American Front gw-1

by Harry Turtledove

  William Dudley Foulke was thinking along with him, at least up to a point. Steepling his fingers, the general said, "Staff work can be the making of a promising young officer. If you see opportunity, by all means seize it. Here." He handed Morrell a book. "Something for you to read on the train: my translation of the Roman military writer Vegetius. Either it will engage your interest or help you sleep the miles away."

  "Thank you very much, sir," Morrell said, wondering whether an ancient writer's precepts would have any bearing on the modern art of war.

  "My pleasure." Foulke sighed. "When I was a boy, I thought I would be a lawyer or a scholar. But I was fourteen years old when the Rebs beat us the first time, and I knew then I wanted to spend the rest of my life in the military service of my country. That little volume there is a relic of what might have been, I'm afraid, nothing more." He grew brisk again. "Well, you don't want to hear an old man maundering on about himself. I certainly didn't when I was a young officer, at any rate."

  Morrell flushed. That embarrassed him, which only made him flush more. "I'll treasure the book, sir," he said.

  "Or perhaps you won't," Foulke said. "It's all right either way, Major. I've sent Philadelphia a wire, letting them know you're on your way. Now the trick will be getting you there. This part of Kentucky isn't what you'd call overburdened with railroads. We'll send you up the Hyden-Hazard road, and east from there to Hazard, where you can catch a train. You're ready to go now, I assume."

  "Uh, two things, sir," Morrell said. "First, I promised I'd ask for a couple of more machine guns for my battalion."

  "They'll have them," Foulke promised. "What else?"

  Morrell looked down at himself. "If I'm going to Philadelphia, shouldn't I cleanup a bit first?"

  Foulke snuffled air out through his mustache. "Seeing what a real front line soldier looks like would do Philadelphia good, but you may be right." He called for his adjutant-"Captain Rothbart!" — and said, "Get Major Morrell a hot bath, get him a fresh uniform, and get him on the road to Hazard so he can catch the train for Philadelphia."

  "Yes, sir!" Rothbart said, and efficiently took care of Morrell. If he handled everything as smoothly for the divisional commander, General Foulke was well served.

  Inside an hour's time, Morrell, clean and newly decked out, was jouncing along in a motorcar over dirt roads never intended for automobile traffic. The motorcar had three punctures before he got to Hazard, which, in the light of that experience, seemed well-named. Morrell stood guard with a rifle while the driver fixed the first two punctures; bushwhackers and Rebel guerrillas still roamed behind U.S. lines, looking like innocent civilians when they weren't out raiding. For the third puncture, Morrell pitched in and helped with the repair job. He thought about the state of his uniform only after his knees were already dirty.

  No Rebs shot at the motorcar, but the train he boarded in Hazard took gunfire three different times before it got out of Kentucky, and once had to turn around on a siding when the Confederates blew up a bridge on the route north. Occupied, eastern Kentucky might have been; subdued it was not.

  Under the white glare of the train's acetylene lights, Morrell pondered Vegetius. Some parts of the book, the ones that dealt with Roman military equipment, were as dry and dusty as he'd feared, and Vegetius' own proposed inventions didn't strike him as any great improvements. He started wondering why General Foulke had wasted his time translating such a useless work.

  But when Vegetius started talking about principles of the military art, the book came to life. It was as if more than fifteen centuries had fallen away, leaving Morrell face-to-face with someone who worried about all the same things he did: ambushes, ways to deceive the enemy, the importance of intelligence, and other such concerns as vital in the twentieth century as they had been in the fourth.

  And one sentence seized his attention and would not let it go: "Let him who desires peace prepare for war." Being ready to fight, he thought, instituting conscription and all the rest of it, had kept the United States from having to do more fighting after the defeat in the Second Mexican War.

  When he finished the volume, he set it down not only with respect, but also with real regret. Not only was it interesting in and of itself, but General Foulke wrote gracefully, an attribute more common among officers of the War of Secession than their busy modern successors.

  He changed trains in Wheeling, West Virginia. The new one pulled into the Pennsylvania Railroad station at Thirtieth and Market in the middle of the night. Waiting for him at the station was a spruce young captain who might have been Rothbart's cousin. His hat cords were intertwined black and gold; he wore black lace on his cuffs and a badge with the coat of arms of the United States superimposed on a five-pointed star-the marks of a General Staff officer.

  His salute might have been machined. "Major Morrell?" he said, his voice as crisp as the creases on his trousers. At Morrell's nod, he went on, "I'm John Abell. As soon as we pick up your bags, I'll take you over to the War Department and we'll find quarters for your stay in the city."

  "I haven't got any bags," Morrell told him. "When General Foulke let me know I'd been detached from my battalion, he gave me time to take a bath and put on a clean uniform, and then he stuck me in an automobile. My gear will catch up with me eventually, I expect."

  "No doubt," Captain Abell said, looking at the mud on Morrell's knees. Well, if a General Staff officer didn't know motorcars got punctures on bad roads, that was his lookout. The captain shrugged, plainly deciding not to make an issue of it. "Let's go, then."

  A couple of antiaircraft cannon stuck their snouts in the air outside the train station. " Philadelphia 's been in the war," Morrell observed.

  "That it has." Captain Abell waved. A driver in an open-topped Ford came up. He opened the door to the rear seat for the two officers, then used the hand throttle to give the automobile more power as he chugged east through the streets of Philadelphia toward the War Department headquarters. Abell went on, "When the Rebs came storming up out of Virginia, we were afraid we'd either have to fight for the town or declare it an open city and pull out. That would have been very bad."

  "I'll say it would," Morrell agreed. Since the War of Secession, and especially since the Second Mexican War, Philadelphia had been the de facto capital of the United States: Washington was simply too vulnerable to Confederate guns in the hills on the south side of the Potomac. Could the United States have gone on with the war after losing both their de jure and de facto capitals? Maybe. Morrell was glad they hadn't had to find out.

  Despite the hour, motor traffic kept rumbling through the city, probably interrupting bureaucrats' sleep. Philadelphia wasn't just an administrative center; it was also a key assembly point for southbound men and materiel. Here and there, Morrell saw houses and shops and buildings that had taken damage. "The Rebs never got into artillery range of you, did they?" he asked.

  "No, sir," Abell answered. "They send bombing aeroplanes over us when they can, though. A lot of bombs have fallen around the War Department, but only a couple on it." His lip curled. "They can't aim for beans."

  It wasn't as if the War Department were a small target, either. It covered a lot of space between the United States Mint and Franklin Square. Thinking of it as one building was a mistake, too; it was a whole great complex, some structures of marble, some of limestone, some of prosaic brick. The driver had to jam on the brake several times to keep from running down uniformed men hustling from one building to another.

  When he finally stopped, it was in front of a building that looked more like a tycoon's house than anything the government maintained. "One way to keep from being noticed is to look poor and worthless," Captain Abell said, noting Morrell's expression. "Another way is to look rich and useless."

  If the Confederates didn't know exactly where the U.S. Army General Staff made its headquarters, Morrell would have been astonished. He didn't say anything, though, but hopped out of the Ford and followed Captain Abell into the build
ing. By the captain's reasoning, the sentries outside should have been decked out in servants' livery and carried trays for visitors' cards rather than rifles. Morrell was relieved to see they weren't and didn't.

  Inside, the place was ablaze with electric lamps. Morrell blinked several times. The security officer to whom Captain Abell took him was brisk, thorough, efficient. After satisfying himself that Morrell really was Morrell, he gave him a temporary pass and said, "Good to have you with us, Major."

  "Thanks," Morrell answered, still a long way from sure he was glad to be here. No matter what William Dudley Foulke had said, could you really fight a war in a fancy place like this?

  Then Abell took him into the map room. Morrell had always had a fondness for maps; the more you studied them, the more you geared strategy and tactics to the terrain, the better off you were liable to be.

  And here was the whole war, spread out before him in blue and red lines and arrows. Both Ontario fronts kept on being clogged, the enemy had the initiative in Manitoba, Kentucky still hadn't been knocked out of the fight. Guaymas remained in Rebel hands. (Morrell's leg twinged.) Utah was still in flames, too. But the Confederates were being driven from Pennsylvania, the USA had bitten off big chunks of Sequoyah, and the Rebs had been chased from New Mexico and well back into Texas. Other maps showed the confused fighting at sea.

  His head swung back and forth, as if on a swivel. Seeing all the maps together, he felt like a general, not just a major worrying about his tiny part of the big picture. "I think I'm going to like this place," he said.

  The motorcar carrying Jacob Colleton kicked up a plume of red-brown dust as it came up the path toward Marshlands. "Is everything ready?" Anne Colleton demanded of Scipio, her voice harsh.

  "Yes, ma'am," he answered; she would have been astonished to hear him say anything else. "The room is waiting for him. Dr. Benveniste should be here momentarily, and we are prepared to do all we can."

  "All we can," Anne echoed. There in the back seat of the motorcar sat her brother, stiff and pale as a mannequin. He'd be sitting or standing for a long time, maybe for the rest of his life. If he lay down, the telegram had warned her, the fluids in his gas-ravaged lungs were liable to choke him to death.

  She opened the door as the motorcar jounced to a stop. Scipio rolled out the wheeled chair that had belonged to her great-grandfather after he started having strokes. But he'd been an old man. Jacob should have had a long, healthy life stretching ahead. It might still be long. The question was, did Jacob wish it would be short?

  The Negro chauffeur (Anne wondered if he was the man who'd driven Tom down from Columbia, but who paid enough attention to Negroes to be sure?) opened the door so Jacob could get out of the motorcar. The effort of sliding over, getting out, and walking two steps to the chair set him coughing, and that set him groaning. He sighed when he sat in the chair, and that made him groan anew.

  Anne gave the chauffeur two dollars. "Thank you, ma'am!" he exclaimed, tipping his cap. The grin was broad and white across his black face; she'd greatly overpaid him. She didn't care. Her brother was worth it. The Negro climbed back into the automobile, put it in reverse so he could turn away from the mansion and the people who had come out of it, and drove off.

  Jacob Colleton looked up at his sister. "Not quite the homecoming I had in mind when I went off to war," he said. His voice was a rasping whisper, as if he were a hundred years old and had smoked a hundred cigars a day for every one of those years.

  "You hush, Jacob. We'll make you as comfortable as we can," Anne replied. Her brother's voice, so far from the vibrant baritone she remembered, made her grind her teeth at the inadequacy of what she'd just said. So did the purple circles under his eyes, almost the only color in his corpse-pale face. "You're coming home a hero, the same way they did after the War of Secession."

  "A hero?" His laugh was a coughing wheeze. "I'd had two cups of coffee and I was on my way to the latrine when the damnyankees gassed us. Only fool luck my men took me with 'em when they fell back. Otherwise I'd be in a prison camp or a Yankee hospital. Not a damn thing heroic about it."

  Speaking so much gave him color, but not of a healthy sort: his whole face turned a leaden violet, as if he were being strangled. And so he was, from the inside out. He sounded much the way Tom had, too, utterly forgetful of the patriotism that had sent him rushing to join the fight against the USA.

  "When we get you to your room, what can we bring you?" Anne asked.

  "Whiskey," Jacob answered. "Morphia, if you can lay hold of it."

  "Dr. Benveniste is on his way," she said. "He'll prescribe it." If he doesn't, he'll be sorry. She nodded to Scipio. "Take him upstairs. We'll discuss permanent service arrangements for him shortly."

  "Yes, ma'am," the butler said, and then, to Jacob, "I'll be as careful as I can, sir."

  Jacob let out a sound full of pain only once, when Scipio had trouble getting the chair smoothly over the threshold. Then, in the front hall, he had to stop, because Marcel Duchamp was standing there and would not move. The artist stared avidly at Jacob Colleton. "Modern man as defective part in the assembly line of war," he murmured. "Or is it man as perfect part? — the end product of what war is designed to produce."

  He probably did not mean to be offensive; he must have seen Jacob not as Anne's injured brother but as an inspiration for art. At that moment, she did not care what he meant. "Get out," she said in a cold, deadly voice. "Pack your paintings and be gone from this house by tomorrow."

  "But where shall I go?" Duchamp exclaimed in horror, sweat beading on his forehead.

  "You can go to Columbia. You can go to Charleston. Or, for that matter, you can go to hell," Anne told him crisply. "I don't care. You are no longer welcome here." He tried to outstare her, to will her into changing her mind. Men had tried that with her before, and all of them had gone away defeated. So did Marcel Duchamp.

  Then he tried for the last word: "You are not modern. You are only a rich atavism, playing with the new but belonging to the old."

  That held enough truth to hurt. Looking down at poor Jacob, Anne saw how important things like the ties of family truly were to her. If those things had a smaller place in the world Duchamp inhabited, she would turn her back on that world, or on the parts of it she did not care for. She let the Frenchman see none of that. "I'll take my chances," she said. "And what I told you stands. Now get out of the way, or I'll throw you out this instant."

  "Should have thrown him out before he got here," Jacob croaked; like Tom, he'd had no use for the exhibition of modern art. "But you don't need to throw him out now on account of me. Far as I can see, he was right. That's what war does: makes lots and lots of things just like me."

  "Take him upstairs, Scipio." Anne didn't directly answer her brother, but she was never one to change her mind once she'd made it up. Duchamp would go, or she would throw him out.

  Dr. Saul Benveniste arrived a few minutes later: a short, dark, clever man who looked, she thought, as Confederate founding father Judah P. Benjamin might have looked were he as thin as Alexander Stephens. The doctor went upstairs and came down a few minutes later. "I've given him morphia," he said. "I'll leave a supply here so you can give him more whenever the pain is very bad. Past that-" He spread his hands and shrugged.

  "Is there any treatment you can give?" Anne asked. "Something that will make his lungs better, I mean, not just something to relieve the pain."

  "I don't know of any," the doctor answered, his brown eyes mournful. "But then, nobody knows much about the business of poisonous gases, though I expect we'll all learn. You have to understand-the tissue in there is burned. I can't repair that from the outside. Breathing warm, moist air may help, and Marshlands has a good supply of that. He may heal some on his own, too. I can't really offer a long-term prognosis. I'm too ignorant."

  "Thank you for being honest with me," she said.

  "I'll do everything I can for him," Benveniste said. "I don't want you to get any exaggerated notions of h
ow much that's likely to be, though."

  "Thank you," Anne repeated. Then she said, "He wants whiskey. Will having it make him worse?"

  "His lungs, you mean? I don't see why," Dr. Benveniste told her. "Most of the time, I don't have much good to say about drinking whiskey. Now, though-" He shrugged again. "If he hurts less drunk, is that so bad?"

  "Not in the least," she said. "All right, Doctor. I'll call you as I need you."

  Benveniste nodded and left. His Ford started up with a bang and a belch, then rattled away.

  Anne went upstairs. Her brother was sitting up in bed, propped up by pillows. He had a bit more color than when he'd arrived at Marshlands. Nodding to Anne, he said, "Here I am, a relic of war," in his ruined voice.

  "Dr. Benveniste said they might come up with new ways to make you better before too long," Anne told him. Dr. Benveniste hadn't quite said that, but he had said he didn't know much about treating poison-gas cases, so surely he and other medical men would be learning new things about them. And giving her brother hope counted a good deal, too.

  "Best thing he could have done for me was shoot me through the head," Jacob said. "Morphia's the next best thing, though. I'm still on fire inside, but it's not as big a fire." He yawned; the drug was making him sleepy. Though his bedroom was rather dim, the pupils of his gray eyes were as small as if he'd been in bright sunshine.

  He yawned again, then started to say something. The words turned into a soft snore. Without his seeming to realize it, his eyelids slid shut. The snore got deeper, raspier; Anne could hear the breath bubbling in and out of his tormented lungs, as if he had pneumonia.

  She walked out into the hall and called one of the servants: "Julia!" When the Negro woman had come into Jacob's bedroom, she said, "I want you to sit here and make sure my brother does not lie down, no matter what. If he starts to slump away from the pillows that are supporting him, you are to straighten him up. Someone will have to be here all the time when he's asleep. I'll make arrangements with Scipio for that. Do you understand what I've told you?"