Good Hope Road: A Novel (33 page)

He patted his horse’s neck again. Evidently not much had been accomplished during the scheduled evacuation of the morning – the camp still teemed with occupants. A demolition crane stood stationary to one side of the buildings, surrounded by a crowd of spectators – veterans from the other camps, people with pushcarts, women with toddlers, workers from the nearby government offices, passers-by and tourists. Despite the number of people, a quiet hung over the crowd, there was a palpable sense of tragedy, ever since the unwonted casualties of the morning.

Nobody knew quite what to make of the sudden appearance of a mounted cavalry officer. At first, they watched in silence as Major Patton turned his horse around and cantered back towards the White House. Someone, it wasn’t clear whether veteran or spectator, suddenly hooted in his wake. This call was picked up by the crowd, following him all the way to the Ellipse, amplifying and changing as it passed from mouth to mouth, so that it was hard to tell if the din echoing along Pennsylvania Avenue was jeering or wild cheering.

It was almost 4 p.m. when Jim was finally able to get off Constitution Avenue and find a parking spot on one of the side streets. ‘I’ll walk you to your hotel,’ he said tersely to Madeleine.

‘It’s only a few blocks from the Capitol,’ she pointed out. ‘We’re headed in the same direction; let’s collect the Major and you can both walk me over.’

A newsboy came rushing down the street, waving the evening edition. ‘The army on Pennsylvania Avenue! Read all about it right here – troops on Pennsylvania Avenue!’

Jim grabbed a copy. ‘TROOPS ORDERED TO OUST MARCHERS’ the headline said in a bold, eight-inch typeface. They quickly read through the article.

‘Dead?’ Madeleine said shocked. ‘They shot a
US veteran
dead?’

Jim’s lips tightened. Tossing the newspaper aside, he grabbed her hand and began to run.

Despite the earlier din, the Ellipse was shrouded once again in an eerie, watchful silence. It sent a chill down Jim’s spine to see the troops arrayed on the grounds. The cavalry first, steel-helmeted. Row upon row of infantry behind them, in battle gear. Massive flatbed army trucks, bringing up the rear.

‘Tanks,’ someone muttered, ‘there’s tanks in them trucks.’

A small, wire-haired dog began to bark uneasily and its owner gathered it into his arms.

Major Patton sat ramrod straight, looking over the avenue. Although the cavalry had been primed and ready for a couple of hours now, it had taken an inordinately long time for the infantry to arrive. All the requisitioned soldiers had finally been accounted for, and were at last assembled on the grounds.

He glanced towards the gleaming black staff car that stood parked to one side, still intrigued by the fact that the Chief of Army Staff, General Douglas MacArthur, had thought this operation important enough to supervise it in the field. The General had alighted from the car when it pulled up a half-hour ago, impressively arrayed in full dress uniform. Eight rows of medals shone on his chest as his aide, Major Dwight D. Eisenhower, briefed him on the proceedings, after which final orders were issued to the officers of the cavalry, infantry and tank platoons. The troops were to use such force as was deemed necessary to accomplish the mission. Women and children found in the affected areas, however, would be accorded every consideration.

Major Patton looked at his watch. He went over the terrain yet again in his mind, visualising the broad, straight lines of the avenue all the way to the evacuation sites. A horse behind him stamped its foot, and his own mount, picking up on its tension, tossed its mane in response. He stroked the warm, muscled neck, and a movement in the crowd caught his eye. He tracked the deep russet of the young woman’s hair as she hurried through the crowd. Deep auburn red, her hair, a burnished fox colour.

For a split second, his attention wandered. He’d recently been appointed Master of the Foxhounds at his riding club. The privilege of leading the hunt had come at the hefty price of two thousand dollars, but it was worth it.
Someone
had to keep up tradition, as he’d written to his wife. Particularly in periods like these, of economic depression – the nouveau riche who appeared so sporty when times were good, scuttled for cover when they lost so much as a nickel . . .

The young lady hurried along, that mane of hair appearing and disappearing in the throng, headed in the general direction of the camps.

The camps. Major Patton frowned, his attention snapping back to the task at hand. Raking his eyes over the avenue, he took in the ever increasing numbers of onlookers pressing along the sidewalks, and looked at his watch once more.

Finally, at 4:30 p.m., the troops began their advance. The crowd had grown all day and was so dense that Jim and Madeleine were yet to reach the downtown camps.

Madeleine looked over her shoulder as the iron click of the horses’ hooves sounded down the avenue. There was something at once magnificent and unsettling about the sight. Troops advancing thirty abreast, in perfect, practised synchronicity. Behind them came the trucks, followed by four companies of infantry. The soldiers marched like automatons, their faces unreadable.

‘Faster,’ Jim urged, pulling her along.

The troops halted a block from the camp. They shifted position so that the foot soldiers now held the point and forward flanks. A command was given. As one, bayonets were affixed to rifles and sabres drawn, a sudden armament of steel appearing smooth and glittering in the summer evening.

Unbelievably, a smattering of applause broke out among the crowd. Civilians mostly, people uncertain of what they were witnessing, thinking that they were privy to a ceremonial display of some sort, a show, perhaps, of military prowess.

‘Wait . . . Jim . . .’ Madeleine gasped. She tugged her hand from his grasp. ‘I need . . .’ She bent forward, placing her hands on her hips as she tried to catch her breath. ‘I need a minute.’

‘It’s all rather grand, don’t you think, dear?’ a sweet, blue-haired old lady asked Madeleine.

‘You’d best be going on home,’ Jim advised tersely.

‘And miss the parade?’ she exclaimed indignantly.

They were close enough to the camp now that the silhouette of gaping, derelict buildings had come into view. Jim looked about him, his eyes filled with worry. Where was his father?

‘We need to hurry,’ he urged Madeleine. And as if to underscore his point, the trucks let down their ramps. Five tanks rolled in unison out on to the avenue, with a laboured creaking and clanking of gears, as a few yards away, two soldiers began deftly to mount a .30 calibre machine gun on to an armoured carrier. A collective gasp went through the crowd.

Jim desperately searched the sea of faces around him, looking for the Major, for Connor, for any of the men from Anacostia. He’d been foolish to drag Madeleine into this.
Why weren’t these people leaving
? He could understand the veterans standing their ground, unwilling on principle to give even an inch before they absolutely had to. It was what his father would do. But these others . . . standing about like lemmings, shifting from foot to foot as they glanced uneasily at the soldiers and then at one another, wondering what to do.

Jim tried to gauge the time it would take him to work his way through the throng and get Madeleine away from here. Far too long, they’d never make it in time. He turned towards the veteran camp. The only path that made sense lay forward, to somehow skirt the camp and the police cordon that surrounded it.

He took such a firm hold of Madeleine’s hand that she winced. ‘Don’t let go,’ he instructed, and plunged forward through the crowd.

Another order was given. The soldiers pulled on their gas masks. Someone in the crowd cried out in astonishment. Jim went faster, using his shoulders to barrel forward through the crowd.
Why weren’t these fools leaving
?

The tanks began to crank forward, belching thick, black exhaust. That was the catalyst the crowd needed. With cries of panic, people started to scatter. The impenetrable mass of just a moment ago collapsed into its soft-bellied centre, people running this way and that, spilling into the avenue only to be pushed back by the advancing troops, shoving and tripping over one another in a belated attempt to put as much distance between themselves and the besieged veteran camp as possible.

‘Jim, slow down, I can’t . . .’ Madeleine panted, but Jim simply took a tighter hold of her hand.

The camp was only a few paces away now. He could make out the groups of veterans standing in the crumbling doorways and amidst the broken-down walls, their wives shading their eyes against the sun as they peered anxiously towards the avenue. The police cordon that girded the camp still held despite the press of the men jammed up against it. Here, so close to the camp, the crowd was mostly veterans. Just veterans, Jim saw, given away by their bedraggled ties and thin faces, and the way they stood their ground, defiantly facing the advancing troops head on.

Most of them had stood there all day. They’d remained peaceable as the police had begun the evacuations that morning, done no more than shouted slogans and waved their flags. Even when the scuffle had broken out inside the camp, resulting in the fatal shooting that afternoon, they had not resorted to violence. They’d stood and watched in shocked silence, deeply shaken as the body of their compatriot was removed. Quietly, they had continued their vigil.

Now, finally, they had reached breaking point, seething with rage over this last, unfathomable betrayal. The
army
had been called out against them. The army, the same one they had fought in, the army that they had burrowed in trenches for, been bullet fodder and shell bait for, that very army was now riding down its own.

‘The last time I saw bayonets raised against me, I was in France!’ a veteran called contemptuously to the advancing troops.

‘If only we had guns,’ another shouted, red-faced with anger.

‘I was shooting down Boche when you was still in half pants!’ yelled a third.

The troops continued their measured, purposeful advance along the avenue. A few of the veterans scrabbled in the dust for stones and pieces of brick, anything with which to arm themselves. They flung these pathetic pieces of rubble at the steadily advancing troops; these too, were disregarded. Another command was given, and the contingent halted. A deep silence pressed down on the block, so intense that Jim stopped in his tracks.

A trio of pigeons burst squawking from an oak. Automatically, he followed their flight. The birds soared higher and as they whirred upwards, something followed in their wake. A cluster of grey metal canisters, arcing gracefully and trailing plumes of gas.

Without warning, giving the unarmed veterans neither any notice nor the time to disperse, the army had unleashed tear gas upon them.

Jim yanked Madeleine towards him, shielding her head with his arms. The canisters burst open upon the sidewalks and inside the periphery of the camp, enveloping everything in a pall of dense, stinging smoke. He held her tight against his chest, as she coughed and gasped for air. Men were bent double all around them, veterans hacking and coughing, staggering about like drunkards as they reeled from the acrid gas. ‘Close your eyes,’ Jim shouted to Madeleine, his own throat seizing. ‘Your eyes, don’t let it get in your eyes.’

His throat was on fire, raw and inflamed. He started to cough, inhaling even more of the gas and worsening the burn. The masked troops were sweeping the sidewalks now, using their bayonets to urge the veterans along.

‘Arm us, just arm us, damn you, so we can have a fair fight!’ a veteran shouted hoarsely, collapsing at the end of his challenge into a fit of laboured wheezing.

‘We have to move,’ Jim gasped over the smoke.

Madeleine squinted up at him, eyes streaming. ‘I can’t see.’

A fresh canister landed right at their feet, rocking slowly as it spewed out its load. Jim bent, and uncaring of the heat that burned through his palm, picked up the canister and flung it as hard as he could at the troops. Lifting Madeleine into his arms, he began to sprint, filled with the sole aim of getting her as far away from the soldiers, from the gas, as he could.

The police cordon had broken. He charged past it, lungs burning, and raced into the veteran camp. Images loomed from the smoke like some twisted nightmare. A man scrambling towards a jalopy, two little boys tucked like sacks of potatoes under his arms. Behind him, a woman, crying aloud in panic, carting a black cat and an armful of clothes. The high-pitched sound of a child crying. Soldiers marching methodically through the rubble, clearing out the buildings one by one.

An officer barked a command, and here now was the cavalry, galloping across the broken ground. Veterans scattered this way and that, trying desperately to shelter their families. Women shrieking, people stumbling blindly into excavation pits as they fled the flailing hooves and sabres. The muzzle of a horse, directly in his path, its rider’s face distorted by the gas mask into a featureless, subhuman form. He gestured with his sabre towards Jim, a wide, sweeping motion, the metal agleam as it looped through the smoke. Jim swerved to the right and continued to run.

‘The flags, not the flags!’ someone shouted, but it was too late. The soldiers had begun to torch the tenements. They burned like kindling, sparks catching the flags perched proudly atop the ramshackle roofs. The Stars and Stripes, beautiful Old Glory, swallowed whole by the flames.

Jim raced on, holding Madeleine close, through the chaos of the camp, to the far perimeter and beyond, and still he ran, down one side street and yet another, to the top of a grassy bank. His legs were trembling when finally he stopped. ‘Are you alright?’ he rasped as he set her down.

She nodded shakily.

‘Jim!’ she whispered, horrified. She took his hand in hers, and it was only then that he realised he’d burned himself, handling the canister of tear gas.

He shook his head, wanting to say it was nothing, but unable to voice the words. Already sick with worry over his father, his mind flooded now with all he’d witnessed, the relentless targeting of the poor and the needy by those far more powerful than they. To his shame, there was the prick of tears behind his eyes. ‘It’s nothing,’ he said, trying to pull his hand away. She wouldn’t let go, her fingers intertwined tightly with his, her own eyes filling with tears.