American Front

XI

Sometimes you dished it out, sometimes you had to take it. Jake Featherston knew that was true, even if he didn't like it for beans. He was taking it now, and his whole battery with him.

"Fire!" he yelled, and the field gun blasted a shell back at the damnyankees on the far side of the Susquehanna. The whole battery was pounding the U.S. positions, as far back as it could reach.

Trouble was, the battery couldn't reach far enough. The Confederacy's three-inch field guns had been the most wonderful thing in the world when the war was new and positions changed not just from day to day but from hour to hour. They moved with the advancing columns of men in butternut and slaughtered the U.S. soldiers who opposed them: slaughtered by tens, by hundreds, by thousands.

Because they did that job so well, the CSA had a lot of them. What the Con federates didn't have, and what they were needing more and more now that the front wasn't going anywhere fast, was a lot of big guns, guns that could reach well behind the enemy line and do some damage when they did reach. Nobody had thought the Confederacy would need so many guns like that.

"Only goes to show," Featherston muttered. "People ain't as smart as they wish they was."

The USA had the big guns, or more of them than the CSA did. Now that the front had stabilized along the Susquehanna, the United States had brought up their heavy artillery, and their gunners were using the big, long-range shells to raise hell deep among the Confederates' secondary positions. If the Yankees decided to try to force the Susquehanna line, they could beat down the opposition with their artillery till the Confederate forces would have a tough time fighting back.

"Wish we could do more to those damned six- and eight-inch guns," Jethro Bixler said as he set another shell in the breech of the field piece.

"Yeah." Featherston adjusted the elevation screw for maximum range, then pulled the lanyard. The field gun bucked and roared, but the muzzle brake kept the recoil short. If they hadn't worn the rifling out of the barrel of the gun, it wasn't because they hadn't tried. As Bixler slammed yet another shell into the breech, Jake went on, "What I wish is, we weren't so damned far forward. We got to be, I know, but if they do start dropping stuff on us, they'll be awful damn accurate on account of it won't be way out at the end of their range, like we are when we try to reach where they're at."

Another shell screamed off. Featherston wondered if he'd have any hearing left by the time the war was done. No sooner had the thought crossed his mind than he realized it contained two possibly false assumptions: that his hearing was the most important thing he risked, and that the war would ever end.

Pompey came up to Featherston and waited to be noticed. When the sergeant gave him a curt nod, he said, "Cap'n Stuart's compliments, suh, and we gonna shift our fire to a new Yankee position, range 5,300 yards, bearing 043."

"Range 5,300, bearing 043," Featherston repeated; he had to work to keep from imitating Pompey's mincing accent. Captain Stuart's servant nodded and went off to give the word to the next howitzer in the battery.

Featherston sighed. He didn't know whether Major Potter had investigated Pompey or not. If the major had, nothing had come of it. Pompey remained Jeb Stuart Ill's trusted servant: too trusted, as far as Jake was concerned. He knew Captain Stuart had given the command. All the same, getting it from Pompey was too close to taking orders from a Negro to suit him.

He glanced over at Nero and Perseus, who were combing down the horses. They were all right. They knew white men gave the orders and they took them. Pompey, just because he worked for somebody important, thought his own station improved, too. Thinks his shit don't stink, is what he does, Jake thought.

And then he stopped worrying about things as trivial as the right status of the Negro in the Confederate States of America. At any other time, that would have been important. Not now, not when Yankee shells came whistling in straight toward where he was standing.

Big ones, he thought with a chill as the freight-train noises in the sky grew to a roar, a scream. The damnyankees' three-inchers fired more slowly than the Confederacy's guns, but their shells gave the same scant warning coming in. A little whizz before the bang, that was all you got.

Not these. Through the growing shriek of torn air, Jethro Bixler screamed something. If it wasn't "Get down!" it should have been. A split second before the shells went off, Featherston threw himself flat.

Back home outside of Richmond, he'd gone to church a lot of times to hear a preacher work himself up into a good sweat over hellfire and damnation and brimstone. You listened to a preacher who was good enough, who threw off his jacket and waved his white-shirtsleeved arms at the congregation, you could get the feeling hell wasn't more than half a mile off.

That's what he'd thought then. Since the war started, he'd begun to get the notion he had a more intimate personal acquaintance with hellfire than any preacher ever spawned-unless the preacher served a gun, too.

But now, with the war that had started in summer and should have ended before winter still going strong at the start of spring and heading into its second summer of what looked like a great many yet to come, he discovered he didn't know so much after all. The battery had been under fire before, plenty of times. That was why he wasn't working with all the same gun-crew men who'd started out with him bombarding Washington, D.C. You shot at the damnyankees, they shot at you. That was fair.

They weren't just shooting at the battery this time, though. They wanted to wipe it off the face of the earth. He frantically hugged the dirt as the big shells burst all around him. Black puffs of smoke with red flame at their hearts sprang into being everywhere. Shrapnel balls and fragments of shell casing hissed through the air. The ground jerked and bucked. Featherston had never felt an earthquake, and after this bombardment was convinced he didn't need to. If you were in a house when an earthquake hit, the worst that would happen was things falling on you. Things weren't just falling here. They were accelerated, viciously accelerated, by high explosive.

Worst was knowing that whether he lived or died was altogether out of his hands. If a shell came down so near the blast ripped his lungs to bits from the inside out, if an explosion blew him to smithereens, if a tiny steel splinter awled through his skull and into his brain.. then that was what happened. He had no say, and whether he was a good soldier or a bad didn't matter. Luck, that was it.

Shells kept raining down on the battery. He heard someone screaming, and realized it was himself. He felt not the least bit ashamed. You had to let some of the terror loose, or it would eat you from the inside out. Besides, in the many times worse than thunderstorm all around, who could hear him?

He wondered what else the Yankees were bombarding. Front-line trenches? Ammunition dumps? It mattered in theory, but not in practice, not right now. He couldn't do anything about it any which way. All he could do was lie flat and scrabble at the ground with the knife he wore on his belt, trying to dig a shallow hole in which he could shelter from the storm of steel- the storm of hate, the infantry called it-raging all around.

Blast from a near miss picked him up and slammed him back down to the ground, the way you might throw a kitten you didn't want against a brick wall to get rid of it. "Oof!" he said, and then, as he got more air back into his lungs, several less printable remarks.

How long the bombardment went on, he never knew exactly. When at last it lifted, it went down into the trenches even nearer the river than the battery was. Dazedly, Jake Featherston sat up. His hands shook. He tried to make them steady, and discovered he couldn't.

His gun, for a miracle, was still upright. Nobody else from the crew was sitting up, though. A couple of people were down and moaning, a couple of others down and not moving. The rest of the battery's howitzers had been tossed every which way, as if they were jackstraws.

He looked toward the smoke and dirt rising from the front-line trenches. Through that haze, he saw Yankees coming out of their own trenches and rushing toward the Susquehanna. They were going to try to force a crossing right now.

He ran to the howitzer. His head swivelled wildly. He had a target artillerymen dreamed of-but if he had to handle the three-incher by himself, he couldn't possibly fire often enough to do the CSA any good. He spied motion. Somehow, Nero and Perseus had come through the bombardment with as little damage as he had.

"You niggers!" he shouted. "Get your black asses up here on the double!" The labourers obeyed. If they hadn't, he would have drawn his pistol and shot them both. As things were, he barked, "You've seen the crew serve this gun often enough. Reckon you know how to do it your own selves?"

The two Negroes looked at each other. "Mebbe we do, Marse Jake," Perseus said at last, "but-"

"No time for buts." Featherston pointed toward the Susquehanna. "Every damnyankee in the world is headin' straight this way. They get this far, they're gonna kill you the same as me. Only way to keep 'em from gettin' this far I can think of is to blow 'em up first. Now-you gonna serve the gun?"

He didn't know whether his logic or his hand on the butt of his pistol was the more convincing. But the Negroes, after glancing at each other again, both nodded. "I kin load, I reckon," Nero said, "an' Perseus, he kin tote the shells. You got to do the rest, Marse Jake. We don't know nothin' 'bout how to aim."

"I'll handle that," Featherston promised. He looked around for Jethro Bixler, then wished he hadn't. The loader was spread out over the ground like an anatomy lesson. He hoped Nero wasn't lying to him, the way blacks did sometimes when they wanted to impress a white man.

Nero wasn't. He waited while Jake frantically worked the elevation screw to lower the muzzle of the gun and shorten range, then opened the breech, slammed in a shell, and dogged it shut almost as fast as poor dead Jethro could have done.

With a whoop, Featherston yanked the firing lanyard. The howitzer bellowed. A couple of seconds later, the shell burst among the swarming Yankees. They were close enough for Jake to watch the ones near the burst going down like ninepins. He whooped again and traversed the piece a little to the left.

Nero worked the breech. Out came the old shell casing. In went the new round. Jake jerked the lanyard. More U.S. soldiers fell. Methodically, he kept pumping shells into them. Despite the Yankee bombardment, not all the Confederate machine gunners were blasted out of their positions. They too began scything the U.S. attackers with bullets. Some of the Yankees did manage to ford the river and get into the Confederate trenches. The only ones who went any farther than that came to the rear as prisoners.

Seeing the glum, bloodied men in green-gray, Nero howled like a wolf. "We done it!" he shouted. "Jesus God almighty, we done it!"

They hadn't done it all by themselves-some guns from other batteries had spread death through the Yankee ranks, too-but they had done it. The eastern bank of the Susquehanna was littered with corpses tossed at every possible angle, and at too many impossible ones. A few last U.S. soldiers were scuttling back to their own trenches, like dogs fleeing with tails between their legs.

"We really did do it." Featherston knew he sounded stunned and shaky. He didn't feel bad about it; he was stunned and shaky. He slapped Nero on the back, and then Perseus. "You boys can serve my gun any time you please, and that's a fact. For a while there, I figured we'd be fightin' off the damn-yankees with pistols."

"Ain't got no pistol, Marse Jake," Nero pointed out. He looked in the direction of a dead artilleryman. "Them Yankees break through an' come this way, though, reckon I woulda had me one."

"Yeah," Jake said abstractedly. Except when Negroes were doing things like hunting for the pot, they weren't supposed to have firearms. You let black men get their hands on guns and you were sitting on a keg of powder with the fuse lighted and heading your way.

And Nero and Perseus hadn't just got their hands on a pistol, or even a Tredegar. They'd served an artillery piece, and they'd done a hell of a job at it, too. You couldn't make them forget how to do it, or that they'd done it. If there ever was a black rebellion, they could do it again, provided they got themselves a field piece.

But if Featherston hadn't put them on the gun, he almost certainly wouldn't have been alive to worry about things like that. If Major Potter ever found out he'd turned them into impromptu artillerymen, he was liable to order them dragged off somewhere and shot. Part of Jake said that was a good idea. Hell, part of him wanted to yank out his pistol and use it now, so nobody would know what he'd done.

He couldn't. They'd saved his neck along with their own. He would never have yelled for their help if he could have yelled for white men instead, but there hadn't been any white men to yell for. He'd done what he'd had to do, and he'd got away with it.

Now he said what he said to say: "It's over, boys. You got to go back to bein' niggers again. You know what I'm tellin' you?"

He wondered if they could obey, even if they wanted to. They'd just been soldiers, after all. One of the reasons you didn't let a Negro get a gun in his hands was that, if he did some fighting with it, he'd start feeling like a man, not like a servant. A Negro who felt like a man was liable to be a dangerous Negro.

But Nero and Perseus understood what Jake meant. Perseus said, 'Yes, suh, Marse Jake, we be your niggers again, till the next time y'all need us to be somethin' different." He sounded almost as if he was inviting Featherston to share a joke.

"All right," Jake answered, not knowing what else he could say. Eventually, the battery would get replacements: young white men, eager-or at least willing-to serve the guns. And, eventually, they'd get slaughtered, too. So would Jake, like as not. He carried on about his business with a grim fatalism; the Yanks could throw more metal at him than he could easily throw back.

And who would serve the guns in 1917, or 1919, or 1921, or however long the war lasted? Negroes? He shook his head. It couldn't happen, not really. He glanced over at Perseus and Nero. Could it?

"Breakthrough!" George Armstrong Custer pounded the desk. "That's what I want, nothing less!" In an old-fashioned dark blue uniform, the fringe on his epaulets would have shaken back and forth. Modern U.S. uniforms didn't have epaulets. He had to make do with shaking jowls instead. "I want to run riot through the Rebels, and by God that's what I'm going to do."

"Sir." Major Abner Dowling took a deep breath. Every time Custer started bellowing about breakthroughs, men died by thousands for gains best measured in yards. "Sir, with the machine gun and barbed wire and artillery, breakthroughs don't come easy these days."

That was not only true, it was the understatement of the year. But Custer shook his head. He didn't want to see it, so he wouldn't. If you imagined a dumpy, half-senile ostrich with its head in the sand, that was Custer, at least in Dowling's uncharitable imagination. But, though he wore no epaulets, he did have stars on his shoulders. "The Rebs have worn themselves out," he declared. "Holding us off has been hard enough on them, and then they tried an offensive of their own. What can they possibly have left?"

Dowling didn't answer, not right away. The Confederate counterthrust from the south had been easier to stop than he'd expected. Maybe that meant the Rebs couldn't force a breakthrough, either. Maybe it just meant their generals were as bad as Custer. The great man's adjutant wasn't sure which of those was the more depressing conclusion.

Direct argument having failed again and again, he tried analogy: "Sir, when Coronado came into the USA from Mexico, he was looking for the Seven Cities of Cibola, all of them stuffed with gold. What did he find? Nothing but a bunch of damn redskins living in mud huts."

"What the hell are you talking about, Major?" Custer demanded: so much for analogy.

"I just meant, sir, that we keep looking for breakthroughs and keep thinking the Rebs are back to their last ditch, but it never seems to be true. Maybe we ought to try some different way of going at 'em," Dowling said.

"Shall we settle the war with a game of football, the way some idiots tried doing Christmas Day?" Custer suggested with sardonic glee.

"Uh, no sir," Dowling said hastily. From what he'd heard, First Army and the Confederate Army of Kentucky hadn't been the only forces that made impromptu Christmas truces with one another. From what he'd heard, the war had damn near fallen apart on Christmas Day, from the Gulf of California all the way to the Susquehanna. But it hadn't. It ground on, and would for who could guess how long.

In a way, the generality of the truce was too bad. If it had happened here and nowhere else, TR would have had all the justification he needed for sacking Custer and replacing him with someone who had some notion of how the world had changed since 1881. But no, no such luck.

"What do you propose, then, Major?" Custer sarcastically courteous was worse than Custer almost any other way. His ruling assumption seemed to be that, since he had no brains, no one else could possibly have any, either.

The trouble was, Dowling had no good answer for him here. That embarrassed the adjutant, but not as much as it might have. Nobody on the U.S. General Staff-or the Confederate General Staff, either, come to that-had any good answer on how to force a breakthrough. West of the Mississippi, the war was still mobile, but that was because there were a lot fewer men and a lot more miles west of the Mississippi. Wherever there were enough soldiers to man a solid trench line, offence literally stopped dead.

But if Dowling didn't know what the answer was, he had a pretty clear notion of what it wasn't. "Sending men out by the division to charge into machine-gun fire wastes lives, sir," he said. "We'd be better off pounding the Rebs with artillery, using soldiers to create positions from which we could pound them from three sides at once, things like that."

"We have the advantage in manpower, Major," Custer said. "What good is it if we don't use it?"

If we keep using it your way, we won't have it much longer, Dowling thought. Saying that aloud was probably fatal to a career. He braced himself to speak up anyway; maybe they'd give him an actual combat battalion as punishment for his crime.

Before he could make himself say anything, though, someone knocked on the door to Custer's office. The commanding general snarled something profane, then barked at Dowling: "See who the devil that is."

"Yes, sir," Dowling said resignedly. You interrupted Custer's meetings at your own risk. Dowling opened the door. Standing there was a scared-looking lieutenant from Cryptography, holding an enciphered telegram and a sheet of typewritten paper that was, presumably, the same message decoded. The lieutenant handed Dowling the paper-actually, thrust it into his hand-and then retreated at a clip not far short of flight.

As soon as Dowling had read the first two lines of the decryption, he understood why. But he was the one who'd have to break the news to Custer. Compared to that, the prospect of leading a combat battalion straight at the Rebel trenches looked downright delightful.

"Well?" the general commanding First Army snapped. "Don't just stand there like an upright piano. Tell me what in tarnation this is all about."

Dowling stiffened to rigid attention. Doing his best to keep vengeful glee from his voice, he said, "Yes, sir. Sir, you are ordered to detach two divisions from your front for immediate transfer to another theatre."

That had about the same effect on Custer as hitting him between the eyes with a two-by-four would have done. He went white, and then a red that rapidly deepened to a dusky purple. "Who's stealing my men?" he whispered hoarsely. "If it's Pershing, I'll kill the son of a bitch with my own hands if it's the last thing I ever do. That upstart whippersnapper wants to steal all the glory for the Kentucky campaign, and damn me to hell if I aim to let him. I'll defy the order, that's what I'll do, and I'll fight it out in the paper if TR sacks me for it. First Roosevelt keeps me from the northern command he knows I want-and he knows why I want it, too-and now, just when I'm beginning to make decent progress here, he robs me of my forces."

"They aren't being transferred to General Pershing, sir." Now Dowling concealed regret: Pershing had made far more progress against the Rebels than Custer had. He'd also had the sense to save lives by pinching off Louisville from the flanks instead of going straight into the city, as the U.S. Army had tried to do during the Second Mexican War. "The order comes directly from General Wood, at General Staff headquarters in Philadelphia."

Custer expressed an opinion of the relationship between Wood and Roosevelt that reflected poorly on the heterosexuality of either man. Like any underling with an ounce of sense, Dowling knew when to feign deafness. "Why the devil is Wood stealing my men, then?" Custer said, rather more pungently than that.

"Sir, a major Mormon uprising has broken out in Utah," Dowling said, waving the decipherment of the telegram to show the source of his news. "They're right on one of our cross-country rail lines; we have to bring them back under the flag as fast as we can."

"God damn them to hell, and may the U.S. Army send them there," Custer exclaimed. "We should have done it before the War of Secession, and we really should have done it during the Second Mexican War, when they tried to sneak out of our beloved Union. If anyone had listened to me then-" He shook his head. "But no. We had to clasp the viper to our bosom. I was there, by God. I wanted them to hang all the Mormons' leaders, not just a handful of them. I wanted them to hang Abe Lincoln, too, while they had the chance. But would anybody hear a word I said? No. Are we better off because no one would? No again."

"Sir, I wouldn't call what we did in Utah during the Second Mexican War clasping the Mormons to our bosom, or afterwards, either," Dowling said; Custer had a selective memory for facts. John Pope and later military governors in Utah had jumped on the Mormons with both feet then, to make sure they didn't try giving the USA any more hard times. He supposed he could see why they'd outlawed polygamy, but suppressing public worship along with all other public meetings had always struck him as far too heavy-handed. Even after Utah joined the Union, public worship by groups larger than ten remained illegal; since the Second Mexican War, the Supreme Court hadn't been much inclined to interfere with claims of military necessity. And so the Mormon Temple in Salt Lake City remained empty to this day. No wonder the Mormons didn't love the U.S. government.

Custer coughed rheumily. Still glowering at his adjutant, he asked, "Are the damned Mormons in bed with the Rebs or the Canucks or both at once?"

"That's-not immediately clear from the reports I have here, sir," Dowling answered, studying his boss with an emotion he wasn't used to feeling: respect. The sole piece of the military art with which Custer was familiar was the headlong smash, but his red-veined nose had a genuine gift for intrigue. "There are some foreign agitators in the state, but no details as to who they are."

"Could be either one," Custer judged. "The Mormons don't like niggers much better than the Rebels do, but the Canadians could be seducing them with lies about freedom of religion." He laughed unpleasantly. "If they were up in Canada, they'd have gotten the same short shrift the Germans who settled that town called Berlin did, and you can bet your bottom dollar on it."

"That's probably true, sir," Dowling said, and for once simple agreement was just that, nothing more. He went on, "Shall I draft orders implementing this command for your signature, sir?"

"Yes, go ahead," Custer said with a melodramatic sigh. "They must have timed their damned uprising with a view to spoiling my offensive and robbing me of the breakthrough I surely would have earned. They'll pay, the scum."

Dowling sighed as he bent over the situation map to figure out how he'd pull thirty thousand men or so out of the line. That let him turn away from Custer, which in turn let him snigger wickedly. If the Confederates and Canadians didn't have worse threats than First Army to worry about, the war was going better than he'd figured.

A sharp explosion close by made Reggie Bartlett jump and look around for the nearest hole in the ground in which to dive. People in civilian clothes on the streets of Richmond gave him odd looks: why on earth would a soldier be frightened of a backfiring motorcar? The Duryea, plainly having engine trouble, backfired a couple of more times before finally beginning to run a little better.

Another soldier coming his way, though, nodded in complete understanding. "Just back from the front, are you?" he said.

Bartlett nodded. "Sure am." His laugh was self-deprecating. "You can take the soldier out of the trenches, but it's not so easy taking the trenches out of the soldier. This is my hometown, and I feel like I'm a stranger here."

"Know what you mean, pal," the other soldier said. "You get away for a while and it doesn't seem like the real world's real, if you know what I mean." He stuck out a hand. "Name's Alexander Gribbin-Alec, they call me." He had swarthy, handsome features and a neat little chin beard that made him look like a Frenchman.

Giving his own name, Reggie shook hands with him. He said, "Alec, shall we find someplace where the only pops we're likely to hear come from corks going out of bottles?"

"Friend, I like the way you think," Gribbin said enthusiastically. "If this is your town, you ought to know about places like that, eh?"

"You just want a drink, we can do that anywhere," Bartlett said.

"I've seen that," Gribbin agreed. "Thank your lucky stars, Reggie my friend, the Drys haven't gotten their way here in Virginia. Down in Mississippi, where I come from, it's a desert, nothin' else but."

"That's hard. That's cruel hard," Bartlett said, and his newfound companion nodded, his mournful expression showing just how hard it was. Bartlett went on, "What we could do, though, if you want the chance of something livelier, is to go to the saloon over at Ford's Hotel, right across the street from Capitol Square. It's only a couple blocks from here. Never know who's liable to show up therecongressmen, foreigners, admirals, who can say? — but they don't turn common soldiers away."

"They'd better not," Gribbin said indignantly. "I'm a white man, by Jesus, and I'm as good as any other white man God ever made."

"Not only that," Reggie Bartlett said, "but I've got money in my pocket- some, anyhow- and it spends as good as any other money the mint ever made."

Alec Gribbin grinned widely. "I'm the same way, and so is my money. Let's go."

Ford's Hotel, on the corner of Broad and Eleventh Streets, was a four-story building of white marble, with a fancy colonnaded entrance. The Negro doorman, who wore a uniform with more gold buttons and ribbons and medals than a French field marshal could have displayed, tipped his hat in salute as the two Confederate soldiers in their plain butternut walked past him.

"Hell of a place," Gribbin said with a low whistle, gazing around at the rococo splendour of the lobby. He winked and lowered his voice: "Wouldn't it make the bulliest damn sporting house in the whole wide world?"

"Matter of fact, it would," Bartlett said, "but I wouldn't have the money to go into a sporting house tricked out this fancy." He walked down the hall. His boots sank into the thick pile of the Turkish carpets underfoot. That wasn't so bad; the rugs didn't try to pull the boots off his feet, the way the trench mud had in the Roanoke River valley.

The saloon was a saloon: long bar, brass rail, mirror behind it so the bottles of whiskey and gin and rum looked to be twice as many as they really were, free-lunch counter with a painting of a nude above it. But the place catered to a prosperous crowd. Not only was the free lunch more appetizing than the usual run of sardines and sausage and limp cheese, but the nude, a voluptuous redhead, was a lot more appetizing than the common saloon daub.

"Makes me wish I was an artist," Gribbin said, eyeing her with genuine respect. "Get to see girls like that, and in the altogether-I tell you for a fact, Reggie, it just beats the stuffing out of freezing your feet in a trench in Pennsylvania. That country's so cold in the wintertime, the Yanks are welcome to it, far as I can see."

They strode off to the bar, squeezing in alongside of a couple of portly, middle-aged men in expensive suits. "Beer," Bartlett said. Gribbin ordered a whiskey. Reggie put a quarter on the bar. It disappeared. No change came back.

"Not your five-cents-a-shot place," Gribbin observed. Then he knocked back the whiskey. His eyes got big. "I see why, too. That's the straight goods there. Those cheap joints, they put in red peppers and stuff, make you think you're getting better'n raw rotgut. You know, real whiskey's good." He watched Bartlett drink half his schooner of beer, then said, "Come on, finish that so as I can buy you another one. We can hit the free lunch, too. We drink enough, they won't care how much we dent the profits with what we eat."

Bartlett drained the schooner. "Ahh," he said. His new friend slapped down a quarter. The barkeep, a Negro in a boiled shirt, fixed refills.

The two portly fellows were talking about pension plans for soldiers after the war was over: congressmen, or else lobbyists. Important people, yes, but Bartlett wasn't much interested in pension law. He wished he had more money now, sure, but he wasn't going to worry about fifty years down the line, especially not when his life expectancy once he got back to the front was more likely to be measured in weeks than in years.

Gribbin returned with salami and radishes on rye bread, a couple of devilled eggs, fried oysters, pickles, and pretzels. Reggie went and got some food for himself. The spread the Ford Hotel set out was another reason to come here, and the congressmen or lobbyists or whatever they were didn't have too much pride to keep them from raiding it, either.

A tough-looking fellow in a foreign naval uniform came up and stood at the bar next to Bartlett. He ordered scotch, which, with his accent, gave a pretty clear notion of his nationality. Nodding affably to Bartlett, he said, "Confusion to the Yankees, what?" and lifted his glass.

"I'll drink to that." Reggie proceeded to prove it.

The Englishman made his drink disappear so fast, he might have done it by magic or inhalation. He got another, then raised his glass again and proceeded to elaborate on his earlier toast: "To the Empire and the Confederacy, and to keeping the United States in their place."

"And out of ours," Bartlett added, which made Alec Gribbin laugh and the naval officer smile wide enough to show a pair of front teeth a rabbit would have been proud to claim. He drank his second shot of scotch as fast as he had the first. Emboldened by his friendly manner, Reggie asked, "How's it going, out on the ocean?"

Before replying, the Royal Navy man ordered a third scotch. Then he said, "Damned if I know how it will all turn out. Damned if anyone knows how it will all turn out. Honours about even thus far in the Atlantic. Argentina 's coming in on our side, I'd say, outweighs Chile 's joining the Americans and Germans, though none of the South American navies is important enough to swing the balance in any decisive way." Then, seeming to contradict himself, he went on, "I do wish the Empire of Brazil would come to a decision of one sort or the other."

"They damn well better come in on our side when they come," Reggie said angrily, to which Alec Gribbin gave an emphatic assent. Bartlett went on, "Hell, they held on to their slaves longer than we did."

He had thought that a convincing argument. He kept on thinking it a convincing argument. The Royal Navy man called for yet another drink and gulped it with the same alacrity he'd shown with the ones before. "Allies," he muttered, but it didn't sound like a toast. Mostly to himself he went on, "The South and the czars. God have mercy on a free country."

"And what the devil is that supposed to mean?" Alexander Gribbin demanded. He sounded a lot hotter with whiskey in him than he had without. "You saying we aren't free? Is that what you're saying? Go up to the USA and see how you like it there. The Confederacy is the freest country in the world, and that's a fact."

"Is it?" The Englishman had taken on whiskey, too. He pointed to the bartender. "Would you agree with that statement, sir? The statement that this great nation is the freest country in the world, I mean."

The bartender looked from the English officer to the two Confederate privates and back again. He didn't say anything, though his eyes were wide in his dark face. "Oh, hell, what are you asking him for, anyway?" Bartlett said with a dismissive wave of his hand. "He's just a nigger. He doesn't know anything."

"Something more than one man in three of your populace falls into that category," the Royal Navy man said. "In spite of that, you still call yourself the freest country in the world?"

"Of course we do," Reggie said. "We are."

He and the Englishman stared at each other in mutual incomprehension. "Enjoy it, then," the fellow said at last. He called for one last drink, drained it, and left after adding a tip for the bartender.

Bartlett shook his head. "Can't figure out what's chewin' on him. I'd say lice, but he's never seen the inside of a trench, not the likes of him."

"Don't worry about it, soldier," one of the prominent men in dark suits said. "There's a certain kind of Englishman who thinks that if you're not English, you're sort of halfway to being a nigger yourself."

"Is that a fact? Well, to hell with him, then," Gribbin said, and started after the naval officer. "Anybody who thinks I'm halfway to a nigger, he's halfway to the hospital."

Reggie grabbed him by the arm. "Ease off, Alec," he said urgently. "You beat on an ally, you get yourself in more trouble than you can shake a stick at."

"That, in essence, is correct," the man in the suit said. "It doesn't matter whether we love the limeys and they love us. What matters is that, no matter what else we do, we don't do anything to make them like us less than they like the USA. Should that misfortune ever strike us, boys, you can buy a coffin, on account of we are dead and buried."

"I don't want to buy me a coffin," Reggie said. "All I want is another schooner." He raised his voice to call to the Negro tending bar: "Boy, another beer!"

"Yes, sir," the bartender said, and brought him one.

After he paid for it, he turned to Gribbin and said, "You know what's nice about niggers? You don't have to waste time bein' polite with 'em."

"I'll drink to that," Alec said, and did.

The bartender picked up a rag and polished the gleaming surface of the bar, over and over again. He did not look up at the two soldiers.

Sam Carsten slept in the middle bunk on the Dakota, which made him feel like the meat in a sandwich. You had a guy on top of you and a guy underneath, to say nothing of a whole bunk room full of guys all around. Your skinny mattress creaked and groaned on the iron frame, as did those of your two bunkmates. Everybody snored. Everybody farted. Nobody washed his feet often enough.

And, half the time or more, you didn't even notice, not from lights-out to the klaxon that yanked you from your bunk as if it physically grabbed you and threw you down on the deck. If you weren't dead beat when you lay down, you'd figured out how to screw around so well, it looked as if you were working to some chief petty officers who'd long since seen every kind of screwing around known to man.

This particular morning, Sam really resented the klaxon. In his dream, Maggie Stevenson had just started doing something highly immoral and even more highly enjoyable. If she'd kept on for another few seconds His feet hit the iron deck before his eyes came open all the way. When they did, they saw not voluptuous Maggie but skinny, hairy, snaggle-toothed Vic Crosetti, who had the top bunk. "You ain't no beautiful blonde," Carsten said accusingly.

"Yeah, and if I was, I wouldn't want nothin' to do with the likes of you," Crosetti said, scrambling into his trousers.

Sam got dressed, too, and staggered down the hall to the galley for break fast. After oatmeal, bacon, stewed prunes, and several mugs of scalding, snarling coffee, he decided he was going to live. He went up on deck for roll call and sick call.

The sky was brilliantly blue, the sea even bluer. The sun blazed down. He could feel his fair skin starting to sizzle, the same way the bacon had on the griddles down below. No help for it, he thought ruefully. He'd smeared every ointment under the tropic sun on his hide, and that tropic sun had defeated them all. He thought longingly of San Francisco, of mist, of fog, of damp. He'd been happy there; that was the country he was made for.

"Romantic," he muttered under his breath as he started chipping paint, stopping rust before it got started. "The South Pacific is supposed to be romantic. What the hell's so romantic about looking like an Easter ham all the goddamn time?"

Chip, chip, chip. Chip, chip, chip. The Dakota plowed through light chop, several hundred miles south and west of Honolulu. The only way to find out what the limeys and the Japs were up to- if they were up to anything- was to go out on patrol and look around.

With the Dakota steamed the Nebraska and the Vermont, as well as a pair of cruiser squadrons and a whole flotilla of speedy destroyers. The fleet could handle any probe the English and the Japanese tried, and could damage a full-scale assault against the Sandwich Islands, meanwhile warning Honolulu of impending danger. "We caught the limeys napping," Carsten said, chipping away so industriously, no one could give him a hard time about it. "They won't give us the same treatment."

As if to underscore his words, a high-pitched buzzing, as if from a gnat made suddenly bigger than any eagle, rose from the bow of the Dakota. Sam stopped what he was doing and looked that way. The buzz rose in volume, then steadied. It was followed by an enormous hiss that might have come from an outsized snake alarmed at the outsized gnat. A rattling and clattering unlike any found in nature accompanied the hiss.

The compressed-air catapult threw the aeroplane off the deck of the Dakota. Inside a space of fifty feet, it had accelerated the flying machine up past forty miles an hour, plenty fast enough for the aeroplane to keep on flying and not fall into the Pacific.

Carsten stood for a moment, watching the aeroplane gain altitude. He shook his head in bemusement. It was such a flimsy thing, wood and canvas and wire, a mere nothing when measured against the armour plate and great guns of a battleship. But if it spotted the enemy where the bulge of the earth still hid them from the Dakota, it made a formidable tool of war in its own right.

Up at the bow, the catapult crew were taking their toy apart and stowing it so it wouldn't be in the way if the guns of the Dakota had to go into action. That didn't take long. They had an interesting job up there, and people seemed to fuss more about aeroplanes with every passing month.

"People can fuss all they want," Sam said. "Let's see an aeroplane sink a ship. Then I'll sit up and take notice. In the meantime, guns are plenty good enough for me."

He worked away for a while. Then horns blared and voices started shouting through megaphones. Sam sprinted toward the forward starboard sponson, one running sailor among hundreds. " Battle stations!" officers and senior ratings shouted, over and over again. "Battle stations!"

When he was working out in the open, Carsten hadn't too much minded the warm, muggy air. He would have enjoyed it, had the sun not pounded down on him. Down below in the sponson, the sun wasn't baking him. In that hot, cramped place, though, he felt as if he were being steamed like a pot of beans in the galley.

"This the real thing?" he asked Hiram Kidde.

The gunner's mate shrugged. "Damned if I know," he answered. "Could be, though. That new wireless they've put on board the aeroplanes, it lets 'em pass on the news before they come back to us."

"Yeah," Carsten said. "Wish we would have had a set like that last year, when we were steaming for the Sandwich Islands. Would have come in mighty handy, spying out the harbour and everything."

Kidde nodded. "Sure would. But the new aeroplanes got bigger engines, so they can carry more'n the ones we brought with us last year, and the new wireless sets are lighter than the ones they had then, too."

"Things keep changing all the damn time." Carsten could not have said for sure whether that was praise or complaint. "Hell, one of these days, 'Cap'n,' maybe even battleships'll be obsolete."

"Not any time soon." Kidde set an affectionate hand on the breech of the five-inch gun whose master he was. But then he looked thoughtful. "Or maybe you're right. Who the devil can say for sure? You're just a pup; the way it looks to you, the Navy hasn't changed a whole hell of a lot since you've been in. Me, though, I joined in 1892. An armored cruiser nowadays'd run rings around what they called battleships back then, and blow 'em to hell and gone without breaking a sweat. You look back on things, they ain't the same as they used to be. Nobody ever heard of aeroplanes when I joined up, that's for damn sure. So who really does know what things'll look like twenty, thirty years from now?"

"I was thinking about aeroplanes when we launched ours," Carsten said.

"Probably thinking when you should have been working," Kidde said with a laugh-he'd been in the Navy a long time, all right.

"Who, me?" Sam answered, drolly innocent. Kidde laughed again. Carsten went on, "I was thinking how good they were for spotting, but that they couldn't really do anything to a ship. What you're saying, though, makes me wonder. If their engines keep getting bigger, maybe they'll be able to haul big bombs or even torpedoes one of these days."

"Yeah, maybe." Kidde frowned. "I wouldn't like to be on the receiving end of something like that, I tell you. Torpedoes from submersibles, they pack more punch than a twelve-inch shell, even if they don't have the range. But you can outrun a submersible. You can't outrun an aeroplane."

"You can shoot an aeroplane down, though, a lot easier than you can get at a submersible when it's under the water," said Luke Hoskins, sticking an oar into the conversation.

Before either Hiram Kidde or Sam could answer the other shell-heaver, the all-clear sounded. Carsten let out a sigh of relief. "Nothing but a drill," he said.

"Got to treat it like the real thing, though," Kidde replied. "You never can tell when it's gonna be."

Despite the all-clear, the gun crew stayed at their station till the starboard gunnery officer poked his head into the sponson and dismissed them. Carsten went back to the upper deck at about a quarter of the speed at which he'd run to his gun. When you'd just wondered whether you were about to go into battle, fighting rust didn't seem so important any more.

A couple of hours after the all-clear was given, the aeroplane splashed down into the water not far from the Dakota. Before long, the battleship's crane hauled it out of the Pacific, only a few feet away from where Sam was working. He waved to the pilot as the fellow came level with the upper deck of the ship.

The pilot waved back, a big grin on his face. "Always good to come home," he called. "Gets lonesome out there when all you can see is ocean."

"I believe it." As far as Carsten was concerned, you had to be crazy to go up there in one of those contraptions in the first place. If your engine quit when you were a hundred miles from anywhere, what did you do? Oh, maybe you could send a wireless message for help, and maybe they'd find you if you did, but did you want to count on that? Not so far as Sam could see, you didn't. The ocean was a hell of a big place; five years' sailing on it had taught him that. An aeroplane bobbing in the chop wasn't even a flyspeck on its immensity.

Not long after the aeroplane was hauled out of the ocean, one of the cruisers with the fleet, the Avenger, sent up a kite balloon. As always, the hydrogen-filled canvas bag put Sam in mind of an outsized frankfurter that had escaped its roll and floated up into the sky. From his distance, he couldn't see the cable that moored the balloon to its mother ship. He had a hard time making out the wicker basket that held the observer below the balloon and the wind cups that stabilized the gasbag as an ordinary kite's tail did for it.

Fleet orders were to have either an aeroplane or a kite balloon aloft as nearly continuously as possible. Balloons, of course, couldn't fly away from the U.S. ships the way aeroplanes could, but, floating four thousand feet above the fleet, could see a lot farther than lookouts on even the tallest observation masts.

The fellow up there had a telephone link to the Avenger. If he spotted any thing, he'd pass on the news and they'd haul him down as fast as they could. A kite balloon would stay up fine at cruising speed. You couldn't keep it up, though, if you needed to go flat out, the way you did when you had a battle to fight.

Carsten was glad to watch the sausage floating up there. It felt like a life insurance policy to him. If the Royal Navy or the Japanese spotted the Americans before the U.S. fleet saw them, that meant trouble, big trouble. You wanted to be in position to do what you intended to do, and do it first. What had happened at Pearl Harbor would have taught that to anyone foolish enough to doubt it.

Sam waved to the balloonist, as he had to the aeroplane pilot. Unlike the pilot, the balloonist didn't see him. That was all right. The balloonist had more important things to look for than one friendly sailor.

"And you know what?" Carsten muttered to himself. "I hope to God he doesn't see any of them."

George Enos peered out over the rail of the Mercy at the broad Atlantic all around. The Mercy flew not only the Confederate flag but also that of the Red Cross. It also had the Red Cross prominently displayed on white squares to port and starboard. Any submarine that got a good look at it would, with luck, sheer off.

With luck. Those were the key words. With luck, the Swamp Fox never would have spotted the Ripple in the first place, and Enos' ordeal in Confederate prison camps wouldn't have started. He hoped his luck was better now than it had been then.

There, in the east-not a star, but a plume of smoke. He turned to Fred Butcher and said, "That's the Spanish ship-I hope."

"Yeah, I hope so, too," the Ripple's mate answered. "If it's not a Spanish ship, then it belongs to… somebody else." In these waters, somebody else might be the USA or Germany or England or France or the Confederate States. Maybe whoever it was would let the Mercy go on its way anyhow- ships from other nations performed similar duties, and wanted to keep reciprocal good treatment-but maybe it wouldn't, too.

"They were saying, before we set out, that ships from Argentina don't go into the open waters of the North Atlantic any more," Enos said. "They scurry across to Dakar in Africa where the ocean's narrowest, and then hug the coast the rest of the way up to England."

" England would starve without that Argentine grain and beef," Butcher said. "I wish they would starve, but we can't get at those ships, not way the hell out there we can't."

Charlie White came over and stood with his crewmates. George leaned across Fred Butcher and slapped him on the shoulder. "Bet that smoke looks even better to you than it does to me," he said.

The Negro nodded. "I don't care if that's the neutral ship to take us home to the USA or a cruiser that's going to sink us," he said. "Either way, it's better off than

being a colored fellow down in the CSA."

He was a lot skinnier than he had been when they were captured. Somehow, his rations had never come out quite right-and the Confederates had worked him harder than any white detainee. All that was supposed to be against the rules, which didn't keep it from happening.

In a musing voice, White went on, "Isn't a whole lot of fun being a Negro in the USA, either. But now I know the difference between bad and worse, I tell you that for a fact."

"I believe it," Enos said. He peered across the ocean again. Now he could see a ship out there, not just smoke. It looked slow and boxy, not like a steam-powered shark. "That's a freighter-and I think that means it's the Spanish ship."

Closer and closer came the ship to the Mercy. Not only did it fly a huge Spanish flag, it also had Spain 's red-and-gold flag painted on its flanks, the same way the Mercy bore the Red Cross. It looked gaudy, but that was better than looking like a juicy target.

An officer in the dark gray of the Confederate Navy shouted, "Detainees, line up by the boats for exchange!"

Along with the other crewmen from the Ripple and several dozen more U.S. sailors captured by Confederate submersibles, commerce raiders, and warships, George Enos hurried to take his place by a lifeboat. The officer, who had a list on a clipboard, went down the line of men, checking off names. He had to ask George who he was, but needed to put no such question to Charlie White, who stood behind Enos. "All right, nigger," he said, drawing a thick, black line through White's name, "we're rid of you. Got rid of your great-granddaddy a while ago, and now we're rid of you. What do you think of that?"

"Sir," Charlie White said (even angry, he was polite), "since you ask, sir, I think that when my grandfather-that's who it was-ran away from Georgia, he knew what he was doing."

The Confederate officer stared at him. George Enos bit his lip. Half of him wanted to cheer Charlie; the other half feared the Negro's outspokenness would queer the exchange for everyone. The officer took a deep breath, as if to shout an order. But then, reluctantly, he shook his head. "If we weren't getting our own back for you, nigger, you'd pay plenty for that," he said, and wrote something next to the name through which he'd just lined. "And you'd better get down on your black knees and pray we don't ever catch you again, you understand me?"

"Oh, yes, sir," White answered. "I understand that real well." The officer gave him one last glare before continuing down the line.

"Good for you, Charlie," George whispered when the Rebel was out of earshot.

"Sometimes your mouth is smarter than your brains, that's all," the cook said.

At the officer's command, the detainees boarded the boats-all except for poor Lucas Phelps, who was buried down in North Carolina and would never see Boston again. God damn the Rebels, George thought, even as the sailors of the Mercy lowered them to the waters of the Atlantic.

Swinging down, ropes creaking as they ran through the pulley, Enos felt as if he were on a Ferris wheel. "One thing," he said as he and his fellow sailors started rowing toward the Spanish ship: "we all know how to handle a boat." A couple of men laughed; most just kept on rowing. A couple of Confederates sat, stolid and silent, at the stern: they would row back to the Mercy.

The Spanish ship-her name was Padre Junipero Serra — loomed up like a gaudily painted steel cliff. Her sailors had hung nets over the side, up which the detainees could scramble. A Spanish officer in a uniform fancy enough to have come out of a comic opera took the names of the sailors as they clambered up on deck and checked them off on a list he held on a clipboard exactly like the one his Confederate counterpart had used.

When everyone was accounted for, the Spaniard blew a whistle. A line of thin men in shabby clothes came up out of the hold and walked to the Junipero Serra's lifeboats. They look just like us, George thought, and then shook his head-why should that surprise him? Only the sailors' drawls-an accent he heartily hoped never to hear again-said they came from the CSA, not the USA.

Their names got checked off as meticulously as those of Enos and his comrades had aboard the Mercy. Once the Spanish officer satisfied himself that the count was full, complete, and accurate, the Confederate sailors boarded the boats and were lowered to the sea. A couple of Spaniards sat in each boat, as a couple of Confederates had sat in the boat Enos had helped row here.

No doubt the Rebels on the Mercy scrutinized their returning detainees as closely as they had the men they were releasing. Some little while went by before they ran up signal flags: ALL PROPER, THANK YOU. Black smoke poured from the Mercy's funnels. Picking up speed, she made a long, slow turn and started back toward her home port.

"We are going to take you to Nueva Iorque," the Spanish officer said, in English that would have been very good if Enos hadn't needed a couple of seconds to realize he meant New York. That hesitation made him miss a few words: "… have a pilot to take us through the minefields around the city. The minefields of the USA, I mean to say. If we meet a Confederate mine, it is as God wills." He made the sign of the cross. Several U.S. sailors, among them Patrick O'Donnell, the captain of the Ripple, imitated the gesture.

"I bet there's mines outside of Boston harbour, too, to keep the Rebs and the limeys from getting too close," Fred Butcher said. "World hasn't stood still while we were stuck in that camp."

George hadn't thought much about that, past getting back to Sylvia and his children. Now he said, "Bet some poor damned fishermen got blown to hell and gone, too, when they hit a mine that wasn't supposed to be where it was."

Everybody who heard him nodded somberly. That was the way things worked. Fishermen always ended up with the shitty end of the stick.

A Spanish sailor, working with a few words of English and a lot of dumb show, took the exchanged detainees below decks to their cabins. Enos' would have been small and cramped with two men in it, and it held four. He didn't much care. Except for sleeping, he didn't plan on spending much time there.

If Charlie White had turned out chow anything like what the Junipero Sena's cooks served up, the Ripple's crew would have lynched him and hung his body on T Wharf as a warning to others. Enos didn't care about that, either. He didn't think he'd starve to death before they got to New York.

The cigar a Spaniard gave him turned out to be nasty, too. He smoked it anyway, and went up on deck to look around. The Atlantic — what a surprise! — looked the same from the Junipero Serra as it had from the Mercy. In the west, the sun was going down toward the ocean. Most ships on most oceans these days showed no lights at night: people who noticed them were too likely to be enemies. But the Junipero Serra lit herself up like a Christmas tree. She wanted everyone on both sides of the war to know exactly what she was. The more obvious she made it, the less likely she'd become a target.

Enos looked around again. He changed his mind. The Atlantic did seem different after all. "I'm going home," he said.

Irving Morrell stared at the list Lieutenant Craddock had just handed him. "You know, Bill," he said mildly, "I don't have time for this." That made a pretty fair understatement. He'd been promoted to major after winkling the Rebs in south-eastern Kentucky out of their tough hilltop position, and was now heading up the battalion where he'd commanded a company till a couple of weeks before.

"Sir, I compiled this list on orders direct from the War Department." Craddock could have spoken no more reverently of the Book of Genesis.

"I understand that," Morrell said, trying for patience. "I handed on the orders myself, if you'll remember. But don't you think getting ready for our next move against the Rebs is more important than a witch hunt?"

Craddock looked stubborn, sticking out his chin. It was firm as granite, and about as hard. The same, unfortunately, held for the rest of his cranium.

"Sir, since you asked my opinion, I think rooting out disloyal elements has a very high priority. If our next move against the enemy should fail, it might be on account of"-he lowered his voice to a dramatic whisper-"subversion."

"Oh, for Christ's sake!" Morrell exploded. "All right, you hunted through the pay records. We have in this battalion"-he glanced down at the list Craddock had given him-"four, count them, four Mormons. Has any one of them ever given the slightest sign of disloyalty?"

"No, sir," Craddock said. "But you never can tell, not with these people you can't. They looked loyal to the USA, too, till this Deseret rebellion kicked up. They might be laying low."

"Lying," Morrell corrected absently.

"Yes, sir, they might be lying, too," Craddock agreed with earnest ignorance. Morrell heaved a silent sigh. The lieutenant said, "But the orders require that they be identified and interrogated. As you see, sir, I've identified them."

He was trained in military subordination. That meant he didn't yell, Now you've got to interrogate them. But he couldn't have shouted it any louder than he didn't say it. And he did have the orders, if not common sense, on his side.

Morrell sighed again, this time loud and long. "All right, Bill. Bring the Mormons to me and I'll have a talk with them." He didn't think a Kentucky forest the ideal spot for this sort of procedure, but this was where he happened to be.

"Yes, sir!" Now Craddock sounded happier. Things were going as they were supposed to on paper, which warmed the cockles of his heart. "I'll go get them. One at a time, of course, so they can't overpower the two of us, escape through the woods, and warn the Rebs of our plans."

Beyond arguing by then, Morrell said, "However you want to do it." Craddock hurried away, intent on his mission. If he'd used that much ingenuity figuring out the trouble real enemies could cause, he would have been a better soldier for it.

He soon returned with a young, towheaded private who looked confused and worried. Morrell would have looked the same way if he'd suddenly been hauled up before his commanding officer. The soldier came to stiff attention. "Dinwiddie, Brigham," he said, rattling off his pay number.

"At ease, Dinwiddie," Morrell said. "You're not in trouble." Lieutenant Craddock's face set in stern, disapproving lines. Morrell ignored him. Dinwiddie was from the company he'd commanded. He'd always thought of the youngster as too good to be true. Dinwiddie didn't drink, he didn't smoke, he didn't gamble, he wasn't out to lay every woman he set eyes on, and he obeyed every order promptly, cheerfully, and bravely. What little Morrell knew about Mormonism made him think it was a pretty silly religion, but it had to have something going for it if it turned out people like Dinwiddie. Picking his words with care, Morrell asked, "What do you think of what's going on in Utah these days, son?"

He'd never seen Dinwiddie's bright-blue eyes anything but open and candid. He did now. Shutters might have slammed down on the private's face. He spoke like a machine: "Sir, I don't know much about it."

Lieutenant Craddock stirred. Morrell glared him into continued silence and tried again: "Have you heard from your family? Are they all right?"

"I got one letter not long ago," Dinwiddie answered. "It was censored pretty bad, but they're well, yes, sir."

"Glad to hear it," Morrell said, on the whole sincerely. "With things the way they are, how do you feel about being a soldier in the United States Army?"

That hooded look stayed on Dinwiddie's face. "Sir, it doesn't have anything to do with me right now, does it? Provo 's a long way from here."

"So it is." Morrell cocked his head to one side and studied the young Mormon. "Rebel lines, though, they're only a few hundred yards off." He waved southwest. As if on cue, a rifle shot rang out, silencing the spring peepers for a moment.

Dinwiddie looked horrified. If he was an actor, he belonged on the stage. "Sir, what the Rebs do to Latter-Day Saints in the CSA- You hear stories about what the Russians do to Jews. It's like that, sir. They don't want any of us, and they don't make any bones about it."

Mof fell wondered what things were going to be like for Mormons in the USA after the Army finished crushing the Deseret revolt. They hadn't been easy before; they'd get harder now. It had been more suppression than persecution. What it was going to be… Well, if Brigham Dinwiddie hadn't thought of that for himself, no point doing the job for him. "All right, Dinwiddie-dismissed," Morrell said. "Go on back to your unit."

The Mormon saluted and left. Lieutenant Craddock said, "Sir, forgive me, but I didn't think that was a very thorough interrogation."

"Neither did I," Morrell said. "The way I see it is, if I rake these people over the coals when they haven't done anything, I'll give them a reason to be disloyal even if they didn't have one before. Now go fetch me Corporal"-he checked the list-"Corporal Thomas."

Corporal Orson Gregory Thomas-who made a point of asking to be called Gregory-echoed Brigham Dinwiddie's comments almost word for word. Lieutenant Craddock found that suspicious. Morrell found it natural- put two men of the same beliefs in the same awkward situation and you could expect to get the same kind of answers out of them.

Homer Benson, another private, again gave almost the same set of responses. Lieutenant Craddock's granite jaw stuck out like the Rock of Gibraltar as he listened, his face even more disapproving than it had been at the start of the interrogations. He didn't say anything when Morrell dismissed Benson back to his unit, but his stiff posture and even stiffer manner spoke volumes.

Dick Francis, still another private, was the last man on the list Craddock had so laboriously compiled. He looked enough like Dinwiddie to have been his first cousin, and shared his diffident manner. But when Morrell asked him what he thought about the Mormon uprising in Utah, he said, "I hope they kick the Army out of there, sir. That's our land. All the United States ever did was give us grief."

Morrell pointed to the green-gray uniform Francis had on. "What are you doing wearing that, then?"

"Sir, I was rendering unto Caesar," the private answered. "When the Prophet and the Elders said that, since we were part of the United States, we should take part in this war, I obeyed: it was a teaching inspired by God. But now that they see things differently, I won't lie and say I'm sorry. I think Deseret should be free, so we can worship as we please."

"Want a whole houseful of wives, do you?" Lieutenant Craddock said, a nasty leer on his face.

"That will be enough, Lieutenant," Morrell said sharply.

But the damage was done. "You see what I mean, sir?" Francis said. "Why should I love a government that looks at us like that? The way we get treated, we're the niggers of the USA."

From what Morrell had heard, the Mormons didn't treat Negroes as if they were their brothers. That, though, was neither here nor there. Morrell rubbed his chin. "What the devil am I supposed to do with you, Francis?" he asked. He hadn't expected this problem, assuming all the Mormons in the battalion would stay loyal. Craddock looked vindicated.

Dick Francis shrugged. "Why are you asking me, sir? You're the United States Army officer." While sounding perfectly respectful, he somehow man aged to turn Morrell's title into one of reproach.

Morrell thought hard about doing nothing whatever to him. When the Rebs started shooting his way, he'd have to shoot back if he wanted to go on living. But Morrell couldn't take the chance, not with somebody who'd openly admitted he was hoping for the ruination of the USA.

"I'm going to send you back to divisional headquarters," he said. "I don't want any man on the front line whose first loyalty isn't to his country and to the men on either side of him."

He didn't know what Division HQ did with people like Francis. The Mormon soldier did; he'd had more incentive to learn such things. "Detention camp for me, then," he said, sounding not a bit put out. "I'll pray for you, sir. For a gentile, you're a good man."

Not knowing what to do with such faint praise, Morrell turned to Craddock. "Take him back to Division," he said. "Tell them he doesn't feel in good conscience he can go on being a soldier." He tried not to think about what lay in store for Francis. He hadn't made a point of learning about detention camps, either, but they bore an evil reputation.

"Yes, sir," Craddock said enthusiastically. He turned to Francis. "Let's go, you."

Watching them tramp away from the front, Morrell shook his head. War would have been a much simpler, easier business with politics out of the mix.