As she tried to regain control of herself, she saw the stricken and hurt look on his face, and saw that he too was near tears. “My father,” he said softly, “had two brothers. Now he has one. The oldest, Klaus, was drafted into the German army. It was peacetime and there was no problem. He would serve his three years and come home and resume his life. So would his two younger brothers. But one day Klaus came home in a box. An accident, they said. But we found he’d been beaten to death by a sergeant for not saluting some goddamn Junker properly. They held him down and stomped on his chest with their boots until his ribs were all crushed and he was puking blood.”
Heinz took a deep breath and felt some of the pain his father had felt. “When my father and his brother found that nobody was going to do anything about the murder, even laughed at him, they decided they wanted nothing more to do with the kaiser’s Reich, and that Germany was no longer their home. This is our home now and, if necessary, I will kill Germans to protect it.”
Molly looked at him and managed a small, bitter smile. “Perhaps I already did that for you,” she said and told him about the vengeance she’d extracted from her attacker.
“Good,” he said when she was finished.
“Young Lieutenant, you may be right. Perhaps I cannot go on hating everyone because of what one did. You are the general’s friend and he is Katrina’s friend, and they are both my friends. Therefore, I must figure out how and if I can learn to include you.”
“Molly, let me be your friend,” Heinz urged. “I am your friend whether you realize it or not or want it or not.”
“Really? We shall see whether I have a choice or not. Besides, don’t we have an assignment from their lordships?”
Yes, he thought, and not all day in which to accomplish it. If he and the general were to remain in the area, they had to find a place to stay. With an overflowing refugee camp only a few miles away, that could be a monumental problem. “You said there was a stable?”
Alone in his White House office, Theodore Roosevelt glared at the document he gripped in his hand. The handwriting was his own, but the words and the topic were so strange, so alien, as to be almost inconceivable. But they had to be conceivable now, didn’t they? He could not deny the dark reality of the invasion and the upheavals throughout the nation that resulted from it. He took his pen and began to read again, poised to make corrections and additions to the message that would be telegraphed throughout America the next day.
My Dear Americans,
Today, Wednesday, July 4, 1901, is the 125th anniversary of the founding of the United States of America, and a day in which the whole country should be uniting in festive celebration of a century and a quarter of freedom and prosperity.
Yet we look about and find it is not to be. For the first time since the War of 1812, a foreign army has imposed itself on our soil, and American soldiers are dying in valiant efforts to hurl them away.
We did not wish this war. We did nothing to deserve it or encourage it. Yet we have been invaded by a tyrannical European power that wants our wealth, our dignity, our future, and our freedom. We will not surrender to them! As I write this, our armies and our navy are gathering to expel them. It will be a most difficult task. Germany is a great military power. We must, therefore, be greater, stronger, smarter.
Germany has demanded that we negotiate a surrender. We shall indeed do that, but the surrender we negotiate will be the kaiser’s, not ours. We will not rest until every German soldier has been purged from our land, our cities have been retaken, our homes have been rebuilt and reoccupied, and the diabolical kaiser has been punished for his grievously evil deeds.
It will take time to do this and we may have to pay a terrible price. The cost will include the lives of many young men who will be called upon to make the greatest sacrifice possible in the cause of their country. We honor them! We will make those sacrifices and proudly mourn our fallen and condemn the invader with our anger.
A word. Please, dear friends, let our anger be righteous and focused only at the German invader. But let us not forget that we are all immigrants, or descendants of immigrants. Either we or our forefathers all came to this fair land from elsewhere in order to be free. This includes people from Germany or of German ancestry. Many of the Germans who came to America did so to be free of that same malevolent kaiser whose marauding hordes have appeared on our shore. The Germans who came to America have already fought bravely in our wars, including the Civil War and the recent Spanish war. Now those same German Americans are uniting with other Americans whose backgrounds include English, Irish, Italian, Dutch, Swedish, and Spanish against a common enemy. Governors of two states, Wisconsin and Ohio, have informed me of their plan to form a German American legion to fight against the kaiser’s barbarian army. Therefore, I implore you not to take vengeance against the helpless immigrants. I have been saddened by reports of burnings, beatings, insults, and, yes, lynchings inflicted upon helpless and outnumbered people who happen to have recently come from Germany.
If you are so brave that you wish to fight Germans, then join our army! I guarantee your blood lust will be sated. I further assure you that there are no saboteurs about. They were all captured, they were all German officers, and they will be punished according to the law. So there is no reason to fear someone who talks with an accent or who behaves differently.
So let us spend this day in prayer, reflection, and preparation. Then let us go forth to bear our burden and earn our just victory.
God bless America,
Theodore Roosevelt
President of the United States
Katrina Schuyler tried hard not to giggle, but it was impossible.
“Darn it, Trina, how can I feed you if you keep making it so difficult?” Patrick had graduated to using the more familiar form of her first name.
The giggles turned to laughter. “I don’t know,” she gasped. Patrick had a piece of chicken impaled on a fork and was poised to pounce with it as soon as her mouth stood still. He was a wondrously ridiculous sight.
“Is this what happened to me when I was a little baby?” Trina asked.
“Probably.”
“Look, I’m bruised, not a cripple. Just cut the food into small pieces and let me use a knife to navigate the items onto a fork. I think I can grasp it well enough from there.”
“How about a wineglass? Can you maneuver one of those?” He held a bottle of chilled white wine and a corkscrew.
Trina laughed hard again. “Most definitely,” she answered.
How pleasant, Patrick thought, and how misleading. The July sky was a vivid blue and the meadow that surrounded the shade tree where they were relaxing was as rich and verdant as could be imagined. A soft breeze weakened the thrust of the sun and made them comfortable. All around them birds chirped and squirrels chattered from overhead branches.
And there were no ants. Yet.
But only a few miles away from their idyll was a refugee camp that teemed with thousands of hurt, lost, and bewildered souls, huddled under inadequate canvas, many of them damaged both in body and soul. And only about thirty miles farther, there was war, and armed people were killing each other.
This was an interlude, an oasis of calm, and it could not last. Tomorrow he would go south, find Baldy Smith’s headquarters, and try to see what was developing. In a few days Trina would be healed enough to go back to helping the refugees find more permanent places to stay than a squalid tent camp.
The comings and goings were, she told him, developing into a cycle. The trains southbound from Springfield and Boston brought soldiers and supplies and picked up refugees in Hartford. From there the refugees were shipped to other cities throughout the eastern half of the United States. Tens of thousands had already departed. Hartford was developing into quite a railhead, and a number of temporary spur lines had been laid down to handle the dramatically increased volume of traffic. It seemed to Patrick to be very well organized.
Along with talk of refugee camps, they learned a great deal about each other. Trina, he found, was extremely well read and well educated, almost intimidating in the depth of her knowledge. She had attended a number of classes at Barnard. She was also extremely athletic, another point that seemed to bother her peers who felt that a woman’s role was to be docile and physically weak. What Patrick first took for thinness he realized was a lithe muscularity. She enjoyed cycling, hiking, swimming, and horseback riding. Patrick recalled the horseback ride from New York and had to admit she was vastly superior to him in that category. He had reminded her he was infantry, not cavalry.