Over supper, she told Blackford of the idea she’d got from Dr. Hanrahan. His eyes glowed. “I think we can pass that,” he said. “The Democrats won’t want people-people like us, for instance-to say they don’t care about cripples.”
“No, especially when their war made so many cripples.” Flora scowled. “And speaking against it is useless. Everyone says, ‘But we won!’ You warned me it would be that way. I didn’t believe it, but you were right.”
“I wish I’d been wrong, but that’s the way the world works.” Blackford beckoned to the waiter. “Let me have the bill, please.”
He drove them back to the apartment building where they both lived. It was natural for them to go upstairs together when their flats were across the hall from each other. “Thank you for a very nice evening,” Flora said in the hallway.
“Thank you for your excellent ideas-and for your excellent company.” Hosea Blackford tipped his hat, then leaned forward and kissed Flora on the mouth. He drew back before she even thought of yanking out a hatpin. Instead of trying to get into her apartment, he went into his own. “Good night,” he said, and shut the door.
“Good night,” Flora said, slower than she should have. She went into her own apartment, locking the door behind her. Then she sat down on the front-room sofa. Her thoughts whirled. She’d been glad of the kiss. Blackford was twice her age, and a gentile to boot. But she’d been glad of the kiss. She was too honest with herself to deny it. And she was far too surprised and confused to have any idea what it meant. She wished her family’s apartment had a telephone, but it didn’t. All she could do was go to bed and think and think and think.
After rumbling through Tennessee inside a barrel, Colonel Irving Morrell found Philadelphia mild and dry by comparison. To anyone coming from anywhere else, the de facto capital of the United States would have been its usual hot, muggy summer self. For once, Morrell was not sorry to return to the General Staff. With the shooting over, the action, such as it was, would be here.
He sat in a little room with a littler window and an overhead fan doing a desultory job of stirring the air. “Good to see you again, Colonel,” General Leonard Wood said. “You being one of our leading experts on barrels, we want your ideas on how thoroughly to restrict the CSA in building and deploying them.”
“Sir, my view on that is very simple,” Morrell said. “I think we ought to forbid them to have anything to do with barrels, on pain of war. The more of them they have, the more they do with them, the more trouble they’ll cause us. Those machines knock everything we thought we knew about defense in war into a cocked hat.”
The chief of the U.S. General Staff frowned. “That won’t be easy. They have a sizable motorcar industry. A plant that manufactures motorcars won’t have any great trouble turning out barrels, too.”
“Yes, sir, I understand that,” Morrell said. “If I had my way, though, I’d put that in the treaty: no barrels. I expect they’ll cheat, or try to cheat. As soon as we catch them at it, I’d take a new bite out of Arkansas or Texas or Tennessee-and make them cough up the barrels, too. Do that once and they aren’t so likely to take a chance on our doing it twice.”
Brigadier General Mason Patrick, who wore a pilot’s wings on his left breast pocket, said, “I told you the same thing in regard to aeroplanes, didn’t I, General Wood?” He nodded to Morrell. “Good to see there’s someone else with his head on his shoulders. We just licked these bastards. I want to kick ’em while they’re down. If they build up to where they can take another whack at us in ten or fifteen years, we’ve wasted a lot of lives since 1914.”
Leonard Wood sighed. “The other side of the coin is, if they sit tight for ten or fifteen years and then start building barrels and aeroplanes and submersibles and all the other tools of war we don’t want them to have, will we have the will to go in and set a foot on their necks, or will we say, ‘Look how much trouble we had beating them the last time. They’ve only got a few of these little toys, so why should we worry about them?’ That’s what makes me wake up sweating of nights.”
“Philadelphia is what makes me wake up sweating of nights,” said General Patrick, who had just come down from Canada.
Morrell stared at Wood in a kind of horror he’d never known on the battlefield. “Sir, as long as Teddy Roosevelt is president-”
“That gives us till March 4, 1921,” Wood broke in. “March 4, 1925, if he decides he wants a third term, and if the people remember to be grateful. After TR isn’t president any more…what then? We spent a generation twiddling our thumbs after the War of Secession. We could do it again.”
“All the more reason to punish the Rebels now, sir,” Morrell said. “The farther they have to climb, the harder it’ll be for them.”
“Bully!” Brigadier General Patrick clapped his hands together. “General Wood, this pup said it better than I could.”
“He’s a bright lad,” Wood said, and Morrell felt as if he’d been given the accolade. But the chief of the General Staff went on, “The harder we hold the Confederates down, the more we make them hate us and want to get their own back.”
“I honestly don’t see the problem, sir,” Morrell said. “They already hate us, the same way we hated them before the war. Somebody licks you, of course you hate him. What we have to do is make sure they can’t hurt us no matter how much they hate us.”
General Wood sighed again. “I’ve been in touch with General Ludendorff in Berlin. If it makes you gentlemen feel any better, our friends the Germans are having these same sorts of arguments about how rough they should be on France.”
“The CSA will have an easier time cheating than France will, though,” Morrell said.
“How’s that?” Wood said. “I don’t follow.”
“France isn’t even as big as Texas,” Morrell said.
“It is now,” General Patrick said. “We carved a good chunk off Texas when we made the state of Houston.”
“How much will Germany carve off France?” Morrell gave the man he thought was his ally an annoyed look: this was not the time for nitpicking precision. Having got the glare out of his system, he resumed: “Be that as it may, the Confederate States are a lot larger than France even after they’ve lost Houston and Sequoyah and Kentucky. They have more room to hide armaments than the frogs do.”
“And they could go down into the Empire of Mexico, too,” Mason Patrick said. “The only way we’d hear about anything down there is by luck. Hell, half the time the damn greasers don’t know what’s going on inside their own country, so how are we supposed to?”
“We have more ways than you’d think, as a matter of fact,” General Wood said. “But never mind that; I take the point. So you gentlemen agree we should squeeze the Rebels till their eyes pop, do you?”
“Yes, sir,” Morrell and Brigadier General Patrick said in the same breath.
“Well, I’m hearing that from the Navy Department, too, I will admit,” Wood said. “They want to go and bombard Charleston and Habana and New Orleans if the Rebels ever even think of building submersibles again.”
“That sounds good to me,” Morrell said.
Wood looked grim. “As a matter of fact, it sounds good to me, too. We had a destroyer, the Ericsson, torpedoed the night after the CSA quit the war. The Royal Navy swears up and down that they had no boats anywhere near her. If I had to guess, I’d say a Rebel skipper thought he could get away with one-but I can’t prove it, mind, and the Confederates deny everything.”
“I hadn’t heard that before, sir,” Morrell said slowly.
“We’re keeping it under wraps,” the chief of the General Staff said. “Don’t see what else to do. Can’t prove it, as I say.”
“Filthy piece of business.” Morrell realized his right hand had folded into a fist. He made it open. “They ever catch that Reb-if it was a Reb-they ought to hang him.”