American Front

His head swung back and forth, as if on a swivel. Seeing all the maps together, he felt like a general, not just a major worrying about his tiny part of the big picture. "I think I'm going to like this place," he said.

The motorcar carrying Jacob Colleton kicked up a plume of red-brown dust as it came up the path toward Marshlands. "Is everything ready?" A

"Yes, ma'am," he answered; she would have been astonished to hear him say anything else. "The room is waiting for him. Dr. Benveniste should be here momentarily, and we are prepared to do all we can."

"All we can," A

She opened the door as the motorcar jounced to a stop. Scipio rolled out the wheeled chair that had belonged to her great-grandfather after he started having strokes. But he'd been an old man. Jacob should have had a long, healthy life stretching ahead. It might still be long. The question was, did Jacob wish it would be short?

The Negro chauffeur (A

A

Jacob Colleton looked up at his sister. "Not quite the homecoming I had in mind when I went off to war," he said. His voice was a rasping whisper, as if he were a hundred years old and had smoked a hundred cigars a day for every one of those years.

"You hush, Jacob. We'll make you as comfortable as we can," A

"A hero?" His laugh was a coughing wheeze. "I'd had two cups of coffee and I was on my way to the latrine when the damnyankees gassed us. Only fool luck my men took me with 'em when they fell back. Otherwise I'd be in a prison camp or a Yankee hospital. Not a damn thing heroic about it."

Speaking so much gave him color, but not of a healthy sort: his whole face turned a leaden violet, as if he were being strangled. And so he was, from the inside out. He sounded much the way Tom had, too, utterly forgetful of the patriotism that had sent him rushing to join the fight against the USA.

"When we get you to your room, what can we bring you?" A

"Whiskey," Jacob answered. "Morphia, if you can lay hold of it."

"Dr. Benveniste is on his way," she said. "He'll prescribe it." If he doesn't, he'll be sorry. She nodded to Scipio. "Take him upstairs. We'll discuss permanent service arrangements for him shortly."

"Yes, ma'am," the butler said, and then, to Jacob, "I'll be as careful as I can, sir."

Jacob let out a sound full of pain only once, when Scipio had trouble getting the chair smoothly over the threshold. Then, in the front hall, he had to stop, because Marcel Duchamp was standing there and would not move. The artist stared avidly at Jacob Colleton. "Modern man as defective part in the assembly line of war," he murmured. "Or is it man as perfect part?-the end product of what war is designed to produce."

He probably did not mean to be offensive; he must have seen Jacob not as A

"But where shall I go?" Duchamp exclaimed in horror, sweat beading on his forehead.

"You can go to Columbia. You can go to Charleston. Or, for that matter, you can go to hell," A

Then he tried for the last word: "You are not modern. You are only a rich atavism, playing with the new but belonging to the old."

That held enough truth to hurt. Looking down at poor Jacob, A

"Should have thrown him out before he got here," Jacob croaked; like Tom, he'd had no use for the exhibition of modern art. "But you don't need to throw him out now on account of me. Far as I can see, he was right. That's what war does: makes lots and lots of things just like me."

"Take him upstairs, Scipio." A

Dr. Saul Benveniste arrived a few minutes later: a short, dark, clever man who looked, she thought, as Confederate founding father Judah P. Benjamin might have looked were he as thin as Alexander Stephens. The doctor went upstairs and came down a few minutes later. "I've given him morphia," he said. "I'll leave a supply here so you can give him more whenever the pain is very bad. Past that-" He spread his hands and shrugged.

"Is there any treatment you can give?" A

"I don't know of any," the doctor answered, his brown eyes mournful. "But then, nobody knows much about the business of poisonous gases, though I expect we'll all learn. You have to understand-the tissue in there is burned. I can't repair that from the outside. Breathing warm, moist air may help, and Marshlands has a good supply of that. He may heal some on his own, too. I can't really offer a long-term prognosis. I'm too ignorant."

"Thank you for being honest with me," she said.

"I'll do everything I can for him," Benveniste said. "I don't want you to get any exaggerated notions of how much that's likely to be, though."

"Thank you," A

"His lungs, you mean? I don't see why," Dr. Benveniste told her. "Most of the time, I don't have much good to say about drinking whiskey. Now, though-" He shrugged again. "If he hurts less drunk, is that so bad?"

"Not in the least," she said. "All right, Doctor. I'll call you as I need you."

Benveniste nodded and left. His Ford started up with a bang and a belch, then rattled away.

A

"Dr. Benveniste said they might come up with new ways to make you better before too long," A