Looking out the windows helped very little. Except when lightning tore across the sky, it was almost night-dark. And what the lightning illuminated was mostly a bumper crop of raindrops.

But after something less than an hour, the storm eased. The thunderheads glided off to the east with ponderous dignity. The subtropical sun of Georgia summer came out again. The ground started to steam-not just the puddles and ponds the rain had left behind but the ground itself.

Colonel Summers strode to the north-facing window. The starch came out of his shoulders; he might have aged ten years in ten seconds. “There’s a hole in the ground not far from the deadline inside the fence,” he said, his tone that of a man in the room with a deathbed. And so he might have been, for that hole meant the passing of many men’s hopes.

No one had ever accused the Confederate guards of brilliance. If they’d had any brains at all, they would have been at the front doing something more useful for their country than this. But they didn’t have to be Sir Isaac Newton to figure out that holes in the ground, especially long, straight ones like this, didn’t happen by themselves.

One of the guards who’d squelched through the mud to the subsidence sighted along it as if down the barrel of a rifle. What he saw when he did was the barracks where Moss stood waiting for the other shoe to drop.

He didn’t have to wait long. The Confederates advanced on the building. One of them fell on his can in the slick red mud. Normally, the U.S. captives would have laughed and jeered at his clumsiness. No one made a peep now. The guards were unlikely to find much funny about an escape attempt, especially one they hadn’t noticed till the storm betrayed it.

“Y’all come out right now!” one of them shouted. “Y’all come out or else.”

The prisoners did come out; Moss, for one, didn’t think the guards were kidding about that or else. Crashing sounds from inside the barracks declared that the Confederates were taking the place apart, looking for where the tunnel started. Along with everybody else in green-gray, Moss stood glumly in the mud, waiting for them to find it.

And they did. He’d known they would. They were stupid, but not stupid enough to miss it. Their leader came out with his face even hotter than the weather. “You sons of bitches!” he screamed. “How dare you try and escape from this here prison? How dare you?”

“We have the right.” Moss spoke up, the lawyer in him touched by that peculiar brainless fury. “The Geneva Convention says so.”

That rocked the Confederate guard officer back on his heels. But he rallied, barking, “It also says I got the right to punish the bastards who try an’ break out. ’Fess up, y’all. Who worked on that there tunnel? Rest of you’ll have an easier time if we can punish the real criminals.”

Every single U.S. prisoner raised his hand at the same time. Most of them hadn’t had anything to do with the tunnel. Some, the new fish, hadn’t even known it was there. They raised their hands anyway, without hesitation. Moss was proud of them.

What the guard officer felt was something else again. “All right. All right,” he said heavily, and snorted like a boar hog. “Y’all reckon you’re so goddamn smart. Well, you’ll all catch it together, then, and see how you like that.” He stormed away. Moss hoped he would take a pratfall in the mud, but no such luck. The rain was on the Confederate side every which way today.

Dr. Leonard O’Doull was about to get on a train that would take him back from Virginia to Ohio (or perhaps, given the way things were going, only to western Pennsylvania) when a clerk bounced out of a command car with a canvas sack slung over his shoulder. “Hang on, Doc!” he called. “I got mail for youse guys.”

Youse guys was as far outside the bounds of ordinary English as the Confederate y’all. A lot of languages had separate forms for second-person singular and plural. English didn’t, but kept trying to invent them. The thought flashed through O’Doull’s mind and flew away in a split second, replaced by simple joy. “Give it here,” he told the clerk. “I thought it would be weeks catching up with us.”

Red Crosses adorned the tops of the cars and the sides of the locomotive. Locomotive and cars alike were painted white. With luck, that would keep the Confederates from dropping bombs on the train or machine-gunning it from the air. There had been a few horrible incidents, but only a few. There had also been a few south of the Mason-Dixon line. O’Doull wondered if Jake Featherston’s propaganda machine had manufactured those, but wouldn’t have been surprised if they proved real. War was full of things like that.

He stopped worrying about the war when he saw his wife’s handwriting on a letter with a stamp from the Republic of Quebec. Sorting through the pile, he found several of those, and one from his brother-in-law, Georges Galtier. Seeing that one made him smile in a different way. Among his wife’s relatives, Georges was the zany, the cuckoo, the odd man out-sometimes very odd indeed.

“Gotta go, Doc. Good luck to you.” Without waiting for a reply, the Army mail clerk hopped back into the command car and drove away.

O’Doull carried the stack of envelopes and magazines and newspapers and small packages up into the train. “Mail call!” he shouted, and for the next couple of minutes he was the most popular guy around.

Once the mail was all doled out, that popularity naturally faded. Only Granville McDougald hung around. He looked glum. To show why, he held up an envelope. It had a big handstamp on it: RETURN TO SENDER. ADDRESSEE DECEASED.

“I’m sorry, Granny,” O’Doull said. “Who is it?”

“Fellow I’ve known since the Great War. He lost a hand then, so they wouldn’t let him stay in the Army, not even as a medic. Dammit, Don was a good guy-one of the best. Now I’ve got to see if I can come up with his sister’s address, find out what happened to him.”

The letter had gone to Trenton, New Jersey. Confederate bombers certainly reached that far. But other things could happen to a middle-aged man, too. As a middle-aged man himself, O’Doull knew that much too well. “I’m sorry he’s gone,” he repeated. “Whatever it was, I hope it was quick.”

“Yeah. Amen,” McDougald said. They’d both seen too many men who lingered in agony and would not let go of life, even if some of them wanted to. A fast end-dead before he knew what hit him-was far from the smallest mercy the world had to offer, and the world didn’t offer it often enough.

“Here.” O’Doull reached into his bag and pulled out a bottle of brandy. “Have a knock of this. Medicinal, you know.”

“Sure. Thanks, Doc. You’re a medical genius.” McDougald took the bottle and raised it in salute. “Here’s to you, Don.” He took one long swig, then handed it back. O’Doull put it away and closed the bag.

As an officer, O’Doull had a Pullman berth. He took his letters there to read them in curtained-off privacy. He opened the one from Georges first. It was the usual nonsense from his brother-in-law: the usual nonsense with the usual ironic sting. Aren’t you glad I am not an English-speaking Canadian? Georges wrote-in English, not the French that was his usual language and that he used for almost all of the letter. He went on in English for one more sentence: If I were, you might have to shoot me. After that, he returned to his own tongue and the usual doings in and around Riviere-du-Loup.

O’Doull wondered whether Georges had had someone else compose that English for him. He would have studied the language in school before the Great War, when Quebec was still part of Canada, but when would he have needed it since? Of course, being Georges, he might have remembered it just so he could make a sarcastic nuisance of himself thirty years later. The uprising in anglophone Canada worried O’Doull, too, and not because he might be called on to pick up a rifle himself.