“Because there will be another round,” Kimball said, and Anne nodded. She reached for the whiskey bottle. He handed it to her. She drank till her eyes crossed. Anything, even oblivion, was better than thinking about spending so many lives and so much treasure-and losing anyhow.

She discovered Roger Kimball’s hand high up on her bare thigh. As she stared at it, it moved higher still. She set the bottle on the floor by the side of the bed and clasped Kimball to her. Love, or even fornication, was better than thinking about what might have been, too.

An aeroplane buzzed high over the line east of Lubbock. Jefferson Pinkard stared up at it. He thought about firing a few rounds-by the way it had come, it was plainly a U.S. machine-but decided not to waste the ammunition. It was so high up there, he had no chance of hitting it.

“Why we don’t got no aeroplanes to shoot down that puto?” Hipolito Rodriguez asked. “The Yankees, they got aeroplanes all the time. They look at us like a man peeking at a woman taking a bath in a river.”

Jeff thought of Emily. He couldn’t help imagining her naked. That was all right, when he didn’t imagine Bedford Cunningham naked beside her or on top of her. He answered, “Guess they don’t reckon this here front’s important enough to send us much in the way of flying machines. Yankees always have had more’n us.”

Something fell from the U.S. aeroplane. Pinkard’s first reaction was to hit the dirt, but he checked himself-that wasn’t a bomb. No: those weren’t bombs. They drifted and fluttered in the air like the snowflakes he occasionally saw in Birmingham. Rodriguez stared at them in blank wonderment. Jeff guessed he never saw snow down in Sonora, even if he’d made its acquaintance here this past winter.

“Papers!” Sergeant Albert Cross said. “The bastards are dropping leaflets on us.”

“Rather have ’em drop leaflets than bombs any old day, and twice on Sunday,” Pinkard said.

“Si.” Hip Rodriguez nodded enthusiastic agreement. “With papers, too, I can wipe my ass. This is muy bueno.”

“Probably be scratchy as hell,” Cross said after a judicious pause for thought. “But hey, Hip, you’re right-damn sight better’n nothin’. It’s a fucking wonder all the flies in Texas don’t live in this here trench.”

“You mean they don’t?” Jeff said, kidding on the square. “Could have fooled me.” As if to make him pay for his words, something bit him on the back of the neck. He swatted, but didn’t think he got it.

By then, the fluttering papers had nearly reached the ground. A few drifted back toward the Yankees’ trenches. Others fell in no-man’s-land. Still others came down in and behind the Confederates’ forward line.

Had Pinkard stabbed up with his bayoneted Tredegar, he could have spitted one of the descending leaflets. He didn’t bother. He just grabbed one out of the air. Cross and Rodriguez crowded close to see what the devil the United States thought it worthwhile to tell their foes.

At the top of the leaflet was a U.S. flag that looked to have too many stars in the canton crossed with another one Pinkard hadn’t seen before, a dark banner with the light silhouette of a tough-looking man’s profile on it. The headline below explained: THE UNITED STATES

“Wait a minute,” Cross said, “Houston’s in Texas, God damn it. I been through there on the train.”

“Here, let me read it,” Jeff said, and did: “ ‘When Texas was admitted to the United States in 1845, it retained for itself the right of forming up to four new states within its boundaries. The people of the state of Houston have availed themselves of the opportunity to break free of the evil and corrupt Richmond regime and found a new political body: in the words of the immortal John Adams, ‘a government of laws and not of men.’ The new state takes its name from Governor Sam Houston, who so valiantly tried to keep the whole of Texas from joining the Confederate States of America. The United States are delighted at this return to the fold of so many upstanding citizens who repent of their grandfathers’ errors.’ ”

Pinkard crumpled up the paper and stuck it in his pocket. “It’s an ass-wipe, sure as hell.” He went down the trench, gathering more leaflets.

Rodriguez and Sergeant Cross also picked up several copies of the announcement, no doubt for the same purpose. Rodriguez peered west, toward the enemy lines and what was presumably the territory of the new state of Houston. “How do they do this?” he asked. “Make a new state where there was no state before, I mean.”

“Same way they did when they stole part of Virginia from us during the War of Secession and called it West Virginia, I reckon,” Pinkard answered with a snort of contempt.

Sergeant Albert Cross added, “Then they went and found themselves enough traitors and collaborators to make themselves a legislature out of, like they done in Kentucky when they went and stole that from us. Wonder how many soldiers they got to use to keep the people from hanging all those bastards from the closest lamp poles.”

“Probably enough so that, if we start ourselves a counterattack, the Yankees won’t have enough reinforcements left to be able to hold us back,” Jeff said.

Sergeant Cross laughed louder than the joke deserved. “That’s good, Pinkard, that’s right good,” he said, but then gave the game away by adding, “Ain’t heard you say nothin’ that funny in a while now.”

“World hasn’t been a funny place lately, and that’s a fact,” Jeff said. “The Yankees have been pushin’ us back every place there is to push, and livin’ in the trenches wouldn’t be my notion of a high old time even if we was winnin’. Other thing is, way it sounds is that everybody else on our side is about to fall over dead, too. Don’t know about you, Sarge, but none of that makes me want to do a buck and wing.”

Hip Rodriguez looked at Pinkard with his large, dark eyes and didn’t say anything. He was still convinced Jeff had more urgent reasons for not making jokes these days. He was right, of course, but also too polite to push it.

Sergeant Cross lacked Sonoran manners. Not only that, he outranked Pinkard, which Hip didn’t. He said, “I don’t reckon it’s fretting over whether we’re goin’ to lose the damn war that’s made you try to get yourself killed every time we sent raiders out the past couple months.”

“Haven’t been trying to get myself killed,” Pinkard protested, which, at least as far as the top part of his mind went, was true. “Want to kill me as many damnyankees as I can, is all.”

“You used to have better sense than to volunteer to do it all the damn time,” Cross said. “You go across no-man’s-land often enough, sooner or later you don’t come back.”

If he could have shot Emily and Bedford first, Pinkard might have been content to turn his Tredegar on himself. One of the reasons he shook his head now was that he hadn’t shot the damned bitch. Give her the satisfaction of outliving him? He shook his head again.

Then, from the other side of no-man’s-land, the Yankees started firing trench mortars. The bombs whistled cheerily as they fell. As he’d almost done for the leaflet, Pinkard threw himself flat. “Hijos del diablo!” Hip Rodriguez shouted as he dove down to the bottom of the trench, too.

Sons of the devil, that meant, and Pinkard couldn’t have agreed more. Mortar bombs flew right down into a trench, as conventional artillery, with its flatter trajectory, often could not. Along the line, somebody shrieked as fragments pierced him.

Machine guns started to rattle, both from the Yankees’ entrenchments and from the Confederate line under attack. “They’re coming!” someone yelled.

Cursing, Jeff scrambled up. That made him more vulnerable to the mortar bombs, which kept on falling. Lying down and waiting for damnyankees to jump into the trench and shoot him or bayonet him was the worse side of that bargain, though.