is.”
“Renick, sir.” Dowling put the letter back in the manila folder from which he’d produced it.
“Ah, yes, of course,” Custer said, which meant he hadn’t heard the answer but was too vain to ask his adjutant to say it over again louder. He picked up a pointer and aimed it at the situation map of Kentucky. “I am of the opinion, Major, that Bowling Green falls at the next onslaught.”
“Seeing as we’re approaching from the west and the north, the Confederates will have a hard time keeping us out, yes, sir,” Dowling agreed. “But fighting in built-up country can be expensive as the devil. As you said before, we need to use our superiority in artillery to the best advantage.”
Custer hadn’t actually said anything quite like that, but had talked about the artillery preparation, which, as far as his adjutant was concerned, came close enough. He scratched at his mustache. “We’ll give the Rebs enough artillery preparation to blow them right back to the War of Secession,” he growled. “And then we’ll follow it with infantry, and then with cavalry-”
“I think the ground troops may well be able to capture the city without the cavalry, sir,” Dowling said. Custer would probably remain sure to his dying day that cavalry could exploit any breakthrough the infantry made. Try as Dowling would, he hadn’t been able to convince the general otherwise. Breakthroughs of any sort looked to be illusory in this war, and, if they came, the cavalry wasn’t going to exploit them, not till somebody bred an armor- plated horse it wasn’t.
“Ground troops,” Custer grumbled. “Artillery.” He let out a long, wheezy sigh. “The spirit has gone out of warfare, Major. It’s not as it was when I was a young man.”
“No, sir.” Dowling wondered if he would be saying the same thing if he lived till 1950 or so. Maybe he would, but Dowling hoped he wouldn’t try to turn an entire army on its head because he didn’t care to adjust to a new reality.
Custer whacked the map with the stick. “And after Bowling Green falls, Major, we advance on Nashville! We took it in the War of Secession, and we held it, too, till the stinking limeys and frogs made us give it back. When we take it this time, we’ll keep it.”
“We’ll need help from the Navy,” he warned. “And up till now, their monitors haven’t been able to get anywhere near Nashville.”
“Well then, seems to me that they’ll need help from us, too,” Custer observed. The comment was so much to the point that Dowling frankly stared at the general commanding First Army. He’d been glad to have Libbie Custer come visit for no better reason than to see her husband dismayed. But if her presence meant Custer turned into something close to the general First Army needed, Dowling hoped she’d never leave.
And if that meant Custer didn’t get to jump on Olivia’s sleek brown body any more, everyone had to make sacrifices to win the war.
Cincinnatus pulled the wool sailor’s cap down over his ears to keep them warm as he walked to the Covington wharves. The sun wasn’t up yet, though the eastern sky glowed pink. Days were getting longer now, noticeably so, but it was still one snowstorm after another.
He walked past a gang of U.S. soldiers. They were busy tearing posters off walls and pasting up replacements. Some of the ones they were destroying had been smuggled up from the unoccupied CSA. Cincinnatus turned a chuckle into a cough so the soldiers wouldn’t notice him. He knew about those.
The other posters going down were printed in red and black-images of broken chains, stalwart Negroes with rifles, and revolutionary slogans. Cincinnatus knew about those, too.
He paused for a moment to have a look at the posters the U.S. soldiers were putting up to replace the Confederate and Red propaganda. The art showed three eagles-the U.S. bald eagle, the German black one, and the two-headed bird symbolizing Austria-Hungary-with their talons piercing four red-white-and-blue flags: those of the CSA, England, France, and Russia. The message was one word: VICTORY.
“Not bad,” he murmured, and disguised another chuckle behind a glove. He’d never expected to become a connoisseur of poster propaganda, not before the war started. A lot of things he’d never expected had happened since the war started.
He saw more of the three-eagle posters as he came closer to the riverfront, and nodded to himself: so the Yanks were going to be putting out a new type, were they? It had the look of the first in a series. He wouldn’t have thought of that kind of thing back in 1913, either.
When he got to the wharves, he waved to the other Negro laborers coming in to help keep the U.S. war effort moving. Some of them, no doubt, also belonged to Red revolutionary cells. He didn’t know which ones, though. He hadn’t had the need to know. What you didn’t know, you couldn’t tell.
Here came Lieutenant Kennan.
“Yes, suh?” Cincinnatus said warily. Kennan sounded more filled with bile than usual, which was saying something.
“Don’t I remember you bragging once upon a time that you could drive a truck?”
“Don’t know about braggin’, suh, but I can drive a truck,” Cincinnatus said. “Been doin’it for a while before the war started.”
Lieutenant Kennan looked as if every word he was about to say tasted bad. “You see that line of trucks over yonder? You get your ass over there, ask for Lieutenant Straubing, and tell him you’re the nigger I was talking about.”
“Yes, suh,” Cincinnatus said. Were the Yanks finally getting smart? If they were, they’d taken their own sweet time about it. Better late than never? Cincinnatus wouldn’t have bet on that, not till he saw for certain. “If I’m drivin’ a truck, suh, what do they pay me?”
“I don’t know anything about that,” Kennan said, as if washing his hands of Cincinnatus. “You take it up with Lieutenant Straubing. You’re his baby now.” No, he didn’t want to have anything to do with Cincinnatus. He rounded on the rest of the men in the labor gang. “What are you coons doing, standing around gaping like a bunch of gorillas?
Cincinnatus had all he could do not to spring over to the trucks to which Kennan had directed him. Nobody, he told himself, could be a worse boss than the one he was escaping. But then, after a moment, he shook his head. Since the war began, he’d learned you couldn’t tell about things like that.
A sentry near the trucks wore one of the helmets that made U.S. soldiers look as if they had kettles on their heads. He carried a Springfield with a long bayonet, which he pointed at Cincinnatus. “State your business,” he snapped, with a clear undertone of
“Lieutenant Kennan back there, suh”-he pointed toward the wharf where his old gang, under Kennan’s loud and profane direction, was beginning to unload a barge-“he tol’ me to come see Lieutenant, uh, Straubing here.”
For a moment, he wondered if there’d be no Lieutenant Straubing, and if Kennan, for reasons of his own (maybe connected with Cincinnatus’ dealings with one underground or another, maybe only with Kennan’s loathing for blacks) had sent him here to get in trouble, or perhaps to get shot.
But the sentry, though he didn’t lower the rifle, did nod. “Stay right here,” he said, as if Cincinnatus were likely to be going anywhere with that bayonet aimed at his brisket. Then he raised his voice: “Hey, Lieutenant! Colored fellow here to see you!”
