That done, Bartlett soaped himself at a footbath. The soap was strong and stinking. He rubbed it into his scalp, his half-grown beard, and the hair around his private parts anyhow, in the hope that it would get rid of the nits he was surely carrying. Then, along with the rest of the men in his section – and, he saw with amusement, with Major Colleton-he leaped with a splash into a great tub, almost a vat, of steaming-hot water.

Everyone was splashing and ducking everyone else. The major joined in the horseplay with no thought for his rank. He came up spluttering by Reggie after someone else pulled him under. Saluting, Reggie said, "It's a rare honor to share an officer's lice, sir."

"Don't know what's so damned rare about it," the battalion commander retorted. "You've been doing it in the trenches for the past year." And he ducked Reggie, holding him under till he thought he was going to drown.

The disinfector baked the soldiers' uniforms for fifteen or twenty minutes. When they were done, more colored attendants issued fresh underwear.

"Feels good -not itching, I mean," Reggie said, buttoning up his tunic. The laundrymen had ironed and brushed it, so he looked as smart as he was going to.

"Enjoy it while it lasts," Jasper Jenkins said.

They went with the rest of the unit to stake places in the tents assigned to them, and then had the rest of the afternoon to themselves. Before they even found the tents, they spotted a crowd of men listening to a tall, thin man in a black sack suit and a straw hat. Reggie's eyes widened. "That's the president!" he exclaimed.

"I'll be a son of a bitch if you're not right," Jenkins said. "Shall we find out what the devil he's got to say for himself?"

"Might as well," Reggie answered. "I was there in Capitol Square in Richmond when he declared war. Might as well find out how he likes it now that he's seen a year's worth." They hurried over and joined the crowd.

Woodrow Wilson was speaking earnestly, but without the changes in tone and volume and the dramatic gestures that were likeliest to win his audience over. He sounded more like a professor than the leader of a nation at war: "We must continue. We must dedicate our lives and fortunes, everything that we are and everything that we have, with the pride of those who know that the day has come when the Confederate States are privileged to spend their blood and their might for the principles that gave them birth and happiness and the peace they have treasured.

"The challenge, in fact, is to all mankind. The choice we make for ourselves must be made with a moderation of counsel and a temperament of judgment befitting our character and our motives as a nation. We must put excited feeling away. Our motive will not be revenge or the assertion of the physical might of the nation, but only the vindication of right, of which we are but a single champion in concert with our allies."

"That's pretty fancy," Reggie murmured to Jasper Jenkins.

"Too goddamn fancy for me," Jenkins whispered back. "What I want to do is, I want to smash those damnyankee bastards. If he'd tell me how we're going to do that, I'd be a sight happier."

"We must stay the course," Wilson said, though a few soldiers drifted away as others came to listen. "We must not swerve suddenly in the middle of the great conflict upon which we have embarked. Giving ourselves over to foolish radicalism at a time like this would only spell disaster for our nation and for all we hold dear."

A light dawned on Reggie. He'd wondered why Wilson had come to the base camp when speaking before soldiers was so obviously unnatural, even uncomfortable, to him. "Presidential election's less than three months off," he said. "He wants to make sure we don't go and elect the Radical Liberal."

"He don't have a hell of a lot to worry about," Jenkins said. "We've never sent one of those crazy bastards to Richmond yet, and I don't reckon we will this time, neither."

"Politicians take all sorts of crazy chances -don't suppose we'd be in this damn war if they didn't," Bartlett said. "But they sure as hell don't take chances about what happens to their party. Wilson can't run again himself, so he wants to make damn sure the vice president, whatever the devil his name is, gets the job."

"Sims? Sands? Something like that," Jenkins said. "Whoever the hell he is, I'm gonna vote for him."

"Me, too, I think," Reggie said, "but I've got better things to do than listen to speeches that tell me to do what I'm already going to do."

"Yeah," Jenkins agreed, and they both walked off. Signboards here and there in the base camp listed attractions. "Let's go watch a boxing match," Reggie suggested.

"White men or colored?" somebody asked.

Bartlett ran his finger down the list of matches to see who was fighting whom. "Our division's colored champion is taking on a fellow from the Confederate Marines who's touring base camps," he said. "That's gonna be the best fight today, no doubt about it."

Nobody argued with him. The crowd around the squared circle was al ready large by the time he got there. He and Jasper Jenkins so effectively used their elbows to get closer to the ring that they almost started a couple of fights of their own.

They cheered Commodus, the division champion, and lustily booed the Negro from the Confederate Marines, whose name was Lysis. "Which," shouted the soldier doing duty as announcer, "means Destruction." More boos.

Reggie bet another soldier two dollars that Commodus would win. He had to pay up depressingly soon: Lysis knocked Commodus cold in the third round. Attendants had to flip water into the fallen champion's face before he could get up and groggily stagger out of the ring.

"That's one tough nigger," Bartlett said as Lysis swaggered around with arms upraised in victory. He gave the fellow he'd bet a two-dollar bill. Then a strange thought struck him: "I wonder how he'd do against a white man his size."

"Bet he wonders, too," the fellow who'd won his money answered. "If he's a smart nigger, he won't let anybody know it, though. Wouldn't be much point if he did -nobody'd let a fight like that happen any which way."

"You're right, I expect," Reggie said. "Niggers start thinking they can fight white men, we got more trouble than we need. And seeing as how we've already got more trouble than we need -"

At that moment, as if on cue in a stage play, one leg started to itch in an all too familiar way. He scratched and swore and scratched again. The Floden disinfector was like an artillery barrage -it made the lice put their heads down, but it didn't get rid of all of them. Some nits always survived and hatched out after you'd had your clothes on for a while. He sighed and scratched still more. No matter what you did, you couldn't win.

Anne Colleton wrote a check, computed the balance remaining in the account, and made a nasty face. Everything cost more these days -niggers' wages, their food, the manure to keep the cotton fields fertile, the kerosene for the lamps in the nigger cottages-everything. She'd got more money than usual for the latest crop she'd brought in, but the rise in prices hadn't stopped since then. If anything, it had got steeper.

A discreet tap at the door to her office made her look up. There stood Scipio, starched, immaculate, stolid. In his deep, rumbling voice, he said, "Ma'am, as you ordered, I have brought the Negro Cassius here for your judgment at his recent abscondment."

She nodded. Disciplining the field hands was a job she undertook from a sense of duty and necessity, not because she enjoyed it. Disciplining a top flight hand like Cassius was especially delicate. Being too lenient with him would provoke worse indiscipline from the field force. Being too harsh, though, would make another three or four or half a dozen Negroes up and leave the fields for factory work in Columbia or down in Charleston.