American Empire: Blood and Iron - By Harry Turtledove Page 0,70

Custer’s pale, red-tracked eyes roamed the office. Again, he might have been a wild beast in a cage.

“What can I do for you, sir?” his adjutant repeated.

“Do for me?” Custer said slowly; he might have forgotten he’d summoned Dowling in the first place. “You can’t do anything for me. No one can do anything for me, no one at all.”

Dowling had heard Custer in a great many moods before, but never despairing. “What’s wrong, sir?” he asked. “Is there anything I can do to help?”

“No, you can’t help me, Major—uh, Lieutenant Colonel.” Custer’s wits weren’t particularly swift, but he hadn’t started turning forgetful. As the general continued, Dowling realized that was part of the problem: “I entered West Point in July 1857. July 1857, Lieutenant Colonel: sixty-two years ago come this summer. I have served in the United States Army longer than most men have been alive.”

“And served with distinction, sir,” Dowling said, which in its own strange way was true. “That’s why you have four stars on each shoulder strap, sir; that’s why you’re here now, still serving your country, at an age when most men”—are dead, but he wouldn’t say that—“are sitting in a rocking chair with pipe and slippers.”

“What do you think I’m doing now, Dowling?” General Custer demanded. “I’ve been in the army almost sixty-two years, as I say, and in an active command during nearly the whole of that time.” He waved a plump, age-spotted hand. “Where is my active command now, pray tell?”

He was feeling trapped, Dowling realized. Custer’s adjutant picked his words with care: “Sir, there aren’t a lot of active commands with the country at peace and our foes beaten. And your assignment here—”

“Is only sound and fury, signifying nothing,” Custer broke in. “I have no duties: no duties that matter, at any rate. Evaluate the transmission of orders from corps headquarters to divisions and regiments, they told me. Jesus Christ, Dowling, it’s a job for a beady-eyed captain, not for me!”

He had a point, a good point. To try to cheer him up, his adjutant had to ignore it. “No doubt they want the benefit of your long experience.”

“Oh, poppycock!” Custer snapped. “Nonsense! Drivel! They’ve put me out to pasture, Lieutenant Colonel, that’s what they’ve done. They don’t give two whoops in hell whether I ever write this goddamn evaluation. Even if I do, no one will ever read it. It will sit on a shelf and gather dust. That’s what I’m doing now: sitting on a shelf and gathering dust. They got all they could out of me, and now they’ve put me on the shelf.”

“Everyone is grateful for what you did, General,” Dowling said. “Would you have headed last year’s Remembrance Day parade if that weren’t so?”

“So Teddy Roosevelt was generous enough to toss an old dog one last bone,” Custer said, a distinct sneer in his voice. “Ha! If he lives long enough, he’ll go into the dustbin of the outmoded, too. And if the election returns from last November are any guide, he may get there faster than I have.”

Dowling didn’t know what to say to that. He judged Custer was likely to be right. The general formerly commanding First Army did have a makework assignment here in Philadelphia. But what else could he expect? He was going to be eighty at the end of the year. He couldn’t very well hope to be entrusted with anything of real importance.

He could. He did. “Barrels!” he said. “That’s where I want to be working. Sure as hell, Lieutenant Colonel, the Rebs are plotting ways to make theirs better even as we speak. I know they’re not going to be allowed to have any, but they’re plotting just the same. We’ll fight another round with them, see if we don’t. I may not live till then, but you will, I expect.”

“Wouldn’t surprise me if you were right, sir,” Dowling said. No one in the U.S. Army trusted the Confederate States, no matter how peaceful they tried to make themselves seem.

“They need me on barrels,” Custer said. “Those chowderheads didn’t know what to do with what they had till I showed them. They won’t know how to make barrels better, either, you mark my words.”

“Sir, there I don’t really know if you’re right or not,” Dowling said, by which he meant Custer was talking through his hat. “Colonel Morrell is doing good work out in Kansas. I’ve seen a couple of the analyses he’s sent in. They’re first-rate. I was