Leon Uris (28 page)

Ben wondered why he had never come to that conclusion, even
though his own life was an amalgamation of free thought. Lord, he’d have to give that one some scrutiny.

“That’s very esoteric, Zachary. How about a bread-and-butter military conclusion?”

“The nature of amphibious warfare is to attack, take your objective, and hold it till reinforced. Darius was not offensive-minded enough. He chose to make a soft landing, picking a place away from the battle site, and unload his army in a leisurely manner. He lost the element of surprise. He allowed the Greeks to select the battle site.”

Zach had come down to the key element of amphibious warfare that had to be instilled in the Marine Corps.

“What should Darius have done?” Ben asked.

“He should have made a hard landing. The Persians should have come in with fifty boats filled with Immortals and elite troops, hit the beach running, moved inland, and staked out their battle site.”

Ben was near dazed with the clarity of Zach’s analysis. In truth, he had hit on the key to the way that amphibious warfare had to develop.

“There is a big problem with this, Zach. As of today, there isn’t a commanding admiral or general who wouldn’t select a soft landing over a hard landing.”

“Yes, sir, casualties.”

“Casualties. What military staff of a democracy would order a landing and knowingly take heavy casualties?”

“There is no other way except to hit the beach running and break the enemy’s back on the initial assault.”

Ben closed his eyes and squealed his rocker into motion. “I’m going to have this study classified as secret . . . let it out piecemeal . . . until there can be a realization that a hard-landing alternative must be the centerpiece of the doctrine.”

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24
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Major Pierre Barjac was at the side of George Washington when Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown. Barjac, an aide of the Marquis de Lafayette, had served the American cause well.

The Calvert dynasty that founded and governed Maryland, as the Barons of Baltimore, awarded Barjac a land patent of three thousand acres on the Eastern Shore.

The Calverts were of Irish Catholic descent in a sea of Protestants. Maryland became the most tolerant of the colonies. It did not go unnoticed that Pierre Barjac was also of the R.C. persuasion.

Pierre Barjac began his plantation with little agricultural background, but slaves, overseers, and some of the richest land on earth provided a fortune and a lordly way of life.

Tobacco, a ceremonial drug of the Indians, found its way to
Europe and addicted the continent. Tobacco was the golden crop and the Eastern Shore yielded the gold of gold in bonanza fields!

Greed-driven plantation owners oversaturated the market, as greed is apt to do, and there were wild swings in prices, causing that blessed land to go into an economic skid.

By the time Major Pierre passed on, slash-and-burn farming tactics had taken their toll. Jacques Barjac inherited a plantation on the fringe of failure.

Jacques Barjac was the basic high-living rotter who pushed his slaves to the brink in order to keep his privileged life and stay ahead of his gambling debts.

Jacques’s three sons bailed out. The youngest, George Washington Barjac, obviously named, bought a commission into the Marine Corps and fought in the Mexican War of the late 1840s. He commanded a company that took the fearsome, disease-ridden overland march from Vera Cruz to Mexico City.

Barjac’s company was on the flank of a company commanded by Ben Boone during the storming of Chapultepec. The two men were bound for life by the experience.

When Father Jacques sent out a desperation call, it was ignored by his older sons, but six years’ service in the Marines had satisfied George Washington’s wanderlust, and he returned to a decrepit plantation.

The father, on his deathbed, was filled with remorse and the need for salvation. George was faced with selling the place off or making it go.

Overbreeding of hogs had all but ruined the marshes and creeks along the boundary. They were sludgy and contaminated by slimy oxygen-sucking algae blooms . . . and the fields were not much better.

The Eastern Shore survived despite gluttonous landowners because of its unmatched abundance. There was timber and shipbuilding, blizzards of water fowl and wild hogs and wild horses. The soil was fertile for near any crop, grain and fruit orchards and vegetables. There was fur trapping of beaver and muskrat and rac
coon, and bursting oyster and clam beds, and multitudes of fish in the bay, and a growing taste for the fascinating crab.

And, there was tobacco, a tarnished but still-golden leaf whose producers were getting in step with the world demand. Many tobacco plantations and small holders converted to general farming. A good farmer who used his acres wisely could make a go of it, given the hunting and fishing at hand.

Despite the dilapidation, Barjac Plantation was too promising to cash out.

The bedrock problem of the Eastern Shore was the constant migration of labor, always causing a shortage of fieldhands.

George Barjac calculated as deeply as he could in an effort to match the type of crop he would grow with the type of labor that was available.

Slaves sold for a few hundred dollars for a young girl to as much as twelve hundred for a top field buck. The negatives were providing subsistence and the never-ending problem of runaways.

. . . and thousands of free blacks wanted out and they fled to the cities and the frontier. The most skilled made it to a shipyard, but almost all other work was menial and conditions for free men of color were often as brutal as slavery. Free blacks lived off fish heads, and filled the jails, burdened with long sentences for trivial or imagined offenses. When farming slackened in the winter, the free blacks had to undercut the plantation owners who hired their slaves out to the canneries or as domestics.

There were times when a free black who could not get off the Shore sold himself to a white master.

. . . and the indentured came from Britain, working off their passage in the fields for five to seven years. It was a means for the English to unload their prisons and dump their convicts on the Eastern Shore.

. . . there was contracted prison labor working shackled and collared, a desperate and violent crowd whose only escape was into the arms of sweet death.

This was a place of whippings and mutilations and brandings and yelping bloodhounds.

Some slivers of decency in this black hell were provided by the Quakers, Methodists, and liberal Catholics who formed a kind of barrier against the hard-nosed Anglicans and Presbyterians.

It remained a torturous place, sucking the life out of cheap labor, but never enough labor, to keep up with greed-driven crops.

In the Corps, George Barjac had dealt with Indians and Mexican peasants. Even during his hard military contact, he retained a moral code that kept him on the side of civility.

If, indeed, he was to take over the plantation, he knew he had to make a decision about labor that included a measure of human decency. He had a number of ideas. He would not promise anyone an easy life, but in terms of the day, a relatively fair life.

Barjac came to a gambler’s decision.

Although tobacco was not as golden as it had been, the Maryland leaf had a great number of things going for it, mainly its addictive qualities. Every generation, his own included, had a love-hate affair with the smoking of tobacco, but each new generation would fall under its spell. There would always be a demand for tobacco and it would be a lifelong proposition to rid oneself of the habit.

The question was how to match up the demanding handwork of tobacco with available labor.

Using the sainted Lafayette, Washington, and Barjac names, he charmed his way to heavy financing from France and put his plan into motion.

Barjac added another fifteen hundred acres of land, purchased a sturdy oceangoing schooner, and built a support system of a deep inlet, pier, and warehouse.

In the 1850s, he offered his most productive slaves and some free blacks a lease of up to a hundred acres, a cabin, animals, equipment, seed, vegetable plot, and he guaranteed the purchase of their tobacco crop.

. . . in exchange for half of the harvest.

Those who took the proposition came to realize that sharecropping and credit at the company store meant debt that could never be overcome, but which was passed down from father to son.

To make feudalism work in the nineteenth century, George Barjac played good owner/bad owner with astonishing skill.

As a one-man dispenser of justice, Barjac was wise enough to let his
people
dip one toe in paradise. There were meaningful perquisites, trapping and fishing rights, the opportunity to open new acres, and protection from the whites.

There would be no corporal punishment. However, any breaking of rules meant instant eviction.

Tobacco wore out one’s body and tested one’s soul, what with the backbending labor in preparing the ground, the hand planting, hand nourishing, handpicking, hand curing by the Indian method, and hand packing into thousand-pound hogshead barrels, which then had to be rolled from warehouse onto pier and aboard his schooner
Maria-Belle,
named for his beloved, pleasantly plump wife.

The bane of the Eastern Shore was that it was one of the Lord’s chosen breeding grounds for mosquitoes. The mosquitoes were fed upon by the masses of fish and fowl and larger insects, but not even a planter’s wife could escape the infestation. Maria-Belle Barjac blessed George with three sons and four daughters, then died young from the summer fever.

George Barjac lamented her death for a proper period, then set out on a lifelong dream, to obtain French culture and plant it in Maryland.

He took his eldest son and daughter, Max and Lilly, to Paris for serious refinement as the start of a plan to “rotate” all seven children.

Paris had a permanent collection of aristocracy from all over the continent. When Barjac entered the scene, he was a bit of a legend himself, and was whisked right into the salons of the top echelon.

Max entered a university, studied economics and banking, and kept his Left Bank life and debts under reasonable control. He
respected his father and was ambitious to secure a future in the dynasty.

For Lilly, not yet sixteen, it meant convent training and finishing school. One could liken the Paris aristocracy to a swarm of Eastern Shore mosquitoes trying to get at this pretty, rich American thing.

There was no shortage of needy aristocracy to keep the old dreams alive. Countess Josephine Bayard, known affectionately as Fifi, was a widowed, childless, clever guardian, a little past her prime. Her forte had become to house a few young ladies of proper foreign families, teach them how to negotiate the risky cultural currents, supervise their education, dress them to snuff, school them on flirtation and seduction and the right places to be seen. When Fifi had a freshly schooled American heiress to offer, aristocracy knocked on her doors.

Countess Josephine Bayard took Lilly as her ward. Although frayed, Fifi was yet desirable, not quite forty, and playful and wise.

In addition to having her to “finish” his daughter, George Barjac took fond notice of her and made the ocean crossing to France as often as possible . . .

Then things went awry and George was summoned to France, unexpectedly. Lilly had lost her head over Baron Felix Villiard, a vain bachelor twice her age from a family of vineyard wealth in Burgundy. Count Felix was “it” in Parisian society, a critic of taste and fashion.

Villiard’s fame had come from his work as an Egyptologist, that is, opening the tombs of pharaohs. In this pursuit, he had spent half his life. His heart was not in the wine business, and several seasons with moderate vintages had made his finances shaky.

Lilly was a tender thing with an ambitious father who owned an enormous plantation in the New World, and she was ripe for the plucking.

Countess Josephine liked neither the peacockery of Felix Villiard nor his “holier than thou” tomb sacking and was suspicious of his finances.