Free When This Cruel War Is Over by Thomas Fleming

purity.
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œI asked you, What is your roommate’s name?”
    â€œTyler. Thomas Jefferson Tyler. We called him Jeff.”

    â€œYou were fond of him?”
    â€œI loved him.”
    She was wide-eyed. Was it amazement or a species of wicked hope? For a moment Confederate agent became an impenetrable barrier between them. But Paul thrust it aside with the reminder that he had known from the start this woman supported the South.
    â€œEveryone in the class loved him. He was generous, honest, true in every imaginable sense of the word. Even the most obnoxious abolitionists had to confess that Jeff Tyler was as close as any of us came to moral perfection. It utterly baffled them that he could own slaves and yet attain such a spiritual ascendancy.”
    â€œYet you have no sympathy for the cause that Jeff Tyler is risking his life to defend?”
    â€œOn the contrary, I have enormous sympathy for Jeff Tyler’s cause. For your cause. What made our farewell so heartbreaking was the knowledge we shared—and expressed—as professional soldiers, the night before we parted, that the South couldn’t win the war.”
    He raised her hand to his lips. She permitted him. It was the sort of proof he was seeking. It added passion to his words. “That’s why I feel capable of offering you my affection, Miss Janet—even though I’m wearing the wrong uniform. I believe I’ve been chosen to console you for the Confederacy’s inevitable defeat.”
    She freed her hand and stepped back a pace, as if she no longer wanted to be too close to him. “How can you say that when Lincoln’s own party loathes him so much, they almost refused to renominate him? When the Democrats of Kentucky, Indiana, Illinois and Ohio are rising in a virtual mass of rage and disgust against Republican tyranny?”
    â€œWars aren’t won by politics and politicians. They’re won by soldiers with the training to organize and concentrate superior force. I was General John Reynolds’ aide until he was killed at Gettysburg. He was the finest
soldier in the Union Army, and his loss remains a tragedy. I sat at his dinner table and listened to him predict and describe in detail the defeat of the South—a fact that saddened him as much as it distressed me. He even predicted the precise strategy that General Grant and General Sherman are pursuing at this moment—battering attacks on the Confederate armies in Virginia to hold them in place while Sherman executes a vast flanking movement to penetrate the heart of the Confederacy from the west.”
    â€œWhy did you decide to become a professional soldier, Major?” Janet asked.
    The question threw Paul off balance like an unexpected attack on an exposed flank. He groped for an answer. “My grandfather was a West Pointer. He was killed in Canada in 1812. My father fought in Mexico. Soldiering was in my blood, so to speak. But I suppose the real reason was—”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œIt offered a life that had nothing to do with politics.”
    He was shocked by the bitterness in his voice. Why was it seeping into his soul after all these years? As the youngest brother he had tried to remain neutral as his brother Jonathan denounced the South as a region of slave drivers and his brother Charlie defended it as the last bastion of gentility and honor against the crude commercialism of the North where everything had a price. While their mother watched, Sibyl-like, defending neither side but subtly demonstrating in a thousand ways that she agreed with Charlie—and their senator father spouted remonstrations and appeals to George Washington’s ideal of an indissoluble union.
    Paul tried to remember how moved he was by West Point’s motto, Duty, Honor, Country. How he believed it promised him a kind of spiritual haven in which he could escape the quarrels and contradictions that had
ravaged the