don't want to leave you, Gard," she objected.

"You've got to, Quette. We can't hold these Federals. We're in a bulge here, and the only reason they haven't cracked us out yet is Chattanooga holding our right flank."

He kissed her goodbye, a long kiss, and strode down the street to the Franklin County courthouse, where he had set up headquarters for the Army of Middle Tennessee when the Union troops had forced them out of Nashville. The place was a beehive of activity.

The eastern sky glowed red over the Cumberlands and the artillery was thundering in the north when General Beauregard Courtney rode out toward the front. He had his driver park the staff car on a slight rise overlooking his troop formations.

The war was going badly for the South, and Beauregard unhappily took much of the responsibility on himself. Perhaps he had been wrong in making that impassioned speech at the Governors Conference in Memphis which, he was sure, had swung the weight of opinion in favor of the Pact of Resistance. Certainly he had been wrong in recommending a farflung northern battle line, at the start of the war, which stretched from Paducah, Kentucky, north of Nashville to Knoxville, with its eastern anchor on the Cumberlands.

It had been his idea that a defensive line so far north would give the South more time to mobilize behind it, would hold the rich industries of Tennessee for the South, and would give the South a jumping off place for a strike across the Ohio River. But the North had mobilized faster, and Northern armies had crunched down through the Southern defenses like paper.

Now all West Tennessee and a segment of Mississippi was in Federal hands. The Southern defense in East Tennessee had been forced back to the mountains around Chattanooga. And his own troops had fallen back from stand after stand after the Battle of Nashville. Even now, Federal armour was reported to have crossed the Tennessee River and be heading south-eastward toward Columbia and Lewisburg.

He hoped Piquette had left Winchester by now. Perhaps he should not have kept his quadroon mistress with him through the constant danger of defeat, but with Lucy way down in New Orleans....

As the morning wore on, the guns thundered below him and the tanks rumbled across the Tullahoma plain, spouting fire. Several times his sergeant urged him to withdraw, out of danger, and return to headquarters, but he stayed. He wanted 

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