American Front (68 page)

“And you, Widow Semphroch,” Pfeiffer said as she went out the door.

When she got back into the coffeehouse, Edna discreetly beckoned her over. She went, curious to see what could make her daughter circumspect. In a low voice, Edna said, “There was a man came in here askin’ after you, Ma, and I didn’t fancy his looks even a little, if you know what I mean.”

Fear leaped up and bit Nellie. The Rebs would have people hunting U.S. spies. “What did he look like?” she asked, forcing herself to speak quietly, too.

“Old and ugly,” Edna answered with the callousness of youth. “Either he ought to shave or else he ought to let his whiskers grow, one way or the other. Said his name was Bill or Phil or Pill or something like that.” She shrugged. It hadn’t been important to her.

A chill ran through Nellie. That sounded altogether too much like Bill Reach to suit her. “If he ever comes back, tell him I don’t want his business here. If he doesn’t like that, throw him out. I’m sure some of our customers would be delighted to help you do anything you ask.”

“Yeah, probably,” Edna said; she enjoyed being attractive to the Rebs. Her gaze sharpened. “He’s known you for a long time, this fellow, whoever he is, hasn’t he?”

“Why do you say that?” Nellie asked, at the same time as she was thinking,
Longer than you’ve been alive
.

Edna gave back some of that thought: “He said I looked just like you did when you were my age, maybe even younger. Did he know you way back then, Ma? That’s long time ago now.”

Don’t I know it
. Nellie made her shrug quiet, casual, easygoing. “I knew a lot of men when I was a young lady.”
And even more when I wasn’t being a lady
. “I don’t remember anybody named Phil or Pill, though.” She hoped her smile was disarming.

It wasn’t disarming enough. “How about somebody named Bill?” Edna said.

“A lot of Bills back then.” Nellie tried a small joke: “Always a lot of bills, never enough money to pay ’em.”

“You’re giving me the runaround, Ma.” Edna didn’t raise her voice, but sounded very certain. She had a right to sound that way; a lifetime with her mother had made Nellie transparent to her. “How well did you know this fellow, anyways? Did you…?” She wouldn’t say it, but she was thinking it.

“None of your business,” Nellie hissed, and then, louder, “Go serve that man there, would you? He wants himself filled up again.”

Edna glared at her, but went over to give the Confederate lieutenant another cup of coffee. “There you go, Toby,” she said, smiling a smile very close to the ones Nellie had once had to paste onto her own face.

“Thank you, Miss Edna,” Toby said. She put a little extra wiggle into her walk, too; the Reb’s eyes followed her every inch of the way back behind the counter. Nellie wanted to grab her daughter and shake her or, better yet, pour a pitcher of iced coffee over her head.

And serving the Confederate hadn’t distracted Edna or made her forget what she’d asked her mother. “C’mon, Ma,” she said. “Don’t tell me you actually had a
life
back then?”

“Whatever I had back then, it wasn’t very good,” Nellie said. “All I’m trying to do is keep you from going through the same things I did.”

Edna shrugged. “You got through ’em, looks like, even if you’re too goody-goody to talk about it now. You don’t want me to have a good time, that’s all. It ain’t fair.”

Nellie sighed. They’d had this fight before. Likely they were going to go right on having it, too. “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Nellie said. That was true. It was also the problem. Edna didn’t know, and was wild to find out.
I won’t let her
, Nellie told herself fiercely.
I won’t
.

Bremen, Kentucky, had been a coal-mining town before the U.S. First Army drove the Confederates out of it. Abner Dowling had no doubt the place had been grimy and ugly and smelly back in peacetime. Now it was grimy, ugly, doubly smelly thanks to so many dead horses nearby, and wrecked to boot. Given a choice, it was not where Dowling would have made First Army headquarters. He had not been given a choice.

“Dowling!” George Armstrong Custer shouted. His rasping, old man’s voice put his adjutant in mind of the braying of the donkey in the fairy tale about the musicians of Bremen. Dowling had done plenty of braying himself, reading his nieces the fairy tale. They’d giggled wildly, back ten years before. “Dowling!” Custer yelled again.

“Coming, sir,” Dowling said. Listening to a real donkey bray wasn’t nearly so much fun as impersonating one. The major squeezed his bulk through the narrow doorway of the house Custer had taken over. He came to attention; Custer was a stickler for courtesy—from subordinates. “What can I do for you, sir?”

“Bring me some coffee from the mess,” Custer said. “Put some fuel in it before it gets here, too.”

“Yes, sir,” Dowling said resignedly. He turned to go. Custer didn’t drink so much as some officers he’d known—but then, they hadn’t been in command of whole Armies, either.

“Do you know,” Custer said, “I hardly drank at all—no more than for medicinal purposes—till after we lost the Second Mexican War. No matter the renown I won in that last campaign, the thought of my beloved country having gone down to defeat at the hands of rebels and traitors and stabbed in the back by foreign foes twice in a generation’s time was too much for me to bear. Since then, I have been known to indulge myself, as an anodyne if nothing else.”

“Yes, sir,” Dowling repeated. He didn’t know whether the lieutenant general was telling the truth or not. He didn’t much care, either. However Custer had first made the acquaintance of the brandy bottle, he’d since become quite intimate with it.

Getting the coffee and adulterating it was a matter of a few minutes. Dowling was carrying the steaming cup back to Custer when the general let out a great bellow, as if he’d been gored by a bull.
Oh, Lord, what now?
Dowling thought. It wasn’t, he was sure, that the First Army drive on Morehead’s Horse Mill had stalled: it had been obvious for days that U.S. forces weren’t going to reach the road junction that had been their goal since they forced the Rebs out of Madisonville any time soon. It also wasn’t the casualty figures coming from their efforts to reach the town. Custer viewed casualty figures with considerable equanimity, especially seeing how many of them his own headlong ferocity caused. What was rattling his cage, then?

“Is something wrong, sir?” the major said, advancing with the coffee cup. “Here, drink this and you’ll feel better for it.”
At least you won’t be able to scream while you’re drinking it
.

Custer seized the cup and poured its contents down his throat. His face, already red, got redder. He coughed a couple of times before coherent if highly irate speech emerged. “That son of a bitch! That no-good, lying, stinking scoundrel. That fiend in human shape. When I’m through with the bastard, he’ll wish he was never born. I already wish he was never born.”

“Uh—who, sir?” Dowling asked. If Custer was swearing at General Pershing or one of the other younger officers in the service, Dowling’s job was to listen and calm him down and make sure he wouldn’t do anything that would damage not only himself (something Dowling didn’t mind at all) but also First Army (which would be regrettable).

“Who?” Custer thundered. “That blackguard Davis, that’s who!” For a moment, Dowling remained confused, Davis being anything but an uncommon name. Then Custer pointed to the
Scribner’s
magazine on his desk. It hadn’t been there when Dowling went to get the general’s coffee. A messenger must have delivered it to Custer and then disappeared in a hurry.

Dowling felt a certain amount of sympathy for that messenger. Unfortunately, he didn’t have the option of disappearing in a hurry. Very cautiously, he asked, “You’re disappointed in the coverage you got from Richard Harding Davis?”

“Disappointed? Great heavens, the man proves himself a pathological liar.” Custer picked up the offending periodical and thrust it at his adjutant. “See for yourself, Major.”

The title of Davis’ article was innocuous enough: “The First Army Attacks: Part Two.” Part One had run a couple of weeks before, and had been a paean of praise for First Army’s courage. Custer had not complained about it at all. Dowling rapidly skimmed through Part Two. The more he read, the more he had to work to keep his face not merely straight but sympathetic. Richard Harding Davis, a manly man himself, had been imperfectly impressed with the person of George Armstrong Custer: “neck wattled like a turkey’s,” “squinting little pouchy eyes,” and “hair that bought its color from a bottle in a vain attempt to hold back Father Time” were some of the choicer epithets.

Davis hadn’t had much good to say about the generalship involved in the first gas attack, either. “Opportunity squandered” was a phrase he used several times. “Failure to achieve a breakthrough despite the advantages given by the preceding chlorine barrage” was also sure to raise Custer’s hackles. To Dowling’s way of thinking, though, the most telling bit of evidence that the war reporter did know what he was talking about was the comment that “up and down the front, troops were committed to battle in a deployment more aggressive than strategically sound.” That was Custer’s style, set out in black and white for all to see.

“I’m sorry, sir,” Dowling said, handing the
Scribner’s
back to the commanding general. “Those reporters, they’re not to be trusted.” Inside, he was chortling. Custer was drawn to publicity like iron filings to a magnet. He’d used it astutely, enabling himself to stay in the Army past what should have been retirement age. Now it had turned on him and bit him. There was a saying about he who lived by the sword, and another one about the pen’s being mightier than that sword. Put those together and examine their implications…

Custer was not in a mood for logical examinations. “If I ever set eyes on that lying son of a whore again, I’ll horsewhip him within an inch of his worthless life. I trusted him to tell the truth about me—”

I trusted him to paint me in glowing colors, the way too many reporters have done for too many years:
Dowling had no trouble making his own translation of Custer’s remarks.

The general was in full spate now: “—and my boys in the trenches, hearing about this—this tripe, will wonder whether I have the right stuff to lead them against the hereditary foe.”

Reluctantly, Dowling admitted to himself that Custer had a point there. The men who did the actual fighting needed to think their general had their best interests at heart and was using them wisely. The loss of that feeling was what had made McClellan’s Army of the Potomac fall to pieces after Camp Hill during the War of Secession: figuring they’d get licked no matter what they did, the rank and file gave up.

Back then, the feeling had been justified; studying McClellan’s campaigns, Dowling had been struck by the way he was always a step and a half behind Lee. The trouble was, he didn’t think Custer’s men were justified in having confidence in their commander. Custer was brave and liked to go right at the enemy. Having said that, you exhausted his military virtues.

No—in military politics, at least, he had a solid Machiavellian streak in him. “Davis is TR’s fair-haired boy, too,” he muttered gloomily. “When the president sees this, I can kiss Canada good-bye forever—he’s going to want my scalp.”

That last was true only metaphorically, Custer being bereft of hair on the portion of his scalp Indians had customarily removed. “It will be all right, sir,” Dowling said, sympathetically if not sincerely. “You and TR fought side by side against the limeys in the Second Mexican War. I’m sure he’ll remember that.”

Half to himself, Custer muttered, “Teddy always did say his troops outperformed my regulars.”

Roosevelt’s volunteer cavalry, a regiment of miners and farmers, had indeed done yeoman work in Montana, fighting their British opposite numbers to a standstill, and had led the pursuit after the British blundered straight into Custer’s Gatling guns. In Dowling’s view, TR had a point; only the armistice U.S. President Blaine had had to accept had kept the triumph from being bigger than it was.

“I’d have licked them anyway,” Custer said, sounding as if he was trying to convince himself. Maybe he would have: nobody examined Chinese Gordon’s campaigns alongside Napoleon’s. Dowling’s opinion remained that Custer had probably needed all the help Teddy Roosevelt gave him.

All of which was irrelevant. He pointed to the
Scribner’s
. “What do we do about that, sir?”

“First, I shall write a memorial and send it to President Roosevelt, detailing the lies and calumnies and false accusations this Richard Harding Davis has leveled against me,” Custer declared, using the correspondent’s full name with equally full contempt. Dowling nodded. That was like Custer: if threatened, attack head-on, and never mind scouting the ground first. Sometimes you won that way; more often, you got your nose bloodied. Dowling would have bet TR would be imperfectly delighted to receive Custer’s memorial, and that it would sharpen the president’s focus on details he might otherwise have ignored. But that was Custer’s lookout, not his. The general commanding First Army went on, “And after that is done and on its way, I am going to tear these lying pages out of the
Scribner’s
and wipe my backside with them, which is precisely what they deserve, no more, no less. What do you think of
that
, Major Dowling?”

“Revenge is, uh, sweet, sir,” Dowling said. He fled then, before his own big mouth got him into even bigger trouble.

Reggie Bartlett sighed with relief as he tramped away from the front line east of Big Lick, Virginia. He and his comrades were battered, worn, filthy, unshaven. Some of them had bandages on minor wounds; several were coughing from chlorine they’d sucked into their lungs during one gas attack or another. None of them would have been invited to serve as a model for a Confederate recruiting poster.

“Here come the rookies,” Corporal Robert E. McCorkle said, pointing at the men marching up to replace Reggie’s regiment. They were obviously raw troops, just out of one training camp or another. It wasn’t so much that they wore clean uniforms; soldiers coming back to the line were often issued fresh clothes. It was more the look in their eyes, the way they stared at the veterans as if they’d never seen such spectral apparitions before.