Chester was thinking about the same thing. “As long as we keep licking him, the rest doesn’t matter. Sooner or later, he’ll be licked whether he likes it or not.”
“Yeah?” Rohe weighed that, then nodded. “Yeah. Sounds right, Sarge. So when do we go over the Ohio?”
“Beats me,” Chester said. “Let’s bundle the other guys across first. Then we can worry about us, right?” Rohe nodded again.
Major Jerry Dover watched from the south bank of the Ohio as trucks and infantrymen crossed the bridge back into Kentucky. The span was laid about a foot below the surface of the river. The damnyankees still hadn’t figured out that trick. When no one was on the bridge, it was invisible from the air. U.S. bombers didn’t keep coming over and trying to blow it to hell and gone.
The foot soldiers on the bridge looked like men walking on water. Dover turned to Colonel Travis W.W. Oliphant and said, “If we keep it up, sir, we can start our own religion.”
“What’s that?” Colonel Oliphant didn’t get it. I might have known, Dover thought with a mental sigh. Then the light dawned on his superior. Oliphant scowled. “I don’t find that amusing, Major. I don’t find that amusing at all,” he said. “I find it the next thing to blasphemous, as a matter of fact.”
“Sorry, sir,” Dover lied. Damned stuffed shirt. It wasn’t as if he didn’t know as much. He did. Any man who got huffy over not one initial but two couldn’t be anything but a stuffed shirt.
Colonel Oliphant went on trumpeting and wiggling his ears and pawing the ground. After a little while, Dover stopped listening to him. He was watching the stream of men and machines to make sure all the field kitchens safely returned to the CSA. Oliphant was supposed to be doing the same thing. He was too busy ranting.
“If we make God turn His face away from us in disgust, how can we prevail?” he demanded.
Dover thought about Negroes disappearing in Atlanta. He thought about the people he lost from the Huntsman’s Lodge in cleanouts. He wondered what was going on since he put on the uniform and went away. Was Xerxes still there? He could hope, but that was all he could do. “Sir, do you know about the camps?” he asked Colonel Oliphant in a low voice.
“What?” The other officer stared at him as if he were suddenly spouting Choctaw. “What are you talking about?”
“The camps,” Dover repeated patiently. “The camps where niggers go in but they don’t come out.”
He wondered if Travis W.W. Oliphant would deny that any such things existed. A little to his surprise, Oliphant didn’t. “Yes, I know about them. So what?” he said.
“Well, sir, if God will put up with those, I don’t think He’ll get too disgusted about a bad joke of mine,” Dover said.
Oliphant turned red. “The one has nothing to do with the other, Major,” he said stiffly. “The Negroes deserve everything that we’re giving them. Your so-called joke, on the other hand, was completely gratuitous.”
“God told you the Negroes have it coming, did He?” Jerry Dover asked.
“See here, Dover, you don’t have the right attitude,” Colonel Oliphant said. “Whose side are you on, anyway?”
“I’m on the Confederacy’s side…sir,” Dover answered. “If you think a stupid joke will put us in bad with God, I’m not so sure you are, though.” He’d managed the Huntsman’s Lodge too damn long. He wasn’t inclined to take guff from anybody, even if the guff-slinger wore three stars on either side of his collar while Dover had only one.
“I will write you up for this insubordination, Major,” Oliphant said in a low, furious voice. “You’ll get a court-martial, by God-yes, by God!”
He failed to impress Dover, who said, “Go ahead. One of three things will happen. They’ll throw my ass in the stockade, and I’ll be safer than you are. Or they’ll take the uniform off my back and ship me home, and I’ll be a lot safer than you are. Or-and here’s my bet-they’ll tear you a new asshole for wasting their time with this picayune shit, and they’ll leave me the hell alone. So sure, court-martial me, Colonel. Be my guest. I’ll thank you for it.”
Travis W.W. Oliphant’s mouth opened and closed several times. He might have been a freshly hooked perch. Subordinates were supposed to react to the threat of a court-martial with terror, not gloating anticipation. After his wordless tries, he finally managed to choke out, “You’re not a proper soldier at all, Dover.”
“That depends, sir. If you want me to keep people fed, I’ll do it like nobody’s business,” Dover said. “If you feed me bullshit and tell me it’s breakfast, I’m gonna puke it all over your shoes.”
Colonel Oliphant retreated in disorder, shaking his head. No summons to a court-martial ever came. Dover hadn’t expected one.
Since he wasn’t going to the stockade, he had plenty to do. The Confederate units that got out of Ohio were in a horrible tangle. They had to try to improvise a defense where they’d thought they wouldn’t need to. The CSA hadn’t had much time to fortify Kentucky before the war broke out, and neglected it afterwards. Confederate thinking was surely that Ohio was more important.
But now Ohio was back in the damnyankees’ hands. Whatever happened next would happen because the United States wanted it to, not because the Confederate States did. How good was the Confederacy at playing defense? Nobody knew, probably including Jake Featherston.
When supplies didn’t come up from farther south fast enough to suit him, Dover acquired an evil reputation with farmers all over northern Kentucky. He requisitioned what he needed, paying in Confederate scrip.
Some of the farmers’ screams reached Richmond. They got Dover a letter of commendation in his promotion jacket. Colonel Oliphant ignored it. Colonel Oliphant ignored Jerry Dover as much as he could from then on out, too.
That suited Dover down to the ground. He got more work done without Colonel Oliphant than he would have with him. He moved depots closer to the river than Oliphant liked, too. He didn’t think Oliphant was a coward-he’d seen the man blazing away at strafing U.S. fighters with a submachine gun, cool as you please. But the colonel’s ideas about logistics formed during the Great War, and didn’t move forward with the easy availability of telephones and wireless sets and trucks.
Front-line soldiers appreciated what Dover did, regardless of whether Travis W.W. Oliphant understood it. Dover got to the front himself whenever he could. The best way to make sure things worked as you wanted them to was to check them with your own eyes. He knew that from the restaurant business.
And he promptly caught one potbellied supply sergeant diverting rations to the local civilians-for a nice little rakeoff, of course. Of course. He landed on the enterprising noncom like a thousand-pound bomb. After the sergeant went off in irons-nobody wasted time being nice to mere noncoms-things elsewhere along the line of the Ohio tightened up remarkably.
Because of all his time at the Huntsman’s Lodge, Dover knew better than to believe he’d worked miracles. He didn’t labor under the delusion that he’d changed human nature. Thieves and grifters were going to keep right on being thieves and grifters. But he forced them to be careful for a while, which was better than a poke in the eye with a carrot.
“Way to go, Major,” a first lieutenant running a company right on the southern bank of the river told him. “We’ve got more grub here than I reckoned we’d ever see.”
“Good,” Dover said. “Good you’ve got it now, I mean. Not so good you gave up thinking you ever would.”
“Yeah, well, what can you do? Shit happens,” the lieutenant answered. “We were up on the other side of the border for a long time. We could swap smokes with the damnyankees for some of their rations, and we could requisition on the farms when we ran low. But that don’t go over so good when you’re requisitioning from your own people. So we were making do and getting by down here, but it’s a damn sight better now.”
“Dammit, this country grows enough food. This country cans enough food,” Dover said-and requisitioning from his own side bothered him not a bit. “We ought to be able to get that stuff to the people who need it the most.”