As a Negro, Rehoboam might not have fit into the ward. As a wounded man, he fit fine. Reggie Bartlett pondered that. He had a lot of time in which to ponder it, too. He wasn’t going anywhere, certainly not very fast.
General Leonard Wood appeared before the House’s Transportation Committee to testify about the difficulties in civilian railroad transport caused by the enormous demands the Army was putting on the rail system of the United States. As the chief of the U.S. General Staff droned on about millions of man-miles traveled, Flora Hamburger jotted the occasional note. Wood was forceful and intelligent, but she found his subject matter distinctly uninspiring.
She wished the Speaker of the House had assigned her to some other committee, but, since she was a Socialist without seniority, nobody-least of all the Speaker-cared about what she wished. But Transportation wasn’t the worst committee, because so many types of legislation involved its subject in one way or another. She could have ended up on the Forestry Committee.
Being the most junior member of the committee, and of a minority party to boot, she had to wait a long time for her turn to question General Wood. When at last it came, her first question was different from those the chief of the General Staff had been getting from other congressmen: “Why are the U.S. forces in the East so slow to adopt the mass use of barrels that has proved so effective in Tennessee?”
The chairman rapped loudly for order. “That question is not germane at this time, Miss Hamburger,” he said. “It falls under the purview of the Military Affairs Committee, not our own.”
“Mr. Taft, the question may not be germane to you, but it is very important to me,” Flora answered. “My brother is a private, and he asked me in a letter to ask that question if I ever had that chance. I can introduce the letter into the record, if you like.”
William Howard Taft’s round, plump face-not at all suited to the upthrust Kaiser Bill mustache he wore-turned red. Flora hid a smile. If the chairman silenced her now, he would also be silencing a man in uniform, a man whom the Democrats’ policies had put into uniform. That would give the Socialists all sorts of lovely ammunition; Flora could already imagine speeches on how the Democrats, not content with starting the war, were now concealing mistakes in how it was being fought.
Taft had been in Congress almost as long as Flora had been alive; he could figure out the angles, too. He turned to Wood. “If the general pleases, he may answer the question,” he said unhappily.
“I will answer,” Wood said, scratching at his gray mustache. “They have pioneered a new way of using barrels out in Tennessee. We had formerly employed a different doctrine throughout the Army. Now that the western way has shown itself to give better results, we are extending its use to other fronts. These things do take a certain amount of time, though, ma’am.”
“So it would seem,” Flora said. “Otherwise, you wouldn’t have kept the-is
Congressman Taft looked unhappier still that he’d allowed the first question. Having allowed it, though, he could hardly shield Wood from the question. Jowls quivering, he nodded to the chief of the General Staff. “No, I cannot give any firm answer to that, ma’am,” Wood said. “I can only tell you that we have, from the beginning, prosecuted this war to the best of our ability. We are but men. We have made mistakes. When we discover a better way of using any equipment, we take advantage of it. I regret the extra casualties we surely suffered because we did not know so much then as we do now. My training was as a physician. I regret any and all human suffering, believe me.”
To her surprise, Flora did believe him. His long, mournful face and slow, deep voice made her have a hard time picturing him as a liar. Still, she persisted in her own line of questioning: “How did they happen to be right in Tennessee when all the best thinkers in the War Department were gathered together here in Philadelphia to come up with…the wrong answer?”
“Let me give you a comparison I think you’ll understand, ma’am,” General Wood said. “Suppose you’re in a kitchen, and-”
Patronizing Flora Hamburger was not a good idea. “I’ve spent most of my time in factories and offices,” she snapped. “I fear I don’t know so much about kitchens.” That was stretching a point; she’d helped her mother every day after getting home from work. But she was not about to let him treat her like a housewife instead of a U.S. Representative. “Please answer the question without kitchen comparisons.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Wood said crisply. If her pinning his ears back angered him, he didn’t show it. “We designed the doctrine at the same time as we were designing the machines themselves. Any time you do something like that, you take the chance of not getting everything perfectly right. General Custer tried something different, it proved to work better than anything we’d done with the doctrine we had before, and we will take advantage of that from now on.”
Flora nodded reluctantly. It was a good answer. Wood had spent a lot of time testifying before Congress. Representative Taft beamed with relief. “If the distinguished lady from New York has no further questions, we can-”
“I do have one more,” Flora said. Taft sighed. Since members of his own party had droned on and on over matters less consequential than those concerning barrels, he could hardly shut her off without raising howls from the Socialists. He held out his hand to her, palm up, fingers spread, to show she could go on. “Thank you, Mr. Chairman,” she told him. “General Wood, if all that you say is so, why did General Custer have to violate War Department orders against using barrels in any way except that prescribed by Philadelphia in order to prove that his ideas were better than yours?”
She hoped he would deny any such orders existed. She knew they did. Not many Socialists worked in the War Department, but the ones who did had a way of keeping their Congressional delegation well informed about the department’s inner workings-and its dirty laundry.
But Leonard Wood was too canny to let himself be caught in a lie. He said, “Ma’am, we had done the best we could in Philadelphia. Do please recall, we did win victories with barrels used as we suggested. Maybe we would have done better using them from the start as General Custer did, but there are many other possible ways to use them, too, most of which are likely to have done worse than ours. The main reason we tried to forbid all experimentation with barrels is that, by the very nature of things, most experiments fail. General Custer’s happened to succeed, and he deserves the credit for it, as he would deserve the blame had it gone wrong.”
By his tone, he thought Custer deserved blame anyhow. But he could have plausibly denied that, and she had no documents to make him out a liar there. “Anything else, Miss Hamburger?” Congressman Taft asked. Flora shook her head. The fat Democrat got in a dig of his own: “Nothing actually pertaining to trains?”
“Mr. Chairman, if the choice is between asking questions that have to do with how crowded trains are and how safe my brother is, I know which questions I want to ask,” Flora said.
“I hope your brother stays safe, Miss Hamburger,” General Wood said. “Despite our gains, the fighting in Virginia has been very hard.”
“Thank you,” she said. For a moment, she was surprised he knew where David had been sent, but only for a moment. Soldiers who happened to be related to members of Congress no doubt had special files high-ranking officers could check at need.
“Any further questions from anyone?” Taft asked. No one spoke. The chairman of the Transportation Committee asked another question: “Do I hear a motion to adjourn?” He did, and gaveled the session to a close.
Later, in her office, Flora was answering letters from constituents when her secretary came in and said, “General Wood would like to see you for a few minutes, ma’am.”
“Send him right in, Bertha,” Flora said. “I wonder what he wants.” She wondered if she’d struck a nerve with her questions about barrels. If he complained about those, she’d send him away with a flea in his ear.
Into the inner office he strode, erect, soldierly. The first words out of his mouth surprised her: “You did a good job of raking me over the coals there earlier this afternoon. One of these days, we’ll sift all the Socialist sneaks out of the War Department, but it isn’t likely to be any time soon.”
She didn’t want to thank him, but he’d succeeded in disarming some of the hostility she felt. “You didn’t come here just to tell me that,” she said.
“No, I didn’t,” he answered. “I came here to tell you again that I wish all the best for your brother. The 91st is a good unit, and they’ve compiled a record that will stand up against anyone’s.”
