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Up and down the long table, soldiers nodded solemnly, Armstrong among them. This camp had everything for giving soldiers a good time except a whorehouse. Bluenoses made sure the U.S. Army didn't officially sponsor any such thing. If you wanted a woman, you had to find your own-which could get you killed if you picked the wrong one, and could easily leave you with a disease that would land you in big trouble when the Army found out you'd caught it.
Squidface had several suggestions on how Herk could satisfy himself, each more alarming than the one before. "Shut up already," Armstrong said after a while. "You're making me lose my appetite."
"You better show up for sick call in the mornin', Sarge," Squidface said. "Something's sure as shit wrong with you."
The line for the nightly movie was almost as long as the one for a brothel would have been. Armstrong got a seat just before they showed the newsreel. "Here is the first film from ruined Petrograd!" the a
Armstrong had seen plenty of ruined cities. He'd seen Provo and Salt Lake City, and you couldn't ruin a place any worse than they got ruined. Or he thought you couldn't, till the camera pa
It was an enormous bronze statue of a man on horseback-or it had been. Now it looked melted, melted from the top down. Armstrong tried to imagine what kind of heat could have done such a thing.
"This was the statue of Peter the Great, who founded Petrograd," the a
"Fuck our allies," Squidface said. "We don't get one of those ourselves pretty damn quick, the goddamn Kaiser'll drop one on Philly next."
That struck Armstrong as a pretty good guess. He made a guess of his own: "What do you want to bet Featherston's got guys in white lab coats working on one, too? With his fucking rockets, he could throw one anywhere in the USA."
"Shit." Squidface looked around, as if expecting one of those rockets to crash down any second now. "You're right."
As a matter of fact, Armstrong was wrong. The most powerful Confederate rockets reached only a couple of hundred miles. That meant they couldn't touch most of the USA, especially since the areas C.S. soldiers actually controlled shrank by the day. But, with a bomb like that, worry outran reality with ease.
"On our side of the Atlantic…" the newsreel a
"We was there. We seen that," Squidface said.
"Better believe it," Armstrong agreed.
"On our side of the Atlantic, the capture of Sava
The Stars and Stripes flew over the wreckage of the Confederate Capitol. U.S. soldiers prowled the cratered grounds of the Gray House, walking past twisted and overturned antiaircraft guns. Scrawny civilians got meals at a U.S. field kitchen.
"How long can the enemy hope to keep up his useless resistance in the face of overwhelming U.S. might?" the a
The answer they were supposed to give him was, Not very long. Armstrong had seen enough propaganda to understand that. But this time the newsreel had outsmarted itself. The fearsome bomb that leveled Petrograd made you think twice. It made Armstrong think twice, anyhow. If the Confederates came up with one of those, or more than one, before the United States could, they were liable to win the war in spite of losing their capital and getting their country cut in half. Drop something like that on Philadelphia and New York and Boston, and the United States would really have something to worry about.
Drop one on Birmingham, Armstrong thought savagely. Drop one on New Orleans. Drop one on fucking Charleston. Like most people from the USA, he particularly despised the city where the War of Secession broke out.
After the newsreel came a short feature, with the Engels Brothers involved with an actor plainly meant to be Jake Featherston. "I'll reduce your population!" he yelled, which made the Brothers get into a ridiculous brawl to see which of them would be eliminated. That was all propaganda, too, but it was fu
And the main feature was a thriller, with the Confederates after the secret of a new bombsight and the heroine thwarting them at every turn. She was pretty and she had legs up to there, which might have made Armstrong root for her even if she saluted the Stars and Bars.
After the feature, he got to lie down on a real bed. He hadn't done much of that lately-oh, a few times, when he flopped in a house some Georgians had vacated, but not very often. With snoring soldiers all around him, he could relax and sleep deep. Out in the field, he might as well have been a wild beast. The least little noise would leave him not just awake but with his heart pounding and with a rifle or a knife in his hand.
Bacon and eggs and more hash browns and halfway decent coffee the next morning were wonderful, too. So was eating them without peering this way and that, afraid of holdouts and snipers and his own shadow if it caught him by surprise.
"You know, this is pretty damn good. I could really get used to this." He was surprised at how surprised he sounded.
"It is, isn't it?" Squidface sounded surprised, too. Had he been in the war from the start? Armstrong didn't know. But he'd sure been in it long enough to turn into a vet.
"I think this is called peace. We used to have it all the time." Armstrong didn't think about those days very often. He'd gone from high school almost straight into the Army. He'd been a boy then. If he wasn't a man now, he didn't suppose he ever would be.
"Not quite peace," Squidface said. "No pussy around. We went through that when we got here."
"Well, yeah, we did," Armstrong admitted. "All right, it isn't quite peace. But it beats the shit outa where we were at before." Squidface solemnly nodded and stuffed another slice of bacon into his mouth.
T hey gave George Enos shore leave after he helped bring the Tierra del Fuego back to New York City. They gave it to him, and then they forgot about him. He grabbed a train up to Boston, had a joyous reunion with Co
The Navy took so long, George wondered whether he ought to look for a slot on a fishing boat going out of T Wharf. He could have had one in a minute; the Navy had sucked in a lot of first-class fishermen. But he had plenty of money as things were, with so much back pay and combat pay in his pocket. And if he was out a few hundred miles from shore when he got called back to active duty, there would be hard feelings all around. His wouldn't matter. The Navy's, unfortunately, would.
He was back from church one Sunday morning when the telephone in his apartment rang. He'd found he liked Catholic services. He'd converted for Co
"I bet that's my ma," Co