Breakthroughs

V

Flora Hamburger wished she were somewhere, anywhere, else than at Theodore Roosevelt’s second inauguration. She wished, most particularly, that she were at the inauguration of President Eugene V. Debs. But Socialist Senator Eugene V. Debs of Indiana felt no qualms about attending the inauguration of the man who had defeated him, so Flora supposed she could get through it, too.

The ceremony was held in an enormous briefing room in one of the many War Department buildings that sprawled through downtown Philadelphia. In a normal year, it would have been outdoors. (In a normal year, of course, it would have been in Washington, D.C., but that was another story.) To keep Confederate bombers from disrupting it now, it was not only indoors but also secret; Flora had found out where to come only the day before.

Someone tapped her on the shoulder. She turned. Sitting behind her was Hosea Blackford of Dakota. “Tell me what kind of bargain we can make to get your vote on that immigration bill,” he said.

She shook her head. “Ask me something else. Half the people in my district have relatives in Europe, and that bill would strand them there forever. If I vote for it, they’ll throw me out, and I’ll deserve it.”

He frowned. “The party leadership backs it, you know.”

“The party leadership backed the war, too, right from the start,” Flora answered. “Were they right then?” Before Blackford could say anything, she waved him to silence. “Here come the president and the chief justice.” She smiled down at the floor. Here she was, glad to see Theodore Roosevelt after all.

He wore cutaway, white tie, top hat, and gloves: all the trappings of capitalist power. With him strode Chief Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, his big fierce white mustache a fitting ornament for his proud hawk face. Holmes was only a few days away from his seventy-fifth birthday, but moved like a much younger man. He was, without a doubt, a class enemy; reckoning him an honest man, Flora granted him grudging admiration for that.

He and Roosevelt took their places behind a podium more often used to let officers know the upcoming plan of attack. After Vice President Kennan took the oath for his second term, Roosevelt did the same in a loud, firm voice.

Once the applause had died down, Justice Holmes stepped away from the podium. President Roosevelt stared out over it at the senators and representatives and other assembled dignitaries. The electric lights flashed off the lenses of his spectacles, giving his face a curiously mechanical appearance, as if a device had taken almost human form and were running the United States.

“Without the fighting edge,” he said, “no man and no nation can be really great, for in the really great man, as in the really great nation, there must be both the heart of gold and the temper of steel.” His gestures were stiff, adding to the industrial impression those blank, shining disks that seemed to replace his eyes created.

“In 1862 England and France said it was the duty of those two nations to mediate between the United States and the Confederate States, and they asserted that any Americans who in such event refused to accept their mediation and to stop the war would thereby show themselves the enemies of peace.

“Even Abraham Lincoln regarded this as an unfriendly act to the United States, but he had not the strength to withstand it. And in so regarding it, as in few other things, Lincoln was right. Looking back from a distance of more than fifty years, we can clearly see as much. Such mediation was a hostile act, not only to the United States but to humanity. The nations that forced that unrighteous peace upon us more than fifty years ago were the enemies of mankind.

“Very many of the men and women who are at times misled into demanding peace, as if it were itself an end instead of being a means of righteousness, are folk of good will and sound intelligence who need only seriously to consider the facts, and who can then be trusted to think aright and act aright. Well-meaning folk who always clamor for peace without regard as to whether peace brings justice or injustice should ponder such facts, and then should still their clamor.”

Ponder the facts, and then think my way, Flora thought scornfully. President Roosevelt pounded on: “England and France and the cuckoo’s egg they planted in the American nest of freedom humiliated our great nation again a generation later, and have sought to encircle us on our own continent ever since, just as they and the Russian tyrants have sought to encircle our partner, friend, and ally, the German Empire, on the European continent.

“They have tried. And they have failed.” Roosevelt could not go on then; thunderous applause interrupted him. He basked in it before raising his hands to ask for quiet. “I promise you this: my second term will show us the victory we have longed for since those now old were young. The debt we owe is old, too, and has accumulated much interest through the years. We shall repay it in full, and more besides.” More applause echoed from the ceiling of the briefing room.

“We must stand absolutely for the righteousness of revenge,” Roosevelt finished, “and we must remember that to do so would have been utterly without avail if we had not possessed the strength and tenacity of spirit which back righteousness with deeds and not mere words. Until we complete our vengeance, we must keep ourselves ready, high of heart and undaunted of soul, to back our rights with our strength.”

He stepped back from the podium. The torrent of applause that rose up made everything that had gone before seem like a whisper in a distant room. Flora Hamburger joined in the applause, though tepidly and for politeness’ sake. She looked around and saw that most of her fellow Socialists and the handful of Republicans still in Congress were doing the same. It mattered little. The Democratic majority made plenty of noise on their own.

Roosevelt took his time leaving the hall. He paused in the aisles to chat with soldiers and politicians and functionaries who came crowding up to him, eager to be recognized. Flora’s lip curled at their fawning sycophancy…till she saw Senator Debs talking amiably with the president. The cooperation she’d already seen between Socialists and Democrats in Congress had surprised her. This shook her. It was as if a long-familiar picture, turned upside down, yielded another image altogether.

Then Roosevelt caught sight of her. She was easy to spot. The audience held only a handful of women, and she was the youngest by at least fifteen years. The president smiled in her direction. “Miss Hamburger!” he called, and beckoned her to him.

She could either go or, staying in her place, seem rude. What ran through her mind as she approached Theodore Roosevelt was, My parents will never believe I’m talking with the president of the United States. She might not share his politics, but the USA had never yet had a Socialist chief executive. “I’m honored to meet you, Mr. President,” she said, honored being true because of his office where pleased would have stretched a point.

“And I am honored to meet you, Miss Hamburger-Congresswoman Hamburger, I should say,” Roosevelt answered, and surprised her by sounding as if he meant it. “You showed great pluck in the campaign that won you your seat; I followed it with interest and no little admiration. And, by all accounts, you seem to be shaping well in the House.”

“Thank you, Mr. President,” she said. “You surprise me, since I am not of your party and”-she couldn’t resist the jab-“I don’t see much point to this war, even if I know a good many of the facts about it.”

He surprised her again by not getting angry. “The point is that winning it will at last let our country take its rightful place in the sun, a place wrongly denied us since the War of Secession.”

“My question is, what price do we pay for our place in the sun?” Flora replied. “How many young men will never see that place in the sun, some because they are blind, most because they are dead? How many young working men will die so the capitalists who own the steel mills and the coal mines and the weapons plants can buy new mansions, new motorcars, new yachts with the profits they make selling munitions to the government?”

Now Roosevelt frowned, but still did not explode. “If the capitalists can afford new toys after the war tax we’ve slapped on ’em, they’ve got better bookkeepers and lawyers than I think they do. You have a fine stump speech there, Congresswoman, and I think you are sincere in it, but it doesn’t altogether match the way the world works. A pleasure to meet you, as I said. If you’ll excuse me-” He shook someone else’s hand.

Flora found herself more impressed with him than she’d thought she would be. Part of that was the office he held. Part of it was realizing that what she had taken for political bombast were in fact his true beliefs. And part was the force with which he expressed those beliefs, a force mocked in her own party but, she discovered, not one to be taken lightly.

Hosea Blackford came up to her in Roosevelt’s wake. His expression was somewhere between amused and curious. “Well, what do you think of the earthquake that walks like a man now that you’ve met him in the flesh?” the congressman from Dakota asked.

“He’s-formidable,” Flora answered. “He’s easy to caricature, but I have the idea that taking the caricature for the man would be a mistake.”

“A dangerous mistake,” Blackford agreed. “Roosevelt has made a lot of people pay for doing that. When he goes charging straight at something, he seems to have no more brains than a bull moose, but anyone who thinks they aren’t hiding behind that smirk ends up regretting it.”

Flora sighed. “He does argue better than I thought he would.”

“He met Lincoln during the Second Mexican War, I gather, the same as I did,” Blackford answered. “They quarreled, so he was less impressed than I was.”

“There’s only one kind of person Roosevelt doesn’t quarrel with, as far as I can see,” Flora said. The congressman from Dakota raised a questioning eyebrow. She explained: “Someone who already agrees with every word he says.”

Hosea Blackford laughed. “You are dangerous, aren’t you? Did you get your invitation to the inaugural ball at the Powel House?”

She nodded. “Yes, I did. I hate to admit it, but I thought the president was generous to invite the whole Congress to his residence, Socialists and Republicans along with the Democrats.”

“Stinginess isn’t one of Teddy’s besetting sins,” Blackford said. “He has enough besides that. Are you going?”

“I was thinking of it, yes,” Flora said. Only weeks out of the Lower East Side, she knew her fascination with the glamour she was encountering was un-Socialist, but she couldn’t help it. “Are you?”

“Oh, no, and I wish you wouldn’t, either,” he said. Alarm stabbed through her: was she committing some dreadful faux pas? Stone-faced as a judge, he went on, “The Socialists should boycott it. That way, if the Confederate bombers get through and level the place, we’ll be ready and waiting to take over the government.”

She stared at him, then laughed so loud, Roosevelt looked back over his shoulder to see what was funny. “Let me ask you again,” she said, her voice dangerous: “Are you going to the inaugural ball?” A little sheepishly, Blackford nodded. So did Flora, with the air of having won a victory. “Good. As I said, so am I. I’ll see you there.”

Sergeant Jake Featherston sat on an upended barrel of flour atop Round Hill, Virginia. He’d bought a Gray Eagle scratchpad in the Round Hill general store, and his pencil scraped over the paper. He knew he wasn’t the best writer ever born, or anything close to it. He didn’t care. So many things he hadn’t been able to say to anybody-so many things he had said that nobody would hear. If he got them down, he would, at least, be able to prove he’d been right all along.

“Got any makings, Sarge?” Michael Scott called as he walked up to Featherston. “My pouch is empty as Teddy Roosevelt’s head.”

“Yeah, I got some,” Jake answered. Before he pulled his own leather tobacco pouch out of a pocket, he slammed the notebook shut and put a hand over the cover. What was in there was his, no one else’s. Only after he’d made sure it was safe did he toss Scott the pouch.

“Thanks,” the loader said, and rolled himself a cigarette. He gave the tobacco back to Featherston. “You been writin’ up a storm there, past couple days.” He lit a match. His cheeks hollowed as he sucked in smoke.

“Somethin’to pass the time,” Featherston said uncomfortably. It was much more than that to him, but he wouldn’t admit as much, not to Scott, not to anybody else, barely to himself. He wondered how he’d managed to get through so much of the war without trying it before. If he’d gone much longer without setting down what he thought, what he felt, he was sure he’d have gone crazy.

Scott didn’t seem to notice anything out of the ordinary, which eased Jake’s mind. “Yeah, we’ve had some time to pass lately,” Scott said, taking another drag on the handmade cigarette. “Yankees got down here into Virginia, and they haven’t done a whole hell of a lot since.”

“I know it.” That didn’t make Featherston any happier, though. Nothing made Featherston very happy these days. Every silver lining had its cloud. “Last time they were quiet like this, back in Pennsylvania, they were building for the push that threw us back to where we’re at now. If they hit us another lick like that one there, where the hell will we end up?”

“I don’t reckon it’s that bad, Sarge,” Scott said. “Remember how you were all up in arms about the niggers going into line in front of us? They haven’t done so bad, and the damnyankees haven’t exactly given ’em a big kiss on the cheek to say good morning, neither.”

“Rifles,” Jake said scornfully, and then, a little less so, “Well, hell, all right, machine guns, too. But they ain’t seen real artillery, and they ain’t seen gas, and they ain’t seen barrels. Till they do, God damn me to hell if I think they’ll make anything like proper soldiers.”

“You’re a stubborn cuss, Sarge,” the loader said with a laugh.

“Bet your ass I am,” Featherston said. “If I wasn’t, I’d have given up long since. But I pay all my bills, and I got a hell of a lot of bills to pay.”

“Uh-huh.” Scott took a last drag on the cigarette, threw it down, and crushed the butt under his heel. He headed off, perhaps a little faster than he had to.

Featherston sighed with relief to see him go. He opened the tablet and began to write again: — officers are fools because they won’t see what’s in front of their faces. The country doesn’t need officers like that, but what other kind has it got? They can’t see that the n-

“Featherston.” The voice was sharp and precise, so much so that it almost seemed a Yankee voice. Jake jumped and slammed the tablet shut.

He whirled, jumped to his feet, and saluted. “Major Potter, sir!” he said. “I’m sorry, sir. I didn’t hear you come up.” He would have had to show respect for any officer. He actually felt some for Clarence Potter.

“At ease, Sergeant,” the bespectacled major from Intelligence said. He pointed north, toward the U.S. lines, the lines that still bubbled and seethed like a pot boiling atop a stove but that, to Featherston’s surprise, had not yet boiled over. “What do you make of the quiet?”

“Funny you should ask, sir,” Jake said. “My loader and I were just talking about that very same thing. Last time they were this quiet this long was before they hit us that first big lick up in Pennsylvania.”

“So it was.” Potter rubbed his chin. “That’s very well reasoned-reasoned like an officer, I would say, if I didn’t think it’d make you pick up that barrel and break it over my head.”

“Sir, I reckon your head is harder than this barrel ever dreamed of being,” Featherston answered, intending it as a compliment. “Reckon your head is as hard as one of the damnyankees’ iron barrels with treads.”

“Heh,” Potter said. “No, those really hard heads are the ones down in the War Department in Richmond. It’d take about an eight-inch gun, maybe a twelve-inch, to blow a hole through one of them and let in some light.”

“Yes, sir,” Jake said. One of the reasons he thought Potter superior to the general run of officer in the Army of Northern Virginia was the boundless contempt they shared for the hidebound aristocrats who held so many important posts in Richmond.

Potter said, “Now that the colored troops have been in the line for a bit, what do you think of them?”

“Don’t like ’em for hell,” Featherston said promptly. “Not for hell. They’re in the line, yeah, but what happens when they really get hit? We haven’t seen it yet. Like I told Scott, I’ll believe they can stand it when I see ’em do it.”

Potter’s jaws worked as if he were chewing tobacco, but he didn’t have a plug in one cheek. “Here’s another question for you, then, Sergeant-which would you rather have in front of you, those full colored units or white units somewhere between a quarter and half strength? Those are your choices. We’ve squeezed out about all the white manpower in the CSA there is to squeeze.”

“I don’t know the answer to that,” Jake said. “I just don’t know. I have a notion of what understrength white units can do. These niggers-who can guess? Might be better. Might be a hell of a lot worse.”

In musing tones, Major Potter said, “Some white units without the proper experience will break and run the first time they come under truly heavy fire, or the first time they have to face barrels. If the black soldiers don’t perform as well as veteran troops, you need to remember it may be because they’re raw, not because they’re black.”

“Yes, sir, I understand what you’re telling me,” Featherston said. “But then again, it may be because they’re niggers, too. Hell of a choice we’ve got, ain’t it, sir? We can lose the war without ’em, or we can put ’em in the line and pray to Jesus they don’t turn their guns on us or go over to the damnyankees in droves.”

Fussily neat, Potter took out a clasp knife and scraped dirt from under a thumbnail. He said, “You know, the United States have a holiday called Remembrance Day coming up next month. They’ve been keeping a list of everything we’ve done to them since we fired on Fort Sumter to start the War of Secession. By now, it’s a long list. If they do lick us, they’re going to pay it all back and make us start a list of our own.”

“You’re saying they’d better not lick us,” Jake said slowly.

“We won’t be happy if they do,” Clarence Potter agreed. Behind his spectacles, his eyes missed very little. He pointed to Featherston’s Gray Eagle notebook. “Are you keeping a list of your own, Sergeant?”

Jake’s ears got hot. He was indeed keeping a list of his own. If anyone besides him saw it, he’d be lucky to escape hard labor. If Major Potter asked-or demanded-to see it, he didn’t know what he’d do. Keeping his voice as light as he could, he answered, “Maybe I’ll do me up a book once the war is over. Over Open Sights, I’ll call it, or somethin’ like that. What do you think, sir?”

“Better be a good book,” Potter said. “They’ll be a drug on the market when the fighting’s done-provided anyone’s left alive to read them.” He had on a tin hat, and tipped it as if it were a real felt derby. “Good morning to you, Sergeant.” On down toward the front he went, a businesslike man who might have been a businessman were it not for his helmet and puttees.

Featherston let out a silent sigh of relief. He’d got away with not having to show what he was writing. Not only that, he’d found a title for what he was setting down in the tablet. OVER OPEN SIGHTS, he printed above the writing on the first page.

He wished he had the War Department over open sights, close enough to blast them all without even having to bother reading the range. He wished he had the Negro troops in front of him over open sights, too. He scowled. If they did run like rabbits, the way he figured they were likely to do, he would have them over open sights. He’d blast them, too.

The only trouble was, that would be too late.

Something buzzed like an early mosquito, but the sound came from farther away than a mosquito’s infernal whine. Jake looked up. Tiny as a mosquito in the sky, an aeroplane sauntered along above the defensive line of the Army of Northern Virginia. Featherston knew what that meant: the damnyankees were taking photographs. When they had all they wanted, when everything was set up the way they wanted, hell would break loose.

No Confederate aeroplanes rose to challenge the Yankee spy. Belatedly, antiaircraft guns over toward Purcellville, east of Round Hill, opened up on the intruder. The hammering of the guns-the only cannon in the Confederate arsenal that were quicker-firing than the three-inchers Jake served-shattered the quiet of the late-winter morning.

Puffs of smoke, round and black as iron soup pots, flecked the sky like smallpox scars on the face of an unvaccinated man. The observation aeroplane flew through them, straight as if it were on rails. From his own observations, Jake knew what that meant: the photographer was taking his pictures.

He knew the exact instant when the photographer was through taking pictures, too. At that instant, the aeroplane stopped behaving like a locomotive on rails and started acting like a staggering drunk, lurching every which way through the air to throw off the aim of the gunners on the ground.

Wearily, Featherston cursed as the U.S. observation aeroplane escaped. He’d seen too many others escape to be more than a little disgusted. His sole consolation was that the Yankees had every bit as much trouble hitting C.S. observation aeroplanes.

As if the aeroplane’s getaway were some kind of signal, firing from the U.S. trenches, which had been very light, suddenly picked up. Rifles and machine guns hammered away. And then, as Jake was about to call his men to ready themselves for the Yankee onslaught, the small-arms fire slackened again. He let out a sigh of relief and went back to filling pages of the Gray Eagle tablet.

Leading a charging column of barrels would have been more impressive if Lieutenant Colonel Irving Morrell could have seen the column he was leading. He could see next to nothing. The louvered vision slits were shut as tight as they could be and still let any light at all into the interior of the barrel. Had they been open any wider, they would have let in bullets along with the light.

Morrell kept wondering if he’d died and gone to hell. The reek wasn’t of fire and brimstone; it was fire and automotive exhaust, which struck him as a reasonable approximation. The two roaring truck engines in the compartment below let out enough bellows and screams and groans for an entire regiment of lost souls. It was hot as hell in the barrel, too. This was March. What the inside of the barrel would be like on a muggy August afternoon was something Morrell did his best not to contemplate.

Nor was he alone, or even close to alone, in his mechanical damnation. Along with the driver and the two engineers who labored to keep the hot metal parts working as they should, he had for company the dozen machine gunners and the two artillerymen at the nose cannon: an apartment building’s worth of people jammed into an ugly metal box half the size of a small flat.

He peered ahead. He stuck his nose too close to the louvers, and tried to flatten it against them when the barrel lurched over the scarred and battered ground. He clutched the wounded member, which, fortunately, was neither bleeding nor broken.

He peered again, as closely as before. If his nose got smashed again, it got smashed, that was all. Peering was rewarded. “Shell hole!” he screamed. “Big shell hole! Steer right!”

What with the din of the two engines and the rattle and clanks of the tracks and all the other ancillary racket inside the barrel, the driver never heard him. He cursed himself for an idiot; he’d found out, the very first time he got into a barrel, that nobody could hear anything inside.

He remembered to use hand signals just as the barrel nosed down into the crater. The driver shifted to his lowest gear. The engines screamed even louder than they had before. Morrell wondered if the barrel’s pointed nose would get stuck in the dirt at the bottom of the shell hole. That was its worst disadvantage when set against its British and Confederate counterparts, which were tracked around their entire rhomboidal hulls: those babies could climb out of anything, and a U.S. barrel couldn’t, quite.

This particular U.S. barrel, though, could and did climb out of this particular shell hole. Beyond it stood a fat man waving a large blue flag. Morrell held up his right hand, palm out, to the driver. Obediently, the man hit the brakes, took the barrel out of gear, and turned off the motors. Everyone inside the steel hull who could reach the handle of an escape hatch opened it, to let in air and light-and the rumble of other barrels behind Morrell.

One by one, the rest of the machines in the column also halted. Hatches and louvers also came open on them. More than a few started disgorging their crews, as the men seized the first chance they got to escape.

Irving Morrell wasted very little time in getting out of his barrel, either. He clambered down to the ground. The fat man stabbed the flagpole into the ground. “That wasn’t so bad,” he said. “Looked like the end of the world, coming straight at me.” He stuck a finger in one ear. “Sounded that way, too.”

“You had a better view of it than I did, Major Dowling,” Morrell answered. He outranked General Custer’s adjutant, but treated him as he would have treated a superior officer. His oak leaves might have been silver while Dowling’s were gold, but the major more than made up in influence what he lacked in rank. Morrell went on, “It’s noisier inside a barrel than outside, though. Far as I can tell, it’s noisier inside a barrel than anywhere.”

“Yes, I think so, too,” Dowling said. “Astounding experience, riding in one of those damn things. Appalling experience, too.” He looked over his shoulder. “Here comes the general. Let’s see what he thought of the exercise.”

Lieutenant General Custer picked his way through the mud with slow, mincing steps. He wore fancy black cavalry boots, and plainly didn’t want to get them dirty. With him came Colonel Ned Sherrard. Sherrard had served for a good while on the General Staff, and General Staff officers were notorious among their counterparts in the field for their aversion to filth. But Sherrard looked to be turning into a real, live field soldier himself, for he took no more notice of the chewed-up terrain than he might have if he’d been in the field since 1914.

“Bully!” Custer said. “This column-or rather, an even grander column than this-will simply pulverize the defenses the Confederates have in front of Nashville. When they do, the infantry goes forward, sweeps up what the barrels have broken loose, and we have ourselves a breakthrough.”

“Yes, sir,” Morrell said. “I think that’s exactly what will happen. I want to be at the sharp end of the wedge.”

“I think we’ll break through, too,” Sherrard said. “I really and truly do.” He sounded surprised at himself, as if still unsure how Custer had managed to seduce him away from the doctrine he himself had helped formulate.

“And once the barrels have broken the way,” Custer went on, “we can also send in the cavalry, to complete the enemy’s demoralization and sweep up his shattered, flying remnants.”

Morrell, Dowling, and Sherrard looked at one another. None of them said a word. Every army east of the Mississippi had a division or two of cavalry based a little behind the front, waiting to exploit a breakthrough. The few times the horsemen got into action, they and their mounts died in droves. They were up above the level of the trenches, and their horses made big targets. Morrell didn’t think that would be any different even after the barrels went in.

By the looks on their faces, neither did Sherrard nor Dowling. Under his breath, Dowling said, “That’ll be a fine plan-when they invent a bulletproof horse.”

“They did,” Morrell murmured, also sotto voce. “It’s called a barrel.”

“What’s that?” Custer said. “What’s that? Speak up, dammit. People around me are always mumbling.”

“Sorry, sir,” Morrell said. Custer wasn’t deaf as a post, but he didn’t hear all that well, either, so nothing sounded loud to him. Moreover, Morrell got the idea that people needed to mumble around Custer, to make horrified comments about the outrageous things he said.

Stubborn old fool, Morrell thought. A man like that commonly found himself plowing ahead with bad ideas because, having got them, he was too pigheaded to give them up. Now, for once, Custer had got a good idea-one that fit in with the aggressive way he thought generally. He was too pigheaded to give that one up, too, but he also wanted to hang some of his bad ideas on it.

Major Dowling said, “Sir, of course we will have the cavalry in place, ready to take advantage of whatever opportunities arise for using it.”

“Of course we will,” Custer said. “Pity so many men these days carry the carbine instead of the saber. I put the saber to good use in the War of Secession. ‘Go in, Wolverines!’ ” he called reminiscently. “ ‘Give ’em hell!’ And we did.”

“But, sir, weren’t you carrying a carbine yourself during the Second Mexican War?” Dowling asked.

“Well, yes,” Custer admitted with a frown. “Even so, gleaming steel terrifies in a way that bullets can’t match.”

Morrell studied Dowling in open admiration. Custer’s adjutant was plainly very good at guiding the general commanding First Army away from courses that held no profit (to say nothing of guiding him out of the nineteenth century) and toward things that needed doing or needed doing in a particular way. Morrell commonly dealt with superior officers who proved difficult by ignoring them as much as he could. Learning other ways of handling the problem could be useful.

“When do we move, sir?” Morrell asked. He was aggressive, too, and wanted to lead the barrels into battle.

“Ground’s still damper than I’d like,” Colonel Sherrard said. “We’ll lose a lot fewer machines to bogging if we wait till the countryside dries out a bit more. That could matter.”

“We’ll have to move in more artillery support, too,” Dowling added. “That will also get easier as the roads dry out.”

“From what I’ve seen up in Philadelphia, the bombardments that go on for a week or so don’t do as much good as everyone thought they would when we started using them,” Morrell said. “The Rebs dig in like moles, and the shelling only shows right where we’re headed.”

“They’ve come up with something new,” Sherrard said. “It’s particularly good against enemy artillery. You give them an opening barrage of phosgene gas shells, make them put on their gas helmets. Hell of a lot of fun to try and serve a piece in a gas helmet, you know.”

“They’ve been harassing gunners like that as long as we’ve had gas shells,” Morrell said.

“I know,” Ned Sherrard said. “But they’ve got a new wrinkle on it. After that first round of phosgene, they saturate the area with puke-gas shells; the antigas cartridges that protect against phosgene don’t do a thing to stop it. Then, when the Reb gunners yank off their helmets so they can heave, they hit ’em with another phosgene barrage.”

Morrell considered. Having considered, he said, “That’s…devilish, sir. Whoever thought of it was probably the Marquis de Sade’s cousin.” He paused. “It’s also going to tie the Rebs into knots.”

“And, a day and a half later, it’ll give your artillery fits, because the Rebs will do it to us, too,” Abner Dowling said. “That’s the way this war has gone, right from the start.”

“I don’t think we’ll be able to move till next month,” Sherrard said. “When we do, we’d better hit hard.”

“That’s true,” Dowling agreed. “If we don’t break through this time, we’ll never get another chance. Everyone will be watching how we do. Teddy Roosevelt said as much. If we don’t measure up-” He pointed a thumb at the ground, a gesture straight from a Roman amphitheater.

“We’ll smash them.” Custer sounded sublimely confident. Had his performance matched his confidence, he would have been in front of Mobile, not Nashville. But confidence was never wasted. “On Remembrance Day, if the weather is good, we’ll smash them.”

“On Remembrance Day,” Morrell repeated. Major Dowling and Colonel Sherrard both nodded. Morrell said it again, softly: “On Remembrance Day.”

Nellie Semphroch had seldom felt more out of place than she did on dismounting from a hired carriage in front of St. John’s Church. Looking south across Lafayette Square, she could see the White House, still battered and sad-looking from the shell hits it had taken when the Confederate States captured the capital of the USA. Presidents worshiped at St. John’s; it was not normally for the likes of her. But these were not normal times.

She turned to Hal Jacobs, who sat beside her on the seat behind the driver. “Well, here we are,” she said.

“Let us make the best of it, then,” he answered. He looked like what he was: a dignified man without a great deal of wealth. His somber black suit, black derby, and wing collar with four-in-hand tie were correct enough for a wedding, but in no way stylish. Smiling at Nellie, he said, “You look lovely today-but then, I think that of you every day.”

“Foosh,” she said; his compliments never failed to make her nervous. She ran her hands down the pleated skirt of her peach silk dress.

“Edna was very kind to ask that I be the one to give her away,” Jacobs said. “I know it is only because she has no men who are close kin, but it was very kind.”

“So it was,” Nellie said, and hoped the subject would drop-with a thud. She knew why Edna had asked the favor of Hal Jacobs: her daughter was doing some heavy-handed matchmaking. She also knew Jacobs had accepted not least for the spying he could do among the Confederate officers who made up the bulk of the wedding party.

They stood around in front of the white-painted church, their dress butternut uniforms shining with gold braid, their kepis almost as fancy as those French officers would wear, many of them with ceremonial swords belted on their hips. As the driver handed Nellie down from the chariot, she listened to them chatting about the war. No doubt Hal Jacobs was listening, too-intently.

But, as he offered her his arm and she, despite misgivings, had to accept or be rude in public, she knew the chance to spy was not the only reason he’d so readily accepted Edna’s invitation. He was glad of her matchmaking; he wanted a match with Nellie.

No one seemed to care what Nellie herself thought. Nellie could not remember the last time anyone had cared what she thought.

As if to prove that, here came Lieutenant Nicholas H. Kincaid, his uniform as gaudy as a lieutenant’s could be, the creases sharp as razors. “Good morning, ma’am,” he said, beaming at her. “Isn’t it a lovely day?”

“It will do,” she answered. If he’d cared what she thought, he would have let her daughter alone. All he cared about, though, was stretching Edna out naked on a bed. He was a man. What point to expecting anything else of him?

He turned to Hal Jacobs. “Sir, when you give her away, you can be sure I’ll take her, and you can be sure I’ll take good care of her, too.”

“That is very good, Lieutenant,” Jacobs said. “That is as it should be.”

Kincaid pointed into the church. “They must have put Edna inside somewhere when she got here a couple of minutes ago. My pals hustled me off, though, so I don’t know for certain: bad luck to see the bride before the wedding, you know.”

“Yes,” Nellie said. Shabby Washingtonians-and, except for collaborators, there was no other kind of Washingtonians-walking by paused to stare at the wedding party. The Rebs could have public gaiety in the middle of the war. For anyone else, it was a distant memory.

“I hope everything goes as it should,” Jacobs said in his deliberate way. “I hope everything goes very well.”

“Yes.” Nellie sounded abstracted. One of those shabby Washingtonians on the other side of H Street…She lowered her voice to the next thing to a whisper: “Mr. Jacobs-Hal. Is that Bill Reach over there?”

“Why-” Jacobs raised his bushy eyebrows. “Why, I believe it is. What can he be doing here? I must go over and-”

Now Nellie took hold of his arm with great firmness. “You must do nothing of the sort. What you must do is come in with me and help me marry my fool of a daughter to this great Rebel oaf she’s chosen. If you do anything else”-she played what she devoutly hoped was a trump-“I’ll never speak to you again.”

“But, Nellie-” He also spoke in low tones, and in a voice full of anguish. “Our beloved country relies upon-”

“It does no such thing,” Nellie broke in. “That skunk hasn’t had anything to do with you for months, and our beloved country is doing just fine. The war’s going better than it has since it started. And if that Reach…person makes trouble,” she added, “I will kill him.”

Still feebly protesting, Jacobs let himself be led into the church. Edna, dressed and veiled in white (white she doesn’t deserve, Nellie thought, forgetting she’d worn white on her wedding day after a past far more maculate than her daughter’s), sat in a waiting room. Behind the veil, her expression was the one the Confederate General Staff would have worn had the Army of Northern Virginia captured Philadelphia.

Grudgingly, trying for peace with her daughter, Nellie said, “I do hope it turns out well, Edna.”

“Of course it will, Ma,” Edna said with the unselfconscious confidence of youth. “We’ll live happily ever after, just like in the fairy tales.”

Nellie burst out laughing. She was sorry the moment she did it, but by then it was too late. Edna glared at her in fury burning as vitriol. And then, bless him, Hal Jacobs started laughing, too. He said, “I beg your pardon, Miss Edna, truly I do, but it is not so simple. I wish it were. My own life would have been much easier, believe me.”

“We’ll do it,” Edna said. “You wait and see. We will.”

Jacobs did not argue with her. Neither did Nellie. What was the use? If Edna didn’t know a human being couldn’t go through life without sorrow and anger and fear and boredom and jealousy and bitterness-if she didn’t know that, she would find out.

“It’s gonna be fine, Ma,” Edna said. “Isn’t everybody gorgeous out there? What would Pa think if he could see it?”

He’d think you were marrying a damned Rebel. But Nellie didn’t say that, either. Again, what point? The die was cast here. “He’d think it was quite a show, so he would,” she answered.

“I hope it is a show that goes well,” Hal Jacobs said. Nellie looked at him sharply. He knew something. She didn’t know what, but he knew something. Before she could find a way to ask him what it was, the organist began to play. The lower notes seemed to resound deep within her; she felt them in her bones rather than hearing them.

Edna got to her feet and smiled at Hal Jacobs. “Let’s go,” she said, and then turned to Nellie. “Is my veil on straight?” Without waiting for an answer, she adjusted it minutely.

The procession formed up in the back of the church. Like an army, the wedding had a defined order of march. Nicholas Kincaid’s eyes lit up when at last he was permitted to see his bride-to-be. Animal, Nellie thought, having seen too many men’s eyes light up in dingy rooms. Nothing but a filthy animal.

Up at the altar, the minister waited, looking almost like a Catholic priest in his vestments. An usher-a lieutenant who was one of Kincaid’s friends-spoke in brisk, businesslike tones: “The bride and the gentleman who will be giving her away take the lead.”

With a smirk, Edna gave Hal Jacobs her arm. They started up the aisle together. But they had taken only a few steps when Bill Reach burst into the church, shouting, “People had better get the hell out of here, because-”

Nellie outshouted him: “Get this man-this robber, this thief-out of here this instant!” She shrieked straight at Reach: “Haven’t you done enough to ruin me, you son of a bitch?”

Words, even words no lady should ever have said, were nowhere near enough to satisfy her. The little handbag she carried did not have much room, but she’d made sure she’d included a stout hatpin, just in case any of the Confederate officers tried putting their hands anywhere they didn’t belong on her. She wished she’d brought a knife instead, but the pin would have to do. Snatching it out, she rushed at the man who’d done so much to wreck her life.

Ushers and guests-Confederate officers all-were rushing toward him, too. But they would throw him out, no more. She wanted to hurt him. She wanted to kill him. “He’s mine!” she shouted furiously. “Mine, do you hear?”

They didn’t hear, or didn’t pay any attention. They had just seized him when the first big shell landed across the street in Lafayette Square. At the scream in the sky, at that ground-shaking roar, half the officers in the church-likely the half that had seen action, as opposed to the half made up of occupying authorities-threw themselves flat between the pews.

Another shell landed somewhere off to one side. Nicholas Kincaid ran down the aisle toward Edna, shouting, “Come on! We’ve got to get out of here!” More shells were falling. One crashed through the roof of St. John’s Church and exploded just behind the altar.

Blast picked Nellie up, flung her through the air, and slammed her down, hard. The hatpin bit into her own leg. She squealed. She couldn’t hear herself squeal. She wondered if she would ever hear anything again. She had trouble breathing. When she wiped at her nose, her hand came away bloody. The explosion had tried to tear her lungs out by the roots.

Her dress was rumpled and ripped. The handbag was gone, she had no idea where. She scrambled to her feet. One ankle didn’t want to bear her weight. She looked down. It wasn’t bleeding. She could move her foot, though that hurt, too. That must have meant it wasn’t broken, or so she hoped. She’d walk on it now and worry about it later.

The church looked as if a bomb had gone off inside it, which was true, or near enough. Edna and Hal Jacobs stumbled toward her, both of them bleeding, red smirching the white of the wedding dress. They stepped over a body in the aisle. The body’s head lay in the aisle, too, a few feet closer to Nellie. Lieutenant Nicholas H. Kincaid stared up at the ceiling that was starting to smolder. His eyes would never see anything again.

Edna saw the body, saw the great pool of blood that had welled from it, and then saw and recognized the head. Her mouth opened in a scream that was for Nellie silent. Nellie ran to her, took her by both hands, and pulled her out of the church, Jacobs staggering along beside them.

More shells kept falling, each one a small earthquake. Some people in the streets were up and fleeing-fleeing in all directions, for no one path seemed safe. Others were down, some wounded or dead, others sheltering against fragments and blast. On the far side of Lafayette Square, the White House burned.

Nellie did not see Bill Reach. He must have known this was coming from the U.S. guns, as Hal Jacobs might have. He’d tried to save people. At risk to himself, he’d tried to save people. Nellie wondered if that meant she couldn’t hate him any more. Savagely, she shook her head. She owed him too much for that.

Anne Colleton glared at the men who served the three-inch guns she’d managed to pry loose from an armory where they’d been gathering dust. “You haven’t got rid of Cassius and his fighters,” she said, her voice suggesting that that was a sin incapable of forgiveness. In her mind, it was.

Captain Beauregard Barksdale, the militiaman commanding the little artillery unit, said, “We’re doing the best we can, Miss Colleton. We aren’t so handy with these here guns as we might be.”

She withered him with a glance. “I’ve seen that.” Her voice dripped scorn. She was being unfair, and knew it, and couldn’t help it. Beauregard Barksdale had undoubtedly been named for the famous Confederate general right after the bombardment of Fort Sumter, and might well be more familiar with the brass Napoleons the Little Napoleon had fired than he was with the modern artillery pieces Anne had obtained for him.

“Ma’am, we are doing what we can,” Barksdale repeated stolidly. He took a deep breath, then let it wuffle out through his thick gray mustache. “And I’m still not even slightly sure it’s legal for you to be ordering the militia of the sovereign state of South Carolina around in the first place.”

Anne’s voice was sweet as ant syrup, and no less deadly: “Shall I wire the governor up in Columbia and ask him whether he’s sure? Shall I telephone him so he can tell you he’s sure?”

She meant it. The militia captain could see she meant it. Behind his bifocal spectacles, his eyes went wide. She stared at him, unblinking and implacable as a hawk. He wilted. She’d been sure he would wilt. “Well, no, ma’am,” he said. “I don’t reckon you’ve got to go so far as to do that. We’ll take your orders-won’t we, boys?” None of the other old men and youths serving the guns dared say no.

“You’d better,” Anne said. “I haven’t the time to waste going through this nonsense. If I have to go through it twice, I’ll be sorry-and so will you. I am going to be perfectly plain with you: yes, I have to squat when I piss. That does not mean I can’t blow your heads off with a rifle at a range beyond any at which you could hit me, and it does not mean I know nothing of war and am unfit to give you orders.”

If she couldn’t get them to obey her any other way, she’d fluster them into doing it. She’d never seen such a collection of red faces in her life. These men and boys had gone through their whole lives never imagining a woman would remind them that she pissed, let alone how she went about it.

“If you’re going to give orders, just give ’em, for God’s sake,” Captain Barksdale said, now not daring to meet her eye. “Don’t go on about…other things.” He shuffled his feet like an embarrassed schoolboy.

“That is what I was trying to do,” Anne said briskly. “I have some reason to believe I know where the Red bandits will strike next. You’ll have to hit them harder than you did last time to do any good.”

“Put us where we can hit ’em and I reckon we’ll do it,” Barksdale replied. The gunners-many of whom, Anne was convinced, could not have hit the ground if they fell off a horse-nodded.

“I will,” Anne said. I hope, she added to herself. Scipio was not to be trusted, not any more, not after shells had come crashing down around him. Had the shells killed Cassius and Cherry, she would have reckoned it worthwhile. As things were…as things were, she contemplated Scipio the exacting perfectionist huddled in the swamps, and knew she had a measure of revenge with every breath he took.

Captain Barksdale said, “We’d be even likelier to hit, ma’am, if you could get us some more shells to practice with.”

Anne rolled her eyes. “I count myself lucky if I’m able to pry loose enough shells for you to use in combat.” That was an understatement. From the start of the war till now, the three-inch field gun had been the workhorse of the Confederate Army. It served on every front, and every front screamed for shells. Detaching any had taken every wire she could pull.

The militia gunners hitched limbers and guns to horses and drove back to St. Matthews. In town, she saw two women on the street in trousers: not so fine as hers, but trousers. She accepted that as no less than her due. She’d been a leader in style and fashion before the war began. It was only natural that she should continue to lead now.

She was about to go up to her room when a messenger boy halted his bicycle with the heels of his boots. “Telegram for you, ma’am,” he said. She took the envelope. He hurried away after pocketing a ten-cent tip.

Ripping apart the flimsy paper was not an adequate substitute for settling Cassius and Cherry for good, but it had to do. When Anne was done reading the wire, she tore it to shreds, threw them in the air, and let the wind blow them away. None of the news from her brokers had been good lately. The markets in Richmond and London and Paris were faltering; the investments that had sustained her even after the ruin of Marshlands faltered, too.

She could not imagine when Marshlands would recover. She had trouble imagining when her investments would recover, either. If they didn’t…If they didn’t, she wouldn’t be the leader around these parts much longer. She had trouble imagining that, too, but less trouble than she would have had in the spring of 1916 and ever so much less than she would have had in the spring of 1915.

A train pulled into the station a couple of blocks away. The fire engine might not have been replaced after the Red uprising, but labor gangs, some working at gunpoint, had put the railroads back together in a hurry. Those iron rails bound the CSA together as nothing else could.

From the direction of the station, someone called her name. Her head turned. Coming her way was a tall man in a butternut uniform. “Tom!” she yelped in glad surprise, and ran toward her older brother.

Lieutenant Colonel Tom Colleton stared at Anne as she drew near. “Good God, Sis, what are you wearing?” he said.

She put her hands on her hips and glared at him. He didn’t flinch, as he would have before the war. In a way, that made her proud: he’d gone from an overage boy, a useless drone, to a man on the battlefield. In another way, it irked her more than ever: even as a man, he thought women should be useless toys.

With precision that showed how tightly she was holding her temper in check, she replied, “I am wearing the clothes I need to wear to go hunting bandits in the swamps of the Congaree-or did you want that rifle you sent me to gather dust in the closet?”

Tom took a deep breath, then decided not to make a scene. “All right,” he said. “You sure as the devil took me by surprise, though. I never would have reckoned the day would come when women showed off their shapes that way.”

“Really?” she asked, as if in innocence. “What sort of joints do you go to when you’re on leave but you don’t come home?” She had the satisfaction of watching a blush climb from his throat to his hairline. Deciding to let him down easy, she asked, “How are things at the front?”

He grimaced, but in an impersonal sort of way. “Not so well. We’ve lost just about all the ground we took back from the Yankees in the counterattack last fall. We’re shoved away from Big Lick and the Roanoke River, back toward the Blue Ridge Mountains. Dammit, it’s not that they’re better soldiers than we are. The trouble is, there are more of them than there are of us.”

“What about the black troops?” Anne asked.

Her brother shrugged. “They’re starting to come into the line. They’re raw. God only knows how they’ll do when push comes to shove. And even with ’em, there are still more damnyankees than there are of us. Defending is cheaper than attacking, thank God. If we’re lucky, sooner or later the USA will get tired of throwing away men against us and against the Canucks, and they’ll make some kind of peace we can stand.”

“And if we’re not lucky?” Anne said quietly.

Tom didn’t answer for a while. When he did, it was obliquely: “We’ve made the USA eat a lot of crow since South Carolina stopped flying the Stars and Stripes. I wonder what the bird tastes like, and how they’d serve it up. They remember every morsel, and that’s a fact.” He dug in his pocket, found a coin, and tossed it to Anne.

It was a U.S. quarter-dollar. On one side, it bore a bust of Daniel Webster, whom Confederate schools vilified for opposing secession. Anne turned it over. The other side showed arrows and lightning bolts superimposed on a star, with the word REMEMBRANCE stamped across it.

She handed the coin back to her brother. “Till this war, we hadn’t fought them for more than thirty years,” she said. “Foolish for them to keep on harping on things when the last war was over and done with so long ago-before either one of us was born.”

“When you lose, Sis, the last war’s never over and done with,” Tom answered, scratching the scar that seamed his cheek. “I’ve questioned a lot of prisoners. The Yankees remember ever single slight from the day this state seceded all the way up to the day they’re captured.”

“The thing to do, then, is to make sure they don’t have the chance to make us eat crow,” Anne said, as if stating an axiom of geometry.

“Yes, that would be the thing to do,” Tom Colleton said.

Anne chose to ignore the incompleteness of his agreement. As she would have before the war, she took charge of him. She took him to St. Matthews’ only functioning hotel, checked him in, and then led him to the better of the town’s cafes. With only two open in St. Matthews, it rated merely the comparative, not the superlative. It wasn’t that good, either; a third one likely would have been the best.

With an air of big-brotherly amusement, he let her do all that. He didn’t depend on her to do it, though, as he would have before the war. He ordered a beefsteak that proved less tender than it might have, stuck a fork in it, and let out several piercing brays. Anne was chewing a bite, and almost choked from laughing.

He gave her a peck on the cheek after supper, saying, “We’ll talk more in the morning, Sis.”

They did, and had plenty to talk about: the night was enlivened when the Reds brought a machine gun out of the swamp and fired several belts of ammunition into St. Matthews from long range before melting away under cover of darkness. Anne had a window shot out, and was nicked on the hand by flying glass.

“Is it like this all the time?” Tom asked.

“They haven’t done that in a while,” Anne said, “but they can, till we hunt down the last of them. We’re having trouble with that, though, because so much of everything goes straight to the front.”

“We’d have worse trouble yet if it didn’t,” Tom replied. Anne’s mouth twisted in something less than a smile. She had no good answer for that.

Sam Carsten peered out of the narrow vision slit in the sponson that housed his five-inch gun as the USS Dakota inched her way forward. What he saw was endless choppy ocean. The South Atlantic swells were slapping against the battleship’s full armored length, which made her roll unpleasantly.

As if also noticing the motion, Hiram Kidde said, “Don’t nobody puke in here. Anybody pukes in here, he’s in big trouble with me. You got that?”

“Aye aye, ‘Cap’n,’ ” the gun crew chorused.

“I wish we’d put some more turns on the engines,” Carsten said. “That would help smooth things out.”

“Oh, that it would, by Jesus-that it would,” the chief of the gun crew answered. “What’s the matter with you, Sam? You think you could stash your brains in your bunk once they promoted you to petty officer? That ain’t how it works, much as I hate to tell you.”

Carsten’s ears heated. “Have a heart, ‘Cap’n.’ That’s not what I meant, and you know it.”

“It’s what you said, goddammit,” Kidde said. “Sure, bend some more turns on the engines. Why the hell not? What the hell we got better to do than charge right into the mine belt the limeys and the Argentines laid between Argentina and the Falklands? What’s it cost us so far? Just a cruiser and a destroyer. Why the hell not put a battleship on the list?”

“Maybe we should have swung wide around the goddamn Falklands.” Now Sam’s voice was an embarrassed mumble.

Hiram Kidde, having scented blood, wasn’t about to let him off the hook. “That’d be good, wouldn’t it? Tack an extra six or eight hundred miles onto the cruise. We don’t have that much margin ourselves, and our supply ships have even less. Shit, the Argentines who didn’t dare stir out of harbor against us are going to come right after our tenders and their escorts even now.”

“Look, ‘Cap’n,’ why don’t you forget I ever said anything?” Sam suggested. And believe me, he thought, it’ll be a cold day in hell-a damn sight colder than this-before I open my mouth again. He retreated from the vision slit and went back toward the breech of the cannon. As long as he stayed at his station and kept his mouth shut, nothing too bad could happen to him-he hoped.

To his relief, Kidde started peering out at the Atlantic. Everybody kept doing that, although there wasn’t anything to see but gray-green ocean. The mines hid below the surface. No one would see them till too late.

Luke Hoskins spoke to Sam in a low voice: “Don’t let Kidde get you down. We’re all edgy these days. We’ve been torpedoed, and we came through it, and we’ve been shelled, and we came through that, too. But if we hit a mine, likely we can’t do nothin’ about it-except sink, I mean.”

“Yeah. Except sink,” Carsten said sourly. “You do so ease my mind, Luke.”

But Hoskins was right. The ship was engaged in hard, slow, dangerous work, work in which the men who served the secondary armament could take no direct part. If all went well, they would live. If not, they would die-and which it would be was not in their hands. No wonder tempers flared.

Kidde turned away from the vision slit. “Things could be worse,” he said, perhaps trying to make amends for ripping into Sam. “We could be in one of those destroyers up ahead of us.”

“Amen.” Everyone in the sponson spoke at the same time, more smoothly than the sailors would have responded to the chaplain of a Sunday morning. Sooner or later, somebody was going to say something more than that. Usually, that somebody would have been Carsten. Not this time. Sam, having been raked once, sulked in his metaphysical tent.

Luke Hoskins said what the whole gun crew had to be thinking: “You’ve got to be crazy to clear mines in a destroyer.”

“Nope.” Hiram Kidde shook his head. “All you’ve got to do is get your orders. Then you say ‘Aye aye, sir!’ and do as you’re told.”

“Crazy,” Hoskins repeated. “Only way to clear the mines you’re supposed to get rid of is to steam past ’em without blowing yourself out of the water.”

“You do lose points if that happens, Luke,” Kidde agreed. “Can’t argue with you there.”

“Goddammit, ‘Cap’n,’ it isn’t funny,” the shell-jerker said. “That damn weighted cable between the four-stackers is supposed to catch on the mines’ mooring cables and yank ’em up to the surface so we can shoot the hell out of ’em. But if they find the mines the hard way, or if they miss ’em…”

His voice trailed away. Nobody said anything for a while after that. Sam knew what kind of pictures he was seeing inside his own mind. The rest of the crew couldn’t have been imagining anything much different.

Turn and turn about: four hours on, four hours off. When the other crew replaced Carsten and his comrades, he hurried to the galley and shoveled down pork and beans and fried potatoes and sauerkraut and lemonade and coffee. He was amazed how much he ate these days, to hold cold and exhaustion at bay. The coffee wouldn’t keep him from sleeping. Nothing would keep him from sleeping, not even the highly charged air in the cramped bunkroom after everybody had been messing on pork and beans and sauerkraut.

Climbing out of his bunk was more like an exhumation than anything else. He shook his head in bewilderment. Hadn’t he just lain down? He put on his shoes and cap, grabbed the peacoat he’d set on top of his blanket, and staggered blank-faced toward the galley for more coffee to help him remember who he was and what the hell he was supposed to be doing.

He went up on deck to let the chilly breeze clear some more cobwebs from his poor befogged brain. Walking forward, he nodded to the two mine-hunting destroyers that cleared the way for the Dakota. So far, they’d done their job perfectly: they hadn’t blown up, and neither had the battleship.

That thought had hardly made its slow way through Sam’s still-fuzzy thoughts when one of the destroyers did go up, in a great dreadful gout of smoke and fire. Across half a mile of water, the roar was loud enough to stagger him.

“Oh, sweet Jesus!” he moaned. Half of that was simple horror. The other half was guilt for jinxing the destroyer by thinking how well she’d been doing her job.

She was sinking fast now, going down by the bow, her stern rising higher and higher until, only a couple of minutes after she was hit, she dove for the bottom of the sea. She never had a chance to lower boats. A handful of heads bobbed in the cold, cold water. In water like that, a man might stay alive for an hour, maybe even a little more if he was very strong.

“Rescue party to the boats!” a lieutenant shouted.

Sam stood not twenty feet from one. He was in it, along with several other men, and dangling his way down toward the surface of the Atlantic less than two minutes later. He plied an oar with a vigor that made him sweat even in that nasty weather. His was not the only boat in the water; the Dakota had launched several others, as had the destroyer’s partner. They all raced to pick up the scattered survivors.

“Back oars!” Sam called as the boat drew near one feebly paddling man. He dropped his own oar, leaned out, and caught hold of the sailor’s hand. The fellow almost pulled him into the water, but a couple of other men in the boat grabbed him around the waist and also helped him pull in the survivor.

“Thank you,” the sailor said through chattering teeth. “Christ, I reckoned I was dead.”

“I believe you,” Sam said. “Saw you go up. Godawful thing. One second you were just going along, and the next one-”

“Felt just like somebody took a two-by-four and hit me in both feet,” the sailor said. Grimacing, he went on, “Bet something’s busted in there, ’cause they sure as hell hurt. Saw we didn’t have a prayer. Everybody was screaming, ‘Abandon ship!’ Made it to the rail-I was half walking, half crawling. Made it over the side and started swimming hard as I could, on account of I didn’t want to get sucked under when she went down. And I didn’t, not quite. Figured my ticket was punched, but you’ve got to keep trying, you know what I mean?”

“Here, pal. Try this.” Somebody pressed the bottle of brandy the boat carried-nothing near so fine as what Rear Admiral Fiske drank-into the sailor’s hands.

He took a long pull. “Marry me!” he exclaimed blissfully. His rescuers laughed.

He raised the dark bottle to his lips again. “Don’t drink it all,” Sam warned. “We’re going to try and get some of your pals, too.” He pointed toward a man floating on his back not far away, then grabbed up his oar and helped pull the boat toward the other sailor.

The man wasn’t moving. When they got to him, they saw he was dead. “Poor bastard,” somebody said quietly. It was all the memorial service the sailor got.

Sam stood up in the boat to see farther. One of the boats from the other destroyer was already heading toward the last swimming man he spied. The others had either been picked up or had sunk beneath the waves forever.

“Well, we got one,” he muttered-a tiny victory, snatched from the jaws of death. He sat on the bench again, then spoke once more to the sailor he’d pulled out of the South Atlantic: “I take it back, pal. You might as well get drunk.”

“God bless you,” the man from the destroyer said. Instead of drinking, he stuck out his hand. “You ever need anything, I’m your man. Name’s Gus Hardwig.”

“Sam Carsten,” Carsten said, and shook the proffered hand. “Believe me, I was glad to do it. We were all glad to do it.” The men in the boat with him nodded. He pointed back toward the Dakota. “Now we’d better take you home.”

They rowed over alongside the battleship, whose cranes effortlessly lifted the boat out of the water. Gus Hardwig put a cautious foot on the Dakota’s deck, then jerked it away as if the steel were red-hot. “Can’t make it,” he said.

Orderlies whisked him away in a stretcher. Carsten stood on the deck, staring north. Only a few floating bodies and an oil slick showed where the mine-clearing destroyer had gone down. Sam’s shiver had nothing to do with his wet tunic and the sharp breeze. The mine could have blown up the Dakota as readily as it had sunk the escort vessel. That could have been him floating in the water as readily as Gus Hardwig, or more likely him going down with the ship. He shivered again.