Breakthroughs (6 page)

The parlor window gave him a good view of a couple of antiaircraft guns sitting out there in the mud, and of the wet, cold, miserable soldiers who served them. The Rebs had stepped up bombing attacks against First Army lately. More pursuit aeroplanes were supposed to be coming, but every Army commander screamed for more aeroplanes at the top of his lungs.

Cornelia brought him his coffee, pale with cream and—he sipped—very sweet, just the way he liked it. “Thank you, my dear,” he said. She smiled at him, but he was wise enough—which wasn’t too far removed from saying
old enough
—to recognize it as a smile of service, not one of invitation.

Dowling had taken only a couple of sips when the general commanding First Army came out of the kitchen and made his slow way into the parlor. His adjutant set the coffee on the arm of the sofa and heaved himself to his feet. Saluting, he said, “Good morning, General Custer.”

“Good morning, Major,” Lieutenant General George Armstrong Custer said as he returned the salute. For a man of seventy-seven, Custer was in fine fettle—but then, most men of seventy-seven were dead, and had been for years. Locks peroxided a brassy gold spilled out from under the hat Custer habitually wore to hide his bald head. His drooping mustache had also been chemically gilded.

With a wheeze, he sank into a chair, then produced a gold cigar case from a breast pocket of his fancy uniform. Dowling had a match ready to light the cigar he took from it. “Here you are, sir,” he said. Custer drew on the cigar, coughed wetly a couple of times, and then settled down to happy puffing.

He blew out a cloud of fragrant smoke—as a general, he could get hold of far finer tobacco than the average U.S. citizen. No sooner had he done so than his wife came into the parlor. “That miserable thing stinks, Autie,” Elizabeth Bacon Custer snapped.

“Now, Libbie, it’s a fine cigar,” Custer said in placating tones. Around his wife, if nowhere else, he took a soft line. Dowling understood that down to the ground. Libbie Custer intimidated him more than the Confederate Army did, too—and he thought she thought well of him.

“Cigars,” she said with a scowl on her round face. “Taking the name of the Lord in vain.” The scowl got deeper. “Liquor.” Now she looked ready to bite nails in half.

“’Scuse me, Miz Custer, ma’am.” Cornelia swept by, round hips working under the skirt. “Here’s that coffee you asked for, General.” She laid the cup on the table in front of Custer, then left the room with that rolling stride. Custer’s eyes followed her, hungrily. So did Dowling’s; he couldn’t help it.

And so did Libbie Custer’s. When Cornelia was out of sight, Libbie glared at her husband even more fearsomely than she had when she spoke of spirits. She didn’t speak now, maybe because she couldn’t find a word a lady could say that would express her feelings. Instead, short and plump and determined, she stomped out of the room herself.

Custer sighed. “She
will
come up toward the front,” he said. That made it harder for him to do what he wanted to do with Cornelia. Dowling didn’t know if he’d done anything with the housekeeper before Libbie arrived. For that matter, Dowling didn’t know if he
could
do anything with the housekeeper, being, after all, seventy-seven.

The only answer the adjutant gave was a shrug. No matter what sort of crimp having Libbie around put in Custer’s plans, Dowling didn’t mind it a bit. He’d noticed First Army fought better when she cohabited with her husband. The conclusion he’d drawn—that she owned more than half the family’s brains—he kept to himself.

Looking around to make sure he was not overseen, Custer drew a flat silver flask from a hip pocket and poured some of its contents into his coffee. Magnanimously, he held it out to Dowling. “Want an eye-opener, Major?”

“Don’t mind if I do, sir—just a wee one.” Dowling tasted the improved coffee. “Ahh. That’s mighty good brandy.”

“Isn’t it, though?” Custer gulped down half his cup. “Well, let’s get down to business, shall we? Soonest begun, soonest done.”

“Yes, sir,” Dowling said. Custer didn’t like minutiae, which made Dowling take a certain acerbic pleasure in giving him a bellyful: “Our trench raids by Cotton Town brought in twenty-seven prisoners last night, sir. The Rebs tried to raid us near White House. We beat them back pretty smartly; only lost a couple of men, and machine-gunned a couple of theirs retreating through no-man’s-land. They threw some gas shells at us farther west, north of Greenbrier. That could be trouble; they’ve brought fresh troops into the area, and they’re liable to be planning a spoiling attack.”

“God damn them to hell,” Custer growled, thereby making a clean sweep of Libbie’s shibboleths. “God damn the whole Entente to hell. And God damn President Theodore goddamn Roosevelt to hell, too, for sticking me here against the Rebs when he knows I’d sooner pay the limeys and Canadians back for what they did to Tom.”

“Yes, sir,” Abner Dowling said resignedly. He wondered how many times he’d heard that from the general commanding First Army. Often enough to be sick of it, anyhow. Custer’s brother was thirty-five years dead now, slain in Montana Territory during the Second Mexican War. Custer and Roosevelt hadn’t got along with each other in the past thirty-five years, either, each suspecting the other of stealing some of his glory. He tried to steer Custer back to the front where he commanded, not the one where he wished he led: “If we could return to planning, sir…”

“Planning? Faugh!” Custer made a disgusted noise. “Once we smash through this line, Nashville falls, because we’ll be able to shell it to kingdom come. One more push—”

“They’ve stopped all the pushes we’ve tried so far, sir,” Dowling reminded him: a sentence that covered thousands of dead and wounded, and burning barrels by the score. Custer’s favorite strategy, now as always in a career that stretched back to the War of Secession, was the headlong smash.

Now the general commanding First Army looked sly, which alarmed Abner Dowling. “I think I’ve finally found a way to break through,” Custer said.

“Really, sir?” Dowling hoped he kept all expression from his voice because, if he didn’t, the expression that would have been there was horror. Generals on both sides in America—and on both sides in Europe, too—had been chasing breakthroughs since the war began, with the same persistence and same success as men dying of thirst chasing mirages in the desert.

Custer beamed, which made his cheeks sag and his jowls wobble. “Yes, by jingo.” He leaned forward and set a liver-spotted hand on Dowling’s knee, much as he would have liked to do with Cornelia. “And you’re going to help me.”

“You’ll give me a combat assignment, sir?” Dowling asked eagerly. He’d longed for one since the war began. The War Department thought he was more useful as Custer’s adjutant. It was a nasty job, but someone had to do it, and Dowling, from long practice, had got good at it. But if Custer himself wanted to put his adjutant into action…

Evidently, Custer didn’t. He shook his head, which made those lank locks of hair flip back and forth. Dowling coughed a little at the stink of the cinnamon-scented hair oil Custer liked. Nobody else Dowling knew had used the nasty stuff since the turn of the century. “No, no, no,” Custer said. “You’re going to help me keep things straight with Philadelphia.”

“I’ll be happy to edit your correspondence, sir,” Dowling said. The general’s correspondence needed editing—more than it commonly got. Custer was a firm believer in a variation on the Ptolemaic theory: he was convinced the world revolved around him. Anything good that happened anywhere near him had to redound to his credit and no one else’s; nothing bad was ever his fault. In that as in few other things, Libbie aided and abetted him.

He was shaking his head again. “No, no, no,” he repeated. “I have something important in mind, and I don’t want those dunderheads with gold and black piping on their caps to get wind of it and tell me I can’t do it because it runs against the way they read the Bible.”

“Exactly what is it you have in mind, sir?” Dowling asked with a sinking feeling. Gold and black were the branch-of-service colors of the General Staff. Whatever Custer was thinking about, it was something he already knew the War Department brass in the City of Brotherly Love wouldn’t love one bit.

“I’ll tell you what I have in mind, Major,” Custer said. “I have in mind the biggest goddamn barrel roll the world has ever seen, that’s what.”

Well, I might have guessed,
Dowling thought. The tracked, armored, motorized forts called barrels were the best thing anyone had yet found for breaking the deadly stalemate of trench warfare. They could smash barbed wire, clearing paths for infantry, and they could bring machine-gun and cannon fire down on the enemy from point-blank range. They also broke down about every five minutes and, even when they were working, didn’t move any faster than a man could walk.

The adjutant chose his words with care: “Sir, doctrine specifically orders that barrels be spread out evenly along the front, to assist infantry attacks wherever they may be carried out.”

“And what a lot of poppycock that is, too,” Custer declared, as if he were the Pope speaking
ex cathedra
. “The right way to use them is to build a whole great whacking column of them, smash a hole in the Rebs’ line you could throw a cow through, and send in the infantry on their heels—a breakthrough. Q.E.D.”

“When Brigadier General MacArthur came up with a similar plan, sir, you cited doctrine,” Dowling reminded him. “You wouldn’t let him do as he’d planned.”

“Daniel MacArthur cares for nothing but his own glory,” Custer said, which was true but which applied in even greater measure to Custer himself. “He knew the attack was weaker than it should have been, but went ahead anyhow. He deserved to fail, and he did.”

“Yes, sir,” Dowling said resignedly. Custer had done more than his share to weaken MacArthur’s attack because he did not want the youngest division commander in the whole Army getting credit for the victory he might have won.

“Besides,” Custer went on, “I aim to launch an army-scale assault, not one on the scale of a division. I intend to concentrate all the barrels in First Army and hurl them like a spear at the Confederate line. It will break, by God.”

“Sir, the War Department will never let you get away with flouting doctrine like that,” Dowling said. “If you try, they’ll confiscate your barrels and ship ’em to other fronts where the commanders are more cooperative.”

“I know.” The sly look returned to Custer’s face. “That’s where you come in.”

“Me?” Whatever was coming next, Dowling didn’t think he’d like it.

He was right. “In the reports First Army sends to Philadelphia,” Custer said, “all the barrels will be lined up exactly as the idiots with the high foreheads say they should be. You’ll vet corps and divisional reports, too—‘in the interest of greater efficiency,’ you know. Meanwhile, we shall be readying the blow that will wreck the Confederate position in Tennessee once and for all.”

Abner Dowling stared at him in dismay. “My God, sir, they’ll courtmartial us both.”

“Nonsense, my boy,” Custer told him. “You’re safe as houses any which way, because you’re acting under my direct orders. But even I need fear only if we lose. If we win, I shall be forgiven no matter what I do. Victory redeems everything. And we
shall
win, Major.”

“My God, sir,” Dowling said again. But then he paused. He’d dreamt for years of seeing Custer ousted from the command of First Army and replaced by someone competent. Now Custer was greasing the skids of his own downfall. And the general was right—his adjutant would only be obeying orders. Slowly, thoughtfully, Dowling nodded. “All right, sir, let’s see what we can do.”

“Stout fellow!” Custer exclaimed. He winked at Dowling. “Stout fellow indeed.” Dowling forced a smile.

The big White truck rumbled through the streets of Covington, Kentucky, toward the loading area by the Ohio River wharves. Cincinnatus knew the streets of Covington as well as he knew his name. He’d driven a delivery truck through them, back in the days before the war started. Covington had changed since U.S. forces wrested it from its Confederate defenders, but its streets hadn’t.

One symbol of the change was the flag flying from the city hall as the Negro drove past it. For the past two and a half years, the Stars and Stripes had fluttered there, not the Stars and Bars. If the USA won the war, the Stars and Stripes would fly there forever. Kentucky—less a few small chunks in the south and southeast still in Confederate hands—had been readmitted to the United States after more than half a century out of the Union.

Guards in green-gray stood guard in sandbagged machine-gun positions in front of the city hall. Not everyone in Kentucky was happy with its separation from the Confederate States. Not even close to everyone in Kentucky was happy with that separation. Cincinnatus sighed. He knew that only too well.

“Damn, I wish I never would’ve got sucked into all this crazy shit,” he muttered as the truck jounced over a pothole and his teeth clicked together. Confederate diehards, black Reds—were Kentucky still in the CSA, they would have been at each other’s throats. As things were, they both hated the occupier worse than they hated each other. Cincinnatus cursed his luck and his own generosity for making him part of both groups. If only he hadn’t hidden Tom Kennedy when the Yankee soldiers were after his old boss. But he had, and so…