THE BRIGADIER GENERAL ROSE from his desk and removed his reading glasses. It was after midnight. His joints popped and crackled like cold sapwood beneath his pajamas. He walked to the window and clasped his hands behind his back, standing before the pale specter of his own reflection. A bald man, his mustaches broad and pale, faintly cavalier.
He sighed through his teeth. The reports on his desk were clear. Over a million rounds fired. Bombs dropped on American soil. Americans fighting Americans in trench warfare. An unknown death toll, rising by the hour. And, at noon, like ten thousand gunfighters in a Hollywood Western, the miners had stared down the Presidential ultimatum hanging over their heads like the sun itself and never blinked, shooting right through the deadline.
He had no choice.
The general breathed in, readying himself. Soon he would wire the War Department to request the deployment of the United States Army to West Virginia. He’d have the state governor roused from bed to tell him the news. The man had been begging Uncle Sam to intervene, to snuff the insurrection burning at the feet of his state, blistering the toes of his biggest campaign donors—the coal operators.
The general’s assessment would not be kind. Already, he was turning the words over in his mind, assembling them like the boxcars of a troop train:
It is believed that the withdrawal of the invaders … would have been satisfactorily accomplished … but for the ill-advised and ill-timed advance movement of State constabulary on the night of August 27, resulting in bloodshed.
Now he must reassert law and order in a failed state. Already, it seemed, he could feel the distant rumble of mobilization tickling the soles of his feet. The thud of infantry boots and iron-shod hooves, the wheels of howitzers and gun carriages, the sizzling roar of bombers, as if their manifold reverberations traveled long miles through the earth, seismic, rising up through his heels, swelling him with power. His chest. His word. Soon, with an utterance, he could command violence of biblical proportions, as if anointed with the powers of a god.
He looked at his swagger stick, a stubby billy club hanging from the brass knob of the wardrobe, dangling by its leather wrist lanyard. Already, the small wooden cudgel seemed to shiver slightly, newly weighted, as if it might snap free of its anchorage and plunge through the floorboards, impaling itself in the concrete floor of the basement. The kind of cudgel Uncle Sam might carry in his left hand, unseen in the recruitment posters, ready to cast a shadow of threat across the land.
THE BUGLER STRODE THROUGH the predawn darkness, his heels striking crisply across the parade ground. He stood straight as a ramrod beside the flagpole and lifted the polished kink of brass to his lips, as if for a kiss. His lungs swelled beneath his uniform blouse. In this moment, at this hour, he was not one man but many, dawn-dark ghosts divided across forts and camps on every side of West Virginia, sounding the simultaneous call of reveille beneath their campaign hats, the unsung lyrics tumbling into the ear canals of still-sleeping men, invading their dreams.
You’ve got to get up
You’ve got to get up
You’ve got to get up this morning
You’ve got to get up
You’ve got to get up
Get up with the bugler’s call …
The men of elite infantry regiments in four states rolled out of their bunks. Their bare feet slapped the floor; their dog tags jingled from their throats. Their orders had come through.
“Hear that, boys? We’re going to the Mountain State!”
The trains were already loaded, waiting. Soon, the black iron engines would cough great gouts of coal-smoke from their stacks, their steel driving wheels rolling the first few inches, stretching the mile-long chains of cars coupler to coupler, clanking, straining, gaining momentum, and then the locomotives would be under way, chuffing out of their stations, the troops waving their caps to well-wishers and sweethearts. Soon, the great war trains would be steaming toward West Virginia from every cardinal point of the compass, like crosshairs converging on Blair Mountain.