Blood and Iron (6 page)

The charge would have been more impressive had it been at something brisker than a walking pace. It would have been much more impressive had the barrel not bogged down in a mud puddle that aspired to be a pond when it grew up. The machine’s tracks were not very wide, and it weighed almost thirty-three tons. It could have bogged on ground better than that it was traveling.

Morrell snapped his fingers in annoyance at himself for not having brought out a slate and a grease pencil with which he could have taken notes here in the field. He was a lean man, nearing thirty, with a long face, weathered features that bespoke a lot of time out in the sun and wind, and close-cropped sandy hair at the moment hidden under a wool cap and the hood of a rain slicker.

His boots made squelching noises as he slogged through the ooze toward the barrel. The commander of the machine stuck his head out of the central cupola that gave him and his driver a place to perch and a better view than the machine gunners and artillerymen enjoyed (the engineers who tended the two motors had no view, being stuck in the bowels of the barrel).

“Sorry, sir,” he said. “Couldn’t spot that one till too late.”

“One of the hazards of the game, Jenkins,” Morrell answered. “You can’t go forward; that’s as plain as the nose on my face. See if you can back out.”

“Yes, sir.” Lieutenant Jenkins ducked down into the cupola, clanging the hatch shut after himself. The engines changed note as the driver put the barrel into reverse. The barrel moved back a few inches, then bogged down again. Jenkins had spunk. Having shifted position, he tried to charge forward once more and escape the grip of the mud. All he succeeded in doing was getting deeper into it.

Morrell waved for him to stop and called, “You keep going that way, you’ll need a periscope to see out, just like a submersible.”

He doubted Jenkins heard him; with the engines hammering away, nobody inside a barrel could hear the man next to him screaming in his ear. Even so, the engines fell silent a few seconds later. The traveling fortress’ commander could see for himself that he wasn’t going anywhere.

When the young lieutenant popped out through the hatch again, he was grinning. “Well, sir, you said you wanted to test the machine under extreme conditions. I’d say you’ve got your wish.”

“I’d say you’re right,” Morrell answered. “I’d also say these critters need wider tracks, to carry their weight better.”

Lieutenant Jenkins nodded emphatically. “Yes, sir! They could use stronger engines, too, to help us get out of this kind of trouble if we do get into it.”

“That’s a point.” Morrell also nodded. “We used what we had when we designed them: it would have taken forever to make a new engine and work all the teething pains out of it, and we had a war to fight. With the new model, though, we’ve got the chance to do things right, not just fast.”

That was his job: to figure out what
right
would be. He would have a lot to say about what the next generation of barrels looked like. It was a great opportunity. It was also a great responsibility. More than anything else, barrels had broken two years of stalemated struggle in the trenches and made possible the U.S. victory over the CSA. Having the best machines and knowing what to do with them would be vital if—
no, when,
he thought—the United States and Confederate States squared off again.

For the moment, his concerns were more immediate. “You and your men may as well come out,” he told Jenkins. “We’ve got a couple of miles of muck to go before we get back to Fort Leavenworth.”

“Leave the barrel here for now, sir?” the young officer asked.

“It’s not going anywhere by itself, that’s for sure,” Morrell answered, with which Jenkins could hardly disagree. “Rebs aren’t about to steal it, either. We’ll need a recovery vehicle to pull it loose, but we can’t bring one out now because it would bog too.” Recovery vehicles mounted no machine guns or cannon, but were equipped with stout towing chains, and sometimes with bulldozer blades.

More hatches opened up as the engineers and machine gunners and artillerymen emerged from their steel shell. Even in a Kansas December, it was warm in there. It had been hotter than hell in summertime Tennessee, as Morrell vividly remembered. It had been hot outside there, too. It wasn’t hot here. All eighteen men in the barrel crew, Jenkins included, started shivering and complaining. They hadn’t brought rain gear—what point, in the belly of the machine?

Morrell sympathized, but he couldn’t do anything about it. “Come on,” he said. “You won’t melt.”

“Listen to him,” one of the machine gunners said to his pal. “He’s got a raincoat, so what the devil has he got to worry about?”

“Here,” Morrell said sharply. The machine gunner looked alarmed; he hadn’t intended to be overheard. Morrell stripped off the slicker and threw it at him. “Now you’ve got the raincoat. Feel better?”

“No, sir.” The machine gunner let the coat fall in the mud. “Not fair for me to have it either, sir. Now nobody does.” That was a better answer than Morrell had expected from him.

Lieutenant Jenkins said, “Let’s get moving, so we stay as warm as we can. We’re all asking for the Spanish influenza.”

“That’s true,” Morrell said. “First thing we do when we get in is soak in hot water, to get the mud off and to warm us up inside. And if thinking about that isn’t enough to start you moving, I’ll give two dollars to any man who gets back to the fort ahead of me.”

That set the crew of the barrel into motion, sure enough. Morrell was the oldest man among them by three or four years. They were all veterans. They were all convinced they were in top shape. Every one of them hustled east, in the direction of the fort. They all thought they would have a little extra money jingling in their pockets before the day was through.

Morrell wondered how much his big mouth was going to cost him. As he picked up his own pace, his right leg started to ache. It lacked the chunk of flesh a Confederate bullet had blown from it in the opening weeks of the war. Morrell had almost lost the leg when the wound festered. He still limped a little, but never let the limp slow him down.

And he got to Fort Leavenworth ahead of any of the barrel men. As soon as he reached the perimeter of the fort, he realized how worn he was:
ridden hard and put away wet
was the phrase that came to mind. He’d ridden himself hard, all right, and he was sure as hell wet, but he hadn’t been put away yet. He wanted to fall into the mud to save himself the trouble.

Soaking in a steaming tub afterwards did help. So, even more, did the admiring looks he got from his competitors as they came onto the grounds of the fort in his wake. He savored those. Command was more than a matter of superior rank. If the men saw he deserved that rank, they would obey eagerly, not just out of duty.

That evening, he pored over German accounts of meetings with British and French barrels. The Germans had used only a few of the traveling fortresses, fewer than their foes. They’d won anyhow, with England distracted from the Continent because of the fighting in Canada, and with mutinies spreading through the French Army after Russia collapsed. Morrell was familiar with British barrels; the CSA had copied them. He knew less about the machines the French had built.

When he looked at photographs of some of the French barrels—their equivalent of the rhomboids England and the CSA used—he snickered. Their tracks were very short compared to the length of their chassis, which meant they easily got stuck trying to traverse trenches.

Another French machine, though, made him thoughtful. The Germans had only one example of that model: the text said it was a prototype hastily armed and thrown into the fight in a desperate effort to stem the decay of the French Army. It was a little barrel (
hardly more than a keg,
Morrell thought with a grin) with only a two-man crew, and mounted a single machine gun in a rotating turret like the ones armored cars used.

“Not enough firepower there to do you as much good as you’d like,” Morrell said into the quiet of his barracks room. Still, the design was interesting. It had room for improvement.

He grabbed a piece of paper and a pencil and started sketching. Whoever designed the first U.S. barrels had thought of nothing past stuffing as many guns as possible inside a steel box and making sure at least one of them could shoot every which way. The price of success was jamming a couple of squads’ worth of soldiers into that hellish steel box along with the guns.

If you put the two-inch cannon into that turret instead of a machine gun, you got a gun firing every which way all by itself. You’d still want a machine gun in front. If the cannon were in the turret, the driver would have to go down into the lower front of the machine. Could he handle a machine gun and drive, too?

“Not likely,” Morrell muttered. All right: that meant another gunner or two down there with him.

You wouldn’t always want to use the turret cannon, though. Sometimes that would be like swatting a fly with an anvil. Morrell sketched another machine gun alongside the cannon. It would rotate, too, of course, and the gunners who tended the large gun could also serve it.

That cut the crew from eighteen men down to five or six—you’d likely need an engineer, too, but the machine had better have only one engine, and one strong enough to move at a decent clip. Morrell shook his head. “No, six or seven,” he said. “Somebody’s got to tell everybody else what to do.” A boat without a commander would be like a boat—no, a ship; Navy men would laugh at him—without a captain.

He was forgetting something. He stared at the paper, then at the plain whitewashed plaster of the wall. Forcing it wouldn’t work; he had to try to think around it. That was as hard as
not
thinking about a steak dinner. He’d had practice, though. Soon it would come to him. Soon…

“Wireless telegraph!” he exclaimed, and added an aerial to his sketch. Maybe that would require another crewman, or maybe the engineer could handle it. If it did, it did. He’d wanted one of those gadgets in his barrel during the war just finished. Controlling the mechanical behemoths was too hard without them.

He studied the sketch. He liked it better than the machines in which he’d thundered to victory against the CSA. He wondered what the War Department would think. It was different, and a lot of senior officers prided themselves on not having had a new thought in years. He shrugged. He’d send it in and find out.

“Miss Colleton”—the broker in Columbia sounded agitated, even over the telephone wire—“I can do only so much. If you ask the impossible of me, you must not be surprised when I do not hand it to you on a silver platter.”

Anne Colleton glared at the telephone. She could not exert all her considerable force of personality through it. But she could not leave St. Matthews, South Carolina, to visit the state capital, either. And so she would have to forgo the impact her blond good looks had on people of the male persuasion. She’d manage with hardheaded common sense—or, if she didn’t, she’d find a new broker. She’d done that before, too.

“Mr. Whitson,” she said, “are the Confederate dollar, the British pound, and the French franc worth more in terms of gold today, January 16, 1918, than they were yesterday, or are they worth less?”

“Less, of course,” Whitson admitted, “but even so—”

“Do you expect that these currencies will be worth more in gold tomorrow, or less again?” Anne broke in.

“Less again,” Whitson said, “but even so, you are gutting your holdings by—”

She interrupted: “If I convert my holdings in those currencies to gold and U.S. dollars and German marks while the C.S. dollar and the pound and the franc are still worth
something
, Mr. Whitson, I will have
something
left when the Confederate States get back on their feet. If I wait any longer, I will have nothing. I’ve waited too long already. Now, sir: will you do as I instruct you, or would you sooner converse with my attorneys?”

“I am trying to save you from yourself, Miss Colleton,” Whitson said peevishly.

“You are my broker, not my pastor,” Anne said. “Answer the question I just gave you, if you would be so kind.”

Whitson sighed. “Very well. On your head be it.” He hung up.

So did Anne, angrily. Her brother, Tom, came into the room. “You look happy with the world,” he remarked. His words held less in the way of lighthearted humor and more sardonicism than they would have before the war. He’d gone off, as if to a lark, a captain, and come back a lieutenant-colonel who’d been through all the horrors the Roanoke front had to offer.

“Delighted,” Anne returned. She was still sorting out what to make of her brother. In a way, she was pleased he didn’t let her do all his thinking for him, as he had before. In another way, that worried her. Having him under her control had been convenient. She went on, “My idiot broker is convinced I’m the maniac. Everything will be rosy day after tomorrow, if you listen to him.”

“You’re right—he’s an idiot,” Tom agreed. “You know what I paid for a pair of shoes yesterday? Twenty-three dollars—in paper, of course. I keep my gold and silver in my pocket.
I’m
not an idiot.”

“It will get worse,” Anne said. “If it goes on for another year, people’s life savings won’t be worth anything. That’s when we really have to start worrying.”

“I’ll say it is.” Her brother nodded. “If the Red niggers had waited to rise up till that happened, half the white folks in the country would have grabbed their squirrel guns and joined in.”

“If they hadn’t risen up when they did, we might not be in this mess now,” Anne said grimly. “And they did bad enough when they rose.”

Tom nodded. The Marxist Negroes had killed Jacob, his brother and Anne’s, who was at the Marshlands plantation because Yankee poison gas left him an invalid. They’d burned the mansion, too; only in the past few months had their remnants been cleared from the swamps by the Congaree River.

“Hmm,” Tom said. “We need an idiot to take Marshlands off our hands for us. Maybe we ought to sell it to your broker.”

“As a matter of fact, I think we need an imbecile to take Marshlands off our hands,” Anne said. “God only knows when anyone will be able to raise a crop of cotton on that land: one fieldhand in three is liable to be a Red, and how could you tell till too late? And the taxes—I haven’t seen anyone talking about taking the war taxes off the books, have you?”

“Not likely.” Tom snorted. “Government needs every dime it can squeeze. Only good thing about that is, the government has to take paper. If they don’t take the paper they print, nobody else will, either.”

“Small favors,” Anne said, and her brother nodded again. She went on, “I’d take just about any kind of offer for Marshlands, and I’d take paper. I’d turn it into gold, but I’d take paper. If that doesn’t prove I’m desperate, I don’t know what would.”

“A hundred years,” Tom said. “More than a hundred years—gone.” He snapped his fingers. “Like that. Gone.” He snapped them again. “Better than fifty years of good times for the whole country. That’s gone, too.”

“We have to put the pieces back together,” Anne said. “We have to make the country strong again, or else the damnyankees will run over us again whenever they decide they’re ready. Even if they don’t decide to run over us, they can make us their little brown cousins, the way we’ve done with the Empire of Mexico.”

“I’m damned if I’ll be anybody’s little brown cousin,” Tom Colleton ground out. He swore with studied deliberation. He’d never cursed in front of her before he went off to the trenches. He still didn’t do it in the absentminded style he’d no doubt used there. But when he felt the need, the words came out.

“I feel the same way,” Anne answered. “Anyone with an ounce of sense feels the same way. But the Congressional elections prove nobody knows how to take us from where we are to where we ought to be.”

“What?” Her brother raised an eyebrow. “Split as near down the middle between Whigs and Radical Liberals as makes no difference? And a couple of Socialists elected from Chihuahua, and one from Cuba, and even one from New Orleans, for Christ’s sake? Sounds to me like they’ll have everything all straightened out by day after tomorrow, or week after next at the latest.”

Anne smiled at Tom’s pungent sarcasm, but the smile had sharp corners. “Even that mess shouldn’t get things too far wrong. We have to do enough of what the Yankees tell us to keep the USA from attacking us while we’re flat. Whatever dribs and drabs we happen to have left after that can go to putting us back on our feet. Lean times, yes, but I think we can come through them if we’re smart.”

“Outside of a couple of panics, we haven’t had lean times before,” Tom said. “We do need better politicians than the gang we’ve got. We could use somebody who’d really lead us out of the wilderness instead of stumbling through it for forty years.”

“Of the current crop, I’m not going to hold my breath,” Anne said. “I—” The telephone interrupted. She picked it up. “Hello?” Her mouth fell open, just a little, in surprise. “Commander Kimball! How good to hear from you. I was hoping you’d come through the war all right. Where are you now?”

“I’m in Charleston,” Roger Kimball answered. “And what the hell is this ‘Commander Kimball’ nonsense? You know me better than that, baby.” Unlike her brother, Kimball swore whenever he felt like it and didn’t care who was listening. He not only had rough edges, he gloried in them. And he was right—she did know him intimately enough, in every sense of the word, to call him by his Christian name.

That she could, though, didn’t mean she had to. She enjoyed keeping men off balance. “In Charleston? How nice,” she said. “I hope you can get up to St. Matthews before long. You do know my brother, Lieutenant-Colonel Colleton, is staying with me here in town?”
You do know that, even if you get up to St. Matthews, you’re not going to make love with me right now?

Kimball was brash. He wasn’t stupid. Anne couldn’t abide stupidity. He understood what she meant without her having to spell it out. Laughing a sour laugh, he answered, “And he’ll whale the living turpentine out of me if I put my hands where they don’t belong, will he? Sweetheart, I hate to tell you this, but I haven’t got the jack for pleasure trips without much pleasure. I’m on the beach, same as every other submarine skipper in the whole goddamn Navy.” Where he could banter about passing on a chance to pay a social call that was only a social call, his voice showed raw pain when he told her the Navy had cut him loose.

“I’m very sorry to hear that,” she said, and trusted him to understand she understood what grieved him most. “What are you going to do now?”

“Don’t know yet,” Kimball said. “I may try and make a go of it here, or I may head down to South America. Plenty of navies there that could use somebody who really knows what he’s doing when he looks through a periscope.”

That was likely to be true. The South American republics had chosen sides in the Great War as the rest of the world had done. Losers would be looking for revenge. Winners would be looking to make sure they didn’t get it.

Anne said, “Whatever you decide to do, I wish you the very best.”

“But not enough for you to send your brother out to hunt possums or something, eh?” Kimball laughed again. “Never mind. We’ll get another chance one of these days, I reckon. Good luck to the lieutenant-colonel, too, the son of a bitch.” Before she could answer, he hung up.

So did she, and she laughed, too. She admired the submariner; he was, she judged, almost as thoroughly self-centered as herself. Tom raised an eyebrow. “Who’s this Commander—Kimball, is it?”

“That’s right. He captained a submarine,” Anne answered. “I got to know him on the train to New Orleans not long after the war started.” He’d seduced her in his Pullman berth, too, but she didn’t mention that.

“How well do you know him?” Tom asked.

“We’re friends,” she said.
I was in bed with him down in Charleston when the Red Negro uprising broke out.
She didn’t mention that, either.

She didn’t have to. “Are you more than…friends?” her brother demanded.

Before the war, he wouldn’t have dared question her that way. “I’ve never asked what you did while you weren’t fighting,” she said. “What I did, or didn’t do, is none of your business.”

Tom set his jaw and looked stubborn. He wouldn’t have done that before the war, either. No, she couldn’t control him any more, not with certainty. He said, “If you’re going to marry the guy, it is. If he’s just after your money, I’ll send him packing. What you’re doing affects me, you know.”

Nor would he have had that thought in 1914. “If he were just after my money, don’t you think
I
would have sent him packing?” she asked in return. “I can take care of myself, you know, with a rifle or any other way.”

“All right,” Tom said. “People who fall in love are liable to go all soft in the head, though. I wanted to make sure it hadn’t happened to you.”

“When it does, you can shovel dirt on me, because I’ll be dead.” Anne spoke with great conviction. Tom came over and kissed her on the cheek. They both laughed, liking each other very much at that moment.

In the trenches down in Virginia, Chester Martin had heard New Englanders talk about a lazy wind, a wind that didn’t bother blowing around a man but went straight through him. The wind coming off Lake Erie this morning while he picketed the Toledo steel mill where he would sooner have been working was just that kind. In spite of coat and long underwear, in spite of hat and ear muffs, he shivered and his teeth chattered as he trudged back and forth in front of the plant.

His sign was stark in its simplicity. It bore but one word, that in letters a foot high:
THIEVES
! “They want to cut our wages,” he said to the fellow in front of him, a stocky man named Albert Bauer. “We went out and got shot at—hell, I got shot—and they stayed home and got rich. No, they got richer; they were already rich. And they want to cut our wages.”

Bauer was a solid Socialist. He said, “This is what we get for reelecting that bastard Roosevelt.”

“He’s not so bad,” Martin said. A Democrat himself, he walked the picket line with his more radical coworkers. “He visited my stretch of the front once; hell, I jumped on him when the Rebs started shelling us. Later, when I got wounded, he found out about it and sent me a note.”

“Bully!” Bauer said. “Can you eat the note? Can you take it to the bank and turn it into money? Roosevelt will oblige. Feudal nobles do. But does he care about whether you starve? Not likely!”

“Hush!” Chester Martin said suddenly. He pointed. “Here come the scabs.” The factory owners always had people willing to work for them, no matter how little they paid. They also had the police on their side.

Jeers and curses and all manner of abuse rained down on the heads of the workers taking the places of the men who’d gone on strike. So did a few rocks and bottles, in spite of Socialist calls for calm and in spite of the strong force of blue-uniformed policemen escorting them into the steel mill. “Well, now they’ve gone and done it,” Albert Bauer said in disgusted tones. “Now they’ve given the goddamn cops the goddamn excuse they need to go on and suppress us.”

He proved a good prophet. As soon as the police had hustled the scabs into the plant, they turned around and yanked the nightsticks off their belts. A whistle blew, as if an officer during the war were ordering his men out of the trenches and over the top. Shouting fiercely, the police charged the strikers.

Chester Martin had not been an officer. But, thanks to casualties in the ranks above him, he’d briefly commanded a company in Virginia not long before the CSA asked for an armistice. Almost all the men on the picket line had seen combat, too. “Come on!” he shouted. “We can take these fat sons of bitches! Let’s give ’em some bayonet drill.”