"The United States land on us with both feet anyhow," Forrest finished bitterly.
"They won't let us quit," Potter said. "They aim to wipe us off the map, same as they did in the War of Secession."
"Featherston never should have started this damn war," Nathan Bedford Forrest III said.
"Oh, cut the crap…sir," Potter said. His superior gaped. Not caring, he went on, "You aren't mad at him for starting the war. You were all for it. So was I. So was everybody. You're just mad because we aren't winning."
"Aren't you?"
"Sure, but at least I know why. I-" Clarence Potter broke off.
"What?" Forrest said, but then he heard it, too: the distant rumble of artillery suddenly picking up. He frowned. His eyes, which were more like his famous great-grandfather's than any other feature, narrowed. "Damnyankees haven't done that much firing for quite a while."
"They sure haven't," Potter agreed. "I wonder if they think they can catch us with our pants down here because we've moved so much stuff to Georgia." I wonder if they're right. He didn't say that out loud. Nathan Bedford Forrest III had enough to worry about, and the same thought was bound to be going through his mind.
The chief of the General Staff stood there listening, his head cocked to one side. After a minute or so, he shook himself; he might almost have come out of a trance. "I'd better get back to the War Department, find out what the hell they're up to," he said.
"I'll come with you," Potter said. Forrest didn't tell him no, even though he didn't have a formal place there any more. The gunfire went on and on. Halfway back to the War Department building, both men broke into a trot.
C assius and Gracchus strode through the streets of Madison, Georgia. They both wore U.S. Army boots on their feet and green-gray U.S. military-issue trousers. Only their collarless chambray work shirts said they weren't regular U.S. soldiers-those and their black skins, of course. Even the shirts had Stars-and-Stripes armbands on the left sleeve. The Negroes were at least semiofficial.
Gracchus carried a captured C.S. submachine gun; Cassius still had his bolt-action Tredegar. Both of them were alert for anything that looked like trouble. Madison had only recently fallen to the United States. The whites here didn't like seeing their own soldiers driven away. They were even less happy about Negroes patrolling their streets.
A couple of days earlier, somebody'd fired at one of Gracchus' men. The guerrilla got his left hand torn up. Madison got a lesson, a painful one. The U.S. commandant, a cold-eyed captain named Lester Wallace, grabbed the first ten white men he could catch, lined them up against a brick wall, and had them shot without even blindfolding them first.
"Nobody fucks with anybody under U.S. authority in this town," he told the horrified locals in a voice like iron, while the bodies still lay there bleeding. "Nobody, you hear?"
"Jesus God, it was only a nigger!" a woman shrilled.
"Anybody who comes out with that kind of shit from now on, I figure you just volunteered for hostage duty," Wallace said. "Far as I can see, the black folks around here are worth at least ten of you assholes apiece-I mean at least. They didn't start murdering people for the fun of it. You 'Freedom!'-yelling cocksuckers did."
"We didn't know what happened to the colored folks who got shipped out," an old man quavered.
"Yeah-now tell me another one. You give me horseshit like that, you're a volunteer hostage, too," Captain Wallace said. "You didn't know! Where'd you think they were going, you goddamn lying bucket of puke? To a fucking football game?"
Cassius didn't know what he'd thought Yankees would be like. This chilly ferocity wasn't it, though-he was sure of that. A lot of U.S. soldiers hated the enemy with a clear and simple passion that shoved everything else to one side.
"You know, I never had much use for smokes," a skinny corporal who needed a shave told Cassius out of the blue one day. "But shit, man, if Featherston's fuckers have it in for you, you gotta have somethin' going for you."
Was that logical? Cassius wondered what his father would have thought of it. But there was a brutal logic that beat down the more formal sort. The enemy of my enemy is my friend. That was working here.
It had a flip side. The friend of my enemy is my enemy. As Cassius and Gracchus patrolled Madison, Cassius said, "Ain't never gonna be safe for niggers around here without Yankees close by from now on."
"Reckon not," Gracchus said, "but how safe was it for us 'fore the damnyankees done got here?"
That question answered itself. His family hauled out of church and taken off to a camp. His own life on the run ever since. The precarious life black guerrillas led, knowing there would be no mercy if they got caught.
"Well, you got me," Cassius said.
They tramped into the town square. A bronze plaque was affixed to a small stone pillar there. Somehow, the little monument had come through the fighting that leveled half the town without even a nick. Gracchus pointed to the plaque. "What's it say?" he asked. Cassius had taught him his letters, but he still didn't read well.
"Says it's the Braswell Monument," Cassius said. "Says in 1817 Benjamin Braswell done sold thirteen slaves after he was dead so they could use the money to educate white chillun. Says they raised almos' thirty-six hundred dollars. Ain't that grand?"
"Sold niggers to help ofays. That's how it goes, sure as hell." Gracchus strode up to the Braswell Monument, unbuttoned his fly, and took a long leak. "Show what I thinks o' you, Mr. Benjamin fuckin' Asswell."
A couple of white women with wheeled wire shopping carts were hurrying across the square. They took one look Gracchus' way and walked even faster. "They don't like your dark meat," Cassius said.
"My meat don't like them, neither," Gracchus replied. "I start fuckin' white women, I ain't gonna start fuckin' no ugly white women, an' they was dogs."
They hadn't been beautiful. Some Negroes in U.S. service didn't care. They took their revenge on Confederate women for everything Confederate men had done to them. A few U.S. officers reacted as badly to that as Confederate men might have. Not everyone in the USA loved Negroes, not by a long shot. But most men who wore green-gray uniforms hated the enemy worse than the blacks he'd oppressed.
"Know what I feel like?" Gracchus said as he and Cassius resumed their patrol. "I feel like a dog that jus' pissed somewhere to say, 'This here place mine.'"
"Dunno if it's yours or not," Cassius said. "Sure as shit don't belong to the Confederate ofays no mo'."
As if to emphasize that, the U.S. troops had run up a barbed-wire stockade just outside of Madison to hold C.S. prisoners of war. Cassius wasn't the only Negro drawn to that stockade as if by a magnet. Seeing soldiers in butternut-and, better still, seeing Freedom Party Guards in brown-splotched camouflage-on the wrong side of the wire, stuck inside a camp, disarmed and glum while he carried a weapon, was irresistibly sweet.
"They gonna reduce your population!" a Negro from a different band jeered at the POWs. "They gonna put you on a train, an' you ain't never gettin' off!"
Some of the captured Confederates looked scared-who could know for sure what the soldiers on the other side would do? Some swore at the black guerrilla. One stubborn sergeant said, "Fuck you in the heart, Sambo. They already put your nappy-headed whore of a mama on the train, and she deserved it, too."
A few seconds later, he lay dead, a bullet through his chest. A U.S. corporal, hearing the shot, came running. "Jesus!" he said when he saw the corpse. "What the hell'd you go and do that for?"
The Confederates in the stockade were screaming and pointing at the Negro who'd fired. The guerrilla was unrepentant. "He dogged my mother," he said simply. "Ain't nobody gonna dog my mother, 'specially not some goddamn ofay fuckhead."
"Christ, I'm gonna have to fill out papers on this shit," the noncom groaned. "Tell me what the fuck happened."