“Because he is what he seems, I suppose,” Blackford answered. “Because he really does believe everything he preaches. And, not least, I suppose, because he enjoyed himself and won glory when he went to war.”
“But he’s been in the trenches now,” Flora persisted. “He knows there is no glory in fighting against cannon and machine guns. My brother’s sergeant helped him take cover when the Confederates shelled the part of the line he was visiting-David has written me about it. How can he not see?”
“He sees the country going forward. He doesn’t see the suffering he’s creating to make it go in the direction he wants,” Blackford said slowly. “That’s the best answer I can give you, and I doubt he could give you a better one.”
Flora wondered about that. Roosevelt was a good deal more eloquent than she’d expected him to be. But he was hardly an introspective man, so perhaps Blackford had a point after all.
The clank and rattle and rumble of the barrels faded in the distance. So, more slowly, the noise of the crowd faded, too. A sort of muted thunder remained. Flora had heard it whenever things grew quiet along the parade route. She wondered what it was. It put her in mind of the roar of the sea by the oceanside, but more by its steadiness than by the sound itself.
Up at the front of the platform, President Roosevelt approached a microphone-which was, Flora thought irreverently, like a fat man approaching a chocolate cake, for the president had no more need of the one than the fat fellow did of the other.
“Listen!” Roosevelt called to the crowd. Pointing to the south, he went on, “Do you know what that is?” Flora realized the low reverberations were coming from that direction.
“Tell us!” somebody-probably a paid shill-called from the crowd.
“I will tell you,” Roosevelt said. “That is the sound of our heavy guns, shelling the forces of the Confederate States still on U.S. soil. We are also shelling them on their own territory, and the Canadians and British opposing us in the north. This is a Remembrance Day they shall remember forever, yes, remember with fear and trembling.”
How the people cheered! Listening to them sent a chill through Flora. The war was not popular in her home district, nor anything about it. The war itself was probably unpopular in Philadelphia, too. But victory, and what victory would bring-those were popular. Flora’s district was full of immigrants, newcomers to the United States, who didn’t bear the full weight of a half century’s resentment and hatred and humiliation on their shoulders.
It was different here. The Army of Northern Virginia had occupied Philadelphia at the end of the War of Secession, as it had come so close to doing in this war. The government had fled here in the Second Mexican War and the present struggle. Philadelphians didn’t merely want peace-they wanted revenge, wanted it with a brooding desire frightening in its intensity.
Lost in her own thoughts, she’d missed some of what Roosevelt was saying. “And if we have suffered,” he thundered now, “our foes have suffered more. If they have overrun some of our sacred soil, we stand in arms on more of theirs. If our cities have suffered from their bombing aeroplanes, their cities have suffered more from our mighty bombers. And we advance, my friends. We advance! Everywhere on the continent of North America, the foe is in retreat.
“So I say to you, stand fast! The enemy’s hope is that our resolve will falter. They pray in Richmond, they pray in Canada, that we shall weary of the struggle. They pray that we shall throw in our hand, our winning hand, and give them at the table what they cannot win on the field of battle. Will we fall into their trap, my fellow citizens of the United States?”
“No!” the crowd cried, a great and angry roar.
Hosea Blackford leaned toward Flora. “Now you see the danger of opposing the war effort too strongly.”
“No, I don’t,” she answered. “I only hear a lot of wind.”
Blackford shook his head. “It’s worse than that. Suppose we do everything we can to end the war… and Teddy Roosevelt goes ahead and wins it anyhow? Who would ever take us seriously again? If Lincoln had somehow won the War of Secession, don’t you think the Republicans would have tarred the Democrats with the brush of peace? Don’t you think Roosevelt would do the same to us-and enjoy every minute of it?”
That was a larger political calculation than Flora had ever tried to make. “Do you really imagine a victory like that is possible?” she asked as the president reached another rhetorical crescendo.
Through the bellowed applause of the crowd, Congressman Blackford gave an answer that chilled her though the day was warm and sunny: “I begin to think it may be.”
Lieutenant Colonel Irving Morrell’s barrel rumbled and clattered south across no-man’s-land toward the Confederate defenses east of White House, Tennessee. It bucked and bounced over the broken ground like a toy boat in a stormy sea, or perhaps more as if Morrell were riding a three-legged horse no one had ever bothered breaking for the saddle.
Now he used hand signals almost as automatically as he breathed. Right, then straight, he ordered the driver, and the ungainly vehicle steered around a shell hole that might have made it bog down.
There just ahead stood the first barbed-wire belt in front of the enemy’s trenches: an obstacle as deadly to infantry as flypaper to flies. Straight, Morrell signaled, and the barrel crushed the barbed wire under better than thirty tons of metal.
With a noise like heavy hail on a tin roof, machine-gun bullets started slapping the armored front of the barrel. Some of them ricocheted off the cupola, too. None, fortunately, hit the armored vision louvers. Even with those louvers closed down tight, lead splash was dangerous.
There, straight ahead, was the reinforced-concrete box from which the machine gun was spitting death. Halt, Morrell signaled to the driver, and the barrel stopped. “Take it out!” Morrell screamed to the two artillerymen at the nose cannon. He didn’t know whether they heard him or not. What he wanted, though, was plain enough.
The cannon bellowed. Inside the barrel, the report was hard to hear over the noise of the two White truck engines. The cordite fumes from the explosion made Morrell cough. But, peering through the vision slits, he watched the machine-gun position crumble to rubble. Straight, he signaled to the driver, and the barrel crushed another belt of wire.
By hook or by crook, General Custer had managed to assemble a striking column of more than three hundred barrels. Every one of them-every one of them that hadn’t broken down or bogged down before it got this far-was chewing a path through the wire for the infantry that was following.
Another, last, belt of wire surmounted, ground down into the mud, and nothing more stood between the barrel and the foremost Confederate trench. Here and there, a few brave men who had withstood the short, fierce preliminary bombardment and who were not overwhelmed by fear of the oncoming barrels popped their heads above the parapet and blazed away with their Tredegars.
Morrell needed to give no orders there. The two machine guns on either side of the barrel started chattering. They could not bear straight ahead, but the nose cannon could. And other barrels were advancing side by side with Morrell’s; their machine guns helped sweep out the space in front of his traveling fortress, just as his swept the space in front of them.
As he bore down on the Confederate soldiers, some of them broke and fled. Bullets sent most of those spinning and writhing to the ground. The rest fought on in place till they too were slain.
Over the parapet climbed the barrel. The machine gunners inside pounded enfilading fire up and down the trench, as far as each traverse. The advance had given them a target of which men of their trade could normally but dream.
Then the barrel was over the trench, almost falling into it, crushing the ground underneath the tracks, helping to level its own way down and forward. Shells had damaged the far wall of the trench. Engines screaming, the barrel climbed over onto the ground between the first trench and the second.