Settling Accounts: Drive to the East

Life was what you got, not what you expected.

In a poker game, you were either a shark or you were bait.

You couldn’t find an answer if you didn’t know you should be asking the question.

“Oderint dum metuant,” O’Doull murmured….

“But it means, ‘let them hate, as long as they fear.’”

“Three words,” McDougald said admiringly. “Boy, that packs more into three words than anything this side of ‘I love you.’”

The desire not to look bad before one’s fellow man is a strange, compelling, and terribly powerful thing.

Poffenberger eyed Pound the way a man wearing a suit made of pork chops might eye a nearby bear.

A man of strong opinions but limited vocabulary, O’Doull thought.

Like other lower forms of life, second lieutenants were too dumb to know better.

When three men plot, one is a fool and two are government spies.

Because he didn’t much care whether he won or lost, he had a terrific poker face. “Nobody can tell what you’re thinking,” one of the other guys in the game grumbled.

“Me? I gave up thinking for Lent,” Chester said. Everybody sitting around the table laughed.

He’d got good at the bureaucratic infighting, too, the sort of quiet warfare that measured itself as much by things prevented as by those accomplished.

“No, no, no, no, no!” Morrell didn’t pound his head against the wall in the pleasant little clapboard house now doing duty for his headquarters. Why he didn’t, he couldn’t have said. As far as he was concerned, that restraint should have been worth a medal. “We’ve been at war for more than a year now. Hasn’t anybody learned anything about anything?”

The Negro wasn’t wrong. And he understood the difference between deaths and effective deaths. A lot of Great War generals hadn’t—their method for smothering fires was burying them in bodies.

He trusted Mormons no farther than he could throw them. They were as sneaky a bunch of bastards as you could imagine.

Don’t be dumber than you can help, all right? If you reckon you’re the only one in the world with troubles, what does that make you? Besides a damn fool, I mean?

Salt Lake City wasn’t hell, but you could see it from there.

“You make me wonder about my own country, Spartacus, not just yours.”

“Good,” the black man rumbled. “Wonderin’s good. Ain’t nothin’ gonna change till you wonder if it oughta.”

“People keep coming up with new ways to maim their fellow man. I don’t know why I don’t despair of the human race.”

“Somebody once said people were the missing link between apes and human beings,” McDougald said wistfully. “Damned if he didn’t hit that one on the button.”

Of course, the Confederacy was also a Christian country…and what did that say about Christianity? Nothing good, she was sure.

It was enough to make a man with a conscience feel guilty.

Of course, a man with that kind of conscience had no business getting into Intelligence in the first place.

“Are you going to see if history can repeat itself? And are you setting me up to take the fall if it does? It can’t be your fault, after all.”

By you he didn’t mean Abell’s alone, but all the officers in Philadelphia who thought of war as theory and maps and not as cordite and burning barrels and mangled men. They were good at what they did. Because they were, they thought they knew everything there was to know about the business of organized slaughter. Morrell had a different, and lower, opinion.

The American general had chosen the next grandest for his own: another Classical Revival home from before the War of Secession. Sandbagged machine gun nests and a thicket of barbed wire around the place detracted from the air of quiet elegance the colonnaded entranceway tried to project.

Nothing like a wound infection to take the romance out of war.

Chester wasn’t about to commit the sin of optimism. Justifiably or not, he feared it would jinx everything.

“All things considered, we got away cheap.”

“Thank you, Mr. Cooley,” Sam said. We got away cheap. The dead and the maimed would not agree with the exec. Sam found that he was inclined to. War measured what you dished out against what you took.

Like a man who’d sweet-talked a girl into bed with him, Sergeant Pound cared little about the whys and wherefores. All he cared about was that it had happened.

The kid from the State Department disappeared. Jake stared after him. Either they really were making them younger than they had once upon a time or he himself was starting to get some serious mileage on him. He suspected the problem did not lie with the State Department.

“Have you noticed there’s something funny in the budget?”

“There’s always something funny in the budget,” Flora answered. “We’re in a war. That just makes it funnier than usual.”

The featured entrée with something called Swiss steak. It struck him as a good reason for emigrating from Switzerland.

“Hang on, Doc!” he called. “I got mail for youse guys.”

Youse guys was as far outside the bounds of ordinary English as the Confederate y’all. A lot of languages had separate forms for second-person singular and plural. English didn’t, but kept trying to invent them.

Will be appointed. Will be accepted. Will be permitted. Abell didn’t say who would do any of those things. He probably didn’t even think about it. In his world, things just happened, without any particular agency. That made him a good bureaucrat. Whether it made him a good soldier was a different question.

Will anything be left of either side when this war is over? Potter wondered. More and more, it reminded him of a duel of submachine guns at two paces. Both countries could strike better than they could defend.

Dowling had long since abandoned optimism along with the other illusions of his youth.

The difference between bad and worse is a lot bigger than the difference between good and better.

Second Lieutenant Don Griffiths was typical of the breed. He was young, he didn’t know much, and one of the things he didn’t know was how much he didn’t know.

“It’s never too early for the truth,” Summers said, which proved he’d never been a lawyer.

“We are going to drive the enemy out of Pennsylvania,” the lieutenant said grandly.

“What? All by ourselves?” Pound said.

Don Griffiths wagged a finger in his face. “I’ve heard about you, Sergeant—don’t think I haven’t,” he said. “You haven’t got the right attitude.”

“Probably not, sir,” Pound agreed politely. “I do object to being killed for no good reason.”

“Besides, when you’re smoking you can’t smell the goddamn war so much.”

You can’t smell the goddamn war so much. Dowling wouldn’t have put it that way, which didn’t mean the kid was wrong. Even here in Washington, well back of the line, you noted whiffs of that smell. Dowling didn’t know what all went into it. Among the pieces, though, were unburied corpses, unwashed men, and uncovered latrine trenches. Cordite and smoke were two other constants. The smell had a sharper note in this war, for exhaust fumes had largely ousted the barnyard aroma of horses.

And there was one other stink that never went away. It blew out of the War Department. With luck, it blew out of the War Department on the other side, too. And it usually did, for most wars went on for a long, long time. No, there was no escaping the all-invasive, all-pervasive reek of stupidity.

When you got past fifty, you had to take care of yourself the way you took care of a motorcar. You’d break down if you didn’t, and replacement parts for your carcass were mighty hard to come by.

Anyone who used a word like obstructions in a sentence was bound to have other things wrong with him, too.

“This would involve cooperation with the Navy,” he said at last. By the way he said it, he might’ve been talking about eating with his fingers. The Army always had the feeling that the Navy didn’t quite pull its weight.

A man who expended power on a whim was a fool.

He never asked for Pound’s opinion. He didn’t seem to think the War Department had issued opinions to enlisted men. If he’d had a better notion of what he was doing himself, Pound wouldn’t have minded so much. But he never had been able to suffer fools gladly, and he never had been able to suffer in silence, either.

Like any Vice President, Charlie La Follette was the very definition of an unknown quantity.