“Thank you, sir,” the noncom said.

The convicts wouldn’t work the way Negroes would have in the last war. They’d know they were doing nigger work, and they’d do it badly just to remind people they weren’t niggers and the work was beneath their dignity. That they might get their countrymen killed because they worked badly wouldn’t bother them. That they might get themselves killed wouldn’t bother them, either. Showing they were good and proper white men counted for more.

Were Dover a convict, he knew he would act the same way. No less than the men who’d fallen foul of military justice, he was a Confederate white man. He’d probably had more experience with Negroes than any white since the days of overseers. That had nothing to do with the price of beer. There were some things a Confederate white man wasn’t supposed to do.

Of course, one of the things Confederate white men weren’t supposed to do was lose a war to the USA. If not losing meant they had to do some other things they wouldn’t normally, then it did, that was all. So Dover thought, anyhow. Some of his countrymen seemed to prefer death to dirtying their hands.

Shells burst a few hundred yards away. Dover didn’t flinch, didn’t duck, didn’t dive for cover. They’d have to come a lot closer than that before he started flabbling. Back in the last war, he’d learned to gauge how dangerous incoming artillery was. The knack came back in a hurry this time around.

Most of the older men working with these crates had it. Some of the younger ones didn’t. What did worry Dover was that the damnyankees’ guns were close enough to strike what should have been the Confederates’ safe rear in Ohio. That showed how badly things had gone wrong. With so many men dead or captured in and around Pittsburgh, the defenses farther west were crumbling. One U.S. thrust was coming west from Pennsylvania and eastern Ohio, the other southeast from northern Indiana and northwestern Ohio. If they met, they would enfold even more irreplaceable Confederate troops in a pocket.