“But there’re other problems, too. This trouble that the clans have experienced this winter with indigeneous nomads means that if we’re going to stay up in this neck of the woods for the length of time we may need to if we’re going to go about rooting out cats, we’re going to be obliged either to hammer out a way to peacefully coexist with the locals or actively make full-scale war on them to the point where we wipe them out or drive them elsewhere. Of the two latter alternatives, the first is preferable I’ve found in similar cases over the years; driven out, they can always lick at their wounds, regroup and come back at you, come back mad for your blood; wiped out, they’ll be done for—well-hacked, arrow-quilled corpses never regroup and counterattack anyone.
“Naturally, I’d much liefer make peace with them, at least. Or better, join them with my people, my Horseclans, just as I did with the Scotts and the Lindsays and not a few before them; there’re still not all that many human beings left on earth that we can afford to butcher large numbers on anything approaching the scale of warfare during the last century of the old world, the old civilization’s horrendous wars. But much as I’d like it, as much real sense as it makes under the circumstances and in light of mankind’s drastically reduced numbers on the face of the land, it still may not be possible, may not work in this case, with this particular group or groups of people; old General Eustace Barstow hit the nail squarely on the head when he averred that mankind was grossly misnamed, that, indeed, he was the least kind and the most savage, cruel and unremittingly bloodthirsty of all the creatures on the planet, more bestial than any beast, never forgetting, never forgiving, ever able to recall or imagine a good excuse for slaughter of his own kind or any other, seldom allowing either age or sex to stand in the way of his insatiable bloodlust.
“Well, his world, the one he tried so hard and so vainly to save, ended just about as he predicted it would end, and that end only missed his timetable by a few, a very few, years, too. It’s such a goddam pity that more people couldn’t have seen, have realized just how right that man and the handful of ones of like mind were in time to have joined with them and saved that world, maybe have kept it and its technology and its institutions going long enough to find a way to cure humanity of its savagery.
“Reading Bedford’s reminiscences, through these long weeks, I’m recalling so much, so very much, of my own life, my own experiences in the dear, dead world. There was a lot of good in it, despite all the undeniable cruelties and horror and inhumanity. Even within the less than a century of it that I recall, things had gotten better in many, many ways for a wide swath of human beings around that world.
“Yes, millions starved to death, but those that did so did so either because they bred unchecked until there were too many of them for the land to support, because they were on marginal land to begin or because of the mismanagement—sometimes the deliberate and cruelly calculated mismanagement—of governmental structures or regimes. In any case, the overall percentage of people who starved to death in that world in those times was far and away lower than those who died similarly in earlier, less technological times on the planet.
“So terribly much would’ve, could’ve been different and better if there had been one overpoweringly strong and, more important, resolute and determined government to take control of the world in the wake of World War Two, point it in the proper path and ride tight herd on all of it until it was firmly set in its course. It was what Eustace Barstow wanted the United States of America to do, what it should’ve done, even if that had then meant pasting the holy living hell out of Josef Stalin and ‘our brave Russian ally.’ Though that might not’ve been necessary, at that point in time, for we had the Bomb then and they didn’t; moreover, for all its size, if we’d stopped supplying the Russian Red Army. it would quickly have ground to a halt long before it could’ve raped its way across Poland and eastern Germany.
“Father Karl, that slimy little pervert, the one we called Padre in the Munich operation at the end of that war, was horrified in my first conversation with him that Barstow might persuade the Powers-that-then-were to do just that, to use our then awesome military force to establish hegemony over the world and all its people. Of course, the reason he was so horrified is that he was plugging something similar—a bastard mixture of Moscow and the Papacy to take over and run the world. That was years before he gave up on the Papacy entirely, in favor of the Kremlin’s variety of Communism. Oh, how I wish I’d strangled the skinny swine in Munich, or given one of the DPs a pack of cigarettes to do it for me—how much misery I would’ve saved myself and who knows how many others, over the years.
“But he’s gone now—good riddance to filthy sewage, in his particular case—and so are Barstow and Bedford and all the other people who were of that world, except for me … and, maybe, Clarence Bookerman and, to believe what he wrote, possibly one or two more like us, somewhere.
“And if Barstow and his few had succeeded, where would I be now? What would I be doing? If he had really succeeded, had gotten the world into the shape it would’ve had to be maintained in to survive, there would be no need of small private armies, no small insurrections to be put down here and there every few years in out-of-the-way generally unpleasant parts of the globe, so surely I wouldn’t be plying the trade I followed for most of the time after the U.S. Army decided I was too old to longer serve.
“Well, whatever and wherever, I wouldn’t’ve been hurting for living expenses, good old Jethro Stiles saw to that much long, long ago. No, I’d most likely have not been soldiering, training soldiers or teaching others how to properly train them, going from continent to continent, nation to nation, war to insurrection to guerrilla as I did for so long; but even so I might well have had to follow the course that Bookerman did: living in areas until too many people were become aware that I didn’t age, then moving on, changing my name and identity, only to have to move on again after a few years or a couple of decades, at the very most, tops.
“Over the years, since he decamped so precipitously, back in Kansas … or was it Nebraska? I can’t now recall … I’ve often wondered about him, speculated on the forces that shaped him, that so warped him as to make him a still-fervent adherent of German National Socialism while seemingly completely forgetting, mentally blanking out, all of the horrors attendant to that ill-conceived, ill-starred philosophy and regime, even scores of years after its overdue demise.
“I’ve just about come to the conclusion that it was the constant moving, the rootlessness, the never-ending fear of apprehension by civil or, worse, ecclesiastical authorities, the endless round of losing all whom he held dear, respected or loved that brought him to cling so passionately to Adolf Hitler and his cause, immediately he discovered Hider to be such a one as himself … and. God help me, like me, too, if he guessed right.
“Hitler, the National Socialist German Workers’ Patty, and the Third German Reich became in Bookerman’s mind, then, not simply a cause but truly a family—the loved and cherished family he had for so long sought and been denied. People, even my kind of people, tend to magnify the good and gloss over the bad qualities of those they love and cherish, and so did Bookerman with his “family.” In his eyes, his mind, Hitler could not possibly do anything wrong, all of his aims were lofty, exalted.
“Clarence Bookerman is not, himself, a bad or an evil man, I believe, I have come to believe. He is brilliant, multitalented, a worthy product of the Renaissance that spawned him; he is, can be, generous, compassionate, self-sacrificing and intensely loyal to those he feels deserving or needful, and all of these have always been considered to be commendable qualities for any human being to possess. Yes, admitted, he can be narrow and very cruel, too, but in all the cases I saw of him, only in regard to his loyalties, to those he knew to be dependent upon him and his protection.