“We’ve got the Geneva Convention,” Toricelli said.
“It doesn’t talk about people bombs,” Dowling said. “It doesn’t talk about those camps, either. It doesn’t talk about gas, come to that. Nobody wanted to talk about gas when they were hammering it out, because everybody figured he might need it again one of these days.”
Now Toricelli eyed Dowling with a certain bemusement. “You’re just about as cheerful as I am, aren’t you, sir?”
“I’m as cheerful as I ought to be,” Dowling answered. He looked out the window. An auto painted U.S. green-gray was coming up to his headquarters. The guards stopped it before it got too close. Anybody could paint a motorcar. Who was inside mattered far more than what color it was.
But the driver seemed to satisfy the guards. He got out of the Chevrolet and hurried toward the building. “I’ll see what he wants, sir,” Captain Toricelli said.
“Thanks,” Dowling told him.
His adjutant returned a few minutes later with the man from the auto-a sergeant. “He’s from the War Department, sir,” Toricelli said. “Says he’s got orders for you from Philadelphia.”
“Well, then, he’d better give them to me, eh?” Dowling did his best not to show worry. Orders from Philadelphia could blow up in his face almost as nastily as a people bomb. He could be cashiered. He could be summoned before the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War again-and wasn’t even once cruel and unusual punishment? He could be ordered back to the War Department to do something useless again. The possibilities were endless. The good possibilities seemed much more sharply limited.
“Here you are, sir,” the sergeant said.
Dowling opened the orders and put on his reading glasses. If this noncom had orders to report on how he took bad news, he was damned if he’d give the man any satisfaction. Wounded soldiers bit back screams for the same reason.
He skimmed through the orders, blinked, and read them again more slowly. “Well, well,” he said when he’d finished.
“May I ask, sir?” Captain Toricelli was sensitive to everything that might go wrong. What hurt Dowling’s career could hurt his, too.
“I’ve been relieved of this command. I’ve been transferred,” Dowling said.
Toricelli nodded. Like Dowling, he didn’t want to show a stranger his wounds hurt. “Transferred where, sir?” he asked, trying to find out how badly he was hit.
“To Clovis, New Mexico, which is, I gather, near the Texas border,” Dowling answered. He couldn’t keep the amazement out of his voice as he went on, “They’ve appointed me commander of the Eleventh Army there. They want somebody to remind the Confederates there’s a war on in those parts. And-”
“Yes, sir?” Toricelli broke in, eyes glowing. He might have been a soldier who’d discovered a bullet had punched a hole in his tunic without punching a hole in him.
“And they’ve given me a second star, Major Toricelli,” Major General Abner Dowling said. He and Toricelli shook hands.
“Congratulations, sir,” the sergeant from the War Department said to Dowling. The man turned to Toricelli. “Congratulations to you, too, sir.”
“Thank you,” Dowling said, at the same time as Toricelli was saying, “Thank you very much.” Dowling went back to his desk and pulled out the half pint. He eyed how much was left in the bottle. “About enough for three good slugs,” he said as he undid the cap. He raised the little bottle. “Here’s to Clovis, by God, New Mexico.” He drank and passed it to Angelo Toricelli.
“To Clovis!” Toricelli also drank, and passed it to the sergeant. “Here you go, pal. Kill it.”
“Don’t mind if I do,” the noncom said. “To Clovis!” He tilted his head back. His Adam’s apple worked. “Ah! That hits the spot, all right. Much obliged to you both.” He would still have a story to tell when he got back to the War Department, but it wouldn’t be one of frustration and rage and despair. Sergeants didn’t drink with generals-or even majors-every day.
One swig of whiskey didn’t turn him into a drunk. He drove off toward Philadelphia. That left Dowling and his adjutant in a pleasant sort of limbo. “What the deuce is going on in New Mexico?” Toricelli asked.
“All I know is what I read in the newspapers, and you don’t read much about New Mexico there.” Dowling figured he was heading to Clovis to fix that, or try. “Only thing I can really recall is that bombing raid on Fort Worth and Dallas a few months ago.”
“Probably a good idea to find out before we get there,” Toricelli said.
“Probably,” Dowling agreed. He was sure that never would have occurred to George Custer. Custer would have charged right in and started slugging with the enemy, regardless of what was going on beforehand. Nine times out of ten, he and everyone around him would soon have regretted it. The tenth time… The tenth time, he would have ended up a national hero. Dowling didn’t make nearly so many blunders as his former boss. He feared he would never become a national hero, though. His sense of caution was too well developed.
“I’m sure we’ll stop in Philadelphia on our way to Clovis,” his adjutant said. “The War Department can brief us there.” Captain-no, Major-Toricelli had a well-developed sense of caution, too.
Not even the stars on his shoulder straps kept Dowling from being searched before he got into the War Department. “Sorry, sir,” said the noncom who did the job. “Complain to the Chief of Staff if you want to. Rule is, no exceptions.”
Dowling didn’t intend to complain. As far as he could see, the rule made good sense. “How many people bombs have you had?” he asked.
“Inside here? None,” the sergeant answered. “In Philadelphia? I think the count is five right now.”
“Jesus!” Dowling said. The man who was patting him down nodded sadly.
He felt like saying Jesus! again when he got a look at the situation map for the Texas-New Mexico border. The so-called Eleventh Army had a division and a half-an understrength corps-to cover hundreds of miles of frontier. The bombers that had plastered Dallas and Fort Worth had long since been withdrawn to more active fronts.
Only one thing relieved his gloom: the Confederates he was facing were just as bad off as he was. Where he had a division and a half under his command, his counterpart in butternut commanded a scratch division, and somebody had been scratching at it pretty hard. Dowling thought he could drive the enemy a long way.
After studying the map, he wondered why he ought to bother. If he advanced fifty miles into Texas, even a hundred miles into Texas-well, so what? What had he won except fifty or a hundred empty, dusty miles? All those wide-open spaces were the best shield the Confederacy had. Advance fifty or a hundred miles into Virginia and the CSA staggered. Advance fifty or a hundred miles into Kentucky and you cut the enemy off from the Ohio River and took both farming and factory country. Texas wasn’t like that. There was a lot of it, and nobody had done much with a lot of what there was.
“Are you sending me out there to do things myself, or just to keep the Confederates from doing things?” he asked a General Staff officer.
That worthy also studied the map. “For now, the first thing is to make sure the Confederates don’t do anything,” he replied. “If they take Las Cruces, people will talk. If they go crazy and take Santa Fe and Albuquerque, I’d say your head would roll.”
“They’d need a devil of a lot of reinforcements to do that,” Dowling said, and the colonel with the gold-and-black arm-of-service colors didn’t deny it. Dowling went on, “They’d have to be nuts, too, because even taking Albuquerque won’t do a damn thing about winning them the war.”
“Looks that way to me, too,” the colonel said.
“All right, then-we’re on the same page, anyhow,” Dowling said. “Now, the next obvious question is, who do I have to kill to get reinforcements of my own?”
“Well, sir, till we settle the mess in Pennsylvania, you could murder everybody here and everybody in Congress and you still wouldn’t get any,” the General Staff officer said gravely. That struck Dowling as a reasonable assessment, too. The colonel added, “I hope you’ll be able to hold on to the force you’ve got. I don’t promise, but I hope so.”