“I’m not in the habit of flattering. You had inadequate information,” Luz said. “It happens all the time in intelligence work. Making decisions based on outdated information, or incomplete, or worse: corrupted, poisoned—what the Czar’s Okhrana call dezinformatsiya, dis-information. Then it doesn’t matter how clever you are, for the cake can’t be sweeter than the spices.”
“Dis-information? Now, there’s a devilish thing to brew up!” Ciara said with a born scholar’s indignation at someone deliberately fouling the well of knowledge.
“And devilishly effective. Did the Protocols of the Elders of Zion ever cross your bookstore’s counter?”
“Oh, yes,” Ciara said. “Henry Ford put out that edition and it was everywhere. I read it . . . it didn’t seem very sensible. There’s Mr. Silverberg who has the antique store who we did business with on old volumes, and I mentioned it to him, and he said some very . . . high-spiced things . . . in Yiddish. He didn’t know I spoke German, which is nearly the same . . . and then he said that if the Jews ruled the world from behind the scenes they would get a good deal more practical use out of this dreadful secret power! Which is a good point, when you think about it. If there’s any tribe who get the sharp end of the stick poked in their eye more than the Irish or even the blacks, it’s the Chosen People.”
Smart girl, Luz thought. Remember not to confuse formal education with brains. Though I must find a gentle way to say Negro is much more polite than blacks.
Only about a tenth of Americans finished high school, though the new Department of Education under Secretary Jane Addams was prodding and poking, shaming and subsidizing the states and localities hard to make it more. The cartoonists always showed her as the schoolmarm-in-chief with a switch in her hand, but at least you could be sure the girls wouldn’t be scanted.
“That’s an example of dis-information—and of the way people will always believe something they want to believe. The Russians came up with it because the pogroms against the Jews were hurting them in the Western countries, making it more difficult to get credits.”
“So they flung some fake dirt to make up for the real smut on their own faces!” Ciara said. “I call that shoddy behavior and no mistake.”
Luz nodded. “You would not believe how much trouble Henry Ford has caused by spreading that damned thing—he has a bee in his bonnet about Jewish bankers, and people listen to him because he makes all those Model Ts and raised his workers’ wages to five dollars a day.”
“A good solid family wage for a laboring man, near as good as a machinist or locomotive engineer makes,” Ciara said, in the tone you used when making yourself be fair. “Unless he drinks it up before his wife gets her hands on it, that’ll keep the house clean and warm and good food on the table, shoes on the children’s feet and clothes on their backs, and enough left over for some savings against misfortune and the odd treat. And a glass of beer with dinner, no harm in that.”
“Yes, Unc . . . the president was quite pleased at least one of the big boys did it without being pushed the way he had to with the steel barons and the mine owners . . . and the railroads provoked him until he nationalized them outright. Though that was also pour encourager les autres, a nice early example to keep the others reasonable and tell them the days when they ran Congress were well and truly over. But if only Henry would stick to making autos!”
“And the Clann na nGael told me what they knew I wanted to hear, after Colm and Da died,” Ciara said bitterly.
“Yes,” Luz said. “If it’s any consolation, they thought they were doing it for a good cause. And they probably didn’t know all the details of what we’ve seen, just that there’s a weapon and an attack planned.”
“Nothing good could come of that . . . that horror we saw,” she said; Luz nodded, knowing what she meant. “And I’m sure as sure they knew the Germans meant America no good, if not precisely how much bad.”
“Well . . . Ciara, did you ever read any H. G. Wells?”
It was a good bet, given her interests. “Oh, yes!” Ciara said enthusiastically, thinking she was changing the subject. “The Time Machine, and The Food of the Gods, and The Island of Dr. Moreau, and The War of the Worlds. Even”—she blushed at the mention of the advanced book—“Ann Veronica. How I envied her attending the Imperial University! Though . . .”
She frowned. “This free-love thing . . . it seems to me that it wasn’t that free at all for her, and would have ended fine for him and badly for Ann, in the world as it is. Also he’s too old for her.”
“I suspect that’s more of a daydream by Mr. Wells,” Luz said, agreeing with every word. “That man she throws herself at is suspiciously like the author, cleaned up a bit, and Mr. Wells has an eye for young ladies, I hear. I don’t doubt he’d be pleased to have them throwing themselves at his feet, saving him the risk and work.”
“Men!” Ciara said, rolling her eyes. “The other books are fine . . . though now you mention it, in The Time Machine, doesn’t the time traveler take up with that Eloi girl named Weena? And she pretty but stupid as a monkey, having no speech of her own, and altogether too much like a little girl in a woman’s body, sort of a pet with a bosom? Which is revolting, when you think about it.”
“No young man of your own, then, I presume?”
“Oh.” Ciara made a dismissive gesture. “Spotty young tykes, the lot of them, and interested in a girl for only one thing—not one to hold a candle to Colm or Da. A husband off to the saloon three days in seven, wanting his corned beef on Sunday and a cradle filled every eighteen months, I do not think. Not yet; someday, perhaps, if I find one I could abide. One I could talk to about real things.”
“Ah,” Luz said. “Now, the reason I mentioned Wells . . . well, my father and mother read The War of the Worlds with me . . . when I was ill, back when I was fourteen, a bout of malaria. And something my father said then struck hard and stayed with me: that if the wilder sort of Irish Brotherhood type had been around in the book, they’d have made common cause with the Martians in an instant, if only they promised to eat the English first, and them last of all. This is not altogether different.”
Ciara gave an involuntary snort of laughter. Then she looked down. “It . . . what we saw today . . . makes me think the worse of . . . what I was brought up to love.”
“Ciara, there’s no country on Earth that doesn’t have great good and great ill to its credit, according to its power to do either, because different as countries may be, they’re all composed of human beings at the last, and there’s a devil and an angel in all of us. Everyone should love their country, and love and respect the memory of their ancestors; there’s something wrong with anyone who doesn’t. England’s treated Ireland badly . . . but it was Diarmait Mac Murchada first sold his kin to Strongbow for help against his personal enemies. There’s bad, and then there’s worse.”
Ciara nodded in easy recognition of the name of the King of Leinster who’d called in armored Anglo-Norman mercenary knights and their retinues from the marcher lordships to back him in a feud, and sworn fealty to London to get their fierce and greedy aid. The Gael had always had long memories. Luz went on:
“And I’m not going to say you shouldn’t have wanted to avenge your brother, or that you wouldn’t have been justified in fighting the English. I crawled through my parents’ blood, and that night I killed the first of those who murdered them—slit his throat in the dark and took his horse and rifle. I killed more of them with my own hands over the next couple of years, during the Intervention—three of them were kneeling in front of the graves we made them dig and I shot them in the back of the head. I helped hunt the others down and watched them die. Some well, like Villa, whose followers the killers were—he walked to the wall on his own and scorned the blindfold and shouted Viva Mexico! into the muzzles of the rifles as he ripped open his own shirt. Others badly, wetting their britches and whimpering for quarter, or their mothers;
but they all died and it was my doing. So I’m not going to judge you, not me of all people on Earth.”
“I’ve been thinking . . . today,” Ciara said. “That Colm died, yes, but he died as a soldier with gun in hand, fighting openly for Ireland against his enemies who were doing likewise for their country. That’s a hero’s death, death with honor, to be remembered with pride. This, what’s going on here, there’s no honor in it at all, only shame. That my brother would turn his face from me, if I had any part in it.”
Luz patted her hand. “And you’ve had the good sense to turn back when you saw it was leading you . . . some place you really didn’t want to go.”
She looked at the sunlight; it would be dinnertime soon. And after that she could get the results of Horst’s meeting out of him, one way or another.
NINE
Schloss Rauenstein
Kingdom of Saxony, German Reich
SEPTEMBER 8TH, 1916(B)
Horst von Dückler thought he knew why the conference started in a grim frame of mind, for all that the room was large and bright with afternoon sunlight and smelled pleasantly of coffee . . . real coffee . . . being handed around to the participants. And for all that the talk was mostly of victories won after a long hard struggle.
They were all men of war, and even Privatdozent von Bülow had seen combat in his youth. And they had all seen weapons grow steadily more deadly. The oldest among them had watched while the Dreyse needle-gun replaced the muzzle-loading musket, and the younger had seen U-boats and airships and aeroplanes, machine guns and cannons that could throw shells the weight of an elephant twenty kilometers. Then clouds of poison gas drifting across the ghostly, cratered tangles of barbed wire on the Western Front among the millionfold rotting legions of the unburied dead.
But a regiment being obliterated in minutes by a single mortar round . . . that is something else altogether. And so is the thought of whole cities destroyed by the same means. Almighty Lord God, even to think of what a few battalions of heavy artillery could do with those shells is enough to make you blanch, much less a zeppelin fleet or . . . what we have planned for the Americans.
Horst put it from his mind; he had work to do. Various aides to the supreme commanders used maps and summary reports to outline the war situation, and he carefully stored the precise data. For once it was even more encouraging than the newspapers, which was probably a unique event in the history of war. That put him in a better mood, exhilarated and keenly anxious at the same time. After two years of titanic effort and terrible sacrifice from Belgium to the Pripet Marshes, from the Baltic to the Persian Gulf, the glittering prize of victory and safety for his Fatherland and Volk was so close . . .
And he was uniquely placed to know how grave the danger was of it being snatched away at the last moment.
Von Hindenburg spoke at last: “So. The Russians we have broken; they have agreed to send emissaries to Brest-Litovsk to negotiate a separate peace. But in the meantime our advance continues and their forces melt away from desertion or mutiny.”
“We tore their hearts out when we trapped their main armies in Poland last year,” Ludendorff said, obviously proud.
Justly so, Horst thought.
It had been Ludendorff’s plan to drive for a double envelopment from north and south on a huge scale instead of just pushing them back as von Falkenhayn had wanted, a risky gamble that had paid off a hundredfold when the Russians’ frantic retreat failed by a hair to prevent the hard-marching pincers from closing in their rear. A Kesselschlacht—cauldron-battle—was the ideal to which German commanders always aspired, and that had been the largest in all recorded history. Germany had brought off a number of encirclements since the war started, mostly in the east: The original attack on France had been intended as an even larger cauldron, but it hadn’t . . . quite . . . succeeded. Verdun had, though at terrible cost.
Risky. But oh, the triumph when it works! That is how armies are broken and nations beaten into dust.
“This offensive of Brusilov’s was their last throw of the dice. An act of desperation—der Mut der Narren, the courage of fools. When it was crushed and the best troops they had left with it, what remained of their will to fight evaporated,” Ludendorff finished.
“It has become almost comical, in the east,” Colonel Nicolai added. “We send a battalion and a few field guns down a railway line, they take the station and make prisoners of the Russians who have not run away, and then we repeat the whole process.”
Von Hindenburg nodded, ponderous and implacable: “There will be no real negotiations, only our Diktat imposed with the point of a German sword to their throats. Russia will be thrust back to the borders of four centuries ago, to those of barbarian Muscovy, and within those they will be our vassals and pay tribute as and when we demand it. The rest, all her rich possessions, the Baltic, Poland, the Ukraine, and the Caucasus—perhaps even central Asia—we will dispose of as we see fit.”
Which means either annexation to the Reich or German colonial governors or puppet governments we control under new monarchs taken from our nobility, as seems most convenient to us, Horst thought. We lost millions of our best to the United States in the last century, because we could not give them homes or bread here in Europe. Now for our Volk . . . lands to settle, lands to rule, lands to exploit for what we need without depending on the seas the Anglo-Saxons control, all without leaving the shelter of our German flag or the protection of the German sword.
“And France bleeds to death from the wound they took at Verdun, and still more their attempts to retake it,” Ludendorff said. “They no longer have any offensive capacity against us. I did not like General Falkenhayn’s butcher strategy there, but I must admit it worked. With the crown prince in command, of course.”
Colonel Nicolai spoke: “Our latest reports indicate widespread refusals to advance among the French troops in Foch’s present attack against our positions on the Chemin des Dames line, though they will still fight hard on the defensive. The death of General Petain was as great a loss to them as Verdun itself; now there is no one who has the confidence of the soldiers. Joffre they have come to hate as a blind fool who spends their lives to no purpose, but there is nobody to replace him in supreme command.”
Ludendorff inclined his head to the intelligence chief. “Any peace we grant France will ensure that they too can never threaten the Reich again; they must acknowledge our hegemony in Belgium, give up the Briey ore fields and the coast down to Dunkirk and most of their African colonies, do no trade with the English, and pay us indefinite yearly reparations that will leave them nothing for an army or navy of their own. And which will pay much of the cost of ours.
“It will take them a little time to realize they have no alternative but to accept these terms,” Ludendorff went on. “Meanwhile the English still strike us heavy blows on the Somme, which is the only reason we have not crushed the French altogether, but we have hurt them even more badly in return. They are paying the price for the small army they had before the war. We destroyed that army in the advance to the Marne, and at Ypres, leaving few to train their rush of volunteers.”
He inclined his head to von Bülow. “There the help of the Institute’s special munitions projects was crucial. That we had thousands of gas shells ready, even the crude early ones, enabled us to eliminate the Ypres salient and drive forward to the edge of the Channel ports before they could develop countermeasures. The English armies that confront us now are brave and numerous and not too badly equipped, even their Indian sepoy mercenaries fight with savage determination, but their volunteers are clumsy and ill-taught, and our U-boat blockade chokes them ever more tightly.”
“Yes, Herr General,” Nicolai said. “But that leaves us with the Yankees. They have been determined on war since the spring. Rather, Roosevelt wished war from the beginning, and now has manipulated their public opinion to the point where most support it, and now he feels he is re
ady for it.”
Tactfully, he didn’t mention the sinking of the Mauretania; Horst thought that the Americans would have entered the war even without it, but possibly—crucially—later than this year. He’d been there when the news came through. It had been fantastic arrogance on their part to imagine that their citizens could blithely sail into a war zone on a British ship carrying military contraband and be immune from attack, but the ugly wave of hate and thirst for revenge had been real enough to raise the hair on the back of his neck. With enough wealth and power you could afford such arrogance, and make others take it seriously too.
We accepted that our invasion of Belgium would bring in the English, but counted on it allowing us to destroy France before they could intervene in force. Then our U-boats were to choke the English before the Americans enraged by the sinking of their ships could intervene in force. There is a pattern here and it is one we must break. Our Project Loki will not enrage or frighten any other Great Power into war against us . . . but only because we are already fighting every other Great Power on Earth except the Austrians, who are not greatly powerful. Germany is very strong, but are we strong enough to make war on the whole world at the same time?
Then he shook himself mentally.
But it’s not the whole world, not anymore. As the general said, we’ve broken the Russians; they’re out of the fight and we can take what they make and grow and use it for our own purposes. The French are broken too, or nearly so. England bleeds, and totters and chokes. We can crush them one at a time. Frederick the Great did the same thing when he took Silesia—it looked as if Prussia would be ground to powder between France and Russia and Austria, but then there was a change of Czar in Russia and it came out right in the end. Otherwise I would be an Austrian. Brrr!
The head of Abteilung IIIb continued, giving Horst his cue:
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