Chapter I
When the Great War ended, Jake Featherston had thought the silence falling over the battlefield as strange and unnatural as machine-gun fire in Richmond on a Sunday afternoon. Now, sitting at the bar of a saloon in the Confederate capital a few weeks later, he listened to the distant rattle of a machine gun, nodded to himself, and took another pull at his beer.
“Wonder who they’re shooting at this time,” the barkeep remarked before turning away to pour a fresh whiskey for another customer.
“Hope it’s the niggers.” Jake set a hand on the grip of the artilleryman’s pistol he wore on his belt. “Wouldn’t mind shooting a few myself, by Jesus.”
“They shoot back these days,” the bartender said.
Featherston shrugged. People had called him a lot of different things during the war, but nobody had ever called him yellow. The battery of the First Richmond Howitzers he’d commanded had held longer and retreated less than any other guns in the Army of Northern Virginia. “Much good it did me,” he muttered. “Much good it did anything.” He’d still been fighting the damnyankees from a good position back of Fredericksburg, Virginia, when the Confederate States finally threw in the sponge.
He went over to the free-lunch counter and slapped ham and cheese and pickles on a slice of none-too-fresh bread. The bartender gave him a pained look; it wasn’t the first time he’d raided the counter, nor the second, either. He normally didn’t give two whoops in hell what other people thought, but this place was right around the corner from the miserable little room he’d found. He wanted to be able to keep coming here.
Reluctantly, he said, “Give me another beer, too.” He pulled a couple of brown dollar banknotes out of his pocket and slid them across the bar. Beer had only been a dollar a glass when he got into town (or a quarter in specie). Before the war, even through most of the war, it had only been five cents.
As long as he was having another glass, he snagged a couple of hard-boiled eggs from the free-lunch spread to go with his sandwich. He’d eaten a lot of saloon free lunches since coming home to Richmond. They weren’t free, but they were the cheapest way he knew to keep himself fed.
A couple of rifle shots rang out, closer than the machine gun had been. “Any luck at all, that’s the War Department,” Jake said, sipping at the new beer. “Lot of damn fools down there nobody’d miss.”
“Amen,” said the fellow down the bar who was drinking whiskey. Like Featherston, he wore butternut uniform trousers with a shirt that had seen better days (though his, unlike Jake’s, did boast a collar). “Plenty of bastards in there who don’t deserve anything better than a blindfold and a cigarette, letting us lose the war like that.”
“Waste of cigarettes, you ask me, but what the hell.” Jake took another pull at his beer. It left him feeling generous. In tones of great concession, he said, “All right, give ’em a smoke. Then shoot ’em.”
“Plenty of bastards in Congress, too,” the bartender put in. He was plump and bald and had a white mustache, so he probably hadn’t been in the trenches or just behind them. Even so, he went on in tones of real regret: “If they hadn’t fired on the marchers in Capitol Square last week, reckon we might have seen some proper housecleaning.”
Featherston shook his head. “Wouldn’t matter for beans, I say.”
“What do you mean, it wouldn’t matter?” the whiskey-drinking veteran demanded. “Stringing a couple dozen Congressmen to lampposts wouldn’t matter? Go a long way toward making things better, I think.”
“Wouldn’t,” Jake said stubbornly. “Could hang ’em all, and it wouldn’t matter. They’d go and pick new Congressmen after you did, and who would they be? More rich sons of bitches who never worked a day in their lives or got their hands dirty. Men of good family.” He loaded that with scorn. “Same kind of jackasses they got in the War Department, if you want to hear God’s truth.”
He was not anyone’s notion of a classical orator, with graceful, carefully balanced sentences and smooth, elegant gestures: he was skinny and rawboned and awkward, with a sharp nose, a sharper chin, and a harsh voice. But when he got rolling, he spoke with an intensity that made anyone who heard him pay attention.
“What do you reckon ought to happen, then?” the barkeep asked.
“Tear it all down,” Jake said in tones that brooked no argument. “Tear it down and start over. Can’t see what in God’s name else to do, not when the men of good family”—he sneered harder than ever—“let the niggers rise up and then let ’em into the Army to run away from the damnyankees and then gave ’em the vote to say thank-you. Christ!” He tossed down the last of the beer and stalked out.
He’d fired canister at retreating Negro troops—and, as the rot spread through the Army of Northern Virginia, at retreating white troops, too. It hadn’t helped. Nothing had helped. We should have licked the damnyankees fast, he thought. A long war let them pound on us till we broke. He glared in the direction of the War Department. Your fault. Not the soldiers’fault. Yours.
He tripped on a brick and almost fell. Cursing, he kicked it toward the pile of rubble from which it had come. Richmond was full of rubble, rubble and ruins. U.S. bombing aeroplanes had paid repeated nighttime visits over the last year of the war. Even windows with glass in them were exceptions, not the rule.
Negro laborers with shovels cleared bricks and timbers out of the street, where one faction or another that had sprung up since the war effort collapsed had built a barricade. A soldier with a bayoneted Tredegar kept them working. Theoretically, Richmond was under martial law. In practice, it was under very little law of any sort. Discharged veterans far outnumbered men still under government command, and paid them no more heed than they had to.
Three other Negroes strode up the street toward Jake. They were not laborers. Like him, they wore a motley mix of uniforms and civilian clothing. Also like him, they were armed. Two carried Tredegars they hadn’t turned in at the armistice; the third wore a holstered pistol. They did not look like men who had run from the Yankees. They did not look like men who would run from anything.
Their eyes swept over Jake. He was not a man who ran from anything, either. He walked through them instead of going around. “Crazy white man,” one of them said as they walked on. He didn’t keep his voice down, but he didn’t say anything directly to Jake, either. With his own business on his mind, Jake kept walking.
He passed by Capitol Square. He’d slept under the huge statue of Albert Sidney Johnston the night he got into Richmond. He couldn’t do that now: troops in sandbagged machine-gun nests protected the Confederate Capitol from the Confederate people. Neatly printed NO LOITERING signs had sprouted like mushrooms after a rain. Several bore handwritten addenda: THIS MEANS YOU. Bloodstains on the sidewalk underscored the point.
Posters covered every wall. The most common showed the Stars and Bars and the phrase, PEACE, ORDER, PROSPERITY. That one, Featherston knew, came from the government’s printing presses. President Semmes and his flunkies remained convinced that, if they said everything was all right, it would be all right.
Black severed chains on red was another often-repeated theme. The Negroes’ Red uprisings of late 1915 had been crushed, but Reds remained. JOIN US! some of the posters shouted—an appeal from black to white.
“Not likely,” Jake said, and spat at one of those posters. No more than a handful of Confederate whites had joined the revolutionaries during the uprisings. No more than a handful would ever join them. Of so much Featherston was morally certain.
Yet another poster showed George Washington and the slogan, WE NEED A NEW REVOLUTION. Jake spotted only a couple of copies of that one, which was put out by the Freedom Party. Till that moment, Jake had never heard of the Freedom Party. He wondered if it had existed before the war ended.
He studied the poster. Slowly, he nodded. “Sure as hell do need a new revolution,” he said. He had no great use for Washington, though. Washington had been president of the United States. That made him suspect in Jake’s eyes.
But in spite of the crude illustration, in spite of the cheap printing, the message struck home, and struck hard. The Freedom Party sounded honest, at any rate. The ruling Whigs were trying to heal an amputation with a sticking plaster. The Radical Liberals, as far as he was concerned, played the same song in a different key. As for the Socialists—he spat at another red poster. Niggers and nigger-lovers, every one of them. The bomb-throwing maniacs wanted a revolution, too, but not the kind the country needed.
He peered more closely at the Freedom Party poster. It didn’t say where the party headquarters were or how to go about joining. His lip curled. “Goddamn amateurs,” he said. One thing spending his whole adult life in the Army had taught him: the virtue of organization.
With a shrug, he headed back toward his mean little room. If the Freedom Party didn’t know how to attract any members, odds were it wasn’t worth joining. No matter how good its ideas, they didn’t matter if nobody could find out about them. Even the damned Socialists knew that much.
“Too bad,” he muttered. “Too stinking bad.” Congressional elections were coming this fall. A shame the voters couldn’t send the cheaters and thieves in the Capitol the right kind of message.
Back in the room—he’d had plenty of more comfortable bivouacs on campaign—he wrote for a while in a Gray Eagle scratch-pad. He’d picked up the habit toward the end of the war. Over Open Sights, he called the work in progress. It let him set down some of his anger on paper. Once the words were out, they didn’t fester quite so much in his mind. He might have killed somebody if he hadn’t had a release like this.
When day came, he went out looking for work. Colored laborers weren’t the only ones clearing rubble in Richmond, not by a long chalk. He hauled bricks and dirt and chunks of broken stone from not long after sunrise to just before sunset. The straw-boss, of course, paid off in paper money, though his own pockets jingled.
Knowing the banknotes would be worth less tomorrow than they were today, Jake made a beeline for the local saloon and the free-lunch counter. He’d drawn better rations in the Army, too, but he was too hungry to care. As before, the barkeep gave him a reproachful look for making a pig of himself. As before, he bought a second beer to keep the fellow happy, or not too unhappy.
He was stuffing a pickled tomato into his mouth when the fellow with whom he’d talked politics the day before came in and ordered himself a shot. Then he made a run at the free lunch, too. They got to talking again; Featherston learned his name was Hubert Slattery. After a while, Jake mentioned the Freedom Party posters he’d seen.
To his surprise, Slattery burst out laughing. “Oh, them!” he said. “My brother took a look at those fellows, but he didn’t want any part of ’em. By what Horace told me, there’s only four or five of ’em, and they run the whole party out of a shoebox.”
“But they’ve got posters and everything,” Jake protested, startled to find how disappointed he was. “Not good posters, mind you, but posters.”
“Only reason they do is that one of ’em’s a printer,” the other veteran told him. “They meet in this little dive on Seventh near Canal, most of the way toward the Tredegar Steel Works. You want to waste your time, pal, go see ’em for yourself.”
“Maybe I will,” Featherston said. Hubert Slattery laughed again, but that just made him more determined. “By God, maybe I will.”
Congresswoman Flora Hamburger clapped her hands together in delight. Dr. Hanrahan’s smile was broader than a lot of those seen at the Pennsylvania Hospital. And David Hamburger, intense concentration on his face, brought his cane forward and then took another step on his artificial leg.
“How does it feel?” Flora asked her younger brother.
“Stump’s not too sore,” he answered, panting a little. “But it’s harder work than I thought it would be.”
“You haven’t been upright since you lost your leg,” Dr. Hanrahan reminded him. “Come on. Give me another step. You can do it.” David did, and nearly fell. Hanrahan steadied him before Flora could. “You’ve got to swing the prosthesis out, so the knee joint locks and takes your weight when you straighten up on it,” the doctor said. “You don’t learn that, the leg won’t work. That’s why everybody with an amputation above the knee walks like a sailor who hasn’t touched land in a couple of years.”
“But you are walking, David,” Flora said. She dropped from English into Yiddish: “Danken Gott dafahr. Omayn.”
Seeing her brother on his feet—or on one foot of his and one of wood and metal and leather—did a little to ease the guilt that had gnawed at her ever since he was wounded. Nothing would ever do more than a little. After her New York City district sent her to Congress, she’d had the chance to slide David from the trenches to a quiet post behind the lines. He wouldn’t have wanted her to do that, but she could have. She’d put Socialist egalitarianism above family ties…and this was the result.
Her brother shrugged awkwardly. “I only need one foot to operate a sewing-machine treadle. I won’t starve when I go home—and I won’t have to sponge off your Congresswoman’s salary, either.” He gave her a wry grin.
As a U.S. Representative, Flora made $7,500 a year, far more than the rest of her family put together. She didn’t begrudge sharing the money with her parents and brothers and sisters, and she knew David knew she didn’t. He took a brotherly privilege in teasing her.
He also took a brotherly privilege in picking her brains: “What’s the latest on the peace with the Rebs?”
She grimaced for a couple of reasons. For one, he hadn’t called the Confederates by that scornful nickname before he went into the Army. For another…“President Roosevelt is still being very hard and very stubborn. I can understand keeping some of the territory we won from the CSA, but all he’s willing to restore is the stretch of Tennessee south of the Cumberland we took as fighting wound down, and he won’t give that back: he wants to trade it for the little piece of Kentucky the Confederates still hold.”
“Bully for him!” David exclaimed. He had been a good Socialist before he went off to war. Now, a lot of the time, he sounded like a hidebound Democrat of the Roosevelt stripe. That distressed Flora, too.
She went on, “And he’s not going to let them keep any battleships or submersibles or military aeroplanes or barrels, and he’s demanded that they limit their Army to a hundred machine guns.”
“Bully!” This time, her brother and Dr. Hanrahan said it together.
Flora looked from one of them to the other in exasperation. “And he won’t come a dime below two billion dollars in reparations, all of it to be paid in specie or in steel or oil at 1914 prices. That’s a crushing burden to lay on the proletariat of the Confederate States.”
“I hope it crushes them,” David said savagely. “Knock on wood, they’ll never be able to lift a finger against us again.” Instead of knocking on the door or on a window sill, he used his own artificial leg, which drove home the point.
Flora had given up trying to argue with him. He had his full share of the Hamburger family’s stubbornness. Instead, she turned to Dr. Hanrahan and asked, “How much longer will he have to stay here now that he’s started to get back on his feet?”
“He should be able to leave in about a month, provided he makes good progress and provided the infection in the stump doesn’t decide to flare up again,” Hanrahan said. Flora nodded; she’d seen he gave her straight answers. He finished with a brisk nod: “We’ll shoot for November first, then.”
After giving her brother a careful hug and an enthusiastic kiss, Flora left the Pennsylvania Hospital. Fall was in the air, sure enough; some of the leaves in the trees on the hospital grounds were beginning to turn. She flagged a cab. “The Congressional office building,” she told the driver.
“Yes, ma’am.” He touched the shiny leather brim of his cap, put the Oldsmobile in gear, and went out to do battle with Philadelphia traffic. The traffic won, as it often did. Philadelphia had been the de facto capital of the USA since the Confederates bombarded Washington during the Second Mexican War, more than thirty-five years before. Starting even before then, a great warren of Federal buildings had gone up in the center of town. Getting to them was not always for the faint of heart.
“I have a message for you,” said Flora’s secretary, a plump, middle-aged woman named Bertha. She waved a piece of paper. “Congressman Blackford wants you to call him back.”
“Does he?” Flora said, as neutrally as she could. “All right, I’ll do that. Thank you.” She went into her inner office and closed the door after her. She didn’t turn around to see whether Bertha was smiling behind her back. She hoped not, but she didn’t really want to know.
Dakota, a solidly Socialist state, had been returning Hosea Blackford to the House since Flora was a girl. He was about twice her age now, a senior figure in the Party, even if on the soft side ideologically as far as she was concerned. And he was a widower whose Philadelphia apartment lay right across the hall from hers. He had left no doubt he was interested in her, though he’d never done anything to tempt her into defending herself with a hatpin. To her own surprise, she found herself interested in return, even if he was both a moderate and a gentile.
“Now,” she muttered as she picked up the telephone and waited for the operator to come on the line, “is he calling about Party business or…something else?”
“Hello, Flora,” Blackford said when the call went through. “I just wanted to know if you had seen the newspaper stories about strikes in Ohio and Indiana and Illinois.”
Party business, then. “I’m afraid I haven’t,” Flora said. “I just got back from visiting David.”
“How is he?” Blackford asked.
“They’ve fitted the artificial leg, and he was up on it.” Flora shook her head, though Blackford couldn’t see that. “Even with one leg gone, he talks like a Democrat.” She inked a pen and slid a piece of paper in front of her so she could take notes. “Now tell me about these strikes.”
“From what I’ve read, factory owners are trying to hold down wages by pitting workers against each other,” he said. “With soldiers starting to come home from the war, they have more people wanting jobs than there are jobs to give, so they’re seeing who will work for the lowest pay.”
“That sounds like capitalists,” Flora said with a frown. A moment later, she brightened. “It also sounds like a political opportunity for us. If the factory owners keep doing things like that—and they probably will—they’ll radicalize the workers, and they’ll do a better job of it than we ever could.”
“I happen to know we’ve urged the strikers to stay as peaceful as they can, unless the bosses turn goons loose on them or their state governments or the U.S. government move troops against them,” Blackford said.
“Good.” Flora nodded. Blackford couldn’t see that, either, but she didn’t care. Something he’d said touched off another thought. “Has Roosevelt made any statement about this yet?”
“One of the wire reports quotes him as calling the factory owners a pack of greedy fools,” the Congressman from Dakota said, “but it doesn’t say he’ll do anything to make them stop playing games with people’s lives.”
“That sounds like him,” Flora said. “He talks about a square deal for the workers, but he doesn’t deliver. He delivered a war.”
“He delivered a victory,” Hosea Blackford corrected. “The country was starved for one. The country’s been starved for one for more than fifty years. You may not like that, but you can’t stick your head in the sand and pretend it isn’t so.”
“I don’t intend to do any such thing,” Flora said sharply. “The people were starved for a victory. I’ve seen as much, even with my own brother. But after a while they’ll discover they have the victory and they’re still starved and still maimed and still orphaned. And they’ll remember Teddy Roosevelt delivered that, too.”
Blackford’s silence was thoughtful. After a few seconds, he said, “You may very well be right.” He did his best to hold down the excitement in his voice, but she heard it. “If you are right, that would give us a fighting chance in the elections of 1918, and maybe even in 1920. A lot of people now are afraid we’ll be so badly swamped, the Democrats will have everything their own way everywhere.”
“A lot of things can happen between now and the Congressional elections,” she said. “Even more things can happen between now and 1920.”
“That’s true, too,” Blackford said. “But you’ve seen how many Socialists are wearing long faces these days. Even Senator Debs is looking gloomy. Maybe they should cheer up.”
“Maybe. The real trouble”—Flora took a deep breath—“is that we’ve never won a presidential election. We’ve never had a majority in either house of Congress. Too many people, I think, don’t really believe we ever can.”
“I’ve had doubts myself,” Blackford admitted. “Being permanently in the minority is hard to stomach sometimes, if you know what I mean.”
“Oh, yes,” Flora said quietly. “I’m Jewish, if you’ll remember.” On the Lower East Side in New York City, Jews were a majority. Everywhere else in the country, everywhere else in the world…permanently in the minority was as polite a way to put it as she’d ever heard.
She wondered if reminding Blackford she was Jewish would make him decide he wasn’t interested in her after all. She wondered if she wanted him to decide that. In many ways, her life would be simpler if he did. With a large family, though, she’d rarely known a simple life. Would she want it or know what to do with it if she had it?
The only thing Blackford said was, “Of course I remember. It means I have to eat crab cakes and pork chops by myself.” His voice held nothing but a smile. “Would you care to have dinner with me tonight? If you like, I won’t eat anything that offends you.”
“I’m not offended if you eat things I can’t,” Flora said, “any more than an Irishman or an Italian would be offended if I ate corned beef on Friday. I’d be offended if you tried to get me to eat pork, but you’d never do anything like that.”
“I should hope not!” Blackford exclaimed. “You still haven’t said whether you’ll have dinner with me, though.”
“I’d like to,” Flora said. “Can we wait till after six, though? I’ve got a shirtwaist manufacturer coming in to see me at five, and I aim to give him a piece of my mind.”
“Six-thirty, say, would be fine. Shall I come to your office?”
“All right.” Flora smiled. “I’m looking forward to it.” She hung up the telephone and went to work feeling better about the world than she had in some time.
Reginald Bartlett was discovering that he did not fit into the Richmond of late 1917 nearly so well as he had in 1914. Fighting on the Roanoke Valley front and in Sequoyah, getting captured twice and shot once (shot twice, too, actually: in the leg and the shoulder from the same machine-gun burst) by the Yankees, had left him a different man from the jaunty young fellow who’d gaily gone off to war.
Richmond was different, too. Then it had been bursting with July exuberance and confidence; now the chilly winds of October sliding into November fit the city’s mood only too well. Defeat and autumn went together.
“Going to rain tomorrow, I reckon,” Reggie said to Bill Foster as the two druggist’s assistants walked along Seventh Street together. He reached up with his right hand to touch his left shoulder. “Says so right here.”
Foster nodded, which set his jowls wobbling. He was short and round and dark, where Bartlett was above average height, on the skinny side (and skinnier after his wound), and blond. He said, “I heard enough people say that in the trenches, and they were right a lot of the time.” He’d spent his war in Kentucky and Tennessee, and come home without a scratch.
After touching his shoulder again, Reggie said, “This isn’t so much of a much.” He’d had a different opinion while the wound stayed hot and full of pus, but he’d been a long way from objective. “Fellow I worked for before the war, man name of Milo Axelrod, he stopped a bullet with his face up in Maryland. He wasn’t a bad boss—better than this McNally I’m working for now, anyhow.”
“From what you’ve said about McNally, that wouldn’t be hard.” Foster might have gone on, but a small crowd had gathered at the corner of Seventh and Cary. He pointed. “I wonder what’s going on there.”
“Shall we find out?” Without waiting for an answer from his friend, Reggie hurried over toward the crowd. Shrugging, Foster followed. “Oh, I see,” Bartlett said a moment later. “It’s a political rally. That figures, with the Congressional election next Tuesday. But what the devil is the Freedom Party? I’ve never heard of ’em before.”
“I’ve seen a couple of their posters,” Bill Foster said. “Don’t rightly know what they stand for, though.”
“Let’s get an earful. Maybe it’ll be something good.” Reggie scowled as his wounded leg gave a twinge, which it hadn’t done in a while. “Couldn’t be worse than the pap the Radical Liberals and the Whigs are handing out.”
“That’s about right.” Foster nodded. “Everybody who’s in is making noise about how he never much cared for the war, and everybody who’s out is saying that if he’d been in he never would’ve voted one thin dime for it.”
“And it’s all a pack of lies, too,” Bartlett said with deep contempt. “Why don’t they admit they were all screaming their heads off for the war when it started? Do they think we’ve forgotten? And when Arango ran against Semmes for president two years ago, he said he’d do a better job of fighting the Yankees than the Whigs were. He didn’t say anything about getting out of the war, not one word.”
The Freedom Party spokesman didn’t have a fancy platform or a fancy suit, which proved he belonged to neither of the CSA’s major parties. He stood in his shirtsleeves on a box or a barrel of some kind and harangued the couple of dozen people who were listening to him: “—traitors to their country,” he was shouting as Reggie and Bill Foster came up. “Traitors and fools, that’s what they are!”
“A crackpot,” Bartlett whispered. He folded his arms across his chest and got ready to listen. “Let’s hang around for a while. He may be funny.”
Somebody in the crowd already thought he was funny, calling, “By what you’re saying there, the whole government is nothing but traitors and fools. You’ve got to be a fool yourself, to believe that.”
“I do not!” the speaker said. He was an overweight, balding fellow of about fifty-five, whose fringe of gray hair blew wildly in the fall breeze. His name was Anthony Dresser—so said a little sign Reggie needed a while to notice. “I do not. I tell you the plain, unvarnished truth, and nothing else but!” His eyes, enormous behind thick spectacles, stared out at his small audience. “And you, my friends, you hug the viper to your bosom and think it is your friend. Congress is full of traitors, the War Department is full of traitors, the administration—”
Reggie stopped paying much attention to him about then. “And the moon is full of green cheese!” the heckler shouted, drawing a roar of laughter from the crowd.
Dresser sputtered and fumed, the thread of his speech, had it ever had one, now thoroughly lost. Reggie and Foster grinned at each other, enjoying his discomfiture. The speech surely would have been boring. This was anything but. “Not as easy to get up on the stump as the old boy thought, is it?” Foster said with a chuckle.
“You are all traitors to your country, for not listening to the plain and simple truth!” Dresser shouted furiously.
“And you’re a maniac, and they ought to lock you up in the asylum and lose the key!” It wasn’t the first heckler, but another man.
Dresser looked to be on the point of having a fit. Somebody reached up and tugged at his trousers. He leaned over, cupping a hand behind his ear. Then, with a fine scornful snort, he jumped down from his perch. “All right,” he said. “All right! You show them then, if you think you know so much. I can tell you what you will show them—you will show them you do not have any notion of what to say or how to say it.”
Up onto the platform scrambled a lean man somewhere in his thirties, in a day laborer’s collarless cotton shirt and a pair of uniform pants. He looked around for a moment, then said, “Tony’s right. A blind man should be able to see it, too. The government is full of traitors and fools.”
Dresser had been argumentative, querulous. The newcomer spoke with absolute conviction, so much so that before he caught himself Reginald Bartlett looked north toward Capitol Square, as if to spy the traitors in the act.
“Yeah? You can’t prove it, either, any more than the other jerk could,” a heckler yelled.
“You want proof? I’ll give you proof, by Jesus,” the lean man said. He didn’t talk as if he had any great education, but he didn’t seem to feel the lack, as did so many self-made men. “Look what happened when the Red niggers rose up, back at the end of ’15. They damn near overran the whole country. Now, why is that, do you reckon? It’s on account of nobody in the whole stinking government had the least notion they were plotting behind our backs. If that doesn’t make everybody from the president on down a damn fool, you tell me what in the hell it does do.”
“He’s got something, by God,” Foster said, staring at the new speaker.
“He’s got a lot of nerve, anyhow,” Reggie said.
“That’s why you ought to vote for Tony Dresser for Congress,” the lean man continued: “on account of he can see the plain truth and you can’t. Now the next thing you’re going to say is, well, they’re a pack of fools up there, all right, with their fancy motorcars and their whores, but they can’t be traitors because they fought as long as they could and the Yankees are pretty damn tough.
“Well, this here is what I’ve got to say about that.” The lean man let loose with a rich, ripe raspberry. “I know for a fact that people tried to warn the government the niggers were going to rise, on account of I was one of those people. Did anybody listen? Hell, no!” Contempt dripped from his voice like water from a leaky roof. “Some of those niggers were servants to rich men’s sons, important men’s sons. And the rich men in the Capitol and the important men in the War Department shoveled everything under the rug. If that doesn’t make ’em traitors, what the devil does?”
“He has got something,” Bill Foster said in an awed voice.
“He’s got a big mouth,” Bartlett said. “You throw charges like that around, you’d better be able to name names.”
Instead of naming names, the newcomer on the stump charged ahead: “And after that—after that, mind you, after the niggers rose up—what did the government go and do? Come on. You remember. You’re white men. You’re smart men. What did they go and do?” The lean man’s voice sank to a dramatic whisper: “They went and put rifles in those same niggers’hands, that’s what they did.” He whispered no more, but shouted furiously: “If that doesn’t make ’em traitors, what the devil does?”
Reggie remembered Rehoboam, the Negro prisoner of war who’d shared his U.S. hospital ward after losing a foot in Arkansas—and after being a Red rebel in Mississippi. Things weren’t so straightforward as this new Freedom Party speaker made them out to be. The older Reggie got, the more complicated the world looked. The lean man was older than he, but still saw things in harsh shades of black and white.
And he contrived to make his audience see them the same way. “You want to put Tony Dresser into Congress to give the real people of the Confederate States a voice,” he shouted, “the working men, the men who get their hands dirty, the men who went out and fought the war the fools and the traitors and the nigger-lovers got us into. Oh, you can throw your vote away for somebody with a diamond on his pinky”—with alarming effectiveness, he mimed a capitalist—“but who’s the fool if you do?”
“Why the hell ain’t you runnin’ for Congress instead of that long-winded son of a bitch?” somebody shouted.
“Tony’s the chairman of the Freedom Party,” the lean man answered easily. “You promote the commander of the unit, not a new recruit.” He took out his billfold and displayed something Bartlett could not make out. “Here’s my membership card—number seven, from back in September.”
“Where do we sign up?” Two men asked the question at the same time. One of them added, “You ain’t gonna stay a new recruit long, pal, not the way you talk. Who the hell are you, anyway?”
“My name’s Featherston—Jake Featherston,” the lean man answered. “Sergeant, Confederate States Artillery, retired.” He scowled. “The fools in the War Department retired damn near the whole Army.” With what looked like a deliberate effort of will, he made himself smile. “Party office is a couple blocks down Seventh, toward the Tredegar works. Come on by. Hope you do, anyways.”
“Damned if I’m not tempted to,” Bill Foster said as the little rally began to break up. “Damned if I’m not. That fellow Featherston, he’s got a good way of looking at things.”
“He’s got a good line, that’s for certain,” Reggie Bartlett said. “If he were selling can openers door to door, there wouldn’t be a closed can in Richmond this time tomorrow. But just because something sounds good doesn’t make it so. Come on, Bill. Do you think a stage magician really pulls a Stonewall out of your nose?”
“Wish somebody’d pull one out of somewhere,” Foster answered.
Reggie’s laugh was rueful, five-dollar goldpieces being in notably short supply in his pockets, too. He said, “The world’s not as simple as he makes it out to be.”
“Well, what if it isn’t?” his friend returned. “I wish it was that simple. Don’t reckon I’m the only one who does, either.”
“Reckon you’re not,” Bartlett agreed. “But most folks are the same as you and me: they know the difference between what they wish and what’s really out there.”
“Yeah?” Foster raised an eyebrow. “How come we just fought this damn war, then?” Reggie thought about that for a while, but found no good answer.
Guided by a pilot intimately familiar with the local minefields, the USS Dakota made a slow, cautious entrance into New York harbor. Sailors on tugs and freighters waved their caps at the battleship. Steam whistles bellowed and hooted. Fireboats shot streams of water high into the air.
Sam Carsten stood by the port rail, enjoying the show. The late-November day was bleak and gloomy and cold, but that didn’t bother the petty officer at all. Anything more clement than clouds and gloom bothered him: he was so blond and pink, he sunburned in less time than he needed to blink. After Brazil entered the war on the side of the USA and Germany and their allies, the Dakota had gone up into the tropical Atlantic after convoys bound for Britain from Argentina. He was only now recovering from what the cruel sun had done to him.
Off to the west, on Bedloe Island, stood the great statue of Remembrance, the sword of vengeance gleaming in her hand. Carsten turned to his bunkmate and said, “Seeing her gives you a whole different feeling now that we’ve gone and won the war.”
“Sure as hell does.” Vic Crosetti nodded vigorously. He was as small and swarthy as Carsten was tall and fair. “Every time I seen that statue before, it was like she was saying, ‘What the hell you gapin’ at me for? Get out there and kick the damn Rebs in the belly.’ Now we gone and done it. Can’t you see the smile on that bronze broad’s kisser?”
Remembrance looked as cold and stern and forbidding as she had since she’d gone up not long after the Second Mexican War. Even so, Carsten said, “Yeah.” He and Crosetti grinned at each other. Victory tasted sweet.
“Carsten!” somebody said behind him.
He turned and stiffened to attention. “Sir!”
“As you were,” Commander Grady said, and Sam eased out of his brace. The commander of the Dakota’s starboard secondary armament was a pretty good fellow; Sam cranked shells into the forwardmost five-inch gun under his charge. Grady said, “Do you recall that matter we were discussing the day the limeys gave up the fight?”
For a moment, Carsten didn’t. Then he nodded. “About aeroplanes, you mean, sir?”
“That’s right.” Grady nodded, too. “Were you serious about what you meant about getting in on the ground floor there?”
“Yes, sir. I sure was, sir,” Sam answered. Aeroplanes were the coming thing. Anyone with an eye in his head could see that. Anyone with an eye in his head could also see the Navy wouldn’t stay as big as it had been during the war. Since Sam wanted to make sure he didn’t end up on the beach, getting involved with aeroplanes looked like a good insurance policy.
Commander Grady said, “All right, then. I have some orders cut for you. If you’d said no, you’d have stayed here. There wouldn’t have been any trouble about that. As things are, though, we both catch the train for Boston tomorrow morning. You’ll see why when we get there.” His smile made him look years younger.
“You’re leaving the Dakota?” Vic Crosetti demanded. When Sam nodded, Crosetti clapped a hand to his forehead. “Jesus Christ, who’m I gonna rag on now?”
“I figure you’ll find somebody,” Carsten said, his voice dry. Crosetti gave him a dirty look that melted into a chuckle, then slapped him on the back. Sam had a gift for getting in digs without making people angry at him.
“Only problem with this is the train ride,” Commander Grady said. “This Spanish influenza that’s going around is supposed to be pretty nasty. We might be better staying aboard the Dakota.”
“Sir, if the limeys couldn’t sink us and the Japs couldn’t sink us and whoever was flying that damn bombing aeroplane out from Argentina couldn’t sink us, I don’t figure we need to be afraid of any germs,” Sam said.
Grady laughed. “That’s the spirit! All right, Carsten. Pick up your new orders, get your paperwork taken care of, and we’ll go ashore tomorrow morning—if you can stand an officer for company, that is.”
“I’m a tough guy, sir,” Carsten answered. “I expect I’ll put up with it.” Grady laughed and mimed throwing a punch at him, then went on his way.
“What’s this about aeroplanes?” Crosetti asked.
“Don’t even know, exactly,” Sam said. “I joined the Navy five years before the war started, and here I am, buying a pig in a poke. Maybe I need my head examined, but maybe I’m smart, too. Smart, I mean, besides getting away from you. I hope I am, anyway.”
“Good luck. I think you’re crazy, but good luck.” Crosetti shook Sam’s hand, then walked off shaking his own head.
Getting orders was the easy part of getting off the Dakota. Carsten filled out endless separation forms. Only after the last of them was signed would the paymaster grudgingly give him greenbacks. With money in his billfold and a duffel bag on his shoulder, he walked down the gangplank from the Dakota to the pier with Commander Grady.
Even at the edge of the harbor, New York boiled with life. When Grady flagged a cab for the ride to the New York Central Railroad Depot, three different automobiles almost ran him and Sam down in the zeal for a fare. The drivers hopped out and screamed abuse at one another in both English and a language that seemed entirely compounded of gutturals.
Grady knew his way through the crowded old depot, which was fortunate, because Sam didn’t. He had to step smartly to keep from being separated from the officer; the only place where he’d felt more crowded was the triple-decked bunkroom of the Dakota. Everyone here was moving, intent on his own business. About every third man, woman, and child was sneezing or sniffling or coughing. Some of them were likely to have influenza. Carsten tried not to inhale. That didn’t work very well.
He and Grady got a couple of seats in a second-class car; the Navy saved money on train fares that way. They were the only Navy men there, though soldiers in green-gray occupied a fair number of seats. The civilians ranged from drummers in cheap, flashy suits to little old ladies who might still have been in Russia.
Once Grady and Carsten pulled into Boston, the officer paid for another cab ride, this one over the Charlestown Bridge to the Navy Yard on the north side of the Charles River. Seeing the battleships and cruisers and submersibles and tenders tied up there made Sam’s heart swell with pride. A few ships from the Western Squadron of Germany’s High Seas Fleet stood out from their American allies because of their less familiar lines and light gray paint jobs.
Sam followed Commander Grady, each of them with duffel bag bouncing on his back. Then, all at once, Sam stopped in his tracks and stared and stared. Grady walked on for a couple of steps before he noticed he didn’t have company any more. He turned and looked back, a grin on his rabbity features. “What’s the matter, Carsten?” he asked, sounding like a man trying hard not to laugh out loud.
“Sir,” Sam said plaintively, “I’ve seen every type of ship in the U.S. Navy, and I reckon damn near every type of ship in the High Seas Fleet, too.” He pointed ahead. “In all my born days, though, I’ve never seen anything that looked like that, and I hope to God I never do again. What the hell is it supposed to be?”
Now Grady did laugh out loud. “That’s the Remembrance, Carsten. That’s what you signed up for.”
“Jesus,” Sam said. “I must have been out of my goddamn mind.”
The Remembrance looked as if somebody had decided to build a battleship and then, about a third of the way through the job, got sick of it and decided to flatten out most of the deck to hurry things along. An aeroplane sat on the deck aft of the bridge: not a seaplane that would land in the water and be picked up by the ship’s crane but a Wright two-decker fighting scout—a U.S. copy of a German Albatros—with utterly ordinary landing gear and not a trace of a float anywhere. Sam shook his head in disbelief.
Laughing still, Commander Grady clapped him on the back. “Cheer up. It won’t be so bad. You’ll still mess forward and bunk aft. And a five-inch gun is a five-inch gun.” He pointed to the sponson under that unbelievably long, unbelievably level deck. “You’ll do your job, and the flyboys will do theirs, and everybody will be happy except the poor enemy bastards who bump into us.”
“Yes, sir,” Sam said dubiously. “What the devil did she start out to be, anyway? And why didn’t she turn out to be whatever that was?”
“They started to build her as a fast, light-armored battle cruiser, to slide in close to the Confederate coast, blast hell out of it, and then scoot before the Rebs could do anything about it—a monitor with legs, you might say,” Grady answered. “But that idea never went anywhere. Some bright boy got to thinking how handy it would be to take aeroplanes along wherever you needed them, and…there’s the Remembrance.”
“I thought of that myself, after the Dakota got bombed off Argentina,” Carsten said, “but I never imagined—this.” He wondered if he’d get into fights because sailors on ordinary, respectable vessels would call the Remembrance the ugliest ship in the Navy. Dammit, she was the ugliest ship in the Navy.
“Come on, let’s go aboard,” Grady said. “She won’t look anywhere near so strange from the inside.”
Even that didn’t turn out to be true. The hangars that held nearly three dozen fighting scouts and the supply and maintenance areas that went with them took up an ungodly amount of space, leaving the bunkrooms cramped and feeling like afterthoughts. As a petty officer, Carsten did get a bottom bunk, but the middle one in the three-tier metal structure was only a few inches above him. He could stand it, but he didn’t love it.
The only place in which he did feel at home was the sponson. The five-inch gun was the same model he’d served on the Dakota, and the sponson itself might have been transferred bodily from the battleship. The chief gunner’s mate in charge of the crew, a burly veteran named Willie Moore, wore a splendid gray Kaiser Bill mustache. He wasn’t half brother to his counterpart from the Dakota, Hiram Kidde, but Sam couldn’t have proved it by the way he acted.
He turned out to know Kidde, which surprised Sam not at all. “If you served with the ‘Cap’n,’ reckon you’ll do for me,” he rumbled when Carsten mentioned the name of his former gun commander a couple of days after coming aboard.
“Thanks, Chief. Hope so,” Sam said, and punctuated that with a sneeze. “Damn. I’m coming down with a cold.”
He was off his feed at supper that evening, which surprised him: the Remembrance, however ugly she was, boasted a first-class galley. Everything was fresh, too—an advantage of sitting in port. But Sam didn’t realize how sick he was till the next morning, when he almost fell out of his bunk. He stood, swaying, in front of it.
“You all right?” asked George Moerlein, who slept just above him. Sam didn’t answer; he had trouble figuring out what the words meant. Moerlein peered at him, touched his forehead, and then jerked back his hand as if he’d tried picking up a live coal. “We better get this guy to sick bay,” he said. “I think he’s got the influenza.” Sam didn’t argue, either. He couldn’t. He let them lead him away.
Arthur McGregor took a certain somber satisfaction in listening to the wind howl around his farmhouse. That was just as well; the wind in Manitoba was going to howl through the winter whether he took any satisfaction in it or not.
“One thing,” he said to his wife. “In weather like this, the Yanks stay indoors.”
“I wish to heaven they’d stayed in their own country,” Maude answered. She was short and redheaded, a contrast to his rangy inches and dark hair that was beginning to show frost as he edged into his forties.
Her eyes went to the photograph of their son, Alexander, that hung on the wall of the front room. The photograph was all they had of him; the U.S. troops who occupied Manitoba had executed him for plotting sabotage a year and a half before.
McGregor’s eyes went there, too. He was still paying the Americans back for what they’d done to Alexander. He would never be done paying them back, as long as he lived. If they ever found out he made bombs, he wouldn’t live long. He couldn’t drive the Yanks out of Canada singlehanded. If they were going to try to rule his country, though, he could make their lives miserable.
Julia came in from the kitchen. She also looked toward Alexander; these days, the family almost made a ritual of it. McGregor looked at his daughter in what was as close to wonderment as his solid, stolid nature could produce. Some time while he wasn’t looking, Julia had turned into a woman. She’d been eleven when the Americans invaded, and hardly even coltish. She was fourteen now, and not coltish any more. She looked like her mother, but taller and leaner, as McGregor himself was.
“What are you going to do about that school order, Pa?” she asked.
The wind gusted louder. McGregor could have pretended not to hear her. His own sigh was gusty, too. “I’m going to pretend I don’t know the first thing about it for as long as I can,” he answered.
He’d pulled Julia and her younger sister, Mary, out of school a couple of years before. The Americans were using it to teach Canadian children their lies about the way the world worked. Since then, McGregor and Maude had taught reading and ciphering at home.
Now, though, the occupying authorities had sent out an edict requiring all children between the ages of six and sixteen to attend school at least six months out of the year. They didn’t intend to miss any chances to tell their stories to people they wanted to grow up to be Americans, not Canadians.
“It’ll be all right, Pa,” Julia said. “I really think it will. You can send Mary and me, and we won’t end up Yanks, truly we won’t.” She looked toward Alexander’s photograph again.
“I know you won’t, chick,” he said. “But I don’t know that Mary would be able to keep from telling the teacher what she really thinks.”
At nine, Mary wore her heart on her sleeve, even more than Alexander had. She also hated Americans with a pure, clear hatred that made even her father’s pale beside it. Letting the Yanks know how she felt struck McGregor as most unwise.
Julia had washed the supper dishes; Mary was drying them. After the last one clattered into the cupboard, she came out to join the rest of the family. She was sprouting up, too, like wheat after planting. She would, McGregor judged, make a tall woman. But she still kept some of the feline grace she’d had since she was very small, and also some of a cat’s self-containment. McGregor hadn’t needed to teach her much about conspiracy. She understood it as if by instinct.
Now he said, “Mary, if you have to, do you suppose you can put up with listening to the Yanks’ lies in school without telling them off?”
“Why would I have to do that, Pa?” she answered. “Maybe they can make me go to school, but—” She caught herself. Her gray eyes, so like those of her father and her dead brother, widened. “Oh. You mean put up with them so I wouldn’t get in trouble—so we wouldn’t get in trouble.”
“That’s right.” Arthur McGregor nodded. No, no one needed to teach Mary about conspiracy.
She thought it over. “If I have to, I suppose I could,” she said at last. “But telling lies is a sin on their heads, isn’t it?”
“So it is.” McGregor smiled to hear that, but not too much: he’d passed his own stern Presbyterian ethic down to the new generation. “The Yanks have so many other sins on the book against them, though, that lying doesn’t look like so much to them.”
“Well, it should,” Mary said. “It should all count against them, every bit of it. And it will. God counts everything.” She spoke with great assurance.
McGregor wished he felt so sure himself. He believed, yes, but he’d lost that simple certainty. If he’d had any left, Alexander’s death would have burned it out of him, leaving ashes behind. He said, “You will go to school, then, and be a good little parrot, so we can show the Americans we’re obeying their law?”
His younger daughter sighed. “If I have to,” she said again.
“Good,” McGregor said. “The more we look like we’re doing what they want us to, the more we can do what we want to when they aren’t looking.”
Julia said, “That’s good, Pa. That’s very good. That’s just what we’ll do.”
“That’s what we’ll have to do,” Maude said. “That’s what everyone will have to do, for however long it takes till we’re free again.”
“Or till we turn into Americans,” Arthur McGregor said bleakly. He held up a work-roughened hand. “No, I don’t mean us. Some of our neighbors will turn into Americans, but not us.”
“Some of our neighbors have already turned into Americans,” Julia said. “They don’t care about what they were, so they don’t care what they are. We know better. We’re Canadians. We’ll always be Canadians. Always.”
McGregor wondered if, with the strongest will in the world, his grandchildren and great-grandchildren would remember they were Canadians. And then, perhaps wondering the same thing, Maude spoke as if to reassure herself: “Germany took Alsace and Lorraine away from France almost fifty years ago, but the people there still remember they’re Frenchmen.”
Canadians had heard a great deal about their ally’s grievances against the Kaiser and his henchmen (till the Americans overran them, after which they’d had to endure lies about Germany’s grievances against France). Now France had more reasons to grieve, for the Germans were biting off more of her land. And McGregor, still in his bleak mood, said, “The Germans settled a lot of their own people in Alsace and Lorraine to help hold them down. If the Americans did that…”
His wife and daughters stared at him in horror. Mary spoke first: “I wouldn’t live next to Americans, Pa! I wouldn’t. If they came here, I’d…I don’t know what I’d do, but it’d be pretty bad.”
“We won’t have to worry about that till next spring at the earliest,” McGregor said. “Won’t be any Yanks settling down to farm in the middle of winter, not here in Manitoba there won’t.” His chuckle was grim. “And the ones who come in the spring, if any do, they’re liable to turn up their toes when they find out what winters are like. We’ve seen that the Americans don’t fancy our weather.”
“Too bad for them,” Julia said.
After the children had gone to sleep, McGregor lay awake beside his wife in the bed the two of them shared. “What am I going to do, Maude?” he whispered, his voice barely audible through the whistling wind. “By myself, I can hurt the Americans, but that’s all I can do. They won’t leave on account of me.”
“You’ve made them pay,” Maude said. He’d never admitted making bombs, not in so many words. She’d never asked, not in so many words. She knew. He knew she knew. But they formally kept the secret, even from each other.
“Not enough,” he said now. “Nothing could ever be enough except driving them out of Canada. But no one man can do that.”
“No one man can,” Maude said in a musing tone of voice.
He understood where she was going, and shook his head. “One man can keep a secret. Maybe two can. And maybe three can, but only if two of them are dead.” That came from the pen of Benjamin Franklin, an American, but McGregor had forgotten where he’d first run across it.
“I suppose you’re right,” Maude said. “It seems a pity, though.”
“If Alexander hadn’t hung around with a pack of damnfool kids who didn’t have anything better to do than run their mouths and make foolish plots, he’d still be alive today,” McGregor said harshly.
Maude caught her breath. “I see what you’re saying,” she answered after a long pause.
“And the strange thing is, if he was still alive, we wouldn’t hate the Yanks the way we do,” McGregor said. “They caused themselves more harm shooting him than he ever would have given them if they’d let him go.”
“They’re fools,” Maude said. That McGregor agreed with wholeheartedly. But the American fools ruled Canada today. God must have loved them, for He’d made so very many.
The notion of God loving Americans was so unlikely, McGregor snorted and fell asleep bemused by it. When he woke up, it was still dark; December nights fifty miles south of Winnipeg were long. He groped for a match, scraped it alight, and lit the kerosene lamp on the nightstand.
He didn’t want to get out from under the thick wool blankets: he could see his own breath inside the bedroom. He threw a shirt and overalls over his long johns and was still shivering. Maude got out of bed, too. She carried the lamp downstairs as soon as she was dressed. He followed her.
She built up the fire in the stove and started a pot of coffee. It wasn’t good coffee; if the Americans had any good coffee, they kept it for themselves. But it was hot. He stood by the stove, too, soaking in the warmth radiating from the black iron. Maude melted butter in a frying pan and put in three eggs. McGregor ate them along with bread and butter. Then he shrugged on a long, heavy coat and donned mittens. Reluctantly, he opened the door and went outside.
It had been cold in the bedroom. As he slogged his way to the barn, he wondered if he would turn into an icicle before he got there. A wry chuckle made a fogbank swirl around his face for a moment, till the fierce wind blew it away. People said there wasn’t so much work on a farm in winter. In a way, they were right, for he didn’t have to go out to the fields.
In spring and summer, though, he didn’t have to work in weather like this. The body heat of the livestock kept the barn warmer than the weather outside, but warmer wasn’t warm. He fed the horse and cow and pigs and chickens and cleaned up their filth. By the time he was done with that, he was warmer, too.
His eye fell on an old wagon wheel, the sort of junk any barn accumulated. Under it, hidden in a hole beneath a board beneath dirt, lay dynamite and fuses and blasting caps and crimpers and other tools of the bomb-maker’s art. McGregor nodded to them. They would come out again.
Rain, some of it freezing, poured down out of a bleak gray sky. A barrel rumbled across the muddy Kansas prairie toward Colonel Irving Morrell. The cannon projecting from its slightly projecting prow was aimed straight at him. Two machine guns projected from each side of the riveted steel hull; two more covered the rear. A pair of White truck engines powered the traveling fortress. Stinking, steaming exhaust belched from the twin pipes.
The charge would have been more impressive had it been at something brisker than a walking pace. It would have been much more impressive had the barrel not bogged down in a mud puddle that aspired to be a pond when it grew up. The machine’s tracks were not very wide, and it weighed almost thirty-three tons. It could have bogged on ground better than that it was traveling.
Morrell snapped his fingers in annoyance at himself for not having brought out a slate and a grease pencil with which he could have taken notes here in the field. He was a lean man, nearing thirty, with a long face, weathered features that bespoke a lot of time out in the sun and wind, and close-cropped sandy hair at the moment hidden under a wool cap and the hood of a rain slicker.
His boots made squelching noises as he slogged through the ooze toward the barrel. The commander of the machine stuck his head out of the central cupola that gave him and his driver a place to perch and a better view than the machine gunners and artillerymen enjoyed (the engineers who tended the two motors had no view, being stuck in the bowels of the barrel).
“Sorry, sir,” he said. “Couldn’t spot that one till too late.”
“One of the hazards of the game, Jenkins,” Morrell answered. “You can’t go forward; that’s as plain as the nose on my face. See if you can back out.”
“Yes, sir.” Lieutenant Jenkins ducked down into the cupola, clanging the hatch shut after himself. The engines changed note as the driver put the barrel into reverse. The barrel moved back a few inches, then bogged down again. Jenkins had spunk. Having shifted position, he tried to charge forward once more and escape the grip of the mud. All he succeeded in doing was getting deeper into it.
Morrell waved for him to stop and called, “You keep going that way, you’ll need a periscope to see out, just like a submersible.”
He doubted Jenkins heard him; with the engines hammering away, nobody inside a barrel could hear the man next to him screaming in his ear. Even so, the engines fell silent a few seconds later. The traveling fortress’ commander could see for himself that he wasn’t going anywhere.
When the young lieutenant popped out through the hatch again, he was grinning. “Well, sir, you said you wanted to test the machine under extreme conditions. I’d say you’ve got your wish.”
“I’d say you’re right,” Morrell answered. “I’d also say these critters need wider tracks, to carry their weight better.”
Lieutenant Jenkins nodded emphatically. “Yes, sir! They could use stronger engines, too, to help us get out of this kind of trouble if we do get into it.”
“That’s a point.” Morrell also nodded. “We used what we had when we designed them: it would have taken forever to make a new engine and work all the teething pains out of it, and we had a war to fight. With the new model, though, we’ve got the chance to do things right, not just fast.”
That was his job: to figure out what right would be. He would have a lot to say about what the next generation of barrels looked like. It was a great opportunity. It was also a great responsibility. More than anything else, barrels had broken two years of stalemated struggle in the trenches and made possible the U.S. victory over the CSA. Having the best machines and knowing what to do with them would be vital if—no, when, he thought—the United States and Confederate States squared off again.
For the moment, his concerns were more immediate. “You and your men may as well come out,” he told Jenkins. “We’ve got a couple of miles of muck to go before we get back to Fort Leavenworth.”
“Leave the barrel here for now, sir?” the young officer asked.
“It’s not going anywhere by itself, that’s for sure,” Morrell answered, with which Jenkins could hardly disagree. “Rebs aren’t about to steal it, either. We’ll need a recovery vehicle to pull it loose, but we can’t bring one out now because it would bog too.” Recovery vehicles mounted no machine guns or cannon, but were equipped with stout towing chains, and sometimes with bulldozer blades.
More hatches opened up as the engineers and machine gunners and artillerymen emerged from their steel shell. Even in a Kansas December, it was warm in there. It had been hotter than hell in summertime Tennessee, as Morrell vividly remembered. It had been hot outside there, too. It wasn’t hot here. All eighteen men in the barrel crew, Jenkins included, started shivering and complaining. They hadn’t brought rain gear—what point, in the belly of the machine?
Morrell sympathized, but he couldn’t do anything about it. “Come on,” he said. “You won’t melt.”
“Listen to him,” one of the machine gunners said to his pal. “He’s got a raincoat, so what the devil has he got to worry about?”
“Here,” Morrell said sharply. The machine gunner looked alarmed; he hadn’t intended to be overheard. Morrell stripped off the slicker and threw it at him. “Now you’ve got the raincoat. Feel better?”
“No, sir.” The machine gunner let the coat fall in the mud. “Not fair for me to have it either, sir. Now nobody does.” That was a better answer than Morrell had expected from him.
Lieutenant Jenkins said, “Let’s get moving, so we stay as warm as we can. We’re all asking for the Spanish influenza.”
“That’s true,” Morrell said. “First thing we do when we get in is soak in hot water, to get the mud off and to warm us up inside. And if thinking about that isn’t enough to start you moving, I’ll give two dollars to any man who gets back to the fort ahead of me.”
That set the crew of the barrel into motion, sure enough. Morrell was the oldest man among them by three or four years. They were all veterans. They were all convinced they were in top shape. Every one of them hustled east, in the direction of the fort. They all thought they would have a little extra money jingling in their pockets before the day was through.
Morrell wondered how much his big mouth was going to cost him. As he picked up his own pace, his right leg started to ache. It lacked the chunk of flesh a Confederate bullet had blown from it in the opening weeks of the war. Morrell had almost lost the leg when the wound festered. He still limped a little, but never let the limp slow him down.
And he got to Fort Leavenworth ahead of any of the barrel men. As soon as he reached the perimeter of the fort, he realized how worn he was: ridden hard and put away wet was the phrase that came to mind. He’d ridden himself hard, all right, and he was sure as hell wet, but he hadn’t been put away yet. He wanted to fall into the mud to save himself the trouble.
Soaking in a steaming tub afterwards did help. So, even more, did the admiring looks he got from his competitors as they came onto the grounds of the fort in his wake. He savored those. Command was more than a matter of superior rank. If the men saw he deserved that rank, they would obey eagerly, not just out of duty.
That evening, he pored over German accounts of meetings with British and French barrels. The Germans had used only a few of the traveling fortresses, fewer than their foes. They’d won anyhow, with England distracted from the Continent because of the fighting in Canada, and with mutinies spreading through the French Army after Russia collapsed. Morrell was familiar with British barrels; the CSA had copied them. He knew less about the machines the French had built.
When he looked at photographs of some of the French barrels—their equivalent of the rhomboids England and the CSA used—he snickered. Their tracks were very short compared to the length of their chassis, which meant they easily got stuck trying to traverse trenches.
Another French machine, though, made him thoughtful. The Germans had only one example of that model: the text said it was a prototype hastily armed and thrown into the fight in a desperate effort to stem the decay of the French Army. It was a little barrel (hardly more than a keg, Morrell thought with a grin) with only a two-man crew, and mounted a single machine gun in a rotating turret like the ones armored cars used.
“Not enough firepower there to do you as much good as you’d like,” Morrell said into the quiet of his barracks room. Still, the design was interesting. It had room for improvement.
He grabbed a piece of paper and a pencil and started sketching. Whoever designed the first U.S. barrels had thought of nothing past stuffing as many guns as possible inside a steel box and making sure at least one of them could shoot every which way. The price of success was jamming a couple of squads’ worth of soldiers into that hellish steel box along with the guns.
If you put the two-inch cannon into that turret instead of a machine gun, you got a gun firing every which way all by itself. You’d still want a machine gun in front. If the cannon were in the turret, the driver would have to go down into the lower front of the machine. Could he handle a machine gun and drive, too?
“Not likely,” Morrell muttered. All right: that meant another gunner or two down there with him.
You wouldn’t always want to use the turret cannon, though. Sometimes that would be like swatting a fly with an anvil. Morrell sketched another machine gun alongside the cannon. It would rotate, too, of course, and the gunners who tended the large gun could also serve it.
That cut the crew from eighteen men down to five or six—you’d likely need an engineer, too, but the machine had better have only one engine, and one strong enough to move at a decent clip. Morrell shook his head. “No, six or seven,” he said. “Somebody’s got to tell everybody else what to do.” A boat without a commander would be like a boat—no, a ship; Navy men would laugh at him—without a captain.
He was forgetting something. He stared at the paper, then at the plain whitewashed plaster of the wall. Forcing it wouldn’t work; he had to try to think around it. That was as hard as not thinking about a steak dinner. He’d had practice, though. Soon it would come to him. Soon…
“Wireless telegraph!” he exclaimed, and added an aerial to his sketch. Maybe that would require another crewman, or maybe the engineer could handle it. If it did, it did. He’d wanted one of those gadgets in his barrel during the war just finished. Controlling the mechanical behemoths was too hard without them.
He studied the sketch. He liked it better than the machines in which he’d thundered to victory against the CSA. He wondered what the War Department would think. It was different, and a lot of senior officers prided themselves on not having had a new thought in years. He shrugged. He’d send it in and find out.