American Front (6 page)

The few ladies in the crowd were bumped and jostled almost as much as their male counterparts—not intentionally, perhaps, but unavoidably. “Beg your pardon, ma’am,” Bartlett said after being squeezed against a pretty young woman more intimately than would have been proper on a dance floor. He couldn’t tip his hat; he hadn’t room to raise his arm to his head.

She nodded, accepting his apology as she’d probably accepted a dozen others. The remembered feel of her body pressed to his made him smile as the motion of the crowd swept them apart. He’d been polite—that came automatically as breathing to a well-raised young man—but his thoughts were his own, to do with as he would.

By dint of stubbornness worthy of what folks said about New England Yankees, Bartlett slithered and squirmed up to within a few yards of the ring of butternut-clad soldiers who held the crush away from the platform with bayoneted rifles. “Don’t you take a step back, Watkins, damn you,” the officer in charge of them shouted. “Make them do the moving.”

Bartlett wondered if the guards would have to stick someone to make the crowd stand clear. The pressure behind him was so strong, it seemed as if the people could crush everything between themselves and the platform.

A high mucky-muck—not a graybeard but a portly, dapper fellow with a sandy, pointed beard like that of the King of England—leaned down over the railing and spoke to that officer. After a moment, Bartlett recognized him from woodcuts he’d seen: that was Emmanuel Sellars, the secretary of war. Was he giving the command for a demonstration against the crowd? Bartlett couldn’t hear his orders. If he was, it would be pandemonium. Bartlett got ready to flee, and hoped the stampede wouldn’t run over him.

The officer—a captain by the three bars on either side of his collar—shouted to his men. Bartlett couldn’t make out what he said, either, but fear ran through him when some of the guards raised the rifles to their shoulders. But they aimed up into the air, not at the people, and fired a volley. Bartlett hoped they were shooting blanks. If they weren’t, the bullets were liable to hurt somebody as they fell.

Into the sudden, startled silence the gunshots brought, a fellow with a great voice shouted, “Hearken now to the words of the President of the Confederate States of America, the honorable Woodrow Wilson.”

The president turned this way and that, surveying the great swarm of people all around him in the moment of silence the volley had brought. Then, swinging back to face the statue of George Washington—and, incidentally, Reginald Bartlett—he said, “The father of our country warned us against entangling alliances, a warning that served us well when we were yoked to the North, before its arrogance created in our Confederacy what had never existed before—a national consciousness. That was our salvation and our birth as a free and independent country.”

Silence broke then, with a thunderous outpouring of applause. Wilson raised a bony right hand. Slowly, silence, or a semblance of it, returned. The president went on, “But our birth of national consciousness made the United States jealous, and they tried to beat us down. We found loyal friends in England and France. Can we now stand aside when the German tyrant threatens to grind them under his iron heel?”

“No!” Bartlett shouted himself hoarse, along with thousands of his countrymen. Stunned, deafened, he had trouble hearing what Wilson said next:

“Jealous still, the United States in their turn also developed a national consciousness, a dark and bitter one, as any so opposed to ours must be.” He spoke not like a politician inflaming a crowd but like a professor setting out arguments—he had taken the one path before choosing the other. “The German spirit of arrogance and militarism has taken hold in the United States; they see only the gun as the proper arbiter between nations, and their president takes Wilhelm as his model. He struts and swaggers and acts the fool in all regards.”

Now he sounded like a politician; he despised Theodore Roosevelt, and took pleasure in Roosevelt’s dislike for him. “When war began between England and France on the one hand and the German Empire on the other, we came to our allies’ aid, as they had for us in our hour of need. I have, as you know, asked the Congress to declare war upon Germany and Austria-Hungary.

“And now, as a result of our honoring our commitment to our gallant allies, that man Roosevelt has sought from the U.S. Congress a declaration of war not only against England and France but also against the Confederate States of America. His servile lackeys, misnamed Democrats, have given him what he wanted, and the telegraph informs me that fighting has begun along our border and on the high seas.

“Leading our great and peaceful people into war is a fearful thing, not least because, with the great advances of science and industry over the past half-century, this may prove the most disastrous and terrible of all wars, truly a war of the nations: indeed a war of the world. But right is more precious than peace, and we shall fight for those things we have always held dear in our hearts: for the rights of the Confederate States and of the white men who live in them; for the liberties of small nations everywhere from outside oppression; for our own freedom and independence from the vicious, bloody regime to our north. To such a task we can dedicate our lives and our fortunes, everything we are and all that we have, with the pride of those who know the day has come when the Confederacy is privileged to spend her blood and her strength for the principles that gave her birth and led to her present happiness. God helping us, we can do nothing else. Men of the Confederacy, is it your will that a state of war should exist henceforth between us and the United States of America?”

“Yes!” The answer roared from Reginald Bartlett’s throat, as from those of the other tens of thousands of people jamming Capitol Square. Someone flung a straw hat in the air. In an instant, hundreds of them, Bartlett’s included, were flying. A great chorus of “Dixie” rang out, loud enough, Bartlett thought, for the damnyankees to hear it in Washington.

Someone tapped him on the shoulder. He whirled around—and stared into the angry face of Milo Axelrod, his boss. “I told you to stay and mind the shop, dammit!” the druggist roared. “You’re fired!”

Bartlett snapped his fingers under the older man’s nose. “And this here is how much I care,” he said, “You can’t fire me, on account of I damn well quit. They haven’t called up my regiment yet, but I’m joining the Army now, is what I’m doing. Go peddle your pills—us real men will save the country for you. A couple of months from now, after we’ve licked the Yankees, you can tell me you’re sorry.”

II

Nellie Semphroch huddled behind the counter in the ruins of her coffeehouse, wondering if she would die in the next instant. She’d been wondering that for hours, ever since the first Confederate shells began falling on Washington, D.C.

Beside her, her daughter Edna wailed, “When will it stop, Mother? Will it ever stop?”

“Lord help me, I don’t know,” the widow Semphroch answered. She had twice her daughter’s twenty years; on her, bitter experience seamed the long, oval face they otherwise shared. “I just don’t know. It wasn’t like this when—”

A shell crashed down nearby. The ground quivered and jerked, as if in pain. Fragments sprayed through the blank square that had been the front window before it shattered early in the bombardment. Edna brushed dark blond curls—a brighter shade than Nellie’s, which were streaked with gray—out of her eyes and repeated, despairingly, “Will it ever stop?”

“It wasn’t like this when the Southerners shelled us before,” Nellie said, at last able to get in another complete sentence. “When I was a girl, they bombarded Washington, yes, but after an hour or so they were done. I was scared then, but only for a little while. That’s why we didn’t leave when—”

Now, instead of a shell, Edna interrupted her: “We should have, Mama. We should have gotten out while we could, along with everybody else.”

“Not everybody left.” Nellie said, her daughter’s bitterness making her defensive. A great host of people had, though, as crisis in some distant part of Europe became by the magic of far-flung alliances crisis in America, too. While Washington remained the nation’s capital, Congress hadn’t met there since the Second Mexican War: going about their business under Confederate guns had seemed intolerable. Before war was declared, an endless procession of wagons and buggies and motorcars jammed the roads leading north out of the capital, and every train bringing in soldiers had been full of civilians on its outbound journey.

But Nellie and Edna had sat tight, selling coffee to panicky bureaucrats and swaggering soldiers alike. They’d made a lot of money, and Nellie had been certain that, even if war broke out, the Rebels would not seek to destroy what had once been their capital, too. They hadn’t back in 1881.

She’d been wrong. Sweet Jesus Christ, how wrong she’d been! She knew that now, to her everlasting sorrow. The Confederacy’s bombardment of Washington a generation before had been more a demonstration that the South could be frightful if it so chose than actual frightfulness in and of itself. Having hit a few targets, the Confederates had gone on to fight the war elsewhere.

This time, they seemed intent on leaving no stone in the capital of the United States standing upon another. Once, just before sunrise, Nellie had gone to a well to draw a bucket of water—shelling had burst the pipes that carried water through the city. The Capitol’s dome was smashed, the building itself burning. Not far away, the White House had also become a pile of rubble, and the needle of the Washington Monument no longer reached up to the sky—that despite the Rebels’ claims to revere Washington as the father of their country, too.

More guns boomed, these not the Confederate cannon across the Potomac but American guns replying from the high ground north of Washington. Shells made freight-train noises overhead, then thudded to earth with roars like distant thunder.

“Kill all those Rebel bastards!” Edna shouted. “Blow Arlington to hell and gone so we don’t have the God-damned Lees looking down on us like lords. Blow their balls off, every fucking one of them!”

Nellie stared at her daughter. “Where ever did you learn such language?” she gasped. Absurdly, at that moment, her first impulse was to wash Edna’s mouth out with soap. After a moment’s reflection, though, she wished she let the words out more readily herself. She knew them—oh, she knew them. And when hell came up here on earth, what did a few bad words matter?

“I’m sorry, Mama,” Edna said, but then her chin came up. “No, I’m not sorry, not a bit of it. I wish I knew worse to call the Confederates. If I did, I would, and that’s the truth.”

“What you just said is pretty bad.” Nellie had not led a sheltered life—far from it—but she’d seldom heard a lady curse as her daughter just had. Then again, she’d never been in a situation where tons of death fell randomly from the sky. As the judge said of the man who knifed a poker partner because he spotted an ace coming out of his sleeve, there were mitigating circumstances.

More freight-train noises filled the air, these from the east and south: Rebel artillery, striking back at U.S. guns. Because the Confederates were trying to hit the cannons, shells stopped falling on Washington itself and began smashing the hills that ringed the city.

Edna stood up. “Maybe we can get out of town now, Mama,” she said hopefully.

“Maybe.” Nellie rose, too. The air was thick with smoke and dust and a harsh odor she supposed came from explosives. Half the chairs and tables in the coffeehouse lay on their sides or upside down. The fine linen tablecloths that gave the establishment a touch of class—and that Nellie was still paying for—were rags now, torn rags.

A shell fragment had ripped into the fancy brass coffee grinder that gleamed out in front of the counter. Nellie wouldn’t be grinding coffee with it again, not any time soon. She shivered and had to grasp the counter for a moment. If a fragment had done that to sturdy, machined brass, what would it have done to flesh? A few feet to one side and she would have found out. No, 1881 hadn’t been like this.

She walked toward what had been her front window and was now a square opening with a few jagged shards round the edges. Out in the street—which had suddenly acquired deep pocks, like the face of a man who’d never been vaccinated—a shattered delivery wagon sat on its side, the horses that had drawn it gruesomely dead in the traces. Nellie gulped. She’d killed and plucked and gutted plenty of chickens, and even a few pigs, but artillery was a horrifyingly sloppy butcher. She hadn’t imagined horses had that much blood in them, either. A scrawny stray dog came up and sniffed the pool. She shouted at it. It ran away. Behind the wagon, she could just see an outflung arm. No, the driver hadn’t been luckier than his animals.

“Can we get out of town, do you think, Ma?” Edna repeated.

Nellie raised her eyes from the street to the high ground. For a moment, she did not understand what she was seeing, and thought a Midwestern dust storm had suddenly been transplanted to those low, rolling hills. Dust there was aplenty, but no wind to raise it. Instead, it came from the carpet of shells the Confederates were laying down. When she looked more closely, she spied the ugly red core of fire in each explosion. She wondered how anything could live under such bombardment, and if anything did.

Her question there was answered a moment later, for not all the flames came from landing shells. Some sprang from the muzzles of U.S. guns hurling death back at the enemy. To her amazement, she discovered she could briefly follow some of the big American shells as they rose into the sky.

She turned her head toward the Potomac. Smoke and buildings obscured most of her view there but, from what she could tell, the Virginia heights were taking as much of a pounding as those around Washington.
Good
, she thought savagely.

From behind her, Edna said, “Let’s go, Ma.”

Nellie waved her daughter up alongside her and pointed to the bombardment raining down outside of town. “I don’t think we’d better,” she said. “Looking at that, we’re safer where we’re at.” Edna bit her lip but nodded.

Across the street, something moved inside a battered cobbler’s shop. Nellie’s heart jumped into her mouth until she recognized old Mr. Jacobs, who ran the place. He waved to her, calling, “You are still alive, Widow Semphroch?”

“I think so, yes,” Nellie answered, which brought a twisted smile to the cobbler’s wizened face.

Before she could say anything more, the sound of many booted men running made her turn her head. A stream of green-gray-clad American soldiers in matching forage caps pounded past the wrecked delivery van and dead horses. Sunlight glinted from the bayonets they’d fixed to the ends of their rifles.

“You civilians better get back under cover,” one of them shouted. “The damn Rebs—beg your pardon, ma’am—they’re liable to try comin’ across the river. They do, we’re gonna give ’em what for. Ain’t that right, boys?”

The soldiers made harsh, eager grunts unlike any Nellie had heard before. Not all of them were fuzz-bearded boys; some had to be close to thirty. Mobilization had scooped up a lot of men who’d done their two years a long time ago, and put them back in the Army.

A couple of the soldiers were trundling a machine gun along on its little wheeled carriage. When they came to shell holes in the street, they either maneuvered it around them or manhandled it over. Its fat brass water jacket must have been newly polished, for it gleamed brighter than the bayonets.

One of the machine-gun handlers stared at Edna and ran his tongue over his lips as if he were a cat that had just finished a saucer of cream. Nellie glanced over to her daughter, who was filthy, bedraggled, exhausted…but young, unmistakably young.

Men
, Nellie thought, a one-word indictment of half the human race. Not long ago, or so it seemed, they’d looked at her that way, and she’d looked back. She’d done more than look back, in fact. That was the start of how Edna came to be, and why her name had changed from Houlihan to Semphroch in such a tearing hurry.

She heard a fresh noise in the air, a sharp, quick
whizz!
A couple of soldiers looked up to see what that was. A couple of others, wiser or more experienced, threw themselves flat on the ground.

Only a couple of seconds after the
whizz!
first reached her ears, it was followed by a huge
bang!
at the head of the column. Men reeled away from the explosion, shrieking. There were more whizzes in the air now, too. The Confederates had spotted the moving infantrymen, and decided to open up on them.

Bang! Bang! Bang!
Shells struck up and down the length of the battalion. Nellie didn’t see all the slaughter they worked. “Get down!” she screamed to Edna, even before the second whizzing shell fell and burst. To make sure Edna listened and didn’t stare back at the machine gunner bold in his uniform, she dragged her daughter to the floor.

More fragments whined past overhead. The shells that went
whizz-bang
weren’t very big; the front wall of the coffeehouse stopped most of their fragments, though plenty screamed through what had been the window and scarred the plaster above the counter.

The barrage stopped as suddenly as it had begun. That didn’t mean the street was silent; far from it. Cries and screams and moans and wails and sounds of pain for which Nellie had no descriptive words filled the air. She got to her feet and looked out. The street had been a sorry sight before. The slaughter now was worse than anything she’d ever imagined.

Men and pieces of men lay everywhere. The ones who were dead were less appalling than the ones who were wounded. A trooper tried to stuff spilled intestines back into his belly through a neat slit torn in his tunic. Another sat staring foolishly at his right arm, which he’d picked up off the pavement and was holding in his left hand. Quietly, without much fuss, he crumpled over and lay still.

“We have to help them, Ma,” Edna said. “We have plenty of rags and things—”

Nellie hadn’t noticed her daughter get up beside her. She nodded, though she knew what would happen if more shells caught them out in the open.

Stretcher bearers were taking charge of some of the wounded. They nodded gratefully, though, when they saw Nellie and Edna come out with old clothes in their hands.

The second man Nellie bandaged was the machine gunner who’d leered at Edna. Now his face was waxy pale instead of ruddy and alight with lust. Nellie had to force his hands—protectively cupped too late—away from the wound at the base of his belly before she could try to stanch the bleeding. If he lived, he wouldn’t be doing much with the girls, not any more.

Off to the west, rifle fire rang out. You lived in the city, you heard guns every so often; you got to know what they sounded like. But, a moment later, Nellie heard a sound she’d never known before. It was something like gunfire, something like a giant ripping a piece of canvas the size of a football field. It made the hair stand up at the back of her neck.

Mangled and in agony though he was, the machine gunner smiled a little. He knew what the sound was, though Nellie didn’t. Seeing his knowledge made her understand, too.

“So that’s the noise a machine gun makes,” Nellie murmured. The pale-faced soldier nodded, a single short jerk of his head. “Good,” Nellie told him. “That means the Rebs are catching it hot.” He nodded again.

The wheat was turning golden under the warm August sun. From the front porch of his farmhouse, Arthur McGregor surveyed the crop with dour satisfaction. The quick-ripening hybrid Marquis strain he’d put in the ground these past few years beat the old Red Fife all hollow. Here a quarter of the way from the U.S. border to Winnipeg, every day you could shave off the growing season was a good one, especially since half your ground lay fallow each year.

McGregor—a tall, lean man, his face weathered almost like a sailor’s from endless exposure to sun and wind—watched the wheat bow and then straighten, politely acknowledging the breeze. The fields seemed to go on forever. He let out a sour snort. That was partly because he’d had the work of plowing and planting them. But the Manitoba prairie was flat as a sheet of newspaper, flat as if it had been pressed. And so, in a way, it had; from what the geologists said, great sheets of ice had lain here in ancient days, squashing down any irregularities that might once have existed.

For hundreds of miles, the only blemishes on the surface of the land were the belts of wire and the fortifications on either side of the border between the United States and the Dominion of Canada. McGregor sighed, thinking about that long, thin, porous border. Late rains or early frost could blight his crops. So could war.