1901 (16 page)

We did not wish this war. We did nothing to deserve it or encourage it. Yet we have been invaded by a tyrannical European power that wants our wealth, our dignity, our future, and our freedom. We will not surrender to them! As I write this, our armies and our navy are gathering to expel them. It will be a most difficult task. Germany is a great military power. We must, therefore, be greater, stronger, smarter.

Germany has demanded that we negotiate a surrender. We shall indeed do that, but the surrender we negotiate will be the kaiser’s, not ours. We will not rest until every German soldier has been purged from our land, our cities have been retaken, our homes have been rebuilt and reoccupied, and the diabolical kaiser has been punished for his grievously evil deeds.

It will take time to do this and we may have to pay a terrible price. The cost will include the lives of many young men who will be called upon to make the greatest sacrifice possible in the cause of their country. We honor them! We will make those sacrifices and proudly mourn our fallen and condemn the invader with our anger.

A word. Please, dear friends, let our anger be righteous and focused only at the German invader. But let us not forget that we are all immigrants, or descendants of immigrants. Either we or our forefathers all came to this fair land from elsewhere in order to be free. This includes people from Germany or of German ancestry. Many of the Germans who came to America did so to be free of that same malevolent kaiser whose marauding hordes have appeared on our shore. The Germans who came to America have already fought bravely in our wars, including the Civil War and the recent Spanish war. Now those same German Americans are uniting with other Americans whose backgrounds include English, Irish, Italian, Dutch, Swedish, and Spanish against a common enemy. Governors of two states, Wisconsin and Ohio, have informed me of their plan to form a German American legion to fight against the kaiser’s barbarian army. Therefore, I implore you not to take vengeance against the helpless immigrants. I have been saddened by reports of burnings, beatings, insults, and, yes, lynchings inflicted upon helpless and outnumbered people who happen to have recently come from Germany.

If you are so brave that you wish to fight Germans, then join our army! I guarantee your blood lust will be sated. I further assure you that there are no saboteurs about. They were all captured, they were all German officers, and they will be punished according to the law. So there is no reason to fear someone who talks with an accent or who behaves differently.

So let us spend this day in prayer, reflection, and preparation. Then let us go forth to bear our burden and earn our just victory.

God bless America,

Theodore Roosevelt

President of the United States

Katrina Schuyler tried hard not to giggle, but it was impossible.

“Darn it, Trina, how can I feed you if you keep making it so difficult?” Patrick had graduated to using the more familiar form of her first name.

The giggles turned to laughter. “I don’t know,” she gasped. Patrick had a piece of chicken impaled on a fork and was poised to pounce with it as soon as her mouth stood still. He was a wondrously ridiculous sight.

“Is this what happened to me when I was a little baby?” Trina asked.

“Probably.”

“Look, I’m bruised, not a cripple. Just cut the food into small pieces and let me use a knife to navigate the items onto a fork. I think I can grasp it well enough from there.”

“How about a wineglass? Can you maneuver one of those?” He held a bottle of chilled white wine and a corkscrew.

Trina laughed hard again. “Most definitely,” she answered.

How pleasant, Patrick thought, and how misleading. The July sky was a vivid blue and the meadow that surrounded the shade tree where they were relaxing was as rich and verdant as could be imagined. A soft breeze weakened the thrust of the sun and made them comfortable. All around them birds chirped and squirrels chattered from overhead branches.

And there were no ants. Yet.

But only a few miles away from their idyll was a refugee camp that teemed with thousands of hurt, lost, and bewildered souls, huddled under inadequate canvas, many of them damaged both in body and soul. And only about thirty miles farther, there was war, and armed people were killing each other.

This was an interlude, an oasis of calm, and it could not last. Tomorrow he would go south, find Baldy Smith’s headquarters, and try to see what was developing. In a few days Trina would be healed enough to go back to helping the refugees find more permanent places to stay than a squalid tent camp.

The comings and goings were, she told him, developing into a cycle. The trains southbound from Springfield and Boston brought soldiers and supplies and picked up refugees in Hartford. From there the refugees were shipped to other cities throughout the eastern half of the United States. Tens of thousands had already departed. Hartford was developing into quite a railhead, and a number of temporary spur lines had been laid down to handle the dramatically increased volume of traffic. It seemed to Patrick to be very well organized.

Along with talk of refugee camps, they learned a great deal about each other. Trina, he found, was extremely well read and well educated, almost intimidating in the depth of her knowledge. She had attended a number of classes at Barnard. She was also extremely athletic, another point that seemed to bother her peers who felt that a woman’s role was to be docile and physically weak. What Patrick first took for thinness he realized was a lithe muscularity. She enjoyed cycling, hiking, swimming, and horseback riding. Patrick recalled the horseback ride from New York and had to admit she was vastly superior to him in that category. He had reminded her he was infantry, not cavalry.

Trina’s younger brother was a recently commissioned ensign in the navy and was serving on the newest battleship, the
Alabama
. She had no idea where he was, except that the ship was on a South American cruise. She hoped it was out of harm’s way, although she knew in her heart that it would not be so forever. Her father was a wealthy investor, descended from a long line of equally successful men. He was currently out west buying up oil rights. Jacob Schuyler had a feeling that the internal combustion engine was going to be important in the future and wanted to be prepared for that day. He was, Trina told Patrick, buying up the oil drilling rights to hundreds of thousands of acres almost for pennies apiece. She had been in contact with him by telegram, and he was trying to make it back from Texas, where oil had been found and was beginning to be drilled in profitable quantities. The first well, she laughed, was something named Spindle-Top.

When she found that Patrick was from southern Michigan, she asked him if he knew Henry Ford.

“No, I’ve never actually met him, but I know who he is and understand he’s trying to line up investors for a new corporation that will make cheap automobiles. He hasn’t asked my family to invest. Although we’re not poor, I don’t think we’d be interested in such a risky endeavor.”

He continued. “My family has lived in the Detroit area for a couple of generations. My grandfather was a blacksmith and gradually expanded from repairing implements into making farm machinery. My father made the enterprise very profitable, but they wouldn’t be interested in Ford. At least not yet and not as investors, although it wouldn’t surprise me if they were interested in working with him as a supplier. I haven’t followed those goings-on very much. I just know what I’ve read in letters from home. I chose the army, not farm machinery.” He laughed. “Why, has Ford contacted your father?”

“Yes, but Father’s not interested in a direct investment either. But he did inform Ford that he would like to sell the automobiles if he was able to make them. That and oil are the extent of his interests at this time.” She thought for a moment. She had ridden in an automobile exactly once in her life and found it an experience that was both frightening and exhilarating. “If Ford succeeds, do you think the army would ever use automobiles instead of horses?”

“Not for a long, long time. The automobile would have to be made reliable as well as inexpensive. That and it would have to be able to go cross-country over rugged terrain like a horse, and there would have to be fuel dumps to keep the things going. And what about mechanics for repairs? It would take a major reorganization of the army to accommodate automobiles. No, I don’t think that will happen for a while. Although,” he demurred, “there are other countries that are experimenting with putting machine guns on them and protecting them with armor plate.” He did not add that the current U.S. Army was firmly entrenched in the last century and not, thanks to Nelson Miles, very interested in future developments.

She asked him why he joined the army and not the navy and was amused at the response: he got seasick.

Quietly, they got around to the reasons why they both were still single. Trina readily admitted that her wealth had attracted many potential suitors when she was younger, but her fond and doting father would not push her into a relationship she did not want. She had known from early in her youth that she would never be a raving beauty according to the standards of the time. Her intellect and forceful personality scared off potential suitors, however obsessed with money they might have been. Too many men didn’t like dominant women or were afraid of them. There were also those who felt her quest for learning and athletics smacked of Bohemianism.

When she mentioned that fact to Patrick, it perplexed him. Since his simplistic view of Bohemianism meant a degree of sexual promiscuity, he found himself wondering about her, and also wondering why he was concerned. Before he could wonder more, Trina answered his unasked question.

“I am hardly a Bohemian. I am probably more conservative than an old dowager.” She frowned. “Why do people fear me when I try to be a little different? All I want is the freedom to be me, to learn, to search. Does that make me a Bohemian?”

Her answer relieved him. “Of course not.” Now why was he so relieved?

“Do I frighten you, Patrick?”

He lay on the ground, his face looking into the latticework of tree limbs while she sat farther in the shade, her back against the tree trunk. “Naw. After fighting Apaches, Spanish, Germans, and the odd drunk in a garrison town, I’m not frightened of you at all.”

Patrick told her about growing up an only child in Michigan, around Detroit, and what it was like being a soldier, moving from place to place and never really being settled. He had a lot of friends and was part of a fraternity, but he had little opportunity for close relationships. As for women, there were very few in a military compound, and those who were there were either already taken or not worth taking. It was, he told her, a strangely monastic existence. Not that he was a saint, but there was no reason to bring up everything.

He told her that for some time he had been considering leaving the military. “I think I may be through with war and killing. I know I don’t want to sell farm machinery, but I would like to do something like what I did at West Point—teach. I’ve friends at the University of Michigan and maybe I can get something there. With what I get from the family business, and a few other investments I’ve managed to make, I could live there quite comfortably.”

Trina nodded. “I wonder now if I could ever go back to living in New York. It’s like a phase of my life that’s closed. It’s occurred to me that I was never really comfortable in the city. For all its cosmopolitanism, it can be strangely restrictive. I don’t think I will ever go back there to live. Those apartments I lived in were rented. It’s as if we knew we would not put down permanent roots.”

Against their wishes, the afternoon passed. As the sun descended, Patrick gathered their belongings and they drove the carriage slowly back to town and her house. When they arrived, Heinz informed him he’d found suitable accommodations with a local farmer a couple of miles down the road. He’d done so by appealing to the man’s patriotism and by outbidding another man.

The four of them ate a quick and light dinner prepared by Molly. Both Patrick and Trina were openly pleased that Molly and Heinz had managed to negotiate a sort of unarmed truce. With dinner finished, it was time to depart. Patrick told Heinz to get the horses, which gave him a moment to say a quiet good-bye to Katrina.

As they stood by the open door, Patrick had a feeling of longing. He wanted to touch Trina, but he feared that simply reaching for her hand would hurt her even more than the possibility of rebuff would hurt him. They stood in silence for a minute until Trina solved the problem. She reached up and kissed him softly on the lips. “I’m not afraid of you either, General Patrick. Please come back to me. I would appreciate it very, very much.”

C
APTAIN
R
OBLEY
E
VANS,
Fighting Bob to his peers and the press, paced the deck of the battleship
Alabama
and peered into the mist. He had a feeling of utter impotence. The
Alabama
was one of the finest and newest American warships afloat; yet with the distant sounds of ships’ guns echoing about, she was forced to crawl at less than one-third her rated speed of sixteen knots. He wondered if she was moving at all. It was maddening.

The powerful
Alabama
was designated BB-8, or the eighth modern battleship in an expanding American navy. It displaced more than twelve thousand tons, was more than 370 feet in length, and had a crew of just under seven hundred. The only newer American battleship was the
Wisconsin
, BB-9, currently cruising the West Coast.

“Anything, Mr. Lansing?”

“No, sir. The lookouts think they can see the sky, so the mist may be breaking up, but until then we are well and truly blind.”

Evans breathed deeply of the warm, moist air. What on earth had caused a mist at this time and place? It only showed how little control man has over the planet. According to the navigator’s best estimate, made less than an hour ago when they could see, the
Alabama
should have been about five miles off Saint Augustine, the ancient city on the east coast of Florida.