“You can almost sense it in the air,” Emil said. “This place is ready to explode.”
It had come close to a riot in the hours after the assassination attempt. Emil declared that Kal stood a chance of making it even though his skull had indeed been fractured by the glancing blow of the bullet. Most of the citizens of the city, though, were convinced that Kal was already dead no matter what Emil or anyone else said. It had almost come to a fight when Andrew personally led a detachment to cut down the broken body of the Roum soldier who had been dragged out of the cathedral and strung up from a tavern sign. It took the intervention of Casmir to still the mob, and the body was taken by a detachment of soldiers to the Roum temple for burial in the catacombs. A guard was now on that temple, and orders passed that any Roum citizens in the city were to remain inside for the time being.
The only good thing to come out of it all was the cancellation of the meeting with the Committee, but that ordeal would come later in the week.
“Here comes Hawthorne,” Hans announced, and Andrew saw Vincent come around the corner of the square, limping slowly, still using a cane, accompanied by the rest of the men Andrew had summoned, Bill Webster, who was secretary of the treasury, Tom Gates from the newspaper, Varinna Ferguson, and Ketswana, who was Hans’s closest friend from their days of captivity and now served on his staff.
As the group came up the steps Andrew motioned for them to stand at ease and led the way into the small dining room, which had already been cleared of the evening meal. The group settled around the table, Andrew playing the role of host and passing around tea and, for those who wanted something stiffer, a bottle of vodka.
“All right, we’ve got to have it out,” Andrew said. “Perhaps I’ve been out of touch,” and he hesitated, “what with getting wounded and staying up at the front. I need to know just what the hell is going on back here.”
No one wanted to open, and finally his gaze fixed on Webster. Years behind the desk had added a bit to his waistline, and his face was rounder, but the flag bearer who had won a Medal of Honor leading a charge still had the old courage in his eyes and the ability to talk straight when needed.
“The economy is in a shambles, sir.”
“You were responsible to make sure it kept running,” Hans interjected.
“Yes sir, I was. Now I could go into some long-winded lecture on this, but the plain and simple fact is we’ve tried ever since we’ve arrived here to pull these people across a hundred years of development in less than a generation. We’ve created a top-heavy system here, and the strain is now showing.”
“Top-heavy? What do you mean?” Andrew asked.
“Well sir. Back when this all started all we needed to build was a factory, actually several factories, that could turn out lightweight rails, steam engines, and a few small locomotives, and works to make powder, smoothbore muskets, light four-pound cannons, and shot. That didn’t take much doing once we got the idea rolling. Primitive as we thought them to be, the Rus can be master craftsmen, and they quickly adapted.”
“And the Tugars were breathing down our necks to spur us along,” Hawthorne interjected.
Webster nodded in agreement and pushed on.
“We had a couple of years of peace after that to consolidate. In fact that was our boom period thanks to the building of railroad installations and the mechanization of farming with McCormick reapers, horse-drawn plows and planters. We produced surpluses that weren’t going into a war, but rather were going to generate yet more production. We even had enough surplus that it started to improve people’s lives as well, things like additional food, clothing, and tools. We started schools, literacy went up, and with it even more productivity.”
“Don’t forget medicine and sanitation,” Emil interjected, and Webster nodded.
“Right there for example, sir. We had close to a thousand people working in Suzdal alone to install sewers and pipes for water. The same in Roum and every other city. We had thousands more building hospitals, training as nurses, midwives, and doctors. They were taken out of the traditional labor force, but the economy could afford that and in fact benefited directly by it. People had immediate benefits with lower mortality, particularly with children. Such things had a major impact on people’s morale and willingness to work.
“Then the Merki War comes along. Sir, as we all know, Rus was devastated from one end to the other in that fight.
We scorched earth like the Russians did against Napoleon; the only thing we evacuated were the machines to make weapons and tools. After the end of that war the rebuilding normally would have taken a generation. Barely a home, other than in Suzdal, was left standing, and in addition we had to help Roum with the building of their railroads.
“Beyond all that we had to change our industry completely to outfit a new kind of army. Now it was rifles, breech-loading guns, more powerful locomotives, aero-steamers, ironclads, new ships for the navy, heavier rail for the track. Tolerances on all machinery had to be improved a full magnitude or more.
“For example our old muzzle-loading flintlocks were nothing more than pipes mounted on wooden stocks; if they were off a hundredth of an inch in the barrel no big deal. The caliber of the ball was three-hundredths of an inch smaller than the barrel anyhow.
“When it comes to our new Sharps model breechloaders, however, we’re talking thousandths of an inch tolerances on each part. It took tremendous effort, precision, and training to reach that. We had to take thousands of men and women and train them from scratch, and that took time, surplus, and money. Remember, they still have to eat, have housing, and the basics of life, even though while they are learning new skills they aren’t directly contributing anything to the economy.”
Andrew nodded, trying to stay focused on what was being said but already feeling frustrated. His point of attention had always been the battlefield, and the politics of shaping a republic, having to deal with this aspect, was troubling to him.
“All our production energy went into improving our military,” Webster continued without pause, “rather than things directly needed to build a broader base of wealth for everybody. Even though we were at peace, we were still running a wartime economy. Living standards, both here and in Roum, actually started to drop as a result even though people were working harder.
“If we had had five years, better yet ten, we could have adjusted, eased off, produced things like housing, schools, churches, hospitals other than for the military, improved roads, made better farm tools, laid track for the transport of goods rather than for items of military priority, trained doctors for the villages-rather than the army, and for that matter had hundreds of thousands of young men building these things rather than carrying rifles. So when this new war started the strain redoubled.
“Add into that the fact that more than half of Roum is occupied territory. Some of our richest land is in the hands of the Horde, with more than a million refugees having to be provided for.”
“Wait a minute,” Hans interjected. “I keep hearing about how nearly half the Rus have died as a result of the wars.”
“That’s right,” Webster replied quietly.
“Then give that land to the Roum refugees.”
“They still have to have places to live, seeds for crops. Some of the fields have been fallow for five years or more and are overgrown. We’re trying that, but still, what they’re producing is maybe one-tenth of what they grew a year ago.”
Hans grunted, looked around, and finally spat out the open window. Andrew could not help but grin and made certain not to make eye contact with Kathleen.
“The point is,” Webster pressed, “the economy is brittle. The best analogy I can give is that we’re like the Confederacy in late 1864. Sherman is cutting the heart out of Georgia, Sheridan has burned the valley, the rail lines have been pounded to pieces by overuse and undermaintenance. I remember Sherman saying that war was not just the armies that fought, it was the entire nation, and he was taking the war into the heart of the enemy nation.