Sergeant Berr did not drop his head before the battery veteran’s challenge. He stood with his blackened bone knuckles resting on the witness rail, his fire-cracked vertebrae straight as a surveyor’s rod, his hollow eye sockets turned toward Sergeant Miller on the middle tier. The silence that followed Miller’s question was heavy, fraught with the hard doubts of men who had spent their lives learning that insubordination was a hanging offense before breakfast, and that an army without unquestioning obedience was an armed rabble waiting to be ridden down by cavalry.
“You don’t hold the line,” Berr answered, his dry, rasping voice cutting through the damp chill of the amphitheater like iron against flint. “That is the answer you don’t want to hear, Sergeant Miller. That is the truth you bury under twenty rounds of blank cartridges on the parade ground.”
Miller frowned, gripping the tier rail with both hands. “An army that doesn’t hold its line is an army running for the baggage wagons, old-timer. An army that breaks is an invitation for the enemy horse to butcher every company in the brush.”
“Sometimes it is,” Berr said, without a trace of mockery. “I stood at the Salt Ford twelve years before the Hill War, when the eastern horse broke our left wing across the marshes. I know what grape-shot does to an open infantry square. I watched four hundred men of the Second Foot die in three minutes because a green lieutenant threw away his colours and ran…
