he found it, was in worse shape than Reggie's. Sadly, he dropped it back onto the grass. Then he said, 'The thing is, though, plenty of people will like it. Damn hard to stomach anybody saying anything good about the United States. A couple of times, I wouldn't have minded walloping Baird myself'
'Thinking about it's one thing,' Bartlett said. 'Doing it, though…' He shook his head. 'People won't be able to stomach that. No way in hell will people be able to stomach that.' Bill Foster thought it over, then nodded. 'People just aren't so stupid,' Reggie said, and his friend nodded again.
Lieutenant Colonel Abner Dowling sat at his desk-because of his protruding belly, sat some distance behind his desk-clacking away at a typewriter. He would have starved to death in short order had he had to try to make his living as a secretary, but he was a good typist for an Army officer.
He wished he were out in the field instead of banging out a report no one would ever read here in a War Department office in Philadelphia. He'd wished he were in the field instead of back of the lines at First Army headquarters all through the Great War. He could have commanded a battalion, maybe a regiment- maybe even a brigade, considering how fast front-line officers went down. Of course, he might have gone down himself, but that was the chance you took.
'Dowling!' At the howl from behind him, he made a typographical error. Save that it held the sounds of his name, the howl might have burst from the throat of a trapped wolf.
'Coming, sir.' He pushed the chair back far enough to let himself rise, then hurried into the larger, more spacious office behind his own. Sleet beat on the window that gave a blurry view of downtown Philadelphia. Even though it was freezing out there, a steam radiator kept the office warm as toast. Saluting, Dowling asked, 'What can I do for you this morning, General Custer?'
Custer stared at him, through him. Dowling had seen that stare before. It meant Custer had been into the bottle he didn't know Dowling knew he had in a desk drawer. No: after a moment, Dowling realized the stare held more than that. Custer's pale, red-tracked eyes roamed the office. Again, he might have been a wild beast in a cage.
'What can I do for you, sir?' his adjutant repeated.
'Do for me?' Custer said slowly; he might have forgotten he'd summoned Dowling in the first place. 'You can't do anything for me. No one can do anything for me, no one at all.'
Dowling had heard Custer in a great many moods before, but never despairing. 'What's wrong, sir?' he asked. 'Is there anything I can do to help?'
'No, you can't help me, Major-uh, Lieutenant Colonel.' Custer's wits weren't particularly swift, but he hadn't started turning forgetful. As the general continued, Dowling realized that was part of the problem: 'I entered West Point in July 1857. July 1857, Lieutenant Colonel: sixty-two years ago come this summer. I have served in the United States Army longer than most men have been alive.'
'And served with distinction, sir,' Dowling said, which in its own strange way was true. 'That's why you have four stars on each shoulder strap, sir; that's why you're here now, still serving your country, at an age when most men'-are dead, but he wouldn't say that-'are sitting in a rocking chair with pipe and slippers.'
'What do you think I'm doing now, Dowling?' General Custer demanded. 'I've been in the army almost sixty- two years, as I say, and in an active command during nearly the whole of that time.' He waved a plump, age- spotted hand. 'Where is my active command now, pray tell?'
He was feeling trapped, Dowling realized. Custer's adjutant picked his words with care: 'Sir, there aren't a lot of active commands with the country at peace and our foes beaten. And your assignment here-'
'Is only sound and fury, signifying nothing,' Custer broke in. 'I have no duties: no duties that matter, at any rate. Evaluate the transmission of orders from corps headquarters to divisions and regiments, they told me. Jesus Christ, Dowling, it's a job for a beady-eyed captain, not for me!'
He had a point, a good point. To try to cheer him up, his adjutant had to ignore it. 'No doubt they want the benefit of your long experience.'
'Oh, poppycock!' Custer snapped. 'Nonsense! Drivel! They've put me out to pasture, Lieutenant Colonel, that's what they've done. They don't give two whoops in hell whether I ever write this goddamn evaluation. Even if I do, no one will ever read it. It will sit on a shelf and gather dust. That's what I'm doing now: sitting on a shelf and gathering dust. They got all they could out of me, and now they've put me on the shelf.'
'Everyone is grateful for what you did, General,' Dowling said. 'Would you have headed last year's Remembrance Day parade if that weren't so?'
'So Teddy Roosevelt was generous enough to toss an old dog one last bone,' Custer said, a distinct sneer in his voice. 'Ha! If he lives long enough, he'll go into the dustbin of the outmoded, too. And if the election returns from last November are any guide, he may get there faster than I have.'
Dowling didn't know what to say to that. He judged Custer was likely to be right. The general formerly commanding First Army did have a makework assignment here in Philadelphia. But what else could he expect? He was going to be eighty at the end of the year. He couldn't very well hope to be entrusted with anything of real importance.
He could. He did. 'Barrels!' he said. 'That's where I want to be working. Sure as hell, Lieutenant Colonel, the Rebs are plotting ways to make theirs better even as we speak. I know they're not going to be allowed to have any, but they're plotting just the same. We'll fight another round with them, see if we don't. I may not live till then, but you will, I expect.'
'Wouldn't surprise me if you were right, sir,' Dowling said. No one in the U.S. Army trusted the Confederate States, no matter how peaceful they tried to make themselves seem.
'They need me on barrels,' Custer said. 'Those chowder-heads didn't know what to do with what they had till I showed them. They won't know how to make barrels better, either, you mark my words.'
'Sir, there I don't really know if you're right or not,' Dowling said, by which he meant Custer was talking through his hat. 'Colonel Morrell is doing good work out in Kansas. I've seen a couple of the analyses he's sent in. They're first-rate. I was very impressed.' He meant that. The more he had to do with Morrell, the more he was convinced the former commander of the Barrel Brigade would wear four stars long before his late seventies.
'Oh, Morrell's a sound lad, no doubt about that,' Custer said, by which he meant Morrell had given him the victories he'd craved. 'But he's only a colonel, and he's only a lad. Will they read his analyses, or will they just shelve them alongside of mine? They aren't soldiers here, Dowling; they're nothing but a pack of clerks in green- gray.'
That held enough truth to be provocative, not enough to be useful. Dowling said, 'Colonel Morrell will make himself noticed, one way or another.'
Custer's thoughts were running down their own track, as they often did. He hardly noticed his adjutant's words. 'Nothing but a pack of clerks in green-gray,' he repeated. 'And now they're making me a clerk, too. How am I supposed to turn into a clerk, Dowling, when I've spent the past sixty years as a fighting man?'
'Sir, I know this isn't your first tour at the War Department,' Dowling said. 'How did you manage before?'
'God only knows,' Custer answered gloomily. 'I sat behind a desk, the same as I'm sitting behind a desk now. Then, though, I had an Army to help reform. I had wars to look forward to. I had a purpose that helped me forget I was-stuck here. What have I got now? Only the desk, Lieutenant Colonel. Only the desk.' His sigh ruffled his bushy mustache.
Exasperation. Fury. Scorn. Occasional astonished admiration. Horror. Those were the emotions Custer usually roused in Abner Dowling. That he should pity the ancient warrior had never crossed his mind till now. Setting Custer to makework was like harnessing an old, worn-out ex-champion thoroughbred to a brewery wagon. He still wanted to run, even if he couldn't any more.
Quietly, Dowling asked, 'Can I get you anything, sir? Anything at all that might make you more comfortable?' Even if Custer told him he wanted an eighteen-year-old blonde-and Custer's asking for something along those lines would not have unduly surprised his adjutant, for he still fancied himself a ladies' man, especially when Libbie wasn't around-Dowling resolved to do his best to get him one.
But the general asked for nothing of the sort. Instead, he said, 'Can you get me the president's ear? We still have soldiers in action, enforcing our rule on the Canadian backwaters we didn't overrun during the Great War. Even a command like that would be better than sitting around here waiting to die. And, by God, I still owe the Canucks more than a little. The British bastards who killed my brother Tom rode down out of Canada almost forty years ago. Even so late as this, revenge would be sweet.'
