Back in the USSA

by Kim Newman

  "Look," London said, pointing.

  They were by the Lincoln Memorial, and Jack London was looking upwards, at the massive white statue of Abraham Lincoln in repose.

  Reed could not see it, but London told him something that would be repeated, at first as a whisper, then as a cry of rage.

  While Charles Foster Kane was being inaugurated as President, the statue of Lincoln was weeping tears of ice.

  Friday, October 9, 1914. S.S. Titanic-, North Atlantic.

  They had only been out of Liverpool two days, but the orchestra in the First Class saloon had taken every available opportunity to defiantly play the liner's special anthem, "Sail on Great Titanic'. Weiss was heartily sick of the tune, but it was not his part to complain. The crew knew their countrymen were fighting for the existence of their nation and probably saw any celebration of British achievements as a patriotic duty.

  "Sail on Great Titanic" he hummed, "the ship that will never go down..."

  The rest of the orchestra's repertoire was strictly jingo as well. Even Strauss waltzes had been struck from the card. There was, however,

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  one patriotic song they wouldn't do. An hour ago, as the Captain was dining with some socialites who were fleeing to America to evade their duty, the band played a song Weiss had heard frequently in Britain before he left. He didn't know the title, but the refrain went "oh we don't want to lose you, but we think you ought to go..." It was a catchy melody, the words encouraging young men to sign up to fight for "your king and your country" For a moment, the room had fallen silent. The captain had flushed red and, it was rumoured, had to be dissuaded from clapping the bandleader in irons.

  He stood on the deck, watching the full moon in the waters. His supple hands were feeling the cold. The great White Star liner was moving at full speed, trying to dash away from the British Isles, and away from the U-boats as quickly as possible. Of course, not even the Fiendish Hun would sink an unarmed passenger liner. Just to make sure they got the message, the master had ordered as much light be shown as possible and had forbidden any curtains to be closed until they were well into the North Atlantic.

  Despite the chill, Weiss stayed outside, mainly to avoid the Colonel. The Colonel was in a perpetual rage, and Weiss knew better than most the reasons for his colourful choler. On the edge of bankruptcy, William Cody had been counting on "playing before the crowned heads of Europe" on one more tour before retiring. He resented the way his "close personal friend" Kaiser Wilhelm had invaded Belgium, dragging all the royal cousins and connections into a spat that was obviously going to rule out further engagements on the continent for the duration.

  All the British hired hands had upped and enlisted, leaving the Colonel unable even to entertain the Crowned Head of England. Now, the great Indian Fighter and Frontier Scout was having to transport, out of his own shallow pocket, over 100 of his ropers, riders, shooters and showmen from war-ravaged Europe to the safety of America.

  Weiss wished he had kept his act to himself, and refused to accept the Colonel's offer of a prominent position on the bill of the Wild West. The offer had been generous, because Cody had needed the Houdini name to revive flagging interest in his Wild West. He was especially irked by the great showman's current bugbear, his theory that the entire war was a conspiracy by Jews to undermine the strength of the white races. Everyone knew, he claimed, that it was a Jew who had shot Roosevelt.

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  Houdini sounded a lot less Jewish than Erich Weiss, but the eagle-eyed Colonel could surely not be stupid enough to be unaware of his race. In London, Weiss had been assailed twice by patriotic citizens who assumed from his real name that he was a German. Europe was one trap from which he was especially pleased to make an escape.

  Looking at the dark waves, Weiss saw a white fleck of foam and the black snake-neck of the conning-tower. Then, the two fluffy trails of white in the water, catching the light as they neared the side of the great liner.

  He looked around, but there was no one else on deck, no one to alert...He felt the explosions before he heard them.

  Taking a deep breath, which he knew from experience he could hold longer than anyone alive, he was ready for the curtain of water.

  Tuesday, May 9th, 1916. Chemin des Dames, France.

  "General Tom can't know about this," said Private Bartlett, face pale and sick under streaks of mud. "Else he'd do something to help us guys."

  Sam wasn't sure about that. He'd had his doubts about General Tom ever since the Kane press started calling him "the American Alexander" The suspicion had always been that Black Jack Pershing was supposed to run the War while General Tom posed for all the photographs, made the speeches and kissed the babies. He was the handsomest officer Sam had ever seen, fond of his white ten-gallon hat and pithy guts and glory slogans. He had been with Roosevelt in Cuba, he said, and had been friends with the martyred Colonel Cody. He claimed he had a personal reason to get that rat, Kaiser Billy.

  The story now was that Roosevelt had been struck down by a German bullet, the first of the Great War. Sergeant Hammett had never told what he knew, and had even been strangely pleased when he read in the accounts of the sinking of Titanic that Annie Oakley had survived, pulled out of the water by that funny little escapologist who had given his own life trying to save so many others in the freezing waters.

  The shelling had been continuous for a week. Most of the men in the forward trenches were dead. The barbed wire forests were splintered

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  into the mud. Sam thought he had an ear infection, and was on the point of going deaf.

  With Eddie, Hemingway and Dobbs, he had drawn the worst detail imaginable in the U.S. Expeditionary Force. Digging out the dead, recovering personal effects and weapons. Between them, they were about all that was left of the 305th Machine Gun Battalion.

  This was Chemin des Dames to the French, known in the U.S. Army as Ladies' Walk or, more poetically, the Road of the Damned. Officially a fortress, it was a muddy network of trenches, tunnels, artillery and gun positions, and huge underground galleries for use as living quarters, magazines and rudimentary hospitals. In summer, with a lot of work and without anyone throwing explosives at it, Chemin des Dames might have been a giant sandcastle, ideal for children playing soldiers. As it was, it was Sam's idea of Bloody Hell on Earth.

  Eddie Bartlett, a cheerful mechanic back in Brooklyn, was still smiling. He had one of those faces that wouldn't work any other way, and his fixed grin was horribly contradicted by his shattered eyes. Hemingway, a kid who had lied about his age to get into the action, was taking it quietly, saying less, getting on with the work. Fred Dobbs—Fred C. Dobbs, as he insisted—was bitching and griping, malingering as usual.

  Sam thought the privates were all near their breaking points. They had not slept since the shelling began. It was almost impossible.

  There had been a trench here, but now it was just a packed-in heap of earth and bodies. Bartlett and Hemingway dug with their entrenching tools, scraping away clods from the ruins of men.

  Weeks before last autumn's major offensive on the Somme, Pershing had been on a tour of the front lines. He had been standing next to a battery of field artillery during a practice, and a defective shell—like one in five of the shells supplied the army—had exploded in a breech, riddling him with steel splinters. Since then, Sam feared General Tom really had been in charge of the conduct of the War. That would explain the crazy, contradictory orders that occasionally filtered through to the front.

  In the Somme, the Americans had exchanged half a million men for two hundred square miles of territory the enemy had intended to yield anyway when they pulled back to positions they had been preparing for months. Since then, it had been a question of dig in, and get shelled, gassed, shot at, diseased, maddened or bombed.

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  A larg
e slab of earth fell away, disclosing the grinning, red-furred skull of a dead doughboy. Months ago, all four soldiers would have vomited instantly. Now, this was a commonplace. The skull still had staring blue eyes. He tried not to think this might have been someone he had known. With the rate of "replacements", it was unlikely. One infantry unit of seven hundred men could sustain such a high casualty rate that almost 7,000 soldiers might pass through it within a single year.

  Dobbs was a long-haul veteran, but Bartlett and Hemingway were Cody Soldiers, part of the flood who enlisted after the Kaiser sank Buffalo Bill. A recruiting poster had shown the fierce-bearded American at the bottom of the sea, waving a vengeful fist at a retreating U-Boat. Kane had wanted the War because it was good for newspaper circulation, good for business, good for taking citizens' minds off rumoured abuses in Washington. Factories were turning out dud shells very profitably. The old world was taking a pounding, the titled aristocracy sinking into the mud of France, and the energetic young forces of American capital were cleaning up.

  A month ago, ten soldiers of a unit posted in the front line between the Oise and Aisne rivers had been tried for mutiny and executed. Their mutinous act had consisted of being driven insane by the deaths of everyone around them.

  A few, like Bartlett, still believed that General Tom was with them. Everyone else was sunk in a mud of despair. Sam knew murders were being committed every day by sullen, desperate, fed-up soldiers who knew they would be dead soon and had nothing to lose. An unpopular NCO could not expect to outlive the week. The officers were in a bad state, afraid of their own men as much as of the enemy. Back home, fortunes were being made. Here, death was like a black gas cloud enveloping them all.

  Since the German offensive began, everything had been falling apart, and most of the supply services around Chemin des Dames had broken down. Positions had been lost through lack of ammunition, fighting men had collapsed from hunger and exhaustion for want of food provisions, wounded soldiers had died unnecessarily through lack of basic hygiene and medical supplies. The Germans, with saw-toothed bayonets and flamethrowers, might make it worse, but things were going to Hell quite nicely, thanks to American inefficiency and blundering.

  "We should try to talk to the General," Bartlett said, hitching his shoulders nervously. "He's a regular guy, he'd try to help..."

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  Sam was coughing again, and Hemingway had to help him up. His lungs had been weak since his ribs were broken, and the climate around here was not good for his health. He thought he might have caught a whiff of gas somewhere along the line.

  He could easily understand how the German commanders thought. The French would fight harder than the British because they were defending their country, and the British would fight harder than the Americans because if France fell, Britain would be next. Therefore, it was sound military sense to concentrate the offensive on the American lines. If they could break through between Noyon and Soissons, they might even have a chance to march on Paris.

  "General Tom is in that chateau at that place, Crappy...?"

  "Crepy-en-Valois," Hemingway said, quietly.

  "Yeah, there. We could go see him, tell him how it really is, cut through all them staff officers telling him lies."

  Sam coughed, painfully. "That'd be mutiny, Eddie," he said, his words not coming out properly.

  "He should know about the rifles that fall apart," Bartlett said, "the shells that don't work, the orders that don't make sense."

  Sam agreed. Hemingway nodded too. Tom Mix certainly ought to know about those things.

  "A man alone ain't got no bloody fucking chance," Hemingway said, eyes old beyond his years. Sam guessed the kid was not yet seventeen. He was a reader, who carted Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage, Jack London's The Iron Heel and Upton Sinclair's The Jungle in his duffel, even if they were mostly on the proscribed list drawn up by Kane's postmaster, Will H. Hays.

  "Hem," Bartlett said, "you can write good. Let's get up a list of them complaint things."

  "Grievances?"

  "Yeah, a list of grievances. We could get all the men in the unit to sign. Then, we could go see General Tom. He'd probably be grateful to us for talking straight, telling him the true facts."

  Sam was coughing so bad he had to sit down. Hemingway and Bartlett crowded around, concerned for their Sarge. Dobbs held back, leaning on his shovel, rat eyes glittering.

  "Yeah," Bartlett said, wonder and belief rekindling in his face, "let's go see General Tom."

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  Saturday December 16th, 1916.

  The Municipal Opera House, Chicago, Illinois.

  Parker leaned against the poster, slumped so he was smaller than the female figure depicted on it, and brought up blood.

  SUSAN ALEXANDER in Thais.

  Red splattered across the young diva's face, soaking in, giving her a panicked look.

  Everyone was in the auditorium, so the cavernous foyer was empty. Parker could hear the whining of the singers and the sawing of the orchestra. It was not what he would have picked to be the last thing he heard on this earth. A tiny voice struggled with the giant music.

  In his ears, he could still hear the echoes of the shots. Not the ones he had taken earlier this evening, but all the others. Thirty years' of gunfire, from Wyoming to Bolivia and back. What the Kid had said was true; if you didn't die young, you outlived your time. Now, Parker guessed time was catching up. He had a couple in the gut, and a bastard of a bullet in his wrist, lodged between the bones.

  A uniformed attendant saw him, and began limping across the acre of marble. One of his legs was tin, his young face was scarred. Since the War in Europe, America was left to cripples and relics.

  He was sitting now, having slid down the poster. Blood was soaking through his starched shirtfront. At least he was dressed for the opera.

  The President was in the auditorium, in a private box. Parker assumed that if what he had heard whispered about la Alexander were true, the First Lady and her cueball wizard would be otherwise engaged. Emily Kane must be annoyed by that, for she relished any chance to dress up. At the opening of the Ballets Russes, she had worn a gown that, according to the social column of the Inquirer, was made up of 100 square yards of French silk, imported from Europe despite U-boats and Zeppelins. Her diamonds were insured for a sum which would have fed an infantry division for a year.

  Parker had tried to get into the army. After all, he had always made a living with his gun. But he was too old, too often-shot, too forgotten.

  Still, he had served his President this evening.

  The attendant was with him now, his mouth opening and closing. All Parker could hear were gunshots.

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  He had his gold. But now he needed more. He had done his job, and now he needed help.

  Cross, he said, get Cross.

  The attendant didn't understand.

  Parker tried to stifle the pain in his gut, and said the name again, deliberately.

  "Noah Cross."

  Even this one-legged Cody soldier knew those were magic words.

  They had met in South America, when Parker was guarding gold shipments. The Machiavelli from California had been part-owner of the mining company, walking tall in his white suit, handing out coins to fellow Americans down on their luck, puffing on cigars. Noah Cross saved people. He tucked them away until they could be useful. Parker had been tucked away for nearly twelve years, a weapon kept oiled and polished until needed.

  The attendant was gone, and Parker relaxed his stomach, letting the pain grow and seep upwards.

  Since the election, there had been a lot of shooting, a lot of work. Kane had won his re-election but, according to the handbills you saw on the streets if the cops were tardy about closing down trouble-making printers, he had only out-polled Wilson and Taft because of an almost unanimous support of the dead. Everyone in the Bronx Cemetery had voted Kane. There were other
stories in the handbills, about the War, about the tins of army-issue beef that were offal swept from the slaughterhouse floor, explosives that were half-sawdust, gun barrels made from degraded materials that melted like wax. The Kane papers were full of victories and advances. Even after the troops rebelled, the Inquirer branded them as traitors in the pay of the Kaiser, not mutineers driven by appalling conditions.

  There were more handbills now. Even here in the palace the President had built with federal funds for his "singer". Scraps of crudely-printed paper wafted across the floor like discarded programmes, drifting against Parker's legs. He had no sensation below his stomach.

  Four years ago, the handbills would have reprinted speeches by Eugene Debs or Upton Sinclair. Now, they were reporting the opinions of Woodrow Wilson. WILSON ACCUSES, he read...

  An act must have finished, or perhaps the whole show. Parker saw the trails of elegant gowns across the marble, and perfectly-pantsed legs.

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  Inside, some were applauding, their claps rifle-shots, but most of the audience were getting out before the curtain was even down.

  This was society, he knew. With the President would be all his cronies, in and out of the administration. Vice President Bryan, Secretary of War Harding. Fords, Vanderbilts, Rockefellers, Dodsworths, Carnegies, Morgans. Underneath the shooting, Parker could hear the rustle of expensive material, the clink of jewellery, the snap of silver cigar cases. These, he knew, were the real sounds of murder.

  A woman, not more than a girl, stared at him, eyes impossibly huge. She was the most beautiful thing Robert Leroy Parker had ever seen, and diamonds enough to fill a king's chest sparkled on her shallow decolletage. Her escort stepped in front of her, and knelt down.

  It was Cross, a cigar in his hand.

  "You were not to come here, Butch."

  He slurped blood. Cross touched Parker's chest, and his fingers came away crimson-dipped. Smiling, he looked as if he wanted to lick his fingerprints clean.