Breakthroughs

time, he let himself see how worn they were. Their heads bobbed agreement with the shavetail’s words-they were whipped. The lieutenant went on, “We’ve done everything we could do. It wasn’t enough.”

“What the hell did you do?” Jake asked. The lieutenant stared at him, disbelieving his ears-how could an enlisted man presume to question him? Jake shook his own head. Strangling the pipsqueak would be fun, but what was the use? The CSA grew his sort in carload lots. Ask a question with an answer worth knowing, then: “What are we supposed to do with the guns after five o’clock?”

“Leave them,” the young lieutenant said, as if they were unimportant. They were-to him. He went on, “The Yankees will take them as spoils of war, I reckon.” That didn’t seem important to him, either. Off he went, to give the word to the next battery he found.

“Spoils of war?” Featherston muttered. “Hell they will.” He looked at his watch. “We got most of an hour, boys, till the war’s over. Let’s make those shitheels wish it never got started.”

Plainly, his soldiers would just as soon have let the fighting peter out. He didn’t shame them into keeping on-he frightened them into it. That he could still frighten them with everything they’d known crashing into ruin around them said a lot about the sort of man he was.

At five o’clock, he himself pulled the lanyard to his field gun one last time. Then he undid the breech block, carried it over to Hazel Run-a couple of hundred yards-and threw it in the water. He did the same with the breech blocks from all the other guns. “Now the damnyankees are welcome to ’em,” he said. “Fat lot of good they’ll get from ’em, though.”

His words seemed to echo and reecho. As the armistice took hold, silence flowed over the countryside. It seemed unnatural, like machine-gun fire on a Sunday afternoon in the middle of Richmond. When the gun crew talked, they talked too loud. For one thing, they were used to shouting over the roar of the three-inchers. For another, they were all a little deaf. Jake suspected he was more than a little deaf. He’d been at the guns longer than any of his men.

Before the sun set, Major Clarence Potter made his way to the battery. Featherston nodded to him as to an old friend; in the Army, Potter was about as close to an old friend as he had. The intelligence officer looked at the field guns, then at Jake. “You’re not going to let them have anything they can use, eh?” he said.

Jake spent some little while describing in great detail the uses the damnyankees could make of his guns. Major Potter listened, appreciating his imagination. Finally, Featherston said, “Goddammit, sir, sure as hell we’re going to fight those bastards another round one of these days before too long. Why give ’em anything they can take advantage of?”

“Oh, you get no arguments from me, Sergeant,” Potter said. “I wish more men were busy wrecking more weapons we’ll have to turn over to the USA.” He wore a flask on his hip. He took it in hand, yanked the cork, swigged, and passed it to Featherston. “Here’s to the two of us. We were right when the people over us were wrong, and much good it did us.”

The whiskey burned its way down to Jake’s belly. He wanted to gulp the flask dry, but made himself stop after one long pull and hand it back to Major Potter. “Thank you, sir,” he said, for once sincere in showing an officer gratitude. Then he asked the question undoubtedly echoing throughout the beaten Army of Northern Virginia, throughout the beaten Confederate States: “What the devil happens next? We never lost a war before.”

“What happens next is up to the Yankees.” Potter drank again. “Unless I read them wrong-and I don’t think I do-they’ll take us down just as far as they can without provoking us into starting up the war.” He thrust the flask at Featherston once more. “Here. Finish it.”

“Yes, sir.” Jake was glad to obey that order. Once the reinforcements had landed and spread warmth along his legs and up on his cheeks and nose, he found another question, closely related to the first: “What’ll they make us do?”

“I’m not Teddy Roosevelt, thank God, but I can make some guesses,” Potter said. “First one is, the United States are going to keep whatever they’ve grabbed in the war. Kentucky’s gone, Sequoyah’s gone, that chunk of Texas they’re calling Houston is gone, the chunk they bit out of Sonora is gone, too.”

“Yeah.” Jake pointed out north. “Probably hold on to Virginia down to the Rappahannock, too.”

“Probably,” the intelligence officer agreed. “When the next war comes, that will keep us from shelling Washington the way we have the last couple of times-keep us from doing it for a little while, anyhow.”

“The next war,” Jake repeated. He assumed there would be a next one, all right. “How soon do you reckon it’ll come?”

“That depends on a lot of things,” Major Potter answered. “How much the damnyankees make us cut our Army and Navy, for one: how many men and barrels and aeroplanes and submersibles they let us keep.”

“Oh, yeah.” Featherston nodded. “And on how many we’ll have stashed away without them being any the wiser.”

“And on that,” Potter agreed. “The other side of the coin is, how soon do the thieves fall out?”

“I don’t know what you mean,” Jake said with a frown.

“Who won the war?” Major Potter asked patiently. “The USA and Germany, that’s who. Oh, Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire, too, but they hardly count. Roosevelt and the Kaiser are pals now, but how long will that last? When they start squabbling among themselves, that may give us the chance to get some of our own back.”

“Ah.” Featherston thought that over, then raised an admiring eyebrow. “You come up with all kinds of things, don’t you, Major?” That was genuine, ungrudging praise, and drew a smile from Potter. Featherston went on, “I’ll tell you who lost the war for us, though.”

“I’ve heard this song before, Sergeant,” Potter said.

Jake went on as if he hadn’t spoken: “The white-bearded fools in the War Department and the niggers, that’s who. Anybody wants to know, we ought to take ’em all out and shoot ’em. Whole lot of good they did us during the war.”

“Take all who out and shoot them?” Major Potter asked interestedly. “The white-bearded fools in the War Department or the niggers?”

“Hell, yes.” Without his quite noticing it, the whiskey had mounted to Jake’s head. “Country’d be better off without ’em, you mark my words.”

“Duly marked, Sergeant.” But Potter sounded amused, not convinced. “Nice to know someone has all the answers. I’ll tell you one thing: a lot of people in Richmond will be looking for answers, and heads will roll on account of it.”

“Some, maybe.” Savage scorn filled Featherston’s voice. “But not enough. You mark my words on that, too. The high muckymucks’ll find ways to cover for their brothers and cousins and in-laws and pals, and nothing much’ll come out of this. And as for the niggers-hellfire, Major, some of those damn coons’ll be voting now. Voting! After they stabbed us in the back, voting! Can you imagine it?”

“You are an embittered man,” the intelligence officer told Jake. He studied him for a long moment, then slowly shook his head. “If you turned to good use the energy you waste in bitterness, who knows what you might be able to do with it?”

“Waste?” Jake shook his head, too. “I’m not wasting it, Major. I’m going to get even. I’m going to get even with everybody who screwed me and my country.”

“Forgive me, Sergeant, but I’ll believe it when I see it,” Potter said.

“You will,” Jake said. “Damned if I know how, but you will.”

Major Cherney was laying things out for the fliers in his squadron: “All right, boys, this is the last act. The Confederate States are out of the war. It’s us against England and Canada now, and we’re going to lick them. That’s all there is to it. Toronto is going to fall. With the Rebs quitting, we can bring up another million men and another thousand aeroplanes and squash ’em flat.”

Jonathan Moss stuck up his hand. When Cherney pointed to him, he said, “Sir, I don’t know about you, but I want to finish licking the Canucks before all the reinforcements come up from the south. If they do it for us, it’s like saying we couldn’t handle the job ourselves.”

He looked around the tent at the Orangeville aerodrome. Most of the pilots who nodded with him were men who’d been flying against the Canadians and Englishmen for a long time. Percy Stone agreed with him, for instance. Pete Bradley, like a lot of the newer men, didn’t seem to care one way or the other. As long as Canada goes under, his shrug might have said, who cares how?