Chapter
30
The
election for governor was held on May 15, and Bill Kraft was elected with 83%
of the vote. He had opponents. In Maine, the law made it easy for candidates to
get on the ballot. We didn’t want any rigged two-party system like in the old
United States, because the two parties soon became one party with a common
interest in keeping everyone else out. But most folks in Maine knew what Kraft
had done for us, and they wanted to give him a chance to do more.
Governor
Kraft was inaugurated on May 20, and since the other N.C. governors all decided
to come, they got together for a meeting. There, they agreed that Kraft would
remain the supreme decision-maker in military matters, just as the two previous
Maine governors had been. States rights notwithstanding, everyone knew what war
required.
I
was called before the governors to tell them where the implementation of the
peace agreement with the Muslims stood. The World Islamic Council had agreed to
return the black Christians kidnapped from Boston and sold into slavery in
return for the Islamic POWs we held. But so far, nothing had happened.
I’d
been communicating directly with the Egyptian military authorities in Cairo,
who were in charge of the exchange for the Islamic side. At first, I’d been
troubled by an incessant gurgling sound on the phone; I figured it was some
kind of recording or EW device. Then one of our intel guys with some experience
in the Middle East explained that the Egyptian general was just smoking hashish
in his water pipe as we talked. I understood why not much was happening.
However,
the Egyptians did tell me they had collected some 3000 of our blacks in camps
outside Cairo, ready for exchange. To get things moving, I proposed we tell
them that as of June 1, unless the exchange was underway, we would forbid all
our Islamic prisoners to practice their religion. No prayers five times a day.
No Korans. And we’d send ’em all to work on pig farms.
Most
of the governors liked that idea. But Bill Kraft was uneasy. “Gentlemen, I have
to tell you this whole business troubles me. It’s gut instinct, and I can’t put
my finger on it. But I feel in my bones that when we bring these black folks
back to Boston, we’re bringing in trouble.”
“They
won’t be in Boston very long,” New York’s governor responded. “Thanks to CORN,
blacks are already moving out of the cities, back to the land, in substantial
numbers. We’re not seeing the usual crime or unrest among those who remain. The
good blacks have taken their community back from the scum. It seems to me these
blacks coming back are good Christian folk who’ll help that process along.”
“What
would be the effect if we repudiated our agreement with the black community to
get their people back?” the governor of Rhode Island asked me.
“Militarily,
it wouldn’t be a problem,” I replied. “The blacks know we won’t tolerate
disorder and we have the muscle to put it down.”
“But
I think CORN has shown us the way to make the Confederation’s blacks into
contributing members of our society. If we broke faith with them, we would
undermine their new direction,” I added.
“Of
course, as a soldier, my word is my bond. If the Confederation broke the deal I
made – a deal that saved Boston from widespread destruction – my honor would be
at stake. I would have no choice but to resign immediately.”
The
governor of Massachusetts broke in. “If I may speak bluntly to Governor Kraft,
does he expect us to agree to break our agreement with the blacks just because
he has a gut feeling?”
“I
cannot expect you to do that, and I don’t,” Kraft replied. “But as those of you
who have been in war or studied war know, sometimes your instincts are your
best guide. Are you willing to agree to repatriate the blacks slowly, into a
few limited areas, until we see how it goes?”
In
the old days, politicians would have rolled anyone, military or civilian, who
offered an argument like Kraft’s. The game was just to “win” the immediate
squabble so someone could look good by making someone else look bad. But the
cold shower of reality we had all taken in the break-up of the U.S.A. had
changed things.
“I
know Governor Kraft’s achievements as a soldier,” the governor of New Hampshire
said. “If he says his soldier’s gut instinct troubles him about this, I’m
troubled too. In the world we now live in, it pays to be careful. I don’t see
any harm in some sort of quarantine of the people we’re getting back. Being too
soft is what brought our old country down. I’d rather risk being too hard.”
The
word “quarantine” seemed to do the trick. We didn’t know what these people
might be bringing back with them. It would have been risky for the Muslims to
impregnate our blacks with a genetically engineered disease because of the risk
it would spread to their own people, but it wasn’t impossible.
The
governors recommended that the matter be handled as a national security issue,
which put Kraft in charge and left me to work out the details. Before the end
of the day, the General Staff had selected a couple areas in Roxbury where
returnees would be held for three months, until we could be sure they were not
infected. The migration to the countryside had left places enough there for
them. The remaining local residents could go or stay, but if they stayed they
would be stuck there for the same three months. The governors seemed
comfortable with that.
In
the absence of any word from Cairo, on June 1 we implemented our threat. We
made sure Al Jazeera got pictures of their POWS shoveling pig manure. We also
made clear it would continue until the prisoner exchange began. The next day,
Cairo called, and on June 7 the first planeload of our blacks landed at Logan.
It took off the same day filled with Egyptian POWs returning home.
Boston
received her heroes gratefully, but Boston’s blacks also accepted the
quarantine. They had learned some lessons, including patience. They knew that
when the Confederation acted, it was for the common good. In the 21st century,
it was wise to be prudent.
For
about six weeks, everything went smoothly. The number of black returnees grew
steadily. Some local folks had deliberately stayed in the areas where they were
quarantined, to help them reintegrate. It turned out that in almost every case,
the experience of being sold into slavery had strengthened their Christianity,
not weakened it. These people would be assets to our society.
Then,
on July 23, I got a phone call from the head of the public health office in
Boston. “Captain Rumford, I don’t like making this call,” the fellow said. “I
hope what I’m about to tell you is wrong. In the last week, we’ve had fourteen
deaths among the blacks who returned from Islamic countries. They all showed
the same symptoms. Now, we’ve got three local people from the quarantined areas
showing those symptoms.”
“What
are they?” I asked.
“First,
inflamed swelling of the lymph glands, usually surrounded by a ring. Then,
fever, chills, diarrhea, and internal bleeding leading quickly to death.”
History
told me immediately what we were facing. Black Death.
“It’s
the plague, isn’t it?” I asked.
“Yes,
it’s plague. But there’s a difference. Normal bubonic plague responds to
antibiotics. This one doesn’t. The doctors have tried every antibiotic known,
with no positive results.”
I
gave orders to tighten the quarantine by evacuating all areas bordering those
where the returnees had settled. No one was to be allowed in or out on pain of
death. Snipers in full MOP gear were positioned to enforce that order. The
prisoner exchange with the Islamics was also suspended immediately.
We
had a network, established in the 1990s by the Marine Corps, that tied us into
scientists who were specialists in biological warfare and genetic engineering.
I immediately pulled a team together to go to Boston and figure out what we
were facing. If it was genetically engineered, we needed to find out how before
we could develop a vaccine.
Meanwhile,
the black returnees continued to die. We had communications with them, of
course, so the picture was clear. Just as in the Middle Ages, the houses filled
up with dead, the living too weak to drag out the bodies. Some dropped in the
street, where the dogs and rats feasted on them.
We
sent every medicine we had, but none made any difference. Some white doctors
and nurses went in as volunteers. Since this plague took at least six weeks
before symptoms appeared, they could relieve some suffering before they too
went down. By then, we hoped to have a cure.
The
scientists worked frantically, but without success. The problem was, there were
many ways bubonic plague or any other disease could be genetically engineered
to get around the usual vaccines and medicines. Finding which genes had been
altered and how took time – too much time for those who had been infected. By
the end of September, they were all dead, including the local residents who had
remained and the volunteers who had gone in to succor them. Roxbury was a
cemetery.
Yet
even as they died, those black Christians accomplished something. They did not
rage or rail or issue demands. They prayed together, and died together, quietly
helping bear one another’s burdens to the end with a Christian patience that
inspired us all. In so doing, they worked powerfully to change whites’ late
20th century image of blacks from whiners who always demanded something for
nothing or punks with guns to an older, truer picture: a good, faithful people
who suffered without complaint and humbly served God and their neighbor. In a
society that was beginning once again to accept such qualities as virtues, that
was no small legacy. It did much to ensure that blacks had a solid future in
the Northern Confederation.
***
Nor
did their deaths go unavenged. In the Muslim countries where Boston’s blacks
had been sold as slaves, the buy-back program had slowly gathered them in
camps, in preparation for the POW exchange. There, they had been injected with
the engineered plague. The Islamics thought this safe enough, since the disease
took about six weeks to manifest symptoms and was not contagious until it did.
That was plenty of time for them to be shipped off to the infidel.
Only
now it wasn’t because we had halted the exchange. So the plague broke out in
the camps. There, too, the blacks died, but in the process they infected their
guards. Islamic countries not being noted for their efficiency, their
quarantines had holes in them, and the bacteria crawled through. Soon, plague
was raging through the slums of Cairo, Istanbul, Tehran, and Islamabad. By the
Fall of 2029, thousands were dead or dying and hundreds of thousands were
infected.
We
still held the Islamic POWs, and I thought turnabout was fair play. I asked our
scientists to come up with a different genetically engineered variant of
plague, one that would mimic the symptoms of the Islamic variant but not
respond to the same vaccines or treatments. Genetic engineering had become all
too easy in the 21st century. Some teenagers working in a basement in Stockholm
cooked up one bug that gave a week-long case of diarrhea to anyone who ate
either rutabaga or herring, thus wiping out Swedish cuisine. We had the right
stuff in a couple weeks’ time, and as soon as we had inculcated it in the POWs
by mixing it with their hummus, we sent them home. Our blacks were dead or
dying, so the POWs were no longer of any value to us as commodities.
The
Islamics took us for fools, welcomed their heroes with open arms, and ended up
with a mix of plagues it took them three years to sort out, at the price of
millions of dead. It was a small lesson in not playing games that advanced,
disciplined societies could play better.
Governor
Kraft’s gut instinct had saved us from a similar catastrophe, but it had been a
close call. The lesson, once again, was that closed borders were essential to
survival. It wasn’t just movements of people that had to be controlled. It was
easy enough to send a bacillus by shipping container or mixed in a bulk
commodity. Foreign trade fell drastically throughout the world as every import
had to be quarantined, examined, and tested. Only what was local was safe, and
even at home we developed a “neighborhood watch” to report any suspicious
basement laboratories. This didn’t require a police state. People were eager
volunteers, because they knew the mortal danger genetic engineering posed to
everyone.
It
was funny, at least for those with a sense of irony, the way Americans in the
early 21st century had howled about the stupid mistakes of earlier generations
in pursuing “better living through chemistry” and similar scientific great
leaps forward. As they scorned their forefathers, they made the same blunder on
a vaster scale. Genetic engineering rolled Frankenstein’s monster, “The Fly,”
and the Black Death all into one, yet they hailed it. Computers reduced their
operators to mindless androids while hooking them on the drug of virtual
reality, yet they were the miracle machine no one could do without.
It
wasn’t a case of those not knowing the past repeating it. They knew, yet they
repeated it anyway. That’s what brings civilizations to their end.
We in the Northern
Confederation were lucky, once again. We figured out early what everyone who
survived learned eventually. Just because a technology exists doesn’t mean you
have to use it. Those who depart from the ways of their ancestors do so at
their own peril.
Chapter 31
By
the 21st century, America had become a country of many universities and little
education. Her colleges were mostly diploma mills crossed with asylums for the
politically insane: howling Bluestockings, inventors of “Afrocentric history,”
mewling “advocates” for the blind, the botched, and the bewildered. Frequently,
these defectives pooled their neuroses and formed a coalition that took over
the campus, turning it into a small, ivy covered North Korea. Any student who
dared dispute their ideology of cultural Marxism swiftly felt the hand of
“revolutionary justice.”
Students
still arrived, despite appalling tuition bills, because they needed the
sheepskin. America had come to value credentials over performance, so anyone
without a college degree remained a bottom-feeder for life. Universities were a
classic socialist set-up: a monopoly that produced crap at high prices. Many
were little more than vending machines; insert your $250,000, pull the lever,
and get your diploma.
Inflation
proved the ax that finally killed the silly goose. The American republic’s
final hyperinflation wiped out college endowments, destroyed the middle class
that footed the tuition bills, and finally made worthless the massive
government grants and subsidies most universities had come to depend on. The
professors were still paid, but in money worth so little a month’s paycheck
couldn’t cover lunch. It got so bad some of them had to go out and get jobs.
The
break-up of the union and the fall of Washington closed the doors of every
college and university. Young people had real work to do, and no state
government had spare cash to fund phony “education.” Frankly, nobody much
missed institutions that had long since abandoned their function, which was
passing the higher elements of our culture on to the next generation. So it was
something of a surprise, in early September, 2029, to see students once again
matriculating. The way it happened was even more surprising.
Sometime
in March, an organization based in Zurich called the Foundation for Higher
Learning had approached the former presidents of Yale, Harvard, and Dartmouth
and asked whether they could start their schools going again if funding were
provided. They said they could, and immediately found themselves with a hundred
million Swiss francs each – an enormous sum in our poverty-stricken economy.
Lured by huge salaries, their professors regathered. Students were offered full
scholarships, plus stipends that amounted to enough money to feed a whole
family. People without much cash realized their college-age son or daughter
could be their main wage-earner, and applications poured in.
At
the time, I’d been occupied with both the Boston problem and our succession
crisis, and I hadn’t paid the whole business much mind. Three hundred million
Swiss francs was an economic Godsend, because it enabled us to increase our
money supply. It was many times what we were earning in foreign exchange from
all our exports put together.
I
had gotten a nose full of “Political Correctness” at Bowdoin, so I guess I
should have known what to expect. But that seemed ages ago, and I figured
reality would impress itself on campuses just as it had on the rest of our
society.
I
was wrong. Quickly, all the old games started up again. The course catalogs
were filled with crap like “Women in Judeo-Christian Societies: Three Thousand
Years of Phallic Oppression and The Symbolism of the Bagel,” “The African
Origins of Chaos Theory” (a course which was quickly denounced as “insensitive”
and withdrawn), and “Salons in the Camp: Lesbian Contributions to Line and
Column Tactics in 18th Century European Warfare.”
An
informal contest developed among the three colleges to see which could be the
most PC. The Harvard faculty collectively led a “love-in” that “introduced
students to the richness of man-boy relationships.” Yale countered with an
“auto-da-fe” in which every heterosexual male student had to choose a “sin”
from a PC list – “sexism,” “homophobia,” “good table manners,” etc. – and
parade around campus wearing a signboard bearing their “confession.” Dartmouth
erected a Temple of Artemis in the center of the green and forced all male
students to prostrate themselves before the goddess, on pain of expulsion it
they refused.
Seeking to establish itself
as the best of the worst, Dartmouth called a “faculty workshop” for October 12,
Columbus Day, “to discover means for reversing Eurocentrism and white male
domination over the North American continent.” Faculty leaders from Yale and
Harvard were invited to attend.
***
On
October 2, I received a note from Governor Kraft asking me to meet with him the
next day and to bring along Ron Danielov, head of our Special Operations
forces. We gathered in his small office that afternoon.
“Are
you both familiar with what is happening in our so-called ‘institutions of
higher learning?’” Bill opened.
“I
guess everybody is,” Ron replied. “It’s in all the newspapers. I can tell you,
people aren’t happy about it. We all thought we were through with this kind of
crap.”
“We
soon will be,” Kraft replied. “As usual, there is more to it than meets the
eye. Do you know where these colleges are getting their funding?”
“From
some foundation in Switzerland,” I said.
“That’s
a front,” Bill replied. “Some friends in Europe did a little sniffing around
for me. The real source of the money is the UN, specifically UNESCO, the UN’s
‘cultural branch.’ It’s been a den of vipers for as long as anyone can
remember. Now, with UN money, it hopes to poison us the same way it’s poisoned
so many other places. Only that’s not going to happen.”
“Where
do we come in?” I inquired.
“Conveniently,
the worst malefactors are gathering at Dartmouth College on October 12,” Bill
answered. “They are meeting in Dartmouth Hall, in room 105, which is a small
auditorium. I’m going to be there.”
“Do
they know that?” I asked.
“No,
and they won’t until I walk in,” Bill replied.
“Mightn’t
that be a bit dangerous?” I cautioned.
“I
intend it to be dangerous – for them,” Bill answered.
“Here’s
my plan, and here’s where you come in, sergeant. About mid-morning, I will
crash their meeting. I’m simply going to barge in, march up to the front and
grab the mic. There, I’ll explain what “political correctness” really is and
why we will not tolerate it, or its advocates, in the Northern Confederation.”
“Sergeant,
I need two things from you. First, I need snipers concealed in 105 Dartmouth
where they can cover the stage. If any of the freaks, phonies, or faggots try
to rush me or shout me down, I want them shot. They are going to hear this
speech whether they want to or not.”
“No
problem,” Ron replied. “I hope you don’t mind if I’m one of those snipers
myself. I’d enjoy taking a few of those bastards out.”
“Be
my guest,” Bill answered. “But you still need to be able to run the second part
of the operation. Once I’ve said my piece and left the stage, I want a massacre.
I don’t want a single one of those idiotlogues to leave that room alive.”
“Press
will be there, so you can’t just blow the building up,” the governor continued.
“I want to kill the people who’ve earned death, but no one else. And I want the
media, including television, to record and report the whole thing, in every
detail.”
I
was taken aback by Kraft’s sudden bloodlust. In the past, we had generally been
careful to minimize casualties, especially among people who were at least
nominally our countrymen. Knowing a General Staff officer has no right to keep
his opinions to himself, I spoke up.
“Excuse
me, but there’s something here I don’t get,” I said. “When the Vermont Deep
Greeners led an actual revolt, we made every effort to avoid killing them. Now
we’ve got a bunch of crazy professors just holding a meeting, and we’re going
to slaughter them like so many pigs. Why?”
“A
good question, captain,” Governor Kraft replied. “It has two answers.”
“First,
the Deep Greeners were deluded, but they were not deluders. They had swallowed
the poison of ideology, but they did not know it as such. They thought what
they were doing was good. And a proper concern for the environment is good. We
Christians call it ‘stewardship.’ They had simply gone too far, in both their
goals and their choice of means.”
“Because
they erred, they had to pay a price, and they did. The price was banishment.
Had we set their lives as the price, we would have gone too far. It is useful
to remind ourselves that we are all fools on occasion.”
“It
is otherwise with the slime now oozing its way toward Dartmouth College,” the
governor continued. “These people are not the ensnared, but the setters of
snares. They are the deluders, the tricksters, the deceivers who serve the One
Deceiver.”
“They
know political correctness is bunk, and ‘deconstruction’ a mere parlor game
with words. Why do you think they devote their efforts so assiduously to youth?
Young people have not seen enough of life to tell what is real from what is
not. So they drink the poison unaware.”
“This
mutilation of innocence in the service of death, the death of culture and the
death of truth, deserves death. That is what it shall receive. Let it be to
each according to his works.”
“And
that leads into the second answer to your question,” Kraft went on. “By giving
each what he has earned – which is to say, by acting justly – we make the point
that at least in the Northern Confederation, our culture, Western culture, is
recovering its will. We are no longer afraid to act on what we know is right.
You know Von Seekt’s saying, captain: Das wesentlilche ist die Tat. The
important thing is the deed.”
“Oh,
we’ve known, most of us anyway, that what was preached in our universities was
garbage. Most of the students themselves have known it, ever since political
correctness reared its ugly backside in our faces in the late 1960s.”
“But
we were cowed. We were frightened out of acting on what we knew, because we
were told it wasn’t nice, it wasn’t ‘tolerant,’ it didn’t ‘respect the rights
of others.’ Those arguments were themselves provided by the politically
correct, to create the opening wedge for an ideology that, once empowered,
showed not the slightest shred of tolerance for any dissent, or dissenters.”
“But
that’s all done with. We’re becoming men again. Men have the will to act. This
act, I promise you, will speak in a voice no one can misunderstand. This
trumpet will not sound uncertain.”
The
governor turned to Danielov. “So then, can you give me my massacre?” he asked.
“Easily,”
Ron replied. “Our snipers are good enough to take out the right people and not
hit the wrong people, even in a melee, which this will become as soon as the
first shots are fired.”
“But
I think there’s a better way,” Sgt. Danielov continued. “You want to send a
signal that we are recovering our will. Killing our enemies does that, but I
think how we kill them can make the signal stronger.”
“In
killing, the hardest thing to do, the greatest challenge to the will, is to
kill up close, with cold steel – to plunge your sword or bayonet or dagger into
your enemy’s guts and twist. Will you allow us to do it that way here?”
“I
like it. Yes!” Governor Kraft replied. Let the trumpet sound loud and clear.”
“What
about the women?” I asked.
“These
women despise anyone who looks upon them as women,” Kraft responded. “They spit
on the word ‘lady.’ If a man opens a door for them, they kick him in the shins.
They demand to be treated equally. Let it be unto them according to their
wish.”
***
Ron knew what was wanted, so I left it to him to make the arrangements. Precisely because I still wasn’t comfortable with the idea of a massacre, I felt a need to be in Hanover on October 12th. I needed to show myself that I could do what I was ordered even when I was uncomfortable with it. On the other hand, I didn’t want Danielov to think I was looking over his shoulder, and I knew I’d be recognized. The targets might suspect something if they spotted the Chief of the General Staff wandering around town.
In
the end, I decided just to go home to Hartland, where I could get a better
sense of the public reaction. I wasn’t at all sure our folks were ready for
this. Up home, I was still just “that Rumford kid,” and people would let me
know in a hurry what they were really thinking.
On
the morning of the 12th, I hitched up the wagon and headed into town. The
general store had a generator, powered by a turbine in the stream that flowed
by the tannery, because they still had a good-sized freezer. The ice cream in
the freezer plus a television made the store the town social center. There’d be
enough of a crowd that I’d get a good sense of public opinion.
The
PC congress at Dartmouth was well known to folks, since the papers had been
talking about the affair at some length. When I got to the store around 9:30, a
good crowd had gathered, and they had hard words for the goings-on. Time had
not dimmed their memories of what was worst about the old USA, and this
political correctness crap was at the top of the list. More than one neighbor
said we ought to take the lot of ‘em out and shoot ’em. I took that as a good
sign, but still wasn’t sure how people would react when we actually did it.
The
television was covering the conference, live, and the other side was laying the
groundwork for us as well as if we’d written the script. The speakers were a
succession of whiney women and faggy men, all bemoaning this or that
“oppression” and blaming the world’s ills on white males. The comments from the
Hartland peanut gallery got increasingly nastier; we all felt like we’d gone
through a worm-hole into a tour of the Inferno conducted by Catullus. The main
sentiment seemed to be, “Why are we still putting up with this stuff?”
By
around 10:30, I began to fear the local crowd would go home before the action
started. Just at the point when Farmer Corman said, “If I want chicken shit, I
got plenty to shovel at home” and headed for the door, the picture changed.
From
the back of 105 Dartmouth, the camera panned to Governor Kraft marching in the
side door, to gasps, then boos, hisses, and shouts of anger from the gutter
worshipers. Bill’s 300-pound bulk tossed those in his path aside like bumboats
around a battleship as he climbed toward the stage. Grabbing the mic from some
stingy-haired bitch reading a poem about making love with her Labrador, the
governor bellowed, “Sit down and shut up!”
They
did. Auctoritas has that effect, even on the illegitimate.
“Fellow
revolutionaries,” were Kraft’s next words. Recovering quickly from their
initial shock, a few of the snakes hissed at them.
“You
doubt that I am a revolutionary?” he replied to the hisses. “Oh, how very wrong
you are. Very wrong indeed, as you will shortly learn,
“Now
‘fellow,’ I confess, is merely a bit of polite rhetoric. After all, I cannot
address you as ‘ladies and gentlemen.’ You would be ‘offended,’ about which I
care not a fig. But it would be untrue. You are neither ladies nor gentlemen.
Considering how long you have coupled with demons, I’m not sure there is any
humanity left in you at all.”
No
one was moving toward the door of the Hartland general store now. It was so
quiet you could have heard a mouse fart. Like all effective leaders, Bill wore
the masque of command well.
“You
see, I am not one of the beguiled,” Governor Kraft continued. “I know whence
you come. I have studied your history. You are not descendants of the hippies,
despite your bedraggled appearance. You are not the offspring of Quakers and
Anabaptists, for when you say ‘peace,’ you mean ‘war.’ You did not grow from
the Suffragettes, nor the civil rights movement, nor apostles of tolerance such
as Roger Williams.”
“For
your father in Hell, no less yours than Lenin’s and Stalin’s and Mao’s, is none
other than Karl Marx himself. Your poison, the poison of political correctness
which you have striven these many years to inject into the Western bloodstream,
is nothing less than Marxism translated from economic into cultural terms.”
At
this, one aged crone on the Dartmouth faculty, Professorette Mary Ucistah,
realized the danger. The governor was about to unveil PC’s ultimate secret:
where it came from and what it really was. She jumped to her feet and cried,
“Come on, people, let’s shout this pig down. You know the chant: Two, Four,
Six, Eight, We Know Who the People Hate. . .”
Their
eyes fixed on the professor, few television viewers noticed Bill look up
slightly toward the rafters and raise his eyebrows. Ron read the signal correctly.
105 Dartmouth rang with one shot from a sniper rifle, and “Ms.” Ucistah’s
brains splattered across the backs of her colleagues. The room froze.
“Thank
you for the courtesy of your attention,” Bill said quietly.
“As
I was saying, the sewage which you have poured for decades into the once-sweet
grove of academe is Marxism, nothing less. The derivation is obvious. Like
classical, economic Marxism, cultural Marxism is a totalitarian ideology. From
Marxist philosophy, it derives its vision of a “classless society” – a society
not of equal opportunity, but equal condition. Since that vision contradicts
human nature, society will not accord with it, unless forced. So forced it will
be. Thank God, you never got control of the power of the state, not in full.
But on campuses like this one, where you did gain power, you made your
totalitarian nature clear. Cultural Marxism was forced on everyone, and no
dissent was allowed. Freedom of speech, of the press, even of thought were all
eliminated. Anyone who challenged you, student or faculty or administer, was
driven out.”
“Like
economic Marxism, your cultural Marxism said that all history was determined by
a single factor. Classical Marxism argued that factor was ownership of the
means of production. You said that it was which groups – defined by sex, race,
and sexual normality or abnormality – had power over which other groups.”
“Classical
Marxism defined the working class as virtuous and the bourgeoisie as evil –
without regard to what members of either class did. You defined blacks,
Hispanics, feminist women, and homosexuals as good, and white men as evil –
all, again, with no attention to anyone’s behavior.”
“Classical
Marxists, where they obtained power, expropriated the bourgeoisie and gave
their property to the state, as the ‘representative of the workers and
peasants.’ Where you obtained power, you expropriated the rights of white men
and gave special privileges to feminists, blacks, gays, and the like –
Marcuse’s revolutionary class.”
“Classical
Marxists justified their actions through a warped economics. You justified your
actions through a deliberate warping of the language: deconstruction.
Deconstruction ‘proved’ that any text, past or present, illustrated white male
oppression of everyone else, just as economic Marxist analysis ‘proved’ the
exploitation of the working class. Deconstruction was in fact merely political
scrabble. Compared with it, classical Marxist economics was at least
intellectually challenging. But then, most of you never had minds.”
“But
that is not all I know about you,” the Governor continued. “I have visited,
through history, the fetid holes where your cultural Marxism grew. I have read
Gramsci, the Italian Communist who pioneered the translation of Marxism from
economics into culture as early as the 1920s. I know Adorno, and his Frankfurt
School that in the 1930s crossed Marx with Freud. I have studied ‘Critical
Theory,’ the product of that school that carried the bacillus into American
universities. I know the whole, sordid story of your sorry ancestry among the
exiled refuse of European Marxism, the story of how failed intellectuals worked
for what is now almost a century to stab our culture in the back.”
“But
as I said at the outset, I too am a revolutionary. My revolution – our
revolution, here in the Northern Confederation – is against you. Marxist
revolutionaries of every yellow stripe, wherever they obtained power, brought
‘revolutionary justice.’ Anyone or anything that furthered their revolution was
just, anyone or anything that opposed it was unjust. And the unjust were
liquidated, by the millions.”
“Now,
by your own standard let you be judged. You have opposed our revolution, so you
stand condemned.”
“You
are condemned, let me hasten to add, not by me alone, nor merely by those who
live today in our Confederation. Your jury is every man and woman who for three
thousand years has labored and fought and died for Western culture, the culture
you sought to sacrifice to your own pathetic egos.”
“And
that jury’s sentence is death.”
At
those words, the doorways to 105 Dartmouth filled with our men. Each wore a
white surplice with the red Crusader cross emblazoned on a shield over the
heart. Each held a Roman gladius, the short, sharp stabbing sword of the Roman
legionary, in his right hand. Through the doorway closest to the stage, a choir
of monks filed in. Mounting the stage, they began chanting the Dies Irae. At
that signal, the soldiers set to their work.
The
hall held 162 politically correct luminaries – 163 if you count “Ms.” Ucistah’s
corpse. The work of slaughter went quickly. In less than five minutes of
screams, shrieks and howls, it was all over. The floor ran deep with the bowels
of cultural Marxism, and at least in the Northern Confederation, it was dead.
As
intended, the television showed the whole thing, the faces frozen first in
terror, then in death. It was not a pretty picture, even to those of us who had
seen war. As the cries turned to moans, and the moans were replaced with
nothing but an occasional twitch of a limb unconnected to any living brain, the
Dies Irae too softened until the choir was silent.
Then,
Governor Kraft, who had stood like some human Matterhorn overlooking the
carnage, moving and unmoved, turned and walked slowly, as if in solemn
procession, toward the door. As he did so, the choir broke again into song, now
in a major key, strong and soaring: the Non Nobis. “Not to us, Oh Lord, but to
Thee be given the glory.”
In
the Hartland general store, I had kept one eye on the television and the other
on my neighbors. Perhaps my own ambivalence made me overly sensitive, but
Kraft’s massacre was a high-risk move, and public reaction would determine
whether it worked or blew up in his face.
State
o’Mainers are born with poker faces and stuck tongues, so at first it was hard
to judge. But as the massacre proceeded, I began to notice a few thin smiles,
the sign a Yankee likes what he’s seeing.
After
Kraft left the stage in 105 Dartmouth, Farmer Corman reached up and turned off
the set. “Waal,” he said, “I don’t know about the rest of you, but I thinks
that deserves a toast. Here’s a jug of my best cider, which I brought in to
sell, and I see some glasses theah on the shelf.” The glasses and the jug
quickly went round.
“Heah’s
to our Governor, the State of Maine, and our own Johnny Rumford, who’ve had the
courage to do what we should have done a long time ago.” As the glasses were
raised, a kid in back shouted “Hip, hip, hurray!” Three cheers rang out, and I
bowed my thanks for good neighbors and a people who deserved their liberty.
***
Bill
Kraft had gambled and won. No one in the Confederation regretted the loss of
the treasonous intellectual scum who, perhaps more than anyone else, bore the
responsibility for what had happened to the old USA. But I felt there was still
some unfinished business, and a few days later, back in Augusta, I asked Bill
if he would stop by my boarding house lodgings some evening so we could talk.
He
came on a cold November night. Knowing that the route to Bill’s heart and brain
lay through his stomach, I had stopped by Father Dimitri’s to wheedle something
special. Not only did the good priest provide the tin of caviar I had hoped
for, he threw in a few bottles of vintage Port, Bill’s favorite drink. “Just
lubricating the wheels of government,” he said smiling as I thanked him and his
Tsar for their generosity. He knew one good bottle often accomplished more than
many memos.
Bill
arrived around eight and caught sight of the sideboard as he was shucking off
his field-gray greatcoat. “I’m pleased to see the General Staff has been
maintaining a productive relationship with the Russians,” he said jovially.
“Tanks
and caviar are a happy combination,” I replied.
“Especially
when it’s Sevruga,” Bill added, quickly pouring himself a glass of Port and
diving into the tin.
“I’m
glad to see you’ve gotten your appetite back,” I joked.
“Nothing
picks up the spirits better than a good massacre,” he mumbled through a
mouthful of black pearls. “An ‘Un-rest Cure,’ you know.”
“Having
a bit of Saki with our caviar?” I teased.
“Reginald
would approve, I’m sure,” he purred. Bill’s ecstasies, like his rages, were
something of an art form.
Seeing
an opportunity to turn the conversation the way I wanted it to go, I asked, “I
wonder how many of the young men growing up today in the Northern Confederation
will ever have a chance to read Saki?”
“Not
many, I guess,” Bill replied. “That’s always a problem with revolutions. You
lose a lot of good things too.”
“Is
it time to start getting some of them back?” I asked.
“What
do you have in mind?” he said.
“A
real university. You know what that is. It’s a place where people study Latin
and Greek, read Aristotle and Cicero and Thomas Aquinas, learn Logic and
Rhetoric, and come to appreciate the classics of our English language – Jane
Austin and Chesterton and Tolkien and, perhaps, even our friend Saki.”
“I
would like to see that too,” Bill said. “But can you read Chesterton on an
empty stomach?”
“Who
was it that said, ‘If I have money, I buy books, and if there is any left over,
I buy food and clothes?’”
“Virgil,
I think,” he answered. “But I’m not sure our fellow citizens are Virgils.”
“Why
don’t we ask them?”
“You
mean a referendum?”
“Exactly.
Remember the first truth about modern war: you have to trust the troops.”
“True
enough,” the Governor said. ‘And you have to take risks. The risk here is that
if it’s voted down, it may be hard later to bring the issue up again.”
Bill
chewed thoughtfully for a while as he pondered my idea. “OK, I’ll do it,” he
decided. “I’ll make the proposal to the other governors, and I’ll campaign for
it in public. If we lose, we lose. If we win, we’ll be on the road to
rebuilding our culture. To me, that’s ultimately what it’s all about,
everything we are doing.”
***
The
other governors agreed the people should decide, and the vote was held on
December 24th, 2029. The citizens of the Northern Confederation decided to give
the future a Christmas present. The measure passed with 63% of the vote.
There
was a general feeling that since Dartmouth College saw the death of the old,
ideologized, corrupted education, it should also be the place classical
education was reborn. Besides, we wanted a college devoted to teaching
undergraduates, not a “research university.”
From
every corner of the Confederation, real scholars emerged from hiding, hiding
they’d been driven into by cultural Marxism, and offered to teach, even though
the salary was small. Many had no PhD; their work was their credentials. Most
proved dedicated and effective teachers.
Autumn,
2030, once again saw students matriculating. The number was small – no stipends
this time – but they were earnest. They came for knowledge and understanding,
not a sheepskin. Small farms and factories cared little about degrees. At least
in the N.C., civilization was returning.
Chapter 32
Following
the Dartmouth massacre, life became pretty quiet in the Northern Confederation.
I had given up hoping the war was over. But gradually, as things stayed
peaceful, I came to think life had again taken me by surprise. Maybe it was
over, at least for us.
It
was hard to call it peace. In the 21st century, a nation lived on guard every
moment or it didn’t live very long. Border control was as necessary as food or
water or air. One moment’s inattention, one contaminated refugee or shipping
container slipping through, could mean death for thousands through a genetic
bomb.
We
still has some disaffected folks at home, Deep Greeners, cultural Marxists,
animal rightsers and the like, but they kept a low profile. We’d made it clear
what would happen to them if they didn’t. Besides, like everyone else, they
were busy trying to eat, stay warm, and maybe make a little money.
Our
poverty continued to cleanse us of our sins, as the Dark Ages had cleansed
Europe of the sins of the late Roman Empire. Consumerism, materialism,
careerism, and the “me first” attitude of early 21st century America faded
before the demands and rewards of real life. People began to see our “Shaker
economy” as something good. Plain living strengthened old virtues and revived
honest pleasures, like the smell of a fresh-mowed field of hay and a cow’s kiss
on a frosty morn.
Summer
and winter, one thing grew stronger: Christian faith. We had some Jews, too, of
course, and they were welcome. And each place still had its town atheist and
village idiot. But our deep roots were Christian, and they were not touched by
the frost. On the contrary, with the tares frozen, faith sprouted everywhere.
Catholic or Protestant, high church or low, made no difference. We all knew
what we shared was more important than what we differed about.
This
was real Christianity, too, not social gospel or social club Christianity. It
was Christianity that changed the way people thought and lived. No longer was
this world the most important. It was the place where people got ready for the
world to come, through self-sacrifice, serving others, and obeying God’s laws
because they loved God. Like our wise medieval ancestors, we were learning to
put beatitudine before felicitas. Being saved was more important than being
happy.
It
was clear we would never turn back to the vulgar carnival that was late 20th
and early 21st century life. But being human, we did hope for a somewhat easier
time of it, for hot water and frequent trains and the power to run machines
that made things we could sell.
Here,
the Christian virtue of patience stood us well. The great project to dam the
Bay of Fundy was moving forward. When it was complete, we knew we would have an
abundance of white coal: electricity. With plentiful, cheap, clean energy, we
could be prosperous despite our lack of most other resources, so long as we
worked hard and maintained our morals. Switzerland isn’t poor.
When
in the Spring of 2031 the former Canadian provinces east of Quebec asked to
join the Northern Confederation, our people voted yes. The Brunswickers,
Labradorans, PEIers, and Newfies shared our faith and morals, language and culture,
and would be assets despite their current poverty. Our economies would be
integrated by the electrical grid anyway, so we felt we might as well make it
official.
The
reception of the former Canadians on July 4th, 2031 completed the Northern Confederation.
We had reached what Mr. MacKinder would have called our “natural limits.”
Unlike in the 19th century, those limits were now marked not by great rivers or
towering ranges of mountains or uncrossable deserts, but by chaos.
***
To
see how lucky we were in the N.C., all we had to do was peer over our southern
border, into what had been Pennsylvania and New Jersey.
Right
after the remnant of the Washington government in Harrisburg fell into
history’s dustbin, Pennsylvania’s future had looked bright. The sweep of our
OMG through Pittsburg had left the white ethnic communities in control of that
city. The state had resources: coal, oil, good farmland. It had a functioning
government. It seemed to have fine prospects.
Unfortunately,
it also had Philadelphia. Already by the late 20th century, much of
Philadelphia resembled some former colonial entrepot on the West African coast.
The remnants of civilization, buildings, paved streets, electric wires, even
that summa of urbanity the streetcar, still filled the view of the passer-by.
But of civilized people there was small sign. Instead, mile upon square mile
was crammed with jobless, skilless, feckless blacks. Beneath the human decay,
every other kind of decay spread.
Up
the Delaware, there was more of the same. East of the water gap, and not far
east, you were in the urban bush. Camden, Trenton, New Brunswick, Newark ran
the line of the new Underground Railroad, moving drugs, guns, whores, and gang
members up and down, back and forth in an endless journey to nowhere.
Newark’s fame as the Aframerican Florence had proven brief. Within a couple years, the corruption and incompetence of black leaders had brought it back to where it started.
Newark’s fame as the Aframerican Florence had proven brief. Within a couple years, the corruption and incompetence of black leaders had brought it back to where it started.
Hell
was like that. By great effort, you could make a difference, for a little
while. But then people got tired, and it all slid back into Hell.
New
Jersey never established itself after the union broke up. There was no
effective government, and soon no government at all. Gangs, mafias, tribes
provided the only order and security, if those terms had any meaning. Within a
year of Pennsylvania’s independence, Philadelphia had de facto joined the
Jersey tribal territories.
Soon,
the tribes started raiding. First it was just into the suburbs, for whatever
they could steal. Then they started burning whatever they couldn’t steal.
Kidnapping became the leading sport once the goods were taken or trashed; you
could get someone to pay for their kid or their grandma.
Pennsylvania
tried to stop it with the Guard, but around Philadelphia the Guard shattered on
ethnic lines. Many blacks went over, with their equipment. Whites fled west
into the countryside, but the raiding parties followed them.
Pennsylvania’s rural areas had been depopulating for generations, and the few people remaining were mostly old. They were easy pickings. By 2030, all the territory up to the laurel highlands was Indian country.
Pennsylvania’s rural areas had been depopulating for generations, and the few people remaining were mostly old. They were easy pickings. By 2030, all the territory up to the laurel highlands was Indian country.
At
the beginning, Pittsburgh could have helped, but it had never given a shit
about Philadelphia and wasn’t about to start. Then, the no-longer-working
Pittsburgh white working class started coming apart. It had given birth to its
own culturally black lower class, “whiggers,” its own children. The poisonous
culture of drugs, sex, and degraded “entertainment” that overwhelmed the urban
blacks proved no respecter of color lines. Soon, whigger gangs were turning
Pittsburgh into another Philadelphia, and the country folk west of the
Alleghenies were living in fear of white savages with painted faces and Mohawk
haircuts. It turned out the dark mills where their grandfathers had labored
were less Satanic than crystal meth and punk rock.
On
March 14, 2031, the last Pennsylvania governor packed up what was left of the
state treasury and fled across the Maryland border into the Confederacy. A
raiding party of Camden Orcs burned the state house the next day. Pennsylvania
had become a geographic expression.
What
happened on our southern border was repeated in most of the other industrial
states: Ohio, Illinois, Michigan, even Wisconsin and Indiana, though there the
rural areas were strong enough to establish lines behind which they lived in
comparative safety. They did it partly by fighting and partly by buying the
barbarians off with regular shipments of food and house coal.
A
few folks in the N.C. argued we should intervene. But when they put the
proposition on the ballot, 83% of the voters said “No.” Our people realized we
could not export our success, not that way. We’d get drawn into the briar patch
with the tar baby, and in the end would have nothing to show for it but a long
butcher’s bill. The cultural base had to be strong enough locally to allow our
old, Western culture to rebuild itself, and in these states it wasn’t. The
rural areas had too few people, and in the cities, too many whites had gotten
caught up in the cultural disintegration of early 21st century America to the
point where they had lost the old ways.
The
only answer was depopulation, and that was happening. People died in the
fighting, the massacres, the raids, and the sieges. They died of hunger and
cold, especially in the cities in Midwestern winters. Mostly, they died of
diseases, diseases created in labs as weapons of war. Lacking any but the most
local political organization or security, they could not protect themselves
from the new weapon of mass destruction , the genetically engineered epidemic.
By 2038, the population of the industrial Midwest was one-tenth what it had
been in 2000. The great cities lay deserted and in ruins. Happy the womb that was
barren.
***
Behind
our sealed borders, we survived. As things stood, we could hope for little
more. Survival itself was tough enough in the New World Disorder of the
21st–formerly the 14th–century. We survived because we still believed in our
old culture, and were ready to do whatever it took to keep it alive. In turn,
it kept us alive. That was the ancient bargain, the bargain that had governed
the West from its beginnings until the apostasy of the Enlightenment.
Because
we knew what we owed to our Christian culture, deep in our hearts we wished we
could do more for it, more than keep it alive in our northern redoubt. We
recognized the limitations on our power, and the primacy of our one absolute
interest, staying alive – no Trotskyites, we. Still, as we smoked our pipes in
our cold rooms, we dreamed.
***
On
a frigid, early December day in 2032, St. Nicholas’ Day to be exact, Bill Kraft
asked me to stop by his place in the evening. Bill wasn’t very social, even
with Marines, and an evening invitation meant he had something on his mind. He
needed to ruminate, and was inviting me to serve as his cud.
I
trudged across the snow, already crisp enough to walk on top of, about eight
o’clock. Although Augusta was our capital, already by that hour it was
shuttered, with most folks in bed. I saw only two sleighs out on the
freshly-rolled streets. The pinholes of my candle lantern sent a wild display
shooting along the silent surface of the snow. Shaker pleasures, I thought to
myself, smiling. In the truck the white stuff would have just been something to
get through.
I
found Bill as always, smoking his pipe and reading. He offered me such luxuries
as a Maine governor now had at his disposal: a good fire and a bottle of Father
Dimitri’s vodka well iced on the windowsill. Together they warmed me up.
“Thank
you for coming by to see me so late,” our Governor said. That touch of Spanish
court etiquette was a sign Bill had carefully worked out what he was going to
say and would proceed to unroll it like a Torah scroll. My function was to let
my ears attend.
“Like
many of us, I am distressed by what is happening to those who believe as we do
in the wreckage of what was our country,” he began. “I would like to do
something to help them, and by that I don’t mean sending potato peelings and
tracts.” That last was accompanied by a sharp look. I knew what Bill was
thinking: the time-honored Anglican response to the needs of others.
“My
model in matters of state is Prince Bismarck,” Bill went on. “He knew when to
make war, and more unusually, he knew when not to make it. I have no intention
of dragging the Confederation into more war for the benefit of peoples
elsewhere, even those who believe as we do. It wouldn’t benefit them in any
case, and I know how our citizens voted when that proposition was made to them.
I voted against it myself. Still, I think there may be another way.”
“What
we did here, in the creation of our island of sanity amidst the chaos, we did
with few resources, no fancy weaponry, not even any real soldiers beyond John
Ross’s Marines. We succeeded because we had some people who understood war.
They knew the history and the theory of war. They had educated their minds to
think militarily. They understood von Seekt’s rule, das Wesentliche ist die
Tat: in war, only actions count. They could put thought and action together.”
“What
if, very quietly, we offered that same ability to our friends elsewhere in the
old United States?”
“Waal,
that’s a thought,” I replied in non-committal Maine fashion. “When you say,
‘very quietly,’ do you mean without letting folks up here know we’re doing it?”
“No,”
Bill replied. “We’re not about to go back to the ‘Imperial Government’ games
Washington used to play. The people of the N.C. would vote on this proposition
as on any other. By quietly, I mean in ways that don’t get our armed forces
into shooting matches.”
“Hmm,”
I responded. “That might be easier said than done.”
“History
shows a way, I think,” Bill suggested. “Remember Liman von Sanders?”
General
Liman von Sanders, I knew, had headed the German military advisory mission in
Turkey during World War I. He turned the creaky Ottoman armies into far more
effective opponents than the Allies had expected. One whole British army was
compelled to surrender to them outside Baghdad, the first time that had
happened since Yorktown. And there was Gallipoli.
“A
military advisory group, you mean?” I asked in turn.
“Precisely,”
Bill answered. “It could help our friends at small risk or cost to ourselves,
and would keep us accurately informed about the wars now raging on our continent.”
The
latter point was important. Our own security demanded that we be up to the
minute on what was going on elsewhere, because it could quickly arrive on our
doorstep. At present, our information was spotty at best, because we didn’t
have our own people on the scene.
“Well,
I think that might have some merit,” I said after chewing on the idea and my
cigar for a while. “Obviously, the group would be small, and so long as things
are quiet I could spare a few general staff officers. It would be a good
education for them. Have you given any thought to who ought to head it up?”
“Yourself,
of course.”
“Me?”
“As
you said, it would be a good education.”
Ouch.
There was the patented Kraft suppository. I shot Bill a resentful glance, but I
couldn’t fairly reply. Even though I was Chief of the General Staff, he was
better educated in the art of war and we both knew it. So I stood up, clicked
my heels (as much as they’d click in heavy wool socks, having left my wet boots
on the landing), and replied, “Zum Befehl, Herr Generalfeldmarschall!” Bill got
the sarcasm.
“Now
don’t be snotty,” he shot back. “If you’ve done as you should in developing
your subordinates, they’ll carry on for you quite nicely in peacetime. If
something happens here, we should be able to get you back quick enough.
Remember, there are wars going on all over the place, some none too distant
from our own frontiers. Would the Chief of the General Staff rather spend his
time in bed?”
That
got my Marine back up. “I’ll march to the sound of any guns I hear, humping a
full pack, and still get there a damn sight before you do,” I replied.
“Good,
then it’s settled, as far as we can settle it. The rest is up to the people of
the Northern Confederation,” Bill said. Over and out.
Slowly,
I realized I’d been had once more. Oh well, I thought, the places I’d be going
were mostly warmer than Maine, and maybe they offered something besides
potatoes and codfish to eat. Still, a small voice told me I’d added one more
layer to the legend of the “dumb Marine.”
The
proposition was put to the people on January 15, 2034, in this form: “Shall the
Northern Confederation, within the limits of its resources and without engaging
its armed forces, offer military advice to those people in the former United
States who are fighting for traditional Western, Christian civilization?” It
passed, though narrowly: it got just 53% of the vote. But my door had been
opened.
The
world I was to find beyond was stranger than any beheld by Alice.
Chapter
33
One
of the rules of America’s second Civil War seemed to be that those who started
off best, ended up worst. In that respect it was like the first Civil War. The
South’s star had shone most brilliantly at the beginning at Bull Run on the
peninsula with Lee and in the Shenandoah Valley with Jackson. After those brief
shining moments, the industrial and financial sinews of the North put forth
their strength and the South withered. Plus, the Union found two generals who
could competently command armies, and the South had only one.
When
the union broke up a second time, the Confederacy resurrected itself smoothly,
almost as if it had been there all along. The southern Senators and Congressmen
again left Washington for Richmond. Old Senator Sam Yancey of Georgia was
elected Mr. Davis’s successor and installed in the Confederate White House (on
Monument Avenue, the trivializing statue of tennis player Arthur Ashe was
replaced by a heroic cast of the black Confederate soldier). Southern officers
and men of the former U.S. Army turned in their Yankee blue uniforms for
Confederate gray.
The
Confederate economy took some shocks from the usual loss of markets and
suppliers, but the South was big enough and prosperous enough to recover
quickly. Beyond the low-level guerrilla war between blacks and Hispanics that
had been going on in south Florida since the 1980s, there was little internal
disorder. All in all, for most Southerners, not much seemed to change.
In
fact, it hadn’t, and that proved to be the Confederacy’s undoing. The southern
wing of the old American Establishment held on to power. The politicians were
the same people, the university presidents and newspaper editors and television
commentators were the same types, and the leading businessmen played up to those
in power, interested only in maintaining their status as members of the club.
These
people all belonged to the “New South.” A product of post-World War II Southern
prosperity, the New South abjured the old Southern ways and culture. It
embraced the rules of political correctness, found the Stars and Bars
“offensive,” and lived the hedonist modern lifestyle. It favored Bauhaus
architecture, not neoclassical columned porticoes. It listened to rock and rap,
not Stephen Foster, and read Günter Grass, not Walker Percy, much less Sidney
Lanier. It shuddered at the Southern Agrarians and sought its heroes among the
carpet-baggers.
The
wealthy, ugly, overgrown crossroads of Atlanta, Southern only in its
inefficiency and corruption, was the New South’s home and shrine. Charleston it
regarded not as a wonder and an inspiration but as some sort of antediluvian
theme park. The recovery of Southern independence and the restoration of the
forms and symbols of the old Confederacy were, to the New South, not the triumph
of The Cause but an unavoidable embarrassment, hopefully to be mitigated by
time.
Because
the New South ruled the new Confederacy, the recovery of Southern independence
did not bring with it any recovery of will. After a brief revival incident on proclamation
of the Southern Republic, the old slide continued. Crime resumed its racial
cast and upward trend, with the same old judges letting off the same old
criminals. The schools – “attendance centers,” as they were already called in
Mississippi by the 2000s – continued to turn out illiterates who had learned
only that their own feelings were the most important thing in the universe.
Television and other video entertainment (the South had plenty of electricity,
thanks to coal and TVA) still sucked out brains like an ape sucking an egg. Ted
Turner became Secretary of Education in Mr. Yancey’s second cabinet.
But
the New South was not the only South. Outside Atlanta and Miami and Charlotte,
the Old South still lived. It hung on in the small towns and the hollows, on
the farms and the shrimp boats, and in the real Southern cities: Charleston and
Savannah, Montgomery and Natchez and Vicksburg. It resided among the country
people – black as well as white – and the old folks and the Independent
Baptists, and also among a genuine southern intelligentsia who did read Walker
Percy and knew the Southern Agrarians and realized the whole civil rights
business was just a second Reconstruction.
Unlike
the New South, the Old South had will. It didn’t have to recover it. It had
never lost its will, the will to preserve and restore the old Cavalier Southern
culture.
It
took about two years for the Old South to figure out that the New South
despised it no less than the Yankees did. By 2030, the first rumblings of discontent
could be heard. From country pulpits, Richmond was denounced in the same words
earlier reserved for Washington. That year in Mississippi, an initiative put a
referendum on the ballot to open each school day with a Christian prayer. When
it passed by 78%, the Supreme Court in Richmond struck it down. A few months
later, the Commanding General of the Confederate States Army asked the Senate
Military Affairs Committee to end the recruitment of women as “incompatible
with Southern chivalry.” The Committee responded by demanding the general’s
dismissal. In the truck stops and the garden clubs, heads shook and tongues
clucked.
In
most of the Old South, race relations were not a problem. Contrary to Northern
propaganda, they had never been, for the simple reason that local blacks and
whites got along. They lived largely separate social lives, but when they came
together, they did so courteously, with understanding of the roles and
responsibilities proper to each. That’s the way people work things out when they
live side-by-side for centuries and are left alone by ideologues.
The
cities of the New South were a different story. There, a black underclass had
formed by the late 20th century. Nurtured on phony resentments and imagined
“injustices,” that underclass generated its own little Africa of crime, drugs,
noise, and dirt. The government in Richmond proved as vulnerable to mau-mauing
as its Washington progenitor, and with no will to contain it, black terror soon
spread its bloody hand into an ever-widening circle of the white community.
In
the Old South, eyeholes were cut in sheets. But the courts and police remained
mostly in New South hands, so the Klan stayed in the hollows, where it wasn’t
needed. Alienation between people and government grew like kudzu in a wet July.
By
2032, the guerrilla war in south Florida could no longer be mislabeled a crime
problem. In Dade county, the body count from battles between blacks and
Hispanics was upward of a hundred a week. Gangs and militias ran a network of
feudal fiefdoms. If anyone, including grandmas pushing prams, ventured off
their turf they were dead meat. Raiding parties of blacks were working steadily
north, while Cuba threatened to send troops to protect the Hispanics.
In
March, 2032, the Confederate Congress finally ordered the army to take over
Florida and restore order. Had the CSA been allowed to do what was necessary,
the Confederacy’s disintegration might have been checked at that point.
The
Confederate Congress, being New South, had no stomach for anything of the sort.
Instead, it laid a set of rules of engagement on the forces it sent to Florida
that made them first impotent, then laughingstocks, and finally targets. All
crew-served weapons were forbidden, and individual weapons could be used only
to return fire, not initiate it. Fleeing felons could not be shot. “De facto
local authorities” were to be respected and negotiated with, not rounded up and
hanged – and the Army had to negotiate in Spanish if the locals demanded it.
Habeas corpus remained in force. Black and Hispanic ombudsmen were to accompany
the troops to investigate any charges of “racism” or “insensitivity,” with
Confederate soldiers subject to courts-martial on either charge.
It
was the same old cultural Marxist crap as used to flow out of Washington, for
the simple reason that the same people were sitting in Richmond who had sat in
Washington. Just as when the Soviet Union fell apart in the 1990s, the
nomenklatura simply transferred its allegiance to the new system, kept the same
jobs, and got richer.
By
the Fall of 2032, the Confederate forces sent into south Florida had been
pushed into enclaves by the effects of their own rules of engagement. As in
intervention missions by the old U.S. Army, “force protection” had become the
top-priority mission. A military that is most concerned with protecting itself
can’t do anything else, so the local tribes and gangs became bolder than ever .
Ominously,
blacks and Hispanics began concluding local nonaggression pacts so they could
cooperate in raiding into white areas up north. On October 2, a column of over
three hundred vehicles and almost 5000 gang-bangers hit Tallahassee, sacked the
city for three days and made it back to Dade with a train of loot that
stretched for seven miles along the highway. The Confederate Army threw up a
roadblock, but the raiders, wise to their enemy’s weaknesses, literally pushed
their way through it without firing a shot. Not having been fired upon, the
Southern soldiers couldn’t use their weapons.
This
pathetic display of impotence on the part of an army with a noble fighting
heritage enraged the Old South. Rallies, marches, and torchlight parades were
held in protest in all the Southern states, with hundreds of thousands of
people turning out. When one came right down Monument Avenue in Richmond, old
President Yancey joined it himself, telling the crowd he was “disheartened and
dismayed by the disgrace to our ancestors and our flag.” In response, the
Confederate Congress removed itself to Atlanta, where it passed a joint
resolution “reaffirming the South’s commitment to a diverse, tolerant, and
multi-cultural future.”
***
New
Orleans had long been a strange Southern amalgam. Physically, it was one of the
finest cities of the Old South, not just in its unique French Quarter, but also
in the old Anglo section along St. Charles Avenue, the site of America’s most
beautiful homes and quaintest streetcar line.
Its
population was another matter. Run since the 1970s by the usual corrupt and
inept black city government, the city had long been a hell-hole of violent
crime and sexual perversion. The scenes in the French Quarter on a Friday or
Saturday night would have given pause to a citizen of Sodom. A walking tour of
the Garden District was dangerous even in daylight.
The
city depended on tourism, but the breakup of the union put an end to most of
that. Under the Confederacy, there were some half-hearted efforts to sweep the
French Quarter’s dirt under the rug, but the lowest class grew steadily more
worthless and more violent. From events in Florida, it drew the lesson that it
could get away with anything. On the prematurely stifling evening of May 17,
2033, it erupted.
At
first, there was some organization, as much as gangs could manage. Columns
headed out into the suburbs and surrounding countryside to loot and kidnap. But
Louisiana wasn’t Florida, and the local refinery workers, shrimpers, and good
old boys had long ago put together the Coon-ass Militia, as they called it. The
black raiding columns were met not with roadblocks, but ambushes. The
Coon-asses knew how to hunt, and the raiders who left New Orleans did not
return.
The
state government in Baton Rouge was corrupt but white, and it swiftly mobilized
the official State Militia and marched on New Orleans. Mississippi sent reinforcements,
and from Richmond President Yancey ordered CSA units to assist – this time with
heavy weapons. Within ten days, New Orleans was sealed and under siege.
The
blacks responded by letting loose the red cock. It wasn’t merely random mob
action, which usually concentrates on liquor stores and leaves civic monuments
alone. It was systematic self-destruction. The mayor of New Orleans, Mr. Tsombe
“Big Daddy” Toussaint L’Overture Othello Jones, climbed up on a Mardi Gras
float (a vast statue of Aunt Jemima pouring syrup into a pool where high yellow
beauties wrestled with “White Planters”) and harangued the crowd in Jackson
Square. “The white folk like things pretty. The white folk love this beautiful
city. Well, I’m here to tell da white folk that this here city ain’t gonna be
beautiful no more. Blow it up! Tear it down! Burn it to the ground! That’s the
word we have for da white folk of Dixie – burn, baby, burn!”
This,
their final promise to their glorious city, the blacks accomplished. The
cathedral on Jackson square was blown up by the New Orleans’s police SWAT team.
The little cafe across from it by the river, famous for its beignets and cafe
au lait, was bulldozed with city equipment, as were the gardens of the square
itself. Bourbon Street was burned, along with Tulane University. Audubon Place,
which 20th century writer George Will said contained “America’s noblest
collection of stately homes,” was first burned by the city fire department,
then razed. The stately, ancient Perley Thomas streetcars of the St. Charles
Avenue line were stacked in a pile, doused with gasoline and set on fire. A mob
then ripped up the tracks, heated the rails over bonfires and twisted them
around trees, just as Sherman had done to southern railroads during the first
Civil War. By the tenth of June, everything that had made New Orleans what it
was lay in smoking ruins. Like Dresden in 1945, the city was no more than a
bend in the river, covered in ash.
The
Confederate Army, state, and militia forces around the city were strong enough
to have intervened, but they did not. The orders to do so never came. No one
believed the blacks would really destroy one of the South’s most historic places,
until they did it. When it happened, the authorities in Baton Rouge and in
Richmond were too stunned to react.
In
Atlanta, the New South Congress did react. Blaming the death of New Orleans on
“racism and intolerance that tried the patience of loyal African Americans
beyond endurance,” they called for a series of “reforms to eliminate the
symbols and substance of the South’s racist heritage.” The first reform was to
abolish both the Confederate national flag and the battle flag as the nation’s
emblems. In their place, they raised over the Congress’s temporary quarters,
the Atlanta Convention Center, a new flag that showed a rainbow on a U.N.-blue
background. Beneath the rainbow was a black-and-white dove, behind and beneath
which floated a sprinkling of silver stars, one for each Confederate state. The
banner was immediately nicknamed “the Pooping Pigeon.”
Charlotte,
Raleigh-Durham, Alexandria, Baltimore, Birmingham, Little Rock, and other New
South cities promptly raised the new flag. The Old South stuck with the old
flag. Pointedly, the St. Andrew’s Cross still flew over the Confederate White
House in Richmond.
***
Often,
a people will put up with unimaginable abuses on matters of real importance,
but rebel when their sacred symbols are defiled. So it proved in the new
Confederacy. The official replacement of the old Confederate flag with the
Pooping Pigeon recalled the people of the Old South to their founding
tradition: rebellion. On June 23, Coffee County, Alabama, announced its
secession from the Confederacy, “in order to uphold and preserve the traditions
of our Southern people and culture.” Interestingly, Coffee County was peopled
almost wholly by blacks.
As
the news of Coffee County’s action spread, it set off a chain reaction. All over
the South, towns and counties, cities and some whole states – Mississippi was
first – seceded from the Confederacy. They still recognized Mr. Yancey as
President, and called themselves True Confederates, but they would have no more
of Atlanta, the Confederate Congress, and the New South.
The
New South responded in mirror-image fashion. New South cities (there was no New
South countryside) withdrew their recognition from the executive branch in
Richmond and from most of the state governments as well, pledging their loyalty
to the Congress in Atlanta. That Congress elected a new President, a Dr. Louis
Greenberg, formerly head of Duke University. True Confederates replied by
electing a new Congress, which once again met in Richmond. This time, there
were no holdovers from Washington.
By
the winter of 2033, two states existed on one territory. There was no
geographic separation, beyond urban and rural. One city owed allegiance to one
government, one to another. So far, there was no shooting, but it was obvious
the situation was too unstable to endure. In the New South cities, militias
were being organized (largely by combining black gangs) and weapons smuggled
in. In Richmond, President Yancey was desperate for peace, but the Confederate
Army was thinking about the war it knew was coming.
***
On
March 4, 2034, Bill Kraft asked me to stop by his office.
“John,
I received a letter this morning via our embassy in Richmond from the
Commanding General of the Confederate States Army. He is of course aware of the
vote up here to provide military advice to people elsewhere in the former
United States who share our beliefs. The True Confederates meet that standard,
without a doubt. Are you ready to do some traveling?”
“Have
they formally asked for our assistance?” I asked.
“They
have,” Bill replied.
“Well,
it should be an interesting war,” I said. “When do you want me to leave?”
“Tomorrow.”
Chapter 34
As
ordered, on March 5, 2034, I left for Richmond. I thought about who to take
with me, and decided in the end I didn’t want anyone but our Spec Ops chief,
Sergeant Danielov. A sergeant would help get me out of trouble, other officers
might get me into it. Besides, if I screwed up, Ron wouldn’t tell anyone.
I
could have asked the Confederates to send a plane for me – due to the fuel
shortage, we didn’t fly ours unless we had to – but I didn’t want to come hat
in hand. So I decided to travel as everyone else did.
From
Augusta, I took the steam train to Portland. I had to admit I enjoyed bucketing
along through the Maine countryside at a stirring 40 miles per hour, the smells
of summer mingling with the wood smoke from the engine, the rail joints and the
locomotive exhaust playing their leisurely, syncopated song. Old pleasures
rediscovered are better than new, because you can muse on your grandparents and
great-grandparents enjoying the same things.
At
Portland, we booked passage on a freighter sailing for Norfolk, Virginia. There
weren’t enough people traveling to support passenger liners, but most freighters
had space for half-a-dozen folks. Ours was a Maine vessel, sail with auxiliary
diesel, the Silas Lapham out of Castine with a cargo of used cars, newsprint,
and live lobsters. I noticed .50 cals mounted on either side of the
quarterdeck. Pirates were operating out of Philadelphia.
We
left Portland harbor on the evening tide, picking up a strong breeze off the
port quarter aft, the remains of a Nor’easter, as we headed south. Dano turned
green and spent the night communing with the leeward rail. I enjoyed the sharp
sea air and a cigar, then turned in. We’d be in Norfolk on the 29th.
Like
so many activities from the past, traveling by ship gave me time to think. The
question I needed to think about was, what was I going to do? Our objective was
to help the True Confederates. In our Germanic way of war, “help” didn’t mean
fiddle and diddle at the margins. Help meant “win,” win decisively, completely,
finally, in such a way that the victory could never be reversed. Icy cold and
lightning fast, as somebody used to say.
Did
that mean keeping the peace or tilting the balance toward war? And what kind of
war could our True Confederate allies wage? I’d known a few Marine generals
from the old Southern aristocracy. They were fine, upright, honorable men,
solid as old Stonewall himself on matters of morals and character. But they
seemed to have the notion that it wasn’t quite gentlemanly to make a decision.
And the people they chose for their staffs… John Randolph of Roanoke’s simile
came to mind: like a rotten mackerel in the moonlight, they shined and they
stank.
War,
as von Moltke said, is a matter of expedients. You need to know what result you
want. That was clear enough in this case. But as to how I’d get there, that
would have to depend on what I found, and who. In war, the power of personality
is immense. You get a Napoleon, you conquer Europe. You get a Napoleon III, you
end up in a chamber pot at Sedan. Sam Yancey even in his younger days had been
a cautious, lawyer-like fellow, and few men get bold as they get old. But it
isn’t only the people at the top who count. Sometimes it’s a guy at the bottom
who takes the action that gains the decision.
Such
soliloquies, along with the volume of Horatio Hornblower I always took with me
when I went to sea, made the few days pass agreeably. The Silas Lapham carried
enough canvas that we bowled along at eight knots or better.
Once
Ron got his sea legs, we liberated some lobsters from the tank in the hold and
dined in style each night on the quarterdeck. Good sergeant that he was, Dano
had a couple bottles of Piesporter Spatlese, the companion God intended for
lobster. As we drained the last on the evening of the 12th, I remembered the
old Marine rule: don’t whistle while packing for deployment. Detached duty had
long been good to captains.
We
awoke on the 13th to find ourselves back in the 21st century; a pilot boat was
leading us through the minefields into Norfolk. The Confederate ambassador in
Augusta had cabled our arrival, and a young CSA officer was on the dock to meet
us and whisk us around customs and immigration. He introduced himself as
Captain Charles Augustus Ravenal of the Palmetto Horse Guards.
Captain
Ravenal splendid in his high-collared gray uniform and mirror-shined cavalry
boots with silver spurs. In the simple, forest green hunting jacket that was
the uniform of the Northern Confederation, I looked like Grant opposite
Lee. Captain Ravenal’s darkey driver bowed us into a Mercedes limo with
the CSA crest on the doors and Confederate battle flags on the front fenders,
and we were soon speeding up the Interstate toward Richmond. Dixie was indeed
rich.
Southerners
are good at small talk. Mainiacs aren’t, but we listen carefully. As the
captain went on, I got the sense he was uncomfortable about something. So in
Maine fashion, I went right at him. “Something’s bothering you, Captain. If
it’s that we smell like lobsters, well, most folks up north smell like fish,
‘cause it’s all we’ve got to eat. If it’s something else, why don’t you tell us
about it?”
“I
am truly sorry, sir, if I have in any way offended,” Captain Ravenal replied.
“We are all deeply grateful for your time and trouble in coming here. But to be
entirely honest, sir, there is a small matter that gives us some difficulty in
our protocol.”
Welcome
to the South, I thought. Up our way, protocol meant seeing that the other guy
was warm and had something to eat. “I am certain we can resolve the matter
easily, Captain, if you’ll tell us what it is,” I replied.
“Sir,
we are all aware that you are Chief of the General Staff of the Northern
Confederation,” Captain Ravenal answered. “You will be accorded every honor due
to your position. Our difficulty, sir, is that formally your rank is that of
captain. That required that you be met by someone of similar rank, which is why
I am your escort. Again, I assure you no offense was intended.”
“None
taken, Captain,” I replied. “I rather like the rank.”
“Thank
you, sir. But you will be meeting with our generals and our President, Mr.
Yancey. Normally, a captain would not be included in such circles, and there is
some concern about seating arrangements, precedence, and the like. We do not
wish to offend, as I have said.”
“No
problem, Captain. Sergeant Danielov and I are happy to stand in the back.”
“Er,
sergeant, sir? Would you expect the sergeant to accompany you, sir? I assumed
he was your servant.”
“Sergeant
Danielov is head of Special Operations for the Northern Confederation. In
effect, he’s a CINC. Besides, he might have something useful to say.”
“Yes,
sir. I’m afraid we have made arrangements for the sergeant to stay in our NCO
quarters.”
“Is
the NCO mess good?” Dano asked.
“The
specialty is Tennessee barbecue,” Ravenal answered.
“Then
I’m not moving. Captain Rumford can go to the meetings. I’ll just potter around
on my own.”
“I’m
certain that will be agreeable with us,” Ravenal said, making a mistake of
serious proportions.
“Captain Rumford,” Ravenal continued, “if I may put forward an entirely unofficial proposal, for which I take full responsibility, would you possibly be willing to take on a higher rank while you are our guest here in the Confederacy? It would make our situation a great deal easier, in term of providing the hospitality which is our duty as officers and gentlemen. Please understand that I intend no disrespect to the rank you hold up North. It’s just that, well, things are different down here.”
“Captain Rumford,” Ravenal continued, “if I may put forward an entirely unofficial proposal, for which I take full responsibility, would you possibly be willing to take on a higher rank while you are our guest here in the Confederacy? It would make our situation a great deal easier, in term of providing the hospitality which is our duty as officers and gentlemen. Please understand that I intend no disrespect to the rank you hold up North. It’s just that, well, things are different down here.”
I
remembered how my Senate staff friend back in Washington in the old days had
always been given three-star rank when he spent time with the American
military. He found it funny as hell, but without that, they didn’t know how to
deal with him.
“If
that would make your situation easier, Captain Ravenal, I have no
objection,” I said. “After all, we are allies, and I hope we will be
friends. Anything I can do to assist, I am ready to do. What rank did you have
in mind?”
“Whatever
you think suitable, sir, so long as it is of a general officer grade.”
This
was too delicious an opportunity to pass up. I could play a joke on the South
and on Bill Kraft at the same time. “How about Field Marshal?” I suggested.
The
captain’s eyes popped. But he recovered quickly, and said, “I am certain that
would be agreeable with our people, sir. In fact, there has been some
discussion about introducing such a rank in our Army, and I know some of our
officers would find such a precedent useful. Thank you, sir.”
As
I settled back into the leather upholstery of the Benz for the remainder of our
drive, I suspected this might be a long war.
***
Now
that I was formally an Exalted High Wingwang, Richmond was rich with
hospitality. I was met by a 500-man honor guard, all in first Civil War
uniforms, though much too well fed to be real Confederate soldiers. For
quarters I was given my own mansion, right off Monument Avenue. The butler was
even white. For a solid week I was toured about in the daytime and feted and
admired at balls and cotillions in the evenings. Not a lick of work was done.
It was just like Richmond in 1863.
When
I gently reminded Captain Ravenal, who I had asked to remain as my escort
despite my promotion, that I had come south to do more than drink Bourbon and
admire the fine figures of Southern ladies, he seemed surprised. “The town
would be deeply disappointed if it did not get to meet such a distinguished
visitor,” he explained. “President Yancey would be deluged with complaints from
the fair sex. The brilliance of your campaigns up north has our newspapers
calling you ‘the new Moltke,’ you know.”
“That’s
butter without much bread,” I replied. “I only know how to be silent in two
languages. But I also know the South wants its guests to be happy. Would you do
me the favor to convey the message that this guest would be happier if he could
do some work?”
Putting
it that way seemed to do the trick. Three days later, on March 23rd, I was
invited to a briefing on the situation in the South by the Commanding General
of the Confederate States Army, General Loren Laclede. Following the brief and
a formal luncheon, I would be received by President Yancey.
The
CSA headquarters wasn’t a building. It was three whole city blocks in downtown
Richmond, mostly highrises, filled to overflowing with staff officers. To take
me there, instead of the usual Mercedes, I was met at my door on the 25th by an
elegant barouche with a cavalry escort. Another honor guard was waiting on
arrival (I found out later there was a brigade-worth of ceremonial troops in
and around Richmond). General Laclede received me in a gorgeous uniform,
complete with that nice Latin American touch, a sash, amongst a vast entourage
of other generals and colonels. Great material for a couple of mine clearing
battalions, I thought.
After
coffee in his mahogany-paneled office, furnished with Second Empire antiques
and decorated largely with pictures of himself, General Laclede escorted me to
the briefing room. It was nothing less than a thousand-seat auditorium, and
every seat was taken. On the stage, three huge screens were set up for the
Power Point slides.
Shit,
it’s the Pentagon all over again, I said to myself. Just as the Confederacy had
gotten the old American politicians, it had also built its military on the old
American senior officer caste. I knew what was coming: a highly choreographed
presentation of absolutely nothing.
I
was right. For three hours we sat in wonderfully comfortable chairs as one
staff officer after the other delivered a scripted, meaningless patter. The
maps did indicate which areas were held by the New South and which by the Old,
but the newspapers had published the same maps long ago. Beyond that, we heard
about the weather in each area, the roads, the telecommunications; the general
locations of units; endless equipment rosters and readiness reports (most of
which I knew were bullshit); and I can’t remember what else.
The
reason I can’t remember is that I offered the most appropriate comment on the
whole affair. I went to sleep.
It
was rude, no doubt. But Southern gentlemen dealt with it with Southern manners.
They pretended it hadn’t happened. When the lights finally came up again, Capt.
Ravenal discreetly elbowed me awake. General Laclede then took to the stage
himself, summed up by thanking his regiment of briefers for a splendid
performance, and asked if I had any questions.
“Just
one, General,” I replied. “What are you going to do?”
Das
Wesentliche ist die Tat. I thought of quoting von Seekt, but realized that if
any of these buffoons spoke a second language, it was Spanish, not German.
“A
most important question, Field Marshal Rumford,” Laclede replied. “It is one
which we have under study. Fourteen Colonels in my G-3 section have been
working on it for most of the summer. Those are all full colonels, I might add,
not lieutenant colonels. We have more than fifty contractors and consultants
supporting them. Confidentially – this is the first my own staff has heard of
this, and I apologize for surprising them – President Yancey is thinking about
appointing a Blue Ribbon Commission of retired senior officers to investigate
the matter and give us the benefit of their recommendations. I can assure you,
we are considering every possible aspect of the situation in the most thorough
manner.”
“When
do you expect to make a decision?” I asked.
“Well,
sir, I am not certain I am prepared to put a time line on it. I would certainly
need to consult further with my staff before attempting to do so,” Laclede
replied. “After all, I’m just the coach,” he added, smiling benignly on his
vast staff horde. They smiled back, with the grin of the apparatchik who know
that nothing is likely to disturb his comfortable routine anytime soon.
I
realized further questions were pointless. It was the worst of the French way
of war combined with the worst of the British: endless staff action and a
commander who played umpire. I’d seen it all before, in the Marine Corps and,
even more, whenever we did a CPX with the United States Army. Like the French
Bourbons, the Confederates had forgotten nothing and they had learned nothing.
We
adjourned to a splendid lunch, including a concert by the CSA band and chorus.
If these guys ever did win a war, they’d put on one fine victory parade. But in
this case, someone else would have to win the war for them. I now understood
why New Orleans had gone as it did. Nobody could decide anything.
My
session that afternoon with Confederate President Yancey confirmed my
depression. He was a splendid old gentleman, earnest, decent, upright. Over and
over, he impressed upon me his urgency to do the right thing. Unfortunately, in
war the right thing is never clear, so he too would do nothing.
***
On
the way out of the Confederate White House, I told Captain Ravenal to ask
Sergeant Danielov to come see me that evening. Dano might have found out
something useful. I certainly hadn’t.
“You
want to see your sergeant, sir?” Ravenal replied, clearly concerned that
someone of Field Marshal rank would stoop so low. “Is it a matter I could take
care of for you?”
“Well,
to be honest, Captain, I’m not quite satisfied with the way my uniform is being
ironed,” I replied. “It takes a Northern man to know how to do it just right.”
“I
understand, sir,” Ravenal responded, reassured and comfortable again. “I’ll
have your sergeant sent over right away.”
I
had requested from General Laclede the papers his staff was developing on
possible courses of action, which arrived during the first solitary dinner I’d
enjoyed since I came South. True to form, the Confederates had made sure my
house had a first-rate cook, an old black mammy who could have stood in for
Aunt Jemima and whose biscuits and cornbread would have made Escoffier swoon.
After stuffing down a third piece of her ambrosial peach pie, I waddled
upstairs, leaving her beaming. I’d put on a pound for each day I’d been in
Dixie, and enjoyed every bite of it. I knew it would come off again as soon as
I got back North, back to codfish cakes and boiled potatoes.
I
settled in my study, lit my cigar and took up the papers. The old U.S. Army
stared out at me from every page. It was endless, badly-written, jargonized
nothing. With the best of intentions, hoping to find a diamond among the dung,
I plowed on. But drivel on top of the dinner was too much for me. I last heard
the great old grandfather clock, once the property of General Longstreet, chime
eight. My brain swam lazily, back to The Basic School, to happy days playing in
the mud and nights of beer and bullshit . . .
Someone
was trying to get me up. Crap, it’s o’dark thirty and I want to sleep. Tell the
SPC to go play with himself. I’m too full for a company run. I’ll puke up all
that wonderful chow, and it never tastes as good the second time around.
I
was awake. Someone was rapping at my second floor window. The clock said 9:15.
If it was Poe’s raven, I’d eaten my last piece of peach pie. It wasn’t. It was
Danielov, and he had somebody with him.
I
threw up the sash and screen, and they scrambled in. “Glad to see you got my
message, Dano” I said. “But this place does have a front door. Or were you just
testing our security?”
“It’s
Southern security,” Ron replied. “Sentries in perfect uniforms walking a
regular beat. Let’s just say we didn’t have a problem getting in. I came this
way because I wanted you to meet someone. This is Captain Walt Armbruster, 3rd
Texas Rangers.”
“Happy
to meet you, Captain,” I replied, “and happier still to dispense with the usual
Southern formalities.”
“I’m
more than happy to meet you, sir,” he replied. “We’ve been down on our knees
praying you’d come.”
“Who’s
‘we’?” I asked.
“The
real soldiers, sir,” he replied.
“Are
there any in the Confederacy?”
“Yes,
sir, there are,” he answered, meeting my eyes. “Despite what you’ve seen here
in Richmond.”
“It
was to discuss what I’ve seen here in Richmond that I asked Sergeant Danielov
to meet me tonight,” I said. “I find myself in a somewhat awkward position,
since what I have to say may appear poor return for lavish hospitality.
Captain, would you excuse us if we go in the other room to talk privately?”
Dano
answered before the captain could. “No need, sir. I know what you’ve found
here, and I know it through Captain Armbruster. You’ve found the worst of the
old U.S. military: bloated staffs, meaningless briefings, commanders who can’t
make decisions, process without content.”
“All
covered in syrup,” Captain Armbruster added. “That’s the Southern touch.”
“That
about sums it up,” I replied. “Make no mistake, Captain, the Northern
Confederation is with the True Confederate party all the way when it comes to
the important things, to morals and culture and religion. But I was sent down
here to help win a war. At the moment, I have some difficulty seeing how I’m
going to accomplish that, since your leaders seem unable to make up their minds
about anything important, like what to do.”
“Sir,
our leaders don’t have any minds to make up,” the captain replied.
Having
been a captain in the American military, I knew what I was dealing with in
Captain Armbruster. He was a warrior himself, but he was more than that. He was
a warrior who realized that most of his superiors were not warriors. I didn’t
figure that out until right at the end of my brief and lusterless Marine Corps
career. This guy was ahead of where I had been.
“Captain,
I think I understand where you’re coming from. Earlier, you used the pronoun
‘we.’ Are there any more like you?”
“Yes,
sir,” he replied. “There’s a lot of us among the junior officers. We never belonged
to the old U.S. Army, so we never learned how to be feather merchants. We
joined up with the Confederate States Army for the same reason our ancestors
did: to fight. We’re eager to get at these “New South” traitors to our Cause.
But what can we do? Some of us have even thought about a coup, sir, but we
don’t want to turn the Confederacy into some Latin American banana republic.
Frankly, we’re stumped.”
“Are
you in touch with each other?”
“Yes,
sir. We’ve got our own network. We can get the word out, if you’ve got a word
for us.”
“Do
you have a base?”
“Yes,
sir, a couple, wherever we have a commanding officer who thinks like we do. My
unit is on one of our bases. We’re in Savannah, right where the old 3rd Ranger
Battalion of the U.S. Army used to be stationed. We’re all Texas boys, and our
colonel, Colonel McMoster, is on the right side.”
“How
do you know that?” I asked sharply. Trust demanded deeds, not just words.
“During
the burning of New Orleans, Colonel McMoster came to Richmond with a plan for
our battalion to jump on the city and take it in a coup de main. He couldn’t
get an answer from Richmond, so he decided we’d do it anyway. We were
commandeering civilian aircraft at the Savannah airport when the word came over
CNN that we were too late. The city was already gone.”
“Why
wasn’t he relieved for disobedience?”
“His
wife is distantly related to President Yancey’s wife. This is the South, sir,”
the captain replied.
Nepotism
has its random virtues, I thought. “All right, Captain, I trust you and I’ll
have to trust your colonel as well. I’m going to head down to Atlanta myself
and see what’s going on there. Once I’ve done that, I’ll come see you and your
CO over in Savannah. You get there first and tell Colonel McMoster that I don’t
plan to go home until I’ve done something. What, I don’t know yet, but whatever
it is it’s not going to happen here in Richmond.”
“Nothing
ever happens here in Richmond,” Captain Armbruster replied. “I’ll head back
tonight. Sir, I speak for our colonel when I say I hope you will regard the 3rd
Texas Rangers as under your command.”
“Thank
you, Captain,” I replied. “What’s the old Texas Ranger rule, ‘One riot, one
Ranger?’ Maybe here we can say, ‘One civil war, one Ranger battalion.’” In any
case, you can count on some action.”
I
turned to Danielov. “Dano, go with him. We’re going to need some aircraft. See
if you can find a former Marine or two who has some.”
“Aye
aye, sir,” Ron replied.
***
The
next morning, when Captain Ravenal came to pick me up for another visit to
another useless headquarters, I told him I had a special favor to request.
“President
Yancey has personally directed that we assist you in every way, sir,” he
replied. “If it can be done, we will do it.”
“I want a Pullman berth on tonight’s train for Atlanta,” I said.
“I want a Pullman berth on tonight’s train for Atlanta,” I said.
The
captain stiffened. “Sir, I cannot advise that. It would be extremely
dangerous.”
“That
is my request, Captain. Will you meet it, or do I have to give you the slip,
find the rail yards and hop a freight?”
Captain
Ravenal’s face was a study as he wrestled with the greatest of military
challenges, the need to make a fast decision in the face of unexpected events.
Finally, he said, “Sir, President Yancey’s order was quite clear. Your ticket
will be waiting at the station. I will of course have to inform my superiors of
what I have done – tomorrow.”
Maybe
Captain Ravenal had the makings of a real military officer after all.
That
night, at 8 PM, at Richmond’s Broad Street station I boarded the Southern
Railway’s crack express for Atlanta, Birmingham, and Mobile, the John Wilkes
Booth.
Chapter 35
In
the fine fashion of Agatha Christie mysteries and the old Orient Express, I was
traveling incognito. When George the Pullman porter asked my name, I gave it as
Mr. McWhorter. I was dressed in the uniform of the New South – expensive suit
worn over a shirt with open collar – and I trusted to a Panama hat pulled low
and Italian sunglasses to make a sufficient disguise. So long as I didn’t slip
into State o’ Maine speech, I figured I was safe enough.
The
train was fast but the Southerns’ track was smooth, and I got a good night’s
sleep as Mr. Pullman’s guest. George woke me at 7 o’clock on the 25th of March
in time to shave and dress, and we arrived in Atlanta’s Peachtree Street
station on the advertised at 8 AM.
The
only way to see a city is to walk it. I traveled light, with one shoulder bag,
so I could do just that. Coming out of the station, I took a right on Peachtree
Street toward downtown.
Immediately
I got a powerful sense of deja vu all over again. I’d been here before, in the
Corps, in places like Lagos, Mombasa, and Maputo, and later in Washington,
Baltimore, and other American cities. Atlanta reeked of disorder and decay.
It
wasn’t just the garbage piled high on the street corners, uncollected, or the
trash littering the potholed streets. It was the smell of fear. Even in the
morning, when the worst elements were usually asleep, my nose wrinkled with it.
All the windows and doors were barred, including upper stories. The better
establishments had armed guards out front. The lesser made do with “Beware Of
The Dog” signs. The few pedestrians scuttled furtively, like people in a
kitchen full of cockroaches.
I
picked up the day’s Atlanta Constitution – now a double entendre, since
Atlanta’s New South government had its own constitution – and dove into a diner
to get some breakfast. The few other patrons looked up briefly without any
expression as I sat down at the counter. The young black counter-man turned to
take my order, and on his face was written “the attitude,” that cultivated
stare of defiance and menace I hadn’t seen up north since CORN solved our black
problem, and that had also vanished from Old South Richmond. He took my order
for a three-egg omelet with ham and sausage without saying a word, then barked
it to the cook at the grill.
As
I waited for my chow, I unfolded the paper to find an unpleasant reminder of
the bad old days. Murder and mayhem, rapes and riots filled the front page.
Even with the New South Congress in session in the city, the political news
took second place to crime. That reflected reality. When order is lost, the
important news is all local.
My
breakfast, when it came, was good. Atlanta was still Southern, in its way. I
was through the sausage and starting on the ham when I heard pop, pop, pop,
from somewhere out in front, mixed with the harsh staccato of an AK on full
automatic. The waiter and cook dove behind the counter and the rest of the
breakfasters ran toward the back. I grabbed the Walther .380 I carried in a
shoulder holster, bent low, and made for the front door. I waited a few seconds
– all quiet – then opened the door carefully a few inches, just enough to be
able to look up and down the street.
About
100 feet away, south toward the downtown, a police cruiser stood, its windows
shot out and one door, toward the sidewalk, hanging open. I could see a cop
stretched out beside it, on the sidewalk. His Glock was in his hand. He wasn’t
moving.
“Call
911,” I shouted back into the diner. “I think a cop’s been shot. I’m going to
check it out.”
From
behind the counter, the counter-man replied, “Fuck the cops and fuck you too,
motherfucker. I ain’t callin’ nobody.”
Boy,
you just lost your tip, I thought.
I
crouched and ran, keeping behind the parked cars, toward the cop. People in
shops closer to the scene must have seen him, but nobody came to help. I
figured whoever had done the drive-by was long gone, but you never know. I kept
checking six, a useful lesson from Marine aviators, but in this case six stayed
clear.
As
I got in closer, I saw a pool of blood around the officer’s head, not a good
sign. Dropping down beside him, I checked for heartbeat and breath. He had
both. He had a nasty gash on his right temple, but I quickly saw it wasn’t
deep. He’d been winged and knocked unconscious, but unless there was something
I couldn’t see, he’d live to collect his retirement.
I
pressed my handkerchief into the wound, held it in place with the cop’s cap,
and leaned into his vehicle to see if the radio was still working. It was. I
pressed talk and gave the signal every cop regards as sacred, and dreads:
“Officer down, officer down!” The dispatcher came on immediately. Glancing at
the street numbers,
I
gave him an address. I knew other cops and an ambulance would be there fast.
Returning
to the downed cop – a good-looking kid, white, Kearney according to his name
badge – I held the bandage tightly to stop the blood flow. As I did so, I
looked up the street to see one of the other patrons leaving the scene of my
breakfast, carrying my bag. A white guy, too. I yelled, but he just ran the
other way. Blood is thicker than baggage, I thought. No way could I leave the
cop. Thanks, New South. I’ll get even, some day.
Kearney
started to come to. His mind was still where it had been when he fell, and he
started to move. I held him down. “It’s OK, kid. You’re covered. Help’s on the
way,” I told him. But he was going into shock.
Even
where everything else has fallen apart, cops still take care of each other. A
cruiser smoked by in less than a minute, slammed on the brakes, and backed up
on the sidewalk. Just one guy was in it – another dumb practice in the jungle.
He saw the Walther in my right hand, reached toward his own weapon, then
realized I was helping his buddy and cooled it. “Better get that out of sight,”
he said to me as he ran up. “It’s illegal here for a private citizen to carry a
weapon.”
“Did
the city council bother to tell that to the guys with the AK?” I asked.
“Fucking
politicians,” he replied as he moved quickly to check his buddy over. “I hate
all of them.”
He
found no other wounds. As usual, the drive-by boys couldn’t shoot, they just
sprayed.
The
new cop guided in a couple other cruisers, a motor and, somewhat later than I
expected, an ambulance. The cops didn’t say anything to the EMT guys, seeing as
they needed them, but their body language told me they weren’t happy.
We
saw Kearney lifted into the ambulance, and the motor and one cruiser gave it an
escort to the nearest hospital. The remaining cops asked me a few questions,
and I told them what I’d seen, which wasn’t much. “Are open attacks on police
something regular down here?” I asked a sergeant.
“Every
day,” he replied. “In case you didn’t know it, you’re in a war zone. And it’s
gonna get worse, fast.”
“You
think so?” I replied as casually as I could. The best way to find out what’s
going on in a place is from the cops. The problem is getting them to talk to
you, if they don’t know you.
“I
know so,” he replied. “Look, we owe you one. You came to the aid of an officer
who was down. I can tell you’re not from around here, because none of the SOBs
in this lousy town will lift a finger to help a cop. I’m afraid Kearney bled
all over that nice, expensive suit. Why don’t you ride with me down to the
station and get cleaned up?”
“Thanks,”
I replied. “I’ll enjoy being safe for a little while.”
“You
think so?” the cop, a Sergeant Randall, replied. “They’ve mortared our station
twice in the last month.”
***
The
police station was walled off for a full block around the actual building with
Concertina wire, street barricades, and blockhouses in which I saw machine guns
mounted. “Welcome to Fort Zinderneuf,” Randall said as we drove in. “Isn’t the
New South gracious?”
The
word had spread that Randall was bringing in a citizen who’d helped a cop in
trouble, so I was met with friendly smiles and strong handshakes from all the
other cops. Nobody said anything about the Walther. Randall showed me to the
shower room, where I cleaned up while another cop did some quick work on my
jacket. “Cold water will take the blood out if you get it before it dries,” he
told me. Somehow, it felt good being back among men who knew that sort of
thing.
After
I’d scrubbed up and the suit coat was hung to dry – my shirt was a lost cause
but a cop my size gave me one of his – Randall stuck his head back in. “Can I
invite you upstairs for a cup of coffee? There are a few other folks here who’d
like to thank you for what you did.”
“Sure,”
I answered. “But no thanks are needed. You guys are out there for us all the
time. I’m happy to have a chance to return the favor. How’s Kearney?”
“The
hospital says there’s no damage beyond what you saw,” Randall replied. “A
transfusion, some IVs, and a couple days in bed and he’ll be OK. Thanks for asking.”
Upstairs
was officer country, as I could see by the “I love me” pictures as we walked
down the second floor hallway. Sergeant Randall led me into the office of the
police captain who ran the station house. There, about a dozen cops were
gathered.
Again,
it was smiles and handshakes all around, along with good southern coffee. The
captain gave a little speech formally offering his gratitude and that of his
men. At the end of it he said, “I’ve got a small present for you,” and handed
me an official looking piece of paper. It was a permit to carry a sidearm. “You
may find that useful, Captain Rumford.”
I
jumped. At least I did inside. I immediately hoped it hadn’t showed. I realized
denial would just make me look foolish. “It’s nice to be addressed by my real
rank again,” I replied with what was intended to sound like nonchalance. “I
think you have to be German to carry out this Field Marshal business. I feel
like I’m playing in The Student Prince at Heidelberg.”
The
cops smiled, though in Dixie I doubt many got the reference. “Don’t worry, sir,
you’re safe with us,” the police captain replied. “You would have been even
without your help to Kearney. We know what you all have done up north, and we
only wish we could do the same down here.”
I’d
learned long ago that liberal cops are very, very rare. Cops see too much of
life to believe in bullshit.
“But
now we do owe you for Kearney, too,” he continued. “So our question to you is,
how can we help you do whatever you came here to do?”
“I
came here to find out what’s going on in the capital of the so-called New
South,” I replied. “The best way you can help me is to tell me.”
“You’ve
already gotten a good taste of it,” one patrolman replied.
“I
have,” I answered. “But on my own, I can only see what’s on the surface. What I
need to know is what’s going on that I can’t see. The situation here can’t
endure. Human nature can’t tolerate disorder indefinitely. Which way is it
going to turn, restoration of order, or chaos?”
My
question met with uneasy silence. The cops looked at each other, looked at me,
then looked at each other again. They were pregnant with something. Could I get
it to drop?
Finally,
the station chief said, “I’m going to give you an honest answer. We owe you
that, and one thing more besides.”
“For
more than a year, we’ve been tracking a conspiracy here in Atlanta. We’ve told
the mayor, the city council, even the New South government, but they won’t
listen. They just call us ‘racists’ and tell us to go away.”
“The
conspiracy involves the gang leaders, some local politicians, some members of
Congress, all black. To put it simply, they plan to take over the city, kill
all the whites and Asians, and proclaim something they call ‘The Commune.’”
“When?”
I asked.
“We
don’t know that,” the police captain replied. “But the pieces all seem to be
pretty much in place. My guess is the only reason they’re still waiting is that
the Congress is importing more arms for them. The gangs are now formally part
of the ‘New South Army,’ which should tell you what that army is worth.”
“What
are you going to do when it happens?”
“Run,”
one officer replied.
The
captain nodded. “We’ve all gotten our families out of this place long ago, into
the Old South, the countryside. We’ve only stayed because we need the paychecks.
We don’t owe the SOBs who run this town, white or black, the time of day. When
the place blows, we hope it takes them with it. We’re getting out.”
A
picture was forming in my mind. The Commune. The Paris Commune in 1871. If
Atlanta became the Paris Commune, the whole South would have to unite against
it – and act, just as the French had to do then. From my standpoint, the sooner
it happened, the better.
“Are
you willing to set this bomb off?” I asked.
The
cops looked startled. That was not a response they expected. “Why should we do
that?” one cop asked.
“Because
it will finally force the True Confederate government in Richmond to act,” I
replied. “As you’ve probably noticed, they aren’t the most decisive sorts. This
would leave them no choice.”
Again,
the cops looked at each other. One spoke up, “Why not? We know it’s coming. If
we set it off, we can be sure we’ll get out.”
“How
could we set it off?” the police captain asked.
“Am
I right that you’ve been recording this meeting?” I said.
The
officers looked a bit sheepish. “You’re right,” the captain answered. “We
record everything. We have for years. It’s the only way to cover our own asses.
If the wrong people found out about this, we could always say we were just
setting you up.”
“Okay,
here’s how you light the fuse,” I told them. “Make a dozen copies of the tape,
get one to each of the chief conspirators, then get out of town. Once they know
I’ve been here, and that I know their plan, they’ll set their coup in motion.
They’ll have to, because they’ll think I’ll move to stop them. Delete the
portions of the tape after my question, ‘What are you going to do?’ so they
won’t know what you’re planning either.”
I
knew the cops would need to palaver on this one. I’d made their day somewhat
more interesting than they had anticipated. I was asking them to play for high
stakes, and to take risks, which cops don’t like. At the same time, I was
giving them a chance to get back at politicians they hated and a citizenry that
looked on them with indifference if not contempt. Which would win out, fear or
rage? I gave them some time to think about it by asking directions to the head.
When
I returned from an extended head call, the cops had made their decision. “We’ll
do it,” the captain announced. “We know what’s coming and we sure can’t stop
it. Plus, we know your war record up north. If you think this is the right
thing to do, we probably ought to listen to you. We’ll time it so they get the
tapes day after tomorrow, March 27th. That will give us a day to get clear.”
“And
we still owe you something. We need to get you out of town, too. If the New
South government or the conspirators nab you, you’ll have seen your last New
England autumn.”
“Can
you get me to Savannah?” I asked.
“Sure,”
he replied. “We’ll just dress you up in one of our uniforms and have you ride
with one of our men. Nobody stops a cop car, and if they do, no one looks at a
cop’s face. They just see the uniform.”
So
the bomb was armed. I spent the night in the station house. The next day, March
26, in the uniform of Atlanta’s finest, I left town in a plain brown wrapper,
driven by a patrolman whose family was in Savannah, a secure bastion of the Old
South. At the outskirts, I turned around in my seat for a last look at the Atlanta
skyline. “Kind of makes you wish old Sherman could come back, doesn’t it?” the
officer who was driving me asked.
I
thought about Kearney left bleeding on the sidewalk and my stolen travel bag.
“Ayuh, it kinda does,” I replied.
***
The
Atlanta cop drove me directly to the 3rd Texas Rangers’ base camp, where our
uniforms and his ID got us through the gate. Still Southern security, I
thought. He dropped me at the CP, where I quickly found Captain Armbruster and
Sergeant Danielov. Armbruster wasn’t quite sure how to react to my latest
avatar as an Atlanta cop. Dano just grinned. “Looks like you’ve been doing some
spec ops on your own,” was his comment.
“Ayuh,
you could say that,” I replied in good Maine fashion.
“You
bring the rest of my trash down with you?”
“Got
it all,” Ron replied. “Though I’m afraid your uniform might need ironing.” He’d
obviously gotten the word from Captain Ravenal.
“We
can take care of that, sir,” Captain Armbruster volunteered.
Dano
and I looked at each other and broke up laughing. No one up north ever thought
of ironing a uniform. We seldom thought of washing them. We were wary of the
Sukomlinov Effect: the side with the best uniforms always loses.
“Don’t
sweat it, Captain,” I replied. “I assume Southern regulations forbid a Field
Marshal’s uniform to wrinkle itself.”
The
battalion commander, Col. McMoster, was out leading some training, but he would
be back around dinner time. I suggested we meet in the mess, then retire to
someplace quiet where we could talk. I told Armbruster we had some sensitive
material to discuss, and left it up to him who should be there. Meanwhile, I
could shower up and change into something more comforting.
Dinner
in the mess was steak, barbecued pork South Carolina style, or both. Dano
and I both took both. It would be some time yet before we had our guts and our
arterial deposits back up to normal.
Col.
Bill McMoster, CO of the 3rd Texas Rangers, joined us halfway through chow. He
knew I had arrived, and I was glad to see he’d put training above hospitality.
His utilities were muddy and he stank, which were also good signs. His
conversation over dinner was direct, honest and self-critical.
We
gathered afterwards in his office, which was paneled with books, most of them
military histories. Their condition suggested somebody had read them in the
field. Cigars and bourbon quickly went around. It was funny to think back on
the old U.S. military, with its “no smoking, no drinking” rules. If your armed
services have become a girls’ school, you probably need rules like that.
I
shared with the assembled Texas officers and NCOs the story of my minor
adventures in Atlanta. The point, as I saw it, was that all we had to do was
wait. When Atlanta erupted and the blacks proclaimed The Commune, the
Confederate government would have to act. “I guess I should probably head back
to Richmond tomorrow,” I concluded. “They shouldn’t need any advice as to what
to do, but from what I saw there, they might.”
Colonel
McMoster sipped his bourbon for a bit, then responded. “I’m afraid you still
don’t understand the depth of the problem in Richmond,” he said. “You weren’t
there during a crisis. I was. They didn’t act when New Orleans burned, and they
won’t act when Atlanta goes up either. With the people they’ve got in charge,
they can’t. All they know how to do is nothing, so nothing is what they will
do.”
“That
leaves me with a question for you,” McMoster continued. “If the blacks proclaim
this ‘Commune’ and Richmond doesn’t respond, what do we do then?”
The
Colonel’s question hit me in the face like a cold, dead flounder. I didn’t have
an answer. I immediately realized I had just played the game of High Seas
Fleet.
Prior
to World War I, Germany had built a powerful force of battleships, the High
Seas Fleet. Britain’s Royal Navy was stronger, but the Germans were certain
that, when war came, the British would steam up close to the German coast to
blockade it. There, mines, submarines, and torpedo boats could whittle them down
until the German battleships could engage them on equal terms. In May of 1914,
Admiral Tirpitz asked the High Seas Fleet’s commander, “What will you do if
they do not come?” He received no answer. When war erupted three months later,
the British dreadnoughts stayed far away from Germany’s home waters, supporting
a distant blockade, and the German High Seas Fleet proved useless.
With
my stomach in free-fall, I looked at Colonel McMoster and the other Confederate
officers and gave the only answer I could. “I don’t know,” I said.
I
could feel the room deflate. Here I was, their best and brightest hope, “the
new Moltke,” caught with his pants down like some second lieutenant in his
first tactical decision game. Nobody said anything, but I knew what they were
thinking. They were right. I hadn’t thought the situation through to the end.
The
one advantage experience gave me over a second lieutenant was that in a moment
like this, my mind didn’t freeze up. I asked myself the question, “If I were
back up north and found myself in a fix like this, what would I do?”
Immediately, I knew the answer.
“Can
you get me a secure communication link with our Governor Kraft, back up in
Augusta, Maine?” I asked the Rangers.
“Yes,
sir,” their commo replied. “We have secure comm with the military attaché in
our embassy there. He can patch you through.”
“OK,
set it up,” I said. I gave the commo the governor’s private number. “Gentlemen,
I’m afraid my guilty secret is out. I’m not really a Field Marshal. But I know
someone who is. God willing, he’ll have the answer I don’t.”
It
took about 20 minutes to put the call through. I took it privately in the XO’s
office. After a fair amount of crackling and hissing in the phone line –
Confederate Bell, I thought – I heard Bill Kraft’s welcome voice come on. “Is
this the vaunted Southern Field Marshal on my phone?” he asked.
“No,
sir,” I replied. “This is one very junior captain calling to say he’s screwed
the pooch and needs some help.”
“Well,
well, the prodigal returns,” Kraft chuckled. Luckily I’d caught him in a good
mood. “Fear not, we shall kill the fatted calf. What can I do for you?”
I
explained the situation to the governor. “We have an embassy in Richmond, as
you know,” he said. “Their estimation of the Confederate government tallies
with that of your colonel there. I suspect he’s correct that when Atlanta
erupts, they still won’t act.”
“So
what do I do then?” I asked.
Kraft
was silent for about thirty seconds. The way his mind worked – instantly or not
at all – that was a long time. I was relieved when his voice came back up on
the net. “Act for them,” he said. “Act in their name. Present them with a fait
accompli, an action so bold they have to repudiate it or take credit for it. If
it works, they’ll take the credit.”
“You
have any thoughts on what that action might be?” I asked.
“It
has to resolve the situation in Atlanta,” Kraft replied.
“How
do I do that with one Ranger battalion?” I inquired. “They’ll go into Atlanta
if I ask them to, and they’ll go down in a blaze of glory, but against a whole
city, they’ll still go down.”
“You’ve
got to use them to generate other forces,” Bill said. “Exactly how to do that I
can’t say from up here. You’re the one at the front, so you’ll have to answer
that question for yourself.”
I
thanked the governor for his advice, which did help put the puzzle together.
But the key piece was still missing.
I
hung up the phone and turned to go back into McMoster’s office, where the
Rangers were still waiting for a brilliant solution. Sergeant Danielov was
standing in the doorway. “I took the liberty of listening in on the phone in
the S-3’s office,” he said. “I’ve got an idea that might do the trick.”
“What
is it?” I asked, hoping I’d been right that if I got myself into trouble, a
sergeant would get me out of it.
“Why
don’t we ask the Rangers to steal us a nuke?”