"Good. I believe you-you sound like a schoolteacher talking about the bawdyhouse next door to her apartment building." The chief of the General Staff chuckled. Potter was less amused, but let it pass. Chuckling still, Forrest went on, "I should have remembered you run spies. You think about these things more than an ordinary officer is liable to."
"Well, I should hope so!" Clarence Potter exclaimed. "Ordinary officers…" He shook his head. "I read a memoir once, by one of Robert E. Lee's couriers. In the Pennsylvania campaign, he almost lost a set of Lee's special orders-the damned fool had wrapped them around three cigars. If McClellan had found out how badly Lee had divided the Army of Northern Virginia, who knows how much mischief he could have done? An enlisted man saw the orders fall and gave them back. If he hadn't, that courier's name would be mud all over the CSA."
"You do have to pay attention to little things," Forrest agreed. He tapped the report with his fingernail. "Go ahead with what you've got in mind. I'll be interested to see what you turn up."
"Yes, sir." Potter's smile was all sharp teeth. "What-and who."
XIV
Colonel Irving Morrell hadn't read the Iliad since he got out of the Military Academy, almost thirty years ago now. Chunks of it still stuck in his mind, though. He didn't remember the anger of Achilles so much as the Greek hero sulking in his tent after he'd quarreled with Agamemnon.
All things considered, Morrell would rather have sulked in Achilles' tent than in Caldwell, Ohio, where he found himself ensconced for the moment. Caldwell was a town of fifteen hundred or two thousand people, a few miles west of Woodsfield. It was the county seat for Noble County, as a sign in front of the county courthouse declared. That made him feel sorry for the rest of the county.
Caldwell was a coal town. People had been mining coal there for more than sixty years, and it showed. The air was hazy with coal dust. When Morrell needed to hawk and spit, he spat black. There were no red brick buildings in Caldwell. There were no white frame houses, either. The brick buildings were murky brown, the frame houses gray. The people seemed as subdued as their landscape. A lot of them seemed covered in a thin film of coal dust, too.
All things considered, Caldwell would have made Irving Morrell gloomy even if he'd gone into the place cheery as a lark. Since he'd gone in sullen, he would have been satisfied to come away without hanging himself. Even that much sometimes seemed optimistic. Caldwell was where what would have been his grand attack against the base of the Confederate salient in Ohio had ingloriously petered out. Sabotage and Confederate Asskickers had brought his armor to a standstill.
That wasn't the worst of it, either. He'd thought it would be, but he'd been wrong. As he watched some of his precious barrels chained onto flatcars bound for the East Coast, his fury and frustration grew too large to hold in. He turned to Sergeant Michael Pound, who was always good for sympathy over imbecilities emanating from the War Department. "I'm being robbed, Sergeant," he said. "Robbed, I tell you, as sure as if they'd held a gun to my head and lifted my wallet."
"Yes, sir," Pound said. "If they're going to take your barrels, the least they could do would be to take you, too. Seems only fair."
"They don't want me anywhere near Philadelphia," Morrell said. "They want me to keep fighting here in Ohio. They've said so."
"They just don't want to give you anything to fight with," Sergeant Pound said. "They'll probably set you to making bricks without straw next."
"You mean they haven't?" Morrell said. "By God, I was doing that for years at Fort Leavenworth. We had the prototype for a modern barrel twenty years ago-had it and stuck it in a back room and forgot about it. Christ, Sergeant, you went back to the artillery when they closed down the Barrel Works."
"I'm glad you don't hold it against me, sir," Pound said.
"A man has to eat. There's nothing in the Bible or the Constitution against that," Morrell said. "If there were no barrels to work on-and there damn well weren't-you needed to be doing something."
"That was how I looked at it, too." Pound suddenly snapped his fingers. "I'll bet I know one of the reasons why they're taking your barrels away from you."
"More than I do," Morrell said sourly. "Tell me."
"They're the biggest bunch we can get our hands on this side of the Confederate salient," Pound said. "Everything west of here has to go the long way around, up through Canada-either that or on Great Lakes freighters that the enemy can bomb."
Morrell eyed him. "Normally, Sergeant, when I say somebody thinks like a General Staff officer, I don't mean it as a compliment. This time, I do. That makes much more sense than anything I've been able to think of." He paused. "How would you like me to recommend you for a commission? You have the brains to do well by it. You have more in the way of brains than four out of five officers I know, maybe more."
"Thank you very much, sir." Michael Pound smiled a crooked smile. "If it's all the same to you, though, I'll pass. I've seen what officers do. There's a lot more nonsense in it than there is when you've just got stripes on your sleeve. Gunner suits me fine. It's simple. It's clean. I know exactly what I have to do and how to do it-and I'm pretty damn good at it, too. My notion is, the Army needs a good gunner more than it needs an ordinary lieutenant, which is what I'd be."
"Oh, I wouldn't say that." Morrell's smile lifted only one corner of his mouth. "Whatever else you were, you'd be an extraordinary lieutenant. You talk back to me as a sergeant. If you got a gold bar on your shoulder, you'd probably talk back to the chief of the General Staff."
"Seeing how the war is going, wouldn't you say somebody ought to?" Pound sketched a salute and ambled off. He was blocky as a barrel himself-and solid as a barrel, too. And, when he went up against something he didn't like, he could also be as deadly as a barrel.
Morrell looked east. Then he looked west. Then he muttered something uncomplimentary about Jake Featherston's personal habits, something about which he was in no position to have firsthand knowledge. Sergeant Pound was altogether too likely to be right. The thrust up to Lake Erie was starting to hurt the USA. Morrell wondered what the exact problem was. Could they ship enough fuel or enough barrels on the rail lines north of the Great Lakes, but not both at once? Something like that, he supposed. Logistics had never been his favorite subject. No good officer could afford to ignore it, but he preferred fighting to brooding about rolling stock.
Of course, if not for rolling stock he'd still have had his barrels with him. They would have broken down one after another if they'd had to get to eastern West Virginia under their own power. Breakdowns kept almost as many of them out of action as enemy fire did. Morrell wished it were otherwise, but it wasn't. The weight of armor they carried stressed engines and suspensions to the point of no return, or sometimes past it.
Half a dozen barrels still in Caldwell had their engine decking off. Soldiers were attacking them with wrenches and pliers. Some, maybe even most, of them hadn't broken down. A barrel whose crew kept it in good running trim didn't fail as often as one whose crew neglected it.
Far off in the distance, artillery rumbled. Morrell cursed under his breath. He should have been up there punching, not stalled in this jerkwater town. And how could he ever hope to land any punches if they kept siphoning away his strength? He couldn't, but they'd blame him because he didn't.
The Constitution said U.S. soldiers weren't supposed to quarter themselves on civilians. Like most rules, that one sometimes got ignored when bullets started flying. Morrell didn't ignore it, though. He was perfectly happy in a tent or a sleeping bag or just rolled in a blanket-he liked the outdoors. That was a concept General Staff officers back in Philadelphia had trouble grasping.