Free When This Cruel War Is Over by Thomas Fleming Page A

Stapleton family. For a while he had found it in the military academy’s mathematical and scientific approach to war. But soon the quarrel between North and South was raging in the barracks and the classrooms; insults far worse than any exchanged by Charlie and Jonathan echoed in the crisp air and the brotherhood of the corps collapsed into fistfights and duels with swords and pistols.
    Suddenly the Gettysburg wound was mocking him again. Is there a sort of calculus of honor being devised here? Duty requires seduction and lies and honor requires confession and truth? Is this whole thing a moral experiment, the sort of game Charlie liked to play with women? If duty is given a value of one and honor is given a value of one is the result zero? Will that entitle you to do as you please, Charlie style? Plunder her pathetic little secrets, take your pleasure, and depart? What about country? How does that fit into the equation?
    A steamboat plowed downriver, a gleaming white mass in the late-afternoon sunshine. A huge American flag flew from its stem. “I never see one of those boats without thinking of my brother Charlie,” Paul said. “The last time I saw him, I was getting on a steamboat at New Orleans.”
    â€œDid he stay there when the war began?”
    â€œHe was dead by then. He was killed in 1859, trying to make Cuba the thirty-fifth state.”
    â€œYour family fascinates me, Major Stapleton. One brother a martyr to the South, another a major general in the Union Army.”
    â€œCharlie was a martyr to the Union, in our eyes. We thought making Cuba a state would placate the South and keep them in the Union. My father put up most of the money for the expedition. But someone in a high place betrayed them. The Spanish took no prisoners.”

    â€œThe Union, the Union. I’m sick of this invocation of the Union. My father began the war using the word as if it were a sacred chant. Now the mere mention of it torments him. Would you have Charlie die for Lincoln’s kind of Union? One created by bullets instead of ballots?”
    â€œIn order to graduate from West Point we were required to take an ironclad oath of loyalty to the federal government.”
    â€œBut is it the same federal government to which you swore your allegiance? A government that has converted the war into a crusade to free the blacks, after teaching them to hate the whites?”
    â€œAs a citizen I deplore that. But as a professional soldier my political opinion is irrelevant.”
    The emotions that played across Janet Todd’s face were an exquisite blend of sympathy and desire. “Major—listen to me. I’m telling you that the constitution—the government—to which you swore allegiance has ceased to exist. Lincoln and the Republicans have annihilated it. We’re in a new world, where force and risk are the only arbiters of the future.”
    As soon as women embark on abstract reasoning, they create love unconsciously. Another of Charlie’s gems of amorous wisdom. But what did it mean? Did reasoning women create love in themselves? Or in their lovers? For the moment, Paul only knew it was another step in the process of discovering the remarkable dimensions of this woman’s mind and heart.
    â€œYour logic, Miss Janet, has a certain irresistibility. Are you prepared to live on risk? That seems to make you susceptible to the flattery of a professional soldier.”
    â€œI’m prepared to love a professional soldier who lives on risk for my sake. That man—I would love with my whole soul.”
    Paul felt the tremor of a fresh wholly original crystallization in his flesh. A woman who wanted him to live on risk. The idea had enormous resonance in his soul.

    Back home in New Jersey, while he was recuperating from his Gettysburg wound, he had been forced to endure the lamentations of his brother Jonathan’s wife. She orated endlessly on how determined she was to persuade