Back in the Great War, Armstrong's father said, delousing meant baking your clothes and bathing in scalding water full of nasty chemicals, none of which kept the lice down for long. The spray that a bored-looking corporal turned on the men now was nothing like that. But it had one advantage over the old procedure: it really worked.
There was nothing wrong with showering under scalding water. "Wish I had a steel brush, to get all the dirt off," Squidface said, snorting like a whale.
"Yeah, well, if you didn't have a goddamn pelt there, you could get clean easier," Armstrong said. Squidface was one of the hairiest guys he'd ever seen-he had more hair on his back than a lot of guys did on their chest. "If the Confederates ever kill you, they'll tan your hide for a rug."
"Ahh, your mother," Squidface said. Only somebody who'd saved Armstrong's bacon plenty of times could have got away with that. Squidface qualified. So did several other guys from the platoon.
After the shower, food. Along with canned rations, Armstrong had eaten a lot of fried and roasted chicken in the field-plenty of henhouses around, and you didn't need much more than a skillet or, in a pinch, a sharp stick to do the cooking. But this was fried chicken done right, not half raw and half burnt. The hash browns were crisp and just greasy enough, too. He couldn't remember the last time he'd seen a regular potato that didn't come out of a can. Yams and sweet potatoes were all right for baking, but they just didn't cut it when you sliced them up and put them in hot lard.
And apple pie! And vanilla ice cream on top! "Goddamn!" Squidface said reverently. "I think I just came in my pants."
"I know what you mean." The size of the bite Armstrong took would have made a boa constrictor jealous.
"I want a slice of cheese to put on my pie, not ice cream," Herk said. The replacement was a veteran now, entitled to a veteran's gripes-and entitled to get razzed like a veteran, too.
"Herk wants to cut the cheese." Squidface held his nose.
"You were the one who came in your pants," Herk retorted. "Me, I want a broad."
Up and down the long table, soldiers nodded solemnly, Armstrong among them. This camp had everything for giving soldiers a good time except a whorehouse. Bluenoses made sure the U.S. Army didn't officially sponsor any such thing. If you wanted a woman, you had to find your own-which could get you killed if you picked the wrong one, and could easily leave you with a disease that would land you in big trouble when the Army found out you'd caught it.
Squidface had several suggestions on how Herk could satisfy himself, each more alarming than the one before. "Shut up already," Armstrong said after a while. "You're making me lose my appetite."
"You better show up for sick call in the mornin', Sarge," Squidface said. "Something's sure as shit wrong with you."
The line for the nightly movie was almost as long as the one for a brothel would have been. Armstrong got a seat just before they showed the newsreel. "Here is the first film from ruined Petrograd!" the announcer said importantly.
Armstrong had seen plenty of ruined cities. He'd seen Provo and Salt Lake City, and you couldn't ruin a place any worse than they got ruined. Or he thought you couldn't, till the camera panned across what was left of Petrograd. The Russian town was leveled, all the way out to the horizon. When the camera got to something that stuck up from the devastation, it moved in for a closer look.
It was an enormous bronze statue of a man on horseback-or it had been. Now it looked melted, melted from the top down. Armstrong tried to imagine what kind of heat could have done such a thing.
"This was the statue of Peter the Great, who founded Petrograd," the announcer said. "Now he demonstrates the power of our allies' scientific accomplishments."
"Fuck our allies," Squidface said. "We don't get one of those ourselves pretty damn quick, the goddamn Kaiser'll drop one on Philly next."
That struck Armstrong as a pretty good guess. He made a guess of his own: "What do you want to bet Featherston's got guys in white lab coats working on one, too? With his fucking rockets, he could throw one anywhere in the USA."
"Shit." Squidface looked around, as if expecting one of those rockets to crash down any second now. "You're right."
As a matter of fact, Armstrong was wrong. The most powerful Confederate rockets reached only a couple of hundred miles. That meant they couldn't touch most of the USA, especially since the areas C.S. soldiers actually controlled shrank by the day. But, with a bomb like that, worry outran reality with ease.
"On our side of the Atlantic…" the newsreel announcer said. The screen showed the charred wreckage of gracious homes that had to date back to long before the War of Secession. It showed sunken ships in a bombed-out harbor district. It showed dirty, unshaven Confederate soldiers shambling off into captivity.
"We was there. We seen that," Squidface said.
"Better believe it," Armstrong agreed.
"On our side of the Atlantic, the capture of Savannah cuts the Confederate States in half," the announcer said proudly. "This on the heels of the loss of Richmond…"
The Stars and Stripes flew over the wreckage of the Confederate Capitol. U.S. soldiers prowled the cratered grounds of the Gray House, walking past twisted and overturned antiaircraft guns. Scrawny civilians got meals at a U.S. field kitchen.
"How long can the enemy hope to keep up his useless resistance in the face of overwhelming U.S. might?" the announcer asked, as if the soldiers watching the newsreel would be able to tell him.
The answer they were supposed to give him was, Not very long. Armstrong had seen enough propaganda to understand that. But this time the newsreel had outsmarted itself. The fearsome bomb that leveled Petrograd made you think twice. It made Armstrong think twice, anyhow. If the Confederates came up with one of those, or more than one, before the United States could, they were liable to win the war in spite of losing their capital and getting their country cut in half. Drop something like that on Philadelphia and New York and Boston, and the United States would really have something to worry about.
Drop one on Birmingham, Armstrong thought savagely. Drop one on New Orleans. Drop one on fucking Charleston. Like most people from the USA, he particularly despised the city where the War of Secession broke out.
After the newsreel came a short feature, with the Engels Brothers involved with an actor plainly meant to be Jake Featherston. "I'll reduce your population!" he yelled, which made the Brothers get into a ridiculous brawl to see which of them would be eliminated. That was all propaganda, too, but it was funny. Armstrong and Squidface grinned at each other in the darkness.
And the main feature was a thriller, with the Confederates after the secret of a new bombsight and the heroine thwarting them at every turn. She was pretty and she had legs up to there, which might have made Armstrong root for her even if she saluted the Stars and Bars.
After the feature, he got to lie down on a real bed. He hadn't done much of that lately-oh, a few times, when he flopped in a house some Georgians had vacated, but not very often. With snoring soldiers all around him, he could relax and sleep deep. Out in the field, he might as well have been a wild beast. The least little noise would leave him not just awake but with his heart pounding and with a rifle or a knife in his hand.
Bacon and eggs and more hash browns and halfway decent coffee the next morning were wonderful, too. So was eating them without peering this way and that, afraid of holdouts and snipers and his own shadow if it caught him by surprise.
"You know, this is pretty damn good. I could really get used to this." He was surprised at how surprised he sounded.
"It is, isn't it?" Squidface sounded surprised, too. Had he been in the war from the start? Armstrong didn't know. But he'd sure been in it long enough to turn into a vet.