Breakthroughs

in time.

Another Confederate came out from behind a large, dun-colored rock. Morrell swung the light machine gun toward him. He was on the point of opening fire when he saw the man was holding a flag of truce.

Bullets from one of the barrel’s hull machine guns stitched the ground near the Confederate officer’s feet. He stood still and let the flag be seen. The machine gun stopped firing. All over the field, firing slowed to a spatter and stopped.

Morrell ducked down into the cupola. Halt, he signaled urgently. Then, like a jack- in-the-box, he popped up again. Even before the barrel had fully stopped, he scrambled down off it and ran toward the Confederate with the white flag. “Sir, I am Colonel Irving Morrell, U.S. Army. How may I be of service to you?”

Courteously, the Rebel, an older man, returned the salute. The three stars on each side of his stand collar showed his rank matched Morrell’s. “Harley Landis,” he said. He said nothing after that for close to half a minute; Morrell saw tears shine in his eyes. Then, gathering himself, he resumed: “Colonel, I–I am ordered to seek from the U.S. Army the terms you will require for a cease-fire, our own forces having proved unable to offer effectual resistance any longer.”

Joy blazed in Morrell. To let his opposite number see it would have been an insult. Sticking to business would not. “How long a cease-fire do you request, sir, and on how broad a front?”

“A cease-fire of indefinite duration, along all the front now being defended by the Army of Kentucky,” Landis answered. Again, he seemed to have trouble finding words. At last, he did: “I hope you will forgive me, sir, but I find this duty particularly difficult, as I was born and reared outside Louisville.”

“You have my sympathies, for whatever they may be worth to you,” Morrell said formally. “You must understand, of course, that I lack the authority to grant a cease-fire of any such scope. I will pass you back to First Army headquarters, which will be in touch with our War Department. I can undertake to say that troops under my command will observe the cease-fire for so long as they are not fired upon, and so long as they do not discover C.S. troops improving their positions or reinforcing-or, of course, unless I am ordered to resume combat.”

“That is acceptable,” Colonel Landis said.

“A question, if I may,” Morrell said, and the Confederate officer nodded. Morrell asked, “Are the Confederate States requesting a cease-fire along the whole front, from Virginia to Sonora?”

“As I understand it, no, not at the present time,” Harley Landis replied.

Morrell frowned. “I hope you see that the United States may find it difficult to cease fighting along one part of the front while continuing in another?”

“Way I learned it, fighting in the War of Secession went on a while longer out here than it did back East, on account of the United States kept trying to hold on to Kentucky,” Landis said.

That was true. Whether it made a binding precedent was another question. Morrell shrugged. “Again, that’s not for me to say, sir. Let’s head back toward Nashville till I can flag down a motorcar and put you in it. The sooner the fighting does stop, the better for both our countries.”

“Yes, sir. That’s a fact.” As Landis stalked past the barrel from which Morrell had emerged, he glowered in its direction. “You Yankees hadn’t built these damn things in carload lots, we’d have whipped you again.”

“I don’t know,” Morrell said. “We’d stopped you before we began using them. Breaking your lines would have been a lot harder without them, though; I will say that.” Landis didn’t answer. He kept on glaring. But he kept on walking, too, north and west toward Nashville and First Army headquarters. The white flag in his hand fluttered in the breeze.

Every soldier in green-gray who saw the Confederate officer inside U.S. lines with a flag of truce stared and stared, then burst into cheers. Off in the distance, gunfire still rattled here and there. It fell silent, one pocket after another. The Rebels had to be sending more men forward under flag of truce to let U.S. forces know they were seeking a cease-fire.

Before Morrell spotted a motorcar, he found something even better: a mobile field-telephone station, the men still laying down wire after them as their wagon tried to keep up with the advance. “Can you put me through to Nashville?” he demanded of them. They nodded, eyes wide with wonder as they too gaped at Harley Landis and the flag he bore. Morrell said, “Then do it.”

They did. In a few minutes, Morrell and General Custer’s adjutant were shouting back and forth at each other through the hisses and pops and scratching noises that made field telephones such a trial to use. “They want what, Colonel?” Major Abner Dowling bawled.

“A cease-fire on this front,” Morrell shouted back.

“On this front? This front only?” Dowling asked.

“That’s what Colonel Landis says,” Morrell answered.

“The general commanding won’t like that,” Dowling predicted. “Neither will the War Department, and neither will the president.”

“I think you’re right, Major,” Morrell said. “Shall I turn him back?” He watched Landis’ face. At those words, the Rebel officer looked like a man who’d taken a bayonet in the guts.

At the same time, Dowling was shouting, “Good God, no! Send him on! If they give so much without being pushed, we’ll get more when we squeeze, I wager. And come yourself, too. Only fitting you should be in at the death.”

“Thank you, sir,” Morrell said, and hung up. He turned to Colonel Harley Landis. “They will be waiting for you, sir. If I had to make a prediction, though, I would say they will not find acceptable a proposal for a cease-fire on one front only.”

“Sir, I have my orders, as you have yours,” Landis replied, to which Morrell could only nod.

A Ford came picking its way up the battered road toward the front. Morrell gave a peremptory wave. The courier who had been in the automobile soon found himself on shank’s mare, while the Ford turned around and carried Landis and Morrell back through the wreckage of war toward Nashville.

Boston was going out of its mind. The trolleyman kept ringing his bell, but inside the trolley Sylvia Enos could hardly hear it through the din of automobile and truck horns, wagon bells, church bells, steam whistles, and shouting, screaming people. The trolley had a devil of a time going forward, for people were literally dancing in the streets.

“Rebs ask for cease-fire!” newsboys shouted at every other streetcorner. They were mobbed. “Rebs ask for peace!” newsboys shouted at the corners where the Rebs weren’t shouting for a cease-fire. They were mobbed, too. Sylvia watched a fistfight break out as two men struggled over one paper.

Mostly, though, joy reigned supreme. Only the oldest granddads and grandmas remembered the last time the United States had beaten a foreign foe. Sylvia saw more men and women kissing and hugging in public during that slow streetcar ride to the shoe factory than she had in her life before.

A man got on the trolley drunk as a lord before eight o’clock in the morning. He kissed two women who seemed glad to kiss him back, then tried to kiss Sylvia, too. “No,” she said angrily, and pushed him away. He might have fallen over, but the trolley was too crowded to let him. “The war’s not over yet,” Sylvia told him and whoever else might listen. As far as she was concerned, the newsboys shouting Peace! were out of their minds.

As far as the drunk was concerned, Sylvia was out of her mind. His mouth fell open, giving her another blast of gin fumes. “Of course”-it came out coursh-“the war’s over,” he said. “Rebs’re quitting, ain’t they?”

She’d already read the Globe. She hadn’t just listened to the boys yelling their heads off. “No,” she answered. “They haven’t surrendered, and there’s still fighting in places. And the Canadians haven’t quit fighting anywhere, and neither has England.” And George was out there somewhere in the Atlantic, and no indeed, the Royal Navy had not quit fighting, and nobody’d said anything about the Confederate Navy quitting, either.

“So what?” the drunk said. “We’ll lick ’em. We’ll lick all them bastards.” He paused and leered. “Now how about a kiss?”

Sylvia wondered if she would have to use a knee in a most unladylike fashion. Her expression, though, must have been fierce enough to get the message across even to a lush. He turned away, muttering things she was probably lucky not to be able to understand.

She also wondered if she was the only person anywhere in the United States not