Having vented steam, he let his adjutant lead him back into the capitol. The southern wing was more nearly intact than the northern; First Army headquarters had been established there. In the map room, an enormous chart of Tennessee was thumbtacked to one wall. Two red arrows projected out from Nashville, one southeast toward Murfreesboro, the other southwest toward Memphis, better than two hundred miles away.
As far as Dowling was concerned, that second line was madness, an exercise in hubris. But it attracted Custer as much as a pretty housekeeper did. “By pushing in that direction, Major, we can lend aid to the attack on Memphis that’s been developing in Arkansas,” he insisted.
Keeping Custer connected with reality was Dowling’s main assignment. “Sir, the Tennessee River is in the way,” he said, as diplomatically as he could. “Not only that, the attack from Arkansas has been developing since 1915, and it hasn’t developed yet.”
“Jonesboro has fallen,” Custer said.
“Yes-at last,” Dowling said, certain the sarcasm would fly over the head of the general commanding First Army, as indeed it did. Stubbornly, Custer’s adjutant went on, “Expecting anything from a campaign west of the Mississippi is whistling in the dark, sir. We just don’t have the forces over there to do all we want. If the Rebs weren’t shy of men west of the river, too, we’d be in worse shape there than we are.”
“We’ll draw off their defenders,” Custer said. “They haven’t got enough men on this side of the river, either.”
That held just enough truth to make it tempting, but not enough to make it valuable. In thoughtful tones, Dowling said, “Well, you may be right, sir. I’ve heard Brigadier General MacArthur find some good reasons for the advance in the direction of Memphis.”
He’d gauged that about right. Custer’s peroxided mustache twitched; he screwed up his mouth as if he’d bitten into a lemon. “The only direction of advance Daniel MacArthur knows anything about is the one in the direction of the newspapers,” he sneered.
Takes one to know one, Dowling thought. Brigadier General MacArthur, with his trademark cigarette holder, courted publicity the way stockbrokers courted chorus girls. Did Custer refuse to admit to anyone else that he did the same thing, or did he refuse to admit it to himself, too? Despite his long association with the general commanding First Army, Dowling hadn’t ever been able to decide.
Custer said, “I wonder what Lieutenant Colonel-no, Coloneclass="underline" you did send in that promotion, didn’t you?-Morrell’s view is?”
“I did send in that promotion, yes, sir,” Dowling said.
“Good,” Custer said. “Good. I wonder what Morrell thinks, yes I do. Now there is a man with a good head on his shoulders, who thinks of his country first and his own glory second. He’s not a grandstander like some people I could name. A very solid man, Morrell.”
“Yes, sir,” Dowling said. Custer approved of him because his plan had brought Custer fame, but it had brought Custer fame because it worked. Dowling didn’t think Morrell so unselfishly patriotic as Custer did, but he didn’t mind ambition in a man if it didn’t consume him.
“And,” Custer muttered, more than half to himself, “I had better find out in which direction Libbie thinks we should go.”
“That would be a good idea, sir,” Dowling said enthusiastically-so enthusiastically, Custer gave him a dirty look. Dowling didn’t care that Libbie kept the general commanding First Army from rumpling serving women. He did care that Libbie had shown herself to be the brains of the Custer family. Whenever she shared living quarters with the general, First Army fought better.
Custer said, “Whether we move against Murfreesboro or Memphis, we have to strike hard.”
His adjutant nodded. Custer’s one great military virtue was aggressiveness. That aggressiveness had cost the lives of thousands of men, because it meant Custer kept trying to ram his head through the stone walls the CSA kept building against him. But, when barrels finally gave him the means to do some real ramming, he made the most of them, as a more subtle general might have been unable to do.
“We have to strike hard,” he repeated. “If we but strike hard, the whole rotten edifice of the Confederate States of America will come tumbling down.”
A year earlier, Dowling would have reckoned that the statement of a madman. Six months earlier, he would have thought it the statement of a fool. Now he nodded solemnly and said, “Sir, I think you may be right.”
Reggie Bartlett’s hospital gown was of a washed-out butternut, not a pale green-gray like those of most of the inmates of the military hospital outside St. Louis. For good measure, the gown had PRISONER stenciled across the chest in bloodred letters four inches high.
He could get around pretty well with one crutch these days, which was a good thing, because the shoulder that had taken a machine-gun bullet was still too tender to let him use two crutches. The doctors kept insisting the wound infection was clearing up, but it wasn’t clearing up anywhere near fast enough to suit him.
He made it to the toilets adjoining the room where he and his companions spent so much time on their backs, eased himself, and slowly returned to his bed. “Took you long enough,” one of the Yankees said. “I figured you were trying to escape, the way you keep bragging that you did before.”
“Pretty soon, Bob, pretty soon,” Reggie answered. “Just not quite yet, is all.”
“Shoot, Bob, didn’t you know?” said another wounded U.S. soldier, this one named Pete. “Reggie started escaping day before yesterday, but he’s so damn slow, this is as far as he’s gotten.”
“You go to hell, too, Pete,” Reggie said. He took care not to sound too angry, though; Pete’s left leg was gone above the knee, blown off by a Confederate shell somewhere in Arkansas.
Bartlett sat on the edge of his bed and leaned his crutch against the wall next to it. That was the easy part. What came afterwards wasn’t so easy. He used his sound right arm to help drag his wounded right leg up onto the mattress. The leg was getting better, too. But, while it was on the way, it hadn’t arrived yet.
Once he was sitting with both legs out before him, he eased himself down flat onto his back. That hurt worse; the shoulder felt as if it had a toothache in there, a dull pain that never went away and sometimes flared to malevolent heights. Sweat sprang out on his forehead at the wound’s bite. After he lay still for a while, it dropped back to a level he could bear more easily.
“You all right, Reggie?” Bob asked, tone solicitous as if Bartlett had been from Massachusetts or Michigan himself. Pain was the common foe here.
“Not too bad,” Reggie said. “I’ll tell you, though, this whole business of war would be a hell of a lot more fun if you didn’t get shot.”
That drew loud agreement from the Yankees on the other beds in the room. “They made the old fools who ordered this war go out and fight it, it never would’ve lasted five minutes,” Bob said. “Tell me the truth, boys-is that so or isn’t it?”
Again, most of the wounded men in the ward agreed. But Pete said, “I don’t know about that. Roosevelt fought in the Second Mexican War when he was our age.”
“Well, that’s a fact-he did,” Bob allowed. “He fought one medium-sized battle against the limeys, licked ’em, and they went home. That was plenty to make him a hero back then. We fight the Rebs or the Canucks, do they go home with their tails between their legs on account of we lick ’em once? We all know better’n that, don’t we?”
“None of us’d be here if the bastards on the other side ran away quick,” Pete said. He grinned. “Well, Reggie would, I reckon, but he don’t count anyway.”
“You damnyankees don’t run, either, the way you did the last couple of times we fought you,” Bartlett said, returning verbal fire. “Wish to Jesus you did. I wouldn’t have these damn holes in me, and I’ll tell you, I liked life a lot better before I got ventilated.”