“I’d like to choose horse turds at five paces to show you what a fool you are,” Potter said.
“Do not make a mockery of this, General. I will not abide it,” Patton warned. “I have challenged; you have accepted. The weapons must be lethal.”
“I just said I’d like to. I didn’t say I would,” Potter answered. “Lethal, is it? All right, sir. I’ll give you lethal weapons, and see how you like it.” By the carnivorous smile on Patton’s face, he expected to like it very much. Then Potter said, “I choose flamethrowers at ten paces.”
General Patton’s jaw dropped. Some of the high color left his face. “You are joking,” he got out with some effort.
“Not me,” Potter said. “Isn’t that lethal enough to suit you? We’ll both be burnt meat in nothing flat. Well, sir? You wanted a duel. I goddamn well gave you one. Do you still want it?”
For a horrible moment, he thought Patton would say yes. His superior might be furious enough to immolate himself if he could take the man he hated with him. But Patton, though his lips drew back from his teeth in a furious grimace, shook his head. Nobody who’d ever seen what a flamethrower could do wanted one to do it to him. Back in gaslight days, a moth would sometimes fly into the flame of a lamp. That was about what jellied gasoline did to a man.
Then, to Potter’s amazement, George Patton started to laugh. “By God, General, you have more spunk than I gave you credit for!”
He admires me, Potter thought, more bemused yet. I made myself into a bigger jackass than he did, and he admires me for it. Some of the Austro-Hungarian alienists who were probing the shape of man’s psyche would probably have had some interesting things to say about that. Wearily, Potter said, “The United States are the enemy, sir. You’re not, and I’m not, either. They’re the ones we’ve got to lick-and the ones we’ve got to keep from licking us.”
“Well said! Very well said!” In a final surreal touch, Patton bowed again. “Please accept my apologies for the slap and the insult. While I was provoked, I see now that I was hasty.”
“I’ll let it go.” But Potter had enough of the old code in him-and enough pride-to go on resenting what Patton had done. Aiming a flamethrower at him would have been a treat. It would, unfortunately, have been a last treat.
Patton, perhaps still unnerved, made what was for him an astonishing choice: he condescended to ask, “Since you seem unhappy with my plans for engaging the Yankees, General, what would you do instead?”
“Fight for time,” Potter answered at once, thinking again of Professor FitzBelmont and U-235. How far were he and his crew from building a bomb that could give the CSA a fighting chance again? And how far were their U.S. counterparts from building a bomb that would end all the Confederacy’s chances?
“You will perhaps understand a campaign needs more detailed goals and objectives than that.” Patton could have sounded snotty. In fact, he did; that was part of his nature. But he didn’t sound anywhere near as snotty as he might have, and Potter gave him reluctant credit for it.
“Yes, sir,” Potter said. “If you ask me, our goal is to keep the Yankees out of Atlanta. We can’t afford to lose it, partly because of all the factories and partly because it’s such an important rail junction. Transit between the East Coast and everything from Alabama on west goes to hell if Atlanta falls, and that goes a long way toward losing the war for us. Objectives would have to do with containing the U.S. advance as close to the Georgia-Tennessee border as we can.”
“And driving it back,” Patton said.
Potter shrugged. “If we can, at this stage of things. But mostly I want to make the U.S. forces come at us. I want to use the defender’s advantage for everything it’s worth. I want the United States to have casualty lists three, four, five times as long as ours. They’re bigger than we are, but they can’t afford that kind of thing forever. If they bleed enough, maybe they’ll get sick of banging their heads against a brick wall and give us a peace we can live with.”
And if we drop uranium bombs on them a year after that, it’d damn well serve them right, he thought. Would they hit us first? I don’t know. I didn’t used to think so. Now, though, we may have given them too many reasons not to let us have another chance.
“In your opinion, then, we cannot hope to win the war on the ground.” Patton spoke like a judge passing sentence.
Potter didn’t care. “Sir, they’re in Georgia. Doesn’t that speak for itself? They’re cleaning up the pockets of resistance west of their thrust through Kentucky and Tennessee, too, and we haven’t been able to keep them from doing that. Between Richmond and Philadelphia, we’ve stayed even with them in the air. Everywhere else? Here, for instance? You know the answer as well as I do. We haven’t matched their latest barrel yet, either.”
“We’re ahead of them in rockets,” Patton said.
“Yes, sir,” Potter said. “Those will hurt them. Those have hurt them. They’ll make us lose slower. Do you really think they can make us win?” Maybe if we put a U-235 bomb in the nose of one. But how much does one of those damn things weigh? When will we have a rocket that can get it off the ground? In time for this war? You’d have to be a wild-eyed optimist to believe anything like that.
“Yours is a counsel of despair,” Patton said.
“I don’t want to throw my brigade away charging their guns,” Potter said. “I want to make them throw their brigades away charging my guns. I don’t think that’s despair. Where we are now, I think it’s common sense.”
“When I give you orders, I expect you to obey them.”
“When I get orders, I expect them to be ones I’m better off obeying.”
They glared at each other. Neither had convinced the other-Potter knew that. Swearing under his breath, Patton stormed out of Potter’s tent. Potter wondered what he would do if Patton commanded him to go over the river line and attack the enemy. I’ll refuse, he decided. Let him do what he wants after that. It’ll keep the brigade in being a while longer, anyhow.
The orders arrived two hours later. Potter’s men were to hold in place. Patton laid on a counterattack farther west. Potter sighed. Patton had grasped the letter, not the spirit. He didn’t know what he could do about that. Well, actually, he did know: he couldn’t do a damn thing.
Guns blazing, the counterattack went in. It drove U.S. forces back a couple of miles, then ran out of steam. Potter wished he’d expected anything different.
The Josephus Daniels rode the waves in the North Atlantic-rode them like a roller-coaster car going up and down ever taller, ever steeper bumps. George Enos took the motion in stride: literally, as he had no trouble making his way around the destroyer escort despite the roughening seas. Though not a big warship, the Josephus Daniels made a platform ever so much more stable than the fishing boats that bobbed on the ocean like little corks in a bathtub…and sometimes sank as if going down the drain.
He wasn’t worried the Josephus Daniels would sink-not on her own, anyhow. She might have help from British, French, or Confederate submersibles, though.
At least she was out of range of British land-based airplanes. George had gone through too many attacks from the air, both here and in the tropical Pacific, ever to want to help try to fight off another one.
“We’re still floating,” the sailors boasted. Most of them were kids. They’d helped rescue men whose ships had gone to the bottom, but they’d never been sunk themselves. They were cocky because of it. It hadn’t happened to them, so they were sure it couldn’t.