“This won’t bring your soldier back,” another hostage said.

“That’s true,” Chester said. “But maybe it’ll make somebody else with a squirrel gun and not a hell of a lot of sense think twice. And even if it doesn’t, it pays you people back.”

“An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth,” Captain Rhodes agreed. “Except we’re taking a whole mouthful of teeth.”

Confederate artillery came in that evening. Maybe someone managed to slip out of Woodbury and let the enemy soldiers know what was going on. But the shells mostly fell short-the front kept moving south. Chester wasn’t sorry not to be right up on the firing line for a while. He slept in his foxhole with his Springfield beside him. If anybody tried to give him trouble, he aimed to give it first.

But he slept till sunup, and woke with nothing worse than a stiff back. He didn’t remember being so tight and sore the last time around. Of course, that was more than half a lifetime ago now. He’d been a young man then. He scratched his belly, which was larger these days. No, he wasn’t a young man any more.

“Anybody come forward?” he asked, opening a ration can.

“Get serious, Sarge,” answered one of the soldiers who was already eating. “Those fuckers are brave enough to shoot somebody who isn’t looking, but they won’t put their own necks on the line when it counts.”

“That one geezer who tried to volunteer had balls,” Chester said.

“Sure. But the point is, he didn’t really do anything,” the soldier replied. “The fellow who did sneak around, he’s still sneaking.”

“He must be pretty sneaky, too,” Martin said. “If the people with kin who got taken hostage knew who he was, you have to figure somebody’d rat on him to save a husband or a son or a brother.”

The soldier only shrugged. “Hasn’t happened-that’s all I can tell you.”

“Well, they’ve got…what, another couple of hours?” Chester said. The soldier nodded. Chester shrugged. “We’ll see what happens then, that’s all.”

What happened then was what he’d expected: U.S. soldiers paraded the hostages out to the town square. Some soldiers had set a post in the ground in front of the courthouse. Captain Rhodes ordered the townsfolk of Woodbury out to watch the executions. “This is what you get when civilians try to fight in a war,” he said. “You’d better remember it.” He gestured to Chester Martin. “Will you do the honors?”

“Yes, sir. Don was in my platoon.” Chester waited till the soldiers had tied the first hostage to the pole. Then he gestured to the men in the firing squad. “Ready!” They brought up their Springfields. “Aim!” The riflemen drew a bead on the white paper pinned over the hostage’s heart. “Fire!”

A dozen rifles barked as one. The hostage slumped against his bonds. Blood poured from his wounds. He writhed, but not for long. In the crowd, a couple of women screamed. Another one fainted. So did a man.

U.S. soldiers cut the dead hostage down and marched another one, a young one, over to take his place. The youth’s shout of, “Freedom!” cut off abruptly when the men from the firing squad pulled their triggers. More screams rang from the crowd. A girl about his age tried to charge the soldiers. Not too roughly, they kept her from hurting them or herself, then shoved her back to her relatives. The locals held on to her to make sure she didn’t try again.

Most of the hostages died as well as men could. Four or five wept and begged. It did them no good. Chester called, “Ready!…Aim!…Fire!” over and over again. Finally, the men in green-gray cut down the last bloody body.

“Bury your dead,” Captain Rhodes told the townsfolk. “And remember, chances are whoever made us do this is still right here with the rest of you. Some of you may even have a pretty good notion who he is. But he kept quiet, and you kept quiet, and this is what you get. You leave us alone, we won’t harm you. If you break the laws of war, you’ll pay. You have paid.”

The courthouse square stank of cordite and blood and shit. It stank of fear, too; Chester had smelled that smell too many times to have any doubts about what it was. For once, he didn’t smell his own fear.

He made sure he patted each man from the firing squad on the back. “You did good,” he told them. “That wasn’t easy, doing what you guys did. I’m proud of you.”

“Those fuckers had it coming,” said one of the men in green-gray. Several other soldiers nodded.

But another man said, “You’re right, Sarge-it wasn’t easy. They were just…people. They didn’t hurt anybody. I did this once, but I don’t think I ever want to do it again.”

“All right, Lewis. You won’t, then,” Martin promised. “Go off and smoke a cigarette. If you’ve got any booze, take a knock. I’ll look the other way. You earned it.”

“I don’t, Sarge,” Lewis said mournfully.

“Don’t worry about it, Frankie,” another soldier said. “I got a pretty good idea where you can get your hands on some.”

Chester turned his back so they wouldn’t see him smile. They were kids doing a man’s job. What about me? he wondered. I’m no kid any more. He was trying to do a man’s job, too, and it wasn’t any easier for him than it was for them.

Arifle on his shoulder, Jonathan Moss trudged along through the muggy hell that was summertime in Georgia. He turned to Nick Cantarella and remarked, “Up at 25,000 feet, where I’m supposed to be fighting, it’s cold enough for me to need fur and leather. Even up above this, it’s still that cold.”

“Yeah, well, that’s how the ball crumbles,” the infantry officer answered. “That’s the way the cookie bounces.”

Spartacus looked from one escaped U.S. POW to the other. “You damnyankee ofays, you fuckin’ crazy, you know dat?” the guerrilla leader said.

“Thanks,” Moss said, which wasn’t likely to convince Spartacus he was wrong. Cantarella chuckled. A couple of the blacks who were close enough to listen to the byplay tapped index fingers against their temples or spun them by their ears to show whom they agreed with.

The guerrillas held the countryside. It did them less good than Moss wished it would. With so many big farms growing one big crop-cotton or peanuts or tobacco-and with so many Negroes taken off the countryside after agriculture was forcibly mechanized, the rebels had a devil of a time feeding themselves. Some of their raids on towns came from no better reason than the need to steal enough food to keep from starving.

Towns were going hungry, too. Trains had cars that mounted machine guns and cannon. Trucks traveled in convoys with machine-gun-toting command cars. Guerrilla bands shot at them and planted explosives under roads and along railroad tracks anyway. Spartacus’ machine-gun-carrying pickup had done some nasty work driving alongside roads and shooting up trucks that stuck to them.

“What are we going to do next?” Moss asked Spartacus. Back in the USA, he wouldn’t have imagined ever taking orders from a black man. But Spartacus unquestionably led this band. A word from him to his followers and both Moss and Cantarella would die the next instant.

But all he said was, “Don’ know fo’ sho’. Wish to Jesus I did. Best thing I kin think of is to keep on movin’ east. Foraging do seem better over dat way.” He had a Tredegar slung over one shoulder-and a ham slung over the other.

“Not so many Mexicans over that way, neither,” Nick Cantarella said. Moss could follow Cantarella when he spoke. He could follow Spartacus when he spoke, too. Trying to follow one of them on the heels of the other sometimes made him feel he was shifting mental gears too fast for comfort.

“Not yet,” Spartacus said. “Dey hear we’s operatin’ in them parts, though, dey git over there pretty damn quick.”

“Maybe,” Moss said. “But maybe not, too. They aren’t what you’d call eager to mix it up with us.”

“Not their fight,” Cantarella said. “I was them, I wouldn’t want anything to do with a bunch of crazy-ass smokes.”