Breakthroughs (80 page)

After she got off the telephone with the doctor, she attacked the papers on her desk, only to be interrupted by Bertha, her secretary, who said, “Congressman Blackford would like to see you, Miss Hamburger.”

Flora blinked but nodded. Into the inner office came Hosea Blackford, a wide smile on his handsome face. “From everything I hear, Flora, you sent Mr. Lansing home with a tin can tied to his tail. That’s not easy; he’s a clever fellow.”

“Yes, I saw that,” Flora said. “But if he insists on treating everyone else like an idiot, he’s not as smart as he thinks he is.”

“A song one could sing about a great many people, from TR on down,” Blackford said. “But what one could do and what one does are often different. One thing you’ve become since you got here, Flora, is the conscience of the Congress.”

Nobody had ever called her anything like that before. She felt herself flush, and hoped Blackford couldn’t see her blushing. “Thank you very much,” she said at last. “I’m just doing the best I can.” Her smile was wry. “There have been times when you’ve said I was trying to do too much.”

“Not here, not now,” the congressman from Dakota answered. “Maybe I was wrong before, too. But certainly not now. You’ll have given Lansing and Roosevelt both something to think about.” He hesitated, then changed the subject: “Will you let me take you out to supper to celebrate a splendid day of witness grilling?”

Flora hesitated, too. The memory of Herman Bruck’s pestering still grated on her. But Blackford was as smooth as Bruck, back in New York City, wished he were. An invitation to supper was not necessarily an invitation to anything else (though it wasn’t necessarily
not
such an invitation, either). Well, she always had a hatpin. “All right,” she said.

Blackford ate shad at the Bellevue-Stratford Hotel, not far from city hall. “I never got seafood in Dakota, but I make up for it here,” he said. “If only oysters were in season.” Flora would never have thought of eating an oyster, no matter how secular she became. She contented herself with a beefsteak that did indeed provoke contentment.

Over supper, she told Blackford of the idea she’d got from Dr. Hanrahan. His eyes glowed. “I think we can pass that,” he said. “The Democrats won’t want people—people like us, for instance—to say they don’t care about cripples.”

“No, especially when their war made so many cripples.” Flora scowled. “And speaking against it is useless. Everyone says, ‘But we won!’ You warned me it would be that way. I didn’t believe it, but you were right.”

“I wish I’d been wrong, but that’s the way the world works.” Blackford beckoned to the waiter. “Let me have the bill, please.”

He drove them back to the apartment building where they both lived. It was natural for them to go upstairs together when their flats were across the hall from each other. “Thank you for a very nice evening,” Flora said in the hallway.

“Thank
you
for your excellent ideas—and for your excellent company.” Hosea Blackford tipped his hat, then leaned forward and kissed Flora on the mouth. He drew back before she even thought of yanking out a hatpin. Instead of trying to get into her apartment, he went into his own. “Good night,” he said, and shut the door.

“Good night,” Flora said, slower than she should have. She went into her own apartment, locking the door behind her. Then she sat down on the front-room sofa. Her thoughts whirled. She’d been glad of the kiss. Blackford was twice her age, and a gentile to boot. But she’d been glad of the kiss. She was too honest with herself to deny it. And she was far too surprised and confused to have any idea what it meant. She wished her family’s apartment had a telephone, but it didn’t. All she could do was go to bed and think and think and think.

After rumbling through Tennessee inside a barrel, Colonel Irving Morrell found Philadelphia mild and dry by comparison. To anyone coming from anywhere else, the
de facto
capital of the United States would have been its usual hot, muggy summer self. For once, Morrell was not sorry to return to the General Staff. With the shooting over, the action, such as it was, would be here.

He sat in a little room with a littler window and an overhead fan doing a desultory job of stirring the air. “Good to see you again, Colonel,” General Leonard Wood said. “You being one of our leading experts on barrels, we want your ideas on how thoroughly to restrict the CSA in building and deploying them.”

“Sir, my view on that is very simple,” Morrell said. “I think we ought to forbid them to have anything to do with barrels, on pain of war. The more of them they have, the more they do with them, the more trouble they’ll cause us. Those machines knock everything we thought we knew about defense in war into a cocked hat.”

The chief of the U.S. General Staff frowned. “That won’t be easy. They have a sizable motorcar industry. A plant that manufactures motorcars won’t have any great trouble turning out barrels, too.”

“Yes, sir, I understand that,” Morrell said. “If I had my way, though, I’d put that in the treaty: no barrels. I expect they’ll cheat, or try to cheat. As soon as we catch them at it, I’d take a new bite out of Arkansas or Texas or Tennessee—and make them cough up the barrels, too. Do that once and they aren’t so likely to take a chance on our doing it twice.”

Brigadier General Mason Patrick, who wore a pilot’s wings on his left breast pocket, said, “I told you the same thing in regard to aeroplanes, didn’t I, General Wood?” He nodded to Morrell. “Good to see there’s someone else with his head on his shoulders. We just licked these bastards. I want to kick ’em while they’re down. If they build up to where they can take another whack at us in ten or fifteen years, we’ve wasted a lot of lives since 1914.”

Leonard Wood sighed. “The other side of the coin is, if they sit tight for ten or fifteen years and then start building barrels and aeroplanes and submersibles and all the other tools of war we don’t want them to have, will we have the will to go in and set a foot on their necks, or will we say, ‘Look how much trouble we had beating them the last time. They’ve only got a few of these little toys, so why should we worry about them?’ That’s what makes me wake up sweating of nights.”

“Philadelphia is what makes me wake up sweating of nights,” said General Patrick, who had just come down from Canada.

Morrell stared at Wood in a kind of horror he’d never known on the battlefield. “Sir, as long as Teddy Roosevelt is president—”

“That gives us till March 4, 1921,” Wood broke in. “March 4, 1925, if he decides he wants a third term, and if the people remember to be grateful. After TR isn’t president any more…what then? We spent a generation twiddling our thumbs after the War of Secession. We could do it again.”

“All the more reason to punish the Rebels now, sir,” Morrell said. “The farther they have to climb, the harder it’ll be for them.”

“Bully!” Brigadier General Patrick clapped his hands together. “General Wood, this pup said it better than I could.”

“He’s a bright lad,” Wood said, and Morrell felt as if he’d been given the accolade. But the chief of the General Staff went on, “The harder we hold the Confederates down, the more we make them hate us and want to get their own back.”

“I honestly don’t see the problem, sir,” Morrell said. “They already hate us, the same way we hated them before the war. Somebody licks you, of course you hate him. What we have to do is make sure they can’t hurt us no matter how much they hate us.”

General Wood sighed again. “I’ve been in touch with General Ludendorff in Berlin. If it makes you gentlemen feel any better, our friends the Germans are having these same sorts of arguments about how rough they should be on France.”

“The CSA will have an easier time cheating than France will, though,” Morrell said.

“How’s that?” Wood said. “I don’t follow.”

“France isn’t even as big as Texas,” Morrell said.

“It is now,” General Patrick said. “We carved a good chunk off Texas when we made the state of Houston.”

“How much will Germany carve off France?” Morrell gave the man he thought was his ally an annoyed look: this was not the time for nitpicking precision. Having got the glare out of his system, he resumed: “Be that as it may, the Confederate States are a lot larger than France even after they’ve lost Houston and Sequoyah and Kentucky. They have more room to hide armaments than the frogs do.”

“And they could go down into the Empire of Mexico, too,” Mason Patrick said. “The only way we’d hear about anything down there is by luck. Hell, half the time the damn greasers don’t know what’s going on inside their own country, so how are we supposed to?”

“We have more ways than you’d think, as a matter of fact,” General Wood said. “But never mind that; I take the point. So you gentlemen agree we should squeeze the Rebels till their eyes pop, do you?”

“Yes, sir,” Morrell and Brigadier General Patrick said in the same breath.

“Well, I’m hearing that from the Navy Department, too, I will admit,” Wood said. “They want to go and bombard Charleston and Habana and New Orleans if the Rebels ever even think of building submersibles again.”

“That sounds good to me,” Morrell said.

Wood looked grim. “As a matter of fact, it sounds good to me, too. We had a destroyer, the
Ericsson
, torpedoed the night after the CSA quit the war. The Royal Navy swears up and down that they had no boats anywhere near her. If I had to guess, I’d say a Rebel skipper thought he could get away with one—but I can’t prove it, mind, and the Confederates deny everything.”

“I hadn’t heard that before, sir,” Morrell said slowly.

“We’re keeping it under wraps,” the chief of the General Staff said. “Don’t see what else to do. Can’t prove it, as I say.”

“Filthy piece of business.” Morrell realized his right hand had folded into a fist. He made it open. “They ever catch that Reb—if it was a Reb—they ought to hang him.”

“You get no arguments from me,” Wood said. “But back to the matter at hand. In your view, we allow the Rebs enough in the way of guns to keep order inside their borders and put up a halfway decent fight in case Mexico decides to invade them?”

Morrell let out a wry snort. “If Mexico invades them, sir, they can shout for help, as far as I’m concerned.”

As he spoke, he worried at the thought General Wood had put in his mind. How long could any country, especially a republic like the USA, keep watch on a neighbor? Sooner or later, the voters would tire of the effort vigilance took. When they did, or maybe even before they did, the one-time enemy would begin to rebuild and become an enemy once more.

“We have to do the best we can,” he said at last. “We have to do the best we can for as long as we can. If we drop the ball later on, or if our kids do, that’s one thing. But if we drop the ball now, we don’t deserve to have won the war.”

“That’s the way it looks to me, too,” Mason Patrick said. “The day the Confederate States start building aeroplanes with machine guns in them again, you’ll be able to see the next war from there.”

“Very well. Thank you for your thoughts, General, Colonel. They will go into our recommendations to President Roosevelt, I assure you,” Wood said. Morrell and Patrick stood up to go. Casually, Wood went on, “Colonel, could you give me another minute or so of your time?”

“Of course,” Morrell answered. He waited till the aviation officer had gone, then asked, “What’s up, sir?”

“Colonel, President Roosevelt has asked me to give you a choice of assignments, in recognition of your outstanding service to your country,” Wood said. “You may, if you like, remain in the field; the president is keenly aware of how much you enjoy the strenuous life, as he does himself.”

“Yes, sir, I do,” Morrell said. “I can’t imagine a choice that would be preferable to staying in the field.”

“Let me see if I can give you one,” Wood said with a smile. “How would you like to have charge of what we might as well call the Barrel Works? It’s plain the machines aren’t everything they ought to be. It’s just as plain nobody has a sounder notion of doctrine for them or more experience with them in the field than you do. What do you say to a free hand at making them better?”

“What do I say?” Morrell asked the question as much of himself as of Leonard Wood. He glared at the chief of the General Staff. “Sir, with all due respect, I say
damn
. That’s a job that needs doing. It’s a job I can do. It’s a job I should do, because, as you say, I can do it well.” He hesitated, grasping at a straw. “Unless you’d rather have Colonel Sherrard?”

“He recommended you,” Wood said. “His opinion was that you had a better feel for all the issues involved than he did. He said he never could have conceived, much less brought off, the crossing of the Cumberland. You did, and that makes you the man for the slot.”

“He’s extraordinarily generous.” Morrell scowled; he’d never known this mix of elation and disappointment. When would he ever get away to the woods and the mountains again? “Sir, you’re right. It’s such an important position that, if you believe I’m the best man to fill it, I don’t see how I can possibly decline.”

“I was hoping you would say that, Colonel,” General Wood replied. “The more work we do on barrels while we’re holding the Confederate States down—holding them down as best we can, I should say—the further ahead of them we’ll be, and the harder the time they’ll have catching up with us.”

“Yes, sir,” Morrell said enthusiastically. “I’ve got some ideas I want to try. And if we get far enough ahead of them, maybe they’ll never be able to catch up again.”

“You’re reading my mind,” Leonard Wood said. “That’s just what I’m hoping for.” Solemnly, the two men shook hands.

Every train that pulled into St. Matthews, South Carolina, brought a few more soldiers home, some from Virginia, some from Tennessee, some from the distant battlefields west of the Mississippi. The men in beat-up butternut tunics and trousers got off the trains and looked around the station, looked around the slowly rebuilding town, in worn wonder, as if amazed even so much peace as St. Matthews provided was left in the world.