Breakthroughs

XV

Lieutenant Gordon McSweeney peered across the Mississippi from the bushes on the low, swampy Arkansas bank to the bluffs on which sat Memphis, Tennessee. U.S. guns, painfully moved forward over roads that would have had to improve to be reckoned miserable, pounded away at the Confederate bastion.

Nor were the Confederates in the least shy about pounding back. They had a lot of guns in Memphis, and a lot of shells, too. Rail lines up from Mississippi made it easy for them to keep those guns supplied with munitions. Farther east, the course of the Tennessee River shielded Memphis from attack by the U.S. First Army.

And C.S. river gunboats dominated not only the course of the Tennessee but also this stretch of the Mississippi. The mines upstream remained too thick for U.S. monitors to make their way down and challenge the Confederate boats. That meant that, wherever the CSA wanted large-caliber guns to deliver their fire, they could-and they did. They’d hurt U.S. forces on the west bank of the river too many times already.

A U.S. field gun down by the riverbank not far from where McSweeney was standing presumed to fire on one of the river monitors flying the Confederate naval ensign. It hit the monitor square on the turret. The C.S. boat, though, was armored to withstand the shells of others of its kind. A hit from a three-inch gun got its attention but did no damage to speak of-the worst of both worlds.

Ponderously, the turret swung so that the pair of eight-inch guns inside bore on the field piece. Flame and great clouds of gray smoke belched from the muzzles of those eight-inch guns. A couple of seconds later, McSweeney heard the roar as the sound traveled across the water to his ear. An instant after that-or perhaps an instant before-the two shells launched from the guns blew the U.S. field piece and its crew to kingdom come. On steamed the gunboat, smug in its invulnerability.

“God have mercy on their souls,” Gordon McSweeney murmured. He said not a word about the bodies of the brave but foolhardy U.S. gun crew. After those shells struck home, the gunners were fit for burial in jam jars; coffins would have been wasted on their remains.

He’d watched that sort of thing happen too many times before. The United States might have finally reached the bank of the Mississippi, but the Confederate States still ruled this stretch of river. Some U.S. mines had gone into the muddy brown water, but McSweeney hadn’t seen them do any good.

“If you want something done properly, do it yourself,” he muttered under his breath. He was no expert with the mines both sides used in ocean and river warfare, but that did not worry him. The methods that sprang to his mind for disposing of a river monitor were considerably more direct.

He wished one of them involved his beloved flamethrower. He could not figure out how to use it without destroying himself along with the monitor, though. He sighed. God did not grant anyone everything he wanted.

If he asked permission to attack a Confederate river monitor, his superiors would surely tell him no. Accordingly, he asked nothing of anyone, save only the Lord. And the Lord provided…with a certain amount of help from Gordon McSweeney.

He already knew how to swim. He knew how to make a raft, too. After a little thought, he figured out that he would be wise to make the raft well upstream, to ensure that the current did not sweep him past the river monitor instead of toward it. If he came out of the Mississippi without having done what he intended to do, he would be in trouble with the U.S. Army. If he came out on the wrong bank of the Mississippi, he would be a prisoner of war-unless the Rebs chose to shoot him, for he would certainly be out of uniform.

“Where are you going, sir?” a sentry asked as McSweeney left the company perimeter.

“To reconnoiter,” he answered, a response that had the virtue of being true and uninformative at the same time.

Another sentry, a man who did not know McSweeney, asked him the same question when he left the battalion perimeter. He gave the same answer, and got by the same way he had with the soldier from his company. The sentry was not inclined to quarrel with an obvious U.S. officer who sounded short-tempered and was armed to the teeth.

McSweeney would have shown just how short-tempered he was had anyone come across the raft he’d hidden behind bushes and underbrush. But there it was when he pulled the brush aside. He stripped off his clothes, loaded his weapons aboard the raft, and pushed off into the river. No one paid any attention to the small splashing noises he made.

The Mississippi was warm. The mud it carried didn’t keep a couple of fish from finding him and nibbling at him. What he would have done if an alligator or snapping turtle had come up to investigate him was a question he was glad he did not have to answer.

He kicked hard, propelling the raft out toward the middle of the Mississippi. One thing he had not taken into account was his small circle of vision with his eyes only a few inches above the water. If he drifted past the C.S. river monitor without spying it, he would feel worse than just foolish.

There it was! That long, low shape, with almost no freeboard, couldn’t be anything else. Someone had described the original Monitor as a cheese box on a raft, which also fit its descendants, both U.S. and C.S., to a tee-although the Confederates billed theirs as river gunboats, refusing to name their kind after a U.S. warship.

McSweeney hung onto the raft with his fingertips, letting as little of himself show as he could. His scheme would have been impossible had the C.S. vessel’s deck been higher above the waterline. As things were, it was just insanely foolhardy. Gordon McSweeney had been doing insanely foolhardy things since the war began. If God willed that he die doing one of them, die he would, praising His name with his last breath.

He wondered what sort of watch the Confederate sailors kept on deck. He knew they didn’t patrol with electric torches. Had they been foolish enough to do so, U.S. sharpshooters on the western bank of the Mississippi would have made them regret it.

He had to kick hard to keep the raft from gliding past the Confederate monitor and down the river. Grabbing the.45 and the sack of rubberized canvas he’d carried on the raft, he scrambled up onto the monitor’s deck. His bare feet made not a sound on the riveted iron. Somewhere aft, a sentry was pacing; his shoes clanked on the deck.

And here he came. He moved without any particular urgency, but as much on his appointed rounds as a postman might have done. McSweeney had no trouble keeping the turret between himself and the man who strode on through the darkness, never expecting trouble could come on his watch when the Confederate States so dominated this stretch of the Mississippi River.

Whether he expected it or not, trouble shared the deck with him. McSweeney undid the sack and drew from it two one-pound blocks of TNT, twenty seconds’ worth of fuse for each, and a match safe that had stood up to all the rain and mud nearly three years in the trenches had thrown at it. The matches inside rattled. He glared at them, willing them to be silent, then crimped the fuses to the explosive blocks.

Silent himself, he scuttled round the turret to the openings from which the barrels of the monitors’ big guns projected. Once he got there, he reluctantly set down the.45 so he could take a match out of the trusty safe and strike it.

The hiss of the match as it caught was tiny. So was the light that came from it. One or the other, though, alerted the sentry. “Who goes there?” he demanded, his voice suddenly sharp and alert.

“Damnation,” McSweeney muttered, and only saved himself from the blasphemy he so despised by hastily adding, “to the enemies of the Lord.” He lit the fuses attached to the explosive blocks, tossed them inside the monitor’s turret, as far to the back as he could, and snatched up the pistol once more.

“Who goes there?” the sentry repeated. Now his shoes rang on the deck as he hurried to investigate.

McSweeney fired three quick rounds at him. One of them must have hit, for the Reb let out a shriek. McSweeney didn’t care, except insofar as the fellow didn’t get a chance to shoot at him. He threw away the pistol and dove into the Mississippi. He’d cut things too fine, both metaphorically and, with the fuses, literally as well.

He swam away from the monitor as fast as he could. He tried to go as deep as he could. His ears ached in protest. He ignored them, knowing better than they what was about to happen.

No matter how muddy the Mississippi was, suddenly the surface of the water, high over his head, lit up bright as day, bright as hellfire. The explosion behind him sent him tumbling through the water, more than half stunned. Why he didn’t open his mouth and breathe in half the river, he never knew. Either the Lord watched over him or he was simply too stubborn to drown.

After a while, his lungs told him he had to breathe or die. By then, the chunks of iron-some of them bigger than he was-had stopped raining down out of the sky. When he broke the surface, he was amazed he’d swum so far from the Confederate monitor-till he remembered the explosion had given him a big push.

He’d hoped his explosives would touch off the magazine inside the turret, and had they! Had they ever! Bombs bursting in air, he thought as one explosion followed another. God had wanted him to live, and so he lived. Surely no one aboard the monitor did, not now. He struck out for the Arkansas bank of the river. His slow backstroke let him rest whenever he needed.

Alarm tingled through him when he finally splashed up onto the bank of the Mississippi. What if the current had swept him beyond the limits of U.S.-held territory and into land the Rebels still controlled? Then he would have to make his way north, that was all. As long as he was on the right side of the river, being captured never entered his mind.

The sentry who challenged him when he came up onto the land was a pure Yankee, from Maine or New Hampshire. He didn’t believe McSweeney’s explanation of who he was or why he was naked. Neither did his superior, nor that fellow’s superior, either.

Calm as could be, McSweeney kept explaining who he was, what he’d done, and how he’d done it. They gave him clothes. Eventually, they got hold of his service record. That made them argue less and gape more. Then they found out he wasn’t with the company where he was supposed to be, which made them begin to wonder if he might not be in front of them after all.

It was mid-morning before they brought Ben Carlton down to identify him. When Carlton did, they stared and stared. “Oak-leaf cluster,” they kept muttering. “Medal of Honor with an oak-leaf cluster. Who would dare write up the citation, though? Who would believe it?”

“Can you please send me back to my unit?” McSweeney asked. “I’ve had a long night, and I’m very tired.” Everyone kept right on staring at him.

Scipio wished he were anywhere but trapped in the swamps by the Congaree River. He’d wished that ever since Anne Colleton sent him here. He’d never wished it so intensely as now.

From out on the perimeter, the fighters of the Congaree Socialist Republic kept up a continuous crackle of fire. The Confederate militiamen were not nearly so good, man for man, as the Reds, but they had more men and, finally, what looked to be a determination to press the fight.

Cassius looked worried. Scipio had never before seen Cassius look worried, not even when the CSA put down the larger version of the Congaree Socialist Republic, the version that had tried to carry the Red revolution to a wide stretch of South Carolina.

“Damn that Cherry!” he burst out now. “She don’ listen to nobody but her ownself, an’ she weren’t as smart as she reckon she were. An’ now she ain’t here no more, an’ I feels like I’s missin’ my lef’ hand.”

“Maybe you is,” Scipio said, “but maybe you is just as well off without it, too. If she was your left hand, you was always watchin’ it to make sure it don’t stab you in the back.”

“Now I knows that ain’t a lie, but I misses she all de same,” Cassius answered. “What she do, she do for the sake o’the revolution. Anything gits in the way o’the revolution, she sure as hell push it off to de side.” He sighed. “She sure as hell try and push me off to de side, you right about dat. But even so, I misses she. She hate de ’pressors more’n anything in the whole wide world.”

Scipio remained not the least bit sorry he’d mailed that letter to Anne Colleton. “Kin hate too much,” he said.

“Mebbe.” Cassius shrugged. “Sure as hell wish she was shootin’ at de damn buckra, though.”

“Yeah, she do dat good,” Scipio allowed, as if making a great concession. “ ’Course, she shoot at anything that strike she fancy. She shoot at de buckra, or else she shoot at you or me or anything else.”

“She committed to de revolution,” Cassius repeated. “She shoot anybody, she reckon dey gets in de way o’ de revolution. She screw anybody, she reckon dat help de revolution. She screw Miss Anne’s gassed brother till he don’t know up from Tuesday.” He scowled at that. He might have recognized the revolutionary need for it while it was going on, but he hadn’t liked it then. He still didn’t.

“Marse Jacob, he dead,” Scipio said quietly, reminding the leader of the Congaree Socialist Republic. Off in the distance, the crackle of gunfire increased. “All o’ we gwine be dead, too, we don’t figure out what the devil we do ’bout they buckra pretty damn quick.”

Cassius didn’t even disagree with him, not directly. He said, “Even if we’s dead, de revolution go on widout we.”

Scipio would sooner have gone on without the revolution than the other way round. Saying as much struck him as highly inexpedient. Just then, a series of rending crashes off to the northwest made him peer in that direction. “The militia find some shells for they artillery again,” he said, and then, “Do Jesus! Ain’t we got a camp over yonder, ’bout where that stuff come down?”

“We does-or maybe we done did.” Cassius frowned. “I don’t reckon de buckra knowed about dat place. I don’t reckon nobody who don’t live in de swamps could know about dat place.”

Traitors. The word hung in the air as clearly as if the Red leader had spoken it aloud. Any talk of traitors inevitably became talk of Scipio, too. He knew it. For once, though, he was innocent. He had betrayed Cherry, but not the camp. But somebody was liable to jump to the wrong conclusion in this particular case, which would also put him in trouble.

Before Cassius could so much as turn his eyes toward Scipio in speculation, both men looked up at a noise in the sky. Scipio, for a wonder, spotted the aeroplane before Cassius did. It was, as far as aeroplanes went, an antique: an ungainly biplane with a pusher propeller, all struts and booms and wires. Against the swift, sleek fighting scouts the USA put in the air these days, the ugly machine wouldn’t have survived five minutes. But it was plenty good for spying on the men of the Congaree Socialist Republic.

Cassius figured that out as fast as Scipio did. “Ain’t fair!” he shouted furiously. “Shitfire, Kip, it ain’t fair. If the buckra looks down on the swamp like a man look through the cabin window when a pretty woman take off she dress, how we gwine stay hid?”

That was a good question. As far as Scipio could see, that was the good question. He shook his head. No, there was one other. He asked it: “You reckon that pilot got one o’ they wireless telegraph machines up there with he?”

“Don’t rightly know,” Cassius answered. “Do Jesus, though, I hope he don’t.”

That hope, like so many hopes of the Congaree Socialist Republic, was shortly to be dashed. The aeroplane flew back and forth, back and forth, over the encampment. A few of Cassius’ men fired rifles and machine guns at it. It was too high for any of that to damage or even alarm it. Back and forth, back and forth.

Cassius cursed horribly for the next couple of minutes. That did no good, either. He had no more than a couple of minutes to curse. After that, shells started falling on the encampment where he and Scipio had been talking.

The first few explosions were long, and off to Scipio’s right. The next couple were short, and off to his left. Sure as hell, the pilot must have had a wireless telegraph in his flying machine, and used it to correct the aim of the gunners firing at the encampment. The first correction had been excessive, but he’d seen where those shells fell, too. After that-

“Do Jesus!” Scipio screeched through the wail of falling shells. “These ones is comin’ down right on top o’we!”

Cassius must have said something by way of reply. Whatever it was, though, Scipio didn’t hear it. He’d been right and more than right-the shells were coming down on top of him and on top of the biggest encampment the men of the Congaree Socialist Republic had maintained in the swamps by the river that gave them their name.

Scipio threw himself flat. He had seen enough of war to have learned that lesson. Cassius sprawled on the ground a few feet away from him. Mud rained down on them as shell fragments chewed up the landscape all around. Through the explosions, men screamed like lost souls. More shell fragments and shrapnel balls hissed through the air. Something that was not mud fell almost harmlessly on Scipio’s back. Almost harmlessly-it was hot enough to burn. With an oath, he knocked away the hunk of brass.

Overhead, the aeroplane kept circling and circling. The pilot could spot exactly how much damage the artillerymen were doing, and let them know where to send the next few shells. The Confederate States had been doing that sort of thing against the United States since 1914. Now the men of the Congaree Socialist Republic were getting a taste of how effective it could be.

“Scatter!” Cassius shouted. “Git out o’de camp. Git under the trees an’ de bushes. Dat buckra pilot up dere cain’t see we, he cain’t tell de buckra at the guns where to put they shells. Scatter!”

Along with the rest of the Negroes in the encampment, Scipio fled into the forest. He paid no attention to which way he was running, so long as it was away from the unending thunder of the Confederate militia’s cannon. A man not twenty feet in front of him was blown to red rags when a shell exploded between his legs. There wasn’t enough left of him to scream. Scipio shuddered and kept running. If he’d run faster, that might have been him.

No one paid him any special attention as he blundered through the lush woods and the mud. For the first time since Anne Colleton’s machinations had forced him back into the shrunken Congaree Socialist Republic, he was on his own. Running for his life from the bombardment, he needed a while to figure out what that meant. He wasn’t thinking so clearly as he might have been had unfriendly strangers not been doing their best to kill him.

Only when he paused to lie panting under a pine did he realize the bombardment gave him an opportunity the likes of which he had not known since entering the swamp. If he was lucky enough, he might escape. If he wasn’t lucky and he tried it, he’d end up dead, of course. Sometimes he told himself he would sooner die than go on living in the swamps by the Congaree. Unfortunately, he knew what a liar he was.

Still, if he never tasted scrambled turtle eggs again, he wouldn’t shed a tear. Now that he was farther from the artillery bombardment, he noted that the small-arms fire was heavier and closer than it had been. The Confederate militiamen really were doing their best to hammer the Congaree Socialist Republic flat this time. Maybe they would.

If they saw him, he’d be just another Red nigger to them, just another rebel to shoot or bayonet so their vision of what the Confederate States should be could go forward. If they saw him…The problem, then, was to make sure they didn’t see him.

Had he been the woodsman Cassius was, it would have been easy. Even being the poor excuse for a woodsman he truly was, he’d got beyond most of the firing before a white man snapped, “Halt! Who goes there?”

Scipio peered through the brush that screened him. The militiaman pointing a Tredegar his way might have been handsome once, but some disaster had ruined the left side of his face. He was going to shoot if Scipio didn’t satisfy him right away. Scipio tried, using his best butler’s tones to say, “Carry on, Sergeant. The sooner we rid these nasty swamps of the Goddamned Red niggers who infest them, the better off our beloved country shall be.”

Had he laid it on too thick? Sometimes, when he used that voice, he sounded more like an Englishman than an educated white Confederate. But the militiaman with the slagged face was satisfied. “Yes, sir!” he said, and plunged deeper into the swamp. He couldn’t possibly have known who Scipio was, but assumed anyone who talked the way he did had to be an officer.

“Thank you, Miss Anne,” Scipio whispered as he made his way farther and farther from the Congaree. Teaching him how to talk like an educated white man hadn’t been for his benefit-having a butler who could talk like that had given Marshlands more swank. It had also made him a white crow, one who couldn’t fully fit in with the rest of the Negroes on the plantation. He’d hated it while it was going on. Now it just might have saved his life.

If he kept going straight away from the swamp, he’d emerge somewhere near the ruins of the Marshlands mansion. He didn’t want to do that. Too many people around there were liable to recognize him. He swung to the west, guiding himself by the sun as best he could.

He came out in a cotton field that was, like so many others in this part of the country, untended and overrun with weeds. He was filthy and exhausted. He didn’t care. He didn’t care even a little bit. He’d escaped Anne Colleton and Cassius, too. He was, for the time being, a free man again.

Chester Martin was not the only U.S. sergeant commanding a company in Virginia these days. They might eventually get around to promoting him or bringing in an officer to take over. On the other hand, they might not. They might just keep putting more young privates under him, sending them forward, and seeing what the hell happened next. Somewhere not far away, there was supposed to be a regiment led by a first lieutenant, the outfit’s senior officer who was alive and in one piece.

Even a year before, rank would have worried him more than it did today. Today, all he wanted to do was get on with the attack, however it went in. He had trouble believing he was actually eager to go forward. Nor was he the only one. Corporal Bob Reinholdt, who had been furious at not getting a section but was now commanding one, looked up from the Springfield he was cleaning and said, “One more good push and these bastards are going to roll over and play dead.”

“That’s about the size of it, I think,” Martin agreed. “Never thought I’d say it, but they don’t snap back the way they used to.”

Tilden Russell remained a private, too, but he was leading a squad in Martin’s shrunken company. He might lack rank, but he had experience. He said, “The Rebs are like an inner tube with a little tiny leak. They look fine till you press on ’em, but then they give.”

Martin whistled, a low, respectful note. “That’s not half bad, Tilden. You ought to think about writing for the newspapers when the war’s done.”

When the war’s done. The words hung in the air. For a long time-from the minute the fighting started up to his own getting shot and beyond-the war had seemed to stretch out forever ahead of Martin. If he wasn’t still fighting thirty years from now, his sons or grandsons would be, if he found time to marry and beget any on his infrequent leaves. The only way out he’d seen was getting killed-and he’d seen a lot of that.

Now…now it was different. As he rolled himself a cigarette, he thought about how. Reinholdt and Russell had defined the difference as well as he heard it defined. “If we keep pressing on ’em, sooner or later they’ll go flat. I’m finally starting to think it’ll be sooner.”

It hadn’t happened yet. Confederate artillery south of Manassas started banging away at the U.S. lines threatening the town. Those lines weren’t so deeply entrenched nor so well furnished with dugouts as many of the ones in which Martin had previously served: they were too new to have acquired what he’d come to think of as the amenities of trench life. He threw himself down in the dirt and hoped he wouldn’t be like Moses, dying before he entered the promised land of peace. Of course, no one had promised that land to him.

After a while, the barrage eased. He braced for a Confederate counterattack to follow it, but none came. The Rebs still fought ferociously on defense, but they didn’t hit back so hard or so often as they once had-another sign, as Tilden Russell had said, that their inner tube had sprung a leak. Martin wished the Army could have pinned them against the Potomac from the west before they could pull out of Washington. That might have ended the war right there.

As things were, he was glad to get to his feet. He was glad to have feet to get to, and arms, and everything else he’d had before the shelling started. Here and there, wounded men and their pals were shouting for stretcher-bearers. He gauged the cries with practiced ears. The company hadn’t been hurt too badly, not as a group. The unlucky soldiers who were the exceptions wouldn’t have seen things the same way.

A couple of hours later, as afternoon drifted toward evening, a fellow who looked no older than Martin but who had gold oak leaves on his shoulder straps came down the trench. “I’m looking for the company commander,” he called.

“You’ve found him, sir,” Martin said, and jabbed a thumb at his own chest.

The major looked surprised, but only for a moment. “All right, Sergeant. Looks like you got your job the same way I got mine.”

“Yes, sir: I’m still breathing,” Martin answered.

“Fair enough,” the major said with a laugh. “I’m Gideon Adkins. Happens that I’m the senior officer still breathing in this regiment, so the 91st is mine till they send somebody to take my place-if they ever get around to that.”

“We’re in the same boat, all right, sir,” Martin said. “Let’s get down to business. What do you need from B Company?”

Adkins studied him. He knew what was in the major’s mind-the same thing that would be in a brigadier general’s mind when he studied Adkins: can this man do the job, or do we need to replace him? If they did replace Martin, he hoped he wouldn’t be as resentful as Bob Reinholdt had been when he first joined the company.

Well, Major Adkins couldn’t complain about the question he’d asked. Indeed, the young regimental commander said, “That’s the spirit, Sergeant…”

“Oh, sorry, sir. I’m Chester Martin.”

“Thanks, Sergeant Martin. Wish I didn’t have to ask, but I’m still learning the ropes, too, no doubt about it. All right, here’s what you need to know: in three days, we go over the top. First objective is Manassas. Second objective is Independent Hill.” Adkins drew a much-folded map from his breast pocket and pointed the hill out to Martin.

After he glanced at the scale of miles, Martin raised his eyebrows. “Sir, that looks to be eight or ten miles past Manassas. If they’re setting that as an objective for this attack, they do think the Confederate States are ready to throw in the sponge.”

“If they aren’t, we’re going to make them throw it in anyhow,” Gideon Adkins declared. “That’s what this attack is all about. We’ll have plenty of barrels to throw at them, and plenty of aeroplanes, and they’ll be bringing forward some new light machine guns that’ll do a better job of keeping up with a rapid advance.”

“That all sounds good, sir.” Martin gave a wry smile. “And there’ll be plenty of us old-fashioned, garden-variety infantrymen around, to do whatever the barrels and the aeroplanes and the machine guns can’t.”

“Infantrymen?” Major Adkins made as if he’d never heard the word. Then he laughed and slapped Martin on the back. “Yes, I expect there’ll be something or other for old-fashioned critters like us to do.”

Martin spread the word to the other sergeants who commanded the platoons in his company. They had all seen a lot of fighting. One of them said, “Well, it’s been going better lately, but ain’t a one of us’d have the job he’s doing right now if it’d been going what you’d call good.” That summed up the course of the war so well, nobody tried to improve on it.

Barrels came forward under cover of night. They went into position behind the front line, shielded from snoopy Confederates by canvas when the sun rose. Even so, they were about as hard to hide as a herd of elephants in church. U.S. aeroplanes did their best to keep Rebel observers in the sky from flying over territory the United States held.

As had the other recent offensives, this one opened with a short, sharp artillery barrage, designed more to startle and paralyze than to crush. Nobody had bothered to issue Chester Martin a whistle-even if he was commanding a company, he wasn’t an officer. “Come on, boys!” he shouted. “A couple more kicks and the doors fall down.”

A lot of soldiers would fall down, too, fall down and never get up again. Martin wondered how many times he’d gone over the top now. The only answer he came up with was, too many. As machine-gun and rifle bullets whipped around him, he wondered why the hell he’d done it even once. For the life of him-literally, for the life of him-he came up with no answer.

The barrels behind which the infantry advanced forced their way through the Confederates’forward line. U.S. fighting scouts buzzed low overhead, adding their machine-gun fire to that from the barrels-and that from the light machine guns Major Adkins had talked about. Having along firepower more potent than that which Springfields could provide felt very good to a veteran foot soldier.

Here and there, Rebel machine-gun nests and knots of stubborn soldiers in butternut, some white men, some colored, held up the U.S. advance. Martin’s bayonet had blood on it before he got out of the trench system. Rebel artillery, though outgunned, remained scrappy. And the Rebels had barrels of their own, if not so many as those that bore down on them.

Yet, even though resistance was heavy in spots, the Army of Northern Virginia yielded its forward positions more readily than Chester Martin had ever seen it do before. As the soldiers in green-gray broke out of the trenches and into open country, he spotted Bob Reinholdt not far away. “This is too damn easy,” he called. “The Rebs have to have something up their sleeve.”

“Reckon you’re right,” Reinholdt answered, “but to hell with me if I know what it is. I’m going to enjoy this while it lasts.”

“Yeah, me, too,” Martin said. He didn’t enjoy it long, because the Army of Northern Virginia did have something up its sleeve. It had put fewer men into the forward trenches than usual, its generals perhaps aware that, no matter what they did, they could not withstand the first U.S. blow.

Once the first line was pierced, though…The Confederates had machine guns cunningly concealed in every cornfield. They had snipers in every other pine and oak. The ground south of their front line was more stubbornly defended than Martin remembered from earlier fights. He tried to think strategically. In those earlier fights, the Rebs defending open country had been men forced from their trenches. Here, the Confederates had planned from the beginning to fight in the open, and they showed a nasty talent for it.

Martin got to hate cornfields in a hurry. The plants stood taller than a man. You couldn’t see more than one row at a time. Anything might be lurking among them. All too often, it was. Machine guns, trip wires, foxholes…anything at all.

His company managed to bypass the fighting for Manassas itself, skirting it to the west. Before long, by the sound of things, the town was cut off and surrounded, but the Confederates inside showed no signs of quitting: they kept banging away at the U.S. soldiers with whatever they had.

“Come on!” Martin yelled as a Wright two-decker, which could see better than he could, poured fire on the Rebs in a field ahead. The objective lines on Major Adkins’ map had seemed insanely optimistic. They were. The soldiers weren’t going to reach those set for the first day, even if Manassas would fall soon. Martin rolled himself in a blanket when night came and wearily thanked God he was still breathing.

The next day was another grim blur, as the Rebs brought reinforcements forward and tried to counterattack. The U.S. soldiers, glad to play defense for a little while, took savage pleasure in mowing them down. By that evening, the Confederates couldn’t find any more troops who would press home a counterattack. Their raw recruits would make a halfhearted lunge, then fall back in disorder and dismay when rifle and machine-gun bullets began to bite.

By noon the next day, a day behind the preordained schedule but far ahead of Chester Martin’s fondest dreams, he stood atop Independent Hill-a knob barely deserving the name-and peered south, wondering where the next push would take him.

Somewhere north of Independent Hill, Jake Featherston and what was left of his battery-what was left of the First Richmond Howitzers, what was left of the Army of Northern Virginia-tried to hold back the tide with bare hands. He was filthy; he couldn’t remember the last time he’d had leisure even to splash in a creek. His butternut uniform, aside from being out at the knees and elbows, had enough green splotches on it to make him look halfway like a damnyankee.

The real damnyankees were forcing their way across Cedar Run. He’d expected they would be any time now, and had taken the range for his guns. “Let’s give it to them, boys,” he shouted, and the four surviving guns of the battery began banging away. Peering through field glasses, he watched the explosions a couple of miles to the north. The shells were falling right where he wanted them to: on the leading Yankees and trailing Confederates.

He was the man with the binoculars. The rest of his gun crews couldn’t tell exactly where the rounds were coming down. That wasn’t their job; it was his. If the Confederate stragglers caught a little hell from their own side, too damn bad. Odds are they’re niggers anyway, he thought.

Retreating infantry streamed past the battery to either side. Some of the men falling back were indeed colored. Others, to Jake’s disgust, were white. “Why don’t you fight the goddamn sons of bitches?” he shouted at them.

“Fuck you,” one of the infantrymen shouted back. “Got your damn nerve yellin’ at us when you lousy bastards ain’t never been up in a trench in all your born days. Hope the damnyankees run right over you, give you a taste of what real for-true soldierin’ is like.”

Featherston’s temper went up like an ammunition dump. “Canister!” he shouted, fully intending to turn his gun on the infantryman who’d talked back to him-and on the fellow’s pals, too. “Load me a round of canister, damn your eyes. I’ll teach that asshole to run his mouth when he don’t know what he’s talkin’ about.”

“Sorry, Sarge, don’t reckon we got any more canister,” Michael Scott said. That was a damn lie, and Featherston knew it was a damn lie. He cussed his loader up one side and down the other. By the time he was through, the offending soldiers were around a stand of trees and out of sight. Scott probably thought that meant they were forgotten, but he underestimated Jake, who never forgot a slight, even when he could do nothing about it.

This was one of those times. Regardless of his shelling, the Yankees kept right on crossing Cedar Run. A few aeroplanes emblazoned with the Confederate battle flag swooped down on them. But more U.S. fighting scouts raked the soldiers in butternut who were trying to hold them back.

Despite the aeroplanes, despite the Yankees’ numbers, Featherston thought for a while that the Army of Northern Virginia would be able to hold them not too far south of Cedar Run. From his own position on slightly higher ground, he was able to watch U.S. assaults crumple in the face of fire from the machine guns the Confederates had posted in cornfields and woods.

“Those fields’ll raise a fine crop of dead men,” he said with a chuckle, turning the elevation screw to shorten the range on his own field piece.

But the men in green-gray did not give up, despite the casualties they took. In almost three years of war, Jake had come to know the enemy well. The Yankees made more stolid soldiers than the men alongside of whom he’d gone to war. They weren’t quite so quick to exploit advantages as were their Confederate counterparts. That coin had two sides, though, for they kept coming even after losses that might have torn the heart out of a C.S. attack.

As usual these days, they had barrels leading the way, too. Featherston whooped with glee when one of the guns from his battery set a traveling fortress on fire. “Burn now and burn in hell, you sons of bitches!” he shouted. He hoped they did burn. That would hurt the damnyankees, for every barrel carried inside it a couple of squads’ worth of men.

For every U.S. barrel Confederate artillery or Confederate tanks-Jake still sneered whenever the term crossed his mind-knocked out, though, two or three more kept waddling forward. And the Yankees’ front-line troops seemed to have an ungodly number of machine guns, too. Featherston recognized the muzzle flashes that went on and on as the guns fired burst after burst at the C.S. troops resisting them.

In disgust, he turned to Michael Scott. “There’s somethin’ else we’ll get around to trying in six, eight months-maybe a year-or we would, ’cept the goddamn war’ll be lost to hell and gone by then,” he said.

“Those can’t be regular machine guns,” the loader replied. “They’re keeping up with the rest of the damnyankee infantry way too good for that. Yankees must’ve turned out some lightweight models.”

“So why the hell ain’t we?” Featherston asked, a good question without a good answer. Not long before, he’d reckoned U.S. soldiers stolid in the way they fought. There was, unfortunately, nothing stolid about their War Department. He spat in disgust. “Those white-bearded fools down in Richmond shouldn’t ever have started this here fight if they didn’t reckon they could whip the USA.”

“They did reckon that.” Steady as if he were attacking New York instead of defending Richmond, Scott loaded yet another shell into the breech of the quick-firing three-inch. Featherston made a minute adjustment to the traversing screw, then nodded. Scott yanked the lanyard. The gun bellowed. Scott opened the breech. Out fell the shell casing, to land with a clank on one of the many others the piece had already fired. As he placed the next shell in the breech, the loader went on, “Maybe they weren’t quite right this time.”

“Yeah-maybe.” A rattlesnake might have carried more venom in its mouth than Jake Featherston did, but not much more. He fiddled with the traversing screw again-the Yankee machine gun at which he’d aimed the last shell was still blazing away. When he was satisfied, he yelled, “Fire!” The field gun roared again. He took off his tin hat and waved it in the air when that lightweight gun-Scott had made a shrewd guess there-abruptly fell silent.

Darkness slowed the carnage, but didn’t stop it. Featherston slept by his gun, in fitful snatches when the firing died down for a while. Ammunition did come forward to his guns, but U.S. bombing aeroplanes kept thundering by low overhead and dropping their loads deep behind the Confederate line. Troops and munitions would have a harder time moving up in the morning.

When the skirmishing along the front line picked up, he fired a few rounds at where he thought the damnyankees were. Michael Scott wasn’t so sure. “Haven’t you shortened the range so much, those’ll be dropping on our own boys?” he asked.

“Don’t reckon so,” Jake answered. “Yanks’ll likely have moved up a bit since we could see where they were at. And if they haven’t, well, what the hell? Odds are I’m just blowing up some coons.”

Fighting grew heavy before sunrise. As soon as black turned to gray, the two armies started going at each other-or rather, the U.S. forces started going at the Army of Northern Virginia, which fought desperately to hold back the onslaught. The damnyankees had brought soldiers and supplies forward during the night, too, and threw everything they had into the fight.

For a couple of hours, in spite of his gibes about the fools in Richmond and his contempt for the Negroes surely manning a large part of the line in front of him, Featherston dared hope that line would hold. The Yankees crept within a couple of thousand yards of his position-close enough that occasional rifle and machine-gun bullets whistled by-and stalled.

But then, no doubt saved for just such an emergency, fifteen or twenty barrels painted green-gray rumbled over pontoon bridges thrown across Cedar Run and straight at the outnumbered, outgunned men in butternut. Jake looked wildly in all directions. Where were the Confederate barrels that could blunt the slow-moving charge of the U.S. machines?

He saw none. There were none to see. He shouted to his gun, to his battery: “It’s up to us. If we don’t stop them fuckers, nobody does.”

They did what they could do. Three or four barrels went up in flames, sending pillars of black smoke high into the sky to mark their funeral pyres. But the rest kept coming, through the woods, through the fields, straight at him-and straight through what was left of the Army of Northern Virginia’s line.

And the line gave way. He’d seen that up at Round Hill: a sea of panic-stricken men in butternut streaming back toward him. He’d hoped he’d never see anything like it again. But here it was. These soldiers-some white, more colored-had had all the fighting they could stand. The only thing left in their minds was escaping the oncoming foe.

They might have had a better chance if they’d stayed and tried to hold back the U.S. soldiers. Infantrymen in green-gray and barrel crews were not the least bit shy about shooting fleeing Confederates in the back.

Featherston would cheerfully have shot them in the back, too. He didn’t have that choice, since they were coming his way. “Fight!” he shouted to the infantrymen. “Turn around and fight, God damn you!” They didn’t. They wouldn’t. As he had at Round Hill, as he had when the soldier cursed him the day before, he shouted, “Canister! If I can’t do it any other way, I’ll send ’em back on account of they’re more afraid of me than they ever dreamt of being afraid of the damnyankees.”

Michael Scott objected again: “Sarge, God only knows how come we didn’t get crucified the last time we did that. If we do it again-”

Featherston did not intend to let his loader balk him, not now. He drew his pistol. “I’ll load and fire it myself if I have to,” he snarled. Then, over open sights, he aimed the gun at the Confederate soldiers heading his way. Scott could have drawn his own weapon. Instead, white-faced, he loaded the round Jake had demanded. Jake pulled the lanyard himself. He shrieked out a Rebel yell when the worthless, cowardly scum in butternut vanished from before the gun as if swept aside by a broom. He might have hit some of the Yankees close on their heels, too.

But the canister rounds-he fired several-did not, could not, stem the rout, any more than they had at Round Hill. The infantry would run, and he could not stop them. Save for the ones he killed and maimed, the men in butternut fled past him. Black soldiers and white cried out in amazement that he did not flee, too.

“Cowards!” he shouted at them in turn. “Filthy, stinking, rotten cowards! Stand and fight, damn you all. You’re stabbing your country in the back.”

And then the Yankees were well within canister range. He gave them several rounds, too, to make them go to ground. That bought him time to limber up his guns and abandon his own position. He could not hold if everything around him fell. All four guns got out.

“Backstabbers,” he muttered as he trudged south past Independent Hill. “Nothing but filthy backstabbers. I’ll pay them all back one day, every goddamn one of them, so help me Jesus I will.”

Sam Carsten shoveled in beans and smoked sausage and sauerkraut alongside dozens of other men in the galley. The USS Dakota rolled as he ate, but the tables were mounted on gimbals. The rolling wasn’t nearly enough to make his food end up in his lap.

Across the table from him, Vic Crosetti grinned and poured down coffee. “Well, you were right, you lucky son of a bitch-we’re still down here and it’s turning into winter. You don’t toast for a while longer yet.”

“Oh, come on,” Sam said mildly. “Yeah, it’s winter, but it’s not winter, if you know what I mean. Just kind of gray and gloomy, that’s all. It’s like San Francisco winter, kind of. That’s not so bad.”

“Yeah, that’s not so bad,” Crosetti said, with the air of a man granting a great and undeserved favor, “but it ain’t so goddamn good, neither. If we was back in the Sandwich Islands now, I’d be laying under a palm tree with one of those what-do-you-call-’em flowers in my hair-”

“Hibiscus?” Carsten said.

“Yeah, one of them,” Crosetti agreed. “With a hibiscus flower in my hair and with my arm around a broad. I’d be suckin’ up a cold drink, or maybe she’d be suckin’ up somethin’ else. But no, it’s winter out in the goddamn South Atlantic, and you, you son of a bitch, you’re happy about it.”

“You bet I am,” Carsten said. “For one thing, back at Pearl Harbor we might get leave once in a while, yeah, but they’d work our tails off the rest of the time, harder’n they’re working us now when we aren’t fighting. That’s one thing, mind you. You know damn well what the other one is.”

“Sure as hell do.” Crosetti cackled like a hen just delivered of an egg. “Layin’ under a palm tree wouldn’t do you one single, stinking, solitary bit of good. Everybody’d reckon you were the roast pig they was supposed to eat for supper, ’cept maybe you wouldn’t have an apple in your mouth. God help you if you did, though.”

“Jesus!” Sam had been swigging coffee himself. He had everything he could do to keep it from coming out his nose. “Don’t make me laugh like that again. Especially don’t make me laugh like that and want to deck you at the same time.” He put down the coffee mug and made a fist-a pale, pale fist.

Vic Crosetti grinned again, no doubt ready with another snappy comeback. Damn smartmouth wop, Carsten thought with wry affection, bracing himself to laugh and get furious at the same time again. But instead of sticking the needle in him one more time, Crosetti jumped from his seat and sprang to attention. So did Sam, wondering why the devil Commander Grady was coming into the galley.

“As you were, men,” the commander of the starboard secondary armament said. “This isn’t a snap inspection.”

“Then what the hell is it?” Crosetti mumbled as he sat down again. Carsten would have said the same thing if his bunkmate hadn’t beaten him to it. Several sailors let out quiet-but not quite quiet enough-sighs of relief.

“I have an announcement to make,” Grady said, “an announcement that will affect the Dakota and our mission. We have just received word by wireless telegraph that the Empire of Brazil has declared war on the United Kingdom, the Republic of France, the Confederate States of America, and the Republic of Argentina.” He grinned now, an expression of pure exultation. “How about that, boys?”

For a few seconds, the big compartment was absolutely still. Then it erupted in bedlam. At any other time, a passing officer would have angrily broken up the disturbance and assigned punishment to every man jack in there. Now Commander Grady, showing his teeth like a chimpanzee in the zoo, pounded on the bulkhead and whooped louder than anybody else.

“Dom Pedro knows whose ship is sinking, and it isn’t ours!” Carsten shouted.

“Good-bye, England!” Crosetti yelled, and waved at Sam as if he were King George. “So long, pal! Be seein’ you-be seein’ you starve.”

“Hell of a lot longer run from Buenos Aires to west Africa than it is from Pernambuco,” Sam said through the din, as if he were seeing things from Rear Admiral Bradley Fiske’s cabin. “And with Brazil in the war on our side, we’ll be able to use their ports, and they’ll have some ships of their own they’ll throw into the pot.” As he weighted the sudden, enormous change, his smile got wider and wider. “Near as I can see, the limeys are a lobster in the pot, and the water’s starting to boil.”

“Near as I can see, you’re right.” Vic Crosetti nodded emphatically. Then he leered at Carsten. “And you know what else?”

“No, what?” Sam asked.

“Near as I can see, you’re a lobster in the pot, and the water’s starting to boil, too,” Crosetti answered. “If we go up into Brazilian waters, buddy, that might as well be Pearl Harbor.” He pantomimed putting on a bib. “Waiter! Some drawn butter, and make it snappy.”

“You go to hell,” Carsten said, but he was laughing, too.

“Maybe I will,” the swarthy Italian sailor answered, “but if we head to Brazil, you’ll burn ahead of me, and that’s a promise.”

He was right. Sam knew only too well how right he was. All at once, the big, fair sailor dug into the unappetizing dinner before him. “I better eat quick,” he said with his mouth full, “so I can get to the pharmacist’s mate before I have to go back on duty.”

“First sensible thing I’ve heard you say in a long time,” Crosetti told him. With Commander Grady still there celebrating along with the sailors, Sam couldn’t even think about punching his bunkmate in the nose…very much.

The pharmacist’s mate behind the dispensary window was a wizened, cadaverous-looking fellow named Morton P. Lewis. On a day like today, even his face wore as much of a smile as it had room for. “Ah, Carsten,” he said, nodding rather stiffly at Sam. “Haven’t seen you for a while, but I can’t say I’m surprised to see you now.” His Vermont accent swallowed the r in Sam’s last name and turned can’t into something that might have come from an Englishman’s mouth.

“Heading up toward sunny weather,” Carsten said resignedly. “You want to give me a couple of gallons of that zinc-oxide goop?”

“It’s dispensed in two-ounce tubes, as you know perfectly well.” Lewis’ voice was prim, proper, precise.

“Oh, don’t I just,” Sam said. “Don’t I just.” He sighed. “Damned if I know why I bother with the stuff. I burn almost as bad with it as without it.”

“Your answer, I would say, boils down to the word almost,” the pharmacist’s mate replied.

“Yeah.” Carsten sighed again. “Well, let me have a tube now, would you? Sooner I start using it-” He broke off and stared at Morton P. Lewis. “Boils down to is right. You do that on purpose, Mort?”

“Do what?” said Lewis, a man whose sense of humor, if he’d ever had one, must have been amputated at an early age. His blank look convinced Carsten he hadn’t done it on purpose. But, even if humorless, the pharmacist’s mate wasn’t stupid. “Oh. I see what you’re asking about. Heh, heh.”

“Listen, can I have the stuff, for God’s sake?” Sam asked.

“You don’t require a doctor’s prescription for zinc-oxide ointment,” Lewis said, which Carsten already knew from years at sea. “You don’t require authorization from a superior officer, either.” Carsten knew that, too. The pharmacist’s mate finally came to the point: “You do require the completion of the required paperwork.” He didn’t notice he’d used the same word twice in one sentence, and Sam didn’t point it out to him.

He did say, “Mort, if we get men wounded during an action, I hope you don’t make them fill out all their forms before you give ’em what they need.”

“Oh, no,” Lewis said seriously. “Unnecessary delay in emergency situations is forbidden by regulation.” He went back in among his medicaments before Carsten could find an answer for that.

When he returned, he was carrying a tinfoil tube and a sheaf of papers. In ordinary situations, delay seemed to be encouraged, not forbidden. Sam checked boxes and signed on lines. What it all boiled down to was that he wouldn’t use the zinc oxide for anything illegal or immoral. Since the stuff was too thick and resistant to be any fun if he wanted to jack off with it, he couldn’t imagine anything illegal or immoral he could use it for.

Wading through the paperwork meant he had to hustle to make it up on deck without getting chewed out. That was the way life in the Navy worked: you hurried so you could take it easy a few minutes later. It had never made a whole lot of sense to him, but nobody’d asked his opinion. He wasn’t holding his breath waiting for anyone to ask, either.

No sooner had that thought crossed his mind than Hiram Kidde came by, puffing on a fat cigar. He asked Sam’s opinion: “How about Dom Pedro, eh?” But he didn’t wait for an answer, giving his own instead: “Took the wall-eyed little son of a bitch long enough.”

“Yeah,” Carsten said; he agreed with that opinion. “But he’s gone and done it. He sees the writing on the wall.”

“He’d better,” the chief gunner’s mate said. “Train was almost out of the station before he decided to jump on board.” He sneered, an expression that could turn a junior lieutenant’s bones to water. “Doesn’t cost him anything, either-just his name on four pieces of paper. Not like Brazil’s gonna do any fighting.”

“Maybe a little against Argentina,” Sam said. “But yeah, not much. Jesus, though, closing that coast to England and opening it up to us…doesn’t cost Dom Pedro much, like you say, but it does us a hell of a lot of good.”

“Uh-huh.” Kidde gave him almost the same leer Vic Crosetti had. “Does us a hell of a lot of good, but you’re going to be fried crisp when we head up that way.”

Wearily, Sam reached into his pocket and displayed the tube of zinc-oxide ointment. Hiram Kidde laughed so hard, he had to take the cigar out of his mouth. When he started to flick the long, gray ash onto the deck, Carsten said, “Whoever swabs that up ought to swab your shoes, too.”

Kidde looked down at his feet. He could have seen himself in the perfectly polished oxfords. Three steps put him by the rail. The ash went into the Atlantic. “There. You happy now?” he asked.

“Sure,” Sam answered. “Why not? Way I see things, world’s looking pretty decent these days. Yeah, I’m going to burn for a while, but the Dakota’s home port is San Francisco. War ever ends, I figure we’ll go back there for a spell.”

“You burn in Frisco, too,” Kidde pointed out, “and that ain’t easy.”

“I know, but I don’t burn so bad there,” Sam said. “I’ll tell you one more thing, too: Brazil jumping into the war may make me burn, but it makes the limeys sweat. You come right down to it, that’s a pretty fair bargain.”

“Well, mon vieux, how is it with you?” Lucien Galtier asked his horse as they made their way up toward Riviere-du-Loup. A U.S. Ford didn’t bother to honk for them to pull over, but zoomed around the wagon and shot up toward town at what had to be close to thirty miles an hour. “I wonder why he is in such a hurry,” Galtier mused. “I wonder why anyone would be in such a hurry.”

The horse did not answer, save for a slight snort that was likelier to be a response to the stink of the motorcar’s exhaust than to Galtier’s words. But the Ford kicked up hardly any dust from the fine paved road. The Americans had extended it for their own purposes, not for his, but he was taking advantage of it. Jedediah Quigley had told him he would. Jedediah Quigley had told him quite a few things. A good many more than he’d expected had turned out to be true.

His mind couldn’t help doing a little of the arithmetic the good sisters had drilled into him with a ruler coming across his knuckles. If he had a motorcar capable of thirty miles an hour-oh, not today, not tomorrow, but maybe one of these days-he could get to town in…could it possibly be so few minutes?

“My old,” he said to the horse, “I begin to see how it is that the Americans have put so many of your relations out to pasture. I mean no offense, of course.”

A flick of the ears meant the horse had heard him. It dropped some horse balls on the fine paved road. Maybe that was its opinion of going out to pasture. Maybe that was just its opinion of the road. Behind him, some chickens made comments of their own. He never paid attention to what the chickens had to say. Their first journey into town was also their last. They did not have the chance to learn from experience.

Outside Riviere-du-Loup, the snouts of antiaircraft guns poked into the sky. The soldiers who manned them wore uniforms of American cut, but of blue-gray cloth rather than green-gray. Galtier cocked his head to one side to listen to them talking back and forth. Sure enough, they spoke French of the same sort as his own. Soldiers of the Republic of Quebec, he thought. Dr. O’Doull had said there were such men. Now he saw them in the flesh. They were indeed a marvel.

“What do you think?” he asked the horse. Whatever the horse thought, it revealed nothing. Unlike the chickens, the horse was no fool. It had come into town any number of times. It knew how much trouble you could find by letting someone know what was in your mind.

Lucien drove the wagon into the market square. Newsboys hawked papers whose headlines still trumpeted Brazil’s entry into the war, though Galtier had heard about it several days before from Nicole, who had heard it from the Americans at the hospital. The newspapers also trumpeted Brazil’s recognition of the Republic of Quebec. That was actually news.

He tried to outshout the newsboys and all the other farmers who’d come into the market square to sell goods from their farms. His chickens had a solid reputation. They went quickly. He made good money. Soon he was down to one last ignorant fowl. He waited for a housewife to carry it off by the feet.

But the chicken was not to go to a housewife and her tinker or clerk or carpenter of a husband and their horde of hungry children. Here came Bishop Pascal, plump enough to look as if he could eat up the whole bird at one sitting. Galtier hid a smile. The bishop was being a good republican-ostentatiously being a good republican-and shopping for himself again, instead of letting his housekeeper do the job. How she would scold if she found out how much a rude farmer had overcharged him! Lucien had no compunctions whatever. Bishop Pascal could afford it, and then some.

“Good day, good day, good day,” he said now with a broad smile. “How does it go with you, my friend?”

“Not bad,” Lucien said. “And yourself?”

“Everything is well. I give thanks to you for asking, and to le bon Dieu for making it so.” Bishop Pascal crossed himself, then held his right forefinger in the air. “No. Not quite everything is perfectly well.” He pointed that finger at Lucien Galtier as if it were a loaded gun. “And it is your fault.” As best he could with his round smiling face, he glowered. He sounded very severe.

“My fault?” Lucien’s voice was a startled squeak, like Georges’ when his son was caught in a piece of tomfoolery. “What have I done?” What had he done to offend Bishop Pascal? Offending the bishop could be dangerous.

“What have you done? You do not even know?” Bishop Pascal sounded more severe yet. He wagged that forefinger in Lucien’s face. “Do I understand correctly that I am not to officiate at the wedding of your lovely Nicole to Dr. O’Doull?”

“I am desolated, your Reverence, but it is so,” Galtier replied, doing his best to imply that he was desolated almost to the point of hurling himself into the St. Lawrence. That was not so; he felt nothing but relief. “You must comprehend, this is not my fault, and it is not meant as an insult to you. Dr. O’Doull is the closest of friends with Father Fitzpatrick, the American chaplain at the hospital, and will hear of no one else’s performing the ceremony.”

Only the truth there. That it delighted Galtier had nothing to do with the price of chickens. He wanted as little to do with Bishop Pascal as he could; the man had got too cozy with the Americans too fast to suit a lot of people, even those who, like Lucien, had ended up getting closer to the Americans themselves than they’d ever expected.

“One can hardly go against the express wishes of the bridegroom, true. Still-” Bishop Pascal always looked for an angle, as his quick collaboration proved. “I must confess, I do not know Father Fitzpatrick as well as I should. I am certain his Latin must be impeccable, but has he also French?”

“Oh, yes.” Galtier most carefully did not smile at the disappointment in the bishop’s eyes. “I have spoken with him several times. He is not so fluent as Major Quigley or Dr. O’Doull, but he makes himself understood without trouble. He also understands when we speak to him. I have seen many an English-speaker who can talk but not understand. I have some of the same trouble myself, in fact, when I try to use English.”

“Ah, well.” Bishop Pascal sighed. “I see there is nothing more to be said in that matter, and I see also, to my great joy, that this choice has not come about because I am diminished in your eyes.” Galtier shook his head, denying the possibility with all the more vigor because it was true. Bishop Pascal turned his forefinger and his attention in another direction. “Since this is so, perhaps you will do me the honor of selling me that lovely fowl.”

Lucien not only did Bishop Pascal the honor, he did him out of about forty cents for which the bishop, being a man of the cloth, had no urgent need. If Bishop Pascal proved unwise enough to mention to his housekeeper the price he’d paid to Galtier, he would indeed hear about it. He’d hear about it till he was sick of it. Odds were, he’d heard enough of similar follies often enough to try to keep quiet about this one.

“I thank you very much, your Reverence,” said Galtier, who could think of several useful purposes to which he might put forty cents or so. He waved at the empty cages behind him. “And now, since that was the last of the birds I brought to town today, I think I shall-”

He did not get the chance to tell Bishop Pascal what he would do. Three newsboys ran into the market square, each from a different direction. They all carried papers with enormous headlines, a different edition from the ones Galtier had glanced at coming into Riviere-du-Loup. They were all shouting the same thing: “France asks for armistice! France asks Germany for armistice!” Over and over, the words echoed through the square.

“Calisse. Oh, maudit calisse,” Lucien Galtier said softly. He needed time to remember that the Germans who were the enemies of France were allied to the United States, the supporters of the Republic of Quebec and, much more to the point, the homeland of his soon to be son-in-law. He wished he had not cursed such news where Bishop Pascal could hear him.

The bishop waved to the newsboys, who raced to get to him. He bought a paper from the one who ran fastest. He blessed them all: some consolation, but probably not much. As they went off, one happy, two disappointed, he turned to Galtier. “I understand how you feel, my friend,” he said, “and I, I feel this pain as well. It is the country from which our forefathers came, after all, and we remain proud to be French, as well we should. Is it not so?”

“Yes. It is so,” Galtier said. To hear that his homeland had gone down to defeat at the hands of the Boches was very hard, even when the Boches were friendly to the United States.

But Bishop Pascal said, “The France that is beaten today is not the France that sent our ancestors to this land. The France that was beaten today is a France that has turned its back on the holy mother Catholic Church, a France that embraced the godless Revolution. This is a France of absinthe-drinkers and artists who paint filthy pictures no sensible man can understand or would want to understand, a France of women who care nothing for their reputations, only that they should have reputations. It is not ours. If it is beaten, God has meant for it to be beaten, that it may return to the right and proper path.”

“It could be that you are right.” Lucien spread his hands. “I am but an ignorant man, and easily confused. Right now I feel torn in two.”

“You are a good man-that is what you are. Here, let us see what has happened.” Bishop Pascal read rapidly through the newspaper, passing sentences to Galtier as he did so: “The Republic of France, unable any longer to withstand the weight of arms of the Empire of Germany, requests a cease-fire…. All English troops to leave France within seven days, or face combat from French forces…. The German High Seas Fleet and the U.S. Navy to have fueling and supply privileges at French ports, the Royal Navy to be denied them…. The new border between France and Germany to be fixed by treaty once the war ends everywhere. Thus the atheists and their mistresses are humbled and brought low.”

No doubt there were some in France who met Bishop Pascal’s description. But, since France was a nation of men and women like any other, Lucien was sure it also held a great many more folk who did not. And they too were humbled and brought low. A meticulous man, Galtier had trouble seeing the justice in that.

Had Germany been conquered instead of conquering, what would have happened to the ordinary Germans? Much the same, he suspected. Did that make it right? Was he God, to know the answers to such questions?

Bishop Pascal said, “How much longer can the war on this side of the Atlantic go on now? How much longer before all of Quebec joins our Republic of Quebec? I assure you, this cannot now long be delayed.”

“I think you are likely to be right.” Lucien recalled the men in blue-gray uniforms at the antiaircraft guns outside of town.

“The killing shall cease,” Bishop Pascal said. “Peace shall be restored, and, God willing, we shall never fight such a great and mad war again.”

“I hope we do not,” Galtier said. “I shall pray that you are right.” But he spent a lot of time talking to his horse on the way home from Riviere-du-Loup. When he got there, he still felt torn in two.