Lansing continued. “In the meantime, the prisoners will work repairing what they have destroyed. We are paying them and they are, allegedly at least, volunteers, so the terms of the Geneva Convention are not being violated. Besides, the victors write the terms, not the losers. Same too with war criminals. We’ve already hanged the man who ran the prison camp near the town of Raleigh, and others will follow.”
Churchill shrugged. The winners always wrote the rules. “Would you care for a cigar? It’s Cuban.”
Lansing accepted and, after the appropriate cutting and sniffing ritual, lit up. “Ecstasy,” he said. Perhaps this Churchill fellow wasn’t such a bad chap after all.
“The Germans are in bad shape in Russia,” Churchill added. “Or perhaps I should call it the Soviet Union. Trotsky’s armies are pushing the German and Austrian armies back by sheer weight of numbers. It’s an incredible bloodbath. Epic proportions, they say. It is rumored that the Germans will sign a treaty with the French, which will enable them to evacuate both the Channel ports and Belgium in return for a nonaggression pact. That would permit them to move troops against Trotsky.”
Lansing offered brandy which Churchill accepted. England would be delighted to have Belgium and the Channel ports out of Germany’s control. It would mean no feasible threat of a cross-channel German invasion.
“And your brief war has turned military thinking on its head,” Churchill added with a knowing smile. After all, the landships, now universally called tanks, had been his idea. Or at least Churchill was taking full credit for it. “Now everyone will want tanks, and everyone also realizes that airplanes are the weapon of the future of naval warfare, and not battleships. I have it on good authority that no warship will go within flying distance of enemy land until this new weapon is figured out.”
“Which won’t take long,” Lansing said. “As you are doubtless aware, my own people are planning both antitank weapons and antiplane weapons along with bigger and stronger tanks and additional capital ships. It appears that war is a series of cycles, and damned expensive ones at that.”
America and Britain were quietly building ships that could launch and recover planes. Carriers, they were called. In the months since the German Army’s surrender, the American Army had been reduced in size from the more than a million it had reached. But Congress had already approved an increase in the standing army to two hundred thousand men and authorized increases in the various states’ National Guard units. Hopefully, there would never be a need for untrained volunteers to defend the United States. Additional budget increases had come to strengthen the Navy and the infant Air Corps.
“Where will it ever end?” Churchill sighed.
Churchill shrugged. “It won’t.”
* * *
The train pulled into the station in Seattle and a young woman got off carrying a threadbare cloth carry-bag. She was young and thin and an observer would logically conclude that the cloth bag contained all her worldly positions.
Trains coming from the east and heading in that direction were no longer a novelty. All of the bridges had either been repaired or temporary replacements had been built, and the same with the other rail lines. California was no longer isolated and transcontinental commerce was beginning anew.
Other passengers swirled around the woman, who scanned the crowd. She was nervous and tired. She’d spent almost a week sitting on a bench since she couldn’t afford Pullman accommodations. She hoped to God the trip had been worth it and that she hadn’t been stranded at a train station. Regardless, she’d needed to escape the emotional hell that her home back east had become.
Tim Randall watched cautiously. She hadn’t spotted him yet. It had taken all his nerve to invite Kathy Fenton to join him. He’d been discharged and had no plans to go back to Camden. There were too many memories and still too much guilt being laid on him by his family.
He’d been shocked and delighted when she’d responded to his telegram and agreed to come.
He walked up behind her. “Kathy?”
Startled, she wheeled and turned. She recognized him and her smile became radiant.
They embraced discreetly, timidly. She pulled apart. “Did you find us a place?”
Tim grinned. “I did and it overlooks Puget Sound.”
Kathy picked up her bag and handed it to him. “Then let’s go see it.”
* * *
“What do you think?” Marcus Tovey asked. The end of the fighting had brought an end to the need for volunteer units like his and he too had been discharged. He had no plans to go back to being a Texas Ranger. He’d had enough of guns to last a lifetime.
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything flatter,” Martina said with a hint of a smile. The land north of San Antonio seemed to go on forever with only slight undulations to the ground. It was certainly nothing like the mountains of her home that formed the spine of Mexico.
“How much of it do you own?” she asked.
“Several thousand acres with options to buy more. And I’ll raise cattle on them. Beef cattle for the people out east and for the growing population of California. I’ve heard from an engineer that there might also be oil underneath the land, but I’ll deal with that when the time comes. Right now, California supplies all the oil we need.”
“That will change, Marcus. Just think of all the automobiles that are being built.”
Tovey grunted and concurred. He decided to make sure he owned the mineral rights to his property.
Martina urged her horse forward. “Do you call that a house?”
The one-story building looked dilapidated, but at least it was built of stone. “I’ll admit it needs work.”
“A lot of work if you expect me to live there, Marcus Tovey. And I will require something more than an outhouse.”
“Of course. But is it a place where you can learn to forget the past?”
She reached over and took his hand. “No. It’s a place to begin a future.”
Postscript
While some of the names of the participants in 1920 are very familiar to those with knowledge of twentieth-century history, some are not. In order to satisfy the curious, here is a summary of the real people and what they actually did in real history during and after the period covered by the novel.
Of the Germans, von Trotha, Scheer, the Crown Prince, Mackensen, and Hutier were real and were major players in World War I. The diplomats, Bernsdorff and Eckhardt were also real. After the defeat of Germany in 1918, they largely disappeared from the public eye. The crown prince followed his father into exile and was no longer a factor in Germany. Von Seekt gained some notoriety by helping rebuild the German Army through a secret accord with the Soviet Union. To my knowledge and with the exception of Rommel, he is the only one who had any significant Nazi connections.
The genially corrupt Italian diplomat, Golitti, continued in Italian politics until he and his cronies were pushed out by the rise of the even more corrupt Benito Mussolini.
The governors of Texas and California, as well as the mayor of San Francisco were also real people, although I used my imagination regarding their behavior, etc.
Some of the American military: Sims, Pershing, Liggett, Nolan, Connor, and Harbord, played major roles in our World War I and after.
Robert Lansing resigned as Secretary of State in 1919 and went into private law practice.
Charles Evans Hughes was named Secretary of State in 1921 and later served as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.
Carranza was overthrown by his numerous enemies and murdered in 1920.
A number of American military personnel are recognized as major players in World War II, including Patton, Nimitz, MacArthur, and Marshall. Herbert Hoover and Eisenhower both served as presidents of the United States, with Hoover unfairly getting much of the blame for the Great Depression. John Lejeune became the Commandant of the Marine Corps and Dr. Grayson was Woodrow Wilson’s personal physician.
D.W. Griffith continued to make movies, but none
were as successful, or as controversial, as Birth of a Nation.
Amelia Earhart disappeared in 1937 while flying over the Pacific.
Most of the other characters: Luke Martel, Kirsten Biel, Elise Thompson, Josh Cornell, Marcus Tovey, Mrs. Tuttle, the Dubbins boys, Steiner and Olson, and others were all figments of my imagination.
If I’ve missed anyone and you’re still curious, do what I did and look it up.
Robert Conroy
1920: America's Great War-eARC Page 41
