American Front (21 page)

“That’s right.” The Confederate major nodded. He wore the tight, high boots and yellow uniform trim of a cavalry officer. “Mighty fine it is, too, ma’am—smooth as I’ve ever drunk.”

“I’m glad you like it.” Nellie refilled the cup from one of the pots behind the counter. Not all the cups matched any more—she’d foraged from here and there and everywhere to replace the ones broken in the fighting. “Enjoy it while you can—when it’s gone, heaven knows how I’ll be able to get more.”

“Life’s going to be hard for a while, I reckon,” the major agreed. He took the cup, then added cream and sugar and a splash from a little tin flask he wore on his belt. “
Right
smooth,” he said with a smile as he drank. He looked from Nellie to Edna and back again. “Would you let me buy either of you charming ladies, or the two of you together, a cup while you still have it to enjoy?”

Edna looked as if she might have said yes to that. The cavalry major was personable enough: even handsome in a florid way. But Nellie answered before her daughter could: “No, thank you. We’d best save it for the customers: can’t afford to drink up our own stock in trade.”

“However you like,” the officer said with a shrug. There were a lot of Confederate cavalrymen in Washington. When they went closer to the front, they had a way of getting killed in a hurry. Their own comrades in the infantry and artillery ragged them about it; the coffeehouse had seen a couple of fights. Confederate military police swung billy clubs with the same reckless abandon Washington city constables had used.

After draining his augmented cup of coffee, the cavalry major got up, took a wallet out of a hip pocket, and pulled out a dollar of Confederate scrip. “I don’t need any change,” he said, and walked out the door.

“Of course you don’t,” Nellie muttered when he was gone. “It’s like play money to you.” The scrip the Confederates had instituted for Washington and for the chunks of Maryland and Pennsylvania they’d taken from the United States—the dollar note the major had set down bore the picture of John C. Calhoun—was nominally at par with the U.S. and Confederate dollars. But Confederate soldiers could buy occupation scrip for twenty cents of real money on the dollar. They spent freely—who wouldn’t, with a deal like that?—which drove down the value of the scrip. Prices were going up, anyway; so much scrip in circulation just made them go up faster.

Nellie walked out to the doorway. Across the street, Mr. Jacobs’ cobbler’s shop had a sign tacked to the boards covering what had been his window:
DISCOUNT FOR SILVER
. If the Rebs didn’t make him take that sign down, it struck Nellie as a good idea. If you fixed the discount as you should, you’d make money whether you got scrip or cash.

And Jacobs was doing a terrific business. You could get leather locally; it wasn’t like coffee. Marching wore down boots, too, so Confederate soldiers were always going into the shop. He’d even had a general make use of his services, said worthy having arrived in a motorcar driven by a colored chauffeur with a face of such perfect insolence, it seemed to be aching for a slap.

Quietly—for there were still a couple of Confederate cavalry lieutenants in the coffeehouse, hashing out on the table the breakthrough that hadn’t yet come and, God willing, never would—Edna said, “Ma, I wish there was something we could do to give the Johnny Rebs a hard time.”

“I’m not going to put rat poison in the coffee, though I’ve thought about it a couple of times,” Nellie answered.

“Maybe we ought to send them to the sporting house around the corner,” Edna said. “If they get a dose of the clap, they can’t very well fight, can they?” Her smile was wide and unpleasant.

Nellie’s ears got hot. “What is the younger generation coming to?” she exclaimed: the cry of the older generation throughout recorded history. “Radicalism and rebellion and free love—” She’d been seduced at the age of fifteen and knew more than she wanted of sporting houses, but conveniently chose not to remember that.

Smiling still, Edna said, “If they go to the sporting house, Ma, love wouldn’t be free. They don’t take scrip there, neither, I hear tell.”

“
Where
do you hear tell such things?” Nellie demanded. Edna was with her almost all day almost every day, but you couldn’t keep an eye on somebody all the time, not unless you were a jailer, you couldn’t.

Before her daughter answered, Mr. Jacobs came out of his shop along with a Confederate soldier carrying a pair of cavalry boots. The cavalryman went on his way. Jacobs called, “Lovely day, isn’t it, Widow Semphroch, Miss Semphroch?”

“Yes, it is,” Edna said, in lieu of replying to her mother’s question.

“No, it isn’t,” Nellie declared.

The cobbler laughed at their confusion.

“Dowling!” As usual, George Custer made too much noise. The shout would have drawn his adjutant from the next county, not just the next room.

“Coming, sir!” Abner Dowling said, also loudly, the better to overcome the commanding general’s deafness—which, of course, the commanding general denied he had.

Custer stabbed a nicotine-stained forefinger down at the map on the table before which he stood. “Major, I am not satisfied with our progress, not satisfied at all.”

“I’m sorry to hear that, General,” Dowling said, taking a discreet half step backwards: Custer’s breath alone was plenty to get you lit up. “I think we’ve made excellent progress, sir.”

He wasn’t lying there, not even a little bit. The crossing of the Ohio had gone better than he’d expected—much better than he’d expected, considering that Custer was in charge of it. Facing simultaneous thrusts aimed at Louisville and Covington, the Confederates hadn’t been able to put enough men into Kentucky to defend all of it. That First Army headquarters was in Marion these days proved the point.

“Well, I don’t, dammit,” Custer bellowed, which made Dowling draw back another half a pace, both from volume and from fumes. “Look at the map, you overfed twit! Second and Third Armies are going to break into the bluegrass country long before we do.”

“Our advance has hurt the Rebs a lot already,” Dowling said stoutly, refusing to take offense at the general’s gibe. “Why, we’ve deprived them of all the fluor spar mines here around Marion, and—”

“Fluor spar!” Custer sneered. “Fluor-stinking-spar! Teddy Roosevelt will be thrilled to get a telegram telling him we’ve captured a whole great pile of fluor-goddamn-spar, now won’t he? He’ll send me to command in Canada because of fluor spar, won’t he? Oh, yes, he’ll be delighted—no doubt about it.” Even by Custer’s standards, the sarcasm was venomous. “The greatest horse country in the world just ahead of us, and you’re babbling about fluor-fucking-spar? God preserve me from idiots!”

“But—” Dowling gave up. If you were going to make steel by any modern process, you needed fluor spar, and you needed it in multiton lots. But Custer had been a cavalry general back in the days when cavalry was good for something more than getting mowed down by machine guns, and so horses were all he thought about.
That he’s a horse’s ass doesn’t hurt, either
, Dowling thought. He usually tried to keep from thinking disloyal thoughts, but that wasn’t easy when Custer rode him on account of his size.

The general said, “I want to put paid to the Confederate cavalry once and for all.”

“Yes, sir, I understand that,” Dowling said, doing his best to get across the idea that Custer might better use his men in another way without coming right out and screaming in the famous general’s wrinkled, sagging face. He also understood that Custer wanted to accomplish something so spectacular, Teddy Roosevelt would have no choice but to give him the command he truly craved. If Custer held his breath waiting for that, he’d be even redder in the face than he was already.

“I should hope you do,” Custer declared. “Cavalry’s done a lot of good work in this war, especially on the far side of the Mississippi.”

“Yes, sir,” Dowling said again, now in resignation. Try as you would, sometimes you couldn’t win. Custer was going to go after cavalry horses, and that was all there was to it. Never mind that the Rebs west of the Mississippi drew their mounts from local stock. Never mind that the reason cavalry could be dashing and bold out West was that there were miles and miles of miles and miles out there, and not enough soldiers, Yankee or Confederate, to keep raiders from breaking through every so often. Never mind that two other armies were already advancing on the bluegrass country. Never mind any of that. Custer wanted his glory, and by jingo he was going to get it.

He said, “We’ll push east past Madisonville and break through there. The Confederates can’t keep throwing up lines against us indefinitely. Sooner or later, the losses they’re suffering will force them to recognize they’ve met their match and then some in me.” He struck a triumphal pose that put his adjutant in mind of a plaster-of-paris statue made by a bad artist having a worse day.

“Our own losses have also been heavy, sir,” said Dowling, whose job, after all, involved keeping some tenuous connection between Custer and military reality. “Defending prepared lines is cheaper than storming them.”

That was especially true because Custer didn’t—wouldn’t—allow enough time for proper artillery bombardment before he sent the poor damned infantry forward. Kentucky wasn’t like the country west of the Mississippi. Here, the Confederacy had plenty of Negroes to build works and plenty of white men in butternut to man them. That was one of the reasons cavalry here didn’t count for much.

Also—“Sir, if we concentrate our main thrust along an east-west line, we can’t take proper precautions against the Confederate buildup we’ve been watching between Hopkinsville and Cadiz, southeast of here. If they take us in flank, we’ll be as embarrassed as our German friends were on the Marne a few weeks ago.”

“Fiddlesticks,” Custer retorted. “I don’t believe the Rebs can muster the sort of force they’d need to shift us, nor anything close to it. They’re too heavily committed here and on too many other fronts. We have the initiative, Major, and we shall retain it.”

“But, sir—” Dowling had to protest. He went through the papers in Custer’s in-basket. Sure enough, there were the reconnaissance reports he’d stamped
URGENT
in crimson ink, and sure enough, Custer hadn’t looked at any of them. “These scouting reports from our aeroplane pilots clearly show—”

“That those pilots are a pack of nervous Nellies,” General Custer broke in. He seemed pleased with the phrase, so he repeated it; “A pack of nervous Nellies, yes indeed. You ask me, Major, what they call reconnaissance is greatly overrated anyhow.”

“But, sir—” Dowling repeated himself, too, before continuing, “back in St. Louis, you were complaining you weren’t getting the reconnaissance you needed from Kentucky.”

“‘A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds,’” Custer quoted grandly. “Now let me tell you what reconnaissance can be worth. Back more than forty years ago now, this damned ragged Indian scout looked at the ground and told me all the Indians in the world—or in Kansas, anyhow—were camped along the Ninnescah, down near the border with Sequoyah: Indian Territory, it was then. Do you know what I ordered, Major? Do you know?”

“The whole country knows, sir,” Dowling answered unhappily.

“Yes, but do you?” Custer glowered at him. “I ordered the charge, Major, that’s what I did. We sent a raft of redskins to the happy hunting grounds by suppertime, and hardly let a one get back to the Confederate side of the border.” He struck his splendid pose once more. “And no one has missed them from that day to this. Now I am going to order the charge again. If the enemy is there, you must strike him.”

“The Confederates are better soldiers than those red savages were, I’m afraid, sir,” Dowling said.

“They’re not good enough to withstand a stroke from the brave soldiers of the United States of America,” Custer declared, “and I aim to give them one they’ll never forget. Besides which, as I’ve told you before, aeroplanes are nothing but newfangled claptrap.”

Abner Dowling had the feeling he’d wandered into quicksand. The more he tried to flail his way toward common sense, the more deeply he got mired in Custer’s prejudices, which were as entrenched as any of the Confederate works against which the general insisted on banging his head. You couldn’t just ignore a building flank attack…could you?

Then, without warning, bombs started falling on Marion: four or five sharp explosions. One of them blew in Custer’s office window; Dowling yelped when a flying shard cut his hand. He couldn’t hear the buzz of the aeroplane that had dropped the bomb. It must have been flying as high as it could.

Outside, soldiers opened up on the aeroplane with their Springfields and with a couple of machine guns. Their chances of bringing it down were about the same as those of taking on the steel trust in court and winning.

“You see?” Custer said triumphantly. “They’re only a nuisance, and couldn’t hurt a fly.”

Clutching his injured hand, Dowling reflected that he was obviously worth less than a fly to his commander. Well, that wasn’t anything he hadn’t already known. Later, he found out one of the bombs had fallen in the midst of a knot of soldiers, killing five of them (as well as an unfortunate local Negro who was cooking for them) and maiming another three.

But that was later. At the moment, he said, “We do have an urgent request for reinforcements on the southeastern part of our line. Wouldn’t it be prudent to—”

“No, and quit pestering me about it!” Custer shouted. His pouchy, sagging features turned quite red. “We didn’t start to fight this war to stand on the defensive, Major, God damn it to hell. We came to do to the Rebs what they did to us fifty years ago: to knock ’em down, and to kick ’em in the balls when they are down. We attack!”

“Yes, sir,” Dowling said miserably.

Flora Hamburger stepped out onto the fire escape to get away. She wasn’t trying to escape the heat trapped inside the flat she shared with her parents, an older sister, a younger sister, and two younger brothers. Escaping the heat was what you did in summer, and here with October heading toward November you were likelier to throw on a sweater or a coat, although she hadn’t bothered doing that.