deprived of Texas, Oklahoma and points west under the infamous Peace of Galveston. The story was well told; Muhlenhoff was lost in its story from the first page.
Good thumbnail sketch of Presidente Lopez, artistically contrasted with the United States’ Whitmore. More-in-sorrow-than-in-anger off-the-cuff psychoanalysis of the crackpot Texan Byerly, derisively known to Mexicans as “El Cacafuego.” Byerly’s raid at the head of his screwball irredentists, their prompt annihilation by the Mexican Third Armored Regiment, Byerly’s impeccably legal trial and execution at Tehuantepec. Stiff diplomatic note from the United States. Bland answer: Please mind your business, Señores, and we will mind ours. Stiffer diplomatic note. We said please, Señores, and can we not let it go at that? Very stiff diplomatic note; and Latin temper flares at last: Mexico severs relations.
Bad to worse. Worse to worst.
Massacre of Mexican nationals at San Antonio. Bland refusal of the United States federal government to interfere in “local police problem” of punishing the guilty. Mexican Third Armored raids San Antone, arrests the murderers (fêted for weeks, their faces in the papers, their proud boasts of butchery retold everywhere), and hangs them before recrossing the border.
United States declares war. United States loses war—outmaneuvered, outgeneraled, out-logisticated, outgunned, outmanned.
And outfought.
Said the author:
“The colossal blow this cold military fact delivered to the United States’ collective ego is inconceivable to us today. Only a study of contemporary comment can make it real to the historian: The choked hysteria of the newspapers, the raging tides of suicides, Whitmore’s impeachment and trial, the forced resignations of the entire General Staff—all these serve only to sketch in the national mood.
“Clearly something had happened to the military power which, within less than five decades previous, had annihilated the war machines of the Cominform and the Third Reich.
“We have the words of the contemporary military analyst, Osgood Ferguson, to explain it:
“The rise of the so-called ‘political general’ means a decline in the efficiency of the army. Other things being equal, an undistracted professional beats an officer who is half soldier and half politician. A general who makes it his sole job to win a war will infallibly defeat an opponent who, by choice or constraint, must offend no voters of enemy ancestry, destroy no cultural or religious shrines highly regarded by the press, show leniency when leniency is fashionable at home, display condign firmness when the voters demand it (though it cause his zone of communications to blaze up into a fury of guerrilla clashes), choose his invasion routes to please a state department apprehensive of potential future ententes.
“It is unfortunate that most of Ferguson’s documentation was lost when his home was burned during the unsettled years after the war. But we know that what Mexico’s Presidente Lopez said to his staff was: ‘My generals, win me this war.’ And this entire volume does not have enough space to record what the United States generals were told by the White House, the Congress as a whole, the Committees on Military Affairs, the Special Committees on Conduct of the War, the State Department, the Commerce Department, the Interior Department, the Director of the Budget, the War Manpower Commission, the Republican National Committee, the Democratic National Committee, the Steel lobby, the Oil lobby, the Labor lobby, the political journals, the daily newspapers, the broadcasters, the ministry, the Granges, the Chambers of Commerce. However, we do know—unhappily—that the United States generals obeyed their orders. This sorry fact was inscribed indelibly on the record at the Peace of Galveston.”
Muhlenhoff yawned and closed the book. An amusing theory, he thought, but thin. Political generals? Nonsense.
He was glad to see that his subordinates had given up their attempt to pass responsibility for the immediate problem to his shoulders; the intercom had been silent for many minutes now. It only showed, he thought comfortably, that they had absorbed his leading better than they knew.
He glanced regretfully at the door that had sheltered him, for this precious refreshing interlude, from the shocks of the project outside. Well, the interlude was over; now to see about this leakage thing. Muhlenhoff made a note, in his tidy card-catalog mind, to have Maintenance on the carpet. The door was bulging out of true. Incredible sloppiness! And some damned fool had shut the locks in the ventilating system. The air was becoming stuffy.
Aggressive and confident, the political engineer pressed the release that opened the door to the greatest shock of all.
My Lady Greensleeves
I
His name was Liam O’Leary and there was something stinking in his nostrils. It was the smell of trouble. He hadn’t found what the trouble was yet, but he would. That was his business. He was a captain of guards in Estates-General Correctional Institution—better known to its inmates as the Jug—and if he hadn’t been able to detect the scent of trouble brewing a cellblock away, he would never have survived to reach his captaincy.
And her name, he saw, was Sue-Ann Bradley, Detainee No. WFA‒656R.
He frowned at the rap sheet, trying to figure out what got a girl like her into a place like this. And, what was more important, why she couldn’t adjust herself to it, now that she was in.
He demanded: “Why wouldn’t you mop out your cell?”
The girl lifted her head angrily and took a step forward. The block guard, Sodaro, growled warningly: “Watch it, auntie!”
O’Leary shook his head. “Let her talk, Sodaro.” It said in the Civil Service Guide to Prison Administration: “Detainees will be permitted to speak in their own behalf in disciplinary proceedings.” And O’Leary was a man who lived by the book.
She burst out: “I never got a chance! That old witch Mathias never told me I was supposed to mop up. She banged on the door and said, ‘Slush up, sister!’ And then, ten minutes later, she called the guards and told them I refused to mop.”
The block guard guffawed. “Wipe talk—that’s what she was telling you to do. Cap’n, you know what’s funny about this? This Bradley is—”
“Shut
