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"I don't know, exactly. I'll be one of the Third Secretaries."

They talked of Jeff's father. The way Horace Locke talked, Nicholas Baker had been much more influential, in the Department, than Jeff had ever guessed. Jeff remarked about this, and Locke said:

"Don't underestimate your own importance. Foreign policy is not made by speeches, or treaties, or directives, or proclamations. It is made by men, and what they do. That's why I stay in the Department. I've got too big a stake in the Twentieth Century to pick up my chips and get out. Some day I might be able to do something again."

Jeff said, "I did something once."

"What's that you said?"

"Oh, nothing," Jeff said.

He said, "Oh, nothing," but he knew now that it was something. It was something he couldn't speak of. He hadn't learned until much later what it meant. He hadn't known a military axiom--that the action of a junior officer can sometimes influence a skirmish, an engagement, a battle, a campaign, a war. History.

Nobody in the General's War Room back in Florence--a War Room in a tent, but commodious and comfortable nevertheless--selected Jeff Baker to be the spearhead, the point, of the offensive against the Gothic Line in September of 1944. The General himself was not responsible for the offensive. It was ordered by the Combined Chiefs of Staff, who were worried. The Germans were planning to pull four divisions out of Italy and send them to the Western Front. If this happened the offensive in the West, already gasping for supplies, would certainly bog down. And if the logistics disease became worse, and the Germans counterattacked in the winter, those four extra divisions would become enormously important. So the General in Florence received a directive to attack the Apennines frontally from the south. If he pushed through to the plains of the Po beyond, that would be wonderful but most unlikely. In all history no army had ever successfully shoved upward through the shark jaws of the Apennines. That's exactly the way it was--like pushing one's naked hand through a shark's clenched jaws. If the four German divisions could not leave Italy--if they could be contained--that would be enough.