American Front (72 page)

First Lieutenant Cecil Schneider made his way down the battered trench line seeing how his company had come through. He was a little weedy fellow who would have looked more at home in mechanic’s coveralls than in his grimy U.S. uniform. He’d been leading the company since Captain Hinshaw died; a lot of companies had lieutenants commanding them these days, and more than one had no surviving officers left at all.

Schneider sniffed at Ben Carlton’s stew pot, sighed, and crouched down by it. He took out his mess kit. “I’m hungry enough for this to smell good,” he said. Paul Mantarakis didn’t know if he could get that hungry, but he was aware he had higher standards than most people.

Carlton, as if vindicated, filled the lieutenant’s tray with stew. Schneider dug in, sighed again, and kept on eating. That Mantarakis understood. You had to keep the machine fueled or it wouldn’t run.

When Schneider was nearly done, Mantarakis asked, “Sir, is there any way of rooting out the Mormons without going straight at them?”

“General Staff doesn’t seem to think so,” Schneider answered. “They’ve got the Great Salt Lake on one side and the mountains on the other, after all. It’s not going to be pretty, but it’s what we’ve got to do.”

Not going to be pretty
was a euphemism for forward companies’ getting melted down to nothing, like candles burning out. Paul knew that. So, no doubt, did Lieutenant Schneider. “Sir,” Mantarakis said, “are the two divisions we’ve got here going to be enough to do the job?”

“I hear we have more troops on the way,” Schneider answered. “This sort of fighting chews up men by carloads.” He sighed one more time, now not about the vile stew. “We have the men to spend, and we’re spending them. This narrow front makes the fighting as bad as it is in the Roanoke valley or in Maryland.”

“Mormons don’t help,” Ben Carlton said. “The Rebs fought fair, anyways. Any civilian you see here—man, woman, boy, girl—is gonna cut your throat in a second if he catches you asleep.”

“You got that right.” Mantarakis turned to Lieutenant Schneider. “Sir, once we beat these Mormons flat, what the hell are we going to do with them? What the hell
can
we do with them?”

“
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant
,” Schneider answered. That made Gordon McSweeney rumble, down deep in his chest. He obviously didn’t know what it meant, but he knew it was Latin. Given how he felt about the Catholic Church, that was plenty to make him suspicious.

“Sir?” Paul said. He didn’t know what it meant, either. He’d grown up speaking Greek, but you needed more in the way of education than he’d picked up to throw Latin around like that.

“‘Where they make a desert, they call it peace,’” Schneider said.

McSweeney rumbled again, this time in approval. “Just what the Mormons deserve,” he said: “Solitude Lake City.”

Mantarakis stared at him. McSweeney joking was about as likely as pigs with wings. He couldn’t let it go by without trying to top it. “Yeah, we’ll make a desert out of Deseret,” he said.

Lieutenant Schneider laughed. Ben Carlton looked from one punster to the other, equally disgusted with both. “You birds don’t shut up, I ain’t gonna feed you.”

“Promises, promises,” Paul said, which made Schneider laugh louder than ever.

Irving Morrell studied the situation map of Utah with considerable dissatisfaction. If it had been up to him, he would have tried to push men through the Wasatch Mountains, and he would also have had a column coming down from Idaho to make the Mormons divide their forces and keep them from concentrating everything they had on the main U.S. attack.

But it wasn’t up to him. He was new at General Staff headquarters, and only a major. He’d made suggestions. He’d sent memoranda. He might have been shouting into the void, for all the attention the higher-ups paid him. He hadn’t expected much different. Sooner or later, they’d listen to him on something small. If it worked, they’d listen to him on something bigger.

A lieutenant came up to him, saluted, and said, “Major Morrell?” When Morrell admitted he was who he was, the lieutenant saluted and said, “General Wood’s compliments, sir, and he’d like to see you immediately. If you’ll please follow me, sir—”

“Yes, I’ll follow you,” Morrell said. Without another word, the lieutenant turned and hurried away. Walking along behind him, Morrell wondered what enormity he’d committed, to make the Chief of the U.S. General Staff land on him personally. He didn’t think his memoranda on the Utah campaign had been as intemperate as all that. Maybe he was wrong. No—evidently he was wrong. He shrugged. If speaking his mind made them want to ship him out, odds were they’d send him back to one of the fighting fronts and let him command a battalion again. That wasn’t so bad.

A captain in an outer office who was pounding away on a typewriter looked up when the lieutenant brought in Morrell. After he’d been identified, the captain—presumably Wood’s adjutant—nodded and said, “Oh, yes, let me tell the general he’s here.” He vanished into the chief of staff’s inner sanctum, then emerged once more. “Come right in, Major Morrell. He’s expecting you.”

He didn’t sound overtly hostile, but the General Staff had an air of genteel politeness over and above the usual military courtesies, so that didn’t signify anything. Wondering whether to ask for a blindfold, Morrell walked past the captain and into the office. He came to stiff attention and saluted. “Major Irving Morrell reporting as ordered, sir.”

“At ease, Morrell,” Leonard Wood said, returning the salute. He was a broad-shouldered man in his mid-fifties, with iron-gray hair and a Kaiser Bill mustache waxed to a pointed perfection that didn’t quite go with his craggy, tired-looking features. Morrell eased his brace only a fraction. Wood said, “Relax, Major. You’re not in trouble. The reverse, in fact.”

“Sir?” Morrell said. He couldn’t fathom why the general had summoned him, if not to call him on the carpet.

Instead of explaining, Wood went off on a tangent: “You may have heard that I earned a medical degree before I went into the Army.”

“Yes, sir, I have heard that,” Morrell agreed. He didn’t know where General Wood was going, but he wasn’t about to try to keep him from getting there.

“Good,” the chief of staff said. “Then you’ll have an easier time understanding why I was extremely interested when a memorandum from you and Dr. Wagner reached my desk earlier this year.”

“Dr. Wagner?” In any setting less august, Morrell would have scratched his head. “I’m afraid I don’t remember—”

“From Tucson,” Wood broke in impatiently. “The memorandum where the two of you were discussing the potential advantages of protective headgear.”

Light dawned on Morrell. “Oh. Yes, sir,” he said. He’d utterly forgotten the physician’s name, if he’d ever known it. He’d forgotten their conversation shortly before he was discharged, too. He’d figured the doctor had also forgotten it, but that looked to be wrong. Not only had Wagner remembered, but he’d remembered to give Morrell half the credit, too. Not just a doctor—that damn near made him a prince.

General Wood leaned over the side of his chair, picked something up, and set it on his desk: a steel helmet shaped like a bowl, with a projecting brim in front and an extension in the back to give the neck a little extra protection. “What do you think of your idea, Major?” he asked.

Morrell picked up the helmet. It weighed, he guessed, a couple of pounds. Leather webbing inside kept it from resting right on a man’s head; a leather chin strap with an adjustable buckle would help it stay on. He rapped the green-gray painted metal with his knuckles. “Will it really stop bullets, sir?” he asked.

Wood shook his head. “Not square hits, no—it would probably have to be three times as heavy to do that. But it will deflect glancing rounds and a lot of shrapnel balls and shell fragments. Head wounds are so often fatal, anything we can do to diminish them works to our advantage.”

“Sir, you’re a hundred per cent right about that,” Morrell said. He thought of the man in the bed next to him in Tucson, the man who’d been made into a vegetable in the blink of an eye. The memory made him want to shiver. Better to die straight out than to linger on like that without hope of ever having a working mind again.

“A commendation for this idea will go into your permanent file, Major,” Wood said. “Our German allies, I understand, are going to copy the notion from us, and I’ve heard, though it’s always hard to gauge how much truth comes from sources in enemy country, that the froggies are also working along similar lines. But we have the helmet first, and that’s thanks in large part to you.”

“Thank you very much, sir,” Morrell said. Getting credit for the idea had never crossed his mind, not least because he’d never thought it would see the light of day. “I hope Doctor, uh, Wagner gets a commendation, too, sir. If it hadn’t been for him, this never would have gotten off the ground.”

“Yes, he has a commendation coming, too,” General Wood assured him. “But such things count for rather more on a fighting soldier’s
curriculum vitae
, eh?”

“Yes, sir.” Morrell hefted the helmet. “Sir, may I keep this one? If I’m ever transferred back to the front, I’ll need one, and I’d be honored to have it be the one you gave me yourself.”

“My pleasure,” Wood said, and Morrell tucked the helmet under his left arm. The chief of staff studied him. “So you want to get back to the front, do you? Why does that not surprise me? Fighting the war with map and wire isn’t your chosen style, is it?”

Morrell had had very much the same thought himself. “Sir, I like the outdoors; I always have. I like hiking and fishing and hunting a lot better than filling out forms and such. I think I’m more useful to the country up at the front, if you want to know the truth.”

General Wood steepled his fingers. “What you’re saying, Major, is that you’d have a better time up at the front than you do here, which is not the same as being more useful to the country. We’re going to teach you everything we can here, Major, and I suspect you’ll teach us a few things, too. If you measure up, we’ll change the color of the oak leaves on your shoulders, maybe give you eagles instead, and we’ll send you back to the front in charge of a regiment.
Then
you’ll be more useful to your country.”

“Uh, thank you, sir,” Morrell said again. He’d dared hope something like that might happen, but he hadn’t taken the notion seriously. He made a mental note to write General Foulke a thank-you letter. Foulke must have seen something in him that he liked, and sent him on to the General Staff to find out if they saw it, too. That was how careers got made, if you were good—and lucky enough to be good when people were watching.

Wood said, “This isn’t for your benefit, Major: it’s for the benefit of the United States of America. We are surrounded by foes on all sides, as we have been since the days of the War of Secession: the Confederate States and the Empire of Mexico to the south, Canada to the north, England and France across an Atlantic none too wide, and the Japanese and the British Empire across the Pacific. Seizing the Sandwich Islands was a heavy blow against them; otherwise, they’d be menacing our western coast even now. But they are going to try to take those islands back, as a first step toward carrying the war to our shores. Surrounded, as I say, we can’t afford to waste talent if we see it.” He went from cordial to brisk in the space of a heartbeat. “Dismissed, Major.”

Morrell saluted, did a smart about-face, and left the office of the Chief of the General Staff. The lieutenant was still in the antechamber with General Wood’s adjutant. He bounced to his feet. “Do you need me to guide you back to your assigned area, sir?”

“I don’t think so,” Morrell answered. “I expect I can manage on my own, unless the birds have eaten the trail of crumbs I left behind.” The lieutenant looked blank. The adjutant chuckled, recognizing the allusion.

Three different men stopped Morrell in the hallway, all of them exclaiming about the helmet he was carrying. Two of them, like him, were ecstatic. The third, a white-bearded brigadier general in his late sixties who might have first seen action in the War of Secession, shook his head in dismay. “It’s a damned shame we have to resort to means like those to fill the men with the spirit of aggression,” he growled, and walked on.

Being far outranked, Morrell didn’t answer. He didn’t see anything wrong with giving the common soldier some slightly better chance to do his job without getting killed or dreadfully wounded.

He set the helmet down beside the map of the Utah rebellion. Try as he would, he couldn’t make himself believe the General Staff had come up with the best possible plan there was. His first efforts to convince his superiors otherwise had failed. If he was going to try again, he’d have to be more subtle.

He was poring over the map when someone behind him said, “Major Morrell?”

“Yes?” Morrell turned around. Before the turn was completed, he came to attention and revised his words: “Yes, Mr. President?”

Theodore Roosevelt pointed to the helmet. “General Wood tells me that’s partly your idea. It’s a bully one, I must say. We aim to win this war, but we aim to do it with the greatest possible efficiency and care for the men who fight it. Your notion goes a long way toward that end. Congratulations.”

“Thank you, sir,” Morrell said. He’d known Wood and TR were longtime friends. He hadn’t imagined that might ever matter to him.

“What other useful ideas have you?” Roosevelt pointed to the map of Utah. “How would you cauterize that running sore, for instance?” He sighed. “My experience has been that, man for man, Mormons make excellent, even outstanding, citizens. In a mass, though, their religion gives them the ambition to be a nationality of their own rather than Americans. This, I realize, is in no small measure engendered by the treatment they have received at the hands of the United States since the 1850s. But fault is irrelevant. Revolt and secession from our country cannot be tolerated.”

“Yes, sir,” Morrell said. “What would I do in Utah, sir?” He took a deep breath and explained to the president what he would do in Utah.