“Haven’t seen any sign of that, sir, have to tell you,” Martin said. “They don’t seem much different than white troops, far as that goes. They throw a lot of lead around, and every so often somebody gets hit. The bullet doesn’t care who shot it, only where it’s going.”
“Chance I take,” the engineer repeated, and worked his way down the trench line, not making a fuss, just doing his job. No cries of alarm rose, nor shouts for stretcher-bearers, so Martin supposed he got away with it.
Dusk fell. Martin rolled himself in a blanket, against the chill and against mosquitoes both. He fell asleep right away. He almost always fell asleep right away. He woke up every bit as fast, too, commonly grabbing for a weapon.
Sometime in the middle of the night, a horrible clatter and rumble had him on his feet with his Springfield halfway to his shoulder before he realized that, whatever else it was, it wasn’t gunfire. It wasn’t C.S. bombing aeroplanes overhead, either. “What the hell?” he said. “What the hell?”
“It’s the barrels coming up, Sarge,” David Hamburger said in the darkness. “Remembrance Day today.”
“That’s right,” Martin breathed. “Remembrance Day today.”
In Philadelphia, Flora Hamburger discovered she’d had only the vaguest notion of what Remembrance Day meant. Up till then, she’d lived her whole life in New York City. Her home town observed Remembrance Day, of course. How could it be otherwise? April 22, the day marking the end of the Second Mexican War, had been a national day of mourning ever since. But New York City did not observe Remembrance Day the way the rest of the United States did.
Oh, there were always military parades and speeches, the same as there were elsewhere in the country. But there were also always Socialist counter-demonstrations and hecklers in New York City; Flora had been caught up in the Remembrance Day riots of 1915. The Socialist Party was not about to let Remembrance Day steal its May Day thunder.
In Philadelphia, though, the Socialist Party maintained a much smaller presence. Philadelphia was a city of government, and therefore, overwhelmingly, a city of Democrats. It was also, far more than New York, a city of soldiers.
No one mocked here. No one heckled here. People crowded along the parade route to cheer the soldiers and the Soldiers’ Circle men of prewar conscription classes-not so many of them left, not with the guns so hungry these past nearly three years-and the graying veterans of the Second Mexican War and the aged veterans of the War of Secession and even, riding along in a motorcar, a pair of ancient veterans of the Mexican War, the last war against a foreign power the United States had won.
Church bells pealed. Flora knew the churches were packed, too, packed with people lamenting past U.S. defeats and praying for future victory. Someone in the crowd on the far side of Chestnut Street from the platform where Flora sat with the rest of Congress and other government dignitaries held up a placard that seemed to sum up the mood as well as anything: IT ’ S OUR TURN THIS TIME.
Aeroplanes buzzed overhead-U. S. fighting scouts, flying in swarms to make sure the CSA did not interrupt the day’s observances. Flora craned her neck to watch them. They put her in mind of dragonflies, and were far more interesting than the endless parade of soldiers and marching bands and veterans.
As he had a way of doing at functions, Hosea Blackford sat close to her. Seeing her looking up into the sky, he said, “It was even more interesting a couple of years ago, when the Confederates stood on the Susquehanna. Then there were dogfights above the parade, and the C.S. bombers dropped their toys not far from the parade route.”
“It was more interesting in New York City, too,” Flora said. “I was there for the riots that year.”
Blackford frowned. “I wish they had never happened. They did the Party a great deal of damage around the country, damage from which it has not entirely recovered even now.”
Flora said, “Nobody knows to this day who threw the bomb that started the riot, whether it was a Socialist or a Mormon who sympathized with the rebellion in Utah.”
“That’s true,” the congressman from Dakota said. “But it’s also true that Socialists did most of the rioting, no matter how the trouble started.”
“What if it is?” Flora said. “What if it is? We were trying to do something to stop this useless, senseless war. It’s more than anyone else in the country was doing. It’s more than anyone else in the Socialist Party was doing, too,” she added pointedly.
“How could anyone stop the war by then?” Hosea Blackford said. “We were fighting the Confederate States from the Gulf of California to the Atlantic, against Canada heavily from Winnipeg east and here and there farther west, too, and against England and France and Japan on the high seas. It was too big to stop. It still is.”
“It should never have started,” Flora said. “A Hapsburg prince wasn’t reason enough to throw the world on the fire.”
“Maybe you’re even right,” Blackford said. “But when Roosevelt called on us to vote for war credits, what would have happened if we had said no? I would not be in Congress now, you would not be in Congress now, none of us would be in Congress now.”
“My brother would not be in Virginia now,” Flora said. “My sister would not be a widow now. My nephew would not be growing up without ever having the chance to know his father now. If you think I would not go back to New York and make that bargain, Mr. Blackford, you are mistaken.”
“You shame me,” he said quietly.
“I think the Party needs shaming,” Flora answered. “I think the Party-especially outside of New York City-has become too bourgeois for its own good, and forgotten the oppressed workers and peasants of the world. If the Socialist Party in the USA goes to war against the Labour Party in England and the Socialist Party in France, where is the international solidarity of Socialism? I’ll tell you where-down in the trenches with a rifle, that’s where.”
Blackford did not reply. Instead, he made a small production out of lighting a cigar. Before he had to say anything more, a rumbling, clanking rattle and ecstatic shouts from the crowd farther up the parade route made Flora forget about the conversation, at least for a little while. Like everyone else, she was staring at the enormous mechanical contraptions lumbering along Chestnut Street.
President Theodore Roosevelt’s voice rose above the racket from the snorting monsters. “Bully!” Roosevelt shouted, as enthusiastic as a small boy over a tin motorcar. “By George, what a bully pack of machines they are!”
They were impressive, if size and noise were the criteria for impressiveness. Each had a cannon at the snout and bristled with machine guns. They were the deadliest-looking things Flora had ever seen. The fighting scouts in the sky were killing machines, too, but graceful and elegant killing machines. The barrels were as graceful and elegant as so many rhinoceri.
Each of them had in it a man standing up so that the top half of his body was outside the square cupola in the middle of the machine’s roof. Each of those soldiers saluted the platform, and Roosevelt in particular, as his barrel waddled past.
“Now go into the fight!” Roosevelt shouted to one barrel after another. “Now go into the fight, and teach all those who dare trifle with the might of the United States the error and folly of their ways!”
He was indeed like a boy playing with tin motorcars and lead soldiers and aeroplanes carved from balsa wood. But his toys really burned and bled and crashed-and made other, similar toys with different markings and colors burn and bleed and crash. He seemed not to understand that.
Flora wondered how such a blind spot was possible. She turned to Hosea Blackford with a question that had, on the surface, little to do with their previous argument: “Roosevelt fought in war. How can he take it so lightly?”