Breakthroughs Read Free Page A

between thumb and forefinger. Blood dripped from the wound. “I really ought to get this seen to, don’t you think?”
    “Go ahead, go ahead.” Pinkard turned most of his attention back to the Yankees. A minute or so later, though, he spoke to Sergeant Cross in tones of barely disguised envy: “Lucky bastard.”
    “Ain’t it the truth?” Cross said. “He’s hurt bad enough to get out of the fight, but that’ll heal clean as a whistle. Shit, they might even ship him home on convalescent leave.”
    That appalling prospect hadn’t occurred to Jeff. He swore. The idea of Stinky Salley getting to go home while he was stuck out here God only knew how far from Emily…
    Then he forgot about Salley, for the U.S. soldiers were making their big push toward the trench line. The last hundred yards of savage fire proved more than flesh and blood could bear. Instead of storming forward and leaping down in among the Confederates, the soldiers in green-gray broke and ran back toward their own line, dragging along as many of their wounded as they could.
    The firefight couldn’t have lasted longer than half an hour. Pinkard felt a year or two older, or maybe like a cat that had just used up one of its lives. He looked around for his tin cup. There it was, where he’d dropped it when the shelling started. Somebody had stomped on it. For good measure, it had a bullet hole in it, too, probably from the aeroplane. He let out a long sigh.
    “Amen,” Sergeant Cross said.
    “Wonder when they’re going to start bringin’ nigger troops into line,” Pinkard said. “Wouldn’t mind seein’ it, I tell you. Save some white men from getting killed, that’s for damn sure.”
    “You really think so?” Cross shook his head to show he didn’t. “Half o’ those black bucks ain’t nothin’ but the Red rebels who were trying to shoot our asses off when they rose up. I think I’d sooner trust a damnyankee than a nigger with a rifle in his hands. Damnyankees, you
know
they’re the enemy.”
    Pinkard shrugged. “I was one of the last white men conscripted out of the Sloss Works, so I spent a deal of time alongside niggers who were doin’ the work of whites who’d already gone into the Army. Treat ’em decent and they were all right. Besides, we got any hope of winning this war without ’em?”
    Albert Cross didn’t answer that at all.
                      
    Iron wheels screaming against steel rails, the train slowed to a halt. The conductor worked his way through the cars, calling out the destination: “Philadelphia! All out for Philadelphia!”
    Flora Hamburger’s heart thudded in her chest. Until this train ride, she had never been out of New York State—never, come to that, been out of New York City. But here she was, arriving in the de facto national capital as the newly elected Socialist member of the House of Representatives for her Lower East Side district.
    She wished the train had not come into the Broad Street station at night. Blackout curtains on the windows kept light from leaking out of the cars—and kept her from seeing her new home. The Confederates’ night bombers were not hitting Philadelphia so hard as the aeroplanes of the United States were punishing Richmond—they had to fly a long way from Virginia—but no one wanted to give them any targets at which they might aim.
    Her lip curled. She had opposed the war from the beginning, and wished her party had been more steadfast in opposing it. After once supporting war loans, the Socialists had been unable to avoid doing it again and again.
    No one sharing the car with her knew who she was. Several young officers—and a couple of older men in business suits—had tried to strike up a conversation on the way down from New York City. As was her way in such situations, she’d been polite but resolutely distant. Most of them were likely to be Democrats, and few if any were likely to be Jews. She wondered what living outside the crowded and