Breakthroughs

troops would never have let themselves get fouled up with ammunition wagons like that. The messenger hadn’t said whether the troopers who’d cause his problem were white or black. He drew his own conclusions.

“When you first started keeping those notes, Sergeant,” someone said behind Featherston, “I never thought you would keep on with them. I seem to have been mistaken.”

Automatically, Jake closed the cover of the notebook. What he wrote in there was his, nobody else’s. “Major Potter, sir,” he said now, “I got nothing better to do than write, on account of I can’t go pasting the damnyankees the way I want to, on account of God may know where the ammunition is, but I sure don’t.”

Clarence Potter sighed. “I wish you could paste them, but that you can’t may matter less than you think. They are building up for another large push against us. If you have the ammunition you’ll need to help stop that, well and good. If not…” He didn’t go on.

“If not, we’re in too much trouble for anything to matter. That’s what you’re saying, isn’t it, sir?”

“That’s what I’m saying.” Potter studied him. “I never have figured out exactly how smart you are, Featherston, but you’ve made it plain you’re shrewd enough and to spare. If you hadn’t made the fatal mistake of being right at the wrong time, we might have the same rank by now.”

Maybe he meant that to console Jake. It didn’t; it made him furious. “Best way to save the country I can think of, sir, would be for a Yankee bomber to put three or four heavy ones right on top of the War Department. That might do it. Can’t think of anything else that would.”

The intelligence officer shook his head. “All things considered, they’ve done about as well as anyone could have expected.”

“God help us if that’s so,” Featherston said. “We’d better make peace in a hurry, before the damn fools do something even worse than they have already. Don’t know what that could be, but I reckon they’d come up with something.”

“You are shrewd.” Behind their metal-rimmed spectacles, Major Potter’s eyes widened slightly. “There are people in the Army and people in the government beginning to say the same thing. If Britain is forced to leave the war, if we have to face not just the whole U.S. Army but the whole U.S. Navy, less whatever part keeps fighting Japan in the Pacific-if that happens, the odds against us grow very long.”

“Odds were long during the War of Secession, too,” Jake said. “We licked the Yankees twice over by Manassas Gap. We’d lick ’em again if only that damned ammunition would ever get here.”

“We had help then,” Potter said. “Without it, I think we should have lost.”

“One way or another, we’d have licked them.” Featherston didn’t know whether that was likely to be true or just his own stubbornness talking. “We’d be licking them now if the damn niggers hadn’t risen up and stabbed us in the back.”

“I wonder,” Clarence Potter said. “I do wonder. We’d be better off than we are, no doubt, but would we be winning? The last two times we fought the United States, we won fairly quickly, before they committed everything they had to the struggle. We failed to do that this time, and they are fully committed to the fight-and they have more to commit to it than we do.”

As if to underscore his words, a flight of U.S. aeroplanes buzzed by overhead. No C.S. fighting scouts rose to answer them. Aeroplanes were mere annoyances, but Jake was sick of being annoyed without having the chance to return the favor. At long last, a couple of antiaircraft guns opened up on the Yankees. They scored no hits. They hardly ever did.

Potter went on, “And speaking of our colored troops, do I hear correctly that you opened up on them with canister during the retreat from Round Hill?”

“Hell, yes, you heard that straight,” Featherston said defiantly. “If they ain’t more afraid of us than they are of the damnyankees, they won’t do us any good, will they? They were running from the enemy, sir, and it was the only way I had to make ’em stop.”

“Some of them will never run from the enemy again, that’s certain-or toward him, either,” Major Potter said. “Some of their white officers and noncoms sent complaints about what you did to Army of Northern Virginia headquarters. You might have faced a court-martial if others had not spoken out on your behalf.”

“Surprised I didn’t any which way,” Jake said. “There’s a big raft of officers who don’t love me a whole hell of a lot.”

“Really?” Potter raised an eyebrow. “I hadn’t noticed.” Featherston, who didn’t know what to make of such understated irony, started to boil till the intelligence officer raised a hand and went on, “That’s a joke, Sergeant. I am happy to be able to tell you that I was able to deflect the complaints and make sure none of them went on to Richmond.”

“Thank you for that much, sir,” Jake said. Potter was a decent sort, as far as officers went. But Featherston hated being in anyone’s debt. He especially hated being in an officer’s debt.

“You’ve had a few bad turns come your way,” Potter said. “Seems only right to even things up as we can.”

There he stood, smug and sweatless in the muggy heat. Yes, you’re a lord, Featherston thought. You can throw the poor peasant a crust of bread and never miss it. In that moment, he might have come close to understanding what had driven the Negroes of the CSA to rise up late in 1915. But he never thought-he never would have thought-to compare his situation to theirs.

Before the comparison could have occurred to him, the first ammunition wagon arrived, too late to suit him but still sooner than the runner had said. Forgetting his resentment of Potter, he took out on the wagon driver the older anger he still felt, cursing him up one side and down the other. The driver, a lowly private first class, had to sit there and take it.

Finally having ammunition in his hands, though, let Jake work out resentment with something more than words. In mere minutes, the four guns he had left were banging away at the Yankees. The range was too long to let him see individual U.S. soldiers, but he could make out the boil and stir as shells slammed down among them. A man dropping rocks on a nest of ants below his second-story window could not see any of the individual bugs, either, but he could watch the nest boil and stir.

Clarence Potter, who spent most of the war back at the Army of Northern Virginia headquarters, also looked on with benign approval. “Make them sting,” he told Jake. “The higher the price they pay, the likelier they are to let us have the sort of peace we can live with.”

“I don’t give a damn about a peace we can live with,” Featherston snarled, adjusting the elevation screw on his field gun. “Only thing I give a damn about is killing the sons of bitches.” He raised his voice to a shout: “Fire!” Michael Scott jerked the lanyard. The cannon roared. Out flew the shell casing. In went another shell.

A man dropping rocks on a nest of ants did not have to worry that the ants would try to drop rocks on him, too. The guns of Featherston’s battery enjoyed no such immunity. Before long, U.S. artillery began replying. Shells did not come in so often as he sent them out, but they came from bigger pieces-four- and six-inch guns-firing from a range he could not hope to match. Since he could not match it, he ignored the fire, and continued to pepper the closer U.S. infantry, whom he could hit.

“You’re cool about this business,” Major Potter said. For a man unused to coming under shellfire, he was pretty cool himself. He didn’t dive for cover at a couple of near misses till the crew of Jake’s gun did.

Featherston shrugged. “They can’t shoot for hell, sir.” That wasn’t true, and he knew it damn well. The Yankee artillerymen were no less skilled at their trade than their counterparts in butternut. Since the beginning of the war, they’d enjoyed an edge in heavy guns, too. Sometimes the numbers and quick firing of the Confederates’ three-inchers could make up for that. Sometimes, as when trying to cave in deep dugouts, they couldn’t.

In a lull, Potter said, “We have to hold them at Bull Run. If we can’t hold them here, Richmond itself is threatened.”

“Do my damnedest, sir,” Jake answered. He didn’t know if that would be enough. By the way Potter talked, he didn’t think it would. Jake shrugged again. Defeat wouldn’t be his fault. As far as he was concerned, the War Department and the niggers could split the blame.

Lucien Galtier had not been expecting a visit from Major Jedediah Quigley. He certainly had not been expecting a warm, cordial visit from Major Quigley. That was what he got, though. The U.S. officer even brought along a bottle of brandy far smoother and finer than the homemade applejack Galtier had grown used to drinking.