Walk in Hell

XVIII

Maria Tresca fiddled microscopically with Flora Hamburger’s hat. The Italian woman stepped back to survey the results. “Better,” she said, although Flora, checking the mirror, doubted the naked eye could tell the difference between the way the hat had looked before and how it did now.

“Remember,” Herman Bruck said, “Daniel Miller isn’t stupid. If you make a mistake in this debate, he’ll hurt you with it.”

He looked and sounded anxious. Had he been running against the appointed Democratic congressman, he probably would have made just such a mistake. Maybe he sensed that about himself and set on Flora’s shoulders his worries about what he would have done.

“It will be all right, Herman,” she said patiently. She sounded more patient than she was, and knew it. Beneath her pearl-buttoned shirtwaist, beneath the dark gray pinstriped jacket she wore over it, her heart was pounding. Class warfare in the USA hadn’t reached the point of armed struggle. The confrontation ahead, though, was as close an approach as the country had yet seen. Democrat versus Socialist, established attorney against garment worker’s daughter…here was the class struggle in action.

Someone pounded on the dressing-room door. “Five minutes, Miss Hamburger!” the manager of the Thalia Theatre shouted, as if she were one of the vaudevillians who usually performed here on Bowery. She felt as jumpy as any of those performers on opening night. The manager, who stomped around as if he had weights in his shoes, clumped down the hall and shouted, “Five minutes, Mr. Miller!”

Those last minutes before the debate went by in a blur. The next thing Flora knew, there she stood behind a podium on stage, staring out over the footlights at the packed house: a fuller house than vaudeville usually drew, which was the main reason the manager had rented out the hall tonight. There in the second row sat her parents, her sisters-Sophie with little Yossel in her arms-and her brothers.

And here, at the other podium to her right, stood Congressman Daniel Miller, appointed to the seat she wanted. He wasn’t quite so handsome and debonair as his campaign posters made him out to be, but who was? He looked clever and alert, and the Democrats had the money and the connections to make a strong campaign for whatever candidate they chose.

Up in between the two candidates strode Isidore Rothstein, the Democratic Party chairman for the Fourteenth Ward. A coin toss had made him master of ceremonies rather than his Socialist opposite number. More tosses had determined that Miller would speak first and Flora last.

Rothstein held up his hands. The crowd quieted. “Tonight, we see democracy in action,” he said, making what Flora thought of as unfair use of his party’s name. “In the middle of the greatest war the world has ever known, we come together here to decide which way our district should go, listening to both sides to come to a fair decision.”

Here and there, people in the crowd applauded. Flora wondered how much anything they did here tonight would really matter. The Democrats would keep a strong majority in Congress unless the sky fell. One district-what was one district? But Myron Zuckerman had spent his whole adult life working to improve the lot of the common people. His legacy would be wasted if this Democrat kept this seat to which he had been appointed. Plenty of reason there alone to fight.

“And now,” Isidore Rothstein thundered, a bigger voice than had any business coming out of his plump little body, “Congressman Daniel Miller!” Democrats in the crowd cheered. Socialists hissed and whistled.

Miller said, “Under Teddy Roosevelt, the Democrats have given every American a square deal. We are pledged to an honest day’s pay for an honest day’s work, to treating every individual as an individual and as he deserves”-the code phrase Democrats used when they explained why they were against labor unions-“to the rights of cities and counties and states to govern themselves as far as possible, and to-”

“What about the war?” a Socialist heckler shouted. Before the debate, the two parties had solemnly agreed not to harass each other’s candidates. Both sides had sounded very sincere. Flora hadn’t taken it seriously, and didn’t expect the Democrats had, either.

Daniel Miller was certainly ready for the shout. “And to keeping the commitments made long ago to our friends and allies, I was about to say,” he went on smoothly. “For years, the USA was surrounded by our enemies: by the Confederacy and Canada and England and France, even by the Japanese. Germany was in the same predicament on the European continent. We are both reaching out together for our rightful places in the sun. Not only that, we are winning this war. It hasn’t been so easy as we thought it would be, but what war is? To quit now would be to leave poor Kaiser Bill in the lurch, fighting England and France and Russia all alone, or near enough as makes no difference, and to guarantee that the old powers will hold us down for another fifty years. Do you want that?” He stuck out his chin. In profile, as Flora saw him, his jawline sagged, but from the front he probably looked most impressively political.

She made her own opening statement. “We are winning this war, Mr. Miller says.” She wouldn’t call him Congressman. “If you want to buy a pound of meat, you can go down to the butcher’s shop and get it. If you have to pay twenty dollars for it, you begin to wonder if it’s worth the price. Here we are, almost two and a half years into a fight the Socialist Party never wanted, and what have we got to show for it? Quebec City is still Canadian. Montreal is still Canadian. Toronto is still Canadian. Winnipeg is still Canadian. Richmond is still Confederate. Our own capital is still in Confederate hands, for heaven’s sake.

“And Nashville is still Confederate. Just this past week, the brilliant General Custer, the heroic General Custer, attacked again. And what did he get? Half a mile of ground, moving away from Nashville, mind you, not toward it. And what was the cost? Another division thrown away. Three-quarters of a million dead since 1914, two million wounded, half a million in the enemy’s prisoner-of-war camps. Poor Kaiser Bill!” Her voice dripped venom.

“And will you have all those brave men die in vain?” Daniel Miller demanded. “Will you have the United States abandon the struggle before it’s over, go back to our old borders, tell our enemies, ‘Oh, we’re sorry; we didn’t really mean it’?” He was sarcastic himself. “Once you’ve begun a job of work, you don’t leave it in the middle. We have given as good as we’ve got; we have given better than we’ve got. The Canucks are tottering; the Confederates are about to put rifles into black men’s hands. We are winning, I tell you.”

“So what?” Flora said. The blunt question seemed to catch her opponent by surprise. She repeated it: “So what? What can we win that will bring those boys back to life? What can we win that’s worth a hundredth part of what they paid? Even if we make the CSA make peace instead of the other way round, what difference does it make? Two thousand years ago, there was a king who looked around after a battle and cried out, ‘One more victory like this and I am ruined!’ He could see. He gave up the war. Is the Democratic Party full of blind men?”

“No. We’re full of men who remember what happened in 1862, who remember what happened twenty years later,” Miller shot back. “We’re full of men who believe the United States of America must never be humiliated again, men who believe we must ten times never humiliate ourselves.”

“A man who makes a mistake and backs away from it has sense,” Flora said. “A man who makes a mistake and keeps on with it is a fool. We-”

“Traitor!” came a voice from the crowd. “You’re just a woman. What do you know about what war costs?”

Tight-lipped, Flora pointed to her family. “Sophie, stand up.” Her sister did, still holding little Yossel. “There’s my nephew,” Flora said into sudden silence. “He’ll never know his father, who died on the Roanoke front.” She pointed again. “David, stand up.” The older of her two brothers rose, wearing U.S. green-gray. “Here is my brother. He has leave. He’s just finished his training. He goes to the front day after tomorrow. I know what this war costs.”

The crowd applauded. To her surprise, the heckler subsided. She’d thought the Democrats would have pests more consistent than that fellow.

No matter. She turned to-turned on-Daniel Miller. “You love the war so well, Congressman.” Now she did use the title, etching it with acid. “Where are your hostages to fortune?”

Miller was a little too old to be conscripted himself. He had no brothers. His wife, a woman who looked to be very nice, sat in the audience not far from Flora’s family. With her were her two sons, the older of whom might have been thirteen. Flora had known the Democratic appointee couldn’t well come back if she raised the question, and she’d been hoping she’d get or be able to make the chance to do it.

And, just for a moment, her opponent’s composure cracked. “I honorably served my time in the United States Army,” he said. “I yield to no one in-”

“Nobody was shooting at you then!” Four people, from four different sections of the hall, shouted the same thing at the same time. A storm of applause rose up behind them. Miller looked as if he’d had one of his fancy clients stand up in court and confess: betrayed by circumstances over which he had no control.

The debate went on. Daniel Miller even made a few points about what a Democratic congressman could do for his district that a Socialist couldn’t hope to match. “Wouldn’t you like to have the majority on your side again?” he asked, almost wistfully. It was not the best question, not in a hall full of Jews. When, since the fall of the Second Temple, had they had the majority on their side? And, after the blow Flora had got in, it mattered little.

At last, like a referee separating two weary prizefighters, Isidore Rothstein came out again. “I know you’ll all vote next month,” he told the crowd. “I expect you’ll vote the patriotic way.” Flora glared at the Democratic Party chairman. He had no business-no business but the business of politics-getting in a dig like that.

Now more like a corner man than a referee, Rothstein led Miller away. Flora had to go offstage by herself. Only when she was walking down the dark, narrow corridor to the dressing room did she fully realize what she’d done. Her feet seemed to float six inches above the filthy boards of the floor.

When she opened the door, Maria Tresca leaped out and embraced her. “It’s ours!” she exclaimed. “You did it!”

Right behind her, Herman Bruck agreed. “His face looked like curdled milk when you reminded people he has no personal stake in watching the war go on.”

“That stupid Democratic heckler gave me the opening I needed,” Flora said. “Rothstein must be throwing a fit in the other dressing room.”

Maria looked at Bruck. Bruck looked uncommonly smug, even for him. “That was no stupid Democrat. That was my cousin Mottel, and I told him what to say and when to say it.”

Flora stared at him, then let out a shriek, then kissed him on the cheek. “Shall we go out and have supper to celebrate?”

She thought she’d meant the invitation to include Maria, too, but Maria didn’t seem to think so. And Flora discovered she didn’t mind. Herman Bruck had just given her the congressional seat on a silver platter. If that didn’t deserve a dinner what did?

Besides, she always had her hatpin, if she felt like using it. Maybe she wouldn’t.

“We’ve got to hold this town, boys,” Lieutenant Jerome Nicoll said. “Below Waurika, there’s no more Sequoyah left, not hardly. There’s just the Red River, and then there’s Texas. The whole Confederacy is depending on us. If the damnyankees push over the river and into Texas, you can kiss Sequoyah good-bye when the war is done.”

“Wish I could kiss Sequoyah good-bye right now,” Reginald Bartlett muttered under his breath. “Wish I was back in Virginia.”

Napoleon Dibble gaped. “You wish you was back on the Roanoke front, Reggie?” He sounded as if he thought Bartlett was crazy.

Had Reggie wished that, he would have been crazy. “No. I wish I was back in Richmond, where I came from.” Dibble nodded, enlightened, or as enlightened as he got. Under his breath, Reggie went on, “The other thing I wish is that Lieutenant Nicoll would get himself a new speech.”

Nap Dibble didn’t hear him, but Sergeant Hairston did. “Yeah,” he said. “We got to hold this, we got to hold that. Then what the hell happens when we don’t hold? We supposed to go off and shoot ourselves?”

“If we don’t hold a place, the damnyankees usually shoot a lot of us,” Bartlett said, which made Pete Hairston laugh but which was also unpleasantly true. The regiment-the whole division-had taken a lot of casualties trying to halt the U.S. drive toward the Red River.

An aeroplane buzzed overhead. Reggie started to unsling his rifle to take a shot at it: it wasn’t flying very high, for gray clouds filled the sky. But it carried the Confederate battle flag under its wings. He stared at it in tired wonder. The USA didn’t have many aeroplanes out here in the West, but the CSA had even fewer.

Hoping it would do the damnyankees some harm, he forgot about it and marched on toward Waurika. The town’s business district lay in a hollow, with houses on the surrounding hills. “We’ll have to hold the Yanks up here,” he said, as much to himself as to anyone else. “We go down there into that bowl, we’re going to get pounded to death.”

As had been true up in Wilson Town, not all the civilians had fled from Waurika. Most of the men and women who came out of the houses to look over the retreating Confederates had dark skins: Waurika, Lieutenant Nicoll had said, was about half Kiowa, half Comanche. Reggie couldn’t have told one bunch from the other to save himself from the firing squad.

Some of the civilians had skins darker than copper: the Indians’ Negro servants. Most of those, or at least most of the ones Bartlett saw, were women. The men had probably been impressed into labor service already: either that or they’d run off toward the Yankees or toward the forests and swamps of the Red River bottom country, where a man who knew how to live off the land could fend for himself for a long time.

More than a few Indians, men wearing homespun and carrying hunting rifles, tried to fall in with the column of Confederate soldiers. “You braves don’t know what you’re getting into,” Lieutenant Nicoll told them. “This isn’t any kind of fighting you’ve ever seen before, and if the damnyankees catch you shooting at them without wearing a uniform, they’ll kill you for it.”

“What will the Yankees do to us if they take this land?” one of the Indians answered. “We do not want to be in the USA.”

“Our grandfathers have told us how bad the living was under the Stars and Stripes,” another Indian agreed. “We want to stay under the Stars and Bars.” He pointed toward the business section of Waurika, where several Confederate flags flew in spite of the threatening weather.

At that moment, the weather stopped threatening and started delivering chilly rain mixed with sleet. Shivering, Bartlett consoled himself with the thought that the rain would be harder on the Yankees, who would have to fight their way through it, than on his own unit, which had already reached the place it needed to defend.

Sergeant Hairston spoke in a low, urgent voice: “Sir, you can’t give them redskins any stretch of line to hold. They ain’t soldiers.”

“We are warriors,” one of the Indians said proudly. “The tribes in the east of Sequoyah have their own armies allied to the Stars and Bars.”

“I’ve heard about that,” Nicoll said. “Isn’t anything like it hereabouts, though.” He scowled, visibly of two minds. At last, he went on, “You want to fight?” The Indians gathered round him made it loudly clear they did indeed want to fight. He held up a hand. “All right. This is what we’ll do. You go out in front of the line we’ll hold. You snipe at the damnyankees and bring us back word of what they’re doing and how they’re moving. Don’t let yourselves get captured. You get in trouble, run back to the front. Is it a bargain?”

“We know this country,” one of the Indians answered. “The soldiers in the uniforms the color of horse shit will not find us.” The rest of the men from Waurika nodded, then trotted quietly north, in the direction from which the U.S. soldiers would come.

Reggie turned to Nap Dibble. “The damnyankees may not find ’em, but what about machine-gun bullets? I don’t care how brave or how smart you are, and a machine gun doesn’t care, either.” He spoke with the grim certainty of a man who had been through the machine-gun hell of the Roanoke River valley.

All Nap Dibble knew was the more open fighting that characterized the Sequoyah front. No: he knew one thing more. “Better them’n us,” he said, and, taking out his entrenching tool, began to dig in.

Along with using the Indians of Waurika as scouts and snipers, Lieutenant Nicoll used the few Negro men left in town as laborers. None of the Indian women and old men left behind objected. No one asked the Negroes’ opinions. With shovels and hoes and mattocks, they began helping the Confederate soldiers make entrenchments in the muddy ground.

Once there were holes in which the men of Nicoll’s company could huddle, the lieutenant set the blacks to digging zigzag communications trenches back toward a second line. “Lawd have mercy, suh,” one of them said, “you gwine work us to death.”

“You don’t know what death is, not till the Yankees start shelling you,” Nicoll answered. Then his voice went even colder than the weather: “Weren’t for the way you niggers rose up last winter, the Confederate States wouldn’t be in the shape they’re in.”

“Weren’t us, suh,” said the Negro who had spoken before. “Onliest Reds in Sequoyah, they’s Indians, and they was born that way.” The other black men impressed into labor nodded emphatic agreement.

“Likely tell,” Nicoll said, dismissing their contention with a toss of the head. “You want to show me you’re good, loyal Confederates, you dig now and help your country’s soldiers beat the Yanks.”

Sullenly, the Negroes dug alongside the soldiers. Bartlett began to hope the Confederates around Waurika would have the rest of the day and the whole night in which to prepare their position for the expected U.S. onslaught. Having slogged through a lot of mud himself, he knew what kind of time the Yankee troops would be having.

But, a little past three in the afternoon, a brisk crackle of small-arms fire broke out ahead of the line. He found himself in a trench and peering out over the parapet almost before he realized he’d heard the rifles. Some of the reports were strange; not all rifles sounded exactly like the Tredegars and Springfields with which he’d been so familiar for so long.

Machine guns were heavy. Units not of the first quality-which, on the Sequoyah front, meant a lot of units-didn’t make sure they kept up with the head of an advancing column. But that malignant hammering started only moments after the rifle fire broke out.

“Now we see what kind of balls the redskins have,” Sergeant Hairston said with a sort of malicious anticipation. “Warriors!” He hawked and spat in the mud.

Here came the Kiowas and Comanches, running back toward the hastily dug entrenchments. Behind them, trudging across the fields, firing as they advanced, were U.S. soldiers. An Indian fell, then another one. An Indian leaped into the trench near Bartlett. “Why do you not shoot at them?” he demanded. “Do you want them to kill us all?”

“No,” Reggie answered. “What we want is for them to get close enough for us to hurt ’em bad when we do open up. Fire discipline, it’s called.”

The Indian stared at him without comprehension. But when the Confederate company did open up with rifles and machine guns and a couple of trench mortars, the U.S. soldiers went down as if scythed. Not all of them, Reggie knew, would be hit; more were taking whatever cover they could find. But the advance stopped.

More Indians jumped into the trenches with the Confederates. They kept on shooting at the Yankees, and showed as much spirit as the men alongside whom they fought. “Maybe they are warriors,” Bartlett said.

Sergeant Hairston nodded. “Yeah, maybe they are. I tell you one thing, though, Bartlett. They give the niggers guns the way it looks like they’re gonna, them coons ain’t never gonna fight this good.”

Reggie thought about that. The Kiowas and Comanches-most of the Indians in Sequoyah-had done pretty well for themselves under the rule of the Great White Father in Richmond. As these young men had said, they wanted to stay under the Stars and Bars.

How many Negroes wanted the same thing? “Maybe they’ll fight for the chance to turn into real citizens,” he said at last.

“Shitfire, who wants niggers voting?” Hairston exclaimed. Since Reggie himself was a long way from thrilled at the idea of their voting, he kept quiet. It all seemed abstract anyhow. Wondering about if and how soon the Yankees would be able to haul their artillery forward through the thickening muck was a much more immediate concern.

Riding a swaybacked horse he’d no doubt rented at the St. Matthews livery stable, Tom Colleton came slowly up the path toward the ruins of Marshlands. Anne Colleton stood waiting for her brother, her hands on her hips. When he got close enough for her to call out to him, she said, “You might have let me known you were coming before you telephoned the train station. I would have come to get you in the motorcar.”

“Sis, I tried to wire you, but they told me the lines out from St. Matthews weren’t up or had gone down again or some such,” Tom answered. “When I got into town, I telephoned just on the off chance-I didn’t really expect to get you. I was all set to show up and surprise you.”

“I believe it,” Anne answered. Tom had always been one to do things first and sort out the consequences later. She pointed to the wire than ran to the cabin where she lived these days. “They finally put that in last week. If you knew what I had to go through to get it-”

“Can’t be worse than Army red tape,” Tom said as he swung down from the horse. He looked fit and dashing and alert; his right hand never strayed far from the pistol on his hip. The scar on his cheek wasn’t pink and fresh any more.

He also wore two stars on either side of his stand collar. “You’ve been promoted!” Anne exclaimed.

He gave a little bow, as a French officer might have done. “Lieutenant-Colonel Colleton at your service, ma’am,” he said. “My regiment happened to find a hole in the Yankee lines up on the Roanoke, and they pushed forward half a mile at what turned out to be exactly the right time.” He touched one of the stars signifying his new rank, then the other. “Each of these cost me about a hundred and fifty men, killed and wounded.”

Slowly, Anne nodded. Tom had gone into the war as a lark, an adventure. A lot had changed in the past two years.

A lot had changed here, too. He strode up to her and gave her a brotherly embrace, but his eyes remained on what had been the family mansion. “Those sons of bitches,” he said in a flat, hard voice, and then, “Well, from what I hear, they paid for it ten times over.”

“Maybe not so much as that,” Anne said, “but they paid.” She cocked her head to one side and sent him a curious glance. “And you’re one of the people who want to put guns in niggers’ hands?”

He nodded. “For one thing, we’re running out of white men to be soldiers,” he said, and Anne nodded in turn, remembering President Semmes’ words. Tom went on, “For another, if niggers have a stake in the Confederate States, maybe they won’t try and pull them down around our ears. We smashed this rebellion, sure, but that doesn’t mean we won’t have another one ten years from now if things don’t change.”

“This one’s smashed, but it’s not dead,” she said. “Cassius is still out in the swamps by the river, and the militiamen they’ve sent after him and his friends haven’t been able to smoke them out.”

“He’s the kind of nigger I wish we had in the Army,” Tom said. “He’d make one fine scout and sniper.”

“Unless he decided to shoot at you instead of the damnyankees,” Anne answered, which made her brother grimace. Then, suddenly, she noticed a new ribbon in the fruit salad above Tom’s left breast pocket. Her eyes widened. Pointing to it, she said, “That’s an Order of Lee, and you weren’t going to say a thing about it.”

She’d succeeded in embarrassing him. “I didn’t want to worry you,” he replied, which went a long way toward explaining the circumstances under which he’d won it. The Order of Lee was the Army equivalent of Roger Kimball’s Order of the Virginia: only one step down from the Confederate Cross.

“I’ve been worried from the beg-” Anne started to say, but that wasn’t quite true: in the beginning, she, like most in the CSA, had thought they’d lick the Yankees as quickly and easily as they had in their first two wars. She made the needed change: “I’ve been worried for a long time.”

Julia came up to them then, her baby on her hip. “Mistuh Tom, we got yo’ cabin ready fo’ you.”

“That’s good,” he answered. “Thank you.” He spoke to her in a tone slightly different from the one he would have used before the war started, even if the words might have been the same then. In 1914, he would have taken the service completely for granted; now, he spoke of it as if she was doing him a favor. Anne found herself using that tone with blacks these days, too, and noticed it in others.

Tom went back to his horse, detached the saddlebags and bedroll from the saddle, and carried them while he walked after Julia. In 1914, a Negro would have dashed up to relieve him of them. If he missed that level of deference, he didn’t show it.

And, before he went into the cabin, he asked, “You’re not putting anyone out so I can stay in here, are you?”

“No, suh,” the serving woman answered. “Ain’t so many folks here as used to be.”

“I see that.” Tom glanced over at Anne. “It’s a wonder you’ve done as much as you have out here by yourself.”

“You do what you have to do,” she said, at which he nodded again. Before the war, that hard logic had meant nothing to him. The Roanoke front had given him more than rank and decorations; he understood and accepted the ways of the world these days. As soon as Julia went out of earshot, she continued, in a lower voice, “We made a bargain of sorts-they do the work that needs to be done, and I make sure nobody from St. Matthews or Columbia comes around prying into what they did during the rebellion.”

“You said something about that in one of your letters,” Tom answered, remembering. “Best you could do, I suppose, but there are some niggers I wouldn’t have made that bargain with. Cassius, for one.”

“Even if you’d want him for a soldier?” Anne asked, gently mocking.

“Especially because I’d want him for a soldier,” her brother said. “I know a dangerous man when I see one.”

“I have no bargain with Cassius,” Anne said quietly. “Every so often, livestock here-disappears. I don’t know where it goes, but I can guess. Not that much to eat in the swamps of the Congaree, even for niggers used to living off the land.”

“That’s so,” Tom agreed. “And he’ll have friends among the hands here. Sis, I really wish you weren’t out here by your lonesome.”

“If I’m not, this place goes to the devil,” Anne said. “I didn’t get a great crop from it, but I got a crop. That gave me some of the money I needed to pay the war taxes, and it meant I didn’t have to cut so far into my investments as I would have otherwise. I don’t intend to be a beggar when the war ends, and I don’t intend for you to be a beggar, either.”

“If the choice is between being being rich and being a beggar, that’s one thing, Sis,” he said. “If the choice is between being a beggar and being dead, that’s a different game.” His face, its expression already far more stern than it had been before the war, turned bleak as the oncoming winter. “That’s what the Confederate States are looking at right now, seems to me: a choice between being beggars and being dead.”

He walked up into the cottage. Anne followed him. He tossed the saddlebags and bedroll onto the floor next to the iron-framed cot on which he’d sleep. Looking around, he shook his head. “It’s not the way it was any more,” he said, half to himself. “Nothing is the way it was any more.”

“No,” Anne said. “It’s not. But-I talked with President Semmes not so long ago. He’s worried, yes, but not that worried.” She checked herself; if the president hadn’t been that worried, would he have introduced the bill calling for Negro troops? Trying to look on the bright side, she pointed to Tom’s tunic. “That was a victory, there in the valley.”

“And it makes one,” her brother answered bitterly. “I pray to God we can hold the ground we gained, too. We need every man in the CSA at the front, and we need every man in the CSA working behind the lines so the men at the front have something to shoot at the damnyankees. If everybody could be two places at once twenty-four hours a day, we’d be fine.”

“That’s why the president wants to give the blacks guns,” she said.

“I understand.” He sounded impatient with her, something he’d rarely done…before the war, that endlessly echoed phrase. “We’ve put them in the factories to make up for the white men who’ve gone. Maybe we can put enough women in to make up for the niggers. Maybe.”

She didn’t want to argue with him any more. “Supper soon,” she said. “Come over to my cottage and we’ll talk more then. Get yourself settled in for now.”

“For now,” he repeated. “I’ve got to catch the train day after tomorrow.” He sighed. “No rest for the weary.”

Supper was fried chicken, greens, and pumpkin pie, with apple brandy that had no tax stamp on it to wash down the food. “It’s not what I would have given you if things were different,” Anne said, watching with something like awe as the mountain of chicken bones on her brother’s plate grew and grew. “No fancy banquets these days, though.”

“It’s nigger food,” Tom said, and then held up a hand against the temper that sparked in her eyes. “Wait, Sis. Wait. It’s good. It’s a hundred times better than what I eat at the front. Don’t you worry about it for a minute.” He patted his belly, which should have bulged visibly from what he’d put away but somehow didn’t.

“What are we going to do?” she said. “If this is the best we can hope for once the war is over, is it worth going on?”

“Kentucky is a state in the United States again,” Tom said quietly. “The Yankees say it is, anyhow, and they have some traitors there who go along with them. The best may not be as good as we hoped when we set out to fight, but the worst is worse than we ever reckoned it could be.” He yawned, then got up, walked over to her, and kissed her on the cheek. “I’m going to bed, Sis-can’t hold ’em open any more. You don’t have to worry about anything tonight-I’m here.” He walked out of the cottage into the darkness.

Julia took away the dishes. Anne got into a long cotton nightgown, blew out the lamps, and lay down. Off in the distance, an owl hooted. Off farther in the distance, a rifle cracked, then another, than a short volley. Silence returned. She shrugged. Ordinary noises of the night. As always, her pistol lay where she could reach it. She even carried the revolver when she needed to go to the outhouse instead of using the pot, though it was no good against moths and spiders.

Did she feel safer because her brother was here? Yes, she decided: now there were two guns on which she could rely absolutely. Did she feel he was taking on the job of protecting her, so she wouldn’t even have to think of such things as long as he was nearby? Laughing at the absurdity of the notion, she rolled over and went to sleep.

George Enos was swabbing the deck on the starboard side of the USS Ericsson when shouts of alarm rang out to port: “Torpedo!” He jumped as if someone had stabbed him with a pin. As klaxons began to hoot, he sprinted toward his battle station, a one-pounder antiaircraft gun not far from the depth-charge launcher at the stern of the destroyer. Someone, by some accident, had actually read his file and given him a job he knew how to do. The one-pounder wasn’t that different from an outsized machine gun.

“Torpedo!” The shouts grew louder. The Ericsson’s deck throbbed under Enos’ feet as the engines came up to full power from cruising speed. Thick, black smoke poured from the stacks. The smoke poured back toward him. He coughed and tried to breathe as little as he could.

The deck heeled sharply as the destroyer swung into a tight turn. The turn was to the right, not to the left as he’d expected. “We’re heading into the track,” he shouted.

At the launcher, Carl Sturtevant nodded. “If it misses us, we charge down the wake and pay the submarine a visit,” the petty officer said.

“Yeah,” George said. If it missed them, that was what would happen. But it was likelier to hit them when they were running toward it than if they’d chosen to run away. Enos did his best not to think about that. He was sure the whole crew of the Ericsson-including Captain Fleming, who’d ordered the turn-were doing their best not to think about that.

He peered ahead, though the destroyer’s superstructure blocked his view of the most critical area. His fate rested on decisions over which he had no control and which he could not judge till afterwards. He hated that. So did every other Navy man with whom he’d ever spoken, both on the Mississippi and out here in the Atlantic.

Something moving almost impossibly fast shot by the onrushing Ericsson, perhaps fifty feet to starboard of her. Staring at the creamy wake, George sucked in a long breath, not caring any more how smoky it was. “Missed,” he said with fervent delight. “Is that the only fish they launched at us?”

“Don’t hear ’em yelling about any others,” Sturtevant said.

Lieutenant Crowder came running toward the stern. “Load it up!” he shouted to Sturtevant and his comrades. “We’ll make ’em pay for taking a shot at us.”

“Yes, sir.” Sturtevant sounded less optimistic than his superior. The depth-charge launcher was a new gadget, the Ericsson one of the first ships in the Navy to use it instead of simply rolling the ashcans off the stern. Like a lot of new gadgets, it worked pretty well most of the time. Like a lot of sailors, George Enos among them, Sturtevant was conservative enough to find that something less than adequate.

Like a lot of young lieutenants, Crowder was enamored of anything and everything new, for no better reason than that it was new. He said, “By throwing the charges off to the side, we don’t have to sail right over the sub and lose hydrophone contact with it.”

“Yes, sir,” Sturtevant said again. His mouth twisted. George understood that, too. A hydrophone could give you a rough bearing on a submersible. What it couldn’t tell you was where along that bearing the damn thing lurked.

An officer on the bridge waved his hat to Lieutenant Crowder. “Launch!” Crowder shouted, as if the depth-charge crew couldn’t figure out what that meant for themselves.

The launcher roared. The depth charge spun through the air, then splashed into the sea. Carl Sturtevant’s lips moved. In the racket, George couldn’t hear what he said, but he saw the shape of the words. Here goes nothing-and it was just as well that Lieutenant Crowder couldn’t read lips. Another depth charge flew. The chances of hitting a submarine weren’t quite zero, but they weren’t good. The charge had to go off within fifteen feet of a sub to be sure of wrecking it, though it might badly damage a boat at twice that range. Since the destroyer and the submersible were both moving, hits were as much luck as in a blindfold rock fight.

As the third depth charge arced away from the Ericsson, water boiled up from the explosion of the first one. “Damnation!” Lieutenant Crowder shouted: only white water, nothing more. By the disappointed look on his face, he’d expected a kill on his very first try.

Another charge flew. The second one went off, down below the surface of the sea. Another seething mass of white water appeared, and then a great burst of bubbles and an oil slick that helped calm both the normal chop of the Atlantic and the turbulence the bubbles had kicked up.

“Hit!” Crowder and Sturtevant and the rest of the depth-charge crew and George all screamed the word at the same time. Skepticism forgotten, Sturtevant planted a reverent kiss on the oily metal side of the depth-charge launcher.

More bubbles rose from the stricken submersible, and more oil, too. Peering out into the ocean, George was the first to spy the dark shape rising through the murky water. “Here he comes, the son of a bitch,” he said, and turned the one-pounder in the direction of the submersible. The gun was intended for aeroplanes, but Moses hadn’t come down from the mountain saying you couldn’t shoot it at anything else.

Vaster than a broaching whale, the crippled sub surfaced. English? French? Confederate? George didn’t know or care. It was the enemy. The men inside had done their best to kill him. Their best hadn’t been good enough. Now it was his turn.

Some of the enemy sailors still had fight in them. They ran across the hull toward the submersible’s deck gun. George opened up with the one-pounder before Lieutenant Crowder screamed, “Rake ’em!”

Shell casings leaped from George’s gun. It fired ten-round clips, as if it were an overgrown rifle. One of the rounds hit an enemy sailor. George had never imagined what one of those shells could do to a human body. One instant, the fellow was dashing along the dripping hull. The next, his entire midsection exploded into red mist. His legs ran another stride and a half before toppling.

George picked up another clip-it hardly seemed to weigh anything-and slammed it into the one-pounder. He blew another man to pieces, but most of the clip went to chewing up the submersible’s conning tower. The sub wouldn’t be doing any diving, not if it was full of holes.

As he was reloading again, one of the Ericsson’s four-inch guns fired a shell into the ocean twenty yards in front of the submarine’s bow, a warning shot that sent water fountaining up to drench the surviving men who had reached the deck gun. They didn’t shoot back at the destroyer. Their hands went up in the air instead.

“Hold fire!” Lieutenant Crowder said. George obeyed. A moment later, a white flag waved from the top of the conning tower. More men started emerging from the hatch and standing on the hull, all of them with their hands raised in surrender.

Crowder used a pair of field glasses to read the name of the boat, which was painted on the side of the conning tower. “Snook,” he said. “She’ll be a Confederate boat. They name ’em for fish, same as we do. Looks like a limey, don’t she?”

Flags fluttered up on the Snook’s signal lines. “He’s asking if he can launch his boats,” said Sturtevant, who had far more practice at reading them than did George.

Captain Fleming’s answer came swiftly. Crowder read it before Sturtevant could: “Denied. We will take you off.” He inspected the dejected crew of the submersible. “I don’t see their captain, but they’re all so frowzy he may be there anyhow.”

Boats slid across the quarter-mile of water separating the Ericsson and the Snook. Confederate sailors were already boarding them when one more man burst from the submersible’s hatchway and hurried onto one of them.

“There’s the captain,” Sturtevant said, and then, “She’s sinking! The goddamn bastard opened the scuttling cocks. That’s what he was doing down below so long. Ahh, hell, no way to save her.” Sure enough, the Snook was quickly sliding down into the depths from which she had arisen. She would not rise again.

Up onto the deck of the Ericsson came the glum Confederates. U.S. sailors crowded round to see the men who had almost sunk them. The attitude of the victors was half relief, half professional respect. They knew the submariners could have won the duel as easily as not.

When the Confederate captain came aboard the destroyer, George’s jaw fell. “Briggs!” he burst out. “Ralph Briggs!”

“Somebody here know me?” The Rebel officer looked around to see who had spoken.

“I sure do.” George pushed through the crowd around the Confederates. His grin was enormous. “I’d better. I was one of the fishermen who helped sink you when you were skipper of the Tarpon.”

“What? We already captured this damn Reb once?” Lieutenant Crowder exclaimed. “Why the devil isn’t he in a prisoner-of-war camp where he belongs, then?”

“Because I escaped, that’s why.” Briggs stood straighter. “International law says you can’t do anything to me on account of it, either.”

“We could toss him in the drink and let him swim to shore,” Carl Sturtevant said, without the slightest smile to suggest he was joking.

George shook his head. “When he was going to sink my trawler, he let the crew take to the boats. He played square.”

“Besides, if we ditched him, we’d have to ditch the whole crew,” Lieutenant Crowder said. “Too many people would know, somebody would get drunk and tell the story, and the Entente papers would scream like nobody’s business. They’re prisoners, and we’re stuck with ’em.” He pointed to the Confederate submariners, then jerked a thumb toward the nearest hatch. “You men go below-and this time, Briggs, we’ll make damn sure you don’t get loose before the war is done.”

“You can try,” the submersible skipper answered. “My duty is to escape if I can.” He nodded to George Enos. “I wish I’d never seen you once, let alone twice, but I do thank you for speaking up for me there.”

George looked him in the eye. “If you were the skipper of the damn commerce raider that got my fishing boat when I was still a civilian, you’d be swimming now, for all of me.”

“Get moving,” Lieutenant Crowder said again, and, along with his crew, Ralph Briggs headed for the-

“The brig. Briggs is going to the brig,” George said, and laughed as the Confederates, one by one, went down the hatchway and disappeared.

Standing in Bay View Park, Chester Martin peered east across the Maumee River to the Toledo, Ohio, docks. Mist that was turning to drizzle kept him from seeing as much as he would have liked, but a couple of light cruisers from the Lake Erie fleet were in port, resupplying so they could go off and bombard the southern coast of Ontario again.

Martin turned to his younger sister. “You know what, Sue? This business of watching the war from the far side of the river is a…lot more fun than being in it up close.” The pause came from his swallowing a pungent intensifier or two. In the trenches, he cursed as automatically as he breathed. He’d horrified his mother a couple of times, and now tried to watch himself around his female relatives.

Sue giggled. She’d caught the hesitation. She found his profanity more funny than horrifying, but then she was of his generation. They shared a sharp-nosed, sharp-chinned family look, though Sue’s hair was brown, not sandy heading toward red like his.

She said, “I’m just sorry you had to get hurt so you could come home for a while.”

“Oh, I knew it was a hometowner as soon as I got it,” he said, exaggerating only a little. “Never worried about it for a minute. Now that my arm’s out of the sling, I expect they’ll be sending me back to the front before too long.”

“I wish they wouldn’t,” she said, and took his good right hand in both of hers. She was careful with his left arm, even if he’d finally had it released from its cloth cocoon.

From behind him, a gruff voice said, “You there, soldier-let’s see your papers, and make it snappy.”

Martin’s turn was anything but snappy; it let the military policeman see the three stripes on his sleeve. The MP was only a private first class. He didn’t worry about that, though, not with the law on his side. Martin was convinced the military police attracted self-righteous sons of bitches the way spilled sugar drew ants.

But this fellow wouldn’t be able to give him a hard time. He took the necessary paperwork from a tunic pocket and handed it to the MP. “Convalescent leave, eh?” the fellow said. “We’ve seen some humbug documents of this sort lately, Sergeant. What would happen if I took you back to barracks and told you to show me a scar?”

“I’d do it, and you’d get your ass in a sling,” Martin answered steadily. He looked the private first class up and down with the scorn most front-line soldiers felt for their not-quite-counterparts who hadn’t seen real action. “Why is it, sonny boy, the only time you ever see a dead MP, he’s got a Springfield bullet in him, not a Tredegar?”

Sue didn’t get that. The military policeman did, and turned brick red. “I ought to keep these,” he said, holding Martin’s papers so the sergeant couldn’t take them back.

“Go ahead,” Martin said. “Let’s head back to your barracks. We can both tell your commanding officer about it. Like I say, doesn’t matter a bean’s worth to me.”

A soldier ready to go back to barracks and take his case to the officer of the day was not a spectacle the MP was used to. Angrily, he thrust Martin’s papers back at him. Angrily, he stomped off, the soles of his boots slapping the bricks of the walkway.

“That’s telling him,” Sue said proudly, clutching her brother’s arm. “He didn’t have any business talking to you like that.”

“He could ask for my papers, to make sure I’m not absent without leave,” Martin said. “But when he got nasty afterwards-” He made a face. “He didn’t have any call to do that, except he’s a military policeman, and people have to do what he tells them.”

“Like the Coal Board officials,” Sue said. “And the Ration Board, and the Train Transportation Board, and the War Loan subscription committees, and-” She could have gone on. Instead, she said, “All those people were bad enough before the war. They’re worse now, and there are more of them. And if you’re not a big cheese yourself, they act like little tin gods and give you a nasty time just to show they can do it.”

“Makes you wonder what the country’s coming to sometimes, doesn’t it?” Martin said. “Old people say there used to be more room to act the way you pleased, back before the Second Mexican War taught us how surrounded we are. Gramps would always go on about that, remember?”

She shook her head. “Not really. I was only six or seven when he died. What I remember about him was his peg leg, and how he always pretended he was a pirate on account of it.”

“Yeah. He got hurt worse than I did, and the doctors in the War of Secession weren’t as good as they are nowadays, either, I don’t suppose. He used to talk about stacks of cut-off arms and legs outside the surgeons’ tents after a battle.”

Sue looked revolted. “Not with me, he didn’t.”

“You’re a girl,” Chester reminded her. “He used to tell me and Hank all the horrible stuff. We ate it up like gumdrops.”

She sighed. “I was only seven when Henry died, too. What a horrible year that was, everybody wailing all the time. I miss him sometimes, same as Gramps.”

“I was-eleven? Twelve? Something like that,” Martin said. “He was two years older than me, I know that much. I remember the way the doctor kept shaking his head. For all the good he did us, he might as well have been a Sioux medicine man. Scarlet fever, any of those things-I wish they could cure them, not just tell you what they are.”

“He’d be in the Army, too-Henry, I mean.” Sue’s laugh was startled. “I don’t think I ever thought of Henry all grown up till now.”

“He’d be in the Army, all right,” Chester agreed. “He’d be an officer, I bet. Hank was always sharp as a razor. People listened to him, too. I didn’t-but I was his brother, after all.” A chilly breeze from off the lake seemed to slice right through his uniform. “Brr! Enough sightseeing. Let’s go home and sit in front of the fire.”

They caught the trolley and went southwest down Summit, alongside the Maumee. After three or four miles, the trolley car turned inland and clattered past the county courthouse and, across the street from it, the big bronze statue of Remembrance, sword bared in her right hand.

Pointing to it, Sue said, “We just got some new stereoscope views of New York City. Now I know how good a copy of the statue on Bedloe’s Island that one is, even if ours is only half as tall.”

“We’ve still got a lot to pay people back for-the United States do, I mean,” Martin said. Now he laughed. “I’ve got a Rebel to pay back, and I don’t even know who he is.”

The trolley took them over the Ottawa River, a smaller stream than the Maumee, and up into Ottawa Heights. The closest stop was three blocks from their apartment house. Chester remembered how cramped he’d felt in the flat before the war started. He had no more room now-less, in fact, because they’d had to make room for him when he came back to convalesce-but he didn’t mind. After crowded barracks and insanely crowded bombproof shelters, a room of his own, even a small one, seemed luxury itself.

His mother-an older, graying version of Sue-all but pounced on him when he came in the door. “You have a letter here from the White House!” Louisa Martin exclaimed, thrusting the fancy envelope at him. The Martin family had a strong tradition of never opening one another’s mail; that tradition, obviously, had never been so sorely tested as now.

“Don’t be silly, Mother,” Chester said. “The Rebs are still holding onto the White House.” His mother glared at him, and with reason. Even if business got done in Philadelphia, Washington remained the capital of the USA.

Sue squeaked. “Open it!” she said, and then grabbed his arm so he couldn’t.

He shook her off and did open the envelope. “‘Dear Sergeant Martin,’” he read from the typed letter, “‘I have learned you were wounded in action. Since you have defended not only the United States of America but also me personally on my visit to the Roanoke front, I dare hope my wishes for your quick and full recovery will be welcome. Sincerely yours, Theodore Roosevelt.’” The signature was in vivid blue ink.

“That’s wonderful,” Louisa Martin said softly. “TR keeps track of everything, doesn’t he?”

“Seems to,” Martin agreed. He kept staring at that signature. “Well, I was going to vote for him anyhow. Guess I’ll have to vote twice now.” If you knew the right people, in Toledo as in a good many other U.S. towns, you could do that, though he’d meant if for a joke.

His mother sighed. “One of these days, Ohio may get around to granting women’s suffrage. Then you wouldn’t need to vote twice.”

Stephen Douglas Martin, Chester’s father, came home from the mill about an hour later. “Well, well,” he said, holding the letter from TR out at arm’s length so he could read it. He was too old to worry about conscription, and had been promoted three times at work since the start of the war, when younger men with better jobs had to put on green-gray. “Ain’t that somethin’, Chester? Ain’t that somethin’? We ought to frame this here letter and keep it safe so you can show it to your grandchildren.”

“That would be something, Pop,” Martin said. He thought of himself with gray hair and wrinkled skin, sitting in a rocking chair telling war stories to little boys in short pants. Gramps’stories had always been exciting, even the ones about how he’d lost his leg. Could Chester make life in the trenches exciting? Was it anything he’d want to tell his grandchildren? Maybe, if he could show them the president’s letter.

“I’m proud of you, son,” his father said. “The Second Mexican War was over before they called me up. My father fought for our country, and now you have, too. That’s pretty fine.”

“All right, Pop,” Martin answered. For a moment, he wondered what his father would have said if he’d stopped that bullet with his head instead of his arm. Whatever it was, he wouldn’t have been around to hear it.

“Supper!” his mother called. The ham steaks that went with the fried potatoes weren’t very big-meat had got expensive as the dickens this past year, he’d heard a hundred times-but they were tasty. And there were plenty of potatoes in the big, black iron pan. She served Chester seconds of those, and then thirds.

“You’re going to have to let out the pants on my uniform,” he said, but all she did was nod-she was ready to do it. His father lighted a cigar, and passed one to him. The tobacco was sharp and rather nasty, but a cigar was a cigar. He leaned back in his chair as his mother and sister cleared away the dishes. For now, the front seemed far, far away. He tried to stretch each moment as long as he could.

“Come on!” Jake Featherston called to the gun crews of his battery. “We’ve got to keep moving.” Rain poured down out of the sky. The southern Maryland road, already muddy, began turning to something more like glue, or maybe thick soup. “Come on!”

A whistle in the air swelled rapidly to a scream. A long-range shell from a Yankee gun burst about a hundred yards to Featherston’s left. A great fountain of muck rose into the air. None splattered down on him, but that hardly mattered. He’d long since got as muddy as a human being could.

More U.S. shells descended, feeling for the road down which the First Richmond Howitzers were retreating. The damnyankee gunners couldn’t quite find it. The barrage, instead of swinging west from where the first one hit, went east. That meant they’d probably find another road and hurt a different part of the Army of Northern Virginia. Jake didn’t care. If he got out in one piece, he’d settle for that.

“Hey, Sarge!” Michael Scott said. With the shelling and the rain, the loader had to call two or three times to get Featherston’s attention. When he finally had it, he asked, “What do we do when we get to the Potomac?”

“You think I’m the War Department, God damn them to hell?” Featherston answered. The War Department, and especially its upper echelons, did not contain his favorite people. “If the damnyankees’ aeroplanes haven’t bombed all the bridges to hell and gone, I reckon we cross over ’em and go back into Virginia.”

“But what are we gonna do there?” Scott persisted.

“I told you, I’m not the goddamn War Department,” Jake said. He shook his head, which made cold rainwater drip down the back of his neck. They wouldn’t make him an officer, they didn’t have the brains to notice when the niggers were going to rise up, and they were still in charge of running the war? Where was the justice in that? And his own men expected him to think like a fancy-pants Richmond general? Where was the justice in that?

“But, Sarge-” the loader said, like a little boy complaining when his mother wouldn’t let him do what he wanted.

“All right,” Featherston said wearily. “Here’s what we do, you ask me. We cross the bridge, if it’s still up there. All the artillery we’ve got goes into battery on the south bank. Soon as the last man from the Army of Northern Virginia comes out of Maryland, we drop the bridge right into the middle of the river, bam. Soon as the damnyankees get in range of our guns, we start plastering them, hard as we can. Those sons of bitches are already in the western part of the state. Sure as the devil don’t want ’em getting a toehold anywhere else, do we?”

“Nope.” Scott sounded-not happy now, but contented. He’d got Jake to tell him what he could have worked out for himself if he’d had an ounce of sense. Featherston shook his head again. More rainwater ran down his neck. What difference did that make, when he was already so soaked?

He cursed the Yankees, he cursed the mud, and he cursed the War Department, the last more sulfurously than either of the other two. “Christ, no wonder we’re losing,” he told the unheeding sky. “If the damn fools can’t do the little things right, how are they supposed to do the big ones?” He supposed the United States Army was afflicted with a War Department, too, but somehow it seemed to be overcoming the handicap.

To make his joy with the world complete, the lead gun went into a puddle and bogged to the hubs. The horses strained in their harness, but it did no good. That gun wasn’t going anywhere any time soon, not with just the team trying to get it out. And the others piled up in back of it.

Along with the rest of the gun crew, he lent his own strength to the work, pushing from behind as the horses pulled. The gun remained stuck. Jake spotted Metellus, the cook, lounging on the limber that traveled behind the gun. “Get your black ass up here and do something to help, damn you,” he snarled. “The Yankees do find this here road with their guns, the shells won’t care what color you are. They’ll blow you up, same as me.” His grin was ferocious. “If that ain’t nigger equality, I don’t know what the hell is.”

Metellus got down and got as dirty as any of the white men, but the gun wouldn’t budge. “Sarge, the horses are gonna founder if we work ’em any more right now,” Michael Scott said. “They’ll plumb keel over and die.”

“Shit.” Featherston looked around, feeling harassed by too many things at once. The whole battery would bog down if he didn’t move the rest of the three-inchers around the lead gun. But if he had to abandon it, the higher-ups would crucify him. The only way he’d kept his head above water was by being twice as good as anybody else around. If he showed he was merely human, they’d cook his goose in jig time.

Here came a battalion of infantry, marching through the mud by the side of the road because the guns were occupying the mud in the middle of the road. “Give us some help, boys!” Jake called to the foot soldiers. “Can’t afford to lose any guns.”

Some of the infantrymen started to break ranks, but the lieutenant in charge of the company shouted, “Keep moving, men. We have our own schedule to meet.” He gave Featherston a hard stare. “You have no business attempting to delay my men, Sergeant.”

“Yes, sir. Sorry, sir,” Jake said, as he had to: he was just a sergeant, after all, not one of God’s anointed officers. How he hated that smug lieutenant. Because of his arrogance, the Confederate States would lose a gun they could have kept, a gun they should have kept.

“What’s going on here?” someone demanded in sharp, angry tones. An officer on horseback surveyed the scene with nothing but disapproval.

Featherston kept quiet. He was only a sergeant, after all. The lieutenant answered, “Sir, this, this enlisted man is trying to use my troops to get out of his trouble.”

“Then you’d better let him, hadn’t you?” Major Clarence Potter snapped. The lieutenant’s jaw dropped. He stared up at Potter with his mouth wide open, like a stupid turkey drowning in the rain. The intelligence officer went on, “Break out some ropes, get your men on that gun, and get it moving. We can’t afford to leave it behind.”

“But-” the infantry lieutenant began.

Major Potter fixed him with the intent, icy stare that had impressed Jake on their first meeting up in Pennsylvania-and how long ago that seemed. “One more word from you, Lieutenant, and I shall ask what your name is.”

The lieutenant wilted. Featherston would have been astounded had he done anything else. Twenty men on a rope and more on the hubs and carriage got the three-inch gun up out of the morass into which it had sunk. On more solid ground, the horses could move it again.

“Thank you, sir,” Jake said, waving the rest of the guns from the battery around the bad spot in the road.

“My pleasure,” Potter said, crisp as usual. “We’ve done a pretty fair job of fighting the enemy in this war, Sergeant, but God deliver us from our friends sometimes.”

“Yes, sir!” Jake said. That put his own anger into words better than he’d been able to do for himself.

“Keep struggling, Sergeant,” Potter said. “That’s all you can do. That’s all any of us can do.”

“Yes, sir.” Jake stared furiously after the now-vanished infantry lieutenant. “He could have been heading up a labor brigade, and if he was, he wouldn’t have let me use any niggers, either.”

“I’d say you’re probably right,” Potter said. “Some people get promoted because they’re brave and active. Some people get promoted for no better reason than that all their paperwork stays straight.”

“And some people don’t get promoted at all,” Featherston said bitterly.

“We’ve been over this ground before, Sergeant,” Potter said. “There’s nothing I can do. It’s not up to me.”

Jake would not hear him. “That damn lieutenant-beg your pardon, sir-wouldn’t pay me any mind, on account of I wasn’t an officer. I command this battery, and I damn well deserve to command it, but he treated me like a nigger, on account of I’m just a sergeant.” He glanced over to the intelligence officer. “It’s true, isn’t it? They are going to give niggers guns and put ’em in the line?”

“It’s passed the House. It’s passed the Senate. Since President Semmes was the one who proposed the bill, he’s not going to veto it,” Major Potter said.

“You know what, sir?” Featherston said. “You mark my words, there’s gonna be a nigger promoted to lieutenant before I get these here stripes off my sleeve. Is that fair? Is that right?”

Potter’s lips twisted in what might have been a sympathetic grin or an expression of annoyance at Jake’s unending complaints. The latter, it proved, for the major said, “Sergeant, if you think you’re the only man unfairly treated in the Army of Northern Virginia, I assure you that you’re mistaken.” He squeezed his horse’s sides with his knees. The animal trotted on.

“Ahh, you’re just another bastard after all,” Jake said. Thanks to the rain, Potter didn’t hear him. Featherston turned back to the battery. “Come on. Let’s get moving.”

They bogged down again, less than half a mile in front of the bridge. This time, Jake had no trouble getting help, for a Negro labor gang was close by, and the white officer in charge of it proved reasonable. Featherston worked the black men unmercifully hard, but he and his comrades were working hard, too. The guns came free and rattled toward and then over the bridge.

The firing pits that waited for them on the south side of the Potomac were poorly dug in and poorly sited. “Everything’s going to hell around here,” Featherston growled, and went tramping around to see if he could find better positions no other guns would occupy.

He had little luck. If the artillery hadn’t had to stay close to the river to defend the crossing, he wouldn’t have wanted anything to do with the area. When the Yankees came down and got their guns in place, his crew was going to catch it.

He’d come down close by the Potomac when the engineers blew the bridge and sent it crashing into the water, as he’d predicted. Somebody near him cheered to see it fall. Featherston’s scowl never wavered. How long would the wrecked bridge keep the Yankees out of Virginia? Not long enough, he feared.