"Tell him not to wait around, that's all," Jake said. "For his sake and ours."

"Winston is a great many things, but not a ditherer. He may from time to time find himself mistaken. He hardly ever finds himself unsure," Halifax said. "I do not know what his answer will be. I am confident you will have it in short order."

"Good. Anything else?" Jake was no ditherer, either.

"The United States are making a good deal of propaganda capital from that camp they captured in Texas," Lord Halifax said. "Did you have to be quite so open in your destruction of the colored populace?"

"You know what, Your Excellency? I don't give a shit how much the damnyankees squawk about that." Jake wasn't being truthful, but he didn't care. He had to make the limey understand. "What we do inside our own country is nobody's business but ours. We've had a nigger problem for hundreds of years-even before we broke away from England. Now I'm finally doing something about it, and I really don't care who doesn't like that. We're going to come out of this war nigger-free, or as close to nigger-free as I can make us."

"Your solution is…heroic," Halifax said.

Jake liked that better than the British ambassador probably intended. He felt like a hero for reducing the CSA's colored population. "I keep 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 ignore it. Taking chances was one thing. Taking stupid chances was something else again.

He didn't want to charge right into the city. He aimed to envelop it instead. That way, the Confederates couldn't do unto him as the USA did unto them in Pittsburgh. An attacking army that took a city block by block put its own dick in the meat grinder and turned the crank.

No help would come to Atlanta from the north or the east, and the bulk of the CSA's strength lay in those directions. The Confederate States were like a snail. They had a hard shell that protected them from the United States. Once you broke through, though, you found they were soft and squishy underneath. How much could they bring in from Florida or Alabama? Not nearly enough-or Morrell didn't think so, anyhow.

Back when he first proposed his slash, the General Staff estimated it would take two years, not one. When Chattanooga fell, he'd hoped to prove them wrong. He might yet, but racing ahead for the sake of speed wasn't smart.

"Then don't do it," he muttered, and headed out of the office. On the floor lay the dentist's diploma from Tulane University, the glass in the frame shattered. Morrell wondered whether the man was still practicing in Monroe or had put on a butternut uniform and gone up toward the front.

Two black men carrying rifles stalked along the street. They wore armbands with USA on them. White civilians fell over themselves getting out of their way. They waved and nodded to Morrell: not quite salutes, but close enough. He nodded back. The Negro guerrillas made him nervous, too. But they scared white Confederates to death, which was good, and they knew more about what was going on here than U.S. troops did, which was even better.

Sometimes they shot first, without bothering to ask questions later. Morrell was sure they'd killed a few people who didn't deserve killing. But how many Negroes who didn't deserve killing were dead all across the CSA? A little extra revenge might be too bad, but Morrell didn't intend to lose any sleep about it.

Except for guerrillas, not many Negroes were left in and around Monroe, or anywhere U.S. armies had reached. White people seemed to suffer from a kind of collective amnesia. More often than not, they denied there'd ever been many blacks close by. In Kentucky, they said the Negroes mostly lived in Tennessee. In Tennessee, they said the Negroes mostly lived in Georgia. Here in Georgia, they pointed two ways at once: towards Alabama and South Carolina. Was that selective blindness, a guilty conscience, or both? Morrell would have bet on both.

"Young man!" A Confederate dowager swept down on him. "I need to speak to you, young man!"