American Front (2 page)

“My government seeks only to bring about a just peace, recognizing the rights of both sides in this dispute,” the British minister answered.

“Yes, you would say that, wouldn’t you,
Lord
Lyons?” Lincoln said, freighting the title with a stinging load of contempt. “All the lords and sirs and dukes and earls in London and Paris must be cheering the Rebels on, laughing themselves sick to see our great democracy ground into the dirt.”

“That strikes me as unfair, Mr. President,” Lord Lyons said, though it wasn’t altogether unfair: a large number of British aristocrats were doing exactly as Lincoln had described, seeing in the defeat of the United States a salutary warning to the lower classes in the British Isles. But he put the case as best he could: “The Duke of Argyll, for instance, sir, is among the warmest friends the United States have in England today, and many other leaders by right of birth concur in his opinions.”

“Isn’t that nice of ’em?” Lincoln said, his back-country accent growing stronger with his agitation. “Fact of the matter is, though, that most of your high and mighty want us cut down to size, and they’re glad to see the Rebels do it. They reckon a slaveocracy’s better’n no ocracy at all, isn’t that right?”

“As I have just stated, sir, no, I do not believe that to be the case,” Lord Lyons replied stiffly.

“Oh, yes, you said it. You just didn’t make me believe it, is all,” Lincoln told him. “Well, you Englishmen and the French on your coattails are guardian angels for the Rebels, are you? What with them and you together, you’re too strong for us. You’re right about that, I do admit.”

“The ability to see what is, sir, is essential for the leader of a great nation,” the British minister said. He wanted to let Lincoln down easy if he could.

“I see what is, all right. I surely do,” the president said. “I see that you European powers are taking advantage of this rebellion to meddle in America, the way you used to before the Monroe Doctrine warned you to keep your hands off. Napoleon props up a tin-pot emperor in Mexico, and now France and England are in cahoots”—another phrase that briefly baffled Lord Lyons—“to help the Rebels and pull us down. All right, sir.” He breathed heavily. “If that’s the way the game’s going to be played, we aren’t strong enough to prevent it now. But I warn you, Mr. Minister, we can play, too.”

“You are indeed a free and independent nation. No one disputes that, nor will anyone,” Lord Lyons agreed. “You may pursue diplomacy to the full extent of your interests and abilities.”

“Mighty generous of you,” Lincoln said with cutting irony. “And one fine day, I reckon, we’ll have friends in Europe, too, friends who’ll help us get back what’s rightfully ours and what you’ve taken away.”

“A European power—to help you against England
and
France?” For the first time, Lord Lyons was undiplomatic enough to laugh. American bluster was bad enough most times, but this lunacy—“Good luck to you, Mr. President. Good luck.”

I

1914

George Enos was gutting haddock on the noisome deck of the steam trawler
Ripple
when Fred Butcher, the first mate, sang out, “Smoke off the starboard bow!” That gave George an excuse to pull the latest fish off the deck, gut it, toss it down into the icy, brine-smelling hold, and then straighten up and see what sort of ship was approaching.

His back made little popping noises as he came out of this stoop.
I’m getting too old for this line of work
, he thought, though he was only twenty-eight. He rubbed at his brown mustache with a leather-gloved hand. A fish scale scratched his cheek. The sweat running down his face in the late June heat made the little cut sting.

He followed Butcher’s pointing finger with his eyes. “A lot of smoke,” he said, whistling low. “That’s not just another Georges Bank fishing boat, or a tramp freighter, either.” His Boston accent swallowed the r’s in the final syllables of the last two words. “Liner, I’d guess, or maybe a warship.”

“I think you’re right,” Butcher said. He was little and skinny and quick and clever, his face seamed by wind and sun and spray till he looked to have ten more years than the forty-five or so he really carried. His mustache was salt and pepper, about evenly mixed. Like Enos, he grew it thick and waxed the ends so they pointed toward his eyes. Half the men in the United States who wore mustaches modeled them after the one gracing Kaiser Wilhelm’s upper lip.

Captain Patrick O’Donnell came out of the cabin and pressed a spyglass to his right eye. “Warship, sure enough,” he said, his Boston mixed with a trace of a brogue. “Four-stacker—German armored cruiser, unless I’m wrong.”

“If you say it, Captain, we’ll take it to the bank,” Fred Butcher answered. That wasn’t apple-polishing. O’Donnell had spent years in the U.S. Navy, rising to chief petty officer, before he retired and went into business for himself. He’d seen German warships at a lot closer than spyglass range; he’d exercised alongside them, out in the middle of the Atlantic, and maybe in the Pacific, too.

“She’s going to pass close to us,” Enos said. He could see the great gray hull of the ship now, almost bow-on to the
Ripple
. The plume of black coal smoke trailed away behind.

Captain O’Donnell still had the telescope aimed at the approaching ship. “Imperial German Navy, sure enough,” he said. “I can make out the ensign. Now—is that the
Roon
or the
Yorck
?” He kept looking, and finally grunted in satisfaction. “The
Yorck
, and no mistaking her. See how her cranes are pierced? If she were the
Roon
, they’d be solid.”

“If you say so, Captain. You’re the one with the spyglass, after all.” Enos’ chuckle suited his wry sense of humor. He took another naked-eye look at the oncoming
Yorck
. The cruiser
was
nearly bow-on. When he spoke again, he sounded anxious: “We see her, Captain, but does she see us?”

The question was anything but idle. As the
Yorck
drew near, she seemed more and more like an armored cliff bearing down on the steam trawler. The
Ripple
was 114 feet long and displaced 244 gross tons. That made her one of the bigger fishing boats operating out of Boston harbor. All at once, though, Enos felt as if he were in a rowboat, and a pint-sized rowboat at that.

“How big
is
she, Captain?” Fred Butcher asked. The huge hull and great gun turrets gave him pause, too.

“At the waterline, 403 feet, 3 inches,” O’Donnell answered with the automatic accuracy of the longtime Navy man he was. “She displaces 9,050 tons. Four 8.2-inch guns, ten 6-inchers, crew of 557. Four-inch armor amidships, two-inch belts at the ends. She’ll make twenty-one knots in a sprint.”

“If she runs us down, she won’t even notice, in other words,” Enos said.

“That’s about right, George,” O’Donnell answered easily. He took pride in the strength and speed of naval vessels, as if having served on them somehow magically gave him strength and speed as well. Even so, though, his glance flicked to the American flag rippling atop the foremast. The sight of the thirty-four-star banner rippling in the brisk breeze must have reassured him. “They’ll see us just fine. Here, if you’re still worried, I’ll send up a flare, that I will.” He dug a cigar out of his jacket pocket, scraped a match against the sole of his boot, and puffed out a cloud almost as malodorous as the coal smoke issuing from the
Yorck
’s stacks.

As if his cigar
had
been a message to the German cruiser, signal flags sprouted from her yards. O’Donnell raised the telescope to his eye once more. The cigar in his mouth jerked sharply upward, a sure sign of good humor. “By Jesus, they want to know if we have fish to sell!” he burst out. He turned to Butcher. “Tell ’em yes, and don’t waste a second doing it.”

The affirmative pennant went up almost as quickly as the order had been given. The
Yorck
slowed in the water, drifting to a stop about a quarter-mile from the
Ripple
. Then everyone aboard the steam trawler whooped with delight as the German cruiser let down a boat. “Hot damn!” yelled Lucas Phelps, one of the men minding the trawl the
Ripple
had been dragging along the shallow bottom of Georges Bank. “The Germans, they’ll pay us better’n the Bay State Fishing Company ever would.”

“And it all goes into our pockets, too,” Fred Butcher said gleefully. On fish that made it back to Boston, the crew and the company that owned the boat split the take down the middle. Butcher went on, “We’re light five hundred, a thousand pounds of haddock, that’s not ever gonna get noticed.”

The happy silence of conspiracy settled over the
Ripple
. Before long, the eight men in the
Yorck
’s lifeboat came alongside the trawler. “Permission to come aboard?” asked the petty officer who evidently headed up the little crew.

“Permission granted,” Patrick O’Donnell answered, as formally as if he were still in the Navy. He turned to Enos. “Let down the rope ladder, George.”

“Right.” Enos hurried to obey. He liked extra money as well as anybody.

Dapper in their summer whites, alarmingly neat, alarmingly well shaved, the German sailors looked out of place on the untidy deck of the
Ripple
, where some of the haddock and hake and cusk and lemon sole that George hadn’t yet gutted still flopped and writhed and tried to jump back into the ocean. Blood and fish guts threatened the cleanliness of the sailors’ trousers.

“I will give you for six hundred kilos of fish forty pfennigs the kilo,” the petty officer said to O’Donnell in pretty good English.

O’Donnell scowled in thought, then turned to Butcher. “Would you work that out, Fred? You’ll do it faster ‘n’ straighter than I would.”

The first mate got a faraway look in his eyes. His lips moved in silent calculation before he spoke. “Two hundred forty marks overall? That makes sixty bucks for…thirteen hundred pounds of fish, more or less. Nickel a pound, Captain, a hair under.”

“
Herr Feldwebel
, we’ll make that deal,” O’Donnell said at once. Everybody on board did his best not to light up like candles on a Christmas tree. Back in Boston, they’d get two cents a pound, three if they were lucky. Then O’Donnell looked sly. “Or, since it ain’t like it’s your money you’re playing with, why don’t you give me fifty pfennigs a kilo—you can tell your officers what a damn Jew I am—and we’ll throw in a bottle of rum for you and your boys.” He turned and called into the galley: “Hey, Cookie! Bring out the quart of medicinal rum, will you?”

“I’ve got it right here, Captain,” Charlie White said, coming out of the galley with the jug in his hand. He held it so the German sailors on the
Ripple
could see it but any officers watching from the
Yorck
with field glasses couldn’t. The smile on his black face was broad and inviting, although George expected the rum to be plenty persuasive all by itself. He was fond of a nip himself every now and then.

The petty officer spoke in German to the seamen with him. The low-voice colloquy went on for a minute or two before he switched back to English: “Most times, I would do this thing. Now it is better if I do not. The bargain is as I first said it is.”

“Have it your way,
Feldwebel
,” O’Donnell answered. “I said I’d make that deal, and I will.” His eyes narrowed. “You mind telling me why it’s better if you don’t take the rum now? Just askin’ out of curiosity, you understand.”

“Oh, yes—curiosity,” the petty officer said, as if it were a disease he’d heard of but never caught. “You have on this boat, Captain, a wireless telegraph receiver and transmitter?”

“No,” O’Donnell told him. “I’d like to, but the owners won’t spring for it. One of these days, maybe. How come?”

“I should not anything say,” the petty officer answered, and he didn’t anything say, either. Instead, he gave O’Donnell the 240 marks he’d agreed to pay. O’Donnell handed the money to Butcher, who stuck it in his pocket.

The captain of the
Ripple
kept on trying to get more out of the German sailor, but he didn’t have any luck. Finally, in frustration, he gave up and told George Enos, “Hell with it. Give ’em their fish and we’ll all go on about our business.”

“Right,” Enos said again. Had he got the extra ten pfennigs a kilo, he would have worked extra hard to make sure the
Yorck
got the finest fish he had in the hold. Some of the haddock scrod down there, the little fellows just over a pound, would melt in your mouth. When Charlie fried ’em in butter and bread crumbs—he got hungry just thinking about it.

But the young fish would also bring better prices back at the docks. He gave the Germans the bigger haddock and sole the trawl had scooped up from the bottom of the sea. They’d be good enough, and then some.

The Germans didn’t raise a fuss. They were sailors, but they weren’t fishermen. Their boat rode appreciably lower in the water when they cast off from the
Ripple
’s rail and rowed back to the cruiser from which they’d come. The
Yorck
’s crane lifted them out of the water and back on deck.

More flags broke out on the signal lines as the
Yorck
began steaming toward Boston once more. “Thank you,” Captain O’Donnell read through the spyglass. “Signal ‘You’re welcome,’ Fred.”

“Sure will, Captain,” the mate said, and did.

George wished he had a good tall tumbler of Cookie’s rum. Moving better than half a ton of fish out of the hold was hard work. With that on his mind, he asked Lucas Phelps, “Ever hear of a sailor turning down the jug?”

“Not when you stand to get away with it clean as a whistle, like them squareheads did,” Phelps answered. “Wonder what the hell was chewin’ on their tails. That’s good rum Cookie’s got, too.”

“How do you know?” Enos asked him. Phelps laid a finger alongside his nose and winked. By the veins in that nose, he knew rum well enough to be a connoisseur. George Enos chuckled. Sure enough, he’d wheedled a shot or two out of Charlie himself. It helped compress the endless monotony of life aboard a fishing boat.

They hauled in the trawl full of flipping, twisting bottom fish. Once the load had gone into the hold, Captain O’Donnell peered down in there to see how high the fish were stacked. They could have piled in another couple of trawlfuls, but O’Donnell said, “I think we’re going to head for port. We’re up over twenty tons; the owners won’t have anything to grouse about. And we’ll have some extra money in our pockets once Fred turns those marks into dollars at the bank.”

Nobody argued with him. Nobody would have argued with him if he’d decided to stay out another day or two and fill the hold right up to the hatches with haddock. He made his pay by having the answers.

Enos went into the galley for a mug of coffee. He found Fred Butcher in there, killing time with the Cookie. By the rich smell rising from Butcher’s mug, he had more than coffee in there. Enos blew on his own mug, sipped, and then said, “Bet we’d be out longer if that petty officer hadn’t got the captain nervous.”

“Bet you’re right,” the mate said. “Captain O’Donnell, he doesn’t like not knowing what’s going on. He doesn’t like that even a little bit.” Cookie nodded solemnly. So did George. Butcher’s comment fit in well with his earlier thought about the captain: if he didn’t have the answers, he’d go after them.

The
Ripple
puffed back toward Boston. At nine knots, she was most of a day away from T Wharf and home. Supper, near sunset, was corned beef and sauerkraut, which made the sailors joke about Charlie White’s being a German in disguise. “Hell of a disguise, ain’t it?” the cook said, taking the ribbing in good part. He unbuttoned his shirt to show he was dark brown all over.

“You must be from the Black Forest, Charlie, and it rubbed off on you,” Captain O’Donnell said, which set off fresh laughter. Enos hadn’t heard of the Black Forest till then—he’d gone to work when he was a kid, and had little schooling—but from the way the captain talked about it, he figured it was a real place in Germany somewhere.

They rigged their running lamps and chugged on through the night. The next day, they passed between Deer Island Light and the Long Island Head Light, and then between Governor’s Island and Castle Island as they steamed toward T Wharf.

On the north side of the Charles River, over in Charlestown, lay the Boston Navy Yard. Enos looked that way as soon as he got the chance. So did Captain O’Donnell, with the spyglass. “There’s the
Yorck
, all right, along with the rest of the western squadron of the High Seas Fleet,” he said. “Doesn’t
look
like anything’s wrong aboard ’em, any more than it does on our ships. All quiet, seems like.” He sounded annoyed, as if he blamed the Germans and the Americans—easily distinguishable because their hulls were a much lighter gray—for the quiet.

Fred Butcher had his eye on profit and loss: he was looking ahead to T Wharf. “Not many boats tied up,” he said. “We ought to get a good price at the Fish Exchange.”

They tied up to the wharf and came up onto it to get their land legs back after more than a week at sea. An old, white-bearded man awkwardly pushing a fish cart with one hand and a hook mounted on the stump of his other wrist folded his meat hand into a fist and shook it at Charlie White. “You go to hell, you damn nigger!” he shouted in a hoarse, raspy voice. “Wasn’t for your kind, we wouldn’t have fought that war and this here’d still be one country.”