Back then, the feeling had been justified; studying McClellan's campaigns, Dowling had been struck by the way he was always a step and a half behind Lee. The trouble was, he didn't think Custer's men were justified in having confidence in their commander. Custer was brave and liked to go right at the enemy. Having said that, you exhausted his military virtues. No-in military politics, at least, he had a solid Machiavellian streak in him. " Davis is TR's fair-haired boy, too," he muttered gloomily. "When the president sees this, I can kiss Canada good-bye forever-he's going to want my scalp."
That last was true only metaphorically, Custer being bereft of hair on the portion of his scalp Indians had customarily removed. "It will be all right, sir," Dowling said, sympathetically if not sincerely. "You and TR fought side by side against the limeys in the Second Mexican War. I'm sure he'll remember that."
Half to himself, Custer muttered, "Teddy always did say his troops outperformed my regulars."
Roosevelt's volunteer cavalry, a regiment of miners and farmers, had indeed done yeoman work in Montana, fighting their British opposite numbers to a standstill, and had led the pursuit after the British blundered straight into Custer's Gatling guns. In Dowling's view, TR had a point; only the armistice U.S. President Blaine had had to accept had kept the triumph from being bigger than it was.
"I'd have licked them anyway," Custer said, sounding as if he was trying to convince himself. Maybe he would have: nobody examined Chinese Gordon's campaigns alongside Napoleon's. Dowling's opinion remained that Custer had probably needed all the help Teddy Roosevelt gave him.
All of which was irrelevant. He pointed to the Scribner's. "What do we do about that, sir?"
"First, I shall write a memorial and send it to President Roosevelt, detailing the lies and calumnies and false accusations this Richard Harding Davis has levelled against me," Custer declared, using the correspondent's full name with equally full contempt. Dowling nodded. That was like Custer: if threatened, attack head-on, and never mind scouting the ground first. Sometimes you won that way; more often, you got your nose bloodied. Dowling would have bet TR would be imperfectly delighted to receive Custer's memorial, and that it would sharpen the president's focus on details he might otherwise have ignored. But that was Custer's lookout, not his. The general commanding First Army went on, "And after that is done and on its way, I am going to tear these lying pages out of the Scribner's and wipe my backside with them, which is precisely what they deserve, no more, no less. What do you think of that, Major Dowling?"
"Revenge is, uh, sweet, sir," Dowling said. He fled then, before his own big mouth got him into even bigger trouble.
Reggie Bartlett sighed with relief as he tramped away from the front line east of Big Lick, Virginia. He and his comrades were battered, worn, filthy, unshaven. Some of them had bandages on minor wounds; several were coughing from chlorine they'd sucked into their lungs during one gas attack or another. None of them would have been invited to serve as a model for a Confederate recruiting poster.
"Here come the rookies," Corporal Robert E. McCorkle said, pointing at the men marching up to replace Reggie's regiment. They were obviously raw troops, just out of one training camp or another. It wasn't so much that they wore clean uniforms; soldiers coming back to the line were often issued fresh clothes. It was more the look in their eyes, the way they stared at the veterans as if they'd never seen such spectral apparitions before.
"You think we're ugly," Reggie called to them, "you should see the fellows who aren't walking out."
That drew gales of laughter from his comrades. They'd seen everything war could do to the human body: bullets, shells, gas. If you didn't laugh about some of the things you'd seen, you'd go mad. A couple of men had gone mad, or so convincingly given the appearance of it as to fool their officers. They were out of the fight for good, not merely coming back for baths and delousing and a show or two from a charitable group. Reggie envied them intensely.
"You got to watch out for the front-line lice, boys," Jasper Jenkins said to the replacements. "Some of them babies is big enough so they have you 'stead of you havin' them." He scratched his crotch.
One of the men going up to the line, a tall, thin, pale fellow who looked so earnest that Bartlett pegged him for a preacher's son, went paler yet and visibly gulped. Poor bastard, Reggie thought with abstract, abraded sympathy. He'd been fairly fastidious himself, back in his civilian days. Anybody who couldn't stand living like a pig — right down to wallowing in the mud- had an even worse time at the front than everyone else.
He didn't like being in the zigzag communication trenches. They weren't deep enough, and they didn't have any shelters into which to dive if the damnyankees started throwing artillery around. The officers felt the same way he did. "Move along, boys, move along," Captain Wilcox said. "We don't want to camp here."
Major Colleton hustled up and down the line of marching — actually, more like shambling-men to deliver the same message: "Keep it moving there, fellows." His uniform was as spruce and neat as any of the ones the replacements were wearing. With Colleton, it was no more than part of his jaunty persona. He'd have been a plumed cavalryman back in the War of Se cession. Cavalry these days wasn't what it had been, though.
And Major Colleton's jauntiness wasn't quite what it had been, either. "Shake a leg," he said. "Sooner we're back behind the secondary trenches, sooner the Yankees won't be able to reach us any more."
A lot of people — Colleton among them, and Reggie Bartlett, too-had gone into the war wanting nothing but the thrill of combat. Bartlett had seen plenty of combat. If he never had another thrill of that sort for the rest of his life, he'd be content.
And he, unlike Major Colleton, was the only man of his family in the Army. "Sir, how's your brother?" he asked when the major came near.
Colleton's face clouded. "He's back home now. From what my sister writes, he's never going to be able to do much for himself any more: a couple of more breaths of chlorine and they'd have put him under the ground. Likely that would have been a mercy." He remembered his manners; he had the virtues of the Southern gentleman. "Kind of you to ask, Bartlett."
Reggie nodded. Colleton went on his way, still urging the men to hurry. He knew just about everyone in the battalion by name. Of course, the battalion carried only about half of its establishment strength, which made learning names easier than it would have been when the war was young.
Machine guns poked their snouts over the parapets of the secondary trenches, ready to rake the ground ahead with fire if a U.S. attack should carry the front-line positions. In theory, Reggie approved of the precaution. In prac tice, a U.S. attack sufficient to bring those machine guns into action would likely have left him dead, wounded, or captured. He was happy they sat there quiet.
The men in the secondary trenches were veterans: grimy, worn men much like Bartlett and his comrades. A couple of them nodded toward the troops going out of the front line. One fellow touched his butternut slouch hat in what looked like half a salute. He'd likely been up there, and knew what the regiment coming back was escaping.
Behind the secondary trenches, Negro labourers, their uniforms dark with sweat rather than dirt, were digging positions for Confederate guns. "Nice to see those," Reggie said to Jasper Jenkins. "The Yanks have been throwing more shells at us than we've been able to give back."
"Ain't that the sad and sorry truth?" Jenkins looked back over his shoulder toward the front line. "One good thing about havin' to pull back to this side o' the river is, we don't have the damnyankees shellin' us like they was whenever we had to cross it."