There Will Be War Volume I, page 5
Tyree drew his revolving pistol and muzzle up, twirled the cylinder with his thumb. The spinning metal whined loudly in the stillness. “A man here opens his mouth again,” Tyree said, “I’ll shoot his eyes out. I trained you. Show your training!”
Then Pennell couldn’t stop laughing. “The louder the band plays the worse the shooting! The less brain the more flags! Only a trained soldier looks right in a bright uniform! Listen, Tyree. If we get up high ourselves—” and he pointed up toward the mesa tops “—Spanish Man’s Grave will stand out to you and me like a cut thumb, for it’ll be a bottleneck on a route that no well-trained soldier would ever think of taking through the tablelands.”
The faces stopped jerking and stared red-eyed with their dried-out mouths hanging open.
“Those dead Spaniards,” Pennell said, “came through the easiest route. The fact that they were all killed means they must have laid themselves wide open to tactical murder. They’ve done it all through their history; that’s why they’ve got no history left to make.” Ross Pennell kneed his horse around and faced the towering gateways of the tablelands. The sun was in his face in long, slanting rays, heavily dust shot, so that it looked as if great rough boards were thrust up through the brilliant beam of light, holding it high for all of them to see by. And all of them looked in through the gateways and saw the wreckage of that ancient erosion, the serried ranks of its vast silence. Then, for a moment, it was as if Ross Pennell had lost something and was searching with his eyes to find it. He pointed. “It will be an approach like this one,” he said. “If we were high enough, I believe we would see their passage winding up the draw, winding around the easiest slopes, winding all the miles back to Sante Fe.”
There was a trace to the right that wound up the side of the mesa. Pennell dismounted, stiff-legged. He almost fell when he tried to stand alone and sling his glasses case high behind his left shoulder. Tyree threw off beside him and stumbled down on one knee before he could control his legs. They started up, clinging, and drawing themselves by their arms and by their hands, for there was slow blood flow still in their legs.
The patrol sat below, watching their painful progress upward. Watching them cling to handholds and swing on up, scrabbling, clawing. Once they slipped and tumbled back rump-over, kicking and trying to catch hold again, spurring into the sand to brake themselves to a stop. To start on up again.
Then the last of the direct rays of the sun flooded down the draw and flared for a moment like a great fire flame. The shadows slowly rose like purple mist, and the two climbing men were lost in them. But not to themselves were they lost. There was still light above when they stood together on the mesa’s rim.
“There’s the draw, Tyree!” Ross Pennell reached for his glasses case. “It traces due west and goes in behind the second table. Do you see—?”
Tyree said, “Yellow thread don’t make chevrons, but brains in the right head can sure make luck. You don’t need them glasses. Look,” and he swept his arm to the left. “There’s Spanish Man, where that bivouac smoke is! The Medicine is supposed to hide that too. I’d say south a half mile, west to the second table and due west about seven miles from there. Come on, Lieutenant; let’s get the hell down while there’s still enough light—”
The silver moon wash was almost as light as early dawn.
“I’ll go in first, Tyree, twenty yards ahead of you. Follow me, keeping to the opposite side, in case they fire at me. Keep bunched to concentrate your own fire. Fire only on my order.”
The Apaches sat about their fires, safe in the ancient power of Medicine. Sat on the robes of their long-dead warriors, robes that were sewn with the symbols of the massacre story. Robes that boasted and lied and gloated in their needle tracery. Robes that had been used so long that they were no longer thick enough to hold smells in them for long. They sat frozen in fear when they saw Pennell, their faces turned toward him, or rose in white, unbelieving panic as he called through cupped hands and his voice rang in the narrow defile like the voice of doom:
“The little Graeme girl! Lie flat where you are!” Then he saw her… “She’s by the fire on our left, Tyree! Hand these bastards the bill!”
And Tyree snarled, “At fifteen yards, fire by squad! The aim is right oblique! Steady… Fire!”
Pennell called to the little Graeme girl again to lie flat and wait, and again the patrol fired, and again, until there was no more sound of thrashing agony, no more panther rush to get away, no more Apaches to teach the niceties to.
The little girl stood there in the moonlight, looking large-eyed at Ross Pennell and his ragged patrol.
“And is your name Alice, too?”
“Yes, sir,” she curtsied, “Alice Graeme.”
“And are you all right, Alice?”
She curtsied again. “Yes, sir; I am now, sir.” She walked toward them slowly with the ancient and solemn dignity of all of womanhood. And she said, “But I’m awfully glad you came, for I was very frightened…” not to Pennell alone, but turning her head to all of them, looking at their red eyes and their scraggly beards, their haggard faces, but knowing them for her own, with silent gratefulness that seemed to reach out and touch them with warm hands, and soft. And the way of their own hard living was suddenly more worthwhile in that moment than all the emeralds of Hind and all the gold of Cathay.
Editor's Introduction to:
MARIUS
by Poul Anderson
Poul Anderson has been one of my closest friends for twenty years. I recall fondly the many nights we have until dawn debated history and philosophy and the future of mankind; alas, such evenings have become all too rare.
In every generation there are those who can lead men to Hell. There are never many, for the secrets of that kind of leadership have not been written in books. No one quite knows where the great captains come from. They appear when needed—or they do not, and homelands die.
The great captains are not immune to the temptations of power; indeed, for those who can lead men to Hell, there is always the suspicion that they might be able to lead them to Heaven. If the generals do not think this way, we can be certain they will have followers to suggest the possibility.
Great soldiers are not often great governors. Sometimes they are: Julius Caesar was certainly preferable to most of his immediate successors and predecessors, Washington was certainly an able president, Mustapha Kemal was the best governor Turkey ever had. England has had able soldier kings. Napoleon reformed French society and developed a code of laws that has spread throughout the world, making one wonder what might have happened had the Allies left him in peace after his return from Elba.
Far too often, though, the habits of military power have been ingrained, so that the great captain becomes tyrant or incompetent—or both—as head of state.
MARIUS
by Poul Anderson
It was raining again, with a bite in the air as the planet spun toward winter. They hadn’t yet restored the street lights, and an early dusk seeped up between ruined walls and hid the tattered people who dwelt in caves grubbed out of rubble. Etienne Fourre, chief of the Maquisard Brotherhood and therefore representative of France in the Supreme Council of United Free Europe, stubbed his toe on a cobblestone. Pain struck through a worn-out boot, and he swore with tired expertise. The fifty guards ringing him in, hairy men in a patchwork of clothes—looted from the uniforms of a dozen armies, their own insignia merely a hand-sewn Tricolor brassard— tensed. That was an automatic reaction, the bristling of a wolf at any unawaited noise, long ago drilled into them.
“Eh, bien,” said Fourre. “Perhaps Rouget de I’Isle stumbled on the same rock while composing the ‘Marseillaise.’”
One-eyed Astier shrugged, an almost invisible gesture in the murk. “When is the next grain shipment due?” he asked. It was hard to think of anything but food above the noise of a shrunken belly, and the Liberators had shucked military formalities during the desperate years.
“Tomorrow, I think, or the next day, if the barges aren’t waylaid by river pirates,” said Fourre. “And I don’t believe they will be, so close to Strasbourg.” He tried to smile. “Be of good cheer, my old. Next year should give an ample harvest. The Americans are shipping us a new blight-preventive.”
“Always next year,” grumbled Astier. “Why don’t they sent us something to eat now?”
“The blights hit them, too. This is the best they can do for us. Had it not been for them, we would still be skulking in the woods sniping at Russians.”
“We had a little something to do with winning.”
“More than a little, thanks to Professor Valti. I do not think any of our side could have won without all the others.”
“If you call this victory.” Astier’s soured voice faded into silence. They were passing the broken cathedral, where child-packs often hid. The little wild ones had sometimes attacked armed men with their jagged bottles and rusty bayonets. But fifty soldiers were too many, of course. Fourre thought he heard a scuttering among the stones; but that might only have been the rats. Never had he dreamed there could be so many rats.
The thin, sad rain blew into his face and weighted his beard. Night rolled out of the east, like a message from Soviet lands plunged into chaos and murder. But we are rebuilding, he told himself defensively. Each week the authority of the Strasbourg Council reached a civilizing hand farther into the smashed countries of Europe. In ten years, five perhaps—automation was so fantastically productive, if only you could get hold of the machines in the first place—the men of the West would again be peaceful farmers and shopkeepers, their culture again a going concern.
If the multinational Councillors made the right decisions. And they had not been making them. Valti had finally convinced Fourre of that. Therefore he walked through the rain, hugging an old bicycle poncho to his sleazy jacket, and men in barracks were quietly estimating how many jumps it would take to reach their racked weapons. For they must overpower those who did not agree.
A wry notion, that the feudal principle of personal loyalty to a chief should have to be invoked to enforce the decrees of a new mathematics that only some thousand minds in the world understood. But you wouldn’t expect the Norman peasant Astier or the Parisian apache Renault to bend the scanty spare time of a year to learning the operations of symbolic sociology. You would merely say, “Come,” and they would come because they loved you.
The streets resounded hollow under his feet. It was a world without logic, this one. Only the accidents of survival had made the village apothecary Etienne Fourre into the de facto commander of Free France. He could have wished those accidents had taken him and spared Jeanette, but at least he had two sons living, and someday, if they hadn’t gotten too much radiation, there would be grandchildren. God was not altogether revengeful.
“There we are, up ahead,” said Astier.
Fourre did not bother to reply. He had never been under the common human necessity of forever mouthing words.
Strasbourg was the seat of the Council because of location and because it was not too badly hit. Only a conventional battle with chemical explosives had rolled through here eighteen months ago. The University was almost unscathed, and so became the headquarters of Jacques Reinach. His men prowled about on guard; one wondered what Goethe would have thought could he have returned to the scene of his student days. And yet it was men such as this, with dirty hands and clean weapons, who were civilization. It was their kind who had harried the wounded Russian colossus out of the West and who would restore law and liberty and wind-rippled fields to grain. Someday. Perhaps.
A machine-gun nest stood at the first checkpoint. The sergeant in charge recognized Fourre and gave a sloppy salute. (Still, the fact that Reinach had imposed so much discipline on his horde spoke for the man’s personality.) “Your escort must wait here, my general,” he said, half-apologizing. “A new regulation.”
“I know,” said Fourre. Not all of his guards did, and he must shush a snarling. “I have an appointment with the Commandant.”
“Yes, sir. Please stay to the lighted paths. Otherwise you might be shot by mistake for a looter.”
Fourre nodded and walked through, in among the buildings. His body wanted to get in out of the rain, but he went slowly, delaying the moment. Jacques Reinach was not just his countryman but his friend. Fourre was nowhere near as close to, say, Helgesen of the Nordic Alliance, or the Italian Totti, or Rojansky of Poland, and he positively disliked the German Auerbach.
But Valti’s matrices were not concerned with a man’s heart. They simply told you that given such and such conditions, this and that would probably happen. It was a cold knowledge to bear.
The structure housing the main offices was a loom of darkness, but a few windows glowed at Fourre. Reinach had had an electric generator installed—and rightly, to be sure, when his tired staff and his tired self must often work around the clock.
A sentry admitted Fourre to an outer room. There half a dozen men picked their teeth and diced for cartridges while a tubercular secretary coughed over files written on old laundry bills, flyleaves, any scrap of paper that came to hand. The lot of them stood up, and Fourre told them he had come to see the Commandant, chairman of the Council.
“Yes, sir.” The officer was still in his teens, fuzzy face already shriveled into old age, and spoke very bad French. “Check your guns with us and go on in.”
Fourre unbuckled his pistols, reflecting that this latest requirement, the disarming of commanders before they could meet Chairman Reinach, was what had driven Alvarez into fury and the conspiracy. Yet the decree was not unreasonable; Reinach must know of gathering opposition, and everyone had grown far too used to settling disputes violently. Ah, well, Alvarez was no philosopher, but he was boss of the Iberian Irregulars, and you had to use what human material was available.
The officer frisked him, and that was a wholly new indignity, which heated Fourre’s own skin. He choked his anger, thinking that Valti had predicted as much.
Down a corridor then, which smelled moldy in the autumnal darkness, and to a door where one more sentry was posted. Fourre nodded at him and opened the door.
“Good evening, Etienne. What can I do for you?”
The big blond man looked up from his desk and smiled. It was a curiously shy, almost a young smile, and something wrenched within Fourre.
This had been a professor’s office before the war. Dust lay thick on the books that lined the walls. Really, they should take more care of books, even if it meant giving less attention to famine and plague and banditry. At the rear was a closed window, with a dark wash of rain flowing across miraculously intact glass. Reinach sat with a lamp by his side and his back to the night.
Fourre lowered himself. The visitor’s chair creaked under a gaunt-fleshed but heavy-boned weight. “Can’t you guess, Jacques?” he asked.
The handsome Alsatian face, one of the few clean-shaven faces left in the world, turned to study him for a while. “I wasn’t sure you were against me, too,” said Reinach. “Helgesen, Totti, Alexios… yes, that gang… but you? We have been friends for many years, Etienne. I didn’t expect you would turn on me.”
“Not on you.” Fourre sighed and wished for a cigarette, but tobacco was a remote memory. “Never you, Jacques. Only your policies. I am here, speaking for all of us—”
“Not quite all,” said Reinach. His tone was quiet and unaccusing. “Now I realize how cleverly you maneuvered my firm supporters out of town. Brevoort flying off to Ukrainia to establish relations with the revolutionary government; Ferenczi down in Genoa to collect those ships for our merchant marine; Janosek talked into leading an expedition against the bandits in Schleswig. Yes, yes, you plotted this carefully, didn’t you? But what do you think they will have to say on their return?”
“They will accept a fait accompli,” answered Fourre. “This generation has had a gutful of war. But I said I was here to speak to you on behalf of my associates. We hoped you would listen to reason from me, at least.”
“If it is reason.” Reinach leaned back in his chair, cat-comfortable, one palm resting on a revolver butt. “We have threshed out the arguments in council. If you start them again—”
“—it is because I must.” Fourre sat looking at the scarred, bony hands in his lap. “We do understand, Jacques, that the chairman of the Council must have supreme power for the duration of the emergency. We agreed to give you the final word. But not the only word.”
A paleness of anger flicked across the blue eyes. “I have been maligned enough,” said Reinach coldly. “They think I want to make myself a dictator. Etienne, after the Second War was over and you went off and became a snug civilian, why do you think I elected to make the Army my career? Not because I had any taste for militarism. But I foresaw our land would again be in danger, within my own lifetime, and I wanted to hold myself ready. Does that sound like… like some new kind of Hitler?”
“No, of course not, my friend. You did nothing but follow the example of de Gaulle. And when we chose you to lead our combined forces, we could not have chosen better. Without you—and Valti—there would still be war on the eastern front. We… I… we think of you as our deliverer, just as if we were the littlest peasant given back his own plot of earth. But you have not been right.”
“Everyone makes mistakes.” Reinach actually smiled. “I admit my own. I bungled badly in cleaning out those Communists at—”
Fourre shook his head stubbornly. “You don’t understand, Jacques. It isn’t that kind of mistake I mean. Your great error is that you have not realized we are at peace. The war is over.”
Reinach lifted a sardonic brow. “Not a barge goes along the Rhine, not a kilometer of railroad track is relaid, but we have to fight bandits, local warlords, half-crazed fanatics of a hundred new breeds. Does that sound like peacetime?”
“It is a difference of… of objectives,” said Fourre. “And man is such an animal that it is the end, not the means, which makes the difference. War is morally simple: one purpose, to impose your will upon the enemy. Not to surrender to an inferior force. But a policeman? He is protecting an entire society, of which the criminal is also a part. A politician? He has to make compromises, even with small groups and with people he despises. You think like a soldier, Jacques, and we no longer want or need a soldier commanding us.”
