Walk in Hell

X

“Not much further now,” Lucien Galtier told his horse as he rode up the fine American-paved road toward Riviere-du-Loup. In the back of the wagon, several hens clucked, but they were not a true part of the conversation. He and the horse had been discussing things for years. The hens’ role, though they did not realize it, was strictly temporary.

Off to the east, perhaps a quarter of a mile away, a steam whistle shouted as a train hurried up toward the town. “Tabernac,” Galtier muttered under his breath: a Quebecois curse. The soldiers on the train, no doubt, would cross the St. Lawrence and then try to push on toward Quebec City. The Americans, worse luck, were making progress, too, for the artillery from the north bank of the river sounded farther off than it had when the campaign was new. The newspapers extolled every skirmish as one Bonaparte would have admired (clumsy propaganda, in a province that had never reconciled itself to the French Revolution), but anyone who believed all the newspapers said deserved nothing better than he got.

The whistle screamed again. The horse twitched his ears in annoyance. The chickens squawked and fluttered in their cages. No, they were not suited for serious talk-too flighty.

Cannon by the riverbank started going off-wham, wham, wham! The horse snorted. The chickens went crazy. Lucien Galtier raised a dark eyebrow. “Those are quick-firing guns,” he told the horse, “the kind they use when trying to shoot down an aeroplane. And so-”

Through the cannons’ roar, he picked up a rapidly swelling buzz. Then he spotted the winged shapes. Before the war, he had never seen an aeroplane. Here, now, were two at once, flying hardly higher than the treetops. They both carried blue-white-red roundels on their wings and flanks. The red was in the shape of a maple leaf.

“There, what did I yell you?” Lucien said to the horse. “And not just any aeroplanes, but Canadian aeroplanes.” He reined in to watch.

In front of the pilots, machine guns hammered. He wondered how the men managed to fire through the propellers without shooting themselves down. However they did it, they shot up the troop train, spun in the air like circus acrobats, and then shot it up again. Then, still low, they streaked back toward the free side of the St. Lawrence.

Galtier expected the train to streak toward Riviere-du-Loup. Instead, it came to a ragged halt. Maybe the aeroplanes had killed the engineer, and the brakeman was doing what he did best. Maybe they had filled the boiler with so many holes, it was either kill the pressure inside or explode.

“It could even be-both,” Galtier said, not altogether unhappily.

Soldiers started spilling out of the train. Some of them came running his way. He scowled and thought himself a fool for having stopped to watch the spectacle. But if he tried to leave now, those soldiers would not be pleased with him. And they had rifles.

“Frenchie! Hey, Frenchie!” they shouted as they got closer. “Bring your wagon on over here. We got wounded.”

“Mauvais tabernac,” Lucien snarled. No help for it, though. As he pulled the wagon off the road and bounced toward the track, he felt a curious mixture of joy at having the enemies of his country wounded and sorrow at having young men who had never personally done him wrong wounded.

The chickens did not approve of the rough ride he was giving them. “Be still, you fools,” he told them, for the first time including them in his…He groped for a word. In my salon, he thought, pleased with himself. “This will keep you alive a little longer.”

Ahead, soldiers in green-gray were sometimes helping out of the train, sometimes carrying from it other soldiers in green-gray extravagantly splashed with red. “How many can you hold?” a captain called to Lucien as he drew near. “Four, maybe five?”

“Yes, it could be,” the farmer had replied. Exposure had improved his English-to a point. When he turned to indicate the chickens and their cages in the wagon bed, he was reduced to a helpless wave and a single word: “But-”

“Here.” The American captain dug in a trouser pocket and tossed something to Galtier, who automatically caught it. “That ought to cover them.” He looked down to see what he had: a twenty-dollar U.S. goldpiece.

He took off his hat in salute. “Oui, monsieur. Merci, monsieur.” The American could simply have had the chickens thrown out onto the ground. He’d expected the Boche americain to do just that. Instead, the fellow had given him more than a fair price for them. Lucien jumped down and piled the cages in a wobbly pyramid, then hurried to help the Americans land their comrades in the space thus vacated. A service for a service, he thought.

“Here, pal,” an unwounded U.S. soldier said. “Careful with Herb here. He’s a damn good fellow, Herb is.” As gently as he could, Lucien arranged the damn good fellow so he could sit against the side of the wagon. Herb had a rough bandage, rapidly soaking through with blood, on his right leg. He also had a streak of blood running down his chin from one corner of his mouth; he must have bitten through his lip against the pain.

The horse snorted and tried to shy, uneasy at the stink of blood. One of the American soldiers caught his head and eased him back toward something approaching calm. There was no earthly reason Americans should not be good with horses. Nonetheless, Lucien felt almost as betrayed as if his wife had been unfaithful with a man who wore green-gray.

“We came past a hospital back there, didn’t we?” the captain asked. “I thought I saw it through the window.”

“Yes, sir,” Galtier answered. “It is, in fact, on my land.” The American didn’t notice the resentment with which he said that. Well, the fellow had paid him. One surprise of a day was plenty; with two, nothing would have seemed certain any more. In the memory of the one surprise, Galtier added, “And my daughter works as a nurse’s helper there.”

“I’m afraid we’ve given her more work to do,” the captain said, to which Lucien could only nod. The wagon was already packed tight with wounded, some moaning, some ominously still. More lay on the ground. Their unhurt comrades were doing what they could for them, but most, obviously, had little skill.

Lucien pointed to the road. “There is an ambulance from the hospital. It goes to Riviere-du-Loup to pick up the blessed.” The captain looked confused. Lucien realized he’d made a mistake, using a French word for an English one with the same sound but a different meaning. He corrected himself: “The wounded.”

“He doesn’t need to go that far, not now he doesn’t,” the captain said. Soldiers were waving to the ambulance. As Galtier had done before, it pulled off the road and came jouncing over the rough ground toward the tracks. The driver and his attendant scrambled out of the machine. The attendant shook his head. “What a mess,” he said.

“Yeah.” The ambulance driver scowled. He couldn’t have been more than seventeen or so, not with that unlined face, but was dark and handsome and looked strong as a bull. “This is what you do. You die.” He sounded world-weary beyond his years. “You do not know what it is about. You never have time to learn.”

“Let’s get ’em on the stretcher and into the bus,” the attendant said.

“Yeah,” the driver said again. But then he recognized Galtier. He nodded. “You are Nicole’s father, n’est-ce pas?” His French was bad, but few Americans spoke any.

“Yes,” Lucien answered. In spite of himself, he’d come to know some of the people at the hospital. “Bonjour, Ernest.”

“Not a bon jour for them,” the ambulance driver said. His broad shoulders-almost the shoulders of a prizefighter-went up and down in a shrug. “We will take them back. We will do what we can for them.”

Up in Riviere-du-Loup and elsewhere along the St. Lawrence, the antiaircraft guns started banging away again. Lucien noticed that only in the back part of his mind till he heard the buzz of aeroplane engines.

“Jesus fucking Christ!” an American screamed-doubly a blasphemy for Galtier. Then the man in green-gray said something even worse: “Here they come again!”

Whether they were the same two aeroplanes or two others, Lucien never knew. All around him, soldiers scattered, some diving for cover under the halted train, others running as far away from it as they could. Lucien stood there, foolishly, as the machine guns began chewing up the dirt close by.

The pilots did not try to shoot up either his wagon or the ambulance near it. He was and remained convinced of that. But they were flying fast, and didn’t miss by much. The captain who’d given him the goldpiece spun and toppled like someone with no bones at all, the top of his head shot off. Fresh cries of pain rose from every direction.

Roaring just above his head, the aeroplanes streaked away. A couple of Americans fired their rifles at them. It did no good. They were gone. Galtier looked around at carnage compounded.

A moan that stood out for anguish even among all the others made him turn his head. The young, strong ambulance driver lay beside the soldier he had been about to help. Now he was wounded, too. His hands clutched at himself. Lucien shivered and made the sign of the cross. Maybe, if God was kind, he had been wounded near there, but not there.

The ambulance attendant, whose name Galtier did not know, came over to him and the injured driver. “We’re going to have to bandage that and get him back to the hospital,” he said, to which Lucien could only nod. The attendant stooped beside the driver. “Come on, kid, you got to let me see that.”

In the end, Lucien had to hold the fellow’s hands away from the wound while the attendant worked. The driver writhed and fought. He wasn’t altogether conscious, but he was, as he looked, strong as the devil. Hanging onto his hands turned into something just short of a wrestling match.

Lucien hadn’t intended to look as the attendant cleaned and bandaged the wound. But his eyes, drawn by some horrid fascination of their own, went to it. He winced and wanted to cross himself again. There, indeed.

He and the attendant got the driver into the back of the ambulance with another wounded man. “Thanks for the help,” the attendant said.

“Not at all.” Galtier hesitated. “With this bl-wound-do you think he can-? Will he be able to-?” He ran out of English and nerve at the same time.

“If he’s lucky,” the attendant said, understanding him anyhow, “if he’s real lucky, mind, he’ll be able to just do it.” He climbed into the ambulance and drove it back toward the hospital. Galtier followed at his necessarily slower pace. He said nothing at all to the horse.

Klaxons hooted, everywhere on the Dakota. Sam Carsten threw his mop into a bucket and ran for his battle station. He’d expected the call even before the battleship fished its aeroplane out of the waters of the Pacific. Officers had been bustling around with the look that said they knew something he didn’t. The aeroplane must have spotted something out there ahead of the fleet and sent word back by wireless.

And, out here south and west of the Sandwich Islands, the only thing to spot was the enemy. “The limeys!” Carsten gasped to Hiram Kidde when he ducked into the forwardmost starboard five-inch gun sponson.

“Them or the Japs,” Kidde agreed. The gunner’s mate rubbed his chin. “Taken ’em damn near two years, but they finally figured they could come out and play with the big boys. Now we got to show ’em they made a mistake, on account of if we don’t, the Sandwich Islands are up for grabs again.” He’d been in the Navy his whole adult life. He might not have been able to order units around like an admiral, but he had no trouble figuring out the way tactics led into strategy.

Lieutenant Commander Grady stuck his head into the sponson. “All present and accounted for?” asked the commander of the starboard-side secondary armament.

“Yes, sir,” Kidde answered. “Loader”-he nodded at Carsten-“gun layers, shell jerkers, we’re all here. Uh, sir, who are we fighting?”

Grady grinned. “Looks like one hellacious fleet of British battleships over the horizon,” he answered, “along with all their smaller friends. I don’t expect they sailed out of Singapore just to pay their respects.” His face clouded. “By what the pilots say, they’re at least as big a force as we are. They’re playing for keeps, no doubt about it.”

“So are we, sir,” Kidde said. “We’ll be ready.” Grady nodded and hurried away, his shoes ringing off the steel of the deck.

“We don’t have the whole Sandwich Islands fleet out here on patrol with us,” Carsten said unhappily. “If the limeys smash us up and push past us-”

Kidde shrugged. “Chance you take when you join the Navy. If they smash us up and push past us, thing we have to make sure of is that we do some smashing of our own.”

The sponson had only small vision slits for laying the gun. Even those had armored visors to protect against shell splinters in action. The visors were up now. Carsten looked out through one of the slits as the Dakota swung into a long, sweeping turn. The patrolling fleet was going into battle formation, the line of half a dozen battleships anchoring it, with smaller, swifter cruisers and destroyers supporting and screening them.

He felt a rumble through the soles of his feet. “That’s the big turrets moving,” he said unnecessarily.

Luke Hoskins, one of the shell-jerkers, made an equally unnecessary comment: “They’ve spotted the limeys, then.” He already had his shirt off against the exertions that were to come. Even now, with him doing nothing, sweat gleamed on his muscle-etched torso.

Carsten peered through the vision slit again, looking for smoke on the horizon. He saw none, but the fire director for the main armament, up in the armored crow’s nest, enjoyed-if that was the word-a view far better than his.

All at once, a great column of water fountained up into the sky, about half a mile from the Dakota. Sam might not have been able to see the British ships, but the director surely could, because they could see him. “Hell of a big splash,” he said. That wasn’t surprising, either: at a range like this, only a battleship’s big guns had a chance of hitting.

A moment later, the Dakota’s main armament salvoed in reply. The noise was like the end of the world. “Here we go,” Hiram Kidde said. He sounded, if not happy, at peace with himself and with the world. He was getting ready to do the job he did better than anything else in the world.

“Odds are, we’re gonna sit here with our thumbs up our asses all day long, too,” Hoskins grumbled. “Anybody think we’re gonna get close enough to the limeys to really use secondary guns?”

“Listen, if we could sink ’em from a hundred miles away and they never came close to hitting us, I’d be happy as a clam,” Carsten said. Nobody in the hot, crowded sponson argued with him.

In a thoughtful voice, Kidde said, “That wasn’t a broadside we fired at the limeys, just the forward turrets. We’d better swing”-and sure enough, the Dakota was again heeling through the water in another turn-“or they’ll cross the T on us at a range short enough to hurt us bad.”

Carsten grimaced, and he wasn’t the only one. If the enemy crossed your path and fired broadsides at you while you could answer only with your forward guns, he was sending you twice the weight of metal you were giving back. Every admiral dreamt of crossing the T, and every one had nightmares about its being crossed on him.

More splashes rose, these closer to the Dakota. If somebody dropped an elephant into the Pacific from a mile up, it might make a splash like that. Shrapnel rattled off the armored sides of the battleship. Carsten whistled softly. “Wouldn’t care to be up on deck right now,” he said.

The rest of the gun crew made noises showing they agreed. “Cap’n” Kidde said, “It’s going to get worse before it gets better, too.”

Nobody argued with that, either. “Hard standing around here,” Carsten said, “waiting for something to happen or for us to get close enough to the limeys to shoot at them. I feel like I’m along for the ride, but I’m not doing anything to earn my keep.”

He looked out through the vision slit again. Some of the cruisers had started firing their main armament: guns of a range not that much longer than those he served. His turn would come before too long.

And then, as he watched, one of the cruisers, the Missoula, took a direct hit from what had to be a battleship shell. Its turrets went up one after the other, like the most spectacular Fourth of July fireworks display he’d ever imagined. When, bare seconds after the hit, flame reached the main magazine, the whole ship exploded in a spectacular fireball. One of the cruiser’s big guns hung suspended on top of the flames for what had to be close to half a minute. But when the flames and smoke finally cleared, only roiled water remained. Nothing else was left to show where six or seven hundred men had been-no boats, no wreckage, nothing.

“Jesus,” Sam said, and looked away. Imagining the same thing happening to the Dakota was all too easy.

Kidde kept peering out of his slit. “You can see the limeys, all right,” he said. “Won’t be long now”-the same thought Carsten had had a minute or so earlier.

As the main armament thundered again, Lieutenant Commander Grady stuck his head in to say, “Pick your own targets, boys. Ship’s movements will be to give the main armament the best possible firing opportunities. Us small fry down here, we have to take whatever we can find.” He hurried off again.

Not much later, Kidde whooped with glee. “Sure as hell, that’s a British cruiser out there,” he said, pointing. He stared into the rangefinder and twiddled with the controls. “I make it about twelve thousand yards,” he said, and shouted orders to the gun layers, who swung their cranks to shift the five-inch gun to bear on the foe. “Fire for effect!” the gunner’s mate yelled.

Grunting, Luke Hoskins grabbed a heavy shell and passed it to Carsten, who slammed it into the breech, dogged it shut, and nodded to Kidde. The chief of the gun crew yanked the lanyard. The cannon roared and jerked. Cordite fumes filled the sponson.

“Short,” Kidde announced, watching the splash, as Sam, coughing, got the casing out of the breech and threw it down to the deck with a clang. Pete Jonas, the other shell-jerker, passed him a new round. Ten seconds after the first one, it was on its way. No more than half a dozen rounds had gone out before Kidde whooped to announce a hit, and then another one.

And then another hit announced itself. It felt as if God had booted the Dakota right in the tail. All at once, she swerved sharply, and missed colliding with the next battleship in line, the Idaho, by what seemed bare inches. “What the hell-?” Pete Jonas burst out.

“We just lost our steering,” Hiram Kidde said matter-of-factly. “Goddamn limeys got lucky.” He looked out to see where they were headed, and his next words were much less calm: “Lord have mercy, we’re steaming straight for the British line of battle.”

Straight was not the operative word; the Dakota was swinging through an enormous circle. “Rudder must be jammed hard to port,” Carsten said. “We’ve got to keep moving best way we can, though. If we’re dead in the water, we’re dead.”

They passed a burning U.S. cruiser. Afterwards, Sam figured that did more good than harm: the fire that had been directed against the less heavily armored vessel now fell on the obviously out of control Dakota. At the time, it was a distinction he could have done without.

“What do we do if we get right in among ’em?” he asked, that being the worst thing he could think of.

“Sink,” Kidde answered, which was very much to the point but not what Carsten wanted to hear. The gunner’s mate added, “Hurt as many of ’em as bad as we can before we go down.”

With nothing better to do, they kept firing as they spun within eight or nine thousand yards of the British line of battle. Smoke enveloped the enemy battleships: some the smoke of damage, more from the big guns the ships carried. Shells from those big guns and from the enemies’ secondary armament rained down on the Dakota.

Sam lost count of how many times the ship was bracketed. Seawater from near misses rained down on her, too, and fragments pattering like deadly hail. And, every so often, she would shake when another shell struck home. Damage-control parties-everyone not serving a gun or the engines-dashed along the corridors, fighting fire and flood.

“Thank God, we’re turning away,” Kidde said, peering out through the vision slit. That meant that, for the time being, his gun didn’t bear on the British fleet. A chance to take it easy, Carsten thought. But then the gunner’s mate let out a hoarse, vile exclamation. “We got more ships bearin’ down on us from the north.” He stared at them, out there in the distance. His voice cracked in anger: “Those aren’t limeys-they’re Japs!”

“I don’t care who they are,” Luke Hoskins said. “We’ll smash ’em up.”

Methodically, as if they were a pair of machines, he and Pete Jonas took turns passing shells to Carsten. “Cap’n” Kidde yelled like a wild man when they started scoring hits on the Japanese. “The limeys, now, they’re good,” he said. “Till the slant-eyed boys messed with us, the only fight they ever picked was with Spain. Hey, I can lick my grandmother easy enough, too, but that don’t mean I’m a tough guy.”

Carsten heard that, but paid it little mind. He was a machine himself, a sweating machine coughing in the fume-laden air but doing his job with unthinking accuracy and perfection. Load, close, wait for the round to go, get rid of the case, load, close…

Shells kept falling around and sometimes on the Dakota. Were they British or Japanese? They didn’t leave calling cards-not calling cards of that sort, anyhow. From not far away, Lieutenant Commander Grady screamed for sand to douse a fire. Nothing exploded, so Sam supposed the fire got doused. The guns in the turrets kept thundering away. So did all the weapons of the secondary armament that would bear on the foe.

“Christ on His cross,” Kidde said, “we’re going around through our own fleet again.”

He was right. Carsten got glimpses of other ships with spouts from near misses splashing up around them and still others aflame. But the U.S. ships were shooting back, too; smoke from the guns, smoke from the fires, and smoke from the stacks all dimmed the bright sunshine of the tropical Pacific. “Are we winning or losing?” Sam asked.

“Damned if I know,” “Cap’n” Kidde answered. “If we live and we make it back to Honolulu, we can find out in the papers.” He barked laughter, then coughed harshly. “And if we don’t live, what the hell difference does it make, anyway?”

Luke Hoskins came up with another good question: “We ever going to get this beast under control again? We’ve done one whole circle, just about, and now…”

With the five-inch gun screened from the enemy by the bulk of the ship, Sam took his place at a vision slit beside Hiram Kidde. He saw they’d come round behind most of the American fleet, and…He grimaced in dismay. “Looks like we’re going to swing toward them again,” he said.

Kidde whistled between his teeth. “It does, don’t it? Well, that means the gun’ll bear again. Get your ass back there, Sam. If they take us out, it ain’t gonna be like we didn’t give ’em something to remember us by.”

“Yeah,” Carsten said, and then, “You know, I wouldn’t mind that much if they remembered some other guys instead.” Pete Jonas handed him a shell. He slammed it into the breech.

Newsboys shouted their papers as Sylvia Enos walked from her apartment building to the trolley stop: “Battle of the Three Navies! Read all about it!” “Extra! USS Dakota in circle of death!” “American fleet crushes the Japs and limeys off Sandwich Islands!”

Sylvia paid her two cents and bought a Boston Globe. She read it on the way to the canning plant. As often seemed true in the war, the headlines screamed of victory while the stories that followed showed the headlines didn’t know what they were talking about.

The U.S. fleet hadn’t crushed those of the two enemy empires, any more than the German High Seas Fleet had crushed the Royal Navy in the North Sea the month before. The papers had shouted hosannas about that, too, till it became obvious that, even after the fight, the bulk of the German Navy couldn’t break out to help the U.S. Atlantic Fleet against the British and the French and the Rebs.

In the Pacific, though, what seemed to be a drawn battle worked for the United States, not against them as it had on the other side of the world. Where the Germans hadn’t been able to break out into the Atlantic, the British and Japanese hadn’t been able to break in toward the Sandwich Islands, which remained firmly in American hands.

Though the Globe hadn’t been the paper whose headlines screeched loudest about the Dakota, its account of the fight did prominently mention the battleship’s double circuit straight into the guns of the opposing fleets. “The valiant vessel sustained twenty-nine hits,” the reporter said, “nine definitely from the enemy’s large-caliber guns, eleven definitely from smaller shells, and nine that might have come from either. Although drawing thirty-six feet of water at the end of the battle, as opposed to thirty-one at the outset, the Dakota and the heroes aboard her also inflicted heavy damage on the ships of the foe and, miraculously, suffered only fourteen killed and seventeen wounded, a tribute to her design, to her metal, and to the mettle of her crew.”

Sylvia left the newspaper on the trolley seat when she got out and hurried over to the plant: let someone else have a free look. She’d wondered why the Navy, in its wisdom, had sent George to the Mississippi rather than the open sea. Now she thanked God for it. The Dakota had got off lightly as far as casualties were concerned, but what about the cruisers and destroyers and battleships that had gone to the bottom with all hands, or near enough to make no difference?

Going down with all hands could happen to a monitor, too. Sylvia made herself not think about that. Coming up the street toward the factory was Isabella Antonelli. Sylvia waved to her friend. “Good morning,” she called.

“Good morning,” Mrs. Antonelli answered. Seeing her, though, did not take Sylvia’s mind as far away from the war as she would have liked. Isabella Antonelli wore black from head to foot, with a black veil coming down from her hat over her face. In her imperfect English, she said, “All this talk of the big Navy fight, I think of you, I think of your husband, I pray he is all right-” She crossed herself.

“He’s fine, yes. He wasn’t anywhere near this fight out on the ocean, thank God,” Sylvia said.

“Thank God, yes,” Mrs. Antonelli said. They walked into the plant and punched their time cards together. As Sylvia did whenever she talked about the war with her friend, she felt faintly guilty that George still lived while Mr. Antonelli had met a bullet or a shell somewhere up in Quebec. The black-bordered casualty lists the papers printed every day showed how easily it could have been the other way round.

She welcomed the mesmerizing monotony of the line that sent cans into her labeling machine and then out again. If she concentrated on the work, she didn’t have to think about the war-although she wouldn’t have been here without the war. She would have been at home with George, Jr., and Mary Jane.

Was what she had now better or worse? Having George away-and in harm’s way-tipped the balance, of course. Suppose George were home-or home as often as he was when he went out on his fishing runs. What then? The children sometimes drove her mad. Even so, she missed them fiercely every moment she was away from them.

Mr. Winter came limping down the line to see how things were going. He smiled at her. She nodded back.

“Good morning, Mrs. Enos,” the foreman said, smiling to show off his bad teeth. “How are you this morning? Your husband wasn’t in the big battle the papers are talking about, I hope?”

“I’m fine, thank you, Mr. Winter,” she answered. “My husband, too, so far as I know. He’s on the Mississippi, not in the Pacific.”

“That’s right, you told me. I just remembered he was in the Navy, is all.” Winter shook his head in chagrin, whether real or put on she couldn’t tell. Then he went back to business, which relieved her: “Machine behaving all right?”

“It seems to be, yes.” With someone else, Sylvia might have joked that saying it was working well would make it break down. The thought was in her mind, but she kept it there. The less she had to do with Mr. Winter outside of things that were strictly business, the better she liked it.

He nodded to her. “That’s fine, then.” With another nod, he headed over to the machine Isabella Antonelli ran. “Hello, ’Bella. How are you this morning?”

The paste reservoir on Sylvia’s machine ran low just then. She had to bend down, pick up the bucket of thick white paste, and refill the reservoir, all without missing a beat on the three levers she had to pull for every can of mackerel feeding through to be labeled. While she was doing that, she felt like a juggler with too many balls in the air.

It also distracted her from the conversation the foreman and Isabella Antonelli were having. She couldn’t have heard all of it anyhow, not over the unending clatter and rumble of the line that moved the cans ahead and the racket of the machines along the way, but she might have heard some. She wanted to hear some. She’d never noticed Mr. Winter using a shortened version of Isabella’s name before. Did that mean he hadn’t done it before, or that she hadn’t noticed?

Like everyone else at the canning plant, Isabella Antonelli had taken off her hat when she started work. That was all the more necessary for her, what with the veil depending from the hat. Before heading toward the next machine on the line, Mr. Winter chucked her under the chin, said something Sylvia didn’t catch, and made as if to kiss her on the cheek but didn’t. He was laughing when he left her station.

Sylvia concentrated on her own machine with a fury whose intensity startled her and was only made worse because it was so futile. She jerked the levers so hard, she jammed the machine, which shut down the whole line till she could clear it.

Mr. Winter came over at a limping trot. “Thought you said it was going good,” he said. “You shut us down, it costs the owners money. They don’t like that, Mrs. Enos. They don’t like that even a little bit.”

“I’m sorry,” she lied. “It was behaving fine till a minute ago.” She used a screwdriver to lever a tin can out of the works. “Let me just check.” She pulled the lever that had started the trouble. It functioned smoothly now. “You can start things up again.”

“All right.” He gave her a grudging nod. “You fixed it fast enough, I will say that.” Cans started flowing once more.

Restraining the anger she’d taken out on the labeling machine made her stomach hurt. She was glad when the lunch whistle blew. Picking up her dinner pail, she fell into step beside Isabella Antonelli. It was hot and muggy outside the factory building, and the view was only of another canning plant across the street, but that still meant cooler weather and a prettier prospect than inside.

They sat down on a bench. Sylvia had a fish sandwich-leftovers from the night before-and Mrs. Antonelli some sort of funny-shaped noodles in tomato sauce. After they’d eaten for a while, Sylvia asked, “Is he bothering you?”

“Who?” Isabella was intent on her food. They had only half an hour before they went back to work.

“Him. Mr. Winter. The foreman. I saw him, what he did this morning. That’s not right.” Remembering, Sylvia got angry all over again.

To her own mortification, a certain amount of relief accompanied the anger. He’s not bothering me, thank God, was the nasty little thought somewhere near the bottom of her mind. Recognizing it for what it was only made her more furious, both at the foreman and at herself.

“Mr. Winter?” Isabella’s eyes grew wide for a moment. Then, to Sylvia’s surprise, she laughed. “Oh, that. No, that is nothing much. I do not worry about it. He is a lonely man, Mr. Winter. And I, now I am lonely, too.” She set down her fork and touched the sleeve of the black dress.

“But-” Sylvia began. She stopped, not knowing how to go on. If, God forbid, something had happened to George, she wouldn’t have been able to look at a man for years. She was sure of it. She was so sure of it, she hadn’t imagined anyone else could be different.

Isabella Antonelli said, “I do not think anything will come of it. If anything does come of it, that would not be so bad.” For a moment, she looked altogether pragmatic. “He is a Catholic. I have found out.”

“Is he? Have you?” Sylvia didn’t scratch her head, but she felt like it. The more you looked at the world, the more complicated it got.

The white man in the munitions plant hiring office scribbled something on the form in front of him, then looked across the table at Scipio. “Well, boy, you sound like you’ll do,” he said in the sharp accent typical of Columbia, South Carolina. “Why don’t you let me have your passbook so we can get this here all settled right and proper?”

Scipio’s heart leaped up into his throat. He’d expected the demand. No Negro in the CSA could have failed to expect the demand. Since the start of the war, things were supposed to have loosened up. That was how it had looked when he was the butler back at Marshlands, anyhow. God only knew what the aftermath of the rebellion had done toward tightening things again, though.

God knew, and he was about to find out. Donning what he hoped was an ingratiating smile, he said, “Ain’t got none, suh. I used to, yes suh, but I plumb lost it in the ruction.”

“I bet you did,” the clerk said with a thin smile. “You talk like a nigger from further down on the Congaree-that right, Nero?”

“Yes, suh,” Scipio said. Nero was one of the commonest names Negro men bore. He wondered what the white man-whose desk bore a little placard proclaiming him to be Mr. Staunton-would have thought had he suddenly started his other way of speaking. He didn’t intend doing anything so foolish. Talking like an educated white might give him away and would surely get him tagged as uppity. He couldn’t afford that, not if he wanted work.

“Let’s see your hands,” Staunton said suddenly. Trying not to show any reluctance, Scipio displayed them. That unpleasant smile flashed across the clerk’s face again. “Not a field nigger-a house nigger, I reckon. And you don’t have a passbook? My, my. What were you doing, these past few months?”

That hit too close to the center of the target. Scipio said, “A minute ago, suh, you says you wants to hire me. Now you talkin’ like I was one o’ dey bad niggers raise all de ruction.” He wanted to flee. Only a well-founded suspicion that he wouldn’t make it outside the door kept him standing where he was.

“Oh, I’ll hire you,” Staunton said. He lowered his voice. “For niggers without passbooks, though, we got a special arrangement. Have to get you a new book, right? Lots of patrollers around these days, that’s a fact.”

“Yes, suh,” Scipio said again. Now he stood at ease once more. Staunton wasn’t going to betray him, just shake him down. “How much I gots to pay you, git de new book?” He also spoke quietly.

“Ain’t you a smart nigger?” By the way the clerk’s pale eyes sparked, that was more warning than compliment. “Half your pay the first month,” Staunton said, greed evidently overcoming suspicion. “End of the month, you be a good boy, you get yourself a book. Understand?”

“Yes, suh.” The repetition was getting monotonous. Scipio let out a mournful sigh. “Not much left fo’ me.” At the start of the war, a dollar and a quarter a day would have been good money for a Negro, and half that survivable for a month. Wages and prices had gone up a good deal the past two years, though.

“Nigger without a passbook ain’t gonna get a better deal no place else,” Staunton said, and that, odds on, was true.

Scipio sighed again. He’d be drinking water and eating cornmeal mush for the next month, no two ways about it-and that with sleeping in the cheapest flophouse he could find. After Marshlands, even after the hectic life as part of the ruling council of the Congaree Socialist Republic, it had all the earmarks of a thoroughly joyless existence.

“God damn the Reds,” he muttered. Nobody had bothered to listen to him, though he’d warned again and again that the uprising would lead only to disaster. Having acquired a fair smattering of a classical education at Marshlands, he found himself wishing Cassandra were a masculine name. He would have used it for an alias instead of Nero.

Mr. Staunton heard what he said, and interpreted it his own way. “God damn the Reds is right, Nero,” he said. “Weren’t for them, wouldn’t hardly have to worry about passbooks at all, not the way things were going. We wanted bodies so bad, we didn’t care. But now it’s gonna cost you money to get fixed up right, on account of what they did. Too bad, boy.” He spoke with the soppy condescension that seemed to be as close as a Confederate white could come to showing sympathy for a black.

“When do I start?” Scipio asked.

“Tomorrow morning, seven o’clock,” the clerk answered. He shoved the form across the desk at Scipio and handed him a pen. “Put your mark right on the line here. We’ll get you a time card made. Foreman’ll punch it for you-you don’t need to worry about pickin’it out. Just so you know to tell him, you’re Nero number three.”

Scipio placed an X on the line the clerk indicated. By what he saw of the form, his spelling and handwriting were considerably better than Staunton’s. He didn’t aim to show that. The less the white man knew about him, the better he liked it.

But, even though he’d written an X, the way he’d taken the pen, as if his hand was accustomed to it, made the clerk’s eyes narrow. “House nigger,” Staunton said, half to himself. “You read and write some, don’t you, boy?”

“Some, yes, suh,” Scipio answered cautiously. Damn it, why couldn’t he have dealt with a dull, bored white clerk rather than an alert, grasping one?

But Staunton visibly decided not to make an issue of it. “Go on, get out of here,” he said. “You ain’t here at seven sharp tomorrow, don’t ever come round again, neither.” He pushed his chair back from his desk and swiveled so he could put Scipio’s paperwork in a file cabinet. That was the first time the Negro had the chance to see his right leg was missing from halfway down the thigh.

After that, Scipio got out of there in a hurry. He had a couple of dollars in his pocket, from odd jobs he’d done on farms and in little towns before he decided the big city was safer. As he walked along Columbia’s busy streets, he wondered if he’d made a mistake.

Probably not, he decided. Negroes were on the streets, and a lot of them looked as ragged as he did. Soldiers tramped along the streets, too, some of them regulars in butternut, some recalled militia in old-fashioned gray that made them look like policemen. They didn’t seem to be checking blacks’ papers, just showing themselves to keep trouble from breaking out.

Columbia had seen trouble during the Red insurrections. It was a city of fine and stately homes and shops, many of them dating from before the War of Secession. Here and there, a block would have a house missing, like a man with a missing front tooth. A couple of places in town, whole blocks were missing, even the rubble cleared away. The Negroes might have lost, but they’d put up a fight.

Much good it did them, Scipio thought gloomily. He ducked into a store whose sign forthrightly proclaimed CHEAP CLOTHES and bought a pair of dungarees and a couple of collarless cotton shirts. He wouldn’t be able to afford any new clothes for the next month, not on sixty-two and a half cents a day he wouldn’t.

A bowl of thin stew cost him another fifteen cents, and a mattress in a tiny, airless cubicle a quarter on top of that. He was left with the munificent sum of half a dollar with which to face the world. It was Wednesday night. Payday would be Friday. He had enough for a bed tomorrow night, and for some bread or mush to keep the hole in his belly from getting any worse. Sighing, he tried to sleep.

On that uncomfortable bed, in that uncomfortable roomlet, waking up in time to be at the munitions plant was not the problem. Sleeping at all before then was. When dawn began showing through the small, rectangular window that wouldn’t open, he gave up, put on the dungarees and one of the shirts he’d bought the evening before, and then discovered he had to pay the flophouse proprietor a dime to watch the clothes he had left so they’d be there when he got back. Day-old bread, he thought, and sighed again.

“Nero number three, eh? All right, you’re on time, boy,” the foreman said when he got to the factory: grudging approval, but approval. The white man punched his card into the clock, then took him back into the factory. “They stack the crates of empty shells here, at the end of this line,” the fellow said, pointing. “You haul ’em over there, where they pick ’em up to be filled. You got that?”

“Yes, suh,” Scipio said. Several crates already stood there. “I do ’em one at a time by hand, suh?”

“’Less you got a servant to do ’em for you, that’s what you do, by Jesus,” the foreman said. “I wanted me a butler, I’d’ve hired a nigger wearin’ different clothes.” He laughed at his own joke.

Scipio, luckily, managed to keep his face straight. “Don’t mind workin’, suh,” he said. “Ain’t what I mean. Jus’ thinkin’ that, you give me a hand truck, I could do mo’ work in de same time.”

The foreman laughed again. “First time I ever heard of a nigger wanting to do more work, ’stead of less.” He rubbed his chin. “It ain’t the worst idea I ever heard, though. Tell you what-you do it this way for today. We’ll see what happens tomorrow. I got to talk with a couple people first.”

“Yes, suh,” Scipio said again. If they think it’s a good idea, I’m going to take the credit for it, was what the white man meant. Scipio couldn’t do anything about that. He strode over to the crates, picked one up, and carried it to where the foreman had told him to put it.

It was heavy. The rough wood bit into his hands. The edge of the crate struck his thighs halfway between knee and hip. He’d be bruised there by evening-hell, he’d be bruised there by noon. He walked back and got another crate. The foreman nodded, satisfied, and went back to supervising check-in.

A Negro in good, well-made work clothes picked up the crate Scipio had set down. The two black man stared at each other. Scipio spoke first. He had to speak first, before the other man used his true name. “How you is, Jonah?” he said. “You ’member ol’ Nero, eh?”

Jonah had been a field hand at Marshlands. He and his woman had gone into Columbia looking for factory work not long after the war started, and not even Anne Colleton had been able to get them back. “Nero,” he said now, after a brief, thoughtful pause. “Yeah, I ’member you good, Nero. So now we is workin’ together again, is we?”

“Dis world a small place,” Scipio said solemnly. He wished it hadn’t been quite so small. If Jonah felt like betraying him, he could. They’d got on well enough at the plantation, but there was always the distinction between house nigger and field nigger. And Jonah might well have heard of the role he’d played in the Congaree Socialist Republic. If, like a good many Negroes, he disapproved of the uprising…

Then Jonah smiled and said, “You come home fo’ supper wid me tonight, Nero. Letitia, she glad to see an ol’ friend.”

“T’ank you,” Scipio said. “I do dat.” It would get him fed and let him save what little money he had left. And it meant-Lord, how he hoped it meant! — Jonah wasn’t going to turn him in to the Confederate authorities. He picked up another clanking crate of shell casings. It hardly seemed to weigh a thing.

The hall was packed. The hot, muggy air would have been thick enough to slice even had it been empty. A small, forlorn electric fan did overmatched battle against the heat of too many bodies, against the fact that a lot of those bodies hadn’t bathed quite so recently as they might have, and against enough cigar, cigarette, and pipe smoke to make Flora Hamburger think of poison gas.

Coughing a little, she turned to Maria Tresca. “They’ve come out, no two ways about it,” she said.

Maria nodded. “That works for you, not against you,” she said. “The regulars would sooner see Herman Bruck with the nomination, even after Remembrance Day.” She sniffed; the smoky air turned the sniff into a cough louder than Flora’s. “They’re reactionaries, that’s what they are. How can they be reactionaries and Socialists at the same time? My sister Angelina never was.”

“When they think of it, they’re progressive,” Flora said with a shrug. “You have to think about your ideology; if you don’t think about it, you haven’t got one. But if you don’t think about your social attitudes, it’s not that you don’t have any, it’s just that yours are the same as your neighbor’s.” She sighed. “And if your neighbors are petty bourgeoisie and proletarians who aspire to the petty bourgeoisie-”

Maria Tresca’s face darkened into a frown. “In that case, they might as well be Democrats.”

“No.” Flora shook her head. “That’s not the problem. The problem is making them think about social issues. When they do think instead of feeling, they’re sound enough. They have to stop taking those concerns for granted, that’s all.”

“Or else the revolution, when it comes, will sweep them away with it,” Maria said. “Sometimes I think you’re too gentle, Flora. My sister was the same way, and look what it got her.” Angelina Tresca had died in the Remembrance Day riots the year before. “If they cannot adapt, they deserve to be swept away.” Maria was as full of revolutionary consciousness as anyone Flora knew: frighteningly full sometimes.

“Sometimes the uprising comes too soon,” Flora said. “Look at the Confederacy. The proletariat failed there-nothing but banditry left now.”

“Race mystified the white proletarians, splitting the laboring class,” Maria returned. “That won’t happen here in the United States. When the workers rise up against the trusts and the capitalists, they’ll all rise together and overthrow the rotten system.” She sounded messianically certain.

Up on the platform at the front of the hall, the chairman rapped loudly for order. Slowly, Saul Masliansky got some small semblance of it. When it didn’t come fast enough to suit him, he rapped again, this time as if firing a gun. “Be quiet, there!” he shouted, first in Yiddish, then in English. “Do you want to caucus, or do you just want to talk?”

“With this crowd, that’s about even money,” Flora said with a smile.

“You should have accepted somebody besides Masliansky,” Maria Tresca said, not smiling back. “He favors Herman.”

“I know. Everyone who could chair this caucus favors Herman, as far as I can tell,” Flora answered. “But Saul is honest. When he sees what the people want, he won’t thwart them.”

“Ha!” Maria said darkly. “He’s assistant editor for the Daily Forward. He’s going to go right on favoring Bruck, because Herman got everything he knows about Socialism straight out of the newspaper.”

That was so unfair, and at the same time so delicious, that Flora couldn’t help giggling. She’d expected to be too nervous here to see straight, let alone to speak well, and now she wasn’t any more. She hoped the delightful, flighty feeling would last. “He’s honest,” she said again. “I’ve seen him admit he’s wrong. How many others who might have done the job can you say that about?”

“We’re not going to have a caucus if you people can’t keep quiet,” Saul Masliansky said, like a schoolteacher confronting a classroom full of hooligans. He didn’t look like a teacher, or like an editor, either. With an embroidered vest and a high, pale forehead, what he looked like was a professional gambler. He played his trump card with the air of a gambler pulling an ace out of his sleeve, too: “Do you want to hear the candidates? We’ve agreed we’re all going to support whichever one we choose, so picking the better one strikes me as a pretty good idea. Anybody who thinks different can go outside to talk.”

“Anyone who thinks different can geh in drerd,” Maria Tresca said. Flora laughed again. Maria had acquired an excellent, often scurrilous command of Yiddish.

“Mr. Chairman,” somebody called, “I move that, when we pick, we pick by secret ballot.”

“Second!” Herman Bruck shouted.

“You keep quiet,” Masliansky barked at him. “Candidates aren’t members of the caucus. You can’t second. You talk to us, and that’s all. Do I hear a proper second?” He did, a moment later. The motion passed on a voice vote.

Member or not, Flora shouted against it. “If you can’t stand up and be counted at a caucus, when can you?” she demanded.

“You’re right-and you’re wrong,” Maria said. “Herman thinks secrecy will work for him, but I think he’s wrong. More people will go against the bigwigs if they aren’t looking over their shoulders.”

“Maybe,” Flora said.

Saul Masliansky plied his gavel once more. “Will the contenders please come forward?” he said.

“There he goes, selling his paper again,” some wit shouted, and got a laugh.

Flora made her way up to the platform. So did Herman Bruck, in a dark gray suit that shouted respectability at the world. Had Flora been respectable in the same sort of way, she wouldn’t have presumed to seek the Congressional nomination in the first place.

Herman nodded to her. He took her more seriously than he had before her Remembrance Day speech, but not so seriously as he would have taken, say, Saul Masliansky. Masliansky, after all, was a man, not someone he’d pestered to go to the cinema with him.

The chairman said, “We tossed a coin to see who would talk to you when. Our esteemed comrade, Mr. Herman Bruck here, won the toss. He chose to speak first. Herman Bruck!”

“Friends, Myron Zuckerman gave our district the best years of his life,” Bruck said, and won sympathetic applause from everyone who revered Zuckerman’s memory-which meant from everyone in the hall. “I aim to go to Philadelphia to do my best to fill his shoes, to keep the Fourteenth Ward as it has been, at the forefront in the fight against the trusts, and, I hope-alevai-to work with the next president of the United States of America, Senator Eugene V. Debs of Indiana!”

The Socialists’ national convention wouldn’t come until next month, but Debs’ nomination to face TR was a forgone conclusion. Again, Herman Bruck got loud cheers. Flora did her best not to let that worry her. He’d been applauded for invoking Zuckerman’s name, and again for invoking that of Debs. She wondered when he’d say anything about himself that deserved cheers.

As far as she was concerned, he never did. That didn’t mean he didn’t get applause, only that he was breathtakingly conventional in every position he took. He might as well have said, I agree with what all the other Socialists think, half a dozen times and then sat down.

After a while-after what seemed to Flora a very long while-he did sit down. Saul Masliansky said, “And now, Miss Flora Hamburger will tell you why she thinks Herman Bruck has been talking nonsense for the past twenty minutes.” He grinned at her.

It wasn’t quite the introduction she’d expected, but it would serve. She could make it serve, though that meant junking the opening she’d worked out in advance. She decided to take the chance: “Herman Bruck doesn’t talk nonsense. He’s a good Socialist. If you choose him, I will support him-that’s what the caucus is all about. But-”

She took a deep breath. “Herman Bruck is safe. Is being safe what the Socialist Party, the party of revolution, stands for? I don’t think so. He tells you what we’ve done in the past. He tells you what he’ll do in the future if you choose him as your candidate. The one is just the same as the other. If we elect people who will go on doing the same things, are we radicals or are we reactionaries?” The talk with Maria before she’d come up here was paying dividends-an alarmingly capitalistic thought for a would-be Socialist candidate.

“If you want life to go on as it always has, if you don’t want to work for radical change in this country, if you don’t want peace between us and our neighbors, you might as well vote for a Democrat. If you want to let Teddy Roosevelt know we don’t intend to let war mean unending oppression of the proletariat, you’ll choose me.”

She embroidered on that theme for a while, then returned to the other: “As I say, Herman Bruck is a sound man. He is a safe man. I think he’s sound and safe enough to lose this November. If you want someone to run hard and do everything she can to get this seat out of TR’s clutches, you’ll vote for me today and you’ll vote for me again in the fall.”

She stepped back. She thought she got as much applause as Herman Bruck had. More? She couldn’t tell. Saul Masliansky said, “Now we fight it out. We have a waiting room for the two of you. We have two waiting rooms, in fact, if you’d rather-?”

“It’s all right,” Flora said. “We aren’t enemies.” Herman Bruck nodded.

They didn’t say much to each other in the waiting room. Flora sat in a hard chair under one of the electric lamps hanging from the ceiling. Bruck smoked a cigarette, and another, and another. Through the closed door, Flora listened to the shouts from the caucus. She wished she were out there. She and Bruck weren’t members, so she couldn’t be.

After what seemed like forever, the door opened. She and Herman Bruck both sprang to their feet, facing Masliansky with the same eager anxiety fathers in a hospital maternity-ward waiting room showed when the doctor came in. But only one of them would get to keep this baby; like the one in the biblical story of Solomon, it was indivisible.

“Mazeltov, Flora,” the caucus chairman said.

Bruck stubbed out his last cigarette under the heel of his gleaming shoe. “Mazeltov,” he echoed. “Anything I can do, you know I will.” He managed a joke, something rare for him: “That’s true, even though you won’t go out with me.”

“Thank you.” Flora felt light-headed. “Talk like that more often, and I might. But now”-she could hardly believe it-“let’s put this seat back where it belongs.”

“I am godalmighty sick of troop trains,” Jefferson Pinkard announced to anybody who would listen as the one on which he was riding rumbled west through Texas toward the front line, which lay somewhere east of Lubbock.

Nobody said anything. As best Jeff could tell, nobody had the energy to say anything. It was hot and muggy outside. That meant it was hotter and muggier on the train. Every window that would open was open. The breeze that came in was like the breath of hell, the occasional cinder or tiny bit of coal blowing in with the breeze only adding to the resemblance.

Pinkard looked outside. Texas, as far as he could see, was nothing but miles and miles of miles and miles. It had been green and lush when the troop train pounded out of Arkansas. Some of the men who sounded as if they knew what they were talking about said parts of it were as swampy and wet as Louisiana, full of alligators and who could say what all else.

This part of Texas wasn’t like that. If God had taken an iron about the size of South Carolina and pressed everything here down flat, that might have given the countryside its look. It was as hot as if it had just been ironed, too. They called it prairie, but wasn’t the prairie supposed to be green with grass? This was yellow at best, more often brown.

“I never left home till they conscripted me,” Jeff went on after a while. “Way things look here, I ain’t never going to leave again once the war’s over, neither.” He sighed. “Birmingham, now, Birmingham is green all the time. Even in winter, most of the grass stays green. Does it ever even get green here?”

“I don’t know why you complain so much, amigo,” Hip Rodriguez said from the seat behind him. “This land here, this is better than what I was farming.”

“Better?” Pinkard awkwardly turned around to stare at the little Sonoran. “How in blazes could this be better than anything?”

“It is very easy.” As Rodriguez made his points, he ticked them off on his fingers. “It is good flat land, not mountains like where I come from. It has not so much calor-heat. It gets more water-you can see.”

“Maybe you can see,” Pinkard said stubbornly. “Looks dry as the desert the Israelites walked through to me.”

Rodriguez laughed in his face. “You do not know what a desert is, if you call this a desert.” Only two things kept Jeff from starting a fight then and there. One was that he was in the Army, so he’d get in trouble. The other was that he really didn’t know what a desert was like. Next to Alabama land, what they had here was pretty appalling. He tried to picture in his mind the kind of land that would make west Texas look good.

Mountains he could imagine. But land that was hotter and drier than this? If this wasn’t hell, that would have to be.

The train chugged to a stop outside a little town called Post. To Jeff Pinkard’s jaundiced eye, the town, as they rolled through it, seemed as sunbaked and defeated as the country surrounding it. The wooden buildings hadn’t been painted or whitewashed for years, and most of the timber was more nearly gray than brown or yellow. Even the bricks seemed faded from their proper, bright oranges.

When Pinkard, grunting and sweating under the weight of his kit, came out of the car in which he’d been ensconced so long and so uncomfortably, he heard artillery off in the distance. When he’d been fighting the Negroes of the Black Belt Socialist Republic, that had been an encouraging sound: his side had the guns, and the enemy didn’t. It wasn’t going to be like that here.

Captain Connolly addressed the formed-up company: “We are going to stop the damnyankees, men. Not only are we going to stop them, we are going to throw them back into New Mexico where they belong.” That got a few yips and cheers from the men, but not many. It was too hot. They were too tired.

Connolly went on, “This isn’t going to be the kind of fighting they have on the other side of the Mississippi. Too many miles for that, and not enough men filling them. If we dig trenches, they go around, and the same the other way. Not a lot of railroads around here, either. Nobody can keep big armies supplied away from the tracks. So we’re going to drive the Yankees back toward Lubbock, and we are going to have detachments out to make sure they don’t get around us while we’re doing it. That last is what the particular task of this company will be. Any questions?”

Nobody said anything. The captain didn’t even give the order to march. He just started marching, and the men followed: not only the company, but a couple of regiments’ worth. Pinkard and his companions were somewhere in the middle of the column. The dust was of a slightly redder shade than the butternut of his uniform. It got in his nose. It got in his eyes. It got in his mouth, so his teeth crunched whenever they came together.

He wasn’t sure whether this had been a road before the war started. It was a road now, a road defined by marching men and by the ruts of wagons and those of motor trucks. It led to a bridge over a river that didn’t look wide or deep enough to need bridging.

“If that poor thing was in Alabama,” he said to Stinky Salley, “they’d ship it back to its mama, on account of it’s too little to show itself in public.”

“We’re not in Alabama any more,” Salley replied with his usual annoying precision. “Or maybe you hadn’t noticed.”

“Oh, put a sock in it, Stinky,” Pinkard answered, too weary even to threaten doing any of the drastic things Salley so richly deserved. The captain came by just then, making sure everybody in the company-less a couple of men who’d passed out, overcome by the heat-was in good shape. Jeff called to him: “Sir, what river is this?”

“Unless the map they gave me is a liar-and God knows it’s possible, way the hell out here-this is the Double Mountain fork of the Brazos,” Connolly answered. Answering the next question before Pinkard could ask it, he went on, “From what they say, it’s supposed to have a lot more water in it in the wintertime.”

“Couldn’t hardly have much less,” Pinkard said.

The bridge, when he got to it, looked to have been there a while; it wasn’t a recent erection by the Confederate Army Engineering Corps. That argued the road had been there a while, too. He wondered where it ended up going. As far as he could tell, it was a road to nowhere.

They camped a little north of the Double Mountain fork. Try as he would, Jeff couldn’t see the mountains that were supposed to have given the fork its name. The ground was a little higher up ahead, but so what? He supposed that, in these parts, anything high enough to serve as a watershed got reckoned a mountain.

Night fell. It didn’t get any cooler, not so far as Pinkard could tell. He ambled over to a chow wagon. The Negro cook was serving up stale bread, tinned beef, and coffee. “Reckon I’d do just about anything for some of Emily’s fried chicken right about now,” he said mournfully, examining the unappetizing supper.

“Hey, soldier, you’ve got food,” said Sergeant Albert Cross, a veteran with the ribbon for the Purple Heart above his left breast pocket. “Believe me, time’ll come when you’re glad you’ve got anything. Ever carve a steak off a mule three days gone?”

He didn’t sound as if he was joking. He didn’t look as if he was joking, either. Sergeants seemed to have had their sense of humor surgically removed when they were children. Pinkard ate what was set before him. He unrolled his blanket and lay down on top of it. The next thing he knew, the sun was shining in his face.

The force of which he was a part resumed their march not long after sunrise. “We’ll take that high ground,” Stinky Salley declared in his best impression of the Secretary of War, “and then we’ll defend it from the damnyankees when they show up.”

From ahead, tiny in the distance, came the crackle of rifle fire. “Deploy from column into line by the left flank-move!” Captain Connolly shouted. The soldiers moved: awkwardly, because they hadn’t had enough training in such maneuvers before they got thrown into action against the Red rebels.

Out ahead, through the dust of the march, Pinkard saw men on horseback blazing away at the advancing Confederates. Yankee cavalry, he realized. As Connolly had said, the land was wide hereabouts. Cavalry had room to maneuver, as it didn’t farther east.

He didn’t see the field artillery with the horsemen, not even after it started shelling him. He heard a whistle in the air, and then a crash somewhere close by. A moment later, he heard screams. Another whistle, another crash. More screams.

“Get down!” Sergeant Cross screamed. Jeff was already on his belly, wondering how the Negroes in Georgia had fought on without guns to give as they received. At Cross’ order, he and his comrades started shooting at the U.S. cavalrymen. “Nothing to worry about-just a skirmish,” the sergeant said. Pinkard supposed he was right, and found the prospect of a big battle even less appealing than supper the night before.