When the New World is Revealed

Preface:

A lot of quarantine angst made its way into this story. It is in part a lament for the lack of live music and dancing going on right now, mended with a setting I created for a hypothetical future role-playing game, itself attempting to combine the bizarre technology of a Red Alert game with the cynicism of Slaughterhouse-Five or Catch-22.



The A train took Charlie and his band into the city from Frankfurt. Before that, it had been Frankfurt. The desolation of the war and the shining chrome of the new cities looked so different from his native Chicago. Europe West of that slowly retreating line now defined at the Vistula was something so obviously of the future.


The intercom blared. “We are now stopping at Hamburg’s Befreiungplatz Station. Those whose final destination is Hamburg must now leave the train. Those going on to Lubeck, Berlin, or Poznan should remain onboard. The train will wait momentarily to ensure that proper anti-air guns are installed before heading into contested zones.”


“Okay, boys, let’s go! Our gig’s in only a couple of hours, so we need to be ready by then!”


His bandmates muttered their assent, and grabbed their instruments and suitcases. They clambered down the stairs to the linoleum train platform.


They were greeted by more chrome: in this case, an automated steward. It proclaimed in a cheery yet unnervingly monotone voice, “Wilkommen in der Neustadt Hamburg! Bienvenue à Hambourg ville-neuve! Welcome to Hamburg New City!”


“Thank you,” replied Charlie, his bugle case in hand. “We’re scheduled to be picked up by an Army bus.”


“What is the name of the party?”


“Chicago Charlie’s Boogie Woogie Bugle Band.”

“The bus is in the concourse. Please follow me.” The robot rolled on its treads out of the eerily shiny building, where sharp-dressed men and women cavorted with military personnel from two dozen countries and the occasional automated steward.


They boarded the stark green bus with the white star emblazoned on its side. It took them through the streets on the ground; flying cars were seen as too dangerous for such important people at the moment.


The flying cars dotted the sky like locusts in the afternoon sun, scurrying this way and that between the glassy pillars that they called skyscrapers. Below the altitudes marked for the flying cars, electrical lines like spiderwebs criss-crossed the city, making this strange new Hamburg gleam like a massive neon sign.


It wasn’t a new look, per se; this is what Rotterdam looked like now, as well as Frankfurt, and he had heard similar plans to do the same to Berlin and Pforzheim and Warsaw.


“You know,” he said to Peter, the band’s drummer, “by war’s end there’ll probably be many more of these cities.” Peter was asleep and as such gave no response.


What struck Charlie most about these new cities, drawn up in some committee building in Washington and designed with input from William Levitt himself, was the advertising. In the central areas, there were massive glimmering advertisements for Coca-Cola (Spark your imagination with Fanta, Germany’s homegrown soft drink!) and Burmashave (With clean chins/the soldiers said/we’re going off/to bash the red/Burmashave). It struck him that so many of these signs were in English.


The bus pulled into the loading bay at the back of Hamburg’s Manstein Hall. There was, fortunately, an up-to-date practice room.


They unpacked their instruments and took out their music. “Okay, gents, you know what they want. The Saints aren’t going to go marching onto Moscow themselves!”


And so Bobby, the singer, started belting out When the Saints Go Marching In, as the PR people had ordered them to.


Charlie remembered getting the order that that song was now one of the songs that the greatest wartime swing musician since Glenn Miller disappeared over the English Channel had to play. He had nothing against the song, indeed he liked it, but it was part of a very strange campaign by the propaganda (or ‘public relations’) people in Washington.


When he was in London they had hauled him to Westminster to attend a meeting with American and British planners. One of the faceless bureaucrats responsible for that decision had said to him that “the Communists are explicitly Godless, so we need to leverage God for all he’s worth.”


The singer wailed, and Charlie’s bugle filled the room. There were some kinks but overall they had it done very well.


They then did some of the other songs that were wanted: a lot of Glenn Miller, of course, some Ellington and Armstrong, and some of this newfangled stuff by names like Elvis Presley and Harry Belafonte. It was strange, to Charlie’s swing-era brain, but he could see the appeal.


He felt that warmth he felt after a good practice, seeing a well-oiled machine run with all of its parts in full cooperation, or a complex dish tasting as magnificent as the recipe promised.


After that practice, one of the venue techs barged into the practice room. “They’re all here. The soldiers, the girls, the bigwigs from the War Office, all of them. Be out there in twenty minutes.”


“You heard the man! Chop chop!” yelled out Charlie. The band picked up their instruments and proceeded to the stage.


The dance hall was packed. It was almost as if there were no war, with the exception of a great many men and women, in all different skin tones, in their uniforms. Charlie remembered when the war was fought solely by men, and by men segregated with their own skin colors, but wartime desperation forced that to change.

From the ceiling hung a cavalcade of banners, turning the ceiling into a parade of mostly red, white, and blue. There were the Stars and Stripes, the Union Jack, the Tricolore, the Schwarz-Rot-Gold, and the flags of other allies, from Italy and Spain to Canada and South Africa to Brazil and Argentina. The whole United Nations was hanging up there by threads.


As Charlie entered in his tan uniform, clutching his bugle much more than he had hoped, the crowd erupted in cheers that he could feel with his toes.


The announcer blared into the microphone in a stentorian voice “welcome, ye Marching Saints, to Manstein Hall! It’s a pleasure to see you all here tonight, just as we begin the offensive to end the war! As you certainly know, Chicago Charlie’s Boogie Woogie Bugle Band is the greatest swing band on either side of the great Atlantic Ocean!”


More cheers. At this point, it started to sound vaguely manic.


“You are here, in this beautiful new city of Hamburg, a city of God and of liberty, because you have all chosen to play your part in the greatest military venture of the century: the Last Crusade. Our enemy is something far more godless than Saladin, for Stalin has no belief in a higher power. We do.”


The words made him sick. This is not what he had thought he would do when he was playing with these very same folks in smaller dance halls in Chicago. But then he was drafted, and his talents were noted, and then they drafted the rest of the band to use it for their own purposes. The politics, he supposed, came with the territory.


“And now,” blurted the announcer, “the song of songs, the song that will march you to God’s Kingdom on Earth, When the Saints Go Marching In!”


And so the brassy frolic of New Orleans jazz swelled to fill the stadium. Charlie’s bugle electrified the room as the crowd began to jitterbug, shocking the crowd alive as if he were bringing the whole city back to life. The drums pounded like the city was being pelted with bombs, leaving the momentary impression that the shining example of American modernity in Europe would have to be rebuilt yet another time. The saxophones serenaded the crowd, and the singer sounded like he just might have been one of God’s own angels, while the trombones were almost war horns.


They segued into more songs: a lot of the Glenn Miller canon, particularly his version of American Patrol, another song the War Department looked kindly on. As they played on and on, he could sense the ballroom to begin smelling heavily of sweat.


They played In the Mood, that most hallowed of Glenn Miller tunes, and breezed through it. It wasn’t a hard song, with its strange jumpiness being a mere trick of timing. Near the end, there are two different repeats of the main melody that get quieter and quieter, a muted melody that is punctured by a proud staccato trumpet, or in this case, to fit the gimmick, a bugle.


Charlie counted the beats measure by measure and, when the time came, dropped his staccato bombs on the crowd. Crowds always went crazy at that particular note.


But this time, it was much louder than even he had expected, as joining the bugle’s sound was that of a klaxon. Its hollow drone ascended to a wail, like those of the children whose parents would undoubtedly be reduced to ash by the napalm.


The song vanished into thin air much like its writer had. “Everyone, into the bunker! Paths to the entrances are now being lit up on walls and floors. Secure yourselves, and pray for deliverance.” That voice was an eerie monotone, clearly automated. In the distance, they could hear the anti-air guns firing off like timpanis, and the bombs dropping like angry bass drum hits.


They followed the illuminated signs to the bunker, and in there they waited. There was food and water marked in a plethora of languages (perhaps all those in the United Nations!), and spartan cots that nevertheless were better than metal flooring.


The bombardment went on. It felt interminable. Bombardments tended to feel that way.

The symphony of steel ended, the final movement finished, and the percussion of bomb and gravity came to its end, fortunately with no unwelcome fermata. The sound of the audience leaving was represented by the crackling of flame and the moans of the injured, punctuated by ambulance sirens as the valets.



Eventually the Hamburg civil defense people came knocking on the harsh iron doors and told them it was safe to come out. They emerged into a ballroom in ruins, with the sputtering construction vehicles clearing the debris bit by bit, filling the cold December air with a flurry of dust.


There was always that massive exhalation after the end of a bombing raid, the combination of jubilation that you weren’t dead and a survivor’s guilt upon confronting the fact that there many people who were, in fact, dead. At this point, Charlie felt more like the latter than the former.


The dance didn’t continue. Hell, it couldn’t continue. There was not much more to be said. A civil defense officer beckoned to him in English to an emergency bus, and the band was whisked to Fort Patton, the largest American military base anywhere near Hamburg.


They waited there for a couple of days, anticipating new orders on what and where to play. This was the part of war that was utter boredom rather than sheer terror.


Some days afterwards (the whole war felt interminable, and it was easy to lose track of time) a man from the War Department came to speak with them. “Washington isn’t at all happy with what happened in Hamburg. They’re moving the time-table for their end of the war way, way up. They want to have the war over by Christmas.”


Charlie’s eyes flared, but he said nothing. He knew the previous use of that statement and it felt like an affront.


“From our current lines on the Vistula, the order has been to capture Minsk within two weeks from now. What the brass want you to do is to play at a concert to be held just outside of Minsk, when our lines are there, to show the denizens of that poor city what Western civilization is capable of. This will be held on the nineteenth of the month, when there will be a lunar eclipse. Given the whole religion thing that the Pentagon is trying to sell, you’ll be playing When the Saints Go Marching In as the moon has turned to blood. It’s great imagery, and it makes the whole war look like the end of history.”


Charlie wanted to say something, to castigate the G-man for spewing obvious bullshit. But the G-man could ensure he was off the government payroll, so he kept quiet.


Charlie went to the band to tell them the news. They objected but likewise they couldn’t do much against Washington’s will lest they, too, lose their jobs.


So they played at Magdeburg and Berlin and Dresden, moving east into what was now Poland, to Poznan and Lodz and Warsaw. Then the train line ended, and they were brought over the line into what had been declared the Belarusian Soviet Socialist Republic, in Brest. Then they played for the front line men in Brest, then Pinsk, then Baranovichi, and then to an encampment in the rolling hills to the west of Minsk.


They practiced again, the horns sounding ever so slightly morose. The night was falling, and the moon ran red with blood, a sickly eye staring down the pettiness that was this awful war.


As they practiced, two army grunts came in with a large box, one each caring for one side. “Goggles, as ordered.”


“What goggles?”


“Eclipse goggles so you don’t go blind.”


“But it’ll be at night!”


“General’s orders.”


There were no complaints. They knew better.


The hour came, and they were escorted to the bandstand, the goggles around their eyes. Soldiers crowded the makeshift dance floor, made of hastily laid plywood.


“Please welcome Chicago Charlie’s Boogie Woogie Bugle Band, and General Curtis LeMay!” blared the announcer.


The general walked out, in full uniform, to a podium. He nodded his head in appreciation of the crowd, and gestured to the band. They all bowed.


“Welcome, one and all, to the beginning of the end. You all have seen the alpha, and now you are at the very tip of omega. The teeming millions of the United Nations have fought for so long to rid the world of dictators, and I promise you tonight that the fight will soon end.


“You now stand within the boundaries of the Soviet Union as declared before this war, the war to truly end all wars. It is from here we will march to Leningrad, and to Moscow, and our final victory. By the end of the carnage, you will have truly earned the title of ‘marching saints,’ and your homelands will have earned the laurels of fame for putting a rotting, bloodthirsty empire out of its misery.


“So now, rejoice! Revelation draws near. The moon is red, as scripture foretold. Now celebrate, for soon the Neva will be Armageddon!”


“That’s our cue!” whispered Charlie to the band. On that cold hill west of Minsk, there was just a slight bit of joy. It was the joy of lambs to the slaughter, but it was joy nonetheless. The horn line ascended like a missile, as the vocals extolled the joy of the end of the world in the way only a black spiritual could.


The song ended. The instructions were to pause for a bit, and then look towards Minsk. In the dark, the city seemed almost peaceful. The residents of that poor city almost certainly did not agree with that assessment.


The roar of propellers came from up above, a droning noise like a less pleasant version of bagpipes. Three bomber planes in a V shape darted towards the city. After they had well passed the crowd, the two bombers that served as the bars of the V peeled off, leaving the one bomber on a course over Minsk.


Up until that point, it had been a pleasant, albeit frigid, night. The stars above were like glitter on a dress, spangling the black with something rather dainty. The whole atmosphere was that of a pleasant flute solo piece, or sweet jazz.


Despite it being about eleven at night, the sun rose. The sky was bleached than white, then lightened to a pleasant pink, then to a vibrant orange, the color of the fruit. The stars were gone. The moon was gone. For the briefest of moments there was the pleasant aura of a new day.


And then came the shockwave.


It was a mallet impacting a bass drum, or a sustained note on timpanis. It was an inelegant blare on tuba. It was Gustav Holst in his angrier moments, the fermata at the end of Mars, the Bringer of War that had the violence of a stab to the heart.


As the dust cleared and the shaking stopped, Charlie gazed upon the radioactive crater that had once been Minsk, and saw the new world he had personally ushered in.




My thanks to @iainbhx and @owenm for help with the German.

The first person who correctly posts what famous swing tune the main character is based off of gets an internet cookie.