Yankees break through an' come this way, though, reckon I woulda had me one.'
'Yeah,' Jake said abstractedly. Except when Negroes were doing things like hunting for the pot, they weren't supposed to have firearms. You let black men get their hands on guns and you were sitting on a keg of powder with the fuse lighted and heading your way.
And Nero and Perseus hadn't just got their hands on a pistol, or even a Tredegar. They'd served an artillery piece, and they'd done a hell of a job at it, too. You couldn't make them forget how to do it, or that they'd done it. If there ever was a black rebellion, they could do it again, provided they got themselves a field piece.
But if Featherston hadn't put them on the gun, he almost certainly wouldn't have been alive to worry about things like that. If Major Potter ever found out he'd turned them into impromptu artillerymen, he was liable to order them dragged off somewhere and shot. Part of Jake said that was a good idea. Hell, part of him wanted to yank out his pistol and use it now, so nobody would know what he'd done.
He couldn't. They'd saved his neck along with their own. He would never have yelled for their help if he could have yelled for white men instead, but there hadn't been any white men to yell for. He'd done what he'd had to do, and he'd got away with it.
Now he said what he said to say: 'It's over, boys. You got to go back to bein' niggers again. You know what I'm tellin' you?'
He wondered if they could obey, even if they wanted to. They'd just been soldiers, after all. One of the reasons you didn't let a Negro get a gun in his hands was that, if he did some fighting with it, he'd start feeling like a man, not like a servant. A Negro who felt like a man was liable to be a dangerous Negro.
But Nero and Perseus understood what Jake meant. Perseus said, 'Yes, suh, Marse Jake, we be your niggers again, till the next time y'all need us to be somethin' different.' He sounded almost as if he was inviting Featherston to share a joke.
'All right,' Jake answered, not knowing what else he could say. Eventually, the battery would get replacements: young white men, eager-or at least willing-to serve the guns. And, eventually, they'd get slaughtered, too. So would Jake, like as not. He carried on about his business with a grim fatalism; the Yanks could throw more metal at him than he could easily throw back.
And who would serve the guns in 1917, or 1919, or 1921, or however long the war lasted? Negroes? He shook his head. It couldn't happen, not really. He glanced over at Perseus and Nero. Could it?
'Breakthrough!' George Armstrong Custer pounded the desk. 'That's what I want, nothing less!' In an old- fashioned dark blue uniform, the fringe on his epaulets would have shaken back and forth. Modern U.S. uniforms didn't have epaulets. He had to make do with shaking jowls instead. 'I want to run riot through the Rebels, and by God that's what I'm going to do.'
'Sir.' Major Abner Dowling took a deep breath. Every time Custer started bellowing about breakthroughs, men died by thousands for gains best measured in yards. 'Sir, with the machine gun and barbed wire and artillery, breakthroughs don't come easy these days.'
That was not only true, it was the understatement of the year. But Custer shook his head. He didn't want to see it, so he wouldn't. If you imagined a dumpy, half-senile ostrich with its head in the sand, that was Custer, at least in Dowling's uncharitable imagination. But, though he wore no epaulets, he did have stars on his shoulders. 'The Rebs have worn themselves out,' he declared. 'Holding us off has been hard enough on them, and then they tried an offensive of their own. What can they possibly have left?'
Dowling didn't answer, not right away. The Confederate counterthrust from the south had been easier to stop than he'd expected. Maybe that meant the Rebs couldn't force a breakthrough, either. Maybe it just meant their generals were as bad as Custer. The great man's adjutant wasn't sure which of those was the more depressing conclusion.
Direct argument having failed again and again, he tried analogy: 'Sir, when Coronado came into the USA from Mexico, he was looking for the Seven Cities of Cibola, all of them stuffed with gold. What did he find? Nothing but a bunch of damn redskins living in mud huts.'
'What the hell are you talking about, Major?' Custer demanded: so much for analogy.
'I just meant, sir, that we keep looking for breakthroughs and keep thinking the Rebs are back to their last ditch, but it never seems to be true. Maybe we ought to try some different way of going at 'em,' Dowling said.
'Shall we settle the war with a game of football, the way some idiots tried doing Christmas Day?' Custer suggested with sardonic glee.
'Uh, no sir,' Dowling said hastily. From what he'd heard, First Army and the Confederate Army of Kentucky hadn't been the only forces that made impromptu Christmas truces with one another. From what he'd heard, the war had damn near fallen apart on Christmas Day, from the Gulf of California all the way to the Susquehanna. But it hadn't. It ground on, and would for who could guess how long.
In a way, the generality of the truce was too bad. If it had happened here and nowhere else, TR would have had all the justification he needed for sacking Custer and replacing him with someone who had some notion of how the world had changed since 1881. But no, no such luck.
'What do you propose, then, Major?' Custer sarcastically courteous was worse than Custer almost any other way. His ruling assumption seemed to be that, since he had no brains, no one else could possibly have any, either.
The trouble was, Dowling had no good answer for him here. That embarrassed the adjutant, but not as much as it might have. Nobody on the U.S. General Staff-or the Confederate General Staff, either, come to that-had any good answer on how to force a breakthrough. West of the Mississippi, the war was still mobile, but that was because there were a lot fewer men and a lot more miles west of the Mississippi. Wherever there were enough soldiers to man a solid trench line, offence literally stopped dead.
But if Dowling didn't know what the answer was, he had a pretty clear notion of what it wasn't. 'Sending men out by the division to charge into machine-gun fire wastes lives, sir,' he said. 'We'd be better off pounding the Rebs with artillery, using soldiers to create positions from which we could pound them from three sides at once, things like that.'
'We have the advantage in manpower, Major,' Custer said. 'What good is it if we don't use it?'
If we keep using it your way, we won't have it much longer, Dowling thought. Saying that aloud was probably fatal to a career. He braced himself to speak up anyway; maybe they'd give him an actual combat battalion as punishment for his crime.
Before he could make himself say anything, though, someone knocked on the door to Custer's office. The commanding general snarled something profane, then barked at Dowling: 'See who the devil that is.'
'Yes, sir,' Dowling said resignedly. You interrupted Custer's meetings at your own risk. Dowling opened the door. Standing there was a scared-looking lieutenant from Cryptography, holding an enciphered telegram and a sheet of typewritten paper that was, presumably, the same message decoded. The lieutenant handed Dowling the paper-actually, thrust it into his hand-and then retreated at a clip not far short of flight.
As soon as Dowling had read the first two lines of the decryption, he understood why. But he was the one who'd have to break the news to Custer. Compared to that, the prospect of leading a combat battalion straight at the Rebel trenches looked downright delightful.
'Well?' the general commanding First Army snapped. 'Don't just stand there like an upright piano. Tell me what in tarnation this is all about.'
Dowling stiffened to rigid attention. Doing his best to keep vengeful glee from his voice, he said, 'Yes, sir. Sir, you are ordered to detach two divisions from your front for immediate transfer to another theatre.'
That had about the same effect on Custer as hitting him between the eyes with a two-by-four would have done. He went white, and then a red that rapidly deepened to a dusky purple. 'Who's stealing my men?' he whispered hoarsely. 'If it's Pershing, I'll kill the son of a bitch with my own hands if it's the last thing I ever do. That upstart whippersnapper wants to steal all the glory for the Kentucky campaign, and damn me to hell if I aim to let him. I'll defy the order, that's what I'll do, and I'll fight it out in the paper if TR sacks me for it. First Roosevelt keeps me from the northern command he knows I want-and he knows why I want it, too-and now, just when I'm beginning to make decent progress here, he robs me of my forces.'
'They aren't being transferred to General Pershing, sir.' Now Dowling concealed regret: Pershing had made far more progress against the Rebels than Custer had. He'd also had the sense to save lives by pinching off Louisville from the flanks instead of going straight into the city, as the U.S. Army had tried to do during the Second
