rockets?" I asked.
"Not familiar."
"He's invented rockets that can go twenty miles or fifty miles or a hundred miles, longer than any artillery shell anyway, and carry a warhead. He teaches at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, and if he can figure out how to steer the things accurately to a target, somebody can sit in Paris, say, and lob them
right onto Trafalgar Square in London. Or the Alexanderplatz in Berlin. It's funny. Here you are, worried about the history of the last war, which was fought, as far as my experience goes, about ten feet underground, but the next one is going be fought in the sky."
Cross shook his head.
"'Without Contraries is no Progression,'" I said.
He did his paper-cutter smile and put down his pen. "William Blake. 'The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.'"
I filled my wine glass again, thinking you never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough, also William Blake. "At Saint Mihiel, you saw a good deal of the machine gun in action."
"The Maxim machine gun, yes."
"Which was aimed by adjusting the angle of the barrel relative to the fixed firing platform and tightening or loosening the transversing screw."
"Yes."
"And the gunner made it sweep back and forth by what the Brits called a 'two-inch tap,' which laid down a stream of bullets so dense you could literally see them shining in the air, like a metal curtain. Six hundred rounds a minute. Nobody in the world could walk upright in front of a machine gun."
I finished my wine and reached for the bottle again. I had visited the American cemetery at Saint Mihiel. There were more than four thousand graves. Major Cross's face was very flat and quiet. "The machine gun," I said, "emphasis on machine, more or less made the business of killing automatic. It's a kind of an automaton, in fact, wouldn't you say? Except that it still requires a human being to aim it and feed it and whisper sweet nothings in its ear. A Goddard rocket doesn't even need that."
"An automaton," said Major Cross, pushing the sample reports across the table to me, "by definition looks like a person or an animal. This is my card with the address. We have an office up on the rue Taitbout. Say, four o'clock Monday?"
I slipped the card in my shirt pocket. "I'm just one of many soldiers, Major—why are you and the Colonel so damned eager to have my interview?"
He was already getting up and preparing to go, and Root had just that moment appeared in front of the café window, peering in like a rakish moon.
Cross shrugged himself into a warm-looking camel's-hair topcoat and began to button it, from the top down, of course. "I can't speak for the Colonel, but as far as the Army goes, you're an anomaly, you know, Mr. Keats. There were thousands of Americans who fought with the British and Canadians, probably as many as nine or ten thousand. But in the whole war only twenty-seven Americans were actually assigned to the British tunneler crews, and despite your Professor Goddard and his rockets the Army is very interested in the underground war."
"Always looking backwards, the Army," I agreed. "Twenty-seven of us with our heads in the ground."
"You're the only survivor," Major Cross said, and turned and left.
Root and I had dinner in another café over by les Halles, a somewhat pricier establishment with cloth on the tables and curtains in the window, and we ate escargots in their shells and then lamb for the main course.
Root looked at the next table, where a couple had also ordered lamb. "Sheeps that pass in the night," he said.
As we ate he told me about the food shortages during the Prussian siege of Paris in 1871. At one point, people grew so hungry that there was actually a shortage of rats to eat. Toward the end, the government slaughtered animals in the zoo for the starving populace, and,
"Not familiar."
"He's invented rockets that can go twenty miles or fifty miles or a hundred miles, longer than any artillery shell anyway, and carry a warhead. He teaches at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, and if he can figure out how to steer the things accurately to a target, somebody can sit in Paris, say, and lob them
right onto Trafalgar Square in London. Or the Alexanderplatz in Berlin. It's funny. Here you are, worried about the history of the last war, which was fought, as far as my experience goes, about ten feet underground, but the next one is going be fought in the sky."
Cross shook his head.
"'Without Contraries is no Progression,'" I said.
He did his paper-cutter smile and put down his pen. "William Blake. 'The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.'"
I filled my wine glass again, thinking you never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough, also William Blake. "At Saint Mihiel, you saw a good deal of the machine gun in action."
"The Maxim machine gun, yes."
"Which was aimed by adjusting the angle of the barrel relative to the fixed firing platform and tightening or loosening the transversing screw."
"Yes."
"And the gunner made it sweep back and forth by what the Brits called a 'two-inch tap,' which laid down a stream of bullets so dense you could literally see them shining in the air, like a metal curtain. Six hundred rounds a minute. Nobody in the world could walk upright in front of a machine gun."
I finished my wine and reached for the bottle again. I had visited the American cemetery at Saint Mihiel. There were more than four thousand graves. Major Cross's face was very flat and quiet. "The machine gun," I said, "emphasis on machine, more or less made the business of killing automatic. It's a kind of an automaton, in fact, wouldn't you say? Except that it still requires a human being to aim it and feed it and whisper sweet nothings in its ear. A Goddard rocket doesn't even need that."
"An automaton," said Major Cross, pushing the sample reports across the table to me, "by definition looks like a person or an animal. This is my card with the address. We have an office up on the rue Taitbout. Say, four o'clock Monday?"
I slipped the card in my shirt pocket. "I'm just one of many soldiers, Major—why are you and the Colonel so damned eager to have my interview?"
He was already getting up and preparing to go, and Root had just that moment appeared in front of the café window, peering in like a rakish moon.
Cross shrugged himself into a warm-looking camel's-hair topcoat and began to button it, from the top down, of course. "I can't speak for the Colonel, but as far as the Army goes, you're an anomaly, you know, Mr. Keats. There were thousands of Americans who fought with the British and Canadians, probably as many as nine or ten thousand. But in the whole war only twenty-seven Americans were actually assigned to the British tunneler crews, and despite your Professor Goddard and his rockets the Army is very interested in the underground war."
"Always looking backwards, the Army," I agreed. "Twenty-seven of us with our heads in the ground."
"You're the only survivor," Major Cross said, and turned and left.
Root and I had dinner in another café over by les Halles, a somewhat pricier establishment with cloth on the tables and curtains in the window, and we ate escargots in their shells and then lamb for the main course.
Root looked at the next table, where a couple had also ordered lamb. "Sheeps that pass in the night," he said.
As we ate he told me about the food shortages during the Prussian siege of Paris in 1871. At one point, people grew so hungry that there was actually a shortage of rats to eat. Toward the end, the government slaughtered animals in the zoo for the starving populace, and,
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