He took his own advice, climbing up onto a firing step that was already starting to crumble and peering toward the northwest. If he’d been a C.S. officer defending this position against a whole great swarm of barrels, what would he have done? His first thought was, turn tail and run like hell.
Say what you would about the Rebels, he could count on the fingers of one hand the times they’d done anything like that. He turned and looked back over his shoulder, studying the earthworks he hadn’t yet explored in person. After perhaps half a minute of contemplation, he grunted softly. “You’d have mounted your guns up there,” he said, pointing, “and fired at us over open sights, or as near as makes no difference. I don’t know how many barrels you had left at the end, but you’d have put them behind that little swell of ground there”-he pointed again-“to keep us from spotting them for as long as you could.”
Harley Landis examined him the same way he’d examined the terrain. The C.S. colonel started to say something, stopped, and started again after a pause: “Has anyone ever told you, sir, that you may be too damn smart for your own good?”
“A whole raft of people, Colonel Landis,” Morrell answered cheerfully. “Once or twice, they’ve even been right.” He remembered all too well his own temporary eclipse after the Mormon rebels in Utah had hurt in a way he hadn’t anticipated the U.S. troops battling to put them down.
“Only once or twice?” Landis was still eyeing him in speculative fashion. “Well, maybe I’m not too surprised.” He took a look at the ground, too, then asked, “How do you think we would have done?”
“You’d have hurt us,” Morrell said. “No doubt about that, Colonel, not a bit. You’d have hurt us-but we would have got through. You couldn’t have had enough barrels to stop us.”
He waited for Landis’ irate disagreement. But the Confederate colonel had been the man who brought his commander’s request for a cease-fire through the U.S. lines. As well as anyone could, he knew how things stood with his army. He looked as if he’d bitten into something sour. “You’re likely right, dammit, but how I wish you weren’t.”
He got out a pack of Raleighs, scraped a match on the sole of his boot, and lit a cigarette. “Can I steal one of those from you?” Morrell asked eagerly. “You wouldn’t believe some of the dried horse manure that passes for tobacco in the United States these days.”
“Yes, I would,” Landis said. “When we’d capture Yankees, the men’d always let ’em keep their smokes. Here, keep the whole pack.”
He tossed it to Morrell. The U.S. officer tapped a cigarette against the palm of his hand, then leaned forward to get a light from Landis. He sucked the fragrant smoke deep into his lungs. At last, reluctantly, he exhaled. “Thank you, Colonel. That is the straight goods. You Rebels make better smokes than we do, and that’s the truth.”
Landis sighed. “I’d trade that for being somewhere up in Illinois right now, the way you said before.”
Morrell nodded as he took another drag. “I haven’t tasted tobacco like this in years, though. It’s bully stuff.” He walked rapidly along the firebay till he came to a communications trench. Then, Colonel Landis in his wake, he zigzagged back until he could inspect the gun position he’d spotted from the front line. He nodded to himself. Field guns there would have done some damage, but not enough to stop a major assault.
He found a question for Landis: “What’s your opinion of our barrels as compared to your-you usually call them tanks, don’t you?”
“These days, we say barrels more often, too,” Harley Landis answered. “My opinion? My opinion is that you had too damned many of them, no matter what name you care to use.” Past that, he declined to say anything. Morrell hadn’t expected him to say much, but had hoped.
To prod the Confederate a little more, Morrell said, “We’ll probably confiscate the ones you do have, you know, and do our damnedest to make sure you don’t build any more of them.”
Colonel Landis muttered something under his breath: “Chicken thieves.” Morrell needed a few seconds to understand it. When he did, he thought it wiser to pretend he hadn’t.
He did say, “If England and France and Russia had smashed Germany in a hurry and then helped you turn on us, I don’t think you’d have given us a big kiss when the war was over.”
“No, I reckon not,” Landis admitted, which made Morrell like him better, or at least respect him more. He went on, “But that’s the way things were supposed to work out, and they didn’t.” His chuckle had barbs. “I know you’re not thinking the same thing I am here.”
“No, not quite,” Morrell said. They both laughed then, a couple of professionals who understood each other even though they stood on opposite sides of the hill.
“Ask you something?” Landis said.
“You can ask,” Morrell said. “I don’t promise to answer.”
“Here-I’ll ply you with liquor first.” Colonel Landis took a flask from his belt. To show Morrell it was safe, he drank first. Morrell took a swig. He’d expected moonshine, or at best its more dignified cousin, bourbon. What he got was a mouthful of damn fine cognac.
“You are a man of parts, sir,” he said, bowing a little. “First the cigarettes, now this. Ask away. I’m putty in your hands.”
Landis’ snort had a skeptical ring. He put the question even so: “Suppose the war had gone on, and you did break through here. What would you have done next?”
“I’m not in command of First Army,” Morrell said, which was true but also disingenuous, considering the victories he’d helped design. He took another small sip of Landis’ brandy and added, “General Custer was talking about an advance to the Tennessee, though, if you must know.” He handed the flask back to the Confederate colonel.
Landis almost dropped it. “To the Tennessee?” His splutters had nothing to do with the second swig of cognac he took. “When were you planning on getting there, 1925? The Tennessee! The very idea! We were down, by God, but we weren’t out.”
“I think he-we-might have done it,” Morrell said. “Not a lot of natural barriers in the way, anyhow. And how many divisions of colored troops did you have in the line when the shooting stopped?”
“If you don’t know, Colonel, I’ll be damned if I’m going to tell you,” Harley Landis answered. “I will tell you this, though: they fought about as well as the new white units we were raising toward the end there.”
“Of course you’ll tell me that and not the other-it makes you look stronger,” Morrell said. Landis nodded, unembarrassed. On the whole, though, the U.S. officer thought his C.S. opposite number was right. From what he’d seen and from reports he’d read, Confederate black units had fought about as well as rookie Confederate white units. That surprised him, but a man who couldn’t see truth when it tried to shoot him wouldn’t live long, and didn’t deserve to. He asked, “Now that the war is over”-politer than saying, now that you’ve lost-“are you folks going to keep on raising Negro troops?”
“I don’t know the answer to that,” Colonel Landis answered. “We didn’t conscript niggers, the way we did with our own people. What we got were volunteers, and probably a better crop than we would have had if we’d scraped the bottom of the barrel.” He sent Morrell a hooded glance. “Other side of that coin is, there are so goddamn many of you Yankees.”
Morrell’s smile was bright and friendly-if you didn’t look too close. “Maybe you’ll think about that a little harder before you decide whether you’ll try picking a fight with us.”
“Picking a fight with you?” Landis shook his head. “No, sir. Teddy Roosevelt declared war on us, not the other way around.”
“After Wilson declared war on our allies,” Morrell said.
“We honored our commitments,” Landis said.
“So did we,” Morrell returned. They glared at each other. Then Morrell laughed, a sound more of bemusement than anything else. “And look what honoring our commitments got us. Better-no, worse-than a million dead on our side, likely not far from that for you, and even more wounded, and all the wreckage…They shouldn’t let civilians start wars, Colonel, because they don’t know what the hell they’re getting into and getting their countries into.”