conclusions absurd. He remembered the claim, though, and enjoyed hauling it out to bedevil his adjutant.
'They do need you, sir,' Major Toricelli said. 'If they didn't, they would have left you in Texas.'
'And if that's not a fate worse, or at least more boring, than death, I don't know what would be,' Dowling said.
While he and Toricelli sparred, the driver, a practical man, looked down the road in the direction from which they'd come. 'Here's a truck,' he said, and waved for it to stop.
Maybe he was persuasive. Maybe the burning command car was. Either way, the deuce-and-a-half shuddered to a halt, brakes squealing. Over the rumble of the engine, the driver said, 'You guys look like you could use a lift.'
'You mean you're not selling sandwiches?' Dowling said. 'Damn!'
The driver eyed his rotund form. 'You look like you've had plenty already…' As his eyes found the stars on Dowling's shoulder straps, his voice trailed off. Too late, of course, and the glum look on his face said he knew it. 'Uh, sir,' he added with the air of a man certain it wouldn't help.
'Just get me to Army HQ in a hurry, and I won't ask who the hell you are,' Dowling said.
'Pile in. You got yourself a deal.' Now the driver sounded like somebody'd who'd just won a reprieve from the governor.
Before long, Dowling repented of the bargain. The trucker drove as if he smelled victory at the Omaha 400. He took corners on two wheels and speedshifted so that Dowling marveled when his transmission didn't start spitting teeth from the gears. Other traffic on the road seemed nothing but obstructions to be dodged.
'What are you carrying?' the general shouted. The engine wasn't rumbling any more-it was roaring.
'Shells-105s, mostly,' the driver yelled back, leaning into another maniacal turn. 'How come?'
Major Toricelli crossed himself. Dowling wondered who was more dangerous, the Confederate fighter-bomber pilot or this nut. Well, if the shells went off, it would all be over in a hurry. Then, brakes screeching now, the driver almost put him through the windshield.
'We're here,' the man announced.
'Oh, joy,' Dowling said, and got out of the truck as fast as he could. Toricelli and the soldier who'd driven the command car also escaped with alacrity. The truck drove off at a reasonably sedate clip. The madman behind the wheel probably felt he'd done his duty.
A sentry with a captured C.S. submachine gun came up. 'I know you, sir,' he said to Dowling. 'Do you vouch for these two?' The muzzle swung toward Toricelli and the driver.
Never saw 'em before. The words passed through Dowling's mind, but didn't pass his lips. The sentry was too grim, too serious, to let him get away with them, and too likely to open fire before asking questions. 'Yes,' was all Dowling said.
'All right. Come ahead, then.' The sentry gestured with his weapon, a little more invitingly than he had before.
Familiar chaos enveloped Dowling as he stepped into the big tent. The air was gray with tobacco smoke and blue with curses. People in uniform shouted into telephone handsets and wireless sets' mikes. But they just sounded annoyed or angry, the way they were supposed to sound when things were going well.
He remembered headquarters in Columbus, back in the first summer of the war. He remembered the panic in officers' voices then, no matter how they tried to hold it at bay. They couldn't believe what the Confederates were doing to them. They couldn't believe anyone could slice through an army like a housewife slicing cheddar. They didn't know how to do it themselves, and so they'd figured nobody else knew, either.
They almost lost the war before they realized how wrong they were.
Now they knew what was what. Now they had the barrels and the bombs and the artillery and the men to turn knowledge into action. Better still, they had the doctrine to turn knowledge into effective action. Yes, they'd learned plenty of lessons from the enemy, but so what? Where you learned your lessons didn't matter. That you learned them did.
One of the men at a field telephone lifted his head and looked around. When he spotted Dowling, he called, 'Message for you from General MacArthur, sir.'
'Yes?' Dowling tried not to show how his stomach tightened at that handful of words. Daniel MacArthur often seemed incapable of learning anything, and the lessons he drew from what happened to him verged on the bizarre. His scheme to land men at the mouth of the James and march northwest up the river to Richmond…
I managed to scotch that one, anyhow, Dowling thought. I earned my pay the day I did it, too.
'Well done for your progress, and keep it up,' the man reported. 'And the general says he's over the Rapidan River east of Fredericksburg and rapidly pushing south. 'Rapidly' is his word, sir.'
'Is it?' Dowling said. 'Good for him!' The Confederates had given MacArthur a bloody nose at Fredericksburg in 1942. There wasn't much room to slide troops east of the town. Abner Dowling wouldn't have cared to try it himself. But if MacArthur had got away with it, and if he was driving rapidly from the Rapidan and punning as he went…'Sounds like Featherston's boys really are starting to go to pieces.'
'Here's hoping!' three men in Army HQ said in one chorus, while another two or three added, 'It's about time!' in another.
Dowling liked prizefights. People said of some boxers that they had a puncher's chance in the ring. If they hit somebody squarely, he'd fall over, no matter how big and tough he was. That was the kind of chance the CSA had against the USA. But when the United States didn't-quite-fall over, the Confederate States had to fight a more ordinary war, and they weren't so well equipped for that.
Did Featherston have one more punch left? Dowling didn't see how he could, but Dowling hadn't seen all kinds of things before June 22, 1941. He shrugged. If the United States seized Richmond and cut the Confederacy in half farther south, what could Featherston punch with?
'Tell General MacArthur I thank him very much, and I look forward to meeting him in front of the Gray House,' Dowling said. Forward to Richmond! Things really were going that way.
A s far as Dr. Leonard O'Doull was concerned, eastern Alabama seemed about the same as western Georgia. The hilly terrain hadn't changed when he crossed the state line. Neither had the accents the local civilians used. Shamefaced U.S. soldiers caught social diseases from some of the local women, too.
This penicillin stuff knocked those down in nothing flat, though. It was better than sulfa for the clap, and ever so much better than the poisons that had been medicine's only weapons against syphilis.
'Move up, Doc!' a noncom shouted at O'Doull one morning. 'Front's going forward, and you gotta keep up with it.'
'Send me a truck, and I'll do it,' the doctor answered. Sergeant Goodson Lord played a racetrack fanfare on his liberated trombone. The soldier who brought the news thumbed his nose at the medic. Grinning, Lord paused and returned the compliment, if that was what it was.
By now, O'Doull had moving down to a science. Packing, knocking down the tent, loading stuff, actually traveling, and setting up again went as smoothly as if he'd been doing them for years-which he had. He was proud of how fast he got the aid station running once the deuce-and-a-half stopped. And every forward move meant another bite taken out of the Confederate States.
He hadn't been set up again for very long before he got a hard look at what those bites meant. 'Doc! Hey, Doc!' Eddie the corpsman yelled as he helped carry a litter back to the aid station. 'Got a bad one here, Doc!'
O'Doull had already figured that out for himself. Whoever was on the litter was screaming: a high, shrill sound of despair. 'Christ!' Sergeant Lord said. 'They go and find a wounded woman?'
'Wouldn't be surprised, not by the noise,' O'Doull answered. 'It's happened before.' He remembered an emergency hysterectomy after a luckless woman stopped a shell fragment with her belly. What had happened to her afterwards? He hadn't the faintest idea.
When he first saw the wounded person, he thought it was a woman. The skin was fine and pale and beardless, the cries more contralto than tenor. Then Eddie said, 'Look what they're throwing at us these days. Poor kid can't be a day over fourteen.'
This time, O'Doull was the one who blurted, 'Christ!' That was a boy. He wore dungarees and a plaid shirt. An armband said, NATIONAL ASSAULT FORCE.
'You damnyankees here're gonna shoot me now, ain't you?' the kid asked.
'Nooo,' O'Doull said slowly. He'd seen National Assault Force troops before, but they were old geezers, guys with too many miles on them to go into the regular Army. Orders were to treat them as POWs, not francs-tireurs.
