Somebody ran shouting down the corridor. The shout held no words, only joy. Sam’s brother-in-law had shouted like that when his wife, Sam’s older sister, was delivered of a boy. “What the hell is going on?” he asked, though he didn’t think anyone would have the answer.
But someone did. When Commander Grady came into the sponson, he looked as exalted as the other sailor had sounded. “Boys, we just got it on the wireless telegraph from Philadelphia,” he said. “England has asked the Kaiser and Teddy Roosevelt for an armistice.”
“It’s over,” Carsten whispered, hardly believing his own words. To help see if they were, if they could have been, true, he repeated them, louder this time: “It’s over.” Nobody called him a liar. Nobody said he was crazy. Little by little, almost in spite of himself, he began to believe.
“Maybe not quite over,” Commander Grady said. “There’s still the Japs, out in the Pacific. But hell, you’re right, Carsten: that scrap is liable to peter out by itself. We’ve shot at each other, but they haven’t taken anything of ours and we haven’t taken anything of theirs. Shouldn’t be too hard to patch up a peace.”
Sam nodded. “Yes, sir. And they won’t have any big reason to fight us any more, either, now that all their allies have thrown in the sponge.”
“That’s right.” Grady nodded, too. “Matter of fact, if I were England and France, I’d worry about Hong Kong and Indochina and maybe Singapore, too. If the Japs want ’em bad enough, they’ll fall into their hands like ripe fruit.” He brought his mind back to the here-and-now. “And, since we have an armistice, you men are dismissed from your posts here.”
“Sir, since we’ve won, are we going to head back to the States?” Hiram Kidde asked.
“I don’t know the answer to that, not yet,” Grady replied. “I hope so, but that’s just me talking, not Admiral Fiske or Philadelphia. Go on up topside, boys. Take a look at the limeys we didn’t have to fight.”
For once, Carsten was glad to go up on deck: the glow of victory, the glow of peace ahead, made him forget about the glow of sunburn. Shading his eyes with a hand, he peered across the Atlantic at the Royal Navy force whose government had finally had to yield. The longer he looked, the gladder he was that the wireless telegraph had brought word when it had. The enemy force looked large and formidable.
In an odd way, he felt sorry for the Englishmen aboard those warships. They’d been top dogs for a hundred years and then some. Coming back to the pack would hurt them a lot. He wondered who the top dog was now: the United States or Germany? He looked east, toward Europe. Wouldn’t that be an interesting fight?
He shrugged. However interesting it was, he didn’t think it would happen any time soon. Teddy Roosevelt and the Kaiser had just won a war together. They’d take a while to pick up the pieces afterwards. Maybe they’d even stay friends while they were doing it. He hoped so.
One by one, the Royal Navy ships turned away from the U.S.-Chilean-Brazilian flotilla and steamed off toward the northeast, toward Britain. Sam wondered what would happen to them there. Would the limeys get to keep them, or would they have to surrender them to Germany and the USA? That wasn’t for him to decide; the boys in striped trousers would have to sort it out.
A U.S. cruiser with the flotilla launched its aeroplane to shadow the British ships. That must have been allowed under the terms of the armistice, because nobody started shooting.
U.S. aeroplanes could have tracked the British ships at the outbreak of the war, too, but neither they nor their wireless sets could have reached as far as they did now. Sam had had that same thought not long before, when he’d spotted the Dakota ’s aeroplane before it landed by the battleship. Now, reminded of it in a different context, he muttered, “I wish that flying machine could follow those bastards all the way back to London.”
He didn’t notice Commander Grady standing behind him, also watching the Royal Navy force withdraw. “That would be pretty fine, wouldn’t it, Carsten?” the commander of the starboard secondary armament said.
“Huh?” Sam spun around, startled. “Uh, yes, sir.” He made himself think straight. “I expect the day is coming when they’ll be able to do just that. I expect it’s coming sooner than most people think, too.”
Grady studied him. “I expect you’re right. If we don’t do it, some other navy will, and they’ll do it to us.” He rubbed his chin. “Matter of fact, I happen to know we are doing something along those lines. Would you by any chance be interested in becoming part of that?”
“Would I?” Sam said. “Yes, sir! Hell yes, sir! Where do I sign up?”
“You don’t, not yet,” Grady answered. “But you’re a sharp fellow-sharper than you let on sometimes, I think. When we get into port in the United States, you remind me about this. I think the effort could use you.”
“Thank you very much, sir,” Carsten said. Part of that was real gratitude-he’d been talking about doing something like this. Part of it, too, was prudent calculation. Even if the Navy did shrink after the war, they wouldn’t drop him on the beach if he was part of this new project. Having a job he was sure of wasn’t the worst thing in the world-no, not even close.
“Bartlett, Reginald, Confederate States Army, private first class,” Reggie Bartlett said to the paymaster in U.S. green-gray. He rattled off his pay number and the date of his capture.
The paymaster found his name, checked both the pay number and the date of capture against his own records, and lined through them. He gave Reggie a sheaf of green banknotes-bills, the Yankees called them-and some pocket change. “Here is the pay owed you under the Geneva Convention, Private First Class Bartlett,” he said. “Frankly, between you, me, and the wall, you’re damn lucky to get it in greenbacks instead of your own money. These will still be worth something six months from now. God only knows if the Confederate dollar will.”
Reggie grunted. From things he’d heard, the paymaster was likely to be right. He put the money into a pocket of the butternut trousers the U.S. authorities had given him-along with a matching tunic-to wear on the train ride back to Richmond, where all released Confederate prisoners were being shipped. Neither color nor cut was quite that of a C.S. uniform, but both were close.
His shoulder ached when he bent his arm to put the money in his pocket, but not too badly. A Yankee doctor had given him chloroform and then gone in there and drained an abscess that refused to clear up on its own. Now the wound really was healing. For a long time, he’d wondered if it ever would.
He could walk with only a bare trace of a limp, too, and his leg hardly bothered him at all. Put everything together and the damnyankees had treated him pretty well. Of course, they were also the ones who’d shot him. Given a choice, he would sooner not have been shot. Then he wouldn’t have had to worry about how the damnyankees treated him. But who ever gave a soldier a choice?
Here came Rehoboam, on two sticks and an artificial foot. The Negro prisoner made slow but steady progress toward the paymaster. With nothing better to do, Reggie waited till he too got paid off, then asked, “What are you going to do when you get back to Mississippi?”
“I be goddamned if I know,” Rehoboam answered. “Ain’t no use in the cotton fields no more. Ain’t no good on any kind o’ farm no more. Reckon I got to go to town, but I be goddamned if I know what the hell I do there, neither.”
“You have your letters,” Bartlett said. “I’ve seen that. It’s something.”
“It ain’t much,” Rehoboam said with a scornful toss of his head. “Ain’t like I’m gonna put on no necktie and sit behind no desk at the bank and loan the white folks money. Ain’t gonna be no doctor. Ain’t gonna be no lawyer or preacher. Ain’t gonna be no newspaperman, neither. So what the hell good my letters do me?”
“If you didn’t have ’em, how could you read all the lies the Reds tell?” Reggie asked innocently.