Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America (13 page)

"Little else does, today," he whispered back.

Then we were administered an Oath—a pledge of loyalty to Flag and Savior, to the worldly power of the Executive Branch, the wisdom of the Senate, and the spiritual majesty of the Dominion.
That was a solemn moment, in spite of our nakedness and uncontrollable shivering.
¹⁸
Then we lined up for uniforms, which were handed out with only cursory attention to size and fit, so that we spent another half- hour bartering coats and pants among ourselves, and warming ourselves at the trench in which our civilian rags had been soaked in spirits and set aflame. At the end of that time a sergeant escorted us to a mess tent in which we were given a hot meal of beef stew, much to the delight of the vagabond men among us, for whom this simple but reliable bill of fare was and would continue to be the Infantry's great redeeming virtue.

At last we were assigned to cots, which were arranged in rows under a canvas tent large enough to house a circus (as I imagined), and we had a few moments to ourselves, to smoke or talk as we preferred, by the light of scattered lamps, before "all dark" was sounded on a trumpet. During this time Julian reminded me that New Year's Day must have come and gone while we were aboard the Caribou-Horn Train. The year 2172 had exhausted itself, and passed into that haunted sepulcher we call the Past; and now it was 2173, a year in which Julian's uncle Deklan would be inaugurated into yet another term as the uncontested President of the United States, sea-to-sea and equator-to-pole; and I reminded myself that I was now a warrior in that cause, and would remain one for some time to come. By Spring I might be fighting to drive the Dutch from the sacred precincts of Labrador, to reclaim our right to the wood, water, and minerals of that contested State, and to assert our God-granted master of the Northwest Passage. I was, in short, and irrevocably, an American Soldier.

"You have fallen out of obscurity, Adam, and into history," Julian said, with only a little of his customary cynicism.

It was a daunting thought, but exciting, and I was still dwelling on it when my fatigue overcame me and I fell asleep.

I will not narrate every trivial detail of camp life, or postpone indefinitely my attention to the battles and conflicts in which Julian and I participated. In any event we did not long remain in that crude camp on the winter prairie. We were kept there only for the most basic kind of training, and to weed out men with hidden epilepsy or pox-gaunt, or who were prone to fits of madness or mad- melancholy. By Easter all such draftees would be mustered out, or put to such simple duties as suited them.

Those of us who remained were naturally curious about our future. Some of the formerly indentured men were ignorant of the nature and purpose of the War in Labrador, an ignorance that made them more fearful than they needed to be. In the great cities there were newspapers to recount the course and outcome of this or that battle, and to chart the overall progress of the War, so that even clerks and wage-laborers might be reasonably well-informed; but the majority of the draftees were landless men and deaf to such sources of information. They took their intelligence where they could find it: from Sunday All-Camp Ser vice or from rumor and hearsay. And some of them took Julian's counsel on the subject.

It must not be assumed that our time at the mustering camp was one long round of historical and philosophical debate—of course it was not. We were up early in the morning for reveille, roll call, sick call, mess call, followed by squad and company drill (as soon as we had been assigned to squads and companies), guard mound, adjutant's call, policing camp (which meant picking up trash); then it was battalion drill until noon, another mess call, regimental drill until the five o'clock mess, general parade, tattoo, and taps—six days out of seven. On Sundays there was no drill, and nothing more formal than a morning All-Camp Ser vice, which allowed for restorative rest and conversation.

We learned the pre sen ta tion of arms and the intricacies of parade, and we were introduced to the Pittsburgh rifles that would accompany us into battle.

We learned to take our weapons apart and put them together, to keep them clean, dry, and oiled, and in general to treat them with all the tender feeling a young mother might attach to a firstborn infant. As the winter became less severe, and the month of February ended, we were taken on marches across the damp patch of prairie where the camp was situated, allowing our boots to make accommodation with our blisters and vice versa; and we were ordered into mock battles, and tutored in the digging of entrenchments, and taught how to negotiate a cutwire fence, how to attack an enemy's lunette, and how to follow a regimental flag. We refined our marksmanship on the firing range. We learned to call out marching cadences without blushing at the obscenities in the chants—toughening us against moral as well as physical hardship. In short, we were worked hard and fed well, until we felt proud of ourselves for having survived the ordeal, and considered ourselves superior to the general run of civilian clerks and laborers. We suspected we could not be bested in genuine warfare, and certainly not by the Dutch (as we called the Mitteleuropan forces).

Julian and I benefited from Sam's prior tutelage, and we were among the more skillful recruits for that reason—though Sam warned us not to make ourselves too conspicuous. Julian in particular had to feign a certain clumsiness during our drills with horses, otherwise he might have been taken up into the cavalry and out of Sam's sphere of protection. Sam himself (by design or because of his age) put in a mediocre per for mance on the endurance exercises, but he was steadily and expertly working up another line of influence. He made a friend of the camp's Quartermaster, who was also a veteran of the Isthmian War. The rivalry between the Army of the Californias and the Army of the Laurentians meant that neither Sam nor the Quartermaster could expect any favoritism because of their prior experience; and for reasons of anonymity Sam could confess to nothing more than a short "stint" as a foot soldier. But the two men supported each other in extra-curricular ways, and did each other collegial favors; and Sam was soon adopted into the small circle of Isthmian veterans who had found their way into the Eastern forces, including officers. Sam used his influence to keep Julian and me within arm's length, and to guarantee that the three of us would stay together even after we were dispatched to Labrador.

Labrador was the subject of many Sunday sermons. Sunday Ser vice was conducted by Dominion Officers, and for that reason, the conflict was cast mainly in spiritual terms. That is to say, the war was presented as a battle between Good and Evil. What was good was full own ership of North America by its natural masters; and what was evil was the claim of "territorial interest" advanced by that ungodly commonwealth of nations known as Mitteleuropa.

We listened with due attention to these sermons, often delivered at white heat, and we took them to heart. But in the free hours after All-Camp Meeting many of the inductees (including Lymon Pugh and myself) gathered around Julian "Commongold," to hear him air a more pragmatic version of War History.

Those talks took place over consecutive Sundays. What Julian told us, in brief, was that the possession of Labrador had been contested, in principle or in fact, ever since the False Tribulation of the last century. The allied nations of Mitteleuropa, while America was still in the grip of civil unrest, had recognized the significance of the Northwest Passage (opened to shipping by a warming climate) and coveted its rich natural resources.
They asserted what some call the Stepping-Stone Theory of International Entitlement: that because Europe controlled Iceland and Greenland—and because Greenland was just adjacent to Baffin Island—and Baffin Island to the Hudson Strait—hence Hudson Bay—hence Labrador and Newfoundland—therefore all this territory ought to be administered by Mitteleuropa from its bureaucratic palaces at Munich.
¹⁹

By the time the Union had rallied and was ready to dispute that claim there were Mitteleuropan coaling stations from Devon Island to Kangiqsu-juaq, Mitteleuropan trawlers plying the rich waters of the Foxe Basin, Mitteleuropan warships patrolling off Belcher Island, and Mitteleuropan troops and colonists ashore at Battle Harbor and Goose Bay.

America fought back, of course. This all happened in the reign of President Otis, who consolidated much of North America under his own unitary rule. It was Otis who gained us such boreal states as Athabaska and Nunavut, and added im mense territories to the Union.
But Otis's campaign against the forces of centralized Eu rope was less successful, and is passed over lightly in the official texts. Suffice to say that at the end of President Otis's thirty-year term of office the Dutch had secured a permanent foothold in Labrador, occupied rebellious Newfoundland, and taken control of the northern bank of the St. Lawrence all the way from the sea to Baie Comeau.
²⁰

There the matter had rested—or
festered
; for what followed was de cades of clashes between American and Mitteleuropan warships, accusations of piracy, skirmishes along the Laurentians, stern diplomatic notes sent and received, etc. Nevertheless a sort of
modus vivendi
 had prevailed, in which the continuity of commerce took pre ce dence over national pride. The so-called Pious Presidents, who ruled during this interlude, were more concerned with entrenching the power of the Dominion of Jesus Christ, and regulating land use in the prairie West, than with battling foreigners.

The Union grew in power and prosperity during the long and sunny reigns of the Pious. Our great rail network was perfected and enlarged, while the Estate System imposed legal regularity on the patchwork of land and indenture customs that prevailed prior to that time. Food was reasonably plentiful, the population began growing after the catastrophic mass deaths of the False Tribulation, the Pox took fewer children during those years, and international trade turned our ports into respectable cities harboring tens of thousands of inhabitants.

That was the State of the Nation when Julian's grandfather Emmanuel Comstock assumed the presidency. (Julian's narrative, as I have said, was not as dry and abbreviated as mine, or he would never have held an audience. In fact his theatrical instincts served him admirably on these slow Sunday afternoons. He spoke in lilting cadences, adopted comic voices or postures to suit his subject, stroked his wispy beard to imitate the Pious Presidents, etc. And when he discussed the Comstock dynasty Julian's impersonations became sharper and more cutting—though I doubt any of his listeners noticed.) Emmanuel Comstock, the first of the imperial Comstocks, was a brutal but far-sighted President who made it his business to modernize the Armies and bring them under the discipline of the Church of the Dominion. His work was successful, and before long the Nation possessed a fighting force to be reckoned with—a force Emmanuel Comstock wasted no time in exercising. The newly-reformed Army of the Laurentians attacked the Dutch north of the St. Lawrence, while Admiral Finch's Red-and-White Fleet inflicted dramatic losses on the Mitteleuropans off Groswater Bay.

During the course of these conflicts Emmanuel Comstock took for his wife a Senator's daughter, and in the fifth and sixth year of his reign the union produced two sons: Deklan, the eldest, and Bryce Comstock. Emmanuel Comstock was determined that his sons would not be aristocratic idlers, so the brothers were trained from infancy as warriors and statesmen, and as soon as they reached maturity they were given military commissions in order to hone their command skills: Deklan was made a Major General in the Army of the Laurentians, and the younger Bryce received a comparable rank in the Army of the Californias.

Different as the brothers were—the kindly, happily married Bryce and the brooding, solitary Deklan—both proved able-enough commanders. The first Comstock's victories had pushed back the Mitteleuropans but had not driven them from North America: the
Stadhouders,
 or Dutch Governors, were too firmly entrenched in the vast tracts of northeastern land they had ruled and exploited for so many years.
But the Army of the Laurentians, under Deklan Comstock, captured and occupied all of Newfoundland, and the rail link between Sept-Iles
²¹
and Schefferville passed into American hands.

That was the famous Summer Campaign of 2160.
²²
In its wake, core elements of the Army of the Laurentians marched to New York City for a Victory Parade.
Soon afterward
²³
Emmanuel Comstock died of a fall from his horse while hunting on the grounds of the Executive Palace; and Deklan, by the consent of a passive Senate, assumed the Presidency.

(Here Julian called his listeners into a closer circle, so that his impersonation of Deklan Comstock's shrill voice and petulant manner would not be overheard by passing officers. Sam was not present, or else he would have put a stop to the proceedings. Sam had already warned Julian against displays of Atheism or Sedition; but Julian saw no reason why his induction into the military should interfere with those interesting hobbies.) Deklan had been competent enough as a figurehead General, but he proved to be a jealous and suspicious President.
He was especially jealous of his younger brother Bryce, whom he saw as a potential rival, and it was partly to put Bryce in harm's way that Deklan conjured up the Isthmian War.
²⁴
An American warship, the
Maude,
 had exploded while passing out of the Panama Canal—probably due to a faulty boiler; but Deklan Comstock declared it an act of sabotage and blamed the canal's Brazilian custodians. He wanted the Canal in American hands; and after a keenly-managed campaign the Army of the Californias—under the command of Bryce Comstock—gave it to him.

Panama should have been a fine gem in Deklan's diadem. But the younger Bryce had frustrated his brother's dark hopes simply by surviving, and aroused further jealousy by the much-discussed brilliance of his military career.