Even hung over, guile Mantarakis had. "That was a good leave, wasn't it, Gordon?" he said.

Addressed directly, McSweeney felt obliged to answer, which meant he stopped singing: the point to the exercise in guile. "Indeed, a good leave," he said seriously-he was always serious, except when he was furious. "I prayed harder, I think, than I ever have before."

"Dice weren't going your way, eh?" Mantarakis knew that was a mistake, but couldn't resist. The idea of praying in a town like Dixon , Kentucky, after it had become a U.S. Army leave center tickled his sense of the absurd.

"I do not gamble," McSweeney said indignantly. "I do not poison my body and my spirit with spirituous liquors, and I do not consort with loose, vile, immoral women."

Sergeant Peterquist was marching along a couple of men over on McSweeney's other side. Grinning, he said, "Sort of takes a lot of the point out of going on leave, doesn't it?"

"I will not be mocked," McSweeney said, about as close as he dared come to telling his sergeant to go to hell. He was bigger than Peterquist, and meaner, too, but Mantarakis would have bet on the non-com if they ever tangled. Peterquist was a sneaky bastard. He would have made a pretty fair Greek, Paul thought, meaning it as a compliment.

Ignoring McSweeney, the sergeant asked Mantarakis, "You go to a house with white girls or colored?"

"Colored," Mantarakis answered. "It was cheaper. And you go to any place like that, white or colored, you ain't lookin' for anything special, just to get the lead out of your pencil. Had a little more money to drink with."

McSweeney started singing his hymn again, louder than ever, so he wouldn't have to listen to his comrades' lewd conversation. Peterquist looked at Mantarakis. They both grinned ruefully. Maybe neither of them made a good Greek -they should have been able to figure out what the effect of talking about going to a whorehouse would have on the pious McSweeney. But when you were coming out of Dixon, what was on your mind (unless you were pious) was all the different ways you'd had a good time.

The countryside looked as if hell had been there, but had gone away on vacation. Like every inch of Kentucky in U.S. hands, it had been fought over, but that had been the fall and winter before. New grass was beginning to spring up, hiding the worst scars of the fighting.

Even the town of Beulah, Kentucky, eight or nine miles north of the front, didn't look too bad. It had also been in U.S. hands, and out of Confederate artillery range, most of that time, though the Rebel offensive coming up out of the south meant long-range guns bore on it again. Still, it seemed resigned to the prospect of flying the Stars and Stripes for the first time in a couple of generations, and a good many buildings damaged when it was captured had been repaired since.

South of Beulah, though, you were back in the war, no two ways about it. Mantarakis trudged past wagon parks city blocks on a side, and horse corrals alongside them full of animals chewing on hay and oats. Every so often, his regiment had to get off the dirt road onto the verge to let a convoy of trucks rumble past, carrying supplies up to the line, or to make way for an ambulance, red cross prominently displayed on a white background, transporting wounded men back toward Beulah.

There were munitions dumps scattered here and there across the landscape, too, shells standing on the ground as if they were the dragon's teeth

Cadmus had sown to raise a crop of soldiers. But they didn't raise men; they razed them. When the pun occurred to Mantarakis, he tried to explain it to the men marching with him, and got only blank looks for his trouble.

The Rebel offensive had been halted just south of Dawson Springs. There, hell hadn't gone on vacation. The Confederates might not have managed to take the town, but they'd shelled it into ruin. So many of the buildings were either burnt or wrecked, so many craters pocked the ground, it was hard to tell where exactly the roads had run before Dawson Springs made war's acquaintance.

Just past Dawson Springs, Mantarakis heard a buzzing in the air. His head swivelled rapidly till he spotted the aeroplane coming north. It skimmed along low to the ground, paralleling the road down which he was marching. For a moment, that made him think it was an American aeroplane returning from the front. Then he spied the Confederate battle flags painted on the fabric under each wing.

The pilot must have seen the regiment before Paul noticed him. He brought the aeroplane down even lower, right down to treetop height. That gave the observer a perfect chance to rake the column of U.S. soldiers with his machine gun.

Men screamed and fell and ran every which way. A few, cooler-headed than the rest, stood in place and fired back at the Rebel aeroplane with their Springfields. Mantarakis admired their sangfroid without trying to imitate it. He was utterly unashamed to dive into a muddy ditch by the side of the road. Bullets kicked up dirt not far away.

Ignoring the rifle fire, the aeroplane wheeled through a turn and came back south down the other side of the road, raking the regiment all over again. Then, pilot and observer no doubt laughing to each other about shooting fish in a barrel, it streaked away for home, going flat out now.

Mantarakis got out of the ditch. He was filthy and wet, as if he'd been in the trenches for a month instead of away from them. Muddy water dripped from the brim of his cap, his nose, his chin, his elbows, his belt buckle.

Gordon McSweeney stood like a rock in the middle of the roadway, still firing after the Confederate aeroplane although, by now, his chances of hitting it were slim indeed. Officers and non-coms shouted and blew whistles, trying to get the regiment back into marching order.

A familiar voice was missing. There lay Sergeant Peterquist, not moving. Blood soaked the damp, hard-packed dirt of the roadway. A bullet had torn through his neck and almost torn off his head. "Kyrie eleison," Mantarakis murmured, and made the sign of the cross.

"Popery -damned popery," McSweeney said above him.

"Oh, shut up, Gordon," Mantarakis said, as if to a pushy five-year-old.

The really funny thing was that the Orthodox Church reckoned the pope every bit as much a heretic as any Scotch Presbyterian did.

"You'll do his soul no good with your mummeries," McSweeney insisted.

Paul paid no attention to him. If Peterquist was dead, somebody would have to do his job. Mantarakis looked around for Corporal Stankiewicz, and didn't see him. Maybe he'd been wounded and dragged off, maybe he was still hiding, maybe… Maybe none of that mattered. What did matter was that he wasn't here.

Even if he wasn't, the job, again, needed doing. Mantarakis shouted for his section to form up around him, and then, as an afterthought, to get the dead and wounded off to the side of the road. A lot of people were shouting, but not many of the shouts were as purposeful as his. Because he sounded like someone who knew what he was doing, men listened to him.

Lieutenant Hinshaw had his whole scattered platoon to reassemble. By the time he got around to the section Sergeant Peterquist had led, it was ready to get moving again, which was more than a lot of the column could say.

"Good work," Hinshaw said, looking over the assembled men and the casualties moved out of the line of march (Stankiewicz was among them: shot in the arm on the Rebel aeroplane's second pass). Then he noticed the absence of non-coms. "Who pulled you people together like this?"

Nobody said anything for half a minute or so. Mantarakis shuffled his feet and looked down at the bloodstained dirt; he didn't want to get a name for blowing his own horn. Then Gordon McSweeney said, "It was the little Greek, sir."