Walk in Hell

I

George Enos looked across the Mississippi toward Illinois. The river was wide, but not wide enough to let him forget it was only a river. Here in St. Louis, he was, beyond any possible doubt, in the middle of the continent.

That felt very strange to him. He’d lived his whole life, all twenty-nine years of it, in Boston, and gone out fishing on the Atlantic ever since he was old enough to run a razor over his cheeks. He’d kept right on going out to fish, even after the USA went to war with the Confederate States and Canada: all part of the worldwide war with Germany and Austria battling England, France, and Russia while pro-British Argentina fought U.S. allies Chile and Paraguay in South America and every ocean turned into a battle zone.

If a Confederate commerce raider hadn’t intercepted the steam trawler Ripple and sunk it, George knew he’d still be a fisherman today. But he and the rest of the crew had been captured, and, being civilian detainees rather than prisoners of war, eventually exchanged for similar Confederates in U.S. hands. He had joined the Navy then, partly in hopes of revenge, partly to keep from being conscripted into the Army and sent off to fight in the trenches.

They’d even let him operate out of Boston for a while, on a trawler that had gone hunting for enemy vessels with a submarine pulled on a long tow. He’d helped sink a Confederate submersible, too, but the publicity that came from success made any future success unlikely. And so, instead of his being able to see his wife and children when he wasn’t at sea and to work like a fisherman when he was, they’d put him on a train and sent him to St. Louis.

He called up to the deck officer aboard the river monitor USS Punishment: “Permission to come aboard, sir?”

“Granted,” Lieutenant Michael Kelly said, and Enos hurried up the gangplank and onto his ship. He saluted the thirty-four-star flag rippling in the breeze at the stern of the Punishment. Kelly waited till he had performed the ritual, then said, “Take your station, Enos. We’re going to steam south as soon as we have the full crew aboard.”

“Aye aye, sir,” Enos said. Because he was still new to the Navy and its ways, he hadn’t lost the habit of asking questions of his superiors: “What’s going on, sir? Seems like everybody’s getting pulled on board at once.”

From some officers, a query like that might have drawn a sharp reprimand. Kelly, though, understood that the expanded Navy of 1915 was not the tight-knit, professional force it had been before the war began. The formal mask of duty on his face cracked to reveal an exuberant grin that suddenly made him look much younger: like Enos, he was tanned and lined and chapped from endless exposure to sun and wind. He said, “What’s up? I’ll tell you what’s up, sailor. The niggers down in the CSA have risen up against the government there, that’s what. If the Rebs don’t put ’em down, they’re sunk. But while they’re busy doing that, how much attention can they pay to us? You see what I’m saying?”

“Yes, sir, I sure do,” Enos answered.

“Mind you,” Kelly said, “I haven’t got any great use for niggers myself-what white man does? And if the scuttlebutt is the straight goods, a lot of these niggers are Reds, too. And you know what? I don’t care. They foul up the Rebels so we can lick ’em, they can fly all the red flags they want.”

“Yes, sir,” George said again. After the commerce raider snagged him, he’d been interned in North Carolina for several months. He’d seen the kind of treatment Negroes got in the CSA. Technically, they were free. They’d been free for more than thirty years. But-“If I was one of those Negroes, sir, and I saw a chance to take a shot at a Confederate-a white Confederate, I mean-I’d grab it in a second.”

“So would I,” Kelly said. “So would anybody with any balls. Who would have thought niggers had balls, though?” He turned away from Enos as a couple of other sailors reported back aboard the Punishment.

The river monitor was, in the immortal words that had described the first of her kind, a cheesebox on a raft. She carried a pair of six-inch guns in an armored turret mounted on a low, wide ironclad hull. She also had several machine guns mounted on deck for land targets not worth the fury of guns that could have gone to sea aboard a light cruiser.

Enos had been a fisherman, which meant he was adept at dealing with lines and nets and steam engines, even if the one the Ripple had carried was a toy beside the Punishment’s power plant. Having made use in his first assignment of the things he knew, the Navy plainly figured it had done its duty and could now return to its normal mode of operation: his station on the Punishment was at one of those deck machine guns.

He minded it less than he’d thought he would. Any New England fisherman worthy of the name was a born tinker and tinkerer. He’d learned to strip and clean and reassemble the machine gun till he could do it with his eyes closed. It was an elegantly simple means of killing large numbers of men in a hurry, assuming that was what you wanted to do.

At Kelly’s shouted orders, sailors unfastened the ropes binding the Punishment to the pier. Black coal smoke pouring from her twin stacks, the monitor edged out into the Mississippi. The first hundred miles or so of the journey down the river, as far as Cairo, Illinois, were a shakedown through country that had always belonged to the USA.

Nobody got to relax, though, shakedown or no. Kelly shouted, “Keep your eyes peeled, dammit! They say Rebs sneak up from Arkansas and dump mines in the river every so often. Usually they’re full of malarkey when they say something, but we don’t want to find out the hard way, now do we?”

Along with everyone else, George Enos peered out at the muddy water. He was used to the idea of mines; Boston harbor had been surrounded by ring upon ring of minefields, to make sure no Canucks or Rebs or limeys paid an unexpected and unwelcome visit. He didn’t see any mines now, but he hadn’t seen any then, either.

A little north of Cairo, they took a pilot on board. The Spray, the steam trawler that had acted as a decoy for Entente warships, had done the same thing coming back into Boston after a mission. Here as there, the pilot guided the vessel through a U.S. minefield. The Confederacy had gunboats of its own on the Mississippi (though it didn’t call them monitors), which had to be kept from steaming upstream and bombarding U.S. positions and supply lines.

When sunset came, the Punishment anchored on the river, the Missouri Ozarks on one side, Kentucky on the other. Kentucky was a Confederate state, but most of it, including that part lying along the Mississippi, lay in U.S. hands.

Over fried catfish and beans belowdecks, Enos said, “When I got transferred here, I thought we’d be going down the river looking for Rebel ships heading up, and we’d have a hell of a fight. That’s what you read about in the newspapers back in Boston, anyway.”

“It happens,” said Wayne Pitchess, the closest friend he’d made on the Punishment: a former fisherman from Connecticut, though he’d joined the Navy back in peacetime. Pitchess scratched at his mustache before going on. Like George, he wore it Kaiser Bill-style, with waxed points jutting upward, but his was blond rather than dark. “It does happen,” he repeated. “It just doesn’t happen very often.”

“Good thing it doesn’t happen very often, too,” added Sherwood McKenna, who was the third man in the tier of bunks with George and Pitchess. “Monitors can sink each other in a godawful hurry.”

George Enos took a swig of coffee. It was vile stuff, but that wasn’t the cook’s fault. The Empire of Brazil, which produced more coffee than the rest of the world put together, had remained neutral. That meant both the Entente and the Quadruple Alliance went after its shipping with great enthusiasm. Most of the other coffee-growing countries were in the Entente camp. Not even the finest cook in the world could have done much with the beans that had gone into this pot.

“Well, if we don’t fight other monitors much,” George said, setting down his mug, “what do we do?”

“Bombard enemy land positions, mostly,” Pitchess answered. “Moving six-inch guns down a river is easy. Hauling them cross-country is anything but. And we’re a harder target to hit back at than guns on land, too, because we can move around easier.”

“And because we’re armored,” Enos added.

“That doesn’t hurt,” Sherwood McKenna agreed. “Another monitor can smash us up, but we just laugh at those little fast-firing three-inch field guns the Rebs use. Lots of difference between a three-inch shrapnel shell and a six- or eight-incher with an armor-piercing tip.”

Lifting the coffee mug again, this time as if to make a toast with it, George said, “Here’s hoping we never find out what the difference is.” Both his bunkmates drank to that.

Sleeping belowdecks was stifling, especially in the top bunk, which Enos, as a newcomer aboard the Punishment, had inherited. Sometime in the middle of the night, though, a couple of the deck machine guns began to hammer, waking up everyone who was asleep. George didn’t stay awake long. As soon as he figured out the shooting wasn’t aimed directly at him, he rolled over-carefully, so as not to fall out of the narrow bunk-and started sawing wood again.

Next morning, he found out somebody on the Kentucky shore had fired a machine gun at the Punishment, hoping to pick off someone on deck or in the cabin. Wayne Pitchess took that in stride. “He didn’t hurt us, and we probably didn’t hurt him,” he said around a mouthful of sausage. “That’s the kind of war I like to fight.”

Cautiously, the Punishment pushed farther down the river. Now Tennessee lay to port. They steamed past the ruins of a Confederate fort that had mounted guns able to sink a battleship, let alone a river monitor. More such forts, still untaken, lay farther south. On the stretches of the Mississippi it owned, the USA had its share of them, too. They were another reason combats between monitors were scarce.

Enos eyed the woods running down to the river. U.S. forces were supposed to have cleared away all the Rebs, but the exchange of fire the night before showed that wasn’t so. He wondered how he would get any sign of the enemy, or, for that matter, of the Negroes who had rebelled against the Confederacy. All he saw were trees. He saw a hell of a lot of trees. He was used to the cramped confines of Massachusetts, where everything was jammed up against everything else. It wasn’t like that here. The land was wide, and people thin on the ground.

With a low rumble, the turret of the Punishment began to revolve. The guns rose slightly. George had never heard them fired before. He braced himself.

Bracing himself wasn’t enough. The roar seemed like the end of the world. Sheets of golden flame spat from the guns’ muzzles. One of them blew a perfect smoke ring, as he might have done with a cigar, only a hundred times bigger.

His ears still ringing, he watched the gun barrels rise again, an even smaller movement than they had made before. They salvoed once more. He couldn’t tell where the shells were coming down. Someone evidently could, though, and was letting the Punishment know, perhaps by wireless. That repositioning must have been what was wanted, for the twin six-inchers fired again and again. Somewhere, miles inside Tennessee, the shells were creating a good approximation of hell. Here, they were just creating an ungodly racket.

After a while, the bombardment stopped. The gunners came out on deck. It had probably been hell inside the turret, too. They stripped off their sweat-soaked uniforms and jumped naked into the river, where they proceeded to try to drown one another. It was, George Enos thought, a strange way to fight a war.

Anne Colleton gunned the Vauxhall Prince Henry up the Robert E. Lee Highway from Charleston, South Carolina, toward her plantation, Marshlands, outside the little town of St. Matthews. The motorcar hit a pothole. Her teeth came together in a sharp click. The so-called highway, like all roads outside the cities, was nothing but dirt. Even with a lap robe and a broad-brimmed hat with a veil, Anne was caked with red-brown dust. She supposed she should count herself lucky she hadn’t had a puncture. She’d already repaired two since leaving Charleston.

“Punctures?” She shook her head. “Punctures are nothing.” She counted herself lucky to be alive. With a dashing submersible commander, she’d been at a rather seedy hotel near the edge of one of Charleston’s Negro districts when the riot or uprising or whatever it was broke out. They’d piled into the Vaux-hall and escaped just ahead of the baying mob. She’d delivered Roger Kimball back to the harbor and then, not bothering to get the bulk of her belongings out of the much finer hotel where she was registered, she’d headed for home.

Down the road toward her, filling up most of it, came a wagon pulled by a horse and a mule and filled to overflowing with white men, women, and children-several families packed together, unless she missed her guess. She stepped on the brake, hard as she could. The Vauxhall came to a shuddering stop. Its sixty-horsepower engine could hurl it forward at a mile a minute-though not on the Robert E. Lee Highway-but slowing down was another matter.

Some of the whites wore bandages, some of those rusty with old blood. Over the growl of the motorcar’s engine, Anne called, “What’s it like up ahead?”

“It’s bad, ma’am,” the graybeard at the reins answered, tipping his battered straw hat to her-he could see she was a person of consequence, even if he didn’t know just who she was. “We’re lucky we got out alive, and that’s a fact.”

The woman beside him nodded vehemently. “You ought to turn around your ownself,” she added. “Niggers up further north, they gone crazy. They got guns some kind of crazy way and they got red flags flyin’ and sure as Jesus they’re gonna kill any whites they can catch.”

“Red flags,” Anne said, and heads bobbed up and down again in the wagon. Her lips moved in a silent curse. Her brother Tom, a Confederate major, had said earlier in the year there were Red revolutionaries among the Negro laborers in the Army. She’d scoffed at the idea that such radicals might also have gained a foothold at Marshlands. Now fear clawed her. Her other brother, Jacob, was back at the mansion, an invalid since the Yankees had gassed him within an inch of his life. She’d thought it surely safe to leave him for a few days.

The fellow in the straw hat tipped it again, then guided his mismatched team off the road so the wagon could get around the automobile. As soon as she had the room, she put the Vauxhall in gear and zoomed forward again. Along with other innovations, she’d had a rearview mirror installed on the motorcar. Looking into it, she saw faces staring after her from the wagon as she drove toward trouble rather than away from it.

Every so often, trees shaded the road. Something dangled from an overhanging branch of one of them. She slowed down again. It was the body of a lynched Negro. A placard tied round his neck said, THIS IS IF WE KETCH YOU. He wore only a pair of ragged drawers. What had been done to him before he was hanged wasn’t pretty.

Anne bit her lip. She prided herself on being a modern woman, on being able to take on the world straight up and come out ahead, regardless of her sex. Outdealing men had made her rich-well, richer, since she was born far from poor. But business was one thing, this brutality something else again.

And what were the Negroes, the Reds, doing in whatever lands-not Marshlands, surely-they’d seized in their revolt? How many old scores, going back how many hundred years, were they repaying?

As much to escape questions like that as to get away from the tormented corpse (around which flies were already buzzing), Anne drove off fast enough to press herself back into the seat. Perhaps a mile farther up the road, she came to another tree with dreadful fruit. The first had shocked her because of its savagery. The second also shocked her, mostly by how little feeling it roused in her. This is how men get used to war, she thought, and shivered though the day was warm and muggy: more like August than late October.

She drove past a burnt-out farmhouse from which smoke was still rising. It hadn’t been much of a place; she wondered whether blacks or poor whites had lived there. Nobody lived there now, or would any time soon.

More traffic coming south slowed her progress. The road wasn’t wide; whenever her motorcar drew near someone coming in the opposite direction, somebody had to go off onto the shoulder to get around. Wagons, buggies, carts, occasional motorcars came past her, all of them loaded with women, children, and old men: most of the young men were at the front, fighting against the USA.

Anne needed a while to wonder how widespread in the Confederacy the uprising was, and what it would do to the fight against the United States. Confederate forces had been hard-pressed to hold their ground before. Could they go on holding, with rebellion in their rear?

“We licked the damnyankees in the War of Secession,” she said, as if someone had denied it. “We licked ’em again in the Second Mexican War, twenty years later. We can do it one more time.”

She came up behind a truck rumbling along toward the north, its canvas-canopied bed packed with uniformed militiamen. Some wore butternut, some the old-fashioned gray that had been banished from frontline use because it was too much like Yankee green-gray. A lot of the militiamen wore beards or mustaches. All of those were gray-except the ones that were white. But the men carried bayoneted rifles, and looked to know what to do with them. Against a rabble of Negroes, what more would they need?

They waved to her when she drove past. She waved back, glad to do anything to cheer them. Then she had to slow almost to a crawl behind a battery of half a dozen horse-drawn cannons. Those couldn’t have come close to matching her Vauxhall’s speed under the best of circumstances, and circumstances were anything but the best: the guns had to fight their way forward against the stream of refugees fleeing the revolt.

Some of the southbound wagons and motorcars had Negroes in them: a scattering of black faces, among the white. Anne guessed they were servants and field hands who’d stayed loyal to their employers (masters wasn’t the right word, though some people persisted in using it more than a generation after manumission). She was glad to see those few black faces-they gave her hope for Marshlands-but she wished she’d spotted more.

Truck farms abounded all around the little town of Holly Hill, about halfway between Charleston and St. Matthews. The farms seemed to have come through pretty well. Not much was left of the town. A lot of it had burned. Bullet holes pocked the surviving walls. Here and there, bodies white and black lay unburied. A faint stench of meat going bad hung in the air; buzzards wheeled optimistically, high overhead.

Anne wished she could have got out of Holly Hill in a hurry, but rubble in the road made traffic pack together. A gang of Negro laborers was clearing the debris. That was nothing out of the ordinary. The uniformed whites covering them with Tredegar rifles, though…

A couple of miles north of Holly Hill, a middle-aged white man whose belly was about to burst the bounds of his butternut uniform stepped out into the road, rifle in hand, and stopped her. “We ain’t lettin’ folks go any further north’n this, ma’am,” he said. “Ain’t safe. Ain’t nowhere near safe.”

“You don’t understand. I’m Anne Colleton, of Marshlands,” she said, confident he would know who she was and what that meant.

He did. Gulping a little, he said, “I’d like to help you, ma’am,” by which he undoubtedly meant, I don’t want to get into trouble with you, ma’am. But he went on, “I got my orders from Major Hotchkiss, though-no civilians goin’ up this road. Them niggers, they got a regular front set up. They been plannin’ this a long time, the sons of bitches. Uh, pardon my French.”

She’d been saying a lot worse than that herself. “Where do I find this Major Hotchkiss, so I can talk some sense into him?” she demanded.

The Confederate militiaman pointed west down a rutted dirt track less than half as wide as the Robert E. Lee Highway. “There’s a church up that way, maybe a quarter mile. Reckon he’ll be up in the steeple, trying to spot what the damn niggers is doin’.”

She drove the Vauxhall down the road he’d shown her. If she didn’t find the church, she intended to try to make her way north by whatever back roads she could find. This Major Hotchkiss might have banned northbound civilian traffic from the highway, but maybe he hadn’t said anything about other ways of getting where she still aimed to go.

But there stood the church, a white clapboard building with a tall steeple. White men in butternut uniforms and old gray ones milled around outside. They all looked her way as she drove up. “I’m looking for Major Hotchkiss,” she called.

“I’m Jerome Hotchkiss,” one of the men in butternut said; sure enough, he wore a single gold star on each collar tab. He didn’t look too superannuated. Then Anne saw he had a hook in place of his left hand. That would have left him unfit for frontline duty, but not for an emergency like this. He nodded to her. “What is it you want?”

“I’m Anne Colleton,” she said again, and caused another stir. She went on, “Your sentry back by the highway said you were the man who could give me permission to keep going north toward Marshlands, my plantation.”

“If any man could do that, I would be the one,” Major Hotchkiss agreed. “I have to tell you, though, it’s impossible. You must understand, we are not trying to put down a riot up ahead. It is a war, nothing less. The enemy has rifles. He has machine guns. He has men who will use them. And he has a fanatical willingness to die for his cause, however vile it is.”

“No, you don’t understand,” Anne said. “I have to get back to the plantation. My brother is an invalid: the damnyankees gassed him this past spring. Do you know if Marshlands is safe? I tried to telephone from Charleston, but-”

“Specifically, no,” Hotchkiss answered. “And most telephone lines are down, as you will have found. I can tell you this, though: it’s not safe to be white-unless you’re also a Red, and there are a few like that, the swine-between here and Columbia. Like I say, ma’am, we have ourselves a war here. In fact-” He stopped looking at her and started looking at the Vauxhall. “I’m going to ask you to step out of that motorcar, if you don’t mind.”

“What? I certainly do mind.”

“Ma’am, I am confiscating your motorcar in the name of the Confederate States of America,” Hotchkiss said. “This is a military area; I have that right. The vehicle will be returned to you at the end of this emergency. If for any reason it cannot be returned, you will be compensated as required by law.” When Anne, not believing what she was hearing, made no move to get out, the major snapped, “Potter! Harris!” Two of his men trained rifles on her.

“This is an outrage!” she exclaimed. The soldiers’ faces were implacable. If she didn’t get out, they would shoot her. That was quite plain. Quivering with fury, she descended to the ground.

Major Hotchkiss pointed farther up the road. “There’s a crossroads general store up there. We’ve got a fair number of folks in tents already. It’s about half a mile. You go on, Miss Colleton. They’ll take care of you best they can. We smash this Colored Socialist Republic or whatever the niggers are calling it, then we can get on with the fight against the damnyankees.”

“Give me a rifle,” Anne said suddenly. “I’m a good shot, and I’m a lot less likely to fall over dead than half your so-called soldiers here.”

But the Confederate major shook his head without a word. She knew she was right, but what good did that do her if he wouldn’t listen? The answer tolled in her mind: none. Dully, she began walking up the road. When war reached out its hand, what did wealth and power matter? A fool with a gun could take them away. A fool with a gun had just taken them away.

Major Irving Morrell and Captain John Abell took off their caps when they went into Independence Hall to see the Liberty Bell. Philadelphia, being the headquarters of the War Department, was full of U.S. military men of all ranks and branches of service. Only someone very observant would have noted the twisted black-and-gold cords on the caps that marked these two as General Staff officers.

Abell, who had a bookish look to him, fit the common preconception for the appearance of a General Staff man. Morrell, though, was more weathered, his face lined and tanned, though he was only in his mid-twenties. He wore his sandy hair cropped close to his head, as field officers commonly did. He felt like a field officer. He’d been a field officer: he’d almost lost a leg in the U.S. invasion of Confederate Sonora, and then, after a long recuperation, he’d led a battalion in eastern Kentucky. What he’d done there had impressed his division commander enough to get him sent to Philadelphia.

Intellectually, he knew what a plum this was. It didn’t altogether fill him with joy, though. He wanted to be out in the forest or the mountains or tramping through the desert-somewhere away from the city and close to the foe.

“Come on, let’s get moving,” he said now, and hurried ahead of Abell to get a good look at the Liberty Bell. His thigh pained him when he sped up like that, and would probably go on paining him the rest of his life. He ignored it. You could let something like that rule you, or you could rule it. Morrell did not aim to let anything keep him from doing what he wanted to do.

“It’s been here a long time, Major,” Abell said. “It’s going to be here for a long time yet.”

“Yes, but I’m not going to be here for a long time,” Morrell answered. When he’d learned enough, or so the promise had gone, they’d promote him and send him back to the field to command a unit bigger than a battalion. “I want to fight with guns, not with maps and dividers and a telegraph clicker.”

He looked back over his shoulder as he said that, just in time to catch the sidelong glance Abell gave him. The captain, like most General Staff officers, preferred fighting the war at a distance and in the abstract to the reality of mud and bad food and wounds and terror. Battle always seemed so much cleaner, so much neater, when it was red and blue lines on a chart.

Then such thoughts left Morrell’s mind as, with a good many other soldiers, he crowded round the emblem of freedom for the United States. The surface of the bell was surprisingly rough, testimony to the imperfect skill of the founders who had cast it. Around the crown ran the words from Leviticus that had given the bell its name: Proclaim liberty throughout the land unto all the inhabitants thereof.

He wondered whether Robert E. Lee had seen the Liberty Bell when he occupied Philadelphia in 1862. Lee’s victories had given the Confederate States a liberty the USA had not wanted to grant them, but he hadn’t taken the bell back south with him. That was something, albeit not much.

Morrell reached out and touched the cool metal. “We’re still free,” he murmured. “Still free, by God.”

“That’s right,” John Abell said beside him. “The freest nation on the face of the earth.” Normally cold-blooded as a lizard in a blizzard, he sounded genuinely moved by the Liberty Bell. Then, almost gloating, he added, “And we’re going to pay the Rebs back for all they’ve done to us these past fifty years, and the English, and the French, and the Canadians, too.”

“You’d best believe it,” Morrell said, and took his hand away. The metal of the bell had grown warm under his fingers. He smiled, enjoying the idea that he had had a connection with history. No sooner had he stepped back from the bell than a fresh-faced lieutenant came up and caressed its smooth curves with almost a lover’s touch.

Independence Hall also boasted a facsimile of the Declaration of Independence. Facsimiles, though, meant little to Morrell. What was real counted. If you wanted to be theoretical…you belonged on the General Staff. He snorted, amused by the conceit.

“What’s funny, sir?” Captain Abell asked. Morrell just smiled and shook his head, not wanting to insult his companion.

They walked up Chestnut, back toward the War Department offices that had swallowed so much of Franklin Square. Philadelphia buzzed with all sorts of Federal activity; especially after the Confederate bombardment of Washington during the Second Mexican War, the Pennsylvania city had become the de facto capital of the USA. That was as well, for Washington now lay under the bootheels of the Rebels.

The opening Confederate attack in the war had been aimed at Philadelphia, too, but was stopped at the Susquehanna, one river short of the Delaware. Here and there, buildings bore scars from Confederate bombing raids. These days, with the Rebels pushed back into Maryland, bombing aeroplanes came over more rarely. Even so, antiaircraft cannon poked watchful snouts into the air in parks and at street corners.

Abell bought a couple of cinnamon rolls, a Philadelphia specialty, from a street vendor. He offered one to Morrell, who shook his head. “I don’t want anything that sweet,” he said. Half a block later, he came upon a Greek selling grape leaves stuffed with spicy meat and rice. To make them easier to handle, the fellow had skewered them on sticks. Morrell bought three. “Here’s a proper lunch,” he declared.

He and Abell both slowed down to eat as they walked. They hadn’t gone far when someone behind them shouted, “Get the hell out of here, you stinking wog! This is a white man’s town.”

Morrell turned on his heel, Abell imitating him. A beefy, middle-aged civilian was shaking his finger in the Greek foodseller’s face. Ignoring the twinge in his bad leg, Morrell walked rapidly back toward them. As he drew near, he saw the beefy man wore a pin in his lapel: a silver circle, with a sword set slantwise across it. Soldiers’ Circle members made up a sort of informal militia of men who had served out their terms of conscription. They were perhaps the leading patriotic organization in the country, especially to hear them talk.

A lot of them, of course, the younger ones, had been reconscripted since the war broke out. Others had proved useful in other ways: serving as additions to the New York City police, for instance, after the Mormons and Socialists had touched off the Remembrance Day riots this past spring. And some of them, like this chap, liked to throw their weight around.

“Sir, why don’t you just leave this man alone?” Morrell said. The words were polite. The tone was anything but. At his side, Captain Abell nodded.

“He’s a damned foreigner,” the Soldiers’ Circle man exclaimed. “He’s almost certainly not a citizen. He doesn’t look like he ought to be a citizen, the stinking wog. Are you a citizen?” he demanded of the Greek.

“Not your gamemeno business what I am,” the foodseller answered, bolder than he had been before he had anyone on his side.

“You see? He doesn’t hardly speak English,” the Soldiers’ Circle man said. “Ought to put him in a leaky boat and ship him back to where he came from.”

“I got son in Army.” The Greek shook his finger at the fellow who was harassing him. “In Army to do fighting, not to play games like you was. Paul is sergeant-I bet you never got no stripes.”

The Soldiers’ Circle man went bright red. Morrell would have bet that meant the Greek had scored a bull’s-eye. “Why don’t you take yourself somewhere else?” Morrell told the dedicated patriot. Muttering under his breath, the corpulent fellow did depart, looking angrily back over his shoulder.

Morrell and Abell waved off the foodseller’s thanks and headed up Chestnut again, toward the War Department. “Those Soldiers’ Circle men can be arrogant bastards,” Abell said. “He was treating that fellow like he was a nigger, not just a dago or whatever the hell he is.”

“Yeah,” Morrell said, “and a Confederate nigger at that.” He checked himself. “The other side to that coin is, the niggers down in the CSA are giving the white folks there a surprise or two.”

“You’re right,” Abell said. “Now what we have to do is see how we can best take advantage of it.”

Morrell nodded. Taking advantage of the enemy didn’t come easy, not when machine guns knocked down advances before they could get moving-assuming artillery hadn’t already done that before soldiers ever came out of the trenches.

He sighed. An awful lot of U.S. officers-including, as far as he was concerned, too many on the General Staff-didn’t, maybe couldn’t, think past slamming straight at the Rebs and overwhelming them by sheer weight of numbers. The USA had the numbers. Using them effectively was proving to be a horse of another color.

You went into General Staff headquarters through what looked like, and once had been, a millionaire’s mansion. Morrell had always doubted that that fooled the Confederate spies surely haunting Philadelphia, but nobody’d asked his opinion. Inside, a sober-faced sergeant checked his identification and Abell’s with meticulous care, comparing photographs to faces. Bureaucracy in action, Morrell thought: the noncom saw them every day.

After gaining permission to enter the sanctum, they went into the map room. Abell pointed to the map of Utah, where U.S. forces had finally pushed the Mormon rebels out of Salt Lake City and back toward Ogden. “That was your doing, more than anyone else,” he said to Morrell, half admiring, half suspicious.

“TR listened to me,” Morrell said with a shrug. Instead of straight-ahead slugging, he urged attacks through the Wasatch Mountains and from the north, to make the Mormons have to do several things at the same time with inadequate resources. He’d proposed that to the brass on arriving here. They’d ignored him. A chanced meeting with the president had revived the plan. Unlike a lowly major, TR could make the General Staff listen instead of trying without any luck to persuade it.

Except for the soldiers actually fighting there (and perhaps except for the resentment higher-ups in the General Staff might show against him for being right), Utah was old news now, anyhow. Morrell looked at a new map, one that had gone up only a few days before. On it, the Confederacy, especially from South Carolina through Louisiana, seemed to have broken out in a bad case of the measles, or maybe even smallpox.

He pointed to the indications of insurrection. “The Rebs will have a jolly time fighting their own Negroes and us, too,” he said.

“That’s the idea,” John Abell said. Both men smiled, well pleased with the world.

Scipio was not used to wearing the coarse, colorless homespun shirt and trousers of a Negro laborer. As butler at the Marshlands mansion, he’d put on formal wear suitable for a Confederate senator in Richmond, save only that his vest was striped and his buttons made of brass. He wasn’t used to sleeping in a blanket on the ground, either, or to eating whatever happened to come into his hands, or to going hungry a lot of the time.

But he would never be butler at Marshlands again. The mansion had gone up in flames at the start of the Marxist revolt-the mostly black revolt-against the Confederate States. If the Congaree Socialist Republic failed, Scipio would never be anything again, except a stinking corpse and then whitening bones hanging from a tree branch.

The headquarters of the Congaree Socialist Republic kept moving, as the Confederates brought pressure to bear against now one, now another of its fluid borders. At the moment, the red flags with the broken chains in black flew over a nameless crossroads not far north of Holly Hill, South Carolina.

Cassius came up to Scipio. Cassius had worn homespun all his life, and a shapeless floppy hat to go with it. He had been the chief hunter at Marshlands, and also-though Scipio hadn’t known of it till after the war with the USA began, and had learned only by accident then-the chief Red. Now he styled himself the chairman of the Republic.

“How you is, Kip?” he asked, the dialect of the Congaree thick as jambalaya in his mouth. But he did not think the way white folks thought their Negroes thought: “Got we anudder one fo’ revolutionary justice. You is one o’ de judges.”

“Where he is?” Scipio asked. When talking with his fellows, he used the Congaree dialect, too. When talking with whites, he spoke standard English better than almost any of them. That had already proved useful to the Congaree Socialist Republic, and likely would again.

“Here he come,” Cassius answered, and, sure enough, two young, stalwart black men were hustling along a short, plump white. His white linen suit was stained with smoke and grass; several days of stubble blurred the outlines of what had been a neat white goatee. In formal tones, Cassius declared, “De peasants an’ workers o’ de Congaree Socialist Republic charges Jubal Marberry here wid ownin’ a plantation an’ wid ’sploitin an’ ’pressin’ he workers on it-an’ wid bein’ a fat man livin’ off what dey does.”

Two others came up beside Scipio to hear the case, not that there was much case to hear at one of these revolutionary tri-bunals. One was a woman named Cherry, from Marshlands, whose screams had helped touch off the rebellion there. The other was a big man named Agamemnon, who had labored at Marberry’s plantation.

He spoke to his former boss-probably his former owner, too, since, like Scipio, he was past thirty: “You got anything to say befo’ the co’t pass sentence on you?”

Marberry was old and more than a little deaf; Agamemnon had to repeat the question. When he did, the white man showed he had spirit left: “Whatever you do to me, they’ll hang you higher than Haman, and better than you deserve, too.”

“What is de verdict?” Cassius asked.

No one bothered with witnesses for the defense, or for the prosecution, either. The three judges walked off a few feet and spoke in low voices. “Ain’t no reason to waste no time on he,” Agamemnon said. “He guilty, the old bastard.”

“We give he what he deserve,” Cherry said with venomous relish.

Scipio didn’t say anything. He’d been in several of these trials, and hadn’t said much at any of them. He’d never intended to be a revolutionary-it was either that, though, or die for knowing too much. He had no love for white folks, but he had no love for savagery, either.

His silence didn’t matter. Had he voted for acquittal, the other two would have outvoted him-and odds were he soon would have faced revolutionary justice himself after such an unreliable act. He’d survived so far by keeping quiet. He hoped he could keep right on surviving.

Agamemnon and Cherry turned back toward Cassius. They both nodded. So did Scipio, a moment later. Cassius said, “Jubal Marberry, you is guilty of the crime of ’pression ’gainst the proletariat of the Congaree Socialist Republic. De punishment is death.”

Marberry cursed at him and tried to kick one of the men who held him. They dragged the planter off behind some trees. A pistol shout sounded, and then a moment later another one. The two Negroes came out. Jubal Marberry didn’t.

With considerable satisfaction, Cassius nodded to the impromptu court. “You done fine,” he told them. Agamemnon and Cherry headed off, both of them obviously well-pleased with themselves. Scipio started to leave, too. One of these days, he was going to let his feelings show on his face despite the butler’s mask of imperturbability he cultivated. That would be the end of him. Even as he turned, though, Cassius said, “You wait, Kip.”

“What you want?” Scipio did his best to sound easy and relaxed. The Congaree Socialist Republic went after enemies of the revolution within its own ranks as aggressively as it pursued them among the whites who had for so long oppressed and battened on the Negro laborers of the area.

But Cassius said, “Gwine have we a parley wid de white folks officer. We trade de wounded white folks sojers we catches fo’de niggers dey gives we. You gwine talk wid de officer.” His long, weathered face stretched into lines of anticipatory glee.

Scipio didn’t need long to figure out why. With a deliberate effort of will, he abandoned the Congaree dialect: “I suppose you will expect me to speak in this fashion, thereby disconcerting them.”

Cassius laughed and slapped his knee. “Do Jesus, yes!” he exclaimed. “You set your mind to it, you talk fancier’n any o’ they white folks. An’ you don’ git angried up in a hurry, neither. We wants a cool head, an’ you got dat.”

“When we do dis parley?” Scipio asked.

“Right now. I take you up to de front.” Cassius reached into his pocket, pulled out a red bandanna, and tied it around Scipio’s left upper arm. “Dere. Now you official.” No doubt because the Confederacy, if you looked at it from the right angle, was nothing but an elaborate hierarchy of ranks and privileges, the Congaree Socialist Republic acted as if such matters did not exist. The revolution was about equality.

The front was just that, a series of trenches and firing pits. Both the black soldiers of the Socialist Republic and their Confederate foes were in large measure amateurs, but both sides were doing their best to imitate what the professionals from the CSA and USA had been doing.

Cassius took Scipio to a tent where the white officer waited. “Ain’t gwine let you cross out of de country we holds,” he said. “Cain’t trust white folks not to keep you an’ give you a rope necktie.”

Considering what had just happened to Jubal Marberry and to many others, Scipio reckoned the barbarism equally distributed. Saying so, however, struck him as inexpedient. And he knew he should have been grateful that Cassius worried about his safety rather than planning to liquidate him.

The tent was butternut canvas, captured Confederate Army issue. Scipio pulled the flap open, ducked his head, and went inside. A man in Confederate uniform sat behind a folding table. He did not stand up for Scipio, as he would have on meeting a U.S. officer during a parley.

“Good day,” Scipio said, as if greeting a guest at Marshlands. “Shall we discuss this matter in a civilized fashion, as it involves the well-being of brave men from both sides?”

Sure enough, the Confederate major’s eyebrows rose. He wasn’t a gray-bearded relic like a lot of the men the CSA was using to try to suppress the revolution; Scipio judged he would have been fighting the Yankees if he hadn’t lost a hand. “Don’t you talk pretty?” he said, and then, as if making a great concession, “All right, I’m Jerome Hotchkiss. I can treat for Confederate forces along this front. You can do the same for your people?”

“That is correct, Major,” Scipio answered. “For the purposes of this meeting, you may address me as Spartacus.”

Hotchkiss let out a bark of laughter. “All you damn Red niggers use that for an alias. Best guess I can give about why is that maybe you reckon we won’t know who to hang once we’ve put you down. If that’s what you think, you’re dreaming.”

Scipio feared the major was right. Showing that fear, though, would put him in Cassius’ bad graces. Cassius being more immediately dangerous to him than were the forces of the CSA, he said, “I suggest, Major, that it is wise to kill your bear before you speak of skinning him.”

“You want to watch the way you talk to me,” Hotchkiss said, as if rebuking a Negro waiter at a restaurant.

“Major, you would be well advised to remember that you are in the sovereign territory of the Congaree Socialist Republic,” Scipio returned. Hotchkiss glared at him. He looked back steadily. The shoe was on the other foot now, and the white man didn’t care for the fit. Scipio understood that. He’d spent his whole life not caring for the fit. He said, “Shall we agree to put other matters aside for the time being, in the hopes of coming to terms on this one specific issue?”

“Fair enough,” Hotchkiss said, making a visible effort to control himself. “Some of our wounded who got left behind when we had to pull back…When we advanced again, we found ’em chopped to bits or burned alive or…Hell, I don’t need to go on. You know what I’m talking about.”

“I also know that your forces are seldom in the habit of taking prisoners of any kind, wounded or not,” Scipio answered. “How many Negroes have been hanged, these past days?”

Plainly, the thought in Hotchkiss’ mind was, Not enough. “Negroes caught in arms against the Confederate States of America-”

Scipio surprised him by interrupting: “Lackeys of the oppressors caught in arms resisting the proletarian revolution of the Congaree Socialist Republic…” The Marxist rhetoric he’d learned from Cassius came in handy here, no matter how low his opinion of it commonly was. He went on, “Our causes being as repugnant to each other as they are, is it not all the more important to observe the laws of war with especial care?”

“That’d mean admitting you have the right to rebel,” Hotchkiss said.

But Scipio shook his head. “The USA did not admit the CSA had that right in the War of Secession, yet treated Confederate prisoners humanely.”

He could see Hotchkiss thinking, White men on both sides. But the major didn’t say that. What he did say was, “Maybe.”

Taking that for assent, Scipio said, “Very well. We undertake to exchange under flag of truce men too badly wounded to go on fighting at a place and time you may choose, said men to have been treated as well as possible by the side capturing them. Is it agreed?”

“Agreed,” Hotchkiss said, “but only as a war measure. It doesn’t mean we say you have any right to do what you’re doing. After we smash you, you’ll still hang for rebellion and treason.”

“First catch the bear, Major,” Scipio answered. He’d done what Cassius wanted. He thought it would bring some good. How much? For how long? He wished he knew how the revolution fared across the rest of the Confederacy.

The adobe farmhouse outside Bountiful, Utah, sat on a low rise, so that it commanded the ground in front of it. The Mormon rebels against the authority of the United States had had months of hard fighting in which to learn their craft. They’d learned it all too well, as far as Paul Mantarakis was concerned. When they found a position like this, they fortified it for everything it was worth, then stayed in it and fought, sometimes men and women both, until U.S. forces finally overwhelmed them.

A machine gun inside the farmhouse opened up, spitting death down at the trenches Mantarakis and his comrades had dug. He ducked, making sure the top of his head was below the level of the parapet. The fancy new helmet he wore didn’t keep out direct hits. People had found out about that the hard way.

He waited till the machine gun’s fire was directed elsewhere along the trench, then stood up on the firing step and popped a couple of rounds from his Springfield at the adobe. He didn’t think they were likely to accomplish much: the mud brick in a lot of these Utah farmhouses was thick enough to stop a bullet, though it had been intended to keep out heat and cold, not flying lead. And, for good measure, the Mormons had put up corrugated iron sheets over the windows, turning them into first-rate firing slits.

Ben Carlton came up to Mantarakis. “Hey, Sarge, you want to come check the stew pot?”

“Sure.” Paul followed him down the line of trench. Carlton was the official company cook, and had a gift for scrounging from sources both official and unofficial. But Mantarakis really had been a cook back in Philadelphia, though getting stripes on his sleeve kept him from exercising his talents these days as often as he would have liked.

The pot smelled more savory than it often did. “Chickens and a couple rabbits,” Carlton said, “and potatoes and beets and onions and-all kinds of things. It’s downright-bountiful around here.” He laughed at his own joke.

“Yeah.” Mantarakis tasted the stew. “Not bad,” he said. “Just kind of bland, you know what I’m saying? You need some garlic and some basil, maybe, or oregano, to perk it up. Not too much,” he added hastily as Carlton started to pour most of a tin of garlic powder into the pot. “You want to make the stew taste better-you don’t want to just taste the spice, either.” Little by little, he was educating Carlton.

He suddenly stopped worrying about the stew, for U.S. artillery opened up on the adobe and the line it anchored. The noise was terrific, overpowering, enough to drive a man mad. To Mantarakis, it was also sweet as fine wine. Without artillery, his guess was that U.S. forces would still be bogged down somewhere south of Provo. It was the one thing government troops had in prodigal supply and the Mormon rebels largely lacked.

Captain Cecil Schneider hurried up into the frontmost trench. Schneider still wore single silver bars, not double; he’d won his promotion just after the ruins of the Mormon Temple in Salt Lake City passed into government hands. With him came Gordon McSweeney, who, like Mantarakis, had started the war a private and who, also like Mantarakis, now sported sergeant’s stripes.

“When the barrage lets up, we go after that farmhouse,” Schneider said. He didn’t sound enthusiastic-no one who’d been through the fall of Salt Lake City was apt to be enthusiastic about fighting ever again-but he sounded determined. Casualties had made him a company commander the same way they’d made Paul and McSweeney noncoms, but he’d turned out to be a pretty good one.

Because of that, the first thing out of Paul’s mouth was, “Yes, sir.” The second thing, though, was, “What the devil is he got up as, sir?” He pointed to Gordon McSweeney, who instead of a pack wore a big metal drum on his back and carried in his hands a hose attached to it.

McSweeney spoke for himself: “This is a device for sending the misbelievers into the fiery furnace.” As far as he was concerned, anyone less grimly Presbyterian than himself was heading straight for hell. That included papists and the Orthodox Paul Mantarakis, but it also most especially included Mormons, who, as far as he was concerned, were not Christians at all.

Captain Schneider amplified that, saying, “The gadget’s supposed to be able to deal with strongpoints that laugh at rifles and machine guns. If the artillery doesn’t punch the ticket on that farmhouse, we’ll send Gordon up to see what he can do. Only disadvantage is, it’s a short-range weapon.”

“I will bring it close enough to the farmhouse to be used,” McSweeney promised. Whatever the thing was, he sounded quiveringly eager to use it. Mantarakis had no idea what the Mormons felt about Gordon McSweeney, or even whether they knew he existed among the multitude of soldiers in the U.S. force. He knew McSweeney scared him to death.

Ever so warily, he peered up over the parapet. The rebels’ line was taking quite a pounding; through dust and smoke, it looked as if several large bites were gone from the farmhouse. Maybe it would be easy this time. It had been, once or twice. Some of the other times, though…

He would have liked to see the artillery go on for days, for weeks, killing all the Mormons without any need for the infantry to do their work. But, for one thing, there wasn’t enough ammunition for a bombardment like that, not on a secondary front like Utah. And, for another, he’d seen fighting the Confederates that even the longest, most savage barrages didn’t kill all or even most of the enemy soldiers at whom they were aimed.

After an hour or so, the guns fell silent. Captain Schneider blew a whistle. Up out of the trenches swarmed his company and several others. “Come on!” Mantarakis called to the men of his squad. “We don’t want to spend a lot of time in between the lines where they can shoot us down. We want to get right in there with ’em.”

The ground was chewed up from previous failed assaults on the Mormon position, and chewed worse by short rounds from the latest shelling. None, for once, seemed to have come down on the U.S. trenches, which Paul reckoned a small miracle. He dashed past stinking corpses and pieces of corpses, some still in green-gray often stained black with old blood. Flies rose in buzzing clouds.

Sure enough, some of the Mormon defenders remained alive and angry at the world, or at least at that portion of the United States Army attacking them. All along their line, flames showed riflemen shooting at the soldiers in green-gray heading their way. Somewhere not far from Paul, a man took a bullet and began shrieking for his mother.

And, sure enough, the machine gun in the adobe farmhouse started up, too. As he dove headlong into a shell crater, Mantarakis was convinced the racket a machine gun made was the most hateful noise in the world.

He looked toward the farmhouse. He and however many men still survived from his squad had come well past the high-water mark of earlier U.S. attacks. He was, he thought, within a hundred yards of that infernal device hammering out death up ahead. He was also damned if he knew how he was going to be able to get any nearer than that.

Somebody thudded down into the crater beside him: Gordon McSweeney. “I have to get closer,” the dour Scotsman said. “Twenty yards is best, though thirty may do: one for each piece of silver Judas took.”

Mantarakis sighed. He too knew they had to take out that machine gun. If McSweeney had a way-“I’ll go left. You go right a few seconds later. We’ll keep moving till you’re close enough.” Or until you get killed-or until I do. He wished he could take out his worry beads and work them.

They weren’t the only soldiers pushing up toward the adobe. The Mormons in there had even less idea than Paul did of what the strange contraption on McSweeney’s back was. Working his way to within twenty yards of the machine gun was slow and dangerous work, but he managed.

To Mantarakis’ horror, McSweeney stood up in the hole where he’d sheltered. He aimed the nozzle end of the hose he carried at the machine gun’s firing slit. Before the gun could cut him down, a spurt of flame burst from the nozzle, played over the front of the farmhouse, and went right through the narrow slit at the crew serving the machine gun.

Paul heard the lyingly cheerful sound of rounds cooking off inside the farmhouse. McSweeney dashed toward it. He stuck the nozzle right up against the slit and let loose another tongue of fire.

Along with the sound of cartridges prematurely ignited came another-the sound of screams. Gordon McSweeney’s face was transfigured with joy, as if he’d just taken Jerusalem from the pagans. And then something happened that Paul had never before seen in Utah: three or four men came stumbling out through a hole in the side of the adobe, their hands lifted high in surrender.

Joyfully smiling still, McSweeney turned the nozzle of the flamethrower hose on them. “No, Gordon!” Paul yelled. “Let ’em give up. Maybe we can break this rebellion yet.”

“I suppose it could be so,” McSweeney admitted reluctantly. The Mormons shambled off into captivity. Out from the adobe floated the strong stench of burnt meat. Mantarakis didn’t care. With its linchpin lost, this line wouldn’t hold. One fight fewer, he thought, till Utah was done.

For this first time since the land was settled in the seventeenth century, a paved road ran between Lucien Galtier’s farm and the town of Riviere-du-Loup on the St. Lawrence. If Lucien had had his way, the road would have disappeared, and with it the American soldiers and engineers who had built it. But, regardless of what he wanted, the Americans maintained their hold on Quebec south of the St. Lawrence, and had pushed across the mighty river at Riviere-du-Loup, intending, no doubt, to sweep southwest toward Quebec City, and then toward Montreal.

The push across the river and the newly paved road were anything but unrelated. As Lucien trudged in toward the white-painted wood farmhouse with the steep red roof after feeding the horse, he glanced at the much larger wooden building, painted what he thought a most unattractive shade of green-gray, that had gone up not far away, on what had been some of his best wheat land.

While he watched, a green-gray ambulance bearing on each side panel a large red cross inside a white circle pulled up to the building. The driver leaped out. He and an attendant who emerged from the rear of the vehicle carried a man on a stretcher into the U.S. military hospital. They hurried back and brought in another injured man. Then the ambulance, engine snarling, headed back toward Riviere-du-Loup to pick up more casualties.

Lucien wiped his feet before he went into the farmhouse. Though not a big man himself, he towered over his wife, Marie. That did not mean he could track muck inside without hearing about it in great detail.

“Warm in here,” he said approvingly. “It is only October, but the wind outside is ready for January.”

“May it freeze the Americans,” Marie answered from the kitchen. Like her husband, she spoke in Quebecois French. It was the only language she knew. Lucien had picked up some English during his conscript time in the Canadian Army, just as English-speaking Canadians soaked up a little French there. He’d forgotten most of what he’d learned in the twenty-odd years since he’d served, though having to deal with the Americans had brought some of it back.

He walked toward the kitchen, drawn not only by the warmth of the stove but also by the delicious smells floating out toward him. He sniffed. He prided himself on an educated nose. “Don’t tell me,” he said, pointing to the covered pot. “Ham baked with prunes. And are there potatoes in the oven, too?”

Marie Galtier regarded him with mixed affection and exasperation. “How am I supposed to surprise you, Lucien?”

He spread his hands and shrugged. “As long as we’ve been married, and you still expect to surprise me? You make me happy. That is enough, and more than enough. What do I need of surprises?”

Also in the kitchen, helping her mother, was their eldest daughter, Nicole. She was slight and dark like Marie, and put Lucien achingly in mind of what her mother had been like when he’d first started courting her. Now she said, “I can surprise you, Papa.”

“Of this I have no doubt,” Lucien said. “The question is, my little bird, do I want to be surprised?” He didn’t remember only what Marie had been like when he was courting her. He also remembered, all too well, what he had been like. He did not think the young male of the species likely to have shown any dramatic improvement over the intervening generation.

And when Nicole answered, “Papa, I do not know,” his heart sank. She took a long, deep breath before going on, and that heart, seemingly a relentless gymnast, leaped into his mouth. Then she said, “I have been thinking of doing nurse’s work at the American hospital. It is very close, of course, and we could use the money the work would bring.”

After all the dreadful possibilities he had imagined, that one seemed not so bad…at first. Then Lucien stared. “You would help the Americans, Nicole? The enemies of our country? The allies of the enemies of France?”

His daughter bit her lip and looked down at the apron she wore over her long wool dress. To Galtier’s surprise, his wife spoke up for her: “If a man is hurt and in pain, does it matter what country he comes from?”

“Father Pascal would say the same thing,” Lucien replied, which made Marie wince, because the priest at Riviere-du-Loup, whatever anyone’s opinion of his piety might be, collaborated eagerly with the Americans.

“But, Papa,” Nicole said, “they are hurt and in pain. You can hear them moaning in the night sometimes.” Lucien had heard those moans, too. They had been sweet to his ears. He shook his head in dismay to discover his daughter did not feel the same. Nicole persisted, “You know what I think of Father Pascal. You know what I think of the Americans. None of that would change. How could it? And they would be giving money to people who despise them.”

“You don’t even speak any English,” Galtier said. As soon as the words were out of his mouth, he knew he was in trouble. When you had to shift your reasons for saying no, you were liable to end up saying yes.

And Nicole pounced: “I can learn it, I know that. It might even be useful for me to know if, God forbid-” She didn’t go on. She didn’t need to go on. Lucien had no trouble completing the sentence for himself. If, God forbid, the United States win the war and try to make us all use English afterwards. That was what she’d meant, or something very much like it.

He didn’t try to answer on the spur of the moment. Believing Canada and France and England and the Confederacy could be defeated went dead against all his hopes and dreams. What he did say was, “How Major Quigley will laugh when he learns you are working for the Americans.”

He spoke with more than a little bitterness. Nicole bit her lip. The French-speaking U.S. major had placed the hospital on Galtier land not least because Lucien would not collaborate with the American occupying authorities.

Marie spoke up again: “Actually, that may be for the best. The major may believe we are coming round to his view of things after all, and so become less likely to trouble us from now on.”

Lucien chewed on that. It did make a certain amount of sense. And so, instead of putting his foot down as he’d intended, he said, “We shall speak of this more later.” His wife and eldest daughter nodded, outwardly obedient to his will as women were supposed to be. He knew they both had to be smiling inside, though. Sooner or later, they would get what they wanted. Talking about things later was but one short step from giving in.

At supper, he discovered he was the last one in the family to hear about what Nicole had in mind. That saddened him but didn’t unduly surprise him. For one thing, he did more work away from the farmhouse than anyone else. For another, he was the one from whom permission would have to come. Nicole would have wanted to know she had support from the rest before bearding him.

“I wish I could go there, too, and make money of my own,” his daughter Susanne said wistfully. Since she was only thirteen, they would not have to worry about that unless the war went on appallingly long. Or, of course, unless there is another war after this one, Lucien thought, and then shivered, as if someone had walked over his grave.

His older son, Charles, did not approve of Nicole’s plan. “I say the Americans are just another pack of Boches, and we should have as little to do with them as we can.” He spoke with the certainty of seventeen. In another year, he would have gone into the Canadian Army to serve his time. The only good thing about the war was that it had rolled over this part of Quebec before he could take part in it.

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Georges, who was a couple of years younger than his brother and almost the changeling of the family: not only was he larger and fairer than his parents and brother and sisters, but he also had a rollicking wit out of keeping with the pungent sarcasm Lucien brought to bear on life. Now he grinned at Nicole across the table. “Maybe you’ll meet a handsome American doctor and he’ll sweep you off your-Oww!”

By the dull thud from under the table, she’d kicked him in the shin. To underscore a point that needed no underscoring, his littlest sister, Jeanne, said, “That was mean.” Eight-year-old certainty wasn’t of the same kind as the seventeen-year-old variety, but it wasn’t any less certain, either. Denise, who was a couple of years older than Jeanne, nodded to show her agreement. Jeanne turned to Nicole and said, “You’d never do anything like that, would you?”

“Certainly not,” Nicole said, frost in her voice. The look she turned on Georges should have turned him into a block of ice, too. It didn’t. He stayed impudent as ever, even if he did have to bend over to rub his injured leg.

“Now wait, all of you,” Lucien said. “No one has said that Nicole will have any opportunity to meet American doctors, even if she wanted to do such a thing, which I already have no doubt she does not.”

“But, Papa,” Nicole said, “are you changing your mind?”

“No, for I never said yes,” he answered. His eldest daughter looked stricken. He glanced down to Marie at the foot of the table. He knew what her expressions meant. This one meant she’d back him, but she thought he was wrong. He sighed. “Perhaps it might be possible to try…but only for a little while.”