American Front (48 page)

Alexander still looked mutinous. It was in the nature of youths his age to look mutinous: that is, to have their looks accurately reflect their thoughts. To quell the mutiny, McGregor didn’t shout or bluster. Instead, he pointed to the roadway. Small in the distance but growing steadily larger as they approached, here came a battalion of U.S. soldiers marching north toward the front. In column of fours, they made a green-gray snake slithering across the land. The snake was having heavy going, the road still being muddy from melted winter snows.

After the troops came supply wagons topped with white canvas, lineal descendants of the Conestogas in which so many Americans—and not a few Canadians, too—had gone west to settle. Hooves and wagon wheels had even more trouble advancing through mud than did marching boots.

About half a mile behind that battalion came another, barely visible in the distance as yet but all too soon to approach in turn. “Do you see, son?” McGregor asked, his voice halfway between gentle and rough. “There are just too many of them, and us spread too thin on the ground to be much use fighting ’em. Either we find some other way to drive ’em mad, or we do as much of what they tell us as we have to and trust to God it’ll all come out right in the end.”

“That’s a bitter pill, Father,” Alexander said.

“I never told you it wasn’t,” McGregor agreed. “And trusting in God is hard, because He does what He wants, not what we want. I don’t know what else to say, though. We get along, and we wait, and we see what happens.”

He couldn’t have given his son much harder advice, and he knew it. The advice was hard for him, too. He wanted nothing so much as to strike back at the Americans. Before the war began, he’d been starting to think about buying a gasoline-powered tractor. Now he counted himself lucky to have a team of horses. He flicked the reins; he’d been standing idle long enough. The horses snorted and strode forward.

As the sun sank toward the flat horizon that evening, he and the team headed back toward the farmhouse and the barn. He’d curry the animals and get them fed and watered, and then go in to see what Maude had done up for supper.

The horses stopped, snorting, their ears twitching. McGregor stopped, too. For a moment, he failed to sense anything out of the ordinary. Then he too caught the low rumble out of the north. Far-off thunder, he would have thought the year before. He knew better now, an education he would willingly have done without. That was artillery. He hadn’t heard it for a while. The front was a long way off these days. A bombardment had to be big to be noticed across so many miles.

“And whose guns are they?” he wondered out loud. Spring was here, summer coming: fighting weather. He had the feeling he’d be hearing guns a lot in days to come. He hoped they’d get louder, not softer: that would mean the front was drawing closer, his countrymen and whatever soldiers the mother country could spare pushing back the invaders.

He and his family spoke of little else over supper: rabbit stew. All they could do, though, was guess and hope. The artillery barrage went on through the night; it was still roaring away when McGregor visited the outhouse in the wee small hours.

And it was still roaring away when he took the horses out to the fields at sunrise. A train no doubt full of troops roared up the track toward the front; the road was full of marching men. By afternoon, ambulances and trains showing the Red Cross rolled south. Were their wounded the residue of advance or retreat? The hell of it was, Arthur McGregor had no way of knowing.

For Remembrance Day, Flora Hamburger and the other Socialists, not only from the Tenth Ward and the rest of the Lower East Side but from all over New York, came to Broadway to watch the parade. Coming as it did just nine days before May Day, their own great holiday, it was a rival focus for the energy and allegiance of the American working class.

As always, the parade route was packed to commemorate the day of mourning. Flags fluttered from poles on top of every building, every one of them flown upside down, symbolizing the distress of the United States when they had had to yield to the forces of the Confederacy, England, and France, and to recognize the Confederate States’ acquisition of Chihuahua and Sonora.

Burly policemen cordoned the Socialist Party delegation away from the rest of the crowd. Brawls broke out every year after the Remembrance Day parade. Now, with the war on, who could say what might happen?

Flora peered across Broadway, to the three-story brick building that housed Slosson’s Café and Billiards. Men looked out through the plate-glass window of the pool hall, and men and women both watched from the cloth-awninged windows of the upper floors. She wondered what sort of bosses squeezed profit from their labor.

Beside her, Herman Bruck said, “Far more of the people are with us than the minions of the ruling class”—he pointed to the policemen—“would ever admit. They’ll let the veterans’ groups, with their fat bellies and their minds full of blood and iron, they’ll let them know what they think.” He looked like a boss himself, in his broadcloth suit and stovepipe hat: a younger son, maybe, or one just taking over the business. But, whether Flora cared for him or not, she had to admit he was Socialist to the core.

“So many have lost husbands and brothers and sons,” she said, nodding, “and for what? How are we better? What have we gained? How many more young men will have to die on the altar of capitalism and nationalism before the war ends?”

“All that is true,” Maria Tresca put in, “but some will say, ‘We have come this far, so how can we stop halfway?’ This is the biggest stumbling block we have to overcoming the support of the masses for the war.” Her sister Angelina nodded.

“It is a problem,” Flora admitted. “I have run into it many times myself.”

“It should not be a problem.” Bruck sounded angry. “We should be able to show clearly why this war is immoral, unnatural, and serves only the interests of the ruling class.”

A few feet away, a policeman with a red Irish face heard that. He turned to Bruck and, smiling nastily, made motions as if of counting money. Then, with theatrical scorn, he turned his broad, blue-clad back.

“Do you see?” Flora said triumphantly. “We voted to finance the war along with everyone else, and now no one lets us forget it. I said at the time that was a mistake.”

“So you did,” Herman Bruck muttered. He was in a poor position to do anything but mutter, as he had supported paying for the war. He still did, sometimes, but not when policemen mocked him for it. And so it was with some relief that he pointed down Broadway and said, “Here comes the parade.”

Leading it, as had hardened into ritual over the past generation, came an enormous soldier carrying the Stars and Stripes, once more upside down. A Marine band at slow march followed him; they played “The Star-Spangled Banner” with the tempo of a dirge. As the flag-bearer and the band went by, men uncovered and held their hats over their hearts.

Flora recognized the white-bearded bandmaster. “That’s Sousa!” she exclaimed with the respect one can give an effective foe. The musician’s stirring songs had done more to fire narrow national patriotism and make the proletariat forget its international ties than the work of most jingo politicians.

Here and there in the crowd beyond the police lines, men left their hats on: odds-on candidates to be Socialists. Fights had started over such things in years past. Now, beyond a couple of low-voiced calls of “Shame!”, no one did anything. Almost no one in the Socialist Party delegation uncovered. The Marine musicians did not turn their heads, but sidelong glances said they took mental note.

Behind the band rolled a limousine that carried—Flora stiffened as she saw who the man standing in the back of the car was—Theodore Roosevelt. The president only showed himself; he did not wave to the crowd. His suit was as black and somber as Herman Bruck’s, and almost as well cut. A few Socialists shouted catcalls at him. He ignored them.

Then came the veterans. After the limousine marched a contingent of men older than John Philip Sousa, survivors of the War of Secession. Some still strode straight and slim despite their years. Others shambled along as best they could, helped along by a stick or a cane. Some had one sleeve flapping empty or pinned to the front of their jackets. Some had one trouser leg pinned up, and propelled themselves with crutches. At the rear, attendants pushed a few legless men along in wheelchairs.

The old soldiers’ faces, almost to a man, bore a grim sadness the passage of half a century had not erased. Flora sympathized with them; the USA had surely been more progressive than the feudal-minded Rebels. But, however sure the historical dialectic was, it did not always move straight ahead. The memory of failure still stung the veterans of the War of Secession.

Behind them marched another group of veterans, these middle-aged, many of them plump and prosperous: men who had fought in the Second Mexican War. Where their predecessors seemed proud of what they had done even in defeat, these ex-soldiers, some of them, had almost a hangdog air, as if they felt they should have done better but didn’t quite know how.

Then came Count von Bernstorff, the German ambassador, fantastically bemedaled and riding in a limousine flanked by a color guard of German soldiers carrying the black-white-red banners of the German Empire. Those drew both cheers and jeers, many of the jeers either in German or in Yiddish, close enough to German for the spike-helmeted soldiers in field-gray to understand.

“Germany taught the USA to ignore the needs of the proletariat!” Herman Bruck shouted, shaking his fist.

“Germany taught the USA to fool the proletariat into thinking its needs are met,” Flora cried a moment later, which gave her the double satisfaction of telling the truth and correcting the self-righteous Bruck.

The mixture of applause and catcalls went on after the German ambassador and his escort passed. Behind him came a troop of men hardly younger than the Second Mexican War veterans: Soldiers’ Circle members of the first class, men who had served their two years in the Army after conscription was passed in the wake of two lost wars.

Flora and Bruck and Maria and Angelina Tresca and all the Socialist representatives joined with their Party members in the crowd in shouting abuse at the marching men of the Soldiers’ Circle, each successive troop from the conscription class a year later than its predecessor. Men who stayed in the Soldiers’ Circle after they served their time were apt to be of a reactionary cast of mind: men who gladly served as strikebreakers, scabs, goons, men to whom even Teddy Roosevelt was a dangerous radical for worrying about the untrammeled power of the bosses.

As the Soldiers’ Circle troops passed by, as the men became of the age where their contemporaries were fighting, other jeers rang out alongside those of the Socialists. Chief among them was the swelling cry. “Why aren’t you in the Army?”

While the youngish men who had done their time as conscripts but had not yet been dragged into the war ignored the mockery and marched stolidly down Broadway, mockery was all they got. But then, not far from the Socialist delegation, one of the men of the conscription class of 1901 lost his temper. He turned his head and shouted at an abuser, “Why ain’t I in the Army now? Fuck you and fuck your mother too, why ain’t you?”

With a roar of rage, the fellow he’d cursed rushed at him, pulled out a knife, and plunged it into his side. The Soldiers’ Circle man went down with a groan, blood bright on his white shirt. Four of his comrades threw the man with the knife to the ground, kicked the blade away, and methodically began stomping the stabber.

A few people in the crowd cheered, but others ran out to try to rescue the man who’d used the knife. More Soldiers’ Circle men set on them. Somebody—in the rapidly swelling chaos, Flora had no idea who, or on which side—fired a pistol. An instant later, several guns were popping away, as if the war had decided to pay New York a visit.

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!” shouted the Irish policeman who’d made money-counting motions at Herman Bruck. Along with his fellows, he dashed toward what had gone in the space of half a minute from patriotic parade to riot.

Flora Hamburger turned her back on it. To her fellow Socialists, she cried, “Stay here! Don’t join it! Don’t let the reactionaries exploit us in the newspapers!”

Angelina and Maria Tresca loudly added their voices to Flora’s. Flora looked around for support from Herman Bruck. To her dismay, she saw him, along with several other hot-blooded Socialists, running straight toward the men from the Soldiers’ Circle. They had their own rallying cry: “Direct action!” The Socialist call to arms had rung out in mines and factories and lumber camps and fields across the USA for a generation, but now…? Flora shook her head in dismay. The place and the timing could hardly have been worse.

Riot spread up the parade, toward the Marine marching band at the front. From that direction, Flora heard a couple of explosions louder and fiercer than pistol shots. “Bombs!” she exclaimed. “They’re throwing bombs!”

She didn’t know who
they
were, but she feared with sick horror the Socialists would get the blame. In the 1880s and 1890s,
direct action
had often meant more than words; the Party’s past had blood in it.

Another bomb went off, this one frighteningly close. Injured men and women screamed. Above their cries rose a great voice bellowing, “Justice for Utah!”

Absurdly, relief flooded Flora: maybe the hard hand of the government would land on the Mormons, not on the Party. She was ashamed of herself a moment later.
Do it to them, not to us
was not the answer; the government, no matter how TR thundered about swinging a big club, had no right to oppress anyone.

Analyzing that in fullness, though, would have to wait. She grabbed Maria and Angelina. “We’d better get out of here,” she said. The secretaries nodded vehemently.

It was easier said than done. A lot of the crowd was trying to flee the brawls and battles that roiled in the middle of Broadway, but almost as many people, women as well as men, were pressing forward, trying to get into the fray. Yet another pistol shot rang out, this one terribly close, terribly loud. Angelina Tresca shrieked. Blood, vividly, impossibly red, stained the white front of her shirtwaist. She stood staring in astonishment. When she opened her mouth to say something, only more blood came from it—not a word. Blood poured from her nose, too. She swayed, toppled, fell.