Drive to the East

XX

On the women’s side again. In a way, Hipolito Rodriguez had to be more careful there than he did on the other side of Camp Determination. He knew in his gut that the black men were dangerous. With the women, he and the other men in gray could let down their guard. They could regret it if they did, too.

The women tried to make the men set over them let down their guard. They dressed provocatively, and acted provocative. And it wasn’t just an act-a lot of them would deliver. They wanted more food, better food, better quarters. They wanted to stay out of the bathhouses. They hadn’t needed long to realize those were news as bad as it got. The trucks, by contrast, nobody seemed to mind. The mallates knew they would be leaving Camp Determination in them, so didn’t worry about climbing aboard. That the trips had no destination, they hadn’t figured out.

“Hello, Mistuh Sergeant, suh.” The black woman who spoke to Rodriguez was falling out of her blouse. “You takes care o’ me, I takes care o’ you. I takes care o’ you real good.” She had only her body to get what she wanted. She used what she had, striking a pose that would have got her arrested on any street corner in the CSA.

Rodriguez just kept walking. He’d found that worked best. If you stopped to talk it over and argue with every colored woman who made advances, you’d never go anywhere and you’d never get anything done all day.

Sometimes nothing worked. “You lousy fairy!” the woman snarled at his back. He ignored her. If he turned around, he could get her into whatever kind of trouble he wanted, up to and including a trip to the bathhouse.

He kept walking anyhow. With or without his help, she’d get hers soon enough any which way. Even if she latched on to some other guard as a protector, she’d get hers before long. Either he’d get bored with her or he’d find somebody else or he’d be off duty when she got picked in a cleanout. He might even be sorry afterwards. She wouldn’t be, not for long.

Another woman came up to him. “Mistuh Sergeant, suh?” None of them ever called him Troop Leader. They knew about Army ranks. The ranks Freedom Party guards used might have been in some foreign language for them. Since Rodriguez felt the same way about those ranks, he couldn’t blame the women-not for that, anyhow.

“What you want?” he asked. Unlike most, this one wasn’t trying to act like a slut. The novelty intrigued him. Because it did, he answered her instead of pretending she wasn’t there.

“Mistuh Sergeant, suh, my little boy, he powerful hungry. He only five year old. You got chilluns your ownself, suh?”

“I got children,” Rodriguez said. “I’m sorry, but I can’t do nothin’.” Children died fast in the camp. Their mothers often died with them, from trying to share rations that weren’t enough for one.

The Negro woman sighed. “You find him some extra food, Mistuh Sergeant, suh, I do anything you want. Reckon you know what I mean. I don’t want nothin’ for me. But he too little to die like dat. He ain’t done nothin’ to nobody.”

“I don’t want nothing like that. I got a wife, too.” Rodriguez occasionally forgot about Magdalena-temptation would get the better of him. But he didn’t forget more than occasionally.

“You sound like you is a Christian man.” The colored woman sounded surprised.

Almost all mallates were Protestants. To Rodriguez, that meant they hardly counted as Christians themselves. He didn’t want to argue with the woman. The less he had to do with the prisoners, the less he had to think of them as people. The job went better when they were just-things-to him. So all he said was, “I try,” and he started to go on with his rounds.

“If you is a Christian man, suh, an’ if you loves Jesus Christ, what you doin’ here?” the woman asked.

He knew what he was doing: reducing population. As far as he was concerned, that needed doing. If it weren’t for the Negroes, the Confederate States wouldn’t have had so many troubles. He’d got his first taste of combat not against the USA but stamping out a Negro Socialist Republic in Georgia. Were blacks any more loyal to the Stars and Bars than they had been a generation earlier? If they were, would the country need camps now?

“Reckon I ax somebody else, then,” the woman said with another sigh. “You seemed like you was a decent fella, but I gots to do what I gots to do to keep my Septimius alive.”

Another raggedy-ass pickaninny with a ten-dollar name. Rodriguez almost asked the woman why she couldn’t have called him Joe or Fred or Pete or something sensible. In the end, he held his tongue. That little kid had nothing left but his fancy name. Why not let him make the most of it for whatever small span of days he had here?

When Rodriguez walked on, the woman didn’t try to stop him. He wondered what her chances of hooking up with some other guard were. She wasn’t anything special to look at. With so many women throwing themselves at the men in gray, it was a buyers’ market. The Freedom Party guards could pick and choose. Ordinary girls got left behind.

Off to the northwest, something that might have been distant thunder muttered. But it wasn’t thunder, not on a day that was fine and bright if chilly. It was artillery. Rodriguez knew the sound-he knew it at much closer range than this. Just the other side of Lubbock, Confederate and damnyankee gunners were doing their best to blow each other to hell and gone.

If the men in green-gray broke through, if they started down the highway toward Snyder and toward Camp Determination… That wouldn’t be so good. The guards had orders to get rid of as many Negroes as they could, and then to blow up the bathhouses and escape themselves.

More mutters in the distance. Would the prisoners know what those sounds meant? Some of the men would; Rodriguez was sure of that. Either they’d fought for the C.S. government or against it-maybe both. Any which way, they would know what artillery was. That could mean trouble.

Rodriguez glanced at the young men with submachine guns who accompanied him. They showed no signs of recognizing the far-off rumble. That only proved they’d never seen combat.

Why aren’t you in the real Army? Rodriguez wondered. The answer wasn’t hard to figure out-they’d pulled strings. This was bound to be a safer duty than facing soldiers in green-gray. The mallates here might be troublesome, but they didn’t shoot back. And they definitely didn’t have artillery.

An airplane buzzed over the camp. It was a Confederate Hound Dog; Rodriguez could make out the C.S. battle flags painted under the wings. U.S. warplanes had made appearances, too. If they wanted to bomb or strafe, they could. Camp Determination wasn’t set up to defend against air attack; nobody had ever thought it would have to.

So far, the U.S. aircraft had left the place alone. Maybe the fliers didn’t know what this place was. Or maybe they knew and didn’t care. It wasn’t as if people in the USA loved Negroes, either. They complained about what the Confederates were doing to them, but that struck Rodriguez as nothing but propaganda. If the United States really cared about Negroes, they would have opened their borders to them. They hadn’t. They weren’t about to, either.

Two women got into a catfight. They screeched and scratched and wrestled and swore. Rodriguez and his comrades hurried toward the squabble. The women were shrieking about somebody named Adrian. Was he a guard? Rodriguez couldn’t think of any guards named Adrian, but he might have missed somebody. Was he a black man in the other half of the prison? Or was he somebody they’d known back where they came from?

Whoever he was, he wasn’t worth disturbing the peace for. “Enough!” Rodriguez yelled. “Break it up!”

The women ignored him. They were too intent on maiming each other to care what a guard said. “You whore!” one of them shouted.

“I ain’t no whore!” The second woman pulled the first one’s hair, which produced a shrill scream. “You the whore!”

“Break it up!” Rodriguez yelled again. “Punishment cell for both of you!”

Life at Camp Determination was hard anyway. It was harder in a punishment cell. They didn’t give prisoners room to stand up or sit down. They had no stoves-you froze in the winter. In the summer, you baked, but everybody in the camp baked in the summer. You got starvation rations, even skimpier and nastier than the cooks doled out to anybody else.

But the two women really meant this brawl. They wouldn’t stop no matter what a man in uniform said. That was unusual. Rodriguez nodded to the junior guards with him. “Take care of it,” he said.

They did, using the butt ends of their submachine guns. Some of the models that went up to the front were of all-metal construction, so cheap they’d fall to pieces if you dropped them on the sidewalk. But the guards got better-made weapons with real wooden stocks. One reason they did was for times like this. Even if you didn’t want to shoot somebody, you sometimes had to knock sense into an empty head.

Now the women shrieked on a different note. Back when they first got half the camp to themselves, some of the guards were reluctant to clout them. No more. Familiarity had bred contempt.

“Didn’t you hear the troop leader yell for you to break it up?” one of the guards panted. “He tells you to do something, you cut the crap and you do it, you hear?”

If Rodriguez hadn’t had three stripes on his sleeve, he likely would have been nothing but a damn Mexican to the guard. Of course, even a damn Mexican stood higher on the Confederate ladder than a nigger (unless you were a white Texan from down near the Rio Grande). And a troop leader stood infinitely higher than a prisoner in an extermination camp.

One of the women had an eye swollen shut. The other one had blood running down the side of her head. They pointed at each other. At exactly the same time, they both said, “She started it.”

“Nobody cares who start it,” Rodriguez said. “You don’t stop when I say to stop. I say twice, you still don’t stop. Now you pay.” He turned to the guards. “To the punishment cells. They start this shit again, you shoot. You hear?”

“Yes, Troop Leader!” they chorused, their timing almost as good as the women’s.

Rodriguez wondered if the Negroes thought he was joking. If they did, it was the last mistake they’d ever make. Nobody in the Confederate States-nobody who mattered, anyway-would care whether a couple of colored women died a little sooner than they would have otherwise. Far away in the distance, artillery rumbled again. As long as it didn’t get much closer, everything was all right. Rodriguez hoped everything would go on being all right, too.

Willard Sloan was not a nice man. Scipio listened to him screaming on the telephone: “You call that lettuce? Holy Jesus, only thing it was good for was wiping my ass! What do I mean? I’ll tell you what I mean. It was limper than an old man’s dick, that’s what, and it looked like the bugs ate as much as you sold me. Nobody pulls that kind of shit on me twice, you hear?” Bang! Down went the receiver.

Sloan might have been nice before the Yankee bullet paralyzed him from the waist down. Or he might have been a son of a bitch from the start. If he’d ever heard the old saying about catching more flies with honey than with vinegar, he didn’t believe it. Maybe he just didn’t like flies.

Most restaurant managers worth their pay had some son of a bitch in them. Jerry Dover sure did. But the new man at the Huntsman’s Lodge took it to extremes. When something made him unhappy, you heard about it, loudly and profanely. Sloan operated on the theory that the squeaky wheel got the grease. He didn’t just squeak-he screeched.

He cussed Scipio out when the black man made mistakes. Scipio did make some-with all the things that went on in a busy restaurant, he couldn’t help it. But he didn’t make many, and Willard Sloan noticed. “Well, looks like Dover knew what he was talking about,” he said one day. “You do know what the fuck you’re doin’.”

“I thanks you, suh,” Scipio said. “You do somethin’, you likes to do it good.”

“Ha!” Sloan said. “Most people”-he didn’t say most niggers, for which Scipio gave him credit-“only want to do enough to get by. You show up every day, and you work like a bastard.”

“I does my job bes’ way I knows how,” Scipio said.

“Well, that’s what you’re supposed to do,” the manager said. “Doesn’t happen as often as it ought to, though. I can hire a hundred people who could wait tables kinda half-assed, you know what I mean? Good enough to get by, but not really good. One of you is worth all of them put together. You’re the kind of waiter a place like this is supposed to have. You’re the kind of waiter who makes the Huntsman’s Lodge the kind of place it is.”

“Thank you, suh. Don’t reckon I hear many finer compliments.” Scipio meant it. Willard Sloan didn’t have to waste praise on him. If Sloan did it, he meant it. Maybe hearing that praise made Scipio rash, for he went on, “How much it matter, though, when they kin ship me off to a camp whenever they please?”

As soon as the words were gone, he wished he had them back. Whining to a white man never did a Negro any good. Willard Sloan didn’t answer for a while. Then he said, “When I got shot, I was out in no-man’s-land, between our lines and the damnyankees’. A nigger soldier brought me back, or maybe I would’ve died out there.”

“What happen to him afterwards?” Scipio asked.

Sloan sighed. “Xerxes, I don’t know. I just don’t know. I don’t know where he’s from. I don’t know his name. I don’t know if he got himself killed next day or next week or next month. I can’t tell you, that’s all. I wasn’t an officer leading colored troops or anything-their sector was next to ours, that’s all. I don’t even know if he was out there already or if he came out to get me. I was in the hospital a hell of a long time after that. I never had the chance to find out.”

“All right, suh.” Thus encouraged, Scipio felt bold enough to add, “If he still ’live now, reckon he either in a camp or worried about goin’ in. Don’t hardly seem fair.”

Sloan sighed again. He spread his hands. “Ain’t much I can do about it. Who pays attention to a guy in a wheelchair who runs a restaurant? Maybe I can help my own people some. I hear tell Dover did. Things are getting tougher all the time. I don’t know if it’ll still work. I aim to try, anyhow.”

“Can’t ask for no more’n dat,” Scipio said. So a human being did lurk under that acid-tongued exterior. Worth knowing, maybe.

Human being or not, Sloan didn’t put up with slackness, any more than Jerry Dover had. When a cook came in late three times in two weeks, he was gone. The Mexican who took his place spoke next to no English, but showed up early every day. He picked up the language in a hurry, especially the obscenities that laced the conversation of the rest of the kitchen staff.

How many Mexicans were in Augusta these days? How many Mexicans were in towns and fields all over the Confederacy, doing what had been nigger work till blacks started getting cordoned off by barbed wire and disappearing into camps? Not so many as the Negroes they replaced, surely. But enough to keep crops coming in, wheels turning, meals cooked and served, hair cut.

They can get along without us. The idea terrified Scipio. He hadn’t thought the Freedom Party could strike at Negroes in any really important way. He hadn’t thought the CSA could do without the hard, unglamorous labor colored men and women provided. He hadn’t thought so, but maybe he was wrong.

One good thing about a busy shift: it left him no time to brood. He was always hopping, taking orders, bringing food out from the kitchen, barking at the busboys, trying to hear the gossip at his tables without letting the whites know he was listening.

Everybody talked about Pittsburgh. The more that people knew, the gloomier they sounded. Some of them sounded very gloomy indeed. “We’re going to lose that whole army,” a colonel home on leave told his banker friend. “We’re going to lose a big piece of Ohio, too. It’s just a mess-a mess, I tell you.”

“What can we do?” the banker asked.

“Hold on tight everywhere else and hope we can ride it out,” the officer answered. “Don’t know what else there is to do. Give up? Not while we’ve still got bullets in the gun. You reckon the last peace was bad? It’d be a walk in the park next to what we’d get from the damnyankees this time around.”

Scipio wished for the destruction of the Freedom Party with all his heart. He had mixed feelings about the Confederate States of America. Every man needed a country, and the Confederate States, for better and often for worse, were his. He’d had no trouble getting along before Jake Featherston took power. Things hadn’t been perfect or even very good, but they hadn’t been so bad, either. He’d known where he fit.

But Negroes didn’t fit anywhere in Featherston’s CSA. And enough whites agreed with Featherston to bring him and his followers into places where they could do something about their ideas. And so…

And so, when Scipio went home that night, he passed the barbed-wire perimeter around the Terry. No street lights inside kept him from tripping. Power had been off for a long time. He stepped slowly and carefully. Falling would be bad, not just because he was an old man and getting brittle but because he might tear his trousers. That would be a real disaster.

He made it back to the apartment undamaged. It was chilly in there. No buildings in the Terry had heat anymore. The handful of people left here used makeshift wood-burning stoves for cooking and heating. One of these days, maybe, a fire would get loose. Scipio dreaded that, but didn’t know what he could do about it.

Bathsheba stirred when he came to bed. “Sorry,” he said. “Didn’t mean to bother you none.”

“ ’S all right,” his wife answered sleepily. “Sunday tomorrow. We kin go to church.”

“All right.” Scipio didn’t argue. He thought God had long since stopped listening to the Confederacy’s Negroes, but Bathsheba still believed. Going along was easier than quarreling.

He thought so, anyway. In the morning, Cassius said, “I ain’t goin’. I got to see some people about some business.”

“What kind of business?” Scipio asked.

His son just looked at him-looked through him, really. Cassius didn’t answer. Some kind of resistance business, then. Scipio sighed but didn’t insist. Bathsheba tried to. It didn’t work. Cassius was going to go his own way. Seeing what things were like these days, Scipio had a harder time thinking him wrong than he would have a couple of years earlier.

The church was as rundown as everything else in the Terry. The preacher’s coat and trousers were shiny with age. The reverend preached a careful sermon, praying for peace and for justice and for an end to misery and oppression. He made a point of not saying that the members of his congregation should rise up against oppression. Somebody was bound to be listening for the authorities. If the government or the Freedom Party-assuming there was any difference between the two-didn’t like what he said, he would vanish off the face of the earth as if he’d never been born.

He might have preached fire and brimstone. He might have preached revolt and revolution. It wouldn’t have mattered. He was just finishing his sermon when somebody at the back of the church exclaimed, “Lord have mercy, dey is out dere!”

Nobody wondered who they were. With gasps of horror, people sprang up from their rickety seats and hurried out of the church, hoping to get away before it was too late. “God be with you, brothers and sisters!” the preacher called after them. He didn’t try to get them to stay. Maybe he had his own escape route planned.

Scipio and Bathsheba and Antoinette scurried away with the rest of the congregation. Like rats, he thought. Any kind of hiding place would do now.

But there were no hiding places. Augusta policemen and Freedom Party stalwarts and guards waited out in the street. They had smiles on their faces and rifles and submachine guns in their hands. One of them shifted a wad of tobacco into his cheek so he could talk more clearly: “Y’all can come along with us quiet-like, or y’all can get shot right here. Don’t matter none to us. Which’ll it be?”

One young man, only a little older than Cassius, ran for it. A submachine gun spat fire. The young man fell and writhed on the cracked pavement. The stalwart who’d cut him down ambled over and put a bullet through his head. The Negro groaned and lay still.

“Anybody else?” asked the cop with the chaw. No one moved. No one spoke.

Cassius. Thank God Cassius isn’t here. Someone may get away, Scipio thought. He glanced over at his wife. She nodded when their eyes met. She had to be thinking along with him.

The policeman spat a brown stream of tobacco juice in the dead man’s direction. “All right,” he said. “Get moving.”

Away the Negroes went. The congregation was only part of the cleanout. Some men tried to offer money to get away. Some women tried to offer themselves. The white men only laughed at them.

Out of the Terry they went. A lot of white Augustans were worshiping and praying at this hour of the day. Maybe God listened to them. He sure hadn’t paid any attention to the colored preacher. The whites who weren’t at church stared at the Negroes herded along like cattle. Some just stared. Some jeered. No one called out a word of protest.

Confederate Station was by Eighth and Walker, right next to St. Patrick’s Catholic Church. Did God listen harder if you called on Him in Latin? Scipio wouldn’t have bet on it. The station wasn’t far from the Terry. The captured Negroes were lucky in that, because he was sure they would have had to walk no matter how far it was.

And then all their luck ran out. Everything happened so fast, neither Willard Sloan nor anyone else had the slightest chance to do anything. “In! Get in, God damn you!” shouted the white men with guns. They stuffed cars tighter than should have been humanly possible. By the way the boxcar Scipio and his family went into smelled, it had hauled cattle the last time. The whites packed it till no one could sit down, then slammed the door shut. That cut off almost all of the air. Scipio resigned himself to dying before he got wherever the train was going. With a jerk and a lurch, it began to roll.

Dr. Leonard O’Doull sometimes thought he was trapped in one of the nastier suburbs of hell. One bleeding, mangled, screaming man after another, from the time he gulped coffee to wake up to the moment he lay down for a stolen bit of sleep. Some of the soldiers wore green-gray, others butternut. He’d almost stopped noticing which color uniform he had to cut away to get at the latest mutilation.

“When will this end?” he groaned to Granville McDougald after amputating a shattered arm.

“You’re asking the wrong guy,” the medic answered. “Only one who can tell you is the Confederate CO.”

“He should have quit three weeks ago,” O’Doull said.

McDougald shrugged. “He’s got orders to hold to as long as he can, and he’s got ammo for his guns. Featherston would probably send a people bomb after him if he did throw in the towel. As soon as we smash him flat, that frees up all of our men here to roll west and knock the Confederates out of Ohio. So he’s holding down a lot more men than he’s still got left himself.”

“You spent all these years as a medic, right?” O’Doull asked. McDougald nodded. The doctor went on, “So how come you talk like you come from the General Staff?”

“Me?” Granville McDougald laughed. “I’m just picking up stuff I hear from the wounded. We’ve got enough of ’em.”

“Well, God knows you’re right about that,” O’Doull said. The University of Pittsburgh hospital held U.S. wounded ranging in rank from private to brigadier general-and Confederates ranging from private to full colonel. It was always stuffed. Men lay on gurneys in the hallway, sometimes on mattresses on the floor, sometimes-when things were at their worst-on blankets on the floor.

The Confederates never had made it over the Allegheny River. They never had tried to break out of Pittsburgh to the west, either. They’d waited till the relieving column could link up with them-but it never did. Now, outside the pocket, there were no Confederate soldiers for miles and miles. The men who’d tried to relieve Pittsburgh had turned west themselves, to try to stem the U.S. advance out of northwestern Ohio and Indiana.

“One thing,” O’Doull said. McDougald raised an eyebrow. O’Doull went on, “I bet the poor bastards stuck here don’t think Jake Featherston is always right anymore.”

“That doesn’t matter,” McDougald said. “What matters is the people down in the CSA. When they figure out Featherston’s led ’em down the primrose path, that’s when things get interesting.”

“Maybe-but maybe not,” O’Doull said. “Yeah, some of them may hate Featherston after things go wrong. But won’t they go on hating us even worse? They really do, you know.” He’d listened to wounded men, too, and some of the captured Confederates were alarmingly frank.

“I don’t care if they hate us. I hate them, too.” Granville McDougald was so matter-of-fact, he might have been talking about the weather. “What I want ’em to remember is, if they mess with us, we’re going to pound the kapok out of ’em, and they better get used to the idea.”

“Oderint dum metuant,” O’Doull murmured. McDougald made a questioning noise. Half embarrassed, O’Doull explained: “I did a lot of Latin when I was an undergrad-in those days, you had to when you went to college. It’s helped with the medical terms, I will say. But the Emperor Caligula said that.”

“Caligula? The crazy one?”

“That’s him. He was nuttier than Jake Featherston, to hell with me if he wasn’t. But it means, ‘Let them hate, as long as they fear.’ ”

“Three words,” McDougald said admiringly. “Boy, that packs more into three words than anything this side of ‘I love you.’ There I was, yakking about how I feel about the Confederates, and that old son of a bitch got it into three words.”

“He wasn’t an old son of a bitch. He was a young son of a bitch,” O’Doull said. “I think he was twenty-seven when they murdered him.”

“Well, he’s been dead long enough that he seems old,” McDougald said. O’Doull nodded; he was right about that. It was something over 1,900 years now.

He didn’t get the chance to cudgel his brains over exactly how many years it was, because the PA system brayed, “Major O’Doull! Sergeant McDougald! Report at once to OR Three! Major O’Doull! Sergeant McDougald! Report at-”

“No rest for the wicked,” McDougald said.

“I thought that was ‘weary,’ ” O’Doull said.

“Works both ways, don’t you think?” McDougald was right about that, too.

They hastily scrubbed in and gowned and masked. Then they found what they were dealing with: a soldier who’d stepped on a mine. That was an even worse misfortune than it might have been, because the Confederates, or possibly the Devil, had come up with a new model. Instead of just exploding and blowing off a man’s foot or his leg, it bounced up to waist height and then burst… with the results they had in front of them.

The kid on the table was shrieking in spite of surely having had a morphine shot. He held his hands in front of his crotch like a maiden surprised, and wouldn’t move them no matter what. “My nuts!” he moaned. “It got my nuts!”

“You’re gonna be all right, son.” O’Doull feared he was lying through his teeth. He turned to McDougald and spoke in a quick, low voice: “Get him under.”

“Right, Doc.” In one swift, practiced motion, McDougald put the ether cone over the soldier’s face and turned the valve on the gas cylinder. The wounded man choked on the pungent fumes, but didn’t try to yank off the mask the way a lot of people did. His hands stayed right where they were till the ether got him and he went limp.

“Let’s see how bad it is,” O’Doull said grimly. Now he could move those blood-dripping hands. When he did, he wished he hadn’t. What he saw made him want to cover himself up the same way.

“How bad?” McDougald asked.

“Well, he won’t need to worry about getting a girl in trouble anymore-that’s for damn sure,” O’Doull answered. “I’ll see if I can put his dick back together well enough for him to piss through it. And he’s got some nasty belly wounds, too.”

“Remember we were talking about the Geneva Convention a while ago?” McDougald said as O’Doull, his mouth a tight line behind the mask, got to work.

“Yeah,” he answered absently, trimming mangled tissue as conservatively as he could. “What about it?”

“Nobody’d thought of Popping Paula back when they were hammering it out,” McDougald said. “Otherwise, it’d be on the list for sure.”

“It’s filthy, all right,” O’Doull agreed. “And you know what’s even worse? I bet you anything the engineer who came up with it got a bonus.”

“I won’t touch that,” McDougald said. “If you look at it the right way-or the wrong way, depending-it’s almost the perfect weapon. Who’d want to maybe trade his family jewels for a hundred-yard advance?”

“I’m just glad they don’t have many of those little toys here,” O’Doull said. “And we’ve got all their airstrips under our guns now, so they won’t be bringing in more.”

“Always parachute drops,” McDougald said helpfully. But there weren’t many of those anymore. Pittsburgh had cost the CSA a god-awful lot of transports. No more than a handful tried to make the trip these days; U.S. Wright fighters ruled the skies above western Pennsylvania.

Outside the hospital, the thunder of U.S. guns went on around the clock. O’Doull hardly noticed it. He might have looked up in surprise if it stopped. Incoming rounds were growing scarcer. That Confederate Army might have got into Pittsburgh. It didn’t look as if it would get out.

“How are you doing there?” McDougald asked after a while.

“Oh, he’ll live. I’m not so sure he’ll think that’s doing him a favor, though,” O’Doull said. “I think he’ll have a penis that works, even if he won’t get much fun out of it. I sure hope it works-otherwise, it’s catheter time.”

“Ouch.” McDougald winced. “Don’t even want to think about that.”

“It’s a bitch.” O’Doull used the smallest needles and finest catgut for his sutures. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d done such delicate work. He wished he could have done more for the wounded soldier, but the essential parts were gone.

At last, the job was done. McDougald surveyed the site. “Well, I think you did about as much as anybody would have been able to,” he said.

“Yeah.” O’Doull gave back a somber nod. “I wish I could say more. I wish I had a drink, too.”

“Don’t blame you a bit. Why don’t you, once you get out of the OR?”

“When I come off, maybe I will,” O’Doull said. “Don’t want to do it now-odds are I’ll be operating again before long.”

“There is that,” McDougald allowed. “I’ll tell you something, though-I’ve known plenty of docs that wouldn’t have stopped for a second, let alone a minute. Some of the old-timers in the last war, the guys who’d been in the Army since 1880-hoo-boy!” He rolled his eyes.

“Yeah, I ran into some of those fellows, too,” O’Doull said. “This one surgeon named Schnitzler-I don’t think he drew a sober breath all the time I knew him. But put a wounded man in front of him and a scalpel in his hand and he’d do as good a job as anybody you’d ever want to meet. He could operate in his sleep. I think he did sometimes.”

“That’s the kind I mean,” McDougald said. “There’s the drunk who goes and drinks till he passes out. And then there’s the other kind, the guy who gets a buzz in the morning and stays buzzed all day long, and as long as he is, he’s fine.”

“Till his liver craps out on him, anyway,” O’Doull said.

“Oh, sure.” By the way McDougald said that, he took it for granted. “Of course, there are some of the first kind, too. Part of the way I learned surgery was when one of the docs who should have been doing it got too toasted to see, let alone operate. If I didn’t cut, this soldier was ruined for sure. If I did, maybe he had a chance. So I did, and he made it-and I thought, Son of a bitch! I can do this shit! I was hooked.”

“It grows on you, all right,” O’Doull agreed. “What happened to the drunken doctor?”

“He kept at it whenever he was sober enough to work,” McDougald answered. “After a while, people said I was doing better work than he was. I don’t know about that. He had the training, after all, and I was amateur city. But I sure was doing more work than he was, ’cause he got loaded more and more often.”

“They should have discharged the fool.” Though a Catholic, O’Doull had more than a little New England Puritan sternness in him.

Granville McDougald shook his head. “It was a war, Doc. If he was only a quarter of what he should have been, that was still a quarter of a surgeon more than they would have had if they canned him. Hell, he may be in the Army yet. He may be in the OR next door, for all I know.”

“He probably killed patients he should have saved,” O’Doull said.

“So have I,” McDougald said. He didn’t ask if O’Doull had. That was generous of him. Like any doctor, O’Doull had buried some of his mistakes. It came with being human. The most important thing was trying not to make the same mistake twice.

Hotel Street in Honolulu was a raucous, drunken place twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Sailors who had liberty got drunk and got laid, caring about nothing but the moment. George Enos, Jr., knew exactly how they felt. He should have-he was one of them.

He’d drunk enough to make the sidewalk seem to sway and twist under his feet like the Townsend’s deck in a heavy sea. But the pavement wasn’t listing-he was.

“Where do we go now?” he asked Fremont Dalby. He’d pretty much given up thinking on his own. If the gun chief could manage it, George would follow along.

Dalby made a production out of pondering. He’d taken plenty of antifreeze on board, too. “Well, do we want to drink some more, or do we want to screw?” he asked.

George frowned. He didn’t want to decide anything. He wasn’t sure he could decide anything. Fritz Gustafson settled things by walking through the next open door they passed.

If it had been a brothel, they would have done their best there. But it was another gin mill. The air smelled of cigarette smoke and spilled beer and vomit. A record player was cranking out Hawaiian music much too loud. George’s head started to ache, and he wasn’t even hung over yet. That would come tomorrow morning, and tomorrow morning might as well be ten years away.

He and his buddies from the Townsend elbowed their way up to the bar. A couple of the men they muscled by gave them sour stares, but nobody threw a punch. “What’ll you have, gents?” the barkeep asked.

“Whiskey,” Fremont Dalby said. George nodded. So did Fritz Gustafson. The man behind the bar poured the booze into three glasses, added ice, and waited till he saw money before sliding the drinks across the bar. Dalby gulped his. So did Gustafson. George went a little slower. By himself, he would have stuck with beer. He liked it better. But when he was out with friends, whiskey got him drunk faster. On a forty-eight-hour liberty, speed mattered.

He wasn’t sorry this had turned out to be a bar, not a cathouse. He always felt bad about being unfaithful to Connie. Oh, not while he was in the act-it felt wonderful then. It always did. How could it not, even with a bored Chinese floozy who chewed gum while you pounded away? But he never failed to feel guilty afterwards.

“Drink up, George,” Dalby said. “The night is young, and you are-hell, I ain’t drunk enough to think you’re beautiful.”

George laughed. He knocked back his drink, then coughed two or three times. The rotgut in the glass was smooth as sandpaper. Gustafson pounded him on the back. “Thanks,” he wheezed.

“Sure,” the loader said. Even pretty well lit up, he spent words as if he paid for them out of his own pocket.

“Another round,” Dalby told the the bartender.

“Coming up.” The man’s gray hair said he’d been around a while. So did his faint British accent. The Sandwich Islands had belonged to the limeys before the USA took them away in 1914. A lot of the old-timers had been here since the Union Jack flew alongside the flag of the Sandwich Islands, which joined it to the Stars and Stripes in what had been the old Kingdom of Hawaii’s doomed effort to keep everybody happy.

George would have loved to spend the rest of his life in the Sandwich Islands. He didn’t suppose many people who came here didn’t want to stay. After the winter he’d just been through, he would never look at January in Boston the same way again. He wouldn’t look at the North Atlantic in January the same way again, either. Oh, they had swells here. But nothing he’d seen came within miles of the Nantucket sleighride. And you’d never have to worry about working on deck in the middle of an ice storm.

Again, Dalby and Gustafson poured down their drinks in nothing flat. Again, they waited not too patiently for him to finish his. He was about to go bottoms up when a brawl broke out behind him.

He never knew what started it. An argument over a barmaid? Two sailors from the same ship who didn’t like each other? Sailors from two ships that didn’t like each other? The roll of the dice at a corner table?

Whatever got it going, it was everywhere fifteen seconds later. Nobody tried to stop it; everyone just joined in. If that didn’t prove there were a lot of drunks in the place, nothing ever would have.

Somebody swung at George: a big, burly machinist’s mate. The haymaker would have knocked him into the middle of next week had it landed, but it missed by at least a foot. George threw what was left of his drink in the other sailor’s face. The man roared and rubbed frantically at his eyes. George hit him in the belly. He folded up with an explosive, “Oof!”

Oh, shit! The bartender was probably yelling it, but George had to read his lips to understand it. Everybody in the joint was shouting at the top of his lungs. The noise of things breaking didn’t help.

Somebody took a swing at Fremont Dalby. The gun chief ducked so the punch caught him on top of the head. That hurt the puncher much more than it hurt Dalby. One of the things you learned in a hurry was not to punch bony places. By the way the sailor clutched his wounded hand, he’d probably broken a knuckle or two. A heartbeat later, he had other things to worry about. Dalby, a barroom veteran, didn’t waste time fighting fair. He kneed the sailor in the crotch. The man howled like a wolf.

George stopped a punch with his forehead. He saw stars. It probably hurt the other guy worse than it hurt him, but that didn’t mean he enjoyed it. Plenty of sailors got into fights for the fun of it. George didn’t understand that. Watching a fight was fun. Getting punched and kicked and elbowed? That wasn’t what he called a good time.

He hit the other guy in the ribs. He’d aimed for the sailor’s solar plexus. If he’d hit it, that would have taken the SOB out of the brawl till his motor started working again.

But a shot to the ribs just pissed the sailor off. He gave George a punch identical to the one he’d just taken. George grunted and swore. That would leave a bruise, and he’d probably be sore whenever he breathed for the next week.

Nobody in a barroom brawl played much defense. George slugged the guy in front of him again. Then Fritz Gustafson hauled off and belted the sailor in the chops. The man went down like a felled tree. With a small smile, Gustafson displayed a set of brass knucks. He would have made a hell of a Boy Scout. He was prepared for anything.

Halfway down the bar, somebody who didn’t have brass knuckles improvised. He picked up a long-legged stool and swung it like a flail, felling whoever he could reach. Maybe the rising and falling screech that burst from him was intended for a Rebel yell. Maybe it just meant he was enjoying himself.

Whatever it meant, the screech abruptly cut off. Someone coldcocked the stool swinger from behind with a beer bottle. The bar stool crashed to the floor. So did the sailor, bleeding from a scalp wound.

A fighting knife gleamed in the hand of a Marine in a forest-green uniform. George didn’t see the leatherneck stick anybody. All the same, he decided he was up way past his bedtime.

Getting out of a brawl without getting a name for running away from brawls wasn’t so easy, though. George didn’t want to skip out on his buddies. And so he stayed there and took some punches and dealt out a few more. Dalby and Gustafson both seemed happy enough where they were.

Then somebody yelled, “Shore patrol!” That sent everybody surging toward the door. George hoped the bartender had shouted out the warning to get the sailors to quit tearing his place to pieces. No such luck. The Navy equivalent of MPs waded into the fray, nightsticks swinging.

George counted himself lucky-he didn’t get hit in the head. He did get hit in the ribs, which made the punch he’d taken there seem a love pat by comparison. Fremont Dalby got a bloody stripe over one eye. Fritz Gustafson knocked a shore patrolman ass over teakettle with his knuckleduster. That could have won him a pounding to end all poundings, but none of the shore patrolman’s pals saw him do it. Some people had all the luck.

Gustafson’s luck didn’t keep him-and George, and most of the rest of the people in the bar, including the barkeep-from getting grabbed and tossed into one of the paddy wagons that pulled up outside.

The SPs had a brig set up a couple of blocks away. It had probably been there for years, but George hadn’t known about it. They found out he and Dalby and Gustafson had legitimate liberty papers, and they found out the three men from the Townsend hadn’t started the fight. When they discovered Gustafson’s persuader, they took it away from him. He looked aggrieved, but he didn’t say anything. Under the circumstances, that was bound to be smart. Of course, Gustafson never had much to say.

Another paddy wagon delivered them to their ship and two more men to the destroyer tied up next to her. The officer of the deck eyed them as if he’d found them in his apple. “Well, well,” he said. “What have we got here?”

“Drunk and disorderly, sir,” a shore patrolman answered. “Tavern brawl on Hotel Street.”

“All right. We’ll take care of them,” the OOD said.

And they did. No one got very excited about it. Captain’s mast was something that happened now and again. George had never come up in front of one before. He might have been more worried if he were less hung over. That made him think more about internal miseries than any the Townsend’s skipper would inflict.

By their expressions, Dalby and Gustafson also had a bad case of the morning afters. Lieutenant Commander Brian McClintock glowered at each of them in turn. “Anything to say for yourselves?” he growled.

“No, sir,” Dalby said. George and Fritz Gustafson shook their heads. George wished he hadn’t. It only made the throbbing behind his eyes worse.

“Why the devil didn’t you get out of there before the SPs came? Now I have to notice this.” McClintock sighed. “Three days in the brig, bread and water.”

The brig was tiny and cramped. Through most of the first day, George didn’t want anything resembling food. He drank lots of water. It helped the hangover a little. By the time he got out, he was sick of piss and punk: Navy slang for the punishment rations. Making him sick of them so he didn’t want to do it again was part of the point of the sentence, but that didn’t occur to him.

Ordinary chow on the Townsend was no better than it had to be. It tasted like manna from heaven when they turned him loose. Greasy fried chicken? Lumpy mashed potatoes? Coffee like battery acid? He made a pig of himself.

“Didn’t figure you for a brawler, Enos,” somebody said.

“Yeah, well…” George shrugged and let the well-gnawed bone from his drumstick fall to the plate in front of him. He had a few bruises to show he’d been in a fight, and delivered the classic line with as much conviction as if no one had ever said it before: “You ought to see the other guy.”

Some British poet talked about ending the world with a whimper, not a bang. Tom Colleton figured that meant the limey had missed out on the Great War. It sure as hell proved he’d never set foot in one of the two or three Confederate pockets left in Pittsburgh.

That Tom didn’t know how many positions his countrymen still held spoke volumes about how bad things were. He was hungry. He was cold. He was lousy-he itched all the time. The regiment he commanded might have had a company’s worth of effectives, which made it one of the stronger units in this pocket. They were desperately low on ammo for their automatic weapons. Most of them carried captured U.S. Springfields instead. They had no trouble scrounging cartridges for them.

Only a couple of hundred yards from the edge of the pocket, the Allegheny rolled south towards its junction with the Monongahela. Tom Colleton felt a certain somber pride at being where he was. His regiment had pushed as far east as any Confederate outfit. They’d done everything flesh and blood could do.

They’d done it, and it hadn’t been enough.

Confederate commanders had already refused two U.S. surrender demands. Tom didn’t know who was in charge over the twitching, dying C.S. positions in Pittsburgh. A light airplane had sneaked into the city and taken out General Patton at the direct order of Jake Featherston. Patton might be useful somewhere else later on. Nobody could do much about what was going on here.

The wind picked up. Snow started to swirl. Crouched in the ruins of what had been a secondhand book shop, Tom lit a cigarette. He muttered something foul under his breath. It was U.S. tobacco, and tasted like straw. He’d taken the pack from a dead Yankee. No way to get the good stuff from home, not anymore.

U.S. barrels rattled forward. Before long, the damnyankees would take another shot at overrunning this pocket, and they just might bring it off. Few Confederate barrels were still in working order. Even fewer had fuel. Fighting enemy armor with grenades and Featherston Fizzes was a losing game.

“Give it up!” a U.S. soldier shouted across the narrow strip of no-man’s-land. “You’re dead meat if you stick it out. We play fair with prisoners.”

Tom knew some of his men had thrown down their rifles and saved their skins. They had orders to hold out, but blaming them for surrendering wasn’t easy. Still, what would happen if-no, when-the Yankees didn’t have to worry about the Confederates in Pittsburgh anymore? How many U.S. soldiers and barrels and guns and airplanes would that free up? How much would C.S. forces elsewhere have to pay?

All those things mattered. Living mattered more to a lot of people. Tom was too hungry and weary to care anymore one way or the other. And he thought like a soldier. As long as he still had bullets in his rifle, he wanted to shoot them at the damnyankees.

He wasn’t a professional. He hadn’t gone to VMI or the Citadel or one of the other schools that turned out the Confederacy’s professional officer corps. But he’d made it through the Great War and through more than a year and a half of this one. He knew what he was doing.

He hadn’t had any experience when they gave him a captain’s uniform in 1914. But he’d come from a plantation-owning family. In those innocent days, they didn’t think he needed anything else. He was innocent himself back then. He was sure he would come home, the Yankees whipped, in time for the cotton harvest.

Innocence died fast on the Roanoke front. So did soldiers, in both butternut and green-gray. The dashing war he’d imagined turned into a brutal slog of trenches and barbed wire and machine guns and gas and always, always, the stench of death.

He’d lived. He hadn’t even been badly hurt. And he’d liked spending the next twenty-odd years as a civilian. He’d gone into this second war with his eyes open. This time, he’d known from the start the Yankees would be tough.

And everything went just the way Jake Featherston said it would. Tom was part of the lightning thrust that carried Confederate troops all the way to Lake Erie. No one could have imagined the operation would go so well.

And no one could have imagined having it go well could mean so little. Maybe my eyes weren’t so wide open after all, Tom thought unhappily. He didn’t know one single Confederate who hadn’t been sure the United States would fold up once they got cut in half. But the USA-again! — proved tougher than the CSA figured.

Pittsburgh, then. Taking Pittsburgh would surely knock the damnyankees out of the fight and give the Confederates the victory they deserved. Except they didn’t take it. And if they were getting what they deserved… In that case, God had a nastier sense of humor than even Tom had imagined.

Pittsburgh then and Pittsburgh now. Pittsburgh now was cold and smoke and blood and fear. Pittsburgh now was that Yankee yelling, “Awright, then, you ast for it!” Most of the time, letting your enemy know you were going to hit him would be stupid-idiotic, even. If you already held all the aces, though, what difference did it make?

Artillery and mortar fire came first. Dive bombers followed a few minutes later. The U.S. airplanes didn’t scream in a dive like Confederate Mules. They didn’t have an impressive nickname like Asskickers; nobody ever called them anything but Boeing 17s. The damnyankees made war as romantically as a bunch of insurance salesmen. But their uninteresting bombers did a fine job of blowing holes in the landscape where they needed them most.

“Barrels!” somebody yelled.

U.S. barrels weren’t as good as their C.S. counterparts. They had more of them than the Confederates did, though. In this pocket of Pittsburgh, that was all too painfully true. And after a while, quantity took on a quality of its own.

The leading U.S. barrel commander rode with his head and shoulders out of the cupola. He was brave and smart. He wanted to see more of what was going on than he could all buttoned up.

He didn’t see Tom draw a bead on him and fire two quick shots. He crumpled as if made from paper when they both struck home. Tom had long since forgotten about his sidearm. He carried a captured Springfield himself. In a battlefield full of artillery and machine guns, even a rifle seemed pitifully inadequate.

Tom worked the bolt and chambered a new round. Springfields didn’t measure up to automatic Tredegars, either. But they were good enough, or more than good enough. Despite losing its commander, the barrel still came on. Tom hadn’t expected anything else. The gunner would run the behemoth now. But it wouldn’t fight so well as it had with a full crew.

A machine next to it hit a mine and threw a track. That barrel slewed sideways and stopped. The five men inside stayed where they were. They could still use the turret and the bow gun, but they weren’t going forward anymore. The barrel’s steel skin protected them from small-arms fire. If a cannon started shooting at the crippled machine, they were in trouble. The Confederates in the Pittsburgh pocket were as short on guns and shells as they were on everything else, though. The Yankees in there might make it.

There weren’t enough mines to stop the rest of the barrels, either. The U.S. machines really were ugly compared to the sleek, elegant Confederate new models. It wasn’t a beauty contest, though. The damnyankees could do the job, which was the only thing that mattered.

If they kept coming, they would tear a hole in the C.S. line. Tom knew only too well what lay behind it: not much. He didn’t know what anybody in the line could do about it.

Some men were ready to give up their lives to try to stop them. Two soldiers ran out with Featherston Fizzes, wicks alight. A Yankee foot soldier cut down one of the Confederates before he got close enough to throw his. As he fell, the burning gasoline gave him his own pyre. Tom hoped he was already dead; if he wasn’t, that was a hard way to go.

But the other soldier flung his Fizz. Fire spread across a barrel’s turret and dripped down into the engine compartment. Paint and grease made barrels vulnerable to fire anyway. When the engine started to burn, too…

Hatches popped open as the crew bailed out. Tom Colleton wasn’t the only man who fired at them. One barrelman might have reached the shelter of a pile of bricks. The rest lay dead.

But all that only put off the inevitable. The Yankees had the firepower, and the Confederates didn’t. The Yankees threw reinforcements into the battle. The Confederates didn’t have enough men to begin with. Fight as the men in filthy butternut would, the pocket shrank.

Tom stumbled back to the next line of trenches and foxholes. If he hadn’t fallen back, the damnyankees would have flanked him out and killed him. Oh, maybe he could have surrendered, but maybe not, too. U.S. soldiers treated prisoners all right-when they took them. They didn’t always. Sometimes they were too busy to be bothered. Then would-be POWs ended up dead. It wasn’t anything the Confederates didn’t do, just… part of the game.

Another weary, unshaven Confederate soldier-a corporal-crouched in a hole a few feet from Tom’s. The noncom managed a smile. “Ain’t this fun?” he said.

“As a matter of fact,” Tom said, “no.”

“Reckon we’ll win the war anyways?” the corporal asked.

“I stopped worrying about it a while ago,” Tom answered after a moment’s thought. “Whatever happens in the rest of it, I think it’ll happen without me.” He popped up and snapped off a shot at what might have been motion. It stopped. Maybe he’d cut down a damnyankee. Maybe he’d fired at nothing.

“Freedom!” the corporal said. “That’s what it’s all about, ain’t it? Fighting so the Confederate States can be what they want and do whatever they please?”

“I never thought about it much,” said Tom, who avoided Jake Featherston’s slogan whenever he could. “All I know is, I never liked the damnyankees. They gassed my brother and they bombed my sister, and I owe ’em plenty. I’ve paid back a lot, but I want to get some more.”

Mortar rounds started falling. Tom pulled in his head like a turtle, and wished he had his own hard shell. Machine-gun bullets snarled overhead. Yes, this was going to be a big push. “Here they come!” the corporal yelled. “Freedom!” He fired-once, twice, three times.

Tom fired, too, at the Yankees coming from the front. But more were slipping around the right flank. He turned and got off a couple of quick shots at them. Then he had to slap a fresh clip into the Springfield. An automatic Tredegar took a twenty-round magazine, not a five-round box. Of course, you could empty it faster, too.

If he and the corporal didn’t fall back again, they were dead. The men in green-gray would surround them and hunt them down. “I’ll cover you,” Tom said. The corporal ran for a hole deeper in the pocket. He made it, then waved for Tom to follow him.

Up. Run like hell. Hunch over to make yourself a smaller target. How many times had Tom done it before?

This was once too often. The bullet caught him in the back. He spun and toppled. His chin hit the snowy, rubble-strewn ground. His legs didn’t want to work. He reached for the Springfield. One more shot. “Oh, no, you don’t,” a Yankee said. He fired from no more than ten feet away. And Tom Colleton didn’t.

Awan early-February sun shone on the snowy, soot-streaked disaster that had been Pittsburgh. The last Confederate pocket on the North Side had surrendered, or was supposed to have surrendered, an hour earlier. Sergeant Michael Pound hadn’t made it this far by being trusting. He had a round of HE in the barrel’s cannon. If any of the men going into captivity felt like getting cute, he would do his damnedest to make sure they couldn’t.

Lieutenant Griffiths stood up in the cupola. He had a much broader view of the devastation than Pound did. He said something in a language that wasn’t English. “What was that, sir?” Pound asked.

The barrel commander laughed self-consciously. “Latin, Sergeant. From Tacitus, the Roman historian. ‘They make a desert and they call it peace.’ ”

“Oh.” Pound weighed that. He approved of the sentiment, taken all in all. But he was not the sort of man to resist discordant details: “It’s sure as hell a desert out there, sir, but we don’t have peace.”

“Not everywhere,” Griffiths agreed. “But nobody’s shooting at anybody in Pittsburgh anymore.”

After another moment of judicious consideration, Michael Pound nodded. “Well, no, sir. Nobody’s shooting right here.” And if anybody in butternut tried shooting right here, Pound intended to shoot first.

“Here they come!” Griffiths squeaked in excitement.

Pound peered through the gunsight, his reticulated window on the world while he was in the barrel. The Confederates were a sorry-looking lot. Out they came, a long, draggling column of them, from the last few square blocks of Pittsburgh they’d held. Their breath smoked in the chilly air. None of them was smoking a cigarette, though. The U.S. infantrymen guarding them had no doubt already relieved them of their tobacco. Lucky bastards, Pound thought without rancor.

The Confederates were skinny and dirty and hairy. They’d been living mostly on hope the past few weeks. Pound had heard of raids with the sole aim of stealing U.S. rations. If that wasn’t desperation, he didn’t know what was. When you were empty, any food looked good.

A lot of the Confederates looked miserably cold. Their issue greatcoats were thinner than U.S. models. Some of the men were all lumpy and bumpy, because they’d stuffed crumpled newspapers under the greatcoats for a little extra warmth. Others wore a variety of captured civilian coats on top of or instead of their greatcoats. They didn’t have good winter boots, either. Those needed to be oversized, to allow for extra padding. They needed to be, but the Confederates’ weren’t.

“There they are,” Lieutenant Griffiths said. “Jake Featherston’s supermen. They don’t look so tough, do they?”

“Sir, if they aren’t tough, what have we been doing here since November?” Pound asked. Griffiths didn’t answer.

A newsreel crew cranked away, filming the enemy soldiers’ trudge into captivity. Maybe the Confederates would look like beaten men on the Bijou screen in St. Paul. Well, they were beaten men-now. If Michael Pound knew the way propagandists’ minds worked, the newsreels would make the Confederates out to be weaklings and cowards. If they were, though, how had they fought their way into Pittsburgh in the first place? The newsreels wouldn’t talk about that. And most people, unless Pound was wildly wrong, would never think to ask.

“I wonder where we’ll go from here,” Griffiths said.

“Wherever it is, I don’t think it’ll be as tough as this,” Pound answered. It had better not be, or there’s no way in hell I’ll live through it.

How many Confederates were holed up in that pocket? More than he’d figured. Some of them helped wounded men along. Others carried stretchers. How many unburied dead lay in the pocket?

“Good thing we fought through the winter,” Griffiths said, thinking along with him. “Can you imagine what this battlefield would be like in August?”

“Yes, sir, I can,” Pound answered. That probably wasn’t what the barrel commander expected to hear. But Pound had gone through the Great War. The stench of those fields soaked into your clothes, soaked into your lungs, soaked into your skin. You thought you’d never be rid of it. Pound still sometimes smelled it in his nightmares, so maybe he wasn’t even now.

The young barrel commander sighed. “I sometimes forget you’re on your second go-round.”

“Wish I could, sir,” Pound said. Was that strictly true? A lot of what he’d learned the last time around helped keep him alive here. Some of it helped keep Lieutenant Griffiths alive, too, whether Griffiths knew it or not. That wasn’t the main thing on the gunner’s mind, though. “Those damned foot soldiers will plunder the bodies. We won’t get a crack at ’em, and we’ll have to pay through the nose for good tobacco and whatever else they’ve got.”

“Won’t be much of that stuff left,” Griffiths said. “They weren’t quite eating their boots when they gave up, but they weren’t far from it, either.”

Michael Pound grunted, more in annoyance than anything else. The shavetail saw something he’d missed. It was supposed to be the other way around. Most of the time, it was-most of the time, but not always. “Well, sir, you’re right,” Pound said.

“You’re a strange man, Sergeant,” Griffiths said.

“Me, sir? How come?” Pound thought himself normal enough, or as normal as anyone could be after close to thirty years in the Army.

“Well, for starters, you just say, ‘Well, you’re right,’ ” Griffiths answered. “Most people would want to argue and fuss.”

“What’s the point?” Pound said, genuinely puzzled. “You are right. I said something silly, and you called me on it. You should have. If I tried to tell you it wasn’t silly, I’d just make a bigger fool of myself.” Clinging to a position that was bound to fall seemed as senseless to him as Jake Featherston’s failure to pull his troops out of Pittsburgh while he still had the chance. Being stubborn just cost you more in the long run.

At last, the stream of Confederates slowed up. There were bound to be stragglers heading west and south, hoping to link up with other units in butternut or simply to get away. But for them, though, Pennsylvania was clear of Confederates. And if half of what people said on the wireless was true, Confederate control in Ohio was crumbling, too.

“He’s not going to win, not anymore,” Pound said, thinking aloud.

“I’m sorry, Sergeant,” Lieutenant Griffiths said. “What was that?”

“Jake Featherston,” Pound answered. “He’s not going to win the war. I don’t see how he can now. Only question left is, can he still get a draw?”

“Nice to know you’ve got it all worked out,” Griffiths said dryly. “Takes a lot of the strain off Philadelphia.”

Pound laughed. “Good shot, sir. But I still think it’s true.”

“Well, I hope you’re right,” the barrel commander said. “With this damn war, though, you never can tell. They’ve done some awfully surprising things. And so have we, now. The move that pinched off Pittsburgh was as pretty as you’d ever want to see.”

“General Morrell knows what’s what,” Pound said.

Griffiths started to rise to that, then caught himself. “No, wait. You were his personal gunner for a while. How did that stop?”

“He got wounded, sir,” Michael Pound answered, remembering Morrell’s weight on his back when he carried the armor commander general to cover after a Confederate sniper hit him. “They didn’t think I deserved that long a vacation.”

“And so now you’re stuck with me,” Griffiths said, his voice still dry.

“You’ve got a pretty good idea of what you’re doing, sir.” From Michael Pound, that was highest praise. By the barrel commander’s quiet snort, he realized as much. Pound went on, “I hope we get a vacation after this. We’re way, way overdue for rest and refit.”

“I know,” Griffiths said. “I haven’t got any more say over that than you do, though. We’ll go where they tell us to go and we’ll do what they tell us to do.”

“Anybody would think we were in the Army or something,” Pound said.

“Wonder why that is.” Lieutenant Griffiths grew intense. “Here come their big shots.”

Pound peered through the gunsight. A few days earlier, he would have loved to put a couple of rounds of HE-or, better yet, shrapnel-on that group of eight or ten Confederate officers. All the men had three stars on the collar tabs of their greatcoats. All but two or three had those stars enclosed in wreaths, which meant they were generals, not colonels. They all looked to be in their late thirties or early forties, younger than most U.S. officers of similar grade.

And they all looked as if they’d just watched a bulldozer run over their kitten. “They really didn’t think this could happen to them,” Pound said. “They’ve been whipping us for a year and a half. They figured it would go on forever.”

“Too damn bad,” Griffiths said.

One of the U.S. soldiers guarding the high-ranking Confederate officers carried an automatic Tredegar rifle, another a captured C.S. submachine gun. Pound wondered whether the colonels and generals in butternut appreciated the compliment. He was inclined to doubt it.

“They get off easy,” Griffiths said. “They stay in a camp away from the fighting for the rest of the war, and the U.S. government pays their salary. The rest of us still have to go on out here.”

Some of the C.S. officers looked as if they would rather be dead. If they were smart, though, they wouldn’t say anything about that to the men in green-gray who herded them along. The U.S. soldiers might oblige them.

“If we get a refit, where do you suppose we’ll go next?” Pound asked.

Lieutenant Griffiths ducked down into the turret to favor him with a wry grin. “I said that before, Sergeant. I thought you’d have a better idea than I did.”

“Not me, not now.” Pound shook his head. “General Morrell would tell me what was up sometimes. Far as everybody else is concerned, I’m just a damn noncom.” He spoke without heat.

“Can’t imagine why that would be,” Griffiths said, and Pound chuckled. The young lieutenant went on, “Well, all I can tell you is, we’ll go wherever they need us most once we get our refit-if we get our refit.”

“Sounds about right.” Pound pictured a map. He pictured what was likely to happen over the next few weeks. “Virginia or Ohio,” he said. “Whichever heats up fastest, I guess.”

“I wouldn’t bet against either one of them,” Lieutenant Griffiths said. “I hope it’s Ohio, to tell you the truth.”

“Me, too-we have a better chance of hurting them bad there, I think,” Pound said. “But wherever it is, by God, we’ll get the job done.”