“Washington was no revolutionary, not in the Marxist sense of the word,” he said now. “He didn’t transfer wealth or power from the aristocracy to the bourgeoisie, and certainly not to the peasants. All he did was replace British planters and landowners with their American counterparts.”
Flora tapped a fingernail against the top of her desk in annoyance. Herman Bruck would probably have made an even better Talmudic scholar than poor Yossel Reisen; he delighted in hairsplitting and precision. Only in chosen ideology did he differ from Yossel.
“For one thing, Soldiers’ Circle goons don’t care about the Marxist sense of the word,” Flora said, holding onto her patience with both hands. “For another, by their use of the term, Washington was a revolutionary, and I got them to think about the consequences of denying the right to revolution now. Either that or I got them angry at me, which will do as well.”
“It’s not proper,” Bruck answered stiffly. “We should be accurate about these matters. Educating the nation must be undertaken in an exact and thoroughgoing fashion.”
“Yes, Herman.” Flora suppressed a sigh. The one thing Bruck lacked that would have made him a truly effective political operative was any trace of imagination. Before he could go on with what would, no doubt, have been a disputation to consume the entire morning, his telephone rang. He gave whoever was on the other end of the line the same sharply focused attention he had turned on Flora.
Her own phone jangled a moment later. “Socialist Party, Flora Hamburger,” she said, and then, “Oh-Mr. Levitzsky. Yes, by all means we will support the garment workers’ union there. That contract will be honored or the rank and file will strike, war or no war. Teddy Roosevelt makes a lot of noise about a square deal for the workers. We’ll find out if he means it, and we’ll let the people know if he doesn’t.”
“I’ll take that word to the factory manager,” Levitzsky said. “If he knows the union and the Party are in solidarity here, he won’t have the nerve to go on calling the contract just a scrap of paper. Thank you, Miss Hamburger.”
That was the sort of phone call that made Flora feel she’d earned her salary for the day. Workers were so vulnerable to pressure from employers, especially with the war making everything all the more urgent: or at least seem all the more urgent. The Party had the collective strength to help redress the balance.
Herman Bruck got off the phone himself a minute or so later. In a new tone of voice-as if he hadn’t been criticizing her ideological purity a moment before-he asked, “Would you like to go to the moving pictures with me tonight after work? Geraldine Farrar is supposed to be very fine in the new version of Carmen.”
“I really don’t think so, not tonight-” Flora began.
Bruck went on as if she hadn’t spoken: “The bullfight scene, they say, is especially bully.” He smiled at his pun. Flora didn’t. “So many people wanted to sit in the amphitheater while it was being photographed, I’ve heard, that they didn’t have to hire any extras.”
“I’m sorry, Herman. Maybe when Yossel sleeps a little better, so I can be sure I’ll sleep a little better. He kept everyone awake through a lot of last night.”
Herman Bruck looked like a kicked puppy. He’d been trying to court Flora almost as long as they’d known each other. The next luck he had would be the first. That didn’t stop him from going right on trying. Abstractly, Flora admired his persistence: the same persistence he showed in his Party work. She admired it even more there than when it was aimed at her.
Turning away from Bruck and toward Maria Tresca, she asked, “What’s next?”
Jake Featherston stuck out his mess tin. The Negro cook for the First Richmond Howitzers gave him a tinful of stew. He carried it back among the ruins of Hampstead, Maryland, and sat down with his gun crew to eat.
Michael Scott, the three-inch howitzer’s loader, said, “Stew tastes pretty good, Sarge. Now all we have to do is hope it ain’t poisoned.”
“Funny,” Jake said. “Funny like a truss.” He dug in with his spoon. Scott had been right; the stew was good. Trying to look on the bright side of things, he went on, “This Metellus, he seems like a good nigger. He knows his place, and he don’t give anybody any trouble.”
“Not that we know about, anyways.” That was Will Cooper, one of the shell haulers for the three-inch gun. Like Scott, he was a kid; both of them had joined the regiment after heavy casualties along the Susquehanna thinned out most of the veterans who had started the war with Jake. But the kids had been around for a while now; their butternut uniforms were stained and weather-beaten, and the red facings on their collar tabs that showed them to be artillerymen had faded to a washed-out pink.
Featherston kept on eating, but scowled as he did so. The trouble was, Cooper was right, no two ways about it. “Be a long time before we can trust the niggers again,” Jake said glumly.
Heads bobbed up and down in response to that. “At this here gun, we were lucky-this whole battery, we were lucky,” Scott said. “Our laborers just ran off. They didn’t try and turn our guns on us or on the infantrymen in front of us.”
Now Jake spoke with fond reminiscence: “Yeah, and we gave the damnyankees a good warm welcome when they came up out of their trenches, too. They figured we couldn’t do nothin’ about ’em with all our niggers givin’ us a hard time, but I reckon we showed ’em different.”
When the wind blew out of the north, it wafted the stench of unburied Yankee bodies into the Confederate lines. It was a horrible stench, sweet and ripe and thick enough to slice. But it was also the stench of victory, or at least the stench of defeat avoided. U.S. forces had driven the Confederacy out of Pennsylvania, but the Stars and Bars still flew over most of Maryland and over Washington, D.C.
Occasional crackles of gunfire came from the front: scouts thinking they’d spotted Yankee raiders, snipers shooting at enemies in the trenches rash enough to expose any part of themselves even for a moment, and, on the other side of the line, Yankee riflemen ready to do unto the Confederates what was being done unto them.
Another rifle shot rang out, then two more. Featherston’s head came up and his gaze sharpened, as if he were a coon dog taking a scent. Those shots hadn’t come from the front, but from well behind the line. He scowled again. “That’s likely to be some damn nigger trying to bushwhack our boys.”
“Bastards,” Cooper muttered. “We finish dealin’ with them, they’re gonna spend the next hundred years wishin’ they didn’t try raisin’ their hands to us, and you can take that to church.”
“I know,” Featherston said. “Back in the old days, my old man was an overseer. Till they laid him in the ground, he said we never ought to have manumitted the niggers. I always thought, you got to change with the times. But with the kind of thanks we got, damned if I think that way any more.”
The whole gun crew nodded in response to that. Jake finished his stew. Maybe Metellus really knew which side his bread was buttered on and did all the things he was supposed to do. But for all Jake knew, maybe he unbuttoned his fly and pissed in the stewpot when nobody was looking. How could you tell for sure? You couldn’t, till maybe too late.
From what he’d heard, it had been like that up and down the CSA-worst in the cotton belt, where whites were thin on the ground in big stretches of the country, but bad everywhere. He didn’t know how many of the ten million or so Negroes in the Confederacy had joined the rebellion, but enough had so that some troops had had to leave the fighting line against the USA to help put them down.
No wonder, then, that the damnyankees were pushing forward in western Virginia, in Kentucky, and in Sonora. The wonder was that the Confederate positions hadn’t fallen apart altogether. He glanced over to his gun. The quick-firing three-incher, copied from the French 75, was one big reason they hadn’t. The USA lacked a field piece that came close to matching it.