'At ease, Major,' Foulke said after they exchanged salutes. 'Effective immediately, I am removing you from command of your battalion.'
'Sir?' Morrell hadn't expected to be summoned before the divisional commander at all, and certainly not for that reason. 'On what grounds, sir?'
'What grounds?' Foulke wheezed laughter, then held up a plump, pink hand. 'On the grounds that Philadelphia asked me for a younger officer who could fill a staff position there, and that your name topped the list. Are those satisfactory grounds, Major?'
'Uh, yes, sir,' Morrell said. 'I can't imagine any better ones, and a whole slew that are worse.' When General Foulke had told him he was being removed, he'd imagined that slew of worse grounds, though he didn't think he'd given reason for invoking any of them. Stubborn honesty, though, compelled him to add, 'After I spent so long in the hospital, sir, I do regret being pulled away from active service again, if you don't mind my saying so.'
'I don't mind at all,' General Foulke said. 'I'd be disappointed if you said anything else, as a matter of fact. A staff officer who likes being a staff officer because he has a soft billet far away from the line isn't a man of the sort the country needs. Men who want to go out and fight, they're the sort who do well for the general staff. You will be fighting, I promise you; the only difference will be, you'll do it with map and telegram, not with a rifle.'
'Yes, sir.' Morrell knew he should have been overjoyed; a tour on the General Staff would look very good on his record. But he revelled in the rugged outdoor life, whether in the Sonoran desert or the Kentucky mountains. Getting stuck behind a desk struck him as altogether too much like being stuck in a hospital bed.
William Dudley Foulke was thinking along with him, at least up to a point. Steepling his fingers, the general said, 'Staff work can be the making of a promising young officer. If you see opportunity, by all means seize it. Here.' He handed Morrell a book. 'Something for you to read on the train: my translation of the Roman military writer Vegetius. Either it will engage your interest or help you sleep the miles away.'
'Thank you very much, sir,' Morrell said, wondering whether an ancient writer's precepts would have any bearing on the modern art of war.
'My pleasure.' Foulke sighed. 'When I was a boy, I thought I would be a lawyer or a scholar. But I was fourteen years old when the Rebs beat us the first time, and I knew then I wanted to spend the rest of my life in the military service of my country. That little volume there is a relic of what might have been, I'm afraid, nothing more.' He grew brisk again. 'Well, you don't want to hear an old man maundering on about himself. I certainly didn't when I was a young officer, at any rate.'
Morrell flushed. That embarrassed him, which only made him flush more. 'I'll treasure the book, sir,' he said.
'Or perhaps you won't,' Foulke said. 'It's all right either way, Major. I've sent Philadelphia a wire, letting them know you're on your way. Now the trick will be getting you there. This part of Kentucky isn't what you'd call overburdened with railroads. We'll send you up the Hyden-Hazard road, and east from there to Hazard, where you can catch a train. You're ready to go now, I assume.'
'Uh, two things, sir,' Morrell said. 'First, I promised I'd ask for a couple of more machine guns for my battalion.'
'They'll have them,' Foulke promised. 'What else?'
Morrell looked down at himself. 'If I'm going to Philadelphia, shouldn't I cleanup a bit first?'
Foulke snuffled air out through his mustache. 'Seeing what a real front line soldier looks like would do Philadelphia good, but you may be right.' He called for his adjutant-'Captain Rothbart!' — and said, 'Get Major Morrell a hot bath, get him a fresh uniform, and get him on the road to Hazard so he can catch the train for Philadelphia.'
'Yes, sir!' Rothbart said, and efficiently took care of Morrell. If he handled everything as smoothly for the divisional commander, General Foulke was well served.
Inside an hour's time, Morrell, clean and newly decked out, was jouncing along in a motorcar over dirt roads never intended for automobile traffic. The motorcar had three punctures before he got to Hazard, which, in the light of that experience, seemed well-named. Morrell stood guard with a rifle while the driver fixed the first two punctures; bushwhackers and Rebel guerrillas still roamed behind U.S. lines, looking like innocent civilians when they weren't out raiding. For the third puncture, Morrell pitched in and helped with the repair job. He thought about the state of his uniform only after his knees were already dirty.
No Rebs shot at the motorcar, but the train he boarded in Hazard took gunfire three different times before it got out of Kentucky, and once had to turn around on a siding when the Confederates blew up a bridge on the route north. Occupied, eastern Kentucky might have been; subdued it was not.
Under the white glare of the train's acetylene lights, Morrell pondered Vegetius. Some parts of the book, the ones that dealt with Roman military equipment, were as dry and dusty as he'd feared, and Vegetius' own proposed inventions didn't strike him as any great improvements. He started wondering why General Foulke had wasted his time translating such a useless work.
But when Vegetius started talking about principles of the military art, the book came to life. It was as if more than fifteen centuries had fallen away, leaving Morrell face-to-face with someone who worried about all the same things he did: ambushes, ways to deceive the enemy, the importance of intelligence, and other such concerns as vital in the twentieth century as they had been in the fourth.
And one sentence seized his attention and would not let it go: 'Let him who desires peace prepare for war.' Being ready to fight, he thought, instituting conscription and all the rest of it, had kept the United States from having to do more fighting after the defeat in the Second Mexican War.
When he finished the volume, he set it down not only with respect, but also with real regret. Not only was it interesting in and of itself, but General Foulke wrote gracefully, an attribute more common among officers of the War of Secession than their busy modern successors.
He changed trains in Wheeling, West Virginia. The new one pulled into the Pennsylvania Railroad station at Thirtieth and Market in the middle of the night. Waiting for him at the station was a spruce young captain who might have been Rothbart's cousin. His hat cords were intertwined black and gold; he wore black lace on his cuffs and a badge with the coat of arms of the United States superimposed on a five-pointed star-the marks of a General Staff officer.
His salute might have been machined. 'Major Morrell?' he said, his voice as crisp as the creases on his trousers. At Morrell's nod, he went on, 'I'm John Abell. As soon as we pick up your bags, I'll take you over to the War Department and we'll find quarters for your stay in the city.'
'I haven't got any bags,' Morrell told him. 'When General Foulke let me know I'd been detached from my battalion, he gave me time to take a bath and put on a clean uniform, and then he stuck me in an automobile. My gear will catch up with me eventually, I expect.'
'No doubt,' Captain Abell said, looking at the mud on Morrell's knees. Well, if a General Staff officer didn't know motorcars got punctures on bad roads, that was his lookout. The captain shrugged, plainly deciding not to make an issue of it. 'Let's go, then.'
A couple of antiaircraft cannon stuck their snouts in the air outside the train station. ' Philadelphia 's been in the war,' Morrell observed.
'That it has.' Captain Abell waved. A driver in an open-topped Ford came up. He opened the door to the rear seat for the two officers, then used the hand throttle to give the automobile more power as he chugged east through the streets of Philadelphia toward the War Department headquarters. Abell went on, 'When the Rebs came storming up out of Virginia, we were afraid we'd either have to fight for the town or declare it an open city and pull out. That would have been very bad.'
'I'll say it would,' Morrell agreed. Since the War of Secession, and especially since the Second Mexican War, Philadelphia had been the de facto capital of the United States: Washington was simply too vulnerable to Confederate guns in the hills on the south side of the Potomac. Could the United States have gone on with the war after losing both their de jure and de facto capitals? Maybe. Morrell was glad they hadn't had to find out.
Despite the hour, motor traffic kept rumbling through the city, probably interrupting bureaucrats' sleep. Philadelphia wasn't just an administrative center; it was also a key assembly point for southbound men and materiel. Here and there, Morrell saw houses and shops and buildings that had taken damage. 'The Rebs never got into artillery range of you, did they?' he asked.
'No, sir,' Abell answered. 'They send bombing aeroplanes over us when they can, though. A lot of bombs have fallen around the War Department, but only a couple on it.' His lip curled. 'They can't aim for beans.'
