“As am I. Are you confined to the bed?”
“No. I was just resting. I still tire very easily.” She shook her head. “No, that’s not quite right. I’ve spent most of the last several days lying here feeling sorry for myself, which is ridiculous when you consider the true horrors the refugees are enduring.” She raised herself to a sitting position. “Please hand me my robe.”
He turned and found it draped across a chair.
“Please don’t be bashful. I’m going to need your help.”
Patrick took her arm, being careful not to touch her hands, and aided her to a standing position. As she swung her legs out of the bed he caught a glimpse of bare calf and tried not to look startled. When she stood, her nightgown modestly covered her from neck to foot. However, it was a light cotton gown and he sensed she had little on underneath.
“You’re not going to blush, are you?” she asked as he draped the robe over her and eased her hands through the sleeves. Patrick allowed that he hoped he would not. He helped her into the living room, where a surprised Molly and Heinz were waiting.
“I should have done this a few days ago. Molly, why didn’t you make me?” Molly snorted and said she’d tried but Katrina’d been a typical stubborn Dutchie.
Patrick looked at his watch. It was only midmorning. “I’ve got to get to General Smith fairly soon, but I can spend the rest of the day. If you’re willing, I’d like to take you out for a carriage ride and a small picnic. It’d do you some good.”
“I’ll have to be very careful of the sun.”
Molly spoke. “You can wear a bonnet to protect your head and face and I’ll fix something to cover your hands.”
“Fine, but how will I eat?”
Patrick grinned. “If necessary, I’ll feed you. I’ll be back at noon. Lieutenant Schmidt, you are free for the rest of the day.” He paused. “That is, after you’ve found a place for you and me to stay.”
Molly smiled. “Why General, sir, you and the German can sleep in the stable.”
Later, after Patrick and Katrina had departed, Heinz confronted Molly in the kitchen of the house.
“Molly, how can I convince you I am an American, not a German?”
“Heinz Schmidt is not a German name? Perhaps you’re one of those Polacks. Or even a dago.” There was bitterness in her voice, but also a degree of sadness.
“Molly, General Mahan told me your brother was killed by the Germans and that one beat you badly, and I’m sorry, but I want you to realize that I’m here to fight them, not love them. Look, the general and Miss Schuyler left us here while they went on their picnic, and I don’t want to spend the rest of the day with you hating me for something I never did.”
She looked at him, a large young man, light haired and open faced. He looked honest and intelligent. And she wanted to hurt him. Or did she?
“You said the Germans killed my brother? They blew his brains out in cold blood when all he did was try to protest them. He was twenty and the insides of his skull splattered all over me! Beat me? Some pig of a German punched me all over with his great fists, and then stuck his ugly thing inside me and raped me. Then, when he felt like it, he did it all over again!” She sagged from the confession and, to her fury, tears came from her eyes and her body began to convulse with sobs. “And it’s not just me. We see it every day as new refugees come in. The Germans let them pass, but they rob them, beat and kill them if they refuse, and take the women just like they did me. They are pigs!”
As she tried to regain control of herself, she saw the stricken and hurt look on his face, and saw that he too was near tears. “My father,” he said softly, “had two brothers. Now he has one. The oldest, Klaus, was drafted into the German army. It was peacetime and there was no problem. He would serve his three years and come home and resume his life. So would his two younger brothers. But one day Klaus came home in a box. An accident, they said. But we found he’d been beaten to death by a sergeant for not saluting some goddamn Junker properly. They held him down and stomped on his chest with their boots until his ribs were all crushed and he was puking blood.”
Heinz took a deep breath and felt some of the pain his father had felt. “When my father and his brother found that nobody was going to do anything about the murder, even laughed at him, they decided they wanted nothing more to do with the kaiser’s Reich, and that Germany was no longer their home. This is our home now and, if necessary, I will kill Germans to protect it.”
Molly looked at him and managed a small, bitter smile. “Perhaps I already did that for you,” she said and told him about the vengeance she’d extracted from her attacker.
“Good,” he said when she was finished.
“Young Lieutenant, you may be right. Perhaps I cannot go on hating everyone because of what one did. You are the general’s friend and he is Katrina’s friend, and they are both my friends. Therefore, I must figure out how and if I can learn to include you.”
“Molly, let me be your friend,” Heinz urged. “I am your friend whether you realize it or not or want it or not.”
“Really? We shall see whether I have a choice or not. Besides, don’t we have an assignment from their lordships?”
Yes, he thought, and not all day in which to accomplish it. If he and the general were to remain in the area, they had to find a place to stay. With an overflowing refugee camp only a few miles away, that could be a monumental problem. “You said there was a stable?”
Alone in his White House office, Theodore Roosevelt glared at the document he gripped in his hand. The handwriting was his own, but the words and the topic were so strange, so alien, as to be almost inconceivable. But they had to be conceivable now, didn’t they? He could not deny the dark reality of the invasion and the upheavals throughout the nation that resulted from it. He took his pen and began to read again, poised to make corrections and additions to the message that would be telegraphed throughout America the next day.
My Dear Americans,
Today, Wednesday, July 4, 1901, is the 125th anniversary of the founding of the United States of America, and a day in which the whole country should be uniting in festive celebration of a century and a quarter of freedom and prosperity.
Yet we look about and find it is not to be. For the first time since the War of 1812, a foreign army has imposed itself on our soil, and American soldiers are dying in valiant efforts to hurl them away.
We did not wish this war. We did nothing to deserve it or encourage it. Yet we have been invaded by a tyrannical European power that wants our wealth, our dignity, our future, and our freedom. We will not surrender to them! As I write this, our armies and our navy are gathering to expel them. It will be a most difficult task. Germany is a great military power. We must, therefore, be greater, stronger, smarter.
Germany has demanded that we negotiate a surrender. We shall indeed do that, but the surrender we negotiate will be the kaiser’s, not ours. We will not rest until every German soldier has been purged from our land, our cities have been retaken, our homes have been rebuilt and reoccupied, and the diabolical kaiser has been punished for his grievously evil deeds.
It will take time to do this and we may have to pay a terrible price. The cost will include the lives of many young men who will be called upon to make the greatest sacrifice possible in the cause of their country. We honor them! We will make those sacrifices and proudly mourn our fallen and condemn the invader with our anger.
A word. Please, dear friends, let our anger be righteous and focused only at the German invader. But let us not forget that we are all immigrants, or descendants of immigrants. Either we or our forefathers all came to this fair land from elsewhere in order to be free. This includes people from Germany or of German ancestry. Many of the Germans who came to America did so to be free of that same malevolent kaiser whose marauding hordes have appeared on our shore. The Germans who came to America have already fought bravely in our wars, including the Civil War and the recent Spanish war. Now those same German Americans are uniting with other Americans whose backgrounds include English, Irish, Italian, Dutch, Swedish, and Spanish against a common enemy. Governors of two states, Wisconsin and Ohio, have informed me of their plan to form a German American legion to fight against the kaiser’s barbarian army. Therefore, I implore you not to take vengeance against the helpless immigrants. I have been saddened by reports of burnings, beatings, insults, and, yes, lynchings inflicted upon helpless and outnumbered people who happen to have recently come from Germany.