If we can do that, we win the war, Cassius thought.
Then he wondered whether winning the war would be worth it. What did he have to go back to in Augusta? Nothing. His family was gone, his apartment not worth living in. The rest of the guerrillas were no better off. They’d already lost, no matter how the war went.
“Boss?” he said as the guerrillas loped away.
“What you want?” Gracchus asked.
“Suppose the United States lick Jake motherfuckin’ Featherston. Suppose we’re still breathin’ when that happens. What the hell we do then?”
“Don’t know about you, but I got me a big old bunch of ofays I wants to pay back,” the guerrilla leader answered. “Reckon that’ll keep me busy a while.”
Cassius nodded. “Sure enough, we can do that for a while. But what kind of life we gonna have? What kind of country this gonna be? Can’t kill all the damn whites-wouldn’t be nobody left then. Gotta live with ’em some kinda way. But how? How we go on, knowin’ what they done to us?”
“Fuck, I dunno. I ain’t never worried about it. Ain’t had time to worry about it-been too worried about stayin’ alive,” Gracchus said. “Lookin’ down the road…You don’t want to think too goddamn much, you hear what I’m sayin’? Spend all your time thinkin’ ’bout tomorrow, you ain’t gonna live to git there.”
That made some sense. But Cassius said, “We ain’t old or nothin’. We make it through this goddamn war, we got a lot o’ time ahead of us. Maybe we go on up to the USA. They ain’t so hard on niggers there.”
“That’s a fact-they ain’t,” Gracchus said. “But here’s another fact-they don’t like niggers much, neither. If they did, they woulda let more of us git away when the Freedom Party first took over. But they didn’t. They closed their border so we had to stay in the CSA an’ take whatever Featherston’s fuckers done dished out. Yankees like us better’n they like Confederate sojers, but it don’t go no further’n that.”
He didn’t just make some sense there-he made much too much. “What’re we supposed to do, then?” Cassius wanted to wail the question. Instead, it came out as more of a panting grunt. It was the sort of thing he would have asked his father when he and Scipio weren’t quarreling.
His father would have had a good, thoughtful answer for it. Gracchus just shrugged and said, “We gots to stay alive. We gots to hit the ofays till the war’s done, an’ go on hittin’ ’em afterwards. Past that…Hell, I don’t know nothin’ past that. Find out when I gits there, if I gits that far.”
The way things were, maybe that was a good, thoughtful answer. If you were someplace where you couldn’t make plans, didn’t trying only waste your time? For now, what was there besides fighting and taking whatever vengeance you could? Cassius trotted on. He couldn’t see anything besides that now himself.
XVIII
Every time an officer Lieutenant-Colonel Jerry Dover didn’t know came to the supply dump, his stomach started knotting up. He kept wondering if someone from Intelligence would take him off and do horrible things to him because of Melanie Leigh. Every time it didn’t happen, Dover relaxed…a little.
He saw plenty of unfamiliar officers, too, enough to keep his stomach sour, enough to keep him gulping bicarbonate of soda. Lots of that came to the front; given what soldiers ate, they needed it.
Some of the new officers he dealt with came from outfits just arrived in northwestern Georgia to try to stem the Yankee tide. Others were men in new slots, the officers they replaced now being wounded or dead.
One day, a brigadier general showed up and asked, “You fought in the line in the last war, didn’t you?”
“Yes, sir,” Dover answered. “I was only a noncom then, though.”
“I was a first lieutenant myself,” said the officer with the wreathed stars. “We’ve both got more mileage on us than we used to. I have a regimental command slot open-Colonel McCandless just stopped some shrapnel with his face, and he’ll be on the shelf for weeks. If you want it, it’s yours.”
“Sir, I’ll take it if you order me to,” Dover answered. “But I don’t think I’d be better than ordinary in that slot. As a supply officer, I’m pretty goddamn good. If somebody ordinary replaces me here, that might hurt the war effort worse than if you have some different ordinary officer take charge of your regiment.”
The brigadier general studied him. Wondering if I’m yellow, Dover thought. The officer’s eyes found the ribbon for the Purple Heart above Dover’s left breast pocket. “How’d you get that?” he asked.
“A scratch on my arm. Not worth talking about,” Dover answered.
Maybe the general would have decided he was a liar and a blowhard if he came up with some fancy story of a wound suffered in heroic circumstances. His offhand dismissal seemed to satisfy the man. “Stay where you are, then, Dover,” the brigadier general said. “You’re doing well here-I know that, and it’s one of the reasons I thought about you for a combat post. But you have a point: this work is important to the war effort, too, and it needs to be done right. I’ll find somebody else for the regiment.”
After the general left, Dover lit a cigarette. He had to stir the butts in the glass ashtray on his cheap desk to make room for it. One of the sergeants who helped keep the depot going stuck his head into the tent and asked, “What was that all about, sir?” Like any sergeant worth his stripes, he assumed he had the right to know.
Dover saw no reason not to tell him. “About what you’d figure, Pete-he thought about moving me up to the front, but he decided I can do more here.”
“Christ, I hope so!” Pete said. “You’re really good at this shit. I don’t even want to think about how much trouble I’d have breaking in some new asshole, and some of those clowns just never do get what’s going on.”
“Nice to know I’m a comfortable old asshole,” Dover said, and Pete laughed. Dover tossed the sergeant the pack of Raleighs.
“Thanks,” Pete said. “Even smokes are getting hard to come by, the way the damnyankees keep tearing things up between here and Atlanta. That never happened the last time around, did it?”
“I don’t think so,” Dover answered. “I don’t remember running short, anyway.” He looked north and west. His personal worries weren’t the only ones he had. “You think we can stop the Yankees if they try to break out again?”
“Reckon we’d better,” Pete said dryly. “They start heading for Atlanta, we better start trying to see how much they’ll let us keep if we quit.”
That was about how Dover saw it, too. “Careful how you talk,” he told Pete, not for the first time. “Lots of people flabbling about defeatism these days.”
“Yeah, well, nobody’d be defeatist if we weren’t getting fucking defeated,” the sergeant said, which was nothing but the truth. “I’d almost like to see Atlanta fall, to tell you the truth, just so I could laugh while some of the Quartermaster Corps fat cats there got it in the neck. Those cocksuckers have done more to lose us the war than any three Yankee generals you can think of.”
“You expect me to argue? You’re preaching to the choir,” Dover said. “Now they use the bad roads and the torn-up train tracks for excuses not to send us what we need.”
“Did I hear right that you told one of the shitheads down there you were gonna send Jake Featherston a wire about how lousy they were?” Pete asked.
“I said it, yeah,” Dover admitted. “Don’t know that I’d do it. Don’t know that it would do any good if I did.”
“You ought to, by God. They’ve been getting fat and living soft off Army goods since the war started,” Pete said. “If Featherston can’t rein ’em in, nobody on God’s green earth can, I reckon.”