Dowling went outside. The sentries in front of the house he’d commandeered came to an attention so stiff, he could hear their backs creak. “As you were,” he told them, and they relaxed-a little. Relax too much in hostile territory and you’d relax yourself right into the grave. “Anything seem strange?” he asked them.

They looked at one another. At last, with unspoken common consensus, they shook their heads. “No, sir,” they chorused.

“All right. Good, in fact,” Dowling said. Enlisted men had a feel for such things that all the fancy reports from Intelligence often couldn’t match. They listened to what the locals said, and to what they didn’t. If they’d been in enemy territory for even a little while, they got good at adding two and two-and sometimes even at multiplying fractions.

Guns boomed off to the south and east. Corps headquarters was supposed to be out of artillery range of the front. So were divisional headquarters. Dowling had noticed, though, that the most effective divisions were the ones whose COs ignored that rule. The closer to actual fighting an officer got, the better the feel for it he came to have. Dowling did his best to apply that rule to himself as well as to the officers who served under him.

The guns boomed again, and then again. Dowling cocked his head to one side, studying the sound. After due consideration, he nodded. That was just the usual exchange between a couple of U.S. batteries and their Confederate counterparts. It was liable to smash up a few unlucky men on each side, but it wouldn’t change the way things turned out if it went on for the next million years. It was just part of the small change of war.

Somewhere overhead, airplanes droned by. Dowling wasn’t the only one who listened to the sound of their engines with a certain concentrated attention, or who glanced around to see where the nearest trench was in case he had to dash for cover. Not this time. One of the sentries delivered the verdict: “Ours.”

“Yeah.” Another man nodded. “Sounds like they’re going to drop some shit on Featherston’s head in Richmond.”

“Good,” Dowling said.

The sentries nodded again. “We nail him, we win big,” one of them said, and then, meditatively, “Asshole.”

“Chrissake, Jimmy,” hissed the soldier who’d spoken first. “You don’t say that in front of a general.”

Jimmy looked abashed-or rather, worried that he might get in trouble. “Don’t get yourself in an uproar about it, son,” Dowling said. “I guarantee you I have seen and worked with and worked for more people of the asshole persuasion than you can shake a stick at.”

“Like who, sir?” Jimmy asked eagerly.

Abner Dowling could have named names. The question was, could he stop once he got started? He was tempted to let all the resentment out at once, in a great torrent that would leave the sentries’ eyes bugging out of their heads. He wouldn’t get in trouble for that; a man with a silver star on each shoulder strap was allowed his little eccentricities. That was what they called them for generals, even if a lot of them would have landed lesser mortals in the stockade. But it took a hell of a lot to make the powers that be decide to jug a general.

So it wasn’t fear of consequences that kept Dowling’s mouth shut. It was more the fear of seeming like a four-year-old-a fat four-year-old with a white mustache-in the middle of a temper tantrum. Dowling remembered too many times when he’d had to calm General Custer down after one of his snits. What was distasteful in another man might also be distasteful in him.

He wagged a coy finger at Jimmy and the other soldiers. “That would be telling.” The men looked disappointed, but not too-he didn’t suppose they’d really expected him to spill the beans. He took out a pack of cigarettes and stuck one in his mouth. Then he held out the pack to the sentries. They accepted with quick grins and words of thanks. The Raleighs-spoil from a dead Confederate-bore Sir Walter’s face above an enormous, and enormously fancy, ruff.

“Damn, but these are good,” Jimmy said after his first drag. “Stuff we call tobacco nowadays tastes like an old cowflop.”

“A real old cowflop,” one of the other sentries added. “One that’s been out in the sun for a while and got all dried out.”

Dowling thought of burnt weeds and lawn trimmings when he smoked U.S.-made cigarettes. He blew out a cloud of smoke, then said, “You boys want to make me give up the habit.”

The sentries laughed. Jimmy said, “Don’t do that, sir. Only thing worse than lousy tobacco is no tobacco at all. Besides, when you’re smoking you can’t smell the goddamn war so much.”

You can’t smell the goddamn war so much. Dowling wouldn’t have put it that way, which didn’t mean the kid was wrong. Even here in Washington, well back of the line, you noted whiffs of that smell. Dowling didn’t know what all went into it. Among the pieces, though, were unburied corpses, unwashed men, and uncovered latrine trenches. Cordite and smoke were two other constants. The smell had a sharper note in this war, for exhaust fumes had largely ousted the barnyard aroma of horses.

And there was one other stink that never went away. It blew out of the War Department. With luck, it blew out of the War Department on the other side, too. And it usually did, for most wars went on for a long, long time. No, there was no escaping the all-invasive, all-pervasive reek of stupidity.

Hipolito Rodriguez had worn butternut in the Great War. The Confederate Conscription Bureau had pulled him off his farm in the state of Sonora, given him a uniform and a rifle and rather more English than he’d had before, and sent him out to fight. And fight he had, first in Georgia against the black rebels in one of the Socialist Republics they’d proclaimed there and then in west Texas against the damnyankees.

He had a son in butternut in this war, and two more bound to be conscripted before long. And he was back in uniform himself. He’d signed up as a member of the Confederate Veterans’ Brigades: men who weren’t fit for front-line service anymore but who could still help their country and free fitter men for the fight.

Now he found himself in Texas again, riding a bus across a prairie that seemed to stretch forever. He wore uniform again-of similar cut to the one he’d had before, but of gray rather than butternut cloth. The rest of the new camp guards wore identical clothes. Only two or three of them besides Rodriguez were from Sonora or Chihuahua. The rest came from all over the CSA.

Being in Texas was a mixed blessing for a man of Mexican blood. White Texans often weren’t shy about calling their fellow Confederate citizens greasers and dagos, sometimes with unprintable epithets in front of the names. But at least Confederates of Mexican blood were citizens.

In an odd way, Rodriguez thanked heaven for the Negroes who would fill the camp where he was to become a guard. If not for them, Mexicans would have been at the bottom of the hill, and everything would have flowed down onto them. As things were, most of the trouble went past them and came down on the mallates’ heads. That suited him fine.

The bus stopped once, in a dusty little town whose name-if it had a name-Rodriguez didn’t notice. The place had a Main Street with a filling station, a saloon that doubled as a diner, and a general store that doubled as a post office. It was even smaller than Baroyeca, the Sonoran town outside of which Rodriguez had a farm. It looked to be even poorer, too. Since Sonora and Chihuahua were and always had been the two poorest states in the CSA, that said frightening things about this place on the road to nowhere.

Along with everybody else, Rodriguez lined up to use the toilet at the filling station. It was dark and nasty and smelly. The proprietor stared at the camp guards as if they’d fallen from another world.