get killed anyway; his role would be expensive. And so Morrell condescended to explain: “You’ll take your company and most of the machine guns around to the east of the mountain there. Don’t do anything in particular to keep from drawing attention to yourself. As soon as you get opposition, I want you to plaster it with rifle fire and those machine guns-make it seem as if you’re in charge of the whole battalion. While you’re keeping the Canucks busy, the rest of us are going to be sneaking up one of these Indian trails to see if we can slide past the observer without getting observed.”
Captain Hall’s eyes widened. “What a good idea, sir!” he exclaimed.
“I’m glad you like it.” Morrell knew his voice was dry, but he couldn’t help it. It didn’t matter. Hall no more noticed the tone than he had figured out what lay in Morrell’s mind before the battalion commander put it in words of one syllable for him.
Morrell kept Sergeant Finkel’s machine-gun squad; the rest went on the diversionary move. Since he was leaving himself with only one gun, he chose the best. Guderian had seen that, too. “The sergeant there should be an officer,” he observed quietly. “Is he held back because he is a Jew?”
“Maybe a little,” Morrell answered. “He holds himself back, too, though: he’d rather deal with the machine guns himself than with men who would be dealing with machine guns, if you know what I mean.”
“I know exactly what you mean,” Guderian said, nodding. “Those are indeed the ones who make the best noncommissioned officers.”
Once he judged Captain Hall’s force well begun on its diversionary move, Morrell led the rest of the battalion north and west on narrow trails through the thickest woods he could find. He strung the men out so that, even if the Canadians up on Pigeon Mountain should spot them, they would have a hard time judging how many U.S. soldiers were on the march.
He tramped along at the head of the column, map in one hand, compass in the other, hoping the two of them could guide him. His boots scuffed almost soundlessly through a carpet of needles fallen from the tall, dark conifers all around. Their resinous, aromatic scent filled his nostrils.
“You are a lucky man, Major,” Captain Guderian said, “to have escaped being chained behind a desk.”
“I think so, anyhow,” Morrell said. “Some people
Guderian was on the point of replying when gunfire broke out, off to the east. It was a good deal of gunfire. The German’s head went up, like a hound’s on taking a scent. “The Canadians’ attention has been drawn, I should say. Nothing like machine guns to do that, is there? Soon we see how much attention they are paying over on that side of the mountain.”
“They can’t have a whole great swarm of men themselves,” Morrell said. “They’re trying to hold off the USA all across their country, and we’re bigger than they are, even if we’re fighting the Confederacy, too.”
“One hopes they can’t,” Guderian answered. Morrell grinned. The foreigner was as dry with him as he’d been with Captain Hall. Unlike Hall, though, he was alert enough to the world around him to realize as much.
He was sure the Canadians had pickets in the woods-he would have, in their shoes. He didn’t run into any of them for quite a while, though. As the trees hid him from Pigeon Mountain, they also hid the mountain from him. That meant he had no choice but to navigate by the map, which he didn’t fully trust. If it was even close to right, he was almost to decent terrain that would take him straight toward the railroad line-and toward the last line of Canadian defenders in front of it.
Just when he’d begun to think he’d used the Indian trails so cleverly as to evade every picket the Canucks had posted, a rifle shot rang out up ahead. The bullet zipped past his head before he heard the report from the rifle that had sent it on its way. He was burying his face in those fragrant needles before a second bullet drilled through the space where his body had been.
Map and compass went flying when he dove. As he grabbed for his Springfield, he shouted, “Get ’em fast. Don’t let this look big.” He fired in the direction from which the shots had come.
His men dashed into the woods on either side of the trail. The little battle that followed was a lot like fighting Indians-running from tree to tree, ambushes, small desperate stands of resistance. After ten or fifteen minutes, no one was shooting anymore. Morrell hoped the Canucks were dead and hadn’t been able to send runners back to announce he and his soldiers were on the way.
The racket of the fight was liable to have done that for them. “Now we push it!” Morrell called as the Americans moved forward once more. “If the Canucks know we’re here, we don’t want them to have time to get ready for us.”
He’d rescued the map-that was precious. God only knew where the compass had landed. He commandeered Captain Spadinger’s. Twenty minutes later, the U.S. force burst out of the woods. There in the distance was the railroad running alongside the Ghost River. A train, tiny as a toy, chugged west. But between him and the object of his desire lay rifle pits and trenches with Canadians in them. He shouted for Sergeant Finkel.
Quiet and competent, the noncom and his crew had kept up with everyone else. Setting up the machine gun on its tripod was a matter of moments. One gun wasn’t much to cover the advance of a battalion, but it was what Morrell had. If nothing else, it would make the Canucks, however many Canucks there were, keep their heads down some of the time.
“Fire and move!” Morrell yelled. “Fire and move!”
As they often had before, his men ran toward the Canadians in small groups, flopped down and fired so their comrades could sprint past them, then moved up again when those comrades took cover. The Canucks fought hard, but, as he’d hoped, their lines weren’t so full as they might have been. Sergeant Finkel engaged at long range some men trying to rush back from the east.
When the first U.S. soldiers started jumping down into the Canadian trenches, Morrell refrained from following them long enough to shout for a runner. He told the men, “Get back to division HQ and tell ’em to send reinforcements after us. From where we are, all we have to do is hold and we can mortar that railroad line to hell and gone. Tell ’em to push it, too; the Canucks’ll try and throw us out. We’ll hold on here as long as we can.”
Bent low at the waist to make himself a small target, the runner dashed back the way he’d come. Morrell figured his men would have to hold on by themselves for most of a day. He figured they could do it, too. And then- and then the Canadians would have only one pass left through the Rockies, and that one higher and farther north and less usable through the winter than either of the two that would be lost to them.
“One more nail in the coffin,” he muttered. But that wasn’t quite right-it was one more stroke of the saw that was cutting the country in half. He nodded, as pleased with his metaphor as he was with his victory.
Brakes squealing, the train pulled into the Richmond and Petersburg Railroad depot. “Richmond!” the conductors shouted, again and again. “All out for Richmond!”
Anne Colleton shook her head in mingled scorn and bemusement. After the train had rattled over the long bridge across the James River, people would have to be idiots not to know it was coming in to the capital of the Confederate States. But then, a lot of people were idiots. She’d seen that often enough. She’d grown rich, then richer, because of it. And she’d grown poorer because of it, too, since blacks proved no more immune to the disease than whites.
“Porter!” she called, stepping out of the compartment. A Negro with a hand truck came hurrying up. Despite the black uprising, that tone of imperious command got results. The colored fellow piled her trunks-not so fine as the ones she’d had before the Marshlands burned-onto the dolly and followed her out of the Pullman coach onto the smoky, noisy platform that served as gateway between train and world. Once out there, she stuck two fingers in her mouth and let out a piercing whistle she’d learned from her brothers. “Taxi!” she yelled, imperious as ever.
Others had got there before her, but her clothes, her manner, and the way the porter followed her all said she was a person of consequence. She forced her way through the milling crowd. The porter loaded her luggage into the automobile. She gave him a quarter. He grinned and tipped his cap and went off to help someone else, his brass buttons gleaming.
“Where to, ma’am?” the taxi driver asked after handing her into the car.
“Ford’s Hotel,” she answered. He had hardly put the cab into gear before she found a question of her own: “Why aren’t you in uniform?”
“Ma’am, I got hit once in the shoulder and once here.” He took his left hand off the wheel for a moment. It was encased in a leather glove, three of whose fingers were unnaturally full and stiff. “They decided they’d had as much of me as they could use, so they let me go.”
