Walk in Hell by Harry Turtledove Read Free Book Online

before bearding him.
    “I wish I could go there, too, and make money of my own,” his daughter Susanne said wistfully. Since she was only thirteen, they would not have to worry about that unless the war went on appallingly long.
Or, of course, unless there is another war after this one,
Lucien thought, and then shivered, as if someone had walked over his grave.
    His older son, Charles, did not approve of Nicole’s plan. “I say the Americans are just another pack of
Boches
, and we should have as little to do with them as we can.” He spoke with the certainty of seventeen. In another year, he would have gone into the Canadian Army to serve his time. The only good thing about the war was that it had rolled over this part of Quebec before he could take part in it.
    “Oh, I don’t know,” said Georges, who was a couple of years younger than his brother and almost the changeling of the family: not only was he larger and fairer than his parents and brother and sisters, but he also had a rollicking wit out of keeping with the pungent sarcasm Lucien brought to bear on life. Now he grinned at Nicole across the table. “Maybe you’ll meet a handsome American doctor and he’ll sweep you off your—Oww!”
    By the dull thud from under the table, she’d kicked him in the shin. To underscore a point that needed no underscoring, his littlest sister, Jeanne, said, “That was mean.” Eight-year-old certainty wasn’t of the same kind as the seventeen-year-old variety, but it wasn’t any less certain, either. Denise, who was a couple of years older than Jeanne, nodded to show her agreement. Jeanne turned to Nicole and said, “You’d never do anything like that, would you?”
    “Certainly not,” Nicole said, frost in her voice. The look she turned on Georges should have turned him into a block of ice, too. It didn’t. He stayed impudent as ever, even if he did have to bend over to rub his injured leg.
    “Now wait, all of you,” Lucien said. “No one has said that Nicole will have any opportunity to meet American doctors, even if she wanted to do such a thing, which I already have no doubt she does not.”
    “But, Papa,” Nicole said, “are you changing your mind?”
    “No, for I never said yes,” he answered. His eldest daughter looked stricken. He glanced down to Marie at the foot of the table. He knew what her expressions meant. This one meant she’d back him, but she thought he was wrong. He sighed. “Perhaps it might be possible to try…but only for a little while.”

Lieutenant General George Armstrong Custer slammed his fist down on the table that held the maps of western Kentucky. “By heaven,” he said, “the War Department’s finally come out with an order that makes sense. General attack all along the line! Draft the orders to implement it here in First Army country, Major Dowling. I’ll want to see them by two o’ clock this afternoon.”
    “Yes, sir,” Abner Dowling said, and then, because part of his job as adjutant was saving Custer from himself, he added, “Sir, I don’t believe they mean all units are to move forward at the same moment, only that we are to take the best possible advantage of the Confederates’ embarrassment by striking where they are weakest.”
    Saving Custer from himself was a full-time job. Dowling had broad shoulders—there wasn’t much about Dowling that wasn’t broad—and needed them to bear up under the weight of bad temper and worse judgment the general commanding First Army pressed down on him. Custer had always been sure of himself, even as a brash cavalry officer in the War of Secession. Now, at the age of seventy-five, he was downright autocratic…and no more right than he had ever been.
    His pouchy, wrinkled, sagging face went from pasty white to dusky purple in the space of a couple of heartbeats. Neither color went well with his drooping mustache, which he peroxided to an approximation of the golden color it had once had naturally. The same applied