drunk!”
“But no white for purity,” Mary Berendtsen murmured to herself from the edge of the crowd. No one in that milling, election-eve crowd heard her. Luckily for her, no one recognized her, either.
Garvin smiled pleasantly down at the new communications officer. “I’m sure you understand your duties, Colonel. Now, here’s the text of your nightly report to Berendtsen.”
And Brent Mackay’s body drifted slowly down the Hudson, out to the broad and waiting ocean.
II
Jim Garvin stood with his hands deep in his pockets, listening to the wind-flapping in the sides of tents as it swept gloomily across the bivouac area. The wind was very cold, condensing his breath into an unpleasant brittle wetness on the thick pile of his collar. He shivered violently as a gust needled his tender right leg, still sensitive from the scattering of buckshot that had chipped its bones two years ago, during the occupation of Jacksonville. A thin light seeped from behind the stringy pines to the east. It was going to be a cold and miserable day.
He looked at his wristwatch and walked toward the nearest tent, glad to be moving. He unsnapped the flap, tightly sealed and stubborn to his numb fingers, and shook the head of the nearer of the two men who slept inside. “All right, Miller, let’s go!”
Miller grunted incoherently and then came awake, rolling over in his wadding of blankets. He found his helmet with a blind movement of his arm, jammed his head into it, and crawled out, nudging his tentmate with a boot as he came. Still bundled, he zipped up his jacket under the blankets before he pulled them off his shoulders, and threw them back into the tent. Begley, the tentmate, crawled out after him, mumbling a string of curses while he handed Miller the canvas flagbag.
“It’s a sonofabitch cold day,” Begley said spitefully as he picked up his bugle.
“Stinkin’ South sucked all the goddam blood out of us,” Miller agreed.
Garvin grunted. Whenever he’d bothered to think about it at all, he’d somehow assumed that the last days of this campaign would be the same as they had been when the still young Army of Unification had swung back down the Jersey palisades into New York—crisp, clear weather with a promise of winter. Instead, the winter was almost over now, and the ground was soaking with rain and molten frost. The raw wind clawed at a man’s insides. It would be a good month before the weather was fit for anything.
But, considering what the last-homecoming had been like, it was probably as good a thing for this one to be different as not. So, he merely grunted.
They walked across the bivouac area to Berendtsen’s trailer without further words. When they reached it, Miller snapped the AU pennant to the jackstaff shrouds while Begley twisted a mouthpiece into his bugle. Garvin stood motionless beside the trailer, his head stiff and erect under its gray helmet, the Senior Sergeant’s green swath dull under a coat of frost. His shoulders were taut, his boots at a forty-five-degree angle.
He looked at his watch again.
“Flag…” He counted to three. “Up!”
Miller sent the blue-and-silver pennant whipping up into the wind, and Garvin’s jacket stretched over his stiff back as Begley blew Assembly. He held to attention while the men kicked their way out of their tents and lined up for roll call.
“This is an army, now,” Berendtsen had said. “It represents a nation. And a nation must have a continuing army. The answer is a tradition of always having an army. Jim, I want you to see that it looks a little like an army.”
If Berendtsen wanted him to set examples of discipline, it was no skin off his nose one way or the other. The men had gradually gotten used to the idea, once they’d realized it made them a more efficient organization when held within reasonable limits. And this was only one of many changes that had come about while the AU was beating its way down the eastern seaboard.
The AU had come a long way, in distance and in time, from the rabble of men who couldn’t have stood before one platoon of this regiment which now made up Berendtsen’s army. Even the bloodied and organized force that had marched back to New York from the Northern Campaign would have been broken by one of the now existing specialist groups—Eisner’s armored cars, probably, that had prowled through the torrential rain of the siege of Tampa like fireclawed hounds—and left to be mopped up by infantry. The AU had learned a lot by the time the blue-and-silver pennant flew over Key West. Learned a lot, enlisted many, looted much. It had learned still more as it returned northwards, cleaning out pockets and dropping garrisons in the familiar strategy that Berendtsen had developed during the Northern Campaign.
So, everything east of the Alleghenies was Berendtsen’s now. Garvin’s gaze swung as he looked bleakly at the lines of silent men, waiting at attention.
The men were lean and hard in their uniforms—old Marine uniforms with helmets and belt buckles finished in crackle-gray paint from a business-machines factory. Most of them would probably have been a match for any soldier that ever walked the Earth, winnowed and weeded as they had been. As to why they fought…Three meals a day and a purpose in life were as good a reason as any. A soldier got his pick of loot—such loot as watches and cigarette lighters, less luxury than convenience—his choice of land to work after his discharge, and a chance to find himself a woman.
Garvin took the roll call report without taking his eyes off the men.
Only a few of them were personally loyal to Berendtsen, but all of them followed him. Garvin wondered how they’d feel when they were pushed across the Appalachians to the west. He wondered, too, how he’d feel personally—and discovered that his mind had been avoiding the subject.
He heard Berendtsen’s hand on the inside latch of the trailer’s door. “Tenn—hut,” he barked, and the men, already stiff, turned their waiting eyes on the door. In their tents, some of them swore they’d keep their eyes oblique the next morning when the trailer door opened. None of them did.
The door opened, and Garvin stepped aside and held it, then swung it back as Berendtsen took three steps forward into the bivouac area.
He was wearing a belted coverall that had been dyed black, and only Garvin, standing slightly behind and a few feet to one side, was in a position to notice that his stomach was heavier than it had been. He surveyed the regiment with his usual unrevealing expression, and today, for the first time and for no obvious reason, Garvin saw that the youthfulness of his face was no more than a mask. His facial skin was waxy, as though someone had taken a cast of young Ted Berendtsen’s features and put it against this older skull under the boyishly-combed but darkening hair, and let his weary eyes look through. His neck was girdled by deep creases.
“All men present, sir,” Garvin said.
Berendtsen nodded curtly. “Good morning, Jim.” His eyes did not change their impersonal and yet intense expression. His face did not lose whatever singleness of purpose it was that gave it its unvarying mold.
And now Garvin realized, in the wake of his sudden glimpse of a Berendtsen stripped of all youth, that Berendtsen had years ago closed the last door that opened from himself to the world, and that now the sound of it had finally reached Garvin’s ears.
“Dismiss the men, Sergeant. All companies messed down and ready to move out in an hour. I want you and Commanders Eisner and Holland in my quarters in five minutes.”
“Yes, sir.” Garvin saluted, issued the orders, and dismissed the men. He walked across the area to where the company commanders were standing in the dawn gloom, leaving the old-young stranger behind.
“We are here.” Berendtsen touched his finger to the contour map of Bucks County and then, characteristically, added a belated “As you know.” Garvin noted that Holland twitched his thin lips opposite him at the map table. Eisner, whose hands were permanently blackened by grease and gear-box dust, and who was completely withdrawn when away from his cars, kept his face expressionless.
“We will be in New York on the day after tomorrow,” Berendtsen went on. “That is—the main body will.” He removed the map and substituted another covering the lower part of New Jersey.
“Now. Our main line of communication between New York and the Philadelphia area, as well as our route to the south in general, cuts across northern New Jersey and across the Delaware at Trenton. Up to now, there has been no reason to enter southern New Jersey at all, with the Camden garrison there to guard our flank, because of
