I hope to get leave before too long, and will come home to have a look at Marshlands. I am sure you are whipping the old place back into shape. Tom was always sure of that. Till now, his confidence had always been justified. Now-Anne didn’t want to think about now. Her eyes went to the last couple of sentences: Who would have dreamt the damned niggers could raise so much Cain? If I’d thought they could do half so much, I’d have sooner had them shooting at the damnyankees so we could get some use out of them. But even though everything else is turned upside down from before the war, I still love you, and I’ll see you soon-Tom.
“Miss Anne?” Julia said when Anne stood there motionless, reading the letter over several times.
“Hush,” Anne Colleton replied absently. After a bit, she put the letter down and picked up the one from the president of the Confederacy. She read through that letter twice, too. Her breath whistled out in a long sigh.
“You all right, Miss Anne?” Julia asked, sounding for once very much like the concerned body servant she’d been till not long before.
“No,” Anne said. “Not even close.” She’d misjudged her brother-and if she couldn’t tell what Tom was thinking these days, how could she trust her judgment on anything else? The short answer was, she couldn’t. She sighed again, even louder this time. “Maybe Gabriel Semmes isn’t a complete utter damn fool after all. Maybe.” She tried to make herself sound as if she believed it. It wasn’t easy.
George Armstrong Custer stood at the edge of the road, by a sign that had an arrow saying KENTUCKY pointing north and another saying TENNESSEE pointing south. A photographer snapped several pictures. “These’ll make bully halftones, General,” he said.
“Splendid, my good man, splendid,” Custer replied grandly. Major Abner Dowling felt ready to retch. That road sign was as resurrected as Lazarus-everything hereabouts, like everything everywhere the rake of war passed, had been stomped flat. When it came to getting his name-and, better yet, his photograph-in the papers, Custer was not a man to let mere rude facts stand in his way. Dowling would have thought he’d had the sign made up special for the occasion, but that order would have gone through him, so Custer must have come up with a real one instead.
The photographer put down the camera and pulled out a notebook and pencil; he doubled as a reporter. “To what do you attribute your success in this spring’s campaign, General?” he asked.
Before Custer could reply, a barrel came rumbling down the road, heading south into Tennessee. Another followed, then another. Everybody except the drivers rode on top of the machines, not inside them. Men had died from heat prostration inside barrels, trying to fight in this hideous summer weather. Kentucky had been bad. Tennessee promised to be worse.
Custer pointed to the machines. “There is your answer, sir. The barrels have filled Rebel hearts not only with fear but also with a good, healthy respect for the prowess of the American soldier and for the genius lying behind what I call with pardonable pride old-fashioned Yankee ingenuity. I have always insisted that machines as well as men will make the difference-are you all right, Major Dowling?”
“Yes, sir. Sorry, sir,” Dowling said. “Must have been the dust the barrels kicked up, or maybe those stinking exhaust fumes. I couldn’t breathe for a second or two there.”
“I hope you’re better now,” Custer said doubtfully. “You sounded like a man choking to death. Where was I? Oh yes, barrels. I-”
Custer barreled on. Dowling took out a pocket handkerchief and daubed at his sweaty forehead and streaming eyes. Custer disapproved of the aeroplane. He disapproved of the machine gun, though he’d risen to prominence in the Second Mexican War because he’d had a few attached to his command. He disapproved of the telephone and the telegraph. He undoubtedly would have disapproved of the telescope had it not been invented before he was born.
But barrels-he approved of barrels. Barrels, to him, remained cavalry reborn, cavalry proof against everything machine guns could do. Since he’d grown up in the cavalry, he’d transferred his affection to these gasoline-burning successors. And Custer, being Custer, never did anything by halves. When he fell in love, he fell hard.
To prosaic Dowling, barrels were bully infantry support weapons. Past that…he failed to share Custer’s enthusiasm. Custer had any number of enthusiasms he did not share, that for Custer being perhaps the largest.
But even Dowling was prepared to admit the barrels had done some good. The first few times the Rebs saw them, they’d panicked. They were good soldiers; as one of their sincerest foes, Dowling admitted as much. Even the best soldiers, though, would run if the alternative was dying without having the chance to hit back at their enemies.
They weren’t panicking quite so much now. They were starting to figure out ways to blow up barrels, too. The armored machines had proved vulnerable to artillery fire, though artillery had trouble hitting moving targets even if the movement was no swifter than the barrels’ mechanized waddle. Still, Dowling had thought he’d grow old and die in Kentucky, and here he was in Tennessee, or at least on the border.
“Next stop-Nashville!” Custer declared, waving his staff as if he were a train conductor. Dowling wished he thought it would be so easy.
“General, what will your men do if they come up against black troops in Confederate uniform?” the reporter asked.
“I’ll believe that when I see it,” Custer answered. Here, for once, Dowling agreed with him completely. He went on, “If it does happen, it will be only one more sign that the Rebels are scraping the bottom of the barrel-heh, heh. The frogs are padding their lines with African savages these days, so I suppose the Rebs might give their home-grown niggers guns-not that they haven’t grabbed guns of their own already, to use on the whites who now talk about using them against us.”
“Er-yes.” The fellow with the camera and notebook hadn’t bargained for a speech. He came back to the question he’d really asked: “But how will your soldiers respond to them, if they are enlisted?”
Custer’s drooping mustache and even more drooping jowls made his frown impressively ugly. “How will they respond to them?” he repeated, not caring for the fact that his earlier answer hadn’t satisfied the man. “I expect they’ll shoot them in great carload lots, that’s how.”
“Great-carload-lots.” The reporter scribbled furiously. “Oh, that’s good, sir, that’s very good. They’ll like that-it’ll probably get a headline.”
“Do you think so?” All of a sudden, the general commanding First Army was sweetness and light once more. Even Dowling thought it was a pretty good line, and he was not inclined to give his commander much credit for such things.
The reporter asked a couple of more questions. Custer, having succeeded with one joke, tried some others, all of which fell flat. They fell so flat, in fact, that the reporter put away his notebook, picked up his camera, and departed faster than he might otherwise have done.
Custer, as usual, was oblivious to such subtleties. Puffing out his flabby chest, he turned to Dowling and said, “I think that went very well.”
Of course you do, his adjutant thought. It was publicity. It was, as usual, hard to go wrong with an answer of, “Yes, sir.”
“And now back to headquarters. I want to prepare the orders for our next attack against the Rebs’ positions.”
“Yes, sir,” Dowling said again. Custer was taking a more active interest in the campaign these days, partly, Dowling supposed, because Libbie was still with him and partly because, like a child with new Christmas toys, he was playing with the barrels to find out what all they could do.