"A little one?" Cincinnatus stared. All at once, he understood why his mother had come. He hurried forward to embrace Elizabeth. "That's wonderful!" And it was wonderful, even if the timing could have been better. But now he wished he hadn't spent that nickel.

The troop train rattled through Lynchburg and west toward the Blue Ridge Mountains. "If I'd known they were going to pack us into these cars like canned sardines," Reginald Bartlett said, feeling not just canned but cooked in his uniform and heavy kit, "I never would have volunteered."

"Ahh, quit whinin'," said Robert E. McCorkle. Since McCorkle was a corporal, his opinion carried considerable weight. So did he; his uniform could have held a couple of men of ordinary girth. He went on, "You don't like it, write your congressman."

"I can't," Bartlett said. "Can't raise my arms to write."

That put a smile on McCorkle's face; even noncommissioned officers responded to Bartlett 's charm, a sure proof of its effectiveness. The corporal said, "Well, you ain't as bad as some here, and that's the Gospel truth. Some o' these birds, they even grouse in their sleep."

"Birds? Grouse?" Reggie Bartlett laughed, but McCorkle failed to join him: he didn't notice he'd made a joke. What were you supposed to do with such people? Burying them struck Bartlett as a good idea, but only for a moment. A lot of young men were getting buried, off in the direction they were going.

McCorkle said, "Ahh, what the hell, anyway? You turn out a bunch of soldiers who can't even complain when they feel like it, they might as well come from the United States."

"Or Germany," somebody said from behind the corporal.

"Yeah, or Germany," McCorkle allowed. "But it's different with the Huns. If it's got buttons on its coat, they salute it. The soldiers in the United States, once upon a time they was Americans, same as you an' me. Not any more. It's all the damn foreign riffraff they let in, you ask me."

Ahead, the bulk of the Blue Ridge notched the skyline. The sun was going down in fire above the mountains. The troop train rolled over an iron bridge spanning the Otter River. Less than half an hour later, it went through Bedford Court House; in the twilight, Bartlett saw street lamps going up into the hills at whose feet the town lay.

Night fell. The troop train kept on traveling. Its pace slowed as it climbed. Some of the peaks of the Blue Ridge rose well over four thousand feet: not so much out West in the United States or the CSA, but more than respectable hereabouts. The tracks went through the passes, not over the peaks, of course, but still rose considerably in a short stretch of time.

Reginald Bartlett made himself as comfortable as he could. Considering all the gear with which he was festooned, that wasn't very comfortable, but at least he had a seat on a hard second-class bench. The aisles were full of men who'd been standing since they left Richmond and who were trying to squat or lie down so they could try to get a little sleep.

That didn't come easy, for them or for him. His pack dug into his spine. If he let his head flop backwards, it went over the back of the seat, and made him feel his neck was breaking. If he leaned forward, he hit himself in the forehead with the rifle he held between his knees. The men on either side of him kept poking him with their elbows, and neither of them, by all the evidence, had ever heard of soap and water-or maybe Bartlett was just smelling himself.

"This whole business of war is a lot more entertaining to read about than to be a part of," he complained. "All the writers who go on about the Revolution and the Secession and the Second Mexican War leave out the parts that have no glory in them."

"And when they do talk about glory, they're talking about the fellows who lived," Corporal McCorkle added. "The poor bastards who died, yeah, they wave good-bye to them, you might say, but that's all."

Bartlett didn't want to think about that, and wished he'd kept his mouth shut. The Confederacy was mowing down damnyankees the way a steam-powered threshing machine mowed down wheat at harvest time. All the papers said so, and so did every military briefing Bartlett had heard since he'd showed up at the recruiting office. But the papers also printed hideously long casualty lists every day, and the maps showed that most of the fighting was on Confederate soil. Things weren't so easy as he'd thought they would be when he joined up.

Just when he finally managed to doze off, the troop transport started down the grade on the western slope of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Couplings bumped and jolted-the weight of the train had shifted from the back end to the front. Bartlett jerked bolt upright. His start woke the soldier next to him, who cursed foully. He'd heard more blasphemy and obscenity in a few weeks of soldiering than he had in all his civilian life-but he remembered that from a few years before, when his birth class had been conscripted.

Iron wheels screamed on iron rails as the train slowed to a stop. "This here must be Vinton," McCorkle said. "This is where we get out."

Bartlett peered through the window. He couldn't see anything. If they were at a station, it was news to him. The doors at either end of the railroad car opened, though, and his companions stumbled out into the night. When his turn came, he went, too.

"This way! This way! This way!" Captain Dudley Wilcox shouted, waving around an electric torch so his men could see which way this way was. Bartlett was glad to be reminded the company commander existed; he'd neither seen nor heard him since the troop train pulled out of Richmond.

Captain Wilcox led them down a path full of pungent horse manure to a field where campfires were already burning. "We'll bivouac here tonight," he declared. "Bedrolls only-no tents. Get what rest you can-tomorrow we go into action."

As Bartlett spread his blanket on the ground and wrapped himself in it, a mutter of distant thunder came from the west. He looked up into the sky. The stars of early autumn twinkled down on him. The trees would be changing color, though he couldn't see that in the darkness. The thunder came again- only it wasn't thunder, it was artillery. Somewhere over there, gunners were launching shells into the dark-and when those shells came down, they probably killed people. That didn't strike Bartlett as glorious. He was too tired to care. He fell asleep almost at once.

Corporal McCorkle woke him with a boot in the seat of the pants. It was still dark. He sat up, stiff from lying on the ground and feeling he needed another two or three or six hours of sleep to turn himself into a properly functioning human being. He rolled up the blanket and put it away. No more sleep today.

"Listen here, you birds!" Captain Wilcox sounded indecently alert and indecently cheerful for whatever the hour was. "The damnyankees want to take Big Lick away from us, take away the mines, take away the railroad junction. There's so damn many of 'em, they've made it over the Alleghenies and they're coming down toward the city. That's why we're here-to keep 'em from taking it. The company-the regiment-the division-we all go across the Roanoke at ten this morning and we drive the Yankees back into the mountains. Sooner or later, we drive 'em out of Virginia. Any questions? I know you'll fight hard. We'll get us some breakfast and then we'll get us some damnyankees."

Negro cooks passed out cornmeal muffins and bacon. Bartlett wolfed his down. He filled the screw-on cup that doubled as a canteen lid with chicory-laced coffee. It made him feel more nearly alive.

He was gulping a second cup when the artillery barrage opened up. The noise was brutal, appalling, overwhelming. He loved every second of it. "More of that racket there is," he shouted to anyone who would listen, "more damnyankees the Devil's dragging down to hell, the fewer of 'em there are left up here to shoot at me."