“Are the Rebels any different since their Negroes rose in revolt?” Davis asked.
The soldiers looked at one another. “Not when we’re coming at them, that’s for sure,” Martin said, and everybody nodded. “You think about it, though, they haven’t been coming at us as hard lately. ’Course, it’s been winter, too, so I don’t know just how much that means.”
“Confederates more inclined to stand on the defensive.” Richard Harding Davis said the words aloud, as if tasting them before setting them down on paper. Then he grunted. It sounded more like surprise than approval. He looked at Martin-no, through Martin. His mouth opened, as if he was about to say something else.
Instead, he swayed. The notebook and pencil dropped from his hands into the mud. His knees buckled. He collapsed.
“Jesus!” Martin and the other soldiers crowded round the fallen reporter. Martin grabbed for his wrist. He found no pulse. “He’s dead,” the sergeant said in blank amazement. Davis’ body bore no wound he could see. He knew a shell fragment as tiny as a needle could kill, but no shells had landed anywhere close by.
His shouts and those of his squadmates brought a doctor into the front line within a couple of minutes. The soldiers wouldn’t have rated such an honor, but Davis was important. The doctor stripped the correspondent out of his fancy not-quite-uniform. Try as he would, he couldn’t find a wound, either. “His heart must have given out on him, poor fellow,” he said, and shook his head. “He’s not-he wasn’t-that old, but he’d been working hard, and he wasn’t that young, either.”
“Isn’t that a hell of a thing?” Martin said as a couple of soldiers carried the mortal remains of Richard Harding Davis to the rear.
“Terrible,” Paul Andersen agreed. “You got a cigarette?”
“Makings,” Martin answered, and passed him a tobacco pouch. “Hell of a thing. You ever expect to see man die of what do you call ’em-natural causes-up here? What a fucking waste.” Andersen laughed at that as he rolled coarse tobacco into a scrap of newspaper. After a moment, Martin laughed, too. Yes, graveyard humor came easy at the front. It was the only kind that did.
VI
“There is, there is, there is a God in Israel!” George Armstrong Custer chortled, brandishing a newspaper at his adjutant.
“Sir?” Abner Dowling said. He’d already seen the Army newspaper. He hadn’t noticed anything in it to make him want to do a buck-and-wing. He wondered what the devil General Custer had spotted to bring him out of the bad-tempered depression in which he’d been sunk ever since his wife got to Kentucky.
Custer wasn’t just happy, he was gloating. “Look!” he said, pointing to a story on the second page of the paper. “Richard Harding Davis had the good grace to drop dead on a visit to the front. I wish he would have done it while he was on this front, but damn me to hell if I’ll complain.”
Davis had written about Custer in less than flattering terms: a capital crime if ever there was one, as far as the general commanding First Army was concerned. “Sir, his work is being judged by a more exacting Critic now than any editor he knew here,” Dowling said, which not only smacked of truth (if you were a believing man, as Dowling was) but was noncommittal, letting Custer pick for himself the way in which the late correspondent was likely to be judged.
He picked the way Dowling had been sure he would: “How right you are, Major, which means they’ve got him on a frying pan hotter than the one that does my morning bacon-and he’ll stay there a lot longer and get a lot more burnt, not that that’s easy these days.” He hadn’t stopped complaining about the ways the meals that were cooked for him had gone downhill since Olivia left. He hadn’t stopped complaining to Dowling, that is. He hadn’t said one word where his wife was liable to hear it. To Dowling’s regret, the old boy had a keenly developed sense of self-preservation.
Still snorting with glee, the illustrious general waddled into the kitchen. Dowling suspected the corporal doing duty at the stove for the time being would hear fewer fulminations than usual. When Custer was in a good mood, everything looked rosy to him. Trouble was, he wasn’t in a good mood very often.
Libbie Custer came downstairs a moment later. She was only a few years younger than her husband, and had the look of a schoolmarm who would sooner crack a ruler over her pupils’ knuckles than teach them the multiplication table. Her eyes were the gray of the sky just before it settles down to rain for a week. When she fixed her gaze on Dowling, he automatically assumed he’d done something wrong. He didn’t know what yet, but he figured Mrs. Custer would tell him.
She, however, chose an indirect approach: “Did I hear the general laughing just now?” She often spoke of her husband in that old-fashioned way.
“Uh, yes, ma’am,” Dowling answered. He had not taken long to decide that at least two thirds of the brains in the Custer family resided in the female of the species.
Libbie Custer did her best to prove herself more deadly than the male, too. “Where is she?” she hissed. “I’ll send her packing in a hurry, I promise you that, and afterwards I’ll deal with the general, too.” She sounded as if she looked forward to it. More-she sounded as if she’d had practice at it, too.
But Dowling said, truthfully if not completely, “There’s no woman here, ma’am. It was only-”
“Don’t give me that.” Mrs. Custer cut him off so abruptly, he was glad she didn’t have a knife in her hand. “He’s been doing this for forty years, the philandering skunk, ever since he found that pretty little Cheyenne girl, Mo-nah-see-tah-did you ever think you’d learn how to say ‘stinking whore’ in Cheyenne, Major Dowling? When he laughs that way, he’s done it again. I know him. I ought to, by now, don’t you think?”
“Ma’am, you’re wrong.” That was truthful, too, if only technically. Dowling had enough troubles serving as intermediary between Custer and the rest of First Army; serving as intermediary between Custer and Mrs. Custer struck him as conduct above and beyond the call of duty-far above. Rather desperately, he explained.
For a wonder, Libbie Custer heard him out. For another wonder, she didn’t call him a liar when he was done. Instead, she nodded and said, “Oh, that explains it. Mr. Richard Harding Davis.” George Armstrong Custer had sworn at Davis. He’d said he would use Davis’ reportage in the outhouse. Nothing he had said, though, packed the concentrated menace of those four words. Mrs. Custer went on, “Yes, that would explain it. Thank you, Major.”
She swept into the kitchen, her long, gray dress almost brushing the ground as she walked. She clung to the bustle, which had gone out of style for younger women a few years before. As far as Dowling was concerned, it made her look more like a cruising man-of-war than a stately lady, but no one had sought his opinion. No one was much in the habit of seeking his opinion.
From inside the kitchen came the sounds of mirth and gaiety-Dowling couldn’t hear the words, but the tone was unmistakable. The general and his wife were happy as a couple of larks. Dowling scratched his head. A moment before, Mrs. Custer had been ready to scalp her husband. Now the two of them seemed thick as thieves. It didn’t figure.
And then, after a bit, it did. Libbie Custer would come down on George like a dynamited building for any of his personal shortcomings. Given the scope of those, she had plenty of room for action. But Mrs. General Custer protected General Custer’s career like a tigress. Bad press jeopardized the general, not the man.
“I couldn’t live like that,” Dowling muttered. And yet the Custers had been wed since the War of Secession. Marital bliss? Dowling had his doubts. He shook his head. He didn’t have doubts, he damn well knew better. Whether they were what any outsider would call happy or not, though, they’d grown together. He doubted one of them would live more than a year or two if the other died. Libbie Custer looked ready to last another twenty years. Dowling wasn’t so sure about the general. But he’d have bet Custer would have keeled over from a heart attack or a stroke, not Richard Harding Davis. You never could tell.