American Front gw-1

by Harry Turtledove

  He didn't sound overtly hostile, but the General Staff had an air of genteel politeness over and above the usual military courtesies, so that didn't signify anything. Wondering whether to ask for a blindfold, Morrell walked past the captain and into the office. He came to stiff attention and saluted. "Major Irving Morrell reporting as ordered, sir."

  "At ease, Morrell," Leonard Wood said, returning the salute. He was a broad-shouldered man in his mid-fifties, with iron-gray hair and a Kaiser Bill mustache waxed to a pointed perfection that didn't quite go with his craggy, tired-looking features. Morrell eased his brace only a fraction. Wood said, "Relax, Major. You're not in trouble. The reverse, in fact."

  "Sir?" Morrell said. He couldn't fathom why the general had summoned him, if not to call him on the carpet.

  Instead of explaining, Wood went off on a tangent: "You may have heard that I earned a medical degree before I went into the Army."

  "Yes, sir, I have heard that," Morrell agreed. He didn't know where General Wood was going, but he wasn't about to try to keep him from getting there.

  "Good," the chief of staff said. "Then you'll have an easier time under standing why I was extremely interested when a memorandum from you and Dr. Wagner reached my desk earlier this year."

  "Dr. Wagner?" In any setting less august, Morrell would have scratched his head. "I'm afraid I don't remember — "

  "From Tucson," Wood broke in impatiently. "The memorandum where the two of you were discussing the potential advantages of protective headgear."

  Light dawned on Morrell. "Oh. Yes, sir," he said. He'd utterly forgotten the physician's name, if he'd ever known it. He'd forgotten their conversation shortly before he was discharged, too. He'd figured the doctor had also forgotten it, but that looked to be wrong. Not only had Wagner remembered, but he'd remembered to give Morrell half the credit, too. Not just a doctor — that damn near made him a prince.

  General Wood leaned over the side of his chair, picked something up, and set it on his desk: a steel helmet shaped like a bowl, with a projecting brim in front and an extension in the back to give the neck a little extra protection. "What do you think of your idea, Major?" he asked.

  Morrell picked up the helmet. It weighed, he guessed, a couple of pounds. Leather webbing inside kept it from resting right on a man's head; a leather chin strap with an adjustable buckle would help it stay on. He rapped the green-gray painted metal with his knuckles. "Will it really stop bullets, sir?" he asked.

  Wood shook his head. "Not square hits, no — it would probably have to be three times as heavy to do that. But it will deflect glancing rounds and a lot of shrapnel balls and shell fragments. Head wounds are so often fatal, anything we can do to diminish them works to our advantage."

  "Sir, you're a hundred per cent right about that," Morrell said. He thought of the man in the bed next to him in Tucson, the man who'd been made into a vegetable in the blink of an eye. The memory made him want to shiver. Better to die straight out than to linger on like that without hope of ever having a working mind again.

  "A commendation for this idea will go into your permanent file, Major," Wood said. "Our German allies, I understand, are going to copy the notion from us, and I've heard, though it's always hard to gauge how much truth comes from sources in enemy country, that the froggies are also working along similar lines. But we have the helmet first, and that's thanks in large part to you."

  "Thank you very much, sir," Morrell said. Getting credit for the idea had never crossed his mind, not least because he'd never thought it would see the light of day. "I hope Doctor, uh, Wagner gets a commendation, too, sir. If it hadn't been for him, this never would have gotten off the ground."

  "Yes, he has a commendation coming, too," General Wood assured him. "But such things count for rather more on a fighting soldier's curriculum vitae, eh?"

  "Yes, sir." Morrell hefted the helmet. "Sir, may I keep this one? If I'm ever transferred back to the front, I'll need one, and I'd be honored to have it be the one you gave me yourself."

  "My pleasure," Wood said, and Morrell tucked the helmet under his left arm. The chief of staff studied him. "So you want to get back to the front, do you? Why does that not surprise me? Fighting the war with map and wire isn't your chosen style, is it?"

  Morrell had had very much the same thought himself. "Sir, I like the out doors; I always have. I like hiking and fishing and hunting a lot better than fill ing out forms and such. I think I'm more useful to the country up at the front, if you want to know the truth."

  General Wood steepled his fingers. "What you're saying, Major, is that you'd have a better time up at the front than you do here, which is not the same as being more useful to the country. We're going to teach you everything we can here, Major, and I suspect you'll teach us a few things, too. If you measure up, we'll change the color of the oak leaves on your shoulders, maybe give you eagles instead, and we'll send you back to the front in charge of a regiment. Then you'll be more useful to your country."

  "Uh, thank you, sir," Morrell said again. He'd dared hope something like that might happen, but he hadn't taken the notion seriously. He made a men tal note to write General Foulke a thank-you letter. Foulke must have seen something in him that he liked, and sent him on to the General Staff to find out if they saw it, too. That was how careers got made, if you were good-and lucky enough to be good when people were watching.

  Wood said, "This isn't for your benefit, Major: it's for the benefit of the United States of America. We are surrounded by foes on all sides, as we have been since the days of the War of Secession: the Confederate States and the Empire of Mexico to the south, Canada to the north, England and France across an Atlantic none too wide, and the Japanese and the British Empire across the Pacific. Seizing the Sandwich Islands was a heavy blow against them; otherwise, they'd be menacing our western coast even now. But they are going to try to take those islands back, as a first step toward carrying the war to our shores. Surrounded, as I say, we can't afford to waste talent if we see it." He went from cordial to brisk in the space of a heartbeat. "Dismissed, Major."

  Morrell saluted, did a smart about-face, and left the office of the Chief of the General Staff. The lieutenant was still in the antechamber with General Wood's adjutant. He bounced to his feet. "Do you need me to guide you back to your assigned area, sir?"

  "I don't think so," Morrell answered. "I expect I can manage on my own, unless the birds have eaten the trail of crumbs I left behind." The lieutenant looked blank. The adjutant chuckled, recognizing the allusion.

  Three different men stopped Morrell in the hallway, all of them exclaim ing about the helmet he was carrying. Two of them, like him, were ecstatic. The third, a white-bearded brigadier general in his late sixties who might have first seen action in the War of Secession, shook his head in dismay. "It's a damned shame we have to resort to means like those to fill the men with the spirit of aggression," he growled, and walked on.

  Being far outranked, Morrell didn't answer. He didn't see anything wrong with giving the common soldier some slightly better chance to do his job with out getting killed or dreadfully wounded.

  He set the helmet down beside the map of the Utah rebellion. Try as he would, he couldn't make himself believe the General Staff had come up with the best possible plan there was. His first efforts to convince his superiors otherwise had failed. If he was going to try again, he'd have to be more subtle.

  He was poring over the map when someone behind him said, "Major Morrell?"

  "Yes?" Morrell turned around. Before the turn was completed, he came to attention and revised his words: "Yes, Mr. President?"

  Theodore Roosevelt pointed to the helmet. "General Wood tells me that's partly your idea. It's a bully one, I must say. We aim to win this war, but we aim to do it with the greatest possible efficiency and care for the men who fight it. Your notion goes a long way toward that end. Congratulations."

  "Thank you, sir," Morrell said. He'd known Wood and TR were longtime friend
s. He hadn't imagined that might ever matter to him.

  "What other useful ideas have you?" Roosevelt pointed to the map of Utah. "How would you cauterize that running sore, for instance?" He sighed. "My experience has been that, man for man, Mormons make excellent, even outstanding, citizens. In a mass, though, their religion gives them the ambition to be a nationality of their own rather than Americans. This, I realize, is in no small measure engendered by the treatment they have received at the hands of the United States since the 1850s. But fault is irrelevant. Revolt and secession from our country cannot be tolerated."

  "Yes, sir," Morrell said. "What would I do in Utah, sir?" He took a deep breath and explained to the president what he would do in Utah.

  Roosevelt listened with poker face till he was through, then said, "Have you presented these ideas to the General Staff with a view toward implement ing them?"

  "I have presented them, yes, sir," Morrell answered. "My superiors are of the opinion they're impractical."

  "Fiddlesticks," TR burst out. "Your superiors are of the opinion that, since they didn't think of these things themselves, they can't be any good. That's what you get for your low rank, Major Morrell." He stood up straight and stuck out his chest. "7 have not got a low rank, Major. When I see something worth doing, it has a way of getting done. I'm glad we had this little talk. A very good day to you." He hurried off.

  Morrell stared after him, somewhere between horror and delight. If Roo sevelt started shouting orders, the plan for operations in Utah would change. Morrell was confident enough that the results could not be worse than those now being obtained. Would they be better? Would they be perceived as being better? If they were perceived as being better, would he get the credit for that-or the blame?

  Roosevelt slammed a door behind him. He was shouting already. Morrell glanced over to the helmet he'd brought from General Wood's office. He snorted. When he took it, he hadn't imagined he'd need to wear it inside Gen eral Staff headquarters. But TR might have taken care of that.

  Achilles started crying. This was the third time he'd started crying since Cincinnatus and Elizabeth had gone to bed. Cincinnatus didn't think it was far past midnight. The baby might wake up a couple of more times before morning. When he woke up, Cincinnatus woke up. He'd be a shambling wreck on the Covington docks. He'd been a shambling wreck a lot of the days since Achilles was born.

  With a small groan, Elizabeth staggered out of bed and over to the cradle where Achilles lay. She picked him up and carried him into the front room to nurse him. Nights were even harder on her than they were on Cincinnatus. She came back from her domestic's work ready to fall asleep over supper.

  Cincinnatus twisted and turned, trying to get comfortable and get back to sleep. In the process, he wrapped sheet and blanket around himself till he might have been a mummy. When Elizabeth came back, she had to unroll him to give herself some bedclothes. That woke him up again.

  When the cheap alarm clock on the nightstand jangled, he jerked upright, as horrified as if a Confederate aeroplane had dropped a bomb on the house next door. Then he had to shake Elizabeth out of slumber; she hadn't so much as heard the horrible racket the clock made.

  They both dressed in a fog of fatigue. The smell of coffee drew Cincinna- tus to the kitchen like a magnet, though the stuff for sale in Covington these days had more chicory in it than the genuine bean. Whatever it was made of, it pried his eyelids open. After bacon and eggs and cornbread, he was more nearly ready to face the day than he would have believed possible fifteen min utes earlier.

  Someone knocked on the front door. Elizabeth opened it. "Hello, Mother Livia," she said.

  "Hello, dear," Cincinnatus' mother answered. "How's my little grand-baby?" Without giving Elizabeth a chance to answer, she went on, "He must have been a terror in the night again-I kin see it in your face."

  Cincinnatus grabbed his dinner pail and hurried out the door, pausing only to kiss his mother on the cheek. That damned Lieutenant Kennan timed things with a stopwatch; if you were half a minute late, you could kiss work for the day good-bye. Cincinnatus had seen it happen to too many other people to intend to let it happen to him.

  "Get your black ass going," the U.S. lieutenant snarled at him when he got to the waterfront. From Kennan, that was almost an endearment. Barges full of crates of munitions had crossed the Ohio. Cincinnatus and his work crew unloaded the barges and loaded trucks and wagons. U.S. soldiers drove them off toward the front. Cincinnatus had given up asking to be a teamster. The Yankees wouldn't hear of it, even if it would have freed up more of their men for actual fighting at the front lines.

  He disguised a shrug in a stretch as he walked back to unload another crate. Whites in the CSA had better sense. Black men in the Confederacy did everything but fight. They drove, they cooked, they washed, they dug trenches. Without them, white Confederate manpower would have been stretched too thin to have any hope of holding back the U.S. hordes.

  When the long day was done, the paymaster gave Cincinnatus the fifty- cent hard-work bonus. "God damn!" said Herodotus, who stood behind him in line. "That there's gettin' to be your reg'lar rate."

  "Got me a baby in the house now," Cincinnatus said, as if that explained everything-which, to him, it did.

  Herodotus said, "Plenty fellers here got five, six, eight chillun in de house. Don't see them gettin' no bonus."

  Cincinnatus shrugged again. That wasn't his lookout. An awful lot of people in this world wanted just to get by, no more. He'd always had his eye on doing better than that. Even now, in the middle of the war, he had his eye on the main chance. He didn't know what would come of it, but he did know he couldn't win if he didn't bet.

  Herodotus made a point of not walking home with him, as if to say he disapproved of such effort. That meant Cincinnatus was by himself when he noticed a wonderful smell in the warm, wet, late summer air. A moment later, a delivery wagon with the words Kentucky smoke house painted in big red letters rounded the corner. He waved to the driver, Apicius' son Felix.

  Felix slowed down and waved back. "My pa, he say for you to come in some time before too long," he called. "He got somethin' he want to talk over with you."

  "Do it right now," Cincinnatus said. Felix nodded, flicked the reins, and got the wagon moving again.

  When Cincinnatus got to the Kentucky Smoke House, the aroma there reminded him how hungry he was after a day hauling heavy crates. Apicius' other son, Lucullus, was basting the meat that turned on a spit over the firepit. Seeing Cincinnatus, he waved him into a little back room.

  In there, Apicius was stirring spices into a bubbling pot, making up more of the wonderful sauce that went onto his barbecued beef and pork. "Ha!" he said when Cincinnatus came in. "Saw Felix, did you?"

  "Sure did," Cincinnatus answered. "He said you wanted to see me 'bout somethin'. Somethin' to do with the underground, I reckon." He spoke quietly, after having closed the door behind him.

  Apicius gave the mixture in the iron pot another stir. "Might say that," he replied after a moment. He gave Cincinnatus a thoughtful glance. "How'd you get mixed up with those underground folks, anyways?"

  "Wish I hadn't, pretty much," Cincinnatus said, "but the white man I used to work for, he's one of 'em, and he was always pretty decent to me. 'Sides, from what I've seen, I ain't got much use for the USA, neither." He met and held Apicius' eyes. "How 'bout you?" Unless he got answers that satisfied him, he wasn't going to say anything more.

  Apicius' massive shoulders went up and down in a shrug. "First time the Yankee soldiers come in here, they clean me out of everything I got, they say they shoot me if I squawk, an' they call me more kind o' names'n I ever hear before. They ain't done nothin' like that since, mind you, but it don't make me want to cheer for the Stars an' Stripes."

  "Yeah, that's about right." Cincinnatus sighed. "I be go to hell, though, if I see us black folks gettin' any kind o' square deal after the war, an' it don't matter if the USA or the CSA win."

  "Dat's the exact
truth," Apicius said emphatically. "The exact truth, an' nothin' but the truth, so help me God." He held up a meaty hand, as if taking oath in court — not that blacks could testify against whites in court, not in the CSA. After stirring the barbecue sauce again, he went on, "On de odder hand, there's undergrounds and then there's undergrounds."

  "Is that a fact?" Cincinnatus said. If Apicius was going to come to a point, he hoped the fat cook would do it soon.

  And, in his own way, Apicius did. Offhandedly, he asked, "You ever hear tell about the Manifesto!"

  He didn't say what kind of manifesto. If Cincinnatus hadn't heard of it, he probably would have slid the talk around to something innocuous, then sent him on his way none the wiser. But Cincinnatus did know what he was talking about. He stared, wide-eyed. "Be you one of the people who — " He didn't go on. He'd heard about Reds a good many times, always in the whispers that were the only safe way to mention such people. He hadn't really imagined he would meet such an exotic specimen.

  "We git justice for ourselves," Apicius said in a voice that had nothing in it of the jolly-fat-man persona he affected, only steely determination. "Come the revolution, nobody treat a workin' man like dirt only on account of he be black."

  That was a heady vision. Cincinnatus, however, had already met the heady visions of the Confederacy and the United States, and seen how neither reality lived up to those visions. He had no reason save hope blinder than he could justify to believe the Red vision would be different. And besides — "Even if the revolution come in the CSA, right now we be under the USA, and it don't look like they gonna give us up."

  "Revolution comin' in the USA, too," Apicius replied with calm certainty. "Now we kin help the Red brothers in the CSA — we git stuff they kin use, ship it south, an'- What so funny?"

  Between giggles, Cincinnatus got out, "We take stuff the white men in the Confederate States ship north, an' use it to drive the damnyankees crazy. Then we take stuff the damnyankees ship south, an' use it to drive the white men in the CSA crazy. If that ain't funny, what is?"