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“Hit!” somebody shouted. Somebody else yelled, “Blew the bastards to kingdom come!” George Enos started yelling, too. It was victory. Then he looked at Mike Kelly, or what was left of him, and at the gouge on the metal of the turret so close to where his own head had been. As easily as not, Kelly could have been alive and himself dead and mutilated. He yelled louder than ever.

Jefferson Pinkard was one of the lucky ones: he had a real seat in a real passenger coach on the troop train rumbling through the night somewhere in southern Georgia. If this is good luck, he thought, I don’t want to know what bad luck is like.

His backside and the base of his spine ached; the seat was bare wood. It might have been a car for whites too poor to afford even second-class fare, or it might have been reserved for Negroes. If Pinkard had had to ride in cars like this whenever he took the train, he might have risen up himself against the people who made him do it.

He couldn’t stretch his legs out, either; the space between his seat and the one in front of it was too narrow. It would have been too narrow even if he hadn’t been kitted out with a pack on his back and a rifle between his knees. As things were, he felt like a sardine jammed into its tin. His newly issued helmet, a low-crowned iron derby with a wide rim on the British model, added to that canned feeling.

What he didn’t feel much like was a soldier. They’d given him his uniform, they’d given him his Tredegar, they’d given him a couple of weeks’ screamed instruction at close-order drill and ri-flery, and then they’d hauled him and his training regiment out of the camp near Birmingham and put them on the train.

Even his drill instructors-ogres in human shape if ever there were any-hadn’t been happy about that. “Weren’t for them damn niggers, y’all’d be here another month, likely tell longer,” one of them had said when the orders arrived. “Y’all was goin’ up against the damnyankees, wouldn’t be a man jack of you left breathing in two weeks’ time. But they reckon y’all are good enough now to whip them Red niggers back into line.”

Pinkard turned to the raw private on the hard, cramped seat next to his: a skinny little fellow with spectacles who’d been a clerk in Dothan till the Conscription Bureau finally swept him up. “Stinky,” he said, “if them niggers was soldiers as lousy as they say, we’d have done licked ’em already, don’t you reckon?”

“My name,” Stinky Salley said in tones of relentless precision, “is Christopher.” He’d said the same thing in the same tone to the drill sergeants who’d rechristened him after he’d evaded bath call one evening. He’d kept on saying it even after they knocked him down-he had spirit, maybe more than his scrawny body could safely contain. It did no good; the nickname had stuck.

“Listen, Stinky,” Pinkard went on, “it stands to reason that-”

One of the soldiers who sprawled in the aisle between seats, somewhere between sitting and lying, spoke up: “Stands to reason somebody’s gonna kick your ass, you don’t shut the hell up and let him sleep if he’s able.”

Pinkard did shut up. He wished he could sleep. He was too uncomfortable. He wondered how he’d be when the train finally stopped. Probably shuffle around like a ninety-year-old man with the rheumatism, he thought.

The window three seats in front of his suddenly blew in, spraying glass around the car. He yelped when a piece stung his cheek. A warm trickle of blood began to flow. “What the hell-?” somebody yelled.

Another window blew out, this one behind him. He felt something-probably more glass-rebound from his helmet. Back there, a man started screaming: “Oh, Mother!” he wailed. “I’m hit! Oh, God! Oh, Mama!”

Realization smote. “They’re shooting at us, the sons of bitches-niggers in the night, I mean.”

He couldn’t do anything about it, either. He had no target at which to shoot. All he could do was sit there and hope the Red revolutionaries would miss him. That might have been worse than anything else about it-or so he thought till his squad leader, a dour corporal named Peter Ploughman, said, “Thank God they ain’t got but a rifle or two. You boys ain’t never seen what comes out of a train that done got chewed up by a machine gun.”

A couple of the men near the wounded soldier did what they could for him, which wasn’t much. The car held neither a doctor nor a medical orderly. Jeff had no idea how anybody who knew anything could have come from another car to the hurt man, not with the way soldiers had been shoehorned into this train. The poor fellow would have to suffer till it stopped.

And it wasn’t stopping. The reverse, in fact: it was speeding up, to escape the harassing fire from the brush by the tracks. In a speculative voice, Ploughman said, “How sneaky are them damn niggers, anyways? They tryin’ to spook us into runnin’ right over some explosives they planted?”

“Jesus!” Jefferson Pinkard said. He was glad he wasn’t the only one who said it. He’d thought working at the Sloss foundry was such a dangerous job, war would hardly faze him afterwards. But in the Sloss works even Leonidas, appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, wasn’t actively trying to kill him and devoting all his ingenuity toward that end. The idea that the Red Negroes might be using a small incident to give rise to a big one, as if they were throwing stones to flush game out of deep cover to where it could more readily be shot-that made the hair stand up at the back of his neck.

Acceleration pressed him against his seat. Things in his pack dug into his spine and his kidneys. He tried to brace himself against an explosion that would fling the car off the tracks like a toy kicked by a brat with a nasty temper. He didn’t think anything he did would help much, but sitting there like a lump of coal wouldn’t help at all.

Without warning, he wasn’t being pressed back any more. He had everything he could do to keep from going facefirst into the back of the seat in front of him. Soldiers in the corridor, who could not steady themselves, tumbled over one another in a shouting, cursing heap.

Iron screamed on iron, rails and wheels locking in an embrace so hot, it sent orange-red sparks leaping up higher than the window through which Jefferson Pinkard stared. Absurdly, he wondered if he’d helped bring any of that iron into being.

Groaning and shuddering, the train staggered to a halt. Pinkard saw a couple of men with kerosene lanterns outside. Their voices came through the shattered windows of the car: “Out! Out! Everybody out!”

That wasn’t easy or quick. It wouldn’t have been easy or quick with veteran troops. With raw recruits, all the shouting of their officers and noncoms helped only so much. They got in one another’s way, went in this direction when they should have gone in that, and generally blundered their way out of the coaches into the night.

Cold nipped at Pinkard as he stood in the darkness. A coal stove and a lot of bodies had kept the car warm. Now he got out the overcoat stowed in his pack. He wished he were home in bed with Emily, who would warm him better than any Army overcoat could. Most of the time, he’d been too busy to notice how much he missed her. Not now, standing here all confused, breathing in coal smoke from the engine, breathing out fog from the chill.

“Just in time-” The phrase started going through the raw soldiers, some of them plainly repeating it without any clear idea of why they were. Then somebody who sounded as if he did know what he was talking about spoke up: “We hadn’t been able to flag the engineer down in time, reckon this here train would have blown sky high.”

“What did I say?” Corporal Peter Ploughman sounded both vindicated and smug. Pinkard shrugged. If Ploughman didn’t know more about the soldiering business than the men he led, he had no business wearing stripes on his sleeves. But Jeff supposed the noncom did need to impress them every now and again with how much he knew.