Leon Uris (3 page)

Major Benjamin Boone knew by rote the instant the train slowed on the big curve before its entry into Washington. He snapped his eyes open as Monroe, the porter, who had made Boone’s friendship over dozens of trips to the capital, entered the compartment and filled the water basin.

Ben dunked his face and took a towel from Monroe, after which the porter assisted the major into his jacket. The empty bottom half of the right sleeve was folded up above the elbow and sewn shut. With the arm stump in place, Monroe buttoned the major’s jacket and brushed it off.

The engine sounded its ceremonial hissing, whistling, squealing, and farting to proudly herald an on-time arrival.

Monroe buckled the major’s belt and declared him fit for debarking. Ben Boone’s grade was impressive—only one rank below
Lieutenant Colonel Commandant Tom Ballard—particularly considering Boone had one arm, a limp, and limited sight in his left eye.

The train braked, rudely pitching the two men together. Private Lamar Jones, the major’s Washington orderly, entered, snapped off a sparkling salute, and took the major’s carpetbag from Monroe. Boone slipped a silver dollar into the porter’s hand.

“You sure about this, sir?” Monroe asked.

“I got lucky in a poker game last night.”

“Thank you, Major, and I hope to catch you on the way back.”

The two Marines made their way from the terminal to a mash of carriages. Traffic into Washington these days was heavy, drumming up talk in Congress of building a grand terminal. When they reached the carriages, Jones whipped out an envelope and handed it to the major.

Dear Ben,

I will not require your presence at the meeting with the Secretary of the Navy tomorrow. Be at my residence for dinner on Wednesday at seven bells. Dress informal, men only.

—Lieutenant Colonel Commandant Thomas Ballard, USMC

Ben got into the carriage hissing beneath his breath. He had been aced out of an important—no, vital meeting. What chance would Tom Ballard have across the table from Horace Kerr, the shipbuilder, and Commodore Chester Harkleroad, chief of naval design? Less than none. Damned!

Boone grunted at the reality. He and Harkleroad in the same room could blow the lid off the building. Harkleroad and Kerr, goddamn sons of bitches. They’d already got the secretary in their pocket.

“Jones!”

“Sir!”

“Take me directly to Prichard’s Inn. I’ll be staying for a night or two.”

“Aye, aye, sir. When shall I fetch you?”

“Wednesday afternoon will be fine. Is there a clean uniform in my closet?”

“Yes, sir. Got all the stains out. Your brass is polished to snuff.”

“Jones!”

“Sir!”

“Do you know how I want this ride?”

“Yes, sir. In silence, sir.”

Ben looked with awe at the expanding alabaster grandeur of the Capitol building as they made their way through the congestion. The new monument to Washington, now open to the public, soared over it all. High, slender, reeking of majesty—its four corners were like a powerful lighthouse beam streaking out to the entire planet, announcing that this would become the center of the earth.

Ben fretted about being left out of tomorrow’s meeting until they crossed the river, then let the countryside lull him.

Lord, had it been four years since the remaining Wart-Hogs had seen one another? Him, Captain Tobias Storm, the mustache that supported a man, and “Boilerplate” Kunkle. Would they accept the new assignment? Both of them had so much service time they could just up and resign. After too many years you can get the esprit de corps knocked out of you. Were they too weary? Did they still believe? Or had they become feeble?

Ben shifted his position as a pain settled in his hip. One thing or another hurt a fair part of the time. He had been wounded in battle on numerous occasions, but his limp and stump were not a result of enemy fire. During maneuvers several years back, Ben thought he was still a rider in the Horse Marines and got low-bridged by a tree branch and his mount rolled over on him.

Though seriously maimed, Ben Boone was too valuable to discharge. He resumed his career and became one of the few remaining Marine officers with influence.

He had evolved into a brilliant maverick military theorist, so much so that his voice and papers had long reach and he was a regular consultant to the army as well as the navy and often called upon to advise the president.

After he lost the confrontation with the tree, Boone ultimately ended up as the lone Marine officer assigned to the Naval War College at its inception in 1884.

The army tried to lure Ben with colonel’s epaulets and the navy dangled a commodore’s stripe if he would transfer to their services. He chose to remain a one-armed Marine who would probably never be promoted higher than major.

Ben’s mind fell into cadence with the horse’s beat and he dozed and let the memories in.

Benjamin Malachi Boone’s memories started when he was a boy in his home in Appalachia. Every year, feuding clans declared a local peace for a glorious Fourth of July in Lynchburg. This particular year, a uniformed Marine sergeant had come recruiting.

Although the Corps was a tiny outfit, it was able to attract exceptional recruits because it had the capacity to draw its strength from past valor and present patriotism.

The first source was the sons of immigrants in three or four large East Coast cities that had ports and naval facilities.

Of equal importance were the farmlands.

Dedication to the Corps was above the norm. The navy also recruited heavily from immigrants, but these were men apt to be going to the sea as a last resort, where one depended only on officers for loyalty. The navy had always drawn their crews from grungy places. A seaman in the lower ranks had a mean, often brutal life.

Marine contingents aboard ship were its police force. Punishment of a crewman could mean a lashing or being brigged on rations of bread and water or an inhuman keelhauling beneath a ship. Navy desertions were commonplace and mutinous whisperings were as much a part of most voyages as the disgusting food and cramped quarters.

The elevated status of the Marines led to a distinct dislike between them and the sailors. Although they shared much misery and the same flag, each stayed with their own.

In Lynchburg on the Fourth of 1845, the Marine recruiter had eagle’s eyes, and claws as well. Generally speaking, hillbillies made first-class troops. All of them were skilled hunters and mountain men, tough as jerky and used to hard work on slim rations.

Eighteen-year-old Benjamin Malachi Boone won the musket- shooting contest by a wide margin against some very fine opponents.

Ben Boone was prime meat for the Corps. Moreover, the recruiter found out that this one could read and write, having learned by memorizing the Bible. The recruiter offered him an eight-dollar bounty, a sum that Ben had to take seriously.

The Boone clan consisted of a dozen families and allies who dominated a swath of mountain from Preacher’s Hollow clear to Glasgow in the Blue Ridges.

Ben Boone’s grandfather, Enoch, the family patriarch, had spent that winter of horrors with George Washington at Valley Forge and was there at the final battle at Yorktown. He was a Christian zealot and a fervent abolitionist in a state where slaves, numbering almost half the population, upward of a half million, toiled in the tobacco fields. It was an open secret that the Boone “territory” held underground-railroad stations. Not all of the clan agreed with Father Enoch’s preachings, but no one would betray their kin, abolitionist or not.

Fortunately the Boones held their piece of mountain without much challenge. They were deadly riflemen and fiercely loyal to one another. Their pride was great in the men from their clan who had fought in the country’s military.

Benjamin Malachi Boone was the best among the coming generation, but it was his time to serve and he went off with his family’s blessing. So great were Ben’s skills that he was commissioned to brevet second lieutenant less than a year after he joined the Corps.

America had burst forth on an expansionist binge, lopping off huge territories from Mexico and reaching from ocean to ocean. Texas had been annexed. California was hoicked from Mexico on the rationale that if America didn’t hoick it, France or England would.

For the better part of a year the navy blockaded Mexican ports on the Gulf under the command of Commodore Perry. Small landings, raids, sieges of wavering forts called for an increase in the size of the Marine Corps.

The Corps recruited, trained, and spread aboard ships an undersized regiment. A Marine liaison was required by both Commodore Perry and General Winfield Scott.

Perry was astonished to be sent young Ben Boone, a brevet lieutenant scarcely twenty years of age, but Scott welcomed him. They were both abolitionists from the same area of Virginia and Boone quickly earned the commander’s respect.

The invasion of Mexico was on! Winfield Scott surveyed his magnificent fleet of seventy ships with twelve thousand soldiers aboard. The fighting was all over in California with the fall of the villages of San Diego and Los Angeles. Now, to hit Mexico in the center and march to the capital!

A six-foot four-inch bear of a man, “Old Fuss and Feathers” exuded confidence to his staff as the fleet deployed for the bombardment and siege of the stinkhole of Vera Cruz. He did not believe that a Mexican army of peasants impressed into service would offer a serious fight.

Not only did the Mexicans acquit themselves well, but heat and dysentery and malaria and swamps and yellow fever wrung the juice out of Scott’s army.

By September, a war-hardened and wiser army reached the plain of Mexico City, domain of the ancient Aztecs and the fortress of Montezuma.

Ben Boone had been at the general’s side during the entire campaign, displaying hillbilly cunning. With the Marine unit down to
battalion size, their swift, controlled movements and courage gained in reputation. Boone was at last released from Scott’s staff to command a company.

September 13, 1847, became the greatest battle in Corps history. Ben Boone’s company was the first to reach and storm the Halls of Montezuma.

After the war, General Scott, seemingly in permanent command of the army, sent Boone to West Point for advanced schooling. Scott shadowed Boone’s progress and then had him stationed in Washington.

The general tried to cajole Ben into transferring to the army and Ben skillfully rejected entreaties, demands, and commands. Ben remained the Marine Corps liaison. After three years of it, the general finally let him go to sea, to all those shitholes Marines seemed to adore.

By the time the Civil War loomed, Scott was ill and exhausted and broken by time. He realized he was too old and without the energy to command such a conflict. He set about feverishly to create a grand strategy for the Union, if Lincoln were elected. Ben Boone, still a brevet second lieutenant in the Marine Corps, was ordered back to Washington.

By the time Ben’s ship docked in Baltimore, Lincoln was inaugurated and the Confederacy had fired on Fort Sumter. War was inevitable.

General Scott wore his years badly now. He was saggy and saddened when Lieutenant Boone reported.

There were two or three sentences of small talk. He tapped Ben’s record book on his desk and Ben nodded that he understood.

“I can no longer give my best,” the general said, “and I doubt if I’ll live through this war.”

“I understand, sir,” Ben said.

“You’re losing your goddamn accent. You been reading?”

“Two years in London and lots of time aboard ship, sir.”

“We are both Virginians, Ben. How is this going to sit with you? Many of our finest officers are heading south. Longstreet, Pickett, Jeb Stuart, Tom Jackson, Robert E. Lee. It was Beauregard who ordered the bombardment of Sumter.”

“I do not choose to be among them,” Ben answered.

“Nor I,” Scott replied. “I’m glad to hear you feel the same.”

“It took mighty courage for my grandfather to be an abolitionist in the Blue Ridge Mountains. I heard him preaching, but it was those times I got to sit on his lap and feel his big hand stroke my head. ‘Slavery is evil, it’s wrong, boy. It’s the worst thing that ever happened to the human race.’ “

“And that’s still your feeling?”

“My family still has a station on the underground railway, sir. And I am rather disgusted with the British. They gave up slavery, but they want us to continue on and on to supply cotton for their mills. Maybe not openly, but they’ll support the Confederacy.”

“Then we agree that the curse of slavery must be eradicated.”

“General, I was born with a squirrel gun in my hand. By the time I was ten, I was helping runaway slaves. Our job was to get them to the Allegheny stations in West Virginia. From there they had a shot at Ohio.”

“No wonder you’re such a good tactician.”

“Not quite good enough, sir. I would make one or two, maybe three, runs a year. One time we got ambushed by the Virginia militia. They lynched all six of the slaves, two men, two women, two kids. My uncle Hackett was strung up in Roanoke with a ‘nigger lover’ sign on him. My kin rescued me.”

“I know your grandfather was a powerful shadow over you, but tell me why? Why did you do it?”

Ben Boone, who had the best poker face in the Corps, bit his lip.

“I saw how much black men loved their kids and women, as
fiercely as we did. And, I know, sir . . . in their agony they was speaking to God.

“General Scott, you know my hills and my county. When you’re indentured to your pitiful acres of tobacco, you’re no more than a half step better than a slave. I was born hungry, lived hungry, and when I hunted, I hunted hungry. Shoot straight or eat collards. It was damned near famine year-round with us and never a year passed that we didn’t bury some kid, died of pellagra. In some ways we were worse off than slaves. A slave was fed enough to be kept alive. Greed knows no color. It was the same system keeping us crushed, but as woebegone as we were, no one would change places with a slave, even one who ate chicken every day.”