Ben Carlton came up alongside him. Carlton wore new sergeant’s chevrons on his sleeve. He was a sergeant for the same reason McSweeney was a captain: the regiment had gone through the meat grinder taking Craighead Forest, and not nearly enough new officers and noncoms were coming up to replace the dead and wounded. Very few veterans were still privates these days.

“Pretty damn soon, the Rebs’ll pack it in here, too, I expect,” Carlton said.

“Every blasphemy that passes your lips means a hotter dose of hellfire in the world to come,” McSweeney answered.

“I’ve seen enough hellfire right here on earth,” Carlton said. “The kind the preachers go on about don’t worry me as much as it used to.”

“Oh, but it must!” McSweeney was shocked out of anger into earnestness. “If you do not repent of your sinful ways, the things you have seen here will be as nothing beside the torments you will suffer there. And those torments shall not pass away, but endure for all eternity.”

Instead of giving a direct answer, Carlton asked, “What are you going to do when the war’s finally done?”

McSweeney hadn’t thought about that, not since the day the United States had joined their allies in the fight against the Confederate States and the rest of the Quadruple Entente. He didn’t like thinking about it now. “I work on my old man’s farm,” he answered reluctantly. “Maybe I’ll go back-don’t know much else. Or maybe I’ll try and stay in the Army. That might be pretty good.”

“Well, I’ll tell you, sir, you can have my place when they turn me loose,” Carlton said. “I’ve done enough fighting to last me all my days. Don’t rightly know what I’ll do afterwards-I was sort of odd-jobbing around before I got conscripted-but I’ll come up with something, I figure.”

“Not cook,” McSweeney said. “Anything but cook. When you’re good, you’re not very good, and when you’re bad, even the rats won’t touch it.”

“Love you, too…sir,” Carlton said with a sour stare. He looked thoughtful; he might have been a lousy cook, but he knew all the angles. McSweeney cared nothing for angles. He always went straight ahead. After a few seconds’ contemplation, Carlton went on, “You want to stay in the Army, I figure they’ll let you do it. You’ve picked up so many medals, you’d fall forward on your kisser if you tried to pin the whole bunch on at once. If the Army tried to cut you loose and you didn’t want to go, you could raise a big stink in the papers.”

Raising a stink in the papers had never crossed Gordon McSweeney’s mind. He’d seen a newspaper but seldom before he had to do his service; when he read, he read the Good Book. So now it was with genuine curiosity that he asked, “Do you think it might help?”

“Hell, yes,” Carlton answered, ignoring McSweeney’s fearsome frown. “Can’t you see the headlines? ‘Hero Forced from Uniform!’-in big black letters, no less. Think the Army wants that kind of headline? Like hell they do. They want everybody proud of ’em, especially now that we’ve finally gone and licked the Rebs.”

It sounded logical. It sounded persuasive. McSweeney knew little of logic. What he knew of persuasion he actively distrusted: it struck him as a tool of Satan. With a sigh, he said, “The Army won’t be the same after the war is over.”

“That’s right,” Carlton said. “Most of the time, you’d sleep in a barracks. You’d get your meals regular, from a better cook than me. Nobody would be trying to shoot you or gas you or blow you up.”

McSweeney never worried about what the enemy was trying to do to him. His only concern was how he could kick the other fellow in the teeth. How to put that into words? “After the war,” he said slowly, “how can anything I do seem better than lukewarm?”

“You’re stationed in a nice, cozy barracks, you can go into town and find yourself a pretty girl.” Carlton had an answer for everything.

Most of the time, though, it was the wrong answer by Gordon McSweeney’s reckoning. “Lewdness and fornication lead to the pangs of hell no less surely than blasphemy,” he said, his voice stiff with disapproval.

Carlton rolled his eyes. “All right, Captain,” he said, using the rank in a way that reminded McSweeney he’d known him when he had none, “go into town, find yourself a pretty girl, and marry her, then, if that’s how you feel about it.”

It is better to marry than to burn. So Paul had said in First Corinthians. To hear the same advice from Ben Carlton was jolting; few people struck McSweeney as being less like Paul than did the longtime and stubbornly inept company cook. “Do I tell you how to arrange your life, Carlton?” he demanded.

“Only when you open your mouth,” Ben answered. “Sir.”

McSweeney gave him a dirty look. “You are godless,” he said. “You have made my life a trial since the moment we began serving together. Why God has not called you to Him to judge you for your many sins, I cannot imagine. By failing to call you, He proves Himself a God of mercy.”

“Reckon you’re right about that, Captain McSweeney, sir,” Carlton said, but the gleam in his eyes warned that he did not expect to be taken altogether seriously. “Maybe He figures that, with you riding herd on me, He doesn’t have to do any nagging of His own.”

“Get out of my sight,” McSweeney snarled. Then he held up a hand. “No. Wait. Get down.” Carlton was already throwing himself flat. No more slowly than McSweeney, he heard the screech of cloven air and, intermixed with it, the roar of a river monitor’s big gun.

The roar of the shell was like the end of the world. Face down in the black, sweet-smelling mud-McSweeney could tell by his nose how rich the soil was-he felt the world shake as the round thudded home. Splinters hissed and squealed past overhead. Dirt pattered down on him and Carlton both. The Rebs hadn’t missed them by much. The crash of the shell left his ears stunned, battered.

Dimly, as if from far away, he heard Carlton shouting, “I hate those goddamn fucking monitors-unless they’re ours!”

Foul language aside, McSweeney agreed with all his heart. That was why he had sent one of them to its no doubt less than heavenly reward. The U.S. Army still had not brought up guns that could match the monitors’ firepower. As a sergeant, he would have guessed about why that was, and only his strong belief would have kept his guesses from being profane. As an officer, he heard official explanations in place of guesses. The only trouble was, the explanations changed from day to day.

Once, he’d been solemnly told that all the really large-caliber cannon were in service east of the Mississippi. A few days later, he heard that the roads down from Missouri were too bad to let the Army move super-heavy cannon down as far as Memphis. The roads were bad. He knew that. Whether they were that bad, or whether the other half of the explanation was true, he did not know. He did know the U.S. artillery that had made it down opposite Memphis could not match what the Rebels’ river monitors carried.

Another shell came whistling down out of the sky. This one struck even closer than had the first. The force of the explosion sent him tumbling along the ground. He felt something wet on his upper lip. When he raised a hand, he discovered his nose was bleeding. If he’d been breathing in rather than out, he might have had his lungs torn to shreds inside his chest, and died without a mark on his body except blood from his nose. He’d seen that happen. After almost three years, he’d seen everything happen.

Ben Carlton was screaming. Because his ears had taken a beating, McSweeney needed longer to realize that than he would have otherwise. He crawled toward Carlton, then stopped and grimaced and shook his head. A shell fragment had gutted the company cook like a trout. His innards spilled into the mud. It put McSweeney in mind of the last time he’d butchered a calf.

“Oh, Mother!” Carlton wailed. “Oh, Jesus! Oh, Jesus fucking Christ!”