American Front (58 page)

Nellie Semphroch went from table to table with a tray for empty plates and coffee cups and a damp rag to wipe the tables clean of spilled coffee and bits of bread from sandwiches. Thanks to Mr. Jacobs, she hadn’t had any trouble getting good bread and meats, despite what her ration books said. No snoopy Confederate inspectors had walked in and started asking questions; Mr. Jacobs evidently knew a way to keep that from happening, too.

She looked around the coffeehouse. Business was good. Business, in fact, was booming. If she wasn’t careful, she’d get rich. Confederate inspectors might not come into the coffeehouse, but Confederate officers did, and they told their friends, and—She stiffened. There sat Nicholas H. Kincaid, moodily sipping at a cup of coffee. He hadn’t come in for food or drink. He’d come in to try to seduce Edna, having come so close once before.

Why
, Nellie thought resentfully,
hasn’t he gone and gotten himself killed?
She wished she could walk up to him and throw him out on his ear. Since he was an occupier and she one of the occupied, she couldn’t do that. What she could do, and did, was thank heaven she had Edna in the back washing dishes and not here out front waiting tables. With a final scowl at Kincaid, she carried the tray back to her daughter.

“Hello, Ma,” Edna said, looking up from the sink. “You got more presents for me? Why don’t you bring me a diamond ring and a motorcar, instead of all these miserable, stinking, goddamn dishes?”

“You’ve got the soap right there.” Nellie pointed to it. “Why don’t you wash your mouth out with it?”

Mother and daughter glared at each other. Mother and daughter had been doing a lot of that lately. The more Nellie tried to keep an eye on Edna, the more Edna took to sneaking around. Nellie didn’t know what to do about it. She had to sleep, she had to eat, she had to mind the customers—and Edna was so wild for life these days—that was what the young people called it, anyway; to Nellie, it was just another word for
loose
—that fifteen or twenty minutes unwatched might well have been all she needed.

“Why don’t you let me be?” Edna said.

“Oh, no,” Nellie answered. “I know you too well.”
You’re too much the way I was, more than half a lifetime ago
. Easing back never occurred to her, nor did the notion that part of Edna’s wildness might have sprung from being watched too closely too often for too long.

With a martyred sigh, Edna took the cups and saucers and plates from the tray and set them in the soapy water in the sink. Nellie nodded—that was what her daughter was supposed to be doing. Leaving Edna to the scrubbing, Nellie went back out to see what her customers needed.

A couple of Rebels held up empty cups and asked for refills. One of them asked for another ham sandwich, too. It was a good thing she was getting those extra rations, thanks to Mr. Jacobs; if the Rebs fought half as well as they ate, the United States were in more trouble than they knew.

She had just served the sandwich when a civilian came into the coffeehouse. That did happen now and again; some Washingtonians came in arm-in-arm with Confederate officers, and a lot of those who didn’t still had the slick, prosperous look of men who were getting along well by getting along well with the enemy. She’d passed a name or two to Mr. Jacobs, in the hope of helping a collaborator to an untimely demise.

This fellow didn’t have that look. He was a middle-aged man with gray muttonchop whiskers, and hadn’t shaved the rest of his face any time in the past couple of days. He wore a suit and tie, but he’d been wearing his collar for a while, and his jacket had shiny elbows and a couple of spots on the front.

Nellie prominently posted her prices. One look at them was plenty to send most customers not armed with either Confederate scrip or good connections fleeing out into the street. The stranger studied the list, sighed, shrugged, and sat down at a corner table. Nellie went over to him. “May I help you, sir?”

He looked up at her, sharply, almost disconcertingly. His eyes were tracked with red. He might have had a drink or two, but he didn’t stink too badly of booze. “A turkey sandwich and a cup of coffee,” he said.

“Yes, sir,” Nellie answered. When a customer didn’t say what kind of coffee he wanted, he got the cheapest she had. “That’ll be a dollar even,” she went on, in a tone of voice suggesting she wanted to see the dollar before she served him.

Getting the unspoken message, the fellow dug in his trouser pocket. A big silver cartwheel chimed sweetly on the tabletop. “There you are,” he said, still studying her.

She ignored that. She was good at ignoring men when they looked at her more closely than they should have. She didn’t ignore the dollar. That she scooped up. Maybe this fellow thought he could leave it sitting there till she gave him his order, then scoop it up and slide out the door. Washington had always been full of grifters, and all the more so since the Rebs occupied it.

Money in hand, she went back behind the counter, poured the coffee, and made the man his sandwich. Because he looked down on his luck, she piled the smoked turkey higher than she would have for a damned Reb, and stuck a couple of sweet pickles alongside even though she usually tacked on an extra nickel apiece for them.

She carried the turkey sandwich and the steaming coffee cup over to him. He smiled, which stretched his mouth out almost to the tips of his muttonchops. “That looks mighty good,” he said, tucking the napkin into his collar to protect his shirtfront. “Thank you, Little Nell.”

Nellie froze. No one had called her that since a couple of years before Edna was born. She’d hoped—she’d thought—no one would ever call her that again, as long as she lived. “Eat your sandwich, whoever you are,” she said tonelessly. “Eat your sandwich, drink your coffee, get out, and never come back here again.”

“Time was when you gave me something better for my dollar than meat and bread,” the man said with a reminiscent leer. Yes, there was whiskey on his breath.

“Get out now,” Nellie said, perhaps more quietly than she’d intended, because she felt a scream boiling up inside her that would shake the place down if she let it loose. “Get out now, or I’ll have the Rebs here throw you out.”

He assumed an injured expression. “Don’t take it like that, Little Nell. Don’t you remember Bill Reach of the
Evening Star
?”

And, for a wonder, she did. He’d been panting after stories in those days. He’d been panting after anything else he could get his hands on, too, and he’d got his hands on her once a week or so for months at a time. He’d been better than some, but that wasn’t saying much, not with what she’d seen there for a couple of years. Men were brutes, men were beasts, no doubt about it.

“Your voice hasn’t changed at all,” he said, which explained how he’d recognized her. “You’re not as blond as you used to be, though.”

Her golden curls had come out of a bottle. They drew customers, so she’d kept them that color till she managed to escape the life she’d been leading. Bill Reach’s looks weren’t what they had been, not by a long shot. He looked to be about two steps up from a bum, too.
Serves him right
, she thought.

But, because he’d been better than some—only out for his own pleasure, not actively cruel—she said, “All right, eat before you go. But don’t come back. Don’t you ever come back here.”

“Is that any way to talk to an old friend?” he demanded indignantly. Maybe that was how he thought of himself. As if she’d made friends with the men who set money on the nightstand! The idea made her want to laugh in his stubbly face. The only thing they’d ever done to make her happy was to get up, get dressed, and leave.

A large shape loomed up beside her: a Confederate officer. “Is this man bothering you, ma’am?” Nicholas H. Kincaid asked. The clear implication was that, if she said yes, Bill Reach would regret it for a long time.

She would have been happier with anyone but Kincaid coming to her aid. He wasn’t helping her because he felt like helping her; he was helping because, if she approved of him, he’d have a better chance at laying Edna. She knew how men’s minds worked, oh yes she did, all too well.

“It’s all right,” she said, surprising Reach and disappointing Kincaid. “He didn’t mean any harm.” She looked that eat-and-get-out warning at the ex-reporter. (What was he doing now? Nothing too well, by the look of him.) Reluctantly, Kincaid went back to his table and sat down again.

Nellie stayed out front till Reach had eaten and left. Then she gathered up his dirty dishes and those from several other tables and carried them in to Edna.

“What’s the matter, Ma?” her daughter asked, “You look like you seen a ghost or something.”

“Maybe I have,” Nellie answered. Her daughter scratched her head.

XV

Major Irving Morrell was waiting for the stew pot full of odds and ends to come to a boil when a runner hurried up to him. “Sir,” the fellow said, saluting, “I’m supposed to bring you back to division headquarters right away.”

“Are you?” Morrell raised an eyebrow. “Well, you’re going to have to wait a minute, anyhow.” He raised his voice: “Schaefer!”

“Sir?” the senior captain in the battalion called.

“I’m ordered back to Division, Dutch,” Morrell told him. “Try not to let the Rebs overrun us till I get back.”

“I’ll do my best,” Captain Schaefer said, chuckling. “As long as you’re going back there, see if they’ll send another couple of machine guns forward. We can use the firepower.”

“I’ll do that,” Morrell promised. He turned to the runner. “All right, lead the way.”

He was sweating by the time he got out of the front-line trenches; the runner had taken him literally, and was setting a hard pace. His wounded leg had unhappy things to say about that. Sternly, he told it to be quiet. It didn’t want to listen. He ignored the complaints and pushed on through the hot, muggy summer night.

Division staff was too exalted to try to survive under canvas. They’d taken over several houses in the little town of Smilax, Kentucky. The one to which the runner brought Morrell had sentries all around and a U.S. flag in front of it. He gave the fellow a startled look. “You didn’t say General Foulke wanted to see me.”

“Yes, sir, that’s who,” the runner said. He spoke to one of the sentries: “This here’s Major Morrell.” The soldier nodded and went inside. He emerged a moment later, and held the door open for Morrell to go in and see the divisional commander. As Morrell climbed the stairs, the runner trotted off down the street, perhaps on another mission, perhaps to escape one.

Major General William Dudley Foulke was sitting in the front room scribbling a note when Morrell came in. The general was a plump man in his mid-sixties, with a bald crown, a white fringe around it, and a bushy white mustache. He looked more like a French general than an American one; all he needed was a kepi and a little swagger stick to complete the impression.

“At ease, Major,” Foulke said after they exchanged salutes. “Effective immediately, I am removing you from command of your battalion.”

“Sir?” Morrell hadn’t expected to be summoned before the divisional commander at all, and certainly not for that reason. “On what grounds, sir?”

“What grounds?” Foulke wheezed laughter, then held up a plump, pink hand. “On the grounds that Philadelphia asked me for a younger officer who could fill a staff position there, and that your name topped the list. Are those satisfactory grounds, Major?”

“Uh, yes, sir,” Morrell said. “I can’t imagine any better ones, and a whole slew that are worse.” When General Foulke had told him he was being removed, he’d imagined that slew of worse grounds, though he didn’t think he’d given reason for invoking any of them. Stubborn honesty, though, compelled him to add. “After I spent so long in the hospital, sir, I do regret being pulled away from active service again, if you don’t mind my saying so.”

“I don’t mind at all,” General Foulke said. “I’d be disappointed if you said anything else, as a matter of fact. A staff officer who likes being a staff officer because he has a soft billet far away from the line isn’t a man of the sort the country needs. Men who want to go out and fight, they’re the sort who do well for the general staff. You
will
be fighting, I promise you; the only difference will be, you’ll do it with map and telegram, not with a rifle.”

“Yes, sir.” Morrell knew he should have been overjoyed; a tour on the General Staff would look very good on his record. But he reveled in the rugged outdoor life, whether in the Sonoran desert or the Kentucky mountains. Getting stuck behind a desk struck him as altogether too much like being stuck in a hospital bed.

William Dudley Foulke was thinking along with him, at least up to a point. Steepling his fingers, the general said, “Staff work can be the making of a promising young officer. If you see opportunity, by all means seize it. Here.” He handed Morrell a book. “Something for you to read on the train: my translation of the Roman military writer Vegetius. Either it will engage your interest or help you sleep the miles away.”

“Thank you very much, sir,” Morrell said, wondering whether an ancient writer’s precepts would have any bearing on the modern art of war.

“My pleasure.” Foulke sighed, “When I was a boy, I thought I would be a lawyer or a scholar. But I was fourteen years old when the Rebs beat us the first time, and I knew then I wanted to spend the rest of my life in the military service of my country. That little volume there is a relic of what might have been, I’m afraid, nothing more.” He grew brisk again. “Well, you don’t want to hear an old man maundering on about himself. I certainly didn’t when I was a young officer, at any rate.”

Morrell flushed. That embarrassed him, which only made him flush more. “I’ll treasure the book, sir,” he said.

“Or perhaps you won’t,” Foulke said. “It’s all right either way, Major. I’ve sent Philadelphia a wire, letting them know you’re on your way. Now the trick will be getting you there. This part of Kentucky isn’t what you’d call overburdened with railroads. We’ll send you up the Hyden-Hazard road, and east from there to Hazard, where you can catch a train. You’re ready to go now, I assume.”

“Uh, two things, sir,” Morrell said. “First, I promised I’d ask for a couple of more machine guns for my battalion.”

“They’ll have them,” Foulke promised. “What else?”

Morrell looked down at himself. “If I’m going to Philadelphia, shouldn’t I clean up a bit first?”

Foulke snuffled air out through his mustache. “Seeing what a real front-line soldier looks like would do Philadelphia good, but you may be right.” He called for his adjutant—“Captain Rothbart!”—and said, “Get Major Morrell a hot bath, get him a fresh uniform, and get him on the road to Hazard so he can catch the train for Philadelphia.”

“Yes, sir!” Rothbart said, and efficiently took care of Morrell. If he handled everything as smoothly for the divisional commander, General Foulke was well served.

Inside an hour’s time, Morrell, clean and newly decked out, was jouncing along in a motorcar over dirt roads never intended for automobile traffic. The motorcar had three punctures before he got to Hazard, which, in the light of that experience, seemed well-named. Morrell stood guard with a rifle while the driver fixed the first two punctures; bushwhackers and Rebel guerrillas still roamed behind U.S. lines, looking like innocent civilians when they weren’t out raiding. For the third puncture, Morrell pitched in and helped with the repair job. He thought about the state of his uniform only after his knees were already dirty.

No Rebs shot at the motorcar, but the train he boarded in Hazard took gunfire three different times before it got out of Kentucky, and once had to turn around on a siding when the Confederates blew up a bridge on the route north. Occupied, eastern Kentucky might have been; subdued it was not.

Under the white glare of the train’s acetylene lights, Morrell pondered Vegetius. Some parts of the book, the ones that dealt with Roman military equipment, were as dry and dusty as he’d feared, and Vegetius’ own proposed inventions didn’t strike him as any great improvements. He started wondering why General Foulke had wasted his time translating such a useless work.

But when Vegetius started talking about principles of the military art, the book came to life. It was as if more than fifteen centuries had fallen away, leaving Morrell face-to-face with someone who worried about all the same things he did: ambushes, ways to deceive the enemy, the importance of intelligence, and other such concerns as vital in the twentieth century as they had been in the fourth.

And one sentence seized his attention and would not let it go: “Let him who desires peace prepare for war.” Being ready to fight, he thought, instituting conscription and all the rest of it, had kept the United States from having to do more fighting after the defeat in the Second Mexican War.

When he finished the volume, he set it down not only with respect, but also with real regret. Not only was it interesting in and of itself, but General Foulke wrote gracefully, an attribute more common among officers of the War of Secession than their busy modern successors.

He changed trains in Wheeling, West Virginia. The new one pulled into the Pennsylvania Railroad station at Thirtieth and Market in the middle of the night. Waiting for him at the station was a spruce young captain who might have been Rothbart’s cousin. His hat cords were intertwined black and gold; he wore black lace on his cuffs and a badge with the coat of arms of the United States superimposed on a five-pointed star—the marks of a General Staff officer.

His salute might have been machined. “Major Morrell?” he said, his voice as crisp as the creases on his trousers. At Morrell’s nod, he went on. “I’m John Abell. As soon as we pick up your bags, I’ll take you over to the War Department and we’ll find quarters for your stay in the city.”

“I haven’t got any bags,” Morrell told him. “When General Foulke let me know I’d been detached from my battalion, he gave me time to take a bath and put on a clean uniform, and then he stuck me in an automobile. My gear will catch up with me eventually, I expect.”

“No doubt,” Captain Abell said, looking at the mud on Morrell’s knees. Well, if a General Staff officer didn’t know motorcars got punctures on bad roads, that was his lookout. The captain shrugged, plainly deciding not to make an issue of it. “Let’s go, then.”

A couple of antiaircraft cannon stuck their snouts in the air outside the train station. “Philadelphia’s been in the war,” Morrell observed.

“That it has.” Captain Abell waved. A driver in an open-topped Ford came up. He opened the door to the rear seat for the two officers, then used the hand throttle to give the automobile more power as he chugged east through the streets of Philadelphia toward the War Department headquarters. Abell went on, “When the Rebs came storming up out of Virginia, we were afraid we’d either have to fight for the town or declare it an open city and pull out. That would have been very bad.”

“I’ll say it would,” Morrell agreed. Since the War of Secession, and especially since the Second Mexican War, Philadelphia had been the
de facto
capital of the United States: Washington was simply too vulnerable to Confederate guns in the hills on the south side of the Potomac. Could the United States have gone on with the war after losing both their
de jure
and
de facto
capitals? Maybe. Morrell was glad they hadn’t had to find out.

Despite the hour, motor traffic kept rumbling through the city, probably interrupting bureaucrats’ sleep. Philadelphia wasn’t just an administrative center; it was also a key assembly point for southbound men and matériel. Here and there, Morrell saw houses and shops and buildings that had taken damage. “The Rebs never got into artillery range of you, did they?” he asked.

“No, sir,” Abell answered. “They send bombing aeroplanes over us when they can, though. A lot of bombs have fallen around the War Department, but only a couple on it.” His lip curled. “They can’t aim for beans.”

It wasn’t as if the War Department were a small target, either. It covered a lot of space between the United States Mint and Franklin Square. Thinking of it as one building was a mistake, too; it was a whole great complex, some structures of marble, some of limestone, some of prosaic brick. The driver had to jam on the brake several times to keep from running down uniformed men hustling from one building to another.

When he finally stopped, it was in front of a building that looked more like a tycoon’s house than anything the government maintained. “One way to keep from being noticed is to look poor and worthless,” Captain Abell said, noting Morrell’s expression. “Another way is to look rich and useless.”

If the Confederates didn’t know exactly where the U.S. Army General Staff made its headquarters, Morrell would have been astonished. He didn’t say anything, though, but hopped out of the Ford and followed Captain Abell into the building. By the captain’s reasoning, the sentries outside should have been decked out in servants’ livery and carried trays for visitors’ cards rather than rifles. Morrell was relieved to see they weren’t and didn’t.

Inside, the place was ablaze with electric lamps. Morrell blinked several times. The security officer to whom Captain Abell took him was brisk, thorough, efficient. After satisfying himself that Morrell really was Morrell, he gave him a temporary pass and said, “Good to have you with us, Major.”

“Thanks,” Morrell answered, still a long way from sure he was glad to be here. No matter what William Dudley Foulke had said could you really fight a war in a fancy place like this?

Then Abell took him into the map room. Morrell had always had a fondness for maps; the more you studied them, the more you geared strategy and tactics to the terrain, the better off you were liable to be.

And here was the whole war, spread out before him in blue and red lines and arrows. Both Ontario fronts kept on being clogged, the enemy had the initiative in Manitoba, Kentucky still hadn’t been knocked out of the fight. Guaymas remained in Rebel hands. (Morrell’s leg twinged.) Utah was still in flames, too. But the Confederates were being driven from Pennsylvania, the USA had bitten off big chunks of Sequoyah, and the Rebs had been chased from New Mexico and well back into Texas. Other maps showed the confused fighting at sea.

His head swung back and forth, as if on a swivel. Seeing all the maps together, he felt like a general, not just a major worrying about his tiny part of the big picture. “I think I’m going to like this place,” he said.