Blood and Iron

by Harry Turtledove

  Either he’d entered his second childhood the night before or he knew perfectly well what it was. Dowling didn’t think senility had overcome the old coot as suddenly as that. He said, “Sir, Mr. Thomas is here to see you. He’s from the War Department.” He added that last in case Custer had gone around the bend in the past twenty-four hours.

  Custer sighed, his wrinkled features drooping. He knew what that meant, all right. “No reprieve, eh?” he asked, like a prisoner who would hang in the morning if the governor didn’t wire. Dowling shook his head. Custer sighed again. “Very well, Lieutenant Colonel. Bring him in. If you care to, you may stay and listen. This will affect you, too.”

  “Thank you, sir. By your leave, I will do that.” Dowling tried to recall the last time Custer had been so considerate. He couldn’t. He went out to the anteroom and said, “Mr. Thomas, General Custer will see you now.”

  “Good.” N. Mattoon Thomas got to his feet. He was a tall, long-faced man in his late thirties, and looked more like a preacher than Upton Sinclair’s assistant secretary of war. He walked with a slight limp; Dowling knew he’d taken a machine-gun bullet in the leg during the Great War.

  When they’d gone down the short hallway to Custer’s sanctum, Dowling said, “Mr. Thomas, I have the honor to present to you General George Custer. General, the assistant secretary of war.” Being one of the civilians overseeing the Army, Thomas took precedence over Custer in the introductions.

  “Pleased to meet you, sir,” Custer said: a palpable lie. He waved to the chair in front of his desk. “Please—sit down. Make yourself comfortable.” As Thomas did so, Abner Dowling also took a seat. He tried to be unobtrusive, which wasn’t easy with his bulk. N. Mattoon Thomas’ blue eyes flicked his way, but the assistant secretary of war only nodded, accepting his presence.

  Custer would have said something more then, but the words seemed stuck in his throat. He sent Dowling a look of appeal, but it wasn’t Dowling’s place to speak. He was here only as an overweight fly on the wall.

  Before the silence could grow too awkward, Thomas broke it, saying, “General, I wish to convey to you at the outset President Sinclair’s sincere appreciation for the excellent service you have given your country in this difficult and important post.”

  “That’s kind of him,” Custer said. “Very kind of him. I’m honored to have him send someone to deliver such a generous message in person. You came a long way to do it, sir, and I’m grateful.”

  He was going to be difficult. Dowling would have bet he’d be difficult, but hadn’t looked for him to be quite so gracefully difficult. Maybe Libbie had coached him. She was even better at being difficult than her husband.

  N. Mattoon Thomas gave him the look of a preacher who’d had the collection plate come back with thirty-seven cents and a subway token on it. “In view of your long career in the U.S. Army, General, the president feels it is time for you to come home to well-deserved thanks and to rest on your laurels hereafter,” he said.

  “Mr. Thomas, I have no desire to rest on my laurels,” Custer replied. “I am as hale and spry as a man of my years can be, and I do not believe those years have adversely affected my ability to reason clearly and to issue appropriate orders. I have been in the saddle a long time. I should like to continue.”

  “I am afraid I must remind you, General, that you serve at the pleasure of the president of the United States.” Thomas was less than half Custer’s age. But he had the power in this situation, and also had the ruthlessness that came naturally to many young men given power over their elders.

  Dowling saw that, and pitied Custer. Custer saw it, too, and grew angry. He dropped his polite mask as if he’d never donned it. “Christ, I despise the notion of taking orders from that Socialist pipsqueak,” he growled.

  “Which is one reason the president takes a certain pleasure in giving them to you,” Thomas replied easily. “Would you prefer to retire, General, or to be sacked? Those are your only choices now.”

  “Teddy Roosevelt could sack me and not worry about what happened next,” Custer said. “He was a soldier himself—not so good a soldier as he thought he was, but a soldier nonetheless. President Sinclair will have a harder time of it: the papers will hound him for months if he dismisses me, for he has not the prestige, the authority—call it what you like—to do so without reminding people of his own inexperience in such matters.”

  That all made excellent political sense to Abner Dowling. Custer the political animal had always been far more astute than Custer the soldier. Dowling glanced toward Thomas, wondering how Upton Sinclair’s assistant secretary of war would take such defiance.

  It fazed him not at all. He said, “General Custer, the president predicted you would say something to that effect. He told me to assure you he was determined to seek your replacement, and that he would dismiss you out of hand if you offered difficulties. Here is his letter to you, which he instructed me to give you if it proved necessary.” Thomas reached into his breast pocket and took out an envelope, which he passed across the desk to Custer.

  The commandant of U.S. forces in Canada had taken off his reading glasses when Thomas came in. Now he put them back on. He opened the envelope, which was not sealed, and drew forth the letter inside. It must have been what Thomas said it was, for his cheeks flushed with rage as he read.

  “Why, the arrogant puppy!” he burst out when he was through. “I saved the country from the limeys when he was still making messes in his drawers, and he has the impudence to write a letter like this? I ought to let him sack me, by jingo! I can’t think of anything else likely to do the Socialists more political harm.”

  “General—” Dowling began. Custer had a large—indeed, an enormous—sense of his own importance. Much of that was justified. Not all of it was, a fact to which he sometimes proved blind.

  N. Mattoon Thomas held up a large, long-fingered hand. “Let General Custer decide as he will, Lieutenant Colonel,” he said. “If he prefers being ignominiously flung out of the Army he has served so well for so long to being allowed to retire and to celebrate his achievements as they deserve, that is his privilege.”

  Dowling sucked in a long breath. President Sinclair had sent the right man up to Winnipeg to do this job. Thomas could be smooth, but under that smoothness he had steel, sharp steel. Dowling had not realized it till that moment. Like so many professional soldiers, he’d assumed any Socialist had to be soft.

  Custer, evidently, had assumed the same thing. Hearing the cool contempt in Thomas’voice, he was discovering he’d made a mistake. He could hardly have looked more horrified. “Mr. Thomas…” he began.

  “Yes, General?” Once again, Thomas was the picture of urbanity.

  “Perhaps I was a mite hasty, Mr. Thomas,” Custer said. He’d never willingly retreated in battle, but he was backpedaling now.

  “Perhaps you were.” The assistant secretary of war let the slightest hint of scorn show in his agreement. Dowling eyed him with respect verging on alarm. He was a formidable piece of work, was N. Mattoon Thomas.

  “Could—Could we arrange it so that I need not retire immediately?” Custer asked. Now he was grasping at straws. Soldiers in the USA had political power only when politicians chose to acknowledge it. By refusing to do that, Sinclair and Thomas left Custer nowhere to stand.

  And Thomas, now that he’d won, was willing to let Custer have a straw. “We could indeed,” he said. “President Sinclair has instructed me that your retirement may take effect as late as the first of August—provided you give me a letter announcing your intention to retire before I leave this room.”

  “Damn you,” Custer muttered. Thomas pretended not to hear. Dowling knew he was pretending, because he himself had no trouble hearing at all. The general pulled a piece of paper from a desk drawer and wrote rapidly—and furiously, if the way the pen scratched over the paper gave any clue. When he was done, he thrust the sheet at Thomas. “There!”

  The assistant secretary of war read it careful
ly before nodding. “Yes, this appears to be satisfactory,” he said. “I will announce it directly on my return to Philadelphia.” He folded it and put it into the envelope in which he’d brought President Sinclair’s letter to Custer. “And, now that the retirement is in order, you may, as I said before, mark it in any way you like. If you want to stop at every town between here and the U.S. border and parade through it with a brass band, go right ahead. When you reach Philadelphia, the president will lead the cheers for you.”

  “Of course he will—it’ll make him look good.” Now that the deed was done, Custer bounced back fast. He leaned forward across the desk toward N. Mattoon Thomas. “And I’ll tell you why he won’t let me retire after August first, either—because he knows damn well it’ll raise a stink, and he wants to make sure the stink dies down before the Congressional elections this fall.”

  “It could be,” Thomas answered. “I’m not saying it is, mind you, but it could be.” He got to his feet. “Whether it is or not, though, is neither here nor there. No, no need to escort me out, Lieutenant Colonel Dowling. Now that I have what I came for, my driver will take me back to the train station, and then I can return to my duties in Philadelphia. A very good day to you both, gentlemen.” Away he went, young, confident, powerful.

  George Custer let out a long sigh. “Well, Dowling, I think it may at last be just about over. I squeezed a couple of more years of active duty out of Teddy Roosevelt, and got what I really wanted from him, too, but you can’t win all the time.”

  “There can’t be many who had a longer run, sir,” Dowling answered. He did his best to sound consoling while he wondered what his own career would look like once he finally got free of Custer.

  He’d said the right thing. Custer nodded. “Only one I can think of is Wilhelm I, Kaiser Bill’s grandfather. He fought under Napoleon—imagine it!—and he was still German Kaiser when I licked Gordon in 1881, and for six or seven more years after that, too. He was up over ninety when he finally gave up the ghost.”

  “That’s…quite something, sir.” Dowling could easily imagine Custer up over ninety. He wouldn’t go till they came and dragged him away—and neither would Libbie, come to that.

  And now Custer was scheming again. “A brass band in every town, that damn Red told me,” he said. “I’ll take him up on it, too—and if he thinks I aim to head straight south for the border from here, he can damn well think again, and so can Upton goddamn Sinclair. I aim to have the bulliest farewell tour in the history of the world.”

  “Yes, sir,” Dowling said, knowing full well who would have to plan that tour.

  “A good morning to you, Arthur,” Wilfred Rokeby said as Arthur McGregor walked into the post office in Rosenfeld, Manitoba.

  “Morning to you, too, Wilf,” McGregor answered. He thrust a hand into the pocket of his overalls. Coins jingled. “Need to buy a mess of stamps.”

  “That’s what I’m here for,” Rokeby said. “This have to do with Julia and Ted Culligan? Congratulations. I expect they’ll be happy together.”

  “Hope so,” McGregor said. “The Culligans are nice folks, and Julia’s so happy, she thinks she invented Ted. If she still feels that way ten years from now, they’ll have done it up right. For now, though, Maude and me, we’ve got invitations to write.”

  “You can have some of your kinfolk come out here for a change,” Rokeby said, “instead of you going back to Ontario.”

  “That’s right,” McGregor said. Since he hadn’t been in Ontario as Rokeby thought, that was liable to get awkward, but he figured he could slide through it. And he wasn’t about to give the postmaster any hint that he’d actually been in Winnipeg. He didn’t think Wilf Rokeby told the Yanks things they didn’t need to know, but he didn’t want to find out he was wrong the hard way.

  He bought a dollar’s worth of stamps, about as many as he’d bought at one crack in his life. “Thank you kindly,” Wilfred Rokeby said. Maybe because McGregor had been such a good customer, he slid a copy of the Rosenfeld Register across the counter to him. “You can have this, too, if you like. I’m done with it.”

  “Thanks, Wilf. That’s nice of you.” Because an American was putting out the new Register, McGregor didn’t like to buy it. He’d read it, though, if he got the chance. As it had in the old days, the Register reserved the top right part of the front page for important news from out of town. The headline leaped out at McGregor. He pointed to it. “So Custer’s finally going back to the USA, is he? Good riddance.” He didn’t mind saying that to the postmaster; most Canadians would likely have said worse.

  Rokeby nodded so emphatically, a lock of hair flopped down on his forehead despite the spicy-scented oil he used to plaster it down. The smell of that hair oil was to McGregor, as to other folks for miles around Rosenfeld, part of the odor of the post office.

  “He’s celebrating more triumphs than imperial Caesar while he’s doing it, too,” Rokeby said. “Just have a look at the story there.”

  McGregor did. The more he read, the longer his face got. “He’ll be parading through every town where his train stops?” he said, shaking his head in wonder. “He doesn’t think he’s imperial Caesar, Wilf. He thinks he’s God Almighty.”

  “He’s a vain old man,” the postmaster said. “Pretty soon he’ll meet God Almighty face-to-face, and I guarantee you’ll be able to tell the difference between the two of them.”

  “That’s the truth,” McGregor said. Had he had any luck at all, the devil would already be roasting Custer over a slow fire. He wondered if Custer would parade through Rosenfeld on his way back to the United States, and made a silent vow: if the American general came into town, he wouldn’t go out again.

  Wilfred Rokeby sighed. “Wish to Jesus I could go back to selling stamps with the portrait of the King, God bless him, but it doesn’t look like it’s going to happen. You have to get along the best way the big fish let you if you’re only a little fish yourself.”

  “I suppose you’re right,” McGregor said. The big fish—the big Yank fish—hadn’t let him get along. But he could still bite. He’d show them he could still bite. His features revealed none of that. Nodding to the postmaster, he went on, “Thanks for the stamps, and thanks for the paper, too.”

  “Any time, Arthur,” Rokeby said. “And congratulations again for your daughter. She’s a nice gal; I’ve always thought so. She deserves to be happy.”

  She’d have been a lot happier if the Yanks hadn’t come up over the border. But McGregor kept that to himself. He’d kept a lot of things to himself since Alexander was shot. With a last nod to the postmaster, he headed across the street to Henry Gibbon’s general store.

  Snow crunched under his boots. The calendar said it would be spring any day, but the calendar didn’t know much about Manitoba. As he walked, he thought hard. If Custer came to Rosenfeld…If Custer paraded through Rosenfeld…If he did, McGregor was going to try to kill him, and that was all there was to it.

  He could see only one way to do it: toss a bomb into Custer’s motorcar. That was how the Serbs had touched off the Great War. McGregor couldn’t see doing it and getting away with it. The prospect of not getting away with it had held him back in the past. He looked deep into himself. No, he really didn’t care any more. If he paid with his life, he paid with his life. He’d never have the chance to strike another blow like this against the Yanks. The next commandant they appointed would probably be some faceless functionary whose own mother had never heard of him. If someone like that got blown to smithereens, so what? But Custer had been famous for more than forty years. Killing him would mean something. The USA didn’t have an Archduke Franz Ferdinand, but Custer came close.

  Murder on his mind, McGregor walked right past the general store. He turned around, shaking his head, and went back. Henry Gibbon nodded from behind the counter. “Morning, Arthur,” he said. “What can I do for you today?”

  “I’ve got a list here somewhere,” McGregor said, and went through his pockets till he found i
t. Handing it to the storekeeper, he went on, “It’s Maude’s stuff, mostly: canned goods and sundries and such. We need kerosene, too, and there’s a couple of bottles of cattle drench on there for me, but it’s mostly for the missus.”

  Gibbon ran his finger down the list. “Reckon I can take care of just about all of this.” He looked up. “Hear tell your daughter’s going to tie the knot. That’s a big day, by heaven. Congratulations.”

  “Thank you, Henry,” McGregor said. He pointed to Gibbon. “I bet the Culligans came into town in the last couple of days. Mercy, even Wilf Rokeby’s heard the news.”

  “You know it’s all over creation if Wilf’s heard it, and that’s a fact,” Henry Gibbon said with a chuckle. He turned to the shelves behind him. “This’ll take a little bit. Why don’t you grab a candy cane—or a pickle, if one’d suit you better—and toast yourself by the stove while I rustle up what you need?”

  “I don’t mind if I do.” McGregor reached into the pickle barrel and pulled a likely one out of the brine. It crunched when he bit into it, the way a proper pickle should.

  “I’m going to give you a crate,” Gibbon said. “Bring it back and I’ll knock a dime off your next bill.”

  “All right. I would have brought one with me this time, only I didn’t think.”

  “I noticed that. It’s why I started knocking a dime off the bill,” the storekeeper answered. “Plenty of people who won’t think about anything else will remember money.”

  McGregor would have been one of those people before the Great War. He would have been one of those people up until 1916. Now the only thing he remembered was revenge. “What do I owe you?” he asked when Gibbon set the last can in the crate.

  “Well, when you bring in the kerosene can and I fill it, everything put all together comes to $8.51,” Gibbon said. “You did bring the kerosene can, I reckon?” By his tone, he reckoned no such thing.

  “Yeah, I did.” McGregor shook his head in dull embarrassment. “Lucky I remembered to hitch the horse to the wagon. I’ll go get the can.”