Greener Than You Think Part 26

General Thario's indiscreet letters kept coming. If anything, they increased in frequency, indiscretion, and length as his continued frustration in securing a field command was added to his helpless wrath at the generalstaff's inept.i.tude. "... They have got hold of that odd female scientist, Francis," he wrote, "and have made her turn over her formula for making gra.s.s go crazy. It's to be used as a war weapon, but how or where I don't know. Just the sort of silly rot a lot of armchair theorists would dream up...."

Later he wrote indignantly: "... They are sending a group of picked men to Russia to inoculate the gra.s.ses on the steppes with this Francis stuff. Sheer waste of trained men; bungling incompetence. Why not send a specially selected group of hypnotists to persuade the Russians to sue for peace? It would be better to have given them Mills bombs and let them blow up the Kremlin. Time and effort and good men thrown away ..."

Still later he wrote with unconcealed satisfaction: "... Well, that silly business of inoculating the steppes came to exactly nothing. Our fellows got through of course and did their job, but nothing happened to the gra.s.s. Either Francis gave them the wrong formula (possibly mislaid the right one in her handbag) or else what worked in California wouldn't do elsewhere. She is busy trying to explain herself to a military commission right now. For my part they can either shoot her or put her in charge of the WAC. It's of no moment. You can't fight a determined enemy with sprayguns and formulas. Attack with infantry by way of Siberia ..."

_43._ While everyone, except possibly General Thario and others in similar position, was enjoying the new comradeinarms atmosphere the abortive war had brought on, a sudden series of submarine attacks on the Pacific Fleet provided a disagreeable jolt and ended the bloodless stage of the conflict. Tried and proved methods of detection and defense became useless; the wars.h.i.+ps were nothing more than targets for the enemy's torpedoes.

In quick succession the battles.h.i.+ps _Montana_, _Louisiana_, _Ohio_, and _New Hamps.h.i.+re_ were sunk, as were the carriers _Gettysburg_, _Antietam_, _Guadalca.n.a.l_, and _Chapultepec_ as well as the cruisers _Manitowoc_, _Baton Rouge_, _Jackson_, _Yonkers_, _Long Beach_, _Evanston_ and _Portsmouth_, to say nothing of the countless destroyers and other craft. Never had the navy been so crippled and the people, presaging correctly a forthcoming invasion, suffered a new series of terrors which was only relieved by the news of the Russian landings on the California coast at Cambria, San Simeon and Big Sur.

"... What did I tell you? What did I tell them, the duffers and dunderheads? We could have been halfway across Asia by now; instead we waited and hemmed and hawed till the enemy, from the sheer weight of our inertia, was forced to attack. The whole crew should be courtmartialed and made to study the campaigns of Generals Shafter and Wheeler as punishment." General Thario's always precise handwriting wavered and trembled with the violence of his disgust.

An impalpable war, pregnant with annihilating scientific devices and other unseen bogies was one thing; actual invasion of the sacred soil over which Old Glory flew, and by presumptuous foreigners who couldnt even speak English, was quite another. At once the will of the nation stiffened and for the first time something approaching enthusiasm was manifest. Cartoonists, moved by a common impulse, unanimously drew pictures of Uncle Sam rolling up his sleeves and preparing to give the pesky interlopers a good trouncing before hurling them back into the Pacific.

Unfortunately the presence of the gra.s.s prevented quick eviction of the unwelcome visitors. Only a small portion of the armed forces was based on the Pacific coast, because of the logistical problems presented by inadequacies of supply and transportation. Of these only a fraction could be sent to the threatened places for fear dispersions of the main body would prove disastrous if the landings were feints. Thus the enemy came ash.o.r.e practically unopposed at his original landingpoints and secured small additional beachheads at Gorda, Lucia, Morro Bay and Carmel.

East of the gra.s.s there were whole armies who had completed basic training, fit and supple. The obvious answer to the invasion was to load them on transports and s.h.i.+p them to the theater of operations.

Unfortunately the agreement not to use heavierthanaircraft was an insuperable bar to this action.

That the pact had never been designed to prevent nations from defending their soil against an invader was certain; thousands of voices urged that we keep the spirit of the treaty and disregard the letter. No one could expect us to sit idly by and let our homeland be invaded because of overfinicky interpretation of a diplomatic doc.u.ment.

But in spite of this clear logic, the American people were swept by a wave of timidity. "If we use airplanes," they argued, "so will the Russians; airplanes mean bombs; bombs mean atombombs. Better to let the Russians hold what advantage their invasion has given them than to have our cities destroyed, our population wiped out, our descendants--if any--born with six heads or a dozen arms as a result of radioactivity."

According to General Thario, for a while it was touchandgo whether the President would yield to the men of vision or the others. But in the end apprehension and calculation ordained that every effort must be made to reinforce the defense of the West Coast--except the effective one.

Of course every dirigible was commandeered and work speeded up on those under construction; troops.h.i.+ps, heedless of their vulnerability, rushed for the Panama Ca.n.a.l; while negotiations were opened with Mexico, looking toward transporting divisions over its territory to a point south of the weed.

While confusion and defeatism took as heavy a toll of the country's spirit as an actual defeat on the battlefield, the Russians slowly pushed their way inland and consolidated their positions. The American units offered valiant resistance, but little by little they were driven northward until a fairly fixed front was established south of San Francisco from the ocean to the bay and a more fluid one from the bay to the edge of the gra.s.s. Army men, like the public, were suspicious of the enemy's apparent contentment with this line, for they reasoned it presaged further landings to the north.

General Thario's jubilation contrasted with the common gloom. "At last the blunderers have given me active duty. I have a brigade in the Third Army--finest of all. Can't write exactly where I'm stationed, but it is not far from a wellknown city noted for its alt.i.tude, located in a mining state. Brigade is remarkably fit, considering, and the men are rearing to go. Keep your ear open for some news--it won't be long...."

_44._ The news was of the heroic counterlandings. The entire fleet, disdainful of possible submarine action, stood off from the rear of the Russian positions, bombarding them for fortyeight hours preliminary to landing marines who fought their way inland to recapture nearly half the invaded territory. Simultaneously the army below San Francisco pushed the Russians back and made contact at some points with the marines. The enemy was reduced to a mere foothold.

But the whole operation proved no more than a rearguard action. As General Thario wrote, "We are fighting on the wrong continent." Joe was even broader and more emphatic. "It's a putup job," he complained, "to keep costplus plants like this operating. If they called off their silly war (Beethoven down in the cellar during the siege of Vienna expresses the right att.i.tude) and went home, the country would fall back into depression, we'd have some kind of revolution and everybody'd be better off."

I had suspected him of being some kind of parlor radical and although he would doubtless outgrow his youthful notions, it made me uneasy to have a crank in my employ. But beyond urging him to keep his ideas strictly to himself and not leave any more memopads scribbled over with clef signs on his desk, I could do nothing, for upon his retention depended his father's goodwill--the general's a.s.signment to a fieldcommand hadnt altered the status of our contracts--and we had too many unscrupulous compet.i.tors to rely solely upon merit for the continuance of our sales.

George Thario's att.i.tude was symptomatic of the demoralization of the country, apparent even during our momentary success. There was no will to victory, and the generalstaff, if one could believe General Thario, was too unimaginative and inflexible to meet the peculiar conditions of a war circ.u.mscribed and shaped by the alien glacier dividing the country and diverting normal operations into novel channels.

So the new landings at Astoria and Longview, though antic.i.p.ated and indeed precisely indicated by the flimsiness of the Russian resistance to the counteroffensive, caught the highcommand by surprise. "Never was a military operation more certain," wrote General Thario, "and never was less done to meet the certainty. Albert, if a businessman conducted himself like the military college he would be bankrupt in six months."

Wherever the fault lay, the American gains were wiped out and the invaders swept ahead to occupy all of the country west of the gra.s.s.

Boastfully, they sent us newsreels of their entries into Portland and Seattle. They established headquarters in San Francisco and paraded forty abreast down Market Street--renamed Kra.s.sny Prospekt. The Russians also renamed Montgomery Street and Van Ness after Mooney and Billings respectively, but for some reason abandoned these designations almost immediately.

But for all their celebrations and 101 gun salutes, this was as far as they could go; the monstrous growth which had clogged our defense now sealed the invaders off and held them in an evershrinking sector. Now came another period of quiescence in the war, but a period radically different in temper from the first. There were many, perhaps const.i.tuting a majority, who like George Thario wanted a peace, almost any kind of peace, to be made. Others attempted to ignore the presence of a war entirely and to conduct their lives as though it did not exist.

Still others seemed to regard it as some kind of game, a contest carried on in a bloodless vacuum, and from these to the newspapers and the Wardepartment came the hundreds of plans, nearly all of them entirely fantastic, for conquering an enemy now una.s.sailably entrenched.

But while pessimism and la.s.situde governed the United States the intruders were taking energetic measures to increase their successes. "I have been present at the questioning of two spies," reported General Thario, "and I want to tell you the enemy is not going to miss a single opportunity, unlike ourselves. What they have in mind I cannot guess; they can't fly over the gra.s.s any more than we can as long as they want to conciliate world opinion and I doubt if they can tunnel under it, but that they intend to do _something_ is beyond question."

Often the obvious course is the surprising one; since the Russians couldnt go over or under the gra.s.s they decided to march on top of it.

They had heard of our prewar snowshoe excursions on its surface and so they equipped a vast army with this clumsy footgear and set it in motion with supplytrains on wide skis pulled by the men themselves. Russian ingenuity, boasted the Kremlin, would succeed in conquering the gra.s.s where the decadent imperialists had failed.

"It is unbelievable--you might even call it absurd, but at least they are doing something, not sitting twiddling their thumbs. My men would give six months' pay to be as active as the enemy. To be sure they are grotesque and inefficient--so was the Army of Italy. Imagine sending an army--or armies if our reports are correct--on a six hundred mile march without an airforce, without artillery, without any mechanized equipment whatsoever. Unless, like the Army of Italy, they have a Bonaparte concealed behind their lunacy they have no chance at all of success, but by the military genius of Joseph Eggleston Johnston, if I were a younger man and not an American I would like to be with them just for the fun they are having."

By its very nature the expedition was composed exclusively of infantry divisions carrying the latest type of automatic rifle. The field commissaries, the ambulances, the baggagetrains, had to be cut to the barest minimum and General Thario wrote that evidently because of the impossibility of taking along artillery the enemy had also abandoned their light and heavy machineguns. Against this determined threat, behind the wall of the Rockies, the American army waited with field artillery, railway guns, bazookas and flamethrowers. For the first time there was belief in a Russian defeat if not in eventual American victory.

But the waiting Americans were not to be given the opportunity for handtohand combat. Since planes could not report the progress of the snowsh.o.e.rs over the gra.s.s, dirigibles and free balloons drifting with the wind gave minutetominute reports. Though many of the airs.h.i.+ps were shot down and many more of the balloons blown helplessly out of the area, enough returned to give a picture of the rapid disintegration of the invading force.

Nothing like it had happened to an army since 1812. The snowshoes, adequate enough for short excursions over the edge of the gra.s.s, became suicidal instruments on a march of weeks. Starting eastward from their bases in northern California, Oregon and Was.h.i.+ngton, in military formation, singing triumphantly in minor keys, the Slavic steamroller had presented an imposing sight. Americans in the occupied area, seeing column after column of closely packed soldiers tramping endlessly up and over the gra.s.s, said it reminded them of old prints of Pickett's charge at Gettysburg.

The first day's march went well enough, though it covered no more than a few miles. At night they camped upon great squares of tarpaulin and in the morning resumed their webfooted way. But the night had not proved restful, for over the edges of every tarpaulin the eager gra.s.s had thrust impatient runners and when the time came to decamp more than half the canvases had been left in possession of the weed. The second day's progress was slower than the first and it was clear to the observers the men were tiring unduly. More than one threw away his rifle to make the marching easier, some freed themselves of their snowshoes and so after a few yards sank, inextricably tangled into the gra.s.s; others lay down exhausted, to rise no more. The men in the balloons could see by the way the feet were raised that the inquisitive stolons were more and more entangling themselves in the webbing.

Still the Soviet command poured fresh troops onto the gra.s.s. Profiting perhaps by the American example, they transported new supplies to the army by dirigibles, replacing the lost tarpaulins and rifles, daringly sending whole divisions of snowsh.o.e.rs by parachute almost to the eastern edge. This last experiment proved too reckless, for enough of these adventurers were located to permit their annihilation by longrange artillery.

"Their endurance is incredible, magnificent," eulogized General Thario enthusiastically. "They are contending not only with the prospect of meeting fresh, unworn troops on our side, but against a tireless enemy who cannot be awed or hurt and even more against their own feelings of fear and despair which must come upon them constantly as they get farther into this green desert, farther from natural surroundings, deeper into the silence and mystery of the abnormal barrier they have undertaken to cross. They are supermen and only supernatural means will defeat them."

But there was plenty of evidence that the general credited the foe with a stronger spirit than they possessed. Their spirit was undoubtedly high, but it could not stand up against the relentless hara.s.sment of the gra.s.s. The weary, sodden advance went on, slower and slower; the toll higher and higher. There were signs of dissatisfaction, mutiny and madness. Some units turned about to be shot down by those behind, some wandered off helplessly until lost forever. The dwindling of the great army accelerated, airborne replacements dependent on such erratic transport failed to fill the gaps.

The marchers no longer fired at the airs.h.i.+ps overhead; they moved their feet slowly, hopelessly, stood stockstill for hours or faltered aimlessly. Occasional improvised white flags could be seen, held apathetically up toward the balloonists. Long after their brave start the crazed and starving survivors began trickling into the American lines where they surrendered. They were dull and listless except for one strange manifestation: they s.h.i.+ed away fearfully from every living plant or growth, but did they see a bare patch of soil, a boulder or stretch of sand, they clutched, kissed, mumbled and wept over it in a very frenzy.

_45._ But the catastrophic loss of their great armies was not all the enemy had to endure. As the gra.s.s had stood our ally and swallowed the attackers, helping us in a negative fas.h.i.+on as it were, it now turned and became a positive force in our relief. Unnoticed for months, it had crept northwestward, filching precious mile after mile of the hostile foothold. Now it spurted ahead as it had sometimes done before, at a furious pace, to take over the coast as far north as the Russian River, which now doubled the irony of its name, and added thousands of square miles to its area at the enemy's expense. It surged directly westward too, making what was left of the invader's foothold precarious in the extreme.

The stockmarket boomed and the country went wild with joy at the news of the Soviet defeats. At the darkest moment we had been delivered by forces outside ourselves, but still indubitably American. Hymns of praise were sung to the gra.s.s as the savior of the nation and in a burst of grat.i.tude it was declared a National Park, forever inviolate.

Rationing restrictions were eased and many industries were sensibly returned to private owners.h.i.+p. Good old Uncle Sam was unbeatable afterall.

But if the Americans were jubilant, the Russians were cast into deepest gloom. Accustomed to tremendous wartime losses of manpower, they had at first taken the news stoically, interpreting it as just another defeat to be later redeemed by pouring fresh troops and then more fresh troops after those which had gone down. But when they realized they had lost not divisions but whole armies, that they had suffered a greater blow than any in their history, that their reserve power was little greater than the armies remaining to the Americans, and finally that the gra.s.s, the foe which had dealt all these grievous blows, was rapidly wiping out what remained of their bridgehead, they began to murmur against the war itself.

"Under our dear little Uncle Stalin," they said, "this would never have taken place. Our sons and brothers would not have been sent to die so far away from Holy Mother Russia. Down with the enemies of Stalin. Down with the warmongering bureaucracy."

The Kremlin hastened to a.s.sure the population it was carrying out the wishes of the sainted Stalin. It convinced them of the purity of its motives by machinegunning all demonstrators and executing after public trials all Trotskyite-fascist-American saboteurs and traitors. For some reason these arguments failed to win over the people and on November 7 a new slogan was heard, "Long live Stalin and Trotsky," which proved so popular that in a short time the entire bureaucracy was liquidated, the Soviet Union declared an unequivocal workers' state, the army replaced by Redguards, the selling of Soviet bonds decreed a contravention of socialist economy, wages of all were equalized, and the word stakhanovism erased from all Russian dictionaries.

No formal peace was ever made. Neither side had any further appet.i.te for war and though newspapers like the _Daily Intelligencer_ continued for months to clamor for the resumption of hostilities, even to using aircraft now that there was less danger of reprisal, both countries seemed content to return quietly to the status quo. The only results of the war, aside from the tremendous losses, was that in America the gra.s.s had been unmolested for a year, and the Soviet Union had a new const.i.tution. One of the peculiar provisions of this const.i.tution was that political offenders--and the definition was now severely limited, leaving out ninetynine percent of those formerly jeoparded--should henceforth expiate their crimes by spending the term of their sentence gazing at the colossal and elaborate tomb of Stalin which occupied the center of Red Square.

_46._ General Stuart Thario, rudely treated by an ungrateful republic, had the choice of a permanent colonelcy or retirement. I have always thought it was his human vanity, making him cling to the t.i.tle of general, which caused him to retire. At any rate there was no difficulty in finding a place for him in our organization, and if his son's salary and position were reduced in consequence, it was all in the family, as the saying goes.

One of the happy results of our unique system of free enterprise was the rewarding of men in exact proportion to their merits and abilities. The war, bringing disruption and bankruptcy to so many s.h.i.+ftless and shortsighted people, made of Consolidated Pemmican one of the country's great concerns. The organization welcoming General Thario was far different from the one which had hired his son. I now had fourteen factories, stretching like a string of l.u.s.trous pearls from Quebec down to Montevideo, and I was negotiating to open new branches in Europe and the Far East. I had been elected to the directors.h.i.+p of several important corporations and my material possessions were enough to const.i.tute a nuisance--for I have always remained a simple, literary sort of fellow at heart--requiring secretaries and stewards to look after them.

It is a depressing sidelight on human nature that the achievement of eminence brings with it the malice and spite of petty minds and no one of prominence can avoid becoming the target of stupid and unscrupulous attack. It would be pointless now to go into those carping and unjust accusations directed at me by irresponsible newspaper columnists.

Another man might have ignored these mean a.s.saults, but I am naturally sensitive, and while it was beneath my dignity to reply personally I thought it perhaps one of the best investments I could make to add a newspaper to my other properties.

Now I am certainly not the sort of capitalist portrayed by cartoonists in the early part of the century who would subvert the freedom of the press by handpicking an editor and telling him what to say. I think the proof of this as well as of my broadmindedness is to be found in the fact that the paper I chose to buy was the _Daily Intelligencer_ and the editor I retained was William Rufus Le ffacase. The _Intelligencer_ had lost both circulation and money since it had, so to speak, no home base.

But moved perhaps by sentiment, I was not deterred from buying it for this reason, and anyway it was purchasable at a more reasonable figure on this account.

Small circulation or no, it--or rather Le ffacase himself--still possessed that intangible thing called prestige and I was satisfied with my bargain. Le ffacase showed no reluctance--as why indeed should he?--to continue as managingeditor and acted toward me as though there had never been any previous a.s.sociation, but I did not object to this harmless eccentricity as a smallerminded person might have.

As publisher I named General Thario. I never knew exactly what purpose a publisher serves, but it seemed necessary for every newspaper to have one. Whatever the duties of the office, it left the general plenty of time to attend to the concerns of Consolidated Pemmican. I fed the paper judiciously with money and it was not long before it regained most of the circulation it had lost.