American Front

XVIII

Jefferson Pinkard shoveled a last forkful of ham and eggs into his mouth, then sprang to his feet. Emily, who'd already finished breakfast, was about to head out the door, and he didn't want to let her go without getting a kiss. Every time he took her in his arms, he felt like a brand new bridegroom. He knew how lucky he was, to have that feeling still after years of marriage.

All things considered, though, he'd had better kisses than the one he got this morning. "You all right, darlin'?" he asked his wife.

"I think so," she said. "Lately I'm just tired all the time. That's what it is, I reckon. They're workin' us hard. We got our quota kicked up again the other day — got to turn out more shells, make up for the ones the soldiers're shootin' at the damnyankees."

"Damnyankees," Pinkard muttered. The war had passed a year old now, no end in sight. "Who woulda thought they could fight like this here?" They stood in western Virginia, in Kentucky, in Sequoyah, in Texas, in Sonora. They were pushing Confederate forces out of Pennsylvania and Maryland, and giving the Canadians and British a hard time, too. "Ain't like it was in the last two wars."

Emily nodded, pecked him on the cheek, and hurried off to catch the trol ley. Her step didn't have the bounce to it he'd once taken for granted. She wasn't pink and perky, either, the way she had been; maybe working to fill the increased quota was what made her seem so wrung out, so sallow.

"God damn the war," Jeff said sincerely. He grabbed his dinner pail and headed for the Sloss works.

As they did every morning, Agrippa and Vespasian greeted him with polite respect. He accepted that as nothing less than his due. "Leonidas ain't got here yet," Vespasian told him.

"Why ain't I surprised?" Pinkard said scornfully. "You ever hear anything about Pericles?"

"No, suh," Vespasian said. "He still in the jailhouse. I dunno if they ever gonna let him out."

"Hope to Jesus they do," Jeff said. "That Leonidas, he don't have the brains God gave a possum. Hell, the two of you do better'n I do with him, on account of I got to carry all my own weight and about three quarters of his. I been yellin' for a replacement — an' I don't care if he's black or white, long as he ain't stupid-but no luck so far."

Vespasian and Agrippa looked at each other. Pinkard wondered if he'd offended them, calling Leonidas stupid. So much landed on Negroes in the Con federacy, they stuck together and defended their own whether their own deserved it or not. But, God damn it to hell, Leonidas was stupid. He would have been stupid if he were white. Hell, he would have been stupid if he were green.

Slowly, cautiously, Vespasian said, "Mistuh Pinkard, suh, this here would be a different place if mo' people cared about gettin' the job done an' less of 'em cared about who was doin' it." When Jeff didn't blow up at that remark, the black steelworker made another, even more wary, comment: "Not jus' a different place. A better place."

"Get your ass out of here. Go on, go home," Pinkard said. "You don't want those policemen throwin' you in the jug for sedition."

Vespasian took off, Agrippa right behind him. Pinkard looked after them with something as close to approval as he was likely to give two Negroes. They did their job, they didn't complain — much, they didn't try to rock the boat. What more could you want from people?

He looked around. Still no sign of Leonidas. He didn't miss him. A lot of ways, he was better off without him. Handling his shift by himself would leave him dog-tired when the closing whistle blew, but the world wouldn't end on account of that. Jeff knew what he was doing.

Leonidas came in about half an hour late. The floor foreman reamed him out about it as he started to work. When the fellow finally let him be, he shook his head and said, "Lord, I wish that man would shut hisself up. Got me a hangover, make my po' head ring like a bell."

Pinkard grunted. He'd done that — once in a great while. When your head already felt as if somebody were forging steel in there, going to a place where they really were forging steel wasn't high on the list of enjoyable things. Leonidas had been working here for only a couple of months, and this was a long way from the first time he'd strolled in a good deal the worse for wear. Stupid, Jeff thought again. Some people belonged in the cotton fields.

Leonidas got through the day without maiming either himself or Pinkard.

He managed partly by not doing much, but that didn't matter, since he never seemed to do much. Pinkard minded less than he would have with a more capable partner. The more Leonidas did, the more he was liable to foul up.

The quitting whistle made the young Negro jerk as if he'd sat on a nail. "Thank God, I can get out of here," he said, and proceeded to do just that, moving faster than he had out on the floor.

Pinkard followed more slowly. He was just as tired as he would have been had Leonidas stayed home with an ice bag or whatever his preferred hangover cure was. He hadn't had to do quite so much as he would have had Leonidas stayed home, but being careful for two was hard work.

When he got back to his house, he built up the fire in the stove, sliced a few potatoes, and set them to frying in lard in a black iron skillet likely made from metal worked at the Sloss foundry. They'd go nicely with the pork roast Emily had put in the oven over a low fire before she went off to work. It wasn't really cooking, he told himself, only a way to save time and have supper ready sooner.

Emily came in about twenty minutes after he did. "Smelled those potatoes outside, comin' up the walk," she said. "They always smell so good like that, give me some of my appetite back."

"You haven't hardly been eating enough to keep a bird alive," Pinkard said. He took the potatoes off the stove so they wouldn't burn while he was kissing his wife. He wondered if she was finally in a family way, only not far along enough to be sure. She was tired all the time, she hadn't been eating well, and he'd noticed at breakfast how sallow she was.

He took another look at her in the evening sunlight pouring through the kitchen window. She wasn't just sallow — her skin was downright yellow. "Honey, what the dickens is the matter with you?" he demanded, and heard the alarm clanging in his voice.

"What do you mean, what's the matter with me?" Emily said.

He held her hand up in a sunbeam. It looked all the more yellow against his own rough, red, scarred skin. "I mean you're only a couple steps this way from bein' the color of a baby chick, that's what."

"Oh, that," his wife answered. "I didn't even hardly notice. It happens to a lot of the girls who work around the smokeless powder like me. It does somethin' to your liver, blamed if I know what, but it makes you yellow that way. Like I say, some of the girls are almost lemon color."

"Does it get better?" Jeff demanded.

"Oh, yeah, it does," Emily said casually. "When somebody gets sick-not just yellow, I mean, but really sick-they move her to another section of the plant for a while, till she gets over it. We haven't had but a couple of people come down that bad."

"Oh." Pinkard was about to shout at her, to demand that she quit her job and come back home where she belonged. The words died unspoken. People got killed every year at the Sloss works, and had been getting killed there long before the war pushed everybody up into a higher gear. He remembered poor Sid Williamson. Emily and her comrades were making munitions for the CSA. The country depended on them, hardly less than it did on the courage and tenacity of the Confederate soldiers.

"It'll be all right, darlin'," Emily said. "Now why don't you go sit down? I'll finish doin' up the potatoes and bring you your supper."

Jeff went and sat down. His wife had the right way of looking at things, and he couldn't very well complain about it. He had to hope her supervisors or foremen or whatever they called them there were paying attention to what they were doing. From what she'd said, it sounded as if they were.

When she came in with a full plate for him, he asked anxiously, "This color you're getting, it will go away if you stop doin' what you're doin', right?"

She nodded. "I've seen it happen with some of the other girls, the ones they had to move away from the powder. But this here, what I've got, it ain't hardly nothin'. And besides"-she cocked her head at a saucy angle and stuck out her hip-"ain't you got a yen for a high-yellow gal?"

He'd just taken his first mouthful, and almost choked on it. Men told smoking-car and after-supper stories about Negro women with a lot of white blood in them. They were supposed to provide some of the fanciest stock in the fanciest sporting houses all over the CSA. Jeff didn't know anything about fancy sporting houses, not from experience. Some of the stories about high-yellow women were pretty fancy all by themselves, though.

He tried to sound severe: "The way you do talk." He couldn't do it; he started laughing. So did Emily. He said, "Gal I got a yen for is you. An' if I say that after the day I put in, you better know it's the truth."

"I like that," Emily said. "I feel the same way about you." She'd always been a bold-talking woman. A lot of men, Pinkard supposed, wouldn't have liked that. He didn't understand why. As far as he was concerned, thinking about it and talking about it were almost as much fun as doing it.

After supper, he dried pots and dishes, as he'd been doing for a while. No sooner had he put the last plate back in the cupboard than Emily said, "You are the helpingest man. That's another reason I love you."

"Is that a fact?" He still didn't quite know himself how he felt about doing women's work. He never told anybody at the foundry he did it, for fear people would say he was henpecked. Emily usually didn't say much about it, either, maybe to keep him from worrying his own mind. Now that she had said it, he felt obliged to answer gruffly: "You know why I'm doin' this, don't you?"

"Why, dear, I haven't got the faintest idea." Her smile and her voice and the way she stood all conspired to make a liar out of her. "Why don't you tell me?"

Instead of telling her — or rather, instead of telling her with words-he picked her up and carried her into the bedroom. She squealed and beat at his shoulders, but she was laughing while she did it. Getting out of his own clothes was the work of a moment. Getting her out of hers required more complicated unbuttonings, unhookings, unlacings. His hands were big and clumsy, but he managed.

He scraped a match afire and lighted a kerosene lamp on the nightstand by the bed. The light it gave was ruddier than sunlight; by it, he could hardly tell Emily's skin had changed color. He didn't care. That wasn't why he'd lighted it. "You are one /zwe-lookin' woman," he told his wife. The words came thick from his throat.

"And what do you propose to do about that?" she asked. He reached out for her and showed her, again without words.

Afterwards, with her curled up, head on his shoulder, both of them drifting off toward sleep, he wondered if Fanny Cunningham had listened to the bedsprings creaking. He and Bedford had teased each other about that every now and again, heading off toward work of a morning. If Fanny heard it now, though, it had to remind her that her husband wasn't there. Pinkard hoped Bedford was all right. He hadn't heard anything different, but what did that prove? Not enough.

"Might be my turn next," he muttered; conscription had scooped more white men out of the Sloss works over the past couple of weeks.

"What's that, honey?" Emily asked drowsily. "You say somethin'?"

"No," he said, and she fell asleep. Eventually, he did, too.

Herman Bruck's face twisted in annoyance. "Why don't you want to go to the play with me tonight?" he asked in a low voice, doing his best not to draw the notice of anyone else at the Socialist Party office.

"I just don't, Herman," Flora Hamburger told him. "When I'm done with work, I'm tired. What I want to do is go home and rest, nothing else." That wasn't the entire reason, but it was polite and true, as far as it went.

Bruck, as usual, did not know how to take no for an answer. "But it's one of Gordin's best," he exclaimed. "It has the most powerful arguments against the war I've seen anywhere."

"I'm already against the war," she reminded him. "I don't need any fresh arguments to be against it. What educates the proletariat is liable to bore me."

"But it shows the effect of the war on the poor, on the working classes," he persisted. "You'll find things you can borrow and get use of here."

Flora exhaled. Bruck was drawn to her, and had trouble realizing she was not drawn to him in return. She'd done her best to avoid being rude; after all, whether she went out with him or not, they had to work together. Instead of sharply telling him to go away and stop bothering her, she answered, "I can see the effect on my own family, thank you very much. My sister married to a soldier, my brothers both turning into militarists and liable to go through conscription as soon as they get old enough… I was against this war before it was declared, remember."

"Do you have to keep throwing that in my face?" he said angrily. "Maybe you were even right. I don't know. But if the United States win this war and we're seen as opposing it, we won't win an election anywhere in the country for the next twenty years. People will vote for the Republicans before they vote for us."

"I don't know about that," Flora said. "I don't know about that at all. With so many dead, with so many maimed, even winning this war won't be enough to make anyone glad we fought it."

"Write that down!" Bruck exclaimed. "It's a good propaganda point, and I haven't seen it anywhere else." He swung from suitor to political animal like a weathervane in a shifting wind.

Flora preferred him as political animal. There his instincts were good, which she would not have said about him as a suitor. She did write down the idea. "We should let it come from someone who isn't operating out of New York City," she said. "The Roosevelt propaganda machine has made New York Socialists pariahs, as far as the rest of the country is concerned."

"That's not right," Bruck said. "It's not fair." He calmed down. "But it is real, no doubt about that. We'll manage. Roosevelt can't censor everything we do, no matter how much he wishes he could."

Figuring ways to do that kept Bruck happily occupied till quitting time. Indeed, Flora was able to slip out the door and down the stairs while he was still shouting into a telephone. When she could, she preferred to deal with annoying men peacefully and indirectly, rather than whipping out a hat pin. When peaceful, indirect means didn't work

"Speak softly and carry a sharp pin," she murmured, laughing at the way she'd twisted TR's slogan. But the laughter did not last long. Roosevelt's stick had not been big enough to knock over either the Confederacy or Canada at the first onslaught, which meant casualties by the tens, by the hundreds of thousands over chunks of land hardly large enough to serve as burying grounds for the dead.

Soldiers' Circle men still prowled through the Lower East Side, but fewer of them than in the days just after the Remembrance Day riots. They weren't so likely to break heads as they had been then, either. She'd even heard a story that one of them had put aside his truncheon after falling in love with a pretty Jewish girl. She didn't know whether it was a true story; no one seemed to have details. That people were telling it was interesting, though. True or not, they wanted to believe it.

When she got back to her family's apartment, her sister Esther was helping their mother get supper ready. Her brother Isaac had his nose in a book. Her other brother, David, walked in a few minutes after she did, looking tired. He'd got a sewing job, and was putting in long hours at it.

Her father came in next. He'd worked the same hours as his son, more or less, but bore them better, or at least more easily: he'd been putting in a back-breaking day for many years, and was used — or resigned-to it. His pipe smoke, though harsher than it had been in the days before the war started, still blended nicely with the odor of the stewing chicken in the pot on the stove.

Sophie dragged herself in last of all. She was very close to her time of confinement, but that didn't keep her from putting in a full day's work. If you couldn't do the job, the boss would find someone who could. Once she'd recovered from having the baby, she'd have to find a new position, too; no one would hold the old one for her. It wasn't right, it wasn't just, but, as Herman Bruck had said, it was real.

"Did I get a letter from Yossel today?" she asked as soon as she walked into the apartment. A framed photograph of Yossel Reisen, looking stern in his U.S. Army uniform, stood on the table next to the divan-sofa where he'd slept so many nights.

"Not today, Sophie," Esther answered.

Sophie looked disappointed. "That's three days now with nothing," she said, setting both hands on her swollen belly as if to say the baby expected to hear from its father, too. Her fingers had got too swollen to let her wear the wedding band Yossel had bought for her, but she had worn it and, more to the point, had the right to wear it.

"He hasn't been writing every day," Flora said, and then quickly added, "But he has been very good about sending you letters." For one thing, that was true. For another, now that Yossel had made Sophie his wife, she defended him like a tigress defending its young. Flora didn't want her thinking she had to do that now.

"Supper's ready," their mother said, another way of defusing a situation that could get sticky.

Over chicken stew, Benjamin Hamburger said, "I saw in the papers today that we are making good progress in the Roanoke valley, that we are pushing the Confederates back there. Soon, alevai, we will clear them out of the land between the Blue Ridge and the Alleghenies."

"You sound like a general, Papa," David Hamburger said with a smile. "Did you know where these places were before we went to war?"

"I didn't know where these places were before I had a son-in-law fighting there," his father answered. He snapped his fingers. "And I didn't care that much, either. You care about what touches you. Everything else is not so important."

"That's shortsighted, Papa," Flora said, respectfully but firmly. "That's how the bosses keep the workers under their control: by mystifying them about what really is important to their well-being."

"Politics at the supper table we can do without," Benjamin Hamburger said. "I wasn't talking about politics. I was talking about this family."

"You can't separate them like that," Flora said. Her father started to raise a hand. She got in one last shot before he could: "If it weren't for politics, would Yossel be in Virginia now?"

"That's different," he said. A moment later, he looked sheepish. "If you ask me to explain exactly how it's different, I may have a little trouble." Flora smiled at him, liking him very much right then. Not many people had the intellectual honesty to admit something like that. Because he had admitted it, she didn't push him any further. The rest of the meal passed in peace.

Afterwards, Sophie sat and rested while her mother and Esther and Flora washed the dishes. The kitchen was crowded with the three of them in it, but they made short work of plates and glasses and pots and silverware.

Someone knocked on the door. Someone was always knocking on the door: neighbors wanting to borrow something, neighbors giving something back, young men coming to talk or play chess or cards with David and Isaac, young men coming to call on Esther, older men coming to talk and smoke with Benjamin, women coming to gossip, delivery boys …

Flora was closest to the door, so she opened it. The young man who stood in the hall was a few years too young for a military uniform, but the Western Union uniform he had on was of similar color and cut, even if its brass buttons were shinier and more aggressively visible than a soldier would have liked.

"Telegram for Mrs. Sophie, uh" — he looked down at the yellow envelope he was carrying-"Sophie Reisen."

"Sophie!" Flora called, and started to give him a nickel for delivering the wire. She was, for a moment, puzzled: who would send Sophie a telegram?

Then the Western Union boy said, "No, ma'am, I never take money for delivering these." He took off his hat when Sophie came to the door, handed her the envelope, and hurried away.

"Who is sending me a telegram?" Sophie asked: the same question Flora had put to herself. Suddenly, Flora knew a dreadful certainty. God forbid, she thought, and bit her tongue to keep from saying anything while Sophie opened the thin, flimsy envelope. "It's from Philadelphia," Sophie said, "from the Secretary of War." Her voice got weaker and more full of fear with every word she spoke. " 'It is my sorrowful duty to inform you that — ' "

She didn't go on, not with words. Instead, she let out a great, full-throated wail of grief that had doors flying open up and down the hallway. Flora took the telegram from her limp fingers and read through it. Yossel had died in Virginia, "heroically defending the United States and the restoration of their proper place among the nations of the continent and of the world and the cause of liberty." Flora wanted to crumple up the telegram and throw it away, but didn't because she thought her sister might want to keep it. The only truth in it, she thought, was that Yossel was dead. Everything else was patriotic claptrap.

Sophie hugged her belly and moaned, "What am I going to do? What are we going to do? I'm a widow, and I never even had a husband!" That wasn't quite true, but it wasn't far wrong, either.

People came flooding into the apartment. The building had heard that kind of anguished cry more than once before. Everyone knew what it meant. Women began bringing food. Everyone who'd ever met Yossel Reisen had a good word for him, as did a good many people who hadn't.

In the midst of the gathering, Esther asked Flora, "Are we going to sit shiva for Yossel?"

"Sophie will," Flora answered, but that went almost without saying. Would the rest of the family sit in mourning with torn clothes and pray for a solid week? Everything American in Flora — and, evidently, in Esther, too- cried out against it, especially for a man who wouldn't yet have been part of the family if he hadn't impregnated their sister. But when death struck, new customs had a way of sloughing off and old ones reasserting themselves. Resignedly, Flora said, "If Mother tells us to do it, how can we say no?" Esther's mouth twisted, but in the end she nodded.

And Flora knew that, while she was rocking back and forth sitting shiva for Yossel, she would not be mourning him alone, but the country and the whole world thrown onto the fire of war.

" Salt Lake City!" Paul Mantarakis said with considerable satisfaction. "One more fight to go and then we've licked these Mormon bastards once and for all."

"Matter of fact, I hear tell there's one big town after Salt Lake City," Ben Carlton said. "Place called Ogden, north of here."

"Yeah, all right, I heard about Ogden, too," Mantarakis admitted. "But it stands to reason, once they lose their capital, they ain't gonna have a whole lot of fight left in 'em."

"Just like the USA and Washington, right?" the cook said with weary cynicism.

Mantarakis gave him a resentful look. "It's not the same," he said. " Salt Lake 's the only real city — city-type city-the Mormons have. Provo and Og-den, they're just towns. I'm from Philly, remember. I know the difference. Next to what I'm used to, even Salt Lake City isn't a big thing."

"Be a hell of a big fight, though," Carlton predicted gloomily. He stirred the cookpot. The smell that rose up from it was none too appetizing: he'd made some kind of horrible stew from bully beef and hardtack and whatever else he happened to have handy. Paul sighed. Since he'd started wearing stripes on his sleeves, he hadn't been able to see to the cooking nearly so often as he had before. That meant the whole company ate worse than they would have otherwise.

Gordon McSweeney, a man with a cast-iron stomach (or at least no sense of taste to speak of) came up, smelled the pot, looked into it, and scowled at Carlton. "If I were a Papist, I'd give that last rites," he said.

He was a sergeant these days, too, so the cook could only assume an ex pression of injured innocence. "It'll be ready pretty soon," he said, which, considering McSweeney's editorial comment, was apt to be something less than a consummation devoutly to be wished.

But McSweeney, luckily for him, was looking north, toward Salt Lake City. " 'Now also the axe is laid unto the root of the trees: there every tree which bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down, and cast into the fire,' " he said. " 'Because they had no root, they withered away.' So it says in the Holy Scriptures, whose words shall be fulfilled."

Mantarakis looked north, too. Here and there, flames burned in the Mormons' capital. Artillery fire had blown the gilded angel off the east-center tower of the Temple and had knocked down two of the other towers, but the big building, the heart of Salt Lake City, still stood. Enormous beehive flags flapped defiantly from the towers that survived. "They read a different book there," Paul said.

"And they will burn in hell because of it," McSweeney answered, sounding as certain as he generally did when speaking of matters of religion. "The Book of Mormon is no more the word of God than is an advertising circular for stomach powders."

It wasn't so much that Mantarakis thought McSweeney wrong — he didn't figure the Book of Mormon was divinely inspired, either. But the way McSweeney said it, like the way McSweeney said anything, put his back up. " Lot of people up there think you're wrong, Gordon," he remarked.

"The more fools they," McSweeney said. "They suffer in this world for their arrogance and overweening pride, and in the next for their false and blasphemous faith." He wasn't simply armored in his faith, but also used it as a sword against the foe. Mantarakis supposed that helped make him a good soldier; it also made him a scary man.

An aeroplane flew in lazy circles above Salt Lake City, spotting targets for the U.S. artillery. All of a sudden, black puffs of smoke started dotting the otherwise clear summer sky around the aeroplane. What artillery the Mormons had was mostly here; they'd got their hands on it by overrunning Camp Douglas, east and north of town. They knew the aeroplane was the U.S. ar tillery's eye in the sky. If they brought it down, they could fight on more nearly even terms. And bring it down they did. The aeroplane seemed to stagger in the sky, then plunged earthward, trailing smoke and flame. It crashed just in side the Mormon lines. The cheer the religious rebels raised rang in Mantarakis' ears. "Kyrie eleison," he muttered.

For once, Gordon McSweeney did not upbraid him for praying in Greek. "Damn them," McSweeney said, over and over again. "Damn them, damn them." It wasn't cursing; it was nothing like the casual way in which most sol diers would have brought out the words. It sounded more as if McSweeney was instructing God about what needed doing and how to go about it. Paul wanted to take a couple of steps away from the other sergeant, in case God got angry at him for using that tone of voice.

With their great factories, the United States had guns especially devoted to antiaircraft fire and others given nothing but ground targets. The Mormon insurgents did not enjoy the luxury of specialization. Having shot down the aeroplane, they began working over the front-line trenches in which Man-tarakis and his companions sheltered. He crouched down in the dirt, hands clutching his head, his body folded up into a ball to make himself the smallest possible target.

He'd been through worse in Kentucky; the Confederates had far more guns to fire at U.S. forces than the Mormons did. But any barrage was a bowel-loosener. The ground shook and jumped. Shrapnel balls and fragments of shell casing filled the air. Whether he lived or died wasn't really in his hands, not for the time being. Either God's providence or random luck, de pending on how the world worked, would decide his fate.

After about half an hour, the Mormon guns eased up. Men helped their wounded comrades back toward the rear. Mormon snipers took potshots at them. The Mormons were short of men, short of guns, short of munitions, but they not only held the high ground (they had their artillery on the mountain spur above Temple Square, not far from the wreckage of what had been the state capitol before the revolt), but they also knew the terrain well and squeezed from it all the advantages they could.

First Lieutenant Cecil Schneider made his way down the battered trench line seeing how his company had come through. He was a little weedy fellow who would have looked more at home in mechanic's coveralls than in his grimy U.S. uniform. He'd been leading the company since Captain Hinshaw died; a lot of companies had lieutenants commanding them these days, and more than one had no surviving officers left at all.

Schneider sniffed at Ben Carlton's stew pot, sighed, and crouched down by it. He took out his mess kit. "I'm hungry enough for this to smell good," he said. Paul Mantarakis didn't know if he could get that hungry, but he was aware he had higher standards than most people.

Carlton, as if vindicated, filled the lieutenant's tray with stew. Schneider dug in, sighed again, and kept on eating. That Mantarakis understood. You had to keep the machine fueled or it wouldn't run.

When Schneider was nearly done, Mantarakis asked, "Sir, is there any way of rooting out the Mormons without going straight at them?"

"General Staff doesn't seem to think so," Schneider answered. "They've got the Great Salt Lake on one side and the mountains on the other, after all. It's not going to be pretty, but it's what we've got to do."

Not going to be pretty was a euphemism for forward companies' getting melted down to nothing, like candles burning out. Paul knew that. So, no doubt, did Lieutenant Schneider. "Sir," Mantarakis said, "are the two divi sions we've got here going to be enough to do the job?"

"I hear we have more troops on the way," Schneider answered. "This sort of fighting chews up men by carloads." He sighed one more time, now not about the vile stew. "We have the men to spend, and we're spending them. This narrow front makes the fighting as bad as it is in the Roanoke valley or in Maryland."

"Mormons don't help," Ben Carlton said. "The Rebs fought fair, anyways. Any civilian you see here — man, woman, boy, girl-is gonna cut your throat in a second if he catches you asleep."

"You got that right." Mantarakis turned to Lieutenant Schneider. "Sir, once we beat these Mormons flat, what the hell are we going to do with them? What the hell can we do with them?"

"Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant," Schneider answered. That made Gordon McSweeney rumble, down deep in his chest. He obviously didn't know what it meant, but he knew it was Latin. Given how he felt about the Catholic Church, that was plenty to make him suspicious.

"Sir?" Paul said. He didn't know what it meant, either. He'd grown up speaking Greek, but you needed more in the way of education than he'd picked up to throw Latin around like that.

" 'Where they make a desert, they call it peace,' " Schneider said.

McSweeney rumbled again, this time in approval. "Just what the Mormons deserve," he said: " Solitude Lake City."

Mantarakis stared at him. McSweeney joking was about as likely as pigs with wings. He couldn't let it go by without trying to top it. "Yeah, we'll make a desert out of Deseret," he said. Lieutenant Schneider laughed. Ben Carlton looked from one punster to the other, equally disgusted with both. "You birds don't shut up, I ain't gonna feed you."

"Promises, promises," Paul said, which made Schneider laugh louder than ever.

Irving Morrell studied the situation map of Utah with considerable dissatisfaction. If it had been up to him, he would have tried to push men through the Wasatch Mountains, and he would also have had a column coming down from Idaho to make the Mormons divide their forces and keep them from concentrating everything they had on the main U.S. attack.

But it wasn't up to him. He was new at General Staff headquarters, and only a major. He'd made suggestions. He'd sent memoranda. He might have been shouting into the void, for all the attention the higher-ups paid him. He hadn't expected much different. Sooner or later, they'd listen to him on something small. If it worked, they'd listen to him on something bigger.

A lieutenant came up to him, saluted, and said, "Major Morrell?" When Morrell admitted he was who he was, the lieutenant saluted and said, "General Wood's compliments, sir, and he'd like to see you immediately. If you'll please follow me, sir-"

"Yes, I'll follow you," Morrell said. Without another word, the lieutenant turned and hurried away. Walking along behind him, Morrell wondered what enormity he'd committed, to make the Chief of the U.S. General Staff land on him personally. He didn't think his memoranda on the Utah campaign had been as intemperate as all that. Maybe he was wrong. No — evidently he was wrong. He shrugged. If speaking his mind made them want to ship him out, odds were they'd send him back to one of the fighting fronts and let him com mand a battalion again. That wasn't so bad.

A captain in an outer office who was pounding away on a typewriter looked up when the lieutenant brought in Morrell. After he'd been identified, the captain-presumably Wood's adjutant-nodded and said, "Oh, yes, let me tell the general he's here." He vanished into the chief of staff's inner sanctum, then emerged once more. "Come right in, Major Morrell. He's expecting you."

He didn't sound overtly hostile, but the General Staff had an air of genteel politeness over and above the usual military courtesies, so that didn't signify anything. Wondering whether to ask for a blindfold, Morrell walked past the captain and into the office. He came to stiff attention and saluted. "Major Irving Morrell reporting as ordered, sir."

"At ease, Morrell," Leonard Wood said, returning the salute. He was a broad-shouldered man in his mid-fifties, with iron-gray hair and a Kaiser Bill mustache waxed to a pointed perfection that didn't quite go with his craggy, tired-looking features. Morrell eased his brace only a fraction. Wood said, "Relax, Major. You're not in trouble. The reverse, in fact."

"Sir?" Morrell said. He couldn't fathom why the general had summoned him, if not to call him on the carpet.

Instead of explaining, Wood went off on a tangent: "You may have heard that I earned a medical degree before I went into the Army."

"Yes, sir, I have heard that," Morrell agreed. He didn't know where General Wood was going, but he wasn't about to try to keep him from getting there.

"Good," the chief of staff said. "Then you'll have an easier time under standing why I was extremely interested when a memorandum from you and Dr. Wagner reached my desk earlier this year."

"Dr. Wagner?" In any setting less august, Morrell would have scratched his head. "I'm afraid I don't remember — "

"From Tucson," Wood broke in impatiently. "The memorandum where the two of you were discussing the potential advantages of protective headgear."

Light dawned on Morrell. "Oh. Yes, sir," he said. He'd utterly forgotten the physician's name, if he'd ever known it. He'd forgotten their conversation shortly before he was discharged, too. He'd figured the doctor had also forgotten it, but that looked to be wrong. Not only had Wagner remembered, but he'd remembered to give Morrell half the credit, too. Not just a doctor — that damn near made him a prince.

General Wood leaned over the side of his chair, picked something up, and set it on his desk: a steel helmet shaped like a bowl, with a projecting brim in front and an extension in the back to give the neck a little extra protection. "What do you think of your idea, Major?" he asked.

Morrell picked up the helmet. It weighed, he guessed, a couple of pounds. Leather webbing inside kept it from resting right on a man's head; a leather chin strap with an adjustable buckle would help it stay on. He rapped the green-gray painted metal with his knuckles. "Will it really stop bullets, sir?" he asked.

Wood shook his head. "Not square hits, no — it would probably have to be three times as heavy to do that. But it will deflect glancing rounds and a lot of shrapnel balls and shell fragments. Head wounds are so often fatal, anything we can do to diminish them works to our advantage."

"Sir, you're a hundred per cent right about that," Morrell said. He thought of the man in the bed next to him in Tucson, the man who'd been made into a vegetable in the blink of an eye. The memory made him want to shiver. Better to die straight out than to linger on like that without hope of ever having a working mind again.

"A commendation for this idea will go into your permanent file, Major," Wood said. "Our German allies, I understand, are going to copy the notion from us, and I've heard, though it's always hard to gauge how much truth comes from sources in enemy country, that the froggies are also working along similar lines. But we have the helmet first, and that's thanks in large part to you."

"Thank you very much, sir," Morrell said. Getting credit for the idea had never crossed his mind, not least because he'd never thought it would see the light of day. "I hope Doctor, uh, Wagner gets a commendation, too, sir. If it hadn't been for him, this never would have gotten off the ground."

"Yes, he has a commendation coming, too," General Wood assured him. "But such things count for rather more on a fighting soldier's curriculum vitae, eh?"

"Yes, sir." Morrell hefted the helmet. "Sir, may I keep this one? If I'm ever transferred back to the front, I'll need one, and I'd be honored to have it be the one you gave me yourself."

"My pleasure," Wood said, and Morrell tucked the helmet under his left arm. The chief of staff studied him. "So you want to get back to the front, do you? Why does that not surprise me? Fighting the war with map and wire isn't your chosen style, is it?"

Morrell had had very much the same thought himself. "Sir, I like the out doors; I always have. I like hiking and fishing and hunting a lot better than fill ing out forms and such. I think I'm more useful to the country up at the front, if you want to know the truth."

General Wood steepled his fingers. "What you're saying, Major, is that you'd have a better time up at the front than you do here, which is not the same as being more useful to the country. We're going to teach you everything we can here, Major, and I suspect you'll teach us a few things, too. If you measure up, we'll change the color of the oak leaves on your shoulders, maybe give you eagles instead, and we'll send you back to the front in charge of a regiment. Then you'll be more useful to your country."

"Uh, thank you, sir," Morrell said again. He'd dared hope something like that might happen, but he hadn't taken the notion seriously. He made a men tal note to write General Foulke a thank-you letter. Foulke must have seen something in him that he liked, and sent him on to the General Staff to find out if they saw it, too. That was how careers got made, if you were good-and lucky enough to be good when people were watching.

Wood said, "This isn't for your benefit, Major: it's for the benefit of the United States of America. We are surrounded by foes on all sides, as we have been since the days of the War of Secession: the Confederate States and the Empire of Mexico to the south, Canada to the north, England and France across an Atlantic none too wide, and the Japanese and the British Empire across the Pacific. Seizing the Sandwich Islands was a heavy blow against them; otherwise, they'd be menacing our western coast even now. But they are going to try to take those islands back, as a first step toward carrying the war to our shores. Surrounded, as I say, we can't afford to waste talent if we see it." He went from cordial to brisk in the space of a heartbeat. "Dismissed, Major."

Morrell saluted, did a smart about-face, and left the office of the Chief of the General Staff. The lieutenant was still in the antechamber with General Wood's adjutant. He bounced to his feet. "Do you need me to guide you back to your assigned area, sir?"

"I don't think so," Morrell answered. "I expect I can manage on my own, unless the birds have eaten the trail of crumbs I left behind." The lieutenant looked blank. The adjutant chuckled, recognizing the allusion.

Three different men stopped Morrell in the hallway, all of them exclaim ing about the helmet he was carrying. Two of them, like him, were ecstatic. The third, a white-bearded brigadier general in his late sixties who might have first seen action in the War of Secession, shook his head in dismay. "It's a damned shame we have to resort to means like those to fill the men with the spirit of aggression," he growled, and walked on.

Being far outranked, Morrell didn't answer. He didn't see anything wrong with giving the common soldier some slightly better chance to do his job with out getting killed or dreadfully wounded.

He set the helmet down beside the map of the Utah rebellion. Try as he would, he couldn't make himself believe the General Staff had come up with the best possible plan there was. His first efforts to convince his superiors otherwise had failed. If he was going to try again, he'd have to be more subtle.

He was poring over the map when someone behind him said, "Major Morrell?"

"Yes?" Morrell turned around. Before the turn was completed, he came to attention and revised his words: "Yes, Mr. President?"

Theodore Roosevelt pointed to the helmet. "General Wood tells me that's partly your idea. It's a bully one, I must say. We aim to win this war, but we aim to do it with the greatest possible efficiency and care for the men who fight it. Your notion goes a long way toward that end. Congratulations."

"Thank you, sir," Morrell said. He'd known Wood and TR were longtime friends. He hadn't imagined that might ever matter to him.

"What other useful ideas have you?" Roosevelt pointed to the map of Utah. "How would you cauterize that running sore, for instance?" He sighed. "My experience has been that, man for man, Mormons make excellent, even outstanding, citizens. In a mass, though, their religion gives them the ambition to be a nationality of their own rather than Americans. This, I realize, is in no small measure engendered by the treatment they have received at the hands of the United States since the 1850s. But fault is irrelevant. Revolt and secession from our country cannot be tolerated."

"Yes, sir," Morrell said. "What would I do in Utah, sir?" He took a deep breath and explained to the president what he would do in Utah.

Roosevelt listened with poker face till he was through, then said, "Have you presented these ideas to the General Staff with a view toward implement ing them?"

"I have presented them, yes, sir," Morrell answered. "My superiors are of the opinion they're impractical."

"Fiddlesticks," TR burst out. "Your superiors are of the opinion that, since they didn't think of these things themselves, they can't be any good. That's what you get for your low rank, Major Morrell." He stood up straight and stuck out his chest. "7 have not got a low rank, Major. When I see something worth doing, it has a way of getting done. I'm glad we had this little talk. A very good day to you." He hurried off.

Morrell stared after him, somewhere between horror and delight. If Roo sevelt started shouting orders, the plan for operations in Utah would change. Morrell was confident enough that the results could not be worse than those now being obtained. Would they be better? Would they be perceived as being better? If they were perceived as being better, would he get the credit for that-or the blame?

Roosevelt slammed a door behind him. He was shouting already. Morrell glanced over to the helmet he'd brought from General Wood's office. He snorted. When he took it, he hadn't imagined he'd need to wear it inside Gen eral Staff headquarters. But TR might have taken care of that.

Achilles started crying. This was the third time he'd started crying since Cincinnatus and Elizabeth had gone to bed. Cincinnatus didn't think it was far past midnight. The baby might wake up a couple of more times before morning. When he woke up, Cincinnatus woke up. He'd be a shambling wreck on the Covington docks. He'd been a shambling wreck a lot of the days since Achilles was born.

With a small groan, Elizabeth staggered out of bed and over to the cradle where Achilles lay. She picked him up and carried him into the front room to nurse him. Nights were even harder on her than they were on Cincinnatus. She came back from her domestic's work ready to fall asleep over supper.

Cincinnatus twisted and turned, trying to get comfortable and get back to sleep. In the process, he wrapped sheet and blanket around himself till he might have been a mummy. When Elizabeth came back, she had to unroll him to give herself some bedclothes. That woke him up again.

When the cheap alarm clock on the nightstand jangled, he jerked upright, as horrified as if a Confederate aeroplane had dropped a bomb on the house next door. Then he had to shake Elizabeth out of slumber; she hadn't so much as heard the horrible racket the clock made.

They both dressed in a fog of fatigue. The smell of coffee drew Cincinna- tus to the kitchen like a magnet, though the stuff for sale in Covington these days had more chicory in it than the genuine bean. Whatever it was made of, it pried his eyelids open. After bacon and eggs and cornbread, he was more nearly ready to face the day than he would have believed possible fifteen min utes earlier.

Someone knocked on the front door. Elizabeth opened it. "Hello, Mother Livia," she said.

"Hello, dear," Cincinnatus' mother answered. "How's my little grand-baby?" Without giving Elizabeth a chance to answer, she went on, "He must have been a terror in the night again-I kin see it in your face."

Cincinnatus grabbed his dinner pail and hurried out the door, pausing only to kiss his mother on the cheek. That damned Lieutenant Kennan timed things with a stopwatch; if you were half a minute late, you could kiss work for the day good-bye. Cincinnatus had seen it happen to too many other people to intend to let it happen to him.

"Get your black ass going," the U.S. lieutenant snarled at him when he got to the waterfront. From Kennan, that was almost an endearment. Barges full of crates of munitions had crossed the Ohio. Cincinnatus and his work crew unloaded the barges and loaded trucks and wagons. U.S. soldiers drove them off toward the front. Cincinnatus had given up asking to be a teamster. The Yankees wouldn't hear of it, even if it would have freed up more of their men for actual fighting at the front lines.

He disguised a shrug in a stretch as he walked back to unload another crate. Whites in the CSA had better sense. Black men in the Confederacy did everything but fight. They drove, they cooked, they washed, they dug trenches. Without them, white Confederate manpower would have been stretched too thin to have any hope of holding back the U.S. hordes.

When the long day was done, the paymaster gave Cincinnatus the fifty- cent hard-work bonus. "God damn!" said Herodotus, who stood behind him in line. "That there's gettin' to be your reg'lar rate."

"Got me a baby in the house now," Cincinnatus said, as if that explained everything-which, to him, it did.

Herodotus said, "Plenty fellers here got five, six, eight chillun in de house. Don't see them gettin' no bonus."

Cincinnatus shrugged again. That wasn't his lookout. An awful lot of people in this world wanted just to get by, no more. He'd always had his eye on doing better than that. Even now, in the middle of the war, he had his eye on the main chance. He didn't know what would come of it, but he did know he couldn't win if he didn't bet.

Herodotus made a point of not walking home with him, as if to say he disapproved of such effort. That meant Cincinnatus was by himself when he noticed a wonderful smell in the warm, wet, late summer air. A moment later, a delivery wagon with the words Kentucky smoke house painted in big red letters rounded the corner. He waved to the driver, Apicius' son Felix.

Felix slowed down and waved back. "My pa, he say for you to come in some time before too long," he called. "He got somethin' he want to talk over with you."

"Do it right now," Cincinnatus said. Felix nodded, flicked the reins, and got the wagon moving again.

When Cincinnatus got to the Kentucky Smoke House, the aroma there reminded him how hungry he was after a day hauling heavy crates. Apicius' other son, Lucullus, was basting the meat that turned on a spit over the firepit. Seeing Cincinnatus, he waved him into a little back room.

In there, Apicius was stirring spices into a bubbling pot, making up more of the wonderful sauce that went onto his barbecued beef and pork. "Ha!" he said when Cincinnatus came in. "Saw Felix, did you?"

"Sure did," Cincinnatus answered. "He said you wanted to see me 'bout somethin'. Somethin' to do with the underground, I reckon." He spoke quietly, after having closed the door behind him.

Apicius gave the mixture in the iron pot another stir. "Might say that," he replied after a moment. He gave Cincinnatus a thoughtful glance. "How'd you get mixed up with those underground folks, anyways?"

"Wish I hadn't, pretty much," Cincinnatus said, "but the white man I used to work for, he's one of 'em, and he was always pretty decent to me. 'Sides, from what I've seen, I ain't got much use for the USA, neither." He met and held Apicius' eyes. "How 'bout you?" Unless he got answers that satisfied him, he wasn't going to say anything more.

Apicius' massive shoulders went up and down in a shrug. "First time the Yankee soldiers come in here, they clean me out of everything I got, they say they shoot me if I squawk, an' they call me more kind o' names'n I ever hear before. They ain't done nothin' like that since, mind you, but it don't make me want to cheer for the Stars an' Stripes."

"Yeah, that's about right." Cincinnatus sighed. "I be go to hell, though, if I see us black folks gettin' any kind o' square deal after the war, an' it don't matter if the USA or the CSA win."

"Dat's the exact truth," Apicius said emphatically. "The exact truth, an' nothin' but the truth, so help me God." He held up a meaty hand, as if taking oath in court — not that blacks could testify against whites in court, not in the CSA. After stirring the barbecue sauce again, he went on, "On de odder hand, there's undergrounds and then there's undergrounds."

"Is that a fact?" Cincinnatus said. If Apicius was going to come to a point, he hoped the fat cook would do it soon.

And, in his own way, Apicius did. Offhandedly, he asked, "You ever hear tell about the Manifesto!"

He didn't say what kind of manifesto. If Cincinnatus hadn't heard of it, he probably would have slid the talk around to something innocuous, then sent him on his way none the wiser. But Cincinnatus did know what he was talking about. He stared, wide-eyed. "Be you one of the people who — " He didn't go on. He'd heard about Reds a good many times, always in the whispers that were the only safe way to mention such people. He hadn't really imagined he would meet such an exotic specimen.

"We git justice for ourselves," Apicius said in a voice that had nothing in it of the jolly-fat-man persona he affected, only steely determination. "Come the revolution, nobody treat a workin' man like dirt only on account of he be black."

That was a heady vision. Cincinnatus, however, had already met the heady visions of the Confederacy and the United States, and seen how neither reality lived up to those visions. He had no reason save hope blinder than he could justify to believe the Red vision would be different. And besides — "Even if the revolution come in the CSA, right now we be under the USA, and it don't look like they gonna give us up."

"Revolution comin' in the USA, too," Apicius replied with calm certainty. "Now we kin help the Red brothers in the CSA — we git stuff they kin use, ship it south, an'- What so funny?"

Between giggles, Cincinnatus got out, "We take stuff the white men in the Confederate States ship north, an' use it to drive the damnyankees crazy. Then we take stuff the damnyankees ship south, an' use it to drive the white men in the CSA crazy. If that ain't funny, what is?"

Apicius' smile was thin (the only thin thing about him), but it was a smile. "You wif us, then?"

When Elizabeth found out, she'd want to kill him. He had a baby now. He was supposed to be careful. That consideration made him hesitate a good half a second before he answered, "Yes."

Up in Pennsylvania, Jake Featherston had been acutely conscious that he'd come to a foreign country. Houses looked different; the winter weather had been harsher than he was used to; the local civilians, those who hadn't fled before the advancing Army of Northern Virginia, had looked and sounded different from their counterparts in the CSA; and they hadn't made any bones about despising the men in butternut who'd overrun their farms and towns.

Now the Army of Northern Virginia wasn't advancing any more. It wasn't in Pennsylvania any more, either. Hampstead, Maryland, where Jake's battery in the First Richmond Howitzers was stationed, looked a lot more like a corresponding small town in Virginia than had anything he'd seen in Pennsylvania. The Old Hampstead Store, for instance, wouldn't have been out of place in some rural county seat outside of Richmond: a two-story clapboard building, a hundred years old if it was a day, in the shape of an L, with a massive water pump shielded from the street by the longer side of the L.

Nero was working the pump. When he'd filled a bucket, Perseus lugged it over to the horse trough. The draft animals that had pulled the battery's can nons and ammunition limbers drank greedily. "Don't give 'em too much too fast," Jake said warningly. "They're liable to get the colic and peg out, and we can't afford that, not now."

"Yes, suh, Marse Jake, I knows," Perseus answered. "But they got to drink some. They been workin' hard."

"I know," Featherston said. "I don't think we'll do much more moving back, though." He paused to wipe his sweaty forehead. "We belter not, or we'll be fighting this damn war back in Virginia."

Jeb Stuart III came round the corner in time to hear that. "It will not hap pen, Sergeant," he said crisply. "They will not get past us. They will not come any farther. All right: we couldn't take Philadelphia. That's too bad; it might have made the damnyankees roll over and show us their bellies like the cow ardly curs they are. But Maryland we hold, Washington we hold, and we're going to keep them."

"Yes, sir," Jake said-you didn't get anywhere arguing with your captain. But he couldn't help adding, "If the damnyankees are such terrible cowards, how come they're moving forward and we're going back?"

"We aren't," Stuart said. "Not one more step back-I have that straight from the War Department in Richmond."

When Jeb Stuart III had something straight from the War Department in Richmond, he had it straight from his father, who'd worn the wreathed stars of a Confederate general for a good many years. That sort of information came straight from the horse's mouth, then. Featherston said, "It's good to hear, sir-if the Yankees cooperate."

For a moment, Stuart seemed more a tired modern soldier than the cava lier he tried to be. His shoulders sagged a little. "The trouble with the Yan kees, Sergeant, is that God was having an off day when he made them, because he turned out altogether too many. They die by thousands, but more thousands keep coming-as you may perhaps have noticed."

"Who, me, sir?" All too well, Featherston remembered the U.S. barrage that had cost him his first gun crew, and remembered pouring shells into oncoming green-gray waves till they broke barely beyond rifle range of his piece. "There's a lot of weight behind them," he agreed.

"There certainly is — weight of metal and weight of men," Stuart said. "And they use that advantage of size in place of true courage, battering us down by stunning us with their big guns and then drowning us in those as saults that leave hillsides and meadows paved with broken bodies from one end to the other. You ask me, Sergeant, that has very little to do with real courage, real elan, as our gallant French allies call it. Elan consists of throwing yourself at the foe regardless of his size, and in going forward for the simple reason that you refuse to admit to yourself you might be beaten. Look what it did for us in the opening days of the war."

"Yes, sir," Jake said. "Took us all the way to the Susquehanna — but not quite to the Delaware."

"If we'd made it to the Delaware, we surely would have crossed it and broken into Philadelphia," Stuart agreed, "and Baltimore would have withered on the vine. But without elan, could we have stopped the Yankee break out from Baltimore before it trapped all our forces up in Pennsylvania?"

"I guess not, sir," Featherston said, which, by the sour look Stuart gave him, was not a good enough answer. But he didn't know whether it had been elan or good field fortifications that had stopped the U.S. drive. For that matter, he didn't know for a fact it was stopped. The Yankees were still shipping men and materiel down into the bulge around Baltimore. Sooner or later, it would burst again, like any carbuncle. "But if they break past Poplar Springs toward Frederick, we may have to skedaddle out of here yet."

Now Stuart looked angry: he'd had his theory contradicted. He put a bit ing edge in his voice: "Sergeant, I've seen the trench lines we've constructed to make sure the Yankees don't break out. I am confident they will hold against any pressure brought to bear against them, just as I am confident the lines ahead of us will hold against any conceivable pressure from the north."

"Yes, sir," Featherston said woodenly. He was kicking himself for dis agreeing with the captain after he'd told himself not to be so foolish. But, damn it, wasn't he a free white man, with the right to say anything he chose? The way the Army treated you, you had to act like a Negro to your superiors. He didn't see the justice in that.

Pompey came up and said, "Captain Stuart, suh, your supper will be ready in a couple minutes. We found us a nice wine to go with your lamb chops, suh. I'm sure you'll enjoy it." "I don't doubt that," Stuart said. Pompey went on his way. Watching him, Stuart returned to the argument with Jake: "Without our niggers, the Yankees would squash us flat, no way around it. But with them to build the works we use, every white Confederate man is a fighting man. We use our resources more efficiently than the USA can."

"Yes, sir, that's a fact," Featherston agreed, now anxious for nothing so much as to get the battery commander out of his hair. He was watching Pompey, too, still wondering whether he'd been right to tell that major about Stuart's servant. He'd never find out now, not with the influence a Stuart had in Richmond just because he was a Stuart.

Happier now that the sergeant was agreeing with him, Captain Stuart headed off, presumably to enjoy his lamb chops. Featherston wasn't going to be eating lamb chops; he'd have whatever came out of the battery kettle, probably some horrible slumgullion whose sole virtue was filling his belly. He wouldn't have a nice wine with his slop, either. He clicked tongue between teeth. The First Richmond Howitzers had been an aristocratic regiment since the days of the War of Secession. He'd managed to get in because he was good at what he did. Everybody above the rank of sergeant had got in by being good at who he was. Some times the differences were more glaring than others.

To Nero, Perseus said, "Bet you that Pompey, he gwine eat hisself lamb chops tonight, too."

"I dunno," Nero answered. "Maybe he gwine wait till Cap'n Stuart done used 'em up, then go to the latrine to git 'em." Both black men laughed. So did Jake Featherston, down deep inside. Seeing the Army's Negroes distrusting one another made white men sleep better at night.

Actually, nothing could have made Featherston sleep well that night. U.S. aeroplanes buzzed over Hampstead, dropping bombs at random. None of them landed within a couple of hundred yards of the battery; none of them, so far as Jake could judge from the absence of screams and cries of alarm from Confederate soldiers, landed within a couple of hundred yards of any worth while target.

Even landing out of the range where they could do any damage, though, they made a hell of a racket. Antiaircraft guns hammered away at the U.S. bombers, adding to the din. They didn't hit anything — or, at least, the rhythm of the engines throbbing overhead didn't falter.

Eventually, the U.S. aeroplanes gave up and flew back to the north. Jake rolled himself tighter in his blanket — which was stiflingly hot but which had the virtue of shielding large areas of his anatomy from mosquitoes-and went back to sleep.

Some time in the wee small hours, another flight of bombing aeroplanes visited Hampstead. Again, they dropped their bombs with nothing more than the vaguest idea of where those bombs might land. And again, the bombs did no damage Featherston could discern. They did, however, wake him up and keep him awake when he would sooner have grabbed as much sleep as he could get.

The next morning, shambling around like a drunk, barely remembering his own name, he realized the bombers had done some damage after all.