“Best guess is, to attack our salient on the other side of the Rapidan.”

“The Wilderness.” Morrell made a discontented-almost a disgusted-noise. “I’ve been down there. I’ve looked it over. You couldn’t come up with worse country for barrels if you tried for a year. What on earth possessed General MacArthur to get a foothold there?”

Dowling considered before answering, “Well, General, you’ll have to understand that he and I are not on the most intimate terms.” By the pained expression he bore, that was an understatement. “My guess is only a guess, then. I suppose that’s where we have the foothold because it’s the only place we could get one.”

“I see,” Morrell said-two words that covered a lot of Deeply Regrets telegrams from the War Department. After a meditative pause of his own, he added, “Do you suppose that salient does us more good than it does the Confederates?”

“I hope so,” Dowling answered, which wasn’t quite what Morrell had asked. “If we can ever get out of that nasty second growth, the terrain gets better. But the Confederates know that as well as we do, and they don’t want to turn us loose.”

“How many casualties are we taking down there?” Morrell asked. “They can hit us from three sides at once.”

“It’s… bothersome,” Dowling admitted, which meant it was probably a lot worse than that. “What we need to do is get barrels over onto the other side of the Rapidan in country where we can really use them. I’m glad you’re here-if anyone can arrange that, you’re the man.”

“Thanks,” Morrell said. “I’m just glad I’m anywhere right now.” As if to underscore that, his shoulder twinged again. “I’ve been thinking about that particular problem myself, and I’ve got a few ideas.”

“You’ll want to talk with a map in front of you,” Dowling said, proving he’d done a good deal of planning in his time, too. He waved back toward the frame house. “Shall we?”

“In a minute,” Morrell said. “Let me scrounge another one of those nice cigarettes off you, if you don’t mind.”

“Not a bit.” Dowling stuck another one in his mouth, too. “Really taste like tobacco, don’t they? Not like…” He paused, searching for a simile.

Morrell supplied one: “Horseshit.”

Dowling laughed. “Well, now that you mention it, yes.” He lit it; his cheeks hollowed as he inhaled. “Damn things are supposed to be hell on the wind. You couldn’t prove it by me-I never had any wind to begin with.” He patted his belly as if it were an old friend-and so, no doubt, it was.

“I don’t think they’ve hurt mine much,” Morrell said. Unlike Dowling, he was usually in good, hard shape, though his stay in the hospital had set him back. He took another drag.

Planes buzzed by overhead. Morrell automatically looked around for the closest trench, and spotted one less than ten feet away. He could jump into it in a hurry if they dove on him. But they kept going: they were U.S. fighters heading south to strafe the Confederates and shoot up C.S. dive bombers and whatever else they could find.

“Good luck, boys,” he called to the pilots once he was sure they wouldn’t come after him.

“Amen,” Abner Dowling agreed, adding, “We could use the Lord on our side. Considering what Featherston’s people are up to, He’d better be.”

“Well, yes,” Morrell said, “but you know what they say about the Lord helping people who help themselves. We’d better do some of that, too, or we’re in real trouble.” He almost wished Dowling would have told him he was wrong, but Dowling didn’t.

Second Lieutenant Thayer Monroe wasn’t even a bulge in his pappy’s pants when the Great War ended. He was just out of West Point, and so new an officer, he squeaked. He really did squeak; he had a thin tenor voice that often didn’t seem to have finished breaking. He went tomato-red whenever something he was saying came out especially shrill.

First Sergeant Chester Martin hadn’t expected anything different, so he wasn’t disappointed. The recruiters back in California had as much as told him this was what he’d be doing. Veteran noncoms held pipsqueak officers’ hands till the pipsqueaks either figured out what they were doing or got wounded or killed. In the first case, the blooded officers commonly won promotion. In the second, they left the platoon for less pleasant reasons. Either way, the platoon got a new, green CO, and the first sergeant’s job started all over again.

At the moment, Lieutenant Monroe’s platoon sprawled on the ground under some oaks not far outside of Falmouth, Virginia. On the other side of the Rappahannock, the Confederates held Fredericksburg. Scuttlebutt said General MacArthur’s next try at dislodging the enemy from his defenses in front of Richmond would go through the C.S. forces here.

“What do you think, Sarge?” asked Charlie Baumgartner, a corporal who led one of the squads in the platoon. “They gonna send us over the river?”

“Beats me,” Martin answered. “I hope to God they don’t. I don’t like getting shot at any better than the next guy.”

“Yeah, well, that’s on account of you’ve got your head screwed on tight,” Baumgartner said. He was more than twenty years younger than Chester, but he’d been in the Army for a while. “Some people…” He didn’t go on.

He didn’t need to, either. Lieutenant Monroe was telling anybody who’d listen what a howling waste they were going to make out of Fredericksburg and its Confederate defenders. Since he outranked everyone close by, people had to listen. Whether they believed him was liable to be a different story.

“Our bombardment will stun them. It will paralyze them,” Monroe burbled. “They’ll never know what hit them. We’ll get over the river without the least little bit of trouble.”

Baumgartner’s grunt was redolent of skepticism. So was Chester Martin’s. He’d seen lots of bombardments, which Thayer Monroe plainly hadn’t. Not even the fiercest one knocked an enemy out altogether. As soon as the bombing and the shelling let up, the survivors ran for their machine guns and popped up out of their holes with rifles in their hands.

The noncoms in the platoon all plainly knew as much. But rank had its privileges: no one told Monroe to shut up. Chester thought about it. He would have been more diplomatic than that if he’d decided to do it. In the end, he kept quiet with the rest. The young lieutenant was heartening new men who hadn’t been through the mill yet. That counted for something.

But when Thayer Monroe said, “We ought to be in Richmond a week after we break through at Fredericksburg,” Chester cleared his throat. For a wonder, the lieutenant noticed. “You said something, Sergeant?”

“Well, no, sir. Not exactly, sir.” Chester knew he had to be polite to the snotnose with the gold bar on each shoulder strap. He wasn’t convinced Monroe deserved such courtesy, but the military insisted on it. “Only, sir, it might be better if you don’t make promises we can’t keep.”

Monroe stared at him. Failure had plainly never crossed the shavetail’s mind. He said, “Sergeant, once we cross the river, we will go forward.” He might have been propounding a law of nature.

He might have been, but he wasn’t. Chester knew it too well. “Yes, sir,” he said, meaning, No, sir.

Maybe Monroe wasn’t altogether an idiot. He heard what Martin wasn’t saying. Stiffly, he said, “When the order comes, Sergeant, we will go forward.”

“Oh, yes, sir,” Martin agreed-he couldn’t quarrel with that, not without ending up in big trouble himself. But he did want to persuade the lieutenant not to take on faith everything his superiors told him. “Sir, when you were at West Point, did you study the battles on the Roanoke front?”

“Sure.” Monroe chuckled. “All twelve or fourteen of them, or however many there were.”

To him, those fights were just things he’d studied in school. He could laugh about them. Chester couldn’t. His memories were too dark. “Sir, I was there for the first six or eight-till I got wounded. I was lucky. It was just a hometowner. But before every attack, they told us this would be the one that did the trick. Do you wonder that after a while we had trouble jumping up and down when they told us to go over the top?”