By the dull thud from under the table, she’d kicked him in the shin. To underscore a point that needed no underscoring, his littlest sister, Jeanne, said, “That was mean.” Eight-year-old certainty wasn’t of the same kind as the seventeen-year-old variety, but it wasn’t any less certain, either. Denise, who was a couple of years older than Jeanne, nodded to show her agreement. Jeanne turned to Nicole and said, “You’d never do anything like that, would you?”
“Certainly not,” Nicole said, frost in her voice. The look she turned on Georges should have turned him into a block of ice, too. It didn’t. He stayed impudent as ever, even if he did have to bend over to rub his injured leg.
“Now wait, all of you,” Lucien said. “No one has said that Nicole will have any opportunity to meet American doctors, even if she wanted to do such a thing, which I already have no doubt she does not.”
“But, Papa,” Nicole said, “are you changing your mind?”
“No, for I never said yes,” he answered. His eldest daughter looked stricken. He glanced down to Marie at the foot of the table. He knew what her expressions meant. This one meant she’d back him, but she thought he was wrong. He sighed. “Perhaps it might be possible to try…but only for a little while.”
II
Lieutenant General George Armstrong Custer slammed his fist down on the table that held the maps of western Kentucky. “By heaven,” he said, “the War Department’s finally come out with an order that makes sense. General attack all along the line! Draft the orders to implement it here in First Army country, Major Dowling. I’ll want to see them by two o’ clock this afternoon.”
“Yes, sir,” Abner Dowling said, and then, because part of his job as adjutant was saving Custer from himself, he added, “Sir, I don’t believe they mean all units are to move forward at the same moment, only that we are to take the best possible advantage of the Confederates’ embarrassment by striking where they are weakest.”
Saving Custer from himself was a full-time job. Dowling had broad shoulders-there wasn’t much about Dowling that wasn’t broad-and needed them to bear up under the weight of bad temper and worse judgment the general commanding First Army pressed down on him. Custer had always been sure of himself, even as a brash cavalry officer in the War of Secession. Now, at the age of seventy-five, he was downright autocratic…and no more right than he had ever been.
His pouchy, wrinkled, sagging face went from pasty white to dusky purple in the space of a couple of heartbeats. Neither color went well with his drooping mustache, which he peroxided to an approximation of the golden color it had once had naturally. The same applied to the locks of hair that flowed out from under his service cap. He wore the cap all the time, indoors and out, for it concealed the shiny expanse of the crown of his head.
“When I see the order ‘general attack,’ Major, I construe it to mean attack all along the line, and that is what I intend to do,” he snapped now. The only time his voice left the range from petulant to irritable was when he was talking to a war correspondent: then he spoke gently as any sucking dove. “We shall go at the enemy and smash him up.”
“Wouldn’t it be wise, sir, to concentrate our attacks where he shows himself to be less strong, break through there, and then use the advantages we’ve gained to make further advances?” Dowling said, doing his best-as he’d done his best since the outset of the war, with results decidedly mixed-to be the voice of reason.
Defiantly, Custer shook his head. Those dyed locks flipped back and forth. Not even the magic word breakthrough had reached him. “Without their niggers to help ’em, the Rebs are just a pack of weak sisters,” he declared. “One good push and the whole rotten structure they’ve built comes tumbling down.”
“Sir, we’ve been pushing with all we have for the past year and more, and it hasn’t tumbled down yet,” Dowling said. If it had, we’d be a lot deeper into the Confederacy than we are-and even good generals have trouble against the Rebs.
“We’ll drive them out of Morehead’s Horse Mill,” Custer said, “and that, thank God, will have the added benefit of getting us out of Bremen here. You can tell why this town is so smalclass="underline" no one in his right mind would want to live here. And once we have the railroad junction at Morehead’s Horse Mill, how in the name of all that’s holy can the Rebs hope to keep us out of Bowling Green?”
Dowling suspected there would be a number of ways the Confederate forces could keep the U.S. Army out of Bowling Green, even with Negroes in rebellion behind Rebel lines. He didn’t say that to Custer; a well-developed sense of self-preservation kept his lips sealed however much his brain seethed.
What he did say, after some thought, was, “So you’ll want me to prepare the orders with the Schwerpunkt aimed toward Morehead’s Horse Mill?” With the Confederates in disorder, they might actually take that town. Then, after another buildup, they could think about moving in the direction of-not yet on-Bowling Green.
“Schwerpunkt.” General Custer made it sound like a noise a sick horse might make. “It’s all very well to have the German Empire for an ally-without them, we’d be helpless against the Rebs and the limeys and the frogs and the Canucks. But we imitate them too much, if you ask me. A general in command of an army can’t walk to the outhouse without the General Staff looking in the half-moon window to make sure he undoes his trouser buttons in the proper order. And all these damned foreign words fog up the simple art of war.”
The United States had lost the War of Secession. Then, twenty years later, they’d lost the Second Mexican War. Germany or its Prussian core, in the meantime, had smashed the Danes, the Austrians, and the French, each in short order. As far as Dowling was concerned, the country that lost wars needed to do some learning from the side that won them.
That was something else he couldn’t say. He tried guile: “If we do break through at Morehead’s Horse Mill, sir, we’ll be in a good position to roll up the Rebel line all the way back to the Ohio River, or else to push hard toward Bowling Green and make the enemy react to us.”
All of that was true. All of it was reasonable. None of it was what Custer wanted to hear. Much of Dowling’s job was telling Custer things he didn’t want to hear and making him pay attention to them. What Dowling wanted was to get up to the front and command units for himself. The only reason he didn’t apply for a transfer was his conviction that more men could handle a battalion in combat than could keep General Custer out of mischief.
Before Custer could go off like a Yellowstone geyser, a pretty young light-skinned colored woman poked her head into the room with the map table and said, “General, suh, I got your lunch ready in the kitchen. Mutton chops, mighty fine.”
Custer’s whole manner changed. “I’ll be there directly, Olivia. Thank you, my dear,” he said, courtly as you please. To Dowling, he added, “We’ll resume this discussion after I’ve eaten. I do declare, Major, that young lady is the one redeeming feature I have yet found in western Kentucky.”
“Er-yes, sir,” Dowling said tonelessly. Custer took himself off with as much spry alacrity as a man carrying three quarters of a century could manage. He didn’t bother hiding the way he pursued Olivia. Amused First Army rumor said she’d been caught, too, not just chaste. Dowling thought the rumor likely true: the general carried on like an assotted fool whenever he was around his cook and housekeeper. The adjutant was more inclined to fault Olivia’s taste than Custer’s. You’d think the old boy would have had his last stand years before.
An orderly came in with the day’s mail. “Where shall I dump all this, sir?” he asked Dowling.
“Why don’t you give it to me, Frazier? The general’s eating his lunch.” Or possibly his serving wench. Dowling shook his head to get the lewd images out of it. Coughing, he went on, “I’ll sort through it for him so he can go through it quickly when he’s finished.”