All right, sonny boy. You asked for it. “Sir, I led a company for a while in the last war, over in northern Virginia.”

“What?” Husak’s voice went high and shrill. By the way he jerked, he might have sat on a tack. “How could you do that?”

“Usual way, sir: all the officers were killed or wounded,” Martin answered stolidly. “This was 1917, sir, and we were almost as beaten down and beat up as the Confederates were. Eventually they got around to putting a lieutenant in the slot, so I got bumped back down again, but I had it for a month or so.”

“Oh.” Husak looked as if he wanted to call him a liar, but he didn’t have the nerve. Chester’s matter-of-fact account was impossible to contradict, especially for someone who’d been making messes in his drawers in 1917. The young lieutenant also looked as if he hated Chester and as if he was scared to death of him, both at once. He jerked a thumb towards a waiting truck. “Hop in. We’ll see how you do in the war we’ve got now.”

“Yes, sir.” As Chester did, he called himself seventeen different kinds of idiot. For this sour little punk he’d walked away from his wife, his son, and a pretty damn good slot in the construction business? What had those bastards at the recruiting station put in his coffee? Whatever it was, they should have used it against the Confederates instead. It would have made them quit without a fight.

The other replacements got in after him. Husak did, too. He spent a lot less time on them than he had on Chester. The PFC–Chester thought his name was Fitzpatrick, though he looked more Italian than Irish-sent him a sympathetic look, but with the lieutenant in the truck with them that was all he could do.

“Move out,” Husak called to the driver.

“Yes, sir.” The man fired up the engine, put the truck in gear, and started west. Chester sighed softly. Back to the war, dammit, he thought.

Instead, the war came to him, and within ten minutes. The truck, which had been rumbling along at a good clip, slowed and then stopped. The driver leaned on his horn. Lieutenant Husak went up to the little window that separated the rear compartment from the driver’s and shouted, “What the hell?”

“Refugees.” The driver’s answer was equally laconic.

“Jesus Christ!” Husak clapped a hand to his forehead.

A few seconds later, Martin, who could only see where he’d been, not where he was going, got a look out the back of the truck at the detritus of war. By the time he’d got to Virginia, all the civilians who’d wanted to leave the combat zone were long gone. Here, a woman stared at him out of eyes as empty and exhausted as those of an overworked draft animal. Sweat plastered her hair to her head; her freckled skin was badly sunburned. She had a knapsack on her back and a crude harness rigged from bed sheets on her chest that let her carry a howling toddler there. A little girl of four or five clung to one hand, a boy a year or two older to the other.

Beside her stood a man in a battered straw hat pushing a wheelbarrow that held whatever he’d been able to distill of his life. He hadn’t shaved for a week or so. His checked shirt was filthy, his dungarees were out at the knees, and his shoes out at the toes. He looked as weary and as beaten as the woman.

Except as an obstacle, they and the others like them ignored the truck. They flowed around it, flowed past it-and kept the men in it from getting to where they could do anything about stopping the Confederate advance that had set the refugees in motion in the first place.

A Model T that edged around the truck held-Chester counted carefully-fourteen people. He wouldn’t have bet you could cram that many in as a stunt. This was no stunt; it was, literally, life and death. The ancient flivver ran, even if it sagged on its springs.

“Lord, what a fuckup,” the PFC said softly. Chester nodded and lit yet another cigarette. That was about the size of it.

Lieutenant Husak, meanwhile, started throwing a fit. “We’ve got to clear these people!” he yelled. “How are we supposed to fight a war if civilians keep getting in the way?” Civilians getting in the way weren’t an accidental consequence of Confederate attacks; Featherston’s men knew they would, and took advantage of it. Husak turned to the soldiers with him. “You men! Fix bayonets and get these refugees off the road. If an Asskicker comes by, we’re sitting ducks, and so are they.”

He wasn’t wrong. Chester hadn’t used his bayonet for anything but a knife and a can opener since the Great War. He put it on the business end of his Springfield now. It was still good for intimidating civilians.

“Get out of the road!” he shouted as he hopped down from the truck. He did his best to sound like a traffic cop. “Come on, people-move it! You’re blocking military traffic! You’ve got to get out of the way!”

Had the truck been full of soldiers, he would have got results faster. It wasn’t so easy with only half a dozen men at his back. The civilians didn’t want to listen. All they wanted was to get away from the Confederates. They returned to the highway as soon as Chester and his comrades went by.

And then a Confederate dive bomber did spot the column and the halted truck.

Chester knew what that scream in the sky was as soon as he heard it. “Hit the dirt!” he yelled, and took his own advice, scrambling away as fast as he could. The PFC dove for cover, too. The rest of the soldiers and the civilians were still mostly upright when the Mule machine-gunned them, dropped a bomb right in front of the truck, and roared back toward the west.

Screams. Shrieks. Raw terror. People running every which way. People down and bleeding-some writhing and howling, others lying still. Pieces of people flung improbably far. The truck going up like Vesuvius. Whatever problems Lieutenant Husak had with his temper, he’d never fix them now.

And now there was even more chaos and delay on the road than there had been before. Chester looked around. With the lieutenant dead, he was the highest-ranking man here. He wanted the responsibility about as much as he wanted a root canal. Want it or not, it had just landed in his lap. He got up and started doing what little he could to set things right.

Despite its quaint name, Tom Colleton found himself liking Beaver, Pennsylvania. The town sat in the middle of a mining and industrial belt near the border with Ohio, but was itself pleasant and tree-shrouded. He’d commandeered the ivy-covered Quay House, former home of a prominent Socialist politician, for his regimental headquarters.

The runner from division HQ, a few miles farther south, caught up with him there. After saluting, the corporal said, “Sir, I have a special order for you.”

It must have been special, or his superiors would have sent it by wireless or field telephone, enciphering it if they thought they had to. Tom nodded. “Give it to me, then.”

He expected the messenger to pull out a piece of paper for him to read and then destroy. Instead, it came orally. The powers that be really didn’t want anything that had to do with it falling into U.S. hands. “Sir, you are ordered to allow a special unit to pass through your lines, and to make sure the troops under your command do nothing to interfere with this special unit in any way.”

That said just enough to leave Lieutenant-Colonel Colleton scratching his head. “Of course I’ll obey, but I’d like to know a little more about what I’m obeying,” he said. “Why would my men want to interfere with this special unit, whatever it is? How can I tell them not to if I don’t know why it’ll cause trouble?”

“Sir, I was told you’d likely ask that question, and that I was allowed to answer it,” the corporal said seriously. “The answer is, this special unit is made up of men who can talk like damnyankees. They wear Yankee uniforms and act like U.S. soldiers.”