That amused the U.S. artillerymen standing by their pieces awaiting the word to commence. "It ain"t no big loss, Pop," one of them said. "That G.o.dd.a.m.n buzzing drives me crazy, nothin" else but." A couple of his comrades spoke up in agreement.
"Better to know the enemy than to let him take you by surprise," Dougla.s.s insisted, which drew another chuckle from the Ma.s.sachusetts volunteers. In the couple of days he"d been with them, they"d treated him well: General Willc.o.x had made a good choice in a.s.signing him to their battery when he"d asked to watch the bombardment of Louisville from among the guns.
A rider came trotting down the road. He halted when he saw the guns: big, dark shapes in what was otherwise an empty field. "Open fire at four A.M A.M. sharp," he called, and rode on to give the next battery the word.
Someone struck a match, first stepping well away from the guns and limbers to do so. The brief flare of light showed the boyish features of Captain Joseph Little, the battery commander. "Fifteen minutes," he said after checking his pocket watch. "Men, we"ll load our pieces now, so as to get the first shots off precisely on the mark."
In darkness just this side of perfect, the gun crews handled uns.c.r.e.w.i.n.g the breech blocks, loading in sh.e.l.ls and bags of powder after them, and sealing the guns once more as smoothly as they might have done at high noon. Dougla.s.s had already seen that the artillery volunteers, most of whom were militiamen of long standing, were trained to a standard close to that of their Regular Army counterparts, which could not have been said about the volunteer infantry.
Captain Little spoke up again: "Mr. Dougla.s.s, you"ll want to make certain"-his Bay State accent made the word come out as suht"n suht"n, almost as if he were a Rebel-"you"re not standing right behind a gun. When they go off, the recoil will will send them rolling backwards at a pretty clip." send them rolling backwards at a pretty clip."
Dougla.s.s made sure he would be out of harm"s way. The quarter of an hour seemed to take forever. Dougla.s.s was beginning to think it would never end when, off to the east toward Jeffersonville, several cannon roared all at once.
"Well! I like that," Captain Little said indignantly. "Still lacks two minutes of the hour by my watch." He must have been staring at it in the faintest early twilight. "Some people think they have to come to the party early. If we can"t be the first, we shan"t be the last, either." More guns were going off, some of them much closer than the earliest ones had been. Little raised his voice: "Battery B ... Fire!"
All six guns bellowed at essentially the same instant. The noise was a cataclysmic blow against Dougla.s.s" ears. Great long tongues of yellow flame burst from the muzzles of the cannon, illuminating for half a heartbeat the men who served them. Dense smoke shot from the muzzles, too.
Dougla.s.s paid that scant heed for the moment. As Captain Little had warned, the cannon recoiled sharply. A couple of artillerymen had to step lively to keep from being run down by the creaking gun carriages.
"Come on, lads!" Little yelled. "Get "em back in place and give the d.a.m.n Rebs another dose of the same." Grunting and cursing, the crews manhandled the cannon up to the positions from which they"d first fired. The breeches were opened, swabbed out to make sure no burning fragments of powder bag remained. Then in went another sh.e.l.l, another charge, and the loaders screwed the breeches shut. The guns bellowed once more, not in a single salvo this time but one after another, each crew struggling to be faster than those to either side of it.
The smoke quickly filled the field. Coughing, Dougla.s.s moved to one side, seeking not only cleaner air to breathe but also an unimpeded view of the battlefield. As twilight brightened toward day, it was as if the curtain lifted on an enormous stage set out before him.
Seeing that panorama, he understood for the first time why men spoke of the terrible grandeur of war. Barges and boats packed with soldiers raced across the Ohio so the men they carried could close with the foe. Sh.e.l.ls from the U.S. guns poured down like rain on the waterfront of Louisville. Each one burst with a flash of sullen red fire and a great uplifting cloud of black smoke. Dougla.s.s could not imagine how any Confederate soldiers compelled to endure such a cannonading could hope to survive.
But the enemy not only survived, he fought. Not only did sh.e.l.ls burst along the waterfront. They also burst in the Ohio. Looking across the river, Dougla.s.s could see flashes from the muzzles of Confederate guns, cannon similar to those the Ma.s.sachusetts volunteers served. Their thunder reached his ears, too, attenuated by distance but still very real.
Tall plumes of water flew up from the sh.e.l.ls that splashed into the Ohio. When Dougla.s.s noticed those, the spectacle before him suddenly seemed less grand. His breathing came short. His palms got sweaty. Remembered terror was almost as vivid as the original. He did not need to wonder what the blue-clad men in the invasion boats were feeling. He"d felt it himself, when the Rebel battery sh.e.l.led the Queen of the Ohio Queen of the Ohio.
Those Confederates had been but a handful, with only a single battery of old-fashioned guns to bring to bear on their target. The Rebels here had modern cannon by the score and targets to match. Many of them, too, would be their Regular Army men, the best they had.
Not all their sh.e.l.ls, then, burst in the river. Some struck the hurrying boats full of U.S. troops. Dougla.s.s groaned when one of those simply broke up and sank, throwing its heavily laden soldiers into the water. Another stricken vessel must have had either its helmsman hit or its rudder jammed, for it slewed sharply to one side and collided with its neighbor. Both boats capsized.
And, as the barges and boats neared the bank the Confederates held, tiny yellow flashes, like far-off fireflies, began appearing in the midst of the sh.e.l.l-bursts from the U.S. guns: Confederate riflemen got to work. Incredible as it seemed to Frederick Dougla.s.s, they had not only lived through the bombardment that still continued, but also retained enough spirit to fight back strongly. Loathe their cause though he most sincerely did, Dougla.s.s could not help respecting their courage.
The first boats began to reach the far bank of the river. Tiny as blue ants in the distance, U.S. soldiers swarmed off them, rushing forward to find cover from the galling fire of their foes-and also from the fire of their friends, which had not shifted its targets despite the landings. Artillery put Dougla.s.s in mind of some great ponderous stupid beast, liable to step on and crush anyone who came too near it.
He scrawled his impressions of the fight down in a notebook, intending to weave them into a coherent whole back at his tent when he had the leisure. He had, as yet, no idea whether the battle would be won or lost. All he could discern at the moment was that both sides were fighting not only with desperate courage but also with all the resources science and industry could give them.
And then, in the twinkling of an eye, the battle lost its abstract, panoramic quality and the face of war changed for him forever. The C.S. artillery had concentrated on the invasion boats on the Ohio and, to a lesser degree, on the quays where the barges and boats took on their cargo of soldiers. Every so often, though, the Rebs would lob a few sh.e.l.ls at the U.S. guns bombarding them, no doubt aiming more to hara.s.s than to stop the cannonading.
By the time the sun came up, Frederick Dougla.s.s had grown intimately familiar with the astonishing cacophony emanating from an artillery battery working at full throttle. He did not, however, understand what shrill, rising screams in the air meant until three sh.e.l.ls burst in swift succession among the Ma.s.sachusetts volunteers whose deeds he"d intended chronicling.
The ground shook under his feet. Something hissed past his head. Had it flown a few inches to one side of its actual path, any hopes of his chronicling the artillerymen"s adventures would have died in that instant.
More screams, these from the ground, not the air: the sounds of agony. Dougla.s.s forgot he was a reporter and remembered he was a man. Stuffing the notebook into a pocket, he ran across the field-even now, under the stink of gunpowder, the gra.s.s smelled sweet-to give what aid he could.
"Oh, dear G.o.d!" He stopped short with an involuntary exclamation of horror. There lay brave, clever Captain Joseph Little, who had never by word or deed shown he thought Dougla.s.s less than himself on account of the color of his skin. Captain Little would never think good or ill of Dougla.s.s again, not in this world. One of the Confederate sh.e.l.ls had burst quite near him. Now he lay like a broken doll. Broken quite literally: his head had been torn from his body, and lay several feet away from the still-twitching corpse. Half the top of it had been blown off, too; red blood pooled on gray brains. More red soaked the green gra.s.s under him. The first flies were already landing.
Captain Little, of course, did not scream. The one virtue of his death was that he could have had no notion of what hit him. One second, he was directing his guns, the next ... gone. The fellow down on the ground beside him-no, by some miracle or insanity, sitting up now-wasn"t screaming, either. When the artilleryman sat, his intestines spilled out into his lap. A sh.e.l.l fragment had laid open his belly as neatly as the slave butcher gutted hogs back in Dougla.s.s" plantation days.
The Ma.s.sachusetts volunteer looked down at himself. "Isn"t that something?" he said, his voice eerily calm. Dougla.s.s had heard of men with dreadful injuries who seemed unaware of pain, in stories from railroad accidents and such. He hadn"t believed them, but now he saw they were-or could be-true. The artilleryman"s eyes rolled up in his head. He slumped back to the ground, dead or unconscious. If he was unconscious, Dougla.s.s hoped he"d never wake, for he had no hope of surviving, not with that dreadful wound.
By one of the h.e.l.lish freaks of war, another soldier had had his guts torn out in almost identical fashion. He was not quiet. He was not calm. He rolled and thrashed and shrieked and wailed, spraying blood and fragmented bits of himself in every direction. Dougla.s.s heard one of his teeth break as he clenched his jaws against yet another scream. He was perfectly conscious, perfectly rational, and looked likely to stay that way for hours to come.
His eyes, wide and wild and staring, fixed on Dougla.s.s and held the Negro"s in an unbreakable grip. "Kill me," the artilleryman growled, his voice rough and ragged and ready to dissolve into yet another howl of anguish. "For G.o.d"s sake, kill me. Don"t make me go through any more of this."
He wore a revolver on his belt. With what looked like a supreme effort of will, he jerked one dripping hand away from his belly long enough to get the pistol out and shove it along the ground toward Dougla.s.s.
Before Dougla.s.s knew what he"d done, he picked up the revolver. It was heavy in his hand. He knew how to use one. He"d carried one in the grim days just after the War of Secession, when whites were liable to blame any Negro they saw for the war and, perhaps, to go from blaming him to hanging him from the nearest lamppost.
He looked around. None of the other artillerymen was paying him the least attention. Some were tending to less dreadfully wounded comrades. Others, farther away, kept on serving their own guns, so as to make sure the Confederates on the other side of the river got their fair share of death and mutilation and horror and torment.
"Shoot me," the eviscerated soldier groaned. "Don"t stand there with your thumb up your a.s.s, d.a.m.n you to f.u.c.king h.e.l.l."
For the first twenty years of his life and more, Dougla.s.s had been caught up in the nightmare of slavery. Now he found another nightmare, one that turned men into beasts-into beasts straight from the abattoir-in different, more abrupt fashion. Caught in the toils of this new nightmare, he pointed the revolver at the artilleryman"s forehead and, with a convulsive motion, squeezed the trigger.
The pistol bucked in his hand. A neat, blue-black hole appeared above the wounded soldier"s left eye. The back of his head blew out, splashing hair and shattered bits of skull and brains and blood over the gra.s.s. With a cry of disgust and dismay, Dougla.s.s set down the pistol and rubbed his blood-smeared palm against a trouser leg again and again, as if by that means he could wipe off the mark of Cain.
Several artillerymen spun toward him at the sound of the shot. Most of them, seeing what he had done, simply went back to what they were doing. One, though, with a sergeant"s three red stripes on his sleeve, walked over toward the distraught Negro. After looking at the dead gunner"s ghastly wound for a few seconds, he put an arm around Dougla.s.s" shoulder. "I want to thank you for what you did, sir," he said. "Noah was my cousin, and you put him out of his pain. If you hadn"t been there, I believe I"d have had to do the job myself, and that would have been mighty hard, mighty hard indeed."
"It was-the only thing I could do," Dougla.s.s said slowly. So often, words like that revealed themselves for the shallow self-justification they were. This once, he heard truth in them.
So did the sergeant, Noah"s cousin. "That"s right," he said. "That"s just exactly right, and don"t you let it trouble your mind again." He went back to his cannon, leaving Dougla.s.s, who was not a Roman Catholic, fully understanding for the first time in his life the power of absolution.
Alfred von Schlieffen paced along the northern bank of the Ohio, growing more frustrated by the moment. A great battle raged a mile away, and he could not get to it. He could not even do a proper job of observing, not from where he was. Too much smoke hung in the air to let him have more than the vaguest notion of how the fight was going. And the U.S. authorities flatly refused to let him board a boat and cross over to the Kentucky side of the river.
"I"m sorry, sir," said Second Lieutenant Archibald Creel, who accompanied him today because General Willc.o.x had more urgent things for Oliver Richardson to do. "The general doesn"t want us to have to explain to Berlin how we let their military attache go and get himself killed."
A couple of Confederate sh.e.l.ls smashed to earth within a hundred yards of Schlieffen. "I am on this side of the river to do that," he remarked with some asperity. As if to underscore his words, more sh.e.l.ls screamed in.
Lieutenant Creel did not look as if he had been out of West Point more than a week. He stood firm, both against the sh.e.l.ling and against the foreign officer he was required to shepherd. "I have my orders, sir," he said. He might have been quoting Holy Writ. In a soldierly way, he was.
"To the devil with your orders," Schlieffen muttered, but in German, which the youngster did not speak. He tried again: "I am a military man. I am obliged to take risks for my fatherland."
"No, sir," Creel said, and stuck out his chin.
"Donnerwetter," Schlieffen said. No doubt about it: he was stuck. Schlieffen said. No doubt about it: he was stuck.
Since he was stuck, he decided to make the most of it. He set off at a brisk walk toward the Jeffersonville wharves, which, as an accomplished map reader, he knew to be closer than those of Clarksville. Like a dog on a leash-and so he was, a watchdog-Second Lieutenant Creel tagged along.
Men in blue-some in the faded uniforms of the regulars, more wearing the dark and almost spotless clothes the volunteers had recently donned-waited in long, stolid lines to board the barges and steamboats that would ferry them over the river so they could fight. Schlieffen had watched boats get hit in midstream. No doubt the soldiers had, too. They kept moving toward the boats anyhow, exactly as Germans would have done. That took discipline and courage both, the combination being especially remarkable for volunteer troops.
Long trenches paralleled the lines that led down to the waterfront. When the Confederates started sending sh.e.l.ls at the men near Schlieffen, they lost their stolidity in a hurry, diving into the trenches to shelter from blast and flying splinters.
Schlieffen stayed upright. So did Lieutenant Creel. It was surely the first time he"d been under fire. He handled himself well. As soon as the sh.e.l.ls stopped falling, the U.S. soldiers scrambled out of the trenches and resumed their places in line as if nothing had happened. Stretcher-bearers carried away a couple of groaning wounded men, but only a couple.
"These ditches are a good idea," Schlieffen said. "They save casualties."
"That they do." Archibald Creel sounded as proud as if he"d thought of them himself.
So, Schlieffen thought, I have here one small worthwhile thing. Is this enough for sending me so far? Is this enough to have gathered from the greatest battle of the war? have here one small worthwhile thing. Is this enough for sending me so far? Is this enough to have gathered from the greatest battle of the war? The answer, in both cases, was painfully obvious. With more temper than he usually showed, Schlieffen rounded on Second Lieutenant Creel: "You can tell me for a fact that U.S. troops are at this time fighting in Louisville?" The answer, in both cases, was painfully obvious. With more temper than he usually showed, Schlieffen rounded on Second Lieutenant Creel: "You can tell me for a fact that U.S. troops are at this time fighting in Louisville?"
"Yes, sir, I can tell you that," Lieutenant Creel said.
"Sehr gut. You cannot, however, tell me where in Louisville or how in Louisville or how well in Louisville they are fighting, nicht wahr?" nicht wahr?"
"I don"t know those things for certain, no, sir," Creel said. "I wish I did." He laughed nervously. "The fog of war." His wave encompa.s.sed the very real layer of thick gray smoke that blanketed Louisville, that hung low and close to the Ohio, and that drifted and swirled in eddies on the U.S. side of the river.
"Where will they know-where will they have some idea-how goes the fighting in Louisville?" Schlieffen demanded. "One place is over across the river, sir," Creel said. "Where I cannot go."
"Where you can"t go," the young lieutenant agreed. "The other place would be General Willc.o.x"s headquarters." He laughed again. "Well, Confederate headquarters, too, I suppose, but you can"t go there, either."
"No," Schlieffen wondered if the German military attache to the Confederate States was over there. He hoped so. Having reports from both sides of the line would be useful back in Berlin-provided he learned enough here to give his report any value. "Be so good, then, as to conduct me back to General Willc.o.x"s tent. To go to the front is for me forbidden, and here in the middle I might as well be in the middle of the sea. Take me back."
"Yes, sir," Lieutenant Creel said. "I don"t know how much the general will let you see with the battle still going hot and heavy, but we"ll find out. You come along with me, sir, and I"ll take you there."
Schlieffen would have got there faster by himself, but not much. The young U.S. officer had some notion of where he was and a pretty good idea of how to reach headquarters. Schlieffen, who laid a map in his head over the territory it represented as automatically as he breathed, had to do some un.o.btrusive guiding only once or twice to keep Creel headed in the right direction.
Creel"s presence was enough to get Schlieffen past the sentries outside General Willc.o.x"s tent. Given the stream of messengers rushing in and out, Schlieffen suspected he could have got past them without the young lieutenant. Some of those messengers clutched telegrams in their fists. Schlieffen noted that, though he didn"t remark on it for fear the Americans would notice him noticing. So they"d managed to get an insulated wire across the Ohio, had they? That would help them. General Willc.o.x would have far more intimate knowledge of what his troops were doing and would be able to send them orders far quicker than if he"d had to rely on boat traffic alone.
Getting to see him actually directing the battle, though, took a bit of doing. A staff officer senior to Second Lieutenant Creel halted Schlieffen, saying, "This isn"t anything we want any foreigners watching."
"I am not an enemy," Schlieffen said indignantly. "I am a neutral. When General Rosecrans let me come here, he gave me leave to observe the actions of the Army of the Ohio. You are preventing me from doing my duty to my country when you keep me from observing."
"I"m doing my duty to my own country," the staff officer retorted.
"I protest," Schlieffen said loudly. He was half the size and twice the age of the soldier barring his path. If the idiot in blue didn"t get out of his way, though, he was going to do his best to break him in half.
Lieutenant Creel saw as much, and put a restraining hand on his arm. "Wait a second, Colonel," he said. "Let me get Captain Richardson. He"ll straighten this out." He hurried past the other staff officer, who suffered him to enter General Willc.o.x"s sanctum sanctorum sanctum sanctorum.
"What"s all this about?" Richardson said when he came out. "I haven"t got time for any nonsense right now." Schlieffen and the other U.S. staff officer both started talking at once, glaring at each other while they did. Richardson listened for a little while, then threw up his hands. "Yes, Colonel Schlieffen, you may observe. Hickenlooper, keep out the Rebs and the Englishmen. Germany"s friendly, and she"s likelier to stay that way if you let the attache here do his job."
"Danke, Captain Richardson," Schlieffen said. He gave the dejected Hickenlooper a severe look as he strode past him.
As he might have expected, the command center of the Army of the Ohio was more chaotic than that which he"d known while serving in the Franco-Prussian War. Messengers and officers rushed in and out and stood around arguing with one another in a fashion no German general would have tolerated for an instant.
Orlando Willc.o.x looked up from the enormous map held flat on a table by a couple of stones, a government-issue tin cup, and one bayonet stabbed through the paper and into the wood. "Ah, Colonel Schlieffen," he said. "Glad to see you. We have our landings on the other side of the river, you see."
Schlieffen bent over the map. Sure enough, pins with blue gla.s.s heads showed U.S. forces scattered along the Kentucky sh.o.r.e of the Ohio and controlling the sandy islands in the middle of the river. Even as the attache watched, an aide stuck in another blue-headed pin, this one a little farther from the riverbank.
"We have to push them back," Willc.o.x said. "We can"t bridge the river with snipers picking off our engineers as fast as they get into range. Artillery is bad enough, but Confederates, say what you will about them, produce first-rate sharpshooters. And they"ll have every stretch of the Ohio ranged to the inch, too, so they"ll know precisely how to sight their rifles."
"The need for accurate sighting is the major drawback of the modern military rifle," Schlieffen agreed. To reach longer ranges, rifle bullets needed considerable elevation, which meant the angle at which they descended was far from insignificant. It also meant a minor error in estimating range was almost sure to result in a miss out past a couple of hundred yards.
Willc.o.x pointed to the red pins measling the map of Louisville. "It would appear that the C.S. commander, rather than withdrawing from the city here to engage us on open ground, intends to make his fight within Louisville itself, thereby subjecting it to all the rigors of war. Such callousness as to its fate and the fate of those civilians remaining there cannot win him favor either with his own people or in the eyes of the Lord."
"This may well be so," Schlieffen said, "but fighting in a built-up area is a good way to cause the foe many casualties. Remember the battle the French had to wage to put down the Paris Commune." He granted the Communards a good deal of thoughtful respect. Their ferocity, along with some of the fighting Napoleon Ill"s army had waged even after its cause was lost, in his view gave the lie to those Germans who reckoned France too weak and decadent ever to be a menace again.
"Fighting like that is uncivilized," Willc.o.x declared.
There, he had a point. European practice had long been for armies to engage away from centers of population, both to avoid endangering civilians and to give both sides the greatest possible opportunity to maneuver. The Americans had generally followed the same rules during the War of Secession. If the Confederates were changing those rules now ... "Have you learned for certain who the C.S. commander is?"
Willc.o.x looked unhappy. "Rebel prisoners are confirming the rumors we had heard. We do face General Jackson."
"Ach, so? Sehr interessant," Schlieffen murmured. In the War of Secession, Jackson"s reputation had come from maneuvers so relentless, his infantry got the name of "foot cavalry." A man who could change his entire strategic concept was one who demanded to be taken seriously. Schlieffen murmured. In the War of Secession, Jackson"s reputation had come from maneuvers so relentless, his infantry got the name of "foot cavalry." A man who could change his entire strategic concept was one who demanded to be taken seriously.
A messenger burst in and said, "General Willc.o.x, sir, Colonel Sully says the First Minnesota is melting like St. Paul ice in May. They"re pinned down on the waterfront, down to a couple of hundred men now. The Rebs in front of "em are too strong for "em to go forward, and if they retreat they swim."
"What in heaven"s name does Sully want me to do?" Willc.o.x demanded.
"Sir, he asks if you could put some artillery on the Rebs in his front," the messenger answered. "They"re either behind barricades or fighting from houses and shops and all. Makes the G.o.dd.a.m.n sons of b.i.t.c.hes twice as hard to kill, sir, hopin" you"ll pardon my French."
"Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord in vain," Willc.o.x said, which gave Alfred von Schlieffen at least a partial understanding of what the idiom meant. Schlieffen knew French, and knew the man had not been speaking it. Willc.o.x consulted the map, then went on, "The First Minnesota is close by Second Street?"
"No, sir-more like Sixth Street," the messenger told him. "Somebody"s boats next to ours took a-a goldanged pounding, sir, and we had to slide downstream a ways to keep from gettin" rammed."
"Sixth Street," Willc.o.x snarled, as if it were an obscenity. "I"ll do what I can, soldier. I make no promises. Has Colonel Sully no other way to escape his predicament?" Street," Willc.o.x snarled, as if it were an obscenity. "I"ll do what I can, soldier. I make no promises. Has Colonel Sully no other way to escape his predicament?"
"Sir, yes, sir," the messenger said. "He told me to tell you if he didn"t get some kind of help some kind of way pretty ... danged quick, he was going to have to surrender."
Willc.o.x jerked as if wounded. "I"ll do what I can," he repeated. The messenger saluted and hurried away. When the fellow was gone, Willc.o.x turned to a runner from the signals office. "A wire across the river: Colonel Sully is to attempt to regain his position as indicated in the plan for the attack. That failing, he is at minimum to hold his present position at all hazards. He is to be informed that I am endeavoring to obtain artillery support for him."
The runner departed with a scrawled order. Schlieffen noted that Willc.o.x made no effort to give the First Minnesota the artillery support he"d said he was trying to arrange. Sometimes, when all resources were committed elsewhere, that kind of deception was necessary to keep a unit fighting a while longer. Sometimes it meant only that the commanding officer wasn"t doing as much as he should to solve a problem.
Which was it here? Schlieffen didn"t know enough to be certain. The Army of the Ohio had a foothold on the far side of its eponymous river. Schlieffen would not have given good odds on that before the battle began. The next question was what Willc.o.x would do with his bridgehead-and what Stonewall Jackson would do to it.
Edgar Leary dumped three telegrams on Sam Clemens" desk. "Here you go," the young reporter said: "More wires on the Louisville fighting."
"These are-what? The sixth, seventh, and eighth today?" Clemens asked. Leary nodded. The editor of the San Francisco Morning Call San Francisco Morning Call puffed out smoke like a steamboat. "Almost makes me wish the lines in Utah were still down." puffed out smoke like a steamboat. "Almost makes me wish the lines in Utah were still down."
He skimmed through the wires. Except for some new casualty figures, higher than the ones he"d seen a couple of days before, he didn"t see anything he hadn"t known already. He threw two of the telegrams into the trash, keeping the one with the numbers. He"d been about to start a new editorial; they would come in handy.
War, he wrote, is a good deal like a meat grinder, in that you feed in fresh chunks of whole meat at one end, and what comes out the other is fit only for stuffing into frankfurters. By all reports, General Willc.o.x is working the crank for all he is worth in the Louisville campaign. Military meat is different from the ordinary kind, because some of the fragments that come out the business end of the grinder are still able to tell you what they were like before they went into the hopper is a good deal like a meat grinder, in that you feed in fresh chunks of whole meat at one end, and what comes out the other is fit only for stuffing into frankfurters. By all reports, General Willc.o.x is working the crank for all he is worth in the Louisville campaign. Military meat is different from the ordinary kind, because some of the fragments that come out the business end of the grinder are still able to tell you what they were like before they went into the hopper.
If the figures we have are accurate-and G.o.d save the soul of the poor devil charged with aggregating the total-the United States have in the past several days gained anywhere from a quarter of a mile to a mile of land formerly having suffered the great misfortune of flying the Confederate flag, and have purchased this real estate at a cost of, to date, 17,409 young soldiers mutilated and killed. That we have here a great bargain can hardly be denied, for- "Excuse me, Mr. Clemens," Edgar Leary said. "A couple of gentlemen are here to see you."
"If they"re gentlemen," Clemens replied without looking up, "they"ll wait till I"m ready to see them. Christ, Edgar, you know better than to jog my elbow when I"m trying to get words down on paper."
"It"s not a social call, Clemens," a rough, unfamiliar voice said.
Angrily, Sam spun his chair around. He discovered he was looking down the barrels of two Colt revolvers, each held by a burly individual who did not look as if he would have much compunction about pulling the trigger. Ignoring the guns, he said, "People who use my surname commonly have the courtesy to put Mister Mister in front of it, as my friend there did." in front of it, as my friend there did."
The larger of the two men-the one who had spoken before-said, "Next Rebel spy I hear tell of who deserves to get called Mister Mister"ll be the first."
"Rebel spy?" That sent Clemens bouncing to his feet in fury. "Who the devil says I am, and how in h.e.l.l has he got the nerve to say it?"
Quick as a striking rattler, the smaller ruffian s.n.a.t.c.hed from his desk the editorial on which Sam had been working. After reading the couple of paragraphs there, he said, "Sure as h.e.l.l sounds like treason to me."