Free In at the Death by Harry Turtledove Page B

my campaign promises, by God,” he said.
    “No one has ever doubted your determination.” Lord Halifax got to his feet. “If you will excuse me…” He left the President’s office.
    When Lulu looked in after Halifax was gone, Jake Featherston asked, “Who’s next?”
    “Mr. Goldman, sir.”
    “Send him in, send him in.”
    Saul Goldman had grown bald and pudgy in the twenty-odd years Jake had known him. That had nothing to do with anything. The little Jew still made a damned effective Director of Communications. Because he did, he could speak his mind to the President, or come closer than most of the glad-handing yes-men who surrounded Featherston.
    “I don’t know how I can present any more losses in Georgia,” he said now. “People will know I’m whistling in the dark no matter what I say.”
    “Then don’t say anything,” Jake answered. “Just say the Yankees are spewing out a pack of lies—and they are—and let it go at that.”
    Goldman cocked his head to one side, considering. “It could work…for a while. But if Atlanta falls, sir, it’s a propaganda disaster.”
    “If Atlanta falls, it’s a fucking military disaster, and the hell with propaganda,” Featherston said. “I don’t think that’ll happen any time soon.” He hoped
he
wasn’t whistling in the dark. The news from Georgia was bad, and getting worse despite the fall rains.
    “You know more about that than I do. I’m not a general, and I don’t pretend to be,” Goldman said.
    “Don’t know why the hell not,” Jake told him. “Seems like every damn fool in the country wants to tell me how to run the war. Why should you be any different?” He held up a hand. “I know why—you aren’t a damn fool.”
    “I try not to be, anyhow,” Goldman said.
    “You do pretty well. Half of being smart is knowing what you’re not smart at,” Jake said. “Plenty of folks reckon that ’cause they know something, they know everything. And that ain’t the way it works.”
    “I never said it was,” Goldman answered primly.
    “Yeah, I know,” Jake said. “You make one.”
             
    A s far as Irving Morrell knew, he was unique among U.S. generals, with the possible exception of a few big brains high up in the General Staff. His colleagues thought about winning battles. After they won one, if they did, they worried about the next one.
    Morrell was different. He thought about smashing the Confederate States of America flat. To him, that was the goal. Battles were nothing in themselves. They were just the means he needed to reach that end.
    Back when the CSA still had soldiers in Ohio, he’d drawn a slashing line on the map, one that ran from Kentucky through Tennessee and Georgia to the Atlantic. That was where he was going now. He aimed to cut the Confederacy in half. Once he did, he figured the Confederate States would do what anything cut in half did.
    They would die.
    The question uppermost in his mind now was simple: could he go on to the ocean without bothering to capture Atlanta first? Would the enemy die fast enough afterwards to make the risk worthwhile?
    He pondered a map. The chart was tacked to the wall of what had been a dentist’s office in Monroe, Georgia, more than fifty miles east of Atlanta. He would have used the mayor’s office, but a direct hit from a 105 left it draftier than he liked.
    Monroe had had a couple of big cotton-processing plants, both of them now rubble. It had had a couple of fine houses that dated back to the days before the War of Secession, both of them now burnt. War had never come to this part of the CSA before. It was here now, and it made itself at home.
    Reluctantly, Morrell decided Atlanta would have to fall before he stormed east again. It gave the enemy too good a base for launching a counteroffensive against his flank if he ignored it. Too many roads and railroads ran through the place. He couldn’t be sure enough his air power would keep them all out of commission to