The Table
Dunmarrow — Day Fourteen
Aurelio Castagnac kept the war on a single sheet of paper.
He had it laid out on a leather blotter at the center of a desk the size of a small boat, a grid of columns and rows in his own tight hand, and by six-forty on the fourteenth morning he had already corrected it three times.
Down the left side ran the consumers: the Ardenne Republic, Tavernay, the Kelsford Dominion, the Solmere Commonwealth, Corvane’s own army corps, and beneath them a scatter of smaller names, Oshtel, Vellenmoor, the Corwyth Defence Force.
Across the top ran the things they wanted.
155mm high-explosive.
120mm tank rounds, sabot and shaped charge.
Fuzes.
Propellant charges.
Rail slots, because a shell is only a paperweight until it is moved.
At the bottom of every column, in red, was what the factories would produce this month.
Above it, in black, what had been asked for.
The black was two and a half times the red.
Castagnac took his coffee to the window and looked down through the smoke at the roofs of Foundry Row.
The Ministry of Armaments stood on a rise above the river, and from its sixth floor a man could see the chimneys of eleven plants, each with its rooftop banner and its flag, and beyond them the long brown sprawl of the Halden Works, which alone made forty percent of the Compact’s heavy ammunition.
He had been born in a rented room within sight of it.
His father had swept its floors.
At twenty he had swept them himself, and at thirty-one he had run the shell shop, and at forty-eight he had been asked by a chancellor who owed him a favor to take the ministry, and he had taken it, because a man who has built the thing ought to be the one deciding who gets it.
He was sixty-one.
His hair was silver and combed straight back, his hands were broad and a little swollen at the knuckle, and in eleven years he had never been late to a meeting he chaired.
There was a knock.
His aide came in with the morning digest.
The aide was perhaps twenty-six.
He wore a cheap grey suit and glasses he pushed up his nose with a knuckle, and he had been in the outer office for six months.
Castagnac had never asked his name.
It was on the door-plate, no doubt.
He had never looked.
“The delegations are in the long room, Minister. Ardenne, Tavernay, Kelsford, and the Corwyth colonel. The Solmere party has withdrawn its request.”
“They have no shell requirements. They have ships.”
“They asked for propellant.”
“They can have it. It doesn’t scale.” Castagnac took the digest, glanced down its columns, and turned it face-down.
“Who’s early?”
“All of them, sir.”
“Then they can wait until nine.”
At nine the long room smelled of floor wax and wet wool.
Twelve men sat in leather chairs down one side of a table that would have seated forty.
Castagnac took the head, and set his blotter square in front of him, and did not look at it.
Régis Montfaucon spoke first, because the Ardenne always spoke first.
He was the Republic’s deputy minister for armed forces, sleek, forty-eight, in a suit the color of good pewter, and he began in the gentle, regretful voice of a man about to be generous.
His president, he said, had authorized the first phase of an armored operation that would relieve pressure on the Corwyth front.
It required one hundred and ten thousand 155mm rounds and twenty-two thousand of the 120mm class, to be delivered by the twentieth.
“By the twentieth of this month,” Castagnac said.
“That is the President’s timeline, Minister.”
“The Halden Works has produced sixty-one thousand 155mm rounds in a month. It will produce sixty-one thousand again. I can give you the arithmetic on a card, if it would be useful to your president.”
Montfaucon smiled, as a man smiles who has heard the number before and prefers not to have heard it.
“The Republic has always regarded the Union as the arsenal of the Compact.”
“The Republic has regarded a good many things,” said Castagnac.
It was said without heat.
He had learned long ago that a quiet insult lands harder than a loud one, because it can be denied.
He let the sentence sit for exactly the length of time it took Montfaucon to decide not to answer it.
Then he said, gravely, that the Union would of course do everything in its power.
That he had personally reviewed the Republic’s request.
That the President’s leadership in this hour was an inspiration to the whole alliance.
Every word was true, in the sense that he had said it.
Around the table, pens moved.
The Marquis of Rennes-Vaux, for Tavernay, was next.
He was fat, courtly, fifty-five and perfumed, and he wanted fuzes.
He had thirty thousand shells sitting in a depot at Corsavy with nothing to detonate them, because a fuze plant in his own country had been closed for a decade to save money, and now the closure was a scandal.
He did not say this.
He said that Tavernay’s contribution to the common defense had always been measured in principle rather than tonnage, and that he hoped the Union would recognize principle.
“I do,” said Castagnac.
“The fuze line at Halden runs three shifts. It is fully committed through the twenty-fifth.”
“And after the twenty-fifth?”
“After the twenty-fifth, Marquis, I would be delighted to discuss it.” He turned a page he had not read.
“Tavernay’s vote in the Compact Council on the joint logistics command comes up on the seventeenth, I believe.”
The Marquis’s plump face became very still.
“I only mention it because I am told the vote will be close,” said Castagnac.
“And I should like to have friends in the room when it is taken.”
There was a pause, a long civilized one.
“I believe,” said the Marquis softly, “that Tavernay’s delegation will be found to have an open mind.”
“That is all any of us can ask.”
Brigadier Wynn Ashcombe, for Kelsford, said nothing pleasant at all.
He was a lean, weathered man of fifty in an unpressed uniform, and he had come six thousand kilometers to say that his country’s northern conscript brigades were drawing eleven rounds per gun per day against a planning figure of thirty.
Kelsford had sent forty thousand men to a war whose causes it did not understand.
It would like to be able to fire back.
“You will have a partial allocation,” said Castagnac.
“The rail slots are what matter.”
“The rail slots are what has been taking three weeks.”
“It is a difficult month, Brigadier.”
“It is a difficult month for the men at the front,” said Ashcombe, “who are counting their rounds on their fingers.”
Castagnac inclined his head.
He did not reply.
He wrote a small figure in the margin of the blotter, in pencil, and the Brigadier watched him do it and understood what the figure meant: that it was small.
Last, quickly, the colonel from Corwyth.
He was young, sunburned, still in field boots, and he asked for the ammunition his government had been promised in the spring.
Castagnac thanked him for his service.
He told him the request was noted.
He said it kindly.
The colonel understood that he had been told no, and understood that there was no one in the room to whom he could say so, and he stood and saluted and went out.
By eleven it was over.
Every man who left believed he had been heard.
That was the art.
The telephone rang as the last door shut.
He knew the voice at once, the Chancellor’s chief of staff, a woman named Perrault who spoke the way another person might sign a document.
The Ardenne president had rung the Chancellor at breakfast.
The Ardenne operation, which the Republic was calling WINDWARD, would begin on the twentieth or not at all.
The president had said so, in those words, on an open line.
He needed it to be in the newspapers before the summit on the seventeenth.
He needed the Union to be seen standing beside him.
“He needs the rounds by the twentieth,” Castagnac said.
“He needs the appearance of them.”
“Those are different things.”
“You are the only man in the government who knows how different,” said Perrault, “which is why I am calling you and not someone else.”
He put the receiver down.
He stood a moment at the window with his hands folded behind his back.
Then he sat at the desk, pulled the blotter toward him, and looked at the sheet for the first time that day.
Out of the sixty-one thousand 155mm rounds, forty-four could go to Windward and still leave the Union its own reserve.
That was the easy part.
The tank rounds were the problem: nine thousand five hundred of the 120mm class this month, against twenty-two thousand asked, and against the requirement, in black, of the Union’s own Third Armored Corps, which was about to send a resupply column of eighty trucks toward the Corwyth front.
That column had been planned for the twenty-first.
It carried, on the plan, enough main-gun ammunition for twenty-three days of fighting at the rate the general staff had projected.
The general staff had projected that the war would be over by winter.
He took the pencil.
He drew a line through the number under Third Armored Corps and wrote a smaller one beneath it.
Then another, on the rail-slot row.
The column would leave on the twenty-sixth, not the twenty-first, because the slots that would have carried it were now Ardenne’s.
It would carry, when it left, eleven days of main-gun ammunition, not twenty-three.
It would carry more fuel instead, because fuel was plentiful, and because fuel showed on a manifest as weight, and weight looked like effort.
It took him four minutes.
He was aware of the aide standing at the door.
“Minister,” said the young man.
He had come in with a folder, and he had not left.
“The distribution list for the allocation memorandum. You will want to approve it for registry.”
“Read it.”
“Nine copies. Chancellor’s office. The general staff. Armaments. Rail. Ardenne, Tavernay, and Kelsford liaison. The Third Armored Corps. And registry.” The aide’s eyes were on the sheet in his hand, and Castagnac was aware that the man’s finger was resting, just beside the margin, on a line lower down.
“There is also the replacement roster for the Third, sir. It was attached for cross-reference.”
“I did not ask for the roster.”
“No, sir.”
Castagnac held out his hand.
The aide gave him the page.
It was a list of sixty-odd names, with columns of ranks and crews and vehicle numbers, and most of it he did not read.
His eye went down it the way a man’s eye goes down a wall to find a crack.
He saw the name before he understood that he had been looking for it.
Castagnac, L.
Gunner.
Bastion-2.
Crew 3-14-C.
Lucan.
Twenty.
He had gone in the autumn, against his mother’s wishes and his father’s advice, and he had asked for no favors and been given none, and Castagnac had told himself for four months that this was the right thing, the clean thing.
A minister’s son in a rear billet was a scandal.
A minister’s son at the front was an ornament.
A minister’s son in a tank crew, unmentioned, in a battalion the minister himself supplied, was simply a soldier.
He had never looked to see which battalion.
The aide had gone very quiet.
Castagnac held the page for what seemed to him a long time.
He held it long enough to see, with the clarity that comes at the edges of a hard decision, that if he restored the twenty-three days of ammunition the column had been planned to carry, if he took the fuel off the manifest and put the shells on it and the column on the twenty-first slot, he would have to take the same shells and the same slot away from Ardenne.
And that in three days the Republic’s president would stand before a microphone and announce that the Union had failed him, and the Compact Council would vote on the logistics command with Tavernay watching to see who was frightened of whom.
He set the page down.
He capped the pencil.
“Approve the list,” he said.
“Nine copies. Registry gets the original.”
“Yes, Minister.”
“And Mr.—” He stopped.
He did not know the name.
“That will be all.”
The aide went out.
The door clicked.
For a while Castagnac sat with his hands flat on the desk and looked at the blotter, and at the grid, and at the tidy pencil corrections in the margin.
Somewhere below him a copy of the memorandum was being carried down four flights of stairs to a room of green steel cabinets where a soft-spoken clerk in a cardigan, who always asked after the minister’s wife and never forgot to, would initial the receipt, C.D., in a small, careful hand.
He had not favored the boy.
No one could ever say he had.