Robert Wilson - Julian Comstock - A Story of 22-nd Century America

Then we were administered an Oath―a pledge of loyalty to Flag and Savior, to the worldly power of the Executive Branch, the wisdom of the Senate, and the spiritual majesty of the Dominion. That was a solemn moment, in spite of our nakedness and uncontrollable shivering. [ The Oath, though we swore to it under a sort of compulsion, was not meaningless to me. I held those Institutions of Liberty in awe, and I had been feeling guilty about my draft-dodging, necessary though it seemed at the time. By swearing fealty I felt washed clean ― despite the bug powder clinging to my mortal fraction. ]

Then we lined up for uniforms, which were handed out with only cursory attention to size and fit, so that we spent another half-hour bartering coats and pants among ourselves, and warming ourselves at the trench in which our civilian rags had been soaked in spirits and set aflame. At the end of that time a sergeant escorted us to a mess tent in which we were given a hot meal of beef stew, much to the delight of the vagabond men among us, for whom this simple but reliable bill of fare was and would continue to be the Infantry’s great redeeming virtue.

At last we were assigned to cots, which were arranged in rows under a canvas tent large enough to house a circus (as I imagined), and we had a few moments to ourselves, to smoke or talk as we preferred, by the light of scattered lamps, before “all dark” was sounded on a trumpet. During this time Julian reminded me that New Year’s Day must have come and gone while we were aboard the Caribou-Horn Train. The year 2172 had exhausted itself, and passed into that haunted sepulcher we call the Past; and now it was 2173, a year in which Julian’s uncle Deklan would be inaugurated into yet another term as the uncontested President of the United States, sea-to-sea and equator-to-pole; and I reminded myself that I was now a warrior in that cause, and would remain one for some time to come. By Spring I might be fighting to drive the Dutch from the sacred precincts of Labrador, to reclaim our right to the wood, water, and minerals of that contested State, and to assert our God-granted master of the Northwest Passage. I was, in short, and irrevocably, an American Soldier.

“You have fallen out of obscurity, Adam, and into history,” Julian said, with only a little of his customary cynicism.

It was a daunting thought, but exciting, and I was still dwelling on it when my fatigue overcame me and I fell asleep.

I will not narrate every trivial detail of camp life, or postpone indefinitely my attention to the battles and conflicts in which Julian and I participated. In any event we did not long remain in that crude camp on the winter prairie. We were kept there only for the most basic kind of training, and to weed out men with hidden epilepsy or pox-gaunt, or who were prone to fits of madness or mad-melancholy. By Easter all such draftees would be mustered out, or put to such simple duties as suited them.

Those of us who remained were naturally curious about our future. Some of the formerly indentured men were ignorant of the nature and purpose of the War in Labrador, an ignorance that made them more fearful than they needed to be. In the great cities there were newspapers to recount the course and outcome of this or that battle, and to chart the overall progress of the War, so that even clerks and wage-laborers might be reasonably well-informed; but the majority of the draftees were landless men and deaf to such sources of information. They took their intelligence where they could find it: from Sunday All-Camp Service or from rumor and hearsay. And some of them took Julian’s counsel on the subject.

It must not be assumed that our time at the mustering camp was one long round of historical and philosophical debate―of course it was not. We were up early in the morning for reveille, roll call, sick call, mess call, followed by squad and company drill (as soon as we had been assigned to squads and companies), guard mound, adjutant’s call, policing camp (which meant picking up trash); then it was battalion drill until noon, another mess call, regimental drill until the five o’clock mess, general parade, tattoo, and taps―six days out of seven. On Sundays there was no drill, and nothing more formal than a morning All-Camp Service, which allowed for restorative rest and conversation.

We learned the presentation of arms and the intricacies of parade, and we were introduced to the Pittsburgh rifles that would accompany us into battle. We learned to take our weapons apart and put them together, to keep them clean, dry, and oiled, and in general to treat them with all the tender feeling a young mother might attach to a firstborn infant. As the winter became less severe, and the month of February ended, we were taken on marches across the damp patch of prairie where the camp was situated, allowing our boots to make accommodation with our blisters and vice versa; and we were ordered into mock battles, and tutored in the digging of entrenchments, and taught how to negotiate a cutwire fence, how to attack an enemy’s lunette, and how to follow a regimental flag. We refined our marksmanship on the firing range. We learned to call out marching cadences without blushing at the obscenities in the chants―toughening us against moral as well as physical hardship. In short, we were worked hard and fed well, until we felt proud of ourselves for having survived the ordeal, and considered ourselves superior to the general run of civilian clerks and laborers. We suspected we could not be bested in genuine warfare, and certainly not by the Dutch (as we called the Mitteleuropan forces).

Julian and I benefited from Sam’s prior tutelage, and we were among the more skillful recruits for that reason―though Sam warned us not to make ourselves too conspicuous. Julian in particular had to feign a certain clumsiness during our drills with horses, otherwise he might have been taken up into the cavalry and out of Sam’s sphere of protection. Sam himself (by design or because of his age) put in a mediocre performance on the endurance exercises, but he was steadily and expertly working up another line of influence. He made a friend of the camp’s Quartermaster, who was also a veteran of the Isthmian War. The rivalry between the Army of the Californias and the Army of the Laurentians meant that neither Sam nor the Quartermaster could expect any favoritism because of their prior experience; and for reasons of anonymity Sam could confess to nothing more than a short “stint” as a foot soldier. But the two men supported each other in extra-curricular ways, and did each other collegial favors; and Sam was soon adopted into the small circle of Isthmian veterans who had found their way into the Eastern forces, including officers. Sam used his influence to keep Julian and me within arm’s length, and to guarantee that the three of us would stay together even after we were dispatched to Labrador.

Labrador was the subject of many Sunday sermons. Sunday Service was conducted by Dominion Officers, and for that reason, the conflict was cast mainly in spiritual terms. That is to say, the war was presented as a battle between Good and Evil. What was good was full ownership of North America by its natural masters; and what was evil was the claim of “territorial interest” advanced by that ungodly commonwealth of nations known as Mitteleuropa.

We listened with due attention to these sermons, often delivered at white heat, and we took them to heart. But in the free hours after All-Camp Meeting many of the inductees (including Lymon Pugh and myself) gathered around Julian “Commongold,” to hear him air a more pragmatic version of War History.

Those talks took place over consecutive Sundays. What Julian told us, in brief, was that the possession of Labrador had been contested, in principle or in fact, ever since the False Tribulation of the last century. The allied nations of Mitteleuropa, while America was still in the grip of civil unrest, had recognized the significance of the Northwest Passage (opened to shipping by a warming climate) and coveted its rich natural resources. They asserted what some call the Stepping-Stone Theory of International Entitlement: that because Europe controlled Iceland and Greenland―and because Greenland was just adjacent to Baffin Island―and Baffin Island to the Hudson Strait―hence Hudson Bay―hence Labrador and Newfoundland―therefore all this territory ought to be administered by Mitteleuropa from its bureaucratic palaces at Munich. [ Airier justifications were sometimes cited, including the theorized ancient landing of Vikings on the eastern shores of North America; but Julian assayed the tolerance of his listeners, and confined his argument to the most pertinent points. ]