Breakthroughs

by Harry Turtledove

  Had Nicole been marrying some young man of the vicinity, he too would have worn a black suit of no particular age (and no particular shape), and like as not a cravat his father had tied for him. Dr. Leonard O’Doull, on the other hand, wore a cutaway, white tie, trousers pressed into creases scalpel-sharp, and a stovepipe hat. When Georges saw him in his splendor, he whistled and said, “I thought I was getting a doctor for a brother-in-law, not a Rockefeller.”

  “And I thought I was getting a troublemaker for a brother-in-law, and I see I was right,” Dr. O’Doull returned. He refused to let Georges get his goat. Lucien reckoned that the best way to handle his younger son, who was indeed a troublemaker.

  Father Fitzpatrick came up to them, a little man with a beaky nose and hair the color halfway between rust and a sunset. “We’ll do it in just a few minutes, now,” he said. He spoke Parisian French with a peculiar lilting accent. When he spoke English with Dr. O’Doull, the lilt remained.

  “This is good,” Lucien said. “This is very good.” He slowed his own speech a little for the priest’s benefit. Turning to his daughter’s fiancé, he asked, “Are you nervous?”

  “Of course I’m nervous,” O’Doull answered. Georges looked disappointed; had O’Doull tried to deny it, Lucien’s son would have made him pay. The American doctor went on, “Weren’t you nervous when you married your wife?”

  “Now that I think on it, it could be that I was,” Galtier said, and pursed his lips to show he knew he was understating things. He’d been as nervous as a man getting a half-grown lynx out of a tree, and he’d known Marie since they were both children. O’Doull had known Nicole only since they began working together at the hospital. No wonder he was nervous.

  Friends and relatives filed into the church. Most of them waved to Lucien; some came over to shake hands with him and O’Doull. A few went inside with rather sour expressions. They were families with young men who might possibly have been matched to Nicole had her father not chosen this outsider. In their shoes, he would have shown a long face, too.

  And then it was time to go inside, and for Lucien to lead Nicole down the aisle toward the altar. In her dress all of white, she looked very young and very beautiful. She beamed at him through the veil. He patted the hand she’d set on his arm. If she was happy, he would be happy. And, even if Dr. O’Doull was an American, he struck Galtier as a solidly good fellow.

  So did Father Fitzpatrick, though he gave Lucien a start by pronouncing the Latin of his prayers in a most peculiar fashion. Galtier glanced sharply over at Father Pierre. The local priest remained calm. That let Lucien also remain calm. If Father Pierre thought Father Fitzpatrick’s pronunciation acceptable, God likely would, too.

  After Dr. O’Doull had opened Nicole’s veil and kissed her, after he had set a ring on her finger, people headed across the street to the hall Lucien had hired for the reception—the money Major Quigley had paid for back rent for the land on which the hospital stood was proving useful in all sorts of ways. Once there, Lucien got a drink and then found an excuse to get Father Pierre in a corner and ask him about Father Fitzpatrick’s Latin.

  Father Pierre was also holding a drink. He knocked it back, chuckled, and answered, “You need have no concern over that. English and Irish and American priests are in the habit of pronouncing their Latin as they believe the ancient Romans would have spoken.”

  “And you, how do you pronounce your Latin?” Lucien asked.

  “In the same way as does His Holiness the Pope,” Father Pierre said. “I think I have made the better choice, but the other is in no way evil, merely different.”

  “I also think you have made the better choice,” Lucien said. “In your mouth, Latin sounds splendid. In Father Fitzpatrick’s mouth, I found it harsh and rather ugly.”

  “Part of that is because you are not used to it,” the priest of St.-Antonin replied. “Their way does have a certain majesty to it—although, as I say, I prefer our own.” He rolled his eyes. “Trust English-speakers to pay no attention to what the rest of the world does.” Galtier laughed at that.

  “Where is the joke, mon beau-père?” Leonard O’Doull asked. He could properly call Lucien his father-in-law now.

  “Yes, Father, where is the joke?” Nicole echoed. Instead of Galtier’s arm, she clung with proud possessiveness to her new husband’s.

  “It is a matter of Latin,” Lucien answered. With any luck at all, that would impress and confuse both the newlyweds.

  It worked with his daughter, but not with O’Doull. The doctor thumped his forehead with the heel of his free hand. “But of course! I’m an idiot. Fitz learned his Latin the Ciceronian way, same as I did. But you folks here pronounce it as if the Romans had been Italians, don’t you? He must have sounded pretty funny to you.”

  “If our way is good enough for the Holy Father in Rome, it is good enough for me,” Galtier said. Behind him, Father Pierre nodded. “And yes, your friend’s Latin did sound odd, though I am given to understand it is also good, of its kind.”

  He wondered if that would insult the American. Instead, he saw that O’Doull was having a hard time not laughing. “Fitz’s Latin is certainly better than mine, these days,” his son-in-law said. “Who but a priest has the chance to keep his grasp of the language so fresh?”

  “You have reason,” Father Pierre said. “I speak no English, I am sorry to say, and many priests who do speak English know not a word of French—unlike your friend Father Fitzpatrick, whose French is very good, if, like his Latin, spoken in an interesting way. But with such folk I speak in Latin, and I am understood. Even with the differences in pronunciation, I am understood.”

  “It’s like the difference between the French of Paris and the French of Quebec,” O’Doull said.

  “Why, so it is!” The priest of St.-Antonin beamed at him, then turned to Lucien and slapped him on the back. “You are a fortunate man, to have a scholar as part of your family.”

  “I am a fortunate man,” Lucien said. “That is enough. And if I owe some of my good fortune to an American—why then, I do, that is all.”

  Before either Leonard O’Doull or Father Pierre could say anything to that, shouts from the street distracted both of them and Galtier, too. A couple of people near the doorway called out to learn what was going on. Lucien heard the reply very clearly: “The flag of the Republic of Quebec flies over the city of Quebec!”

  Several other people who also heard shouted for joy. A moment later, somebody punched one of them in the nose. Half a dozen men jumped on the puncher and threw him out. To Lucien’s dismay, he saw the fellow sprawled in the street with his trousers torn was a cousin he’d always liked pretty well.

  Before the reception could turn into a free-for-all, he let out a great bellow: “Enough!” He was loud enough to make everyone turn around and notice him. Still at the top of his lungs, he went on, “This is a wedding, not a political rally. Anyone who wishes to make it a political rally will answer to me.” He cocked a fist, leaving no doubt about what he meant.

  “And me!” Georges and Charles said in the same breath, standing shoulder to shoulder with their father.

  That settled that. People horrified at the victory of the Americans and the Republic of Quebec (very much in that order) over the Canadian and British troops defending the capital of what had been the Canadian province of Quebec kept that horror to themselves. Lucien Galtier felt some, as he watched the world with which he was long familiar crack further. But his manner also persuaded those who were delighted with the success of the Republic to keep their mouths shut. The reception went on.

  Marie came up to him and spoke quietly: “You did very well there.”

  “Did I?” Lucien shrugged. “I do not know. What should I feel? I was torn in two when France lay down her arms to Germany. Now I am torn in two again. What we had is not what we shall have.”

  “Change.” His wife spoke the word as if it were more filthy than tabernac. “Why can the world not stay as it has always been?�
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  Now it was Galtier’s turn to whisper: “You ask this at the wedding of your eldest daughter to an American doctor? How many American doctors would have come to the farm a-courting without the war? Not more than six or eight, I am certain.”

  Marie stuck an elbow in his ribs. “And I am certain you are as much trouble as Georges, which is saying a good deal. I am also certain Dr. O’Doull is a fine young man, even if he is an American.”

  “I am certain of this as well, else I should never have allowed him to join the family,” Galtier said. “And I am certain we have profited since the Americans came, when everything is taken all in all. But in doing so, we have turned our backs on everything that we knew and taken hold of everything that is new. Do you wonder that I worry on account of it?”

  “I wonder that you worry so little on account of it,” Marie answered.

  “This only shows that, wife of mine as you have been these many years, you do not know every dark place inside my heart,” Lucien told her. “I worry—how I worry! But I have got by…we have got by. And, old or new, we will go on getting by.” Now he spoke with great determination. After a moment, Marie nodded.

  Lieutenant General George Custer was in a state, and, for once, his adjutant was damned if he blamed him. “On my front!” Custer shouted. “Roosevelt accepts a cease-fire on my front! Does he accept a cease-fire on any other front? In a pig’s arse he does! Why my front? Why my front alone?”

  “He must have reasons,” Major Abner Dowling said, though he’d been hard pressed to find any that made sense to him.

  “Oh, he has reasons, all right,” Custer snarled. He had no trouble finding them, either: “He wants to rob me of my glory, that’s what he wants to do. He always has, damn him. He never let me go to Canada, to lead our soldiers there. And now this is the front where we first broke through the Rebels’ lines. This is the front where the U.S. Army learned how to break through the Rebels’ lines. And this is the front Teddy Roosevelt chose to halt. Do I have to draw you a picture, Major?”

  “Sir, you can’t mean that,” Dowling said.

  He might as well not have spoken, for Custer ranted right through him: “That man in the White House has tried to rob me of the credit I deserve for the past thirty-five years. I was the one in command when we drove Chinese Gordon out of Montana during the Second Mexican War, but who stole the headlines? Roosevelt and his Unauthorized Regiment, that’s who. Tell me to my face, Major, that he’s not doing the same thing now. Look at the map and tell me that to my face!”

  Dowling obediently looked. The longer he looked, the more he wondered whether the general commanding First Army didn’t have a point. If Roosevelt hadn’t accepted the cease-fire, how far would U.S. forces have advanced by now?

  Custer, inevitably, had his own opinion about that: “Murfreesboro? To hell with Murfreesboro! We’d be pushing on toward Chattanooga by now, damn me to hell if we wouldn’t.” Fortunately for him, Dowling couldn’t do anything of the sort. Chattanooga was a long way away.

  “I doubt that, General.” The voice came from the doorway. Dowling turned. His mouth fell open. There, grinning, stood Theodore Roosevelt. How much of Custer’s tirade had he heard? By the look of that grin, altogether too much. Dowling kissed his own career good-bye.

  And Custer wasn’t finished. Custer wasn’t anywhere close to finished. “How dare you inflict this indignity on First Army, Mr. President? How dare you?” he demanded. “Whatever you may think of me, the brave soldiers who have given so much to the cause deserve to be in at the kill.”

  Many of those soldiers would have agreed with him, too, though being in at the kill might have meant their dying. Dowling knew as much; complaints from the front kept flooding into Nashville.

  Roosevelt said, “Either the Confederates will yield on all fronts in a week’s time, General, or you will be moving forward again. That I promise you. Maybe you will be able to aim toward Chattanooga after all.”

  “Why the devil did you halt me in the first place?” Custer said, anything but mollified. “Even more to the point, why did you halt me and no one else? You do not serve your country well by bearing a grudge across so many years.”

  If that wasn’t the pot complaining of the kettle’s complexion, Dowling had never heard any such. But Roosevelt didn’t rise to the bait. Instead, walking over to the map on the wall, he pointed to the ground First Army had seized south of the Cumberland. “I stopped First Army, General, because you have done something no other U.S. force has accomplished.”

  “You halted us because we did better than any other force you have?” Custer howled. “You admit it?”

  “That’s not what I said, General,” Roosevelt answered sharply. “Your unique achievement is easy to describe: in moving south of the Cumberland, yours is the only force to have captured territory I am willing to return to the Confederate States in exchange for concessions elsewhere. We go from the realm of war into the realm of diplomacy here—do you see?”

  “Ahh.” That wasn’t Custer; it was Abner Dowling. He wasn’t sure he agreed with what Roosevelt was doing (not that the president would lose any sleep if he didn’t), but he was profoundly relieved Roosevelt was doing it for some other reason besides (or at least in addition to) pique against Custer.

  Custer himself did not give over sputtering and fuming. “Why on earth should we give any land we’ve taken back to the Rebs? When I was a lad, this was all part of the United States, and so it should be again.”

  “In principle, General, I agree with you,” Roosevelt answered. “In practice, the line we occupy—and what we can reasonably hope to take—will not give us a neat, defensible frontier everywhere along it. We’ll do some horse trading at the table, and this stretch south of the Cumberland I can trade without a second thought.”

  “You won’t have to do much trading, sir,” Dowling said. “We hold the whip.”

  “That’s true, Major, but I can’t wipe the Confederate States from the face of the earth, however much I might want to,” the president answered. “Kaiser Bill can’t make France go away, either. If we weaken them, though, and make them pay, they won’t trouble us for a long while.”

  “Then, by thunder, when we do fight them again, we’ll put paid to them once and for all,” Custer said. He rubbed his age-gnarled hands together. “Damned if I don’t look forward to reuniting the country at last.”

  He sounded as if he looked forward to commanding U.S. soldiers in the next war against the CSA. If, as Roosevelt hoped, the Confederates would have to lie quiet for a long time, the wait would put him up into his nineties—or beyond. Maybe he didn’t think about that. Maybe he thought about it and didn’t care: having gone on for so long, he might believe he could go on forever.

  Major Dowling asked, “Mr. President, for what land might you want to swap what we’ve taken south of the Cumberland?”

  “What I have in mind getting is the little chunk of southeastern Kentucky the Confederates still hold,” Roosevelt answered. “Lord knows it’s not worth much as far as land goes, but having the whole state in our hands will make life simpler after the shooting stops. The Confederates won’t be able to keep Kentucky in their Congress then, or to go on electing senators and a congressman or two who’ll spend all their time speechifying about how the Confederacy needs to take back their home state. I want it gone from their minds, altogether gone, and that will be that.”

  “That makes a…good deal of sense,” Dowling said slowly. Because of his bulldog aggressiveness, Roosevelt didn’t get the credit he deserved either as a politician or as a statesman. “The Germans had no end of trouble from France when they took part of Lorraine after the Franco-Prussian War but let the froggies keep some, too. Better they should have grabbed it all, to make the break clean.”

  Roosevelt beamed at him. “The very example I had in mind, as a matter of fact, Major.” Dowling beamed, too; looking smart in front of your boss never hurt. The president went on, “Our allies will correct that omis
sion in the forthcoming peace, I assure you.”

  Custer coughed, one of those coughs loosed for no other purpose than to draw attention to oneself. “This is all very well, your Excellency, I have no doubt, but why do it at the expense of what First Army has achieved? If you must trade the Confederates land for land, why not give them back some of the vast worthless stretches we’ve captured west of the Mississippi, in Arkansas and Sequoyah and Texas and Sonora?”

  “Not all that land out there is worthless, General,” Roosevelt answered. “The stretch of Arkansas we hold puts Memphis under our guns, which emphatically is worth doing. Sequoyah is full of oil and gas, and we can use them: motorized machines grew ever more important as this war moved along. And as for the land that is largely worthless—that being so, why would the CSA want it back?”

  “It still strikes me as unjust that my forces should be singled out for this halt,” Custer said. “We deserve better than that.”

  I deserve better than that, he meant. Dowling had no trouble understanding as much, and neither did Theodore Roosevelt. He blew air out through his mustache before replying, “General, would you not say that, in your long and distinguished military career, you have already been treated better than you deserve?”

  “I haven’t the faintest idea what you are referring to, Mr. President,” Custer said, bristling, “and I resent the imputation.”

  “Resent all you like,” Roosevelt growled. Abner Dowling did his best to seem a large, corpulent fly on the wall. He listened avidly as Roosevelt continued, “When we were taking our position north of the Teton, you were the one who wanted to move back the Gatling guns that chopped the British infantry to dog-meat. If we had moved them, the limeys probably would have overrun us. The only reason you ever got to be a hero, you pompous fraud, is that Colonel Welton and I talked you out of it.”

  “That’s a damned lie!” Custer shouted.