that’s certain, and iron’s about the only thing he knew.”
Rodriguez closed his right hand into a fist. He watched it carefully as he did so. Pinkard watched, too: all the marvelous, miraculous interplay of muscle and tendon and bone beneath a sheath of wonderfully unbroken skin.
“If this happen to me,” Rodriguez said, “I take whatever money I have, I go to the
“Don’t know,” Pinkard said. “You couldn’t farm one-handed, any more than you could go back to the foundry. It’s funny,” he went on after a little while. “Just reading this here letter about Bedford hits me harder than seeing some of the people from the company get hurt right in front of my eyes. Is that crazy, or what?”
“No,” Rodriguez answered. “This is a good friend, almost like your
“Yeah, maybe.” That still tasted wrong, but it was closer than any explanation Jeff had come up with. “God damn the war,” he muttered. Rodriguez nodded solemnly. A Yankee machine gun started up, the gunner spraying bullets over a wide arc to see what he could hit. “God damn the war,” Jeff said again, and checked to make sure his Tredegar had a full clip.
From under the awning, Lieutenant General George Armstrong Custer stared gloomily at the hills above White House, Tennessee. “We have to have a victory,” he said. “We have to. The war requires it, and politics require it, too.”
Cautiously, Major Abner Dowling said, “Joining battle for the sake of politics is a recipe for getting licked, sir. We learned that in the War of Secession, and all over again during the Second Mexican War.”
Custer’s pouchy stare swung from the stalled battlefield toward his adjutant. “Most times, Major, I would agree with you,” he said after what was for him an unusual pause to reflect. “Now, though-do you want that wild- eyed lunatic Debs sitting in the White House come next March? He’s already said he’ll treat for peace with the Rebels and the Canucks if he gets elected. Is that what you want, Major?
“No, sir,” Dowling said at once; he was as good a Democrat as Custer.
He might as well not have spoken; once the general commanding First Army got rolling, he kept rolling till he ran down. “God in heaven, Major!” Custer burst out, a rheumy thunderer. “We’re winning on every front-on every front, I tell you-and that crackbrained maniac wants to give it up? And for what? For an honorable peace, he calls it. Honorable!” With his age-loosened, wrinkled skin and enormous mustache, Custer had a formidable sneer when he turned it loose, as he did now.
“I agree with you, sir,” Dowling said, for once telling Custer the unvarnished truth. “We just have to hope the people back home haven’t got too sick of the war to want to fight it through to the finish.”
“They had better not try quitting,” Custer growled. “If Debs calls the troops home, we’ll have a brand-new American Revolution, mark my words.”
Dowling did mark them. They filled him with horror. His head whipped around. After a moment’s panic, he heartily thanked God. Nobody but he had heard Custer. As casually as he could, he said, “Armed rebellion against the government of the United States is treason, sir.”
“I know that.” Custer sounded testy, not repentant. “Still some Rebs left alive who need hanging, by God, unless their own niggers shot ’em for us. Too much to hope for, that, I daresay. Now you listen to me, Major.” Dowling, who had done his share and more of listening, made himself look attentive. Custer resumed: “I don’t want a rebellion, not even a little bit. Do you understand me? What I want is to make a rebellion unnecessary, and that means victory, to give the people the idea-the true idea, mind you-that we stand on the edge of the greatest triumph in the history of mankind.”
“The Rebs are still fighting hard, sir,” Dowling said, in what had to be the understatement of this or any other decade: the front hadn’t moved a mile closer to the White House since the enormous U.S. offensive opened. “So are the Canadians, which forces us to divide our efforts.”
“Teddy Roosevelt bit off more than he could chew, right at the start of the war,” Custer said. This, from a man whose notion of reconnaissance was a headlong charge at an obstacle with everything he had, struck Major Dowling as a curious utterance-which, for once, did not mean it was wrong.
Rather to Dowling’s relief, the debate on grand strategy stopped then, for one of Custer’s division commanders came up, stood under the awning, and waited to be noticed. He waited a while, too; Custer was jealous of his own prerogatives. At last, grudgingly, he said, “Good morning, Brigadier General MacArthur.”
“Good morning, sir.” Brigadier General Daniel MacArthur came to stiff attention, which made him tower even more over both Custer and Dowling. Dowling understood why Custer was touchy around this particular subordinate. MacArthur was, visibly, a man on the rise. At thirty-two, he was the youngest division commander in the U.S. Army. Unlike earlier conflicts, this was one where an officer had a devil of a time making a name for himself by pluck and dash. As far as anyone could do that in an age of machine guns and trenches and barbed wire, Daniel MacArthur had done it.
He made sure people knew he’d done it, too, which was one reason he’d got his division. In some ways, he and Custer were very much alike, though both of them would have angrily turned on Dowling had he been rash enough to say such a thing. Still, as far as the adjutant was concerned, the long ivory holder through which MacArthur chain-smoked cigarettes was as much an affectation as Custer’s gold-dyed locks.
MacArthur said, “Sir, we need a breakthrough. The Army needs one from us, and the country needs one from us.”
“The very thing I was saying to my adjutant not five minutes ago,” Custer replied. He looked up at the young, lean, ramrod-straight officer standing beside him. His smile was cynical and infinitely knowing. Dowling would not have wanted that smile aimed at him. After pausing to cough, Custer went on, “And you wouldn’t mind having a breakthrough for yourself, either, would you, Daniel?”
“The country’s needs come first, sir,” MacArthur answered, and sounded as if he meant it. Maybe he even believed it. But he was still very young. Dowling saw how he tensed, almost as if he’d seen a beautiful woman walk by. Yes, he lusted after a breakthrough, all right.
“We’ve been pounding the Rebs for weeks now,” Custer said. “They haven’t given us anything at all, and we haven’t been able to take much. They know as well as we do that the White House line is the last thing keeping our guns from letting Nashville know the full taste of war.”
“Yes, sir,” MacArthur said, and pulled a map from the breast pocket of his uniform. Unlike Custer, who was old-fashioned enough to relish the epaulets and other fancy accoutrements accruing to his rank, MacArthur wore an ordinary officer’s uniform set apart only by the single silver stars of his rank: ostentatious plainness, as opposed to ostentatious display. He unfolded the map. “I believe I know how to get past them, too.”
Custer put on his reading glasses, a concession of sorts. “Let’s see what you have in mind, General.”
“Misdirection.” Daniel MacArthur spoke the word solemnly, as if it were the capstone of a magic spell. Dowling figured he’d cooked his own goose then and there; Custer had about as much use for misdirection as an anteater did for snowshoes. The dashing division commander (and how many major generals gnashed their teeth at that, when they led only brigades?) said, “As you know, my men are stationed on our far left, in front of Cottontown.”
“Yes, yes,” Custer said impatiently, though Dowling wouldn’t have bet more than half a dollar that he’d been sure where in the line MacArthur’s formation did belong.
“We have found to our cost how strong the Confederate defenses due south and southwest of our position are,” MacArthur said. Custer nodded, those peroxided curls flapping at the back of his neck. MacArthur continued, “Aerial reconnaissance suggests, though, that the Rebels’ line is weaker toward the southeast. If we strike in that direction, toward Gallatin, we can set our men to taking lines less formidably manned, thereby giving them the opportunity to swing back toward Nashville, cutting in behind the entrenchments that have delayed them so long.”
Custer sucked at something between two of his false teeth. Abner Dowling scratched his chin. “Sir,” he said, “it’s not a bad scheme.” He suspected he sounded surprised. He didn’t much care for MacArthur, having seen in Custer what the passage of years was likely to do to such a man.
Custer studied the map a while longer. MacArthur had used bright blue ink to show exactly what he wanted to do. “No,” Custer said at last, “it’s not.” He sounded imperfectly enamored of it, but seemed to recognize it was a
