American Front (43 page)

And who would serve the guns in 1917, or 1919, or 1921, or however long the war lasted? Negroes? He shook his head. It couldn’t happen, not really. He glanced over at Perseus and Nero. Could it?

“Breakthrough!” George Armstrong Custer pounded the desk. “That’s what I want, nothing less!” In an old-fashioned dark blue uniform, the fringe on his epaulets would have shaken back and forth. Modern U.S. uniforms didn’t have epaulets. He had to make do with shaking jowls instead. “I want to run riot through the Rebels, and by God that’s what I’m going to do.”

“Sir.” Major Abner Dowling took a deep breath. Every time Custer started bellowing about breakthroughs, men died by thousands for gains best measured in yards. “Sir, with the machine gun and barbed wire and artillery, breakthroughs don’t come easy these days.”

That was not only true, it was the understatement of the year. But Custer shook his head. He didn’t want to see it, so he wouldn’t. If you imagined a dumpy, half-senile ostrich with its head in the sand, that was Custer, at least in Dowling’s uncharitable imagination. But, though he wore no epaulets, he did have stars on his shoulders. “The Rebs have worn themselves out,” he declared. “Holding us off has been hard enough on them, and then they tried an offensive of their own. What can they possibly have left?”

Dowling didn’t answer, not right away. The Confederate counterthrust from the south had been easier to stop than he’d expected. Maybe that meant the Rebs couldn’t force a breakthrough, either. Maybe it just meant their generals were as bad as Custer. The great man’s adjutant wasn’t sure which of those was the more depressing conclusion.

Direct argument having failed again and again, he tried analogy: “Sir, when Coronado came into the USA from Mexico, he was looking for the Seven Cities of Cibola, all of them stuffed with gold. What did he find? Nothing but a bunch of damn redskins living in mud huts.”

“What the
hell
are you talking about, Major?” Custer demanded: so much for analogy.

“I just meant, sir, that we keep looking for breakthroughs and keep thinking the Rebs are back to their last ditch, but it never seems to be true. Maybe we ought to try some different way of going at ’em,” Dowling said.

“Shall we settle the war with a game of football, the way some idiots tried doing Christmas Day?” Custer suggested with sardonic glee.

“Uh, no sir,” Dowling said hastily. From what he’d heard, First Army and the Confederate Army of Kentucky hadn’t been the only forces that made impromptu Christmas truces with one another. From what he’d heard, the war had damn near fallen apart on Christmas Day, from the Gulf of California all the way to the Susquehanna. But it hadn’t. It ground on, and would for who could guess how long.

In a way, the generality of the truce was too bad. If it had happened here and nowhere else, TR would have had all the justification he needed for sacking Custer and replacing him with someone who had some notion of how the world had changed since 1881. But no, no such luck.

“What
do
you propose, then, Major?” Custer sarcastically courteous was worse than Custer almost any other way. His ruling assumption seemed to be that, since he had no brains, no one else could possibly have any, either.

The trouble was, Dowling had no good answer for him here. That embarrassed the adjutant, but not as much as it might have. Nobody on the U.S. General Staff—or the Confederate General Staff, either, come to that—had any good answer on how to force a breakthrough. West of the Mississippi, the war was still mobile, but that was because there were a lot fewer men and a lot more miles west of the Mississippi. Wherever there were enough soldiers to man a solid trench line, offense literally stopped dead.

But if Dowling didn’t know what the answer was, he had a pretty clear notion of what it
wasn’t
. “Sending men out by the division to charge into machine-gun fire wastes lives, sir,” he said. “We’d be better off pounding the Rebs with artillery, using soldiers to create positions from which we could pound them from three sides at once, things like that.”

“We have the advantage in manpower, Major,” Custer said. “What good is it if we don’t use it?”

If we keep using it your way, we won’t have it much longer
, Dowling thought. Saying that aloud was probably fatal to a career. He braced himself to speak up anyway; maybe they’d give him an actual combat battalion as punishment for his crime.

Before he could make himself say anything, though, someone knocked on the door to Custer’s office. The commanding general snarled something profane, then barked at Dowling: “See who the devil that is.”

“Yes, sir,” Dowling said resignedly. You interrupted Custer’s meetings at your own risk. Dowling opened the door. Standing there was a scared-looking lieutenant from Cryptography, holding an enciphered telegram and a sheet of typewritten paper that was, presumably, the same message decoded. The lieutenant handed Dowling the paper—actually, thrust it into his hand—and then retreated at a clip not far short of flight.

As soon as Dowling had read the first two lines of the decryption, he understood why. But he was the one who’d have to break the news to Custer. Compared to that, the prospect of leading a combat battalion straight at the Rebel trenches looked downright delightful.

“Well?” the general commanding First Army snapped. “Don’t just stand there like an upright piano. Tell me what in tarnation this is all about.”

Dowling stiffened to rigid attention. Doing his best to keep vengeful glee from his voice, he said, “Yes, sir. Sir, you are ordered to detach two divisions from your front for immediate transfer to another theater.”

That had about the same effect on Custer as hitting him between the eyes with a two-by-four would have done. He went white, and then a red that rapidly deepened to a dusky purple. “Who’s stealing my men?” he whispered hoarsely. “If it’s Pershing, I’ll kill the son of a bitch with my own hands if it’s the last thing I ever do. That upstart whippersnapper wants to steal all the glory for the Kentucky campaign, and damn me to hell if I aim to let him. I’ll defy the order, that’s what I’ll do, and I’ll fight it out in the paper if TR sacks me for it. First Roosevelt keeps me from the northern command he knows I want—and he knows why I want it, too—and now, just when I’m beginning to make decent progress here, he robs me of my forces.”

“They aren’t being transferred to General Pershing, sir.” Now Dowling concealed regret: Pershing had made far more progress against the Rebels than Custer had. He’d also had the sense to save lives by pinching off Louisville from the flanks instead of going straight into the city, as the U.S. Army had tried to do during the Second Mexican War. “The order comes directly from General Wood, at General Staff headquarters in Philadelphia.”

Custer expressed an opinion of the relationship between Wood and Roosevelt that reflected poorly on the heterosexuality of either man. Like any underling with an ounce of sense, Dowling knew when to feign deafness. “Why the devil is Wood stealing my men, then?” Custer said, rather more pungently than that.

“Sir, a major Mormon uprising has broken out in Utah.” Dowling said, waving the decipherment of the telegram to show the source of his news. “They’re right on one of our cross-country rail lines; we have to bring them back under the flag as fast as we can.”

“God damn them to hell, and may the U.S. Army send them there,” Custer exclaimed. “We should have done it before the War of Secession, and we really should have done it during the Second Mexican War, when they tried to sneak out of our beloved Union. If anyone had listened to me then—” He shook his head. “But no. We had to clasp the viper to our bosom. I was there, by God. I wanted them to hang all the Mormons’ leaders, not just a handful of them. I wanted them to hang Abe Lincoln, too, while they had the chance. But would anybody hear a word I said? No. Are we better off because no one would? No again.”

“Sir, I wouldn’t call what we did in Utah during the Second Mexican War clasping the Mormons to our bosom, or afterwards, either,” Dowling said; Custer had a selective memory for facts. John Pope and later military governors in Utah had jumped on the Mormons with both feet then, to make sure they didn’t try giving the USA any more hard times. He supposed he could see why they’d outlawed polygamy, but suppressing public worship along with all other public meetings had always struck him as far too heavy-handed. Even after Utah joined the Union, public worship by groups larger than ten remained illegal; since the Second Mexican War, the Supreme Court hadn’t been much inclined to interfere with claims of military necessity. And so the Mormon Temple in Salt Lake City remained empty to this day. No wonder the Mormons didn’t love the U.S. government.

Custer coughed rheumily. Still glowering at his adjutant, he asked, “Are the damned Mormons in bed with the Rebs or the Canucks or both at once?”

“That’s—not immediately clear from the reports I have here, sir,” Dowling answered, studying his boss with an emotion he wasn’t used to feeling: respect. The sole piece of the military art with which Custer was familiar was the headlong smash, but his red-veined nose had a genuine gift for intrigue. “There are some foreign agitators in the state, but no details as to who they are.”

“Could be either one,” Custer judged. “The Mormons don’t like niggers much better than the Rebels do, but the Canadians could be seducing them with lies about freedom of religion.” He laughed unpleasantly. “If they were up in Canada, they’d have gotten the same short shrift the Germans who settled that town called Berlin did, and you can bet your bottom dollar on it.”

“That’s probably true, sir,” Dowling said, and for once simple agreement was just that, nothing more. He went on, “Shall I draft orders implementing this command for your signature, sir?”

“Yes, go ahead,” Custer said with a melodramatic sigh. “They must have timed their damned uprising with a view to spoiling my offensive and robbing me of the breakthrough I surely would have earned. They’ll pay, the scum.”

Dowling sighed as he bent over the situation map to figure out how he’d pull thirty thousand men or so out of the line. That let him turn away from Custer, which in turn let him snigger wickedly. If the Confederates and Canadians didn’t have worse threats than First Army to worry about, the war was going better than he’d figured.

A sharp explosion close by made Reggie Bartlett jump and look around for the nearest hole in the ground in which to dive. People in civilian clothes on the streets of Richmond gave him odd looks; why on earth would a soldier be frightened of a backfiring motorcar? The Duryea, plainly having engine trouble, backfired a couple of more times before finally beginning to run a little better.

Another soldier coming his way, though, nodded in complete understanding. “Just back from the front, are you?” he said.

Bartlett nodded. “Sure am.” His laugh was self-deprecating. “You can take the soldier out of the trenches, but it’s not so easy taking the trenches out of the soldier. This is my hometown, and I feel like I’m a stranger here.”

“Know what you mean, pal,” the other soldier said. “You get away for a while and it doesn’t seem like the real world’s real, if you know what I mean.” He stuck out a hand. “Name’s Alexander Gribbin—Alec, they call me.” He had swarthy, handsome features and a neat little chin beard that made him look like a Frenchman.

Giving his own name, Reggie shook hands with him. He said, “Alec, shall we find someplace where the only pops we’re likely to hear come from corks going out of bottles?”

“Friend, I like the way you think,” Gribbin said enthusiastically. “If this is your town, you ought to know about places like that, eh?”

“You just want a drink, we can do that anywhere,” Bartlett said.

“I’ve seen that,” Gribbin agreed. “Thank your lucky stars, Reggie my friend, the Drys haven’t gotten their way here in Virginia. Down in Mississippi, where I come from, it’s a desert, nothin’ else but.”

“That’s hard. That’s cruel hard,” Bartlett said, and his newfound companion nodded, his mournful expression showing just how hard it was. Bartlett went on, “What we could do, though, if you want the chance of something livelier, is to go to the saloon over at Ford’s Hotel, right across the street from Capitol Square. It’s only a couple blocks from here. Never know who’s liable to show up there—congressmen, foreigners, admirals, who can say?—but they don’t turn common soldiers away.”

“They’d better not,” Gribbin said indignantly. “I’m a white man, by Jesus, and I’m as good as any other white man God ever made.”

“Not only that,” Reggie Bartlett said. “but I’ve got money in my pocket—some, anyhow—and it spends as good as any other money the mint ever made.”

Alec Gribbin grinned widely. “I’m the same way, and so is my money. Let’s go.”

Ford’s Hotel, on the corner of Broad and Eleventh Streets, was a four-story building of white marble, with a fancy colonnaded entrance. The Negro doorman, who wore a uniform with more gold buttons and ribbons and medals than a French field marshal could have displayed, tipped his hat in salute as the two Confederate soldiers in their plain butternut walked past him.

“
Hell
of a place,” Gribbin said with a low whistle, gazing around at the rococo splendor of the lobby. He winked and lowered his voice: “Wouldn’t it make the bulliest damn sporting house in the whole wide world?”

“Matter of fact, it would,” Bartlett said, “but I wouldn’t have the money to go into a sporting house tricked out this fancy.” He walked down the hall. His boots sank into the thick pile of the Turkish carpets underfoot. That wasn’t so bad; the rugs didn’t try to pull the boots off his feet, the way the trench mud had in the Roanoke River valley.

The saloon was a saloon: long bar, brass rail, mirror behind it so the bottles of whiskey and gin and rum looked to be twice as many as they really were, free-lunch counter with a painting of a nude above it. But the place catered to a prosperous crowd. Not only was the free lunch more appetizing than the usual run of sardines and sausage and limp cheese, but the nude, a voluptuous redhead, was a lot more appetizing than the common saloon daub.