Blood and Iron

Blood and Iron by Harry Turtledove

Book: Blood and Iron by Harry Turtledove Read Free Book Online
Authors: Harry Turtledove
Tags: Fiction
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leaves you little room for discretion.”
    “I don’t want to go back to Philadelphia,” Custer repeated. He
had
scant discretion. Once set on a course, he kept on it, and derailing him commonly took the rhetorical equivalent of dynamite. He’d been stubborn and hard-charging for more than seventy-eight years; no wire from the War Department would make him change his ways. Abner Dowling was convinced nothing would make him change his ways.
    “Sir,” Dowling said, “I suspect they want to honor you. You are, after all, the senior soldier in the United States Army.”
    “Don’t pour the soft soap on me, even if you’re shaped like a barrel of it,” Custer growled. His description of Dowling’s physique was, unfortunately, accurate, although he was hardly the dashing young cavalryman himself these days. He tapped at the four stars on the shoulder of his fancy—as fancy as regulations permitted, and then some—uniform. “Took me long enough to make full general, by God. When I think of the fools and whippersnappers promoted ahead of me…I could weep, Lieutenant Colonel, I could just weep.”
    Custer’s slow promotion had also meant Dowling’s slow promotion. Custer never thought of such things, nor that calling a fat man fat to his face might wound his feelings. Custer thought of Custer, first, last, and always.
    Dowling scratched at his mustache, in lieu of reaching out and punching the distinguished general commanding the U.S. First Army right in the nose. He took a deep breath and said, “Sir, they may have taken a while to recognize your heroism, but they’ve gone and done it.”
    In an odd sort of way, he was even telling the truth. As with the rest of his life, Custer knew only one style of fighting: straight-ahead slugging. First Army had paid a gruesome toll for that aggressiveness as it slogged its way south through western Kentucky and northern Tennessee.
    When Custer saw his first barrel, he’d wanted to mass the traveling forts and beat his Confederate opponents over the head with them, too. War Department doctrine dictated otherwise. Custer had ignored War Department doctrine (lying about it along the way, and making Dowling lie, too), assembled his barrels exactly as he wanted to, hurled them at the Rebs—and broken through. Other U.S. armies using the same tactics had broken through, too. If that didn’t make him a hero, what did?
    If he’d failed…if he’d failed, he would have been retired. And Dowling? Dowling would probably be a first lieutenant in charge of all the battleship refueling depots in Montana and Wyoming. He knew what a narrow escape they’d had. Custer didn’t even suspect it. He could be very naive.
    He could also be very canny. “I know why they’re calling me to Philadelphia,” he said, leaning toward his adjutant so he could speak in a conspiratorial whisper. “They’re going to put me out to pasture, that’s what they’re going to do.”
    “Oh, I hope not, sir,” Dowling lied loyally. He’d fought the good fight for a lot of years, keeping Custer as close to military reality as he could. If he didn’t have to do that any more, the War Department would give him something else to do. Anything this side of latrine duty looked more pleasant.
    “I won’t let them,” Custer said. “I’ll go to the newspapers, that’s what
I’ll
do.” Dowling was sure he would, too. Publicity was meat and drink to him. He might even win his fight. He’d won many of them in his time.
    All that was for the moment beside the point, though. “Sir, you are ordered to report in Philadelphia no later than Sunday, twenty-first April. That’s day after tomorrow, sir. They’ve laid on a special Pullman car for you and Mrs. Custer, with a berth in the next car for me. You don’t have to take that particular train, but it would be a comfortable way to get there.” Dowling was, and needed to be, skilled at the art of cajolery.
    Custer sputtered and fumed through his peroxided

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