Nobody'd set up a kitchen anywhere close by. Jorge made do with a ration can. It was U.S.-issue deviled ham, the favorite canned meal on both sides of the front. Jorge hadn't swapped cigarettes to get his hands on this one. He'd taken three or four cans off a dead Yankee. Looking at those bodies out there made him shake his head as he ate. Maybe he'd been lucky not to get blown to kingdom come.

It wasn't as if the damnyankees wouldn't have other chances. Sooner or later-probably sooner-they would start pushing hard toward Savannah again. The only question was whether they'd do it right here or somewhere a little farther west. If they did it right here, Jorge knew he'd have to retreat or die. If they did it farther west, his choices would lie between retreating and getting cut off and trapped.

He didn't think the C.S. line could hold. As for counterattacks…Well, no. When a sergeant commanded a company, when a new corporal was leading a platoon, this army would have a devil of a time holding its ground. Pushing the enemy back seemed far beyond its power.

Too many damnyankee soldiers. Too many damnyankee barrels. Too many airplanes with the eagle and crossed swords. With Atlanta gone, with Richmond in trouble, with Birmingham getting pounded, how could the Confederacy reply?

No U.S. troops came close enough to try to plunder the booby-trapped corpses. That left Jorge more relieved than anything else. Advancing U.S. soldiers would have meant more hard fighting. He'd seen enough-more than enough, in fact-to last him a lifetime. He knew he hadn't seen the end of things here. Either he'd have to do more fighting or he'd have to fall back. Chances were, he'd have to do both. If he didn't have to do either one today, or maybe even tomorrow, so much the better.

Quiet lasted through the afternoon and into the evening. He smoked and ate and dozed and listened to the problems of a soldier in his platoon who had woman trouble back in North Carolina. Somebody'd sent Ray a letter that said his wife (or maybe fiancйe; Jorge wasn't quite sure) was fooling around on him with a mechanic who was back there because he'd already lost an arm in the fighting.

"Shoulda blown off his shortarm instead," Ray said savagely. "What I want to do is, I want to go on home and take care o' that my own self."

"Well, you can't," Jorge said. "They catch you deserting, they shoot you. Then they hang up your body to give other people the message."

"It'd be worth it. Then Thelma Lou'd know how much I love her," Ray said.

Jorge wondered why he'd got stuck listening to this crap. He himself hadn't had a fiancйe, let alone a wife, back in Baroyeca. The few times he'd lain down with a woman, he'd had to put money on the dresser first. But he was the platoon leader. That must have made him seem to Ray like someone who knew what he was doing. He wished he seemed that way in his own eyes.

He knew enough to be sure Ray was talking like a fool. Anybody who wasn't in love with Thelma Lou would have known that. "She just laugh when you get in trouble," Jorge said. "Then she go on fooling around with this asshole."

"Not if I kill him, she don't." Ray was as stubborn as he was stupid, which took some doing.

"Then she fool around with somebody else," Jorge said. "A gal who cheats on you once, she cheats on you lots of times. You don't get her back like she never screwed around at all." Ray's jaw dropped. Plainly, that had never crossed his mind. Dumb as rocks, Jorge thought sadly. He went on, "Or maybe this letter you got, maybe it's bullshit. Whoever sent it to you, there ain't no return address, right?"

"I dunno," Ray said, which covered more ground than he realized. "You might could be right, but I dunno. Kinda sounds like somethin' Thelma Lou'd go and do."

So why do you give a damn about her? Jorge didn't scream it, however much he wanted to. He could tell it would do no good. "You can't go nowhere," he said. "You don't want to let your buddies down, right?" Ray shook his head. He wasn't a bad soldier. Jorge pressed on: "You can't get leave, and there's lots of military police and Freedom Party men between here and your home town. So stay. All this stuff, if it really is anything, it'll sort itself out when the war's done. Why worry till then?"

"I guess." Ray didn't sound convinced, but he didn't sound like someone on the ragged edge of deserting, either.

Sergeant Blackledge swore when Jorge warned him of the trouble. "This ain't the first time he's had trouble with that cunt," he said. "But you were dead right-if he does try and run off, he ain't gonna get far, and he'll land in more shit than Congress puts out."

Half an hour after that, a captain and a second lieutenant and six or eight enlisted men showed up: a new company CO, a platoon commander, and some real live (for the moment, anyhow) reinforcements. Would wonders never cease? The captain, whose name was Richmond Sellars, walked with a limp and wore a Purple Heart ribbon with two tiny oak-leaf clusters pinned to it.

"I told 'em I was ready to get back to duty," he said, "so they sent my ass here." He pointed to the lieutenant, who had to be at least forty and looked to have come up through the ranks. "This is Grover Burch. Who's in charge now?"

"I am, sir. Sergeant Hugo Blackledge." Blackledge likely wasn't happy to see company command go glimmering. Jorge wasn't thrilled about losing his platoon. The good news was that he wouldn't have to listen to complaints like Ray's so much. They'd be Burch's worry, and Sergeant Blackledge's, too.

"Well, Blackledge, why don't you fill me in?" Sellars said. He'd seen enough to know he'd be smart to walk soft for a while.

The sergeant did, quickly and competently. He said a couple of nice things about Jorge, which surprised and pleased the new corporal. Then Blackledge pointed northwest. "Not really up to us what happens next, sir," he said. "The damnyankees'll do whatever the hell they do, and we've got to try and stop 'em. I just hope to God we can."

F orward to Richmond! That had been the U.S. battle cry in the War of Secession. It would have been the battle cry during the Great War, except the Confederates struck north before the USA could even try to push south. And in this fight…

In this fight, the CSA had held the USA in northern Virginia. The Confederate States had held, yes, but they weren't holding any more. Abner Dowling noted each new U.S. advance with growing amazement and growing delight. After U.S. soldiers broke out of the nasty second-growth country called the Wilderness, the enemy just didn't have the men and machines to stop them. The Confederates could slow them down, but the U.S. troops pushed forward day after day.

A command car took Dowling and his adjutant past burnt-out C.S. barrels. Even in this chilly winter weather, the stink of death filled the air. "I didn't believe I'd ever say it," Dowling remarked, "but I think we've got 'em on the run here."

"Yes, sir. Same here." Major Angelo Toricelli nodded. "They just can't hold us any more. They'll have a devil of a time keeping us out of Richmond."

"I hope we don't just barge into the place," Dowling said.

He glanced over at the driver. He didn't want to say much more than that, not with a man he didn't know well listening. His lack of faith in Daniel MacArthur was almost limitless. He'd served with MacArthur since the Great War, and admired his courage without admiring his common sense or strategic sense. He doubted whether MacArthur had any strategic sense, as a matter of fact.

"I've heard we're trying to work out how to get over the James," Major Toricelli said.

"I've heard the same thing," Dowling replied. "Hearing is only hearing, though. Seeing is believing."

A rifle shot rang out, not nearly far enough away. The driver sped up. Toricelli swung the command car's heavy machine gun toward the sound of the gunshot. He didn't know what was going on. He couldn't know who'd fired, either. The shot sounded to Dowling as if it had come from a C.S. automatic rifle, but about every fourth soldier in green-gray carried one of those nowadays-and the other three wanted one.