Science Fiction by Gaslight: A History and Anthology of Science Fiction in the Popular Magazines, 1891-1911
Page 30
“Manhood versus Machinery” occurred to him as a suitable headline. Journalism curdles all one’s mind to phrases.
He strolled as near the lined-up prisoners as the sentinels seemed disposed to permit, and surveyed them and compared their sturdy proportions with those of their lightly built captors.
“Smart degenerates,” he muttered. “Anaemic cockneydom.”
The surrendered officers came quite close to him presently, and he could hear the colonel’s high-pitched tenor. The poor gentleman had spent three years of arduous toil upon the best material in the world perfecting that shooting from the saddle charge, and he was inquiring with phrases of blasphemy, natural in the circumstances, what one could be expected to do against this suitably consigned ironmongery.
“Guns,” said someone.
“Big guns they can walk round. You can’t shift big guns to keep pace with them, and little guns in the open they rush. I saw ‘em rushed. You might do a surprise now and then—assassinate the brutes, perhaps—”
“You might make things like ‘em.”
“What? More ironmongery? Us? . .
“I’ll call my article,” meditated the war correspondent, “ ‘Mankind versus Ironmongery,’ and quote the old boy at the beginning.”
And he was much too good a journalist to spoil his contrast by remarking that the half-dozen comparatively slender young men in blue pyjamas who were standing about their victorious land ironclad, drinking coffee and eating biscuits, had also in their eyes and carriage something not altogether degraded below the level of a man.
The Red Book, Magazine
April, 1911
THE DAM
by Hugh S. Johnson
THE United States was scarcely immune to the “future war” story, particularly after the Japanese naval victory over Russia at the turn of the century. The efficiency of the Japanese navy left no doubt in the mind of anyone that Japan could provide formidable opposition at sea and was capable of landing an invading army.
Hugh Samuel Johnson, author of The Dam, graduated from West Point in 1903. He was to become an internationally known figure since he would formulate the methodology and policies for selective service in World War I and supervise its execution through 1917 and 1918, rising to the rank of Brigadier General. When Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected president of the United States in the midst of the worst depression in this nation’s history, Hugh Johnson was appointed to head the NRA (National Recovery Administration) during 1933 and 1934, until the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that its functions were unconstitutional. He was then made head of the WPA (Works Progress Administration) for New York City in 1935.
Although Johnson owed his political life to Franklin Roosevelt, he campaigned against Roosevelt’s third term in 1940.
Johnson practiced law, but in his younger days he had been a regular contributor of fiction and nonfiction to the popular magazines. He resumed writing as a columnist for the Scripps-Howard papers in 1934 and was also much in demand as a lecturer and radio commentator.
Understanding Johnson’s background, it is easy to believe that The Dam was written as a “warning” story, to encourage military preparedness on the part of the United States. On the Contents page of the April 1911 issue of the red book magazine in which it appeared, editor Karl Edwin Harriman blurbed the story as “An incident of the American-Japanese War.” When the story begins, the war has been in progress for some time and the United States has had reverses. When the story ends, the war is continuing and the end is not yet in sight.
There would be many other stories of American wars with Japan, at least enough to warrant the writing of a substantial monogram, and thorough research would probably disclose a quantity adequate for an entire book. With the advantage of historical perspective, it can be said that such stories have underscored the accuracy of a great deal of science fiction prophecy.
THERE had been no warning of the war. The Pacific cables had ceased to work and the Atlantic fleet voyaged southward. Then, the lifting fog-curtain across Monterey Bay disclosed the Japanese transports riding at anchor in the offing. The puny flower of the American army was destroyed at a blow, and the great, half-trained colossus that now lay sprawled along the edge of the last green strip of California, with the desert behind it, and a new Japanese Empire in front, was the remaining hope of the Union on the Coast.
For the country had settled earnestly to the bitter business of war. It had strengthened the remnant of that early-destroyed army of laymen, in every way that six months’ time can strengthen an army. There were sent to it thousands of eager but untrained volunteers, hundreds of guns, and mountains of supplies. Eagerness and guns and supplies do not make armies and of this fact the invaders at least were confidently aware.
Japan had been very busy, organizing to remain, taking toll for the cost of war, and converting the mountain passes into miniature Port Arthurs. Up to this time they had paid scant heed to the huddled and defeated remnant that still held the gate of the last feasible avenue of attack from the states beyond the mountains. The time had come to seal that gap and render themselves as securely in possession as hills and desert could make them.
Perhaps they had waited a month too long. The American general, Eblee, was a theoretical soldier, but he was, first of all, an organizer— and he had done good work. It was true, that at his back, were only the desert and the shimmering rails of the Southern Pacific leading across it to safety. But his right flank rested firmly in the mountains, his left in a strong position on the Mexican frontier, and his center was manned by his best troops.
“They will strike our left and try to crumple it back on the center, and then push us from our railroad and into the mountains,” the General predicted. “If they succeed, we’re lost—but they won’t succeed.”
The American extreme right consisted of two regiments of cavalry, posted at the great dam of the Santa Symprosa Irrigation Project.
“Where that wild Indian, Bolles,” the General said, “won’t have any chance to go cavorting around with his ‘splendid survivals,’ getting in the way of good infantry, and spoiling what little strategy there is in this war.”
Eblee did not believe in cavalry. He had even decried the rear-guard work of Bolles’ regiments, which same work had saved the remnant of the First Army in its long flight down the length of California. The General was a soldier of the new Germanic school, with which nothing could have been more at outs than that same hard-riding, irreverent, chance-taking Bolles who, with his admiring and sympathetic troopers, was enduring his banishment from the supposed seat of war with the worst of grace. To Bolles, Eblee sent a bespectacled and well-crammed Lieutenant, fresh from a service school.
“To instill a little modern science into your command,” the tactless order said. Considering that Bolles had been chasing White Mountain Apaches across the Arizona alkali, when the Lieutenant was still kicking on a counterpane, he, Bolles, was not vastly pleased.
“Look here, Napoleon,” was his greeting, “I have no doubt at all of your ability and acquirements, but I wish you’d demonstrate them for me by figuring out the stresses and strains of the Santa Symprosa dam, the amount of water it backs up, and the country it controls.”
“That will keep him busy for ten days,” Bolles explained to the British Observer, who had insisted upon remaining at Cavalry Headquarters in spite of many invitations from the General, “and by that time I expect doing along this line.”
“But why the dam? I should think you could get all that information— if you have the faintest need for it.”
“Heavens, man, I don’t care a blue fig about the dam—it’ll keep him from messing with my troops, won’t it?”
“Oh,” said the Guards’ Major, “I see.”
In the fullness of their own good time the Japanese turned their attention to the growing army in the South, and out in front of Eblee’s long line their perfectly ordered divisions began to take positions on a parallel range of hills.
Then began a week of scientific sparring. An aeroplane chugged and whirred across the American lines at a thousand feet, one morning at dawn. It drew a sputtering fire from the Japanese hills, and then, swooping toward it from the invaders’ signal station, came the first of the blue Odzu monoplanes to be seen in the war. The American had the wings of his pursuer and he began a sweeping reconnaissance of the whole line. Over the center, he ran fairly counter of a vertical battery firing “marking” shells, that left a parabolic wake of stringy, heavy smoke, and finally brought the American to the earth, wheeling and tumbling out of the sky like a wounded sand-hill crane.
Patrols were wrangling in the valley and finally a force of Japanese cavalry struck Eblee’s right flank, driving in Bolles’ outposts, where the narrow gorge of the Santa Symprosa canon debouches on the valley. It was their first real experience with American dragoons. Upon them descended Bolles like an angry deity. He caught them in the open, slashed them with short-range fire and drove them pell-mell to their hills and the cover of their artillery. But they came back, to follow an erratic course down Eblee’s front. They were checking the reports of their aeroplanes and patrols. After they disappeared, there was an ominous quiet for two days and then—along the whole left wing of the American army, from the center to the very Mexican line, the Japs opened the ball with their guns.
They sprayed the trenches with indirect shrapnel fire and hunted the hills for the range. Then they found the American artillery positions and proceeded methodically to pound them. The gunners’ work in that battle was a bit of well-turned beauty. One by one, Eblee’s field-pieces withdrew from the Yankee chorus, and they did it so plausibly that even the General was not certain that his artillery had not been duly silenced. The ruse worked well, for on the heels of the last salvos, came the premature infantry advance and, over the distant sky-line, the long black columns began to pour. They disintegrated in the V of the valley and came out of the cover of the trees along the stream, in a slender cordon of skirmishers that looked, through the field glasses, like a string of infinitesimal beads on an invisible wire. They were about half-way up the defenders’ slope when every gun in the American left wing opened on them. A horizontal sheet of sharpnel and machine-gun fire struck them like a blight. They crumpled but came on, and down to the cover of the trees rushed their reserves.
The American infantry had just opened fire when a staff-officer brought Eblee Bolles’ message, reporting activity in the front of that detached and forgotten position in the hills. The General was quite ready to stand firm in the strength of his prophecy.
“Mere demonstration on our right,” he said, not taking his glasses from his eyes. “Tell Major Bolles that we are in full possession of the details of this attack—and you might add, Caldwell, that he needn’t be alarmed.”
Squatting at the far end of the field-buzzer Bolles received this message and swore.
“I needn’t be alarmed—needn’t I? As if I couldn’t get out of the way of any skip-two-and-carry-a-dozen saddle-colored-serfs-of-the-Orient that have ever shouldered a rifle—I needn’t be alarmed. Well when the end of this theoretical, Deutcherized line crumples like a jack-knife, we’ll see who needs to be alarmed.”
“You really needn’t, you know, Major,” ventured the well-crammed Lieutenant. “They have nothing to gain by attacking us in force here and all the German authorities are unanimous—” He got no further.
“Slow up, Von Moltke. I don’t know what the German authorities say about the Santa Symprosa dam, but American common-sense says that it controls this theatre of operations like an electric push-button—”
Bolles stopped suddenly as thought distracted by something in his own words. The lieutenant thought that “something” was their rather rough jocularity. He smiled faintly, patronizingly.
“Oh, that’s all right, Major. I don’t mind a little chaffing.”
Bolles heard this remark no more than he noticed the good-natured sarcasm of Major Barwell-Carruthers, of the Guards:
“You don’t seem to have much influence with your general, Bolles.”
Forty miles away, the General was beaming with elation. For the infantry fire of the defenders had completed the work of the guns. From where Eblee stood he could see below him a few squat figures, staggering like drunken men in a yellow fog. But the fog was the heavy, saffron smoke of exploding shells and the dust and earth kicked up from the hillside by the withering fire of his own rifles and guns. It lay along the valley as far as he could see. In its cover the broken Japanese line had hesitated a moment—only a moment; after that, it went scuttling down the hill in chaotic rout. Already news of an American victory was being blocked out before cheering crowds on a thousand bulletin boards throughout the states. It was the first reversal of humiliation and utter gloom in the six months’ war, and it produced an hysterical enthusiasm that peace-time words cannot suggest. Stores and offices were not closed. They were deserted with open doors, and the streets were filled with mobs of joy-crazed people.
Eblee was certain of what to expect now. The enemy’s attack had developed exactly as he had deduced it. They were trying to force him from the railroad and destroy him in the hills. He knew that the assault would be repeated and he began drawing fresh troops from his center and even from the far-off right flank.
“Bolles—at the Santa Symprosa dam—two regiments of cavalry—” the chief of staff read, from his list of available reserves.
“Oh, cavalry has no bid to this party,” Eblee ordered, “leave ‘em there. If we get that badly stalled we can send for ‘em.”
All that night troops from the center and right were stumbling in through the darkness to be assigned to positions by sleepy staff-officers who had been in the saddle for hours on end. With the dawn came the opening guns of the renewed attack. In retrospect, there was something unusual about that attack that, in the elation of its repulse, Eblee cannot be blamed for overlooking, any more than he blamed himself, when Bolles’ second message came growling over the field-buzzer:
“Force of Japanese of all arms marching up the gorge of the Santa Symprosa cañon. Conservative estimate—forty thousand men. Reports indicate that it is the Second Japanese Field Army—Field Marshal Tsushima. You might add for me to the General, Caldwell, in a purely unofficial way, that I, personally, am not in the least alarmed, though I am sure that the Right of the Line is completely enveloped and the last position for American troops is rendered untenable. We may be able to put up a bluff and hold ‘em for an hour—they’re ten miles away— say four hours in all. I’m waiting orders.”
It is difficult to make clear enough the significance of Tsushima’s flanking movement in the Battle of Santa Symprosa. The frontal attack on Eblee’s left wing had been a colossal feint, to allow the approach, on an unprotected portion of the American position, of an overwhelming force, which (once it had reached the dam), by its mere presence decided the battle more completely than any amount of firing and death could ever decide it. Eblee was not only checkmated, he was rendered helpless, boxed, tied and tagged for transportation. He knew it before his aide had half-finished the stammered message. To his credit be it said that his first thought was of the waiting, cheer-hoarse Americans, whom he had deceived by his early confident messages of victory. Eblee was not a strong man; he was only a superficially brilliant one and he had been completely cozened. He sat limply down upon a rock and his flushed, tired face dropped to his knees and folded arms. The chief of staff assumed control.
Out at the dam, Bolles’ two regiments were standing “to horse” in columns of masses, eagerly watching the little group of waiting officers about the box of the field-buzzer on the ground. Bolles was fully as bitter in his rage and disappointment as Eblee could pos
sibly have been, but he was a different stamp of man. He could even reply to the chaffing of the British attache.
Major Barwell-Carruthers had had much to suffer in his weeks with Bolles. A camp-intimacy that allowed it had sprung up between them, and the distinctively American Bolles had lost no opportunity and overlooked no racial peculiarity, in that time. The South-Sea generic term of “lime-juicer” had been shortened to mere “lime,” and not one time-honored quip had been forgotten.
Major Carruthers’ day had come, and he was making gentle use of it.
“You’ve got to give it to the little beggars, Bolles. Right up to your back-door—and your outposts all asleep—I say, old fay-low, it’s rough. You’d better show ‘em your heels—their infantry will catch you.”
“Don’t you worry about their infantry, Lime; they haven’t got the Santa Symprosa dam—yet, you know.”
“There’s no use holdin’ ‘em, I’d say—even if you could. The general couldn’t possibly get enough troops here to do any good, in ten hours’ time. The refreshin’ audacity of ‘em though! Marchin’ up a canon that way. They wouldn’t have done that if they hadn’t known you Yankees were asleep. Too risky and gives you too good a chance to pot ‘em. As it was, it screened the movement from the aeroplanes and the like. Oh, you’ve got to give it to ‘em.”