The Grapple

XVIII

Every time an officer Lieutenant-Colonel Jerry Dover didn’t know came to the supply dump, his stomach started knotting up. He kept wondering if someone from Intelligence would take him off and do horrible things to him because of Melanie Leigh. Every time it didn’t happen, Dover relaxed…a little.

He saw plenty of unfamiliar officers, too, enough to keep his stomach sour, enough to keep him gulping bicarbonate of soda. Lots of that came to the front; given what soldiers ate, they needed it.

Some of the new officers he dealt with came from outfits just arrived in northwestern Georgia to try to stem the Yankee tide. Others were men in new slots, the officers they replaced now being wounded or dead.

One day, a brigadier general showed up and asked, “You fought in the line in the last war, didn’t you?”

“Yes, sir,” Dover answered. “I was only a noncom then, though.”

“I was a first lieutenant myself,” said the officer with the wreathed stars. “We’ve both got more mileage on us than we used to. I have a regimental command slot open-Colonel McCandless just stopped some shrapnel with his face, and he’ll be on the shelf for weeks. If you want it, it’s yours.”

“Sir, I’ll take it if you order me to,” Dover answered. “But I don’t think I’d be better than ordinary in that slot. As a supply officer, I’m pretty goddamn good. If somebody ordinary replaces me here, that might hurt the war effort worse than if you have some different ordinary officer take charge of your regiment.”

The brigadier general studied him. Wondering if I’m yellow, Dover thought. The officer’s eyes found the ribbon for the Purple Heart above Dover’s left breast pocket. “How’d you get that?” he asked.

“A scratch on my arm. Not worth talking about,” Dover answered.

Maybe the general would have decided he was a liar and a blowhard if he came up with some fancy story of a wound suffered in heroic circumstances. His offhand dismissal seemed to satisfy the man. “Stay where you are, then, Dover,” the brigadier general said. “You’re doing well here-I know that, and it’s one of the reasons I thought about you for a combat post. But you have a point: this work is important to the war effort, too, and it needs to be done right. I’ll find somebody else for the regiment.”

After the general left, Dover lit a cigarette. He had to stir the butts in the glass ashtray on his cheap desk to make room for it. One of the sergeants who helped keep the depot going stuck his head into the tent and asked, “What was that all about, sir?” Like any sergeant worth his stripes, he assumed he had the right to know.

Dover saw no reason not to tell him. “About what you’d figure, Pete-he thought about moving me up to the front, but he decided I can do more here.”

“Christ, I hope so!” Pete said. “You’re really good at this shit. I don’t even want to think about how much trouble I’d have breaking in some new asshole, and some of those clowns just never do get what’s going on.”

“Nice to know I’m a comfortable old asshole,” Dover said, and Pete laughed. Dover tossed the sergeant the pack of Raleighs.

“Thanks,” Pete said. “Even smokes are getting hard to come by, the way the damnyankees keep tearing things up between here and Atlanta. That never happened the last time around, did it?”

“I don’t think so,” Dover answered. “I don’t remember running short, anyway.” He looked north and west. His personal worries weren’t the only ones he had. “You think we can stop the Yankees if they try to break out again?”

“Reckon we’d better,” Pete said dryly. “They start heading for Atlanta, we better start trying to see how much they’ll let us keep if we quit.”

That was about how Dover saw it, too. “Careful how you talk,” he told Pete, not for the first time. “Lots of people flabbling about defeatism these days.”

“Yeah, well, nobody’d be defeatist if we weren’t getting fucking defeated,” the sergeant said, which was nothing but the truth. “I’d almost like to see Atlanta fall, to tell you the truth, just so I could laugh while some of the Quartermaster Corps fat cats there got it in the neck. Those cocksuckers have done more to lose us the war than any three Yankee generals you can think of.”

“You expect me to argue? You’re preaching to the choir,” Dover said. “Now they use the bad roads and the torn-up train tracks for excuses not to send us what we need.”

“Did I hear right that you told one of the shitheads down there you were gonna send Jake Featherston a wire about how lousy they were?” Pete asked.

“I said it, yeah,” Dover admitted. “Don’t know that I’d do it. Don’t know that it would do any good if I did.”

“You ought to, by God. They’ve been getting fat and living soft off Army goods since the war started,” Pete said. “If Featherston can’t rein ’em in, nobody on God’s green earth can, I reckon.”

Maybe nobody could. Jerry Dover was inclined to believe that, which was another reason he hadn’t sent the telegram. Before he could say so, air-raid sirens started howling. Somebody clanged on a shell casing with a hammer, too, which was the emergency substitute for the sirens.

“Head for shelter!” Dover said. He heard U.S. airplane engines overhead even before he got out of the tent. The dugout into which he and Pete scrambled was as fancy as any he’d known in the Great War. It had all the comforts of home-if your home happened to be getting bombed.

“Maybe they aren’t after us,” Pete said.

“Here’s hoping,” Dover agreed. Northwestern Georgia had plenty of targets. Then explosions started shaking the ground much too close. The supply dump was one of those targets.

Something on the ground blew up-a roar different from the ones bombs made. Jerry Dover swore. He hoped the secondary explosion didn’t take too much with it. He was as careful with ordnance as he knew how to be. He didn’t store much of it in any one place, and he did build earth revetments around each lot. That minimized damage, but couldn’t stop it.

Another secondary explosion proved as much, as if proof were needed. Dover swore some more. A couple of other soldiers in the bombproof laughed, as much from nerves as for any other reason. A lucky hit and the bombproof might not be; it might turn into a tomb.

“Sometimes the bastards get lucky, that’s all,” Pete said.

“I don’t want them to get lucky, goddammit,” Dover said. “What if they’re starting the big push now? The guys at the front will need everything we can send ’em.”

“And if the damnyankees break through, we’ll be the guys at the front,” Pete said.

That made Dover wish he hadn’t already used up so much good profanity. Then, instead of cussing, he started to laugh himself, which made Pete send him a fishy stare. He still thought it was funny. Here he’d gone and turned down a combat command, but he was liable to get one whether he wanted it or not.

A big explosion sent dirt trickling down between the planks on the shelter’s roof. “I hope to God that was one of their bombers crashing,” Pete said.

“Me, too,” Dover said. “Why don’t they go away and bother somebody else?” He knew why perfectly well. That didn’t keep him from wishing anyway.

The bombers stayed overhead for more than two hours. That had to mean several waves of them were pounding Confederate positions. Now that the United States had airstrips down in southern Tennessee, they were only a short hop away. And they were making the most of it, too.

After no bombs had fallen for fifteen minutes or so, Dover said, “Well, let’s see what’s left upstairs.” He hoped something would be. He also hoped he wouldn’t come out when a new wave of enemy bombers appeared overhead. That’d be just my luck, wouldn’t it? he thought sourly.

The passage out from the bombproof’s outer door had a dogleg to keep blast from getting in. It also had several shovels stashed near that outer door, in case the men inside needed to dig their way out. But Jerry Dover could see daylight when he got the door open.

He could see daylight, yes. He could also see smoke, and smell it: smoke from burning rubber and explosives and wood and paint and several other things. His eyes stung. He coughed again and again.

Behind him, Pete said, “How bad is it?” He was coughing, too. Dover wished he were wearing a gas mask. He hoped the Yankees hadn’t blown up any gas shells, or he might really need one.

“I don’t think it’s good,” he answered. Getting out of the trench was easy. A near miss had built a nice, convenient ramp. If that one had burst a hundred feet to the left…No, you didn’t have to fight at the front to see combat these days.

He and Pete and the other soldiers hurried up to ground level and looked around. “Fuck,” Pete said softly, which summed things up pretty well.

Enemy air strikes had pounded Jerry Dover’s supply dumps before. That was part of the cost of doing business in a war. He didn’t think one of his depots had ever taken a beating like this before, though. Eight or ten fires raged. Yes, one of them was an enemy bomber’s pyre-he could see the airplane’s tail sticking up. But the damnyankees had done a lot more damage here than they’d taken doing it.

Hoses were already playing on some of the worst blazes. Dover felt proud of his men. They knew what they had to do, and they did it. And in doing it, they took chances front-line soldiers never had to worry about.

Of course, the men at the front had worries of their own. Pete cocked his head to one side, listening. “Firing’s picked up-fuck me if it hasn’t.”

Dover listened, too. He said the worst thing he could think of: “Yeah, I think you’re right.”

“They’re trying to break out.” Pete found something bad to say, too.

“Sure sounds that way,” Dover allowed.

“Think they can do it, sir?” Any time Pete used an officer’s title, he needed reassurance.

Right now, Dover longed for reassurance, too. “Hope to hell they can’t.”

A telephone rang. He would have bet the bombardment had blown up the instrument or broken the lines that made it work, but no. He ran over to it and admitted he was there and alive.

“Dover, you’ve got to send me everything, fast as you can!” He recognized the voice of the brigadier general who’d offered him a regiment. “They’re coming at me with everything they’ve got. If you have a division’s worth of dehydrated infantry, pour water on ’em quick and get ’em up here.”

In spite of everything, Dover smiled. But he had to say, “Sir, I don’t know what the hell we’ve got right this second. They just bombed hell out of the dump, too.”

The general’s opinion of that violated all the Commandments with the possible exception of the one against graven images. “We’re doing all we can, dammit, but how can we hang on if we don’t have enough bullets and shells?” he said.

“I’ll get you what I have, sir.” Dover slammed down the handset and yelled orders. He had to interrupt himself when the telephone rang again. “Dover here,” he said.

“Rockets! Antibarrel rockets!” another harried officer screamed in his ear. “Damnyankee armor’s tearing holes in my lines! They’ve got these goddamn flail barrels to clear mines, and they’re going through us like a dose of salts. If we don’t stop ’em quick, we are dead meat, you hear me? Fucking dead meat!”

Dover didn’t know what a flail barrel was. He didn’t know how many antibarrel rockets had escaped the Yankee bombs. He didn’t even know who was yelling at him. He managed to find that out. He rapidly figured out one other thing, too: the United States were pushing hard here. If they did break through…If they break through, we’ve lost the damn war for sure, Dover thought. He dashed off to do what he could to stop them.

Signs with skulls and crossbones on them warned the world a minefield lay ahead. Lieutenant Michael Pound was pretty sure the signs and the field were genuine. When the Confederates bluffed, they usually slanted the bones and the word MINES. These stood straight.

He was a hard charger, but he didn’t want to tear across that field and blow a track or maybe get the bottom blasted out of his barrel. And he didn’t have to. “Here comes a flail,” he said happily, ducking down into the turret to relay the news to his gunner and loader and to get on the wireless to the other machines in his platoon. He’d had to make himself remember to do that when he first became an officer. Now he did it automatically.

Sergeant Mel Scullard grinned. “Those bastards sure are funny-looking,” he said.

“Well, I won’t argue with you,” Pound told the gunner. “But who gives a damn? They do the job, and that’s what counts.”

Some engineer must have been smoking funny cigarettes when he came up with the flail barrel. He mounted a rotor drum on a couple of horizontal steel bars out in front of the barrel’s chassis. The barrel’s engine powered the contraption. Lengths of heavy chain came off the drum. As it rotated, the chains spanked the ground ahead of the oncoming machine. They hit hard enough to touch off mines before the barrel itself got to them. And other barrels could follow the path the flail cleared.

Naturally, the Confederates did everything they could to blow up flail barrels before they got very far. But, after the pounding U.S. artillery and aircraft had given the defenders here, they couldn’t do as much as they wanted to. The Confederate Army remained brave, resourceful, and resilient. It wasn’t so responsive as it had been earlier in the war, though. You could knock it back on its heels and stun it if you hit it hard enough, and the USA had done that here.

“Follow the flail!” Pound commanded, and his driver did. They all wanted to get past the minefield as fast as they could. The pine woods ahead weren’t cleared yet. That meant they were bound to have Confederate soldiers-and, all too likely, Confederate barrels-lurking in them.

The other machines in Pound’s platoon followed him, as he followed the flail barrel. Every commander rode with his head and shoulders out of the cupola, the better to see trouble. He was proud of them. He hadn’t ordered them to do it. He wouldn’t have given an order like that. They got out there on their own.

Fires in the woods sent up smudges of smoke. There weren’t enough of them to drive out the lurkers, however much Pound wished there were. If they had an antibarrel cannon waiting…

They did. Sensibly, they fired at the flail barrel first. If they knocked it out, all the machines behind it would expose themselves to danger among the mines. Their AP round scored a direct hit…on the flail. The gadget fell to ruins, but the barrel kept going. Now it was as vulnerable as any of the others.

“Front!” Pound sang out-he’d seen the muzzle flash.

To his relief, Mel Scullard sang out, “Identified,” which meant he’d seen it, too. To the loader, he added, “HE!”

With a thrum of hydraulics, the turret traversed to the left. As it steadied, Pound ordered the barrel to stop to give the gunner a better shot. If the gun in the woods was drawing a bead on him at the same time…Well, that was the chance you took.

Several cannon spoke at once: the antibarrel gun and at least four barrels’ main armaments. An AP round dug a furrow in the dirt a few feet to the right of Pound’s machine. He was surprised it didn’t touch off a mine or two. The other shells all burst close to the same place in the woods.

“Gun it!” Pound yelled to the driver. If they hadn’t knocked out the gun or wounded the crew, more murderous projectiles would come flying out of there. “Stay behind the flail barrel,” he added a split second later.

“How come?” the driver asked. “He’s not gonna do any more flailing.”

“Well, no,” Pound said, and let it go at that. Some people weren’t very bright, and you couldn’t do anything about it. The lead barrel’s flail might have taken a knockout, but it could still show where at least one mine lay-the hard way.

Pound wished he hadn’t thought that-it might have been a jinx. A few seconds later, the flail barrel did hit a mine. It slewed sideways and stopped, its right track blown off. It didn’t catch fire, but it was hideously vulnerable out there. The commander traversed his turret till it faced the woods, putting as much armor as he could between himself and the enemy. Past that, he had to wait for a recovery vehicle and hope.

Losing the flail barrel left Pound in the lead. He could have done without the honor, but he had it like it or not. He got on the wireless to the other barrels in his platoon: “Stay behind me. If I make it through, you will, too. And even if I don’t, you won’t have far to go, so you may make it anyhow.”

He could see the signs at the far edge of the minefield. Only a couple of hundred yards to go…Maybe a hundred yards…Maybe fifty…It would be a shame to run over one now, with the end of the field so close…

“Made it!” he said, a great whoop of relief, as if all his troubles were over.

No matter how much he savored the moment, he knew better. The Confederates had a strongpoint up ahead on some high ground called Snodgrass Hill. They’d put a lot of guns up there, most of which could fire AP ammo. Hitting a moving barrel with an artillery piece wasn’t easy, but horrible things happened when gunners did. Not even the latest U.S. barrel had a prayer of surviving a tungsten-tipped 105mm round. Pound drove past a couple of burnt-out hulks that showed as much. One of them had the turret blown off and was lying upside down ten feet away from the chassis. That wasn’t the kind of thing a barrel commander wanted to see.

Much more welcome were the fighter-bombers working over Snodgrass Hill. They hit the Confederates again and again, bombing and strafing. Two or three of them went down, but the fire coming from the hill decreased dramatically.

“Couldn’t have done that in the last war,” Pound said.

“No, sir,” Sergeant Scullard agreed. “But their goddamn foot soldiers wouldn’t have been carrying stovepipes then, either.” He sprayed some bushes up ahead with a long burst from the coaxial machine gun. If any Confederates with antibarrel rockets crouched there, they didn’t get the chance to fire them.

Machine guns at the base of Snodgrass Hill held up U.S. infantry. Barrels painted green-gray knocked out the machine-gun nests one by one. Antibarrel cannon farther up the hill knocked out some U.S. barrels. Michael Pound got on the wireless and screamed for artillery support. Being only a lowly platoon commander, he didn’t have a set that let him talk directly with the gun bunnies. He yelled loud enough to make the soldier he did talk to say, “Keep your hair on, pal. I’ll get the word through, honest to Pete.”

“You’d better,” Pound said. “Otherwise, if they find you mysteriously strangled with telephone wire, they’ll know just who to suspect.” On that encouraging note, he switched off.

He couldn’t have been the only barrelman yelling for HE. The barrage didn’t land on Snodgrass Hill fast enough to suit him, but it would have had to go in yesterday to do that. Land it did. The lower slopes of the hill went up in smoke and shrapnel and poison gas. Watching all that come down on the Confederates, anybody would have thought nothing could stay alive under it.

Pound knew better. Featherston’s fuckers had trenches, and they had gas masks, and they had balls. As soon as things eased off even a little bit, they’d pop up and start serving all the guns that weren’t knocked off their wheels. He didn’t want that to happen-it was the last thing he did want.

He had no idea if he was the highest-ranking barrel officer down near the bottom of Snodgrass Hill. He didn’t care, either. He sent his platoon an order barrels didn’t hear every day: “Charge!” A moment later, he added, “And bring everybody else with you if you can. Let’s get them before they get us!”

He stood up in the cupola to wave all the U.S. barrels forward. The commanders in his other machines were doing the same thing. A short round from his own side burst much too close to his barrel. Shell fragments whined past his head. He turned the wave into an obscene gesture aimed at the artillery he’d wanted so badly only a few minutes before. You were just as dead if your buddies got you as you were if the bad guys put one between your eyes.

With a few more barrels of their own, the Confederates probably could have broken up the charge before it got rolling. But they didn’t have enough, and one of the U.S. barrels killed the first C.S. machine that showed itself. The infantrymen in butternut with stovepipes mostly stayed down in their holes; they wanted to live just like anybody else. And the charge pounded on.

Before long, Pound ducked down and closed the cupola hatch. By then, rounds didn’t have to fall short to be dangerous. He was brave enough, but not suicidal. He thought of himself as a coldly practical man. Whether that kind of man would have led a charge up the heavily defended hill was a question he never worried about.

Both his barrel’s bow machine gun and the one beside the main armament chattered. Brass casings clanked down onto the floor of the fighting compartment. “This is kind of fun, you know?-like a pinball arcade,” Sergeant Scullard said. “They pop up here, you shoot ’em, then they come up somewhere else, so you gotta knock those guys down, too.”

“I can tell you one difference,” Pound said dryly.

“Yeah? What’s that, sir?” Scullard didn’t even need to look at what he was doing to feed a new belt of cartridges into the coaxial machine gun.

“In the arcade, they don’t shoot back,” Pound answered. Machine-gun bullets and shell fragments clattered off the barrel’s thick steel skin.

“God knows we’ve been through worse.”

“You aren’t wrong,” Pound agreed. They were almost to the top of Snodgrass Hill now, and resistance was thinning out. Too much had landed on the Confederates too fast. They were groggy, like a boxer who’d taken too many rights. In the ring, the ref would have stopped the fight before the loser got badly hurt. Hurting the other side was the point of the exercise here.

Pound’s barrel rolled over the tube of an overturned 105. Even if the Confederates drove the USA off this hill, they’d never use that gun again-or if they tried, the first round would blow up inside it. Wouldn’t that be a shame? Pound thought.

He looked around for more enemy soldiers to shoot or guns to wreck, and he didn’t see any. He wasn’t quite at the crest of the hill-why give somebody on the far side a clean shot?

More airplanes appeared. He needed a moment to realize they were Confederates: Asskickers with rockets slung under their wings. When the dive bombers salvoed them, they looked like lances of fire slashing across the sky. They tore into the U.S. forces on Snodgrass Hill like lances of fire, too. And Pound couldn’t do a thing about it. He’d seen a few barrels with a.50-caliber machine gun mounted in front of the commander’s cupola to serve as an antiaircraft weapon. He didn’t have one, but he was thinking he’d get one as soon as he could.

The Asskickers sped off to the south. They couldn’t linger, or U.S. fighters would hack them down. They’d done damage, no doubt about it. But they hadn’t driven U.S. forces off of Snodgrass Hill. They didn’t have a chance of doing that, not by themselves, and no Confederate ground counterattack materialized. The strongpoint seemed to be the center of the C.S. position here, and it had just fallen.

Clarence Potter knew the wintry pleasure of being right. The Confederates had hit the United States as hard as they could, and the USA didn’t quite fall over. Now the United Sates were hitting back, and they had the CSA on the ropes. The Confederates’ problem was that they’d kept trying to land haymakers when they should have been doing their damnedest not to get hit. He thought of everything his country had squandered on aggressive counterattacks that it should have kept under cover or in reserve. If that wasn’t enough to drive a man to drink, he didn’t know what would be.

If Chattanooga had held, they still might have had a chance. Chattanooga was the cork in the bottle. U.S. paratroopers had yanked the cork. Now the damnyankees could spill out into the heart of the Confederacy, into country that hadn’t seen Yankee invaders even in the War of Secession.

And the enemy knew it, too. It didn’t do any more to expect U.S. generals to stay half a step behind their opposite numbers in butternut. The United States banged through the improvised C.S. lines in northwestern Georgia…oh, not with the greatest of ease, but not with the kind of effort that ruined them, either. They could bang some more whenever and wherever they chose to.

Meanwhile, General Patton was trying to piece together another line. This one, of necessity, was longer than the one centered on Snodgrass Hill. It was also weaker. Fewer men and barrels were doing their damnedest to cover more ground. Their damnedest, Potter feared, wouldn’t be good enough.

His own brigade was stationed near Calhoun, Georgia, defending the line of the Oostanaula and Coosawattee Rivers. He wished the rivers were as wide as their names were long. But even if they were, how much difference would it make? The Yankees had crossed the Ohio and the Cumberland. They would be able to deal with obstacles like these.

Right now, they weren’t trying very hard. Their artillery and his fired at each other across the rivers. Not a half hour went by when his brigade didn’t take at least one casualty. Replacements trickled in more slowly. He would have bet the commander of the U.S. outfit to the north didn’t have that worry.

His stomach started to knot up when General Patton paid him a call. He feared he knew what Patton would want, and he was right. “How soon do you think your brigade can be ready to strike a blow for-”

“Freedom?” Potter interrupted, turning the Party slogan into a jeer.

Patton turned red. “You still don’t have the proper attitude, Potter.”

“That’s a matter of opinion, sir,” Potter replied. “I don’t think we can win the war any more, not on the battlefield.” He thought about U-235 and Professor FitzBelmont. If the Confederacy still had hope, it lay there. Did Patton know about uranium bombs? Potter hoped not. He went on, “Seems to me what we ought to do now is try not to lose it on the battlefield.”

“You’re a defeatist. I’ll report you to the President,” Patton snarled.

Such a threat would have chilled the blood of ninety-nine percent of the officers in the Confederate Army. Potter yawned in Patton’s face. “Go ahead. He knows how I feel.”

Patton stared at him. “Then why doesn’t he throw you in irons, the way you deserve?”

“Because he knows I think with my head, not with my heart or my balls,” Potter answered. “It’s really a useful technique. You ought to try it one of these days…sir.”

“You can go too far, General,” Patton warned. “Watch yourself.”

“Sir, you can do whatever you please to me, and I really don’t care. I’m Clarence Potter, and I’m here to tell you the truth.” Potter appropriated President Featherston’s phrase with malicious glee. Patton gaped at him. Smiling a chilly smile, Potter went on, “We can’t afford the head-knocking style you’ve been using. What will it take to make you see that? The damnyankees in Atlanta? In Savannah, on the ocean? In Mobile, on the Gulf of Mexico? From where I sit, you’re greasing the skids to get them there.”

“How dare you say such a thing to me?” Patton thundered. “How dare you? I’ll have you court-martialed and drummed out of the Army, so help me God I will!”

“Good luck,” Potter said. “I’ve got a Stonewall in my pocket that says you can’t do it.” He took out the goldpiece and tossed it up and down. “Worse thing that’ll happen is that the President’ll overrule the court and order me back to Richmond. My bet is, he’ll overrule the court and keep me right here.”

His calm voice must have held conviction. Patton stood there breathing hard, his cheeks a mottled and furious red. Then, suddenly, he lashed out and slapped Potter in the face. While Potter was grabbing-successfully-for his glasses, Patton ground out, “All right, you son of a bitch! Will you meet me on the field of honor tomorrow morning? Have you honor? One of us will go down in history as a casualty of war, and the other will be able to continue the campaign as he thinks best.”

He was dead serious. He was also deadly serious, his hands hovering near the fancy pistols he wore on each hip. He looked ready-more than ready-to plug Potter on the spot. Replacing his spectacles on his nose, Potter said, “As challenged party, I believe I have the choice of weapons, sir?”

Patton actually bowed. Did he imagine himself a knight in shining armor? Hadn’t he got that idiocy knocked out of him during the Great War? Evidently not, for he was courtesy itself as he replied, “That is correct, sir. Pistols, swords, rifles at long range if you prefer a contest of skill…I am entirely at your disposal in that regard.”

“I’d like to choose horse turds at five paces to show you what a fool you are,” Potter said.

“Do not make a mockery of this, General. I will not abide it,” Patton warned. “I have challenged; you have accepted. The weapons must be lethal.”

“I just said I’d like to. I didn’t say I would,” Potter answered. “Lethal, is it? All right, sir. I’ll give you lethal weapons, and see how you like it.” By the carnivorous smile on Patton’s face, he expected to like it very much. Then Potter said, “I choose flamethrowers at ten paces.”

General Patton’s jaw dropped. Some of the high color left his face. “You are joking,” he got out with some effort.

“Not me,” Potter said. “Isn’t that lethal enough to suit you? We’ll both be burnt meat in nothing flat. Well, sir? You wanted a duel. I goddamn well gave you one. Do you still want it?”

For a horrible moment, he thought Patton would say yes. His superior might be furious enough to immolate himself if he could take the man he hated with him. But Patton, though his lips drew back from his teeth in a furious grimace, shook his head. Nobody who’d ever seen what a flamethrower could do wanted one to do it to him. Back in gaslight days, a moth would sometimes fly into the flame of a lamp. That was about what jellied gasoline did to a man.

Then, to Potter’s amazement, George Patton started to laugh. “By God, General, you have more spunk than I gave you credit for!”

He admires me, Potter thought, more bemused yet. I made myself into a bigger jackass than he did, and he admires me for it. Some of the Austro-Hungarian alienists who were probing the shape of man’s psyche would probably have had some interesting things to say about that. Wearily, Potter said, “The United States are the enemy, sir. You’re not, and I’m not, either. They’re the ones we’ve got to lick-and the ones we’ve got to keep from licking us.”

“Well said! Very well said!” In a final surreal touch, Patton bowed again. “Please accept my apologies for the slap and the insult. While I was provoked, I see now that I was hasty.”

“I’ll let it go.” But Potter had enough of the old code in him-and enough pride-to go on resenting what Patton had done. Aiming a flamethrower at him would have been a treat. It would, unfortunately, have been a last treat.

Patton, perhaps still unnerved, made what was for him an astonishing choice: he condescended to ask, “Since you seem unhappy with my plans for engaging the Yankees, General, what would you do instead?”

“Fight for time,” Potter answered at once, thinking again of Professor FitzBelmont and U-235. How far were he and his crew from building a bomb that could give the CSA a fighting chance again? And how far were their U.S. counterparts from building a bomb that would end all the Confederacy’s chances?

“You will perhaps understand a campaign needs more detailed goals and objectives than that.” Patton could have sounded snotty. In fact, he did; that was part of his nature. But he didn’t sound anywhere near as snotty as he might have, and Potter gave him reluctant credit for it.

“Yes, sir,” Potter said. “If you ask me, our goal is to keep the Yankees out of Atlanta. We can’t afford to lose it, partly because of all the factories and partly because it’s such an important rail junction. Transit between the East Coast and everything from Alabama on west goes to hell if Atlanta falls, and that goes a long way toward losing the war for us. Objectives would have to do with containing the U.S. advance as close to the Georgia-Tennessee border as we can.”

“And driving it back,” Patton said.

Potter shrugged. “If we can, at this stage of things. But mostly I want to make the U.S. forces come at us. I want to use the defender’s advantage for everything it’s worth. I want the United States to have casualty lists three, four, five times as long as ours. They’re bigger than we are, but they can’t afford that kind of thing forever. If they bleed enough, maybe they’ll get sick of banging their heads against a brick wall and give us a peace we can live with.”

And if we drop uranium bombs on them a year after that, it’d damn well serve them right, he thought. Would they hit us first? I don’t know. I didn’t used to think so. Now, though, we may have given them too many reasons not to let us have another chance.

“In your opinion, then, we cannot hope to win the war on the ground.” Patton spoke like a judge passing sentence.

Potter didn’t care. “Sir, they’re in Georgia. Doesn’t that speak for itself? They’re cleaning up the pockets of resistance west of their thrust through Kentucky and Tennessee, too, and we haven’t been able to keep them from doing that. Between Richmond and Philadelphia, we’ve stayed even with them in the air. Everywhere else? Here, for instance? You know the answer as well as I do. We haven’t matched their latest barrel yet, either.”

“We’re ahead of them in rockets,” Patton said.

“Yes, sir,” Potter said. “Those will hurt them. Those have hurt them. They’ll make us lose slower. Do you really think they can make us win?” Maybe if we put a U-235 bomb in the nose of one. But how much does one of those damn things weigh? When will we have a rocket that can get it off the ground? In time for this war? You’d have to be a wild-eyed optimist to believe anything like that.

“Yours is a counsel of despair,” Patton said.

“I don’t want to throw my brigade away charging their guns,” Potter said. “I want to make them throw their brigades away charging my guns. I don’t think that’s despair. Where we are now, I think it’s common sense.”

“When I give you orders, I expect you to obey them.”

“When I get orders, I expect them to be ones I’m better off obeying.”

They glared at each other. Neither had convinced the other-Potter knew that. Swearing under his breath, Patton stormed out of Potter’s tent. Potter wondered what he would do if Patton commanded him to go over the river line and attack the enemy. I’ll refuse, he decided. Let him do what he wants after that. It’ll keep the brigade in being a while longer, anyhow.

The orders arrived two hours later. Potter’s men were to hold in place. Patton laid on a counterattack farther west. Potter sighed. Patton had grasped the letter, not the spirit. He didn’t know what he could do about that. Well, actually, he did know: he couldn’t do a damn thing.

Guns blazing, the counterattack went in. It drove U.S. forces back a couple of miles, then ran out of steam. Potter wished he’d expected anything different.

The Josephus Daniels rode the waves in the North Atlantic-rode them like a roller-coaster car going up and down ever taller, ever steeper bumps. George Enos took the motion in stride: literally, as he had no trouble making his way around the destroyer escort despite the roughening seas. Though not a big warship, the Josephus Daniels made a platform ever so much more stable than the fishing boats that bobbed on the ocean like little corks in a bathtub…and sometimes sank as if going down the drain.

He wasn’t worried the Josephus Daniels would sink-not on her own, anyhow. She might have help from British, French, or Confederate submersibles, though.

At least she was out of range of British land-based airplanes. George had gone through too many attacks from the air, both here and in the tropical Pacific, ever to want to help try to fight off another one.

“We’re still floating,” the sailors boasted. Most of them were kids. They’d helped rescue men whose ships had gone to the bottom, but they’d never been sunk themselves. They were cocky because of it. It hadn’t happened to them, so they were sure it couldn’t.

With the Townsend at the bottom of the Gulf of California, George knew better. The water there was shallow. Maybe one day somebody would salvage her for scrap metal. Unless someone did, she’d never see the surface again. Neither would the men who’d died aboard her or who hadn’t been able to get off before she went down.

Sam Carsten knew better, too. The captain sometimes talked about how he’d been on the Remembrance when the Japanese sank her. That made George wonder if he’d seen the skipper in the Sandwich Islands.

It seemed logical, but he didn’t think so. The memory, if it was a memory, felt older than his stint there. When he thought of the skipper, he thought of Boston, and not of Boston the way it was now, either: not the Boston he’d occasionally come back to since joining the Navy. When he thought of Sam Carsten, he thought of his home town a long time ago, back in the days when he was a kid.

Sunshine flashing off the gilded dome of the State House, seen from across Boston Common…

When that came back to him, his mouth fell open in amazement. He felt like a man who’d just scratched an itch he’d thought he would never be able to reach. “Son of a bitch!” he said softly. “Son of a bitch!”

Then he wanted to tell the skipper about it. That would have been next to impossible on a battlewagon or an airplane carrier. For an able seaman to get an audience with the captain of a ship like that was like getting an audience with God. It shouldn’t have been that hard on the Josephus Daniels. Sam Carsten was only a two-striper, and a mustang to boot. He should have had-he probably did have-a soft spot for the men from whose ranks he’d risen.

He wasn’t the problem. His exec was. Lieutenant Myron Zwilling seemed convinced God Himself needed to stand in line to see the skipper. As for a mere rating…Well, in Zwilling’s mind the question hardly arose.

But there were ways around the executive officer. The skipper was a gunnery fanatic. He lavished most of his attention on the two four-inch guns that gave the Josephus Daniels what little long-range bite she had, but he didn’t forget the 40mm mounts, either.

Picking a time when Carsten seemed a bit less rushed than usual, George said, “Ask you something, sir?”

“What’s on your mind, Enos?” The captain of a bigger ship wouldn’t have known all his men by name, but Sam Carsten did.

“You’ve been in Boston a good many times, I expect,” George said.

“That’s a fact-I told you so once. Anybody who’s been in the Navy as long as I have, he says he hasn’t been in Boston a lot, he’s a damn liar,” Carsten replied.

“Yes, sir. Do you remember one time when you were out on the Boston Common and you went under a tree to get out of the sun?” George said. “There was a family having a picnic under there-a woman, and a boy, and a girl. This would have been-oh, some time around the start of the Twenties. I was ten, eleven, maybe twelve. Does that ring any kind of bell, sir?”

Sam Carsten’s face went far away as he thought back. “No,” he said, but then, “Wait a minute. Maybe. Damned if it doesn’t. Somebody said something about the Ericsson.” Because of what had happened to the destroyer at the end of the Great War, any Navy man who heard about it was likely to remember.

And, when the skipper remembered that, it brought everything flooding back to George. “I did!” he said. “I told you my father was on her.”

“There was a girl along with you, yeah,” Carsten said slowly. “She was younger than you, I think.”

“My sister Mary Jane,” George said.

Carsten shook his head in slow wonder. “Well, if that doesn’t prove it’s a small world, I’ll be damned if I know what would. I wanted to get under that tree so I wouldn’t burn, and your mother was nice enough to let me share it.”

He was almost as fair as a ghost; George had seen him blotched with zinc-oxide ointment several times, and it wasn’t much paler than his skin. No, he wouldn’t have liked summer sun in Boston, not one bit. And…“My mother was a nice person,” George said.

“Nice-looking, too. I remember that,” the skipper said. Would he have tried to pick her up if he’d met her without her children? Had he tried anyhow, in some way that went over the kids’ heads? If so, he’d had no luck. He eyed George. “You say was? I’m sorry if she’s not living any more.”

“She’s not.” That brought memories back, too, ones George would sooner have left submerged. “She took up with the writer who did the book about how she went and shot the Confederate submersible skipper. Bastard drank. They would fight and make up, you know? Except the last time, they didn’t. He shot her and then he shot himself.”

“Jesus!” the skipper said. “I’m sorry. That must have been hell.”

“It was…pretty bad, sir,” George said. “If he wanted to blow his own brains out, fine, but why did he have to go and do that to her, too?”

Carsten set a hand on his shoulder. “You look for answers to stuff like that, you go crazy. He did it because he went around the bend. What else can you say? If he didn’t go around the bend, he wouldn’t have done anything like that.”

“I guess so.” That wasn’t much different from the conclusion George had reached himself. It made for cold comfort. No-it made for no comfort at all. What he wanted was revenge, and he couldn’t have it. Ernie robbed him of it when he turned the gun on himself.

“Sure as hell, you were right about one thing-I did look familiar.” Sam Carsten tried to steer him away from his gloom. “I wouldn’t have known you in a million years, but you were just a kid then. Damned if I don’t recall that day on the Common, though. How about that?” He walked down the deck shaking his head.

“So you weren’t just blowing stack gas when you said you ran into the Old Man once upon a time,” Petty Officer Third Class Jorgenson said. He still had charge of the 40mm mount. “How about that?”

“Yeah, how about that?” George agreed. “I thought so, but I couldn’t pin it down till now.”

The crew for the gun spent as much time working together as they could. Because of casualties, just about everyone was in a new slot. Till they figured out how to do what they had little practice doing, they would be less efficient than the other gun crews. That could endanger the ship.

Because the skipper was a fiend for good gunnery, he encouraged them and kept their usual bosses from loading extra duty on them. Carsten wanted them to spend as much time at the gun as they could. They steadily got better. Fremont Dalby would have had some pungent things to say about their performance. Jorgenson did have pungent things to say about it. But they improved.

The Josephus Daniels went back to patrolling east of Newfoundland. The men who’d been in her for a while told stories of earlier adventures on that duty. If a quarter of what they said was true, she’d had some lively times. The limeys worked harder at smuggling arms into Canada than the USA did at smuggling them into Ireland. Canada and Newfoundland had a much longer coast than the smaller British isle, which gave the enemy more chances to slip through.

Navy Department doctrine was that stopping the arms smuggling would snuff out the Canadian rebellion. The sailors didn’t believe it. “What? The fucking Canucks can’t find any guns of their own? My ass!” Jorgenson said when the talk got around to the patrol.

Klaxons hooted. That killed a bull session. George and Jorgenson raced toward the bow. They got to their gun in a dead heat. The rest of the crew wasn’t more than a couple of steps behind them. “What’s going on?” asked the new shell-jerker, a big blond kid named Ekberg.

“Beats me,” Jorgenson answered. “Maybe it’s a drill.” He was even bigger than Ekberg, and almost as fair, though neither of them matched the skipper.

“Now hear this!” The PA system crackled to life. Lieutenant Zwilling’s harsh voice got no sweeter blaring from the speakers: “Y-ranging gear has picked up an unidentified aircraft approaching from the south. Exercise caution before opening fire, as it may be friendly. Repeat, exercise caution before opening fire, as it may be friendly. But do not endanger the ship.”

George swore, and he wasn’t the only one. The exec wanted to have his cake and eat it, too. Don’t shoot the airplane down, but don’t let it make an attack run, either? How was that supposed to work?

A minute or so later, the PA came on again. “This is the captain,” Sam Carsten said. “The ship comes first. If we have to fish some flyboys out of the drink afterwards, we’ll do that. We’re trying to find out who’s in the airplane, but no luck so far. If we open up on the wireless, we tell everybody in the North Atlantic where we’re at, and we don’t want to do that.”

“See, the skipper tells us what’s what,” Jorgenson said. “The exec just bullshits.”

“Lieutenant Cooley, he was all right,” Ekberg said. “This guy, though-you can keep him.”

“Damn airplane ought to be one of ours,” Jorgenson said. “Don’t see how the limeys could’ve snuck a carrier this far west without us knowing.” He paused. “’Course, sometimes they fly fighters off their merchantmen. One of those assholes carrying a bomb could be real bad news.”

“Confederate seaplane?” George suggested.

Jorgenson frowned. “Right at the end of their range. They couldn’t get home again unless they refuel somewhere.” The frown turned into a scowl. “They might do that, though. Maybe the limeys have a station or two on the Newfoundland coast. We can’t keep an eye on everything. So yeah, maybe. Whatever it is, we’ll find out pretty damn quick.” He swept the southern sky with a gun commander’s binoculars.

Somebody farther astern spotted the airplane first and let out a yell. George had a shell in the breech of each gun in the mount. He was ready to open up as soon as Jorgenson gave the word. The gun chief swung the twin 40mms to bear on the target.

“It is a seaplane,” he said, still peering through the field glasses. George felt smart for about fifteen seconds. Then Jorgenson went on, “It’s one of ours. That’s a Curtiss-37, sure as shit. Stand easy, boys-we’re all right.”

“Don’t shoot! Repeat-do not shoot!” Lieutenant Zwilling blared a few seconds later. “The airplane has been positively identified as nonhostile.”

George needed a moment to translate that into English. Then he realized the exec said the same thing as Jorgenson, though not so clearly.

The seaplane buzzed past, the eagle and crossed swords plainly visible on its sides. It waggled its wings at the Josephus Daniels and flew on toward the north. “Nice not to need to fight for a change,” George said, and none of the other sailors at the mount told him he was wrong.

When a bath meant a quick dip in a creek, Jonathan Moss did what anybody else would: he mostly did without. Sometimes, he got too smelly and buggy to stand himself, and went in for a little while. He came out with his teeth chattering-fall was in the air, even in Georgia.

“Jesus, I miss hot water!” he said.

“Yeah, no kidding.” Nick Cantarella had just taken a brief bath, too. “We’re both skinny bastards these days, you know?”

Moss ran a hand along his ribs. “You mean this isn’t a xylophone?”

“Funny. Funny like a crutch. And you’ve got more meat on your bones than I do,” Cantarella said.

“Not much,” Moss said. “You started out built like a soda straw, and I didn’t. That’s the only difference.”

They both got back into the ragged dungarees and collarless work shirts that would have been the uniform of black guerrillas in the CSA had the guerrillas enjoyed anything so fancy as a uniform. In one way, the only difference between them and the rest of Spartacus’ band was their lighter skin. In another…

“You ofays!” Spartacus called. He used the word as casually as a white Confederate would have used niggers. Most of the time, it meant the Confederate whites the guerrillas were fighting. But it could mean any white at all, too.

“What is it, boss?” Jonathan Moss asked. The band didn’t run on anything like military discipline, but Spartacus fancied his title of respect.

“How come the United States done lost the War of Secession? You lick them damn Confederates then, nobody have to worry ’bout ’em since.”

Moss and Cantarella looked at each other. Any schoolchild in either country knew the answer to that, or at least the short version. But Spartacus and the rest of the blacks with him were never schoolchildren. The Confederate States always did everything they could to discourage Negroes from getting any kind of education. They didn’t want them to be anything more than beasts of burden with thumbs.

“Shall I do the honors, or would you rather?” Cantarella asked.

“I can, unless you’re hot to trot,” Moss said.

Cantarella waved him forward. “Be my guest.”

“Well, the first thing that happened was, the Confederates had a good general in Virginia and we had a lousy one,” Moss said. “McClellan was never a match for Robert E. Lee-not even close. And Abe Lincoln didn’t get rid of McClellan and put in somebody who knew what he was doing. We blame Lincoln for a lot, and it starts right there.”

“He wanted to be good to niggers, though,” Spartacus said. “Ofays down here don’t reckon so, they don’t secede in the first place.”

That was probably true. From the U.S. viewpoint, it was one more thing for which to blame Lincoln. If someone sensible like Douglas had won the election…In that case, there wouldn’t have been a War of Secession in the first place.

“It gets worse,” Moss said. “Lincoln couldn’t do anything when England and France recognized the CSA after Lee beat McClellan up in Pennsylvania. Neither could anybody else in the United States.”

“What difference recognizing the Confederate States make?” Spartacus said. “They there whether they recognized or not.”

“After the limeys and frogs recognized them, they broke our blockade,” Moss said. “They had better navies than ours. Then they shipped the Confederates whatever they needed, and got cotton back. And they could blockade U.S. ports if we didn’t make peace with the CSA.”

“They could, and they did,” Nick Cantarella put in.

“They ganged up on us again twenty years later, after the Confederates bought Chihuahua and Sonora from Mexico,” Moss said. “When we lost the Second Mexican War, that’s what made us decide to line up with Germany. That way, we had a…what would you call it, Nick?”

“A counterweight,” Cantarella said.

“There you go.” Moss nodded. “With Germany on our side, we had a counterweight to England and France. And that’s how things have been for the last sixty years.”

“How come y’all don’t let niggers in the USA when things is tough fo’ us down here?” Spartacus might not know much about what had happened a long time ago, but he had that piece of recent history straight. Chances were every Negro in the CSA did.

Moss and Cantarella eyed each other again. They both knew the reason. They both feared it would be unpalatable to the Negroes around them. And they both feared the guerrillas would recognize a lie.

Sighing, Moss told the truth: “A lot of whites in the USA don’t like Negroes much better than whites here do.”

A low hum ran through the guerrillas. It was, Moss judged with more than a little surprise, a hum of approval. “Leastways you don’t put no sugar on a spoonful o’ shit,” was how Spartacus put it.

“I don’t care if them Yankee ofays likes us or not,” another guerrilla said. “Ain’t never had no ofays like us. Don’t hardly know what I’d do if’n they did. Long as they ain’t tryin’ to murder us, that’ll do fine.”

Several other Negroes nodded. One of them said, “Wish them damnyankees’d come farther down into Georgia.”

“Amen!” Two or three Negroes spoke together, as if responding to a preacher. One of them added, “That’d be about the onliest thing that could save the niggers down here. That or the Second Coming, one.”

“Don’t hold your breath,” Spartacus said dryly.

“Well, hell, I know Jesus ain’t comin’,” the guerrilla said. “But the damnyankees, they might.”

“They’re moving again. We’re moving again,” Nick Cantarella said. “I don’t think the Confederates can stop us from breaking out of our bridgehead south of Chattanooga. And once we’re loose in north Georgia…”

“Yeah!” Again, the response might almost have come in church.

“They gonna get here soon enough to do us any good?” Spartacus answered his own question with a shrug. “We gots to las’ long enough to find out, dat’s all.”

One way the guerrillas survived was by never staying in one place very long. Mexican soldiers and white militiamen hunted the Negroes-not all the time, but too often. Not staying around to be found was simple common sense.

Of course, moving had dangers of its own. You could walk into trouble as well as away from it. But Spartacus’ point man, Apuleius, was as good as anybody Jonathan Moss ever saw. He was as good as anybody Cantarella ever saw, too. “Put that little so-and-so in our uniform and he could sneak a division of barrels right on into Richmond,” Cantarella said.

“Wouldn’t be surprised,” Moss agreed. “Or he could, anyway, if we let Negroes join the Army.”

“Yeah, well, that’s horseshit, too,” Cantarella said. “You know smokes can fight, and I know smokes can fight, and if Philly’s too goddamn dumb to know smokes can fight, then fuck Philly, you know what I’m sayin’?”

Apuleius held up the band outside an abandoned sharecropper village. He didn’t think it was abandoned. “Somebody in dere,” he told Spartacus after crawling back through the forgotten, overgrown vegetable plots around the place.

“How you know?” Spartacus asked. “Looks quiet enough. Ain’t no smoke or nothin’.”

“Not now,” the point man said. “But sure enough was some not long ago. An’ when I git close, I smell me some people ain’t had no baths in a hell of a long time.”

He kept himself cleaner than most of the other guerrillas. Moss had thought that was because he was unusually fastidious, and had even wondered if he was a fairy. Now he saw good sense lay behind it. If Apuleius didn’t smell himself, he had a better chance of sniffing out other people.

“You reckon they ofays or Mexicans?” Spartacus asked.

“Likely ofays,” Apuleius answered. “They stink worse. The Mexicans, they washes when they gits the chance.”

“How we gonna smoke ’em out?” Spartacus suddenly grinned a predatory grin. “Reckon you kin wiggle back close enough to chuck a grenade into the middle o’ things?”

“I kin try.” The point man didn’t sound thrilled, but he didn’t say no.

“Well, why don’t you wait a bit?” Spartacus said. “Let us set up the machine gun at the edge o’ the brush. Then we be ready to give them ofays a proper how-do-you-do.”

The two-man machine-gun crew positioned their precious weapon. The rest of the guerrillas, riflemen all, took cover where they could. Moss hoped the bush he crouched behind wasn’t poison oak.

Apuleius worked his way forward again. Moss presumed he did, anyhow; were the point man visible to him, he would have been visible to whoever was inside the village, too. Moss didn’t see the grenade fly, either.

He sure heard it when it went off. And all of a sudden that village didn’t seem abandoned any more. Militiamen, some in gray uniforms, others with clothes no fancier than the guerrillas wore, boiled out of the tumbledown shacks that hadn’t been anything much when they were in good repair and looked even more sorrowful now. The white men were cussing and clutching their weapons and pointing every which way. Some of those flying fingers aimed at Apuleius, but others flew in the opposite direction.

“Now!” Spartacus said.

Along with the rest of the riflemen in the band, Moss started shooting at the youths, mutilated men, and old-timers who made up the local militia. The machine gun spat death at the village. Death had visited it before-where were the sharecroppers who once lived there? Where were their wives and children? Gone to camps, most of them, if they were like most of the Negroes in Georgia.

As soon as the gunfire gave him cover, Apuleius tossed another grenade into the village. This one made the militiamen yell and scream even more than they were already doing. The kids, the ones who’d never seen real fighting before, suffered worse than the veterans. Men who’d come under fire knew they needed to get down and get behind something when bullets started flying. The youngsters stayed upright much too long-and paid for it.

“Fish in a barrel,” Nick Cantarella said happily, sprawled behind a bush not far from the one that hid Moss.

A bullet snapped past between them. “Fish don’t shoot back,” Moss said.

One of the militiamen had got his hands on a fancy C.S. automatic rifle. He sprayed bullets back at the guerrillas almost as fiercely as the machine gun fired at his side. A couple of Negroes howled when they were hit, but the noise they made was as nothing beside that from the militiamen caught in the ambush.

When Spartacus ordered a withdrawal, the machine gun gave covering fire. The militiamen didn’t seem to have any stomach for coming after them, anyhow. Were Moss one of them, he wouldn’t have, either, not after the way they got shot up.

“Keep movin’!” Spartacus called. “They be all over the place round these parts now.” He was sure to be right, though Moss wasn’t sure how many militiamen and Mexican soldiers the local authorities could scrape together.

Litter bearers carried one of the wounded men. The other, shot through the right arm, was able to walk-and to swear with remarkable fluency. Moss looked around for Apuleius. He didn’t see the point man, but that proved nothing. Apuleius might need to wait till dark before making his getaway, and he’d caught up with the band before. Odds were he could do it again.

Would any of it matter? Could they hang on till the U.S. Army came down here or put the Confederates out of business? Moss had no idea. With his scheme for stealing an airplane as dead as too many of the men who’d helped him try, he could only hope.

“Bad one, Doc!” Eddie called as he brought the casualty into the aid station.

Leonard O’Doull knew the medic was right even before he saw the casualty. When you smelled something that reminded you of a pork roast left too long in the oven…then it was a bad one, all right.

Vince Donofrio wrinkled his nose. “Christ, I hate burns!” he said.

“Me, too,” O’Doull said. “But I sure don’t hate ’em near as much as the poor bastard who’s got one.”

The wounded man came out of a barrel. That much was plain from what was left of his coverall. One leg was charred, and he was howling like a wolf. “Has he had morphine?” O’Doull asked.

“Three shots, Doc,” Eddie answered. O’Doull bit his lip. Sometimes even the best painkiller was fighting out of its weight. Eddie went on, “Ether’ll put him out.”

“Yeah.” O’Doull turned to Sergeant Donofrio. “Get him under, Vince.”

“Right,” Donofrio said tightly. The man’s hands were burned, too, and so was his face, though not so badly. He tried to fight when Donofrio put the ether cone over his mouth and nose. As gently as Eddie could, he held the wounded man’s arms till they went limp. His screams faded then, too.

“How much can you do for him, Doc?” Eddie asked.

“Me? Not much. I just want to get rid of the tissue that’d go gangrenous if I left it. Then the specialists take over.”

“That tannic-acid treatment they give ’em?” Donofrio asked.

“That’s right,” O’Doull said. “Tans their hide, scars it fast so they don’t weep fluid out through the burns. They get better results with it than with anything they used to do.”

“Tans their hide…” Donofrio shuddered. “Must hurt like hell while the poor guy’s going through it.”

“I bet it does, yeah,” O’Doull said. “But if you’ve got burns like that, you already hurt like hell. You heard this guy before you knocked him out. How many syrettes of morphine did you say he had in him, Eddie?”

“Three,” the medic answered. “I hear these guys with the burns, a lot of ’em turn into junkies ’cause they need so much dope to get ’em through it while it’s bad.”

“I’ve heard the same thing,” Donofrio said.

“Yeah, so have I,” O’Doull said. “You can’t blame ’em, though. If they didn’t have the drugs, a lot of them would kill themselves. There just isn’t pain much worse than a bad burn.”

He methodically went on debriding flesh that would never heal. The smell made him hungry and nauseous at the same time. That was one more reason to hate burns. “What happened to the rest of the barrel crew?” he asked.

“Don’t know for sure,” Eddie said. “All I know is, he’s the only one we brought back. Maybe the other guys all got out and didn’t get hurt. Here’s hoping.”

“Here’s hoping,” O’Doull agreed. His eyes met Sergeant Donofrio’s over their masks. They both shook their heads. Much more likely that the other four men in the crew never made it out at all. Much more likely that they burned to death. What kind of memories were now dimmed inside this fellow’s head? Would he hear his buddies’ shrieks for the rest of his life? Too bad there’s no morphine for the soul, O’Doull thought.

The burned soldier was still mercifully unconscious when the corpsmen took him off for more treatment farther back of the line. O’Doull shed his mask. So did Vince Donofrio. “That was a tough one,” Donofrio said.

“Burns are about as bad as it gets,” O’Doull agreed. “I’m going outside for a cigarette. You want one?”

“After a case like that? What I want is a good, stiff drink. I guess a butt’ll have to do.” Donofrio was another one who didn’t drink when he might have to deal with patients soon. O’Doull approved, though he wouldn’t have said anything as long as the medic didn’t show up smashed.

He pulled out a pack of Raleighs, gave one to Donofrio, and lit another for himself. After the first drag, he said, “Getting away from the smell in there is good, too.”

“Bet your ass,” Donofrio said. “That’s another thing smoke is good for.” He inhaled, held it, and then blew out a blue-gray cloud. Even after that, he made a face. “You know what it reminded me of? Like there’s spare ribs in the oven and the telephone rings, you know, and it’s the gal’s sister, and she gets to yakking and doesn’t look at the clock till she smells stuff burning-and then it’s too damn late.”

“That sounds about right,” O’Doull said. “I wonder why they call them spare ribs. I bet the pig didn’t think so.”

Donofrio laughed. “Good one, Doc! I bet I steal it.”

“You better not,” O’Doull said, so seriously that the medic looked surprised. He went on, “You’ll cut into my royalties if you do.”

“Royalties?” Donofrio snorted. “You want royalties, go to Mexico or France or England.”

“Sure, tell an Irishman to go to England for the king,” O’Doull said. “You know how to win friends, don’t you?”

“In a poker game, right?” Donofrio could be even loopier than Granny McDougald.

“Poker game.” O’Doull shook his head. He couldn’t get the wounded barrelman out of his thoughts. “That poor son of a bitch sure had the cards stacked against him.”

“Yeah.” The medic scowled, too. “One good thing-his face came through pretty good. He won’t have to go through life like that guy in the book-The Phantom of the Catacombs, that’s what the name of it was. You ever see the movie they made from it? Scared the crap outa me when I was a kid.”

“I was grown up by then, but I know what you mean,” O’Doull said. “They ought to do a talking version now. They have for a lot of the old silents, but not that one-not yet, anyway.”

“Who do you suppose they’d get to play the Phantom?” Donofrio asked. “You could put anybody in one of the other parts, but the Phantom? Everybody who saw the movie would be comparing him to Lon Chaney.”

“Not everybody,” O’Doull said. “The silent version’s more than twenty years old now. Most people younger than you never saw it. They would have stopped showing it as soon as talking came along. When was the last time you saw a silent movie?”

“Been a while,” Donofrio admitted after a little thought. “You don’t even worry or wonder about crap like that, but it disappears when you aren’t looking. Like Kaiser Bill mustaches, you know? Now it’s just a few stubborn old farts who wear ’em, but my old man sure had one in the last war. Everybody did. Hell, I think even my mother did.”

O’Doull laughed. “You said it-I didn’t.”

“My mother’s a nice lady,” Donofrio said. “She heard me going on about her like that, she wouldn’t beat me up…much.”

A green-gray truck pulled up. “You guys get ready to take your aid station forward,” the driver said. “Front’s moving up again. You’re too far behind the line.”

He sounded as if he came from Kansas or Nebraska. All the same, O’Doull said, “I don’t know you from a hole in the ground. Give me the password.” Confederates in Yankee clothing remained a nuisance. O’Doull hoped U.S. soldiers with drawls were also making the enemy sweat.

“Oh-Sequoyah!” The truck driver couldn’t sing worth a damn, but that was the opening for a hot new Broadway show, and the day’s password. He pointed at O’Doull. “Now give me the countersign, or I’ll figure you’re one of Featherston’s fuckers in disguise.”

Fair was fair. “Away we go!” O’Doull said dutifully. The driver nodded. O’Doull turned to Donofrio. “Time to pack up and leave our home sweet home.”

“Leave, my ass-we take it with us,” Donofrio said, and then, with a shrug, “What the hell? It’s not like we never did it before.”

“I’d rather go forward than back,” O’Doull said, and the medic nodded.

As Donofrio said, they’d had practice knocking down the aid station. And it was designed to fit inside the rear compartment of a deuce-and-a-half. Military engineering extended to things besides rifles and barrels. Making aid stations go into the trucks that had to move them fit the bill, and the people who’d put things together knew what they were doing. Even the operating table folded up for a smooth fit.

“Let’s roll,” the driver said.

Roll they did, down past Dalton, Georgia, toward Resaca. O’Doull and Donofrio rode in the cab with the driver; Eddie and the other corpsmen who gathered casualties stayed in the back of the truck. Several bodies hung in the Dalton town square. HE SHOT AT SOLDIERS, said the placard tied around the neck of one of them. The others bore similarly cheery messages.

“They love us down here,” Donofrio said, eyeing the bodies.

“Who gives a damn if they love us?” the driver said. “Long as they know they better not screw with us, that’s all that counts.”

Oderint dum metuant. An ancient Roman playwright had put that into three words. Let them hate as long as they fear. English was a less compact language than Latin. O’Doull didn’t suppose he could expect a truck driver to match a poet’s concision.

War’s wreckage littered the landscape: burnt-out barrels from both sides, crashed airplanes, smashed houses and barns, hastily dug graves with helmet-topped rifles taking the place of headstones. O’Doull nodded to himself. The aid station had got too far behind the front. Smelling death again reminded him what war was like.

Brakes squealed when the driver stopped. Small-arms fire came from up ahead. “This about right?” the man asked.

“Should do,” O’Doull answered. Vince Donofrio’s head bobbed up and down.

They got out and started setting up what they’d taken down not long before. The corpsmen wrestled with canvas and ropes and tent pegs. As soon as they had the tent up, O’Doull and Donofrio put in the operating table and medical supplies. Before long, the doctor and senior medic were ready for business again. Eddie and his pals headed up toward the front to see what kind of business they could bring back.

“Hope we don’t see them for a while,” O’Doull said.

“That’d be nice, wouldn’t it?” Donofrio cocked his head to one side, listening to the gunfire up ahead. “You really think all that shit’s flying around and nobody’s getting hurt?”

“No,” O’Doull admitted. “But you’re right. It would be nice.”

They had a respite of most of an hour. That was about how long the corpsmen would have needed to walk up to the fighting, find someone wounded and give him emergency first aid, and then lug him back to the relocated aid station.

The first wounded man came back cussing a blue streak. A bandage swathed his left hand. Another one soaked up blood from his left buttock. “Same fucking bullet clipped off a finger and a half and got me in the ass,” he growled.

“Could’ve been worse,” Donofrio said. “Could’ve been your other hand.”

“Up yours, Jack,” the wounded man told him. “I’m a lefty.”

“Oh.” For a moment, the medic looked as foolish as he sounded. “Sorry. How was I supposed to know?”

“You coulda kept your goddamn mouth shut.”

“Let’s get you on the table,” O’Doull said. “I’ll do what I can for your hand, and I’ll see if I can dig out the bullet.”

“Hot damn! So I get to turn the other cheek, huh?” the soldier said.

O’Doull winced. Donofrio reached for the mask attached to the ether cylinder with nothing but relief. Putting this guy under would shut him up, anyway.