Free 1901 by Robert Conroy Page A

pain and rage as people were hit.
    “Fall back!”
    Why? Weber thought. Despite the fact that he didn’t want to be here, his blood was up. Those stupid people had tried to kill him! How dare they? Didn’t they know he meant them no harm? And now they had to be killed. How foolish they were to even try to stop the Imperial German Army. My God, he thought, I am beginning to sound like a soldier.
    When the Germans reached their original starting point, Weber understood why they had been ordered to fall back as he heard the warships opening up with their great cannon. He realized that it was much better to let the big guns chew up the barricades than to storm them in the face of rifle fire. Along with the others, he exulted as this ultimate display of German might raged against the enemy.
    Of course it had never been anyone’s intent to burn the city; it was just another example of how things race out of control when people start killing each other. It hadn’t taken long for Weber’s pride to turn to horror as he watched the flames roar through the crowded buildings. He waited in vain for the fire brigades to come and put them out even after the bombardment had finally ceased. How naive, he thought. There will be no fire brigades. The clean and lovely city of Brooklyn—no, it is called a borough now—will burn until the fires run out of things to burn.
    For the rest of the day and the night he and the others watched in stunned disbelief while Brooklyn was largely destroyed. Their horrified eyes saw sights that they would never forget. They saw the tightly packed brick buildings erupt with people carrying whatever they could, often just bundles of clothing, sometimes not even that, as they tried to flee. They saw the eager flames lick at and take the tardy, turning them into running, screaming torches. They saw panic as the Americans trampled the slow and the weak in their efforts to get out of the way of the implacable and malevolent fire.
    At one point, Weber may have cried. He didn’t know. He saw the captain and realized that the man also felt the sadness of the terrible event.
    But he didn’t see Kessel. He looked around and saw the others from his old squad, but not Kessel. He asked one of his friends, who said he hadn’t seen their corporal since the order came to fall back from the barricade.
    Good grief, Weber thought. Could Kessel have been killed? He grinned slightly at the thought of such rough justice. What a tragedy for mankind. Perhaps now the bastard is roasting in the fires of Brooklyn in preparation for the eternal fires of hell. For the first time, Weber felt some relief. Perhaps something good would come of this awful incident.
    As Molly Duggan slowly regained consciousness, the first thing she became aware of was the pain that racked portions of her body. Then she noticed she was lying on a cold floor in a strange room. She forced her eyes open through her swollen lids and looked about. Where was she? She tried to roll over onto her side, and the pain in her groin caused her to gasp.
    Then she remembered. She and her brother, Cormac, had gone beyond the barricades to harass the stupid Germans with their pointed helmets. Cormac, at twenty, was four years older than she and her caretaker following the recent death of her father. Cormac was a wild one; the idea of tormenting an armed army was lunacy, but Cormac convinced her and a number of others to join in the wildness.
    With whoops and hollers they approached the cowlike Germans and threw rocks and horseshit at them, then laughed when the hurled turds struck home. It stopped being funny when the Germans started moving on them with their bright bayonets flashing in the sun. The tormentors had run back to the barricades, where, with an unladylike leap to the top of an overturned wagon, Molly yelled an obscenity she’d heard an angry customer in her father’s butcher shop exclaim over the price of a cut of meat. Cormac looked shocked, then