General Earth history-unlike the histories of agriculture, ecology, oceanography, physics or computing-had become largely a matter of oldsters' tales, a unit in junior high school. As a university course it had never been popular and soon faded away-it was obviously useless, and most of us had enough scraps of family traditions to think we knew it anyway. Even oldsters who found themselves homesick for Earth had done themselves no favors by brooding over it.
Now we were looking at scraps. And many of them seemed to make no sense. Scraps like "infantry" and related words. Infants? There was something that seemed like a sort of song:
He'll attack in the face of murderous fire On flat sand or through craters of mud.
He'll smash through the lines, over wire and mines On the point of his bayonet is blood.
If you meet him untidy, begrimed and fatigued, Don't indulge in unwarranted mirth.
For the brave infanteer deserves more than your sneer, He is truly the salt of the Earth.
It was English. We all knew English. It was one of Wunderland's main official tongues, but this was also like a foreign language. Wire and mines? Mines? What had mines to do with military matters? There were plenty of mines on Wunderland: the more modern used biologically engineered worms to digest and process rare minerals. "Infanteer" again? Or this: "The niche-warriors of the future will wage information-intensive warfare." That seemed to be saying something. If only we knew exactly what. And this, that had come up under "weapons":
Whatever happens, we have got The Maxim Gun, and they have not.
We had all been tired when we arrived, and this seemed utterly futile. "Let's see what's in the archives, under 'Military Science,' " von Diderachs had said, almost light-heartedly. Now half a dozen of us were staring disconsolately at a few boxes of rubbish and fragments. I had been scheduled to fly down to Castledare to address the Rotary Club, and though someone said unkindly that Rotary lunches had not changed in four hundred years and four and a half light-years, I wished that was where I was. "Here is a fragment from someone called Gerald Kersh, from a book, They Died with their Boots Clean, published about… 1942. Listen:
"We came of the period between 1904 and 1922… Those of us not old enough to remember the warweariness of the century in its 'teens, are children of the reaction of the 1920s, when 'No More War' was the war-cry… If only our own propagandists took a little of the blood and thunder that the peace propagandists so effectively used to move us!
"From page after laid-out page, the horrors of war gibbered at us… stripped men, dead in attitudes of horrible abandon… people (were they men or women?) spoiled like fruit, indescribably torn up… shattered walls that had enclosed homes, homes like ours, homes of men, men like us… cathedrals shattered; the loving work of generations of craftsmen demolished like slum tenements… children starving, nothing left of them but bloated bellies and staring eyes… trenches full of dead heroes rotting to high heaven… long files of men with bandaged eyes, hand-on-shoulder like convicts, blind with gas… civilians cursing God and dying in the muck-heaps of blasted towns…
"Oh yes. We saw all the pictures and heard all the gruesome stories, which we knew were true. We were the rich culture-ground of the peace-propaganda that said: 'If war was like this then, what will it be like next time, with all the sharpened wits of the death-chemists working on new poison gas and explosives, and the greatest engineers of all time devoting themselves to aeroplanes that can come screaming down like bats out of Hell?
"When we heard that first siren on the Sunday of the declaration of war, things like damp spiders ran up and down our backs…"
He paused and drew breath.
"Damp spiders… I'm not surprised."
It goes on:
"And then… we went out and begged… Men of 60, who had seen the things at the pictures of which we had lost our breakfasts, and who had spent twenty years saying: 'never again!' declared on oath that they were 40 and beseeched the authorities to give them rifles… Because it couldn't take us all at once, we cursed the War Office."
"It seems there is a good deal about our ancestors we didn't know."
"Blind with gas… blind with gas… I wonder how that would work."
"On them or us?"
Up came something headed "strategical matrices"-rows of outdated mathematical notations. "Axis of advance"? "Maginot Line"? "Cones of fire"? Was that something like a Bunsen burner? And what did they want it for?
Among the scraps the search of "war" had found us was another piece, of no immediate value, but which I would remember much later:
In one Japanese prisoner-of-war camp in World War II a prisoner was caught stealing supplies from the Japanese guards. Other prisoners had been brutally beaten or tortured to death for the most petty infractions of discipline or for slow work, and hundreds were dying of starvation and other ill-treatment. The Japanese authorities, however, decided to make a real example of this man: The punishment they devised was so hideous that even the ordinary Japanese guards were sickened and ashamed by it, and went out of their way to give the victim extra food and otherwise try to compensate for the atrocity. The punishment that so horrified them was this: the prisoner was compelled to wear an armband saying "I am a thief."
Yes, I remembered that later.
"I'm worried," said Peter Brennan. He too had been perusing old texts, trying to sort fact from fiction and put it all into some sort of coherent order. "Listen to this:
' "See what you have done!" cried the King, "Cost us a proven warrior on the eve of battle." ' "
Why does that worry you?" I asked. It seemed an odd thing to arouse his concern among so much else. "Because… because when I read those words, I realized I would like someone to refer to me as a 'proven warrior.' I don't know why. I'm very uncomfortable about it."
"Don't worry," said von Diderachs, "the occasion is hardly likely to arise."
I looked again at one of the first things I had collected:
Pale Ebenezer thought it wrong to fight. But roaring Bill, who killed him, thought it right.
I had been too late shutting the house down: The cleaner had got to my clothes, but there was some mud from our shoes on the floor of the car. None of the police forensic laboratories had people available, but I had my own laboratory at the Institute.
Analysis produced DNA fragments: mine and Dimity's, other human DNA that might have come from the island or from previous passengers, a mess of countless Wunderland microbes, nucleic acid fragments and other microscopic biological debris, and a single hair, origin unknown, of an orange color. I had Dimity co-opted onto the Defense Committee.
We would be moving into permanent session, I was told. Apparently it had been decided that Defense was a full-time job.
I was advised to get my senior graduate students to take over my basic teaching. The best of them wouldn't like that, I thought. They had research projects of their own. Or perhaps the best researchers were those who loved teaching too.
I was told to tell them it was the first step to tenure. And, anyway, it was an emergency. I called Leonie Hansen first. It is a dreadful failing for an academic to have favorites, but one can't help picking out the brightest. I told myself my good opinion of her was entirely due to the quality of her work, and not at all because she reminded me a little of Dimity.
Chapter 6
It is useless for the sheep to pass resolutions in favour of vegetarianism