"Ich will nicht nur zu-" Morrell snarled in exasperation and switched from German to English: "I don't want to hold them. I want to drive them back, to hurt them." He pointed northeast.

"If their artillery is alert, they'll slaughter us, sir," Hall said.

"I don't think they will be," Morrell answered. They'd better not be. "They've got this bombardment laid on to cover an attack. Who'd be cuckoo enough to move forward when they're putting pressure on us?" He didn't give the company commander any chance to argue. He also didn't give himself any chance to think twice. "Let's go!" He scrambled to his feet and ran for the Canadian lines, Springfield in his hands.

His men followed, whooping like Red Indians. He'd gained them a couple of major advances toward Banff by all-out audacity; they were willing to believe he could buy them one more. For close to thirty seconds, the Canucks left behind in their trenches were too intent on their comrades' push to pay much attention to what the Americans were doing off to the west. That was about fifteen seconds too long. Before a machine gun started mowing down the oncoming men in green-gray, they were within grenade range of its position. It fell silent. More grenades flew into the Canadian trenches. The Americans followed.

As Morrell leaped over the parapet, a Canadian aimed at him from point-blank range. He braced himself for another wound. Christ, not that leg again, he thought. I don't want to be on crutches or in a wheelchair for the rest of my life. Blow my brains out and get it over with.

The Canuck fired. The bullet went wild, for the fellow in khaki had taken a wound of his own in the instant that he pulled the trigger. Morrell finished him with the bayonet, then looked over his shoulder to find Major Dietl there with a pistol in his hand. "Danke schon," he said.

"Bitte," the Austrian answered, with such Hapsburg formality that Morrell expected him to click his heels. He didn't. He leaped down into the trench instead. Cleaning it of Canadians was the ugly business it always seemed to be. Dietl held his own. At one point, though, he observed, "These foes of yours are in greater earnest than the Russians and have discipline of a sort the Serbs have never imagined."

"The Canadians are good soldiers," Morrell agreed. "The Confederates, too, come to that."

Having driven the Canucks back, his men turned their fire on the Canadian detachment that had gone ahead. Caught between two forces, some of the Canadians went down, some threw down their rifles and threw up their hands in surrender, and some, the hard cases, dug in among the pines and firs and spruces to make the Americans pay a high price for them.

Morrell paid the price, having made the cold-blooded judgment that he could afford it. When the fighting had died away to occasional rifle shots, the Americans were still holding the trenches from which the Canadian attacking party had jumped off. "Very nicely done," Captain Guderian said. "You used the enemy's aggressiveness against him most astutely."

"Coming from an officer of the Imperial General Staff, that's quite a compliment," Morrell said.

"You have earned it, Major. It will be reflected in my report."

"And mine," Dietl agreed. Morrell grinned, more pleased with the day's work itself than with the praise it had garnered, but not despising that, either. I wonder if favorable action reports from German and Austro-Hungarian observers cancel out the Utah fiasco, he thought, and looked forward to finding out.

Reggie Bartlett examined the trench line just outside of Duncan, Sequoyah, with something less than awe and enthusiasm. "Lord," he said feelingly, "don't they teach people around here anything about digging in?"

"You listen good, Bartlett," said Sergeant Pete Hairston, his new squad leader. "Just on account of they gave you a pretty stripe on your sleeve for bustin'out o'the damnyankees'prisoner camp, that don't mean you know everything there is to know. Where were you fighting before the Yankees nabbed you?"

"I was on the Roanoke front," Bartlett answered.

Hairston's lantern-jawed face, the face of a man who'd acquired three stripes on his own sleeve more by dint of toughness than any other military virtue, changed expression. More cautiously, he asked, "How long you put in there?"

"From a few weeks after the war started till the Yanks got me last fall," Bartlett said with no small pride. Anybody who'd spent almost a year and a half fighting between the Blue Ridge Mountains and the Alleghenies could hold his head high among soldiers the world over.

Hairston knew that, too. "Shitfire," he muttered, "all the fighting in Sequoyah's nothin' but a football game in the park, you put it next to the clangin' and bangin' back there." He hadn't bothered asking about Reggie's previous experience till now. After a moment's thought, he went on, "But I reckon that's why this here ain't like you expected it would be. We ain't got the niggers to dig all the fancy trenches like I hear tell they got back there, and even if we did, we ain't got the soldiers to put in 'em."

"I see that," Bartlett said. "I surely do."

It horrified him, too, though he saw no point in coming out and saying so. The sergeant was right-there weren't enough trenches, not by his standards. A lot of what they called trenches here were only waist-deep, too, so you might not get shot while you crawled from one foxhole to another. Then again, of course, you might. There wasn't that much barbed wire out in front of the lines to keep the U.S. troops away, either. And, as Hairston had said, there weren't that many Confederate soldiers holding the position, such as it was.

The sergeant might have picked that thought out of Reggie's mind. "Ain't that many damnyankees up here, neither," he said. "They put four or five divisions into a big push, reckon they'd be in Dallas week after next." He laughed to show that was a joke, or at least part of a joke. "'Course, they ain't got four or five spare divisions layin' around with dust on 'em, any more'n we do. An'if they did, they'd use 'em in Kentucky or Virginia or Maryland, just like we would. This here's the ass end o' nowhere for them, same as it is for us."

"Not quite the ass end of nowhere," Reggie said, liking the sound of the phrase. "I saw those oil wells when I came up through Duncan."

"Yeah, they count for somethin', or the brass reckons they do, anyways," Hairston admitted. "You ask me, though, you could touch a match to this whole goddamn state of Sequoyah, blow it higher'n hell, an' I wouldn't miss it one goddamn bit."

On brief acquaintance with Sequoyah, Bartlett was inclined to agree with the profane sergeant. To a Virginian, these endless hot burning plains were a pretty fair approximation of hell, or at least of a greased griddle just before the flapjack batter came down. Somewhere high up in the sky, an aeroplane buzzed. Reggie's head whipped round in alarm. For the briefest moment, half of him believed he wouldn't see any man-made contraption, but the hand of God holding a pitcher of batter the size of Richmond.

Hairston said, "We'll take you out on patrol tonight, start gettin' you used to the way things are around here. It ain't like Virginia, I'll tell you that. Ain't nothin' like Georgia, neither."

His voice softened. Reggie hadn't been sure it could. He asked, "That where you're from?"

"Yeah, I'm off a little farm outside of Albany. Hell." The sergeant's face clouded over. "Probably nothin' left of that no more anyways. By what I hear tell, them niggers tore that part o' the state all to hell and gone when they rose up. Bastards. You think about things, it ain't so bad, not havin' that many of 'em around."

"Maybe not." Reggie had been in the Yankee camp all through the Red Negro uprising. The U.S. officers had played it up, and the new-caught men had gone on and on about it, but it didn't feel real to him. It was, he supposed, like the difference between reading about being in love and being in love yourself.