Breakthroughs

XIX

From the conning tower of the Bonefish, Roger Kimball stared gloomily out into the blackness of night on the tropical Atlantic. A million stars hung overhead. The moon’s lantern floated low in the east and spilled a long track of pale yellow light across the dark water. It was as beautiful a seascape as God ever made.

He was blind to the beauty. That afternoon, the wireless telegraph had picked up orders directing all Confederate submersibles to return to their home ports, as the Confederate States had been forced to seek an armistice from the United States. Ever so reluctantly, he’d shaped course for Habana.

He’d wondered how the crew would take the news. Most of the sailors had taken it the same way he had: they’d been furious and heartsick at the same time. “God damn it, Skipper, we didn’t lose the war!” Ben Coulter had cried. “It was those stupid Army bastards who went and lost it. Nobody ever licked us. Why do we have to go and quit?” Several other men had shouted profane agreement.

Since Kimball felt like that, too, he’d had trouble answering. Tom Brearley had done it for him: “If the damnyankees lick us on land, we have to give in. Otherwise, where do we go home?”

“I don’t give a fuck,” Coulter had answered. “Ain’t had a home but for my boat the past twenty years anyways.”

Kimball chuckled, remembering the startled expression on his exec’s face, as if Coulter had hit him in the side of the head with a sack full of wet sand. The captain of the Bonefish agreed with the petty officer. For that matter, he still wasn’t sure whether or not the Arkansas farm on which he’d grown up remained in C.S. hands. He hadn’t heard from his mother in a long time. And whether it did or not, he didn’t want to go back. The Navy was his life these days…he hoped.

Brearley joined him atop the conning tower. The exec stayed silent for several minutes, accurately guessing Kimball did not care for conversation. But Brearley, as happened sometimes, didn’t keep his mouth shut long enough. “Sir, once we get to port, what are they going to do with us?”

“Don’t know,” Kimball said shortly, hoping the exec would take the hint.

He didn’t. “The damnyankees are liable to make us cut way back on submarines. We’ve hurt ’em bad; they won’t want to give us the chance to do it again.”

“Worry about that if it happens.” But Kimball had already started worrying about it. He’d been worrying for weeks, even since word of the first Confederate peace feelers came to his ears. He was liable to end up on the beach, not because of what he wanted but because of what the United States decreed. He enjoyed that idea about as much as the idea of a kick in the balls.

A fragment of a curse floated up through the open hatch: “-it, we fought the bastards to a draw out here. Hell, ain’t close to fair we have too-”

Brearley broke into it, as he’d broken into Kimball’s silence: “The Yankees could cripple our Navy for years. They could even-”

“Shut up.” Now Kimball spoke in a flat, harsh tone: the voice of command. Brearley stared, his face a white oval in the moonlight. He opened his mouth-a dark circle in the white oval. “Shut up, damn you,” Kimball snapped. He pointed off toward the east, where a ship was suddenly visible against the moon’s track.

He raised binoculars to his eyes. The ship leaped closer. How close? Estimating range at night was as tricky a thing as a submersible skipper could do, but he didn’t think it was more than a couple of miles. And that silhouette, seen against sky and moonlit ocean, was all too familiar.

“Take it easy, sir,” Brearley said as Kimball stared hungrily toward the ship that steamed along unaware he was anyplace close by. “The war’s over for us.”

“Shut up,” Kimball said again, now almost absently. “You know what ship that is, Tom? It’s that fucking destroyer that’s given us nothing but trouble since she came out here.”

“Is it?” Brearley said. “That’s too bad, sir. Shame we didn’t spy her last night instead of now.”

Kimball went on as if the exec hadn’t spoken: “And do you know what else? I’m going to sink the son of a bitch.”

“My God, sir!” Brearley burst out. “You can’t do that! If anybody ever found out, they’d hang you. They’d hang all of us.”

“No doubt about it,” Kimball agreed. “But England’s still in the war. The damnyankees’ll blame it on a limey boat-as long as we can keep our mouths shut. To hell with me if I’m going home with my tail between my legs. I’m going to hit ’em one more lick, and I’m going to make it the best one I know how.”

“You can’t, sir,” Brearley repeated.

“Go below, Mr. Brearley,” Kimball said. “I can and I goddamn well will. If you don’t like it, you don’t have to play. You can lay on your bunk and suck your thumb, for all I care.” He leaned close to the younger man. “And if you ever breathe one word of this to anybody, I don’t know what’ll happen to me, but you’re a dead man. You won’t die pretty, either. Have you got that?”

“Yes, sir,” Brearley whispered miserably.

“Then go below.” Kimball followed the executive officer down into the stinking steel tube that was the Bonefish’s fighting and living quarters. Brearley headed toward the stern: he really didn’t want any part in what Kimball was about to do. Kimball didn’t care. He was going to do it anyway. In conversational tones, he told the rest of the crew, “Boys, we’ve got the USS Ericsson a couple miles off to starboard. Load fish into tubes number one and two and open the water-tight doors. I aim to put a couple right in the whore’s engine room.”

Had the sailors hesitated, they might have made Kimball think twice, too. But they didn’t. After brief, incredulous silence, they let loose with yells and howls so loud, Kimball half feared the Yankees on the destroyer would be able to hear them. He made frantic shushing noises. Discipline returned quickly, discipline and a fierce eagerness for the kill much like his own.

He took the helm himself, sending a sailor up to the conning tower to watch the destroyer while he made his attack approach. “Give me fifteen knots,” he said. “They’re just lollygagging along. I want to get out in front of them and double back for the firing run.”

“We’re in the dark quarter of the sea,” Ben Coulter remarked, as much to himself as to Kimball. He grunted in satisfaction. “They’ll never spot us.”

“They’d damned well better not,” Kimball answered, to which the petty officer nodded. Kimball went on, “We’ll make the firing run coming in at a steep angle, too, so they won’t pick up the reflection of the moon from the paint on the conning tower. And we’ll be going in with the wind at our back, pushing the waves along to help hide our wake in the water.”

“You don’t want to make the angle too steep, though, Skipper,” Coulter said. “Easy to think it’s smaller than it is, and to miss with your fish on account of it. Don’t want that, not now we don’t.”

“Not hardly,” Kimball agreed with a dry chuckle. From the bow, a sailor waved to let him know the torpedoes were loaded into the forward tubes. He waved back, wishing he could be two places at the same time: he wanted to be at the helm and up on the conning tower both. He peered through the periscope, which at night was like making love wearing a rubber, for it took away a lot of the intimacy he wanted.

Despite that annoyance, everything went smooth as a training run in the Gulf of Mexico outside Mobile Bay. The destroyer, which could have left him far behind, kept lazing through the sea. He pulled ahead of the U.S. ship and swung the Bonefish into the tight turn for the firing run. “Bring her down to five knots,” he ordered, not wishing to draw attention to the boat as he closed in.

Like any submarine skipper, he would have made a hell of a pool player, for he was always figuring angles. Here, though, players and balls and even the surface of the table were in constant motion.

He took his eyes away from the periscope every so often to check the compass for the Bonefish’s true course. Gauging things by eye didn’t work at night-too easy to be wrong on both range and angle. He swung the submersible’s course a couple of degrees more toward the southeast. Ben Coulter had been right: if he was going to do this, he couldn’t afford to miss.

The lookout on the conning tower called softly down the hatch: “Sir, I reckon we’re inside half a mile of that Yankee bastard.”

“Thanks, Davis,” Kimball called back. He’d just made the same calculation. Having the lookout confirm the range made him feel good. Inside six hundred yards…Inside five hundred…Inside four hundred…“Fire one!” he shouted. If he couldn’t hit the Ericsson now, he never would.

Clangs and hisses and the rush of water into the emptied tube announced the torpedo was on its way. Even in moonlight, Kimball had no trouble making out the white track of air bubbles the fish left behind it. Maybe somebody on the destroyer’s deck also spotted it. If he did, though, he was too slow to do anything about it. Less than half a minute after the Bonefish launched it, the torpedo slammed into the U.S. warship just forward of amidships.

“Hit!” Kimball screamed, and the sailors howled out Rebel yells. The Ericsson staggered on her course like a poleaxed steer. Water foamed as it poured into the hole better than two hundred pounds of guncotton had blown in her flank. Already she was listing to port and appreciably lower in the water than she had been a moment before.

Up on the conning tower, Davis the lookout whooped for joy. “We-uns is goin’ home, but not them Yankees!”

Taking his time now, Kimball lined up the second shot with painstaking precision. “Fire two!” he shouted, and the torpedo leaped away. It broke the destroyer’s back and almost tore the stricken ship in two. She went to the bottom hardly more than a minute later. Kimball scanned the sea for boats. Spotting none, he grunted in satisfaction. “Resume our course for Habana,” he said, and stepped away from the periscope. “We’ve done our job here.”

Ben Coulter spoke earnestly to the sailors: “Remember, boys, this ain’t one where you get drunk and brag on it in a saloon. You do that, they’re liable to put a rope around your neck. Hell, they’re liable to put a rope around all our necks.”

“You do want to bear that in mind,” Kimball agreed. He wished he could tell Anne Colleton. If she ever heard he’d gone right on killing Yankees even after the armistice, she’d probably drag him down and rape him on the spot. Warmth flowed to his crotch as he thought about that. But then, slowly, regretfully, he shook his head. He didn’t think with his crotch, or hoped he didn’t. If she found out what he’d done here, it would give her more of a hold on him than he ever wanted anyone to get. He’d have to keep quiet.

The log would have to keep quiet, too. Kimball went back to an earlier attack and neatly changed a 3 to a 5 on the writeup of the run. That would make the number of torpedoes listed as expended on this cruise match the number he’d actually launched.

He strode toward the stern. Sure enough, Tom Brearley sat on his bunk, looking glum and furious. He glared up at Kimball. “How does it feel to be a war criminal-sir?” He made the title into one of scorn.

Kimball gravely considered. “You know what, Tom? It feels pretty damn fine.”

Sylvia Enos threw a nickel in the trolley-care fare box for herself and another one for George, Jr. Next year, she’d have to spend a nickel for Mary Jane, too. She sighed. Even though she was getting her husband’s allotment along with her salary at the shoe factory, she wasn’t rich, not anywhere close. Nickels mattered.

She sighed again, seeing she and her children had nowhere to sit during the run from Mrs. Dooley’s to her own apartment building. She clung to the overhead rail. George, Jr., and Mary Jane clung to her.

As the trolley squealed to a stop at the corner closest to her building, she sighed yet again. Who could say how long she’d keep the job at the shoe factory? With soldiers coming home from the war, they’d start going back to what they’d done before. Women would get crowded out. It hadn’t happened yet, but she could see it coming.

She wondered when the Navy would let George loose. He’d have no trouble getting a spot on a fishing boat operating out of T Wharf. As long as he was home with her, she wouldn’t have to-she didn’t think she’d have to-worry about his chasing after other women. They could try getting back to the way things had been before the war, too. Maybe she’d have another baby.

Mary Jane would be heading to kindergarten next year. If Sylvia didn’t get pregnant right away, maybe she could look for part-time work then. Extra cash never hurt anybody.

She paused in the front hall of the apartment building to pick up her mail. It was unexciting: a couple of patent-medicine circulars, a flyer announcing a Fishermen’s Benevolent League picnic Sunday after next, and a letter to the woman next door that the postman had put in her box by mistake. She set the last one on top of the bank of mailboxes for her neighbor to spot or for the mailman to put in its proper place and then took the children upstairs.

“What’s for supper?” George, Jr., demanded. “I’m starved.”

“Pork chops and string beans,” Sylvia said. “They’ll take a little while to cook, but I don’t think you’ll starve before they’re ready. Why don’t you play nicely with your sister till then?” Why don’t you ask for the moon, Sylvia, while you’re at it?

Rebellion came not from George, Jr., but from Mary Jane. “I hate string beans,” she said. “I want fried potatoes!”

Sylvia swatted her on the bottom. “You’re going to eat string beans tonight, anyhow,” she answered. “If you don’t feel like eating string beans, you can go to bed right now without any supper.”

Mary Jane stuck out her tongue and crossed her eyes. Sylvia swatted her again, harder this time. Sometimes she practically needed to hit her daughter over the head with a brick to get her to behave. Now, though, Mary Jane seemed to get the idea that she’d pushed things too far. She looked so angelic, any real angel who saw her would have been extremely suspicious. Sylvia laughed and shook her head and started cooking.

She’d just set supper on the table and was cutting Mary Jane’s pork chops into bite-sized pieces when someone knocked on the door. She muttered something she hoped the children didn’t catch, then went to see which neighbor had chosen exactly the wrong moment to want to borrow salt or molasses or a dollar and a half.

But the youth standing there wasn’t a neighbor. He wore a green uniform darker than that of the U.S. Army; his brass buttons read WU. “Sylvia Enos?” he asked. When Sylvia nodded, he thrust a pale yellow envelope at her. “Telegram, ma’am.” He hurried away before she could say anything.

Scratching her head-delivery boys usually hung around to collect a tip-she opened the envelope. Then she understood. “The Navy Department,” she whispered, and ice congealed around her heart.

DEEPLY REGRET TO INFORM YOU, read the characterless letters, THAT YOUR HUSBAND, GEORGE ENOS, WAS AMONG THE CREW ABOARD THE USS ERICSSON, WHICH WAS SUNK LAST NIGHT BY AN ENEMY SUBMERSIBLE. DESPITE DILIGENT SEARCH, NO TRACE OF SURVIVORS HAS BEEN FOUND OR IS EXPECTED. HE MUST BE PRESUMED DEAD. THE UNITED STATES ARE GRATEFUL FOR HIS VALIANT SERVICE IN THE CAUSE OF REMEMBRANCE AND VICTORY. The printed signature was that of Josephus Daniels, Secretary of the Navy.

“Your pork chops are getting cold, Ma,” George, Jr., called from the table.

“If you don’t eat your green beans, you have to go to bed right now,” Mary Jane added gleefully.

Sylvia kept staring at the words of the telegram, hoping, praying, they would twist into some different shape, some different meaning. Twice now, when George had been captured by a Confederate commerce raider and when he’d survived the sinking of the Punishment, she’d feared the worst. This wasn’t like those times. She didn’t fear the worst now. She knew it. She felt it in her bones.

“What am I going to do?” she said, though no one could answer. “What am I going to do without George?”

“I’m right here, Ma,” her son said. “I didn’t go nowhere. Your pork chops are still getting cold. They’re no good if they get cold. You always say that, Ma. You do.”

She turned back to the table. She didn’t realize tears had started running down her face till Mary Jane asked, “Why are you crying, Ma?”

“Don’t cry, Ma,” George, Jr., added. “What’s wrong? We’ll fix it, whatever it is.”

They depended on her. She had to be strong, because they couldn’t do it for themselves. And she had to tell them the truth. They needed to know. She swiped her sleeve over her eyes. Then she held up the telegram. “This says-” She had to pause and gulp before she could go on. “This says your father…it says your father’s ship got sunk and he isn’t…isn’t alive any more. He isn’t coming home any more, not ever again.”

They took it better than she had imagined possible. Mary Jane, she realized, hardly remembered George. She’d been very little when he went into the Navy, and he’d come home but seldom since. How could she miss what she hadn’t truly known?

George, Jr., understood better, though he plainly didn’t want to. “He’s…dead, Ma?” he asked, his voice trembling. “Like Harry’s father at school, the one the dirty Canucks shot?”

“That’s right,” Sylvia said. “That’s…sort of what happened.”

A noise in the hallway behind her made her turn. There stood Brigid Coneval and several of her other neighbors. Somehow, almost as if by magic, everyone knew when a Western Union messenger brought bad news. Had anyone doubted the news was bad, the look on Sylvia’s face would have told the tale.

“Oh, you poor darling,” said Mrs. Coneval, who, if anyone, knew what Sylvia was feeling at the moment. “You poor darling. What a black shame it is, with the war so near won and all.”

People crowded round her, holding her and telling her they would do what they could to help. Someone pressed a coin into her hand. She thought it was a quarter. When she looked at it through tear-blurred eyes, she discovered it was a gold eagle. She stared in astonishment at the ten-dollar goldpiece. “Who did this?” she demanded. “It’s too much. Take it back.”

No one said a word. No one made any move to claim the coin.

“God bless you, whoever you are,” Sylvia said. She started crying again.

Mary Jane said, “You’re going to have to go to bed without any supper, because you aren’t eating your pork chops.” Small things mattered to her; she didn’t understand the difference between what was small and what was not.

Sylvia wished she didn’t understand that difference, either. Not understanding it would have made life much simpler and much easier…for a little while. Life wasn’t going to be easy, not ever again. Life probably wouldn’t be comfortable, not ever again. If she lost her job at the shoe factory, she’d have to find another one, and right away. If she didn’t find another one right away, her children would go hungry, and so would she. Even if she did, money was going to be tight from now on.

What could she do if she lost the factory job? She had no idea. She couldn’t think. Her wits felt stunned, strangled. She knew she had to use them, but they didn’t want to work.

“Mourning clothes!” she exclaimed suddenly, out of the blue. “I have to fix up some mourning clothes.”

Brigid Coneval put an arm around her shoulder and steered her back to the sofa in the front room. When the Irishwoman pushed her down, her legs gave way and she sat. “You wait right here. Don’t move, now. Don’t even twitch. Back in a flash, I’ll be.” She hurried out of the apartment.

Sylvia didn’t move. She didn’t think she could move. George, Jr., and Mary Jane, seeing their mother upset, picked their way through the crowd of neighbors and crawled up into her lap. She did manage to put her arms around them.

“Out of my way, now. Move aside.” Brigid Coneval spoke with as much imperious command as General Custer or some other famous war hero might have used. She thrust a tumbler of whiskey at Sylvia. “Drink it off, and be quick about it.”

“I don’t want it,” Sylvia said.

“Drink it,” Mrs. Coneval insisted. “He was a good man, your George, sure and he was. Hardly ever a cross word from him did I hear. But he’s gone, darling. You may as well drink. What could you do that’s better, pray?” She rolled her eyes. “Drink!”

Without much will-without much anything-of her own, Sylvia took the glass and gulped down what it held, choking a little as she did. As far as she could tell, it didn’t do anything. Her head was already spinning. “What am I going to do without George?” she asked again, as if one of her neighbors might know.

No one answered. As Mrs. Coneval had, people kept praising her husband. He would have been a happier man had they said all those nice things about him while he was there to hear them.

Then Sylvia started to cry again as another thought struck through the walls of grief and liquor. “He won’t even have a funeral,” she said. “He would have hated that.” Fishermen dreaded being lost at sea. They ate of its creatures, and did not want those creatures turning the tables.

After a while, even in the midst of disaster, routine reasserted itself. Sylvia had to put the children to bed. After she did that, she went to put the pork chops she hadn’t been able to eat into the icebox. She discovered a couple of silver dollars and a tiny gold dollar on the kitchen table, along with some smaller coins. When she opened the icebox, she found a dressed chicken in there she had not bought, and also a package wrapped in butcher paper that might have been sausage or fish.

“Thank you,” she said. “Thank-” She couldn’t go on. Brigid Coneval put her to bed, much as she’d taken care of George, Jr., and Mary Jane. She lay awake and stared and stared at the ceiling. What will I do? she thought, endlessly, uselessly. What will I do?

When his name was called, Jefferson Pinkard marched up to a pair of officers, his Tredegar on his shoulder. “Pinkard, Jefferson Davis,” he said, and then his pay number. He tossed the rifle down on a growing pile of weapons.

“Pinkard, Jefferson Davis,” echoed a Confederate captain from divisional headquarters. He had a list of the soldiers in Jeff’s regiment. After lining through his name, he turned to the other officer and spoke in formal tones: “Jefferson Davis Pinkard has turned in his rifle.”

“Jefferson Davis Pinkard has turned in his rifle,” the other officer agreed. He was also a captain, but wore a uniform of green-gray, not butternut. He lined through Pinkard’s name on his copy of the list.

Yankee officers freely crossed the line between their positions and those of the CSA these days. Confederate soldiers had to obey them as they obeyed their own officers. Confederate officers, even those of higher rank, had to obey them, too. The Yanks didn’t sneer or gloat, but they didn’t take any nonsense, either.

One by one, in alphabetical order, the soldiers of his regiment surrendered their weapons. Hipolito Rodriguez came only a few men after Pinkard. Once he’d thrown his rifle onto the stack, he came over and stood by the big steelworker. “Finito,” he said.

That was close enough to finished for Jeff to understand it. “Yeah, it’s done,” he said. “It’s done, and we got licked. Who the hell would have reckoned on that when we started out?”

Rodriguez shrugged. “Asi es la vida,” he said, and then translated that: “Such is life. Now they must send us to our homes once more.”

“Bully,” Pinkard said in a hollow voice. He hated the west Texas prairie, no doubt about that, but he dreaded going back to Birmingham, too. What had Emily been doing since the leave when he’d walked in at just the wrong moment? Even if she hadn’t been doing anything since then (which, knowing her, he found less likely than he would have wanted), could he live with her once he did get home? Or-the other side of the same coin-could he live without her?

And how was he supposed to go on living next door to Bedford Cunningham? That was a smaller question, but not a small one. They’d been best friends and foundry partners for years. But Bedford wouldn’t be going back to the Sloss Works, not shy an arm he wouldn’t, and how could you be friends with a man when you’d found your wife naked on her knees in front of him?

Hip Rodriguez sighed. “I hope everything goes good for you, amigo.”

“Thanks,” Jeff said. “Same to you.” Here, unlike talk about going home, he could speak freely. “I never knew any Sonorans before you. You’re a good fellow. You ever get tired of trying to scratch out a living down where you’re at, you bring your family on up to Alabama. Plenty of good farm country there. You’d live high on the hog.”

“Thanks, amigo, but no thanks.” Rodriguez’s smile was sweet and sad. “I want to go home. I want to talk espanol, to see my friends and family. And in Sonora, I am a man. In Alabama, I am a damn greaser.” He tapped a brown hand with a brown finger to remind Pinkard of what he meant.

In the trenches, Jeff had long since stopped worrying about their being of different colors. Hip was right, though; it would matter in Alabama. Jeff put the best face on it he could: “It’s not like you was a nigger.”

“Too close,” Rodriguez said positively, and odds were he was right. “You go to your home, and I go to my home, and maybe God lets us both be happy.”

The last Tredegar thudded onto the pile. The C.S. captain addressed his U.S. counterpart: “All weapons for this unit are now accounted for.”

“All rifles for this unit are now accounted for,” the U.S. officer answered sharply. “This regiment still has two machine guns outstanding.”

“Destroyed in combat,” the Confederate captain said blandly. “Can’t give you what we haven’t got.”

Pinkard wouldn’t have believed that from a beaten foe, and neither did the Yankee. “You’re holding out on us,” he growled. His sharp, quick accent made him sound suspicious even when he wasn’t. When he was…“That’s a violation of the terms of the armistice, and you’ll be sorry for it. Weapons are to be turned over.”

“I can’t give you what we haven’t got,” the C.S. captain repeated. He waved to Jeff Pinkard and his companions. “This here is an infantry company, not a machine-gun outfit. They’ve turned in their weapons. Why don’t you let them go and take the other up with division HQ?”

For a long moment, Jeff thought the U.S. officer would hold them up out of sheer cussedness, if for no other reason. In the end, though, he said, “All right, these bastards can go. But I am going to take it up with your superiors, Captain, and heads will roll. Yours among ’em, unless I miss my guess.” His eyes measured the Confederate for a coffin.

What passed between the two captains afterwards, Pinkard never learned. His company was marched away to the paymaster, who gave each man what he was owed-in banknotes, not specie. He also gave a word of advice: “Don’t waste your time before you spend it, on account of it won’t be worth as much tomorrow as it is today.”

“How come?” Jeff asked.

“Government’s gonna have a devil of a time payin’ its bills, especially in gold,” the paymaster answered. “Yankees’ll soak us till our eyes pop-you wait and see if I’m wrong. And everybody’s gonna wanna buy things, and there won’t be a hell of a lot of things to buy. You put that all in the pot and cook it, and you get prices going straight through the roof. Like I say, wait and see. People’ll be wiping their asses with dollar banknotes, ’cause they won’t be good for anything else.”

With that cheery prediction ringing in his ears, Pinkard marched with the men with whom he’d been through so much toward the nearest railhead. It was, he realized, the last time he would ever march with them. He tried to sort out how he felt about that. He wouldn’t miss marching, or the trenches, or the horror that went with war. The men, though, and the comradeship-those he would miss. He wondered if he would ever know their like back in Birmingham.

He kicked at the dirt. He’d thought he had that kind of comradeship with Bedford Cunningham, and what was left there? Dust and ashes, nothing more. After Bedford and Emily had let him down, could he ever trust anybody again? He wasn’t going to hold his breath.

He did hold his breath when the company got to the train. Almost all the cars were boxcars stenciled with the words 36 MEN, 8 HORSES. They’d held a lot of horses lately; the stink made that plain. He clambered up into a car and made himself as comfortable as he could on none-too-fresh straw. After all the cars were filled, the train headed east. By the way the engine coughed and wheezed, it, like the boxcars, was what remained after all the better rolling stock had been used in more important places.

Nobody bothered feeding the soldiers or giving them water. Pinkard emptied his canteen and ate the tortillas and the chunk of sausage he had with him. After that was gone, he got hungrier and hungrier and thirstier and thirstier till, some time in the middle of the night, the train pulled into Fort Worth.

He’d fallen into an uneasy, unpleasant doze by then, and woke with a start. At the station, men shouted through megaphones: “Check the signboards! Find the train heading toward your hometown and get aboard! Men in uniform travel free, this week only!”

Amid handclasps and good-luck wishes and promises to keep in touch, the company broke apart. Jeff found a signboard and discovered, to his surprise, that a train that would stop in Birmingham was leaving early in the morning. He found the right platform after a couple of false starts and settled down to wait.

He hadn’t been there more than a couple of minutes before a woman came up to him and snapped, “If you men hadn’t been a pack of yellow cowards, you would have whipped those damnyankees.” She stomped off before he could answer. It was, he decided, a good thing he’d had to turn in his Tredegar. Otherwise, he might have answered her with a bullet.

Had he had the rifle, he might have shot eight or ten people, mostly women, by the time his train pulled up to the station. Everyone who spoke to him seemed to think he was personally responsible for losing the war. He boarded a second-class passenger car with nothing but relief. It didn’t end there, though. About half the people on the car were eastbound soldiers like him. The civilians who filled the other half of the seats showered them with abuse.

And the abuse got worse the farther east the train went. Every time a soldier got off and a civilian took his place, the abuse got worse. The farther from the front the train went, the more convinced people were that the war should have been won, and won in short order, too.

One heckler, a man who had plainly never seen the war at first hand, went too far. A soldier got up, knocked him cold with one punch, and said, “We might not’ve licked the damnyankees, but I sure as hell licked you.” After that, the rude remarks diminished, but even then they did not stop.

The train pulled into the Birmingham station just over a day after it set out from Fort Worth. No one sat close to Pinkard when he got on the trolley that would take him out to the factory housing by the Sloss Works. Maybe that was because he still wore his uniform. Maybe, too, it was because he’d had no chance to bathe since coming out of the line.

He walked from the trolley stop toward his house. He felt as if he were heading toward the doctor’s, and likely to be diagnosed with a deadly disease. He tried the front door. It was locked. Emily had gone to work, though how long she’d keep her munitions-plant job was anyone’s guess. He had a key in his trouser pocket-about the only thing he did have with him from when he’d gone into the Army. He let himself in. (He wouldn’t get that diagnosis till she came home.)

Doing nothing much felt strange and good. He took hot water from the stove’s reservoir and bathed and put on a shirt and trousers he found in the closet. They hung loosely on him; he’d lost weight. He got cold chicken out of the icebox, then read an old Richmond Review: so old, one of the articles talked about how to drive back the Yankees. Laughing bitterly, he tossed the magazine aside.

At last, the front door opened. Emily stared at him. “Jeff!” she exclaimed, and then, “Darling!”

Was there too much hesitation between the one word and the other? Pinkard didn’t get the chance to think much about that. His wife threw herself into his arms. They tightened around her. He’d never stopped wanting her, even though…

He didn’t get the chance to think about that, either. Her kiss made him dizzy. “Thank God you’re home,” she breathed in his ear. “Thank God you’re safe. Everything’s going to be fine now, just fine.” Her voice went low and throaty. “I’ll show you how fine.” She led him back toward the bedroom. He went willingly, even gladly. That would do for now. Later?

“I’ll just have to find out about later, that’s all,” Jeff muttered.

“What did you say, darling?” Emily was already getting out of her clothes.

“Never mind,” he said. “It’ll keep. It’ll keep till later.”

Sam Carsten sighed. The exhalation hurt. His lips were even more sunburned than the rest of him. They cracked and bled at any excuse or none. He’d filled out the forms for every kind of cream alleged to help; the pharmacist’s mates were all sick of the sight of him. He was sick of the baked-meat sight of himself. As usual, none of the creams did the slightest good against the onslaughts of the tropic sun.

“God damn Dom Pedro IV to hell and gone,” he said. “Stinking son of a bitch should have stayed out of the war.”

Vic Crosetti laughed at him. “You’re more worried about your hide than you are about licking the limeys.”

“Ever since the Dakota came up into Brazilian waters, my hide’s what’s been taking the licking,” Carsten said. “And we haven’t fought the Royal Navy or even seen more than a couple of British freighters. Waste of time, anybody wants to know what I think of the whole business.”

Crosetti laughed harder than ever. “Yeah, I’m sure Admiral Fiske is gonna call you up into officers’ country any second now, so he can find out what’s on your mind. He couldn’t’ve run the flotilla without you till now, right?”

“Makes sense to me,” Sam said. Crosetti grimaced at him. He was about to go on when his ears caught a distant buzzing. He searched the heavens, then pointed. “That’s an aeroplane. Now, God damn it, is it one of ours or one of theirs?”

“Escorts ain’t shooting at it, so I guess it’s one of ours,” Crosetti said. “Hope to Jesus it’s one of ours, anyways.”

“Me too.” Carsten kept watching, squinting, his eyes half shut against the bright sky, till he could make out the eagles and crossed swords under the wings of the aeroplane. He breathed easier then. “Aeroplanes,” he said. “Who would have thought, when the war started, they’d matter so much?”

“Bunch of damn nuisances, is what they are,” Crosetti said as this one splashed into the tropical Atlantic a few hundred yards from the Dakota and taxied across the water toward the battleship.

“They’re sure as hell nuisances when they spot us or strafe us,” Sam said. “But they couldn’t do a quarter of what they’re doing now back in 1914. I bet they keep right on getting better, too.”

“I think everybody on the Dakota except maybe Admiral Fiske has listened to you go on like this,” Crosetti said with exaggerated patience. “You like ’em so goddamn much, go and get yourself a pair of wings after the war’s done.”

“Don’t want wings,” Carsten said. “I like being a sailor just fine. But I like aeroplanes, too. Look at that, Vic-isn’t that bully?” The Dakota’s crane was hauling the flying machine out of the water and up on deck.

Crosetti yawned. “It’s boring, is what it is. I think everything about aeroplanes is boring till they start dropping bombs. Then they scare the shit out of me.”

“No, that’s not boring,” Sam agreed. “Tell you something else, though-I’d sooner be bored.”

Later that day, the Dakota and the flotilla with her, which had been lazing along at ten or twelve knots, suddenly changed course toward the northeast and put on speed. Carsten grunted, waiting for the klaxons to cry out the orders to battle station. One of the other aeroplanes from the flotilla must have spotted a British convoy. He looked forward to knocking it to pieces.

Then rumors started flying: rumors that it wasn’t a convoy after all, but a good-sized chunk of the Royal Navy. Sam didn’t like hearing that for beans. He’d fought the Royal Navy before, in the tropical Pacific, and had high respect for what the limeys could do. He’d had a lot more of the U.S. Navy sailing along beside him then, too. If they’d run up against a major British fleet, they would regret it as long as they lived, which might not be long.

When the klaxons did begin to hoot, running toward the forward starboard sponson was almost a relief. Once he started slamming shells into the breech of the five-inch gun, he’d be too busy to worry. Whatever happened after that just happened-he couldn’t do anything about it.

Hiram Kidde put that same thought into words: “Now we smash ’em-or else it’s the other way around.”

“Yeah,” Sam said. “Well, if they smash us, I hope to God we at least hurt them. We can afford the losses and they can’t, not fighting us and Kaiser Bill both.”

“I’ll die for my country if I have to,” Kidde said, “but I’d sooner live for it.” He puffed out his chest. “Where the hell else are the United States going to find a better chief gunner’s mate?”

“Under any flat rock, I expect,” Carsten answered, which won him a glare.

Commander Grady looked into the sponson. “It is the Royal Navy,” he announced. “If the flyboy who spotted them had it straight, they’ve got a force about the same size as ours.”

“That’s great,” Luke Hoskins muttered. “They’ll sink all of us, and we’ll sink all of them. Last one standing wins.”

“Why should this be any different than anything else in the war?” Sam whispered. Hoskins chuckled and shrugged.

Hiram Kidde peered through the sponson’s vision slit. “I see smoke,” he said, and then, “Jesus, if I see smoke from down here, the fire-control boys up at the top of the mast have been seeing it the past five minutes. And if they can see it, the big guns can hit it. Why the hell aren’t they shooting?”

As if to answer his question, the klaxons wailed once more. Sam dug a finger in his ear, wondering if that ear were playing tricks on him. “Was that the all-clear?” he asked, not believing what he’d heard.

“Sure as hell was,” Hoskins said.

“Why are they sounding the all-clear, though?” “Cap’n” Kidde demanded. “The enemy’s in sight, for Christ’s sake.” He took off his cap and scratched his head. “And why the hell aren’t the limeys shooting at us?”

Somebody ran shouting down the corridor. The shout held no words, only joy. Sam’s brother-in-law had shouted like that when his wife, Sam’s older sister, was delivered of a boy. “What the hell is going on?” he asked, though he didn’t think anyone would have the answer.

But someone did. When Commander Grady came into the sponson, he looked as exalted as the other sailor had sounded. “Boys, we just got it on the wireless telegraph from Philadelphia,” he said. “England has asked the Kaiser and Teddy Roosevelt for an armistice.”

“It’s over,” Carsten whispered, hardly believing his own words. To help see if they were, if they could have been, true, he repeated them, louder this time: “It’s over.” Nobody called him a liar. Nobody said he was crazy. Little by little, almost in spite of himself, he began to believe.

“Maybe not quite over,” Commander Grady said. “There’s still the Japs, out in the Pacific. But hell, you’re right, Carsten: that scrap is liable to peter out by itself. We’ve shot at each other, but they haven’t taken anything of ours and we haven’t taken anything of theirs. Shouldn’t be too hard to patch up a peace.”

Sam nodded. “Yes, sir. And they won’t have any big reason to fight us any more, either, now that all their allies have thrown in the sponge.”

“That’s right.” Grady nodded, too. “Matter of fact, if I were England and France, I’d worry about Hong Kong and Indochina and maybe Singapore, too. If the Japs want ’em bad enough, they’ll fall into their hands like ripe fruit.” He brought his mind back to the here-and-now. “And, since we have an armistice, you men are dismissed from your posts here.”

“Sir, since we’ve won, are we going to head back to the States?” Hiram Kidde asked.

“I don’t know the answer to that, not yet,” Grady replied. “I hope so, but that’s just me talking, not Admiral Fiske or Philadelphia. Go on up topside, boys. Take a look at the limeys we didn’t have to fight.”

For once, Carsten was glad to go up on deck: the glow of victory, the glow of peace ahead, made him forget about the glow of sunburn. Shading his eyes with a hand, he peered across the Atlantic at the Royal Navy force whose government had finally had to yield. The longer he looked, the gladder he was that the wireless telegraph had brought word when it had. The enemy force looked large and formidable.

In an odd way, he felt sorry for the Englishmen aboard those warships. They’d been top dogs for a hundred years and then some. Coming back to the pack would hurt them a lot. He wondered who the top dog was now: the United States or Germany? He looked east, toward Europe. Wouldn’t that be an interesting fight?

He shrugged. However interesting it was, he didn’t think it would happen any time soon. Teddy Roosevelt and the Kaiser had just won a war together. They’d take a while to pick up the pieces afterwards. Maybe they’d even stay friends while they were doing it. He hoped so.

One by one, the Royal Navy ships turned away from the U.S.-Chilean-Brazilian flotilla and steamed off toward the northeast, toward Britain. Sam wondered what would happen to them there. Would the limeys get to keep them, or would they have to surrender them to Germany and the USA? That wasn’t for him to decide; the boys in striped trousers would have to sort it out.

A U.S. cruiser with the flotilla launched its aeroplane to shadow the British ships. That must have been allowed under the terms of the armistice, because nobody started shooting.

U.S. aeroplanes could have tracked the British ships at the outbreak of the war, too, but neither they nor their wireless sets could have reached as far as they did now. Sam had had that same thought not long before, when he’d spotted the Dakota’s aeroplane before it landed by the battleship. Now, reminded of it in a different context, he muttered, “I wish that flying machine could follow those bastards all the way back to London.”

He didn’t notice Commander Grady standing behind him, also watching the Royal Navy force withdraw. “That would be pretty fine, wouldn’t it, Carsten?” the commander of the starboard secondary armament said.

“Huh?” Sam spun around, startled. “Uh, yes, sir.” He made himself think straight. “I expect the day is coming when they’ll be able to do just that. I expect it’s coming sooner than most people think, too.”

Grady studied him. “I expect you’re right. If we don’t do it, some other navy will, and they’ll do it to us.” He rubbed his chin. “Matter of fact, I happen to know we are doing something along those lines. Would you by any chance be interested in becoming part of that?”

“Would I?” Sam said. “Yes, sir! Hell yes, sir! Where do I sign up?”

“You don’t, not yet,” Grady answered. “But you’re a sharp fellow-sharper than you let on sometimes, I think. When we get into port in the United States, you remind me about this. I think the effort could use you.”

“Thank you very much, sir,” Carsten said. Part of that was real gratitude-he’d been talking about doing something like this. Part of it, too, was prudent calculation. Even if the Navy did shrink after the war, they wouldn’t drop him on the beach if he was part of this new project. Having a job he was sure of wasn’t the worst thing in the world-no, not even close.

“Bartlett, Reginald, Confederate States Army, private first class,” Reggie Bartlett said to the paymaster in U.S. green-gray. He rattled off his pay number and the date of his capture.

The paymaster found his name, checked both the pay number and the date of capture against his own records, and lined through them. He gave Reggie a sheaf of green banknotes-bills, the Yankees called them-and some pocket change. “Here is the pay owed you under the Geneva Convention, Private First Class Bartlett,” he said. “Frankly, between you, me, and the wall, you’re damn lucky to get it in greenbacks instead of your own money. These will still be worth something six months from now. God only knows if the Confederate dollar will.”

Reggie grunted. From things he’d heard, the paymaster was likely to be right. He put the money into a pocket of the butternut trousers the U.S. authorities had given him-along with a matching tunic-to wear on the train ride back to Richmond, where all released Confederate prisoners were being shipped. Neither color nor cut was quite that of a C.S. uniform, but both were close.

His shoulder ached when he bent his arm to put the money in his pocket, but not too badly. A Yankee doctor had given him chloroform and then gone in there and drained an abscess that refused to clear up on its own. Now the wound really was healing. For a long time, he’d wondered if it ever would.

He could walk with only a bare trace of a limp, too, and his leg hardly bothered him at all. Put everything together and the damnyankees had treated him pretty well. Of course, they were also the ones who’d shot him. Given a choice, he would sooner not have been shot. Then he wouldn’t have had to worry about how the damnyankees treated him. But who ever gave a soldier a choice?

Here came Rehoboam, on two sticks and an artificial foot. The Negro prisoner made slow but steady progress toward the paymaster. With nothing better to do, Reggie waited till he too got paid off, then asked, “What are you going to do when you get back to Mississippi?”

“I be goddamned if I know,” Rehoboam answered. “Ain’t no use in the cotton fields no more. Ain’t no good on any kind o’ farm no more. Reckon I got to go to town, but I be goddamned if I know what the hell I do there, neither.”

“You have your letters,” Bartlett said. “I’ve seen that. It’s something.”

“It ain’t much,” Rehoboam said with a scornful toss of his head. “Ain’t like I’m gonna put on no necktie and sit behind no desk at the bank and loan the white folks money. Ain’t gonna be no doctor. Ain’t gonna be no lawyer or preacher. Ain’t gonna be no newspaperman, neither. So what the hell good my letters do me?”

“If you didn’t have ’em, how could you read all the lies the Reds tell?” Reggie asked innocently.

Rehoboam started to give him a straight answer. Then the black man started to get angry. And then, grudgingly, he started to laugh. “You ain’t no stupid white man,” he said at last. “Wish to Jesus you was.”

“Stupid enough to get shot,” Reggie said. “You come right down to it, how can anybody get any stupider than that?”

“You in one piece,” Rehoboam said. “I ain’t gonna see my foot again till Judgment Day, and I don’t believe in Judgment Day no more.”

“You are a damned Red,” Bartlett said. He meant damned in a more literal way than he was in the habit of using it. He didn’t think of himself as all that pious, but he’d gone to church on Sunday back in Richmond. Hearing Rehoboam casually deny the Last Judgment rocked him.

“Reckon bein’ a Red is more dangerous’n the other,” the Negro answered. “But if the damn gummint ain’t cheatin’ me, I’m gonna be a citizen, like you been sayin’, so I reckon I can think any kind o’ damnfool thing I like, an’ say so, too. That’s what bein’ a citizen’s about, ain’t it?”

“I suppose so.” Reggie hadn’t thought that much about it. He hadn’t needed to think much about it. Citizenship was natural to him as water to a fish, and so he took it altogether for granted. Whatever else Rehoboam did, he wouldn’t do that.

A military policeman in green-gray came up. “You Rebs been paid off?” he asked. When they didn’t deny it, he jerked a thumb toward a doorway at the end of the hall. “Shake a leg, then. Trucks to take you to the train station are right through there. You think we’ll be sorry to get you off our hands, you’re crazy.”

As the two men from the CSA made their way toward the door-they could hardly shake a leg-Bartlett spoke in a sly voice: “See? He treats you just like me-far as he’s concerned, we’re both scum.”

“I’m used to white folks what reckon I’m scum,” Rehoboam said after a moment. “How about you?”

Outside, Reggie proved he wasn’t used to it. Thinking to be helpful, he asked a Yankee guard, “Which one of these trucks is for the coloreds?”

“We ain’t bothering with any of that shit here,” the U.S. soldier answered. “You and Snowball look like you’re pals. You can sit together.”

Reggie had to help Rehoboam up into the back of the truck. Conscious of the Negro’s eye on him, he said not a word as they sat down side by side. None of the other freed prisoners-all of them white-already in the truck said anything, either.

Most places in the USA, Negroes-a relative handful, not close to a third of the population as they were in the CSA-had to take a back seat to whites, as they did in the Confederacy. Bartlett figured the damnyankees were piling one last humiliation on his comrades and him. He also figured he would survive it-and that he would catch hell if he complained about it. That made keeping quiet look like a smart idea.

The Yankees also made no distinction between white and black C.S. prisoners on the train that set out from Missouri toward Richmond. Reggie and Rehoboam ended up sitting side by side in a crowded, beat-up coach. Bartlett resigned himself to that, too, and told himself it wouldn’t be so bad. They knew each other, anyhow; after weeks of lying across the aisle from each other, they couldn’t help it.

Until it crossed into Virginia, the train stayed in territory that had belonged to the USA before the war began. Reggie stared out through the dirty window glass at countryside Confederate soldiers hadn’t been able to reach or damage. Here and there, in Cincinnati and a couple of other towns, he did see craters and wrecked buildings that had taken bomb hits, but not till the train got into central Pennsylvania, more than a day after it set out, did the landscape take on the lunar quality with which he’d grown so unpleasantly familiar.

“We fought like hell here,” he remarked to Rehoboam.

“Reckon we did,” the Negro answered, “or you white folks did, anyways. Yankees licked you just the same.”

Bartlett sighed; he could hardly argue with that. He did say, “We might have done better if you Red niggers hadn’t jumped on our backs while we were fighting the USA.”

“Mebbe,” Rehoboam said. “You might’ve did better if you didn’t go an’ make all the black folks in the country hate you like pizen, too.”

Since that held only too much truth, Reggie forbore from replying. He kept looking out the window. Maryland seemed just like Pennsylvania, a hell of wreckage and shell craters and forests smashed to toothpicks. The smell of death was fresher there, and filled the train. And when he rolled through Washington, D.C., he stared and stared. The whole city was a field of rubble, with most of the buildings knocked flat and then pounded to pieces. The stub of the Washington Monument stuck up from the desolation all around like a broken tooth in a mouth otherwise empty.

Rehoboam gaped at what was left of Washington, too. “Didn’t see nothin’ like this here in Arkansas,” he allowed. “This here, this is a hell of a mess.”

“Didn’t see anything like this in Sequoyah, either,” Bartlett said. “But in the Roanoke valley, especially around Big Lick-we saw plenty of it there. Too many men smashed together into too small a space, with no room for anybody to give way, that’s what does it. Over across the Mississippi, the fighting didn’t get this crowded. The Yankees and us had more room to move.”

“When we was fightin’ to keep ’em away from Memphis, it got plenty bad, but not like this,” Rehoboam said. “No, ain’t never seen nothin’ like this.”

After the train crossed the Potomac on a pontoon bridge and went into Virginia, Reggie expected the devastation to be even worse than it had been in Yankee country. For the most part, it wasn’t. It was fresher, but not worse. After a little while, he thought he understood why: by the time the fighting moved down into Virginia, U.S. forces had gained such a preponderance over those of the CSA that the Army of Northern Virginia had to give ground before it and everything around it were pounded completely flat. A war of movement didn’t tear up the landscape so badly as one of position.

And then, as soon as the train got south of the reach of U.S. guns, the countryside was the one Reggie had always known, with only an occasional bomb crater to remind him of the war. Coming into Richmond, though, brought it home once more. U.S. aeroplanes had done their worst to the capital of the Confederate States. Richmond was in better shape than Washington, but it wouldn’t win prizes any time soon.

“Check the signboards for trains going toward your home towns!” railroad officials-or perhaps they were government functionaries-shouted.

To his own surprise, Reggie reached out to shake Rehoboam’s hand. The Negro took the offered hand, looking a little surprised himself. “Good luck to you,” Reggie said. “I don’t care if you are a Red, or not too much. Good luck.”

“Same to you,” Rehoboam said. “You ain’t the worst white man I ever run acrost.” He made that sound like high praise.

They got off the train together. Rehoboam slowly headed toward a platform from which a train would leave for Mississippi. He didn’t need to hurry; it wasn’t scheduled to head out for another six hours, and might well run late. Bartlett left the station. He would have to stay in his parents’ home till he found work.

A taxi driver hailed him: “Hey, pal, take you anywhere in town for three beans. Won’t find anybody cheaper.”

“Three dollars?” Reggie stared at him as if he’d started talking Hindustani. The paymaster back at the hospital had known what he was talking about. Bartlett’s hand went into his pocket and closed on a coin. “I’ll give you a quarter, U.S.”

“Deal,” the driver said at once.

Reggie wondered if he’d offered too much. By the way the cabbie bounced out of the motorcar-a Birmingham that had seen better days-and held the door open for him, he probably had. He clicked his tongue between his teeth. No help for it now. He gave the driver his parents’ address.

“Hope you didn’t get hurt too bad,” the cab driver said, evidently recognizing the kind of clothes Bartlett had on. Reggie only grunted by way of reply. Not a bit put out, the driver asked, “What’ll you do now that you’re home?”

“Damned if I know,” Reggie said. “Try and find my life again, I reckon.” By the way the cabbie nodded, he’d heard that answer plenty of times already.

Colonel Irving Morrell scrambled down into the Confederate works that would have defended Murfreesboro, Tennessee. Without soldiers in them, the trenches seemed unreal, unnatural. Before the armistice, Morrell would have had to pay in blood, and pay high, for the privilege of examining them. Now he had Colonel Harley Landis, CSA, as his personal guide.

Not that Landis was delighted with the job. “If I had my choice, Colonel,” he said, “the only excavation of ours I’d show you would be six feet by three feet by six feet deep.” He raised an eyebrow. “Nothing personal, of course.”

“Of course,” Morrell agreed with a dry chuckle. “Believe me, if you were going through our trenches outside Chicago, I’d feel the same way.”

“Chicago?” The Confederate officer snorted ruefully. “In my dreams, maybe. You have the stronger power. We aimed at nothing more than defending ourselves.”

Now Morrell was the one to arch his brows. “Aimed at Philadelphia, you mean. Aimed at Kansas, too, for that matter, and Missouri. Talk straight, Colonel, if you don’t mind. This poor-little-us business wears thin after the War of Secession and the Second Mexican War.”

Colonel Landis stared at him. “But surely you can see…” He checked himself, then shook his head. “Maybe not-who knows? But if you can’t, the world must seem a very strange place from the Yankee side of the hill.”

“Looking at the world from the other fellow’s side of the hill is always a useful exercise.” Morrell regretted the words as soon as they were out of his mouth. Landis was an enemy-Landis was the enemy. If he hadn’t figured that out for himself, why hand it to him?

Fortunately, his thoughts seemed to be elsewhere. “All we’ve tried to do is hold you back a little and keep up with you ourselves. You Yankees have got to be the pushingest people in the whole wide world.”

“Thank you,” Morrell said, which made his Confederate counterpart’s mouth twist: Landis hadn’t meant that as a compliment. Morrell held his smile inside. Too bad.

He took his own advice, climbing up onto a firing step that was already starting to crumble and peering toward the northwest. If he’d been a C.S. officer defending this position against a whole great swarm of barrels, what would he have done? His first thought was, turn tail and run like hell.

Say what you would about the Rebels, he could count on the fingers of one hand the times they’d done anything like that. He turned and looked back over his shoulder, studying the earthworks he hadn’t yet explored in person. After perhaps half a minute of contemplation, he grunted softly. “You’d have mounted your guns up there,” he said, pointing, “and fired at us over open sights, or as near as makes no difference. I don’t know how many barrels you had left at the end, but you’d have put them behind that little swell of ground there”-he pointed again-“to keep us from spotting them for as long as you could.”

Harley Landis examined him the same way he’d examined the terrain. The C.S. colonel started to say something, stopped, and started again after a pause: “Has anyone ever told you, sir, that you may be too damn smart for your own good?”

“A whole raft of people, Colonel Landis,” Morrell answered cheerfully. “Once or twice, they’ve even been right.” He remembered all too well his own temporary eclipse after the Mormon rebels in Utah had hurt in a way he hadn’t anticipated the U.S. troops battling to put them down.

“Only once or twice?” Landis was still eyeing him in speculative fashion. “Well, maybe I’m not too surprised.” He took a look at the ground, too, then asked, “How do you think we would have done?”

“You’d have hurt us,” Morrell said. “No doubt about that, Colonel, not a bit. You’d have hurt us-but we would have got through. You couldn’t have had enough barrels to stop us.”

He waited for Landis’ irate disagreement. But the Confederate colonel had been the man who brought his commander’s request for a cease-fire through the U.S. lines. As well as anyone could, he knew how things stood with his army. He looked as if he’d bitten into something sour. “You’re likely right, dammit, but how I wish you weren’t.”

He got out a pack of Raleighs, scraped a match on the sole of his boot, and lit a cigarette. “Can I steal one of those from you?” Morrell asked eagerly. “You wouldn’t believe some of the dried horse manure that passes for tobacco in the United States these days.”

“Yes, I would,” Landis said. “When we’d capture Yankees, the men’d always let ’em keep their smokes. Here, keep the whole pack.”

He tossed it to Morrell. The U.S. officer tapped a cigarette against the palm of his hand, then leaned forward to get a light from Landis. He sucked the fragrant smoke deep into his lungs. At last, reluctantly, he exhaled. “Thank you, Colonel. That is the straight goods. You Rebels make better smokes than we do, and that’s the truth.”

Landis sighed. “I’d trade that for being somewhere up in Illinois right now, the way you said before.”

Morrell nodded as he took another drag. “I haven’t tasted tobacco like this in years, though. It’s bully stuff.” He walked rapidly along the firebay till he came to a communications trench. Then, Colonel Landis in his wake, he zigzagged back until he could inspect the gun position he’d spotted from the front line. He nodded to himself. Field guns there would have done some damage, but not enough to stop a major assault.

He found a question for Landis: “What’s your opinion of our barrels as compared to your-you usually call them tanks, don’t you?”

“These days, we say barrels more often, too,” Harley Landis answered. “My opinion? My opinion is that you had too damned many of them, no matter what name you care to use.” Past that, he declined to say anything. Morrell hadn’t expected him to say much, but had hoped.

To prod the Confederate a little more, Morrell said, “We’ll probably confiscate the ones you do have, you know, and do our damnedest to make sure you don’t build any more of them.”

Colonel Landis muttered something under his breath: “Chicken thieves.” Morrell needed a few seconds to understand it. When he did, he thought it wiser to pretend he hadn’t.

He did say, “If England and France and Russia had smashed Germany in a hurry and then helped you turn on us, I don’t think you’d have given us a big kiss when the war was over.”

“No, I reckon not,” Landis admitted, which made Morrell like him better, or at least respect him more. He went on, “But that’s the way things were supposed to work out, and they didn’t.” His chuckle had barbs. “I know you’re not thinking the same thing I am here.”

“No, not quite,” Morrell said. They both laughed then, a couple of professionals who understood each other even though they stood on opposite sides of the hill.

“Ask you something?” Landis said.

“You can ask,” Morrell said. “I don’t promise to answer.”

“Here-I’ll ply you with liquor first.” Colonel Landis took a flask from his belt. To show Morrell it was safe, he drank first. Morrell took a swig. He’d expected moonshine, or at best its more dignified cousin, bourbon. What he got was a mouthful of damn fine cognac.

“You are a man of parts, sir,” he said, bowing a little. “First the cigarettes, now this. Ask away. I’m putty in your hands.”

Landis’ snort had a skeptical ring. He put the question even so: “Suppose the war had gone on, and you did break through here. What would you have done next?”

“I’m not in command of First Army,” Morrell said, which was true but also disingenuous, considering the victories he’d helped design. He took another small sip of Landis’ brandy and added, “General Custer was talking about an advance to the Tennessee, though, if you must know.” He handed the flask back to the Confederate colonel.

Landis almost dropped it. “To the Tennessee?” His splutters had nothing to do with the second swig of cognac he took. “When were you planning on getting there, 1925? The Tennessee! The very idea! We were down, by God, but we weren’t out.”

“I think he-we-might have done it,” Morrell said. “Not a lot of natural barriers in the way, anyhow. And how many divisions of colored troops did you have in the line when the shooting stopped?”

“If you don’t know, Colonel, I’ll be damned if I’m going to tell you,” Harley Landis answered. “I will tell you this, though: they fought about as well as the new white units we were raising toward the end there.”

“Of course you’ll tell me that and not the other-it makes you look stronger,” Morrell said. Landis nodded, unembarrassed. On the whole, though, the U.S. officer thought his C.S. opposite number was right. From what he’d seen and from reports he’d read, Confederate black units had fought about as well as rookie Confederate white units. That surprised him, but a man who couldn’t see truth when it tried to shoot him wouldn’t live long, and didn’t deserve to. He asked, “Now that the war is over”-politer than saying, now that you’ve lost-“are you folks going to keep on raising Negro troops?”

“I don’t know the answer to that,” Colonel Landis answered. “We didn’t conscript niggers, the way we did with our own people. What we got were volunteers, and probably a better crop than we would have had if we’d scraped the bottom of the barrel.” He sent Morrell a hooded glance. “Other side of that coin is, there are so goddamn many of you Yankees.”

Morrell’s smile was bright and friendly-if you didn’t look too close. “Maybe you’ll think about that a little harder before you decide whether you’ll try picking a fight with us.”

“Picking a fight with you?” Landis shook his head. “No, sir. Teddy Roosevelt declared war on us, not the other way around.”

“After Wilson declared war on our allies,” Morrell said.

“We honored our commitments,” Landis said.

“So did we,” Morrell returned. They glared at each other. Then Morrell laughed, a sound more of bemusement than anything else. “And look what honoring our commitments got us. Better-no, worse-than a million dead on our side, likely not far from that for you, and even more wounded, and all the wreckage…They shouldn’t let civilians start wars, Colonel, because they don’t know what the hell they’re getting into and getting their countries into.”

“You may be a damnyankee, but I’m damned if I think you’re wrong,” Landis said.

“This must never happen again,” Irving Morrell said solemnly. “Never.”

“Never,” Colonel Landis said. “Never, by God.” He took the flask off his belt again. “To peace.” He drank and offered it to Morrell.

“Thank you, sir.” Morrell drank, too. “To peace.”