Harry Turtledove - Advance and Retreat

“Has anyone ever called you a poet, Major?” John asked.

“Why, no, sir.” Major Strabo looked as modest as a walleyed man could.

“Well, I understand why,” John said. His adjutant sent him an injured look. The commanding general didn’t care. Something had gone wrong for the traitors. John didn’t know what, but he knew the only thing that mattered: he would gladly take advantage of it.

Lieutenant General Bell had taken what the healers politely called a heroic dose of laudanum, even by his own standards. He’d taken plenty to leave a unicorn flat on its back waving its hooves in the air, a silly smile on its face. For once, Bell felt no physical pain.

But Bell was sure all the laudanum in the world wouldn’t have sufficed to take the edge off his towering inferno of wrath. Had he had two working arms and two legs, he would have done murder against his wing and brigade commanders. As things were, he could only scorch them with his leonine eyes, wishing each and every one of them into the most agonizing firepit of the hottest hell.

“You idiots!” he roared. “You bunglers! You fools! You knaves! How could you let the gods-damned southrons escape you? How? How?” The word came out as an agonized howl. “Are you cowards or are you traitors? Those are the only two choices I see.”

His officers stirred. He didn’t think any of them would have the effrontery to answer him, but Patrick the Cleaver did: “In that case, sir, you’d better get new fletching for your sight so it’ll carry farther.”

“Oh, unicorn shit!” Bell bellowed. “I watched you botching boobies there on the field. I watched you, and what did I see? Nothing! Nothing, gods damn it! You would not close with them. None of you would, you spineless squid! The best move in my career as a soldier I was thus destined to behold come to naught. To naught! You disgrace the uniforms you infest. A half-witted dog could have led an attack that would have swept the southrons away. Would I’d had one in an officer’s uniform!”

The subordinate commanders stirred again, more angrily. A brigadier whose parents had given him the uncompromising name of Provincial Prerogative hissed, “You have no business to use us so… sir.”

“You had no business to use me so!” Bell yelled, still in a perfect transport of fury. “Did I order you to attack the retreating southrons? I did. And did you attack them? You did not. They escaped. And whose fault is that? Mine? No, by the gods. Yours!”

A very red-faced young brigadier called Hiram the Cranberry said, “You have no business calling us cowards and dogs.”

“You have no business acting like cowards and dogs,” Bell raged. “You were supposed to act like soldiers. Did you? Did you?” He was screaming again. He half hoped he would have an apoplexy and die so he could escape this mortification.

“Sir, we did the best we could,” said another brigadier, a short, squat fellow known as Otho the Troll.

“Then gods help King Geoffrey and his kingdom!” Bell said.

“You go too far, sir; you truly do,” Patrick the Cleaver said. “Indeed and it’s a sore trial to our honor.”

“Have you any? It’s news to me.” Lieutenant General Bell wished he could simply turn his back on the wing and brigade commanders. Being a cripple brought with it all sorts of humiliations, some less obvious than others.

“For gods’ sake, sir!” another brigadier burst out. That was his favorite expression; because of it, he was widely called For Gods’ Sake John. Twirling one end of his fiercely outswept mustache, he went on, “You damage your own honor, sir, when you impugn ours.”

“That’s right. That is well said,” agreed a brigadier known as Count John of Barsoom after the Peachtree Province estate where he’d grown goobers before the war. He thought very well of himself.

“I don’t damage my honor. You-the lot of you-damaged my honor,” Bell insisted. “If you’d only done what I told you to do, we would be celebrating an enormous victory right now. Instead, we have-this.” He gestured in disgust. “You are dismissed, every single one of you. I wish I never had to see any of you ever again. The gods don’t grant all wishes-I know that .”

“Were you after calling us together for no better purpose than to be railing at us like your Excellency was a crazy man?” Patrick the Cleaver asked. “A bad business that is, a very bad business indeed.”

Bell could at the moment think of no better purpose than the one Patrick had named. If the officer from the Sapphire Isle didn’t agree with him-well, too bad for Patrick the Cleaver. “You are dismissed,” Bell said again. “Get out of my sight, before I murder you all.”

He couldn’t make good on the threat. He knew that. His subordinate commanders had to know it, too. But if his look could have stretched them all dead on their pyres, it would have. They had to know that, too. By the way they hurried off, they feared his glare might strike them dead.

He took yet another swig of laudanum after they were gone. He hoped it would make him fall over. Again, no such luck. It didn’t even quell his fury. All it did was make him a little woozy, a little sleepy. He heaved himself to his feet: no easy job, not with a missing leg and a useless arm. Laudanum or no laudanum, sticking a crutch in his left armpit brought a stab of pain. He welcomed it like an old friend; being without pain, these days, felt unnatural.

He pushed his way out through the tent flap. The sentries guarding the pavilion stiffened to attention. They saluted. General Bell nodded in reply; returning a salute while he was on his feet-on his foot, rather-wasn’t easy.

The Army of Franklin was encamped not far from the road down which John the Lister’s southrons had escaped. Healers still worked on some of the men who’d been wounded in the skirmishes of the day before. Bell growled something under his breath and ground his teeth. His army shouldn’t have skirmished with the southrons. It should have crushed them.

One of the sentries pointed north. The motion swung Bell’s eyes in that direction, too. The soldier said, “Looks like Ned of the Forest’s unicorn-riders are coming in, sir.”

“Yes, it does,” Bell said. “I wish they’d been here yesterday. Say what you will about Ned, but he knows how to fight, which is more than most of the useless, worthless officers in this miserable, gods-forsaken army can do.”

Prudently, the sentry didn’t answer.

Before long, Ned’s men were pitching their tents and building campfires next to those of the footsoldiers in the Army of Franklin. Ned of the Forest himself rode toward Lieutenant General Bell’s pavilion. He swung down from his unicorn with an easy grace Bell remembered painfully-and that was indeed the way he remembered it-well. “By the gods, Bell,” Ned cried, striding up to him, “what went wrong?”

“ I don’t know,” Bell answered, his bitterness overflowing. “What I know is, I’m surrounded by idiots. I know that right down to the ground.”

“We had ’em,” Ned declared. “We had ’em. All we had to do was bite down on ’em and chew ’em up. Why didn’t we?”

“I wish I could tell you,” Bell said. “I gave the necessary commands. I gave them repeatedly. I gave them, and I saw them ignored. The attack I ordered did not take place. I wish it had.”

“We won’t get another chance like that,” Ned warned.

Lieutenant General Bell nodded. “That, Lieutenant General, I do know. I wish I could cashier every brigade commander in my army, but I can’t, gods damn it.”

“There was a squabble like this here one after the battle by the River of Death,” Ned of the Forest said.