“I hope we’ve got better at what we’re doing since then.” By the way Thayer Monroe said it, it was a forgone conclusion that the Army had.

“So do I.” By the way Chester Martin said it, it was anything but.

The bombardment started on schedule, regardless of Martin’s opinion. It didn’t go on for days, the way it would have during the Great War. The men in charge of the guns had learned something. Long bombardments did more to tell the enemy where the attack was going in than they did to smash him flat. Make him keep his head down, then strike hard-that was the prevailing wisdom these days.

Martin would have liked it better if they hadn’t had to throw bridges across the Rappahannock before they could cross. He and the rest of the platoon-the rest of the regiment-waited by the river for the engineers to do their job. Martin liked and admired military engineers. They were good at their specialized trade, and when they had to they made pretty fair combat soldiers, too.

They did their damnedest on the Rappahannock, but they never had a chance. Even though U.S. artillery kept pounding Fredericksburg, Confederate machine guns and mortars started pounding the engineers right back. Guns up in the hills behind the town, guns that had stayed quiet so the U.S. cannon wouldn’t spot them and knock them out ahead of time, added their weight of metal to the countershelling.

And they added more than metal. The U.S. engineers had to try to do strenuous work in gas masks. U.S. guns had thrown poison gas at Fredericksburg along with everything else, and the C.S. artillery replied in kind. Martin was wearing his mask well before the order went out to put them on. He’d seen mustard gas the last time around. He hadn’t seen what they called nerve agents-those were new. But he didn’t want to make their acquaintance the hard way.

Confederate Mules-U.S. soldiers more often called them Asskickers-swooped down on the bridges. These days, the gull-winged dive bombers weren’t the symbol of terror they had been when the war was new. They were slow and ungainly; U.S. fighters hacked them out of the sky with ease when they ventured into airspace where the CSA didn’t have superiority. But they still had a role to play. They screamed down, put bombs on three bridges, and zoomed away at just above treetop level.

“I hate those bastards, but they’ve got balls.” Because of Corporal Baumgartner’s mask, his voice sounded distant and otherworldly.

“You want to know what I think, I think we have to be nuts to try to cross here at all,” Martin said. Baumgartner didn’t argue with him. He wished the other noncom would have.

U.S. raiders in rubber boats tried crossing the Rappahannock to quiet the mortar crews and machine gunners and riflemen on the other side. Despite smoke screens and heavy U.S. fire, a lot of the boats got sunk before they made it to the south bank of the river. The raiders who managed to cross no doubt did their best, but Chester couldn’t see that Confederate fire diminished even a little.

About every half hour, Lieutenant Monroe would say, “We’ll get the order to cross any minute now, men,” or, “It won’t be long!” or, “Be ready!” Knowing how stubborn the high brass could be, Chester feared the platoon leader was right, but kept hoping he was wrong.

The order never came. Towards evening, the units that had been pushed forward drew back out of enemy artillery range. Martin wondered how many casualties they’d taken, and how many they’d inflicted on the Confederates. He would have bet the first number was a lot bigger than the second one.

“Don’t worry, men,” Thayer Monroe said, invincibly optimistic. “We’ll get them soon, even if we didn’t get them today.”

Chester had never known a common soldier who worried about not going into battle. No doubt such men existed. You heard stories about them, stories often prefaced, There was this crazy bastard who… But he’d never run into one himself.

Like other lower forms of life, second lieutenants were too dumb to know better. Martin thought some more about telling this particular lieutenant to put a sock in it, but refrained. Monroe had a job, too. He was supposed to make soldiers enthusiastic about going out there and getting maimed. Having led that company in the Great War, Chester knew what a nasty job it could be.

At the moment, he worried more about whether the regiment would get its field kitchens set up after all the marching and countermarching it had done. He wasn’t especially surprised when it didn’t. “Canned rations,” he told the men in his platoon. (Thayer Monroe had a different opinion about whose it was, but what did second lieutenants know?)

“That shit again?” somebody said. It wasn’t the only grumble sullying the sweetness of the evening air. Canned rations ranged from boring to actively nasty. The labels usually peeled off, too, so you didn’t know ahead of time whether you were getting spaghetti and meatballs-tolerable-or chicken with stewed prunes-disgusting. As with men who liked combat, there were a few who liked the chicken concoction and would trade for it, but Chester didn’t think any were in his platoon.

Charlie Baumgartner plopped down beside him. “How’s that gonna look in the newspapers, Sarge? ‘U.S. Army Pulls Back from Fredericksburg! Does Not Cross!’ ” He made the headline very convincing.

Chester opened his can. It was hash-not very good, not very bad. He dug in. After the first mouthful, he said, “They can print that if they want to. I don’t care. As long as they don’t say, ‘U.S. Army Massacred at Fredericksburg!’ I’m not going to worry about it.”

“You got a good way of looking at things,” Baumgartner said. “Better’n some people I could name-that’s for damn sure.”

“He’s nothing but a puppy,” Martin said, identifying one of those unnamed people without undue difficulty.

“You know what a puppy is?” the corporal said. He waited for Chester to shake his head, then answered the rhetorical question: “Just a little son of a bitch.”

“Ouch,” Martin said. To his own surprise, he found himself defending Lieutenant Monroe: “He’s not so bad. He just needs experience.”

“He needs a good, swift kick in the ass,” Baumgartner said.

“Odds are he’ll get one. Let’s just hope he lives through it,” Chester said.

“Yeah.” Baumgartner nodded. “Let’s hope we do, too.”

Armstrong Grimes didn’t know where the Mormons got all their machine guns. He supposed the Confederates had sneaked some to them and they’d taken others from U.S. arsenals when they started their latest uprising. Or, for all he knew, maybe they had secret machine shops out in the desert somewhere, and men with green eyeshades working lathes to turn out their own.

Wherever the machine guns came from, they had a hell of a lot of them.

The one in front of Armstrong and his companions now was firing from the window of a house in Orem, Utah; U.S. forces had finally managed to drive the Mormons out of Provo. An enormous canning plant dominated Orem. The rebels were holed up inside the factory, too, but the Americans were going to have to clear them out of the buildings in front of the place before they could even think about attacking it.

Clearing them wouldn’t be easy. Nothing that had to do with Mormons ever was. The machine gun spitting death in front of Armstrong, for instance, hadn’t just been set in that window. As soon as it started up, Sergeant Stowe called artillery fire in on it. The guns had turned the house to rubble. They hadn’t bothered the machine gun or its crew one bit.

Crouched in a hole that didn’t feel nearly deep enough with bullets cracking past just overhead, Armstrong turned to Yossel Reisen and said, “Bastards have that thing all sandbagged.”

“Either that or there’s a real cement bunker inside the place,” Reisen answered. “Wouldn’t surprise me a bit.”