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honor.”
    â€œAnd massacred the English.”
    â€œWrong again.” Phelan was visibly delighted with himself. “The English fired first, and blew the French to pieces. Cut them to shreds.”
    Catto guffawed.
    â€œYou laugh. But the French won the battle,” Phelan said sternly. “That is called justice.”
    â€œI’m glad I missed it,” Catto said. “It sounds worse than bayonets, which I am also glad I missed.”
    â€œAfraid of cold steel,” Phelan scoffed. “Not like the Irish guards at Waterloo.”
    â€œNever mind Waterloo. And never mind your omnis morris equus either.”
    â€œThe truth is they were Scots,” Phelan said sadly. “The colonel and I would like more sulphate of iron in the sinks. You want the job?”
    â€œYes. And anything else you find. I have to keep the men busy.”
    â€œThat’s the problem now.”
    â€œThey’re gambling.”
    â€œThey’ll be brangling in a month.”
    For a time his men had been no trouble. (“My men”: now and then he called them that, smiling down a childish pride. But they were less than a gallant band, his scrubby fraternity of tatterdemalion kerns.) They cheered and whistled at their new log barracks, shouted “Hey cookie, beefsteak tonight” at the fat, weary master of pot and pan, gazed upon the officers’ cabins as if upon Rome, and fell into reverent silence before the freshly turned, cleanly patterned grid of sinks, with shovels evenly spaced, upright, permanent as crosses in a graveyard. (Tubby, unwashed Private Franklin had already eased himself against a log wall and been cursed out by Catto, who called him, among other exquisite epithets, a pig’s bladder, causing Haller to cackle aloud. Franklin was thenceforth known as Piggy.)
    Cincinnati itself was still some way off, but the dust of the roads, the passage of horses, of mule-drawn wagons, of buckboards bearing women and children, all betrayed peace and civilization. The men settled in, and sexless marriages were dissolved; any two who shared a dog tent were called the old man and the old woman (“Who’s your wife?” was a common question, and not a joke), but now they all slept in two rows of ten or a dozen, an aisle between. A potbellied stove presided at one end of the barracks so that a sooty pipe could run the length of the building, saving fuel, lavishing heat; each man in turn sat up for two hours, watching in the night and adding billets. City life. They boiled water in the cook-pots and washed clothes, blankets, kerchiefs, everything but themselves, until Catto issued soap and orders. “Feet,” he said. “If nothing else, your cruddy feet. Draw socks this afternoon. I catch you without them, you stand on a barrel all day.”
    And then Catto became a foreman, an alderman: the men were a sulking mass of inept municipal employees. Garbage-men, carpenters, ditch-diggers, tailors, grocers, courthouse loiterers, road-menders, tinkers, cooks, petty grafters, wheelwrights—anything but soldiers. Traders and hagglers: half of them had lost, or discarded, or swapped their blankets and overcoats, traded off Canton flannel drawers for coffee; they were allowed forty-two dollars a year for clothes but relied on generous quartermasters. They used postage stamps and scrip for money, and came to Catto when the rain had pulped their life’s savings. In three weeks they turned sullen. After almost three years Catto was learning what it meant to be a soldier. “Only because the war is over. Over for us, and everybody knows it, and they want to go home.”
    â€œKeep them in line,” the colonel said. “General Hooker is a tough one, and will come down on them hard. Make sure they know that. Hooker has the whole department on his hands and does not want to be distracted by us wee folk.”
    â€œI don’t suppose you could have me