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He spoke as if of a fate worse than death. That was probably how he saw it. That was how any soldier who was first of all a cog in a bureaucratic machine and only afterwards a fighting man would have seen it. But Morrell didn't want to be here in the first place. Getting back out into the field, even somewhere in the back of beyond, sounded pretty good to him.
Yes, it does-to you, he thought then, several beats later than he should have. What will Agnes think about it? You've got a little girl now, Morrell. Do you want to haul Mildred off to God knows where, just because you couldn't stand to keep your big mouth shut?
He muttered unhappily. Colonel Donaldson thought he was contemplating the horrors of life outside Philadelphia. "Dismissed," Donaldson said.
Unhappily, Morrell left his superior's office. Even more unhappily, he went back to his own. Where does your first loyalty lie? To your wife and daughter, or to the United States of America?
He cursed softly. But he didn't need long to make up his mind. Agnes had been a soldier's widow before she met him, dammit. She knew what the price of duty could be. If they had to go off to Lethbridge or Nehi or Flagstaff, she'd take that in stride. It might even end up better for Mildred.
Morrell nodded to himself. He fed a sheet of paper into the typewriter that squatted on his desk like some heathen god. He typed with his two index fingers-a slower way of doing things than proper touch-typing, but it got the job done well enough. If the powers that be chose to ignore his report, that was their business. But he was going to make sure they saw what he saw.
He did warn his wife what he'd done, and what might happen as a result. To his relief, she only shrugged. "Philadelphia's a nice town," she said. "But I got along well enough in Leavenworth, too."
He kissed her. "I like the way you think."
"It isn't a question of thinking," Agnes said. "It's a question of doing what you have to do." Mildred Morrell didn't say anything. She just kicked her legs and gri
"What will you think, if you grow up in Lethbridge or Nehi instead of Philadelphia?" Morrell asked her. Mildred only laughed. She didn't care one way or the other. "Maybe, just maybe," her father said, "I'm fixing things so you don't have to go through a war when you grow up. I hope I am, anyway."
He was eating lunch the next day when Lieutenant Colonel John Abell came up to him. Without preamble, General Liggett's adjutant said, "You do believe in cooking your own goose, don't you, Colonel?"
"Ah." Morrell smiled. "You've read it, then?"
"Yes, I've read it." The astringently intellectual General Staff officer shook his head in slow wonder. "Amazing how a man can analyze so brilliantly and be so blind to politics, all at the same time."
After another bite of meat loaf, Morrell said, "You've told me as much before. What am I being blind to today?"
"One and a half million dead men, Colonel, and I'd think even you should notice them," Lieutenant Colonel Abell answered with a certain somber relish. "One and a half million dead men, or a few more than that-all the reasons why there's no stomach in the USA for another war against the Confederate States."
Morrell winced. His smile faded. John Abell was a snob. That didn't mean he was a fool-anything but. "Don't you believe most people would rather fight a small war now if the Confederates don't back down-which I think they would-than fight a big one ten or twenty years down the road?"
"Some people would. A few people would. But most?" Abell shook his head. "No, sir. Most people don't want to fight any war at all, and they'll do almost anything to keep from fighting. Meaning no offense, sir, but I think you've just cooked your own goose."
With a shrug, Morrell said, "Well, even if I have, I won't mind getting back in the field again." Lieutenant Colonel Abell looked at him as if he'd spoken in Hindustani, or maybe Choctaw. Like Colonel Donaldson, Abell was a creature of the General Staff, and didn't care to contemplate life outside it. Morrell did, which gave him a certain moral advantage. And how much good will that do you in Lethbridge when the blizzards come? he wondered, and wished he hadn't.
T om Colleton held out a package too well wrapped for him to have done it himself. "Happy birthday, Sis!" he told A
"Oh, for heaven's sake," she said in fond exasperation. "You shouldn't have." She kissed him on the cheek, but at least half of her meant every word of that. The birthday in question was her thirty-ninth, and the only one she would have felt less like celebrating was her fortieth.
"Well, whether I should have or not, I damn well did," her younger brother answered. Tom still had a few years to go before facing middle age-and forty meant less to a man than it did to a woman, anyhow. From forty, a woman could see all too well the approaching end of too many things, beauty among them. From thirty-nine, too, A
"I will," she said, and she did, tearing into the wrapping paper as she would have liked to tear into Father Time. "What on earth have you got here?"
"I found it the last time I was in Columbia," he said. "There. Now you've got it. See? It's-"
"A book of photographs of Marcel Duchamp's paintings!" A
"Seeing as he exhibited at Marshlands, I thought you'd like it," her brother said. "And take a look at page one seventy-three."
"Why? What's he done there?" A
Tom looked over her shoulder to make sure she'd got to the right page. "You see?" he said. "You see?" He pointed to the title below the photograph.
" 'Mademoiselle A
"What do you think of the likeness?" her brother asked.
Before the war, A
She took a longer look at "Mlle. A
"No, it's worse," Tom said. "When I was in the trenches, I saw men who got hit by shells and didn't look this bad afterwards." He brought his experience to the abstract painting, just as A
As things were, she only shrugged and said, "It is a compliment of sorts. Whatever he thought of me, he didn't forget me once he got back to France."