American Front

IX

Cincinnatus and his wife Elizabeth were getting ready for bed when some one knocked on the back door. It wasn't that late, but, ever since Elizabeth had found out she was going to have a baby, she'd been tired a lot of the time, even more tired than her domestic's work usually made her. "Who is that?" she said in some irritation. "I don't want visitors."

"You'd think visitors would come to the front of the house," Cincinnatus said as he headed out of the bedroom toward the kitchen. From the hall, he added over his shoulder, "One thing-it ain't U.S. soldiers. They don't just come to the front of the house, they go and break down the door, you don't let 'em in fast enough."

The knock came again. It wasn't very loud, as if whoever was out there didn't want the neighbors to notice. Cincinnatus frowned, wondering if it was a strong-arm man trying to trick him into opening the door. Crooks were having a field day. The Yankees didn't seem to care what people in Covington did to one another, so long as they left U.S. troops alone.

If it was a strong-arm man, Cincinnatus vowed to give him a hell of a surprise. He plucked a heavy iron spider out of the draining rack by the sink. Clout somebody upside the head with that and he'd forget about everything for a good long while.

Spider in his right hand, he opened the back door with his left. When he did, he almost dropped the frying pan. "Mistuh Kennedy!" he exclaimed. "What the devil you doin' here?"

Even in the dim light of the lamp from the kitchen, Tom Kennedy looked as if the devil had indeed brought him to his present state. He was haggard and skinny and dirty, and his eyes tried to move every which way at once, the way a fox's did when hounds were chasing it. "Can I come in?" Cincinnatus' former boss asked.

"I think maybe you better," Cincinnatus said. "What you doin' out, anyways? Curfew's eight o'clock, and I know it's past that."

"Sure is," Kennedy said, and said no more.

That made Cincinnatus ask the next question: "What are you doin' here, Mr. Kennedy? You don't mind me sayin' so, this ain't your part of town." If that wasn't the understatement of 1915, it would do till a better one came along. Why the devil would a white man come into the colored part of Covington after curfew? The only thing Cincinnatus was sure about was that it wasn't any simple, ordinary, innocent reason.

"Who is it?" Elizabeth called from the bedroom.

"It's Mr. Tom Kennedy, sweetheart," Cincinnatus answered, trying to sound as ordinary and innocent as he could, and knowing he wasn't having much luck.

Kennedy's hunted look got even worse. "Don't say my name so loud," he hissed urgently. "The fewer people who know I'm here, the better off everybody will be."

Elizabeth came into the kitchen. She'd put on a quilted cotton housecoat over her nightgown. Her eyes got wide. "It is Mr. Kennedy," she said, and then, determined to be a good hostess no matter what the irregular circumstances in which she found herself, "Shall I put on some coffee for you?"

Kennedy shook his head, a quick, jerky motion. "No, nothing, thanks. I've been running on nerves for so long, coffee would just make things worse."

"Mr. Kennedy," Cincinnatus said with a mixture of deference and annoyance that struck him odd even at the time, "what are you doing here after curfew?"

"Can you hide me for a couple of days?" Kennedy asked. "I won't tell you any lies-I'm on the dodge from the damnyankees. They catch up with me, it's a rope around my neck or a blindfold and a cigarette-except I don't think they'd bother with the cigarette."

"You're in real trouble," Cincinnatus said quietly. A moment later, he realized that meant he was in real trouble, too. The U.S. authorities didn't take kindly to people who harboured fugitives from what they called justice. Elizabeth 's eyes widened again. She must have figured out the same thing at the same time. Cincinnatus clicked his tongue between his teeth. "Why'd you come here?" he asked, directing the question as much to the world at large as to Tom Kennedy.

"Yes, I'm in real trouble," Kennedy said. "My life is in your hands. You want to holler for the patrols, I'm a goner. They'll put money in your pocket, too. Up to you, Cincinnatus. All depends on how you like living under the USA, because I'm doing everything I can to throw the damnyankees out of Kentucky. That's why they're after me, in case you haven't worked it out."

"Oh, I worked it out, Mr. Kennedy," Cincinnatus said, softly still. "I'm studying' what I should oughta do about it, is all." He had no reason to love the CSA; what black man did? But the men from the United States hadn't shown him his lot was better with them in charge, not even close.

He glanced over to Elizabeth. Her belly hadn't started to swell, certainly not to the point where anyone could notice it when she was wearing clothes. He was acutely aware of her pregnancy all the same. It made him less willing to take chances than he would have been a few months before, and far less willing to take chances than he would have been before he got married.

And so he said, "What did you do, Mr. Kennedy? How come the damnyankees are after you so bad?"

"I don't want to tell you," Kennedy answered. "The more things you know, the more they can squeeze out of you if they ever take a mind to."

That made a certain amount of sense. Most times, Cincinnatus would have accepted it without argument. Now- He felt a curious sense of reversal. For what might well have been the first time in his life, he had the upper hand in a conversation with a white man. Even though he did, he used it cautiously, deferentially: "I don't know why they want you, suh, I don't know whether I should oughta help you or help them get you. You understand what I'm sayin'?"

"You won't buy a pig in a poke, not even from me," Kennedy said. Cincinnatus nodded-that was it, in a nutshell. Tom Kennedy sighed. He recognized the reversal, too. "All right, have it your way. I haven't broken any little old ladies' legs with a crowbar or stolen from the church poor box or anything like that. But I'm in the hauling and moving business, Cincinnatus, right? Some of the things I've hauled into Covington aren't the ones the U.S. Army's real happy to have here."

He meant guns. He had to mean guns, and maybe explosives, too. Under U.S. military law, the penalty, for that kind of thing was death. Soldiers had nailed up placards saying as much, all over Covington. Warnings appeared in the newspapers about twice a week. And if you harboured a gun runner, you got the same thing he did. Those warnings were in the papers, too.

"You don't make it easy, Mr. Kennedy," Cincinnatus said. He came close to hating his former boss for putting him in a spot like this-not just his neck on the line now, but Elizabeth's and the coming baby's, too. If he turned him out into the street without saying anything to the authorities but Kennedy got caught later, he'd be in just as much trouble as if he'd concealed him. The only way not to be in trouble with the U.S. authorities was to hand Kennedy over to them now. He didn't have the stomach for that. As white men went, Kennedy had been pretty decent to him-far better than that screaming U.S. lieutenant who bossed him nowadays.

He had just reached that conclusion when Elizabeth said, "Here, come on with me, Mistuh Kennedy. I got a good place to put you."

That relieved Cincinnatus, because he hadn't come up with any good place to hide Kennedy. He didn't want him under the bed, and the Yankees would be sure to look behind the couch and down in the storm cellar. He'd been wondering if he could take Kennedy over to his mother's or some other relative's, but he wasn't enthusiastic about involving them in the danger the white man had brought to him.

Elizabeth opened the door to the pantry by the stove. It was full of sacks of potatoes and beans and black-eyed peas. Cincinnatus didn't feel the least bit guilty about hoarding. No matter how bad things got, he and his wouldn't starve.

When Elizabeth started taking out the sacks, he quickly moved her aside and did it himself. That wasn't something he wanted his wife doing, not when she was in a family way. The sacks took up a surprising lot of room, all spread out on the kitchen floor.

Once he had them all out, he saw that several boards at the back of the pantry were rotten at the bottom. He hadn't noticed that before, but Elizabeth had. He stepped into the little cramped space and pulled at the boards. They came out with squeaks and squeals of nails, revealing a black opening behind them.

"God bless you both," Tom Kennedy said, and squeezed into the opening. Cincinnatus replaced the boards as well as he could by hand. He hoped Kennedy would be able to breathe with them back. One thing seemed pretty clear, though: if U.S. soldiers caught up with Kennedy, his former boss wouldn't be breathing much longer. Still muttering to himself, Cincinnatus put back the produce sacks; Elizabeth swept up a few beans that had escaped from one of them.

When she was done, she and Cincinnatus looked at each other. They both shook their heads. "Let's go to bed," Cincinnatus said, though he didn't think he was going to sleep much, no matter how tired he'd been.

"All right." By her tone, Elizabeth was thinking the same thing. If they didn't sleep like the dead tonight, they'd shamble like the living dead tomorrow. Nothing to be done about that, not now.

After he'd blown out the lamp in the bedroom, Cincinnatus said, "We can't keep him in there long. He go crazy, cooped up like that. An' we didn't even think to give him a thundermug or nothin'."

"I'll take care of that in the morning," Elizabeth answered around an enormous yawn. Cincinnatus felt himself fading, too. Now that he was horizontal, he suspected sleep might sneak up on him after all.

Sure enough, the wham! wham! wham! in the middle of the night woke him out of deep, sound slumber. At first, groggy and confused, he thought it was hail pounding on the roof. Then he realized that, while it certainly was pounding, it was all coming from one direction: that of the front door.

"Soldiers," he whispered to Elizabeth. She nodded. He felt the motion rather than seeing it. Wham! Wham! Wham! He groped for a match, found the box, struck a light, and lighted the lamp he'd blown out. Carrying it, he went out and opened the front door.

An electric torch blazed into his face, blinding him. "You just saved your door, nigger," a Northern voice said. "We were gonna break it down."

"What you want?" Cincinnatus asked. He didn't have to struggle very hard to sound stupid, not as tired as he was. Fright came easy, too.

The Yankee officer, hard to see past that powerful torch, said, "You know a white man name of Tom Kennedy, boy?"

"Yes, suh," Cincinnatus admitted. If they'd come here, they already knew he knew Kennedy. A lie would have got him in deeper trouble than the truth.

"You seen him any time lately?" the officer demanded.

Cincinnatus shook his head. "No, suh. Sure ain't, not since jus' a little while after de war start. He run out o' town, I hear tell, 'fore you Yankees come." He laid the Negro accent on with a trowel; it would help make the U.S. soldiers think he was stupid. He'd have done that for Confederates, too.

"Wish to Jesus he had," the officer said, so feelingly that Cincinnatus blinked; he hadn't thought any damnyankees took Jesus Christ seriously. The fellow went on, "He's been seen in Covington, and he's been seen not far from right here, so what we're gonna do is, we're gonna search this shack." He waved to the soldiers with him.

In they came. Cincinnatus got out of the way in a hurry. If he hadn't, they would have trampled him, or maybe bayoneted him. The U.S. troops turned his tidy little house-he bristled at hearing it called a shack-upside down and inside out looking for Tom Kennedy. They stabbed those bayonets into the sofa and into his mattress through the sheets. Had Kennedy been in there, he would have regretted it. As things were, Cincinnatus did the regretting, for his bed linen and the upholstery. Elizabeth, watching with round eyes, made distressed noises. The Yankees ignored her.

One of the soldiers got down on hands and knees to peer under the stove, though a midget would have had trouble hiding there. Another one flung open the pantry door. The officer-short, skinny, with gold-rimmed spectacles and a mean look-shone that torch in there. Cincinnatus' heart thumped- had he got those boards back well enough? He did his best not to show what he was thinking.

"Nothin' but a pile of beans," the officer said disgustedly, and slammed the pantry door. He turned to Cincinnatus. "All right, boy, looks like you were tellin' the truth." He dug into his pocket, pulled out a silver dollar, and tossed it to the Negro. "For the damage." He raised his voice. "Come on, men. We got other places to search."

Cincinnatus stared down at the coin he'd automatically caught. It wasn't enough, but it was a dollar more than he'd expected to get. He set it on the counter. When the U.S. soldiers were gone, he opened the pantry door and asked quietly, "You all right, Mr. Kennedy?"

The disembodied voice floated back from behind the wall: "Yes, thanks. God bless you."

"We take better care of you come mornin'," Cincinnatus promised, and went off to see if he could get some rest. He sighed. He wasn't even close to sure he'd done the right thing in hiding Kennedy. But that didn't matter now. Right or wrong, he was committed. He'd have to see what came of that.

Nellie Semphroch sighed wearily as she carried the big cloth grocery bag back toward the coffeehouse. The bag itself was lighter than she'd wished it would be; the grocers had trouble keeping things in stock. But she was tireder than she thought she should have been, and felt old beyond her years. Winter always wore at her, and this year it wasn't just winter, it was Rebel occupation, too.

She slipped, and had to flail her arms wildly to keep from falling: the sidewalk was icy in spots. Across the street, Mr. Jacobs came out of his shop with a Confederate soldier wearing one pair of boots and carrying another. The Reb strutted up the street as if he owned it, which, in effect, he did. As far as he was concerned, Nellie wasn't worth noticing.

Mr. Jacobs, being occupied rather than occupier, could see-and admit seeing-his fellow U.S. citizens. "You are all right, Widow Semphroch?" he called.

"Yes, I think so, thank you," Nellie answered. "One more thing on top of everything else." She bit her lip. What she wanted to say was, I've been through so much. Why can't life be easy for a change? The answer to that one was depressingly obvious, though: her life had never been easy, so why should it start now?

"I hope it will be better soon," the shoemaker said.

"So do I, Mr. Jacobs; so do I," Nellie said. A good Christian, she knew, would not resent another's honestly earned success, but she was jealous of Jacobs. His business flourished, while hers withered on the vine. Why not? Leather was easy to come by, coffee wasn't. The Confederate soldiers in Washington went through a lot of shoes and boots. They'd gone through a lot of coffee, too, but now only a tiny bit was left.

"Widow Semphroch, is there anything I can do to help you?" Mr. Jacobs asked. Nellie shook her head. Things had come to a pretty pass, hadn't they, when even the shoemaker knew she was failing and pitied her? With stubborn pride, she picked up the grocery bag and went into the coffeehouse.

The little bell above the door didn't tinkle as she went in. After surviving the Confederate bombardment at the start of the war, it had fallen off its mounting a few weeks before, and she'd never bothered replacing it. Not much point to that, not when she or Edna was almost always there-and not when customers were few and far between, too.

But Edna wasn't behind the counter now. Frowning, Nellie set down the grocery bag. No customers were being slighted-all the tables in the front part of the shop were empty. But her daughter hadn't told her she was going anywhere-and, if Edna had decided to go out, she should have locked the front door. Nellie started down the hall, turned the corner-and there stood Edna, kissing a cavalryman in butternut, her arms tight around him, his big, hairy hands clutching at her posterior. Nellie gasped-not in dismay, but in fury. "Stop that this instant!" she snapped.

Intent on each other and nothing more, her daughter and the cavalry officer hadn't noticed her till she spoke. When she did, they sprang apart from each other as if they were a couple of the clever magnetic toys that had been all the go a couple of years before.

"Mother, it's all right-" Edna began.

Nellie ignored her. "Young man, what is your name?" she demanded of the Confederate soldier.

"Nicholas Henry Kincaid, ma'am," he answered, polite even though Nellie could still see the bulge in his trousers, the bulge he'd got from rubbing up against Edna.

"Well, Mr. Nicholas Henry Kincaid"-Nellie freighted the name with all the scorn it would bear-"your commanding officer will hear of this-this- this-" She couldn't find the word she wanted. But Edna wouldn't go the way she had gone. Edna wouldn't. Nellie shouted, "Get out!" and pointed to the front door.

Kincaid was more than a head taller than she was. He carried a knife and a large revolver on his belt. None of that mattered. Face red, expression mortified, he retreated: Nellie had accomplished more than the entire U.S. garrison of Washington, D.C. She tried to kick him in the shins as he went, but he was too fast for her, so she missed.

Still steaming, she rounded on Edna. "As for you, young lady-"

"Oh, Ma, leave it alone, will you, please?" her daughter said in a weary voice. "How's a girl supposed to have any fun these days, with the whole town turned into one big morgue?"

"Not like that," Nellie Semphroch said grimly. "Not like that, because-"

"Because you let some boy pull your knickers down a long time ago, and now you've decided I shouldn't." Edna tossed her head in disdain. "I'm grown up now, and you can't keep me from being alive myself, no matter how much you want to."

Nellie stared in dismay. Her cheeks got hot. The worst was, her daughter's shot was an understatement. Edna didn't know that, thank God. As parents will, though, Nellie rallied. "As long as you are living under my roof, you will-"

But Edna interrupted again: "Some roof." She tossed her head once more. "I could do better than this by lifting my little finger."

"By lifting your skirt, you mean," Nellie retorted. "No daughter of mine is going to make her way through the world by selling herself on street corners, I tell you that. I won't just report that cavalryman's name to the Rebel commandant, Edna-I'll give him yours, too."

They glared at each other, two sides of the same coin, though neither realized it. With what looked like a distinct effort, Edna made herself stop snarling. "It's not like that, Ma. I've never once prostituted myself, and I never will, neither. But I'm not going to sit cooped up in this damned shop all day long, either, watching the dust on the counter getting thicker and thicker and thicker. I'm going to be twenty-one in a couple months. Don't I deserve a life?"

"Not that kind," Nellie said, breathing hard. (She wished she could say everything Edna had.) "You want that kind, find yourself a man you're going to marry. Then you can have it." Only after she was done speaking did she realize how little Edna's language, which would have been shocking before the war began, shocked her now. Everything was coarsened, cheapened, turned to trash and vileness.

"And how am I supposed to meet anybody I might want to marry if I stay here all the time?" Edna shot back. "About the only people who come in are Confederate soldiers, and if you don't want me to have anything to do with them-"

"That man was not going to marry you," Nellie said positively. "All he wanted was to have his way with you." Edna did not have a snappy comeback to that, by which Nellie concluded she'd won a point. Trying to sound earnest rather than furious, Nellie went on, "You just can't trust men, Edna. They'll say whatever they have to, to get what they want, and afterwards they'll leave you flat, go off whistling, and never care whether they've left you in a family way-"

"How do you know so much about it?" Edna said.

"Ask any woman. She'll tell you the same if you can get her to let her hair down." Automatically, Nellie's hand straightened the curls on her own head. She felt dizzy with anger at her daughter. Memories that hadn't come back to her in years-memories she'd thought, she'd hoped, long forgotten-came bubbling back up to the surface of her mind, memories of the harsh taste of rotgut whiskey and the deceptively sweet clink of silver dollars and the occasional quarter-eagle on the top of a pine nightstand.

"I'm not going to die an old maid, Ma," Edna insisted.

"I didn't ask you to," Nellie said. "But I-"

"Sure sounded to me like you did," her daughter interrupted. "Don't go out, don't meet nobody; if you do meet somebody, don't have any fun with him, on account of all he wants to do is lay you anyways. You maybe caught me this time, Ma, but you can't watch me every hour of every day. I'm not gonna wear your ball and chain, and you can't make me."

Edna stormed past Nellie and out of the coffeehouse. As Nellie had with Nicholas Kincaid, she tried to kick her daughter. As she had then, she missed. The door slammed. Nellie burst into tears.

At last, she dug in her handbag for a cheap cotton handkerchief. She wiped her eyes and blew her nose. Then, slowly, her steps dragging, she went to the door, too. She opened it, stepped outside, and looked up and down the street. She didn't see Edna. She started to cry again.

A Negro in fancy livery driving a high-ranking Confederate officer with a white mustache came down the street in a gleaming motorcar. Nellie wanted to scream the filthiest things she knew at him. After the automobile-a procession in and of itself-had passed, she crossed the street and went into Mr. Jacobs' cobbler's shop.

The little bell above his door worked. He looked up from the marching boot he was repairing. Behind magnifying lenses, his eyes looked enormous. The wrinkles on his round little face rearranged themselves into an expression of concern. "Widow Semphroch!" he exclaimed. "Whatever can be wrong?"

Nellie found herself telling him what was wrong. Everybody needed someone with whom to talk, and she'd known him for as long as she'd been in business across the street from his shop. He wasn't one to spread gossip around. He wouldn't blab of her troubles with Edna, either, or of how much she hated the Rebel soldiers and officers who kept sniffing round her daughter.

When she was finished, he pulled a handkerchief-a bright green silk- out of his trouser pocket, took off his spectacles, made a production out of polishing the lenses, and then set the glasses on the counter by his last. He studied Nellie for close to a minute without saying anything. Then, in a thoughtful tone of voice, he remarked, "You know, Widow Semphroch, I am sorry for you and for your poor daughter. I wish there were some way you could take revenge on these Confederates who have caused you so much grief."

"Oh, good Lord, so do I!" Nellie said fervently.

The shoemaker continued to study her. "When the Rebs came into your coffeehouse, they must have had all sorts of… interesting stories to tell. Wouldn't you say that's so, Widow Semphroch? It is here, that I can tell you. The ones who come in to get their shoes repaired, they do run on at the mouth. And me, I just listen. 1 listen very carefully. You never can tell what you might hear."

Nellie started to answer Mr. Jacobs, then suddenly stopped before she'd said anything. Now she looked sharply at him. He'd just told her something, without ever once coming right out and saying it. If she hadn't been paying attention, she wouldn't have noticed-which, no doubt, was what he'd intended.

She said, "If I hear anything like that, Mr. Jacobs, maybe you'd like me to let you know about it. If you think that would be interesting, of course."

"It might," he answered. "Yes, it might." They nodded, having made a bargain neither of them had mentioned.

When she was in New Orleans, Anne Colleton had thought she would be glad to get home to South Carolina. Now that she was back in her beloved Marshlands, she often wished she'd stayed in Louisiana.

Even the trend-setting exhibition of modern art she'd arranged, the trend-setting artists who'd crossed the Atlantic to exhibit their works, now seemed more albatross than triumph. She set hands on hips and spoke to Marcel Duchamp in irritable, almost accent-free French: "Monsieur, you are not the only one who regrets that the outbreak of war has left you here rather than in Paris, where you would rather be. I agree: it is a great pity. But it is not something over which I have any say. Do you understand this?"

Before replying, Duchamp took a long drag at the skinny cigarillo in his hand; he used smoking as a sort of punctuation to his speech. He made everything he did, no matter how trivial, as dramatic as he could. Exhaling a long, thin plume of smoke the February sunlight-tolerably warm here- illuminated, he spoke in mournful tones: "I am confined here. Is that what you do not understand, Mademoiselle Colleton? This is the only word I can use- trapped like a beast in jaws of steel. Soon I shall have to gnaw off a limb to escape." He made as if to bite at his own wrist.

I haven't got the time to deal with this now, Anne thought. Aloud, she said, "You did not sound this way when you accepted my invitation-and my money-to come to the Confederate States last summer."

"I had not thought I would be here an eternity!" Duchamp burst out. "What is bearable-forgive me: what is pleasant-for a time in the end becomes unpleasant, imprisoning."

"Ships sail for England and France from Charleston every week, Monsieur Duchamp," Anne said in frigid tones. "You are not held here without bond, as if you were a Negro criminal. You have but to use the return fare I gave you when you came here. I would not have you stay where you feel unwelcome."

Duchamp paced back and forth, so swiftly that he almost appeared to be many places at once, as if he were the inspiration for his own Nude Descending a Staircase. Anne Colleton judged that much of his agitation was real. "Yes," he said. "Ships do sail. You have reason there. But it is also true that they reach their intended ports far less often than a prudent man would wish."

"Even prudence is not always prudent," Anne replied. "What did Danton say before the Legislative Assembly? L'audace, encore I'audace, toujours I'audace. If you wish so much to be gone, you will find the audacity to go."

The artist looked most unhappy. Anne smiled without moving her lips. He hadn't expected her to throw a quotation from the French Revolution in his face. Instead of answering her, he bowed and walked off, thin and dark and straight as his cigarillo.

Anne did smile then, but only for a moment. Duchamp would start being difficult again in another few days-unless, of course, he seduced a new serv ing wench, in which case he would imagine himself in love. But even if he did that, it wouldn't last long, either. The one constant about Marcel Duchamp was mutability.

In the Confederate States of America, mutability was not well thought of. The CSA tried to hold change to a minimum. If you shut your eyes just a little, the thought went, you could believe everything was as it had been before the War of Secession.

"We need to be reminded that isn't so," Anne murmured. "It just isn't." That was one of the reasons she'd arranged her exhibition: to make more peo ple see what the twentieth century really meant. It was also one of the reasons the exhibition had been so deliciously scandalous.

But change had come to Marshlands in other ways, too, ways she didn't like so well. How was she supposed to raise a decent crop of cotton if her col ored hands kept leaving the plantation to work in factories in Columbia and Spartanburg and even down in Charleston? It's the war. She'd heard that ex cuse so many times, she was sick of it.

And not even all her power, all her wealth, all her connections, had let her pull all her hands back to the fields. She'd had to raise what she paid to keep the drain from being worse than it was. That cut into her profits. And pay in the factories was going up, too. She scowled. She wasn't used to being in the position of wanting the good old days back again.

The front door opened and closed. Anne glanced at a clock. Half past eleven: time for the postman to come. She hurried toward the front hallway- and almost bumped into the butler, who was bringing the mail on a silver tray.

"Thank you, Scipio," she said, more warmly than she was in the habit of speaking to servants.

"My pleasure, madam," he replied, deep voice grave as usual.

She took the tray from him. His sober features were as familiar to her as anything else at Marshlands, and more comfortable than a lot of the furniture. She wondered for the briefest moment how she would run the plantation if Scipio took a position elsewhere. But no. It was inconceivable. Born and bred here, a fixture since the days when Negro slavery remained the law of the land, Scipio was as much a part of Marshlands as she was herself. Nice to have something on which I can rely, she thought.

After setting the tray on a stained mahogany table, she sorted rapidly through the mail. She discarded advertising circulars unread, as not deserving anything better. Invoices and correspondence pertaining to the business side of Marshlands she set aside for later consideration. That left half a dozen per sonal letters.

"Do you require anything else of me, madam?" Scipio asked.

He had already started to turn to go when Anne said, "Wait. As a matter of fact, I should like to discuss something with you in a few minutes." Obediently, the butler froze into immobility. He would stay frozen till she let him know he could move, however long that took.

To her disappointment, none of the letters was from her brothers. They were both in combat. Neither, so far, had been hurt, but she knew that was only by the grace of the God in Whom she believed so sporadically. Notes from friends and distant cousins were welcome, but could not take the place of news of her own flesh and blood.

And whom did she know in Guaymas? The grimy port and railroad town wasn't anyplace you'd want to go on holiday, especially not when the United States were still liable to cut the railroad line that linked it to the rest of the Confederacy. Making it back to civilization through the bandit-ridden hinterlands of the Empire of Mexico struck her as adventurous without being enjoyable.

Curious, she used a letter opener shaped like a miniature cavalry saber to slit the envelope. The letter inside was in the same firm, clear, unfamiliar hand as the outer address. Dear Anne, it read, / hope this finds you as well as I found you on the train to New Orleans and in the town. As you will see, I remain there no longer, that not being a primary center for one of my training — not enough beasts to hunt. I can't say that here, having shot at several big ones and hit a few. Well, there's hunting and there's hunting, as the saying goes. I find I enjoy both kinds, and hope to pursue the other if I am ever out your way. By contrast with the rest of the letter, the signature below was al most a scrawl: Roger Kimball.

Anne Colleton folded the letter again. The submariner had discretion; she gave him that much. No spy would be able to infer what he did from that let ter. She could see why New Orleans was not a chief submarine base: the Gulf of Mexico being a Confederate lake, enemy ships were probably few and far between. Not so at Guaymas; the USA had a much longer Pacific coastline than the CSA.

No spy would be sure they'd been lovers, either. She worried about that less than most women might have, but it remained in her mind. She wondered whether to answer the letter or pretend she'd never got it. The latter choice was surely safer, but Anne had not got where she was by always playing safe. Either way, she didn't have to decide right now.

And, in fact, she didn't want to decide now. "Scipio," she said, and the butler began to move, seemingly began to breathe, for the first time since she'd started going through her mail. "Scipio," she repeated, gathering her thoughts, and then, "Do you know of anything special that's driving so many niggers out of the fields and into the factories? Besides money, I mean-I know what money does."

"I had not really thought about it, past endeavoring to see that we always have enough hands to perform the required labor," Scipio replied after a momentary hesitation: perhaps for thought, perhaps not.

Could she believe that? She did some fast thinking of her own, and decided she could. Scipio's duties centered on the mansion, and on keeping it and its staff in smooth working order. The field hands weren't his main concern. "Let me ask that another way," she said. "Have you noticed unusual unrest among any of the hands? I'm especially concerned about the new ones, you under stand. I'm sure the bucks and wenches who've grown up on this plantation are contented with their lot: again, except possibly over money."

Scipio's dark, handsome features reflected nothing but meticulous attention to her words. So he had been trained, and no one could deny the training was a success. Not even Anne, who had caused that perfect mask to be made, could hope to lift up one edge, so to speak, and see what lay behind it. And his beautifully modulated voice revealed only a polite lack of curiosity as he replied, "Madam, I assure you I make every effort to weed out any undesir able influences before they find positions here. And, as you say, the loyalty of your long-time staff is of course unquestioning."

"Thank you, Scipio. You do relieve my mind," Anne said. With a gracious nod, she released him to pursue the rest of his duties. He'd told her exactly what she wanted to hear.

The Confederates had the U.S. soldiers exactly where they wanted them, or so they thought. Captain Irving Morrell wondered how — wondered if-he was going to prove them wrong. The war to which he'd returned two and a half months before bore only a faint resemblance to the one from which he'd been carried in Sonora back in August. For that matter, the heavily forested Kentucky hill country in which he was operating now wasn't anything like the dusty desert where he'd been wounded.

His leg throbbed. He ignored it, as he'd been ignoring it ever since he hiked out of Shelbiana. Somewhere ahead, a good many miles ahead, lay Jenkins right by the Virginia border. In between seemed to be nothing but mountains and valleys and tiny coal-mining towns and even tinier farming hamlets and enough Rebels with guns to make advancing slow, hard, pain ful work.

Atop the hill ahead and in the trenches at its base were enough Confederates not just to slow the U.S. advance but to bring it to a halt. With the lieutenants and sergeants under him, Morrell slipped from one tree to another, drawing as close to the Rebel line as he could.

The sergeants would have been doing that job anyhow, but both lieutenants — their names were Craddock and Buhl-looked notably unhappy. "See for yourself," Morrell said as they sheltered behind a gnarled oak. He spoke as if he were in the pulpit expounding on Holy Writ. "See for yourself. Without good reconnaissance, your force is only half as useful as it would be otherwise-sometimes less than half as useful."

They couldn't argue with him-he outranked them. But they didn't look convinced, either. It wasn't that they were cowards; he'd already seen them fighting with all the courage any superior officer could want from his men. What they lacked was imagination. The way the war was chewing up the offi cer corps, they'd make captain if they lived. He supposed they might even end up majors. He was damned, though, if he saw them going any further, not if the war lasted till they were ninety.

Bill Craddock pointed out to the cleared ground in front of the Confeder ate line. "How are we supposed to cross that, sir?" he said, clearly with the expectation that Morrell would have no answer. "Rebel machine guns'll chew us up like termites gnawing on an old house."

"We'll have to bring our own machine guns forward before we move," Morrell said. "We can bring them up within a hundred yards of their trenches, and concentrate our fire on the places where we want to break in. And… Lieutenant, have you ever gone down to the Empire of Mexico and watched a bullfight?"

"Uh — no, sir," Craddock answered. His broad, stolid face showed he hadn't the faintest idea what Morrell was driving at, either.

With a mental sigh, the captain explained: "The fellow in the bull ring has a sword. That doesn't sound like enough against an angry bull with sharp horns, does it? But he also has a cape. The cape can't hurt the bull, not in a million years. But it's bright and it's showy, and so the bull runs right at it- and the bullfighter sticks the sword in before the bull even notices."

Karl Buhl was marginally quicker than Craddock. "You want us to feint from one direction and hit them from the other, is that what you're saying, sir?"

Morrell glanced at his non-coms. They all understood what he was talking about without his having to draw them any pictures. Some of them were liable to end up with higher ranks than either of their present platoon commanders. But Buhl and Craddock were doing their best, so he answered, "That's right. "We'll try going around the right flank, and then, as soon as they're all hot and bothered, the main force will come straight at 'em, with the machine guns de livering suppressive fire. We can assemble back there"-he pointed-"on the little reverse slope they've been kind enough to leave us."

Had he been commanding the Confederate defenders, he would have moved his line east from the base of the hill to the top of that reverse slope, so he'd have had men covering the ground Rebel bullets could not now reach. If the Rebs were going to be generous enough to give him a present like that, though, he wouldn't turn it down.

"Flanking party will attack at 0530 tomorrow morning," he said. "Buhl, you'll lead that one. We'll give you a couple of extra machine guns, too. If things go well, you won't be only a feint: your attack will turn into the real McCoy. You understand what you're to do?"

"Yes, sir," the lieutenant answered crisply. As long as you dotted all the i's and crossed all the t's for him, he did well enough.

"I'll lead the main force myself, starting at 0545," Morrell said. That left Craddock with no job but support. Morrell didn't care. For that matter, sup port mattered here, and could easily turn into something more. Crossing the open space toward the Confederate trenches was liable to get expensive in a hurry, and Craddock, however imperfectly qualified for company command, was liable to have it thrust upon him.

The reconnaissance party slid along the front for a while, then drifted back through the forest to where the rest of the company waited. An over- eager sentry almost took a pot-shot at them before they would call out the password. When the soldier started to apologize, Morrell praised him for his alertness.

After darkness fell, Morrell guided the machine-gun crews forward to the positions he wanted them to take. That was nerve-wracking work; Confeder ate patrols were prowling the woods, too, and he had to freeze in place more than once to keep from giving away his preparations for the assault.

It was well past midnight when everything was arranged to his satisfaction. He returned to his soldiers, huddled without fire on that chilly reverse slope, and wrapped himself in his green wool blanket. Try as he would, sleep refused to come. Moving pictures kept running behind his eyes: all the differ ent ways the attack might go, all the different things that could go wrong.

At 0500, his orderly, a scar-faced laconic fellow named Hanley, came to tap him on the shoulder. "I'm already awake," he whispered, and Hanley nod ded and slipped away.

Just then, somebody fired a shot — a Tredegar by the sound of it, not a U.S. Springfield. The Rebel trenches came alive, with more gunfire ringing out. Morrell tensed, willing his men not to reply. They knew they shouldn't, but- After a couple of minutes, the Confederates stopped shooting. Somebody had seen a shadow he'd misliked, that was all.

Lieutenant Buhl got his half of the attack going at 0530 on the dot. He was, if uninspired, at least reliable. And, with a couple of machine guns yam mering away for fire support, he sounded as if he had a hell of a lot more than a platoon's worth of men with him.

Morrell passed the word to the rest of his company: "All right, we move up now. No shooting unless the Rebs discover us, or until the time, whichever comes first. I'll skin the man who opens up too soon and gives us away."

Morning twilight was just beginning to seep through the branches of the trees. You could see a trunk a couple of paces before you'd walk into it, but not much farther than that.

The flank attack sounded as if it was going well, not only making progress but also, by the counterfire Morrell heard, drawing Rebels to their left, his right. He held his pocket watch up to his face. Another two minutes, another minute… He blew his whistle, a piercing blast easily audible through the racket of rifles and machine guns.

At the signal, the Maxims he'd sneaked up close to the Confederate lines started hammering at them. Morrell wouldn't have cared to be under machine- gun fire at what was as close to point-blank range as made little difference. Screams and cries of dismay said the Rebs didn't care for it, either.

"Narrow arc!" Morrell yelled. "Narrow arc!" The gunners were supposed to know that already; he'd told them their jobs the night before. If they made the Confederates stay under cover in the areas covered by those narrow arcs of fire, his men would have stretches of trench they could storm with minimal risk. If that didn't happen, his men would get slaughtered.

And so would he. He blew the whistle again, this time twice, burst from the cover of the woods, and ran, bad leg aching under him, toward the Confederate trenches. If you led like that, your soldiers had no excuse not to follow. Follow they did, yelling like so many madmen, firing their Springfields from the hip as they came. You weren't likely to hit anybody that way, but you made the fellows on the other team keep their heads down. That meant they couldn't do as much shooting at you.

A few bullets did crack past Morrell. He fired a couple of shots himself, but made sure he kept a round in the chamber for when he'd really need it. Faster than he imagined possible, he jumped down into the enemy trench.

Nobody waited there to bayonet him or fire at him while he was leaping. A Rebel with the top of his head neatly clipped off sprawled dead; another writhed and moaned, clutching a bleeding arm. But the only healthy Confed erates were trying to get away, not fighting back.

One of his men hurled a grenade at the fleeing Rebs: a half-pound block of Triton explosive with sixteen-penny nails taped all around it, and with five seconds' worth of fuse hooked up to a blasting cap. Unlike guns, grenades could be used around corners and without showing yourself, which made them wonderfully handy for fighting in trenches. Talk was, the munitions factories would start making standardized models any day now. Till they did, improvised versions served well enough.

More grenades, more gunfire. A few Confederates kept fighting. More threw down their rifles and threw up their hands. And still more fled through the gulleys that ran east and south from their trench line.

"Shall we pursue, sir?" Lieutenant Craddock asked, panting. He had the look of a man who'd seen a rabbit pulled out of a hat he thought assuredly empty. Sounding happy but dazed, he went on, "We haven't lost but a man or two wounded, I don't think, and nobody killed."

"Good," Morrell said; it was, in fact, far better than he'd dared hope. Af ter thinking for a moment, he shook his head. "No, Lieutenant, no pursuit, not in that terrain. The Rebs would rally and bushwhack us." He pointed ahead. "Where I want to be is the top of that hill. We control that, we control the countryside around it, too, and we can start flushing the Rebels out at our leisure."

Some of his men were already out of the Confederate trench lines and heading up the steep, rocky slopes. Around here, the elevation, which might have reached fifteen hundred feet, was reckoned a mountain; Morrell didn't like dignifying it with a name he didn't think it deserved. Whatever you called it, though, it was the high ground, and he intended to seize it. He scrambled out of the trench himself. He got to the top of the hill bare moments after the sun came out and let him see for miles. He pulled his watch out of his pocket and looked at it in some surprise: a few minutes past six. His part of the fight had taken only a bit more than twenty minutes. He put the watch back. He'd seen a couple of officers carrying pocket watches on leather straps round their wrists. That was more convenient than having to dig it out whenever you wanted to know the time. Maybe he'd do it himself one day soon.

"King of the mountain, sir," one of his soldiers said with a big grin.

"King of the mountain — such as it is," Morrell echoed, liking the sound of it. He would have liked it even better had the elevation been a more important conquest. But every little bit helped. Enough victories and you won the war. He rubbed his chin. "Now that we're up here, let's see what else we can do."

When Jefferson Pinkard and Bedford Cunningham came back to their side-by-side cottages after another day at the foundry, their wives were standing out in front, talking. The grass was still brown, but would be going green soon; spring wasn't that far away. That wasn't so unusual; Fanny and Emily were good friends, if not so tight together as their husbands, and Emily Pinkard had helped Fanny get a job at the munitions plant where she was already working.

What was unusual was the buff-colored envelope Fanny held in her left hand. Only one outfit used paper that color: the Confederate Conscription Bu reau. Jeff recognized the envelope for what it was before his friend did, but kept his mouth shut. You didn't want to be the one who gave your buddy news like that.

Then Bed Cunningham spotted the CCB envelope. He stopped in his tracks. Pinkard walked on a couple of steps before he stopped, too. "Oh, hell," Cunningham said. He shook his head in profound disgust. "They went and called me up, the sons of bitches."

"It'll be me next," Pinkard said, offering what consolation he could.

"It's not that I'm afraid to go or anything like that," Cunningham said. "You know me, Jeff — I ain't yellow." Jefferson Pinkard nodded, for that was true. His friend went on, "Hell and damnation, though, ain't I worth more to the country here in Birmingham than I am somewhere on the front line totin' a rifle? Any damn fool can do that, but how many folks can make steel?"

"Not enough," Pinkard said. Like a lot of men, he'd picked up almost an attorney's knowledge of the way wartime conscription worked. "You could appeal it, Bed. If the local Bureau board won't listen to you, I bet the governor would."

But Cunningham gloomily shook his head. He'd kept his ear to the ground when it came to conscription, too. "Heard tell the other day how often the governor overrules the CCB when it comes to suckin' people into the Army. Three and a half percent of the time, that's it. Hell, three and a half per cent don't even make good beer."

"I missed that one," Jeff Pinkard admitted.

"Three and a half percent," Cunningham repeated with morose satisfac tion. "States' rights ain't like what it was in the War of Secession, when a governor could stand up and spit in Jeff Davis' eye and he'd have to take it. Don't dare do that no more, not with everybody so beholden to Richmond.

Sorry damn world we live in, when a governor ain't any better'n the president's nigger, but that's how it goes."

Slowly, they went on to Cunningham's walk and headed up it together. The expressions on their wives' faces took away any doubt about what might have been in the CCB envelope. Bedford Cunningham took it out of Fanny's hand, removed the paper inside, and read the typewritten note before crumpling it up and throwing it on the ground.

"When do you have to report?" Pinkard asked, that seeming the only question still open.

"Day after tomorrow," Cunningham answered. "They give a man a lot of time to get ready, now don't they?"

"It's not right," Fanny Cunningham said. "It's not fair, not even a little bit."

"Fair is for when you're rich," her husband answered. "All I could do is the best I could. We'll get by all right now that you're workin', honey. I didn't like the notion, I tell you that much, but it's turned out pretty good." He set a hand on Jefferson Pinkard's shoulder. "You're the one I feel sorry for, Jeff."

"Me?" Pinkard scratched his head. "I'm just goin' on doin' what I always did. They ain't messed with me, way they have with you."

"Not yet they ain't, but they're gonna, an' quicker'n you think." Cunningham sounded very certain, and proceeded to explain why: "All right, I take off my overalls an' they deck me out in butternut. Foundry work's got to go on, though — we all know that. Who they gonna get to take my place?"

Emily Pinkard saw what that meant before her husband did. "Oh, lordy," she said softly.

The light went on in Jeff's head a moment later. "They ain't gonna put no nigger on day shift," he exclaimed, but he didn't sound certain, even to himself.

"Hope you're right," Cunningham said. "I won't be around here to see it, one way or the other. You drop me a line, though, once I find out where my mail should head to, and you tell me whether I'm right or whether I'm wrong. Bet you a Stonewall I'm right." The Confederate five-dollar goldpiece bore Jackson 's fierce, bearded image.

They shook hands on the bet, solemnly. Pinkard thought he was likelier to lose it than win, but made it anyhow. Five dollars wouldn't break him, and they'd come in handy to a private bringing in less than a dollar a day.

Muttering under his breath, Cunningham led Fanny into their house. The evening breeze picked up the conscription notice and skirled it away. Emily and Jeff walked across the lawn to their own cottage, up the steps, and inside. They were both very quiet over the chicken stew Emily served up for supper. Afterwards, when Jefferson got a pipe going, Emily said hesitantly, "Jeff, they wouldn't really put a nigger alongside you — would they?"

Pinkard savored a mouthful of honeyed tobacco before he answered, "You ask me that last year, before the war started, I'd've laughed till I ripped a seam in my britches — either that or I'd've grabbed me a shotgun and loaded it with double-aught buck. Nowadays, though, the war goin' like it is, suckin' up white men like a sponge sucks up water, who the devil knows what they'll do?"

"If they do… what'll you do?"

"Gotta make the steel. Gotta win the war," he said after some thought. "Don't win the damn war, nothin' else matters. Nigger don't get uppity, reckon I have to work with him — for now. Come the day the war's over, though, comes the day of payin' back debts. I got me a vote, an' I know what to do with it. Gets bad enough, I got me a gun, too, an' I know what to do with that."

Slowly, Emily nodded. "I like the way you got o' lookin' at things, honey."

"Wish there were some things I didn't have to look at," Pinkard said. "Maybe we're all wrong. Maybe I'll win that Stonewall from Bed after all. Never can tell."

Word of Cunningham's call to the colors spread fast. All the next day, people came by the foundry floor with flasks and bottles and jars of home- cooked whiskey. The foremen looked the other way, except when they swung by to grab a nip themselves. If any of them knew who was going to replace Cunningham, they kept their mouths shut.

The day after that, Pinkard walked to Sloss Foundry by himself, which seemed strange. His head pounded as if someone were pouring molten metal in there, then rolling and trip-hammering it into shape. He'd done more drinking after he and Bed got home. Hangovers made some men mean. He didn't feel mean, just drained, empty, as if part of his world had been taken away.

He got to the foundry on time, hangover or no hangover. There waiting for him stood Agrippa and Vespasian, the two Negroes who were his and Bed ford Cunningham's night-shift counterparts. However wrong having them around had seemed at first, he'd grown used to it. Most days, he'd nod when he came on and even stand around shooting the breeze with them before they went home to get some sleep, almost as if they'd been white men.

He didn't nod this morning. His face went hard and tight, as if he were in a saloon and getting ready for a fight. Three black men stood waiting for him today, not just two. "Mornin", Mistuh Pinkard," Vespasian said. Agrippa echoed him a moment later. They knew what he had to be thinking.

"Mornin'," Pinkard said curtly. The moment had really come. He hadn't believed it. No, he hadn't wanted to believe it. It was here anyhow. What was he supposed to do about it? Before it turned true, telling your wife you'd stay was easy. Now — Should he stand up on his hind legs and go home? If he didn't do that, he'd have to stay here, and if he stayed here, he'd have to work side by side with this Negro.

"Mistuh Pinkard, this here's Pericles," Vespasian said, nodding at the black man Jeff hadn't seen before.

"Mornin', Mistuh Pinkard," Pericles offered. Like all the Negroes Sloss Foundry had hired since the war began, he was a big, strapping buck, with muscles hard and thick from years in the cotton fields. He couldn't have been more than twenty-one or twenty-two; he had open, friendly features and a thin little mustache you could hardly see against his dark skin.

Years in the cotton fields… Pinkard almost demanded to see his pass book. Odds were, Pericles had no legal right to be anywhere but on a plantation. But the same probably held true for Agrippa and Vespasian, and for most of the other newly hired Negroes at the foundry. If the inspectors ever started checking hard, they'd shut the Sloss works down — and the steel had to be made.

"He kin do the work, Mr. Pinkard," Vespasian said. "We been learnin' him on nights, so he be ready if the time come." He hesitated, then added, "He be my wife's cousin. I vouch for him, I surely do."

Fish or cut bait, Jeff thought. Damn it to hell, how could you walk out on your job when your country was in the middle of a war? You had to win first; then you figured out what was supposed to happen next — he'd had that much right, talking with Emily the night before. "Let's get to work," he said.

"Thank you, Mr. Pinkard," Vespasian breathed. Pinkard didn't answer. Vespasian and Agrippa didn't push him. Even if things were changing, they knew better than that. They nodded to Pericles and headed off the floor.

For the first couple of hours after his shift started, Pinkard didn't say word one to Pericles. When he wanted the Negro to go somewhere or do something, he pointed. Pericles did as he was directed, not with any great skill-a few nights' watching and pitching in couldn't give you that-but with willing enthusiasm.

When Pinkard finally did speak, it wasn't aimed at Pericles, but at the world at large, the same useless complaint Fanny Cunningham had made the night before: "It ain't fair."

"Mistuh Pinkard?" Pericles didn't know how to talk under the foundry floor racket; he bellowed to get permission to speak himself. When Jeff nodded, the Negro said, still loudly, "Fair is for when you're white folks. I can only do the best job I know how."

Pinkard chewed on that for a while. It sounded a hell of a lot like what his friend had said a couple of nights before. When you were down, everybody above you looked to have it easy. When you were a Negro, you were always down, and everybody was above you. He'd never really thought of it in those terms before. After a bit, he shoved the idea aside. It made him uncomfortable.

But he did start talking with Pericles after that. Some things you couldn't explain with just your hands, and some things Bedford Cunningham would have done without thinking were just the sort of things Pericles didn't know, any more than any other new hire would have. The Negro caught on fast enough to keep Pinkard from snarling at him.

A couple of times, Pericles tried to talk about things that weren't directly tied to the job. Pinkard stonily ignored those overtures. Answering back, he thought, would have been like a woman cooperating with her ravisher. After a while, Pericles gave up. But then, when the closing whistle blew, he said, "G'night, Mr. Pinkard. See you in the mornin'."

"Yeah," Pinkard said, his mouth out in front of his brain. What the hell? he thought as he walked home alone. Didn't do any real harm. Maybe I'll even say "Mornin' " tomorrow — but nothin' after that, mind.

Chester Martin knew the Roanoke River lay only a few hundred yards ahead, though he also knew better-much better-than to stick his head up and see just how close the river was. The latest U.S. push had moved the battle line in western Virginia forward into the suburbs of Big Lick again. A couple of more pushes and they'd be over the river at last so they could clean out the eastern side of the Roanoke valley.

"That's what Captain Wyatt says, anyhow," Martin remarked to Paul Andersen, summarizing the latest Army bulletins. "You believe it any more than I do?"

"Hell, no, Sarge," the corporal answered. "What's gonna happen next is, the Rebs'll put on a push of their own, knock us halfway back to Catawba Mountain again. You wait and see."

"I'm not gonna argue with you," Martin said. "We push them, they push us, we push them some more… These lines aren't going to move more than a couple of miles either way from now till doomsday, doesn't look like." He wished he hadn't said doomsday. Too many men with whom he'd started the war — too many replacements, too-had already found their doom here.

"I can see it in the fancy history some fool will write after the war," An dersen said: "you know, some educated fool, the kind who wears those spectacles that stick on your nose but don't have any side pieces to hook 'em to your ears. He'll talk about the thirty-seventh battle of the Roanoke, and that'll be us pushin' the Rebs back a ways, and then he'll talk about the thirty-eighth battle of the Roanoke two weeks later, and that'll be the Rebs kickin' us back to where we started from, and maybe another half a mile besides."

"That all sounds pretty likely," Martin agreed. "I just hope to Jesus we ain't any of the ones who get buried before that thirty-eighth battle." Most of the time, you didn't like to think about such things, not when the whole battlefield stank of death to the point where, if you weren't used to it and just fell here from, say, Philadelphia, you'd puke your guts up for a week. It wasn't cold enough to fight the stink, as it had been a few weeks before.

"Heads up." Andersen pointed down the trench. "Visiting fireman com ing this way."

Sure enough, here came Captain Wyatt with a fellow Martin hadn't seen before, an older man wearing a major's uniform cleaner than those of most soldiers who actually made their living in the front lines. Some sort of inspector, snooping around to see what he thinks we've done all wrong, Martin thought. He hated people like that, hated them with the cold contempt a practical man gives a theoretician's high-flown, useless notions.

He started to laugh, and turned his face away so the new major, whoever he was, wouldn't see. The fellow had spectacles just like the ones to which Paul Andersen had slightingly referred, and a sandy mustache heavily streaked with gray, and a mouth full of big, square teeth…

Chester Martin's head whipped around. It couldn't be, but it was. Ander sen was staring and staring. Captain Wyatt said, "Boys, here's the President of the United States, come to see the war for himself."

Martin hadn't come to attention in the front-line trenches in months. Now he stiffened to straightness so suddenly, his backbone cracked like knuckles. Beside him, Andersen also came to a stiff brace. "At ease," Teddy Roosevelt said. "As you were. I came here to see soldiers, not marionettes."

"Yes, sir!" Martin relaxed, though not all the way. If the battlefield stench bothered TR, he didn't let on. He acted like a soldier, though he hadn't led troops into battle in thirty years or so. But he really could have been an elderly major, not just some politician posturing for the newspapers.

As if picking that thought out of Martin's mind, Roosevelt said, "Reporters don't know I'm here. Far as they know — which isn't far, believe me, not with most of them-I'm still in Philadelphia. If the papers don't know, maybe the Rebs don't know. You think they wouldn't like to put one between my eyes?"

"Yes, sir, they sure would," Martin said. If the Confederates did know the president was here, they'd do everything they could to keep him from getting away again.

"This isn't what war was like out on the plains back before you were born," Roosevelt said. "There was glory in that, the sweep of horses rushing forward, movement, adventure. This… The most I can say for this, gentle men, is that it's necessary, and what we gain from it will make certain that the United States of America take their proud and rightful place among the nations of the world once more."

When you listened to the president talking, you forgot the reek of unburied bodies, the mud, the lice, the barbed wire, the machine guns. You saw farther than your length of trench. You got a glimpse of the country that would come out the other side of this war. It was a place where you wanted to be, too.

Yeah, and what are the odds of that? asked the part of Martin that had been under fire for months. Do you really think you're going to come through alive, or with all your arms and legs if you do live?

Captain Wyatt said, "We hope, sir, that the next offensive will bring us up to the river, and from there we'll proceed toward the Blue Ridge Mountains."

"Bully," TR said. "Our German allies have offensives in the works, too. With God's help, they'll strike the French and the English a heavy blow on the continent." He shook his head. "I don't know what we would have done without Germany, boys. With England and France backing up the Rebels, we were fighting out of our weight when we tried to scrap with them. Not now, though, by jingo, not now."

"Yes, sir," Martin said. "We have friends in high places, eh?"

"The All-Highest place," TR answered with his famous chuckle, still boy ish though he was in his mid-fifties. "Kaiser Wilhelm's done everything he could for us, and we've paid him back, thanks to soldiers like you men."

Martin didn't stand straighter now; Roosevelt had ordered him to be at his ease. But he felt tall and proud just the same. Again, TR made him believe the war had a point, a goal, beyond the miseries of the front. He wondered how long he'd go on believing that once the president left.

A few hundred yards off, a couple of U.S. machine guns started hammer ing away at some Confederate target or other. Rifle fire answered from the Rebel lines, and then their machine guns. After a few minutes, U.S. field guns started pounding the enemy's forward trenches.

Captain Wyatt frowned. "They shouldn't be doing that, not now. It's going to bring down — "

"Captain, I didn't come here to watch a Sunday-school debating society," President Roosevelt said. "This is war. I know what war is.I-"

Before he could finish, the Confederates' quick-firing three-inch guns started raining shells down, on and near the U.S. front lines. The Rebs seldom wasted time replying to an artillery bombardment.

Paul Andersen threw himself flat, Captain Wyatt threw himself flat. To Martin's horror, he saw TR start to stand up on a firing step so he could get a better look at what was going on. Without thinking, he knocked the president down with a block from behind that would have been illegal in a football match, then flopped over TR's squirming body. "Stay flat, dammit!" he shouted. He'd never expected to have the president's ear. Now that he did, this was what he got to tell him? It would have been funny if he hadn't worried about getting killed.

Shrapnel balls and jagged bits of shell casing whined through the air. Bigger U.S. guns started firing, trying to silence the Confederate field pieces. Bigger Rebel guns struck back at the bigger U.S. guns. Both sides forgot about the men at the front for a while.

Warily, Chester Martin sat up. That let TR get up, too. Martin gulped, wondering what the penalty was for levelling the president. But all Roosevelt said was, "Thank you, Sergeant. You know conditions here better than I."

"Uh, thank you, sir." Martin looked at Roosevelt, whose green-gray uniform was now as muddy as his own. "You look like a real, modern soldier now, sir." The president of the United States laughed like a man possessed.