Jorge fell back. He fired at enemy infantrymen. He had no idea if he hit anybody, but he made the damnyankees hit the dirt. Even slowing them down felt like a victory. Once, sprawled behind what was left of a stone fence, he saw Sergeant Blackledge on his belly not far away. Blackledge nodded to him. They were both still fighting, even if they were retreating. Jorge looked around for Gabe and didn’t see him. He hoped his buddy hadn’t stopped something for his country.

On that battlefield, an upright man was a prodigy. An upright man in dress uniform seemed like a hallucination. But the officer who came forward wore a chromed parade helmet with a general’s three stars in a wreath on the front in gold plate-or, for all Jorge knew, in solid gold. This spotless apparition also had a pearl-handled revolver in a holster on his left hip, and another one in his right hand.

However magnificent he looked, he sounded like Hugo Blackledge. “Come on, you stinking, cowardly scuts!” he roared. “Drive these Yankee bastards back! They’re not getting into Chattanooga, and that’s flat. It’s ours, and we’re damned well going to keep it. Come on! Do you want to live forever?”

Yes, Jorge thought. Oh, yes. But the general fired that revolver and ran forward.

“Get moving, you sorry bastards!” Sergeant Blackledge yelled. “Anything happens to General Patton, you fuckers’ll wish the Yankees blew your asses off! Move, God damn you!”

General Patton, fighting at the front line? General Patton, fighting like a private soldier? Like a crazy-brave private soldier? Jorge supposed it was possible. He’d heard weird things about Patton. A general who actually liked fighting for its own sake was a rare breed. Patton filled the bill.

Jorge did go forward to protect the crazy general. He believed Sergeant Blackledge. If anything happened to Patton, the unit that let it happen would catch hell. With the damnyankees throwing hell around in carload lots, that wouldn’t be hard to arrange.

“Incoming!” Gabriel Medwick shouted-he wasn’t hurt after all. Then he added, “Hit the dirt, General!” Jorge hit the dirt. He knew what that rising, hateful scream in the air was, whether George Patton did or not. My namesake, he realized. Patton would be one dead namesake if he didn’t get down.

He didn’t. The shell burst not far away. Smoke and dirt fountained up. Splinters knifed out in all directions. None of them touched Patton. Certain madmen were supposed to be able to walk through the worst danger without getting scratched. As far as Jorge was concerned, Patton qualified. You had to be loco to stay on your feet when you heard artillery coming in.

But if you did it, and if by some accident you lived through it, you could pull a lot of soldiers with you. Jorge and the men near him had started forward to try to keep General Patton from getting himself killed. When they saw he didn’t, they kept going forward to share his luck-and they drove the startled U.S. soldiers back before them. The men in green-gray hadn’t dreamt that the battered, pressured Confederates owned this kind of resilience. Jorge couldn’t blame them. He hadn’t dreamt any such thing himself.

And then the spell broke. Patton ran up to a soldier crouched behind a rock. “Come on, son!” he roared. “We’ve got Yankees to kill! Up and at ’em!”

The soldier didn’t move. Jorge was close enough to see he was gray and shaking. Shellshock, he thought, not without sympathy. Sometimes too many horrible things could happen to a man all at once, or a bunch of smaller things could accumulate over time. Then he’d be worthless for a while, or only good for light duty. If you let him take it easy, he usually snapped out of it after a while. If you tried to make him perform while he was at low ebb, chances were you wouldn’t have much luck.

Patton didn’t. His face darkened with anger. “Get up and fight, you shirking son of a bitch!” he bellowed.

“I’m sorry, sir,” the private said. “I’m doing the best I can, but-”

“No buts,” Patton growled. “I’ll boot your butt, that’s what!” And he did, with a jackboot almost as shiny as his helmet. “Now fight!”

Tears ran down the young soldier’s cheeks. His teeth chattered. “I’m sorry I’m not at my-”

He got no further. Patton slapped him in the face, forehand and then backhand. When that still didn’t get the kid moving, the general raised his fancy six-shooter.

“Hold it right there, General!” The shout came from Sergeant Blackledge. But his wasn’t the only automatic weapon pointed somewhere near Patton’s midriff. “Sir, you don’t shoot a man with combat fatigue. You do, you’ll have yourself a little accident.”

“You wouldn’t dare,” Patton said.

“Sir, you pull that trigger, it’d be a pleasure,” Blackledge replied. Jorge listened in astonished admiration. He’d known Blackledge wasn’t afraid of the enemy. Knowing he wasn’t afraid of his own brass, either…That took a rarer brand of courage.

Jorge waited for Patton to demand the sergeant’s name. He didn’t know whether the general would want to know to arrest Blackledge or to promote him on the spot. But Patton did neither. “All right, then. If you want to stick with a lousy, stinking coward, you can,” he ground out. “But you’ll see what it gets you.” As if there weren’t U.S. soldiers no more than a hundred yards away, he turned on his heel and stalked off. His gait put Jorge in mind of an affronted cat.

Blackledge called, “Freedom!” after the departing general. Patton’s back stiffened. He kept walking.

“Th-Th-Thank you,” the guy with combat fatigue got out.

“Don’t worry about it, buddy,” Sergeant Blackledge said. “That fancy-pants asshole comes up here for half an hour, so he reckons he’s hot shit. Let him stay in the line for weeks at a stretch like us and see how he likes it. Being brave is one thing. Staying brave when all kinds of shit comes down on you day after day, that’s a fuck of a lot tougher.”

“I-I’ll try and go forward,” the shellshocked soldier said.

Blackledge only laughed. “Don’t worry about it,” he repeated. “We ain’t doin’ any more advancing, not for a while.” He raised his voice: “Everybody dig in! Damnyankees are gonna hear we’re getting frisky in this sector, so they’ll hit us with everything but the kitchen sink.”

“You forget something, Sergeant,” Jorge said.

“Yeah? What’s that?” The sergeant bristled at the idea he could have overlooked anything.

“Any second now, our own side, they gonna start shelling us, too,” Jorge answered.

Sergeant Blackledge stared at him, then grudged a chuckle. “That’d be a good joke if only it was a joke, you know what I mean? Fucking Patton’s probably ciphering out how to get us all killed right this minute.”

“Shoulda scragged him when we had the chance,” Gabe Medwick said. Dirt flew from his entrenching tool as he scraped out a foxhole. Jorge was also doing his best to imitate a mole.

“Nah.” Reluctantly, Blackledge shook his head. “Somebody woulda blabbed, and we’d all be in deep shit then. Deeper shit, if there is shit deeper’n this. Besides, who says the next jerk with stars and a wreath’d be any better? Oh, chances are he wouldn’t grandstand so much, but he’d still do his best to get us killed. Generals get their reputations for getting guys like us killed. Some’re smart assholes and some’re dumb assholes, but they’re all assholes, pretty much.”

“Good thing the enemy, he’s got assholes for generals, too,” Jorge said.

Before Blackledge could answer, U.S. artillery started coming in. The sergeant called that one right on the button. Jorge hoped the Yankees didn’t have barrels to follow up the bombardment. If they did, he knew damn well the outfit would have to retreat. He didn’t think they could hold the line they’d been in before Patton brought them forward, either. If they’d had armor of their own, maybe, but one general in a chromed helmet didn’t make up for what was missing.