XIII
May, 1908 28°20'N, 177°22'W
1640 Hours
"Hey, listen up: 'Can you draw this simple stick figure? If so, the DAYTON ART ACADEMY can help you Develop Your Talent. Professor Andre DeFlaunce, noted ARTIST and former Professor of ART at the SORBONNE--as well as CURATOR OF THE LOUVRE--can reveal to you the Secrets of turning Idle Doodles into ART AND CASH!!!'"
Private Kitrell held a pencil tightly in his good hand and carefully followed the illustration in the Harper Monthly's thick advertising section. When done, he proudly displayed his artwork. "Well?"
"I didn't know shit had a face," observed Private Depoy.
"After I've made my first million--"
"Tell it to the marines," Depoy snapped.
"But... that's us."
"The boy's quick," Depoy granted.
A faint series of gunshots interrupted them.
"Top Cut's swanking on A-range again."
The men seated in the shade of the relay station looked out across the lagoon towards Eastern Island. Because of the dwarf magnolia and beach grass that flourished there, it was also called Green Island by the men of the tiny garrison. Its vegetation was positively luxuriant compared to that of the aptly dubbed island where they now sat: Sand.
They could just make out Sergeant Ziolkowski waving his arms as he emphasized something to the marksmen prone in front of him. A cluster of smoke puffs burst from their Springfields. This time, a gust off the Pacific carried the sound away.
"Those boys couldn't shoot holes in a camel if it was sitting on their face," said Depoy, easily dovetailing his insults.
"Go sit on them and see," shot Kitrell, scratching the bandage on his right hand. He was considered the detachment's resident intellectual. Right now, his left arm was in a sling as a result of his reading. A couple of months before departing San Diego he'd happened upon an oddly punctuated ad in McClurel's:
A JAPANESE VICTORY: Japanese Strategy--The Flank Attack (against the individual or an army--and the ever successful) Application of the Unexpected reveals ALL THE SECRETS OF JIU-JITSU the wonderful Japanese Method * * *
Printed by the Japan Publishing Company, it declared Captain Skinner, the author, would show how BRAINS AND SKILL could overcome mere brute force. The advertisement even quoted President Roosevelt: The art of Jiu-Jitsu is worth more in every way than all our athletics combined. To top it all, it was stated that 'A Japanese Victory' would soon be adopted by the U.S. Navy for instruction of its crews on war vessels.
This was enough to convince Kittrell, who promptly put his dollar in the mail. He received his copy of the manual one day before leaving for Midway. Once on the island, he'd studied the book and its illustrations for several months. Deciding he was ready, he concluded an appropriate test subject would be, naturally enough, a Japanese. He attacked one of the smaller fishermen.
And now his arm was in a sling.
It had been a bad break. His arm was still tender.
This did not deter other marines from borrowing the book and following in Kittrell's footsteps. The idea of tossing Ziolkowski around like a meal sack had strong appeal. They had to be careful. The sergeant had let it be known he would personally set the arm of the next man who broke it in this manner. They could just imagine what that meant.
Adjusting his sling, Kitrell returned to his copy of Harper's.
"Anything in there about us?" Private Hoffman asked him.
"Marines occupy Midway!" Depoy intruded. "Enemy flees! Citizens cower! Sand spit safe for democracy!"
His headline was late. The island pair had been discovered in 1859 and claimed by the United States under the Guano Islands Act. It was garrisoned by marines in 1903.
"If Lieutenant Anthony hears you, he'll sic the Top on you."
Depoy shrugged and lay back on a scrawny patch of grass. Shading his eyes, he kept a wary eye on a frigate bird hovering nearby. The most perilous thing on the island was bird crap.
"We're the most isolated marine outpost on earth," Kitrell said importantly. "You know that?"
"Well, run up the flag and piss on my grave."
Depoy was always cranky around Kittrell. This was due as much to envy as anything else--because Skinny Kittrell, inept, a fumbler, impractical, dreamy, goofy, with a silly woman's laugh, was one of the detachment's most prized members. Kittrell was a demon of the squares, a chess master who played as though he'd invented the game. Which made him invaluable, because Lieutenant Anthony, commander of the garrison, was a chess fanatic.
The lieutenant owned an illustrated pamphlet of some of the key tournaments of recent years. It was never far from hand. Hunching next to a cheap wooden set, he would follow the moves of the masters with deep, glowing envy. Before arriving at Midway he'd sustained his imagination with fantasies of defeating Chodera or Shipley. He dreamed of taking Grassi's place in Como and beating Perlasca into tears. When Kittrell landed on the atoll and Anthony discovered his talent for chess, he rubbed his hands in glee. What luck! He could pass the rest of his stint on this hideously dull plot of coral sand in the throes of chess ecstasy. His enthusiasm was multiplied when two of the other replacements, as well as the new civilian, also turned out to be players. This was swell society, compared to the blank year preceding it. A year in which his grandest accomplishments had been the planting of marram grass and some dabbling with a proposed golf course.
Against Sergeant Ziolkowski and Hamilton Hart, the civilian, Anthony played on a par, winning and losing a near equal number of matches. He usually won when he played Depoy, but he could never be sure if the private was losing on purpose, thinking Anthony would make life miserable for him if he didn't.
When he first sat across from Kittrell, however, the private demolished him with such effortless ease the lieutenant was left numb and perplexed. Consequent games were not much different. It took some time for Anthony to catch a glimmer of what was happening. Kittrell was a master of the sleight of hand, drawing one's attention away from the real action. Anthony had spent too many years studying the master strokes of chess geniuses. Now he was compelled to view the entire board. What he finally comprehended was that it was not simply a square of squares, but an integrated active process. With a shudder, he realized how illusory the physical dimensions of the board were. It was small, yet vast, with all the complexity of the microcosm scientists were beginning to speculate upon. And Kittrell, at a glance, comprehended things which Anthony only vaguely imagined.
The private's hearty good cheer was infuriating.
With equal alacrity, Kittrell defeated Ziolkowski, Hamilton and Depoy. Depoy would sit before the barrel on which the game sat, play ten moves at most, then kick the barrel over with a curse and stomp away. Hamilton Hart, on the other hand, approached the board as if he was about to be defeated, played as if he would be defeated, and rose... defeated. The dullest of Midway's players in character if not in style.
A fair-sized audience always gathered when he played Ziolkowski. It was a treat to watch the Top lose. He would gear himself up as though entering battle, eyes keen, jaw determined, his powerful hands clutching his knees. When determining colors he would select one black pawn and one white pawn and hide them behind his back as he mixed them between his fingers. It was well-known that Ziolkowski preferred to make the first move. Occasionally, a daring soul would make idiotic gestures at Kittrell, as if trying to tell him which of the sergeant's hands held the white pawn. With a roar, Ziolkowski would chase him off. Then he would hold out his fists and let Kittrell choose. The private never took more than a second to make his selection.
Once the game was under way, Ziolkowski was all silence and intensity. There was no time limit. Midway was timeless. Why bother with a clock? The Top might spend forty-five minutes, even an hour, determining a single move. Meanwhile, Kittrell would read, saunter down the beach, or harry the gooney birds. When he heard the sergeant shout, he would trot back, glance briefly at the board, then make his move and wander off again. As the game progressed, Ziolkowski's face would grow redder and redder, his neck muscles would swell, his bare toes would bunch into stones. No matter how far behind he got, he never gave up. He might have only a king left against Kittrell's small army. No matter--he would struggle for a stalemate. Once defeated, he would stand, plop his campaign hat on his head, nod, and walk silently away. Kittrell once ventured pointing out the Top Cut's problem: "You're trying to inflict casualties. That's not the same as strategy. You're aiming for the wrong thing."
Ziolkowski was unresponsive.
The awesome fact was that no one on the island had ever beaten Kittrell at chess. Anthony, Ziolkowski and Depoy often seemed to be racing each other to be the first to do so--Hart was the only one who did not seem to care. That this uncoordinated, bookish, undersized, entirely nondescript marine could beat them every time was too much to bear. It was almost too much to comprehend. Kittrell was a force of nature that had to be overcome.
In the shade of the telegraph building Depoy could only glower at his fellow Leatherneck. He was tempted to challenge him to a game, but he didn't feel quite up to being humiliated.
Sand Island was not entirely bare. A few ironwood trees had been imported from Australia. Also from Australia--via Golden State Park--was marram grass. Several times a week Lieutenant Anthony put his men to work planting grass in the dunes. By placing it deep and cutting it off at the surface, the marram stooled out as it grew, making new cuttings possible. Once the dunes were anchored, more exotic plants could be imported. But they had only begun planting grass in 1906. As of yet, nothing on Sand could be described as lush. The clumps of grass crouched like dying beavers, while the trees were no more than sick saplings.
The seated marines would have preferred lounging on Eastern, but--theoretically at least--they were guarding the building behind them. Small and white with a red tile roof. "Look's like an Italian outhouse," was Depoy's comment when he first saw it. Situated on the northern end of Sand Island, it was owned by the Commercial Pacific Cable Company.
And protected by the United States Marine Corps.
When Commercial Pacific arrived on the island, the only human residents were a group of thirty Japanese fishermen. More Japanese were imported to work on the relay station that marked the halfway point of the submarine cable that stretched from San Francisco to Shanghai.
The Japanese not only proved industrious workers, but busied themselves with slaughtering the wildlife on the island. The feathers of many of the birds were strikingly beautiful and drew good prices in the home country. Midway was already recognized as paradise for birds. Over the last hundred years, however, experience had shown such sanctuaries could quickly become abattoirs. The United States decided Midway would not become synonymous with extinction. In addition to the relay station, the marines were sent in to protect the rookeries. More to the point, the Japanese and Germans held most of the strategic 'line' atolls along the Pacific equator. Midway was a rare item: a strategic gem that was already owned by the Americans.
Thus the marines landed.
The original detachment contained twenty men under Second Lieutenant Clarence Owen. Because of the workers' unruly habit of getting drunk on saki and shooting up precious equipment, as well as feathered friends, the lieutenant's first act was to confiscate all the Japanese guns. Stop shooting birds and start pouring concrete, he commanded.
Once the station and auxiliary buildings were completed, most of the construction workers were shipped back home. The dozen or so who'd become acclimated to the Americans' odd behavior remained behind as laborers and cooks.
Over the years, it was realized that the extreme isolation of the Midway post produced behavioral oddities in the garrison that were noticeable even to the tolerant Japanese. This was rectified by relieving the men at two-year intervals. Still, two years of isolation, reinforced in many cases by a nearly complete ignorance of English, could make a man behave in some pretty strange ways.
Out of boredom, the men in the shadow of the relay station now turned their attention to one of those strange manifestations. Private Lieber, stripped naked (there wasn't a woman within twelve hundred miles), was rowing back and forth across the lagoon in search of his favorite prey.
1713 Hours
One thing certain to raise Lieber's hackles was to be called 'Fritz.' As a consequence, everyone on the island called him 'Fritz.' Except the Japanese, who called him 'Flitz.'
Heinrich Lieber was the son of Rudolf Lieber, tanner, pamphleteer, would-be anarchist. In 1897 Rudolf penned an imprudent letter to an acquaintance in Parma in which he discussed Wilhelm II's upcoming trip to Jerusalem. Rudolf listed the many excellent opportunities there would be to assassinate the Kaiser and mentioned Haifa as a particularly good spot. Rather than follow this advice, the Italian tried to kill his own despot, King Humbert, but he failed and Rudolf's letter was discovered in his apartment.
News of the assassination attempt in Rome reached the Liebers before the police did. Rudolf fled with his family to Hamburg, thence to New York. Young Heinrich did not understand why the story of the escape had to be repeated to him again and again, seeing as he had lived it.
He left home to escape poverty, only to find more of it on the streets. He worked as a garbage collector, a bill collector, and a dead horse collector. Meanwhile, his thoughts ranged across the injustices of the world.
One could not grow up with an anarchist without some of it rubbing off. Assassination had been a worldwide vogue in his youth. Empress Elizabeth of Austria, wife of Franz Joseph, had been stabbed in the heart while walking down the Quai Mont Blanc in Geneva. Premier Canovas of Spain had been shot while on holiday at the spa in Santa Agueda. A bomb had killed five policemen in the Rue des Bons Enfants and the next year another was tossed directly into the Chambre des Deputes. Of course, the crown went to the six inches of steel thrust into the stomach of President Carnot of France in 1894.
It seemed to Heinrich that injustice was the only justice for men without wealth or reputation. Knocking about New York, his daydreams ranged variously from murdering the mayor, the governor, a senator or two, and the president. The anarchist Leon Czolgosz beat him to the latter when he shot McKinley in 1901. But there was always someone else to assassinate, because there was always someone else who ruled.
Meanwhile, he grew tired of collecting things and took a job as an actor at Coney Island. This entailed switching roles as much as twelve times a day as he raced back and forth through the concessions to the various stages and 'living exhibits.'
By 1904 the amusement park at Coney Island was without doubt the largest of its kind in the world, spilling over onto Brighton and Manhattan Beaches. One of its central exhibits was The Boer War, in which skirmishes between British troops and rebels were re-enacted. Instead of shooting real political figures, Lieber found himself firing blanks at South African insurgents. Charging blockhouses and revetments, he took a curious satisfaction in acting out the role. Some of the other actors thought he flourished his bayonet with too much enthusiasm. But surface cuts and powder burns aside, no one was harmed in the mock battles. It provided an emotional release for the young German. Not only that, it paid.
It also opened doors to other jobs in the area. Over a period of two summers, he was a bit player in The Creation, The Great Galveston Flood, and The Trip to the Moon. He also spelled as a barker for the Coney Island Steeplechase, which provided him as much amusement as it did the public. Watching grown men rock on wooden horses as they raced opponents down the sloped track evoked roars of encouragement and laughter from the spectators. The manager correctly predicted that Lieber, barking the ride with Teutonic, barely comprehensible authority, could lure even the most staid passersby into feats of mock-equine derring-do. Professors vied with illiterate stevedores, matrons challenged seamstresses, all for a little pink slip of paper--the First Place prize that entitled them to a free ride. Such scenes took place in Wilhelm's Germany only when the upper class grimly dared itself to mingle with the lower. The longer Lieber lived in America, the more he began to see the land of his birth as twisted, unnatural. Turn of the century German plays, opera and literature gushed with blood and sexual perversion. Taking Darwin to heart, they believed this represented reality. Still, in the land of blood and iron, everything had to fit in its proper place. So the baggy, grisly Unknowns were given a rigid home in the fine arts.
But Americans! They looked cockeyed at you, told you the world was theirs for the taking, that everything that could be known would be known, given time and native know-how--and then institutionalized skewed perception in the freewheeling spirit of Coney Island. There was the Trip to the Moon, where lunar dwarfs escorted you around extinct volcanos; Hell Gate, which took you through manmade rapids into the infernal regions; 'Bumps,' where people were tossed about like popcorn on tin; the moving-picture machines--which cost a penny to view, but which drew large crowds nonetheless because of Anthony Comstock's protest that they seduced public morality.
Lieber's personal favorite was the Foolish House, a huge maze of mirrors that left him gasping with the confusion mere reflections could cause. He would spot the exit--only to have it resolve as a reflection of the exit. There was Lieber--yet only a reflection of his reflection. Sometimes he would stand before a mirror and see nothing--walking forward, though, he would hit clear glass. Strangers appeared alarmingly intimate--yet whirling, Lieber would see only himself.
This was America at its best. Taking common tricks of the cosmos, unmasking their rich complexity, then converting them into simple amusements. Not a denial, but an admission. By no means could one laugh at God. But one could sometimes enjoy the Joke with Him.
None of Lieber's stage duties required much in the way of the spoken word. Unlike the steeplechase proprietor, the theatrical directors saw no charm in his accent. He was a sturdy lad who made a good-looking prop. His career at Coney would have ended with the season had he not proved himself handy with tools--a legacy from his hated father, who did carpentry on the side. He spent the winter building new sets, repairing storm damage, helping redesign shopworn spectacles. The pay was meager but the life amusing, if not entirely fulfilling.
Then came the day an entrepreneur approached management with a sensational plan for a new exhibit: The Fall of Port Arthur.
While scholars and interested amateurs gleaned their history from books, visitors to Coney Island learned from vivid reenactments. Biblical and historical recreations were highly popular. Best attended were the battles. The Boer War played to packed open-air houses. The Fall of Port Arthur promised the same.
It was a wonderful undertaking. Models of Japanese warships five times as large as a man were made to seem even bigger using illusions of perspective and realistic backdrops. Smoke poured from their funnels as they stormed up the channel, firing broadside after broadside. All of which would have been impressive enough. What made The Fall truly awesome, however, was the cinematic screen hidden behind the backdrop. Explosions, soldiers landing and storming the heights, Russian volleys tearing through their ranks, were all projected from behind the screen. Used in conjunction with live sound effects, it was the most impressive display Lieber had ever seen. And he helped to build it. When finished, and summer came, it was mobbed by amazed spectators.
Lieber returned to his role-playing duties. Yet as he dashed from Dreamland to New Walk, across Neptune Avenue and down Coney Island Avenue, past the Scenic Railway or through Luna Park, scraping off greasepaint from one show and slapping on pancake for another, he nearly always found a way to pause by the Port Arthur panorama. It was not the ships so much as the martial air that captivated him. The old Prussian blood coming up. He had learned during his long ocean voyage between Hamburg and New York that he was not made for the sea. The health inspector at Ellis Island had kept him in isolation for a week, convinced he was contagious, when he was really only seasick.
So if he could not join the Navy--what?
There was the East Side Army recruitment center, but it was closed much of the time. Even when open, the recruiters seemed so dull and dismal you'd have thought you were enlisting in Sing Sing.
The great change in Lieber's life came when he ran into a group of marines at the Port Arthur Exhibit. He was startled to discover he could clearly understand what they were saying.
Why... they were Germans!
Thus, he waded into their conversation--and into the Corps.
It was heaven on earth. Compensation for the rigors of Parris Island came in the form of his drill instructor; he was from Eschwege, a town on the Werra, practically dead center of the Fatherland. Teutonic in thought and action, he made Lieber feel as though the South Carolinians were the aliens, not the other way around. A multitude of nationalities, in addition to German, were scattered throughout the barracks. The Marine Corps seemed to be nothing less than a Foreign Legion smack in the American southland.
Lieber earned high praise from the sergeant from Hesse, as well as from the Kommandant. He seemed destined for a great career in the Corps.
Then came disaster.
A month out of boot camp, he drew a unique historical assignment. Just over a hundred years earlier, Admiral John Paul Jones had gone to the great spinnaker in the sky. He was interred in the country where he died, France. It seemed a crime that America's first great naval hero should be entombed in a foreign land, so preparations were made to transfer the body to a crypt in a new chapel in Annapolis. This was a major public relations event for the Navy. Only the snappiest, handsomest sailors and marines were chosen for the honor guard.
An atavistic thrill darted through Lieber when he joined the detail for the voyage to Paris. The nightmarish passage from Hamburg was forgotten. He suffered not a single moment of queasiness on the journey over, and decided his awful experience on the immigrant ship had been due to the overcrowded, despicable conditions in steerage. Sadly, he was only half right.
As Jones' body was piped on board the Brooklyn, Lieber stood at port arms above the gangway. The ship was crowded with photographers, who had difficulty keeping their tripods steady as choppy water from the Channel disturbed the harbor. It was as if the ghosts of drowned British sailors were intent on one la