Chapter 82

1100 hours local time,
Saturday, 12 July, 2014
Glencoe Museum,
Radford, Virginia

Yes, we stayed overnight in the abandoned museum, once the stately residence of General Wharton himself. I wondered what that old secesh general would think of such a diverse company, practicing open miscegenation, staying at his old Virginia home. Probably nothing good, going by the usual attitudes of ex-Confederate officers. Even some Unionist Virginians were a bit racist, especially at first. General George Thomas comes to mind, and he was the Rock of Chickamauga, though his views improved somewhat over time. A rebel general? Yeah, nothing good there.

In any case, we tried to be careful not to damage any of the historical artifacts, hoping that they somehow were preserved. We couldn’t exactly take them with us, not trying to travel light. Besides, we didn’t wish to steal a part of the Old Dominion’s history, to put it mildly. We also didn’t wish to risk any artifacts getting damaged en route to our ultimate destination. So, yes, we were as careful in how we spent our stay there.

We had mostly slept in a bit, though Sonali and Trish accompanied us toward the tail end of the journey here and then stood guard over the museum while we slumbered. Trust me, there are fewer better guards than a soldier of Heaven. Angels don’t require sleep, after all, and certainly don’t doze off during their watch. Otherwise, we’d have to take turns doing this, as we might in the future.

I didn’t spend nearly as much time having sex as I had during my stay in Roanoke, as I tried to balance things more now that I wasn’t on breeding duty. I had babies now to fret about, and I made a point of fussing over them like any good Daddy. There were a lot of them, in fact, and I tried not to neglect them. Then again, I didn’t ignore their mothers, either. We just didn’t have the wild, frenzied orgies that would last for hours, my wives, husbands, and I. Not as much time for that kind of thing.

Breakfast came rather late, but it came nonetheless, even if it was much closer to brunch. We all sat there, slowly waking up fully as we downed plenty of good coffee and hot tea that was on hand. Ham, fried eggs over easy, grits, and hashbrowns, of course. It was my last breakfast in Virginia, after all. I planned to have a Virginia ham steak in honor of the state that had played hostess to me for so long, so I did just that.

Today, we planned to push through Pulaski and Giles counties, into West Virginia, my native state. To think, not that long ago in the span of history, only a century and a half ago, 20 June, 1863, West Virginia was created out of Virginia by an act of Congress. Normally, that would have required the full permission of Virginia itself, but since the Old Dominion was in open rebellion against the United States, the approval of the Reorganized Government of Virginia under Francis H. Pierpont had to suffice. That was the Unionist rump state government that operated out of Wheeling, of course. This was unprecedented, but so was the Civil War.

“Thinking a lot about history, huh? That’s the trouble with staying over in a museum, I guess, even one that used to be a private home,” Tania pointed out as she snuggled against me, the new relationship energy mixing with bittersweet memories of the past.

“There are plenty of those in your old hometown, too, or was that your mother’s hometown?” I teased her about her Russian roots.

“My mother’s yes. I was born in the good ol’ US of A like yourself, my love. True-blue American, if such a thing exists now. The trouble with civic nationalism, which is mostly a good thing, is that so much of it depends upon the political structures to maintain it. The upside is that anyone can be part of the nation, based upon birth or naturalization, without having to be part of an ethnic group. Ethno-states aren’t that flexible. And, of course, civic nationalism can be rebuilt, albeit probably in a different form. An even better, more durable one, I hope.

“But, yes, my mother was from St. Petersburg, so you can imagine the history there. The Winter Palace. Kronstadt Naval Station. The February and October Revolutions. The Russian Civil War. The Constituent Assembly while it briefly convened. The Petrograd Soviet. Bloody Sunday. The Siege of Leningrad. I wonder who’s in charge now that Moscow’s gone. That’s another city with a lot of history, but all destroyed by fire and sulfur.

“My mother, Yulya Kornilova, claimed to be related to General Lavr Kornilov, though that wasn’t something that she mentioned a lot back home. She waited until she came to the States to assert that. He was a fierce White Guards commander who was killed while fighting the Red Army, after all. He also tried to overthrow the Provisional Government under Alexander Kerensky and was stopped by Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, and Socialist Revolutionaries. Yeah, he was a real prick, but he was an important figure in history, so Mama was absurdly proud of that alleged kinship with him,” Tania laughed as she kissed me again.

“Kerensky. A damn fool. He should have sued for peace as quickly as he could. Though he wasn’t alone in that folly. Prince George Lvov was guilty of that, too. Anyway, Russia was in no shape to continue the war and to do so was sheer folly. Then again, I was never a big fan of American entry into the war. I would have done it in Wilson’s shoes if I was given no alternative by German actions, of course, but I wouldn’t have been keen on it. I wouldn’t have exactly danced on the tightrope as recklessly as Wilson did, either, with the trade policy toward the belligerents,” I groused about the stupidity of a collapsing, chaotic Russia staying in the Great War when it had no realistic chance of winning it.

All that had accomplished was to strengthen Lenin and his Bolsheviks, after all. Maybe it was just hindsight, but so much of the tragedy of later history could have been avoided if someone had read the Riot Act to much of Europe at the time. Someone like the President of the United States, for instance. America could have achieved a major moral and cultural victory, even economic one, by presiding over a peace conference held on American soil. As by far the most powerful neutral country in the world at the time, the Great Powers of Europe would have had to take the United States quite seriously. Peace with honor, but without victory or defeat, could indeed have happened, and even the much vaunted Fourteen Points espoused by Woodrow Wilson could have had a fighting chance. Well, minus the Covenant of the League of Nations in its final draft.