Harry Turtledove

Don’t be dumber than you can help, all right? If you reckon you’re the only one in the world with troubles, what does that make you? Besides a damn fool, I mean?

“You make me wonder about my own country, Spartacus, not just yours.”

“Good,” the black man rumbled. “Wonderin’s good. Ain’t nothin’ gonna change till you wonder if it oughta.”

“People keep coming up with new ways to maim their fellow man. I don’t know why I don’t despair of the human race.”

“Somebody once said people were the missing link between apes and human beings,” McDougald said wistfully. “Damned if he didn’t hit that one on the button.”

Of course, the Confederacy was also a Christian country…and what did that say about Christianity? Nothing good, she was sure.

It was enough to make a man with a conscience feel guilty.

Of course, a man with that kind of conscience had no business getting into Intelligence in the first place.

“Are you going to see if history can repeat itself? And are you setting me up to take the fall if it does? It can’t be your fault, after all.”

By you he didn’t mean Abell’s alone, but all the officers in Philadelphia who thought of war as theory and maps and not as cordite and burning barrels and mangled men. They were good at what they did. Because they were, they thought they knew everything there was to know about the business of organized slaughter. Morrell had a different, and lower, opinion.

Nothing like a wound infection to take the romance out of war.

Chester wasn’t about to commit the sin of optimism. Justifiably or not, he feared it would jinx everything.

“All things considered, we got away cheap.”

“Thank you, Mr. Cooley,” Sam said. We got away cheap. The dead and the maimed would not agree with the exec. Sam found that he was inclined to. War measured what you dished out against what you took.

The kid from the State Department disappeared. Jake stared after him. Either they really were making them younger than they had once upon a time or he himself was starting to get some serious mileage on him. He suspected the problem did not lie with the State Department.

“Have you noticed there’s something funny in the budget?”

“There’s always something funny in the budget,” Flora answered. “We’re in a war. That just makes it funnier than usual.”

The featured entrée with something called Swiss steak. It struck him as a good reason for emigrating from Switzerland.