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day.” Hancock cleared his throat. “And the other Mrs. Barlow? I hear she’s a splendid nurse, your wife. I trust she’s well?”
    “She’s fine, thank you, sir. Marvelous, in fact. She’s quite a brave girl.”
    “My regards, when next you write.”
    Mrs. Francis Channing Barlow might, indeed, be brave, Hancock thought, but she was hardly a girl. He had been bewildered upon meeting the woman during one of her camp visits. She had to be a decade Frank Barlow’s senior. Side by side, they looked more like mother and son than husband and wife. Odd match, strange. You’d think a young man, a fighter …
    You never knew about men and women, Hancock warned himself. And probably best not to know. He’d been damned lucky himself. Almira. Born to be a soldier’s wife, that one.
    “But back to Grant,” Barlow said, moving his sword and settling his rump on the cot. For a slender man, the young brigadier was broad-hipped. “He hardly seems the conquering hero sort. At the review, he looked like a vagabond.”
    Hancock eased his posture, wondering if the butchers really had gotten the last metal out of his thigh. At inconvenient moments, pain shot to his skull.
    “Don’t judge Grant by appearances,” Hancock said. “Christ, if people judged generals by appearances, you’d be back in a Harvard dormitory, conjugating Latin and fucking your mattress. Grant will fight.” He grunted to mask another stab of pain. “And I’ll tell you why he’ll fight. He’s the opposite of Georgie McClellan, in all his grandeur. Grant has nothing to lose. He’d already lost all he had before the war … reputation, commission, livelihood … everything but his wife. She sticks to him like a carbuncle. And now he’s playing for once-in-a-lifetime stakes, with other people’s money. Or their blood. And that man loves every minute of it, if I’m any judge.”
    Hancock massaged his thigh, the swollen meat of it. “Grant may look untidy, but he’s a tough sonofabitch. Only knows how to go forward. Because he remembers what’s behind him and doesn’t much like the thought of it catching up. Problem won’t be getting Grant to fight, but getting him to stop when it makes sense to. George Meade’s going to age ten years before the summer’s out.” The corps commander lifted his hand to his face, as if the pain had moved there. Hurting or not, he chuckled. “Maybe we all will. Sam Grant and old Marse Robert are going to come as a shock to one another.”
    Barlow had lowered his gaze, but Hancock could read him: Frank Barlow was thinking about the upcoming fighting the way a glutton pondered a heaping plate. Barlow was an odd bugger: number one in his class at Harvard and pals with all the great brains of New England, a lanky, slump-shouldered gent who appeared eternally bored, with eyes that looked as if he were always drowsy. But let him hear the sound of the guns, and he’d light up like a battery of rockets.
    War drew out unexpected talents in men, or so they said. Hancock suspected it was less a matter of talent than of brilliant, burning insanity. Killing well was the darkest form of genius. And, God help them all, the greatest of earthly thrills.
    He often wondered what he would do when the war was done. Even the Army wouldn’t be the same. And Barlow: Could he go back to the settled life of a fine society lawyer?
    “Well”—Hancock picked up the thread again—“soon enough we’ll be headed to Hell or Richmond.” He grinned. “And Frederick the Great won’t help us, I’m afraid.”
    “No, actually, he won’t,” Barlow sniffed. “It’s been idiocy to resurrect his tactics.” The younger man’s condescending tone made Hancock want to slap him. “His approach to discipline made perfect sense, but consider those famed oblique attacks of his: The way our generals and Lee’s bunch have been struggling with his method is simply ridiculous. It only worked for Frederick because the range of the weapons was