Every time an officer Lieutenant-Colonel Jerry Dover didn’t know came to the supply dump, his stomach started knotting up. He kept wondering if someone from Intelligence would take him off and do horrible things to him because of Melanie Leigh. Every time it didn’t happen, Dover relaxed…a little.

He saw plenty of unfamiliar officers, too, enough to keep his stomach sour, enough to keep him gulping bicarbonate of soda. Lots of that came to the front; given what soldiers ate, they needed it.

Some of the new officers he dealt with came from outfits just arrived in northwestern Georgia to try to stem the Yankee tide. Others were men in new slots, the officers they replaced now being wounded or dead.

One day, a brigadier general showed up and asked, “You fought in the line in the last war, didn’t you?”

“Yes, sir,” Dover answered. “I was only a noncom then, though.”

“I was a first lieutenant myself,” said the officer with the wreathed stars. “We’ve both got more mileage on us than we used to. I have a regimental command slot open-Colonel McCandless just stopped some shrapnel with his face, and he’ll be on the shelf for weeks. If you want it, it’s yours.”

“Sir, I’ll take it if you order me to,” Dover answered. “But I don’t think I’d be better than ordinary in that slot. As a supply officer, I’m pretty goddamn good. If somebody ordinary replaces me here, that might hurt the war effort worse than if you have some different ordinary officer take charge of your regiment.”

The brigadier general studied him. Wondering if I’m yellow, Dover thought. The officer’s eyes found the ribbon for the Purple Heart above Dover’s left breast pocket. “How’d you get that?” he asked.

“A scratch on my arm. Not worth talking about,” Dover answered.

Maybe the general would have decided he was a liar and a blowhard if he came up with some fancy story of a wound suffered in heroic circumstances. His offhand dismissal seemed to satisfy the man. “Stay where you are, then, Dover,” the brigadier general said. “You’re doing well here-I know that, and it’s one of the reasons I thought about you for a combat post. But you have a point: this work is important to the war effort, too, and it needs to be done right. I’ll find somebody else for the regiment.”

After the general left, Dover lit a cigarette. He had to stir the butts in the glass ashtray on his cheap desk to make room for it. One of the sergeants who helped keep the depot going stuck his head into the tent and asked, “What was that all about, sir?” Like any sergeant worth his stripes, he assumed he had the right to know.

Dover saw no reason not to tell him. “About what you’d figure, Pete-he thought about moving me up to the front, but he decided I can do more here.”

“Christ, I hope so!” Pete said. “You’re really good at this shit. I don’t even want to think about how much trouble I’d have breaking in some new asshole, and some of those clowns just never do get what’s going on.”

“Nice to know I’m a comfortable old asshole,” Dover said, and Pete laughed. Dover tossed the sergeant the pack of Raleighs.

“Thanks,” Pete said. “Even smokes are getting hard to come by, the way the damnyankees keep tearing things up between here and Atlanta. That never happened the last time around, did it?”

“I don’t think so,” Dover answered. “I don’t remember running short, anyway.” He looked north and west. His personal worries weren’t the only ones he had. “You think we can stop the Yankees if they try to break out again?”

“Reckon we’d better,” Pete said dryly. “They start heading for Atlanta, we better start trying to see how much they’ll let us keep if we quit.”

That was about how Dover saw it, too. “Careful how you talk,” he told Pete, not for the first time. “Lots of people flabbling about defeatism these days.”

“Yeah, well, nobody’d be defeatist if we weren’t getting fucking defeated,” the sergeant said, which was nothing but the truth. “I’d almost like to see Atlanta fall, to tell you the truth, just so I could laugh while some of the Quartermaster Corps fat cats there got it in the neck. Those cocksuckers have done more to lose us the war than any three Yankee generals you can think of.”

“You expect me to argue? You’re preaching to the choir,” Dover said. “Now they use the bad roads and the torn-up train tracks for excuses not to send us what we need.”

“Did I hear right that you told one of the shitheads down there you were gonna send Jake Featherston a wire about how lousy they were?” Pete asked.

“I said it, yeah,” Dover admitted. “Don’t know that I’d do it. Don’t know that it would do any good if I did.”

“You ought to, by God. They’ve been getting fat and living soft off Army goods since the war started,” Pete said. “If Featherston can’t rein ’em in, nobody on God’s green earth can, I reckon.”

Maybe nobody could. Jerry Dover was inclined to believe that, which was another reason he hadn’t sent the telegram. Before he could say so, air-raid sirens started howling. Somebody clanged on a shell casing with a hammer, too, which was the emergency substitute for the sirens.

“Head for shelter!” Dover said. He heard U.S. airplane engines overhead even before he got out of the tent. The dugout into which he and Pete scrambled was as fancy as any he’d known in the Great War. It had all the comforts of home-if your home happened to be getting bombed.

“Maybe they aren’t after us,” Pete said.

“Here’s hoping,” Dover agreed. Northwestern Georgia had plenty of targets. Then explosions started shaking the ground much too close. The supply dump was one of those targets.

Something on the ground blew up-a roar different from the ones bombs made. Jerry Dover swore. He hoped the secondary explosion didn’t take too much with it. He was as careful with ordnance as he knew how to be. He didn’t store much of it in any one place, and he did build earth revetments around each lot. That minimized damage, but couldn’t stop it.

Another secondary explosion proved as much, as if proof were needed. Dover swore some more. A couple of other soldiers in the bombproof laughed, as much from nerves as for any other reason. A lucky hit and the bombproof might not be; it might turn into a tomb.

“Sometimes the bastards get lucky, that’s all,” Pete said.

“I don’t want them to get lucky, goddammit,” Dover said. “What if they’re starting the big push now? The guys at the front will need everything we can send ’em.”

“And if the damnyankees break through, we’ll be the guys at the front,” Pete said.

That made Dover wish he hadn’t already used up so much good profanity. Then, instead of cussing, he started to laugh himself, which made Pete send him a fishy stare. He still thought it was funny. Here he’d gone and turned down a combat command, but he was liable to get one whether he wanted it or not.

A big explosion sent dirt trickling down between the planks on the shelter’s roof. “I hope to God that was one of their bombers crashing,” Pete said.

“Me, too,” Dover said. “Why don’t they go away and bother somebody else?” He knew why perfectly well. That didn’t keep him from wishing anyway.

The bombers stayed overhead for more than two hours. That had to mean several waves of them were pounding Confederate positions. Now that the United States had airstrips down in southern Tennessee, they were only a short hop away. And they were making the most of it, too.

After no bombs had fallen for fifteen minutes or so, Dover said, “Well, let’s see what’s left upstairs.” He hoped something would be. He also hoped he wouldn’t come out when a new wave of enemy bombers appeared overhead. That’d be just my luck, wouldn’t it? he thought sourly.

The passage out from the bombproof’s outer door had a dogleg to keep blast from getting in. It also had several shovels stashed near that outer door, in case the men inside needed to dig their way out. But Jerry Dover could see daylight when he got the door open.