Ten days in the wilderness restored the granite of New Hampshire in my muscles and my brain. I still had plenty of gas, towed on a trailer behind the truck, so I drove across Vermont to Ft. Drum in upper New York state. We had an active battalion of light infantry there, along with our light infantry school. Unannounced inspections are the only useful kind.
I was pleased to discover nobody got nervous when I arrived unexpected. John Ross was in command of both the battalion and the school, so I anticipated I'd find both in good shape, and I did. I turned the Southern campaign I’d just come from into an Operational Decision Game for the young officers and NCOs, forbidding them to use the real solution, which made it tough for them. It was tough for me to tell the story as it happened, including my own brain fart when McMoster faced me with his “What now, Field Marshal” question. But it was important for our young soldiers to hear me admit to my own error. Only honest commanders can build honest subordinates.
Trains have the advantage of being social. You meet people on trains, talk with them, and often develop the strange intimacy that comes from knowing you will part in a few hours, never to meet again. Travel on back roads opens other windows. You see people at work in their fields, factories, and homes. You develop a sense whether towns are prospering or decaying. You get an earful from hitchhikers (astonished and delighted to get a ride in a truck, not a wagon) and town drunks and old men in the diner and young women running inns. You can take the temperature of the land you’re passing through.
What I found that fall in the Northern Confederation gave me courage, and hope. People were beginning to make things work again. There was still great dislocation, and hardship. Most people were having to learn new and different ways, different from the modern, and build new lives. But the bottom was no longer falling out of everything, as it had seemed to do though the last decades of the American republic and the first years after it fell. On the streets of the small towns, people were looking out again instead of down.
Everywhere, the land was being reclaimed from wilderness for farms. With Asia populous and growing rich, world food prices were rising fast. A small farmer could make a good living. Chinese and Japanese freighters were loading our wheat, corn, oats, cattle, and sheep as fast as we could get them to our ports.
Inland, shipping meant the railroads, and along their steel spines the Metropolitan Corridor was coming to life again. As the auto-driven malls and strips lay crumbling, the towns along the railroads were reviving. People again came to town to sell their produce and crops and to buy the manufactures they needed. Each town’s railroad sidings were full of freight cars, and they didn’t sit there long. Merchants, too, began to earn livings, as “Saturday night in town” saw the sidewalks thick with people and stores open. More people window-shopped than bought, but they wanted to buy, and as they got money, they would.
Some found jobs with the railroads, the single greatest employer in the 19th century. The small town station agent was again a busy man. Wherever the capital could be assembled, trails were being converted back to rails. In Schenectady, the American Locomotive Works was turning out Consolidations, Mikados, and Ten-Wheelers.
Motoring in the Northern Confederation was a slow business, not just because of the state of the roads, but because the roads had people in them: people in wagons, people on bicycles, and, mostly, people on foot. Morning and evening, the crowds of kids walking to school swarmed the highways.
Because kids can’t walk very far, most of the schools they went to were local, one-room affairs. I stopped in and visited a number of them. There was one schoolteacher, usually a woman. She taught the older kids, and they did most of the teaching of the younger kids, which meant they really had to learn the material. Most communities had again posted the Ten Commandments up front by the blackboard—these schools relied on chalk, not computers—and everyplace I visited, the children were hard at work. No one need fear sending their kids to these public schools.
The roads were also full of people, walking, on Sundays. Dressed in the best clothes they had, they were going to or coming from church. Often, they did so twice, for morning and evening services, often with a big meal at someone’s house along the way. Like most else, the churches didn't have much money–the priest or preacher got paid in hens or firewood or eggs, most of the time – but they did again have people in them. Lots of people. Along most of the roads I traveled, new churches were going up, even when nothing else was. Priorities were changing.
Life was becoming local again, and local means real. The scale of most things was small. People found they could get their hands around their lives without everything running through their fingers. News was what the neighbor said over the back fence. The economy was the price of eggs or corn or butter. The girl’s heartthrob was the boy next door. Music was grandmother at the piano.
Most of the new ways people were discovering were old ways. Sometimes they knew that. Most often they probably didn’t, not then, not yet. But they were discovering what worked, and what worked was usually old, because we now lived under the same conditions people had known for many generations. And those generations had learned some things.
Poets write odes to the sweet air in Spring. I found a sweet smell in our air that fall. It wasn’t just the wood smoke.
By the time I got home to Hartland on the 14th of November, the leaves were gone, the fields were brown and the sky was speaking of snow. I wanted to spend the Winter at home, working on the General Staff histories of the Northern Confederation’s campaigns and an assessment of the Confederacy’s forces. I put the second first, partly to do it while it was fresh in my mind and partly because it was shorter. I had a draft by Thanksgiving, enough to send to Augusta. My mind was eager to get into the campaign histories like a kid is eager for Christmas. Everything in the way of it seemed tedious and exasperating. My ear’s dread of a phone call summoning me to another von Sander’s mission added to my impatience.
The phone call didn’t come. Instead, on the bright, prematurely frigid morning of December 5, 2034, someone knocked on the front door. I knew it had to be a stranger, because the locals all came around back to the mud room behind the kitchen. Maine front doors were reserved for formal events, and Maine didn’t have many of those.
I opened the door to find a big, square-jawed, blond-haired, blue-eyed kid, obviously military, but not in uniform. My first take was that it was one of our sergeants or junior officers, come to pay a call on his CO. If he wanted to see me enough to make his way to Hartland in winter, he was welcome to some of my time. He might learn something, and so might I. Here again, Maine wasn't formal.
“Good morning, Captain Rumford,” the kid said, snapping a salute. “I’m Hauptsturmführer Halsing of the Wisconsin Landwehr. I have a letter for you from our Leader, Herr von Braun.”
I was astonished to find a foreign officer at my door with no heads-up from our Border Control people. “Where did you come through immigration?” I asked sharply.
“I didn’t, sir.”
I looked at him wonderingly. “Are you saying you infiltrated across our border, then E-and-E’d your whole way up here without getting caught?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Why? We would have let you pass.”
“Those were my orders from Leader von Braun, sir. We do not question our Leader’s orders.”
“Sounds like I have a problem with the Border Patrol. You should have been shot.”
“Your Border Patrol was good, sir. But I’m better. Triumph of the will, sir.”
“And the future belongs to you, I suppose. It sounds to me more like the triumph of some first-class field craft,” I said. “Well, you’ve earned some breakfast, anyway. Come on in. I’ll take a look at Herr Braun’s letter while you help yourself. There’s bread, apple butter, and oatmeal, and you're welcome to boil an egg.”
We headed for the kitchen, where the captain gave me the letter. I sat down at the table while he secured some chow, which he did
like he not only knew my kitchen but owned it. No shy puppy this, I thought. That was seldom a Nazi failing.
I knew of Leader Braun. He had put together something called the Party of Will out in Wisconsin and Minnesota. Thanks to cities like Milwaukee and St. Paul, those states had gotten a good taste of the disorder that engulfed the rest of the Midwest. It wasn’t as bad as Illinois or Pennsylvania, but it was bad enough to get the local Germans and Scandinavians riled. Northern peoples haven’t much tolerance of disorder, and when they get mad, which they don’t do easily, they don’t just sound off. They kill.
Braun was trying to organize the killing. His Party of Will spouted a vaguely Nazi ideology, built around the usual Aryan superiority, the need for order, extermination of the Untermenschen and so on. He’d organized a militia, which was hardly unique, but his seemed to have a more serious military edge than most. They’d sustained a major, month-long cross-border operation into the Chicago area to wipe out black gangs raiding up into Wisconsin. That meant they had a serious supply-and-maintenance organization, among other things. Halsing's rank, which was straight out of the SS organization chart, told me what they were using for a model.
Herr Braun's letterhead was a black eagle with long, straight wings, beneath which was a funny three-legged device I recognized as the symbol of the Dutch SS division during World War II. He wasn’t quite to the point of resurrecting the swastika, it seemed. But the content of the letter suggested that would come soon enough.
Dear Captain Rumford!
Greetings from the Aryan Heartland! I write first to express my personal approval for your brilliant actions in defending the White Race and Aryan Culture in eastern North America. I am personally admiring of the Germanic decisiveness of your successful campaigns.
I guessed I was supposed to be grateful for Herr Braun’s personal whatever. He would be disappointed to learn it had not previously entered my calculations, nor was it likely to.
For us, the decisive moment is coming also. The Black-Jewish-Freemason conspiracy is yet alive on our soil. But its fate will soon be determined. Hourly, our Landwehr and Freikorps swell with eager Aryan recruits. The Will to Power is in their blood, and it cannot be denied. Everything inferior will be reduced to ashes under its feet.
When that moment comes, a Fourth Reich will arise from our rich Northern soil. All that was lost in 1945 will stand forth again, cleansed and renewed, stronger and harder for the experience of temporary defeat. The Will of the Leader and the iron discipline of those who follow him will prove to all time that Racial Mastery cannot be denied. It is an Iron Law of History.
My personal Will to Power ensures our victory. However, I am aware that others have roles to play in our Aryan Triumph. Your achievements in the Blood-sacrifice of War grant you the honor of joining us. I have personally ordered that a place on our muster rolls be reserved for you, with the rank of Obergruppenführer. Hauptsturmfführer Halsing will escort you to our Free, Aryan, Unspotted land where the Will Triumphs.
Sieg Heil!
Von Braun
Under this humble petition was a postscript, in Braun’s handwriting, perhaps to avoid appearing on the archival copy:
Please regard this as a formal request to your government for your assistance as an advisor to our Party and its armed forces.
Von Braun, indeed, I thought. Where did he get his “von,” from, a cereal box? An image swam unstoppably into my mind: Charlie Chaplin in The Great Dictator.
My first reaction was to throw the letter in the stove and send Captain Halsing on his way, this time with a laissez passer so he wouldn’t embarrass our border guards again. I glanced at him across the table, where he was working on his third boiled egg. His expressionless face and chiseled features gave the contradictory impression of an android feeding. After weeks on the lam dodging our patrols and everyone else he met, he was clean, carefully shaven, immaculate. In World War II, American soldiers always wondered how the German officers they captured managed that.
Halsing caught my gaze. “Thank you for breakfast, sir. Do you have any work I can do while I’m here?”
“After what you went through to get here, I’d expect you’d rather take a long nap. Is this part of the Iron Man competition?”
“We are all iron men in the Party of Will, sir,” Halsing answered.
“Work makes you free, eh?” I took a good look at the Hauptsturmführer's bulging biceps and ox-like shoulders. “Waal, I got a couple cords of wood out back that need splitting. You’re welcome to make a start on that chore if you really want to work.”
“Thank you, sir,” Halsing said, in a voice without a hint of irony or anything else. Which of La Mettrie's books applied to him, I wondered, Man the Machine or Man the Plant? I watched as he methodically took his dishes to the sink, washed them and put them all away in the right places. He then went straight to the maul, which was hidden away behind the kitchen door to the barn.
“Excuse me Captain, but I’ve got to ask you a question. How do you know my place so damn well?” I said.
“I had you under observation for three days before I came in, sir,” he replied.
“You must have been in awful close to know where things are in my kitchen.”
“Yes, sir. I was in your kitchen, sir, among other places.”
I glared at him, then at the house dog, an old mixed shepherd bitch named Brunnhilde who was stretched out as close to the stove as she could get. “Nice work, girl,” I said to the dog. She rolled her eyes and beat her tail feebly. “Nice work on your part too, Captain,” I added quite sincerely. He was the perfect Nazi, cold and competent.
“Thank you, sir. I’ll get to the woodpile now,” he responded, picking up the maul like a 20-pound toothpick and heading out the back door. Shortly thereafter came the sound of a pile-driver at work. The intervals were short, and the regular rhythm told me no log took more than one blow. The wood was ash and locust, with plenty of knots in it. The thought crossed my mind that I might not want to disappoint this captain too deeply.
I looked at the letter from Halsing's Leader as it lay among the crumbs on the breakfast table. My inclination was still to toss it into the stove. But I’d learned the hard way that first impulses were not to be trusted. I picked the letter up, took it with me into the study where my barely-begun history looked up invitingly, and lit a cigar. I knew a cigar before lunch was garment district, but I needed to think and tobacco wakes the mind.
The reasons to refuse Herr Braun’s request were easy enough to catalogue. I didn’t like Nazis. I thought the past, what America had and was from around 1865 to about 1965, was better than what had followed, better even than what we had now in the N.C. Bill Kraft’s Retroculture appealed to me. The Nazis were nothing if not modern. Hitler would have loved computers and color television and the rest of the video screen infernal devices.
The Nazis also disliked Christianity – Nietzsche’s “slave religion”–and had tried to revive Norse paganism in the Third Reich. Funny how the real pagan revival had come from the radical left, the goddess-worshipping feminists and the Gaia-worshipping greens, in the last years of the American republic. Little did they realize whose hand they were holding. My own Christian faith had grown stronger, year by year, as realities like war and poverty and the deaths of too many friends stripped away my spiritual impedimenta. Besides, I knew enough history to know where Nietzsche’s philosophy came from: his syphilis.
There was the Holocaust to reckon in the account. I didn’t put as high a value on that as some people did. History, ancient and modern, was full of holocausts, one people wiping another people out. Met any Carthaginians lately? Jews had carried out plenty of holocausts of their own. The Old Testament was full of them. As a butcher and a tyrant, Hitler ran a distant second to Stalin. That didn’t excuse him, but I found it difficult to put a higher moral value on six million Jews than on eight million Ukrainian Christians, not to mention the other 52 million killed by Soviet communism. Or the 78 million C
hinese and Tibetans killed by its Maoist strain.
Of course, I was also partly responsible for nuking Atlanta, so some might question my moral own abacus. With reason.
What made the Holocaust unique was its impersonal, industrial efficiency. That, more than the killing itself, got towards the heart of why I didn’t like Nazism. In an ideal Nazi state, every aspect of life would be icily efficient. The whole place would be one vast factory, with every machine working perfectly, and every person merely another, identical machine. My Utopia came from Tolkien: The Shire, where fuddy-duddy hobbits smoked their long pipes, endlessly re-told the same stories and liked their meals regular. The Nazis would have built an autobahn through The Shire and turned it over to the Strength Through Joy department, with mandatory calisthenics at 05:30.
But there was another side to the coin. Leader Braun and his boys were up against the same canaille we’d had to fight: Black Muslims, the Dykes on Bikes Motorcycle Cavalry Brigade, the Theban Band, Deep Greeners, the whole zoo. Minnesota had long been loony-left country, and they had a real chance of winning out there. If the lunatics won, the Christians would go up the chimneys. This wasn’t the kind of war where anyone took prisoners.
Nazi efficiency had its hellish aspect, but chaos was a greater hell. It wasn’t called pandemonium for nothing. The first need of any people is for order. In most of the old industrial Midwest, chaos had already claimed hundreds of thousands of lives. Nazism would restore order, no question about that. More, it would restore competence. Captain Halsing was probably one of their best, but he was also a model. There would be more Captain Halsings in a Nazi state, and they would bring relief to a people groaning under a hopeless present and a future of despair. That was, after all, why Hitler came to power in Germany, through an election, not a coup. And he delivered in a way, he made Germany work again and gave hope to a beaten, suffering people.
Victoria: A Novel of 4th Generation War Page 31
