the brake. As the truck skidded to a stop, rifle and machine-gun fire rang out from the side of the road, stitching down the convoy toward him.

He had no gun. He carried nothing more lethal than a clasp knife. Without a moment’s hesitation, he dove out of the cab and away from the White as fast as he could go. That proved smart. Flames started licking up from under the hood in spite of the rain: a bullet or two must have smashed up the motor. Cincinnatus just watched those flames for a moment. Then, with a moan of fright, he crawled farther away from the truck, not to escape the bullets still flying, but to get away from the-

The flames spread rapidly. With a soft whoomp, the gas tank went up, setting the whole truck ablaze. A minute or so after that, the fire reached the artillery rounds in the bed. At first, a couple of them exploded individually. And then, with a great roar, the whole truckload went up.

Cincinnatus had been on his hands and knees. The blast knocked him facedown into the mud. Shell fragments and shrapnel balls slashed the air around him. Some of them fell hissing into puddles of rainwater close by.

As other trucks began exploding, he tried desperately to put more distance between himself and them. He heard screams from drivers who hadn’t been able to get away, and Rebel yells from the raiders still shooting up the convoy. The explosions, though, kept the raiders from coming after him.

Or so he thought, till a shape wallowed toward him. He grabbed for his little knife, knowing it would do no good against a rifle, but then stopped. “That you, Herk?” he asked, not sure he recognized the filthy, dripping driver.

But the white man nodded. “Yeah. How the hell do we get out of this?”

“Dunno,” Cincinnatus answered. He started laughing. Herk stared at him, eyes wide and shining in his dirty face. Cincinnatus explained: “We got us the chance to find out, though.” Very solemnly, Herk nodded again.

Very solemnly, Abner Dowling peered south through his field glasses, toward the wooded hills north of the little Tennessee town called White House. He stood under a green-gray canvas awning, so the hot August rain didn’t splash down onto his lenses. But the rain cut down on visibility nonetheless, masking those hills from clear observation. What little he could see, he didn’t like.

He turned to General Custer. “Sir, the Rebs have that line as fortified as all get-out. They’re not going to be easy to shift, not even a little bit.”

“Yet shift them we must, and shift them we shall,” Custer said, as usual mixing desire and ability. He raised his field glasses to his face, holding them with one shaky, liver-spotted hand. “That line in front of White House is the last one they can hold to keep our artillery out of range of Nashville. Once it goes down, we commence bombarding the city.” He let the binoculars fall down on the leather strap holding round his neck so he could rub his hands in anticipation.

“I understand that, sir,” Dowling said. “The trouble is, I’m very much afraid the Confederates understand it, too. That is a formidable position they have there-not only high ground, but wooded high ground, so we have trouble pinpointing their dispositions.”

He had no trouble pinpointing Custer’s disposition: it was petulant. The general commanding First Army said, “I intend to bombard that area until every tree in it has been made into toothpicks and matchsticks. Toothpicks and matchsticks,” he repeated, relishing the rhyme.

“Yes, sir,” Dowling said, working to remind Custer of reality. “We lost a good deal of ammunition when that convoy was ambushed last week.”

“True,” Custer said. “You will of course note that, although those munitions were intended for my force, that shocking breach of security occurred in an area under General Pershing’s jurisdiction, not mine.”

“Of course, sir,” his adjutant agreed: where self-preservation was concerned, Custer had a keen enough grasp on reality. Dowling went on, “However that may be, though, the ammunition is not here. And”-he pointed toward the dark, tree-clad, rolling hills-“that’s not good country for barrels. No country is good country for barrels in this rain.”

“We’ll send them in anyhow,” Custer said, which was just like him: he’d found a weapon that worked once, so he’d keep right on using it, regardless of whether circumstances warranted such use. He continued, “And we have plenty of ammunition, even without that which was lost. And, no doubt, our soldiers will make up with their courage any minor deficiencies in the preliminaries.”

Translated into English, that meant a hell of a lot of young Americans were about to get shot, a good many of them unnecessarily. Custer had already fought a lot of battles like that in western Kentucky, and advanced at a snail’s pace: the pace of a snail whose trail was blood, not slime. Dowling said, “It might be wiser to hold off a bit, sir, until the weather’s more favorable and we have better reconnaissance.”

“Major, we have been fighting for two years and more now,” Custer replied. “Would you not say we have already seen a sufficiency of delay?” Without giving Dowling a chance to answer, he said, “I expect the bombardment to commence tomorrow morning and to continue until the Rebel positions are pulverized, at which point we advance, barrels and infantry both.”

What Custer expected, Custer got. That was the advantage of being a lieutenant general. The next day, the guns began to roar. Dowling didn’t envy the artillerymen serving them in the mud. Again, no one asked his opinion. He watched explosions wrack the Confederate hilltop lines. First Army had a lot of guns and a lot of ammunition even without what the raiders had blown up. They pounded the positions north of White House with high explosive and shrapnel and gas.

Custer watched, too, with the delight of a small boy at a fireworks show. “Give it to ’em,” he said hoarsely. “Give it to ’em, by jingo!”

As Dowling had foreseen, the Confederates understood perfectly well what the unending barrage implied. Their own guns pounded the U.S. trenches. In the wretched weather, accurate counterbattery fire was next to impossible, because the U.S. artillery had and could gain no exact notion of the Rebel guns’ positions.

The U.S. artillery preparation went on for five days. By the end of that time, as Custer had desired, the hills were no longer tree-covered. Seen through Dowling’s field glasses, they resembled a close-up photograph of an unshaven man who’d survived a bad case of smallpox: all over craters and old eruptions, with now and then, as if by afterthought, something straight sticking up from one of them. It was easy to imagine that every Confederate in those hills had been blown to kingdom come.

It was especially easy for Custer to imagine as much. “We’ve got ’em now,” he told Dowling in the middle of it, preening like a cock pheasant. “The Lord has delivered them into our hands, and our soldiers have only to storm forward and capture whatever demoralized wretches chance to remain alive.”

“I hope you’re right, sir,” Dowling said, “but in the big fights in Pennsylvania and Maryland, and even the ones First Army had in western Kentucky, the defenders ended up with an advantage all out of proportion to their numbers.”

“That’s why we’re laying on the artillery preparation.” Custer looked at his adjutant as if he’d just crawled out from under a flat rock. “Never in the history of the planet had any place on the face of the earth been bombarded like those hills there. Only a wet blanket would think otherwise.”

Dowling sighed. Custer had reckoned him a wet blanket since the earliest days of their association. That he’d proved right more often than not had done nothing to endear him to the general commanding First Army-on the contrary. This was one of the times Dowling devoutly hoped he was wrong. Custer had laid on one hell of a bombardment, and maybe it would be good enough to wipe out the foe. Maybe.

It went on for two more days, till the artillerymen were as near deaf as made no difference. Even when the U.S. soldiers swarmed out of their trenches and rushed for the ruined woods, the barrage kept on, now dropping down on where Intelligence thought the Rebels had their front-line trenches. Some of the Americans unrolled telephone wire as they advanced. Others carried signal flags, in case the wires broke as they so often did.

From under that camouflaged awning, Custer and Dowling watched the troops. Dowling saw sparklike points of light begin to spurt here and there in the woods. “We didn’t get quite everyone, sir,” he said.

“Leftover dust to be swept away by the broom of the infantry,” Custer said grandly. “A broom five miles wide, Major.”

Confederate artillery started falling in no-man’s-land. U.S. troops got hung up in the belts of barbed wire not even the titanic American barrage had been able to tear up. More and more Confederate machine guns, muzzle flashes winking like malign eyes filled with horrible amusement, opened up on the U.S. soldiers stuck out in the open.

Every so often, a runner or a staff officer would bring news of the progress the attack was making. By the time the news reached Custer and Dowling, it was old and stale. “What’s the slowdown?” Dowling demanded.

“Too many phone lines broken by the Rebel artillery, sir,” answered a lieutenant who didn’t seem to realize he was bleeding from a wound in his upper arm. “Too many runners getting shot before they can make it back, too. And the goddamn Rebel snipers are concentrating on our signalers. It’s worth your life to stick up a banner.”

Custer moved blue counters on a map. “We are making progress,” he insisted. “We need to send in the reserves, to take advantage of the gains the first wave has carved out.”

In went the reserves. For all they gained, the ground might as well have swallowed them up. The ground had swallowed too many of them up, and they would never rise from it again. Toward evening, Custer committed more reserves. “Once we break the hard crust and reach the softness it protects, they are ours,” he said.

The third wave of reserves went in the next morning, a couple of hours slower than they might have. The Rebs had been dislodged from most of their forward trenches, and from some of the secondary trenches as well. The line, though, still held. And the cost! “Sir,” Dowling said late that second afternoon, “we’ve lost almost a division’s worth of dead, and twice that many wounded. How long can we go on like this?”

“As long as it takes,” Custer replied. “All summer, if we need to.”

By the end of summer, Dowling feared, First Army would be down to battalion size. The question, he supposed, was whether the Confederates opposing them would have any men left at all. Even if they didn’t, was that a victory? Could the U.S. survivors go on and take Nashville, which was, after all, the point of this entire exercise?

Custer seemed to entertain no doubts. “If you hammer the anvil long enough, Major, it breaks.”

Dowling didn’t answer. He had blacksmiths in his family, and knew what Custer might not: if you hammered the anvil long enough, it broke, all right, but it was the hammer, not the anvil. He wondered if he should try explaining that to the general commanding First Army. After a moment, he shook his head. General Custer hadn’t been in the habit of listening to him before. Why would he start now?

Major Irving Morrell said, “What we’ve got going now is the big push toward Banff. The last thing we want to do is go straight at the place. The Canucks are set up and waiting for us to try it. If we do, they’ll slaughter us. We have to make them watch the cape, the way the bullfighters do in the Empire of Mexico. If they keep their eyes on the cape, they won’t notice the sword.”

Captain Heinz Guderian nodded. “This is sound doctrine, Major. Deception. Deception by all means.” He spoke in German, which not only Morrell but also his officers understood.

“Thanks, Captain.” Morrell turned an ironic eye on the German staff officer. “I thought you’d have headed back to Philadelphia along with Major Dietl.”

Guderian shrugged. “Dietl goes back to a real war, so he has no compunctions about leaving this one. If I go back to Germany, I go back to fighting at a desk, with machine pencil and large-caliber typewriter.” His eyes sparkled. “If I am to make my life as a soldier, I intend to be a soldier, not a clerk in a field-gray uniform.”

“Fair enough.” Morrell took a map from one of his pockets. “Let’s have a look at exactly what we’ve got here.”

Guderian and Morrell’s own company-grade officers huddled close to him. Captain Karl Spadinger pointed to the map. “What do these ‘I.T.’ markings stand for?” he asked.

“The abbreviation means ‘Indian trail,’” Morrell answered. “Shows what kind of country we’re operating in. And we’ll have the devil’s own time doing anything with the Canadians watching us-they’re bound to have observers here on this peak”-he pointed toward Pigeon Mountain-“and it’s almost two miles high.”

“How are we going to fool them, then?” Captain Charlie Hall asked. “If they know we’re coming, they’re going to bake us a cake.”

He had a gift for the obvious; Morrell had long since seen that. But what was obvious to him would also be obvious to the Canadians. “What’s obvious,” Morrell observed, “isn’t always true.”

Guderian’s head bobbed up and down. He got it. So did Captain Spadinger. So, for that matter, did Lieutenant Jephtha Lewis. Hall’s tanned, handsome face was still blank. Rather sourly, Morrell decided that made him perfect for leading half the attack he had in mind: if its own commander didn’t understand it, the Canadians were sure to be fooled.

But no, he decided after a brief hesitation. Sending Hall in blind would surely get him killed. He was liable to get killed anyway; his role would be expensive. And so Morrell condescended to explain: “You’ll take your company and most of the machine guns around to the east of the mountain there. Don’t do anything in particular to keep from drawing attention to yourself. As soon as you get opposition, I want you to plaster it with rifle fire and those machine guns-make it seem as if you’re in charge of the whole battalion. While you’re keeping the Canucks busy, the rest of us are going to be sneaking up one of these Indian trails to see if we can slide past the observer without getting observed.”

Captain Hall’s eyes widened. “What a good idea, sir!” he exclaimed.

“I’m glad you like it.” Morrell knew his voice was dry, but he couldn’t help it. It didn’t matter. Hall no more noticed the tone than he had figured out what lay in Morrell’s mind before the battalion commander put it in words of one syllable for him.

Morrell kept Sergeant Finkel’s machine-gun squad; the rest went on the diversionary move. Since he was leaving himself with only one gun, he chose the best. Guderian had seen that, too. “The sergeant there should be an officer,” he observed quietly. “Is he held back because he is a Jew?”

“Maybe a little,” Morrell answered. “He holds himself back, too, though: he’d rather deal with the machine guns himself than with men who would be dealing with machine guns, if you know what I mean.”

“I know exactly what you mean,” Guderian said, nodding. “Those are indeed the ones who make the best noncommissioned officers.”

Once he judged Captain Hall’s force well begun on its diversionary move, Morrell led the rest of the battalion north and west on narrow trails through the thickest woods he could find. He strung the men out so that, even if the Canadians up on Pigeon Mountain should spot them, they would have a hard time judging how many U.S. soldiers were on the march.

He tramped along at the head of the column, map in one hand, compass in the other, hoping the two of them could guide him. His boots scuffed almost soundlessly through a carpet of needles fallen from the tall, dark conifers all around. Their resinous, aromatic scent filled his nostrils.

“You are a lucky man, Major,” Captain Guderian said, “to have escaped being chained behind a desk.”

“I think so, anyhow,” Morrell said. “Some people want to coop themselves up with stoves and electric lamps and telephones and typewriters. You need those people, too, if you’re going to win a war, but I am not any of them. This, for me, is better.”

Guderian was on the point of replying when gunfire broke out, off to the east. It was a good deal of gunfire. The German’s head went up, like a hound’s on taking a scent. “The Canadians’ attention has been drawn, I should say. Nothing like machine guns to do that, is there? Soon we see how much attention they are paying over on that side of the mountain.”

“They can’t have a whole great swarm of men themselves,” Morrell said. “They’re trying to hold off the USA all across their country, and we’re bigger than they are, even if we’re fighting the Confederacy, too.”

“One hopes they can’t,” Guderian answered. Morrell grinned. The foreigner was as dry with him as he’d been with Captain Hall. Unlike Hall, though, he was alert enough to the world around him to realize as much.

He was sure the Canadians had pickets in the woods-he would have, in their shoes. He didn’t run into any of them for quite a while, though. As the trees hid him from Pigeon Mountain, they also hid the mountain from him. That meant he had no choice but to navigate by the map, which he didn’t fully trust. If it was even close to right, he was almost to decent terrain that would take him straight toward the railroad line-and toward the last line of Canadian defenders in front of it.

Just when he’d begun to think he’d used the Indian trails so cleverly as to evade every picket the Canucks had posted, a rifle shot rang out up ahead. The bullet zipped past his head before he heard the report from the rifle that had sent it on its way. He was burying his face in those fragrant needles before a second bullet drilled through the space where his body had been.

Map and compass went flying when he dove. As he grabbed for his Springfield, he shouted, “Get ’em fast. Don’t let this look big.” He fired in the direction from which the shots had come.

His men dashed into the woods on either side of the trail. The little battle that followed was a lot like fighting Indians-running from tree to tree, ambushes, small desperate stands of resistance. After ten or fifteen minutes, no one was shooting anymore. Morrell hoped the Canucks were dead and hadn’t been able to send runners back to announce he and his soldiers were on the way.

The racket of the fight was liable to have done that for them. “Now we push it!” Morrell called as the Americans moved forward once more. “If the Canucks know we’re here, we don’t want them to have time to get ready for us.”

He’d rescued the map-that was precious. God only knew where the compass had landed. He commandeered Captain Spadinger’s. Twenty minutes later, the U.S. force burst out of the woods. There in the distance was the railroad running alongside the Ghost River. A train, tiny as a toy, chugged west. But between him and the object of his desire lay rifle pits and trenches with Canadians in them. He shouted for Sergeant Finkel.

Quiet and competent, the noncom and his crew had kept up with everyone else. Setting up the machine gun on its tripod was a matter of moments. One gun wasn’t much to cover the advance of a battalion, but it was what Morrell had. If nothing else, it would make the Canucks, however many Canucks there were, keep their heads down some of the time.

“Fire and move!” Morrell yelled. “Fire and move!”

As they often had before, his men ran toward the Canadians in small groups, flopped down and fired so their comrades could sprint past them, then moved up again when those comrades took cover. The Canucks fought hard, but, as he’d hoped, their lines weren’t so full as they might have been. Sergeant Finkel engaged at long range some men trying to rush back from the east.

When the first U.S. soldiers started jumping down into the Canadian trenches, Morrell refrained from following them long enough to shout for a runner. He told the men, “Get back to division HQ and tell ’em to send reinforcements after us. From where we are, all we have to do is hold and we can mortar that railroad line to hell and gone. Tell ’em to push it, too; the Canucks’ll try and throw us out. We’ll hold on here as long as we can.”

Bent low at the waist to make himself a small target, the runner dashed back the way he’d come. Morrell figured his men would have to hold on by themselves for most of a day. He figured they could do it, too. And then-and then the Canadians would have only one pass left through the Rockies, and that one higher and farther north and less usable through the winter than either of the two that would be lost to them.

“One more nail in the coffin,” he muttered. But that wasn’t quite right-it was one more stroke of the saw that was cutting the country in half. He nodded, as pleased with his metaphor as he was with his victory.

Brakes squealing, the train pulled into the Richmond and Petersburg Railroad depot. “Richmond!” the conductors shouted, again and again. “All out for Richmond!”

Anne Colleton shook her head in mingled scorn and bemusement. After the train had rattled over the long bridge across the James River, people would have to be idiots not to know it was coming in to the capital of the Confederate States. But then, a lot of people were idiots. She’d seen that often enough. She’d grown rich, then richer, because of it. And she’d grown poorer because of it, too, since blacks proved no more immune to the disease than whites.

“Porter!” she called, stepping out of the compartment. A Negro with a hand truck came hurrying up. Despite the black uprising, that tone of imperious command got results. The colored fellow piled her trunks-not so fine as the ones she’d had before the Marshlands burned-onto the dolly and followed her out of the Pullman coach onto the smoky, noisy platform that served as gateway between train and world. Once out there, she stuck two fingers in her mouth and let out a piercing whistle she’d learned from her brothers. “Taxi!” she yelled, imperious as ever.

Others had got there before her, but her clothes, her manner, and the way the porter followed her all said she was a person of consequence. She forced her way through the milling crowd. The porter loaded her luggage into the automobile. She gave him a quarter. He grinned and tipped his cap and went off to help someone else, his brass buttons gleaming.

“Where to, ma’am?” the taxi driver asked after handing her into the car.

“Ford’s Hotel,” she answered. He had hardly put the cab into gear before she found a question of her own: “Why aren’t you in uniform?”

“Ma’am, I got hit once in the shoulder and once here.” He took his left hand off the wheel for a moment. It was encased in a leather glove, three of whose fingers were unnaturally full and stiff. “They decided they’d had as much of me as they could use, so they let me go.”

“Very well,” she answered. As he drove north toward Capitol Square, she saw plenty of other such expended men on the street: men on crutches with one trouser leg pinned up, men who had no legs in wheelchairs, men with an empty sleeve or a hook doing duty for one hand, men with a patch over one eye, and a couple of men with black silk masks who kept a hand on a companion’s shoulder so they could find their way.

Traffic was appalling, with trucks and heavily laden horse-drawn wagons slowing things to a crawl for everyone else. The air tasted of exhaust fumes and coal smoke and horse manure and chemical stinks Anne could not name. The driver coughed a couple of times when it got particularly ripe, then spoke as if in apology: “Place stinks like one of those miserable U.S. cities, don’t it, ma’am?”

“It had better,” Anne said sharply. “We need weapons and men both, and we have to make the weapons, because the sea war won’t let us import them.”

“You know about these things,” the cabbie said respectfully.

He’d turned left on Canal Street for a block, then gone up Seventh to Grace, where he turned right and went on till he came to Ninth, which abutted Capitol Square. There he waited and waited and waited till he finally found the chance to turn left and go on for half a block, and then to turn right onto Capitol Street. When he got to Eleventh, he-slowly-turned left again, and went past the bulk of Ford’s Hotel to the entrance, which was at the corner of Eleventh and Broad.

A Negro in a uniform fancier than any a general wore took charge of Anne’s luggage. She paid the fare, adding a tip of the same size. The taxi driver took off his cap with his good hand and bowed to her. “Stay well,” she told him.

“Ma’am,” he said, “I used to cuss about traffic till the first time I got shot. Now it don’t worry me none-not even a little bit.”

“No servants, ma’am?” the desk clerk asked.

“Do you see any?” Anne demanded. Julia was not long delivered of a baby girl. No one else who remained at Marshlands seemed suitable as a traveling companion, and she had not wanted to hire a servant. She had enough trouble trusting Negroes she knew-or thought she knew.

Flushing, the clerk gave her a big bronze key with the number 362 stamped onto it. An arthritic elevator took her, the bellman, and her cases upstairs. The room was large and fancy, with thick carpets, landscapes on the walls, elaborately carved tables, and a great profusion of lacework doilies and maroon plush upholstery. It was, no doubt, intended to impress the daylights out of the prosperous businessmen and lobbyists who usually stayed here, and no doubt succeeded. The exhibition of modern art Anne had put together just before the war broke out had been the antithesis of everything the room stood for. “Looks more like a whorehouse than a hotel room,” she remarked as she tipped the bellhop. He let out a scandalized giggle and fled.

Anne unpacked-after living for months in a refugee camp, she could still see having a room to herself as a luxurious waste of space-and went downstairs for supper. The restaurant was as spectacularly overdecorated as the room. But they did a fine job on crab cakes-the boast of “Best in the CSA” on the menu didn’t seem misplaced-so she had little cause for complaint.

The bed was comfortable enough, too. After a Pullman, any bed that didn’t sway and rattle seemed splendid. The next morning, she looked at the gray linen dress she’d intended wearing and shook her head. She hadn’t seen how wrinkled it was the night before, or she would have had it pressed. She chose a maroon silk instead.

After breakfast in the hotel, she hailed a cab. “The Executive Mansion,” she said crisply. The driver, a sensible man, did not bother pointing out that the building was only two blocks north and one east from where she’d got in. What the damnyankees still disparagingly called the Confederate White House also stood near the top of Shockoe Hill; Anne had no intention of arriving there as draggled and sweaty as a housemaid. The cab labored up the hill to the corner of Clay and Twelfth, where the driver let her out. She reckoned the quarter fare and dime tip money well spent.

Armed guards patrolled the grounds of the mansion behind a wrought-iron fence whose points were not only decorative but looked very sharp. A white man who wore formal attire but carried himself with a military bearing examined her letter of invitation and checked her name off on a list before allowing her to proceed. “I am not an assassin,” she remarked, half annoyed, half amused.

“I know that, ma’am-now,” the fellow replied. Anne Colleton seldom yielded anyone else the last word, but made an exception here.

As she’d expected, she had to wait before being admitted to President Semmes’presence. A Negro servant offered her coffee and cakes dusted with powdered sugar. She ate one, then prudently checked her appearance in the mirror of her compact. Wouldn’t do to see the president with sugar on my chin, she thought.

After most of an hour-half an hour past the nine-thirty for which her appointment was scheduled-another servant led her into Gabriel Semmes’ office. Since the man who walked out past her was the secretary of war, she did not think the president had delayed meeting her to be inconvenient.

President Semmes certainly received her with every sign of pleasure. “So very good of you to come up from South Carolina,” he said, and moved the chair across from his desk slightly to suggest that she sit in it. “Here, please-make yourself comfortable. Can I have the staff bring you anything?”

“No, thank you,” she answered. “Let’s get straight down to business, shall we?”

“However you like, of course,” he answered. He looked like a Confederate politician, or rather the apotheosis of a Confederate politician: in his early fifties, handsome, ruddy, a little beefy, with a mane of gray hair combed straight back from his forehead, a mustache, and a little chin beard that was almost pure white. The absence of tobacco stains from that beard was enough almost by itself to place him outside the common herd. He went on, “I won’t beat around the bush with you, Miss Colleton-I need your help on this bill to arm our Negroes and use them against the USA.”

Any time a politician said he wouldn’t beat around the bush, you were well advised to keep your hand on your wallet. “You’ll have to show me things are as bad as you said in your letter inviting me here,” she told him. “The press certainly does not make them out to be so desperate.”

“Have you ever heard of any war in the history of the world where the press did not make things out to be better than they were?” Gabriel Semmes returned. “If you look at papers in the USA during the War of Secession and the Second Mexican War, you will see they thought they were winning each time until almost the moment of their overthrow.”

“As may be,” she said. “I am not yet convinced.” She did not tell him what her brother Tom kept saying in his letters. Politicians were not the only ones who learned to hold their cards close-business taught the same lesson.

President Semmes said, “A glance at the map will show you much of the trouble. We have lost ground against the USA almost everywhere, and our remaining gains in Maryland are threatened. Our latest effort to reclaim western Texas failed-there is no other word. They hammer us on every front. We do have some counterstrokes in the offing, and we have thus far managed to avoid losing anything vital, but that cannot continue forever. We are under more pressure than our allies in Europe, and have little prospect of aid from them.”

“We hurt the Yankees worse than they hurt us in every fight, is that not so?” Anne said. “That’s one reason why we stand on the defensive so much.”

“Yes, we do, by a ratio of close to three to two,” Semmes answered. “Each U.S. conscription class, though, outnumbers our corresponding class of whites by about three to one. Add in the Negroes and the deficit shrinks to about two to one. Better, actually, for we would be calling up several conscription classes of blacks at once.”

Anne pursed her lips thoughtfully. “But not all the U.S. soldiers are used against us,” she pointed out. “Many of them go into the fight against Canada. That helps even the numbers somewhat.”

“Somewhat, yes, for now,” President Semmes agreed. “But, even with troops from Britain aiding them-they have the advantage of the northern route-the Canadians, I tell you in confidence, are in a bad way. How long we can rely on them to continue siphoning off Yankee resources, I cannot say.”

Beyond what he asserted, beyond what the papers asserted (which, thanks to censorship, was liable to be the same thing), she didn’t know how things stood with Canada. Would he lie for political advantage alone? Probably. But she could check what he said with her senators and the congressman from her district, the men he wanted her to influence. He would know that. Therefore, he was likely to be telling the truth, or most of it.

“The other question is,” she said, as much to herself as to him, “what will the Confederate States be like with Negroes as citi-zens? Is that better, or is losing as we are?”

“Miss Colleton, I always thought you were on the side of modernity, of progress, of change,” President Semmes said, a shrewd shot that proved he-or his advisors-knew her views well. “And if we lose, can we stay as we are? Or would we face another round of Red upheaval?”

That was another good question. The answer seemed only too obvious, too. Try to freeze in the mold of the past, or take a chance on the future? If you didn’t gamble, how were you going to win? But when she thought about what blacks had done to Marshlands and to her brother-“I hate this,” she said quietly.

“So do I,” the president of the Confederate States replied.

“I’ll do what I can,” Anne said, trying not to see the disapproving look on dead Jacob’s face. Well, better the damnyankees should have gassed a Negro than poor Jacob. If you looked at it the right way, they’d killed him before the Negro uprising could finish the job.

“From the bottom of my heart, I thank you, and your country thanks you as well,” President Semmes said. He rose and bowed to her, then went on, “Now that we know ourselves to be in agreement, perhaps you will accompany me to a ceremony where your presence will surely serve as an inspiration to the brave men we honor.”

Roger Kimball was bored. The ceremony should have started at half past ten. He drew out his pocket watch. It was closer to eleven. Almost imperceptibly, he shook his head. Civilians could get away with nonsense like that. For a naval officer, it would have meant trouble at least, maybe a court-martial.

Not only was he bored, he was hot, too. They’d run up an awning so he didn’t have to stand in direct sunshine, but it didn’t cut the heat much or the humidity at all. He felt as if he were melting down into his socks. The only advantage he found to sweating so much was that he wouldn’t have enough water left in him to need to take a leak-probably for the next three days.

Out on the lawn, old people sat in folding chairs and looked at him and the other hunks of uniformed beef on display under the awning. Ladies fanned themselves. Some of their male companions used straw hats to make the air move. By the way the old folks were turning red in the vicious sunshine, they needed the awning worse than he and his companions did.

Off to one side of the awning, a band struck up “Dixie.” Kim-ball came to attention; maybe that meant things really would get rolling now. The Negro musicians were in black cutaway coats and black trousers. They didn’t have an awning, either. He wondered how they could play without keeling over. He shrugged. They were just niggers, after all.

A woman walked quickly forward to take a seat near the front. Roger’s eyebrows came to attention, as the rest of him had at the national anthem. Unlike most of the audience, she was anything but superannuated. Her maroon silk dress clung tightly to her rounded hips and, daringly short, revealed trim ankles. Under her hat, her hair shone in the sun, but it shone gold, not silver.

Next to Kimball, an Army sergeant murmured through unmoving lips, “The president ought to pin her on my chest instead of a medal.”

“Yeah,” he whispered back. Then he stiffened far beyond the requirements of attention. “Christ on a crutch, that’s Anne Colleton!”

“You know her?” the sergeant said. Microscopically, Roger nodded. The Army man sighed. “Either you’re a liar, Navy, or you’re one lucky bastard, I’ll tell you that.” And then, recognizing him, too, Anne waved, not too obviously but unmistakably. The sergeant sighed again. “You are a lucky bastard.”

Here came President Gabriel Semmes, all sleek and clever, to present their decorations. Kimball noticed him only peripherally. He’d had a note from Anne when she was stuck in that refugee camp, but nothing since. He hadn’t been a hundred percent sure she was still alive, and found himself damn glad to discover she was.

President Semmes made a speech, of which he heard perhaps one word in three. The gist of it was, with bravery like that which these heroes had displayed, the Confederate States were surely invincible. Roger Kimball didn’t believe that for a minute. Semmes didn’t believe it, either, or why was he pushing that bill to put guns in the hands of black men?

A flunky brought the president a silver tray with dark blue velvet boxes stacked on it. Reporters scribbled as Semmes read out the deeds of the heroes he was honoring. One of the awards was posthumous: a Confederate Cross for a private who’d leaped on a grenade to save his pals.

Kimball wasn’t up for a C.C. himself; Semmes would pin an Order of the Virginia on him, the next highest award a Navy man could get. To earn the Confederate Cross and live through it, you had to be brave, lucky, and crazy, all at the same time. Without false modesty, he knew he was brave and he’d been lucky, but he hadn’t-quite-been crazy up there in Chesapeake Bay.

The sergeant standing there next to him had won a Confederate Cross. “P.G.T.B. Austin, without concern for his own safety, climbed onto the top of a U.S. traveling fort,” President Semmes said, not calling it a barrel, “and threw grenades into the machine through its hatches until fire forced the crew to flee, whereupon he killed three with his rifle, wounded two more, and accepted the surrender of the rest. Sergeant Austin!” The audience applauded. Photographers snapped away as Austin went up to get his medal. Kimball nodded to himself. Brave, lucky, and crazy, sure enough.

His own turn came a moment later. After hearing what the Army man had done, he felt embarrassed to accept even a lesser decoration. The president shook his hand and told him what a splendid fellow he was. He already knew what a splendid fellow he was, so he didn’t argue. The medal, a tiny gold replica of the Confederacy’s first ironclad hanging from a red, white, and blue ribbon, did look impressive on his chest.

He went back to his place under the awning and waited for the rest of the medals to be awarded. Then, as he’d expected, the men who’d won them got the chance to mingle with guests and reporters.

He wondered if Anne Colleton would still give him the time of day. He wasn’t a big fish, not in this pond. If she wanted heroes, she had her pick here. But she came straight up to him. Maybe she wants an ornery so-and-so, he thought. Takes one to know one.

“Congratulations,” she said, and shook his hand man-fashion. “I’m glad to see you here and well.”

“Same to you,” he answered. The feel of her flesh against his sent a charge through him, as if he’d touched a bare wire. He watched her face. Her pupils got bigger; her nostrils flared, ever so slightly. She wanted to be alone with him, too. Heat different from that of Richmond August filled him. “Last I got a look at you, you were seeing how fast you could get away from the Charleston docks.”

“I did fine, halfway to Marshlands.” Her voice turned bitter. “Then my car got stolen.”

“Rebels? Reds?” Kimball said. “You’re lucky they didn’t kill-”

“Not Reds,” Anne broke in. “Soldiers. Our soldiers. Oh, I suppose they needed it against the uprising, but-” She didn’t go on.

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw men gathering around them, drawn to Anne Colleton like moths to a flame. He knew how good a comparison that was, too. But he was no moth; he had fire of his own. So he told himself, anyhow. Quickly, while he still had the chance, he asked, “Where are you staying?”

“Ford’s,” she answered. “Would you like to celebrate your medal by having supper with me there tonight?”

“Can’t think of anything I’d like better,” he said. He could, in fact, think of several things, but those were things you did, not things you talked about. “Half past six?” he asked, and, when she nodded, he drifted away as if she were just someone in the crowd he happened to know.

He showed up at the hotel a couple of minutes early. She was waiting in the lobby and, again, had drawn a crowd. Some of the officers were of considerably higher rank than lieutenant commander; all the civilians looked more than prosperous. Everyone stared after Kimball and Anne when they went off to the dining room, her hand on his arm.

He grinned over at her. “I could get used to this,” he said.

A tiny vertical crease appeared between her eyebrows. “Don’t,” she said, more seriously than he’d expected. “If people think of you because of whoever’s with you-so what? Make them remember you for yourself.”

He thought about that, then nodded. “I started on a little farm. I’ve come this far on my own. I’ll go farther, if I can.”

“That’s the way to look at it,” she agreed. “Any one of those fat lawyers back there would love to take care of my affairs-and you can take that any way you like. I won’t let them. I run my life, no one else.” That had the sound of hard experience behind it, and also, perhaps, a note of warning.

Ford’s Hotel did right by its dinner spread. “Wouldn’t hardly know there’s a war on,” Kimball said happily, digging into almost fork-tender leg of lamb.

Anne Colleton stayed serious. “What do you think of President Semmes’bill?” she asked. She didn’t need to say which bill. Only one mattered now.

“I’m against it,” he answered firmly. “As long as we’re holding our own, or even anything close, we should go on doing what we’ve been doing. Far as I can see, we’re giving the darkies a kiss on the cheek, right after they tried to up and knock our heads off.”

She nodded, slowly. “Is that how most Navy men feel?”

Kimball knocked back the whiskey in his glass. “It’s not even the way my exec feels. All you hear these days is arguments.”

“What if we can’t win the war, can’t hope to win the war, if things keep on going as they have been?” Anne said. “Would you want to arm Negroes then?”

“Hung for a sheep or hung for a lamb, you mean?” He shrugged, unable to come up with a better answer. “If we’re that bad off, putting rifles in niggers’ hands won’t help us, far as I can see. And if we do that, and we lose anyhow, what will the country look like afterwards? Be a hell of a mess, begging your pardon-not that it isn’t already.”

“A point,” she said. “It may be the most serious point in opposition I’ve heard yet.” A colored waiter came up and cleared away plates. After a tutti-frutti ice, brandy, a cigar for Kimball and a couple of cigarettes for Anne, the waiter came back. “Charge this to my room,” she told him, and he dipped his head with practiced obsequiousness.

Roger Kimball’s hand had been going to his wallet. He scowled, angry that she’d accepted the bill before he had the chance. “I’m not broke-” he began.

“I know,” she answered, “but, for one thing, I invited you to supper, not the other way round, and, for another, I promise I have more money than you do; I know what naval officers make. It’s my pleasure, believe me.”

“Weren’t you the one talking about making your own way when we came in here?” he asked, unhappy still.

“I didn’t suggest annoying your friends by being stubborn when that’s plainly foolish,” she said, a touch of sharpness in her voice.

He subsided, looking for a word he’d heard a few times but had had little occasion to use. Gigolo, he thought. She’s made me her gigolo tonight. He seemed to have no choice but to accept that. Well, all right. Gigolos had privileges of their own. He remembered how she looked under that maroon silk, and how she felt, and how she tasted, too.

If the Ford Hotel boasted a house detective, he was good at making himself invisible. Kimball and Anne went up to her floor and walked down the richly carpeted hallway to her room without interference. She opened the door with her key, leaned forward to brush his lips with hers…and then said, “Good night, Roger. I hope you sleep well.”

It was not an invitation to come in. “What the devil-?” he said roughly. “We’ve been-”

“I know what we’ve been,” she answered. “We won’t be, not tonight. The very first time we met, you did a splendid job of seducing me.” Her eyes glinted, half amusement, half remembered anger of her own. “And so, tonight, no. Call it a lesson: never, ever take me for granted. Maybe another time, probably another time-but not tonight.”

He wasn’t that much bigger than she, but he knew he was stronger. With a lot of other women, he would have picked them up, thrown them on the bed, and taken what he wanted. If he tried that with her-even if he succeeded, because he knew she’d fight like a wildcat-he figured she was liable to stab him or shoot him as he left.

“You are a bitch,” he said, reluctantly admiring.

“I know.” She knew, all right, and she was proud of it.

He seized her, jerked her chin up, and kissed her, hard. He figured she’d fight that, too, but she didn’t. Her body molded itself against him. When the kiss broke, though, she pushed him away. She was laughing-and panting a little. So was he. “Thanks for supper,” he said, and tipped his hat. He strode down the hall toward the elevator without a backward glance.

Out on the sidewalk, a drunken artillery sergeant walked right into him. “Watch where you’re going, you goddamn medal-wearing son of a bitch,” the fellow snarled. By the way his mouth twisted, he was looking for a fight wherever he could find one.

Kimball didn’t feel like fighting, which, since he hadn’t got laid, surprised him. “I’m an officer,” he warned, meaning the sergeant would catch special hell if he fought with him.

“Watch where you’re going, you goddamn medal-wearing son of a bitch, sir,” the sergeant said.

Laughing, Kimball peeled off a five-dollar note he hadn’t spent at supper and pressed it into the noncom’s hand before that hand could close into a fist. The sergeant stared. “Go on, get drunker on me,” Kimball said. He slapped him on the back, then headed off to his barracks close by the James.

Jake Featherston gaped in owlish disbelief at the banknote that had magically appeared in his hand. Even if the fellow who’d given it to him was a Navy man, he had, until the grayback pressed it on him, wanted to smash his face: not only was he an officer, he was a decorated officer. Jake knew damn well he deserved to be an officer. He also knew he deserved several medals, not just one.

“And am I gonna get ’em?” he asked the empty air around him. “Sure I am-same time as I get promoted.” He laughed a loud, raucous, bitter laugh. He wasn’t holding his breath.

He ambled around Capitol Square, like a sailing ship tacking almost at random. That was how he felt, too. He wasn’t going anywhere in particular, just letting his feet and the crowds in the streets take him wherever they would. Half seriously, he saluted the statues of Washington and Albert Sidney Johnston in the square.

“They’d know how to take care of a soldier,” he muttered to himself. Muttering did no good. Complaining out loud did no good, either. He’d seen that when he went to Major Clarence Potter. Maybe if he walked into the Capitol itself and started screaming at congressmen and generals-

He shook his head, which made the world spin alarmingly. No good, no good. It was late. He didn’t know how late it was, but it was late. No congressmen working in the Capitol now, by Jesus. They’d all be in bed with their mistresses. And the generals…the generals would be in bed with Jeb Stuart, Jr. He laughed. The truth in that hurt, though. If the powers that be in the Confederate War Department hadn’t been sucking up to the father of his late, brave, stupid company commander, they would have given him his due. But they did suck up, they hadn’t given it to him, and they damn well never would.

“Bastards,” he said. “Sons of bitches.” The words were hot and satisfying in his mouth, the way the whiskey had been at that saloon-those saloons-earlier. Pretty soon, he figured he’d go looking for another saloon. He was sure he’d have no trouble finding one.

Around him, Richmond didn’t so much ignore the war as take it in stride. He wandered south and east, away from Capitol Square. Plenty of soldiers and sailors on leave clogged the sidewalks and the streets themselves, making people in buggies and motorcars yell at them to get out of the way. They didn’t want to get out of the way, not with so many women to look for, so many stores open so late, so many saloons…

Most of the men in civilian clothes were Negroes. Featherston glowered at them. They were out celebrating as hard as the white people. They had their nerve, he thought. Here white men went out to fight and die, and all the blacks had to do was stay home and have a high old time. Stories of lazy niggers his overseer father had told him ran through his head. He had no doubt every goddamn one of them was true, too.

A big buck in a sharp suit-too sharp for any Negro to deserve to wear-bumped into him. “Watch it, you ugly black bastard,” he snarled.

“Sorry, suh,” the Negro said, but he wasn’t sorry-Jake could see it in his eyes. If people had been paying better attention, the whole Red uprising would have been nipped in the bud. When the fellow didn’t get out of the way fast enough, Featherston shoved him, hard. The black’s hand closed into a fist as he staggered.

A fierce joy lit Jake. “So you want to play, do you?” he said genially, and gave the black buck a knee square in the balls. The fellow went down as if he’d been shot. Jake wished he had shot him. He wished he could shoot all of them. Brushing his hands together, he headed off down the street, leaving the Negro writhing on the pavement behind him. No one said boo.

He was about to cross Franklin Street, a good way down from Capitol Square, when military policemen blocked the way. He felt like cursing them, too, but that would land him in jail, and he still had a couple of days’leave before he had to go back to the Maryland front. So he stood and watched as a long column of soldiers tramped past.

Farther up the street, people were laughing and cheering. A hell of a racket was coming from somewhere up there, too. Jake craned his neck. A moment later, he laughed and cheered, too. Four barrels-nobody who’d faced the Yankee version said tanks-rumbled toward him, battle flags painted on the front and sides. They looked different from the ones the USA manufactured; Featherston wondered whether the CSA had built them or they’d somehow been imported from England.

However that was, he was damn glad to see them. “Give ’em hell!” he shouted, and a soldier riding on top of one of them waved his way. He yelled again: “Let the damnyankees know what it’s like, by Jesus!” Had he been in the infantry, he probably would have shouted even louder.

The barrels were so heavy, their wraparound tracks tore up the concrete surface of the street. They’d probably come through town to build morale. Sure built mine, Jake thought. More soldiers followed, young, serious-looking men intent on keeping step. They’d learn what was important and what wasn’t pretty damn quick. Jake knew that.

Having been born and raised in Richmond, he also knew which railroad station the men and barrels were heading for: the Richmond and Danville. He wished they’d been coming up to Maryland, but the Roanoke front was probably the next best place for them. Grudgingly, he admitted to himself that the Roanoke front might have been the best place to send them. The Yanks were in Virginia there, as opposed to fighting them on their own soil farther north and east.

To celebrate the chance of throwing the damnyankees out of his own state, Jake went into a saloon and poured down whiskey. To celebrate that whiskey, he had another one, and then another. When he came out of the saloon, he’d spent a good piece of the note that Navy man had given him. And, when he came out, he didn’t need to turn his head sharply to make the world revolve.

Off in the distance, he heard, or thought he heard, a low-pitched, droning rumble. More barrels? He shook his head, and almost fell over. The troop trains pulling out? No, this wasn’t a train noise. It was real, though. He hadn’t been sure of that before, but he was now.

It sounded like…aeroplanes. His face twisted in slow-witted puzzlement. “If it is aeroplanes, it’s a hell of a lot of ’em,” he said, thinking out loud. He wondered why the Confederacy would put so many aeroplanes in the sky so late at night. “Damn foolishness,” he mumbled.

The part of his mind that functioned at a level below conscious thought came up with the answer. “Sweet suffering Jesus, it’s the Yankees!” he exclaimed, a moment before the first antiaircraft gun outside the Confederate capital began pounding away at the intruders.

He knew too well how futile antiaircraft fire often turned out to be. At night, hitting your target was even harder. And the United States had put a hell of a lot of aeroplanes in the air. They’d bombed the front. They’d bombed Confederate-occupied Washington. Till now, they hadn’t done much to Richmond. All that, evidently, was about to change. Featherston dove under a bench at a trolley stop, the first shelter he spied.

With so many lights on in the Confederate capital, the bombers had targets to dream of. Most of the explosions sounded as if they were close to Capitol Square-most, but not all. The damnyankees seemed to have plenty of bombing aeroplanes to carpet the whole city.

From under the bench, Featherston watched a sea of feet and legs, men’s and women’s both, running every which way. “Like chickens with their heads cut off,” he said, and then raised his voice to a shout: “Take cover, dammit!”

They didn’t listen to him. Nobody listened to him. Civilians paid him no more mind than soldiers ever had. And, when the bombs started falling all around, the civilians of Richmond found out that they should have paid attention, just as the Confederate brass should have listened when he tried to tell them Pompey was no damn good.

Crummp! Crummp! For him, the bombing of Richmond was like being under a medium-heavy artillery bombardment, except it didn’t last so long. It wasn’t that he had no fear-anybody who wasn’t afraid when things were blowing up nearby was crazy, and Mrs. Featherston had raised no fool. But he, like most of the soldiers in town, had faced such horrors before. His chiefest wish was to be able to shoot back.

For civilians, though-for Negroes, for women, for the old and the young-the raid had to seem like the end of the world. Screams rose into the night, those of the panicked side by side with those of the injured. Then secondary screams went up as the panicked discovered the injured, and the dismembered, and the dead. Civilians had no notion of what high explosives and sharp-edged fragments of flying metal could do to the human body. Courtesy of the Yankees, they were learning.

Bombs or no bombs, somebody had to do something to help. Jake got out from under his bench as if he were leaving a dugout to serve his howitzer under fire. He passed by a groaning black man to bandage a cut on a white woman’s head.

More bombers roared past up above. He could hear them, but couldn’t see them. No-he could see one, for smoke and fire were trailing from it, getting brighter every second. The antiaircraft guns ringing Richmond weren’t entirely useless, then: only pretty much so.

The stricken bomber nosed down and dove. It seemed to be coming right at him. He flattened himself out on the street, absentmindedly knocking down the woman he’d just bandaged, too. The bombs the aeroplane hadn’t had the chance to drop exploded when it crashed a block away.

He got picked up and slammed down again, right on top of the woman. It wasn’t anything erotic. He scrambled off her. The houses where the bomber had crashed were burning furiously.

Through the chaos, he heard the fire alarm bell from Capitol Square. It made him throw back his head and laugh. “Thanks for the news!” he shouted. “Thanks for the goddamn news! Never would have known it without you!”