“Oh, sure,” the enemy officer said bitterly. “We’re just the sideshow, along with the trained ponies and the flea circus and the freaks.”
“You said it, pal-I didn’t,” Armstrong replied. The Mormon gave him another dirty look. He ignored it.
He passed the Mormon major on to behind-the-line troops, then went back to his platoon. “You think anything will come of it?” Yossel asked him.
“Beats me,” Armstrong said. “Even if it does, are we ever gonna let up on these snakes again? Every time we try it, they give us one right in the nuts.”
“Be nice to get the hell out of Utah,” Yossel said wistfully.
“Yeah, and if they let us leave, you know where they’ll ship our asses next?” Armstrong waited for Yossel to shake his head, then went on, “Up to fucking Canada, that’s where. We’re good at putting down rebellions, so they’ll give us another one.” Yossel, a look of horror on his face, flipped him the bird. Armstrong gave it right back. He knew how the War Department’s mind worked-if you called that working.
Flora Blackford and Robert Taft glared at each other in the small conference room. The Congresswoman from New York and the Senator from Ohio were friends on a personal level. Though she was a Socialist and he a conservative Democrat, their views on prosecuting the war hadn’t been very different. They hadn’t been, but they were now.
“We have Jake Featherston to deal with,” Flora said. “He’s more important. We can worry about the Mormons later.”
“We’ve got them on the ropes now. We ought to finish them off,” Taft said. “Then we won’t have to worry about them later.”
“How do you aim to finish them?” Flora inquired. “If you don’t make peace when they ask for it, don’t you have to kill them all?”
Taft gestured toward the front of Congressional Hall. Along with Confederate bombs from the air, it was also scarred by Mormon auto bombs and people bombs. “Aren’t they doing their best to kill us all, or as many of us as they can?” he said.
“But they can’t, and we can,” she said. “They’re only trouble to us. We can destroy them. Isn’t that reason enough not to?”
“How many bites do they get?” Robert Taft returned. “Whenever we get in trouble with the Confederate States, the Mormons try to take advantage of it. They did it in the Second Mexican War. They did it in the Great War. If they just stayed quiet in Utah this time around and enjoyed being citizens again, nobody would have bothered them at all.”
“‘Enjoyed being citizens again,’” Flora echoed. “Do you think they might resent us a little for occupying them for twenty years?”
“Maybe,” Taft answered calmly. “Do you think we might resent them a little bit for making us conquer the whole state of Utah house by house in the Great War? How many casualties did they cause? How many divisions did they tie down? And now they’re doing it again. Do you think they can just walk away and say, ‘All right, we’ve had enough,’ and get off easy? Your nephew’s there, isn’t he? What does he say about that?”
“Yossel says he’d sooner fight the Confederates. That’s the war that really counts,” Flora answered. He also said he worried about getting sent to Canada instead. She understood that. If a division showed it could put down one rebellion, wouldn’t the War Department figure it was good at the job and ship it off to help put down another one?
“Even if the Mormons do surrender, or claim they’re surrendering, how many troops will we have to leave behind in Utah to disarm them all and make sure they don’t start fighting again as soon as our backs are turned?” Robert Taft asked. “Just licking them isn’t the only problem. We have to remind them that they’re licked, and that they’ll catch it even worse if they give us any more trouble. Even now, they’re probably stashing guns and explosives as fast as they can.”
They probably were, too. She couldn’t tell him he was wrong. But she said, “If we say, ‘No, you can’t surrender,’ what will they do? Fight till they’re all dead. Send people bombs all over the country, and auto bombs, and poison gas if they can arrange that. They’ll play Samson in the temple, except they won’t be playing.”
Now Taft gave her an unhappy look, because that also seemed only too probable. “You’re saying we don’t win even if we win, and they don’t lose even if they lose.”
“Oh, they lose, all right,” Flora said. “But so do we.”
“Maybe we ought to kill them all in that case,” Taft said.
Now Flora violently shook her head. “No, Robert. I’m going to quote the New Testament at you, even if I am Jewish: ‘For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his soul?’ You’ve seen the photos of those Confederate camp guards grinning while they hold their rifles and stand there on trenches full of dead Negroes. Do you want pictures like that with our soldiers in them?”
She waited. If Taft said yes, their cautious friendship was just one more war casualty. But he shook his head, too. “No. Those photographs sicken me-almost as much for what massacres like that do to the guards as for what they do to the poor colored people. I don’t want to murder the Mormons like that. But if they die in battle I won’t shed many tears.”
“The question is, can we make real U.S. citizens out of the Mormons?” Flora said.
“We’ve been trying since before the War of Secession, and we haven’t had much luck,” Taft said.
Almost two thousand years earlier, hadn’t Roman senators and imperial officials in Palestine asked the same kind of questions about the Jews there? They didn’t come up with any good answers. Discrimination and maltreatment sparked one Jewish revolt after another. The revolts sparked mass slaughter, plus more discrimination and maltreatment. Finally, the Romans ended up throwing most of the surviving Jews out of Palestine altogether.
Flora’s head came up. “I wonder if that would work here,” she murmured.
“If what would work here?” Robert Taft asked.
“Expelling the Mormons from Utah after they surrender,” Flora answered.
“Where would you put them if you did that?”
“Some place where they wouldn’t make so much trouble.” Flora explained what she’d been thinking about her own people’s past.
“Are they tied to Salt Lake City the way the Jews were to Jerusalem in days gone by?” Taft asked. “I have to tell you, I don’t know the answer to that. Does anyone? Somebody would probably be able to tell us. But where would you put them? In Houston, now that we have some of it back? Wouldn’t they join the Confederates against us? Would you send them up to Canada? Wouldn’t they just stir up the Canucks? Aren’t the Canucks stirred up enough already? Newfoundland? Wouldn’t they start waving across the Atlantic to the British?”
Those were all good questions. Disagree with him or not, you judged Robert Taft a fool at your peril. Flora said, “Maybe we could ship them to the Sandwich Islands. It looks like we’ll be able to hold on to those now.”
“Wouldn’t the Mormons yell for the Japanese?” Taft snorted laughter. “And wouldn’t they deserve each other?”
“Maybe we could keep them off the island with Honolulu and Pearl Harbor on it,” Flora said. “The others don’t matter so much to the military. What I’m thinking is that, if we get them out of Utah, we can search what they take with them. They wouldn’t have years and years’ worth of guns and ammunition and explosives squirreled away and hidden so well we couldn’t find them.”
“They wouldn’t when they left, no,” Taft agreed. “How long would they need to start getting hold of them, though?”
“Twenty minutes-maybe half an hour if we take them all the way out to the Sandwich Islands,” Flora said. “I know that, Robert. But we have to do something with those people, and I don’t want to kill them all. I don’t want to leave them in place, either. That’s just asking for the whole thing to start all over again in another generation.”