"Get dressed," she said, dropping her bare feet to the floor and smoothing her nightgown over her knees. "I'll fix you some coffee."
He pulled on his uniform, the Confederate grey with the stars glittering on the shoulders, while she plugged in the hotplate and started the coffee. Outside, the eastern sky was streaked with dim light, against which the sleeping houses of Winchester thrust up stark silhouettes.
She sat across the little table from him, a flowered robe drawn around her, while he sipped his coffee and thrust the last wisps of dreams from his head.
"Quette," he said, "I want you to pack and get out of here. Before daylight, if you can get ready. Head south, for Birmingham. I'll send a staff car around for you as soon as I get to headquarters."
"I 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.