“And me!” Georges and Charles said in the same breath, standing shoulder to shoulder with their father.
That settled that. People horrified at the victory of the Americans and the Republic of Quebec (very much in that order) over the Canadian and British troops defending the capital of what had been the Canadian province of Quebec kept that horror to themselves. Lucien Galtier felt some, as he watched the world with which he was long familiar crack further. But his manner also persuaded those who were delighted with the success of the Republic to keep their mouths shut. The reception went on.
Marie came up to him and spoke quietly: “You did very well there.”
“Did I?” Lucien shrugged. “I do not know. What should I feel? I was torn in two when France lay down her arms to Germany. Now I am torn in two again. What we had is not what we shall have.”
“Change.” His wife spoke the word as if it were more filthy than tabernac. “Why can the world not stay as it has always been?”
Now it was Galtier’s turn to whisper: “You ask this at the wedding of your eldest daughter to an American doctor? How many American doctors would have come to the farm a-courting without the war? Not more than six or eight, I am certain.”
Marie stuck an elbow in his ribs. “And I am certain you are as much trouble as Georges, which is saying a good deal. I am also certain Dr. O’Doull is a fine young man, even if he is an American.”
“I am certain of this as well, else I should never have allowed him to join the family,” Galtier said. “And I am certain we have profited since the Americans came, when everything is taken all in all. But in doing so, we have turned our backs on everything that we knew and taken hold of everything that is new. Do you wonder that I worry on account of it?”
“I wonder that you worry so little on account of it,” Marie answered.
“This only shows that, wife of mine as you have been these many years, you do not know every dark place inside my heart,” Lucien told her. “I worry-how I worry! But I have got by…we have got by. And, old or new, we will go on getting by.” Now he spoke with great determination. After a moment, Marie nodded.
Lieutenant General George Custer was in a state, and, for once, his adjutant was damned if he blamed him. “On my front!” Custer shouted. “Roosevelt accepts a cease-fire on my front! Does he accept a cease-fire on any other front? In a pig’s arse he does! Why my front? Why my front alone?”
“He must have reasons,” Major Abner Dowling said, though he’d been hard pressed to find any that made sense to him.
“Oh, he has reasons, all right,” Custer snarled. He had no trouble finding them, either: “He wants to rob me of my glory, that’s what he wants to do. He always has, damn him. He never let me go to Canada, to lead our soldiers there. And now this is the front where we first broke through the Rebels’ lines. This is the front where the U.S. Army learned how to break through the Rebels’ lines. And this is the front Teddy Roosevelt chose to halt. Do I have to draw you a picture, Major?”
“Sir, you can’t mean that,” Dowling said.
He might as well not have spoken, for Custer ranted right through him: “That man in the White House has tried to rob me of the credit I deserve for the past thirty-five years. I was the one in command when we drove Chinese Gordon out of Montana during the Second Mexican War, but who stole the headlines? Roosevelt and his Unauthorized Regiment, that’s who. Tell me to my face, Major, that he’s not doing the same thing now. Look at the map and tell me that to my face!”
Dowling obediently looked. The longer he looked, the more he wondered whether the general commanding First Army didn’t have a point. If Roosevelt hadn’t accepted the cease-fire, how far would U.S. forces have advanced by now?
Custer, inevitably, had his own opinion about that: “Murfreesboro? To hell with Murfreesboro! We’d be pushing on toward Chattanooga by now, damn me to hell if we wouldn’t.” Fortunately for him, Dowling couldn’t do anything of the sort. Chattanooga was a long way away.
“I doubt that, General.” The voice came from the doorway. Dowling turned. His mouth fell open. There, grinning, stood Theodore Roosevelt. How much of Custer’s tirade had he heard? By the look of that grin, altogether too much. Dowling kissed his own career good-bye.
And Custer wasn’t finished. Custer wasn’t anywhere close to finished. “How dare you inflict this indignity on First Army, Mr. President? How dare you?” he demanded. “Whatever you may think of me, the brave soldiers who have given so much to the cause deserve to be in at the kill.”
Many of those soldiers would have agreed with him, too, though being in at the kill might have meant their dying. Dowling knew as much; complaints from the front kept flooding into Nashville.
Roosevelt said, “Either the Confederates will yield on all fronts in a week’s time, General, or you will be moving forward again. That I promise you. Maybe you will be able to aim toward Chattanooga after all.”
“Why the devil did you halt me in the first place?” Custer said, anything but mollified. “Even more to the point, why did you halt me and no one else? You do not serve your country well by bearing a grudge across so many years.”
If that wasn’t the pot complaining of the kettle’s complexion, Dowling had never heard any such. But Roosevelt didn’t rise to the bait. Instead, walking over to the map on the wall, he pointed to the ground First Army had seized south of the Cumberland. “I stopped First Army, General, because you have done something no other U.S. force has accomplished.”
“You halted us because we did better than any other force you have?” Custer howled. “You admit it?”
“That’s not what I said, General,” Roosevelt answered sharply. “Your unique achievement is easy to describe: in moving south of the Cumberland, yours is the only force to have captured territory I am willing to return to the Confederate States in exchange for concessions elsewhere. We go from the realm of war into the realm of diplomacy here-do you see?”
“Ahh.” That wasn’t Custer; it was Abner Dowling. He wasn’t sure he agreed with what Roosevelt was doing (not that the president would lose any sleep if he didn’t), but he was profoundly relieved Roosevelt was doing it for some other reason besides (or at least in addition to) pique against Custer.
Custer himself did not give over sputtering and fuming. “Why on earth should we give any land we’ve taken back to the Rebs? When I was a lad, this was all part of the United States, and so it should be again.”
“In principle, General, I agree with you,” Roosevelt answered. “In practice, the line we occupy-and what we can reasonably hope to take-will not give us a neat, defensible frontier everywhere along it. We’ll do some horse trading at the table, and this stretch south of the Cumberland I can trade without a second thought.”
“You won’t have to do much trading, sir,” Dowling said. “We hold the whip.”
“That’s true, Major, but I can’t wipe the Confederate States from the face of the earth, however much I might want to,” the president answered. “Kaiser Bill can’t make France go away, either. If we weaken them, though, and make them pay, they won’t trouble us for a long while.”
“Then, by thunder, when we do fight them again, we’ll put paid to them once and for all,” Custer said. He rubbed his age-gnarled hands together. “Damned if I don’t look forward to reuniting the country at last.”
He sounded as if he looked forward to commanding U.S. soldiers in the next war against the CSA. If, as Roosevelt hoped, the Confederates would have to lie quiet for a long time, the wait would put him up into his nineties-or beyond. Maybe he didn’t think about that. Maybe he thought about it and didn’t care: having gone on for so long, he might believe he could go on forever.
Major Dowling asked, “Mr. President, for what land might you want to swap what we’ve taken south of the Cumberland?”