American Front (22 page)

She wasn’t going out to escape the noise, either. Her father and mother seldom spoke to each other or to their children at anything less than a shout, and her brothers and sisters weren’t the quietest people God ever made. Flora wasn’t one of those people, either, and she knew it.

But going out onto the iron floor of the fire escape didn’t make the noise disappear. What her family lost in volume, the rest of New York gained. It was getting dark outside, but boys still played and screeched in the street below. “I got you, you lousy Reb!” one of them yelled in Yiddish in a high, piercing voice. “You’re dead, so fall over!”

“You missed me by a mile!” another boy called back, this one in English, even more shrilly. “Nyah-nyah-nyah! Couldn’t hit a barn.” The first boy imitated a machine gun, which set Flora’s teeth on edge. However many imaginary bullets he spat, though, he couldn’t kill one real child. In the real war, unfortunately, it didn’t work like that.

Every day, the front page of the
New York Times
screamed of battles won and battles lost. Every day, bordered in black, ran long lists of names: men and boys who would never come home because of those battles won and lost. More than anything else, the black-bordered casualty lists were what had driven Flora outside, away from her family.

If the rest of New York cared, it didn’t let on. Along with the children playing, babies howled from every second flat. Flora’s parents weren’t the only ones shouting. Folk of their generation yelled in Yiddish or Russian or Polish or Magyar or Romanian. Folk of Flora’s generation answered back, when they answered back, in all those languages, and sometimes in English, too. Sometimes getting an answer in English made parents yell even more, because it seemed to mean their children were slipping away from them, becoming American. And, sure enough, their children were.

When Flora didn’t come back into the flat after a few minutes, her older sister, Sophie, stepped out onto the fire escape with her. Sophie was calm and steady and accepting, all the things Flora wasn’t. Instead of being a Socialist Party agitator, she sat in front of a sewing machine twelve hours a day six days a week, turning linen and cotton into shirtwaists and, lately, into uniform tunics.

“Come back,” she urged now. “You’re making Mama upset, you do this so often now. It’s not normal.”

“I’m upset,” Flora said. “Does anyone care about that? Thousands of people are getting blown to bits every day. Does anyone care about
that
?” She pointed down to the street and across it, to another crowded brownstone just like the one in which she and her family lived. “It doesn’t look like it to me.”

“People don’t want our soldiers to get killed in the war. Nobody wants that,” Sophie said reasonably. “But we can’t do anything about it. Life has to go on, the way it’s supposed to.”

“This isn’t the way it’s supposed to, and it won’t be the way it’s supposed to until we find a way to make the fighting stop,” Flora insisted. “And all the capitalists are making money from the fighting, so it can go on forever as far as they’re concerned. If anyone goes against it, it will have to be the members of the working class—like you, for instance.” She stared defiantly at Sophie.

Sophie sighed. She was—not surprisingly, given the hours she worked—exhausted when she came home, and every bit of that weariness showed in her voice. “Flora, I don’t need you to agitate for me here,” she said. Had she been more like her sister, she would have grown furious. “I hear plenty from the Socialist recruiters every day at the shop.”

“You hear, but you don’t listen,” Flora exclaimed.

“However you like,” Sophie answered. “But I’ll tell you this much: the agitation sounds a lot more foolish than it would if the Socialists hadn’t voted for the war credits. It takes a lot of
chutzpah
”—she had been speaking English, but let the Yiddish word find a place—“to say yes to something out of one side of your mouth and no from the other.”

Flora bit her lip. “You’re right about that, and I wish we hadn’t. But I think all the congressmen thought this would be a sharp, short war. Doesn’t look that way any more, does it?” She stamped her foot, as much to listen to and to feel the clatter of the cast iron as for any other reason. “And once we’ve voted yes once, how can we vote no after that without looking like—without being—even worse hypocrites?”

Before Sophie could reply, her mother stuck her head out onto the fire escape and said, “Yossel is here to see you.”

“Oh, good,” Sophie said, and, smiling, went back inside.

Sarah Hamburger glanced over to her middle daughter. “Flora, you’ll say hello to your sister’s fiancé, I hope?”

“All right,” Flora said resignedly. She did not dislike Yossel Reisen, even if he was a reactionary—or maybe just an anachronism. Here in New York in the twentieth century, as progressive an era and as progressive a city as had existed in the history of the world, he could find nothing better to do with his life than to study Torah and Talmud. He might make a rabbi one day, but even if he did, Sophie would likelier end up supporting him than the other way round. But Sophie was happy, so Flora, for the sake of family peace, kept her opinions there to herself.

When she stepped back into the flat, Sophie and Yossel were sitting side by side on the divan couch against the far wall of the front room. Yossel, a tall, pale, thin fellow whose rusty beard obscured half the high collar on his shirt, was saying, “I have some news I should tell you.” He spoke Yiddish with a hissing Litvak accent; every
sh
sound turned into an
s
.

“What is it?” Sophie asked, a beat ahead of her younger sister, Esther, and her brothers, David and Isaac. Her mother and father didn’t blurt out the question, but they plainly wanted to know, too.

Yossel took a deep breath. His fingers plucked at the green tufted plush upholstery of the divan. He knew such furniture well; he must have slept on a dozen lounges and couches and davenports, boarding now with this family, now with that one, while he pursued his studies. He never had much money to pay anyone, which was why he moved frequently.

He needed a second deep breath before he could come out with his news: “I have volunteered for the Army of the United States. I am going into the service in one week’s time.”

“Why did you do that?” Sophie exclaimed, her placid face suddenly full of harsh lines of pain. “Why, Yossel, why? When they didn’t call you up as soon as the war started, I thought—” She didn’t go on. What she meant to say was probably something like,
I thought we could be married and go on with our lives as if the world weren’t coming to pieces around us
. But the world was always there, no matter how much you tried to pretend it wasn’t if you didn’t look at things from an economic perspective.

“Good luck,” said David Hamburger, who was seventeen and was raising a downy mustache that made him look younger rather than older.

“Get lots of Rebs or Canucks—wherever they send you,” said Isaac, who was two years younger. Neither of them was yet eligible for conscription. As with a lot of young men, too, they still thought of war as adventure. The black-bordered casualty lists meant nothing to them.

Yossel answered Sophie, not them: “I volunteered to help the United States get back what they lost: what they had taken away from them. I volunteered because the Confederates and the English and the French deserve to be put down for what they have done to us—and because they are all allies of the Russians.” No Lithuanian Jew was likely to think kind thoughts of Czar Nicholas and his regime.

“You’ve fallen victim to the capitalists’ propaganda,” Flora exclaimed. Everyone turned to look at her. “Don’t you see?” she said. “Workers get nothing from this war, nothing but suffering and death. The ones who make the money are the factory owners and the munitions merchants. Don’t listen to their lies, Yossel.”

“I am in the United States,” Yossel said stiffly. “Now I can be
of
the United States, too. This is my country. I will fight for it. And now, even if I wanted to, I could not withdraw my enlistment. But I do not want to.”

Sophie started to cry. So did her mother. After a moment, so did Esther. Isaac and David both shouted angrily at Flora. Her father, Benjamin Hamburger, stood silent, puffing on his pipe. He didn’t usually vote Socialist, but he came closer than the rest of the family to sympathizing with the Party’s goals.

Yossel went back to explaining why he’d enlisted, but no one, save possibly Flora’s father, was listening to him. Flora, desperate to get away, wished she’d stayed out on the fire escape. No one heeded her warnings. No one would—till too late, she feared.

VI

Along with the rest of Captain Lincoln’s command, Corporal Stephen Ramsay rode out of Jennings, Sequoyah, on horseback to repel U.S. raiders. “Wouldn’t think the damnyankees’d get the idea so quick,” he said mournfully. It had rained the night before, and the horses were kicking up a lot of mud. Everybody would be filthy by the time the company got back into Jennings—everybody who was alive.

Lincoln said, “They’re money-grubbing bastards, the Yankees. A chance to grab the oil south of the Cimarron’d look good to ’em. Then they can ship it over to the Huns, to burn Belgian babies with.”

“Good luck to anybody shippin’ anything on the Atlantic,” Ramsay said. “Best I can tell, it’s like a cavalry campaign a whole ocean wide.”

Lincoln chuckled at that, though Ramsay had meant it seriously. Warships and liners and freighters and submarines from the CSA and the USA and England and France and Germany were scurrying all over the ocean, and shooting at one another whenever they knocked heads.

Ramsay added, “This here is better country for fightin’ than the regular prairie or the ocean. If we can’t hold the Yanks the far side of the river, we ain’t gonna hold ’em anywheres.”

“I’m not going to tell you you’re wrong, Corporal,” Captain Lincoln said. The territory between the Cimarron and the Arkansas, which came together about twenty miles east of Jennings, was rough and rugged: wooded hills and gullies took over for prairie. There were caves in the hills, if you knew where to find them. Outlaws and robbers had infested the area for years, because just about all the people who could find them after they’d fled from their crimes were either friends or relations.

“One other thing,” Ramsay said. “They ain’t gonna get one o’ those armored automobiles through here. You try and run a motorcar in this kind of landscape and it’ll fall to pieces before you’ve gone ten miles.”

“Damn good thing, too,” the company commander said, to which Ramsay could only nod. A lot of the men with them in the company were new recruits. Confederate raids into Kansas hadn’t lasted long: the damnyankees had the initiative now, pushing down into Sequoyah and threatening the oil fields that gave the Confederacy so much of its petroleum.

The U.S. troopers were not better soldiers than their Confederate counterparts; anyone who claimed they were would have got himself pounded by any cavalryman in butternut who happened to hear. But what Ramsay and Lincoln had feared from the time of their first encounter was a reality: the U.S. cavalry usually advanced with armored cars bolstering the horsemen. Confederate armored automobiles, by contrast, were often promised, seldom seen. In open country, protected, mobile machine guns were deadly all out of proportion to their numbers.

Ramsay chuckled reminiscently as an exception to that rule came to mind. “Remember when we had that battery of field artillery with us, up near the border with the Yankees? We made ’em pay that day, by Jesus.”

“Sure did,” Captain Lincoln agreed. “Sure do. Pretty damn fine to have guns to outrange those damn cars—and to blow one of ’em to hell and gone when you hit it.”

“Yes, sir,” Ramsay said enthusiastically. The quick-firing three-inch field guns had hit two armored cars, setting them ablaze and making their fellows scuttle on back toward Kansas. They’d also started a grass fire that had slowed up the advance of the U.S. horsemen, who weren’t nearly so eager to go forward without their mechanical buddies, anyhow.

But there weren’t enough batteries of field artillery to go around, and the Yankees kept coming. Even if they weren’t very good at what they did, enough mediocre soldiers were eventually liable to wear down a smaller force of good ones. And now parts of Sequoyah lay in U.S. hands.

Ramsay’s horse stumbled. What passed for roads here in these badlands were pretty miserable even when they were dry. When they were wet, puddles disguised potholes deep enough to break an animal’s leg—sometimes, it seemed, deep enough to drown an animal.

He sharply jerked the horse’s head up. The beast let out an indignant squeal of complaint, but it didn’t fall. Ramsay knew everything there was to know about complaining—he was a soldier, after all. He’d heard better, from men and horses.

The damp, muddy road wound round the edge of some bare-branched scrub oaks and opened out into a valley wider than most. A couple of farms took up most of the horizontal land and some that wasn’t: the sheep grazing on a hillside would have done better if their right legs had been shorter than their left. Smoke curled up from the chimneys of both wooden farmhouses: cabins might have been a better word for them.

A woman wearing a kerchief, a man’s flannel shirt, and a long calico dress was tossing corn to some scrawny chickens between one farmhouse and the barn. As the cavalry company drew nearer, Ramsay saw she was a half-breed, or maybe a full-blooded Indian. Sequoyah held more Indians than the rest of the Confederacy put together, and had even elected a couple of Indian congressmen and a senator.

Seeing soldiers approaching, the woman grabbed a shotgun that was leaning up against a stump. It wouldn’t have done her much good, not against a cavalry company, but Ramsay admired her spirit. After a moment, the woman lowered the barrel of the shotgun, though she didn’t let go of it. “You’re Confederates, ain’t you?” she said, her words not just uneducated but also flavored with an odd accent: she was Indian, sure enough.

“Yes, we’re Confederates,” Captain Lincoln answered gravely, brushing the brim of his hat with a forefinger. He pointed to the flag the standard bearer carried. “See for yourself, ma’am.”

The woman peered at it, peered at him, and then nodded. She turned the barrel of the shotgun away from the troopers, using it to point north and west. “Yankees in them woods. Leastways, they was there last night. Seen their fires. Don’t know how many—less’n you, reckon. Go over there and
kill
’em.”

Her vehemence made little chills run up Ramsay’s back. One thing you could rely on: the Indians in the state of Sequoyah were loyal to Richmond. The government of the United States had made them pack up and leave their original homelands back east for this country. Since the War of Secession, though, the Confederacy had treated them with forbearance, and that was paying off now.

“Whereabouts exactly were they?” Captain Lincoln asked, getting down off his horse and standing beside the woman. A chicken walked over and pecked at the brass buckle of his boot—maybe the stupid bird thought it was a grain of corn.

The woman pointed again. “Halfway up this here side of that hill—you see it? Ain’t seen ’em move out since. Maybe they still there.”

Ramsay doubted that, but you never could tell. Maybe they’d decided to wait out the bad weather—even though it wasn’t raining now—or maybe they were waiting for reinforcements to come up before they started pushing south again. Any which way, the company would have to ride on up there and find out what was going on.

Captain Lincoln touched his hat again. “Thank you, ma’am. Don’t want to ride into trouble blind, you know.”

“You just keep them damnyankees from tramplin’ our garden and stealin’ our critters,” the woman said, as if such petty thievery were the only reason U.S. soldiers were in Sequoyah now. She probably thought that; Ramsay wondered if she’d been off this farm since she was married.

As if the thought had gone straight from his head to Captain Lincoln’s, the company commander’s voice suddenly got hard and suspicious as he demanded, “Where’s your husband at?”

The farm woman spat, right between his feet. “Where the hell you think he’s at?” she snapped. “He got drug into the Army, and I jus’ hope to Jesus he come home again.”

“Sorry, ma’am,” Lincoln said, color rising in his face. A couple of the troopers snickered. One of them was in Ramsay’s squad. He’d rake Parker over the coals later on; couldn’t let discipline go to pot. The captain was saying, “Hope he comes home, too. Hope we all do, when this war is over.” He swung back up into the saddle and waved to the company. “Let’s go find those damnyankees.”

They rode in loose order, with plenty of scouts forward and more out on either flank. This whole country was made for bushwhacking. And then, up ahead, they heard a brisk crackle of gunfire. “Somebody else done found ’em for us,” Ramsay yelled. “Now we go in there and clean ’em out.”

As the Confederates rode toward the shooting, a machine gun started hammering away. “That’s Yankees, all right,” Lincoln said. “God knows the outlaws have plenty of rifles, but they don’t have any of those.”

A winding little track led through the scrub oaks toward the fighting. Lincoln dismounted his men and sent them through the woods on foot, using them like dragoons rather than true cavalry. Ramsay heartily approved—galloping up that path was asking to be massacred.

Before long, the dismounted troopers ran into Yankee pickets. Whoever was commanding the U.S. forces was doing the same thing with them as Lincoln was with the Confederates: they might have ridden to get to the fight, but they were making it on foot.

They also seemed to be outnumbered, and had to give ground again and again to keep from being outflanked and cut off. What with the thick undergrowth, you couldn’t see much. If anything moved, you took a shot at it. And when you moved, people you couldn’t spot shot at you. Getting a taste of what infantry did for a living. Ramsay discovered he didn’t much care for it.

Eventually, the crew for the company machine gun managed to lug both it and its mount through the woods and started spraying the Yankee positions with damn near as many bullets as the rest of the company put out all together. Ramsay waited for the U.S. troopers to move their own Maxim gun away from wherever they’d had it before and try to neutralize the Confederate weapon, but they didn’t. Instead, here and there among the oaks, white flags started going up.

“Ease off, you Rebs!” somebody yelled. “You got us.”

Firing slowly died away. “All right, Yanks, come out,” Captain Lincoln called. The U.S. troopers obeyed, hands high over their heads. Nobody shot them down. This wasn’t like the skirmish up in Kansas, the one by the railroad track. This one had been fair all the way—no armored automobiles to mess up the odds.

There were, all told, maybe twenty-five U.S. soldiers. Their leader, a fellow with a Kaiser Bill mustache that had lost a good deal of its waxed perfection, wore the single silver bars of a first lieutenant. “We have some wounded back there,” he said, pointing in the direction from which he’d come.

“We’ll take care of them,” Captain Lincoln promised, and told off a detachment to lead the Yankee prisoners back toward the road.

“A good haul,” Stephen Ramsay said, standing up and emerging from cover. “We’ll pick up that machine gun and as much ammunition as they have left for it, and then somebody’ll shoot it back at ’em till all the cartridges are gone.”

Captain Lincoln gathered him up by eye. “Come on, Corporal,” he said. “Let’s go see who we rescued there.”

Ramsay followed him through what had been the U.S. position. He was curious about that himself; he hadn’t known any other Confederate cavalry was operating in this neck of the woods. He didn’t know everything there was to know, though; he would have been the first—well, maybe the second—to admit as much.

From out of some woods that looked impenetrable, a voice called a sharp warning: “Don’t come no further! We got you covered six different ways.”

Captain Lincoln stopped. So did Ramsay, right behind him. “Who are you?” Lincoln asked; it hadn’t sounded like a Yankee holdout.

A hoarse laugh answered him. “Ain’t none of your damn business who we are and who we ain’t,” the unseen man said. “You jus’ go on home, Captain; we ain’t got a quarrel with you now, even if mebbe we used to.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Ramsay muttered.

He hadn’t meant anyone, even Lincoln, to hear him, but his ears were ringing from the fire fight, and he spoke louder than he’d intended. “Means we wouldn’t’ve mixed it up with them damnyankees if we hadn’t thought they was you.”

“Outlaws!” Captain Lincoln exclaimed.

“Yeah, and now we got a nice new Maxim gun to play with, too, you want to come in after us. You want to fight the USA, fine. Leave us the hell alone.”

“What do we do, sir?” Ramsay asked.

“I think we leave them the hell alone, Corporal,” Lincoln said loudly. “We’re not the police and we’re not the sheriffs. We owe these people one, too. They let us know where the Yankees were, and a machine gun’s too heavy to lug around to robberies.” He turned his back and started away. Nobody shot at him, or at Ramsay.

“Hell of a thing,” Ramsay said when they were back among their comrades, and then, “We could take ’em.”

“Oh, no doubt,” Lincoln agreed. “But that’s not our mission. We’re having enough trouble with what is.” Ramsay thought that over and decided the captain was right.

Sam Carsten wished he were someplace else. He’d had that feeling before, but never so bad. If he got noticed—

“This is what I get for volunteering,” he muttered under his breath as the ugly freighter pulled away from Kapalama Basin, around Sand Island, and west over Keehi Lagoon toward the entrance to Pearl Harbor. “Cap’n” Kidde could have told him as much. Hell, Kidde
had
told him as much—after it was too late for him to do anything about it. But the gunner’s mate hadn’t been standing next to him when the captain of the
Dakota
asked for volunteers for a dangerous mission, and so his hand had shot up along with everybody else’s. He hadn’t particularly expected to be picked, but here he was.

Off to the west, the sound of big and medium-sized guns never let up. All of Oahu belonged to the United States Navy and Marines—all of it except one lump of rock and cement that made the U.S. hold on everything else a hell of a lot less secure than it should have been.

Smoke wreathed Fort William Rufus, the fort everybody, limey and Yank alike, called the Concrete Battleship. “Why the devil did the damned English have to go and build a fort right there?” Carsten said.

“Drive us crazy?” somebody next to him suggested.