Walk in Hell

every gun we had.”

“I don’t doubt it for a moment,” Major Potter said. “But you asked whom you had to kill to get a promotion, Sergeant?” After waiting for Featherston to nod in turn, he went on, “The plain answer is, you will never be promoted in the First Richmond Howitzers, and you are most unlikely to win promotion anywhere in the Confederate States Army, for the simple reason that you killed Captain Jeb Stuart III.”

Jake stared at him. Potter was dead serious. “I didn’t, sir, and you know I didn’t,” Jake said, holding up one hand to deny the charge. “When I was starting to move the battery out, I did everything I could to get him to come along. He stopped me. He stopped the whole battery. If the damnyankees hadn’t shot him, he would have kept us there till they overran us.”

“‘If the damnyankees hadn’t shot him,’” Potter repeated. “And why, Sergeant, did he put himself in a position where the Yankees were able to shoot him so easily?”

“You ought to know, sir,” Jake answered. “On account of the trouble he got into with you for keeping that snake-in-the-grass nigger Pompey around and not letting anybody find out the son of a bitch really was a Red.”

“That’s right,” Major Potter said. “And, having fallen under a cloud, he did the noble thing and fell on his sword, too-or the modern equivalent, at any rate.” His nostrils twitched; by the way he said the noble thing, he meant something more like the boneheaded thing. “But now we come down to it. Who was it, Sergeant Featherston, who first alerted Army of Northern Virginia Intelligence to the possibility that there might be something wrong with this Pompey?”

When a heavy shell landed close to the battery, it picked you up and slammed you down and did its level best to tear your insides out right through your nose and mouth and ears. That was how Jake Featherston felt now, sitting in a wood-and-canvas folding chair in a tent too far back of the line to have to worry about shellfire. “Christ,” he said hoarsely. “They’re blaming me.”

“Of course they are.” Major Potter’s manner was as mild as his appearance; to look at him or listen to him, you’d peg him for a schoolteacher-until you noticed what he had to say. “You wouldn’t expect them to blame Jeb Stuart III, would you? All he did, Sergeant, was cause the suppression of an investigation. If some low, crass individual hadn’t mentioned this Pompey’s name, no one would have needed an investigation in the first place, and Captain Stuart could have continued on his brave, empty-headed track toward a general’s stars and wreath.”

Featherston stared at the Intelligence officer again, this time for an altogether different reason. Once he’d drunk the stuff the Russians cooked up from potatoes. It didn’t taste like anything, so he hadn’t thought he was drunk-till he tried to stand up and fell over instead. Potter’s words were like that. They unexpectedly turned the whole world sideways.

“That’s not fair, sir,” Jake said. “That’s-”

“Shooting the messenger for bad news?” Potter suggested. “Of course it is. What do you expect? That they should blame their own? Not likely, Sergeant. You must know the First Richmond Howitzers are a blue-blood regiment if ever there was one. You must know Jeb Stuart, Jr., has a fancy office in the War Department down in Richmond, from which he sends eager young men out to die for their country. I’ve done everything I can for you, Sergeant. I know your record. I’ve urged your promotion. Set that against the traditions of the First Richmond Howitzers and the animus of Jeb Stuart, Jr., and it doesn’t amount to a hill of beans. I’m sorry.”

“If I transfer out, I’ll be-”

“A sergeant, I’m afraid, till your dying day,” Major Potter interrupted. “Jeb Stuart III blighted his career by being wrong. You’ve blighted yours by being right. Sergeant Featherston, I am sorry. I feel I ought to apologize for the entire Confederate States of America. But there’s not one damned thing I can do about it. Have you got any more questions?”

“No, sir.” Jake got to his feet. “If that’s how it is, then that’s how it is. But if that’s how it is, then something stinks down in Richmond. Sir.”

He figured he’d said too much there. But Clarence Potter slowly nodded. “Something does stink down in Richmond. If we try to root it out now, we’re liable to lose the war in the confusion that would follow. But if we don’t try to root it out, we’re liable to lose the war from the confusion it causes. Again, I have no good answers for you. I wish I did.”

Featherston saluted. “Thank you for trying, sir. I hope you don’t end up hurt on account of that. All I’ve got to say is, sooner or later there has to be a reckoning. All these damn fools in fancy uniforms who let the niggers rise up without having a notion they were going to, all the damn fools who can’t think of anything past promoting their friends and relations-they ought to pay the price. Yes, sir, they ought to pay the price.”

“That’s a political decision, not one for the military,” Potter said.

“If that’s what it is-” Jake broke off. He saluted again and left the tent, heading back to his battery. All right, he wasn’t going to be a lieutenant. He had a goal even so.

Major Abner Dowling hurried into the fancy house on the outskirts of Bowling Green, Kentucky. “Here’s the motorcar, sir, come to take you back toward Bremen,” he called loudly-you had to call loudly, if you expected General Custer to hear you.

Libbie Custer heard him. She was sitting in the parlor, reading Harper’s. Her expression became remarkably similar to that of a snapping turtle on the point of biting. Back in Bremen was Olivia. She didn’t know-Dowling didn’t think she knew-about Olivia, not in particular, but she knew there was someone like Olivia back there, and she didn’t like it for beans. But the car had been laid on not at General Custer’s instance, but at that of the Secretary of War, and she couldn’t do anything about it. No wonder she looked ready to chomp down on a broom handle.

And here came Custer, looking no happier himself. “This is all a pack of nonsense and idiocy,” he said loudly. “Why don’t they leave a man alone so he can run a proper campaign? But no, that doesn’t satisfy them. Nothing satisfies them. Pack of ghouls and vultures is what they are back in Philadelphia, crunching the bones of good men’s reputations.”

At first, Dowling thought that soliloquy was delivered for Libbie’s benefit. But Custer kept on grumbling, louder than ever, after he went outside and waddled toward the green-gray-painted Ford waiting for him in front of his residence. The driver scrambled out and opened the door to the rear seat for him and Dowling. Neither of them was thin, which made that rear seat uncomfortably intimate.

As they rattled off toward the northwest, Custer leaned forward and asked the driver, “What is this stupid barrel thing you’re taking me to see? Some newfangled invention, I don’t doubt. Well, let me tell you, Lieutenant, I am of the opinion that the world has seen too many new inventions already. What do you think of that?”

“Sir,” the driver said, a gloriously unresponsive but polite answer. Dowling didn’t know whether to wish the First Army commander would shut up or to hope he’d go on blathering and at long last give the War Department enough rope to hang him.

A couple of miles later, Custer ordered the driver to stop so he could get out and stand behind a tree. Along with so much of the rest of him, his kidneys weren’t what they had been forty years earlier. He came back looking even more dissatisfied with the world than he had when he’d scrambled up into the motorcar.

The road ran roughly parallel to the railroad line. Every so often, it would swing away, only to return. At one of the places where it came very close to the tracks, the driver stepped on the brake. “Here we are, sir,” he said.

Here was a meadow that had been part of the Confederate line defending Bowling Green, about halfway between the tiny towns of Sugar Grove and Dimple. But for wrecked trenches and dozens of shell holes big enough to bury an elephant, the only thing to be seen was an enormous green-gray tent with a couple of squads’ worth of soldiers around it. Why the driver had chosen to stop at this particular place was beyond Abner Dowling.

It was evidently beyond Custer, too. “We aren’t even halfway back toward Bremen,” he complained. Olivia had been on his beady little mind, then. Libbie Custer knew her husband well.

“If you’ll just come with me, sir.” The driver got out of the automobile and handed down Custer and Dowling as if they were a couple of fine ladies. He headed for the tent. The general and his adjutant perforce followed: it was either that or be left all alone by the motorcar. At every other step, Custer snarled about what the mud was doing to his boots.

A man came out of the tent. He was wearing ordinary Army trousers, but with a leather jacket and leather helmet that put Dowling in mind of flying gear. With a wave, he hurried toward Custer. As he got nearer, Dowling saw he wore a major’s oak leaves on that jacket, and, a few steps later, that he had the eagle-on-star badge of a