Walk in Hell

foe.

“Come on, let’s get moving,” he said now, and hurried ahead of Abell to get a good look at the Liberty Bell. His thigh pained him when he sped up like that, and would probably go on paining him the rest of his life. He ignored it. You could let something like that rule you, or you could rule it. Morrell did not aim to let anything keep him from doing what he wanted to do.

“It’s been here a long time, Major,” Abell said. “It’s going to be here for a long time yet.”

“Yes, but I’m not going to be here for a long time,” Morrell answered. When he’d learned enough, or so the promise had gone, they’d promote him and send him back to the field to command a unit bigger than a battalion. “I want to fight with guns, not with maps and dividers and a telegraph clicker.”

He looked back over his shoulder as he said that, just in time to catch the sidelong glance Abell gave him. The captain, like most General Staff officers, preferred fighting the war at a distance and in the abstract to the reality of mud and bad food and wounds and terror. Battle always seemed so much cleaner, so much neater, when it was red and blue lines on a chart.

Then such thoughts left Morrell’s mind as, with a good many other soldiers, he crowded round the emblem of freedom for the United States. The surface of the bell was surprisingly rough, testimony to the imperfect skill of the founders who had cast it. Around the crown ran the words from Leviticus that had given the bell its name: Proclaim liberty throughout the land unto all the inhabitants thereof.

He wondered whether Robert E. Lee had seen the Liberty Bell when he occupied Philadelphia in 1862. Lee’s victories had given the Confederate States a liberty the USA had not wanted to grant them, but he hadn’t taken the bell back south with him. That was something, albeit not much.

Morrell reached out and touched the cool metal. “We’re still free,” he murmured. “Still free, by God.”

“That’s right,” John Abell said beside him. “The freest nation on the face of the earth.” Normally cold-blooded as a lizard in a blizzard, he sounded genuinely moved by the Liberty Bell. Then, almost gloating, he added, “And we’re going to pay the Rebs back for all they’ve done to us these past fifty years, and the English, and the French, and the Canadians, too.”

“You’d best believe it,” Morrell said, and took his hand away. The metal of the bell had grown warm under his fingers. He smiled, enjoying the idea that he had had a connection with history. No sooner had he stepped back from the bell than a fresh-faced lieutenant came up and caressed its smooth curves with almost a lover’s touch.

Independence Hall also boasted a facsimile of the Declaration of Independence. Facsimiles, though, meant little to Morrell. What was real counted. If you wanted to be theoretical…you belonged on the General Staff. He snorted, amused by the conceit.

“What’s funny, sir?” Captain Abell asked. Morrell just smiled and shook his head, not wanting to insult his companion.

They walked up Chestnut, back toward the War Department offices that had swallowed so much of Franklin Square. Philadelphia buzzed with all sorts of Federal activity; especially after the Confederate bombardment of Washington during the Second Mexican War, the Pennsylvania city had become the de facto capital of the USA. That was as well, for Washington now lay under the bootheels of the Rebels.

The opening Confederate attack in the war had been aimed at Philadelphia, too, but was stopped at the Susquehanna, one river short of the Delaware. Here and there, buildings bore scars from Confederate bombing raids. These days, with the Rebels pushed back into Maryland, bombing aeroplanes came over more rarely. Even so, antiaircraft cannon poked watchful snouts into the air in parks and at street corners.

Abell bought a couple of cinnamon rolls, a Philadelphia specialty, from a street vendor. He offered one to Morrell, who shook his head. “I don’t want anything that sweet,” he said. Half a block later, he came upon a Greek selling grape leaves stuffed with spicy meat and rice. To make them easier to handle, the fellow had skewered them on sticks. Morrell bought three. “Here’s a proper lunch,” he declared.

He and Abell both slowed down to eat as they walked. They hadn’t gone far when someone behind them shouted, “Get the hell out of here, you stinking wog! This is a white man’s town.”

Morrell turned on his heel, Abell imitating him. A beefy, middle-aged civilian was shaking his finger in the Greek foodseller’s face. Ignoring the twinge in his bad leg, Morrell walked rapidly back toward them. As he drew near, he saw the beefy man wore a pin in his lapel: a silver circle, with a sword set slantwise across it. Soldiers’ Circle members made up a sort of informal militia of men who had served out their terms of conscription. They were perhaps the leading patriotic organization in the country, especially to hear them talk.

A lot of them, of course, the younger ones, had been reconscripted since the war broke out. Others had proved useful in other ways: serving as additions to the New York City police, for instance, after the Mormons and Socialists had touched off the Remembrance Day riots this past spring. And some of them, like this chap, liked to throw their weight around.

“Sir, why don’t you just leave this man alone?” Morrell said. The words were polite. The tone was anything but. At his side, Captain Abell nodded.

“He’s a damned foreigner,” the Soldiers’ Circle man exclaimed. “He’s almost certainly not a citizen. He doesn’t look like he ought to be a citizen, the stinking wog. Are you a citizen?” he demanded of the Greek.

“Not your gamemeno business what I am,” the foodseller answered, bolder than he had been before he had anyone on his side.

“You see? He doesn’t hardly speak English,” the Soldiers’ Circle man said. “Ought to put him in a leaky boat and ship him back to where he came from.”

“I got son in Army.” The Greek shook his finger at the fellow who was harassing him. “In Army to do fighting, not to play games like you was. Paul is sergeant-I bet you never got no stripes.”

The Soldiers’ Circle man went bright red. Morrell would have bet that meant the Greek had scored a bull’s- eye. “Why don’t you take yourself somewhere else?” Morrell told the dedicated patriot. Muttering under his breath, the corpulent fellow did depart, looking angrily back over his shoulder.

Morrell and Abell waved off the foodseller’s thanks and headed up Chestnut again, toward the War Department. “Those Soldiers’ Circle men can be arrogant bastards,” Abell said. “He was treating that fellow like he was a nigger, not just a dago or whatever the hell he is.”

“Yeah,” Morrell said, “and a Confederate nigger at that.” He checked himself. “The other side to that coin is, the niggers down in the CSA are giving the white folks there a surprise or two.”

“You’re right,” Abell said. “Now what we have to do is see how we can best take advantage of it.”

Morrell nodded. Taking advantage of the enemy didn’t come easy, not when machine guns knocked down advances before they could get moving-assuming artillery hadn’t already done that before soldiers ever came out of the trenches.

He sighed. An awful lot of U.S. officers-including, as far as he was concerned, too many on the General Staff-didn’t, maybe couldn’t, think past slamming straight at the Rebs and overwhelming them by sheer weight of numbers. The USA had the numbers. Using them effectively was proving to be a horse of another color.

You went into General Staff headquarters through what looked like, and once had been, a millionaire’s mansion. Morrell had always doubted that that fooled the Confederate spies surely haunting Philadelphia, but nobody’d asked his opinion. Inside, a sober-faced sergeant checked his identification and Abell’s with meticulous care, comparing photographs to faces. Bureaucracy in action, Morrell thought: the noncom saw them every day.

After gaining permission to enter the sanctum, they went into the map room. Abell pointed to the map of Utah, where U.S. forces had finally pushed the Mormon rebels out of Salt Lake City and back toward Ogden. “That was your doing, more than anyone else,” he said to Morrell, half admiring, half suspicious.

“TR listened to me,” Morrell said with a shrug. Instead of straight-ahead slugging, he urged attacks through the Wasatch Mountains and from the north, to make the Mormons have to do several things at the same time with inadequate resources. He’d proposed that to the brass on arriving here. They’d ignored him. A chanced meeting with the president had revived the plan. Unlike a lowly major, TR could make the General Staff listen instead of trying without any luck to persuade it.

Except for the soldiers actually fighting there (and perhaps except for the resentment higher-ups in the General Staff might show against him for being right), Utah was old news now, anyhow. Morrell looked at a new