"You have not got a bad life here." Victor still sounded stiff, even to himself.
"No, I have not. I have a good wife-herself brought hither against her will, but good even so-and I have a good friend," Blaise said. "But it is not the life I would have chosen for myself, and that makes a difference, too."
Imagining himself making the best of things in a jungle full of lions and elephants and black men speaking peculiar languages, Victor could only nod.
Hanover. General Cornwallis was at Hanover. In Cornwallis' place, Victor supposed he would have gone to Hanover, too. It was the biggest city in Atlantis, and the best port on the east coast. Though less centrally placed than New Hastings or Freetown, it did let the redcoats strike to north or south.
He set his own men moving north and east, back toward the settlements of English Atlantis from which most of them had sprung. They grumbled, as he'd known they would. They would have grumbled more had he pushed them harder. He would have, too, were he more confident of supplies. He was still close to the Green Ridge Mountains, and settlements still sparse.
Some of his men were willing enough to march toward the settlements from which they'd sprung. They weren't exactly the ones Victor would have had in mind, though: they were soldiers whose terms had expired. When they came back to the farms and towns in which they'd grown up, they weren't going to fight. They'd just head for home.
"Sorry, General," one of them said, and he even sounded as if he meant it. "I signed up for a year, and that's all I aim to give." He produced a dirty, much-creased-and-folded sheet of paper that showed he had indeed met his promised commitment.
It only irked Victor more. "God damn it to hell," he ground out. "I begged the Atlantean Assembly that henceforward all terms of enlistment were to be for the war's duration."
"Don't reckon they listened to you." Yes, the soldier did sound sympathetic, which was the last thing Victor Radcliff needed. With a whimsical shrug, the insufficiently embattled farmer added, "And what else is new?"
"Not a thing," Victor said heavily. "Not a… stinking thing. Well, that's one letter I shall have to write over again."
He did, too, when the army stopped for the night. When he sanded the sheet to blot up excess ink, he was amazed smoke didn't rise from the paper. He'd put heart and soul into the missive-and spleen as well. He glanced down at his midsection. Yes, if his spleen wasn't well vented by now, it never would be.
He stepped out of his tent and shouted for a messenger. The youngster who came up to him looked alarmed-he was usually a quieter man. Right this minute, Victor cared nothing for what he usually was. He thrust the letter at the youth. "Get this to the Conscript Fathers in Honker's Mill quick as you can."
"I'll do it, General," the young man said. "But how come you're so all-fired angried up all of a sudden?"
"Because, as near I can tell, the Assembly and the settlements' parliaments are doing their level best to lose us the war," Victor answered. "You wouldn't think the gentlemen there assembled could be such dunderheads, would you? Especially not after France has come into the war on our side, I mean. But they are. By God, a thundermug's got more sense in it than half the heads at Honker's Mill."
That won him a chuckle from the messenger, who asked, "What have they gone and done now, sir?"
"They keep recruiting short-term soldiers, that's what. Why would I want men who can go home just when I'm likely to need them the most? Answer me that, if you please."
"Beats me." The messenger sounded much too cheerful. But then, why shouldn't he? Recruiting soldiers and retaining them wasn't his worry. It was Victor Radcliff's. And it was supposed to be the Atlantean Assembly's. Expecting the Assembly and the parliaments with which it had to dicker to remember as much was evidently too much to hope for.
The messenger rode away. Victor stood outside the tent listening till the horse's hoofbeats got too distant to make out, and then a little longer besides. When he finally went back inside and lay down on his cot, he wondered whether he'd sleep. He tossed and turned for some time. Just when he was sure the Atlantean Assembly's idiocy would cost him a night's rest, he dozed off. Next thing he knew, the army's buglers were blowing morning assembly.
Instead of tea or coffee, he drank a brew of roasted native roots and leaves. He made a point of eating and drinking no better than the men he led. Even well-sugared-that, the Atlanteans could do-the brew tasted nasty. Worse, it was less invigorating than the ones that had to be imported. But it was what the cooks had left, so Radcliff drank it.
"Enjoy your coffee, General," said the man in the dirty apron who filled his tin mug.
It was no more coffee than Victor was Czar of all the Russias. And enjoying it stretched the bounds of probability if it didn't break them. A man could learn to tolerate it, and Victor had.
None of that showed on his face or in his voice. "Much obliged, Innes. I expect I shall," he said, and smiled when he said it. Sometimes you had to deceive your own men as well as the enemy.
More soldiers whose terms had expired marched away from the Atlantean army. To Victor's well-concealed surprise, fresh companies joined him. Some of them had enlisted for six months or a year. He gave their men a choice: they could fight the English till the war ended, or they could go home at once.
"Do whichever suits you," he told them. "I am better off without you than I would be to have you for a short term. If I must plan my campaigns around your enlistments, I would do better to pray General Cornwallis' mercy now."
He exaggerated; most of the time, short-term soldiers were better than no soldiers at all. To his relief, most of the new recruits agreed to serve for the duration. "Ha!" Blaise said. "Only shows the dumb strawfeet don't know what the devil they're getting into."
"I shouldn't be amazed if you were right," Victor agreed. Then he chuckled. "Strawfeet, is it?"
"Oh, they are, General. You can tell by looking at them," Blaise said.
Atlantean drillmasters often despaired of teaching country bumpkins the evolutions they needed to learn if they were to move from column to line of battle or do any of the other things soldiers had to do. Baron von Steuben frequently ran out of English when he tried to show them what they needed to do. They couldn't understand his German, but it sounded as if it ought to be worth remembering.
Among the worst complaints the drillmasters had was that raw recruits couldn't reliably tell their right feet from their left. They did know the difference between hay and straw, though. Drill sergeants tied a wisp of hay to their left feet and straw to their right. "Hayfoot!" a drillmaster would call. "Strawfoot! Hay-foot! Strawfoot!" It was an awkward makeshift, but it worked. And, more and more often, Atlantean veterans called new men strawfeet. (Von Steuben called them everything he could in English, and worse than that auf Deutsck.)
Naturally, the new men were inclined to resent the name. Just as naturally, the veterans didn't care. There had already been several scraps about it. Victor expected more to come. As long as veterans and recruits didn't squabble with the redcoats in front of them, he wouldn't worry.
A courier rode up. "I have a letter for you, General, from the Atlantean Assembly," he said importantly.
"Oh, you do, do you?" Victor growled. He took the letter, broke the seal, and unfolded the paper.
It was, to his utter lack of surprise, a missive censuring him for what the Assembly characterized as his "ill-bred, ill-tempered, intemperate, and altogether ill-advised communication of the twenty-seventh ultimo."