American Empire: The Center Cannot Hold (19 page)

  Jefferson Pinkard had never had so many strangers call him
friend
in all his born days. In Texas, the Confederates had gone raiding to catch a handful of Yankee prisoners. Here, prisoners were coming out of his ears. “What do we do with ’em, Sergeant?” asked a soldier who spoke English—maybe he’d worked in the CSA once upon a time. “We go—?” The gesture he made wasn’t the throat-cutting one Pinkard would have used, but it meant the same thing.

  For once, Jeff’s blood lust was sated. Slaughter in the heat of battle was as fine as taking a woman, maybe finer. Killing prisoners felt like murder.
Maybe I’m still a Christian, after all.
 “Nah, they’ve surrendered,” he answered. “We’ll take ’em back with us. We’d better. Till those barrels break down, they’re gonna keep bringin’ in plenty more.”

 
  “Sí, es verdad,”
 the soldier said, and translated Pinkard’s words for the other Mexicans. They all assumed he knew how to handle a flood of prisoners of war, too—including the prisoners themselves, who swarmed up to him to kiss his hands and even try to kiss his cheeks in gratitude for being spared.

  “Cut that out!” he roared. It made him wish he had ordered a massacre. Instead, he led the captured rebels—who were even more ragged and sorry-looking than the Mexican imperialists—back out of the fighting. Once he got them behind the line, he had to figure out what to do with them next. Nobody else seemed to want to do anything that looked like thinking.

  He commandeered some barbed wire and some posts to string it from. After he herded the prisoners into the big square he’d made, he told off guards to make sure they didn’t head for the high country.

  Then he had to yell to make sure they got something—not much, but something—to eat and drink. And he had to go on yelling, to make sure
mañana
didn’t foul things up. By the time three or four days went by, all the Mexicans assumed he was in charge of the prisoner-of-war camp. Before very much longer, he started thinking the same thing himself.

 
C
olonel Irving Morrell hated soldiering from behind a desk. He always had. As best he could tell, he always would. And he especially hated it when there was fighting going on and he found himself a thousand miles away. The reports filtering north from the civil war in the Empire of Mexico struck him as particularly maddening—and all the more so because he couldn’t get anybody else in the War Department to take them seriously.

  “God damn it, the imperialists are cleaning up with these new barrels of theirs,” he raged to his superior, a stolid senior colonel named Virgil Donaldson. He waved papers in Donaldson’s face. “Has anybody besides me read this material? By what it’s saying, they’ve got just about all the features we put on our fancy prototype at Fort Leavenworth. But we built our prototype and said to hell with it. Those bastards have got a production line going in Tampico.”

  Colonel Donaldson puffed on his pipe. He had a big red face and a big gray mustache. He looked more like somebody’s kindly uncle than a General Staff officer. He sounded like somebody’s kindly uncle, too, when he said, “Take an even strain, Colonel Morrell. You’ll burst a blood vessel if you don’t, and then where will you be?”

  “But, sir—!” Morrell waved the papers again.

  “Take an even strain,” Donaldson repeated. He liked the phrase. Before Morrell could explode, Donaldson went on, “Who cares what a bunch of goddamn greasers are up to, anyway?”

  “But it’s not just greasers, sir,” Morrell said desperately. “These barrels have Confederate mercenaries as crew. They’ve got to have Confederates designing them, too. And the Confederate States aren’t allowed to build barrels. The armistice agreement makes that as plain as the nose on my face.” A ceiling fan spun lazily. A fly buzzed. Outside Donaldson’s window, summer heat made the air shimmer. The government building across the street from General Staff headquarters might have belonged to some other world, some other universe. Morrell laughed softly. He’d had that feeling about the General Staff before, with no tricks of the eye to start it going.

  Trying to come back to what he was sure was reality, he said, “We ought to protest to Richmond. The Confederate government is turning a blind eye toward what has to be several regiments’ worth of their veterans going south to fight on Maximilian’s side. That may not be against the letter of their agreements with us, but it’s dead against the spirit.”

  After another puff on that pipe, Colonel Donaldson said, “Nice idea, but don’t hold your breath.

  President Sinclair is looking for good relations with the CSA. He doesn’t want to bother Richmond with trifles, and he thinks anything this side of a Confederate invasion of Kentucky is a trifle.” Morrell muttered something under his breath. It wasn’t that he thought Donaldson was wrong. No, he feared his superior was right. “Why did we bother to win the war, if we won’t make it count?”

  “You’d have to talk to President Sinclair about that, Colonel Morrell,” Donaldson answered. “
Why
isn’t my job, or yours, either. It’s for the civilians. They decide what to do, and they tell us. Doing it is our department.”

  “I know, sir.” The lesson had been drilled into Morrell since his West Point days. During the War of Secession, U.S. generals had spoken of overthrowing the republic and becoming military dictator. Then they’d gone out and lost the war, so they’d never had the chance to do more than talk about it. No one had wanted to take the risk of such things since, though it was only now, a lifetime later, that the United States had to deal with the consequences of victory rather than defeat.

  “In fairness, we could use some peace and quiet with Richmond right about now,” Donaldson said.

  “After all, we’ve got Germany to worry about, too.”

  “Well, yes,” Morrell admitted reluctantly. He knew why he was reluctant to admit any such thing, too:

  “But if we ever do fight the Kaiser, that’ll be the Navy’s worry, not the Army’s. At least, I have a devil of a time seeing how the Germans could invade us, or how we could land troops in Europe.”

  “It wouldn’t be easy, would it?” Donaldson said. “But, of course, a lot depends on who’s friends with whom. The Germans have the same worries about France and England as we do about the CSA. And God only knows what’s going to happen to the Russians, even now. They’re having more trouble putting down their Reds than the Confederates ever did during the war.”

  “Not our worry, thank God.” Morrell chuckled. The puff of smoke Donaldson sent up might have been a fragrant question mark. Morrell explained: “The Russian Reds make up the best names for themselves.

  I especially like the two who are operating in that town on the Volga—Tsaritsin, that’s the name of the place. The Red general is the Man of Steel, and his second-in-command goes by the Hammer. The Reds in the CSA weren’t so fancy.”

  “They were nothing but a bunch of coons,” Donaldson said. “You can’t expect much from them.” That made Morrell thoughtful. “I wonder,” he said. “I do wonder, sir. When I was in the field, I ran up against Negro regiments a few times. Far as I could tell, they didn’t fight any worse than raw regiments of white Confederate troops.”

  “Huh.” The older man sounded deeply skeptical. But then he shrugged. “
That’s
not our worry, either, thank God.”

  “No, sir,” Morrell agreed. “Are you sure there’s no point to writing that report about the barrels down in Mexico, sir? I really do think that’s alarming.”

  Donaldson sighed the sigh of a man who’d been a cog in a bureaucratic machine for a long time. “You can write the report, Colonel, if it makes you happy. I’ll even endorse it and send it on. But I can tell you what will happen. The most likely thing is, nothing. It’ll go into a file here along with a million other reports. That’s what happens if you’re lucky.”

  “I don’t call that luck,” Morrell said.

  “Compared to the other thing that could happen, it’s luck,” Donaldson told him. “Believe you me, it’s luck. Because the other thing that could happen is, somebody reads the report and passes it on to somebody else, somebody outside the General Staff, and it gets into the hands of one of those precious civilians—say, somebody like N. Mattoon Thomas, the assistant secretary of war.”

  “But he’s just the man—just the sort of man—who ought to see a report like this one,” Morrell said.

  “He thought well of the one I did on the mess in Armenia.”

  “Well, maybe. But maybe not, too. Armenia’s a long ways off, you see. The Confederate States are right next door,” Colonel Donaldson said. “If you’re lucky,
he
reads it and then he throws it into a file in the War Department offices. Different file, but that’s all right.” He held up a hand to silence Morrell, then went on, “If you’re not so lucky, he reads it and he thinks,
Who’s this smart-aleck soldier trying to tell
me how to do my job?
 And if that’s what somebody like N. Mattoon Thomas thinks, pretty soon you’re not here in Philadelphia any more. You’re commanding a garrison in the middle of nowhere: Alberta or Utah or New Mexico, somewhere like that.”

  He spoke as if of a fate worse than death. That was probably how he saw it. That was how any soldier who was first of all a cog in a bureaucratic machine and only afterwards a fighting man would have seen it. But Morrell didn’t want to be here in the first place. Getting back out into the field, even somewhere in the back of beyond, sounded pretty good to him.

 
  Yes, it does—to you,
 he thought then, several beats later than he should have.
What will Agnes think
about it? You’ve got a little girl now, Morrell. Do you want to haul Mildred off to God knows
where, just because you
couldn’t stand to keep your big mouth shut?

  He muttered unhappily. Colonel Donaldson thought he was contemplating the horrors of life outside Philadelphia. “Dismissed,” Donaldson said.

  Unhappily, Morrell left his superior’s office. Even more unhappily, he went back to his own.
Where does
your first loyalty lie? To your wife and daughter, or to the United States of America?

  He cursed softly. But he didn’t need long to make up his mind. Agnes had been a soldier’s widow before she met him, dammit. She knew what the price of duty could be. If they had to go off to Lethbridge or Nehi or Flagstaff, she’d take that in stride. It might even end up better for Mildred.

  Morrell nodded to himself. He fed a sheet of paper into the typewriter that squatted on his desk like some heathen god. He typed with his two index fingers—a slower way of doing things than proper touch-typing, but it got the job done well enough. If the powers that be chose to ignore his report, that was their business. But he was going to make sure they saw what he saw.

  He did warn his wife what he’d done, and what might happen as a result. To his relief, she only shrugged. “Philadelphia’s a nice town,” she said. “But I got along well enough in Leavenworth, too.”

  He kissed her. “I like the way you think.”

  “It isn’t a question of thinking,” Agnes said. “It’s a question of doing what you have to do.” Mildred Morrell didn’t say anything. She just kicked her legs and grinned up at her father from her cradle, showing off her first two brand new baby teeth. Some of her babbles and gurgles had
dada
in them, but she didn’t yet associate the sound with him.

  “What will you think, if you grow up in Lethbridge or Nehi instead of Philadelphia?” Morrell asked her.

  Mildred only laughed. She didn’t care one way or the other. “Maybe, just maybe,” her father said, “I’m fixing things so you don’t have to go through a war when you grow up. I hope I am, anyway.” He was eating lunch the next day when Lieutenant Colonel John Abell came up to him. Without preamble, General Liggett’s adjutant said, “You do believe in cooking your own goose, don’t you, Colonel?”

  “Ah.” Morrell smiled. “You’ve read it, then?”

  “Yes, I’ve read it.” The astringently intellectual General Staff officer shook his head in slow wonder.

  “Amazing how a man can analyze so brilliantly and be so blind to politics, all at the same time.” After another bite of meat loaf, Morrell said, “You’ve told me as much before. What am I being blind to today?”

  “One and a half million dead men, Colonel, and I’d think even you should notice them,” Lieutenant Colonel Abell answered with a certain somber relish. “One and a half million dead men, or a few more than that—all the reasons why there’s no stomach in the USA for another war against the Confederate States.”

  Morrell winced. His smile faded. John Abell was a snob. That didn’t mean he was a fool—anything but.

  “Don’t you believe most people would rather fight a small war now if the Confederates don’t back down—which I think they would—than fight a big one ten or twenty years down the road?”

  “Some people would. A few people would. But most?” Abell shook his head. “No, sir. Most people don’t want to fight any war at all, and they’ll do almost anything to keep from fighting. Meaning no offense, sir, but I think you’ve just cooked your own goose.” With a shrug, Morrell said, “Well, even if I have, I won’t mind getting back in the field again.” Lieutenant Colonel Abell looked at him as if he’d spoken in Hindustani, or maybe Choctaw. Like Colonel Donaldson, Abell was a creature of the General Staff, and didn’t care to contemplate life outside it.

  Morrell did, which gave him a certain moral advantage.
And how much good will that do you in
Lethbridge when the blizzards come?
 he wondered, and wished he hadn’t.

 
T
om Colleton held out a package too well wrapped for him to have done it himself. “Happy birthday, Sis!” he told Anne.

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake,” she said in fond exasperation. “You shouldn’t have.” She kissed him on the cheek, but at least half of her meant every word of that. The birthday in question was her thirty-ninth, and the only one she would have felt less like celebrating was her fortieth.