What really scared him was, they were liable to like it just fine. He could easily imagine them looking down at all those contorted corpses and saying, Well, so what, you lousy damnyankee? They’re only niggers, for cryin’ out loud.

He scowled out at Littlefield, wishing his imagination didn’t work quite so well. All at once, he wanted nothing more than to wipe the town and everybody in it off the face of the earth.

Major Jerry Dover knew how to give men orders. He’d commanded at about the platoon level during the years between the wars. Bossing the cooks and waiters and busboys at the Huntsman’s Lodge in Augusta, Georgia, gave him most of the experience he needed to put on the uniform and tell people in the Confederate Quartermaster Corps what to do.

Being white and the boss had given him authority over the staff at the restaurant. Military law made a good enough substitute in the field. Dover hadn’t been out there long before one of his subordinates exclaimed, “Jesus, sir, you work us just like a bunch of niggers!”

“Good,” Dover answered, which made the grumbling corporal goggle and gape. “Good, goddammit,” Dover repeated. He was a foxy-featured man, wiry and stronger than he looked, with graying sandy hair and mustache. “We’ve all got to work like niggers if we’re going to whip those bastards on the other side.”

He drove himself at least as hard as he drove anybody under him. He left a trail of chain-smoked Raleigh butts and empty coffee cups behind him. He tried to be everywhere at once, making sure all sorts of supplies got to the men at the front when they were supposed to. The men who worked under him didn’t need long to figure that out. They swore at him as they shivered in the snow in southern Ohio, but his kitchen staff had sworn at him the same way while they sweltered over their stoves. The soldiers might not love him, but they respected him.