This wasn't going to go the way Abner Dowling had thought it would. Whatever Carter was, he wasn't the U.S. liberal somehow fallen into the CSA Dowling had thought him to be. "Maybe you'll explain why," the U.S. soldier said.
"Of course, sir. I'd be glad to," Jack Carter replied. "My chiefest reason is that I am a Confederate patriot. I wish you were hundreds of miles from here, suing for peace from victorious Confederate armies."
"That's nice," Dowling said. "Jake Featherston wishes the same thing. He won't get his wish, and you won't get yours. Santa Claus doesn't have those in his sack."
"Jake Featherston. Do me the courtesy, if you please, of not mentioning that name in my presence again." Carter's loathing might have been the most genteel Dowling had ever met, which made it no less real.
"Sorry about that. He's still President of the Confederate States."
"He's an upstart, a backwoods bumpkin. His father was an overseer." Jack Carter's lip curled. That was one of those things people talked about but hardly ever saw. Dowling saw it now. Carter went on, "My family has mattered in this state since before the Revolution."
A light went on in Dowling's head. "That's why you saved your Negroes!"
"Yes, of course. They've served us for as long as we've served Virginia. To lose them to the vulgar excesses of that demagogue and his faction…" Carter shook his head. "No."
"Noblesse oblige," Dowling murmured.
"Mock me if you care to. We did what we thought right for them."
Dowling wasn't sure whether he was mocking or not. Without a doubt, Carter had risked his own life and his family's to protect those of his servants. That almost required admiration. And yet…"Did you do anything for other colored people, Mr. Carter?"
"That was not my place," Carter said simply. "But you'll find I was not the only one to take the measures I thought necessary."
He was bound to be right. Some other whites had hidden Negroes and helped them escape the Freedom Party's population reductions. Some had, yes, but not very many. "Maybe you'd better go," Dowling said.
Jack Carter took a step back. "You thought we might be friends because of what I did. I assure you, sir, I am more sincerely your enemy than Jake Featherston ever dreamt of being. Good day." He bowed, then stalked out.
He might be a more sincere enemy, but Jake Featherston made a more dangerous one. Carter was content to abhor from a distance. Featherston wasn't. He wanted to kill what he didn't like, and he was much too good at it.
A sergeant with the wireless patch on his left sleeve burst into the tent. "Paris, sir!" he exclaimed.
"Paris?" Dowling's first thought, absurdly, was of Helen of Troy.
The sergeant set him straight: "Yes, sir! Paris! The Kaiser just blew it to hell and gone. Eiffel Tower's nothing but a stump, the report says!"
"Jesus Christ!" Dowling said, and then, "Will anything still be standing by the time this damn war gets done?"
N obody messed with Lavochkin's Looters as they fought their way up the South Carolina coast toward Charleston. Nobody shot at them from ambush. Nobody gave them any guff when they went through a town. Confederate soldiers who surrendered to them seemed pathetically grateful to have the chance.
"You see?" Lieutenant Boris Lavochkin said. "You can put the fear of God in these assholes. You can, and we did."
Chester Martin didn't answer that. He pretended he didn't hear it. He wished he could pretend he'd had nothing to do with the massacre in Hardeeville. But he had. He was no damn good at lying to himself. Even if he were, the nightmares that tore apart even his exhausted sleep would have made him stop trying.
He wasn't the only one who had them. Several guys in Lavochkin's platoon were jumpier than a cat at a Great Dane convention. Some replacements knew what was going on as soon as they came in. "Aren't you the guys who-?" they would say, and stop right there.
Others, more naпve or less plugged in, tried to figure out what was going on. They usually said something on the order of, "How come you guys are so weird?"
If anything bothered Lieutenant Lavochkin, he didn't show it. If anything, he was proud of what had happened in Hardeeville. "Nobody fucks with my outfit," he would tell anyone who wanted to listen. "I mean nobody. You fuck with us, tell the carver what you want on your goddamn headstone, 'cause you are all over with."
Captain Rhodes kept shaking his head. "I never expected anything like this to happen to me," he said one evening. He and Chester had got outside of some pretty good cherry brandy a Confederate had left behind. Booze blunted nightmares.
"War's a filthy business," Chester said. "God knows I saw that the last time around. I think the trenches were even worse than what we're doing now. For fighting in, I mean."
"Yeah, for fighting in," the company CO agreed. Or rather, half agreed, for he went on, "But what happened in Hardeeville, that wasn't fighting. That was just…murder for the fun of it. And what the Confederates are doing in those goddamn camps, that isn't fighting, either. That's murder for the fun of it, too, 'cause the smokes can't fight back. This war's filthier than the last one was. The horrible stuff then just kinda happened, 'cause they couldn't help it. This time, they're making it horrible on purpose."
He knew about the last war from what he'd read and what people told him. He wasn't anywhere near old enough to have fought in it. "You have a point, sir," Chester said. "Some of a point, anyway." Disagreeing too openly with a superior didn't do. But he damn well had been through the Great War. "What about the guys who started using gas? You think they weren't being horrible on purpose?"
"Well, you got me there," Rhodes admitted. Chester liked shooting the bull with him not least because he would admit somebody else had a point. He didn't have anything close to Boris Lavochkin's messianic confidence in his own rightness…and righteousness. What was Lieutenant Lavochkin but a scale model of Jake Featherston?
Featherston had flushed a whole country down the toilet. Lavochkin had only a platoon to play with-so far. But Chester was part of the platoon. If the lieutenant threw it away, the first sergeant went with it.
He didn't want to think about that, so he took another swig. Yeah, cherry brandy made a good thought preventer. The bottle was damn near empty. He passed it to Captain Rhodes, who put the kibosh on damn near.
"Charleston up ahead," Chester said. "Won't be long now."
"One more city," Rhodes said.
"Oh, it's more than that." Chester knew he sounded shocked. But Rhodes would have gone to school in the lull of the 1920s. Back then, nobody thought you needed to remind anybody of just how and why the USA and CSA got to be mortal foes. They would stay peaceful and live happily ever after. And if pigs had wings…
Chester remembered his own school days, before the Great War. They pounded you over the head with the War of Secession then. They kept saying that one day the USA would pay the CSA back. And the United States did. And then the Confederate States had some backpaying to do. And that's how come I'm sitting on my ass somewhere south of Charleston, Chester thought.
"I wouldn't mind marching through there," he said. "Give them one in the eye for Fort Sumter, you know?"
"Well, yeah," Rhodes said. But it didn't mean so much to him. Martin could tell. He didn't have that This is where it all began, and we'll damn well end it here, too kind of feeling. Maybe Lieutenant Lavochkin would. Or maybe he hated the whole Confederacy equally. All things considered, Chester didn't want to ask him.
He woke with a headache the next morning. Strong coffee and a couple of aspirins helped. Incoming artillery, on the other hand…Even now, the Confederates counterattacked whenever they thought they could drive their foes back a couple of miles. A U.S. machine gun opened up no more than twenty yards from Chester. His head didn't explode, which only proved he was tougher than he thought.