American Front

XII

Emily Pinkard looked at the alarm clock, which, as she did every morning, she'd carried out from the bedroom to the kitchen. "Oh, goodness, I'm late," she said, and gulped down her coffee.

Jefferson Pinkard was still plowing his way through bacon and eggs. He got up, though, when his wife set her cup in the tin sink, and grabbed her. "Give me a kiss before you go," he said. When she did, he tightened his arms around her. Her lips and tongue were warm and sweet and promising. "Mm," he said, still holding her. "I don't think I want you to leave."

She twisted away from him. "I got to, Jeff," she said. "You can just walk on over to the foundry, but I got to catch the trolley if I'm gonna get where I'm going. They dock you every minute you're not there, too. I'll see you tonight, honey." Her eyes told what she meant by that. It was everything he could have hoped for and then some.

Reluctantly, he nodded, no matter how much he wanted to take her back to the bedroom now. By the time they got home tonight, they'd both be worn to nubs. "Miserable war," he growled, and sat back down to finish his breakfast.

Emily nodded from the front hall. "Sure enough is." She pointed to the stove. "I got supper goin' in there. Don't forget to soak your dishes 'fore you leave. Makes 'em a lot easier-and quicker-to wash." She blew him another kiss, then hurried out the door, closing it after herself.

Jeff did soak his breakfast dishes. The quicker Emily got them clean, the more time she'd have for other things. He'd been doing more chores around the house than he'd expected when she started working, just to keep her from being too tired to feel like making love. Life got crazy sometimes, no two ways about it.

He grabbed his dinner pail and headed out the door himself. Walking to work alone still felt unnatural, but Bedford Cunningham was toting a gun these days, not a sledgehammer or a crowbar or a long-handled slag rake. The Cunningham house looked sad and empty. Fanny was gone, too, on her way to work. Pinkard wondered if she and Emily were riding the same trolley car.

He had his own job to worry about, though, and trudged off to Sloss Foundry. You had to take care of your business first, and worry about the rest later. What he did didn't take a wagonload of brains, but his life had got a lot more complicated, these months since the shooting started.

He'd got used to greeting Vespasian and Agrippa when he came down onto the casting floor every morning. It wasn't the same as talking with the white men who'd been there before, but it wasn't so bad. Both of them were old enough to have been born before manumission, and they both understood their place in the scheme of things. You could work with a nigger like that, Pinkard thought. When the time came for them to go back to stoking the furnaces or whatever they'd done before the war, they'd do it, and keep whatever complaint they had to themselves.

Pericles, now… "Mornin', Pericles," Pinkard said. He talked to the young black man now, the same way he did with Agrippa and Vespasian. He'd decided life was too short to get yourself all in an uproar over little things, and working the day through without gabbing with the guy alongside reminded him of nothing so much as a fellow who'd had a fight with his wife trying to show her who was boss by clamming up. It didn't work at home, and it didn't work here, either.

"Mornin', Mistuh Pinkard," Pericles answered. There wasn't anything wrong with the way he acted, not so you could put your finger on it there wasn't, but his manner was somehow different from those of the older Negroes who worked the night shift. Pericles acted as deferential to Jefferson Pinkard as they did, but Maybe that was it, Pinkard thought as a huge crucible swung by over his head and positioned itself to pour a fresh load of molten steel into the big cast-iron mold that waited to receive it. Then he stopped thinking about such things for a while. You had to watch the pouring like a hawk. If anything went wrong, you needed to be ready to jump and run-either that or you got yourself burned to a crisp, dead or wishing you were. Sid Williamson had lingered a week before he finally died, poor bastard.

That was especially true since the new crucible operator still wasn't so smooth as Herb, who'd gone into the Army when the war was new and looked like being over in a hurry. But Herb wasn't coming back. Somewhere up in Kentucky, near a town nobody two towns over had ever heard of till the war started, he'd stopped a bullet or a shell. His widow worked with Emily, too, and wore sombre black all the time.

This pour, though, went well. A great cloud of steam hissed out of the mold, steam heavy with the bloody smell of hot iron. Jeff and Pericles worked side by side, going right up to the pour and making sure it didn't escape the mold before it started solidifying. "Warm this mornin'," Pericles said with a grin. The heat of the foundry floor dried the sweat on his face as fast as it tried to spring forth.

Pinkard knew the same thing happened with him, but he turned fiercely red from working up by the pour. Pericles seemed unaffected, as if he were made of cold-forged iron himself. He handled his tools with nonchalant confidence; a little more experience and he'd be as good a steel man as Bedford Cunningham ever was.

"You are gettin' to know what you're doin'," Pinkard said, acknowledging that.

"Thank you, Mistuh Pinkard," Pericles answered. That was fine. So was his self-effacing tone of voice. But then he added, "Ain't so hard, is it? Once you get the hang of it, I mean."

Neither Agrippa nor Vespasian would have said anything like that. Even if they thought it, they wouldn't have said it. Every once in a while, though, Pericles came out with something like that, something that made the way he acted around Jefferson Pinkard seem just that: an act. You couldn't call him for being uppity; he never showed disrespect, nor anything close to it. But even a Negro with self-confidence was something new on Jeff's mental horizon.

After a while, Pericles said, "Mistuh Pinkard, you knew Herb, didn't you?"

"Sure did," Pinkard said. "That's funny: I was thinking about him not so long ago, when the kid up there was pouring. What about him?"

"Did you hear tell they gonna throw his widow and her children out o' their company house, on account o' he don' work here no mo' an' he ain't never comin' back? Agrippa, he tol' me that this mornin'. His wife, she go over there with some catfish fo' to give her las' night, an' she all cryin' an wailin' to beat the band. Don' hardly seem right, the bosses do that."

"It sure as hell don't," Pinkard agreed. He thought about it for a little while. "That grates so much, I don't know that I want to swallow it."

Pericles held up his right hand. The bottom of the pale patch on his palm showed below the edge of his leather glove. "I ain't makin' it up, swear to God I ain't," he said, now sounding completely serious.

"Emily will know," Jeff said. "I'll ask her when she gets home tonight. If it is so, it's a pretty low-down piece of dealing, that's all I've got to say."

" 'Fore I started workin' here, what I was thinkin' was that everybody white in this whole country had it easy, just on account o' he was white," Pericles said. "More I look, though, more I see it ain't like that. The white folks in the suits an' the collars an' the tall hats, they do things to the white factory hands, ain't so much different than happens to niggers every day."

"That there is a natural-born fact," Pinkard said, slamming one gloved fist into the palm of the other hand to emphasize his words. "Damn all we can do about it, though. They got the money, they got the factories, like you say. All we got is our hands, an' there's always plenty more hands around."

"You dead right, Mistuh Pinkard," Pericles said. "Same way in the fields-planter don't like what a nigger does, he gets hisself another nigger. Don' matter what the first one did. Don' matter he did anything. They don' like him, he gone. Didn't think it was like that fo' white folks."

"Shouldn't ought to be." Having his position in life compared to a Negro's made Pinkard sit up and take notice. "They shouldn't be able to throw us out like an asswipe with shit on it. Wasn't for the work we did, what would they have? Nothin'. Not one thing, I tell you."

"Hard row everybody hoes these days," Pericles said. "Shouldn't be harder'n it's got to. The men who work in the factory, they should have some kind o' say in how the factory runs. Got more right to it than the fat cats with the bulgin' money bags, you ask me." He paused, as if wondering whether he'd said too much.

But Jefferson Pinkard clapped his hands together. "Damn straight!" he said. "Things'd run a hell of a lot smoother if somebody who knew what he was doin'-if somebody who'd done the work himself-had charge of things, not a big wheel with a diamond ring on his pinky."

I'm talking politics with a nigger, he realized. And if that didn't beat all, when Pericles couldn't even vote. But the young black man had touched Pinkard's own dissatisfaction with the way things were, and had brought it out into the open so he could see all of it for himself.

After that, Pericles clammed up. Now it was Jeff who wanted to talk more, and the Negro who went about his job without wasted words. Pinkard started to get angry, but his temper cooled down after a bit. Pericles had walked dangerous ground, saying even as much as he'd said. But Pinkard was feeling damn near as trampled on as the black man. That was just what the bosses were doing, he thought: trying to turn white men into niggers.

When the closing whistle wailed, Pinkard almost ran home, he was so anxious to find out from Emily whether Pericles had the straight goods about Herb's widow. He got back to the yellow cottage before his wife did; she was probably still on the trolley. He busied himself by setting the table for the two of them, as he'd got into the habit of doing when he made it home first. Bedford Cunningham, had he known about that, would have given him a hard time over it. But Bed was worried about machine-gun bullets these days, not china and cheap iron flatware.

The door opened. In came Emily. "You'll never guess what they've done to Daisy Wallace," she said.

"Herb's widow? Thrown her out on the street like a dog, on account of her husband got hisself shot savin' the Sloss family's greedy behinds," Jeff answered.

Emily stared at him. "For heaven's sake, how did you know that?" He hadn't usually heard the gossip she brought home.

"I got ways," he answered, a little smugly. "Sure does stink, don't it?"

"Sure does," she agreed, hanging up her hat and taking off the apron that protected her skirt. "Makes me want to spit, is what it does." She walked past Jeff into the kitchen, slowly shifting gears from work to home. When she saw the table ready for supper, she paused and said, "Oh, thank you, honey," in a voice suggesting his thoughtfulness had surprised her. That made him feel better about helping than he would have if she'd taken it for granted.

Even over the stew of salt pork and hominy and green beans, both of them kept on fuming about the way the crucible man's widow had been treated. Borrowing Pericles' idea, Jeff said, "We'd all be better off, I reckon, if the workers had the say in how the factories got run."

He'd expected Emily to agree to that. Instead, she paused with a bit of meat halfway to her mouth. "That sounds like somethin' a Red would say," she told him, her voice serious, maybe even a little frightened. "They been warnin' us about Reds almost all the time lately, maybe 'cause makin' shells is such an important business. Never can tell who's a bomb-flingin' revolutionary in disguise, they say."

"You ain't talkin' about me," Jefferson Pinkard declared. "Don't want no revolution-nothin' like it. Just want what's right and what's fair. Lord knows we ain't been gettin' enough of that."

"Well, that's so," Emily said, nodding. She ate the bite that had hung suspended. Neither one of them said much more about politics afterwards, though.

Jeff worked the pump while Emily did the dishes. Afterwards, he slid his arm around her waist. He didn't need to do much talking about that to let her know what he had in mind. By the way she smiled at him, she was thinking the same thing. They went into the bedroom. He blew out the lamp. In the darkness, the iron frame of the bed creaked, slow at first, building to a rhythm almost frantic.

Afterward, Emily, spent and sweaty, fell asleep almost at once. Jeff stayed awake a little longer, his mind not on the feel of his wife's arms around him but on Red revolutionaries. As far as he could see, these days people feared Reds and anarchists the same way they'd feared slave uprisings back before manumission.

Pericles, a Red? The idea was ridiculous. He was just a poor damned nigger sick of getting stuck with the short straw every draw. In his shoes, Jefferson figured he would have felt the same way. Hell, he did feel that way, thanks to the dislocations the war was bringing. He'd thought having a white skin made him immune to such worry, but he'd turned out to be wrong.

"Maybe we need another revolution, after all," he muttered. He was glad Emily hadn't heard that; it would have made her fret. But saying it seemed to ease his mind. He rolled over, snuggled down into his pillow, and fell asleep.

A voice with a Southern twang: "Ma'am?" An arm encased in a butternut sleeve, holding up an empty coffee cup. "Fill me up again, if you please."

"Of course, sir," Nellie Semphroch said, taking the cup from the Rebel lieutenant colonel. "You were drinking the Dutch East Indian, weren't you?"

"That's right," the officer answered. "Sure is fine you have so many different kinds to choose from."

"We've been lucky," Nellie said. She carried the cup to the sink, then took a clean one and filled it with the spicy brew the Confederate evidently enjoyed. She brought it back to him. "Here you are, sir."

He thanked her, but absently. He and the other Rebs at the table were busy rehashing an engagement up along the Susquehanna that had happened a couple of weeks before. "Damnyankees would have crossed for sure," an artillery captain said, "if one of my sergeants hadn't fought his gun with niggers toting shells and loading: his own crew got knocked out in the bombardment."

"Heard tell about that," the lieutenant colonel said. "Damned-pardon me, ma'am," he added with a glance toward Nellie, "I say, damned if I know whether they ought to pin medals on those niggers or take 'em out somewhere quiet, have 'em kneel down in front of a hole, and then shoot 'em, cover 'em up, and try to make out the whole thing never happened." All the Rebs around the table nodded. The lieutenant colonel nodded to the artillery captain. "You're closest to the matter, Jeb. What do you think about it?"

"Me?" The captain-Jeb-was boyishly handsome, with a little tuft of beard under his lower lip that should have looked absurd but somehow seemed dashing instead. "I think I'd like another cup of our hostess' excellent coffee, too." He held out his cup to Nellie. As she hurried off to refill it, he lowered his voice-but not quite enough to keep her from overhearing-and said, "I wouldn't mind a go with our hostess' excellent daughter, either."

Hoarse male laughter rose. Nellie stiffened. If Edna judged by looks-if Edna judged by anything-she probably wouldn't have minded a go with this Jeb, either. Nellie thought hard about dosing his coffee with a potent purgative. In the end, she didn't. All men were like that. Some, at least, were honest about it.

When she got back to the table, the artillery captain was saying, "… niggers don't seem to be putting on airs on account of it. They're back to driving and fetching, same as they were before. You ask me, it's worth knowing niggers can fight if their necks are on the block. Way we're losing men, we may need black bodies one of these days."

One of the other officers-a major-got out a silvered flask and poured a hefty shot of something into his coffee. "That's not the most cheerful notion I've ever heard," he said, taking a big swig of the augmented brew. "Ahh! Don't like the idea of niggers' getting their hands on guns. Don't like 'em getting their hands on military discipline, either."

"I don't like it myself," the lieutenant colonel said. "We've got ourselves a white man's country. That's how it ought to be, and that's how it ought to stay."

"Well, gentlemen, you won't hear me disagreeing there," Jeb said, "but if it turns into a matter of winning the war with niggers or losing it without 'em, what do we do then?"

An uncomfortable silence followed that question. The major with the flask poured another shot into his cup. What he had in there was probably more hooch than coffee. That didn't keep him from gulping it down as if it were water. "Ahh!" he said again, and then, "What we do is, we pray to God to keep that cup from passing to us."

"Amen," Jeb said, and the rest of the officers nodded. But the artillery captain went on, "War's already gone on longer than we thought it would. The middle of April now, and no end in sight. Christ! We ought to be ready in case it goes on longer yet."

"Not up to you and me to decide that kind of thing, thank heaven," the lieutenant colonel said, which brought another round of nods. "The president and the secretary of war, they'll do whatever they choose to do, and we'll make the best of it. That's what the Army's for."

The major started telling a long, complicated story about a mule that had tried to kick an aeroplane to death. It would have been funnier if he hadn't had to go back and repeat and correct himself over and over again. That's what the demon rum does to you, Nellie thought; in her mind, all liquor got lumped together as rum. It calcifies the brain, and serves you right.

She had other tables on which to wait. The coffeehouse was jumping these days, business better than it had been since before the war, maybe better than it had ever been. Being able to get her hands on all the coffee she needed didn't hurt there. A lot of places in Washington had gone belly-up, just as she had been at the point of doing not so long before.

She'd wondered if anyone would ask how she managed to keep getting coffee beans in the middle of a tightly rationed town. But that hadn't happened. Even Edna hadn't been unduly curious. She probably thinks I'm sleeping with someone, Nellie thought sadly. It was, she feared, what her daughter would have done in her place. Or maybe Edna only noticed the beans were there and truly did think no more about it.

The next morning, Nellie and Edna were sweeping up the floor by the light of a couple of kerosene lamps-neither gas nor electricity had yet come back to this part of Washington. Outside, black night brightened toward dawn; a coffeehouse's customers started showing up early. As Nellie emptied the dustpan into a wastebasket, a light went on across the street.

A small pot of coffee was already on the coal stove, to give her and Edna an eye-opener before customers started coming in. Nellie poured a cup from the pot and set it in a saucer. "I see Mr. Jacobs is up and about, too," she said. "I'll take this over to him. It will be better than anything he's likely to make for himself."

"All right, Ma." Edna's laugh was not altogether kindly. "Beyond me what you see in a little wrinkled old shoemaker, though."

"Mr. Jacobs is a very nice man," Nellie said primly. Her daughter laughed again. Nellie took a haughty tone: "Your mind may be in the gutter, but that doesn't mean mine is."

"Now tell me another one, Ma," Edna said; her mind was in the gutter, sure enough. To keep from heating up one of their all too frequent fights, Nellie let the door she closed behind her serve in place of an angry response.

No sooner had she crossed the street than a long line of trucks rolled past, their acetylene lamps turning morning twilight to noon. She looked back at the growling monsters. Almost all of the drivers were Negroes. She had to tap twice to get Mr. Jacobs to hear her.

He peered through his magnifying glasses. His wizened face wrinkled in a new way when he smiled. "Widow Semphroch! Come in," he said. "And you have brought me coffee, too. Oh, this is wonderful. I was afraid you would be a Confederate soldier with boots that had to be repaired at once because he was going back to the front. I am glad to be wrong." He stood aside and bowed like an Old World gentleman as he welcomed her.

She set the coffee on his work counter, by the last. Closing the door after her, he came over, picked up the cup, and sipped. At his appreciative hum, Nellie said, "Thank you so much for helping to arrange to get the beans delivered to my shop in the first place."

"It is my pleasure," he said, and then, sipping again, "It is my pleasure. And it is so very kind of you to bring a cup to me every morning." He cocked his head to one side. "You hear all sorts of interesting news in a coffeehouse. What have you heard lately?"

Nellie told him what she'd heard lately, chief among the stories being the one about the Negroes who had served as artillerymen after the men for whom they laboured went down, wounded or killed. She recounted the tale in as much detail as she could. "The commander of the battery was a captain named Jeb, though I don't know his last name," she finished.

"I do not know this, either, but I think I may have friends who will." Mr. Jacobs nodded thoughtfully. "Yes, thank you for bringing this to my notice, Widow Semphroch. I think my friends may be most interested to hear it. I am very glad we were able to help you in your difficulty." He finished the coffee and set cup back in saucer. "Here you are. Your business grows busy before mine, and I would not keep you from it."

"Edna will take care of things till I get back," Nellie said. But she picked up the cup and saucer and hurried back to the coffeehouse even so. Leaving Edna alone in there with all those lecherous Confederates was asking for trouble.

And sure enough, when she walked inside, there sat the handsome artillery captain from the night before, with Edna pouring him a cup of coffee and looking, to Nellie's jaundiced eye, as if she was about to plop herself down in his lap. But the scene was outwardly decorous, so Nellie, in spite of what she was thinking, kept her mouth shut.

Edna didn't. Subscribing to the notion that the best defense was a good offence, she said, "Hello, Ma. Took you long enough to get back from the shoemaker's shop. What were you doing over there, anyhow?" Her tone was light; Jeb the Confederate gunner would have noticed nothing amiss. But Nellie knew she meant something like, You went over there and tore one off with Mr. Jacobs, didn't you? And since you did, what are you doing meddling in my life?

But Nellie had gone across the street for patriotic reasons, not vile ones. She said, "We were just talking-he's a good friend. Why don't you go back and scrub out the sinks?" Why don't you wash out your mouth with soap while you're doing it, too?

Edna went, with a walk that, Nellie thought, would have got her arrested for soliciting had she done it on the street-and had the Confederates bothered arresting streetwalkers. They mostly didn't; their basic attitude seemed to be that all U.S. women were whores, so what point to worrying about a few in particular?

Jeb followed Edna with his eyes till she disappeared. Then he seemed to remember the coffee growing cold in front of him. He gulped it down, set a coin on the table, and rose, setting his red-corded artilleryman's hat on his head. Touching the brim, he nodded to Nellie and said, "Obliged, ma'am."

Nellie nodded back. Why not? she thought. She was obliged to him, too, for running off at the mouth so freely the night before. And he hadn't got his hands on Edna: the moonstruck way he looked at her proved that. She knew all about the ways men looked at women. If he'd had her, his stare would have been more possessive, more knowing. He was still wondering what she was like, and all the more twitchingly lustful for that.

Keep right on wondering, you stinking Reb, Nellie thought.

Plowing the land had an ancient, timeless rhythm to it. Walking behind horses, guiding the plow, watching the rich, dark earth of Manitoba furrow up on either side of the blade made Arthur McGregor think of his grandfather, who had done the same thing back in Ontario; of his several-times-greatgrandfather, who had done his best to scratch a living from the stony soil of Scotland; and, sometimes, of an ancestor far more distant than that, an ancestor who didn't speak English or Scots Gaelic, either, an ancestor who wore barely tanned skins and walked behind an ox scratching a furrow in the ground with a stick sharpened in the fire.

Like his ancestors, going back to that ancient, half-imaginary one, McGregor eyed the sky, worrying about the weather. If he hadn't, his son would have taken care of that for him. Here came Alexander, with a pitcher of cold water from the well. "Think it's safe, getting the seed in the ground so soon, Pa?" Alexander asked, as he already had more than once. "A late frost and we're in a lot of trouble."

Alexander was a good boy, Arthur McGregor thought, but he was getting to the age where he thought everything his father did was wrong, for no better reason than that it was the old man doing it. "This year, son, we're in a lot of trouble no matter what we do, I think," McGregor answered. "But I want to plow and plant as early as I can, before the Americans find a reason to come round and tell me I can't."

"They can't do that!" Alexander exclaimed. "We'd starve."

"And if the lot of us did, do you think they'd shed a single tear?" Arthur McGregor shook his head. "Not likely."

There, for once, his son had a hard time disagreeing with him. But Alexander found a different question to ask: "Even if we do get our crop in, will they let us keep enough of it to live on?"

His father sighed. "I don't know. But if we have no crop, I'm certain sure we'll not be able to live on that."

Arthur McGregor looked north. Like all his ancestors save a couple of lucky ones, he worried about war hardly less than weather. The front lay a good way off now-but who could guess where it would be when harvest time rolled around? Would the Yanks have overrun Winnipeg by then? Or would the Canadians and British have rallied and pushed the thieves in green-gray back south over the border where they belonged? If you read the newspapers, you figured Canada was in a state of collapse. But if you believed all the lies the Americans made the papers tell, Winnipeg had already fallen twice, Montreal three times, and Toronto once-maybe for luck.

Alexander persisted: "How do you feel about raising a crop when the Americans will end up eating most of it while they're fighting Canada?"

McGregor sighed. "How do I feel about that? Like the mother bird after the cuckoo laid the egg in her nest, son. But what am I supposed to do, I ask you that? What the Americans don't take, we'll eat ourselves."

His son kicked at the dirt. When you were young, you were sure every thing had answers either black or white. Alexander was getting his nose rubbed in the reality of gray, and didn't much care for it. Trying to avoid it, he said, "Why not just plant enough for us, and leave the rest of the fields"- he waved at the broad, flat acreage-"to lie fallow for the year?"

"I could do that, I suppose, if I didn't need to make some cash to buy the things we can't raise on the farm," Arthur McGregor said. He eyed his son with genuine respect; the boy-no, the young man-could have come up with many worse notions. But- "If I try that, too, the other thing likely to happen to me is farming at the point of an American bayonet."

"If every farmer in Manitoba did the same thing, they couldn't put bayonets to all of our backs." Alexander's face flamed with excitement. In the course of a couple of sentences, he'd given himself a bold and patriotic movement to join. "A farmers' strike, that's what it would be!"

The only drawback to the movement was that it didn't exist. Arthur McGregor shook his head: no, it had more. "For one thing, son, with all the Yanks in Manitoba these days, they likely do have enough men to put a bayonet at every farm. And for another, the way they shoot hostages, they wouldn't wait more than a minute or two before they started shooting farmers. And once they shot a few, the rest would-"

"Rise up and throw the Yanks off our soil!" Alexander broke in.

"Not that easy," McGregor said with a sigh. "I wish it was, but it's not. They shoot a few, most of the rest will do just what they say and nothing else but. Other thing is, there's too many Americans up here for us to throw 'em out even if we did rise up. Oh, we could make nuisances of ourselves, that I don't deny, but no more. The Yanks are bastards, sure enough, but we've seen too much to have the notion that they are cowards and they are fools. They'd beat us down, and we'd spend our blood for nothing."

Alexander still looked mutinous. It was in the nature of youths his age to look mutinous: that is, to have their looks accurately reflect their thoughts. To quell the mutiny, McGregor didn't shout or bluster. Instead, he pointed to the roadway. Small in the distance but growing steadily larger as they approached, here came a battalion of U.S. soldiers marching north toward the front. In column of fours, they made a green-gray snake slithering across the land. The snake was having heavy going, the road still being muddy from melted winter snows.

After the troops came supply wagons topped with white canvas, lineal descendants of the Conestogas in which so many Americans-and not a few Canadians, too-had gone west to settle. Hooves and wagon wheels had even more trouble advancing through mud than did marching boots.

About half a mile behind that battalion came another, barely visible in the distance as yet but all too soon to approach in turn. "Do you see, son?" McGregor asked, his voice halfway between gentle and rough. "There are just too many of them, and us spread too thin on the ground to be much use fighting 'em. Either we find some other way to drive 'em mad, or we do as much of what they tell us as we have to and trust to God it'll all come out right in the end."

"That's a bitter pill, Father," Alexander said.

"I never told you it wasn't," McGregor agreed. "And trusting in God is hard, because He does what He wants, not what we want. I don't know what else to say, though. We get along, and we wait, and we see what happens."

He couldn't have given his son much harder advice, and he knew it. The advice was hard for him, too. He wanted nothing so much as to strike back at the Americans. Before the war began, he'd been starting to think about buying a gasoline-powered tractor. Now he counted himself lucky to have a team of horses. He flicked the reins; he'd been standing idle long enough. The horses snorted and strode forward.

As the sun sank toward the flat horizon that evening, he and the team headed back toward the farmhouse and the barn. He'd curry the animals and get them fed and watered, and then go in to see what Maude had done up for supper.

The horses stopped, snorting, their ears twitching. McGregor stopped, too. For a moment, he failed to sense anything out of the ordinary. Then he too caught the low rumble out of the north. Far-off thunder, he would have thought the year before. He knew better now, an education he would willingly have done without. That was artillery. He hadn't heard it for a while. The front was a long way off these days. A bombardment had to be big to be noticed across so many miles.

"And whose guns are they?" he wondered out loud. Spring was here, summer coming: fighting weather. He had the feeling he'd be hearing guns a lot in days to come. He hoped they'd get louder, not softer: that would mean the front was drawing closer, his countrymen and whatever soldiers the mother country could spare pushing back the invaders.

He and his family spoke of little else over supper: rabbit stew. All they could do, though, was guess and hope. The artillery barrage went on through the night; it was still roaring away when McGregor visited the outhouse in the wee small hours.

And it was still roaring away when he took the horses out to the fields at sunrise. A train no doubt full of troops roared up the track toward the front; the road was full of marching men. By afternoon, ambulances and trains showing the Red Cross rolled south. Were their wounded the residue of advance or retreat? The hell of it was, Arthur McGregor had no way of knowing.

For Remembrance Day, Flora Hamburger and the other Socialists, not only from the Tenth Ward and the rest of the Lower East Side but from all over New York, came to Broadway to watch the parade. Coming as it did just nine days before May Day, their own great holiday, it was a rival focus for the energy and allegiance of the American working class.

As always, the parade route was packed to commemorate the day of mourning. Flags fluttered from poles on top of every building, every one of them flown upside down, symbolizing the distress of the United States when they had had to yield to the forces of the Confederacy, England, and France, and to recognize the Confederate States' acquisition of Chihuahua and Sonora.

Burly policemen cordoned the Socialist Party delegation away from the rest of the crowd. Brawls broke out every year after the Remembrance Day parade. Now, with the war on, who could say what might happen?

Flora peered across Broadway, to the three-story brick building that housed Slosson's Cafe and Billiards. Men looked out through the plate-glass window of the pool hall, and men and women both watched from the cloth-awninged windows of the upper floors. She wondered what sort of bosses squeezed profit from their labor.

Beside her, Herman Bruck said, "Far more of the people are with us than the minions of the ruling class"-he pointed to the policemen-"would ever admit. They'll let the veterans' groups, with their fat bellies and their minds full of blood and iron, they'll let them know what they think." He looked like a boss himself, in his broadcloth suit and stovepipe hat: a younger son, maybe, or one just taking over the business. But, whether Flora cared for him or not, she had to admit he was Socialist to the core.

"So many have lost husbands and brothers and sons," she said, nodding, "and for what? How are we better? What have we gained? How many more young men will have to die on the altar of capitalism and nationalism before the war ends?"

"All that is true," Maria Tresca put in, "but some will say, 'We have come this far, so how can we stop halfway?' This is the biggest stumbling block we have to overcoming the support of the masses for the war." Her sister Angelina nodded.

"It is a problem," Flora admitted. "I have run into it many times myself."

"It should not be a problem." Bruck sounded angry. "We should be able to show clearly why this war is immoral, unnatural, and serves only the interests of the ruling class."

A few feet away, a policeman with a red Irish face heard that. He turned to Bruck and, smiling nastily, made motions as if of counting money. Then, with theatrical scorn, he turned his broad, blue-clad back.

"Do you see?" Flora said triumphantly. "We voted to finance the war along with everyone else, and now no one lets us forget it. I said at the time that was a mistake."

"So you did," Herman Bruck muttered. He was in a poor position to do anything but mutter, as he had supported paying for the war. He still did, sometimes, but not when policemen mocked him for it. And so it was with some relief that he pointed down Broadway and said, "Here comes the parade."

Leading it, as had hardened into ritual over the past generation, came an enormous soldier carrying the Stars and Stripes, once more upside down. A Marine band at slow march followed him; they played "The Star-Spangled Banner" with the tempo of a dirge. As the flag-bearer and the band went by, men uncovered and held their hats over their hearts.

Flora recognized the white-bearded bandmaster. "That's Sousa!" she exclaimed with the respect one can give an effective foe. The musician's stirring songs had done more to fire narrow national patriotism and make the proletariat forget its international ties than the work of most jingo politicians.

Here and there in the crowd beyond the police lines, men left their hats on: odds-on candidates to be Socialists. Fights had started over such things in years past. Now, beyond a couple of low-voiced calls of "Shame!", no one did anything. Almost no one in the Socialist Party delegation uncovered. The Marine musicians did not turn their heads, but sidelong glances said they took mental note.

Behind the band rolled a limousine that carried-Flora stiffened as she saw who the man standing in the back of the car was-Theodore Roosevelt. The president only showed himself; he did not wave to the crowd. His suit was as black and somber as Herman Bruck's, and almost as well cut. A few Socialists shouted catcalls at him. He ignored them.

Then came the veterans. After the limousine marched a contingent of men older than John Philip Sousa, survivors of the War of Secession. Some still strode straight and slim despite their years. Others shambled along as best they could, helped along by a stick or a cane. Some had one sleeve flapping empty or pinned to the front of their jackets. Some had one trouser leg pinned up, and propelled themselves with crutches. At the rear, attendants pushed a few legless men along in wheelchairs.

The old soldiers' faces, almost to a man, bore a grim sadness the passage of half a century had not erased. Flora sympathized with them; the USA had surely been more progressive than the feudal-minded Rebels. But, however sure the historical dialectic was, it did not always move straight ahead. The memory of failure still stung the veterans of the War of Secession.

Behind them marched another group of veterans, these middle-aged, many of them plump and prosperous: men who had fought in the Second Mexican War. Where their predecessors seemed proud of what they had done even in defeat, these ex-soldiers, some of them, had almost a hangdog air, as if they felt they should have done better but didn't quite know how.

Then came Count von Bernstorff, the German ambassador, fantastically bemedaled and riding in a limousine flanked by a color guard of German soldiers carrying the black-white-red banners of the German Empire. Those drew both cheers and jeers, many of the jeers either in German or in Yiddish, close enough to German for the spike-helmeted soldiers in field-gray to understand.

" Germany taught the USA to ignore the needs of the proletariat!" Herman Bruck shouted, shaking his fist.

" Germany taught the USA to fool the proletariat into thinking its needs are met," Flora cried a moment later, which gave her the double satisfaction of telling the truth and correcting the self-righteous Bruck.

The mixture of applause and catcalls went on after the German ambassador and his escort passed. Behind him came a troop of men hardly younger than the Second Mexican War veterans: Soldiers' Circle members of the first class, men who had served their two years in the Army after conscription was passed in the wake of two lost wars.

Flora and Bruck and Maria and Angelina Tresca and all the Socialist representatives joined with their Party members in the crowd in shouting abuse at the marching men of the Soldiers' Circle, each successive troop from the conscription class a year later than its predecessor. Men who stayed in the Soldiers' Circle after they served their time were apt to be of a reactionary cast of mind: men who gladly served as strikebreakers, scabs, goons, men to whom even Teddy Roosevelt was a dangerous radical for worrying about the untrammeled power of the bosses.

As the Soldiers' Circle troops passed by, as the men became of the age where their contemporaries were fighting, other jeers rang out alongside those of the Socialists. Chief among them was the swelling cry, "Why aren't you in the Army?"

While the youngish men who had done their time as conscripts but had not yet been dragged into the war ignored the mockery and marched stolidly down Broadway, mockery was all they got. But then, not far from the Socialist delegation, one of the men of the conscription class of 1901 lost his temper. He turned his head and shouted at an abuser, "Why ain't I in the Army now? Fuck you and fuck your mother too, why ain't you?"

With a roar of rage, the fellow he'd cursed rushed at him, pulled out a knife, and plunged it into his side. The Soldiers' Circle man went down with a groan, blood bright on his white shirt. Four of his comrades threw the man with the knife to the ground, kicked the blade away, and methodically began stomping the stabber.

A few people in the crowd cheered, but others ran out to try to rescue the man who'd used the knife. More Soldiers' Circle men set on them.

Somebody-in the rapidly swelling chaos, Flora had no idea who, or on which side- fired a pistol. An instant later, several guns were popping away, as if the war had decided to pay New York a visit.

"Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!" shouted the Irish policeman who'd made money-counting motions at Herman Bruck. Along with his fellows, he dashed toward what had gone in the space of half a minute from patriotic parade to riot.

Flora Hamburger turned her back on it. To her fellow Socialists, she cried, "Stay here! Don't join it! Don't let the reactionaries exploit us in the newspapers!"

Angelina and Maria Tresca loudly added their voices to Flora's. Flora looked around for support from Herman Bruck. To her dismay, she saw him, along with several other hot-blooded Socialists, running straight toward the men from the Soldiers' Circle. They had their own rallying cry: "Direct action!" The Socialist call to arms had rung out in mines and factories and lumber camps and fields across the USA for a generation, but now…? Flora shook her head in dismay. The place and the timing could hardly have been worse.

Riot spread up the parade, toward the Marine marching band at the front. From that direction, Flora heard a couple of explosions louder and fiercer than pistol shots. "Bombs!" she exclaimed. "They're throwing bombs!"

She didn't know who they were, but she feared with sick horror the Socialists would get the blame. In the 1880s and 1890s, direct action had often meant more than words; the Party's past had blood in it.

Another bomb went off, this one frighteningly close. Injured men and women screamed. Above their cries rose a great voice bellowing, "Justice for Utah!"

Absurdly, relief flooded Flora: maybe the hard hand of the government would land on the Mormons, not on the Party. She was ashamed of herself a moment later. Do it to them, not to us was not the answer; the government, no matter how TR thundered about swinging a big club, had no right to oppress anyone.

Analyzing that in fullness, though, would have to wait. She grabbed Maria and Angelina. "We'd better get out of here," she said. The secretaries nodded vehemently.

It was easier said than done. A lot of the crowd was trying to flee the brawls and battles that roiled in the middle of Broadway, but almost as many people, women as well as men, were pressing forward, trying to get into the fray. Yet another pistol shot rang out, this one terribly close, terribly loud. Angelina Tresca shrieked. Blood, vividly, impossibly red, stained the white front of her shirtwaist. She stood staring in astonishment. When she opened her mouth to say something, only more blood came from it-not a word. Blood poured from her nose, too. She swayed, toppled, fell.

More pop-pop-pops went off, incongruously cheerful. Maria's shriek was louder than her sister's. She couldn't even run to Angelina; the crowd, panicked by gunfire, swept them apart. When Maria tried to go against it, she was swept off her own feet. Flora dragged her up before she could get too badly trampled, then dragged her away.

Clinging to each other, weeping, the two of them struggled to get off Broadway and onto Twenty-third Street so they could escape the riot. "Oof!" A portly man ran into Flora. He acted as if he were trying to fend her off, but his hands slid up her body till they closed on her breasts, the crowd and turmoil offering concealment for what he did. She'd had such unwelcome attentions before. Snatching a pin from the floral hat she wore, she stuck him with it. He howled and whirled away. She stuck him again as he fled, this time where he sat down. He howled again, almost seeming to levitate. The pin was long and sharp and had blood on a good part of its length. Savagely pleased at that, she stuck it back amidst the artificial greenery on her hat.

Maria Tresca didn't react, staring numbly. Maybe she was too numb to think too much about Angelina yet.

"It would be better if they knew not to do such things," Flora said, not wanting to think about Angelina, either, "but we have to educate them if they don't."

She wished her sister had stuck a hat pin in Yossel Reisen. But no, that wasn't fair. He hadn't taken anything from Sophie she hadn't wanted to give. It was only what he'd given her in return…

A man stepped on her foot. He didn't try to feel her up; he just went on his way as if she didn't exist. That she didn't mind so much; it could have happened at any time in the streets of New York City, the biggest, most indifferent city in the USA. In a way, in fact, it almost comforted her, showing the world wasn't devoid of normality even in the midst of riot.

Off Broadway, things were quieter. Flora and Maria walked quickly down Twenty-third Street, to put some distance between themselves and the insanity that had swallowed the Soldiers' Circle parade.

"Trouble will come from this," Flora said grimly, and then amended that: "More trouble, I mean." Back behind them, Angelina was almost surely dead.

Even as Maria nodded, tears streaming down her face, a burly policeman grabbed a Jewish-looking fellow in a shabby suit and demanded, "You wouldn't be a Socialist, would you now?" When the man nodded, the policeman hit him in the head with his billy club. Blood streaming down his face, the fellow turned to run. The policeman kicked him in the seat of the pants, shouting, "Lucky I don't shoot you, you black-hearted traitor!"

"Shame!" Flora cried, and Maria added her voice an instant later. Flora went on, "You have no business beating a man for what he believes, only for what he does. Haven't you heard of the Constitution of the United States?" Yes, thinking of politics was easier than thinking of death unleashed on the streets of New York.

The policeman stamped toward her and Maria, nightstick still upraised. To Flora's relief, at the last moment he discovered he didn't quite have the crust to beat two women. Voice strangled with rage, he said, "Get out o' here this minute, or I'll run the both of you in."

"On what charge?" Flora asked, her chin jutting in defiance.

"Streetwalking." The policeman stripped her and Maria with his eyes.

"We're not the ones who sell ourselves to get our daily bread," Flora retorted.

"Get out!" the policeman screamed. His face was crimson, furious. He spat on the sidewalk. "And that for the God-damned Constitution of the United States. There's a war on now, and the gloves are off. Get out!"

He would have hit them had they stayed an instant longer. Flora was willing to suffer a beating for the cause, but now Maria dragged her away. "We can't," the secretary said. "Enough blood spilled already. Please, Flora-not after Angelina."

Later, Flora decided the secretary was right; the Socialists already had martyrs aplenty today, Maria Tresca's sister among them. The policeman's hate-filled words kept ringing in her ears. The gloves are off. She shivered. If TR felt the same way-and he probably would-what was the government going to do now?

A Negro maid lifted her feather duster from the windowsill-not that she'd been working hard anyhow, but an excuse to stop was always welcome-in one of the forward-facing rooms at Marshlands and said to Scipio, "Here come de man from de Mercury wid a paper for we."

"Thank you very much, Griselda," he answered gravely, and heard her snicker by way of reply. He ignored her amused scorn; so long as he was on duty in the mansion, he was obliged to sound like an educated white man, not a Negro of the Congaree.

He checked for himself before going to the front hall to open the door; the rest of the staff was not above playing small jokes. But, sure enough, here came Virgil Hobson on a mule, carrying with him a copy of the Charleston Mercury. Anne Colleton got the Daily Courier, too, and the South Carolinian and Southern Guardian from Columbia. Marshlands was a good way out of the way for all of them, but you declined to render its mistress a service at your peril.

Virgil was just climbing down off the mule as Scipio opened the door for him. "Good afternoon, sir," he said. Hobson was a poor buckra who spent half his time drinking and the other half hung over, but he was white folks- and the white folks who didn't deserve respect raised the most hell if they didn't get it.

"Afternoon," Virgil said. He walked straight, but very gently, as if touching the ground hurt. That meant he was after a binge, not in the middle of one. He thrust the Mercury at Scipio. "Here y'are." Without waiting for a reply, he turned and walked back toward his long-eared mount.

"Thank you, sir," Scipio said to his back. He waited till the delivery man rode away before shutting the door. As he set the newspaper on the tray to take it to Anne Colleton, he glanced down at the front page.

Big black headlines shouted up at him: SOCIALISTS AND MORMONS RAM PAGE IN NEW YORK CITY! REDS AND FANATICS RIOT, FORCE YANKS TO DECLARE MARTIAL LAW! UNREST IN U.S. ARMY REPORTED.

He didn't know how the Mercury had got the story or how much truth was in it, but if it was even a quarter true, the USA was in a peck of trouble.

On reading past the headlines, the other thing he noted, less happily, was that the U.S. Army, despite the claims of unrest in its ranks, was going about the business of keeping a lid on New York City. The people they were putting a lid on might be Socialists, but they were white folks. If damnyankee soldiers would put down an uprising from white folks, what would Confederate troops do if- when- their Negro labourers rose up under the red flag?

He was afraid he knew the answer to that question. He'd tried telling it to the Reds among the field hands here. They kept laughing at him. He resolved to hang on to this newspaper and the others that came in over the next few days, to let Cassius and his fellow revolutionaries see what happened in the real world. How could you expect a band of Marxist fanatics to seize power in a country? They didn't seem to understand how big a place a country was.

Going on with that argument, fortunately, could wait. He carried the Charleston Mercury upstairs to Anne Colleton's office: of an afternoon, you could expect to find her there. She was on the telephone. He stood in the doorway, waiting to be noticed.

"No," she said crisply into the mouthpiece. "I told you to buy, not sell. You shall carry out my instructions as I give them, sir, or I will find another broker and you will find a lawsuit… What?… An oversight? I have no more tolerance for oversights than I have for deliberate errors. Whatever it was, this is your first, last, and only warning. Good day." She hung up, muttered something sulphurous under her breath, and then, anger expunged, smiled at Scipio. "I hope you have better news for me than that chucklehead did."

"I believe so, yes." Without another word, Scipio set the tray with the Mercury on the desk in front of Anne Colleton, turning it as he did so to make sure the headlines were right side up for her.

Her eyes widened. Her mouth twisted into something halfway between a smile and the expression a tiger wears on spotting a juicy sheep. Scipio was heartily glad that expression bore on the newspaper, not on him. The mistress of Marshlands rapidly read through the stories having to do with the troubles in the USA, pursuing them into the inner pages. When she finished, she looked up at Scipio and asked, "Did you take any notice of these?" She paused. "You must have. You told me the news was good."

"I did look at the headlines, yes, ma'am," Scipio answered. You didn't want to be in a position of having to lie to Anne Colleton. She was sharp as the edge of a straight razor, and even more dangerous.

Her finger stabbed down at one of those headlines. "That's why we'll win the war, Scipio. The United States are divided against themselves. They haven't the stomach for a fight to the finish. We have no Socialists here, by God!" That predatory expression grew even fiercer. "We have no Mormons here, either, but that doesn't keep us from using them against the USA. Our states are truly united, even if the Yankees have the name. And because of that, we'll dictate terms to them in the end, as we did two generations ago and then again in my parents' time."

"Yes, ma'am," Scipio repeated. Some of the sweat springing out on his face came from having to wear tailcoat, vest, and boiled shirt on a muggy spring day that threatened summer. Part, though, came from his own fear. Sharp as Anne Colleton was, she looked right at Negroes-at one person in three in the CSA- without even seeing them… or maybe seeing them only as labourers, not as people. An awful lot of white folks saw-or didn't see- blacks the same way. Anne Colleton was more clever than most of them, though. If she ever really looked instead of taking things for granted She looked… toward a clock on the wall. Her expression faded to one of discontent. "Probably too late for Cassius to bring in a couple of turkeys before nightfall. Go tell him to hunt tomorrow. I want to lay on a fancy supper then."

"Yes, ma'am." Scipio slid the tray out from under the Charleston Mercury and took it back to the table in the front hall where it rested. He was always delighted at escaping the mistress' attention-except when she sent him out to Cassius. Her eyes remained closed to the double game Scipio was playing. Whatever else you said about him, Cassius had his eyes wide, wide open.

He was sitting on the steps in front of his cottage, running a cleaning patch through the barrels of his shotgun, when Scipio came up. The hunter's weathered face cracked into a leathery grin. He jumped to his feet, limber as a man half his age. "Kip! What fo' you do me de favor o' yo' comp'ny?" Ignoring the irony, Scipio told him what Anne Colleton wanted. Cassius nodded vigorously. "I do that." He waved Scipio an invitation. "Come inside. You 'n' me, we talk."

Normally, Scipio dreaded that invitation, though he found it impossible to refuse. Today, though, he thought he would do more talking than usual. As soon as Cassius shut the door to give them privacy, he began, "You know what de Socialists do in New York City? They rise up, an' do Jesus! they make the USA — "

Cassius waved him to silence. "Kip, dat ol' news," he said scornfully. "Dat happen las' week. It over an' done with now, 'cep' fo' de 'pression. De 'pression, dat go on a long time. Always do." He sounded very cynical, very sure.

Scipio stared. "But de newspaper jus' say today-"

"White folks' paper." Cassius laced his voice with even more scorn than before. "Dey got to wait, dey got to decide what they want they good little boys an' girls to hear about. De buckra, you give bad news to they, they get res'less."

"How you know 'fo' de newspaper come?" Scipio asked.

"Somebody not so far, they got a wireless set," Cassius answered after a moment's hesitation. In lieu of staring, Scipio looked down at the weathered pine boards of the floor. That somebody-presumably a Negro-among the Red would-be revolutionaries had the knowledge to run a wireless set, that that somebody (and, unless Scipio was wrong, a lot of somebodies in the CSA) had acquired such knowledge under the nose of the Confederate authorities… put that together with the undoubted desperation of the rising that would come, and maybe, just maybe…

"Maybe, jus' maybe, come de revolution, we win," Scipio said softly.

"Do Jesus! Hell yes, we win," Cassius declared. "De dialectic say, when de whole of de proletariat rise up, de capitalists an' de bourgeoisie, they cain't no way put we down again."

Saying a thing didn't make it so. Scipio knew that. He'd even tried telling Cassius and Island and the other Reds as much. They didn't listen to him, any more than the preacher would have if he'd denied Jesus. If they had men on wireless sets-maybe, just maybe, they had reason not to listen.

Chester Martin ducked behind a stretch of brick wall that reached up to his belly button. It was a hard landing; more bricks lay all around what was left of the wall. Somewhere not far away were two whitewashed pieces of wood nailed together at right angles. Once upon a time, this had been a church on the outskirts of Big Lick, Virginia. Now it offered him a different kind of salvation.

A Confederate bullet smacked the other side of the bricks. Maybe it had been aimed at him, maybe fired at random. He had no way of knowing. What he did know was that the bricks were good and solid, and would keep rifle and machine-gun fire from him, as long as he stayed low. Anybody who hadn't learned to stay low by now was already dead or wounded.

Martin took advantage of the momentary respite to put a fresh, full clip on his Springfield. Never could tell when you'd have to try to kill somebody- or several somebodies-in a hurry. If one of the Rebs had more bullets in his rifle than you did in yours… "You'd be sorry," Martin muttered. "I don't want to be sorry. I want the other son of a bitch to be sorry."

Paul Andersen crawled up beside him. "Ain't this fun?" he said, also pausing to reload.

"Now that you mention it," Chester said, "no."

Andersen's grin was wry. "Let me ask it a different way. Ain't this fun, next to leave back in White Sulphur Springs?"

Martin considered that fine philosophical point. "Nobody's trying to kill you back there," he said at last. "Other than that, though, you got a point."

"Nobody's trying to kill you back there?" Andersen exclaimed. "You mean you didn't think they were trying to bore you to death?"

"Hmm," Martin said, and then, "Yeah, maybe they were. I mean, if you don't like lemonade and you don't like hot water that stinks like somebody cut the cheese in it, not a hell of a lot to do back there."

"I hear they got saloons-hell, I hear they got whorehouses-in leave towns on what used to be Confederate territory," Andersen said. "The Army has charge there, and the Army knows what soldiers want to do when they get away from the front for a while. But White Sulphur Springs, that's back in the USA, and it ain't the Army in charge. It's the damn preachers."

"No whiskey," Chester Martin agreed. "No women, except the Red Cross girls handing out the lemonade. A couple of them were pretty, but once I'm back there and cleaned up, I want to do more than look at a woman, you know what I'm saying?"

"You bet I do," Andersen answered. "Me, too. Hell, looking is harder, some ways, than not being around 'em at all."

"I think so, too," Martin said. "I-" He shut up then, and flattened him self out among the bricks, because the Rebs started throwing whizz-bangs into the neighborhood. The shells burst all around, throwing deadly fragments every which way.

The barrage-mostly those damned three-inchers that seemed to fire almost as fast as machine guns, but some bigger cannon, too-went on for about half an hour. Stretcher-bearers hauled groaning, thrashing U.S. soldiers back toward the doctors. Some men didn't need stretcher-bearers. If all that was left of you was your leg from the knee down, your foot still in your boot, doctors wouldn't do you any good.

As soon as the bombardment stopped, Martin and Andersen popped up like a couple of jack-in-the-boxes. Sure as hell, here came the Rebs, dashing forward through the ruins of Big Lick. They ran low and bent over, not wanting to expose themselves any more than they had to. Veteran troops, Martin thought; new fish had less sense.

He was a veteran, too. The more you let the other guys take advantage of a bombardment, the worse off you'd be. The time to smash them was as soon as they jumped out of their holes. If you could pot a couple then, the rest lost enthusiasm for the work they'd been assigned.

He squeezed the trigger. The Springfield slammed against his shoulder. A Reb pitched over on his face. Martin worked the bolt and fired again. Another Confederate soldier fell, this one grabbing at his arm. Martin seemed to have all the time in the world to swing his rifle toward a third figure clad in butternut, to squeeze the trigger, to watch the fellow topple.

Beside him, Paul Andersen was also banging away. Somewhere not far off, a machine gun started hammering. A lot of Rebels went down. But a lot of them kept coming, too. They pitched improvised grenades at the U.S. soldiers. Martin didn't like the idea of carrying those damn things around-if a bullet hit one, it would blow a hole in you they could throw a dog through. But he didn't like being on the receiving end of grenades, either. It was as if the infantry started having its own artillery.

Shouts of alarm from the left made him whip his head around. The Confederates were in among the U.S. trenches and foxholes, trying to drive the Americans back to White Sulphur Springs without benefit of leave.

Martin ran toward the battling, cursing men. In a fight like that, you used anything you had: rifle, bayonet, knife, the sawed-off spade you carried to dig yourself in. The question was brutally simple: would enough Rebs get past the U.S. rifle and machine-gun fire to overwhelm the defenders and make this wrecked stretch of suburb their own once more, or would the men who were in place and whatever reinforcements who could get forward blunt the attack and throw it back?

Butternut smeared with mud and grass stains didn't look much different from similarly dirty green-gray. Being sure of who was who was anything but easy. You didn't want to go after the wrong man by mistake, but you didn't want to hesitate and get yourself killed, either.

An unmistakable Rebel leaped out from behind a pile of rubble and swung one of those short-handled shovels at Chester Martin's head. He threw up his rifle just in time to fend off the blow. The force of it staggered him even so. The Confederate, intent on his work, drew back the shovel for another blow. Before he could deliver it, a bullet-from a U.S. soldier or a Rebel, Martin never knew-caught him in the shoulder. The spade spun from his hands. "Ahh, shit," he said loudly. "You got me now, Yank."

Martin dashed past him. If he'd stayed there an instant longer, he would have shot the wounded Rebel in the head. Accepting the surrender of a man who'd been doing his best to kill you till he got hurt himself felt fiercely unnatural. A lot of such attempted surrenders never got made. Machine gunners, in particular, had a way of dying heroically at their posts.

Yells from the rear told of fresh U.S. troops coming up. The Confederates still battling in among their foes weren't getting reinforcements; their barrage hadn't made the U.S. defenders say uncle. "Give up!" Martin shouted to the Rebs. "We got you outnumbered, and you ain't gonna make it back to your own lines. You want to keep breathin', throw down what you got."

For a few seconds, he thought that call would do no good. The Rebs were stubborn bastards; he'd seen them die in place before. But then a sergeant in butternut said, "Hell with it," and threw up his hands. His example was enough for his comrades, who dropped their rifles and whatever other lethal hardware they were holding.

The U.S. soldiers stripped their prisoners of ammunition, grenades, and knives, and of their pocket watches and cash, too. None of the Confederates said a word about that. Several of them had U.S. coins and bills in their pockets, which argued they'd stripped a prisoner or two themselves.

"Hammerschmitt, Peterson, take the Rebs back to where they can deal with 'em," Martin said. The rest of the U.S. soldiers looked enviously at the two men their sergeant had chosen: they'd get away from the front and the righting, if only for a little while.

"Hear tell the food in Yankee prisoner camps ain't too bad," the Confederate sergeant who'd been first to throw down his Tredegar said hopefully.

As Specs Peterson and Joe Hammerschmitt gestured with their bayoneted rifles to get the prisoners of war moving, Chester Martin answered, "Listen, Rebs, I'll give you one warning: whatever you do, don't let 'em ship you to White Sulphur Springs."

The sergeant nodded, grateful for the advice, then looked puzzled when the U.S. soldiers started laughing. "Come on, you lugs," Peterson said, sounding as fierce as any man with glasses could. Hands still high, the Confederates shuffled off into captivity.

"You're a regular devil, Sarge, you are," Paul Andersen said as the U.S. soldiers shared out the weapons and other loot they'd got from the Rebels. Four men all wanted a knife with a brass handle made as a knuckle-duster; they had to go down on their knees and roll dice to decide who got to keep it.

"Who, me?" Martin said. "Listen, how much difference is there really between a prisoner camp and where they sent us? You can't do what you want either place, now can you?"

"Hadn't looked at it like that," the corporal admitted after a little thought.

"And I'll tell you another thing," Martin said, warming to his theme: "we can joke however goddamn much we want, but they're both better than being at the front." This time, Paul Andersen nodded at once.