The adjutant chose his words with care: “Sir, doctrine specifically orders that barrels be spread out evenly along the front, to assist infantry attacks wherever they may be carried out.”
“And what a lot of poppycock that is, too,” Custer declared, as if he were the Pope speaking
“When Brigadier General MacArthur came up with a similar plan, sir, you cited doctrine,” Dowling reminded him. “You wouldn’t let him do as he’d planned.”
“Daniel MacArthur cares for nothing but his own glory,” Custer said, which was true but which applied in even greater measure to Custer himself. “He knew the attack was weaker than it should have been, but went ahead anyhow. He deserved to fail, and he did.”
“Yes, sir,” Dowling said resignedly. Custer had done more than his share to weaken MacArthur’s attack because he did not want the youngest division commander in the whole Army getting credit for the victory he might have won.
“Besides,” Custer went on, “I aim to launch an army-scale assault, not one on the scale of a division. I intend to concentrate all the barrels in First Army and hurl them like a spear at the Confederate line. It will break, by God.”
“Sir, the War Department will never let you get away with flouting doctrine like that,” Dowling said. “If you try, they’ll confiscate your barrels and ship ’em to other fronts where the commanders are more cooperative.”
“I know.” The sly look returned to Custer’s face. “That’s where you come in.”
“Me?” Whatever was coming next, Dowling didn’t think he’d like it.
He was right. “In the reports First Army sends to Philadelphia,” Custer said, “all the barrels will be lined up exactly as the idiots with the high foreheads say they should be. You’ll vet corps and divisional reports, too-‘in the interest of greater efficiency,’ you know. Meanwhile, we shall be readying the blow that will wreck the Confederate position in Tennessee once and for all.”
Abner Dowling stared at him in dismay. “My God, sir, they’ll courtmartial us both.”
“Nonsense, my boy,” Custer told him. “You’re safe as houses any which way, because you’re acting under my direct orders. But even I need fear only if we lose. If we win, I shall be forgiven no matter what I do. Victory redeems everything. And we
“My God, sir,” Dowling said again. But then he paused. He’d dreamt for years of seeing Custer ousted from the command of First Army and replaced by someone competent. Now Custer was greasing the skids of his own downfall. And the general was right-his adjutant would only be obeying orders. Slowly, thoughtfully, Dowling nodded. “All right, sir, let’s see what we can do.”
“Stout fellow!” Custer exclaimed. He winked at Dowling. “Stout fellow indeed.” Dowling forced a smile.
The big White truck rumbled through the streets of Covington, Kentucky, toward the loading area by the Ohio River wharves. Cincinnatus knew the streets of Covington as well as he knew his name. He’d driven a delivery truck through them, back in the days before the war started. Covington had changed since U.S. forces wrested it from its Confederate defenders, but its streets hadn’t.
One symbol of the change was the flag flying from the city hall as the Negro drove past it. For the past two and a half years, the Stars and Stripes had fluttered there, not the Stars and Bars. If the USA won the war, the Stars and Stripes would fly there forever. Kentucky-less a few small chunks in the south and southeast still in Confederate hands-had been readmitted to the United States after more than half a century out of the Union.
Guards in green-gray stood guard in sandbagged machine-gun positions in front of the city hall. Not everyone in Kentucky was happy with its separation from the Confederate States. Not even close to everyone in Kentucky was happy with that separation. Cincinnatus sighed. He knew that only too well.
“Damn, I wish I never would’ve got sucked into all this crazy shit,” he muttered as the truck jounced over a pothole and his teeth clicked together. Confederate diehards, black Reds-were Kentucky still in the CSA, they would have been at each other’s throats. As things were, they both hated the occupier worse than they hated each other. Cincinnatus cursed his luck and his own generosity for making him part of both groups. If only he hadn’t hidden Tom Kennedy when the Yankee soldiers were after his old boss. But he had, and so…
A soldier playing traffic cop held up a hand. Cincinnatus trod on the brake and shifted the White into neutral. An officer in a chauffer-driven motorcar rolled past. The soldier waved the truck convoy on again.
Cincinnatus drove on up to the riverside, pulled into the loading area, and stopped the truck. The engine ticked as hot metal began to cool. He opened the door and climbed down onto the paving stones. The air was thick with the exhaust of a lot of trucks in a small space. He coughed a couple of times at the harsh stink.
More trucks rolled south on the bridge over the Ohio between Covington and Cincinnati. The Confederates had dropped it into the river as soon as the war began, but it was long since not only rebuilt but widened. A stream of barges crossed the river, too, carrying the sinews of war from U.S. factories toward the fighting front. Negro laborers unloaded the barges and hauled their contents over to the truck-transport unit of which Cincinnatus was a part.
He’d been one of those laborers till the head of the transport unit discovered he could drive. Since then, he’d made more money for less physical labor, but his hours were longer and more erratic than they had been. Now that the front reached down into Tennessee, it was most of a day’s drive from Covington. He didn’t like sleeping in a tent away from Elizabeth and their baby boy, Achilles, but nobody cared what he liked.
“Come on!” Lieutenant Straubing shouted. “Get yourselves checked off. You don’t get checked off, you don’t get paid.”
That blunt warning from their boss got the drivers moving into the shed to make sure the payroll sergeant put a tick by their names on his sheet. About half the drivers were white, the other half colored. If a man could do the job, Straubing didn’t give a damn what color he was. For a while, Cincinnatus had thought that meant Straubing had a better opinion of blacks than did most whites from either the USA or the CSA. He doubted that now. More likely, Straubing just grabbed the tools he needed without worrying about the paint job they had.
Even that attitude was an improvement on what most whites in the USA and the CSA thought about blacks.
The line in front of the payroll sergeant formed solely on the basis of who got there first. Cincinnatus fell in behind a white driver named Herk and in front of another white who, because he wore his hair cropped close to his skull, got called Burrhead a lot. They chatted amiably enough as the queue moved forward; black or white, they had work in common.
“God only knows when poor Smitty gonna get in,” Cincinnatus said. “Saw him pull off with
“He ain’t lucky, and that’s a fact,” Herk said.
“He’d be a hell of a lot luckier if the damn Rebs didn’t keep throwin’ nails in the road,” Burrhead added. “’Course, we’d all be a hell of a lot luckier if the damn Rebs didn’t keep throwin’ nails in the road.”
“I’ll tell you who’s lucky.” Herk pointed at Cincinnatus. “Here’s the lucky one.” Cincinnatus had rarely heard a white man call him that. But Herk went on, “You and me, Burrhead, we’ll sleep in the barracks tonight. He’s going home to his wife.”
“That ain’t bad,” Burrhead agreed.
Cincinnatus collected five dollars-two days’ pay. Herk got the same. Burrhead, who hadn’t been in the unit so long, got four and a half. Some of the white drivers had grumbled because experienced blacks got more than they did. Some had tried to do more than grumble. They were spending time at hard labor; Lieutenant Straubing tolerated nothing that got in the way of his unit’s doing its job.
A trolley line ran from the wharves to the edge of Covington’s Negro district, over by the Licking River on the east side of town. Cincinnatus set a nickel in the fare box without hesitation. When he’d been working on the wharves, making a dollar or a dollar and a half a day, he’d almost always walked to and from his house. By his standards of comparison, being able to sit down in the colored section at the back of the trolley was affluence.
The trolley ran past the charred ruins of a general store. Cincinnatus wondered if Conroy had been able to rebuild somewhere else. The white storekeeper was one of the stubborn Confederates still working against the U.S. occupiers. If he did get back in business, Cincinnatus expected he’d hear from him. He looked forward to that as much as he did to smallpox.
