She filled the paste reservoir to her machine from one of the cans under it. The foreman at the paste plant probably had the exact same attitude. For that matter, the generals probably had the exact same attitude, too. What was Antonelli to them but one more line in the casualty lists?
All the canning machines, including Sylvia's, ran smoothly, unlike the war machine. She pulled her three levers, one after the other, then went back and did it again and again and again. If you didn't notice how your feet got sore from standing by the machine for hours at a time, you could get into a rhythm where you did your job almost without conscious thought, so that half the morning could go by before you noticed. Sylvia didn't know whether to like those days or be frightened of them.
Mr. Winter's voice startled her out of that half-mesmerized state: "Your husband well, Mrs. Enos?"
"What?" she said, and then, really hearing the words, "Oh. Yes. Thank you. I got a letter from him yesterday, as a matter of fact. I wrote an answer, too," she added virtuously, "but I forgot to mail it this morning. I'll do it on the way home."
"Good. That's good." The foreman's smile displayed large yellow teeth, a couple of them in the lower jaw missing. "Good-looking woman like you, though, I bet you get lonely anyhow, no man around. Being lonely's no fun. I know about that, since Priscilla died a few years ago."
Numbly, Sylvia nodded. The machine ran low on labels, which let her tend to it without having to say anything. Mr. Winter hadn't been crude, as men sometimes were. But she felt his eyes on her as she loaded in the labels. He was the foreman. If he pushed it and she said no, he could fire her. The line kept running smoothly, but she never got the easy rhythm back.
Among the butternut uniforms in the West Virginia prisoner-of-war camp were a few dark gray ones: Navy men captured by the damnyankees. Reggie Bartlett found himself gravitating toward them. For a while, he wondered why; he'd never had any special interest in the Confederate States Navy before the war began. After a bit, he found an answer that, if it wasn't the whole picture, was at least a good part of it.
The trouble was, soldiers were boring. He'd done as much hard fighting as any of them, and more than most-war in the Roanoke valley was as nasty a business as war anywhere in the world. He'd seen almost all the horrors there were, and heard about the ones he hadn't seen. Soldiers told the same kinds of stories, over and over again. They got stale.
Navy men, now, Navy men were different, and so were their stories. They'd been in strange places and done strange things-or at least things Reggie Bartlett had never done. Those tales made the time between stretches of chopping wood and filling in slit trenches and the other exciting chores of camp life pass more quickly.
Even when things went wrong in the stories, they went wrong in ways that couldn't happen on dry land. A senior lieutenant who somehow managed to look clean and spruce and well-shaved in spite of the general camp squalor was saying, "Damnyankees suckered me in, neat as you please. There sat this fishing boat, out in the middle of the Atlantic, no ships around her, naked as a whore in her working clothes. So up came my boat to sink her with the deck gun-cheaper and surer than using one of my fish-"
"One of your what, Lieutenant Briggs?" Reggie asked, a beat ahead of a couple of other prisoners who had gathered around the Navy lieutenant for reasons probably similar to his own.
"Torpedoes," Briggs explained. Under his breath, he muttered, "Landlubbers." But he resumed after a moment, as glad to tell the story as the others were to hear it: "You can't always trust a whore, though, even when she's naked. And sure enough, this was the badger game. The fishing boat was towing a Yankee sub on a cable with a telephone line attached. I let the fishermen go over the side before I sank their boat, and what thanks did I get? Their damned submersible blew me out of the water." His face clouded. "Only a couple-three of us lived. The rest went right to the bottom, never had a chance."
"It's almost like what the Mormons done to the damnyankees, blowin' up all that powder right under 'em," somebody said.
"More like sniper's work," Reggie contradicted. "A lot of times, a sniper'll be hiding, and he'll try and make somebody on the other side look up to see what's going on further down the trench. And if you're dumb enough to do it, the bastard with the scope on his rifle, he'll put one right in your earhole for you."
"Good analogy," Briggs said, nodding. He wasn't a whole lot older than Bartlett, but better educated and also stiffer in manner; had he been a civilian, he would have been something like a junior loan officer at a bank. He was steady, he was sound, he was reliable-and Reggie would have loved to play poker against him, because if the Yankees could play him for a sucker that way, Reggie figured he could, too.
He'd just noticed that his analogy, whether Briggs approved of it or not, took things back to the trenches when the U.S. guards started shouting, "Prisoners form by barracks in parade ranks!"
Senior Lieutenant Briggs frowned. "This isn't right. It's not time to form parade ranks." The break in routine irked him.
"Probably got some kind of special announcement for us," Bartlett said. The guards had done that before, a time or two. The special announcements they handed out weren't good news, not if you backed the Entente.
He didn't get the chance to learn Briggs' opinion of his guess; he had to hurry off to form up outside his own harsh, chilly building, a good ways away from where the Navy man was holding forth. The uniforms he and his comrades in misery wore would have given a Confederate drill sergeant a fit, but the ranks the men formed were as neat and orderly as anything that sergeant could have wanted.
"What do you reckon this is?" Jasper Jenkins asked, taking his place beside Bartlett.
"Dunno," Reggie told his friend. "I hope it's that we've had a couple more escapes, and they're gonna make the rest of us work harder on account of that. I don't mind paying the price they put on it. Worth it, you ask me."
"Yeah, that'd be good," Jenkins agreed. "They haven't figured out that we're gonna keep on tryin' to break out o' here no matter what they do. Only a fool'd want to stay, and that's a fact."
A U.S. captain strode importantly to the front of the prisoners' formation. He unfolded a sheet of paper and read from it in a loud, harsh voice: "The Imperial German government, the loyal ally of the United States, has announced the capture of the city of Verdun, the French having evacuated the said city after being unable in six weeks of battle to withstand the might of German arms. Victory shall be ours! Dismissed!"
The neat ranks of prisoners broke up into pockets of chattering men. Jasper Jenkins tugged at Bartlett's sleeve. "Hey, Reggie, where's this Vair-done place at?" he asked. Before the war, he probably would have asked the same thing about Houston or Nashville or Charleston; his horizon had been limited to his farm and the small town where he sold his crops and bought what little he couldn't raise for himself.
Reggie could have done better at the geography of the Confederate States. When it came to foreign countries, even foreign countries to which the CSA was allied…"I dunno, not exactly," he admitted. "Somewhere in France, it has to be, and I reckon somewhere near Germany, or the Huns wouldn't have been fighting for it. Past that, though, I can't tell you."
"Damnyankees sound like losin' it's about two steps from the end o' the world for the Frenchies," Jenkins said.
"I know they do," Reggie answered, "but you've got to remember two things. First one is, for all you know, they're lying just to get us downhearted. Second one is, even if they're not, I expect they're making it out to be more important than it really is. What are we going to do, call 'em liars?"