did. A soldier near Jorge lit a cigarette.
'Kill that, you dumb dipshit!' Sergeant Blackledge yelled. 'Kill it, you hear me? You want some damnyankee to spot your match or your coal? Jesus God, how fuckin' stupid are you, anyways?'
'All right, all right,' the offender muttered. Down to the deck went the smoke. A boot mournfully crushed it out.
'Now, when it gets light y'all got to keep your eyes peeled for damnyankee submarines,' Blackledge went on. 'One of them fuckers puts a torpedo in our guts, it's a hell of a long swim to land, you know what I mean?'
'Boy,' Gabriel Medwick muttered, 'he sure knows how to make a guy feel safe.'
Jorge laughed. That was so far wrong, it was funny. It would have been funny, anyway, if he weren't aboard this floating coffin. How many men were with him? He wasn't sure, but it had to be a couple of thousand. A damnyankee submersible skipper who sank the Dixie Princess would probably get the biggest, fanciest medal the USA could give out.
'You reckon it's true, what happened to that town in Russia?' somebody not far away from him asked.
'It's bullshit, you ask me,' another soldier answered. 'Damn Kaiser's just runnin' his mouth. Stands to reason-a city's too fuckin' big for one bomb to take out.'
'You hear about that?' Medwick asked Jorge.
He nodded. 'I hear, sн, but I don't know what to believe. What do you think?'
'I hope like anything it's bullshit,' his buddy said. 'If it ain't…If it ain't, we all got more trouble than we know what to do with. If the Germans have a bomb like that, if it's really real, how long before the Yankees do, too?'
'ЎMadre de Dios!' Jorge crossed himself. 'One bomb, one city? You couldn't fight back against something like that, not unless…Maybe we get those bombs, too.'
'Maybe.' Gabe seemed doubtful. 'If we get 'em, we better get 'em pretty damn quick, that's all I got to say. Otherwise, it's gonna be too late.'
He wasn't wrong, however much Jorge wished he were. The fall of Savannah meant the Confederate States were cut in half. People were saying that Richmond had fallen, too, and that Jake Featherston had got out one jump ahead of the U.S. soldiers coming in. Some people said he hadn't got out, but that didn't seem to be true, because he was still on the wireless.
What can I do about any of that? Jorge wondered. The only answer that occurred to him was, Not much. He yawned; it had to be somewhere not long after midnight. He couldn't even lie down and go to sleep: no room to lie down. He dozed a little standing up, the way only a tired veteran could.
Dawn was just painting the eastern horizon-all ocean, flat out to the edge of the world-with pink when he saw another ship ahead. No, it was a boat, much smaller than the Dixie Princess. It had a blinker that flashed Morse at the freighter. Up on the bridge, where no soldiers were allowed, a sailor-maybe an officer-answered back.
'What's going on?' Gabe Medwick asked around a yawn.
'Beats me,' Jorge answered. 'We just gotta wait and find out.' If that didn't sum up a lot of soldiering, what did?
The Dixie Princess changed course and followed the smaller craft toward the low-lying coast ahead. Her guide zigged and zagged in a way that made no sense to Jorge. And whatever the guide did, the Dixie Princess did, too.
Then somebody said, 'We better not hit one of them damn mines, that's all I got to say. That'd be worse'n getting torpedoed.'
A light went on in Jorge's head. They had to be heading towards a port, one warded by mines to keep out U.S. warships. And the small boat knew the way through the floating death traps. Jorge hoped like hell it did, anyhow.
WELCOME TO BEAUFORT, a sign said. Jorge would have guessed the name was pronounced Bofort. What his guess was worth, he found out when a man with bushy white side whiskers called, 'Welcome to Bew-fort, y'all! Where d'you go from here?'
Jorge hadn't the faintest idea. Somebody-probably an officer-called, 'Where's your train station?'
'Mile outside o' town,' the old-timer said, pointing west. 'We like our peace and quiet, we do. Ain't but one train a day anyways.'
'Jesus H. Christ!' the officer exploded. 'This is as bad as it would've been before the War of Secession!'
'No, sir.' The white-whiskered man shook his head. 'We had the hurricane back in '40, and the really bad one back in '93, an' we came through both o' them. And besides, we was full o' niggers in the old days. Ain't hardly got no more coons around now, though. Don't hardly miss 'em, neither. More room for the rest of us, by God.'
Odds were the Negroes had done most of the hard work. Sailors had to jump down from the Dixie Princess and grab the mooring lines that bound her to the pier. Gangplanks thudded onto the rickety planking.
'Disembark! Form up in column of fours!' an officer shouted. 'We will proceed to the railroad station and board transportation for Virginia!'
'Well, now we know what we're doing, anyway,' Gabe Medwick said.
'Sн.' Jorge nodded. 'But one train a day? How big a train is it gonna be? How long we gonna have to wait?' He looked up at the sky, which was sunny and blue. 'We ain't that far from Savannah, even now. What if a damnyankee airplane sees us? They come and drop bombs on our heads, that's what.'
'Better not happen, that's all I've got to say.' Medwick shivered at the idea, though the day felt more like spring than winter.
Down the gangplanks went the soldiers. As corporals, Jorge and Gabe tried to gather their squads together, but they didn't have much luck. The soldiers had got too mixed up in the desperate boarding in Savannah. 'Hell with it,' Sergeant Blackledge said-he was trying to gather a whole section, and having no more success than the squad leaders. 'We'll sort things out when we get wherever the hell we're going.'
They marched through Beaufort. Though it wasn't at all far from Savannah, the war might have forgotten all about it. Only some small, shabby houses with broken windows and with doors standing open spoke of the blacks who'd lived here till not long before.
Old men and those too badly maimed to fight-and a few women, too-crewed fishing and oystering boats. Truck gardens grew all around the town. Women and kids and the old and injured tended them, too.
At the station, the railroad agent stared at the long butternut column in unabashed horror. 'What in God's name am I supposed to do with y'all?' he said.
'Get on the telegraph. Get trains down here, dammit,' an officer answered. 'We got out of Savannah. They want us up in Virginia. Fuck me if we're gonna walk.'
'Well, I'll try,' the agent said doubtfully.
'You better.' The officer-he was, Jorge saw, a colonel, with three stars on each side of his collar-didn't even bother disguising the threat.
The agent clicked away on the telegraph. A few minutes later, an answer came back. 'They'll be here in two- three hours,' he reported.
Jorge would have bet that the time promised would stretch, and it did. The trains didn't get there till midafternoon. He had enough food in his pockets and pouches to keep from getting hungry before then, but he wondered if anybody would feed the soldiers on the way north. He wondered how bad the fighting would be, too. He'd served in Virginia before coming down to Tennessee. Wherever things get tough, that's where they send me. He was surprised at how little he resented that. It wasn't as if he were the only one in the same boat.
On the train, his two stripes won him a seat, even if it was hard and cramped. What with all the men standing in the aisles, he counted himself lucky. No matter how uncomfortable he was, he didn't stay awake long.
His eyes opened again when the train rolled through the town of St. Matthews. Except for a good many women wearing widow's weeds, the place seemed as untouched by the war as Beaufort. Jorge wasn't used to landscapes that hadn't been torn to bits. A town with all its buildings intact, without barricades and foxholes and trenches, seemed unnatural.
'It does, doesn't it?' Gabe Medwick said when he remarked on that. 'It's like the place isn't important enough to blow up, almost.'
Jorge hadn't looked at it quite like that, which didn't make Gabe wrong. He turned to ask one of the soldiers in the aisle what he thought, only to discover that the man was sound asleep standing up, much deeper under than
