cried out against it, especially for a man who wouldn't yet have been part of the family if he hadn't impregnated their sister. But when death struck, new customs had a way of sloughing off and old ones reasserting themselves. Resignedly, Flora said, 'If Mother tells us to do it, how can we say no?' Esther's mouth twisted, but in the end she nodded.
And Flora knew that, while she was rocking back and forth sitting shiva for Yossel, she would not be mourning him alone, but the country and the whole world thrown onto the fire of war.
' Salt Lake City!' Paul Mantarakis said with considerable satisfaction. 'One more fight to go and then we've licked these Mormon bastards once and for all.'
'Matter of fact, I hear tell there's one big town after Salt Lake City,' Ben Carlton said. 'Place called Ogden, north of here.'
'Yeah, all right, I heard about Ogden, too,' Mantarakis admitted. 'But it stands to reason, once they lose their capital, they ain't gonna have a whole lot of fight left in 'em.'
'Just like the USA and Washington, right?' the cook said with weary cynicism.
Mantarakis gave him a resentful look. 'It's not the same,' he said. ' Salt Lake 's the only real city — city-type city-the Mormons have. Provo and Og-den, they're just towns. I'm from Philly, remember. I know the difference. Next to what I'm used to, even Salt Lake City isn't a big thing.'
'Be a hell of a big fight, though,' Carlton predicted gloomily. He stirred the cookpot. The smell that rose up from it was none too appetizing: he'd made some kind of horrible stew from bully beef and hardtack and whatever else he happened to have handy. Paul sighed. Since he'd started wearing stripes on his sleeves, he hadn't been able to see to the cooking nearly so often as he had before. That meant the whole company ate worse than they would have otherwise.
Gordon McSweeney, a man with a cast-iron stomach (or at least no sense of taste to speak of) came up, smelled the pot, looked into it, and scowled at Carlton. 'If I were a Papist, I'd give that last rites,' he said.
He was a sergeant these days, too, so the cook could only assume an ex pression of injured innocence. 'It'll be ready pretty soon,' he said, which, considering McSweeney's editorial comment, was apt to be something less than a consummation devoutly to be wished.
But McSweeney, luckily for him, was looking north, toward Salt Lake City. ' 'Now also the axe is laid unto the root of the trees: there every tree which bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down, and cast into the fire,' ' he said. ' 'Because they had no root, they withered away.' So it says in the Holy Scriptures, whose words shall be fulfilled.'
Mantarakis looked north, too. Here and there, flames burned in the Mormons' capital. Artillery fire had blown the gilded angel off the east-center tower of the Temple and had knocked down two of the other towers, but the big building, the heart of Salt Lake City, still stood. Enormous beehive flags flapped defiantly from the towers that survived. 'They read a different book there,' Paul said.
'And they will burn in hell because of it,' McSweeney answered, sounding as certain as he generally did when speaking of matters of religion. 'The Book of Mormon is no more the word of God than is an advertising circular for stomach powders.'
It wasn't so much that Mantarakis thought McSweeney wrong — he didn't figure the Book of Mormon was divinely inspired, either. But the way McSweeney said it, like the way McSweeney said anything, put his back up. ' Lot of people up there think you're wrong, Gordon,' he remarked.
'The more fools they,' McSweeney said. 'They suffer in this world for their arrogance and overweening pride, and in the next for their false and blasphemous faith.' He wasn't simply armored in his faith, but also used it as a sword against the foe. Mantarakis supposed that helped make him a good soldier; it also made him a scary man.
An aeroplane flew in lazy circles above Salt Lake City, spotting targets for the U.S. artillery. All of a sudden, black puffs of smoke started dotting the otherwise clear summer sky around the aeroplane. What artillery the Mormons had was mostly here; they'd got their hands on it by overrunning Camp Douglas, east and north of town. They knew the aeroplane was the U.S. ar tillery's eye in the sky. If they brought it down, they could fight on more nearly even terms. And bring it down they did. The aeroplane seemed to stagger in the sky, then plunged earthward, trailing smoke and flame. It crashed just in side the Mormon lines. The cheer the religious rebels raised rang in Mantarakis' ears. 'Kyrie eleison,' he muttered.
For once, Gordon McSweeney did not upbraid him for praying in Greek. 'Damn them,' McSweeney said, over and over again. 'Damn them, damn them.' It wasn't cursing; it was nothing like the casual way in which most sol diers would have brought out the words. It sounded more as if McSweeney was instructing God about what needed doing and how to go about it. Paul wanted to take a couple of steps away from the other sergeant, in case God got angry at him for using that tone of voice.
With their great factories, the United States had guns especially devoted to antiaircraft fire and others given nothing but ground targets. The Mormon insurgents did not enjoy the luxury of specialization. Having shot down the aeroplane, they began working over the front-line trenches in which Man-tarakis and his companions sheltered. He crouched down in the dirt, hands clutching his head, his body folded up into a ball to make himself the smallest possible target.
He'd been through worse in Kentucky; the Confederates had far more guns to fire at U.S. forces than the Mormons did. But any barrage was a bowel-loosener. The ground shook and jumped. Shrapnel balls and fragments of shell casing filled the air. Whether he lived or died wasn't really in his hands, not for the time being. Either God's providence or random luck, de pending on how the world worked, would decide his fate.
After about half an hour, the Mormon guns eased up. Men helped their wounded comrades back toward the rear. Mormon snipers took potshots at them. The Mormons were short of men, short of guns, short of munitions, but they not only held the high ground (they had their artillery on the mountain spur above Temple Square, not far from the wreckage of what had been the state capitol before the revolt), but they also knew the terrain well and squeezed from it all the advantages they could.
First Lieutenant Cecil Schneider made his way down the battered trench line seeing how his company had come through. He was a little weedy fellow who would have looked more at home in mechanic's coveralls than in his grimy U.S. uniform. He'd been leading the company since Captain Hinshaw died; a lot of companies had lieutenants commanding them these days, and more than one had no surviving officers left at all.
Schneider sniffed at Ben Carlton's stew pot, sighed, and crouched down by it. He took out his mess kit. 'I'm hungry enough for this to smell good,' he said. Paul Mantarakis didn't know if he could get that hungry, but he was aware he had higher standards than most people.
Carlton, as if vindicated, filled the lieutenant's tray with stew. Schneider dug in, sighed again, and kept on eating. That Mantarakis understood. You had to keep the machine fueled or it wouldn't run.
When Schneider was nearly done, Mantarakis asked, 'Sir, is there any way of rooting out the Mormons without going straight at them?'
'General Staff doesn't seem to think so,' Schneider answered. 'They've got the Great Salt Lake on one side and the mountains on the other, after all. It's not going to be pretty, but it's what we've got to do.'
Not going to be pretty was a euphemism for forward companies' getting melted down to nothing, like candles burning out. Paul knew that. So, no doubt, did Lieutenant Schneider. 'Sir,' Mantarakis said, 'are the two divi sions we've got here going to be enough to do the job?'
'I hear we have more troops on the way,' Schneider answered. 'This sort of fighting chews up men by carloads.' He sighed one more time, now not about the vile stew. 'We have the men to spend, and we're spending them. This narrow front makes the fighting as bad as it is in the Roanoke valley or in Maryland.'
'Mormons don't help,' Ben Carlton said. 'The Rebs fought fair, anyways. Any civilian you see here — man, woman, boy, girl-is gonna cut your throat in a second if he catches you asleep.'
'You got that right.' Mantarakis turned to Lieutenant Schneider. 'Sir, once we beat these Mormons flat, what the hell are we going to do with them? What the hell can we do with them?'
'Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant,' Schneider answered. That made Gordon McSweeney rumble, down deep in his chest. He obviously didn't know what it meant, but he knew it was Latin. Given how he felt about the Catholic Church, that was plenty to make him suspicious.
'Sir?' Paul said. He didn't know what it meant, either. He'd grown up speaking Greek, but you needed more in the way of education than he'd picked up to throw Latin around like that.
