Walk in Hell

V

Back when Scipio had been butler at Marshlands, he’d wondered how a man could ever get used to the racket of battle. Even single gunshots had been plenty to set his heart pounding. He was inclined to laugh at his former self nowadays. He hadn’t known much back then.

He hadn’t known much about a lot of things back then. As far as a lot of them went, he would gladly have remained ignorant, too. Much of what Cassius fondly thought of as revolutionary practice looked to Scipio an awful lot like what the whites of the Confederate States had been doing, only stood on its head.

Sometimes the strain of keeping his mouth shut was almost more than he could bear. But he’d turned his own experience in the days before the Congaree Socialist Republic to his advantage, too. Anne Colleton hadn’t been able to see past the smooth butler’s mask he wore, and neither could Cassius now.

Fortunately, Cassius hadn’t noticed that he hadn’t noticed Scipio’s mask. The chairman of the Republic had plenty of other things on his mind. He somehow managed to make the undyed, unbleached cotton homespun of Negro field laborers into a good approximation of a uniform, and even to look smart in it, which was far beyond Scipio’s ability. What he could not do, though, was lose the worried expression on his face.

“Ain’t got enough white folks wid we, Kip,” he said now. “De po’ buckra, de gov’ment ’press them same as it done to we. Dey gots to see where dey class int’rest is at. Dey gots to see de revolution fo’ dey, too, not jus’ fo’ we.” He shook his head. “But dey don’. Dey is still de dogs o’ de massers dat ’sploits dey. Cipher dat out fo’ me, Kip. Don’ make no sense.”

Scipio still found revolutionary rhetoric and the Congaree dialect an odd blend. No one cared about his opinion in such matters, though, and he was canny enough to keep it to himself. Cassius had asked his opinion about the other matter, though, and might even have been ready to hear it. Scipio decided to take a chance there.

He pointed to what had been the country courthouse of Kingstree, South Carolina. The two-story, buff-colored building with a fancy, fanlighted pediment, built in the style of the early years of the last century, no longer flew the Stars and Bars. Instead, the red revolutionary banner of the Congaree Socialist Republic fluttered above it. Red paint had been daubed over the name KINGSTREE, which was carved into the frieze above the pediment. In letters equally blood-colored, someone had given the town a substitute name: PEOPLE’S TREE.

“Dat kind o’ thing, Cass-an’ we done a lot of it-dat kind o’ thing, like I say, dat skeers de white folks out o’ dey shoes,” he said.

Cassius looked back at the courthouse, then swung his gaze toward Scipio once more. As soon as Scipio saw the expression on the chairman’s face, he knew he had failed. “Ain’t gwine have no backslidin’ in this here revolution,” Cassius declared. “We is bringin’ liberty to de people, an’ if dey is too foolish to be grateful, dey pays de price.”

He truly did not seem to realize that terrorizing everyone who was not ardently on his side to begin with would ensure that he drew few new supporters who didn’t have great grievances against the Confederate States. Hardly any Negroes lacked such grievances. But, exactly because whites had been inflicting grief instead of taking it, the system that had been in place suited them well enough.

And now he went on, “De niggers here in People’s Tree, dey live in the sections dey call Buzzard’s Roost and Frog Level. You t’ink de white folks, dey want to live in sections wid they names?” He spat on the ground to show how likely he reckoned that was. Scipio didn’t think it was very likely, either. But destroying white privilege only boosted white fear. And then Cassius wondered why whites fought against the Red revolution with everything they had.

Once more, Scipio tried to suggest that: “De more we puts they backs up, the harder they tries to put us down.”

For a moment, he thought he’d got through to Cassius. The chairman of the Congaree Socialist Republic sighed and shook his head. He said, “We git a messenger under flag o’ truce las’ night.”

“Dat a fact?” Scipio said. If it was a fact, it was news to him. That was worrisome in and of itself. Cassius had been in the habit of letting him know what happened as soon as it happened. A change in the pattern was liable to mean Scipio’s status was slipping, which was liable to prove hazardous to his life expectancy. Warily, he asked, “Dis messenger, what he say?”

“He say dat, if we doesn’t lay down we arms, de white folks liable to start killin’ de niggers in de part o’ de country we ain’t managed to liberate. What you t’ink o’ dat?”

Scipio’s first reaction was horror. His second reaction was horror, too. The Confederates could do that, and who would be able to stop them? The answer to that question came all too clear: nobody. “What you say?” he asked Cassius.

“I say two things,” the ex-hunter answered. “I say, if dat de game dey gwine play, we got plenty white folks to kill, too. Dey got mo’ niggers’n we got white folks, but dey think one white folks worth a whole heap o’ blacks. So dat make dis cocky ’ristocrat think some.”

Scipio nodded. It was a brutal ploy, but one to match the threat from the CSA. He had no doubt Cassius would carry it out, either, and was sure the chairman had left no doubt in the Confederate envoy’s mind. “Dat one,” he said, his voice showing his approval. “What de other?”

Cassius startled him by laughing out loud, a deep, rich, nasty laugh, the kind of laugh you let out after you’d heard a really good, really ripe dirty story. A moment later, Scipio understood why, for the chairman said, “I tell he, we don’t even got to do no killin’ to git our own back, if de ’pressors start de persecution in de unliberated land. I tell he, dere plenty white folks wimmin in the Congaree Socialist Republic. I don’ say no more. Ain’t got no need to say no more.”

“Do Jesus!” Scipio said. Confederate laws against miscegenation were harsh, and vigorously enforced. For some reason, Confederate white men seemed convinced that the first thing blacks would do, given any sort of chance, was make a beeline for white women. Even after the uprisings in the Congaree Socialist Republic, it hadn’t happened much. Scipio had heard of a few cases, but the revolutionary government had more urgent things-survival, for instance-with which to concern itself. But now, to use the mere idea as a club with which to beat the Confederates over the head…Scipio stared at Cassius in astonished admiration. “You is a devil, you is.”

Cassius took that as the compliment it was intended to be. “Wish you was there. This white folks captain, he got a seegar in he mouth. When I say dat, he like to swallow it.” He laughed again.

So did Scipio. The story was worth laughing about-if it turned out to have a happy ending. “Once he cough de seegar up, what he say?”

“He say we never dare do no such thing.” Cassius’ eyes glittered. “I tell he we is a pack o’ desp’rate niggers, an’ who know what we do? De white-folks gov’ment been sayin’ dat so much an’ so loud, dey lackeys all believes it. So he say, de honor o’ de white folks wimmin matter to de gov’ment, an’ dey don’t do nuffin to hurt it. You know what dat mean.”

“Mean dey don’t want white folks wimmin birthin’ a pack o’ yaller babies,” Scipio said.

Cassius nodded with yet another chuckle. “Marx, he know ’bout dis. If de peasant wench have de lord’s baby, dey call dat de droit de seigneur.” What he did to the pronunciation of the French words was a caution, but Scipio understood him. He went on, “But de lord’s lady, if she have a baby by de peasant, everybody run around like chickens wid a fox in the henhouse. An’ if that baby yaller, like you say-”

“You reckon de white folks think twice, then?” Scipio asked.

“Dey think fo’-five times ’fore they want the likes o’ me humpin’ dis fifteen-year-old buckra gal wid de hair in de yaller braids,” Cassius said positively, and Scipio thought he was right. The chairman spat again. “Like I got me trouble findin’ wimmin wants to do it.”

He wasn’t boasting, just stating a fact. He’d boasted plenty, back when he was chief hunter on the Marshlands plantation. As chairman of the Congaree Socialist Republic, he seemed to find it beneath his dignity. Scipio prodded him a little: “Drusilla,” he said slyly.

He won a chuckle from Cassius, which relieved him: when Cassius was thinking about Cassius, he wasn’t thinking about Scipio. “Ain’t looked fo’ she since de revolution come,” Cassius said. “Maybe I ought to.” His hands described an hourglass in the air. He’d used the excuse of fooling around with Drusilla, who’d lived on the late, purged Jubal Marberry’s plantation, to travel by routes only he knew and bring back weapons from the USA.

Scipio spoke another name: “Cherry.”

He’d intended that to come out sly and man-to-man, too. Somehow it didn’t, not quite. And Cassius stopped grinning. His answer, this time, was serious: “Dat gal, she do anything to help de revolution. If dat mean sleep wif you, she do it.”

“That so,” Scipio agreed. She’d slept with Jacob Colleton, to keep the mistress’ gassed brother distracted from any of the revolutionary buildup on the plantation, and then she’d used his abuse of her-or what she claimed to be his abuse of her-to touch off the uprising at the right moment. She was, Scipio knew, sharing a bed with Cassius these days.

But the chairman, instead of leering and bragging-for Cherry was one fine-looking, strong-minded woman-held up a forefinger in warning. “She do anything to help the revolution,” he said. “Anything at all. If dat mean cut yo’ balls off while you sleep, she do dat, too, an’ she don’ think twice.”

If he thought Scipio would argue with him, he was mistaken. The former butler was more afraid of Cherry than he was of Cassius, and that was saying something. Finding out that she also intimidated the chairman was interesting. He wondered if and how he’d be able to use that.

Before he had a chance to think about it, he heard a screaming whistle in the sky, coming out of the south. Several artillery shells burst with thunderous roars a few hundred yards outside of the renamed People’s Tree. More explosions farther south meant the People’s Revolutionary Army line was taking a pounding. Artillery was the one thing the Republic conspicuously lacked.

Cassius swore with bitter resignation. “I don’ reckon we gwine hold they white folks out of this here town more’n another two-three days.”

“What we do then?” Now Scipio sounded nervous, and knew it. When Cassius was optimistic about the way the fighting was going, he was often wrong; when he was pessimistic, he was always right.

“Fall back. What else kin we do?” the chairman answered. “We maybe lose dis here stand-up war”-the first time he had admitted the possibility, which sent a chill up Scipio’s spine-“but we go to de deep swamp, fight they white folks forever. An’ some o’ we, we jus’ goes back to bein’ ordinary niggers again, niggers what ain’t never done nothin’ de white folk get they-selves in a ruction about-till we sees de chance. We sees de chance, an’ we seize de chance.” He looked sharply at Scipio, to make sure he caught the wordplay.

Scipio did, and gave back a dutiful smile. He hoped that smile covered what was no longer a chill but a blizzard inside him. If Cassius admitted the revolution was starting to come unraveled, then it was. And, while Cassius and some of his followers could no doubt carry on a guerrilla campaign against the Confederacy from out of the swamps they knew better than any white man did, Scipio wasn’t any of those followers. His skills at living under such conditions were nonexistent. He couldn’t go back to being an ordinary Negro, either; the uprising had literally destroyed the place he’d had in the world.

What did that leave? He saw nothing. He’d always had trouble believing the revolution would succeed. Whenever he’d oh so cautiously raised doubts, no one paid him any mind. Now he saw himself vindicated. Much good it does me, he thought bitterly.

George Enos looked to his left. The woody shoreline of Tennessee lay to port of the monitor Punishment. George looked to his right. To starboard were the hills of northeastern Arkansas. U.S. land forces held the Tennessee side of the Mississippi. God only knew who could lay claim to the Arkansas side of the river. It wasn’t trench warfare over there-more like large-scale bushwhacking.

Wayne Pitchess came up to Enos. He was looking toward the Arkansas bank of the Mississippi, too. “If we ever clear out those Rebs, we’ll have a better chance of heading down the river and grabbing Memphis,” he said.

“Thank you, Admiral,” George said, which made Pitchess glare at him in mock anger. He went on, “We get Memphis, that’s a long step toward cutting the CSA right in half. Sure would be fine.”

“Now who’s the admiral?” Pitchess retorted, and Enos spread his hands, admitting to attempted strategizing. His buddy’s face took on a wistful expression. “Wonder if we’ll ever see the day. If it takes us a year and a half to clear a quarter of the river, how long do we need to do all of it?”

“Reminds me of the kind of questions that ran me out of school and onto a fishing boat,” George said, to which Pitchess nodded. George looked south now, toward the distant Tennessee city. “I feel like Moses looking toward the Promised Land, knowing I’m never going to get there.”

“Sailor, you have the wrong attitude,” Pitchess declared, sounding very much like the morale-building lectures that came out of the Navy Department and were read with straight faces by the officers of the Punishment. “If only we don’t worry about the minefields in the Mississippi and the shore batteries that can blow us out of the water and the Confederate river monitors, we’ll waltz into Memphis day after tomorrow.”

“Now there’s sugar for my morning coffee,” Enos exclaimed, and Wayne Pitchess laughed out loud. “Now, Mr. Sugar, sir, what happens if I do worry about those things, or even about one of ’em?”

“Then it takes longer,” Pitchess said, “and you get written up for malicious fretting and impeding the war effort. They issue you a ball and chain and a sledgehammer, and you start making boulders into sand. Sounds bully, don’t it?”

The Punishment inched down the Mississippi. Everyone on deck kept an eye peeled for the round, spiked ugliness of mines. George methodically checked and cleaned the action of his machine gun. Lieutenant Kelly would have given him hell had he neglected it, but he didn’t need the officer riding him to make sure he attended to what needed doing. Hosing bullets out at the Rebs was the likeliest way he’d stay alive in an action; if the gun jammed, that gave the enemy a free shot at him. Best, then, that it didn’t jam.

Kelly came up behind him and watched in approval so silent that George jumped when he turned around and discovered him there. “You take care of the equipment,” the Navy man said, as if surprised to discover that trait in someone so recently a civilian.

“Sir, I put in a lot of years on a fishing trawler,” George answered. “We didn’t spend so much time polishing things as we do here, but everything had to work.” The Atlantic, he thought, was much less forgiving of mistakes than the Mississippi. It would, quite impersonally, kill you if you gave it even a quarter of a chance.

On the other hand, the Rebels would kill you most personally if they got their chance, or even a piece of their chance. He supposed that pretty much balanced things out. Kelly might have been thinking along those lines, too, for he said, “We have to be ready every second.”

“Yes, sir,” Enos agreed.

Kelly sighed. “I do wish we were something more than fire support for the Army. Out on the ocean, by all I hear, ships do what they need to do, not what some fool in green-gray thinks they need to do.”

As far as George was concerned, a dark blue uniform could also cover up a fool. He carefully did not mention that to Kelly, who was liable to think Enos had him in mind with the comment. What he did say was, “Crazy kind of war we’re fighting here.”

“Sailor, if you think I’m going to argue with you, you’re the one who’s crazy,” Kelly told him. “Snapping-turtle Navy is a strange sort of place.”

Enos would have said more, but klaxons started shouting. He would have run to his battle station, but he was already there. What he did do was run a belt into his machine gun, then look around to see what he was supposed to use for a target. He didn’t spot anything.

Word was not long in coming. Fingers began pointing south. Squinting, Enos spotted a tiny smudge of smoke on the horizon. It was what the smoke from the Punishment’s stacks might have looked like, if seen from a distance of several miles. Which meant-

“Well, well,” Lieutenant Kelly said, whistling tunelessly between his teeth. “You don’t see ship-to-ship actions very often in river warfare. Aren’t you glad we’ve found an exception for you, Enos?”

“Sir, I’ll fight,” George said. “You know I’ll fight. Expecting me to be glad about it is probably asking too much.” He’d had revenge enough by now for what the Rebs had done to him while he was a fisherman. He wouldn’t have minded spending the rest of the war somewhere far away from the roar of guns and close to Sylvia, George, Jr., and Mary Jane. He wondered if his little girl remembered him. Then he wondered if Sylvia remembered him-he hadn’t had a letter for a while.

Kelly said, “The next interesting question is whether we saw the Rebs before they saw us.” Interesting was such a nice, bland word to apply to a question that was liable to determine whether the Punishment remained a river monitor or turned into a flaming hulk in the next few minutes.

With a small noise, half whir, half grind, the turret of the Punishment began to revolve. The big guns elevated a few degrees. Before they could fire, though, a couple of great columns of water fountained up from the Mississippi, several hundred yards ahead of the monitor. Secondary splashes rose from shell fragments hitting the water.

“Well, well,” Kelly said again, as calmly as if the toast were too dark to suit him. “That answers that, doesn’t it?”

It did, and, as far as George was concerned, it was the wrong answer. He felt singularly useless. Whatever happened in the duel between the Punishment and the Confederate monitor, it wasn’t going to happen at ranges where a machine gun would do any good. That meant he had to remain a spectator at what might be his own destruction. He’d had to do that before, aboard the submersible-hunting trawler Spray. He didn’t think he’d get used to it if he had to do it a hundred times.

The Punishment’s guns bellowed. The deck quivered under Enos’ feet. He hoped the fellow at the rangefinder knew his business. No way to be certain, not with land and the twists of the river hiding the enemy from sight. Only smoke by which to gauge positions-it was a particularly deadly version of blindman’s buff.

Smoke spurted from the Punishment’s stacks. Now the monitor had to move quickly, either that or present a sitting target to its Confederate counterpart. Moving, though, was as likely to mean heading into the path of enemy fire as away from it. George wondered how Commander Heinrich, the skipper of the Punishment, chose which way to go. However he did it, he earned his money.

More shells from the Confederate gunboat splashed into the Mississippi. These were closer, so that some of the water they kicked up came raining down onto the deck of the Punishment. Enos wished he had his slicker from the Ripple.

Lieutenant Kelly, though, was grinning. “They haven’t straddled us,” he said. “Their next salvo will be long, and the one after that, if we’re lucky, longer yet. That gives us more time to find them and hit them.” He spoke as if that were all in a day’s work-and so, in fact, it was. George still hadn’t got used to the notion that, wearing this uniform, his day’s work involved killing people.

Boom! Boom! The guns in the Punishment’s turret replied to the Confederate fire. George hadn’t watched to see whether their muzzles had moved up or down or whether they thought they had the range. How, firing with only smoke to go by, would they know if they’d made a hit? By seeing more smoke, he supposed, or by having the enemy gunboat quit shooting at them.

It hadn’t quit shooting at the moment, worse luck. As Kelly had predicted, the next two shells were long. Enos waited anxiously for the salvo after that. How clever was the Rebel captain?

George had heard the Confederate shells roaring overhead before they splashed into the Mississippi. When the roar came again, he cringed at his machine gun: the shells screaming down sounded as if they were going to land on top of his head. “Brace yourselves, boys,” Lieutenant Kelly shouted through the screech of their descent. “They’re-”

One of them hit just to port of the Punishment, the other, half a second later, to starboard. The monitor staggered under Enos’ feet, as if it had fallen into a hole. But there were no holes in the Mississippi-or rather, there hadn’t been. That stagger was part of what knocked George off his feet. The rest was blast, which flung him against the side of the turret.

A fragment from the shell clanged off the turret about the same time as he hit it. A fresh, bright scar appeared on the metal, less than six inches above his head. He sucked in a breath, wondering if he’d feel the stab of a broken rib or two. To his relief, he didn’t.

Dazedly, he sat up and looked around. Lieutenant Michael Kelly hadn’t been so lucky as he was. There Kelly sprawled, cut almost in half by a piece of flying steel. To his horror, he saw the lieutenant’s eyes still had awareness in them. Kelly’s mouth moved, but only blood came from it. Then, mercifully, he slumped down dead.

And then, quite as if nothing had happened, the Punishment’s guns bellowed out a reply to the Confederate salvo. The crew might have been damaged, but the warship lived on. It would keep doing its job, too. George had an uneasy vision of a stream of men entering its hatches like beeves being driven into a slaughterhouse, the cannon firing, and out the far hatches coming, not steaks and ground meat, but coffins. But that would not matter to the ship. There would always be more men to feed into it, as there were always more men to feed into the trenches.

Across the water came a deep, low rumble, like thunder far away. For a moment, Enos thought it was the sound of the Confederate gunboat firing. But he hadn’t heard it when the other vessel’s previous salvos reached for the Punishment. The distant plume of smoke suddenly swelled enormously at the base.

“Hit!” somebody shouted. Somebody else yelled, “Blew the bastards to kingdom come!” George Enos started yelling, too. It was victory. Then he looked at Mike Kelly, or what was left of him, and at the gouge on the metal of the turret so close to where his own head had been. As easily as not, Kelly could have been alive and himself dead and mutilated. He yelled louder than ever.

Jefferson Pinkard was one of the lucky ones: he had a real seat in a real passenger coach on the troop train rumbling through the night somewhere in southern Georgia. If this is good luck, he thought, I don’t want to know what bad luck is like.

His backside and the base of his spine ached; the seat was bare wood. It might have been a car for whites too poor to afford even second-class fare, or it might have been reserved for Negroes. If Pinkard had had to ride in cars like this whenever he took the train, he might have risen up himself against the people who made him do it.

He couldn’t stretch his legs out, either; the space between his seat and the one in front of it was too narrow. It would have been too narrow even if he hadn’t been kitted out with a pack on his back and a rifle between his knees. As things were, he felt like a sardine jammed into its tin. His newly issued helmet, a low-crowned iron derby with a wide rim on the British model, added to that canned feeling.

What he didn’t feel much like was a soldier. They’d given him his uniform, they’d given him his Tredegar, they’d given him a couple of weeks’ screamed instruction at close-order drill and ri-flery, and then they’d hauled him and his training regiment out of the camp near Birmingham and put them on the train.

Even his drill instructors-ogres in human shape if ever there were any-hadn’t been happy about that. “Weren’t for them damn niggers, y’all’d be here another month, likely tell longer,” one of them had said when the orders arrived. “Y’all was goin’ up against the damnyankees, wouldn’t be a man jack of you left breathing in two weeks’ time. But they reckon y’all are good enough now to whip them Red niggers back into line.”

Pinkard turned to the raw private on the hard, cramped seat next to his: a skinny little fellow with spectacles who’d been a clerk in Dothan till the Conscription Bureau finally swept him up. “Stinky,” he said, “if them niggers was soldiers as lousy as they say, we’d have done licked ’em already, don’t you reckon?”

“My name,” Stinky Salley said in tones of relentless precision, “is Christopher.” He’d said the same thing in the same tone to the drill sergeants who’d rechristened him after he’d evaded bath call one evening. He’d kept on saying it even after they knocked him down-he had spirit, maybe more than his scrawny body could safely contain. It did no good; the nickname had stuck.

“Listen, Stinky,” Pinkard went on, “it stands to reason that-”

One of the soldiers who sprawled in the aisle between seats, somewhere between sitting and lying, spoke up: “Stands to reason somebody’s gonna kick your ass, you don’t shut the hell up and let him sleep if he’s able.”

Pinkard did shut up. He wished he could sleep. He was too uncomfortable. He wondered how he’d be when the train finally stopped. Probably shuffle around like a ninety-year-old man with the rheumatism, he thought.

The window three seats in front of his suddenly blew in, spraying glass around the car. He yelped when a piece stung his cheek. A warm trickle of blood began to flow. “What the hell-?” somebody yelled.

Another window blew out, this one behind him. He felt something-probably more glass-rebound from his helmet. Back there, a man started screaming: “Oh, Mother!” he wailed. “I’m hit! Oh, God! Oh, Mama!”

Realization smote. “They’re shooting at us, the sons of bitches-niggers in the night, I mean.”

He couldn’t do anything about it, either. He had no target at which to shoot. All he could do was sit there and hope the Red revolutionaries would miss him. That might have been worse than anything else about it-or so he thought till his squad leader, a dour corporal named Peter Ploughman, said, “Thank God they ain’t got but a rifle or two. You boys ain’t never seen what comes out of a train that done got chewed up by a machine gun.”

A couple of the men near the wounded soldier did what they could for him, which wasn’t much. The car held neither a doctor nor a medical orderly. Jeff had no idea how anybody who knew anything could have come from another car to the hurt man, not with the way soldiers had been shoehorned into this train. The poor fellow would have to suffer till it stopped.

And it wasn’t stopping. The reverse, in fact: it was speeding up, to escape the harassing fire from the brush by the tracks. In a speculative voice, Ploughman said, “How sneaky are them damn niggers, anyways? They tryin’ to spook us into runnin’ right over some explosives they planted?”

“Jesus!” Jefferson Pinkard said. He was glad he wasn’t the only one who said it. He’d thought working at the Sloss foundry was such a dangerous job, war would hardly faze him afterwards. But in the Sloss works even Leonidas, appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, wasn’t actively trying to kill him and devoting all his ingenuity toward that end. The idea that the Red Negroes might be using a small incident to give rise to a big one, as if they were throwing stones to flush game out of deep cover to where it could more readily be shot-that made the hair stand up at the back of his neck.

Acceleration pressed him against his seat. Things in his pack dug into his spine and his kidneys. He tried to brace himself against an explosion that would fling the car off the tracks like a toy kicked by a brat with a nasty temper. He didn’t think anything he did would help much, but sitting there like a lump of coal wouldn’t help at all.

Without warning, he wasn’t being pressed back any more. He had everything he could do to keep from going facefirst into the back of the seat in front of him. Soldiers in the corridor, who could not steady themselves, tumbled over one another in a shouting, cursing heap.

Iron screamed on iron, rails and wheels locking in an embrace so hot, it sent orange-red sparks leaping up higher than the window through which Jefferson Pinkard stared. Absurdly, he wondered if he’d helped bring any of that iron into being.

Groaning and shuddering, the train staggered to a halt. Pinkard saw a couple of men with kerosene lanterns outside. Their voices came through the shattered windows of the car: “Out! Out! Everybody out!”

That wasn’t easy or quick. It wouldn’t have been easy or quick with veteran troops. With raw recruits, all the shouting of their officers and noncoms helped only so much. They got in one another’s way, went in this direction when they should have gone in that, and generally blundered their way out of the coaches into the night.

Cold nipped at Pinkard as he stood in the darkness. A coal stove and a lot of bodies had kept the car warm. Now he got out the overcoat stowed in his pack. He wished he were home in bed with Emily, who would warm him better than any Army overcoat could. Most of the time, he’d been too busy to notice how much he missed her. Not now, standing here all confused, breathing in coal smoke from the engine, breathing out fog from the chill.

“Just in time-” The phrase started going through the raw soldiers, some of them plainly repeating it without any clear idea of why they were. Then somebody who sounded as if he did know what he was talking about spoke up: “We hadn’t been able to flag the engineer down in time, reckon this here train would have blown sky high.”

“What did I say?” Corporal Peter Ploughman sounded both vindicated and smug. Pinkard shrugged. If Ploughman didn’t know more about the soldiering business than the men he led, he had no business wearing stripes on his sleeves. But Jeff supposed the noncom did need to impress them every now and again with how much he knew.

“Where are we?” someone asked.

“About twenty miles outside of Albany,” the authoritative-sounding voice answered. Albany, or its outskirts, had been their destination. Jeff had a ghastly suspicion he knew how they were going to get there now.

A moment later, that suspicion was confirmed. Captain Connolly, the company commander, shouted, “Form column of fours!” Grumbling and cursing in low voices, the soldiers obeyed, again less efficiently than veterans might have done. And off they tramped, eastward along the line of the railroad toward Albany.

Pinkard promptly tripped over a rock, almost falling on his face. “They’re going to pay for this,” he muttered. He’d had to make only one night march during his abbreviated training. He hadn’t liked it for beans. Now he discovered practice was a lot easier than the real thing.

After some endless time, dawn began to break. What had been dark punctuated by deeper black turned into trenches and shell crates and burned-out Negro shacks and also the occasional burned-out mansion. Fresh-turned red earth in the middle of winter meant new graves. There were a lot of them. A faint odor of corruption hung in the air.

“Niggers are playing for keeps,” Stinky Salley remarked, in tones full of the same surprise and disbelief Pinkard felt. “Never would have reckoned they could do nothin’ like this.”

“Whole damn world’s gone crazy since the war started,” Jeff said. “Women workin’ men’s jobs, niggers workin’ white men’s jobs, and now, hell, niggers fightin’ damn near like white men. Shitfire, I wish they were fightin’ the damnyankees, not me.”

That argument had raged on the train and in the training camp, as it had all over the Confederacy since the Negro uprising began. Stinky Salley was on the other side. He stared at Pinkard with withering scorn. “Yeah, and I bet you wish they was marrying your womenfolks, too,” he said.

“Don’t wish anything of the kind, goddammit,” Pinkard said. “Just use your eyes instead of your mouth for a change, why don’t you? If niggers was the happy-go-lucky stay-at-homes everybody been sayin’ they are, you and me wouldn’t be here. We’d be fighting the USA instead.” Salley’s glare didn’t get any friendlier, but he shut up. Not even he could argue that they were where they’d figured on being, or that Negroes in arms weren’t opposing the Confederate government.

“Let’s get moving,” Captain Connolly shouted. “You don’t want to fall out of line hereabouts-niggers’d sooner cut your throat than look at you. Sooner we put these stinking Reds down, sooner we can get back to whipping the damnyankees. Train can’t do the work, so your legs got to. Keep movin’!”

Keep moving Pinkard did, though his feet began to ache. He wondered if the CSA really could recover from this rebellion as if nothing had happened. The captain certainly seemed to think so. Looking at the devastation through which they were marching, Pinkard wasn’t so sure. Who would repair everything that had been damaged?

A couple of Negroes, a man and a woman, were working in a garden plot near the tracks. They looked up at the column of white men in butternut. Had they been rebels a few days before? Had they hidden their weapons when government forces washed over them? Would they cut his throat if they saw half a chance? Or were they as genuinely horrified by the uprising as a lot of blacks in Birmingham were?

How could you know? How were you supposed to tell? Pinkard pondered that as he tramped past them. Try as he would, he found no good answers.

Lucien Galtier spoke to his horse as the two of them rolled down the road from Riviere-du-Loup toward his home: “This paving, it is not such a bad thing, eh? Oh, I may have to put shoes on you more often now, but we can go out and about in weather that would have kept us home before, n’est-ce pas?”

The horse didn’t answer. The horse never answered. That was one of the reasons Lucien enjoyed conversing with it. Back at the house, he had trouble getting a word in edgewise. He looked around. Snow lay everywhere. Even with overcoat, wool muffler, and wool cap pulled down over his ears, he was cold. The road, however, remained a black ribbon of asphalt through the white. The Americans kept it open even in the worst of blizzards.

They did not do it for him, of course. The racket of an engine behind him and the raucous squawk of a horn told him why they did do it. Moving as slowly as he could get away with, he pulled over to the edge of the road and let the U.S. ambulance roar past. It picked up speed, racing with its burden of wounded men toward the hospital the Americans had built on Galtier’s land.

“On my patrimony,” he told the horse. It snorted and flicked its ears, as if here, for once, it sympathized with him. His land had been in his family for more than two hundred years, since the days of Louis XIV. That anyone should simply appropriate a piece of it struck him as outrageous. Had the Americans no decency?

He knew the answer to that, only too well. Major Quigley, the occupier in charge of dealing with the Quebecois, had blandly assured him the benefits of the road would make up for having lost some of his land. Quigley hadn’t believed it himself; he’d taken the land for no other reason than to punish Lucien. But it might even turn out to be so.

“And what if it is?” Lucien asked. Now, sensibly, the horse did not respond. How could anyone, even a horse, make a response? Thievery was thievery, and you could not compensate for it in such a way. Did they reckon him devoid of honor, devoid of pride? If they did, they would be sorry-and sooner than they thought. So he hoped, at any rate.

Another ambulance came up the road toward him. He took his time getting out of the way for this one, too. That was a tiny way to resist the American invaders, but even tiny ways were not to be despised. Perhaps a man who might have lived would die on account of the brief delay.

He glanced toward the west. Ugly clouds were massing there: another storm coming. Even on a paved road, Galtier did not care to be caught in it. He flicked the reins and told the horse to get moving. The horse, which had been listening to him for many years, snorted and increased its pace from a walk…to a walk.

Here came a buggy toward his wagon. He stiffened on the seat. The man in the seat did not wear American green-gray. American soldiers at least had the courage to fight their foes face to face, however reprehensible their other habits might be. The small, plump man in black there, far from fighting his foes, embraced them with a fervor Galtier found incomprehensible and infuriating.

The priest waved to him. “Bonjour, Lucien,” he called.

“Bonjour, Father Pascal,” Galtier called back, adding under his breath, “Mauvais tabernac.” Even English-speaking Canadians thought the Quebecois way of cursing peculiar, but Lucien did not care. It satisfied him more than their talk of manure and fornication.

Father Pascal’s cheeks were always pink, and doubly so with the chilly wind rising as it was now. “I have given those poor injured men a bit of spiritual solace,” he said, smiling at Lucien. “Do you know, my son, a surprising number of them are communicants of our holy Catholic church?”

“No, Father, I did not know that.” Galtier did not care, either. They might be Catholics, but they were unquestionably Americans. That more than made up for a common religion, as far as the farmer was concerned.

Father Pascal saw the world differently. “C’est vrai-it’s true,” he said. Father Pascal, Lucien thought, saw the world in terms of what was most advantageous for Father Pascal. The Americans were here, the Americans were strong, therefore he collaborated with the Americans. Nodding again to Lucien, he went on, “I had the honor also to see your lovely daughter Nicole at the hospital. In her whites, I did not recognize her for a moment. The doctors tell me she is doing work of an excellent sort. You must be very proud of her.”

“I am always very proud of her,” Lucien said. That had the virtue of being true and polite at the same time, something which could not be said about a good many other possible responses. Galtier glanced over toward the building clouds. “And now, Father, if you will pardon me-” The horse broke into a trot this time, as if it truly did understand how much he wanted to get away.

“Go with God, my son,” Father Pascal called after him. He waved back toward the priest, hoping the snowstorm would catch him before he got back to Riviere-du-Loup.

If Lucien was to reach the farmhouse, he had to drive past the hospital. It was almost as if Major Quigley had set a small town on his property: the hospital certainly had more ambulances coming to it and leaving it than Riviere-du-Loup had had motorcars at the start of the war. It also had a large gasoline-powered generator that gave it electricity, while trucks and big wagons brought in coal to keep it warm against the worst a Quebec winter could do.

People bustled in and out the front door, those going in pausing to show their bona fides to armed guards at the doorway. A doctor stood outside the entrance, smoking a cigarette; red spattered his white jacket. Out came a U.S. officer in green-gray, a formidable row of ribbons and medals on his chest and an even more formidable scowl on his face. Lucien would have bet he hadn’t got what he wanted, whatever that was. And here came a couple of women pulling overcoats on over their long white dresses to fight the chill outside.

Galtier steered the wagon toward them and reined to a halt. “Bonsoir, mademoiselle,” he said, formal as a butler. “May I offer you a ride to your home?”

Nicole Galtier smiled at him. “Oh, bonsoir, Papa,” she said. “I didn’t expect you here at just this time.” She started to climb into the wagon, then turned back toward the other nurse. “See you tomorrow, Henrietta.”

“See you tomorrow,” Henrietta said. She went over to the doctor. He gave her a cigarette and lighted it with his own, leaning his face close to hers.

The horse had taken several strides before Lucien fully noticed what he’d heard. “You spoke to her in English,” he said to Nicole.

“I am learning it, yes,” she answered, and tossed her head so that the starched white cap she wore almost flew off. “If I am to do anything that is important and not just wash and carry, I have to learn it.” She glanced at him to see how he was taking that. When he didn’t say anything, she went on, “You have learned it, and use what you have learned, is that not so?”

“Yes, it is so,” he told her, and wondered where to go from there. Discovering he had no idea, he kept quiet till he had driven the wagon into the barn. “Go on to the house,” he said then. “I’ll see to the horse and be in with you in a few minutes.”

Brushing down the animal and making sure it had food and water-but not too much of either-was a routine he took for granted. He had heard that rich farmers had motorcars of their own, and tractors and threshers with motors, too. He wondered what they thought of doing without horses. He shrugged. He was not a rich farmer, nor likely to become one.

As he often did, he sighed with pleasure on walking into the farmhouse. Not only was it warm, it was also full of the good smells of cooking. “Is that chicken stew?” he called in the direction of the kitchen.

Marie’s voice floated resignedly out: “Yes, Lucien-chicken stew. One day, I swear, I shall buy a zebra or a camel, so I can roast it in the oven and not have you know at first sniff what it is.”

“Zebra would probably taste like horse,” their son Georges said, and then, exercising his gift for the absurd, “although it could be the meat would have stripes.”

“Thank God we have not been hungry enough to have to learn the taste of horse,” Lucien said. “Thank Him twice, for the beast we have is so old, he would surely be tough.”

Charles said, “I have read in a book on the French Foreign Legion that the roasted hump of a camel is supposed to be a great delicacy.”

“Since a man has to be a fool-a brave fool, yes, but a fool-to join the Foreign Legion, I do not think he is to be trusted in matters of taste,” Galtier said. “And I do not think a camel would do well in the snow.”

“You do not have reason, Papa,” Charles said, glad to show off knowledge at his father’s expense. “Not only are there camels that live in the desert, there are also others-Bactrians, they are called-that live in cold countries.”

“But not in Quebec,” Lucien said firmly. He caught the evil gleam in Georges’ eye and forestalled him: “Nor, for that matter, have we any great herds of zebras here.” Georges pouted; he hated having his father anticipate a joke.

Over the supper table, they talked of camels and zebras and of more practical matters like the price chickens were bringing in Riviere-du-Loup, whether the kerosene ration was likely to be cut again, and what a good bunch of applejack this latest one from their neighbor was. “Warms you better than the fire does,” Charles said, sipping the potent, illegal, popular stuff.

And Nicole, as had become her habit, talked about the work she did at the hospital. “The officer had a wounded leg full of pus, and I helped drain it,” she said. “I did not do much, of course, as I am so new, but I watched with great care, and I think I will be able to do more next time.” Her nose wrinkled. “The smell was bad, but not so bad that I could not stand it.”

Susanne screwed up her face into a horrible grimace. “That’s disgusting, Nicole,” she exclaimed, freighting the word with all the emphasis she could give. The rest of her sisters, older and younger, nodded vehemently.

Gently, Marie said, “Perhaps not at supper, Nicole.”

“It is my work,” Nicole said, sounding as angry as Lucien had ever heard her. “We all talk about what we do in the day. Am I to wear a muzzle because I do not do what everyone else does?” She got up and hurried away from the table.

Lucien stared after her. When he had hesitated over letting her take the job at the hospital, it had been because he feared and disliked the company into which she would be thrown there. He had never thought that, simply by virtue of doing different things from the rest of the family, she might become sundered from it-and might want to become sundered from it.

He knocked back his little glass of applejack and poured it full again. The problems he had expected with Nicole’s job had for the most part not arisen. The problems he had not expected…“Life is never simple,” he declared. Maybe it was the applejack, but he had the feeling of having said something truly profound.

“Gas shells,” Jake Featherston said enthusiastically. “Isn’t that fine? The damnyankees have been doing it to our boys, and now we get to do it right back.”

Michael Scott grinned at him. “Chokes me up just thinkin’ about it, Sarge,” he said, and did an alarmingly realistic impression of a man trying to cough chlorine-fried lungs right out of his chest. After the laughter at the gallows humor subsided, he went on, “When they going to have ’em for the big guns?”

“God knows,” Jake said, rolling his eyes. “Best I can tell, we got our factories stretched like a rubber band that’s about to break and hit you a lick between the eyes. There’s a war on, case you haven’t noticed, so they got to make more stuff than they ever reckoned they could. They got to do that with most of the men who were workin’ in ’em before totin’ guns now. And they got to do it with half the niggers, maybe, up in arms instead of doin’ the jobs they’re supposed to be doin’. Damn lucky the Yankees ain’t ridden roughshod over us.”

That produced a gloomy silence. It also produced several worried looks toward the north. The first U.S. attacks after the Red uprising had been beaten back, and the damnyankees, as if taken by surprise that they hadn’t easily overwhelmed the Confederates, seemed to have paused to think things over. Signs were, though, that they were building up to try something new. Whenever the weather was decent, U.S. aeroplanes buzzed over the Confederate lines, spying out whatever they could. Confederate reconnaissance reported more activity than usual in the Yankee trenches.

Featherston added one thing more, the artilleryman’s tipoff: “Their guns been firing a lot of registration shots lately.” When a few shells came over, falling around important targets, you started worrying. That usually meant the other side’s artillery was taking exact ranges. Before too long, a lot more than a few shells would be dropping thereabouts.

“Sarge, we got these gas shells to go with the rest of what we shoot,” Michael Scott said. He glanced around. Nobody was in earshot of the gun crew. Even so, he lowered his voice: “With things like they are with Captain Stuart and all, we gonna be able to get enough of ’em to shoot to do any good?”

“That’s a damn fine question,” Jake told him. “Wish to Jesus I had me a damn fine answer for it. Way things used to be, we had shells the way a fellow been eatin’ green apples gets the runs-they were just fallin’ out of our ass, on account of Jeb Stuart III was Jeb Stuart III, and that was plenty to get him everything he wanted. Nowadays…” He sighed. “Nowadays I reckon I’d sooner have me Captain Joe Doakes in charge of the battery, or somebody else no one ever heard of. We might not get a whole raft o’ shells, but we wouldn’t get shortchanged, neither. And I got the bad feeling we’re gonna be from here on out.”

Everybody in the gun crew sighed. Jeb Stuart III wasn’t Richmond’s fair-haired boy any more. Now he was under a dark cloud, and that meant the whole battery had to go around carrying lanterns. Sooner or later, Stuart would pay the price for not having kept a better eye on Pompey. Trouble was, the rest of the battery would pay it along with him.

Featherston filled his coffee cup from the pot above the cook-fire. The coffee was hot and strong. Once you’d said those two things, you’d said everything good about it you could. Nothing was as good as it had been before the Negroes rose up against their white superiors, not the chow, not the coffee, not anything.

“Damn niggers,” Jake muttered. “If we lose this damn war, it’s their fault, stabbing us in the back like they done. We could have licked the damnyankees easy, wasn’t for that.”

As if to contradict him, U.S. artillery opened up in earnest then. As soon as he saw the flashes to the north, as soon as he heard the roar of explosions and the scream of shells in the air, Jake knew the enemy guns weren’t doing registration fire this time. They meant it.

The howitzer he commanded had a splendid view north. “Come on!” he shouted, pointing toward the gun. “Let’s give it back to ’em!”

He didn’t think any of his men could have heard him, not through the blasts of shells landing close by and the whine and hiss of shrapnel balls and flying fragments of shell casing. But they’d been bombarded before. They knew what to do. In less than a minute, they were flinging shells-gas and shrapnel both-back at the U.S. lines.

Those lines were working, vomiting out men the way an anthill vomited ants after you kicked it. Featherston whooped when shells burst among the damnyankees swarming toward the Confederate lines, whooped when men flew through the air or sprawled bonelessly on the ground or threw themselves flat and stopped moving forward.

But a godawful lot of damnyankees kept right on toward the Confederate trenches, which were taking a fearful pounding. The infantry in the trenches couldn’t do any proper shooting at the advancing Yanks, not with tons of metal coming down on their heads. So much dust and dirt flew up from the Confederate lines, Jake had trouble spotting targets at which to aim his piece. “They’re gonna get in!” he yelled. If the U.S. troops didn’t just get into the Confederate lines but also through them-if that happened, the Confederate position in north-central Maryland was going to come unglued in a hurry.

Back in his training days, he’d learned that the three-inch howitzer, with its muzzle brake to keep recoil short and not fling the carriage backwards at every shot, could in an emergency fire twenty rounds a minute. Most of the time, that was only a number; the normal rate of fire was less than half as fast. No picky drillmaster was standing over the crew with a stopwatch now, as had been so back on the firing range. But if Jake and his men didn’t smash every firing-range record ever set, he would have eaten his hat-had he had any idea where the damn thing was.

In spite of the shells falling on them, the other guns of the battery matched his round for round, or came close enough as to make no difference. And in spite of all they did, the damnyankees kept coming. Men started emerging from the Confederate trenches up ahead-men in butternut, at first. Some of them looked for new firing positions from which to shoot back at the U.S. soldiers who had forced them out of what had been the safety of their lines. Others were running, nothing else but.

Then Featherston spotted men in green-gray. “Shrapnel!” he shouted, and depressed the barrel of the howitzer till he was all but firing over open sights. He yanked the lanyard. The shell roared. Again, he watched men tumble. They were closer now, and easier to see. He could even spy the difference in shape between their roundish helmets and the tin hats some of the Confederate troops were wearing.

A rifle bullet cracked past the gun’s splinter shield, and then another. He shook his head in dismay. He’d done a lot of shooting at enemy infantry during the war-that was what the three-incher was for. Up till now, though, he’d never been in a spot where enemy infantry could shoot back at him.

“Running low on ammunition!” somebody shouted in the chaos-he wasn’t sure who. Shells from the guns of the battery still in action tore great holes in the ranks of the oncoming U.S. soldiers, but they kept coming nonetheless, on a wider front than the field guns could sweep free.

“Bring the horses up to the gun and to the limber!” Jake shouted. He looked around for the Negro laborers attached to the gun. They were nowhere to be seen. He wasted a few seconds cursing. Nero and Perseus, who had been with the battery from the day the war started, would have done as he told them no matter how dangerous the work was. He’d seen that. But Nero and Perseus had been infected by the Red tide, too, and had deserted when the uprising broke out. God only knew where they were now.

“If the niggers won’t do it, reckon we got to take care of it our own selves,” Will Cooper said. Along with a couple of other men, he went back to the barn nearby and brought out the horses. The animals were snorting and frightened. Jake Featherston didn’t worry about that. He was plenty frightened himself, thank you very much. And if they didn’t get the howitzer out of there in a hurry, he’d be worse than frightened, and he knew it. He’d be dead or captured, and the gun lost, a disgrace to any artilleryman.

“God damn it to hell, what the devil do you think you’re doing?” It wasn’t a shout-it was more like a scream. For a moment, Featherston didn’t recognize the voice, though he’d heard it every day since before the war. His head snapped around. There stood Jeb Stuart III, head bare, pistol in his hand, eyes blazing with a fearful light.

“Sir-” Featherston pointed ahead, toward the advancing Yankees. “Sir, if we don’t pull back-” He didn’t think he needed to go on. The Confederate front was dissolving. A bullet ricocheted off the barrel of the cannon. If they didn’t get out, they’d be picked off one by one, with no chance of doing anything to affect the rest of what was plainly a losing battle.

Jeb Stuart III leveled the pistol at his head. “Sergeant, you are not going anywhere. We are not going anywhere-except forward. There is the enemy. We shall fight him as long as we have breath in us. Is that clear?”

“Uh, yes, sir,” Jake said. The barrel of the pistol looked as wide to him as that of his howitzer.

“Call me naive, will they? Call me stupid? Say my career is over?” Stuart muttered, not to Featherston, maybe not even to himself-more likely to some superior who wasn’t there, perhaps to his father. He had, Jake realized, decided to die like a hero rather than living on in disgrace. If he took a gun crew to glory with him, so what?

They unhitched the horses and fired a couple of shells at the damnyankees. Stuart made no effort whatever to seek shelter. On the contrary-he stood in the open, defying the Yankees to hit him. In short order, he went down, blood spurting from a neck wound. The gun crew got the horses hitched again in moments. Under Featherston’s bellowed orders, they got the howitzer out of there-and Captain Stuart, too. They saved the gun. Stuart died before a doctor saw him.

Chester Martin wished he’d had a bath any time recently. He wished the same thing about the squad he led. Of course, with so many unburied corpses in the neighborhood-so many corpses all up and down the Roanoke front-the reek of a few unwashed but live bodies would be a relatively small matter.

Turning to the distinguished visitor (without whose presence he wouldn’t have cared nearly so much about the bath), he said, “You want to be careful, sir. We’re right up at the front now. You give the Rebel snipers even the littlest piece of a target, and they’ll drill it. They won’t know you’re a reporter, not a soldier-and the bastards probably wouldn’t care much if they did know.”

“Don’t you worry about me, Sergeant,” Richard Harding Davis answered easily. “I’ve been up to the front before.”

“Yes, sir, I know that,” Martin answered. Davis had been up to the front in a good many wars over the past twenty years or so. “I’ve read a lot of your stuff.”

Davis preened. He wasn’t a very big man, but extraordinarily handsome, and dressed in green-gray clothes that were the color of a U.S. uniform but much snappier in cut-especially when compared to the dirty, unpressed uniforms all around him. “I’m very glad to hear it,” he said. “A writer who didn’t have readers would be out of work in a hurry-and then I might have to find an honest job.”

He laughed. So did Martin, who asked, “Are you all right, sir?” Handsome or not, Davis was an old geezer-well up into his fifties-and looked a little the worse for wear as he strode along the trench.

He was game enough, though. “I’m fine. Bit of a bellyache, maybe. I eat Army chow when I come up to the front. God knows how you poor souls survive on it.” It probably wasn’t anything like the fancy grub he ate back in New York City, Martin thought with a touch-more than a touch-of envy. Then Davis went on, “As a matter of fact, Sergeant, I know your work, too. That’s why I chose this unit when I decided to visit the Roanoke front.”

“Beg your pardon, sir?” For a second, Martin didn’t get it.

Richard Harding Davis spelled it out for him: “Teddy Roosevelt recommended you to me, as a matter of fact. He said you knocked him flat and jumped on him when the Rebs started shelling your men while he was on an inspection. If you’d do it for him, he said, you might even do it for me.” He flashed that formidable smile again.

“Do you want to know the truth, sir?” Martin said. “I’d almost forgotten about that. Been a lot of war since, if you know what I mean.”

Davis produced a notebook from a coat that had as many pockets as Joseph’s must have had colors and scribbled in it. “If you forget about the president of the United States, Sergeant, what do you remember?”

Martin chewed on that. When you thought about it, it was a damn good question. Most of what happened in the trenches wasn’t worth remembering. Most of what happened in the trenches, you would have paid anybody anything to forget. Davis right behind him, he turned out of a traverse and into a long firebay, and there found his answer. “When you get down to it, sir,” he said, “the only thing you want to remember is your buddies.”

Here came Paul Andersen, who’d been with him from the start. After so many casualties, that alone was plenty to forge a bond between them. Here came Specs Peterson, who looked as if he ought to be a pharmacist and who was probably the meanest, roughest son of a gun in the whole battalion. Here came Willard Tarrant, Joe Hammerschmitt’s replacement, who carried the name of Packer because he worked at the Armour plant in Chicago.

“Fellas, this here’s Richard Harding Davis,” Martin said, and let them tell the correspondent their own stories.

They had plenty of stories to tell him. If you stayed alive for a week at the front line, even a week where the official reports called the sector quiet, you’d have stories enough to last you the rest of your life-stories of courage and suffering and fear and endurance and everything else you could name. Experience was intense, concentrated, while it lasted…if it lasted.

Davis’ hand raced over the pages of the little notebook, trying valiantly to keep up with the flood of words. At last, after what might have been an hour or so, the tales that came of themselves began to flag. To keep things going, the correspondent pointed east across the rusting barbed wire, across the cratered horror of no-man’s-land, over toward the Confederate line, and asked, “What do you think of the enemy soldiers?”

Now Packer and Specs and the rest of the privates fell silent and looked to Martin and Andersen. It wasn’t, Martin judged, so much because they were sergeant and corporal: more because they’d been there since the beginning, and had seen more of the Rebels than anybody else. Chester paused to gather his thoughts. At last, he said, “Far as I can see, Rebs in the trenches aren’t a hell of a lot different than us. They’re brave sons of bitches, I’ll tell you that. We’ve got more big guns than they do, and there was a good long while there last summer when we had gas and they didn’t, but if you wanted to move ’em back, you had to go in there with more men than they had and shift ’em. No way in hell they were going to run then, and they don’t now, either.”

Paul Andersen nodded. “That’s how it is, all right. They’re just a bunch of ordinary guys, same as we are. Too damn bad they didn’t let us have a real Christmas truce last year, way there was in 1914. Nice to be able to stick your head out of the trench one day a year and know somebody’s not going to try and blow it off. But what the hell can you do?”

“I’ll tell you something, Corporal,” Davis said. “The reason there wasn’t a truce last year is that the powers that be-in Philadelphia and Richmond both, from what I hear-made certain there wouldn’t be, because they watched the whole war almost fall to pieces on Christmas Day, 1914.”

“What? They think we’d have quit fighting?” Packer Tarrant shook his head at the very idea. “Got to lick ’em. Taking longer than anybody figured, but we’ll do it.”

Several men nodded, most of them new to the front. Richard Harding Davis wrote some more, then asked, “If they’re just like you are in the trenches, what keeps you going against them?”

In a different tone of voice, the question would have been subversive. As it was, it produced a few seconds of thoughtful silence. Then Specs Peterson said, “Hell and breakfast, Mr. Davis, we done too much by now to quit, ain’t we? We got to beat those bastards, or all of that don’t mean nothin’.”

“That’s about the size of it,” Chester Martin agreed. “One of my grandfathers, he got shot in the War of Secession-and for what? The USA lost. Everything he did was wasted. Jesus, it’d be awful if that happened to us three times in fifty years.”

Corporal Andersen pointed over to the enemy lines. “And the Rebs, they don’t want to find out what losing is all about, either. That’s why they keep comin’at us, I guess. Been a lot of what the newspapers been calling Battles of the Roanoke, anyway.” As if to underscore his words, a machine gun started rattling away, a couple of hundred yards to the north. Rifles joined in, and, for five or ten minutes, a lively little firefight raged. Gradually, the firing died away. Anything might have started it. Martin wondered if anyone had died in the meaningless exchange of bullets.

“Are the Rebels any different since their Negroes rose in revolt?” Davis asked.

The soldiers looked at one another. “Not when we’re coming at them, that’s for sure,” Martin said, and everybody nodded. “You think about it, though, they haven’t been coming at us as hard lately. ’Course, it’s been winter, too, so I don’t know just how much that means.”

“Confederates more inclined to stand on the defensive.” Richard Harding Davis said the words aloud, as if tasting them before setting them down on paper. Then he grunted. It sounded more like surprise than approval. He looked at Martin-no, through Martin. His mouth opened, as if he was about to say something else.

Instead, he swayed. The notebook and pencil dropped from his hands into the mud. His knees buckled. He collapsed.

“Jesus!” Martin and the other soldiers crowded round the fallen reporter. Martin grabbed for his wrist. He found no pulse. “He’s dead,” the sergeant said in blank amazement. Davis’ body bore no wound he could see. He knew a shell fragment as tiny as a needle could kill, but no shells had landed anywhere close by.

His shouts and those of his squadmates brought a doctor into the front line within a couple of minutes. The soldiers wouldn’t have rated such an honor, but Davis was important. The doctor stripped the correspondent out of his fancy not-quite-uniform. Try as he would, he couldn’t find a wound, either. “His heart must have given out on him, poor fellow,” he said, and shook his head. “He’s not-he wasn’t-that old, but he’d been working hard, and he wasn’t that young, either.”

“Isn’t that a hell of a thing?” Martin said as a couple of soldiers carried the mortal remains of Richard Harding Davis to the rear.

“Terrible,” Paul Andersen agreed. “You got a cigarette?”

“Makings,” Martin answered, and passed him a tobacco pouch. “Hell of a thing. You ever expect to see man die of what do you call ’em-natural causes-up here? What a fucking waste.” Andersen laughed at that as he rolled coarse tobacco into a scrap of newspaper. After a moment, Martin laughed, too. Yes, graveyard humor came easy at the front. It was the only kind that did.