American Empire: Blood and Iron - By Harry Turtledove Page 0,1

both view him with suspicion—as does Luther Bliss, the head of the Kentucky State (secret) Police. He has been driving a truck for the U.S. Army, but with the end of the war finds himself out of work and looking for a way to support his wife and young son.

On a Canadian farm not far from Rosenfeld, Manitoba, Arthur McGregor has avenged himself on the U.S. occupiers who executed his teenage son, Alexander, for rebellion against their authority. His bomb killed Major Hannebrink, the officer who ordered Alexander up before a firing squad, during a celebration of the end of the war. Arthur McGregor has no intention of confining his vengeance to Major Hannebrink alone. This worries his wife, Maude. His surviving daughters, Julia and Mary—especially Mary, the younger—don’t precisely know what he is doing, but hope he will do more of it.

Lucien Galtier is also a farmer working land formerly belonging to the Dominion of Canada. These days, though, his farm near Rivière-du-Loup is part of the Republic of Quebec, a U.S. creation during the Great War. Galtier at first opposed the U.S. occupation of Quebec, especially after U.S. authorities took part of his farm—part of his patrimony—and built a hospital on the land. Lately, though, his reservations about the United States have faded, not least because his daughter, Nicole, who was working at the hospital, married an American doctor, Leonard O’Doull.

Just returned to the United States from the province of Ontario is Jonathan Moss, who served as a pilot all through the Great War. Moss, who lives in the Chicago area, plans to resume his study of the law. While in Canada, he fell in love with a Canadian woman, Laura Secord. Even though she emphatically does not love him in return—she is descended from a famous Canadian patriot of the same name—he cannot get her out of his mind.

Steelworker Jefferson Pinkard has just returned to Birmingham, Alabama, after fighting in the Confederate Army in West Texas. He looks forward to returning to his job at the Sloss Works. He is not so sure he looks forward to returning to family life. During the war, his wife, Emily, was unfaithful with his best friend, Bedford Cunningham, who had come home for good after losing an arm in Tennessee.

Steelworker Chester Martin will be returning to Toledo, Ohio. He fought in the Great War from first shot to last, and was lucky enough to be wounded only once. As a sergeant, he had commanded a company in the closing days of the fighting in Virginia (he was, in fact, David Hamburger’s company commander). He is eager to return to the United States to see his parents and his sister, Sue.

Petty Officer Sam Carsten remains in the U.S. Navy. He has seen the effects of aviation on naval warfare off the South American coast, when the USS Dakota was bombed by land-based aeroplanes. His superior officer, Commander Grady, has hinted that the U.S. Navy has something new in mind when it comes to naval aviation. Carsten is eager to learn what it is.

Reggie Bartlett, a pharmacist’s assistant, has returned home to Richmond, Virginia, capital of the CSA. He has had a hard war. He was captured once in Virginia, but escaped from a U.S. prisoner-of-war camp. Returning to action, he was badly wounded in Sequoyah and captured again. This time, he remained in a U.S. hospital in St. Louis till the fighting ended. His long talks with Rehoboam, a colored Confederate soldier also at the hospital after losing a foot, have made him thoughtful about parts of life in the Confederate States he had always taken for granted before the war.

Sergeant Jake Featherston, former battery commander in the First Richmond Howitzers, has also come home to Richmond. He too fought from first shot to last in the Great War, and never rose above sergeant, not least because the War Department was angry at him for exposing the shortcomings of his former CO, Captain Jeb Stuart III. Furious and bitter at the War Department in particular and the world in general, Featherston wonders what to do now that he has no place in the Army any more.

When the Great War ended, Jake Featherston had thought the silence falling over the battlefield as strange and unnatural as machine-gun fire in Richmond on a Sunday afternoon. Now, sitting at the bar of a saloon in the Confederate capital a few weeks later, he listened to the distant rattle of a machine gun, nodded to