Clutching his injured hand, Dowling reflected that he was obviously worth less than a fly to his commander. Well, that wasn't anything he hadn't already known. Later, he found out one of the bombs had fallen in the midst of a knot of soldiers, killing five of them (as well as an unfortunate local Negro who was cooking for them) and maiming another three.

But that was later. At the moment, he said, "We do have an urgent request for reinforcements on the southeastern part of our line. Wouldn't it be prudent to-"

"No, and quit pestering me about it!" Custer shouted. His pouchy, sagging features turned quite red. "We didn't start to fight this war to stand on the defensive, Major, God damn it to hell. We came to do to the Rebs what they did to us fifty years ago: to knock 'em down, and to kick 'em in the balls when they are down. We attack!"

"Yes, sir," Dowling said miserably.

Flora Hamburger stepped out onto the fire escape to get away. She wasn't trying to escape the heat trapped inside the flat she shared with her parents, an older sister, a younger sister, and two younger brothers. Escaping the heat was what you did in summer, and here with October heading toward November you were likelier to throw on a sweater or a coat, although she hadn't bothered doing that.

She wasn't going out to escape the noise, either. Her father and mother seldom spoke to each other or to their children at anything less than a shout, and her brothers and sisters weren't the quietest people God ever made. Flora wasn't one of those people, either, and she knew it.

But going out onto the iron floor of the fire escape didn't make the noise disappear. What her family lost in volume, the rest of New York gained. It was getting dark outside, but boys still played and screeched in the street below. "I got you, you lousy Reb!" one of them yelled in Yiddish in a high, piercing voice. "You're dead, so fall over!"

"You missed me by a mile!" another boy called back, this one in English, even more shrilly. "Nyah-nyah-nyah! Couldn't hit a barn." The first boy imitated a machine gun, which set Flora's teeth on edge. However many imaginary bullets he spat, though, he couldn't kill one real child. In the real war, unfortunately, it didn't work like that.

Every day, the front page of the New York Times screamed of battles won and battles lost. Every day, bordered in black, ran long lists of names: men and boys who would never come home because of those battles won and lost. More than anything else, the black-bordered casualty lists were what had driven Flora outside, away from her family.

If the rest of New York cared, it didn't let on. Along with the children playing, babies howled from every second flat. Flora's parents weren't the only ones shouting. Folk of their generation yelled in Yiddish or Russian or Polish or Magyar or Romanian. Folk of Flora's generation answered back, when they answered back, in all those languages, and sometimes in English, too. Sometimes getting an answer in English made parents yell even more, because it seemed to mean their children were slipping away from them, becoming American. And, sure enough, their children were.

When Flora didn't come back into the flat after a few minutes, her older sister, Sophie, stepped out onto the fire escape with her. Sophie was calm and steady and accepting, all the things Flora wasn't. Instead of being a Socialist Party agitator, she sat in front of a sewing machine twelve hours a day six days a week, turning linen and cotton into shirtwaists and, lately, into uniform tunics.

"Come back," she urged now. "You're making Mama upset, you do this so often now. It's not normal."

"I'm upset," Flora said. "Does anyone care about that? Thousands of people are getting blown to bits every day. Does anyone care about that}" She pointed down to the street and across it, to another crowded brownstone just like the one in which she and her family lived. "It doesn't look like it to me."

"People don't want our soldiers to get killed in the war. Nobody wants that," Sophie said reasonably. "But we can't do anything about it. Life has to go on, the way it's supposed to."

"This isn't the way it's supposed to, and it won't be the way it's supposed to until we find a way to make the fighting stop," Flora insisted. "And all the capitalists are making money from the fighting, so it can go on forever as far as they're concerned. If anyone goes against it, it will have to be the members of the working class-like you, for instance." She stared defiantly at Sophie.

Sophie sighed. She was-not surprisingly, given the hours she worked- exhausted when she came home, and every bit of that weariness showed in her voice. "Flora, I don't need you to agitate for me here," she said. Had she been more like her sister, she would have grown furious. "I hear plenty from the Socialist recruiters every day at the shop."

"You hear, but you don't listen," Flora exclaimed.

"However you like," Sophie answered. "But I'll tell you this much: the agitation sounds a lot more foolish than it would if the Socialists hadn't voted for the war credits. It takes a lot of chutzpah" -she had been speaking English, but let the Yiddish word find a place-"to say yes to something out of one side of your mouth and no from the other."

Flora bit her lip. "You're right about that, and I wish we hadn't. But I think all the congressmen thought this would be a sharp, short war. Doesn't look that way any more, does it?" She stamped her foot, as much to listen to and to feel the clatter of the cast iron as for any other reason. "And once we've voted yes once, how can we vote no after that without looking like- without being-even worse hypocrites?"

Before Sophie could reply, her mother stuck her head out onto the fire escape and said, "Yossel is here to see you."

"Oh, good," Sophie said, and, smiling, went back inside.

Sarah Hamburger glanced over to her middle daughter. "Flora, you'll say hello to your sister's fiance, I hope?"

"All right," Flora said resignedly. She did not dislike Yossel Reisen, even if he was a reactionary-or maybe just an anachronism. Here in New York in the twentieth century, as progressive an era and as progressive a city as had existed in the history of the world, he could find nothing better to do with his life than to study Torah and Talmud. He might make a rabbi one day, but even if he did, Sophie would likelier end up supporting him than the other way round. But Sophie was happy, so Flora, for the sake of family peace, kept her opinions there to herself.

When she stepped back into the flat, Sophie and Yossel were sitting side by side on the divan couch against the far wall of the front room. Yossel, a tall, pale, thin fellow whose rusty beard obscured half the high collar on his shirt, was saying, "I have some news I should tell you." He spoke Yiddish with a hissing Litvak accent; every sh sound turned into an s.

"What is it?" Sophie asked, a beat ahead of her younger sister, Esther, and her brothers, David and Isaac. Her mother and father didn't blurt out the question, but they plainly wanted to know, too.

Yossel took a deep breath. His fingers plucked at the green tufted plush upholstery of the divan. He knew such furniture well; he must have slept on a dozen lounges and couches and davenports, boarding now with this family, now with that one, while he pursued his studies. He never had much money to pay anyone, which was why he moved frequently.

He needed a second deep breath before he could come out with his news: "I have volunteered for the Army of the United States. I am going into the service in one week's time."

"Why did you do that?" Sophie exclaimed, her placid face suddenly full of harsh lines of pain. "Why, Yossel, why? When they didn't call you up as soon as the war started, I thought-" She didn't go on. What she meant to say was probably something like, I thought we could be married and go on with our lives as if the world weren't coming to pieces around us. But the world was always there, no matter how much you tried to pretend it wasn't if you didn't look at things from an economic perspective.