Love is Always Write Anthology Volume 9

stood in front of the relief staring at it. He was the one on the ground and I was the one standing over his body. Tried and failed to protect him then. His warm hand squeezed mine in vice like grip, reminding me that we were alive now. That what happened then was no longer important. We have each other again now. We made a solemn vow to each other that history would not repeat itself."
    ~ Pete

    genre: historical fantasy
    tags: Victorian America (alternate universe); military men; over age 40; sweet (no sex); friends to lovers
    content warnings: strong wartime violence
    word count: 33,891
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    SPY HILL
    by Dusk Peterson
    CHAPTER 1
    WE WON'T ALL BE COMING BACK
    Words spoken by the field-cornet of the Mippite forces at Spy Hill, to his soldiers before the battle:
    "Citizens of the republic, we're now going in to attack the enemy, and we won't all be coming back. Do your duty and trust in your gods."
    ****
    It was the incident with the white spaniel which gave Fairview and me our first hint that we hadn't been total blockheads to bring along Doyle.
    I have to explain that we hadn't yet reached Spy Hill. Between Spy Hill and our camp to the west lay farmland. We'd marched through the farmland practically on tiptoe, hidden by the mist and the night and our own efforts to suppress all sound. We held our breaths when we reached Big Pool Road, which runs from southwest to northeast, parallel to Spy Hill. There was no way to avoid the road; going any further south or north would bring us up against the encampments of the Mippite soldiers. So our two lines of troops marched ever so softly across the road lined by Mippite farms, any one of which might sound the alarm and spoil our surprise attack.
    It didn't help that the night was so black that we couldn't see our hands before our faces. I'd already spent three hours searching for one of my companies that had lost its way. By the time I arrived back, the rest of my men had fallen asleep, exhausted from the week's battles. Waking them had taken yet more time.
    Now the moon was out, lighting the white mist around us. It was when we were just past the farmyards, and barely beginning to let out our breaths, that Doyle decided to have a chat.
    "Bloody stupid way to attack the siegers of a fort," he announced to me cheerfully. Even though the mist dimmed the moonlight, I could see the outline of his slumped shoulders and could imagine his scowl. "The Mippite soldiers are camped on top of this hill, while the fort is miles away, so what're we doing scrambling over rocks in the middle of the night? It don't make no sense. All of us fellows say so. But you officers, you don't pay us no mind. Nobody wants us enlisted men around – we know that."
    "All of us fellows" were Doyle's perpetual, invisible backing for his grumbles. It wasn't Doyle's grumbles that bothered me; I'd learned to ignore them long ago. It was the fact that he was voicing them aloud.
    He'd at least had sense enough to whisper; otherwise, I've no doubt that the other soldiers in my battalion, all of whom were on edge, would have jumped on him in a heap in their eagerness to be the first to gag him. But I'd made the mistake, at the beginning of this night, of telling my men that they could whisper a quick word to me during our attack on the hill "if it's important." I'd forgotten that Doyle held a different definition of "important" than the rest of the world.
    To jump on Doyle myself, satisfying though the act might be, was unfortunately below the dignity of a colonel. I gestured to Canton, my soldier-servant, but he was busy looking nervously at the cows we were passing. The cows watched us go by without emitting a single moo.
    "So what me and the other fellows say is, this ain't no way to run a war. Cramming us all into them tiny boxcars, making us swim across a right big river, then ordering us to wriggle on our bellies for a mile or three. It ain't natural. It ain't dignified. See, me and the fellows got our standing to think of. We can't be acting all low, or the fellows in the 1st Ninth will be all after us—"
    "Doyle." It was the colonel of the 1st Battalion of the Ninth Landstead's Fusiliers; he had been marching at the head of the line of soldiers nine yards away from ours. The fact that he had been able to hear Doyle at that distance was a bad sign. He leaned over and whispered to Doyle, "If you do not remain silent until we win the summit, your colonel and I will rethink our