And serving the Confederate hadn't distracted Edna or made her forget what she'd asked her mother. "C'mon, Ma," she said. "Don't tell me you actually had a life back then?"
"Whatever I had back then, it wasn't very good," Nellie said. "All I'm try ing to do is keep you from going through the same things I did."
Edna shrugged. "You got through 'em, looks like, even if you're too goody-goody to talk about it now. You don't want me to have a good time, that's all. It ain't fair."
Nellie sighed. They'd had this fight before. Likely they were going to go right on having it, too. "You don't know what you're talking about," Nellie said. That was true. It was also the problem. Edna didn't know, and was wild to find out. I won't let her, Nellie told herself fiercely. I won't.
Bremen, Kentucky, had been a coal-mining town before the U.S. First Army drove the Confederates out of it. Abner Dowling had no doubt the place had been grimy and ugly and smelly back in peacetime. Now it was grimy, ugly, doubly smelly thanks to so many dead horses nearby, and wrecked to boot. Given a choice, it was not where Dowling would have made First Army headquarters. He had not been given a choice.
"Dowling!" George Armstrong Custer shouted. His rasping, old man's voice put his adjutant in mind of the braying of the donkey in the fairy tale about the musicians of Bremen. Dowling had done plenty of braying himself, reading his nieces the fairy tale. They'd giggled wildly, back ten years before. "Dowling!" Custer yelled again.
"Coming, sir," Dowling said. Listening to a real donkey bray wasn't nearly so much fun as impersonating one. The major squeezed his bulk through the narrow doorway of the house Custer had taken over. He came to attention; Custer was a stickler for courtesy-from subordinates. "What can I do for you, sir?"
"Bring me some coffee from the mess," Custer said. "Put some fuel in it before it gets here, too."
"Yes, sir," Dowling said resignedly. He turned to go. Custer didn't drink so much as some officers he'd known-but then, they hadn't been in command of whole Armies, either.
"Do you know," Custer said, "I hardly drank at all-no more than for medicinal purposes-till after we lost the Second Mexican War. No matter the renown I won in that last campaign, the thought of my beloved country having gone down to defeat at the hands of rebels and traitors and stabbed in the back by foreign foes twice in a generation's time was too much for me to bear. Since then, I have been known to indulge myself, as an anodyne if nothing else."
"Yes, sir," Dowling repeated. He didn't know whether the lieutenant general was telling the truth or not. He didn't much care, either. However Custer had first made the acquaintance of the brandy bottle, he'd since become quite intimate with it.
Getting the coffee and adulterating it was a matter of a few minutes. Dowling was carrying the steaming cup back to Custer when the general let out a great bellow, as if he'd been gored by a bull. Oh, Lord, what now? Dowling thought. It wasn't, he was sure, that the First Army drive on More-head's Horse Mill had stalled: it had been obvious for days that U.S. forces weren't going to reach the road junction that had been their goal since they forced the Rebs out of Madisonville any time soon. It also wasn't the casualty figures coming from their efforts to reach the town. Custer viewed casualty figures with considerable equanimity, especially seeing how many of them his own headlong ferocity caused. What was rattling his cage, then?
"Is something wrong, sir?" the major said, advancing with the coffee cup. "Here, drink this and you'll feel better for it." At least you won't be able to scream while you're drinking it.
Custer seized the cup and poured its contents down his throat. His face, already red, got redder. He coughed a couple of times before coherent if highly irate speech emerged. "That son of a bitch! That no-good, lying, stinking scoundrel. That fiend in human shape. When I'm through with the bastard, he'll wish he was never born. I already wish he was never born."
"Uh-who, sir?" Dowling asked. If Custer was swearing at General Pershing or one of the other younger officers in the service, Dowling's job was to listen and calm him down and make sure he wouldn't do anything that would damage not only himself (something Dowling didn't mind at all) but also First Army (which would be regrettable).
"Who?" Custer thundered. "That blackguard Davis, that's who!" For a moment, Dowling remained confused, Davis being anything but an uncommon name. Then Custer pointed to the Scribner's magazine on his desk. It hadn't been there when Dowling went to get the general's coffee. A messenger must have delivered it to Custer and then disappeared in a hurry.
Dowling felt a certain amount of sympathy for that messenger. Unfortunately, he didn't have the option of disappearing in a hurry. Very cautiously, he asked, "You're disappointed in the coverage you got from Richard Harding Davis?"
"Disappointed? Great heavens, the man proves himself a pathological liar." Custer picked up the offending periodical and thrust it at his adjutant. "See for yourself, Major."
The title of Davis ' article was innocuous enough: "The First Army Attacks: Part Two." Part One had run a couple of weeks before, and had been a paean of praise for First Army's courage. Custer had not complained about it at all. Dowling rapidly skimmed through Part Two. The more he read, the more he had to work to keep his face not merely straight but sympathetic. Richard Harding Davis, a manly man himself, had been imperfectly impressed with the person of George Armstrong Custer: "neck wattled like a turkey's," "squinting little pouchy eyes," and "hair that bought its color from a bottle in a vain attempt to hold back Father Time" were some of the choicer epithets.
Davis hadn't had much good to say about the generalship involved in the first gas attack, either. " Opportunity squandered" was a phrase he used several times. "Failure to achieve a breakthrough despite the advantages given by the preceding chlorine barrage" was also sure to raise Custer's hackles. To Dowling's way of thinking, though, the most telling bit of evidence that the war reporter did know what he was talking about was the comment that "up and down the front, troops were committed to battle in a deployment more aggressive than strategically sound." That was Custer's style, set out in black and white for all to see.
"I'm sorry, sir," Dowling said, handing the Scribner's back to the commanding general. "Those reporters, they're not to be trusted." Inside, he was chortling. Custer was drawn to publicity like iron filings to a magnet. He'd used it astutely, enabling himself to stay in the Army past what should have been retirement age. Now it had turned on him and bit him. There was a saying about he who lived by the sword, and another one about the pen's being mightier than that sword. Put those together and examine their implications…
Custer was not in a mood for logical examinations. "If I ever set eyes on that lying son of a whore again, I'll horsewhip him within an inch of his worthless life. I trusted him to tell the truth about me-"
I trusted him to paint me in glowing colors, the way too many reporters have done for too many years: Dowling had no trouble making his own translation of Custer's remarks.
The general was in full spate now: "-and my boys in the trenches, hearing about this-this tripe, will wonder whether I have the right stuff to lead them against the hereditary foe."
Reluctantly, Dowling admitted to himself that Custer had a point there. The men who did the actual fighting needed to think their general had their best interests at heart and was using them wisely. The loss of that feeling was what had made McClellan's Army of the Potomac fall to pieces after Camp Hill during the War of Secession: figuring they'd get licked no matter what they did, the rank and file gave up.