“Bully,” David said, as if he were Roosevelt. “After everything it’s cost us, we’d better get the most we can out of this war. If we stop too soon, why did we go and fight it in the first place?”

“Because we were mad,” Flora replied, staring at her brother with a new kind of horror: he did sound like the president, where he’d been growing up a Socialist like everyone else in the family. She asked, “How can you say that, after what happened to you?” Only after she’d spoken the words did she notice she’d slipped from English into Yiddish.

David answered in the same language: “How can I say anything else? Do you want me to lose my leg and the country to have nothing to show for it?”

“I never wanted you to lose your leg at all,” Flora said. “I never wanted anyone to lose his leg, or his arm, or his eye, or anything. Even if we win, we have nothing to show for it. We never should have fought at all.”

“Nu?” David said. Even raising an eyebrow seemed to cost him no small physical effort. “Maybe you’re right, Flora. Maybe we shouldn’t have gotten into it. But once we did decide to fight, what can we do but fight as hard as we can to win?”

That dilemma had dogged the Socialist Party from the beginning. Cutting the war short once a treasure of money and an even greater treasure of lives had been spent had proved not just impossible but, worse, unpopular, as the majorities Roosevelt and the Democrats brought in showed.

As David had learned new ways of talking and thinking in the trenches, so Flora had on the floor of Congress. Being without a good answer, she changed the subject: “Have they said anything more about fitting you with an artificial leg? As I was coming in, I saw a man walking very well with one.” She was stretching a point, but not too far.

“They’ll have to wait a while longer,” he said. “The stump’s not healed well enough yet, and the amputation was pretty high.” His mouth twisted. “Maybe I’ll be a one-crutch cripple instead of a two-crutch cripple.” Flora’s expression must have betrayed her, for her brother looked contrite. “It’s better than being dead, believe me.”

Reluctantly, Flora nodded. Her sister’s husband, Yossel Reisen, had been killed in Virginia bare days after he married Sophie; he had a son he’d never seen and never would see now.

A doctor came in. “Congresswoman Hamburger,” he said, polite but not obsequious: he’d dealt with a lot of important people. “If you’ll excuse me-” He advanced on David.

“Maybe you’d better go,” David said to Flora. “The stump looks better than it used to, but it’s still not pretty.”

She was glad of the excuse to leave, and ashamed of herself for being glad. Here was her baby brother-or so she remembered him, at any rate-dreadfully mutilated, and here he was, too, wanting the fighting to go on so others could suffer a like fate or worse. He obviously meant every word he said, but he might as well have started talking Persian for all the sense he made to her.

She went downstairs. A soldier with no legs was moving along in a wheelchair. He was whistling a vaudeville tune of some sort, and seemed happy enough with his world. Flora didn’t understand it. Flora couldn’t understand it. And, had she asked him, she was sure he would have told her the war had to go on, too. She didn’t understand that, either, but she was sure of it.

She went back to her office, but accomplished little that truly resembled work. She’d expected nothing different; seeing David always left her the worse for wear. After a while, realizing she’d read a letter three times without having the faintest idea what it was about, she put it away, got up, and told her secretary, “Bertha, I’m going over to my apartment.”

“All right, Miss Hamburger,” Bertha answered. “I hope your brother is better. I pray for him every night.” She crossed herself.

“Thank you,” Flora said. “He’s doing as well as he can, I think.” She’d said that so many times. It was even true. But as well as he can was a long way from well. And still he thought the United States should keep on with the war. Flora shook her head till the silk flowers on her hat rustled and rattled. She could live another hundred years without having it make sense to her.

She was standing in front of the Congressional office building waiting to flag a taxi when someone in a Ford called to her: “Where are you going, Flora?”

It was Hosea Blackford. “To my apartment,” she answered.

The congressman from Dakota pushed open the passenger-side door. “I’m heading that way myself,” he said. “Hop in, if you’ve a mind to.” She did hop in, with a word of thanks. She had very little to say on the short trip back to the apartment building. Blackford glanced over at her. “You’ve been to see your brother, or I miss my guess. I hope he hasn’t taken a turn for the worse?”

“No,” Flora said, and then she burst out, “He still thinks we have to go on pounding the Confederate States!”

Blackford drove in silence for some little while before finally saying, “If your own brother feels that way after he was wounded, you begin to get an idea of what the Democrats would have done to us if we had tried hard to cut off funds for the war after it began. This country thirsts for revenge the way a drunk thirsts for rotgut whiskey.”

“But it’s all mystification!” Flora exclaimed. “The capitalists have tricked the workers into going to war against their class interest, and into being thankful while they’re getting slaughtered. They’ve even tricked someone like David, who ought to know better if anyone should.” To her dismay, she began to cry.

Congressman Blackford parked the Ford across the street from the apartment building where they both lived. “Mystification is a notion that sounds more useful than it is,” he observed as he got out and went around to open her door for her. “What people believe and what they’ll do because they believe it is a big part of what’s real, especially in politics.”

“It’s one of the planks in the platform,” Flora said, taking his arm as she got out of the motorcar. “The capitalists and the bourgeoisie mystify the proletariat into going along with their desires.” She raised an eyebrow; he’d shown before that his ideology wasn’t so pure as she would have liked.

He shrugged now. “If you run a campaign that doesn’t do anything but shout ‘They’re tricking you!’ over and over, you’re going to lose. That’s one of the things the Socialist Party has proved again and again. The other thing the Democrats have proved for us-or against us, rather-is that, right now, anyhow, nationalism is stronger than class solidarity.” He shrugged again. “I’d say the whole world has proved that for us.”

“What about the Negroes in the Confederate States?” Flora asked.

“What about them?” Blackford returned. “They rose up and they got smashed. You’re still learning the difference between being an agitator and being a politician. Listen to me, Flora.” He sounded very earnest. “Compromise is not a dirty word.”

“Maybe it should be,” she answered, and strode into the apartment building ahead of him. She could feel his eyes on her back, but she did not turn around.

Gordon McSweeney prowled along the west bank of the Mississippi, looking for Confederate soldiers to kill. He didn’t find any. The United States had this stretch of the riverbank under firm control these days. He felt frustrated, as a lion might feel frustrated looking out of its cage and seeing a cage full of zebras across the walk in the zoo.

Not even the new, shiny captain’s bars he wore made him feel any easier about the world. He knew he’d been lucky to wreck one Confederate river monitor. Asking God to let him be that lucky twice was pushing the limits of what He was likely to grant.

Across the Mississippi lay Memphis. It might as well have lain across the Pacific, for all McSweeney could do to it. U.S. artillerymen still pounded the city; the cease-fire did not hold west of the Tennessee River. McSweeney was glad of that. Watching smoke rise from the foe’s heartland gave him a certain amount of satisfaction, but only a certain amount. He hadn’t caused any of that devastation himself, and acutely felt the lack.