American Empire : The Center Cannot Hold Read online

  “That’s pretty good,” Sam said. “He taught you, too, eh?”

  “Yeah, me and my brothers and my sister. German was easy, of course, because we already used Yiddish around the house, and they’re pretty close. But he made us learn French, too.”

  “So what does he do in New York City?” Sam asked. “How come you aren’t too rich to think about joining the Navy?”

  “How come?” Hirskowitz snorted. “I’ll tell you how come, sir. Pop had a storing and hauling business. But he liked horses better than trucks, and so that went under. He’s smart, but he’s a stubborn bastard, my old man is. And since his business went under, he hasn’t done much of anything. He sponges off the rest of my relatives, that’s all. You listen to him talk, he’s too smart to work.”

  “Oh. One of those.” Carsten nodded; he’d met the type. “Too bad. Any which way, though, I expect I’ll stick with you when we get shore leave. Always handy to have somebody along who knows the lingo.”

  “Sir, you’re an officer, remember? You got to find one of your own who speaks French. You can’t go drinking with a no-account gunner’s mate.”

  Sam cursed under his breath. Hirskowitz was right, no doubt about it. The trouble was, Carsten didn’t like drinking with officers. That was the bad news about being a mustang. He’d spent close to twenty years as an able seaman and petty officer himself. His rank had changed, but his taste in companions hadn’t. Officers still struck him as a snooty lot. But he would hear about it, and in great detail, if he fraternized—that was the word they’d use—with men of lower rank.

  Up to the wharf came the O’Brien. The skipper handled that himself, disdaining the help of the tugboats hovering in the harbor. If he made a hash of it, he’d have nobody but himself to blame. But he didn’t. With all the Frenchmen watching—and, no doubt, with some Germans keeping an eye on the destroyer, too—he came alongside as smoothly as if parking a car.

  A French naval officer whose uniform, save for his kepi, didn’t look a whole lot different from American styles, came aboard the O’Brien. “Welcome to la belle France,” he said in accented English. “We have been allies before, your country and mine. We are not enemies now. It could be, one day, we shall ally again.”

  He didn’t say against whom he had in mind. He didn’t say—and he didn’t need to say. The O’Brien’s executive officer said something in French. Sam didn’t want to go drinking with the exec. The Frenchman saluted. The executive officer returned the salute. He said, “We come to France on a peaceful visit, and hope that peace will last forever.”

  With a very Gallic shrug, the French officer replied, “What lasts forever? Nothing in this world, monsieur. I need to say one thing to you, a word of—comment dit-on?—a word of warning, yes. Your men are welcome to go ashore, but they should use a certain . . . a certain caution, oui?”

  Since the Frenchman plainly wanted the O’Brien’s crew to hear that, the exec carried on in English: “What sort of caution, sir?”

  “Political caution,” the local said. “The Action Française has no small power here in Brest. You know the Action Française?”

  “Mais un petit peu,” the executive officer said, and then, “Only a little.”

  “Even a little is too much,” the Frenchman told him. “They are royalist, they are Catholic—very, very Catholic, in a political way—and (forgive me) they oppose those who were the allies of the United States during the . . . the unpleasantness not so long past.”

  They hate the Germans’ guts, Carsten thought. That’s what he means, but he’s too polite to say so. The O’Brien’s executive officer nodded and said, “Thanks for the warning. We will be careful.”

  “I have done my duty,” the French officer answered. I wash my hands of the lot of you, he might have said. With another salute, he went back over the gangplank, up onto the pier, and into Brest.

  Carsten wondered if the skipper would keep his crew aboard the ship after a greeting like that, but he didn’t. He did warn the men who got liberty to stick together and not to cause trouble. Sam hoped they would listen, but sailors in port weren’t always inclined to.

  He went ashore himself, as much from simple curiosity as from any great desire to paint the town red. Brest wasn’t the sort of place to which tourists thronged. It was, first and foremost, a navy town. That didn’t faze Sam. The steep, slippery streets were another matter. Brest sat on a ridge above the Penfeld River, and seemed more suited to mountain goats than to men.

  Mountain goats, though, didn’t go into bars. Carsten did, the first chance he got. “Whiskey,” he told the bartender, figuring that word didn’t change much from one language to another.

  But the fellow surprised him by speaking English: “The apple brandy is better.” Seeing Sam’s look of surprise, he explained, “Many times during the Great War—and since—sailors from Angleterre come here.”

  “All right. Thanks. I’ll try the stuff.” When Sam did, he found he liked it—Calvados was the name on the bottle. He drank some more. Warmth spread through him. A navy town had to have friendly women somewhere not too far from the sea. After I drink some more, I’ll find out about that, he thought.

  Before he could, though, three or four French officers came in. One of them noticed his unfamiliar uniform. “You are—American?” he asked in halting English. “You are from the contre-torpilleur new in the harbor?”

  “Yes, from the destroyer,” Sam agreed.

  “And what think you of Brest?” the fellow asked.

  “Nice town,” Carsten said; his mother had raised him to be polite. “And this Calvados stuff—this is the cat’s meow.” The Frenchman looked puzzled. Sam simplified: “It’s good. I like it.”

  “Ah. ‘The cat’s meow.’ ” The French officer—a tough-looking fellow in his forties, a few years older than Sam—filed away the phrase. “Would it please you, monsieur, to see more of Brest?”

  “Thank you, friend. I wouldn’t mind that at all,” Sam answered, thinking, among other things, that an officer ought to know where the officers’ brothels were, and which of them had the liveliest girls. But the Frenchman—his name turned out to be Henri Dimier—took him to the maritime museum housed in a chateau down by the harbor, and then to the cathedral of St. Louis closer to the center of town. Maybe he was an innocent, maybe he thought Sam was, or maybe he was subtly trying to annoy him. If so, he failed; Carsten found both buildings interesting, even if neither was exactly what he’d had in mind.

  When they came out of the cathedral, a whole company of blue-uniformed policemen rushed up the street past them. “What’s going on there?” Sam asked.

  “I think it is the Action Française,” Dimier answered, his face hard and grim. “They are to have a—how do you say?—a meeting in the Place de la Liberté. It is not far. Would you care to see?”

  “Well . . . all right.” It wasn’t what Sam had had in mind. It wouldn’t be much fun. But it might be useful, and that counted, too. I suppose that counts, too, he thought mournfully.

  The Place de la Liberté wasn’t far from the cathedral: only two or three blocks. Even before Carsten and Henri Dimier got there, the sound of singing filled the air. A forest of flags sprouted inside the park. Some were the familiar French tricolor, others covered with fleurs-de-lys. Pointing, Sam asked, “What are those?”

  “That is the old flag, the royal flag, of France,” Dimier replied. “They want to, ah, return to his throne the king.”

  “Oh.” Carsten wasn’t sure what to make of that. The mere idea struck him as pretty strange. He tried another question: “What are they singing?”

  “I translate for you.” The French officer cocked his head to one side, listening. “Here. Like this:

  “The German who has taken all,

  Who has robbed Paris of all she owns,

  Now says to France:

  ’You belong to us alone:

  Obey! Down on your knees, all of you!’

  “And here is the—the refrain—is tha
t the word?

  “No, no, France is astir,

  Her eyes flash fire,

  No, no,

  Enough of treason now.

  “Would you hear more, monsieur?”

  “Uh—yeah. If you don’t mind.” I do need to know this. We all need to know it.

  Dimier picked up the song again:

  “Insolent German, hold your tongue,

  Behold our king approaches,

  And our race

  Runs ahead of him.

  Back to where you belong, German,

  Our king will lead us!”

  And the refrain:

  “One, two, France is astir,

  Her eyes flash fire,

  One, two,

  The French are at home.”

  And once more:

  “Tomorrow, on our graves,

  The wheat will be more beautiful,

  Let us close our ranks!

  This summer we shall have

  Wine from the grapevines

  With royalty.

  “Do you understand, being an American, what all this means?”

  “I doubt it,” Sam answered. “Do you?”

  Before Henri Dimier could answer, the men of the Action Française charged the police who were trying to hold them in the square. For a moment, clubs flailing, the police did hold. But then the ralliers—the rioters, now—broke through. With shouts of triumph, they swarmed into the streets of Brest. Sam had a devil of a time getting back to the O’Brien. After that, though, he understood, or thought he understood, a good deal that he hadn’t before.

  * * *

  Clarence Potter was a meticulous man. If he hadn’t been, he couldn’t very well have had a successful career in intelligence work during the war. That habit of precision was one reason why he had no use for the Freedom Party. To his way of thinking, Jake Featherston and his followers only wanted to smash things up, with no idea what would replace them.

  He stood in Marion Square in Charleston, listening to a Freedom Party Congressional candidate. The fellow’s name was Ezra Hutchinson. He was a rotund man who put Potter in mind of a hand grenade in a white summer suit. He exploded like a hand grenade, too. Unlike a hand grenade, though, he kept doing it over and over.

  “Now hear me, friends!” he thundered, pumping a fist in the air atop the portable platform on which he stood. “Hear me! We’ve turned the other cheek to the USA for too long! It’s high time we took our place in the sun again our own selves. We’re a great country. We ought to start acting like it, by God!”

  Some of the people in the little crowd in front of the platform clapped their hands. Ezra Hutchinson didn’t stand up there alone. A dozen Freedom Party hardnoses in white shirts and butternut trousers backed him. They all applauded like machines. Whenever he paused a little longer than usual, they barked out, “Freedom!” in sharp unison.

  “Freedom!” echoed several voices from the crowd.

  “We’re a great country!” Hutchinson repeated. “But who remembers that, here in the CSA? The Radical Liberals? Hell, no—they’d rather be Yankees. The Whigs? Oh, they say they do, but they’d rather suck up to the Yankees. I tell you the truth, friends: the only party that remembers when the Confederate States had men in them is the Freedom Party.”

  That gave Clarence Potter the opening he’d been waiting for. He shouted, “The only party that shoots presidents is the Freedom Party!”

  People stirred and muttered. Wade Hampton V was only a couple of years dead, but a lot of folks didn’t seem to want to remember how he’d died. The Freedom Party sure as hell didn’t want people to remember how he’d died. It was doing its best to act respectable. As far as Potter was concerned, its best could never be good enough.

  Some of the goons on the platform turned their heads his way. More goons were sprinkled through the crowd, some in the Party’s near-uniform, others wearing their ordinary clothes. But Ezra Hutchinson only smiled. “Where were you during the war, pal?” he asked; Freedom Party men often believed they were the only ones who’d done any fighting.

  “I was in the Army of Northern Virginia,” Potter answered, loudly and distinctly. “Where were you, you fat tub of goo?”

  Hutchinson’s smile disappeared. He’d been a railroad scheduler during the Great War, and never come within a hundred miles of a fighting front. But then he stuck out his chins and tried to make the best of it: “I served my country! Nobody can say I didn’t serve my country.”

  He waited for Potter to make some other gibe so he could give a sharper comeback. But Potter said nothing more. He just let the candidate’s words hang in the air. When Hutchinson did try to go back to his speech, he seemed flat, uninspired.

  Several Freedom Party men started working their way back through the crowd toward Potter. He was there by himself. He carried a pistol—he always carried a pistol—but he didn’t want to use it unless he had to. He slipped away and around the corner before any of the goons got a good look at him. He’d done what he’d set out to do.

  But, in a way, the Freedom Party men had done what they’d set out to do, too: they’d made him retreat. And they would make it hard for other candidates to speak; they weren’t shy about attacking their rivals’ gatherings. Jake Featherston, damn him, had turned Confederate politics into war.

  Who knows where Featherston would be now if that Grady Calkins hadn’t gone and shot President Hampton? Potter thought. But snipers were part of war, too: a part that had upped and bit the Freedom Party.

  Potter discovered the real problem at a Whig meeting a few days later. Everything there was stable, orderly, democratic. Speaker yielded politely to speaker. No one raised his voice. No one got excited. And, Potter was convinced, no one could possibly have hoped to influence the voters or make them give a damn about keeping the Whigs in power in Richmond.

  He threw his hand in the air and was, in due course, recognized. “I have a simple question for you, Mr. Chairman,” he said. “Where are our hooligans, to break up Freedom Party rallies the way Featherston’s bastards work so hard to break up ours?”

  People started buzzing. You didn’t often hear such questions at a gathering like this. The chairman’s gavel came down, once, twice, three times. Robert E. Washburn was a veteran of the Second Mexican War. He wore a big, bushy white mustache, and both looked and acted as if the nineteenth century had yet to give way to the twentieth. “You are out of order, Mr. Potter,” he said now. “I regret to state that I have had to point this out to you at previous gatherings as well.”

  Heads bobbed up and down in polite agreement with Washburn’s ruling. Too many of those heads were gray or balding. The Whigs had dominated Confederate politics for a long time, as the Democrats had in the USA. The Democrats had got themselves a rude awakening. Potter feared the Freedom Party would give the CSA a worse shock than the Socialists had given the United States.

  He said, “I am not out of order, Mr. Chairman, and it’s a legitimate question. When the damnyankees started using gas during the war, we had to do the same, or else leave the advantage with them. If we don’t fight Featherston’s fire with fire, what becomes of us now?”

  Down came the gavel again. “You are out of order, Mr. Potter,” Washburn repeated. “Your zeal for the cause has outrun your respect for the institutions of the Confederate States of America.”

  He seemed to think that was plenty to quell Potter, if not to make him hang his head in shame. But Clarence Potter remained unquelled. “Featherston’s got no respect for our institutions,” he pointed out. “If we keep too much, we’re liable not to have any institutions left to respect after a while.”

  Now heads went back and forth. People didn’t agree with him. He’d run into that before. It drove him wild. He’d seen a plain truth, and he couldn’t get anyone else to see it. Jake Featherston had come much too close to smashing his way to a victory in 1921, and he would be even more dangerous now if that Calkins maniac hadn’t shown up the Freedom Party for what it was. Potter felt li
ke knocking these placidly disagreeing heads together. That brought him up short. I’m not so different from Featherston after all, am I?

  Robert E. Washburn said, “We rely upon the power of the police to protect us against any further, uh, unfortunate outbursts.”

  That was an answer of sorts, but only of sorts. “And how many coppers start yelling, ‘Freedom!’ the minute they take off their gray suits?” Potter asked. “How well do you think they’ll do their job?”

  He did make the buzz in the room change tone. A great many policemen favored the Freedom Party. That was too notorious a truth to need retelling. It had caused problems in 1921 and again in 1923, though the Freedom Party men had been on their best behavior then. How could anybody think it wouldn’t cause problems in the upcoming Congressional election?

  The local chairman was evidently of that opinion. “Thank you for expressing your views with your usual vigor, Mr. Potter,” Washburn said. “If we may now proceed to further items of business. . . ?”

  And that was that. They didn’t want to listen to him. And what the Whigs didn’t want to do, they didn’t have to do. More than sixty years of Confederate independence had taught them as much, and confirmed the lesson again and again. What would teach them otherwise? he wondered. The answer to that seemed obvious enough: losing to the Freedom Party.