Drive to the East

IX

Waiting for the balloon to go up was the hardest thing a soldier did. Back in 1914, Tom Colleton had waited eagerly, even gaily, confident the war would be won and the damnyankees smashed before the cotton harvest came in. Everything would be glorious. Three years later, he was one of the lucky ones who came home again, glory quite forgotten.

The new war had smashed the USA, had split the country in two. That he was up here by Sandusky, Ohio, proved as much. Like Jake Featherston, like everyone else in the CSA, he’d assumed that splitting the United States meant winning the war. There was a lesson there, on what assumptions were worth, but he didn’t care to dwell on it.

“This time for sure,” he muttered.

“Sir?” asked an improbably young lieutenant commanding one of the companies in his regiment. He should have had a more experienced officer in that slot, but the replacement depot hadn’t coughed one up. Reinforcements were coming into Ohio, which was good. Even with them, though, not every hole got filled.

Tom wished the damnyankees had the same problem. He envied them their manpower pool. Confederate soldiers mostly had better weapons. He thought, and was far from alone in thinking, Confederate soldiers were better trained. Every one of them was worth more in combat than his U.S. counterpart. But Jesus God, there were a hell of a lot of Yankees!

He needed to answer the youngster. “This time for sure,” he repeated. “When we hit the U.S. forces this time, we’ve got to knock them out of the war. We’ve got to, and we damn well will.”

“Oh, yes, sir!” said the shavetail-Tom thought his name was Jackson. It was a safe bet, anyway; about one in every three Confederate soldiers seemed to be named Jackson. “Of course we will!”

He hadn’t been at the front very long. He could still think about-could still talk about-inevitable victory, the way Confederate wireless broadcasts did. Tom knew better. He thought the Confederates still had a good chance of doing what they wanted, but a good chance wasn’t a sure thing. Anyone who’d ever lost a hand with a flush knew all about that.

“We’ll see pretty soon,” he said.

Lieutenant-Jackson? — said, “How can we lose?”

Colleton put a hand on his shoulder. “I said the same damn thing when I came to the front at the start of the last war. I would have been a little older than you are now, I suppose, and then I spent all the time that came afterwards finding out how we could lose. I just hope like hell that doesn’t happen to you.”

“It won’t.” Jackson sounded supremely confident. “We got stabbed in the back last time. Niggers won’t have the chance to do that now. The Party’s going to take care of ’em, but good.”

He really believed that. To a certain extent, Tom did, too, but only to a certain extent. He said, “We would have had a better chance if they hadn’t risen up-sure. But there’s something you’ve got to remember, or you’ll go home in a box and never find out how the latest serial ends: the damnyankees can fight some, too.”

“Yes, sir.” Jackson’s tones were those of a well-brought-up young man too polite to correct an elder who’s said something obviously foolish. “But they’re just doing it on account of their government makes ’em.”

“Where did you hear that?” Tom asked, sending him a curious stare.

“In school. Everybody knows it.”

Is this what they’re teaching my children, too? Tom wondered. God help us if it is. Gently, he asked, “Haven’t you ever noticed that not everything they teach you in school is true, and that a lot of things ‘everybody knows’ aren’t true at all?”

“No, sir, can’t say that I have,” Jackson answered after serious, earnest, and very visible consideration.

He meant that, too. For the first time, Tom found himself frightened for the younger generation in the CSA. If this was what they learned… “Lieutenant, there’s something you have to understand, because it’s the Lord’s truth. The Yankees don’t like us any better than we like them. They don’t need the government to make them fight. They’d do it anyhow, on account of we jumped them. Next time we interrogate some prisoners, you listen in. You’ll see.”

“I’ll do that,” Jackson said. “But they’ll just spout the nonsense their higher-ups told them. They’re-what’s the word? They’re indoctrinated, that’s it.” He looked pleased with himself for remembering.

And you’re not? Tom wondered. He couldn’t ask, though. Jackson might see other people’s indoctrination. His own was to him like the air under its wings to a butterfly. He didn’t think about it. He didn’t notice it. He just floated on it and let it support him.

Not far behind them, artillery rumbled. Things were starting to pick up. The Confederate gunners fired barrages to east and west, to keep the U.S. soldiers posted in front of them from guessing which way they would move when the time came. Tom wished the men in green-gray didn’t know the time was coming. Wish for a million dollars while you’re at it, he thought. The Yankees weren’t blind men. The Confederate buildup had been as subtle as the soldiers with wreathed stars on their collars could make it, but you couldn’t hide everything no matter how hard you tried.

The Confederates were doing their best. As Tom walked up toward the front, he passed barrels-both the older model and the new-crouching under camouflage netting with leaves and sod applied to make them as nearly invisible as possible. They’d moved up under cover of darkness; the orders against moving by daylight were explicit to the point of bloodthirstiness. More C.S. artillery fire had masked the sound of their advance. The damnyankees had used that trick in the last war. Imitation was the sincerest form of flattery. With luck, it would be the best revenge, too.

“Get low, you damn fool, before somebody shoots you!” The raucous advice came from a foxhole by the side of the path. Only the two stars on each side of Tom’s collar that marked his rank showed he was an officer. He’d deliberately dulled them, so the Yankees’ snipers wouldn’t single him out. Evidently his own men couldn’t single him out, either.

And getting low was good advice almost any time. Tom hit the dirt and crawled toward the foxhole. U.S. artillery started coming in before he got there. The crawl turned into an undignified scramble.

“Jesus!” The private already in it sounded disgusted. “This fucker ain’t big enough for two.” Then he noticed Tom’s rank badges. “Uh, sir.”

He wasn’t wrong, even if he was rude. Tom took his entrenching tool off his belt and started digging like a mole after forty cups of coffee. “Just have to make it bigger,” he said. He added the dirt from his excavation to the breastwork in front of the hole.

“Huh,” the soldier said in surprise. “Didn’t know officers knew how to handle one o’ them things.”

“If I didn’t, I would have got killed when I was your age,” Tom answered, glad to pause and pant. “Ever hear of the Roanoke front?”

“Sure as hell did. Uncle Lucas came back without most of his arm on account of he was there.” The soldier paused, taking longer than he should have to make the connection. “You was there, too?”

“That’s right. I’m sorry about your uncle. I never got more than a few scratches myself-I was lucky.”

“Better believe you was.” The private might have said more, but the scream of an incoming shell warned it would come down somewhere close. He and Tom both ducked. The explosion was close enough to make the ground shake. Fragments maliciously whined and screeched overhead. A few clods of dirt pattered down into the hole, but nothing worse.

On the Roanoke front, that one shell would have been the harbinger of many more, and only extraordinary luck and a hole better than this one would have kept a man from getting maimed or killed. Things were quieter here. The damnyankees had shifted a lot of their weight to Virginia. What was left was good enough to hold the Confederates in place and harass them, but not to work the wholesale slaughter that had been so common in the Great War.

The United States didn’t seem to have figured out that the Confederate States were shifting men out of Virginia and sliding them back over here. Nothing made Tom happier than their continued ignorance. The more the Yankees fussed and fumed in the East, the less attention they’d pay to anything out here. If they stayed ignorant till morning after next…

They did. The real Confederate barrage started an hour before sunrise. It was thunderous enough to wake Tom. After all the gunfire he’d slept through at the front in two wars-and in fighting the Negroes after the first one-that was no mean feat. Freight-train noises traveled the rails of the sky from west to east.

Yankee counterbattery fire started almost at once. The U.S. soldiers weren’t fools. He’d said as much to Lieutenant Jackson. (Absently, he wondered whether Jackson still lived. He thought so, but he hadn’t had any reports from that company for most of a day.) They knew trouble when they walked into it. One after another, though, their guns fell silent, battered into submission by a heavier weight of metal.

The Confederate barrage let up precisely at sunrise. Its purpose was to stun, not to kill everything on the U.S. side of the line. Three years of bloody experience had taught the CSA and the USA that they couldn’t kill all their enemies, or even enough of them, with big guns alone. And a really heavy artillery preparation, one that went on for days, ruined the ground over which attackers would advance and slowed them down. Less gunnery amounted to more.

Confederate barrels rumbled and rattled and clanked forward. Tom scrambled up out of his hole. He had an officer’s brass whistle, and blew a long, shrill blast on it. “Come on, you lazy sons of bitches!” he yelled. “We’ve caught ’em by surprise, and now we’ll make ’em pay. Watch your buddies and follow me!”

An officer who told his men to follow him could almost always get them to obey. An officer who told troops to advance but sat tight himself had a lot more trouble. The only thing wrong with officers of the first sort was that they got shot a lot more often than the others.

If you thought about things like that… Tom resolutely didn’t. If everybody thought about things like that instead of being afraid to act like a coward in front of his buddies or his men, war would become impossible. The machine-gun fire in front of him said this war remained altogether too possible. Not all the damnyankees were stunned-far from it.

Asskickers screamed down out of the sky to bomb strongpoints the C.S. artillery hadn’t silenced. For the moment, the dive bombers-and the Confederates-had it all their own way. Dazed U.S. soldiers threw up their hands and hoped the advancing men in butternut would let them surrender instead of just shooting them and moving on. Just like last year, Tom thought, and wondered if that was good or bad.

When Brigadier General Irving Morrell’s train pulled into the Broad Street Station in Philadelphia, he couldn’t have been in a worse mood if he’d tried for a week. The endless delays on the trip north from Virginia did nothing to improve his temper. Between bomb damage and rail sabotage, the trip took three times as long as it should have. All he missed was getting the train strafed from the air. But he could have flown up in the Army’s fastest fighter and still arrived ready to bite nails in half.

Colonel John Abell met him at the station. That didn’t make him any happier, even if the colorless General Staff officer was the one who’d let him know he’d finally earned stars on his shoulder straps.

“Goddammit, Colonel, I’m not a Ping-Pong ball, you know!” Morrell exploded. He almost said, God damn you, Colonel. He suspected Abell was responsible for getting him pulled out of Virginia, and he intended to raise Cain about it.

For the moment, Abell was imperturbable. “Consider it a compliment, sir,” he answered, his voice-an unmemorable baritone-never rising. “We always try to send you where the country needs you most.”

That took some of the wind out of Morrell’s sails, but only some. “I’m not a fire brigade all by myself,” he pointed out. “Where are my fire engines? Where are my firemen? Where’s my… hook and ladder?” At the last possible instant, he left off the participle.

“Come with me, sir,” Abell said, still mildly. “We’ll give you our estimate of the situation in Ohio, and then we’ll send you West to-”

“Make bricks without straw,” Morrell broke in. The General Staff officer looked pained. How he looked wasn’t a patch on how Morrell felt. “I’ve already tried that in Ohio, thank you very much. Are you going to see if history can repeat itself? And are you setting me up to take the fall if it does? It can’t be your fault, after all.”

By you he didn’t mean Abell’s alone, but all the officers in Philadelphia who thought of war as theory and maps and not as cordite and burning barrels and mangled men. They were good at what they did. Because they were, they thought they knew everything there was to know about the business of organized slaughter. Morrell had a different, and lower, opinion.

“We’re both on the same side, sir,” Abell said. “We’ve flushed out several traitors-some of them planted long, long ago-and more no doubt remain in place. But no one has ever questioned your loyalty or patriotism.”

“That’s white of you, by God,” Morrell said.

“Making things as difficult as possible is another story,” Abell snapped, his iron control rusting a little at last. “Will you come with me to the War Department, please? We can’t hash things out here on the platform.”

“I’ll come,” Morrell replied, and he did.

He and Abell had little to say to each other on the short ride through central Philadelphia. The de facto capital looked more battered every time Morrell saw it. The War Department had taken several hits since the last time he was there. Abell remarked, “Much of what we do these days is underground. We dig like moles.”

“You’ve had your heads in the ground for a long time,” Morrell observed, and bright patches of red burned on Abell’s sallow cheeks. Morrell went on, “Tell me about the new Confederate barrels. How long will we have to wait before we’ve got anything like that?”

The General Staff officer got redder. Amazingly lifelike, Morrell thought. “Production of an improved model is expected to begin within the next few weeks,” Abell said stiffly.

That was better than Morrell expected. He’d feared the USA would have to design anything new from scratch. Even so, he asked, “How late will the improved model be if the Confederates take Pittsburgh away from us? How much of our steel production would that cost?”

“We are hoping… sir… that that will not happen,” Abell answered. “We are hoping you will help keep that from happening. That’s why we’re sending you to Ohio.”

“Why you’re sending me back to Ohio,” Morrell corrected, and had the somber satisfaction of seeing John Abell flinch. To rub it in, he murmured, “Youngstown. Akron. Cleveland.”

“They haven’t taken Cleveland this past year!” Now Abell sounded truly furious. “What makes you think they can take it now?”

“They weren’t trying before,” Morrell said. “They wanted to split us, and they did. Now they want to cripple us.”

“If you’re telling me this is hopeless, General, someone else will be appointed. Your resignation will be accepted. You will be permitted to return home to your wife and daughter. Not just permitted-encouraged.”

Will be appointed. Will be accepted. Will be permitted. Abell didn’t say who would do any of those things. He probably didn’t even think about it. In his world, things just happened, without any particular agency. That made him a good bureaucrat. Whether it made him a good soldier was a different question.

Morrell wanted to go home to Agnes and Mildred-but not that way. “Sorry, no. If you want to get rid of me, you’ll have to throw me out. I’m telling you it would have been a lot easier if we’d started getting ready when the Confederates did.”

“Hindsight…” But Abell’s voice lacked conviction. Morrell had been saying the same thing when it was foresight. Abell gathered himself. “We’re almost to the map room. You’ll see what we’re up against there.”

Except for lacking windows, the map room could have been three stories above ground instead of two stories below it. A haze of tobacco smoke hung in the air. It also smelled of coffee that had been perking for too long and bodies that had gone unwashed for too long. That last odor pervaded the front, too, so Morrell nodded, as at an old friend, when he recognized it here. The stench of death, at least, was mercifully absent.

Officers were poring over large-scale maps of Virginia and Ohio. John Abell led Morrell to one that covered the eastern part of the latter state. Morrell let out a tuneless note of dismay when he saw where the pins with the red heads were. “They’ve come that far this fast?”

“I’m afraid it looks that way,” John Abell answered.

“Jesus,” Morrell said. “They’re already inside Cleveland. I thought you told me they couldn’t take it.”

“They must have revised this since I went to meet you at the station,” Abell said unhappily.

“Are the Confederates moving that fast?” Morrell asked.

“They can’t be.” Abell spoke with less conviction than he might have liked. “It’s just signal lag, I’m sure.”

“It had better be,” Morrell said. “Well, what do you expect me to do about it? Have we got armor here?” He pointed. “If we do, we can thrust toward the lake and try to cut through their advancing column-do to their supply lines what they’ve done to us.”

“I don’t believe we have enough equipment in place there to give us much hope of success,” Abell replied.

“Why am I not surprised?” Morrell didn’t bother to keep his voice down. Several officers studying other maps looked up at him. He scowled back at them, too furious to care. They looked away. Fury wasn’t an emotion they were used to seeing here. Too bad, Morrell thought savagely. He turned back to John Abell. “Well, if we can’t do that, our next best move is pretty obvious.”

“Is it?” The General Staff officer raised an almost colorless eyebrow. “It hasn’t seemed that way here.”

Morrell almost asked why he wasn’t surprised again. Then, remembering the old saw about flies and honey and vinegar, he didn’t. He pointed again instead, this time along the lakeshore, from Cleveland over to Erie, Pennsylvania. “We’ll have to fight like hell here. We’ll have to fight like hell in all the built-up places-barrels aren’t really made for street fighting in the middle of towns.”

“They can do it,” Abell said.

“Sure they can,” Morrell agreed. “Dogs can walk on their hind legs, too, but it’s not what they’re for, if you know what I mean. Send barrels through a few good-sized towns and you won’t see very many come out the other end.”

“Suppose they bypass them.” Abell might have been back at West Point, trying to solve a tactical problem. “That’s what they did last year. They didn’t go into Columbus with armor. They got it in a pocket and attacked with infantry and artillery.”

“That’s why we defend the towns along the lake like mad bastards,” Morrell said. “They can’t surround them the way they surrounded Columbus. They have to take them instead, and that’s more expensive. If they don’t, we can resupply and reinforce by water, maybe break out and get into their rear. They’ll know that-they can read maps.” Unlike some people I could name.

John Abell drummed his fingers on the side of his thigh-from him, the equivalent of another man’s jumping up and down and waving his arms and yelling his head off. “This would involve cooperation with the Navy,” he said at last. By the way he said it, he might have been talking about eating with his fingers. The Army always had the feeling that the Navy didn’t quite pull its weight. Here, though…

Morrell shrugged. He had that feeling himself. There’d been no great naval coups in this war, nothing like the capture of the Sandwich Islands. Indeed, the Navy seemed to be losing those islands a few at a time. Even so, he said, “This is something they can do,” and hoped he told the truth.

Rather than replying, Abell pulled a notebook from a breast pocket and scribbled in it. “You… may be right,” he said when he put the notebook back. “It’s a, ah, more indirect approach to defending the interior regions than we’d had in mind. What happens if you’re wrong?”

“I’ll probably be too dead to worry about it,” Morrell answered. Abell blinked-no, he didn’t think about things like leading from the front. Morrell went on, “But whoever takes over for me will have a couple of things going for him. Either the Confederates won’t have taken all the lakefront, or they’ll have fought their way through it. If they haven’t, he can hit them in the flank. If they have, with luck they’ll be bled white and they’ll have a tougher time getting to Pittsburgh-if that’s where they’re going.”

“That is the current assessment,” Abell said primly.

Bully. But, again, Morrell swallowed the old-fashioned slang before it came out. He and the desk warriors of Philadelphia might not agree on means, but they did on ends. If he were Jake Featherston and he wanted to try to knock the USA out of the war, he would have gone after Pittsburgh, too. Pontiac was the other possibility. Engine production, though, was more widely dispersed than steel. And without steel, you couldn’t make engines for very long, either.

“We’ll do what we can, Colonel,” he said.

“We have to do more than that,” John Abell exclaimed.

Morrell started to laugh, then checked himself yet again. Abell hadn’t been joking. Morrell looked at the map again. Abell had no reason to joke, either.

Dr. Leonard O’Doull had thought that pulling out of Fredericksburg would cut U.S. casualties. And so it would, no doubt, in the long run. In the short run… In the short run, the Confederates on the heights gleefully bombarded the withdrawing men in green-gray. They’d knocked out the pontoon bridges over the Rappahannock more than once, knocked them out and then poured shellfire into the men stuck near them waiting to cross.

“I hate artillery,” O’Doull remarked as he worked to repair a mangled leg. He’d thought at first that he would have to take it off. Now he hoped this corporal would be able to keep it, and thought he would, too, if he didn’t get a wound infection that spread to the bone.

Across the table from him, Granville McDougald nodded. “The wounds are a lot nastier than anything a bullet can do, aren’t they?”

“They’re more likely to be, anyhow.” O’Doull had seen horrors from both. A lot of the very worst horrors, he’d never seen at all. They were reserved for front-line soldiers and stretcher bearers and Graves Registration personnel. No one could hope to repair some wounds. God almighty would have had trouble repairing some men hit by artillery fire for the Resurrection.

“Get that bleeder there, Doc,” McDougald said, and O’Doull did. The bald medic went on, “I thought you were crazy when you said you were going to try and patch this leg. I’d’ve just reached for the bone saw myself. But you may get a good result out of it. My hat’s off to you.” He doffed an imaginary chapeau.

“I hope so-and thanks.” O’Doull yawned behind his surgical mask. Granville McDougald chuckled, recognizing the expression. O’Doull added, “Jesus, but I’m tired.”

“I believe it. This just never ends, does it?”

“Doesn’t seem to,” O’Doull said. “Now they’ll probably ship us back to Ohio, eh? That would give us a few days of vacation.”

“Oh, boy,” McDougald said in a hollow voice. “We’re getting plenty of practice going back and forth, anyway.”

They were still joking about it when the corpsman brought in another wounded man. They both fell silent at the same time. All O’Doull said was, “Get him under fast, Granny.” McDougald nodded and put the ether cone over the soldier’s face. Even that wasn’t easy; he’d lost part of his nose. He’d also lost a chunk of his upper jaw and a bigger chunk of his lower jaw. He made horrible gobbling noises nothing like words.

“Can you fix him, Doc?” one of the corpsmen asked. The fellow gulped afterwards, and O’Doull had a devil of a time blaming him. This was another artillery horror, and viler than most.

Before answering, O’Doull told MacDougald, “Get a blood-pressure cuff on him, and watch his airway, too-don’t want him drowning on us.”

“Right.” The medic handled his end of the business with quick but unhurried competence. “BP is 110 over 70,” he reported a few seconds later. “He’s got a strong pulse, the poor bastard.”

“He would,” O’Doull said morosely. He nodded to the stretcher bearer then. “I don’t think he’s going to up and die on us, but I’m not sure we’re doing him any favor keeping him alive.”

“Yeah.” The corpsman looked away. With the best will in the world, with the best plastic surgery in the world-which, odds were, the wounded soldier wouldn’t be lucky enough to get-people would be looking away from the man on the table for the rest of his life. Did he have a girlfriend? A wife? Would he still, once she saw him? Did he have a little boy? What would Junior make of Daddy with half a face?

“Gotta try,” McDougald said, and O’Doull nodded. Some men were tough enough to come through something like this not only sane but triumphant. Some had people around them who loved them no matter what they looked like.

Most, unfortunately, didn’t.

Knowing that made O’Doull more hesitant than he wished he were. He did what he could to clean the wound, trim away smashed tissue and bone, and make repairs where and as he could. Then he shot the man full of morphine and told McDougald, “Put him under as deep as he’ll go, Granny. He won’t want to be awake once he finally is. Let’s put off the evil minute as long as we can.”

“No arguments here. Back at a field hospital, they’ll get him all bandaged up so he won’t have to look at-that-right away. If they know what they’re doing, they’ll break it to him gently.”

“Yeah,” O’Doull said tightly, and let it go at that. Field hospitals were almost as frantic as aid stations. Would the people farther back of the line have the time to think of gently breaking the news of this man’s mutilation? Even if they did think of it, would they have the time to do it? Or would they treat him as one more body that took up a valuable cot till they could send him somewhere else? O’Doull didn’t know, but he knew how he’d bet.

Granville McDougald straightened and stretched. “I’m gonna have me a cigarette,” he announced, and headed out of the tent.

“Sounds good to me.” Leonard O’Doull didn’t want to look at or think about that operating table for a while. The Virginia countryside wasn’t much of an improvement, not battered and bludgeoned by war as it was, but mutilated meadows were easier to bear than mutilated men.

McDougald held out a pack of Confederate cigarettes. O’Doull gladly took one. The veteran noncom gave him a light. He drew in smoke. Here, he almost wished it were the harsh stuff that came from U.S. tobacco. Wanting to choke would have done more to distract him than this rich-tasting smoothness.

Off to the south, artillery rumbled. Nothing was coming down close by. He thanked the God he was having ever more trouble believing in. “Bad one,” he said.

“Now that you mention it-yes. Don’t see ones like that ever day, and a good thing, too.” McDougald exhaled a thin gray stream of smoke. “You fixed him up as well as anybody could have, Doc.”

“I know. And he’ll still look like something they wouldn’t put in a horror movie because it would really scare people.” O’Doull took a flask off his belt and swigged from it, then offered it to McDougald. He didn’t usually drink when he might be operating again in another couple of minutes. This time, he made an exception. You didn’t see ones like that every day.

“You can do things now you couldn’t begin to in the last war,” McDougald said after a swig of his own. “Thanks, Doc. That hits the spot. Where was I? Yeah-you really can. Get him to where he looks like-”

“A disaster and not a catastrophe,” O’Doull finished for him. “Come on, Granny. There’s not enough left to fix. I’ve seen a lot of wounds, but that poor fucker made me want to lose my lunch.”

He tried to imagine writing Nicole a letter about what he’d just done. That was cruelly funny. He wouldn’t-couldn’t-have written it even if the censors would have passed it. He always wrote her in French, but they would have found somebody who could read it. But you couldn’t subject anyone you loved to even the shadow of what you went through when you were in combat or where you could see what combat did to men. His letters to his wife and son were bright, cheerful lies. When somebody at the aid station said something funny, he would pass that along, especially if it stayed funny in French. Otherwise, he just said he was well and safe and not working too hard. Lie after lie after lie. He didn’t know anyone who tried to tell the truth, not about this kind of thing.

McDougald ground out the cigarette under his heel and lit another one. “Days like this, I wonder why I stayed in the Army,” he said.

“I wonder why I came back,” O’Doull agreed.

“Oh, no, Doc. Oh, no. You did more for that guy than I ever could have. You’re good. I’m not bad-I know I’m not bad-but you’re good.”

“Thanks, Granny. I’m not good enough, not for that. Nobody’s good enough for that.” O’Doull muttered something under his breath. Even he wasn’t sure if it was curse or prayer. He went on, “Is there any point to all this?”

“For us? Sure,” Granville McDougald answered. “If not for us, a lot of guys would be a lot worse off than they are. What we do is worth doing. For the whole thing? I’m not the one to ask about that, sir. If you want to cross the lines and talk to Jake Featherston…”

“If I ever ran into Jake Featherston, I’d smash his head in with a rock, and screw the Hippocratic oath,” O’Doull said. McDougald laughed, for all the world as if he’d been kidding. He hadn’t, not even a little bit. In plaintive tones, he added, “Featherston went through the last war, every goddamn bit of it. Wasn’t that enough for him?”

“When you lose, a war is never enough,” McDougald answered. That probably held an unfortunate amount of truth. “You happen to recall what Remembrance Day was like before the Great War?”

O’Doull grunted, because he did. The United States, twice beaten and humiliated by the Confederates and Britain and France, had had a lot to remember. The regimentation, the constant stinting to build up the Army and Navy, the tub-thumping speeches, the parades with the flag flown upside down as a symbol of distress… He sighed. “So we finally won. So what did it get us?” He waved. “This.”

“What would we have got if we lost?” McDougald asked. “Something better? Something worse? Christ, we might have grown our own Featherston.”

“Tabernac!” O’Doull said, startled into the Quebecois French he’d used for so long. “That’s a really scary thought, Granny.”

The medic only shrugged. “When things go good, everybody laughs at people like that and says they belong in the loony bin. But when times get hard, they come out of the woodwork and people start paying attention. You go, ‘Well, how could they make things any worse? Let’s see what they can do.’ ”

“Yeah. And then they go and do it,” O’Doull said. Featherston wasn’t the only one of that breed running around loose these days, either. Action Francaise and King Charles had mobilized France even sooner than the Freedom Party grabbed the reins in the CSA. And in England, Churchill and Mosley were yet another verse of the same sorry song.

“It’s a bastard,” McDougald said. “Except for bashing in Featherston’s brains, to hell with me if I know what to do about it. And it might even be too late for that to do any good. By now, this mess has a life of its own.”

“Some life.” The aid station was close enough to the front to share in the smell of the battlefield. O’Doull knew what death smelled like. He lived with that odor-not always heavy, but always there. When war was alive, that smell always got loose.

“Doc! Hey, Doc!” Stretcher bearers hauled another wounded man toward the tent with the big Red Crosses on the sides. Leonard O’Doull and Granville McDougald looked at each other. Maybe they could save this one. Maybe he wouldn’t be horribly mangled. Maybe… They’d find out in a minute. Shaking their heads, they ducked back into the tent.

Appointments, appointments, appointments. Jake Featherston had started to hate them. They chewed up his time and spat it out. When he was talking with people, he couldn’t do the things that really needed doing. He even resented Ferdinand Koenig, and if Ferd wasn’t a friend he didn’t have any.

Today, a smile lightened the Attorney General’s heavy features. “That Pinkard fellow’s given us a new line on things,” he said. “We may be able to dispose of more niggers faster than we ever dreamed we could.”

“Oh, yeah?” Sure as hell, that piqued Jake’s interest. “Tell me about it.” Koenig did. The more Jake listened, the more intrigued he got. “Will this shit work?” he asked. “Do we make it in bulk now, or would we have to run up a new factory to get as much as we need?”

“That’s the beauty of it,” Koenig answered. “They already use the stuff to fumigate houses and such. There’s a company in Little Rock-Cyclone Chemicals, the name of the place is-that makes it by the ton. They aren’t the only one, either. They’re just the biggest.”

“Well, I will be a son of a bitch. Pinkard’s chock full of good ideas, isn’t he?” Jake said. “Promote him a grade and tell him to see what he can do to try this out as fast as he can. We’ve got a big job ahead of us, and we’re going to need all the help we can get.”

“I’ll do it.” The Attorney General wrote in a notebook he pulled from a breast pocket. Half apologetically, he said, “I’ve got so much going on, I lose things if I don’t write ’em down. Forget my own head if it wasn’t nailed on tight.”

Jake laughed. “I know what you mean. Boy, don’t I just? But stay on that one, Ferd. Taking care of the niggers is just as important as licking the Yankees. Anything else I ought to know about?”

“Reports I get from here and there, grumbling about the war is up a little.”

“We’ll deal with it.” Jake muttered to himself. Things were dragging on longer than he’d told the country they would. That made propaganda harder than it should have been. “New offensive’s going well,” he said, looking on the bright side. “I’ll talk with Saul, too, see if we can’t figure out a way to perk up morale. Anything besides that?”

“Don’t think so.” Big and ponderous, Koenig rose to his feet. “I’ll get on the telephone to Pinkard right away.”

“Yeah, you do that.” Featherston got up, too, and walked to the door with him. As Koenig left, Jake asked, “Who’s next on the list, Lulu?”

“A Professor FitzBelmont, Mr. President,” his secretary answered. Working underground fazed her not at all. Jake suspected working underwater wouldn’t have fazed her, either.

“FitzBelmont…” The name was vaguely familiar. And then, with a good politician’s near-total recall for people, Jake remembered exactly who Professor Henderson V. FitzBelmont was. He groaned. “Oh, for God’s sake! The uranium nut. How did he get another appointment?”

“Do you want me to tell him it’s been canceled, sir?” Lulu asked.

“No, no,” Jake said resignedly. “If he’s out there cooling his heels in the waiting room, he’ll raise a stink if you send him home now. Fetch him in. I’ll get rid of him as quick as I can.”

Professor FitzBelmont was as rumpled and tweedy as he had been the year before. “Good to see you, Mr. President,” he said.

“Likewise,” Jake lied. “What’s on your mind today, Professor? Kindly cut to the chase-I’ve got a lot to do.”

“You will remember, sir, that I told you that uranium-uranium-235, that is-has the potential to make an explosive thousands of times as strong as dynamite.”

“I do recollect, yeah. But I also recollect it’d cost an arm and a leg, and you weren’t sure how long it’d take or whether you could do it at all. Has anything changed since then? Better be something, Professor, or I won’t be real happy with you. I haven’t got time to waste.”

Henderson V. FitzBelmont licked his lips and nervously fiddled with his gold-framed spectacles. “In terms of what we know about uranium itself, not much has changed.” Jake started to growl angrily, but FitzBelmont plowed ahead anyway: “But I do know, or I can make a good guess, that the United States are probably looking at this same question.”

“How do you know that?” Featherston rapped out. Professor FitzBelmont had found a way to make him pay attention, all right.

“For one thing, their journals have suddenly stopped mentioning uranium at all. For another, there are large engineering works in the northwestern USA that appear consistent with an effort along these lines.”

“And how do you know that?”

“I was asked by C.S. Intelligence to identify buildings in photos,” the professor replied. “No doubt because of my previous visit to you, those officers knew of my interest in that field. And if I were to build a plant for producing enriched uranium, it would look something like what the United States are building in Washington.”

“All right.” Featherston surprised himself by how mildly he spoke. Every once in a while, somebody who looked and sounded like a nut turned out not to be one after all. This felt like one of those times. “If the damnyankees are interested in this uranium stuff, too, there must be something to it. That’s what you’re telling me, isn’t it?”

“I don’t know, sir, not for sure. I don’t know whether we can isolate U-235, how long doing it would take, or how much it would cost. There also seems to be a possibility that U-238 can be transmuted-”

“Can be what?” Jake wished the prof would stop talking like a prof.

“Changed,” FitzBelmont said patiently. “Maybe it can be changed into another element that will also explode. Theory seems to suggest the possibility. I know less about this than I do about U-235. There is much more U-238, so the second possibility would be advantageous to us. But I am certain of one thing.”

“Oh? And what’s that?” Jake asked, as the physics professor surely wanted him to do. Usually, he manipulated. Not today; not right now.

Henderson V. FitzBelmont moved in for the kill, an intellectual tiger on the prowl: “If the enemy succeeds in acquiring this weapon and we do not, I fail to see how our cause can avoid disaster.”

Jake thought about it. Twenty thousand times as strong as TNT? One bomb and no more city? The USA with eight or ten of those bombs and the CSA with none? A fleet of Yankee bombers had done horrible things to Fort Worth and Dallas, catching the Texas towns by surprise. That wouldn’t happen again. The officer who’d been asleep at the switch now made his reports in hell; those bombers had made him pay for his mistake. But if the USA didn’t need a fleet of bombers, if one airplane would do the job… Nobody could stop every single goddamn airplane.

“Figure out what you need, Professor,” Jake said heavily. “Money, machinery, people-whatever it is, you’ll get it. I want the list as fast as you can shoot it to me. No more than two weeks, you hear?”

“Uh, yes, sir.” FitzBelmont sounded more than a little dazed. He lost a point in Jake’s book on account of that. If he’d really believed in this, he would have pulled that list out of his briefcase now. Maybe he hadn’t believed he could persuade the President of the CSA. Featherston hoped that was it.

He accompanied FitzBelmont out of his subterranean sanctum, as he had Ferd Koenig a little while before. After the physics professor left, Jake turned to Lulu and said, “Get on the horn to General Potter. Tell him I want to see him here ten minutes ago.”

“Yes, Mr. President.” She didn’t bat an eye. She never did. “Can I tell him what this is in reference to?”

“Nope. I’ll take care of that when he gets here.”

“Yes, Mr. President.” Lulu knew what was always the right answer.

Featherston endured a delegation of Freedom Party officials from Alabama and Mississippi going on about how they needed more men and more guns to help keep their smoldering Negro rebellions from bursting into flames. Since Jake couldn’t possibly give them more men, he promised them more guns, and hoped he wasn’t crossing his fingers on the promise. They seemed satisfied as they went away. Whether he could keep them satisfied… I’ll do my goddamnedest, that’s all.

Clarence Potter came in next. Somebody in the waiting room down the hall was bound to be madder than hell. Too bad, the President thought. Without preamble, he barked, “What do you know about Henderson V. FitzBelmont and uranium?” Sweet Jesus Christ, he thought. Till FitzBelmont came here last year, I’d never even heard of the shit. I wish I still hadn’t.

“Ah,” Potter said. “Has he convinced you?”

“He sure as hell has,” Jake answered. “How about you?”

“I’m no scientist,” Potter warned. Jake made an impatient noise. Potter made an apologetic gesture. “Yes, sir, he’s convinced me, too. Sooner or later, somebody’s going to be able to make a hell of a bang with that stuff. If it’s sooner, and if it’s the damnyankees, we’ve got us some big worries.”

“That’s how it looks to me, too,” Featherston said unhappily. He pointed at Potter. “How the hell did you find out about that place in Washington? That’s as far from here as it can be.”

“It’s in the U.S. budget-a lot of money, and no details at all about what the Yankees are spending it on,” the Intelligence officer replied. “Spotting the combination sent up a red flag.”

“Good,” Jake said. “Nice to know somebody in your outfit wouldn’t blow his brains out if he farted, by God. Now the next question is, how did you get the pictures of that place for FitzBelmont to look at? I didn’t think our spy airplanes could fly that far, and I reckon the USA’d shoot ’em down most of the time even if they could.”

“Yes, Mr. President, I agree with you-that’s what would have happened if we’d taken off from Texas or Sonora,” Potter said. “And we would have given away our interest in the area, too. So we didn’t do that. Our man in western Washington rented a crop duster at a local airstrip. Nobody paid any attention to him, and he got his photos.”

Jake Featherston guffawed. “Good. That’s goddamn good. But we won’t be able to do it again anytime soon, though.”

“I wouldn’t be surprised,” Potter said, nodding.

“We found out what we need to know, so we don’t have to worry about putting the damnyankees’ backs up by trying it again,” Jake said, and Clarence Potter nodded once more. The President aimed his finger like a rifle. “We’ve got to keep the USA from finding out that we know what they’re up to, and from finding out we’re up to the very same thing ourselves. Whatever your super-duper top-secret security business is, use everything you’ve got and then some on whatever has anything to do with uranium.”

“I’ve already given those orders, sir,” Potter said. “Minimum possible in writing, and code phrases all through instead of the name of the metal. No telephone discussion at all-never can tell who might be listening. You did that just right when you had your secretary call me.”

“Thanks,” Jake said. “Uranium! Who would’ve thunk it?” He would have bet money Henderson V. FitzBelmont was a nut. He would have bet big-and he would have lost his shirt.

Scipio felt like a ghost, rattling around in a nearly empty part of the Terry. His family wasn’t the only one in the area to have survived the cleanout, but there weren’t many. A few others had got advance warning, but only a few-the ones that had good connections with white folks one way or another.

Nobody knew where the people who’d been evacuated had gone-or rather, had been taken. They’d just… vanished. No cards, no letters, no photographs came back to Augusta. Maybe the deportees who could write didn’t have the chance. Maybe the C.S. authorities weren’t letting them. Or maybe they were simply dead.

For the handful who remained, life got harder. The authorities shut off electricity and gas in the depopulated areas. The water still ran. Maybe that was only an absentminded mistake, or maybe the people who ran Augusta kept it on so they could put out fires if they had to. Scipio had nobody he could ask.

He did ask Jerry Dover where the deportees went. The white man looked him in the eye and said, “I have no idea.”

“Could you find out, suh?” Scipio asked. “It do weigh on my mind.”

The manager of the Huntsman’s Lodge shook his head. “No, I’m not about to ask. Some answers are dangerous. Hell, some questions are dangerous. Do I have to draw you a picture?”

“No, suh,” Scipio answered unhappily. “Don’t reckon you do.”

“All right, then.” Dover hesitated before adding, “Sometimes finding out is worse than wondering. You know what I mean?”

Had the white man not told him to bring his family when he came to work that one night, they would have found out. Scipio didn’t think the answer would have made them happy. They might yet learn from the inside out, and so might he. He didn’t want to.

Dover lit a cigarette, then held the pack out to Scipio, who couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen a white man do even such a simple favor for a black. “I thanks you kindly,” Scipio said. He had matches of his own. He didn’t need to lean close to Dover to get a light from his cigarette; his boss might have taken that as an undue familiarity.

“Everything’s gonna be…” Dover stopped and shook his head. “Shit, I don’t know whether everything’s gonna be all right. You got to do the best you can, that’s all.”

“Yeah.” Scipio smoked with short, savage puffs. “Don’t mean no offense, suh, but you got an easier time sayin’ dat than I does doin’ it.”

“Maybe. But maybe I don’t, too,” Dover said. Scipio felt a rush of scorn the likes of which he’d never known. What kind of trouble could the restaurant manager have that came within miles of a Negro’s? But then Dover went on, “Looks like they may pull me into the Army after all. More and more people are putting on the uniform these days.”

“Oh.” Scipio didn’t find anything to say to that. Horrible things happened to Negroes in the CSA, yes. But horrible things could happen to anybody in the Army, too. The one difference Scipio could see was that Dover’s family wasn’t in danger if he went into the service. Then a fresh worry surfaced: “You puts on de uniform, suh, who take over here?”

“Well, I don’t exactly know.” Dover didn’t sound comfortable with the answer.

“Whoever he be, he give a damn about colored folks?”

“Well, I don’t exactly know that, either.”

“Do Jesus!” Scipio stubbed out the butt in the pressed-glass ashtray on the manager’s desk. The deceased cigarette had plenty of company. “He one o’ dat kind o’ buckra, we is all dead soon.”

“I do know that,” Dover said. “Other thing I know is, I can’t do thing one about it. If they call me up…” He shrugged. “I can talk to my own bosses till I’m blue in the face, but they don’t have to listento me.”

Scipio sometimes had trouble remembering that Jerry Dover had bosses. But he didn’t own the Huntsman’s Lodge; he just ran the place. He was good at what he did; if he hadn’t been, he wouldn’t have kept his job for as long as he had. As long as he stayed in Augusta, he had no place to move up from the Huntsman’s Lodge. He would have to go to Atlanta, or maybe even to New Orleans, to do better.

Now he said, “Go on. Go to work. Get your ass in gear.”

Not having anything else he could do, Scipio obeyed. Despite his worries, he got through the shift. When he went back to the Terry, he had no trouble passing through the barriers around the colored part of town. Cops and stalwarts knew who he was.

Getting back to work the next day, he found his boss in a terrible temper-not because he’d been called up but because two dishwashers weren’t there when they were supposed to be. That was a normal sort of restaurant crisis, and Dover handled it in the normal way: he hired the first two warm bodies off the street that he could.

Neither of them spoke much English. They were Mexicans-not Confederate citizens from Chihuahua or Sonora, but men out of the Empire of Mexico up in the CSA looking for work. Now they’d found some, and they went at it harder than anyone Scipio had seen in a long time. They wanted to keep it.

At first, thinking of the restaurant and nothing more, Scipio was pleased to see their eagerness. He didn’t blame Jerry Dover for telling the black men they’d replaced not to bother coming back to work. The look on the Negroes’ faces was something to see, but the color of those faces didn’t win the men much extra sympathy from Scipio. If you didn’t, if you couldn’t, show up, you were asking for whatever happened to you. Showing up on time all the damn time counted for more than just about anything else in the restaurant business.

That was at first. Then, coming up to the Huntsman’s Lodge a couple of days later, Scipio walked past a barbershop. All the barbers in there had been Negroes; he couldn’t imagine a white Confederate demeaning himself by cutting another man’s hair. But now the barber at the fourth chair, though he wore a white shirt and black bow tie like the other three-a uniform not far removed from a bartender’s-did not look like them. He had straight black hair, red-brown skin, and prominent cheekbones. He was, in short, as Mexican as the two new dishwashers.

Ice ran through Scipio, not when he noticed the new barber but when he realized what the fellow meant, which didn’t happen for another half a block. “Do Jesus!” he said, and stopped so abruptly, the white man behind him almost walked up his back.

“Watch what you’re doing, Uncle,” the ofay said irritably.

“I is powerful sorry, suh,” Scipio replied. The white man walked around him. Scipio stayed right where he was, trying to tell himself he was wrong and having no luck at all. He wasn’t sorry. He was afraid, and the longer he stood there the more frightened he got.

For twenty years and more, Jake Featherston had been screaming his head off about getting rid of the Negroes in the Confederate States. Scipio had had trouble taking the Freedom Party seriously, not because he didn’t think it hated blacks-oh, no, not because of that! — but because he didn’t see how the CSA could get along without them. Who would cut hair? Who would wash dishes? Who would do the field labor that still needed doing despite the swarm of new tractors and harvesters and combines that had poured out of Confederate factories?

Whites? Not likely! Being a white in the Confederacy meant being above such labor, and above the people who did it.

But whites felt themselves superior to Mexicans: not to the same degree as they did toward Negroes, but enough. And the work blacks did in the CSA couldn’t have looked too bad to people who had no work of their own. Which meant…

If workers from the Empire of Mexico came north to do the jobs Negroes had been doing in the CSA, the Freedom Party and Jake Featherston might be able to have their cake and eat it, too.

Scipio wasn’t at his best at work that day. He was far enough from his best to make Jerry Dover snap, “What the hell’s the matter with you, Xerxes?”

“Jus’ thinkin’ ’bout Jose an’ Manuel, Mistuh Dover,” he answered.

“They aren’t your worry. They’re mine. If they keep on like they’ve started, they’re no worry at all, and you can take that to the bank. You just keep your mind on what you’re supposed to be doing, that’s all. Everything will be fine if you do.”

“Yes, suh,” Scipio said. But yes, suh wasn’t what he meant. Jose and Manuel-and that barber in the fourth chair-were the thin end of the wedge. If Jake Featherston banged the other end, what would happen? Nothing good.

The restaurant manager eyed him. “You wondering if we can find some damn greaser to do your job? Tell you one thing: the worse you do it, the better the chances are.”

That came unpleasantly close to what Scipio was thinking. Say what you would about Dover, he was nobody’s fool. “Ain’t jus’ me I is worried about,” Scipio muttered.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Dover asked.

“More Mexicans they is, mo’ trouble fo’ niggers,” Scipio answered.

“Oh.” Dover thought about it for a little while, then shrugged. “I can’t do anything about that, you know. The only thing I care about is keeping this place going, and I’ll handle that till they stick a uniform on me and drag me out of here.”

He’d done everything a decent man could-more than most decent men would have. Scipio had to remind himself of that. “Yes, suh,” the black man said dully.

“Hang in there,” Dover said. “That’s all you can do right this minute. That’s all anybody can do right this minute.”

“Yes, suh,” Scipio said again, even more dully than before. But then, in spite of himself, his fear and rage overflowed. He let them all out in one sarcastic word: “Freedom!”

Jerry Dover’s eyes got very wide. He looked around to see if anyone else could have heard the rallying cry that, here, was anything but. Evidently satisfied no one else had, he wagged a finger at Scipio, for all the world like a mother scolding a little boy who had just shouted a dirty word without even knowing what it meant. “You’ve got to watch your mouth there, Xerxes.”

“Yes, suh. I knows dat.” Scipio was genuinely contrite. He knew what kind of danger he’d put himself in.

Dover went on as if he hadn’t spoken: “You’ve got a nice family. I saw them. You want to leave them without their pa?”

“No, suh.” Again, Scipio meant it. Still clucking, the restaurant manager let it go and let him alone. He’d told the truth, all right. Here, though, how much did the truth matter? His family, like any black family, was all too likely to be torn to bits regardless of what he wanted.

Chester Martin couldn’t have been more bored if the Confederates had shot him. As a matter of fact, they had shot him, or rather, ripped up his leg with a shell fragment. Everybody kept assuring him he would get better. He believed it. He did feel better than he had right after he was wounded. Thanks to sulfa powder and pills and shots, the wound didn’t get badly infected. A little redness, a little soreness on top of the normal pain from getting torn open, and that was it.

Everybody kept telling him he’d get back to duty pretty soon, too. He also believed that. People kept saying it as if it were good news. For the life of him, he couldn’t understand why. Hey, Chester! The Confederates’ll get another chance to maim you or kill you before too long. Ain’t that great? Maybe he was prejudiced, but it didn’t seem great to him.

Meanwhile, he lay on a cot with the iron frame painted Army green-gray. Once a day, he got exercise and physical therapy. The rest of the time, he just lay there. The Army gave him better rations in the hospital than it had while he was in the field. That struck him as fundamentally unfair, but then, so did a lot of other things about the Army.

He also got his pay here. Money in his pocket let him sit in on a poker game whenever he felt like it. The only trouble was, he didn’t feel like it very often. Sometimes he sat in even when he didn’t much feel like it. It was something to do, a way to make time go by.

Because he didn’t much care whether he won or lost, he had a terrific poker face. “Nobody can tell what you’re thinking,” one of the other guys in the game grumbled.

“Me? I gave up thinking for Lent,” Chester said. Everybody sitting around the table laughed. And he had been joking… up to a point.

He’d just come back from his exercise one day when a ward orderly stuck his head into the room and said, “You’ve got a visitor, Martin.”

“Yeah, now tell me another one,” Chester said. “I’m not bad enough off to need the padre for last rites or anything, and who else is gonna want to have anything to do with me?”

The orderly didn’t answer. He just ducked back out of sight. Rita walked into the room. “You idiot,” she told him, and burst into tears.

Chester gaped at his wife. “What are you doing here?” he squeaked.

She pulled a tiny linen handkerchief out of her purse and dabbed at her eyes. “When I found out you got wounded, I asked the War Department where you were,” she answered. “They told me, and so I got on a train-got on a bunch of trains, really-and here I am. Carl’s with Sue and Otis till I get back.”

“All right,” Chester said dazedly. His sister and brother-in-law would do fine with his son. “Jesus, sweetie, it’s good to see you.”

Rita gave him a look laced with vitriol. “If you like seeing me, why did you go put that stupid uniform on again? You could have stayed in L.A. and seen me every day.”

He sighed. “It seemed like a good idea when I did it.” How many follies got perpetrated because they seemed a good idea at the time? Was there any way to count them? Chester didn’t think so.

By the way Rita drummed her fingers against the painted iron of the bedstead, she didn’t, either. “They told me you weren’t hurt bad enough for them to discharge you from the Army,” she said. “That means the Confederates will have to shoot you at least one more time before I get you back, doesn’t it?”

“I… hadn’t thought of it like that,” Chester said, which was true.

“No? Maybe you should have.” Rita could be devastating when she felt like it. “How many pieces of you will be missing when you finally do come home?”

“For all either one of us knows, I won’t get another scratch the rest of the way,” Chester said.

She didn’t laugh in his face. She didn’t say anything at all. Her silence made his remark sound even more foolish than it would have anyway. He grimaced. He knew that as well as she did.

At last, she unbent enough to ask, “How are you?”

“I’m getting better,” he answered. “As soon as the leg is strong enough, they’ll send me back.”

“Swell,” Rita said. “I thought I was going to die when I got the wire that said you’d been hurt.”

“Chance I took,” Chester said. “It’s not that bad.” That was true. He would recover, as he had when he got hit in the arm during the Great War. He’d seen plenty of men crippled for life, plenty of others torn to pieces or blown to bits.

Rita’s first husband hadn’t come out of the Great War alive, so she knew about that, too. “What will it be like the next time?” she demanded pointedly. “I love you. I couldn’t stand getting another ‘The War Department deeply regrets to inform you…’ telegram. I’d die.”

No, I would. Chester swallowed the words long before they passed his lips. Rita wouldn’t find them funny. He did, but only in the blackly humorous way that didn’t make sense to anyone who hadn’t been through the things front-line soldiers had.

Rita came over, bent down, and laid her head on his shoulder. She really started to bawl then. “I don’t want to lose you, Chester!”

“Hey, babe.” Awkwardly, he put his arms around her. “Hey,” he repeated. “I’m not going anywhere.” He did laugh then, because that was literally true.

Almost to Chester’s relief, the orderly came in then and said, “You’ve got to go, ma’am. Doctors don’t want him tired out.”

The look she gave the man should have put him in a hospital bed. She kissed Chester. His eyes crossed; nobody’d done that since he reenlisted. Then, reluctantly, she let the orderly lead her away.

When she’d left the ward, the guy in the next bed said, “Must be nice, getting a visit from your wife.” He wasn’t even half Chester’s age. By pure coincidence, the two of them had almost the same wound.

“Yeah, it was,” Chester said, more or less truthfully. “She sure caught me by surprise, though.” That was also true.

“Too bad you don’t have a private room.” The kid-his name was Gary-leered at him.

“Yeah, well…” Chester didn’t know why he was embarrassed; the same thought had crossed his mind. He went on, “If I wasn’t just a noncom, if I was an officer like the snotnose whose hand I was holding, maybe I would have one. Life’s a bitch sometimes.”

“Would we be here if it wasn’t?” Gary was a buck private. To him, a top sergeant was as exalted a personage as any officer, at least this side of a general.

“You’ve got a point,” Chester said. Of course, instead of ending up in a military hospital, they could have ended up dead. Or they could have been maimed, not just wounded.

Or we might not have got hurt at all, Chester thought resentfully. But he knew too well how unlikely that was. If you stayed in the meat grinder long enough, odds were you’d brush up against the blades.

Gary was looking at him. “You’re not a lifer, are you?”

“Me? Hell, no,” Chester said. “Do I look crazy?”

“Never can tell.” Gary wouldn’t get in Dutch for sassing a sergeant here; the rules were relaxed for wounded men. “It’s like your wife said-if you’re so smart, how come you signed up for round two when you’d already been through round one?”

“We licked those Confederate bastards once, but then we let ’em up, and look what we got,” Chester answered. “Millions of maniacs screaming, ‘Freedom!’ and out to take anything they can grab. If we don’t beat ’em again, they’ll damn well beat us, and then we have to start all over.”

“Yeah, but why you?” Gary persisted. “You paid your dues the last time. You didn’t have to take a chance on getting your ass shot off twice.”

“You’re too young to know what Remembrance Day was like before the last war,” Chester said slowly. “It really was a day of remembrance and a day of mourning. Things shut down tight except for the parades and the speeches. Nobody who saw it could ever forget the flag going by upside down. The Confederates and the limeys and the frogs beat us twice. We had to get tough. We had to build up if we were going to pay them back-and we did. I don’t ever want to see the country go through anything like that again.”

“That talks about the country. That doesn’t talk about you,” Gary said. “Me, I’m here on account of I got conscripted. But they weren’t going to conscript you.” You old fart. He didn’t say it, but he might as well have. “So how come you volunteered to let ’em take another shot at you? You’re not Custer-you aren’t going to win the war all by yourself.”

That would have been insulting if it hadn’t been true. “Yeah, I know,” Chester said with a sigh. “But if everybody sat on his hands, we’d lose. That’s the long and short of it. So I put the uniform back on.”

“And look what it got you,” Gary said.

“I think I did some good before I got hurt,” Chester said. “I commanded a company for a while the last time around, so-”

“Wait a second,” Gary broke in. “You were an officer then?”

Chester snorted. “Hell, no. Just an ordinary three-striper. But when everybody above me got killed or wounded, I filled the slot for a while. Did all right, if I say so myself. After a while, they found a lieutenant to run it. If I could do that then, I didn’t have any trouble helping a shavetail run a platoon this time. I’ll probably do the same thing somewhere else when they turn me loose here.”

“You’re like a football coach,” Gary said.

“Sort of, I guess. I never even thought about coaching football, though. I used to play it-not for money, but on a steel-mill team. We weren’t bad. We sure had some big guys-you better believe that.” Chester’s eye went to the clock on the wall. It was a few minutes before eleven. “Hey, Greek. you’ve got two good legs. Turn on the wireless, why don’t you? News coming up.”

“Sure.” The guy called Greek had one arm in a cast, but nothing was wrong with the other.

The knob clicked. The set started to hum. Everybody waited for the tubes to warm up. What came out of the wireless when the sound started reminded Chester of a polka played by a set of drunken madmen. When it mercifully ended, the announcer said, “That was the Engels Brothers’ new recording, ‘Featherston’s Follies.’ ” Everyone snorted; the Engels Brothers were madmen. The announcer went on, “And now the news.”

">“Heavy fighting is reported in and around Cleveland,” a different announcer said. “The fierce U.S. defense is costing the Confederates dearly.” Chester knew what that meant-the United States were getting hammered. The newsman continued, “Occupation authorities have also declared that the situation in Canada is under control, despite enemy propaganda.” He went on to another story in a hurry. Chester didn’t think that sounded good, either.