The wedding march rang out again as the new couple and their attendants went up the aisle to the back of the church. Everybody else filed by to congratulate them. “Well, what do you think?” Jeff asked Hip Rodriguez after the last guards and cousins of Edith’s slowly shuffled past.

“Very nice, Senor Jeff,” Rodriguez answered, but he couldn’t help adding, “I miss the priest’s fancy robes and the incense and the Latin. This way, it hardly seems like you are in an iglesia-a church.”

“Oh, it’s a church, all right,” Jeff said. He had seen priests in rich robes down in the Empire of Mexico. He hadn’t seen a service there, though. It didn’t seem as if those prelates and somebody like Reverend Sutton were talking about the same God.

The church boasted a little social hall next to the sanctuary. The reception was there. The punch and cider were teetotal; Reverend Sutton wouldn’t have it any other way. Warned of this, Jeff had got the intelligence to the guards. A lot of them carried flasks with which to improve the liquid refreshment. They stayed reasonably discreet, and the minister stayed reasonably polite.

One of the guards made models for a hobby. Working with a tiny brush, he’d changed the clothes of the groom atop the wedding cake from white tie and tails to dress-gray uniform. The figure was still too slim to make a good image of Jeff Pinkard, but it looked a lot more like him than it had before. Edith stuffed gooey chocolate cake into his mouth, and he did the same for her.

He wasn’t sorry not to dance on church property. He’d never been much for cutting a rug. At about ten o’clock, he and Edith went out to the Birmingham. People cheered and yelled bawdy advice and pelted them with rice. The driver took them back to Jeff’s quarters. Edith squeaked when he picked her up to carry her over the threshold. Then, as he set her down, he said, “What’s this?”

This was a bottle of champagne in a bucket of ice by the bed. A card in an envelope leaned against the bucket. When Jeff opened the envelope and took out the card, his eyes almost bugged out of his head. Hope the two of you stay real happy together, it read in a looping scrawl surely written by no secretary. The signature was in that same rough hand: Jake Featherston.

“Oh,” Edith said, reading it with him. “Oh, Jeff.”

“Yeah,” Jeff said. “That’s… somethin’, all right.” He picked up the champagne bottle. “Reckon the least we can do is drink some o’ this before…” He stopped. Edith turned pink anyhow. He laughed. Wedding nights were for laughing, weren’t they?

Champagne went down smoother than spiked punch had. Edith got pinker yet, not from embarrassment but from the sparkling wine. Jeff picked her up again. He was a big man, and she wasn’t a very large woman. This time, he set her down on the bed.

She was no giggling maiden. She knew what was what, the same as Jeff did. That made it better, as far as he was concerned. When it was over, he stroked her, lazy in the afterglow. “Hello there, wife,” he said.

“Hello… husband,” Edith said, and started to cry. “I love you, Jeff.” Even though she said it, even though he was sure she meant it, he knew she was remembering Chick, too. He didn’t know what the hell he could do about it. Doing nothing seemed the smartest thing, so he did that.

Chester Martin’s leg still didn’t feel like carrying him around. Like it or not, though, the leg could do the job. The Army let wounded men heal, but only as long as it absolutely had to. Then it threw them back into the meat grinder to see if they could get chopped up again.

As Martin lit a cigarette in a replacement depot somewhere in western Pennsylvania, he wondered why the devil he’d joined up again. He’d known he could get hurt. Get hurt, hell-he could get killed. He’d done it anyhow. After a while, you forgot how bad it had been. That was the only thing he could think of. Women said the same thing happened when they had babies. If they’d truly remembered how bad labor was, none of them would have had more than one.

He couldn’t imagine a lonelier place than this depot. He was still part of the Army, of course, but he wasn’t exactly in it. He wasn’t part of a unit. A soldier by himself was hardly a soldier at all. Whatever outfit he joined now, he’d be the new guy for a while-till enough other men got killed and maimed and enough other replacements took over for them to make him an old-timer again.

The way things were going these days, it wouldn’t take long.

Men ranging in rank from private up to major sat on benches and folding chairs. Some of them smoked, some read newspapers or paperback adventures or mysteries, some just stared into space. Chester recognized that stare, because he’d worn it: the look of a man who’d seen too much of hell. You could help a buddy out when things got bad, or he could help you. Nobody here had a buddy. That was part of being in limbo, a bad part. You were stuck with yourself.

A fat technical sergeant who would never get any closer to the front than this called out three names, following each with a serial number. Two privates and a corporal shouldered the packs they’d had between their feet. They went up to the tech sergeant, signed some papers, and went out the door by which Chester had come in. They were fully part of the military machinery again.

Off in the distance, antiaircraft guns barked. Confederate dive bombers and strafing fighters were tearing up U.S. positions in these parts, softening them so C.S. barrels and foot soldiers could cut through them more easily. The boys in butternut had the bit between their teeth again, and they were running like hell.

Chester ground out the cigarette under his heel and lit another one. He didn’t have the wind he’d had the last time around, but who did? Smoking gave him something to do. It was as much fun as he was allowed to have here.

Out popped that tech sergeant again. Half a dozen privates got up and trudged off to whatever awaited them. Chester went on chain-smoking. Second lieutenants got killed in droves. First sergeants were a tougher, smarter-or at least more experienced-breed. Till one went down, he’d sit here twiddling his thumbs.

“Martin, Chester A.!” the tech sergeant yelled, and his pay number after it. The man also shouted several other names.

Speak of the devil, Martin thought. He rose, slung on his pack-which didn’t make his sore leg rejoice-and went over to the other noncom. The men with him were all kids-a PFC and five or six newly minted privates. The technical sergeant paid more attention to him than to the rest of them put together. Chester signed off on his paperwork, then went outside.

He’d wondered if his new outfit would have sent another senior sergeant to collect men from the repple-depple. Instead, a shavetail second lieutenant awaited him. That was good news and bad: good because it showed his new CO had enough sense to pick somebody who wasn’t needed in the field, bad because the youngster here was liable to know that and resent it.

By the sour expression on the lieutenant’s rather rabbity features, he knew it too well. “Hello, Sergeant. I’m Jack Husak,” he said. “You’re my new nursemaid, aren’t you?”

Yes, Chester thought as he saluted and gave his own name. But dealing with a superior with a chip on his shoulder was the last thing he wanted, so he said, “I’m sure that won’t be necessary, sir.”

“So am I,” Husak said. “I’ve been in charge of my platoon for a good six weeks now, and I’ve got it running solid-solid, all right.”

“I’m glad to hear it, sir.” Chester wondered what the youngster’s notions of solid were. He hadn’t got shot in six weeks, but what did that prove? Not much, as Chester knew too well.

Second Lieutenant Husak didn’t want to leave it alone. “Commanding a platoon is an important responsibility,” he said, which only proved he didn’t understand his place in the world. Lieutenants in charge of platoons had the company CO above them and a senior noncom below to fix things if they screwed up too badly. Doing all right meant you were training for a real role. Not doing all right probably meant getting wounded or killed, and certainly meant you’d never see another promotion. Husak went on, “What’s the biggest command you ever had, Sergeant?”