Morrell saluted, did a smart about-face, and left the office of the Chief of the General Staff. The lieutenant was still in the antechamber with General Wood's adjutant. He bounced to his feet. 'Do you need me to guide you back to your assigned area, sir?'
'I don't think so,' Morrell answered. 'I expect I can manage on my own, unless the birds have eaten the trail of crumbs I left behind.' The lieutenant looked blank. The adjutant chuckled, recognizing the allusion.
Three different men stopped Morrell in the hallway, all of them exclaim ing about the helmet he was carrying. Two of them, like him, were ecstatic. The third, a white-bearded brigadier general in his late sixties who might have first seen action in the War of Secession, shook his head in dismay. 'It's a damned shame we have to resort to means like those to fill the men with the spirit of aggression,' he growled, and walked on.
Being far outranked, Morrell didn't answer. He didn't see anything wrong with giving the common soldier some slightly better chance to do his job with out getting killed or dreadfully wounded.
He set the helmet down beside the map of the Utah rebellion. Try as he would, he couldn't make himself believe the General Staff had come up with the best possible plan there was. His first efforts to convince his superiors otherwise had failed. If he was going to try again, he'd have to be more subtle.
He was poring over the map when someone behind him said, 'Major Morrell?'
'Yes?' Morrell turned around. Before the turn was completed, he came to attention and revised his words: 'Yes, Mr. President?'
Theodore Roosevelt pointed to the helmet. 'General Wood tells me that's partly your idea. It's a bully one, I must say. We aim to win this war, but we aim to do it with the greatest possible efficiency and care for the men who fight it. Your notion goes a long way toward that end. Congratulations.'
'Thank you, sir,' Morrell said. He'd known Wood and TR were longtime friends. He hadn't imagined that might ever matter to him.
'What other useful ideas have you?' Roosevelt pointed to the map of Utah. 'How would you cauterize that running sore, for instance?' He sighed. 'My experience has been that, man for man, Mormons make excellent, even outstanding, citizens. In a mass, though, their religion gives them the ambition to be a nationality of their own rather than Americans. This, I realize, is in no small measure engendered by the treatment they have received at the hands of the United States since the 1850s. But fault is irrelevant. Revolt and secession from our country cannot be tolerated.'
'Yes, sir,' Morrell said. 'What would I do in Utah, sir?' He took a deep breath and explained to the president what he would do in Utah.
Roosevelt listened with poker face till he was through, then said, 'Have you presented these ideas to the General Staff with a view toward implement ing them?'
'I have presented them, yes, sir,' Morrell answered. 'My superiors are of the opinion they're impractical.'
'Fiddlesticks,' TR burst out. 'Your superiors are of the opinion that, since they didn't think of these things themselves, they can't be any good. That's what you get for your low rank, Major Morrell.' He stood up straight and stuck out his chest. '7 have not got a low rank, Major. When I see something worth doing, it has a way of getting done. I'm glad we had this little talk. A very good day to you.' He hurried off.
Morrell stared after him, somewhere between horror and delight. If Roo sevelt started shouting orders, the plan for operations in Utah would change. Morrell was confident enough that the results could not be worse than those now being obtained. Would they be better? Would they be perceived as being better? If they were perceived as being better, would he get the credit for that-or the blame?
Roosevelt slammed a door behind him. He was shouting already. Morrell glanced over to the helmet he'd brought from General Wood's office. He snorted. When he took it, he hadn't imagined he'd need to wear it inside Gen eral Staff headquarters. But TR might have taken care of that.
Achilles started crying. This was the third time he'd started crying since Cincinnatus and Elizabeth had gone to bed. Cincinnatus didn't think it was far past midnight. The baby might wake up a couple of more times before morning. When he woke up, Cincinnatus woke up. He'd be a shambling wreck on the Covington docks. He'd been a shambling wreck a lot of the days since Achilles was born.
With a small groan, Elizabeth staggered out of bed and over to the cradle where Achilles lay. She picked him up and carried him into the front room to nurse him. Nights were even harder on her than they were on Cincinnatus. She came back from her domestic's work ready to fall asleep over supper.
Cincinnatus twisted and turned, trying to get comfortable and get back to sleep. In the process, he wrapped sheet and blanket around himself till he might have been a mummy. When Elizabeth came back, she had to unroll him to give herself some bedclothes. That woke him up again.
When the cheap alarm clock on the nightstand jangled, he jerked upright, as horrified as if a Confederate aeroplane had dropped a bomb on the house next door. Then he had to shake Elizabeth out of slumber; she hadn't so much as heard the horrible racket the clock made.
They both dressed in a fog of fatigue. The smell of coffee drew Cincinna- tus to the kitchen like a magnet, though the stuff for sale in Covington these days had more chicory in it than the genuine bean. Whatever it was made of, it pried his eyelids open. After bacon and eggs and cornbread, he was more nearly ready to face the day than he would have believed possible fifteen min utes earlier.
Someone knocked on the front door. Elizabeth opened it. 'Hello, Mother Livia,' she said.
'Hello, dear,' Cincinnatus' mother answered. 'How's my little grand-baby?' Without giving Elizabeth a chance to answer, she went on, 'He must have been a terror in the night again-I kin see it in your face.'
Cincinnatus grabbed his dinner pail and hurried out the door, pausing only to kiss his mother on the cheek. That damned Lieutenant Kennan timed things with a stopwatch; if you were half a minute late, you could kiss work for the day good-bye. Cincinnatus had seen it happen to too many other people to intend to let it happen to him.
'Get your black ass going,' the U.S. lieutenant snarled at him when he got to the waterfront. From Kennan, that was almost an endearment. Barges full of crates of munitions had crossed the Ohio. Cincinnatus and his work crew unloaded the barges and loaded trucks and wagons. U.S. soldiers drove them off toward the front. Cincinnatus had given up asking to be a teamster. The Yankees wouldn't hear of it, even if it would have freed up more of their men for actual fighting at the front lines.
He disguised a shrug in a stretch as he walked back to unload another crate. Whites in the CSA had better sense. Black men in the Confederacy did everything but fight. They drove, they cooked, they washed, they dug trenches. Without them, white Confederate manpower would have been stretched too thin to have any hope of holding back the U.S. hordes.
When the long day was done, the paymaster gave Cincinnatus the fifty- cent hard-work bonus. 'God damn!' said Herodotus, who stood behind him in line. 'That there's gettin' to be your reg'lar rate.'
'Got me a baby in the house now,' Cincinnatus said, as if that explained everything-which, to him, it did.
Herodotus said, 'Plenty fellers here got five, six, eight chillun in de house. Don't see them gettin' no bonus.'
Cincinnatus shrugged again. That wasn't his lookout. An awful lot of people in this world wanted just to get by, no more. He'd always had his eye on doing better than that. Even now, in the middle of the war, he had his eye on the main chance. He didn't know what would come of it, but he did know he couldn't win if he didn't bet.
Herodotus made a point of not walking home with him, as if to say he disapproved of such effort. That meant Cincinnatus was by himself when he noticed a wonderful smell in the warm, wet, late summer air. A moment later, a delivery wagon with the words Kentucky smoke house painted in big red letters rounded the corner. He waved to the driver, Apicius' son Felix.
Felix slowed down and waved back. 'My pa, he say for you to come in some time before too long,' he called. 'He got somethin' he want to talk over with you.'
'Do it right now,' Cincinnatus said. Felix nodded, flicked the reins, and got the wagon moving again.
When Cincinnatus got to the Kentucky Smoke House, the aroma there reminded him how hungry he was after a day hauling heavy crates. Apicius' other son, Lucullus, was basting the meat that turned on a spit over the firepit. Seeing Cincinnatus, he waved him into a little back room.
In there, Apicius was stirring spices into a bubbling pot, making up more of the wonderful sauce that went onto his barbecued beef and pork. 'Ha!' he said when Cincinnatus came in. 'Saw Felix, did you?'
'Sure did,' Cincinnatus answered. 'He said you wanted to see me 'bout somethin'. Somethin' to do with the
