Blood and iron
( American Empire - 1 )
Harry Turtledove
Harry Turtledove
Blood and iron
Introduction
The Great War is over. After three years of brutal conflict, the United States have defeated the Confederate States and Canada- as, in Europe, the German Empire and Austria-Hungary have defeated France, Britain, and Russia. Now, all across North America, people are trying to pick up their shattered lives.
In Boston, Sylvia Enos mourns the loss of her husband, George, who was killed when his destroyer, the USS Ericsson, was sunk by a torpedo during the last moments of the war. As the Confederate States had already asked for an armistice, she believes a British submersible sank the Ericsson. She has more urgent things to worry about, though: keeping her job when so many men are returning from the war, and bringing up her young son and daughter.
In fact, though, Commander Roger Kimball of the CSS Bone-fish sank the Ericsson, a last blow against the United States even though he knew the Confederacy had asked for quarter. His executive officer, Tom Brearley, tried to talk him out of this, but he ignored Brearley and went ahead. As the USA prohibited the CSA from keeping submarines after the armistice, Kimball is on the beach in Charleston, South Carolina, looking for whatever he can find.
Roger Kimball is Anne Colleton's sometime lover. Her plantation, Marshlands, a ruin because of the Red Negro uprising of 1915-16, Anne is now living in St. Matthews, South Carolina, not far from Columbia, the state capital. After the war ended, she and her brother Tom and a militia they recruited have finally succeeded in clearing out the last remnants of the black rebels who called themselves the Congaree Socialist Republic from the swamps along the banks of the Congaree River.
Colonel Irving Morrell is one of the U.S. heroes of the moment. The young officer spearheaded the column of armored traveling forts known as barrels that broke the Confederate defenses around Nashville, Tennessee, and allowed the United States to capture the important city. Pushing south from Nashville, he was one of the first officers to receive a Confederate request for a cease-fire.
Lieutenant Colonel Abner Dowling is adjutant to Colonel Morrell's commanding officer in the Nashville campaign, George Armstrong Custer. As the war ended, he was summoned to Philadelphia, the de facto capital of the United States, along with Custer, whom Democratic President Theodore Roosevelt has just promoted to full general as a reward for his long, faithful, and-in the end-successful service. Custer's headlong aggressiveness found a perfect match with the use of barrels en masse.
In Philadelphia, young Socialist Congresswoman Flora Hamburger has earned the nickname "the conscience of the Congress" for her principled stands on important issues. Her younger brother, David, is also in Philadelphia, at the Pennsylvania Hospital-he lost a leg fighting in Virginia not long before the end of the war. To her dismay, David has become a Democrat and supports a hard line against the CSA. Flora has become friendly with Hosea Blackford, the veteran Socialist congressman from the state of Dakota, who lives in the same block of flats as she does.
Nellie Semphroch, a widow, lives in Washington, D.C., with her grown daughter, Edna. They have run a coffeehouse throughout the Great War in the de jure capital of the United States, which was occupied for two and a half years by Confederate soldiers. Nellie has also gathered information from Confederates in the coffeehouse and passed it on to the cobbler across the street, Hal Jacobs, an important member of a U.S. spy ring. Nellie and Edna were both decorated by President Roosevelt for their services, and Nellie has just accepted a proposal of marriage from Jacobs.
Anne Colleton's former butler, Scipio, has found a job waiting tables in Augusta, Georgia. The cultured, educated Negro is glad to have escaped from the ruin of the Congaree Socialist Republic, and perhaps even gladder to have escaped from his former mistress' vengeance: the Red uprising, of which Scipio had been an unwilling part, had begun at Marshlands with the murder of her brother, Jacob, a fact that helps drive her push for revenge against the Negroes involved. Scipio hopes for nothing more than to live out the rest of his life in obscurity.
In Lexington, Kentucky, another Negro, Cincinnatus Driver, is adjusting to life in the United States. The adjustments aren't easy; Kentucky was forcibly rejoined to the USA after its conquest in the Great War. Confederate diehards remain active in the state. So do Red factions consisting mostly of Negroes. Cincinnatus has been uncomfortably and unwillingly involved with both groups, and both view him with suspicion-as does Luther Bliss, the head of the Kentucky State (secret) Police. He has been driving a truck for the U.S. Army, but with the end of the war finds himself out of work and looking for a way to support his wife and young son.
On a Canadian farm not far from Rosenfeld, Manitoba, Arthur McGregor has avenged himself on the U.S. occupiers who executed his teenage son, Alexander, for rebellion against their authority. His bomb killed Major Hannebrink, the officer who ordered Alexander up before a firing squad, during a celebration of the end of the war. Arthur McGregor has no intention of confining his vengeance to Major Hannebrink alone. This worries his wife, Maude. His surviving daughters, Julia and Mary-especially Mary, the younger-don't precisely know what he is doing, but hope he will do more of it.
Lucien Galtier is also a farmer working land formerly belonging to the Dominion of Canada. These days, though, his farm near Riviere-du-Loup is part of the Republic of Quebec, a U.S. creation during the Great War. Galtier at first opposed the U.S. occupation of Quebec, especially after U.S. authorities took part of his farm-part of his patrimony-and built a hospital on the land. Lately, though, his reservations about the United States have faded, not least because his daughter, Nicole, who was working at the hospital, married an American doctor, Leonard O'Doull.
Just returned to the United States from the province of Ontario is Jonathan Moss, who served as a pilot all through the Great War. Moss, who lives in the Chicago area, plans to resume his study of the law. While in Canada, he fell in love with a Canadian woman, Laura Secord. Even though she emphatically does not love him in return-she is descended from a famous Canadian patriot of the same name-he cannot get her out of his mind.
Steelworker Jefferson Pinkard has just returned to Birmingham, Alabama, after fighting in the Confederate Army in West Texas. He looks forward to returning to his job at the Sloss Works. He is not so sure he looks forward to returning to family life. During the war, his wife, Emily, was unfaithful with his best friend, Bedford Cunningham, who had come home for good after losing an arm in Tennessee.
Steelworker Chester Martin will be returning to Toledo, Ohio. He fought in the Great War from first shot to last, and was lucky enough to be wounded only once. As a sergeant, he had commanded a company in the closing days of the fighting in Virginia (he was, in fact, David Hamburger's company commander). He is eager to return to the United States to see his parents and his sister, Sue.
Petty Officer Sam Carsten remains in the U.S. Navy. He has seen the effects of aviation on naval warfare off the South American coast, when the USS Dakota was bombed by land-based aeroplanes. His superior officer, Commander Grady, has hinted that the U.S. Navy has something new in mind when it comes to naval aviation. Carsten is eager to learn what it is.
Reggie Bartlett, a pharmacist's assistant, has returned home to Richmond, Virginia, capital of the CSA. He has had a hard war. He was captured once in Virginia, but escaped from a U.S. prisoner-of-war camp. Returning to action, he was badly wounded in Sequoyah and captured again. This time, he remained in a U.S. hospital in St. Louis till the fighting ended. His long talks with Rehoboam, a colored Confederate soldier also at the hospital after losing a foot, have made him thoughtful about parts of life in the Confederate States he
had always taken for granted before the war.
Sergeant Jake Featherston, former battery commander in the First Richmond Howitzers, has also come home to Richmond. He too fought from first shot to last in the Great War, and never rose above sergeant, not least because the War Department was angry at him for exposing the shortcomings of his former CO, Captain Jeb Stuart III. Furious and bitter at the War Department in particular and the world in general, Featherston wonders what to do now that he has no place in the Army any more.
I
When the Great War ended, Jake Featherston had thought the silence falling over the battlefield as strange and unnatural as machine-gun fire in Richmond on a Sunday afternoon. Now, sitting at the bar of a saloon in the Confederate capital a few weeks later, he listened to the distant rattle of a machine gun, nodded to himself, and took another pull at his beer.
"Wonder who they're shooting at this time," the barkeep remarked before turning away to pour a fresh whiskey for another customer.
"Hope it's the niggers." Jake set a hand on the grip of the artilleryman's pistol he wore on his belt. "Wouldn't mind shooting a few myself, by Jesus."
"They shoot back these days," the bartender said.
Featherston shrugged. People had called him a lot of different things during the war, but nobody had ever called him yellow. The battery of the First Richmond Howitzers he'd commanded had held longer and retreated less than any other guns in the Army of Northern Virginia. "Much good it did me," he muttered. "Much good it did anything." He'd still been fighting the damnyankees from a good position back of Fredericksburg, Virginia, when the Confederate States finally threw in the sponge.
He went over to the free-lunch counter and slapped ham and cheese and pickles on a slice of none-too-fresh bread. The bartender gave him a pained look; it wasn't the first time he'd raided the counter, nor the second, either. He normally didn't give two whoops in hell what other people thought, but this place was right around the corner from the miserable little room he'd found. He wanted to be able to keep coming here.
Reluctantly, he said, "Give me another beer, too." He pulled a couple of brown dollar banknotes out of his pocket and slid them across the bar. Beer had only been a dollar a glass when he got into town (or a quarter in specie). Before the war, even through most of the war, it had only been five cents.
As long as he was having another glass, he snagged a couple of hard-boiled eggs from the free-lunch spread to go with his sandwich. He'd eaten a lot of saloon free lunches since coming home to Richmond. They weren't free, but they were the cheapest way he knew to keep himself fed.
A couple of rifle shots rang out, closer than the machine gun had been. "Any luck at all, that's the War Department," Jake said, sipping at the new beer. "Lot of damn fools down there nobody'd miss."
"Amen," said the fellow down the bar who was drinking whiskey. Like Featherston, he wore butternut uniform trousers with a shirt that had seen better days (though his, unlike Jake's, did boast a collar). "Plenty of bastards in there who don't deserve anything better than a blindfold and a cigarette, letting us lose the war like that."
"Waste of cigarettes, you ask me, but what the hell." Jake took another pull at his beer. It left him feeling generous. In tones of great concession, he said, "All right, give 'em a smoke. Then shoot 'em."
"Plenty of bastards in Congress, too," the bartender put in. He was plump and bald and had a white mustache, so he probably hadn't been in the trenches or just behind them. Even so, he went on in tones of real regret: "If they hadn't fired on the marchers in Capitol Square last week, reckon we might have seen some proper housecleaning."
Featherston shook his head. "Wouldn't matter for beans, I say."
"What do you mean, it wouldn't matter?" the whiskey-drinking veteran demanded. "Stringing a couple dozen Congressmen to lampposts wouldn't matter? Go a long way toward making things better,/think."
"Wouldn't," Jake said stubbornly. "Could hang 'em all, and it wouldn't matter. They'd go and pick new Congressmen after you did, and who would they be? More rich sons of bitches who never worked a day in their lives or got their hands dirty. Men of good family." He loaded that with scorn. "Same kind of jackasses they got in the War Department, if you want to hear God's truth."
He was not anyone's notion of a classical orator, with grace-fill, carefully balanced sentences and smooth, elegant gestures: he was skinny and rawboned and awkward, with a sharp nose, a sharper chin, and a harsh voice. But when he got rolling, he spoke with an intensity that made anyone who heard him pay attention.
"What do you reckon ought to happen, then?" the barkeep asked.
"Tear it all down," Jake said in tones that brooked no argument. "Tear it down and start over. Can't see what in God's name else to do, not when the men of good family9-he sneered harder than ever-"let the niggers rise up and then let 'em into the Army to run away from the damnyankees and then gave 'em the vote to say thank-you. Christ!" He tossed down the last of the beer and stalked out.
He'd fired canister at retreating Negro troops-and, as the rot spread through the Army of Northern Virginia, at retreating white troops, too. It hadn't helped. Nothing had helped. We should have licked the damnyankees fast, he thought. A long war let them pound on us till we broke. He glared in the direction of the War Department. Your fault. Not the soldiers fault. Yours.
He tripped on a brick and almost fell. Cursing, he kicked it toward the pile of rubble from which it had come. Richmond was full of rubble, rubble and ruins. U.S. bombing aeroplanes had paid repeated nighttime visits over the last year of the war. Even windows with glass in them were exceptions, not the rule.
Negro laborers with shovels cleared bricks and timbers out of the street, where one faction or another that had sprung up since the war effort collapsed had built a barricade. A soldier with a bayoneted Tredegar kept them working. Theoretically, Richmond was under martial law. In practice, it was under very little law of any sort. Discharged veterans far outnumbered men still under government command, and paid them no more heed than they had to.
Three other Negroes strode up the street toward Jake. They were not laborers. Like him, they wore a motley mix of uniforms and civilian clothing. Also like him, they were armed. Two carried Tredegars they hadn't turned in at the armistice; the third wore a holstered pistol. They did not look like men who had run from the Yankees. They did not look like men who would run from anything.
Their eyes swept over Jake. He was not a man who ran from anything, either. He walked through them instead of going around. "Crazy white man," one of them said as they walked on. He didn't keep his voice down, but he didn't say anything directly to Jake, either. With his own business on his mind, Jake kept walking.
He passed by Capitol Square. He'd slept under the huge statue of Albert Sidney Johnston the night he got into Richmond. He couldn't do that now: troops in sandbagged machine-gun nests protected the Confederate Capitol from the Confederate people. Neatly printed NO LOITERING signs had sprouted like mushrooms after a rain. Several bore handwritten addenda: THIS MEANS YOU. Bloodstains on the sidewalk underscored the point.
Posters covered every wall. The most common showed the Stars and Bars and the phrase, PEACE, ORDER, PROSPERITY. That one, Featherston knew, came from the government's printing presses. President Semmes and his flunkies remained convinced that, if they said everything was all right, it would be all right.
Black severed chains on red was another often-repeated theme. The Negroes' Red uprisings of late 1915 had been crushed, but Reds remained, JOIN us! some of the posters shouted-an appeal from black to white.
"Not likely," Jake said, and spat at one of those posters. No more than a handful of Confederate whites had joined the revolutionaries during the uprisings. No more than a handful would ever join them. Of so much Featherston was morally certain.
Yet another poster showed George Washington and the slogan, WE NEED A NEW REVOLUTION. Jake spotted only a couple of copies of that one, which was put out by the Freedom Part
y. Till that moment, Jake had never heard of the Freedom Party. He wondered if it had existed before the war ended.
He studied the poster. Slowly, he nodded. "Sure as hell do need a new revolution," he said. He had no great use for Washington, though. Washington had been president of the United States. That made him suspect in Jake's eyes.
But in spite of the crude illustration, in spite of the cheap printing, the message struck home, and struck hard. The Freedom Party sounded honest, at any rate. The ruling Whigs were trying to heal an amputation with a sticking plaster. The Radical Liberals, as far as he was concerned, played the same song in a different key. As for the Socialists-he spat at another red poster. Niggers and nigger-lovers, every one of them. The bomb-throwing maniacs wanted a revolution, too, but not the kind the country needed.
He peered more closely at the Freedom Party poster. It didn't say where the party headquarters were or how to go about joining. His lip curled. "Goddamn amateurs," he said. One thing spending his whole adult life in the Army had taught him: the virtue of organization.
With a shrug, he headed back toward his mean little room. If the Freedom Party didn't know how to attract any members, odds were it wasn't worth joining. No matter how good its ideas, they didn't matter if nobody could find out about them. Even the damned Socialists knew that much.
"Too bad," he muttered. "Too stinking bad." Congressional elections were coming this fall. A shame the voters couldn't send the cheaters and thieves in the Capitol the right kind of message.
Back in the room-he'd had plenty of more comfortable bivouacs on campaign-he wrote for a while in a Gray Eagle scratchpad. He'd picked up the habit toward the end of the war. Over Open Sights, he called the work in progress. It let him set down some of his anger on paper. Once the words were out, they didn't fester quite so much in his mind. He might have killed somebody if he hadn't had a release like this.
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