Drive to the East

V

Second Lieutenant Thayer Monroe wasn’t even a bulge in his pappy’s pants when the Great War ended. He was just out of West Point, and so new an officer, he squeaked. He really did squeak; he had a thin tenor voice that often didn’t seem to have finished breaking. He went tomato-red whenever something he was saying came out especially shrill.

First Sergeant Chester Martin hadn’t expected anything different, so he wasn’t disappointed. The recruiters back in California had as much as told him this was what he’d be doing. Veteran noncoms held pipsqueak officers’ hands till the pipsqueaks either figured out what they were doing or got wounded or killed. In the first case, the blooded officers commonly won promotion. In the second, they left the platoon for less pleasant reasons. Either way, the platoon got a new, green CO, and the first sergeant’s job started all over again.

At the moment, Lieutenant Monroe’s platoon sprawled on the ground under some oaks not far outside of Falmouth, Virginia. On the other side of the Rappahannock, the Confederates held Fredericksburg. Scuttlebutt said General MacArthur’s next try at dislodging the enemy from his defenses in front of Richmond would go through the C.S. forces here.

“What do you think, Sarge?” asked Charlie Baumgartner, a corporal who led one of the squads in the platoon. “They gonna send us over the river?”

“Beats me,” Martin answered. “I hope to God they don’t. I don’t like getting shot at any better than the next guy.”

“Yeah, well, that’s on account of you’ve got your head screwed on tight,” Baumgartner said. He was more than twenty years younger than Chester, but he’d been in the Army for a while. “Some people…” He didn’t go on.

He didn’t need to, either. Lieutenant Monroe was telling anybody who’d listen what a howling waste they were going to make out of Fredericksburg and its Confederate defenders. Since he outranked everyone close by, people had to listen. Whether they believed him was liable to be a different story.

“Our bombardment will stun them. It will paralyze them,” Monroe burbled. “They’ll never know what hit them. We’ll get over the river without the least little bit of trouble.”

Baumgartner’s grunt was redolent of skepticism. So was Chester Martin’s. He’d seen lots of bombardments, which Thayer Monroe plainly hadn’t. Not even the fiercest one knocked an enemy out altogether. As soon as the bombing and the shelling let up, the survivors ran for their machine guns and popped up out of their holes with rifles in their hands.

The noncoms in the platoon all plainly knew as much. But rank had its privileges: no one told Monroe to shut up. Chester thought about it. He would have been more diplomatic than that if he’d decided to do it. In the end, he kept quiet with the rest. The young lieutenant was heartening new men who hadn’t been through the mill yet. That counted for something.

But when Thayer Monroe said, “We ought to be in Richmond a week after we break through at Fredericksburg,” Chester cleared his throat. For a wonder, the lieutenant noticed. “You said something, Sergeant?”

“Well, no, sir. Not exactly, sir.” Chester knew he had to be polite to the snotnose with the gold bar on each shoulder strap. He wasn’t convinced Monroe deserved such courtesy, but the military insisted on it. “Only, sir, it might be better if you don’t make promises we can’t keep.”

Monroe stared at him. Failure had plainly never crossed the shavetail’s mind. He said, “Sergeant, once we cross the river, we will go forward.” He might have been propounding a law of nature.

He might have been, but he wasn’t. Chester knew it too well. “Yes, sir,” he said, meaning, No, sir.

Maybe Monroe wasn’t altogether an idiot. He heard what Martin wasn’t saying. Stiffly, he said, “When the order comes, Sergeant, we will go forward.”

“Oh, yes, sir,” Martin agreed-he couldn’t quarrel with that, not without ending up in big trouble himself. But he did want to persuade the lieutenant not to take on faith everything his superiors told him. “Sir, when you were at West Point, did you study the battles on the Roanoke front?”

“Sure.” Monroe chuckled. “All twelve or fourteen of them, or however many there were.”

To him, those fights were just things he’d studied in school. He could laugh about them. Chester couldn’t. His memories were too dark. “Sir, I was there for the first six or eight-till I got wounded. I was lucky. It was just a hometowner. But before every attack, they told us this would be the one that did the trick. Do you wonder that after a while we had trouble jumping up and down when they told us to go over the top?”

“I hope we’ve got better at what we’re doing since then.” By the way Thayer Monroe said it, it was a forgone conclusion that the Army had.

“So do I.” By the way Chester Martin said it, it was anything but.

The bombardment started on schedule, regardless of Martin’s opinion. It didn’t go on for days, the way it would have during the Great War. The men in charge of the guns had learned something. Long bombardments did more to tell the enemy where the attack was going in than they did to smash him flat. Make him keep his head down, then strike hard-that was the prevailing wisdom these days.

Martin would have liked it better if they hadn’t had to throw bridges across the Rappahannock before they could cross. He and the rest of the platoon-the rest of the regiment-waited by the river for the engineers to do their job. Martin liked and admired military engineers. They were good at their specialized trade, and when they had to they made pretty fair combat soldiers, too.

They did their damnedest on the Rappahannock, but they never had a chance. Even though U.S. artillery kept pounding Fredericksburg, Confederate machine guns and mortars started pounding the engineers right back. Guns up in the hills behind the town, guns that had stayed quiet so the U.S. cannon wouldn’t spot them and knock them out ahead of time, added their weight of metal to the countershelling.

And they added more than metal. The U.S. engineers had to try to do strenuous work in gas masks. U.S. guns had thrown poison gas at Fredericksburg along with everything else, and the C.S. artillery replied in kind. Martin was wearing his mask well before the order went out to put them on. He’d seen mustard gas the last time around. He hadn’t seen what they called nerve agents-those were new. But he didn’t want to make their acquaintance the hard way.

Confederate Mules-U.S. soldiers more often called them Asskickers-swooped down on the bridges. These days, the gull-winged dive bombers weren’t the symbol of terror they had been when the war was new. They were slow and ungainly; U.S. fighters hacked them out of the sky with ease when they ventured into airspace where the CSA didn’t have superiority. But they still had a role to play. They screamed down, put bombs on three bridges, and zoomed away at just above treetop level.

“I hate those bastards, but they’ve got balls.” Because of Corporal Baumgartner’s mask, his voice sounded distant and otherworldly.

“You want to know what I think, I think we have to be nuts to try to cross here at all,” Martin said. Baumgartner didn’t argue with him. He wished the other noncom would have.

U.S. raiders in rubber boats tried crossing the Rappahannock to quiet the mortar crews and machine gunners and riflemen on the other side. Despite smoke screens and heavy U.S. fire, a lot of the boats got sunk before they made it to the south bank of the river. The raiders who managed to cross no doubt did their best, but Chester couldn’t see that Confederate fire diminished even a little.

About every half hour, Lieutenant Monroe would say, “We’ll get the order to cross any minute now, men,” or, “It won’t be long!” or, “Be ready!” Knowing how stubborn the high brass could be, Chester feared the platoon leader was right, but kept hoping he was wrong.

The order never came. Towards evening, the units that had been pushed forward drew back out of enemy artillery range. Martin wondered how many casualties they’d taken, and how many they’d inflicted on the Confederates. He would have bet the first number was a lot bigger than the second one.

“Don’t worry, men,” Thayer Monroe said, invincibly optimistic. “We’ll get them soon, even if we didn’t get them today.”

Chester had never known a common soldier who worried about not going into battle. No doubt such men existed. You heard stories about them, stories often prefaced, There was this crazy bastard who… But he’d never run into one himself.

Like other lower forms of life, second lieutenants were too dumb to know better. Martin thought some more about telling this particular lieutenant to put a sock in it, but refrained. Monroe had a job, too. He was supposed to make soldiers enthusiastic about going out there and getting maimed. Having led that company in the Great War, Chester knew what a nasty job it could be.

At the moment, he worried more about whether the regiment would get its field kitchens set up after all the marching and countermarching it had done. He wasn’t especially surprised when it didn’t. “Canned rations,” he told the men in his platoon. (Thayer Monroe had a different opinion about whose it was, but what did second lieutenants know?)

“That shit again?” somebody said. It wasn’t the only grumble sullying the sweetness of the evening air. Canned rations ranged from boring to actively nasty. The labels usually peeled off, too, so you didn’t know ahead of time whether you were getting spaghetti and meatballs-tolerable-or chicken with stewed prunes-disgusting. As with men who liked combat, there were a few who liked the chicken concoction and would trade for it, but Chester didn’t think any were in his platoon.

Charlie Baumgartner plopped down beside him. “How’s that gonna look in the newspapers, Sarge? ‘U.S. Army Pulls Back from Fredericksburg! Does Not Cross!’ ” He made the headline very convincing.

Chester opened his can. It was hash-not very good, not very bad. He dug in. After the first mouthful, he said, “They can print that if they want to. I don’t care. As long as they don’t say, ‘U.S. Army Massacred at Fredericksburg!’ I’m not going to worry about it.”

“You got a good way of looking at things,” Baumgartner said. “Better’n some people I could name-that’s for damn sure.”

“He’s nothing but a puppy,” Martin said, identifying one of those unnamed people without undue difficulty.

“You know what a puppy is?” the corporal said. He waited for Chester to shake his head, then answered the rhetorical question: “Just a little son of a bitch.”

“Ouch,” Martin said. To his own surprise, he found himself defending Lieutenant Monroe: “He’s not so bad. He just needs experience.”

“He needs a good, swift kick in the ass,” Baumgartner said.

“Odds are he’ll get one. Let’s just hope he lives through it,” Chester said.

“Yeah.” Baumgartner nodded. “Let’s hope we do, too.”

Armstrong Grimes didn’t know where the Mormons got all their machine guns. He supposed the Confederates had sneaked some to them and they’d taken others from U.S. arsenals when they started their latest uprising. Or, for all he knew, maybe they had secret machine shops out in the desert somewhere, and men with green eyeshades working lathes to turn out their own.

Wherever the machine guns came from, they had a hell of a lot of them.

The one in front of Armstrong and his companions now was firing from the window of a house in Orem, Utah; U.S. forces had finally managed to drive the Mormons out of Provo. An enormous canning plant dominated Orem. The rebels were holed up inside the factory, too, but the Americans were going to have to clear them out of the buildings in front of the place before they could even think about attacking it.

Clearing them wouldn’t be easy. Nothing that had to do with Mormons ever was. The machine gun spitting death in front of Armstrong, for instance, hadn’t just been set in that window. As soon as it started up, Sergeant Stowe called artillery fire in on it. The guns had turned the house to rubble. They hadn’t bothered the machine gun or its crew one bit.

Crouched in a hole that didn’t feel nearly deep enough with bullets cracking past just overhead, Armstrong turned to Yossel Reisen and said, “Bastards have that thing all sandbagged.”

“Either that or there’s a real cement bunker inside the place,” Reisen answered. “Wouldn’t surprise me a bit.”

“Me, neither,” Armstrong agreed with a sour sigh. “They were probably getting ready here while they were still fighting down in Provo.”

“I bet you’re right,” Reisen said. They both swore: part of the automatic obscenity that made up the small change of any conversation between military men. To Armstrong, the idea of preparing a position long before you fell back into it felt like cheating.

A runner scrambled into the hole with the two of them. “When the whistle blows, pop up and start shooting at that machine gun as hard as you can,” he said, and then climbed out to pass the word to the next few U.S. soldiers.

“What’s going on?” Armstrong called after him. The runner didn’t answer. Armstrong did some more swearing, this time in earnest. He didn’t like orders he didn’t understand, especially when they were liable to get him killed.

Like them or not, he had them. About fifteen minutes later, an officer’s whistle shrilled. He popped up and fired a shot, then ducked down again to work the Springfield’s bolt. He felt like a jack-in-the-box after a while, or maybe like a jackass. But everybody else in front of the machine gun was doing the same thing, so the Mormons manning the piece didn’t aim all their attention-to say nothing of all their fire-at him.

“Ha!” Yossel Reisen spoke with a certain somber satisfaction. “I see what’s going on.”

“Yeah?” said Armstrong, who didn’t. “What?”

“Guy with a flamethrower sneaking up on that house,” Reisen answered.

“Is that what it is?” Armstrong said. “Well, no wonder we’re supposed to keep ’em busy, then.”

The only drawback to a flamethrower was that the fellow who used it had to get close to his target before opening up-and had to get close while he was lugging a tank of jellied gasoline on his back. Armstrong’s opinion was that the men who carried flamethrowers had to be nuts. If, say a tracer round hit that tank of fuel…

And one did, just when Armstrong was squeezing off a round. The fireball made him blink. “Oh, fuck,” he said softly. Nobody would ever bury that soldier, because there wouldn’t be much left of him. Armstrong hoped it was over in a hurry. He’d got hardened to a lot of war, but that was a nasty way to go. The poor bastard hadn’t had time to scream, anyhow. Maybe his silence meant something.

After the flamethrower man’s untimely demise, firing at the Mormon strongpoint eased off. That made perfect sense, as far as Armstrong was concerned. Why take a chance on getting killed when you wouldn’t accomplish anything doing it?

Yossel Reisen summed it up in four words: “So much for that.”

“Yeah. You said it.” Armstrong sagged back down into the hole they shared. “You got a cigarette?” As Reisen gave him one, the enemy machine gun cut loose with a defiant burst to tell the world its crew was alive, well, and sassy.

That machine-gun position had to go if U.S. troops were to advance. Armstrong hoped a barrel would waddle up and blast the nest to kingdom come. But barrels, even the old-fashioned waddling kind, were in short supply in Utah these days. A lot of them had gone up in flames in the house-to-house fighting in Provo. Without them, the soldiers still might have been stuck down there. But none seemed to be close by right now.

“What would you do if you were a general?” Yossel Reisen asked.

“Me? Find another line of work,” Armstrong answered. Reisen laughed but waved to show he’d really meant the question. Armstrong thought about it, then said, “Probably another guy with a flamethrower. Cheapest way there is to make those fuckers say uncle if we don’t have a barrel ready, and it doesn’t look like we do.”

He guessed wrong, which didn’t much surprise him-he’d never wanted to be a general. The powers that be decided to try shelling the machine-gun nest out of existence again. As soon as Armstrong heard the first couple of shells gurgle by overhead, he knew they weren’t just counting on explosive power to do the job this time. “Gas!” he shouted. “Gas!” He jammed the mask over his head as fast as he could. Some of those shells were bound to fall short, the artillery being what it was. And even if they didn’t, the breeze, what there was of it, came from the north, and would blow some of the poison back towards U.S. lines.

A big stretch of the world disappeared with the pig-snouted mask over his face. What was left he saw through two portholes of none too clean glass. The air tasted of rubber. He didn’t feel as if he could get quite enough of it. That was an illusion; he’d proved as much plenty of times. But he did have to work harder to suck breaths through the activated-charcoal filter cartridge, so the illusion persisted.

Sure as hell, a couple of rounds were short, which meant they came down among the soldiers stuck in front of the machine gun. Armstrong hoped they weren’t carrying what people called nerve agents. That crap could kill you if it got on your skin. Everybody had rubberized coveralls. Nobody wanted to wear them. They were unbearably hot.

With infinite caution, Armstrong stuck up his head. The machine-gun nest was catching hell, no doubt about it. With a little luck…

That officer’s whistle squealed again. “Forward!” he shouted.

“Aw, shit,” Armstrong muttered. They were going to find out if they’d got rid of the Mormons, all right. Armstrong thought of spraying Flit all over an ants’ nest. Mormons stung even harder than red ants, though.

They were harder to kill, too. The U.S. soldiers ran toward the machine-gun nest in little scuttles from one bit of cover to the next. The gun that had held them up stayed silent. Some of them, the green ones, whooped and got a little less cautious, figuring the rebel gunners were dead.

Armstrong kept his belly on the dirt and the snout of his gas mask banging the ground. He trusted Mormons no farther than he could throw them. They were as sneaky a bunch of bastards as you could imagine. He tried not to show himself as he scooted up toward that battered house.

Beside him, Yossel Reisen took no chances, either. He snaked ahead. He didn’t walk. He didn’t even crawl. He snaked on his belly, pulling himself along with his elbows.

And their wariness and distrust paid off, for the Mormons inside the machine-gun nest must have had masks and must have got them on in time. The gunners waited till they found good targets, then opened up with a savage burst that cut down half a dozen American soldiers. After that, the advance congealed. Everybody knew you couldn’t charge a well-served machine-gun nest. If armor or artillery didn’t take it out, infantry would just keep piling up corpses in front of it.

Quite suddenly, the Mormon machine gunners ceased fire. Armstrong didn’t even twitch; he suspected another nasty trick. Then somebody behind him shouted, “Flag of truce! Flag of truce coming forward!”

That didn’t make Armstrong move, either. Mormons sounded just like anybody else. They looked just like anybody else, too. And they had no trouble getting green-gray uniforms from dead or captured U.S. soldiers. They often pretended to be ordinary Americans, and they caused a lot of trouble when they did.

But a flag of truce was coming forward. The U.S. captain who carried it shouted to the men in the machine-gun nest: “I have a message for your leaders.” He had trouble being as loud as he wanted through his mask, but he managed.

“Come ahead.” The Mormon who answered was also yelling through a gas mask. “We won’t shoot as long as nobody in front of us tries moving forward.”

“Agreed,” the captain said. Waving the white flag so the rebels could see who he was, he picked his way through the wreckage, towards and then past the machine-gun nest. Other Mormons emerged from concealment that didn’t look big enough to hide a cat. One of them blindfolded the U.S. officer, which struck Armstrong as a sensible precaution. Then they led him north.

“Wonder what that’s all about,” Yossel Reisen said. “Are they flabbling so much about this one strongpoint? They wouldn’t call a truce just on account of it… would they?”

“Christ, I hope not,” Armstrong said. “Wish I had a cigarette.” No matter how much he wished he did, he didn’t take off his mask and light up. There was bound to be gas still floating in the air. If he saw somebody else smoking and getting away with it, he’d try. Till then, no. He went on, “Most of the damn Mormons don’t smoke. Makes ’em harder to spot.”

He didn’t stick his head up or expose himself unduly. The rebels were good about honoring cease-fires, but they weren’t perfect-and they’d said they would open up if anybody on the American side got frisky.

After the truce had stretched for a couple of hours, Americans got up and stretched and began to move around. The Mormons let them. When someone was dumb enough to start to go toward the machine-gun nest, the gunners fired a warning burst well over his head. He got the message and drew back in a hurry.

A little before sunset, the captain returned. This time, he waved the flag of truce so his own side wouldn’t shoot him. With him came a little old man in a somber black suit. He looked like a grandfather who was having a tough day. Nimble as a mountain goat, he followed the captain through the rubble of what had been Orem.

“What the hell’s going on here?” Armstrong asked. Neither Yossel Reisen nor anybody else had a good answer for him.

“What the hell’s going on here?” Senator Robert Taft demanded. He was a thoroughly reactionary Democrat who’d run against Al Smith in 1940. Flora Blackford didn’t think along with him very often when they met together with the rest of the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War. She didn’t very often, but she did now.

The chairman rapped loudly for order. “You were not recognized, Senator,” he said in tones of bureaucratic severity.

“I’m very sorry, Mr. Chairman.” Taft sounded anything but. “I must say that I have trouble recognizing what the present administration is up to.”

Bang! The chairman rapped again. “You are out of order, sir. Your remarks will be stricken from the record.” He pointed to Flora. “Congresswoman Blackford!”

“Thank you, Mr. Chairman,” Flora said. George Norris smiled in relief. Like her, the Senator from Nebraska was a Socialist; he judged she was likely to go easy on President La Follette and his henchmen. Not today, though; she continued, “Mr. Chairman, I would also like to know what the hell is going on here.”

Several people exclaimed in surprise in the Philadelphia meeting room. “Thank you, Mrs. Blackford!” Senator Taft said in glad surprise. Senator Norris looked as if he’d stepped on a land mine.

“I didn’t do it for you, Senator. I did it for me,” Flora replied. That made the chairman no happier. She’d hoped it would-Norris was an old man, and a Party warhorse-but hadn’t really expected it to. Turning to him, she went on, “What is the administration doing by negotiating with the Mormons? What have they done that makes them deserve negotiation?”

“I couldn’t have put that better myself,” Taft said.

“Congresswoman, I am not the right person to answer your question, as I trust you are aware,” the chairman said.

“Certainly,” Flora said. “That is why I move that we call the Secretary of the Interior to come before the committee and explain this extraordinary action.”

“Second!” Robert Taft wasn’t the only one to call out the word; it came from half a dozen throats. Some were Democrats, some Socialists; here, people were breaking party lines.

Seeing as much, Senator Norris looked even more pained than he had before. “With talks in progress, I am not sure the Secretary would respond to such a summons,” he replied. “I am not sure he should respond to such a summons.”

“There, Mr. Chairman, I must respectfully disagree,” Flora said. The language of Congress was marvelously polite. Anywhere else, she would have said something like, My God, you’re an idiot! Polite language or no, the message came through. Norris turned a dull red. Flora went on, “If the Secretary does not respond to an invitation to come before us, I will move that we subpoena him. We need to know why the administration thinks it can offer concessions to a group now rebelling against the U.S. government not for the first, not for the second, but for the third time.”

“You will not need to look far to find a second for that motion, either, Congresswoman,” Senator Taft said. Flora nodded back to him. He was only half the man his father had been; he was on the lean side, where William Howard Taft had been as round as the golf balls he’d loved to whack. William Howard Taft had also had the fat man’s gift of being, or at least seeming, good-natured most of the time. His son was far more acerbic-which had probably helped him lose the last election.

George Norris coughed. “You do realize that publicizing disagreements over policy may give aid and comfort to the Confederate States?”

“Oh, no, you don’t!” Flora said sharply. “I’m sorry, sir, but no one is going to get away with that. You can’t say I’m not a proper patriot if I don’t agree with everything this administration does. That’s Jake Featherston’s way of doing things, and he’s welcome to it. Why have we got a Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War if we can’t ask questions that have to do with the way we’re conducting the war?”

Several Senators and Representatives clapped their hands. The chairman licked his papery lips. He spoke carefully: “We are at war with the Confederate States, Congresswoman, and with the Empire of Mexico, and with Britain, France, Japan, and Russia. We are not at war with the state of Utah.”

Flora curtsied. “Thank you for informing me of that, Mr. Chairman. You might do better to inform the state of Utah, which seems unaware of the fact.” She got a laugh loud enough to make Norris ply his gavel with might and main. She continued, “By all precedent, it is a war. Congress established a Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War during the War of Secession, long before we had to recognize the CSA as an independent nation. Will you tell me I’m wrong, sir?”

By his expression, George Norris would have liked nothing better, but knew he couldn’t. “Call the question on the motion!” someone yelled. Looking even more unhappy, the chairman did. It passed with only a couple of dissenting votes.

When Flora walked into to her office, her secretary said, “Mr. Roosevelt called a little while ago, Congresswoman. He’d like you to call him back.”

“Thanks, Bertha. I’ll bet he would,” Flora said. How angry would the Assistant Secretary of War be? Only one way to find out. She went into the inner office and made the call.

“This is Franklin Roosevelt.” As always, his voice conceded nothing to the illness that left him in a wheelchair. When Flora gave her name, Roosevelt started to laugh. “You’ve been naughty today, haven’t you?” he said.

“I don’t think so. I think the administration has,” Flora said. “Talking with the Mormons? It’s madness.”

“Is it? President La Follette doesn’t think so. Neither do I,” Roosevelt said. If he did, you would, too, Flora thought. But a lot of politics worked that way. Roosevelt went on, “Don’t you think the Confederate States would be better off if Jake Featherston tried talking with his colored rebels instead of doing his best to put them all six feet under?”

“I don’t want the Confederate States better off,” Flora said.

Roosevelt’s laugh invited everyone who heard it to share the joke. “You can’t duck me like that and expect me not to quack,” he said. “You’re too smart not to know what I’m talking about.”

“We can talk to the Mormons till we’re blue in the face,” Flora said. “What good will it do if they don’t want to listen?”

“That’s what Ferdinand Koenig would say, all right.” Roosevelt was being as exasperating as he could.

“What can we possibly give the Mormons that would satisfy them and us?” Flora asked.

“I don’t know,” Roosevelt admitted. “But the President thinks we ought to find out and not go on till everyone who could fight us is dead.” Pointedly, he added, “And he thinks his own party ought to back him while he’s doing it.”

“I will happily back the President when I think he’s right, or even when I’m not sure-I haven’t said a word about whatever is going on in western Washington, and I don’t intend to,” Flora said. “But when I think he’s wrong… I’m sorry, Franklin, but party loyalty doesn’t go that far.”

A lot of people thought it did. Presidents were usually of that opinion. Roosevelt just sighed. “I might have known you’d say that. As a matter of fact, I did know you’d say that. It doesn’t make things any easier for me, you know.”

I’m the one who’s in charge of keeping you from running wild, Flora translated mentally. “Tell me what sort of terms we’re offering the Mormons. Then maybe I’ll change my mind and believe this is worth doing,” she said.

“Not my bailiwick,” Roosevelt told her. “But I’d hope you’d trust Charlie La Follette far enough to believe he wouldn’t make terms that are bad for the country.”

“I trusted Al Smith not to make a deal that was bad for the country,” Flora said. “Look how that turned out.” Good God! she thought. I sound just like my reactionary brother David. But that didn’t mean she thought she was wrong now, however much she wished it did.

“Low blow,” Franklin Roosevelt said.

“Is it? We’ll see what the Secretary of the Interior has to say,” Flora answered.

“Some people are disappointed in the stand you’re taking.”

Though Roosevelt couldn’t see her, Flora shrugged. “They can put up another Socialist candidate when my district nominates this summer. Or they can back the Democrat against me this fall.”

“No one would do anything like that,” Roosevelt said hastily. Flora also knew nobody would do anything like that. She’d represented her district for most of the past twenty-six years, and she was a President’s widow. They’d need better reasons than this to oppose her: treason, say.

A few days later, the Secretary of the Interior did appear before the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War. Harry Hopkins came from Iowa and still spoke with a flat Midwestern accent, but he’d gone to New York as a young lawyer. He’d got to know Al Smith there, and had risen with him. Now he had to defend the policies of another President.

“What terms has the administration offered the Mormon insurgents in Utah?” Senator Norris asked the question reluctantly. He knew the other members would be sharper than he if he faltered.

“No more than a return to the status quo ante bellum if they lay down their arms,” Hopkins answered. “If they want peace, we will give them peace: no treason trials, no persecutions. But that is absolutely as far as we will go. Demands for autonomy and independence for the so-called State of Deseret have been and will continue to be rejected out of hand.”

“And what is the response of the Mormon representative to this proposal?” the chairman asked. “Uh-what is the gentleman’s name?” He plainly wanted to call the Mormon representative something else, something less polite, but refrained.

“Rush. Hyrum Rush.” Hopkins spelled the Mormon’s first name. Having done so, he let out a resigned sigh. “Mr. Rush does not feel our proposal goes far enough, and fears it leaves his people vulnerable to further U.S. aggression. Those are his words, not mine.”

Flora raised her hand. With a certain amount of trepidation, Norris recognized her. She said, “Mr. Hopkins, why does Mr. Rush think Utah would be any safer as an independent country surrounded by the United States than as one state among many? This makes little sense to me.”

“He said, ‘You gave Kentucky and Houston and Sequoyah plebiscites, but you wouldn’t give us one. You thought we were a bunch of perverts, and we didn’t deserve one,’ ” Hopkins replied.

Hyrum Rush wasn’t so far wrong. Flora said, “Don’t you think we ought to get rid of an abscess like that instead of putting a bandage on it?”

“Normally, Congresswoman, I’d say yes. Right now, we’ve got bigger things to worry about than an abscess.”

Flora winced. With the country cut in half, she couldn’t very well disagree with the Secretary of the Interior. “The rebels show no sign of agreeing to these terms?” she asked.

“That’s correct, ma’am,” Harry Hopkins said.

Good, Flora thought, but she kept it to herself. She nodded to the chairman. “No further questions.”

Brigadier General Abner Dowling studied Confederate dispositions on a large map pinned to a wall of the house in Culpeper he used as a headquarters. If the U.S. Army ever moved deeper into Virginia, the house’s owner would get it back, and would probably be unhappy about the holes in his plaster. Dowling, whose own disposition was none too good, intended to miss not a moment of sleep worrying about that.

He called Captain Toricelli in to look at the latest dispositions. His adjutant was a sharp young officer. “Tell me what you make of this,” Dowling said, as neutrally as he could. He left it there. He wanted to see if the junior officer noticed the same thing he had-and if it was truly there to notice.

Angelo Toricelli eyed the map with unusual care. He knew Dowling wouldn’t have asked him for no reason. After a thoughtful pause, he said, “They really are thinning out their positions a bit, aren’t they?”

“It looks that way to me,” Dowling answered. “It’s got to the point where we can’t ignore it, hasn’t it?”

His adjutant nodded. “I’d say so. But the bastards in butternut don’t want us to spot it. Just by the way they’re doing it, I’d bet money on that.”

“Does seem so, doesn’t it?” Dowling said. “And why not? For fear we’ll pour through? They aren’t weakening themselves that much.”

“Where are those men going?” Toricelli asked.

“If I knew, I would tell you.” Dowling scratched his head. His hair was thinning-one more indignity of age. He sighed. “We ought to send out raiders, bring back some prisoners. They may know where their pals are headed. It doesn’t seem to be down toward the Wilderness. That was what I guessed when I conferred with General Morrell. If it turns out to be over toward Fredericksburg instead, we’ll have to alert General MacArthur, assuming such a thing is possible.”

“Er-yes, sir,” Captain Toricelli said. These days, Dowling didn’t bother hiding his scorn for his superior. MacArthur didn’t like him, either, and manifested it by withholding men and materiel from his corps. That was how things looked to Dowling’s jaundiced eye, anyhow.

“Draft the orders,” Dowling said. “Send them by runner, not by telegraph or telephone or wireless, not even in code. I don’t want the Confederates getting wind of what we’re up to and priming some men to lie like Ananias.” Maybe he had what the smart alienists these days were calling a persecution complex. He didn’t intend to worry about it. An Army officer who didn’t worry that the enemy was out to diddle him didn’t deserve his shoulder straps.

And Toricelli didn’t think his orders were anything out of the ordinary-or, if he did, he had the sense to keep his mouth shut about it. “I’ll have them on your desk in twenty minutes, sir,” he promised.

“That sounds good,” Dowling said.

As if further to disguise whatever they were up to, the Confederates in front of Dowling’s corps suddenly turned aggressive-not in any big way, but with lots of raids and artillery barrages and all the other things that made it look as if a major offensive might be brewing. Several regimental commanders sent panicky messages back to Culpeper.

One thing Dowling was good at was not getting excited at every little thing. Had he got excited at every little thing while serving under General Custer, he would have jumped out a window early in his career. He managed to calm down his subordinates, too. Had he been wrong, had the Confederates been planning a big push, he might have ended up with egg on his face for calming them down too well. But no big push came.

In due course, the interrogation reports did. Dowling’s eyebrows rose toward his retreating hairline when he read them. He looked up to Captain Toricelli, who’d given him the transcripts. “The questioners think this is reliable and accurate?” he asked.

“Yes, sir. I talked to one of them. They’re pretty certain,” Toricelli replied.

“All right. We’ll relay it to General MacArthur’s headquarters, and we’ll also relay it to the War Department,” Dowling said. “In code, mind you.”

“Oh, yes, sir,” his adjutant agreed. “This is too hot to go out in clear.” For once, he showed none of the quiet scorn with which adjutants often greeted their superiors’ ideas. I hope my notions aren’t as bad as a lot of Custer’s were, Dowling thought. And yet one of Custer’s ideas-as foolish at first sight and as stubbornly maintained as any of the others-had gone a long way toward winning the Great War. You never could tell.

A few hours later, Dowling’s telephone jangled. He picked it up. “First Corps Headquarters, Dowling speaking.”

“Hello, sir. This is John Abell.” The General Staff officer didn’t give his rank or affiliation. That was no doubt wise. A lot of telephone wire lay between Philadelphia and Culpeper. If the Confederates weren’t tapping it somewhere, Dowling would have been amazed. Abell went on, “You have confidence in the information you sent us?”

“Would I have sent it if I didn’t?” Dowling returned.

“You’d be amazed,” Abell said, and that was probably true. He continued, “We still have to confirm it at the other end.”

“I don’t know anything about that,” Dowling said. “But I do know what I’ve seen, and I know-or I think I know-I wasn’t imagining it.”

“You weren’t, not if these reports are even close to accurate,” Abell said. “Have you heard anything from General MacArthur yet?”

“No, not a word,” Dowling said.

The General Staff officer sniffed disdainfully. “Why am I not surprised?”

“I’ve alerted him to the possibility. That’s all I can do,” Dowling said. That’s all I want to do, he added to himself. If I could have found any way to keep from doing even that much, I would have grabbed it like you wouldn’t believe.

“I hope something good comes of it.” Abell’s tone suggested he didn’t think that was likely. “So long, sir. Take care of yourself.” He hung up.

So did Dowling, muttering to himself. Daniel MacArthur didn’t want to talk to him any more than he wanted to talk to MacArthur. So he thought, anyhow. But when the telephone rang again and he picked it up, what he heard was an abrupt rasp: “This is MacArthur.”

“Yes, sir.” Dowling unconsciously came to attention in his chair. “What can I do for you, sir?”

“It’s really true that the Confederates are draining men away from this entire front?” MacArthur demanded.

“Sir, that’s the way it looks from here.” Dowling didn’t intend to commit himself any further than that. Assert that something was really true and it was only too likely to come back and haunt you.

What he did say seemed to satisfy MacArthur. “In that case, I’m going to take one of the divisions out of your corps and bring it east.”

“What?” The word burst from Dowling’s throat as a pained yelp. “What do you want to do that for?”

“We mounted an attack at Fredericksburg that could have succeeded-that should have succeeded, in fact,” MacArthur answered. “I intend to send more men in this time-send them in and have them break through.”

From everything Dowling had heard, the attack on Fredericksburg hadn’t come anywhere near as close to succeeding as MacArthur claimed. From everything Dowling had heard, U.S. forces hadn’t even got over the Rappahannock and into Fredericksburg itself. Would throwing in more men help? Dowling didn’t know. Custer had always liked to smother fires by burying them in bodies. He’d had his share of bloody fiascoes, but he’d also finally had his breakthrough. Maybe Daniel MacArthur would, too. Maybe.

One thing was certain: if MacArthur wanted one of Dowling’s divisions, he had the right to take it. Dowling did what he could, saying, “We’ll be spread thin here if you do shift it east.”

“So are the Confederates you’re facing. You found that out yourself. Since they are, why worry? It seems to me that you spend too much time carping and complaining and not enough figuring out how to strike the foe.”

It seemed to Dowling that MacArthur spent too much time figuring out stupid ways to strike the foe. He didn’t say so. What point to it? He’d just get MacArthur angry at him again. He wouldn’t change his superior’s mind. No one except MacArthur could do that, and he wasn’t in the habit of doing so.

Suppressing a sigh, Dowling said, “Sir, I’ll do my best with whatever men you leave me. You can rely on that.”

“There. You see?” Daniel MacArthur actually sounded pleased. “You can be cooperative when you set your mind to it.”

By be cooperative, he meant do exactly what I tell you without asking any inconvenient questions no matter what. Dowling knew that only too well. Again, though, what could he do about it? Not much, as he knew all too well. He tried his best to keep resignation out of his voice as he answered, “Yes, sir.”

“Good,” MacArthur said. Dowling wondered if it was. MacArthur went on, “You’ll have your orders soon. Thin their lines against me, will they? I am going to bury those Confederates-bury them, I tell you. There’s no doubt in my mind.”

“Yes, sir,” Dowling said. Maybe he would. But how many U.S. soldiers would they bury, too? No way to know, not till it happened. Dowling had long since abandoned optimism along with the other illusions of his youth. He had thought before that MacArthur had more in common with George Custer than either of the two generals would ever have admitted: a complete lack of doubt and a strong belief in their own brilliance running neck and neck.

As if to underscore that, MacArthur said, “See you in Richmond, then,” and slammed down the telephone. Dowling slowly replaced his own handset in its cradle. See you in Richmond? MacArthur would either make good on the boast or an awful lot of young men would die trying.

Dowling knew which way he would bet. He couldn’t say anything about that, not to anybody, not without being accused of deliberately damaging morale. He couldn’t even get on the telephone to Philadelphia, the way he had when MacArthur proposed the amphibious operation aimed at the mouth of the James. That had been madness. This might work. Dowling didn’t think it would, but he had to give his superior the benefit of the doubt.

He said something filthy. However much he’d longed for combat posts, he’d spent much of his career either as Custer’s adjutant or on occupation duty in Utah-his main job there, in fact, had been to keep that from turning into a combat post, and he’d done it. Now he had what he’d always wanted. He had it, and he hadn’t covered himself with glory in it. Maybe he wasn’t cut out to be a hero. Or maybe he should have been more careful about what he wished for, lest he get it.

Jake Featherston peered down from Marye’s Heights over the town of Fredericksburg toward the Rappahannock and the damnyankees on the other side. He turned to Nathan Bedford Forrest III, who stood by his side. “I was right about here when the last war ended,” the President of the CSA said.

“Yes, sir,” replied the chief of the Confederate General Staff, who’d been too young to fight in the Great War.

“Well, I was, goddammit,” Featherston said. “When the order to cease fire came, I waited till the very last minute. Then I took the breech block out of my piece and chucked it in that creek over yonder.” He pointed. “I was damned if the United States were gonna get anything they could use from me.”

“Yes, sir,” Forrest repeated, adding, “That sounds like you.”

“Good. It ought to,” Jake said, more than a little smugly. “Maybe what pissed me off most about having to quit, though, was that I could have killed every damnyankee in the world from right here, if the bastards kept coming at me and my ammo held out.”

“It’s a good position,” Forrest allowed. “Not as good as it would have been in the Great War-artillery’s better now than it was then, and barrels and bombers are a hell of a lot better. But it’s still mighty good.”

“I know it is,” Jake said. “That’s how come I was more than half disappointed we didn’t let the enemy get into Fredericksburg and then try to storm these heights. We’d have been shooting ’em till they got sick of trying.”

Nathan Bedford Forrest III frowned. “Conventional wisdom says you don’t want to let them have a bridgehead if you can help it. You can get around conventional wisdom a lot of the time, but not always. That foothold they’ve got south of the Rapidan in the Wilderness still worries me.”

One of the reasons Forrest headed the General Staff was that he wasn’t afraid to speak his mind, even to the President of the Confederate States. Jake asked, “Are you telling me they might break through if they cross the river here? We couldn’t hold ’em and drive ’em back?”

Forrest scratched his mustache with his right thumb. “Odds are we could, but it’s not a sure thing. Remember, sir, they kept fighting after we thought they wouldn’t.”

After you thought they wouldn’t, he meant. Featherston couldn’t even swear at him, not when he wasn’t wrong. Because Forrest spoke his mind, Jake handled him more carefully than he would have dealt with some Party yes-man. “What’s your judgment, then, General? If you reckon the risk is too high, we won’t take it. But if you don’t, this looks like a dandy place to bleed the damnyankees white.”

“If everything goes well, sir, we ought to be able to do that,” Forrest said at last. “If things go wrong, though… If things go wrong, we’ve given ourselves a lot of trouble that we didn’t have to. And remember, Mr. President-we’ll need more men here to bleed the Yankees than we would if we just kept ’em on the north bank of the Rappahannock. Those are men we wouldn’t be able to use for other operations. The one thing the Yankees always have is more men than we do. So which is more important to you?”

Featherston smiled. He almost laughed out loud. He’d put the burden on Forrest’s shoulders, and the chief of the General Staff had put it right back on his. And Forrest’s question was a serious one. Jake hated nothing worse than being deflected from any purpose of his-indeed, he’d made a hallmark of being impossible to deflect. Here, though, Nathan Bedford Forrest III was speaking plain good sense, much too plain to ignore. “All right, dammit,” Jake said grudgingly. “Hold ’em on the other side of the Rappahannock if you can.”

He didn’t fail to note how relieved Forrest looked. “We’ll do that, sir, or we’ll do our best to do it, anyhow,” the general said. “If they try to force another crossing, they may get over whether we want them to or not. In that case, we’ll do our best to give you the killing ground you have in mind.”

He’s trying to let me down easy. Again, Jake almost laughed. He said, “All right, that’s how we’ll do it, then. Make your orders out that way. And make sure the other thing, Coal-scuttle, is going forward the way it’s supposed to. I want to make the United States feel the pinch, goddammit.”

“Things are moving into place on that one, Mr. President,” Forrest said. “Keeping a smaller presence here will help that, too. I don’t think you’d find anyone who’d disagree there.”

“All right. All right. You made your point.” No, Jake didn’t like being balked. It didn’t happen very often, not when he was both President of the Confederate States and head of the Freedom Party. He’d thought he knew just how Al Smith’s mind worked, but then the son of a bitch decided to go on with the war. And now this…

“Mr. President, we simply aren’t big enough to do two big things at once,” Forrest said. “That’s a nuisance, but it’s the truth. If we try to pretend we are, we’ll end up in trouble.”

“If you try to teach your grandma how to suck eggs, you’ll end up in trouble,” Jake said. Nathan Bedford Forrest III chuckled, though Jake hadn’t been joking. The President went on, “Let’s get back to Richmond, then.” He all but spat out the words. He’d wanted to take off his shirt and serve a gun, the way he had in the Great War. Things were simple then. With the enemy right in front of you, you went ahead and blew him up. You didn’t need to worry about anything else.

These days, enemies were everywhere: not just the damnyankees, not just the niggers who tormented the CSA, but fools and bunglers who wouldn’t go along and traitors who wanted to see him fail just because that would mean they were right and he was wrong. I’ll settle them all-every last one of them, Jake thought. By the time I’m through, this country will look the way it’s supposed to, the way I want it to.

As usual, he went back to Richmond in an ambulance. If U.S. airplanes appeared overhead, the Red Crosses on the vehicle ought to keep the Yankees from shooting it up. Also as usual, he had an ordinary-although armored-motorcar take him the last leg of the journey so no Yankee reconnaissance aircraft or spies on the ground would spot an ambulance going into the Gray House.

Bomb craters turned the grounds around the Presidential residence into a lunar landscape. And repairmen swarmed over the building itself. “Jesus!” Jake exclaimed. “How come nobody told me it got hit again?”

“Probably didn’t want to get you all upset, sir,” his driver answered.

Probably didn’t want to make you blow a gasket, that meant. The driver was probably right, too. Jake had succeeded in making people afraid of him. Men who would tell him what they thought, men like Nathan Bedford Forrest III and Clarence Potter, were rare. The rest said what they thought he wanted to hear-either that or they hunkered down and didn’t tell him anything. That last looked to be what had happened here.

“Is Lulu all right?” he demanded when he got inside. If his secretary wasn’t and they’d kept that from him, they’d be sorry, and pretty damn quick, too.

But the flunky he’d asked nodded. “She sure is, Mr. President. Just about everybody got down to the shelter before the bombs started falling.”

“Well, that’s good, anyway,” Featherston said. The bomb shelter below the Gray House was as elaborate as the one under the Confederate War Department. No doubt the shelter under Powel House in Philadelphia was just as fancy, but it hadn’t done Al Smith one damn bit of good. Jake preferred not to dwell on that.

When he got to his office, Lulu greeted him with a nod. “Hello, Mr. President,” she said, as calmly as if nothing had happened while he was away.

“Hello, sweetie,” he said, and gave her a hug. She was one of the tiny handful of people he cared about as people and not as things to order around or otherwise manipulate. If he’d lost her… He didn’t know what he would have done.

Her sallow cheeks turned pink. “You worry about running the country, sir,” she said. “You don’t need to worry about me.” In such things, she could give him orders, or thought she could.

“I’ll worry about whatever I… darn well want to,” he said. He swore like the old soldier he was around everyone else, but tried not to around her. Her disapproving sniffs were too much for him to take. He went on, “Can I still work at my desk, or did it get blown to, uh, smithereens?”

“I’m afraid it did, sir,” Lulu answered. “But everything down below came through just fine.”

Jake made a discontented noise, down deep in his throat. He didn’t want to run the war from down in the bomb shelter, even if its air conditioning made it a comfortable place in the hot weather that lay ahead. It felt like being cooped up inside a submarine. Actually, Jake had never been inside a sub, so he couldn’t prove that, but it felt like what he thought being cooped up in one would feel like. And what he wanted to do wasn’t always the same as what he needed to do. The shelter bristled with telephone and wireless links. He could run the war from it. If he didn’t like it-well, too bad. This was war, and people all over the continent were putting up with things they didn’t like.

A young man in a State Department uniform came up to him, waited to be noticed, and then said, “Sir, may I speak to you for a moment?”

“You’re doing it,” Jake told him.

“Er-yes.” For some reason, that flustered the State Department fellow. He needed a moment to gather himself. Then he said, “Sir, we’ve heard from the Emperor of Mexico. His Majesty will provide the three divisions you requested.”

“Good. That’s good.” Featherston tried to make his smile benign instead of tigerish. Maximilian hadn’t wanted to cough up the men. Jake had been blunt about what would happen to his miserable gimcrack country-and to him-if he didn’t. Evidently the message had got through. The President went on, “We’ve saved the greasers’ bacon a few times. Only fitting and proper they pay us back.”

“Yes, sir,” the State Department man said. He looked as if he would have been more comfortable in striped trousers and cutaway coat. Too damn bad for him.

“Anything else, sonny?” Jake asked. The puppy shook his head. Featherston jerked a thumb toward the front door, which hadn’t been damaged. “All right, then. Get lost.”

The kid from the State Department disappeared. Jake stared after him. Either they really were making them younger than they had once upon a time or he himself was starting to get some serious mileage on him. He suspected the problem did not lie with the State Department.

Whether he was getting old or not, he still had a war to run. He could do that better than anybody else in the CSA. Better than anybody else in the USA, too, by God, he thought. And those three Mexican divisions would help, especially since, now that Maximilian had agreed once, he’d have a harder time saying no if Jake asked again. And Jake intended to do just that.

Dr. Leonard O’Doull wondered what was going on when he and his aid station got pulled out of their position across the Rapidan from the Wilderness and shifted east. Now he knew: they’d left the frying pan and gone straight into the fire.

Most of the frying was getting done on the other side of the Rappahannock, in and just beyond Fredericksburg. The U.S. Army had battered out a foothold there, as it had in the Wilderness. It was trying to feed in enough men and machines to make the foothold mean something. Whether it could was very much up in the air.

Whether the kid on the table in front of O’Doull would make it was also up in the air. A piece of shrapnel had torn the hell out of his chest. He was bleeding faster than O’Doull could patch him. “Keep pouring in the plasma!” O’Doull barked to Granville McDougald. “Gotta keep his blood pressure up.”

“Pretty soon there won’t be any blood in the pressure,” McDougald said. That exaggerated, but not by much. An awful lot of blood had come out, and an awful lot of plasma had gone in. “Shit!” McDougald exclaimed. “We haven’t got any pressure now!”

“Yeah.” O’Doull had no trouble figuring out why, either-the kid’s heart had stopped. He grabbed it and started cardiac massage. Once in a blue moon, that worked. Most of the time, a heart that stopped would never start again. This was one of those times. After a few minutes, he let it go and shook his head. “We’ve lost him.”

McDougald nodded. “Afraid you’re right. That was a nasty wound. We did everything we could.” He beckoned to a corpsman. “Get him off the table, Eddie. He’s Graves Registrations’ business now.”

“Right, Granny,” Eddie said. “One more Deeply Regrets telegram. One more time when everybody hopes the Western Union delivery boy stops next door.”

The corpse was hardly out of the tent before a groaning sergeant with a shattered knee came in on a stretcher. “Granny, you do this one and I’ll pass gas,” O’Doull said. “You’re neater at orthopedic stuff than I am.”

“I’ve had more practice, Doc, that’s all.” But McDougald sounded pleased. He wasn’t an M.D. despite his vast experience; to have a real doctor defer to him had to make him feel good.

“Gas!” the sergeant said when O’Doull pressed the ether cone down over his nose and mouth. O’Doull had seen that before. He and Eddie kept the wounded man from yanking off the cone till the anesthetic took hold.

Eddie shook his head as the sergeant’s hands finally went limp. “That’s always so much fun,” he said.

“Yeah,” O’Doull agreed. “How’s he look, Granny?”

“It’s a mess in there. Kneecap’s smashed, medial collateral’s cut,” McDougald answered. “Can you get him down a little deeper? I want those leg muscles as relaxed as I can get ’em.”

“Will do.” O’Doull opened the valve on the ether cylinder a little more.

After a minute or so, McDougald gave him a thumbs-up. The medic worked quickly and skillfully, repairing what he could and removing what he couldn’t repair. When he was through, he said, “He’ll never run the mile, but I think he’ll walk… pretty well.”

“Looked that way to me, too,” O’Doull said. “That medial collateral was nicely done. I don’t think I could have got it together anywhere near as neat as you did.”

“Thanks, Doc.” McDougald’s gauze mask hid most of his smile, but his eyes glowed. “Had to try it. A knee’s not a knee without a working medial collateral. It’s not a repair that would do for a halfback, but for just getting around it ought to be strong enough.”

“They play football in Quebec, too. Well, sort of football: they’ve got twelve men on a side, and the end zones are big as all outdoors. But it’s pretty much the same game. Guys get hurt the same way, that’s for sure,” O’Doull said. “I’ve had to patch up a couple of wrecked knees. I told the men I’d come after ’em with a sledgehammer if I ever caught ’em playing again.”

“Did they listen to you?” McDougald asked, amused interest in his voice.

“Are you serious? Quebecois are the stubbornest people on the face of the earth.” Leonard O’Doull knew he sounded disgusted. “Repairing a knee once isn’t easy. Repairing it twice is damn near impossible.” He flexed his none too impressive biceps. “I’m getting pretty good with a sledgehammer, though.”

“I believe that.” McDougald and Eddie eased the wounded sergeant off the table. He would finish recovering farther back of the line. McDougald caught O’Doull’s eye. “Want to duck out for a butt before the next poor sorry bastard comes in, Doc?”

“I’d love to. Let’s-” But O’Doull stopped in midsentence, because the next poor sorry bastard came in right then.

One look made O’Doull wonder why the hell the corpsmen had bothered hauling him all the way back here. He had a bullet wound-pretty plainly an entry wound-in his forehead, just below the hairline, and what was as obviously an exit wound, horrible with scalp and blood, in back.

Seeing O’Doull’s expression, one of the stretcher-bearers said, “His pulse and breathing are still strong, Doc. Maybe you can do something for him, anyways.”

“Fat chance,” O’Doull muttered. Military hospitals still held men who’d got turned into vegetables by head wounds in the Great War. Some of them had a strong pulse and breathed on their own, too. Some of them would die of old age, but none would ever be a functioning human being again.

Then the wounded man sat up on the stretcher and said, “Have any aspirins, buddy? I’ve got a hell of a headache.”

“Jesus Christ!” Everybody in the aid tent except the fellow with the head wound said the same thing at the same time. One of the bearers and Eddie and O’Doull crossed themselves. O’Doull had seen a lot of things in his time, but never a man with a through-and-through head wound who sat up and made conversation.

Granville McDougald strode forward. He bent low and looked not at the soldier’s injuries but at the scalp between them. Then he shook his head in slow wonder. “I will be damned,” he said. “I’ve heard of wounds like this, but I didn’t think I’d ever run into one myself.”

“What is it, Granny?” O’Doull asked. He wanted to latch on to something, anything, but the idea of a dead man talking.

“Look, Doc. You can see for yourself.” McDougald’s finger traced the injury. “The slug must have gone in, then slid around the top of this guy’s skull under the scalp till it exited back here. It didn’t do a damn thing more. It couldn’t have, or he’d be dead as shoe leather.”

“I’m fine,” the soldier said. “Except for that headache, anyhow. I asked you guys for aspirins once already.”

“Well, I’ll be a son of a bitch,” O’Doull said, ignoring him. “You’re right. You’ve got to be right. That is the luckiest thing I have ever seen in my life. I thought he was a ghost for a second, I swear to God I did.” The rational part of his brain started working again. “We’d better send him back for X-rays once we clean him up. He could have a fracture in there-though his head’s so hard, he might not.”

“What the hell’s that supposed to mean?” the wounded man demanded.

“If you didn’t have a thick skull, pal, that bullet might’ve gone through instead of around,” O’Doull told him. “Can you get up on the table by yourself? We’re going to want to get some disinfectant on that and stitch you up and bandage you. You’ve got a story you can tell your grandchildren, that’s for sure.”

The soldier walked to the table and sat down. “You ain’t doin’ nothin’ to me till I get my aspirins, you hear?”

“Give him a couple, Eddie,” O’Doull said wearily. “Hell, give him a slug of the medicinal brandy, too. If anybody ever earned it, he did.”

That produced the first thing besides loud indignation he’d got from the wounded man, who exclaimed, “Now you’re talkin’, Doc! Want a smoke? I got these off a dead Confederate-fuck of a lot better’n what we make.”

O’Doull grabbed his hand before he could light a match. “You don’t want to do that in here,” the doctor said in gentle tones that camouflaged the panic inside. “You’re liable to blow us sky high if you do.”

After the little white pills and the knock of honey-colored hooch, the wounded man was willing to sit still while O’Doull patched him up. He grumbled about the way the doctor’s novocaine burned before it numbed. He grumbled that he could feel the needle even after the novocaine started working. Except for complaining about his headache, he didn’t grumble at all about getting shot in the head.

“Don’t get the bandages over my eyes, dammit,” he said. O’Doull had to coax him back into the stretcher so the corpsmen could take him away-he wanted to walk.

Once he was gone, O’Doull let out a long sigh and said, “Now I am going to have that smoke, by God!”

“Me, too,” Granville McDougald said. They both left the tent to light up-and they both smoked Confederate tobacco, too.

O’Doull blew out a long plume of smoke. “Great God in the foothills,” he said. “Now I really have seen everything.”

“Yeah, well, you know what’s gonna happen as well as I do, Doc,” McDougald said. “They’ll patch him up and they’ll send him home till he finishes healing, and he’ll be a nine days’ wonder while he’s there. And then he’ll come back to the front, and he’ll stop a shell burst with his nuts, and he won’t have to worry about telling his grandchildren stories anymore.”

“Christ!” Whatever O’Doull had expected him to say, that wasn’t it. “And I thought this war was making me cynical.”

McDougald shrugged. “You got out after 1917. You found yourself a nice little French gal and you settled down. I’ve worn the uniform all that time. I’ve got a long head start on you. The shit I’ve seen…” He shook his head. But then he shook it again in a different way. “I’d never seen anything like that before, though. Talk about beating the odds! I’d heard of it. I knew it was possible. But I’d never seen it, and I never thought I would.”

“You sure were one up on me,” O’Doull said. “When he rose up on the stretcher there, I figured he was Lazarus.”

“Gave me a turn, too, and I won’t try to tell you any different.” McDougald took a last drag on his cigarette and crushed it out under his boot. “Well, at least we can feel good about things for a while. Lazarus is going to get better. Some of the ones like that help make up for the sorry bastards we lose.”

On the other side of the Rappahannock, Confederate guns started pounding. Asskickers screamed down out of the sky. Bombs burst. O’Doull stamped out his cigarette, too. “They’ll be bringing more back to us before very long,” he predicted. “Either that or they’ll move us forward up into Fredericksburg.”

“Gotta keep us close to the source of supply,” McDougald said.

“The source of supply,” O’Doull echoed. “Right.” That was cynical, too, which didn’t mean it was wrong.