Sergeant Jake Featherston, former battery commander in the First Richmond Howitzers, has also come home to Richmond. He too fought from first shot to last in the Great War, and never rose above sergeant, not least because the War Department was angry at him for exposing the shortcomings of his former CO, Captain Jeb Stuart III. Furious and bitter at the War Department in particular and the world in general, Featherston wonders what to do now that he has no place in the Army any more.
I
When the Great War ended, Jake Featherston had thought the silence falling over the battlefield as strange and unnatural as machine-gun fire in Richmond on a Sunday afternoon. Now, sitting at the bar of a saloon in the Confederate capital a few weeks later, he listened to the distant rattle of a machine gun, nodded to himself, and took another pull at his beer.
"Wonder who they're shooting at this time," the barkeep remarked before turning away to pour a fresh whiskey for another customer.
"Hope it's the niggers." Jake set a hand on the grip of the artilleryman's pistol he wore on his belt. "Wouldn't mind shooting a few myself, by Jesus."
"They shoot back these days," the bartender said.
Featherston shrugged. People had called him a lot of different things during the war, but nobody had ever called him yellow. The battery of the First Richmond Howitzers he'd commanded had held longer and retreated less than any other guns in the Army of Northern Virginia. "Much good it did me," he muttered. "Much good it did anything." He'd still been fighting the damnyankees from a good position back of Fredericksburg, Virginia, when the Confederate States finally threw in the sponge.