“Pick your own replacement for your command and run the name by me. What’s the state of the regiment?”

Since I’m now going to have to be more hands-on. Dammit, Kohler, I needed you! I’ve got half a dozen jobs to juggle! I only took the Colonel’s post because you needed someone whose father was a Sheriff as a figurehead!

He’d led them to victory more than once, led from the front, and his latest plan had let them give the enemy a lot more of a world of hurt than they received. That had probably kept the men reasonably happy with him, even though he was busier than he liked with other things half the time. It wasn’t that he couldn’t run a light cavalry regiment; he’d done it before, and pretty well. Time, time . . .

Jaeger flicked his eyes aside at Woburn while he chewed hastily; Ingolf nodded very slightly. Let him know how light we got off; can’t hurt, might help.

“Three more of the wounded died overnight, Colonel,” Jaeger said when he’d swallowed.

He had medium-brown hair and was whippet-thin despite the way he was shoveling in the potato salad and mutton-ham and something very like kielbasa, and tomatoes and onions dressed with oil and vinegar and crusty rolls and butter, and eyeing the pastries. He’d eaten that way every time Ingolf saw him have an opportunity, but he wasn’t surprised at the man’s looks. From what older people said now and then, fatties had been common before the Change even among farmworkers, though that was difficult to imagine. You certainly weren’t going to get that way doing what a horse-soldier did these days.

“Richter and Smith died of internal bleeding, the doctor tried, but too much was sliced up. They had to stop transfusing them, there were men who might recover who needed it and only so many donors.”

Ingolf sighed. There were places that could store refrigerated blood for a while, but they were few and far between. Triage was an ugly fact of a fighting-man’s life, but it was a fact. You weren’t doing anyone a favor if you let a man who had some chance to live die just to keep someone who didn’t have a chance going another half hour. There were times when the only favor you could do a comrade was a quick knife-thrust; at least they’d been spared that.

“The third?” he said.

Can’t recall anyone else who looked that bad and it’s too early for infection to show up.

“Sir, Olson got hit on the head hard enough to dent his helmet in, but he was doing fine and then . . . he just started breathing funny and died, real quiet.”