Before long, his own men came hurrying up to support him. “Good to see you,” he said, not intentionally ironic.
Ben Carlton shook his head. “When that machine gun turned around, uh, sir,” the cook said, “I knew you’d got to it some kind of way. You’ve done it too damn often for me even to be real surprised about it any more.”
“Do not blaspheme,” McSweeney said, almost automatically. “I do my duty. And here, if not in your cookery, you have done yours. Let us push on against the foe. With God’s help, victory shall indeed be ours at last.”
XII
Sergeant Jake Featherston cursed a blue streak. The surviving guns of his battery, along with the rest of those belonging to the First Richmond Howitzers, perched on Sudley Mountain, a little east of Centreville, Virginia. From those low hills, they could have wreaked fearful havoc on the Yankees farther west, over near the small stream called Bull Run-if they’d had any ammunition.
A runner came up to Featherston. “Sir, uh, Sergeant, I mean, the wagons will be here in an hour or so, headquarters says.”
Could looks have killed, the messenger would have been deader than if a twelve-inch shell from a battleship had gone off under his feet. “They should have been here this morning, God damn it,” Featherston ground out. “What the fucking hell happened to them?”
The runner stared. He took a lot of abuse: a big part of his job was telling people of superior rank they couldn’t have what they wanted and what they thought they were entitled to. Featherston’s words were nothing out of the ordinary. The icy vitriol of the tone was. It might have come from an irate colonel, not a sergeant running a battered battery.
“Sergeant, they got tangled up with a division of infantry on the march, so after that they needed a good long while to get unraveled again.”
“Do you think the damnyankees don’t care that the Army of Northern Virginia doesn’t know what in Christ’s name it’s doing?” Jake snapped. “Maybe they do care-enough to send us a big thank-you bouquet.”
“I’ve given you the news I have, Sergeant,” the runner said, and went on his way. Having other duty let him escape Featherston’s fury; it wasn’t as if Jake were his commanding officer.
Out came the Gray Eagle scratch pad and Over Open Sights. The white-bearded fools in Richmond are doing their best to make sure that we lose this war, Featherston wrote, though we had victory straight ahead of us. Now they give the niggers guns to try to put their own blundering to rights, even though it was the niggers who helped stick us in this mess in the first place. And white troops would never have let themselves get fouled up with ammunition wagons like that. The messenger hadn’t said whether the troopers who’d cause his problem were white or black. He drew his own conclusions.
“When you first started keeping those notes, Sergeant,” someone said behind Featherston, “I never thought you would keep on with them. I seem to have been mistaken.”
Automatically, Jake closed the cover of the notebook. What he wrote in there was his, nobody else’s. “Major Potter, sir,” he said now, “I got nothing better to do than write, on account of I can’t go pasting the damnyankees the way I want to, on account of God may know where the ammunition is, but I sure don’t.”
Clarence Potter sighed. “I wish you could paste them, but that you can’t may matter less than you think. They are building up for another large push against us. If you have the ammunition you’ll need to help stop that, well and good. If not…” He didn’t go on.
“If not, we’re in too much trouble for anything to matter. That’s what you’re saying, isn’t it, sir?”
“That’s what I’m saying.” Potter studied him. “I never have figured out exactly how smart you are, Featherston, but you’ve made it plain you’re shrewd enough and to spare. If you hadn’t made the fatal mistake of being right at the wrong time, we might have the same rank by now.”
Maybe he meant that to console Jake. It didn’t; it made him furious. “Best way to save the country I can think of, sir, would be for a Yankee bomber to put three or four heavy ones right on top of the War Department. That might do it. Can’t think of anything else that would.”
The intelligence officer shook his head. “All things considered, they’ve done about as well as anyone could have expected.”
“God help us if that’s so,” Featherston said. “We’d better make peace in a hurry, before the damn fools do something even worse than they have already. Don’t know what that could be, but I reckon they’d come up with something.”
“You are shrewd.” Behind their metal-rimmed spectacles, Major Potter’s eyes widened slightly. “There are people in the Army and people in the government beginning to say the same thing. If Britain is forced to leave the war, if we have to face not just the whole U.S. Army but the whole U.S. Navy, less whatever part keeps fighting Japan in the Pacific-if that happens, the odds against us grow very long.”
“Odds were long during the War of Secession, too,” Jake said. “We licked the Yankees twice over by Manassas Gap. We’d lick ’em again if only that damned ammunition would ever get here.”
“We had help then,” Potter said. “Without it, I think we should have lost.”
“One way or another, we’d have licked them.” Featherston didn’t know whether that was likely to be true or just his own stubbornness talking. “We’d be licking them now if the damn niggers hadn’t risen up and stabbed us in the back.”
“I wonder,” Clarence Potter said. “I do wonder. We’d be better off than we are, no doubt, but would we be winning? The last two times we fought the United States, we won fairly quickly, before they committed everything they had to the struggle. We failed to do that this time, and they are fully committed to the fight-and they have more to commit to it than we do.”
As if to underscore his words, a flight of U.S. aeroplanes buzzed by overhead. No C.S. fighting scouts rose to answer them. Aeroplanes were mere annoyances, but Jake was sick of being annoyed without having the chance to return the favor. At long last, a couple of antiaircraft guns opened up on the Yankees. They scored no hits. They hardly ever did.
Potter went on, “And speaking of our colored troops, do I hear correctly that you opened up on them with canister during the retreat from Round Hill?”
“Hell, yes, you heard that straight,” Featherston said defiantly. “If they ain’t more afraid of us than they are of the damnyankees, they won’t do us any good, will they? They were running from the enemy, sir, and it was the only way I had to make ’em stop.”
“Some of them will never run from the enemy again, that’s certain-or toward him, either,” Major Potter said. “Some of their white officers and noncoms sent complaints about what you did to Army of Northern Virginia headquarters. You might have faced a court-martial if others had not spoken out on your behalf.”
“Surprised I didn’t any which way,” Jake said. “There’s a big raft of officers who don’t love me a whole hell of a lot.”
“Really?” Potter raised an eyebrow. “I hadn’t noticed.” Featherston, who didn’t know what to make of such understated irony, started to boil till the intelligence officer raised a hand and went on, “That’s a joke, Sergeant. I am happy to be able to tell you that I was able to deflect the complaints and make sure none of them went on to Richmond.”
“Thank you for that much, sir,” Jake said. Potter was a decent sort, as far as officers went. But Featherston hated being in anyone’s debt. He especially hated being in an officer’s debt.
“You’ve had a few bad turns come your way,” Potter said. “Seems only right to even things up as we can.”
There he stood, smug and sweatless in the muggy heat. Yes, you’re a lord, Featherston thought. You can throw the poor peasant a crust of bread and never miss it. In that moment, he might have come close to understanding what had driven the Negroes of the CSA to rise up late in 1915. But he never thought-he never would have thought-to compare his situation to theirs.