Walk in Hell Read Free Page B

plain. Quivering with fury, she descended to the ground.
    Major Hotchkiss pointed farther up the road. “There’s a crossroads general store up there. We’ve got a fair number of folks in tents already. It’s about half a mile. You go on, Miss Colleton. They’ll take care of you best they can. We smash this Colored Socialist Republic or whatever the niggers are calling it, then we can get on with the fight against the damnyankees.”
    “Give me a rifle,” Anne said suddenly. “I’m a good shot, and I’m a lot less likely to fall over dead than half your so-called soldiers here.”
    But the Confederate major shook his head without a word. She knew she was right, but what good did that do her if he wouldn’t listen? The answer tolled in her mind: none. Dully, she began walking up the road. When war reached out its hand, what did wealth and power matter? A fool with a gun could take them away. A fool with a gun had just taken them away.
             
    Major Irving Morrell and Captain John Abell took off their caps when they went into Independence Hall to see the Liberty Bell. Philadelphia, being the headquarters of the War Department, was full of U.S. military men of all ranks and branches of service. Only someone very observant would have noted the twisted black-and-gold cords on the caps that marked these two as General Staff officers.
    Abell, who had a bookish look to him, fit the common preconception for the appearance of a General Staff man. Morrell, though, was more weathered, his face lined and tanned, though he was only in his mid-twenties. He wore his sandy hair cropped close to his head, as field officers commonly did. He felt like a field officer. He’d been a field officer: he’d almost lost a leg in the U.S. invasion of Confederate Sonora, and then, after a long recuperation, he’d led a battalion in eastern Kentucky. What he’d done there had impressed his division commander enough to get him sent to Philadelphia.
    Intellectually, he knew what a plum this was. It didn’t altogether fill him with joy, though. He wanted to be out in the forest or the mountains or tramping through the desert—somewhere away from the city and close to the foe.
    “Come on, let’s get moving,” he said now, and hurried ahead of Abell to get a good look at the Liberty Bell. His thigh pained him when he sped up like that, and would probably go on paining him the rest of his life. He ignored it. You could let something like that rule you, or you could rule it. Morrell did not aim to let anything keep him from doing what he wanted to do.
    “It’s been here a long time, Major,” Abell said. “It’s going to be here for a long time yet.”
    “Yes, but
I’m
not going to be here for a long time,” Morrell answered. When he’d learned enough, or so the promise had gone, they’d promote him and send him back to the field to command a unit bigger than a battalion. “I want to fight with guns, not with maps and dividers and a telegraph clicker.”
    He looked back over his shoulder as he said that, just in time to catch the sidelong glance Abell gave him. The captain, like most General Staff officers, preferred fighting the war at a distance and in the abstract to the reality of mud and bad food and wounds and terror. Battle always seemed so much cleaner, so much neater, when it was red and blue lines on a chart.
    Then such thoughts left Morrell’s mind as, with a good many other soldiers, he crowded round the emblem of freedom for the United States. The surface of the bell was surprisingly rough, testimony to the imperfect skill of the founders who had cast it. Around the crown ran the words from Leviticus that had given the bell its name:
Proclaim liberty throughout the land unto all the inhabitants thereof
.
    He wondered whether Robert E. Lee had seen the Liberty Bell when he occupied Philadelphia in 1862. Lee’s victories had given the Confederate States a liberty the USA had not wanted to grant them, but he