“It won’t if we keep an eye on them.” Robert Taft sighed and ran a hand over the bald crown of his head. He was a much slimmer man than his father, but William Howard Taft had kept his hair till his dying day. With another sigh, the Senator from Ohio went on, “I don’t suppose it’s in the range of human nature to hold somebody down for much longer than a generation, is it? We couldn’t even do it to the Confederates after the Great War.”
“Will we after this one?” Flora asked. “If we don’t, what will they eventually do to us because we didn’t?”
“Whatever they can, probably. We put off the evil day as long as we’re able to, that’s all,” Taft said.
“I suppose so.” Flora also supposed she sounded uneasy. If Taft knew about the U.S. project out in western Washington, he’d never given any sign of it. Flora didn’t want to talk about the possibility of splitting atoms, or about the possibility of one bomb’s being able to destroy a whole city. The Confederate States weren’t so big a country as the United States. But they were plenty big enough to conceal a project like that.
If the Confederacy lost the war, that kind of project would also fall to pieces…wouldn’t it? It would take lots of money and lots of equipment a beaten CSA wouldn’t be able to afford or to hide. But the fastest way to go from a beaten country to one ready to stand on its own two feet again was to make a bomb like that.
“The Mormons.” She got back to the issue at hand. “If we’re not going to slaughter them all, we’ve got to accept their surrender. I don’t see any other choice. Do you, really?”
“No-o-o.” Taft sounded most reluctant to accept his own conclusion, for which Flora could hardly blame him. “But what can we do with them once we do?”
“Sit on them in Utah or sit on them somewhere else,” Flora said. “Those are the only two things we can do. Which would you rather?”
“If we drive them out, we bring gentiles into Utah to take their place,” Taft said. “That won’t be easy or cheap, either.”
“Robert, from now on nothing this government does will be easy or cheap,” Flora said. Taft pursed his lips as if biting down on an unripe persimmon. Democrats hated letting the government spend money, except on guns. But he didn’t contradict her. She went on, “We have to worry about whether we do the right thing. Finding it won’t always be easy, but we have to try.”
“Right now, nothing comes ahead of beating Jake Featherston,” Taft said. “Nothing.”
“Well, I don’t think you’ll find many people in the USA to tell you you’re wrong,” Flora said. “I sure won’t. He’s a danger to us and he’s a danger to his own country.” And if he gets one of those uranium bombs, he’s a danger to the whole world. Again, she swallowed that worry. “I don’t like to speak ill of the dead, but you were right and Al Smith was wrong in 1940. We never should have allowed the plebiscites that gave Kentucky and Houston back to the CSA. Featherston uses the empty space in west Texas as a shield against us, and he used Kentucky as a springboard to attack us.”
“He said he was going to,” Taft said. “He told us what he had in mind, and we didn’t listen to him. It almost makes you think we deserve what’s happened since. Aren’t we paying for our own stupidity?”
“We’re paying for our own decency,” Flora answered. “It’s not quite the same thing, or I hope it’s not. And that brings us back to the Mormons, I’m afraid. Can we be right and decent at the same time?”
“If we don’t wipe them off the face of the earth, if we do accept their surrender, how do we make sure we don’t give them a chance to pay us back for letting them live?” Taft asked. “That’s what it comes down to.”
“Occupy the land they still hold. Disarm them as thoroughly as we can. Maybe ship them out of Utah; I don’t know. Hostages for good behavior, I suppose.” Flora grimaced. She didn’t like that. But she could see that it had a better chance of controlling the Mormons than a lot of other things did. Taft nodded at each suggestion. Then she said, “Freedom of worship as long as they render unto Caesar.” She laughed; she’d quoted the New Testament twice in the space of a few minutes.
“They’ll use it as an excuse to take lots of wives. They’ll use it as an excuse to get together and plot against us, too,” Taft said.
“We have to give them a carrot along with the stick,” Flora said. “Otherwise, they’ll just keep fighting. Wouldn’t you, if you didn’t get anything by quitting? And do you know what else? As long as all their marriages after the first one are unofficial, I’m sick of flabbling about them. Life is too short.”
Taft grumbled discontentedly. He was a straitlaced man. But when they discussed the surrender offer in the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War, he didn’t oppose her when she made the same proposal. She hoped that was a good sign.
From Pittsburgh to Cincinnati. In one way, Dr. Leonard O’Doull thought that was progress. When he’d labored in the hospital on the University of Pittsburgh campus, the Confederates still had a chance to break through, to run wild in the second year of the war as they did in the first.
That didn’t-quite-happen. Now, after a hard winter and a rugged spring, the enemy was gone from U.S. soil east of the Mississippi. This summer, the United States would have the chance to show what they could do.
Granville McDougald summed up O’Doull’s worries in one pithy sentence: “How are we going to fuck it up this time?”
Even more than To be or not to be?, that was the question. The U.S. push toward Richmond had shown a lot of the ways not to fight a war. Daniel MacArthur seemed to do his best to acquaint the War Department with every single one of them. He hadn’t come west to lead whatever the United States would do out here. That struck O’Doull as at least mildly encouraging.
But when he looked around at what was left of Cincinnati, when he thought about all the devastation between Pittsburgh and here, he came close to despairing. His church taught that despair was the one unforgivable sin, and he understood why, but it was hard to avoid anyway. “Have we got enough left to do what we need to do?” he asked.
“Have the Confederates got enough left to stop us?” McDougald returned.
That was the other side of the coin, all right. Plainly, the Confederates had put everything they had into the invasion of Ohio and Pennsylvania. “They aren’t running up the white flag,” O’Doull said. The ruins of Cincinnati proved that, too. After sullenly pulling back across the Ohio-and after rescuing most of the force they had north of the river-Featherston’s men started methodically shelling the Ohio city from emplacements in Kentucky. Their attitude seemed to be that if the United States wanted to use Cincinnati as a base from which to invade C.S. territory, they were welcome to try.
Most of the casualties U.S. doctors were treating came from artillery rounds. Bombs caused the rest; Confederate airplanes didn’t come over every night, but they came whenever they could. U.S. bombers also did their best to smash up targets on the far side of the river.
“When do you think the balloon will go up?” McDougald asked. The hospital where they worked was painted white and had big Red Crosses on the walls and roof. O’Doull didn’t think the Confederates shelled and bombed it on purpose. That didn’t mean it didn’t get hit every now and again. C.S. bombs and shells didn’t have eyes; they couldn’t see exactly where they were going.
O’Doull remembered other offensives in days and years gone by. “When we’ve gathered everything together so there’s no possible doubt about where we’re going or what we’re doing,” he answered. “When we’ve given the Confederates all the time they need to get ready to knock us for a loop.”
McDougald raised an eyebrow toward the bald crown of his head. “You’re in a cheerful mood today, aren’t you, Doc?”