“My God!” Moss said. “Was that my fifth?” He counted on his fingers. “Jesus, I guess it was.”
“Here we have something new,” Pruitt observed: “the unintentional ace.”
More laughter rang out. Dud Dudley said, “It’s a good thing you finally showed up. We were going to eat this beauty without you in a couple of minutes, and then spend the next five years gloating about it.”
“Give me a piece,” Moss said fiercely.
“You want a piece, go to the brothel,” Innis told him. “You want some cake, stay here.” A bayonet lay next to the cake. He picked it up and started slicing.
Cake and whiskey wasn’t a combination Moss had had before. After he’d taken a couple of good swigs from the pint, he didn’t much care. The hooch was good, the cake was good, the company was good, and he didn’t think at all about the man he’d killed to earn the celebration.
IX
Jake Featherston went from gun to gun, making sure all six howitzers in the battery were well positioned, supplied with shells, and ready to open up if the Yankees decided to pay the trenches a call. He didn’t think that would happen; the drive through Maryland had taken an even crueler toll on U.S. forces than on those of the Confederacy, and the latest Yankee push had drowned in an ocean of blood a couple of days before.
All the same, he made sure he hunted up Caleb Meadows, the next most senior sergeant in the battery, and said, “You know what to give the damnyankees if they hit us while I’m gone and you’re in charge.”
“Sure do.” Meadows’ Adam’s apple bobbed up and down as he spoke. He was a scrawny, gangly man who spoke as if he thought somebody was counting how many words he said. “Two guns sighted on that ridge they got, two right in front of our line, and t’other two ready for whatever happens.”
“That’s it,” Jake agreed. “I expect I’ll be back by suppertime.”
Meadows nodded. He didn’t say anything. That was in character. He didn’t salute, either. How could he, when he and Featherston were both sergeants? Jake had commanded the battery ever since Captain Stuart went out in a blaze of glory. He was still a sergeant. He didn’t like still being a sergeant.
He went back through Ceresville, past a couple of mills that had stood, by the look of what was left of them, since the days of the Revolutionary War. They weren’t standing any more. U.S. guns had seen to that.
The bridge over the Monocacy still did stand, though the ground all around both ends of it had been chewed up by searching guns. Military policemen stood on the northeastern bank, rifles at the ready, to keep unauthorized personnel from crossing. Jake dug in his pocket, produced his pass, and displayed it to one of the men with a shiny MP’s gorget held on his neck by a length of chain. The fellow examined it, looked sour at being unable to find anything irregular, and waved him across.
He had to ask several times before he could find his way to the headquarters of the Army of Northern Virginia. They were farther back toward Frederick than he’d thought, probably to make sure no long-range U.S. shells came to pay them a call. Once he got into the tent city, he had to ask for more directions to get to Intelligence.
A corporal who looked more like a young college professor was clacking away on a typewriter inside the flap of the tent, which was big enough to be partitioned off into cubicles. He finished the sentence he was on before looking up and saying, “Yes, Sergeant?” His tone said he outranked Featherston regardless of how many stripes each of them wore on his sleeve.
“I have an appointment with Major Potter.” Jake displayed his pass once more.
The corporal examined it more carefully than the military policeman had done. He nodded. “One moment.” He vanished into the bowels of the tent. When he came back, he waved for Jake to accompany him.
Major Clarence Potter was typing, too. Unlike the corporal, he broke off as soon as he saw Featherston. “Sit down, Sergeant,” he said, and then, to the noncom who’d escorted Jake back to him, “Fetch Sergeant Featherston a cup of coffee, why don’t you, Harold? Thanks.” It was an order, but a polite one.
“Good coffee,” Jake said a minute or so later. You couldn’t make coffee this tasty up near the front, not when you were brewing it in a hurry in a pot you hardly ever got the chance to wash. Jake realized he couldn’t complain too much, not when the infantry hardly boasted a pot to their name, but made their joe in old tin cans.
“I’d say you’ve earned good coffee,” Major Potter said equably. “Glad you like it. We get the beans shipped up from a coffeehouse in Washington. But enough of that.” He glanced down to whatever paper he had in the typewriter. “I’d say you’ve earned any number of things, but my opinion is not always the one that counts. Which is, I suppose, why you asked to see me today.”
“Yes, sir,” Featherston said. And then, as he’d feared it would, all the frustration came boiling to the top: “Sir, who the devil do I have to kill to get myself promoted in this man’s Army?”
Potter frowned at him. The major didn’t look like much, not till you saw his eyes. Sniper’s eyes, the soldiers called a glance like that: they didn’t necessarily mean the fellow who had them was good with a rifle, only that you didn’t want to get on his bad side or he’d make you pay. But Jake was also frowning, too purely ticked off at the world to give a damn about what happened next.
And Potter looked down first. He fiddled with some of the papers on his desk, then sighed. “I’m afraid killing Yankees doesn’t do the job, Sergeant. I wish it did. It’s the criterion I’d use. But, as I told you, my views, while they have some weight, are not the governing ones.”
“I been running that battery every since Captain Stuart went down, sir,” Jake said, and Clarence Potter nodded. “We’ve fought just as good with me in charge of things as we did with him, maybe better. Besides”-he had enough sense to hold his voice down, but he couldn’t keep the fury out of it-“that damned fool would have got every man jack of us killed for nothin’ better than him goin’ out in a blaze of glory. We would have lost every man and every gun we had.”
“I don’t doubt it for a moment,” Major Potter said. “But you asked whom you had to kill to get a promotion, Sergeant?” After waiting for Featherston to nod in turn, he went on, “The plain answer is, you will never be promoted in the First Richmond Howitzers, and you are most unlikely to win promotion anywhere in the Confederate States Army, for the simple reason that you killed Captain Jeb Stuart III.”
Jake stared at him. Potter was dead serious. “I didn’t, sir, and you know I didn’t,” Jake said, holding up one hand to deny the charge. “When I was starting to move the battery out, I did everything I could to get him to come along. He stopped me. He stopped the whole battery. If the damnyankees hadn’t shot him, he would have kept us there till they overran us.”
“‘If the damnyankees hadn’t shot him,’” Potter repeated. “And why, Sergeant, did he put himself in a position where the Yankees were able to shoot him so easily?”
“You ought to know, sir,” Jake answered. “On account of the trouble he got into with you for keeping that snake-in-the-grass nigger Pompey around and not letting anybody find out the son of a bitch really was a Red.”
“That’s right,” Major Potter said. “And, having fallen under a cloud, he did the noble thing and fell on his sword, too-or the modern equivalent, at any rate.” His nostrils twitched; by the way he said the noble thing, he meant something more like the boneheaded thing. “But now we come down to it. Who was it, Sergeant Featherston, who first alerted Army of Northern Virginia Intelligence to the possibility that there might be something wrong with this Pompey?”