with dirty rifles. 'Don't seem too bad so far, suh,' the fellow answered. 'Ain't easy nowheres, though, you don't mind me sayin' so.'
And that was probably- no, certainly- nothing but the truth. Dowling thanked his rather deaf God he'd been born with a nice, pink skin. Niggers had it tough, USA, CSA, any old place. 'Maybe you should go to Haiti,' he remarked. 'That's nigger heaven if ever there was one.'
'No, suh.' The bartender sounded very sure of himself. 'Only difference 'tween Haiti and anywhere else is, in Haiti it's black folks doin' it to black folks, 'stead o' whites like it is here.'
'You may be right,' Dowling said, and sipped his drink. What he knew about Haiti was what a soldier of the United States needed to know: that the Confederates hated and despised the place because the Negroes there, no matter what they did to one another, were free and independent, and that Teddy Roosevelt had reaffirmed- loudly reaffirmed- President Reed's pledge to protect that independence.
One of the things he didn't know was how TR would go about making good on that pledge if the Confederates invaded Haiti. With Confederate Cuba so close by, with the long stretch of Southern coastline past which the U.S. Navy would have to steam, it wouldn't be easy. Or had TR intended to invade the CSA if the Rebs attacked Haiti? He shrugged. Trying to read Teddy's mind was always risky. Anyway, the USA had invaded the CSA without a Confederate attack on Haiti.
As he raised the whiskey glass to his lips, the rumble of artillery fire outside got louder. Dowling's head came up like a hunting dog's at a scent. The new roar of the big guns wasn't coming from the east, but from the south.
He slammed the glass down onto the bar. Whiskey sloshed over the side. He slammed down a couple of coins to pay for his drinks, and then, as an afterthought, an extra dime as well. 'Here, buy yourself a drink,' he told Aurelius. 'It's the one I would have had in a minute.' He rushed out of the bar and back toward First Army headquarters. The Rebel counterattack, the one between Hopkinsville and Cadiz — and the one Custer had insisted all along was impossible-had finally started. Dowling wondered how far the U.S. forces would have to retreat, and how fast.
A lieutenant clad in butternut spun on his heel and stomped away from the field telephone, muttering unsweet nothings under his breath. That meant it was Jake Featherston's turn to confront the marvel of the electrified age. To the corporal in charge of the care and feeding of the mechanical beast, he said, 'Put me through to the main artillery dump, back toward Red Lion.'
'I'll give it a shot,' the corporal said, showing less than perfect faith in the gadget with which he'd been entrusted. He turned the crank and shouted into the mouthpiece: 'Hello, Central?' When nobody shouted back at him, he muttered something that made what the lieutenant had said sound like an endearment. He cranked again. 'Hello, Central, goddammit!'
Waiting for the connection-waiting to see if the corporal could make the connection- Featherston wished he'd sent a runner back to Red Lion. It was only a few miles southwest of Martinsville; the runner wouldn't have needed more than two hours- three at the outside- to make it there and back again.
But Captain Stuart was hell-bent for leather about using the very latest thing. Sometimes, Featherston admitted to himself, that was because the very latest thing was better than what had gone before. His battery of French-inspired three-inch guns certainly fell into that class. But sometimes the very latest thing was just newfangled confusion replacing old-fashioned stupidity- or, worse, replacing something that worked well even if it had been around for a long time.
'Hello, Central!' the corporal screamed. Featherston was about to give it up as a bad job and walk off- he could tell the captain he'd tried to use the phone, but it hadn't wanted to work- when the operator said, in reverent tones, 'I'll be a son of a bitch.' He turned to Jake. 'Who'd you say you wanted to talk to again? Been so long, I plumb forgot.'
'The main artillery dump,' Jake answered, and the corporal relayed his words to the central switchboard. Now, if the wire between there and the ammunition dump wasn't broken, he might be able to save some time after all. But even when, as they sometimes did, Negro labourers buried phone lines as they laid them, shell hits would dig them up and break them. And water soaked through insulation, and…
But, to his amazement, after a couple of minutes, the corporal handed him the earpiece and said, 'Go ahead.'
'Main ammo dump?' he bawled into the mouthpiece; he'd had botched connections before, too, even when everything was supposed to be working perfectly. Sometimes you were better off sending Morse over the line.
But, now, a thin, scratchy voice sounded in the earpiece: 'That's right. Who're you and what d'you need?'
'Jake Featherston, First Richmond Howitzers.' Jake didn't say he was just a lowly sergeant. If the fellow on the other end of the line wanted to assume he was the battery commander, that was all right with him. It was better than all right, in fact, because he was more likely to be taken seriously that way. 'We're giving the damnyankees on the other side of the Susquehanna tarnation, or we would be, 'cept we're mighty low on shells.'
'Whole army's mighty low on shells,' that disembodied voice answered. 'We can maybe get you a few up there, but not a whole lot. Sorry.' The soldier back in safe, comfortable Red Lion didn't sound sorry. As best Jake could make out over this infernal apparatus, he sounded bored. Saying no was a lot easier over a wire than face to face.
'The Yankees get time to consolidate, they're gonna hit us back hard,' Featherston said. These past few weeks, every mile forward had been gained only by wading through blood. The Confederates stood on the Susquehanna. Featherston wondered if they'd ever stand on the Delaware.
The telephone reproduced a sigh. 'Featherstitch or whatever your name is, I can't give you what I ain't got. Some of the shells we were supposed to be gettin', they went to Kentucky instead, for the big push there.'
'We don't got enough to do two things both at once?' Jake demanded. 'Jesus Christ, is this an army or a man who's too stupid to fart while he walks?'
That got him a chuckle as tinny as the sigh had been. 'Makes you feel any better, First Richmond, the Yanks are as bad off as we 'uns. You can shoot off shells faster'n you can make 'em, and that's a fact.'
'Yeah, but if the Yanks are short in Kentucky and full-up here 'stead o' the other way round, that doesn't do us a hell of a lot of good,' Featherston said.
'Send you all I can, promise,' the fellow back at the dump said.
'You better, you expect us to keep fightin' the war,' Featherston told him. He hung the earpiece back on its hook with a crash, muttering, 'Son of a bitch acts like they're his goddamn shells.' The corporal in charge of the telephone, who'd undoubtedly heard language a lot worse than that, snickered. Still fuming, Jake headed off toward the guns.
If the dump didn't send enough shells forward, as seemed highly likely, Captain Stuart would have to do the calling next time. What was the point of carrying a famous name if you couldn't exploit it every now and then?
When Featherston got back to his battery, he discovered his men gathered around a major he'd never seen before: a major of infantry, for the single stars showing his rank were mounted on blue-faced collar tabs. 'What's up?' Jake asked, which really meant, What the devil is the infantry doing sniffing around an artillery unit?
The major turned to him. The fellow wasn't very big and his face wasn't very tough, but Featherston' wouldn't have wanted any damnyankee with those hard, gray eyes staring at him over the sights of a Springfield. Almost without realizing he'd done it, he stiffened to attention and saluted.
Crisply, the major returned the salute. 'Clarence Potter, Army of Northern Virginia Intelligence,' he said. His voice was harsh and clipped and had a trace of a Yankee accent; Featherston wondered if he'd gone to college in the United States. Potter went on, 'I am here to investigate a conspiracy threatening the security not only of this army but of the Confederate States of America.'
'Jesus Christ!' Jake exclaimed, and then said, 'Excuse me, sir, but I don't know anything about anything like that, and I'd be right surprised-I'd be more than right surprised-if anybody here does.'
'That's what we were tellin' him, Sarge,' Jethro Bixler said. The loader went on, 'All we want to do- all any of us want to do- is tie a can to the damnyankees' tails and then get back to what we was doin' 'fore the damn war started.'
'Sergeant, if your men are as good with their gunnery as they are at flapping their gums, the Confederate
