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Text copyright © 2020 Shane Carrow
All Rights Reserved
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 OTHER WORKS

BY SHANE CARROW

The End Times zombie apocalypse series

End Times I: Rise of the Undead
End Times II: The Wasteland
End Times III: Blood and Salt
End Times IV: Destroyer of Worlds
End Times V: Kingdom of Hell
End Times VI: Brother’s Keeper

The Avery-Carter series

Vampire on the Orient Express
Werewolf on the Western Front
 Table of Contents
CHAPTER I: KILOMETRE ZERO
CHAPTER II: WINTER ON THE WESTERN FRONT
CHAPTER III: BAY THE MOON
CHAPTER IV: CROW’S NEST
CHAPTER V: HONOUR AND FIDELITY
CHAPTER VI: OLD FRIENDS
CHAPTER VII: MYTHS AND LEGENDS
CHAPTER VIII: EGALITE
CHAPTER IX: FRATERNITE
CHAPTER X: LIBERTE
CHAPTER XI: THE LAST POST
CHAPTER XII: HOUR COME ROUND AT LAST
CHAPTER XIII: ASSAULT ON THE CHATEAU DE MEZIRE
CHAPTER XIV: THE BETTER PART OF VALOUR
CHAPTER XV: AN ENGLISHMAN, AN AMERICAN AND A GERMAN
CHAPTER XVI: MISERY OF DAWN
CHAPTER XVII: NEUTRAL SOIL
CHAPTER XVIII: MAN ABOUT TOWN
CHAPTER XIX: THE NATURE OF THE BEAST
CHAPTER XX: THE DARK MOUNTAIN
CHAPTER XXI: MY BLOODY LIFE AWAY
CHAPTER XII: CHRISTMAS IN BIEL
CHAPTER XXIII: NIGHT CALLER
CHAPTER XXIV: PAPERS, PLEASE
CHAPTER XXV: THE VERY ERROR OF THE MOON
CHAPTER XXVI: KNIGHT ERRANT
CHAPTER XXVII: THE FOX AND THE HOUND
CHAPTER XXVIII: SILENT NIGHT
EPILOGUE: INTER ARMA CARITAS
 CHAPTER I:

KILOMETRE ZERO

L ieutenant Lucas Avery of the British Army stood on a fire-step in

the French trenches of Kilometre Zero and pressed the binoculars to
his eyes. There was a weather front coming in from the east, but for
now the skies above were clear, lit up by a full moon and a thousand
blazing stars. He was at an observation post in the forward trench, a
place no officer would normally venture unless a major offensive was
scheduled. But the world was quiet here.
“Amazing,” he breathed to the soldiers and adjutants around him.
“Simply amazing.”
Before them was the half-mile scar of no man’s land—something
he instinctively thought of as a scar, but which here was an
unbroken mess of rain-washed dirt, covered in undisturbed weeds
and even small saplings. Beyond that were the German trenches;
the veiled glow of campfires, cigarette lights, hints of electric bulbs
as somebody opened the door of a concrete bunker.
It was almost utterly silent. No crack of sniper fire, no machine
guns, no whistle or thud of artillery. Avery almost fancied he could
hear snatches of conversation and laughter from the German
soldiers, carried across the rift on the wind.
He turned to his right, facing south towards Switzerland, another
unremarkable patch of moonlit hills and trees. “You expected the
Alps, hmm?” commented his handler from French intelligence, a
fellow lieutenant named Felix Leroux. “When I was sent here I
expected the Alps.”
“I did,” Avery admitted.
 “Those are much further south. Here, just farms and forest. You
see the lights of that village? To the left, there—maybe you can see
the flag. That is the border.”
It took Avery a few moments in the gloom, but eventually he
found it. A huge Swiss flag marking the bunker on their side of the
border, where the Western Front met neutral territory; a white cross
against a red background, rippling in the moonlight. He couldn’t see
it now, but he knew there must be a long and careful fortification of
barbed wire, trenches and artillery emplacements lining that
southern frontier. Or northern frontier, from the perspective of the
Swiss; the last stop before the cataclysmic barbarism that had split
Europe asunder. Switzerland was neutral but she was not toothless.
Avery knew, too, there must be Swiss soldiers looking back at him
across the moonlit landscape, soldiers in bunkers and pillboxes with
their own expensive binoculars held up to their eyes; mittens and
hoods and fur cloaks guarding against the winter cold. French and
German and Italian Swiss. The only country in all the Continent
bound not by language or race, but by national identity; not a
nation-state but a multi-cultural confederacy. And this was where it
ended: seven hundred kilometres of war-torn front, thousands of
men ripped apart by metal every single day, two great powers
clashing against each other, from the North Sea all the way down to
the border. Here, at Kilometre Zero.
“I haven’t known quiet like this since the desert,” Avery
whispered, passing the binoculars back to an adjutant and stepping
down onto the duckboards. “Thank you for showing me.”
Lieutenant Leroux shrugged. “Go north to the Vosges and you will
see trouble again. The Germans made a major push just yesterday.
Here… more trouble than it’s worth, hmm? Nobody wants to upset
the neighbours. Nothing can be gained here compared to what
would be lost. Nothing that cannot be gained elsewhere.”
They departed the forward trenches, moving back into the
relatively busy network that would return them to the village of
Seppois-le-Bas, where Leroux had a car waiting. Relative indeed:
there were a handful of soldiers here and there playing cards or
warming their hands by fires, but to Avery’s war-weary eyes it
looked alarmingly undermanned. He supposed the opposite numbers
on the German side were similarly low. “It must be a plush posting.”
“For those on their last tours,” Leroux said. “Or those wounded
but still able to serve. Or,” and he smirked, “those who know the
right people. What? Don’t look at me like that. I expect the Germans
do it also. And it is just a few kilometres.”
Avery couldn’t blame them. The whole front was a
slaughterhouse; what did it matter if for a handful of miles, in the
interests of diplomacy, both the French and Germans implicitly
agreed to keep things quiet? Did he really believe some great
breakthrough might occur here—something that might tip the
balance of the war one way or the other? Or was it just a thousand
fewer deaths each month on the reaper’s abacus?
They emerged from the rear trenches and walked the half-mile to
Seppois-le-Bas, where a staff car was waiting in the shadows outside
the post office. The village was deserted, the houses long
abandoned—even on a quiet front, nobody wanted to live this close
—and the driver flicked away a cigarette as they approached. A few
moments later they were humming along the road through the dark
countryside, back towards the division headquarters at the Chateau
de Mezire.
“You got to see something not many people see, anyway,” Leroux
said, lighting a cigarette and then leaning across with his match to
light Avery’s.
“Quite,” the Englishman said. “Though I suppose everybody’s
seeing something not many people see these days. One way or
another.”
The Frenchman snorted. “This war is the event of a lifetime. Of a
century. Everybody will have a story and they will all sound the
same: mud and blood and misery. But Kilometre Zero, that is
something unusual. The front where the war stood still.”
Avery reflected on Leroux’s position. Being posted to this quiet
sector on the Swiss border might be infuriating for a straight military
man, but for an intelligence officer—right on a tripartite international
border—it was probably just fine. He said nothing.
 “Do you think you’ll stay at Amiens for the rest of the war?”
Leroux asked.
“I don’t know,” Avery said. “If you’d asked me six months ago I
would’ve told you I’d happily serve anywhere for king and country.
But a few months of that front… God. I wish they’d send me back to
Paris. I miss Paris.”
“I hate Paris,” Leroux commented indifferently, tapping his
cigarette ash into the tray.
“Where are you from?”
“Lyon.”
“Typical,” Avery chuckled.
Leroux smiled back. “Perhaps they will send you back to the
Levant, or to Egypt. It cannot be so bad, really?”
“It’s all politics.”
Leroux exhaled a fog of tobacco smoke and grinned like a
Cheshire cat. “O-ho? Matters of the heart, or so I heard.”
Avery stiffened in his seat and turned to stare at him. “What on
earth are you talking about?”
Leroux frowned. “Calm down. The rumour is that you had an
affair with your CO’s woman, that’s all. God knows I’ve done it.”
The Englishman relaxed slightly, but the convivial atmosphere had
evaporated. He looked out the window at the impenetrable black
and grey landscape of moonlit Alsace scrolling past, and took a half-
hearted puff of his cigarette. “Don’t believe everything you hear,
lieutenant.”
“Ce n’est pas grave,” Leroux said. “Really, Lucas, I’m sorry. I
forget you people get so upset about things like that. We are
French! You must forgive me. Come on. You must drink with me
back at the chateau. It’s not every night I get to see an old friend,
come on, Lucas, please…”
Avery stared out the window. Friend was pushing it—he’d met
Felix Leroux perhaps half a dozen times at dinner parties and
gatherings in Paris, years ago, before the war, when he’d been
working for the Foreign Office. He did like the man, and it really was
nice to see a familiar face after all these years of gruesome
geopolitical bloodshed. But Leroux’s thoughtless comment had
reignited not just the familiar old panic but a sense of jagged loss
which lay heavy on his heart every hour of the day, only occasionally
pushed away by something that genuinely captured his attention—
like the eerie silence of Kilometre Zero.
“I thought the French were supposed to know the meaning of
discretion,” he said, interrupting Leroux’s apologies. “Especially
French intelligence officers.”
Leroux shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “Forget it, friend.”
“I’ll try,” Avery said.
Their conversation moved on to other topics, as the car wound its
way along the frosty strips of bitumen cutting through the Alsatian
countryside, under the light of the full moon. Eventually, some ten
miles from the front, they arrived at the place the French officers of
Kilometre Zero called home.
The headquarters of the French Army’s 38th Division had, very
early in the war, settled upon the Chateau de Mezire: an 18th century
mansion with twenty acres of tended gardens, sixteen bedrooms,
some rather sumptuous bathrooms and an extensive wine cellar, a
safe distance behind the point where the front line had eventually
settled. It was an ancient country home which, since it was situated
on land which had started off the war as German territory, had
probably been commandeered from some rich Alsatian ritter without
a second thought in those heady days in the summer of 1914. Not
that second thoughts had ever bothered the French military when it
came to claiming chateaux from their own side either, further north,
during the Battle of the Frontiers. The brass did like their luxuries,
and in a time of war everybody was expected to pitch in, no matter
how much they might loudly protest after retreating to their pieds-a-
terre in Paris.
Avery found he couldn’t really fault them that, sitting by the
ornamental pond halfway down the estate grounds, wrapped in furs
and with his feet propped up by a firepit. He certainly would have
fought for this place. Leroux had wandered back up to the chateau
to fetch a second bottle of wine, and Avery was quite happy to be
left alone for a moment, looking at the frost patterns on the surface
of the water, the stark white stars above, the ash settling on his legs
and his shoulders. His uniform would smell of woodsmoke tomorrow,
which he liked. He associated the smell with hunting and camping
trips from his youth. A winter smell. Winter was no fun on the front,
he imagined, but he’d been in the desert for two years. Baking hot
days and freezing cold nights and barely a seasonal variation all
through the year. Not like here. He hadn’t wanted to come back in
the first place, but it was precisely because he hadn’t wanted to
come back that he found himself feeling suddenly optimistic. France
had always felt as much a home to him as England, and he felt
nostalgic. A homecoming was never entirely bad: familiar smells,
familiar places, familiar sounds. The French tongue everywhere on
his ears again. Even if the bureau sent him elsewhere after Amiens,
so what? He could handle it. He was thirty-three years old: old
enough to be wise, young enough still to handle whatever life might
throw at him. He felt excited, for the first time in a long time. Being
somewhat drunk certainly helped.
Leroux returned from the big house with a fresh bottle tucked
under his arm. “I would’ve thought you’d cleared the cellar out by
now,” Avery said.
“We did,” Leroux winked. “I have to get deliveries in. This is a ‘07
pinot noir from Chiroubles.”
“I suppose vignerons get special dispensation,” Avery said.
“Immunity from conscription.”
“They do.”
“Really? I was joking.”
“I don’t know,” Leroux said, twisting the cork out from the bottle.
“How the fuck should I know?”
“No wonder everybody speaks so highly of the French intelligence
service.”
“Do you know which occupations are exempt in Britain?” Leroux
asked, pouring him a glass.
“No,” Avery admitted.
“Exactly. I can tell you which occupations are exempt in Germany.
I can tell you their numbers, for the summer gone and the upcoming
year. I can tell you age demographics, experience, corps numbers,
where they’re likely to push. I can tell you what the officers are
thinking and I can tell you what the public is thinking. Whether the
young vignerons in France are exempt from service, I don’t care,” he
said, lifting his glass and admiring the colour in the firelight. “Let the
old farts make the wine. They’re better at it.”
Avery said nothing. The logs in the firepit cracked and split, and
the breeze shifted slightly to send a few specks of hot ash settling
on his shoulders, which he brushed away.
“I’m sorry about what I said in the car,” Leroux said, looking over
at him. “If that upset you. I didn’t mean anything by it, you see? In
France… you know, we are different. People here like to brag about
it. I know your people are more private, but I forget. That is my
problem. My mistake. I should have said nothing. I am very sorry,
Lucas.”
Few men would have apologised; even fewer would have looked
him in the eye while apologising. Which served to remind Avery why
he’d always liked Leroux in the first place. “It’s nothing,” he said. He
was about to add don’t mention it before remembering that this
ultimate expression of forgiveness in English would translate as a
rudely aggressive order in French. “Please—all is forgiven.” He had a
moment to contemplate the differences between those two phrases
and what they revealed about English and French culture before
Leroux was clinking his glass and they were sipping at more wine.
“I am sorry we cannot be inside,” Leroux commented. “No good
for conversation, at this hour.” It was only eleven o’clock, but while
both intelligence agents were used to late nights in their line of
work, the other officers of the chateau were clearly accustomed to
early and uninterrupted bedtimes; the place had already been silent
when they’d returned from Avery’s sightseeing trip to the front. “Out
here, in the summer, is much nicer. Grasshoppers, all the birds…
leaves and flowers. Very nice.” Leroux yawned, and refilled his glass.
“You are famous for your gardens in England, yes? Nicer than here?”
“I couldn’t say, out of season,” Avery said.
Leroux chuckled. “Very diplomatic.”
They worked their way through the bottle, chattering tipsily about
the various merits of France as opposed to Britain, ranging from
geographical (the Scottish Highlands had an earthy humbleness
which the Alps lacked, Avery asserted) to the historical (the
Napoleonic conquest of Europe was a far greater relative
accomplishment than Britain’s naval domination of lesser countries,
Leroux insisted) to the literary and poetical (on this, Leroux had little
interest, and merely took Avery’s word for it that Shakespeare and
Tennyson outweighed anything France had ever produced). “I will
concede this, though,” Avery said. “No doubt in my mind. Paris is a
finer city than London.”
Leroux made a snorting noise. “Paris is the worst of our cities.”
Avery smiled. “Well, take your pick. Is Lyon better than
Birmingham?”
Leroux almost spat his wine out. “You would compare that place
to Lyon? Your grimy little city of—what is it they do? Textiles?”
“That’s Manchester. Birmingham is manufacturing. What does
Lyon do?”
Leroux looked smug. “Banking.”
Avery sighed, swirled his wine, looked out over the pond. “Terrible
industry to base a city around. Who wants a city full of bankers?
London would never let that happen, at least.”
“You know I am not Lyonnaix?”
“You told me you were.”
“No, I went to school there. But my family is from Provence. Near
Avignon.”
“Which do you prefer?”
“Lyon is a marvellous city. But when I retire I will go home to
Provence.”
“Why?”
“Because I do not like cities. Not even small cities, like Lyon. I
prefer the country. And my family is there, of course.”
“You have children?”
“No, no—I am not married. But I miss my parents, my brother, my
sisters. My aunts and uncles and cousins. Do not you?”
Avery felt suddenly melancholy, running his thoughts over his
extended family. He despised his father, who despised him in turn;
his stepmother pretended he didn’t exist; and his relations with his
brothers could be summed up as perfunctorily polite. His sole
remaining brother, he still had to remind himself; Major Edward
Avery had been killed in action at Ypres more than a year ago. His
other brother, Francis, a Royal Navy lieutenant, had informed him of
Edward’s passing in a blunt telegram to Cairo.
“My sister, I suppose,” Avery said uneasily. Emily had been the
only member of the family he’d ever got along with, but even now
they rarely exchanged letters more than once every few months.
“But not really. I’d sooner go back to Paris than England. I suppose
that’s another matter in which France excels. Convivial family
relations.”
“Oh, that is a stereotype,” Leroux said. “I’ve known many
unhappy families. And I am sure there are many happy English
families. It is just a matter of luck, really.” He smiled, and went to
refill Avery’s glass. “At least you can choose your friends.”
Avery clapped a hand over the top of his glass. “I think I may
have had enough, Felix. Thank you anyway. In fact, I think I’ll turn
in.” He drained the last of his glass and stuck his hand out. “Thank
you again.”
“Ce n’est pas grave,” Leroux said, shaking his hand but making no
move to get up—clearly he intended to finish the bottle himself.
“Really, it is good to have somebody I can talk to out here. The army
officers, they are so boring. I shall look you up when I am next in
Paris.”
“If I’m there,” Avery said morosely.
“Well, that’s why it’s called looking up,” Leroux said cheerfully, the
last two words in English.
Avery walked back through the dark towards the chateau. He had
lately been in the Nile Delta, and night-time to him, even in
December , was supposed to mean humid warmth and a chorus of
frogs and insects. This utter silence and biting cold took him further
back than that, to the desert at night. Nights he’d prefer to forget.
He had a bed waiting for him up a staircase on the second floor of
the chateau. An empty bed, with no other soul to warm it. Empty
and alone.
 That bed is more than a million men will be getting tonight all the
way up this front, his inner Stoic reminded him. Quit your whingeing.
And it was true. Other people were worse off than him. Far worse
off. So what right did he have to complain?
Avery thought about Tom’s face, his hair, his strange body of
contrast; the deeply tanned face and arms, the pale legs and torso.
The press of their bodies against each other. It wasn’t fair. He
missed him and he hated him, for the hand Avery suspected Tom
had played in having him sent back to Europe. Where was the Stoic
now?
I’m right here, the Stoic said, reminding you that plenty of men
much younger than you have suffered horrible deaths these past
two years without even getting the chance to fall in love. You
could’ve been shot in the head the moment you stepped off the train
in Constantinople in 1914 and you still would’ve lived a fuller life
than any of those poor boys.
And how is that supposed to stop me thinking about him? Avery
said.
It’s not, the Stoic replied. It’s supposed to remind you of how
lucky you were to have him. And everything else you’ve had. And
still have, and will continue to have, since you’re lucky enough to
see this war out in the intelligence corps. You’re going to live to a
ripe-old age and die peacefully on a sun lounger back home at the
manor in the year 1975 while you watch a fit young gardener trim
the hedge in July sunlight with his shirt off. So stop whining.
Avery sighed. His Stoic, like himself, had a good imagination.
Don’t worry about it, his inner Epicurean said. Just go upstairs
and have a good sleep in that nice, comfy bed.
That at least was something Avery could agree with. But he
walked slowly through the gardens—dead and frozen, but peaceful
nonetheless—and enjoyed the smell of the woodsmoke drifting from
the firepit. The stars here were nowhere near as bright or stark as
they’d been out in the deserts of the Levant, but they still attracted
his attention, especially on a still and calm night when he was
somewhat—all right, very—drunk.
 Avery paused at the rear portico of the chateau, on this deathly
silent night, staring up at the stars and the fat, full moon. It was
half-past ten. After a moment he tottered upstairs, pulled his boots
off, and fell asleep in his warm, comfortable bed.
 CHAPTER II:

WINTER ON THE WESTERN

FRONT

A few miles away from where Lieutenant Lucas Avery of the

British Army was asleep in a soft, warm bed with a belly full of
expensive wine, Legionnaire Sam Carter of the French Foreign
Legion was squatting by a fallen pine tree in a sad, sorry patch of
forest amid the rolling farmlands of Alsace, trying and failing to light
a cigarette. It was past midnight now and the stars were blotted out
by heavy cloud, drifting across no man’s land from Bavaria. A cold
rain had begun to fall, and to Carter’s patrol—all three of them well-
versed in Alsatian weather patterns by now—it seemed likely it
would only get heavier.
After some time he managed to stoke the cigarette to life, cupped
in his hands beneath the shelter of the pine log and his oilskin cape.
He managed a few puffs and then it was gone again. Carter sighed,
tucking it back into his pocket. The rain drummed down on the hood
of his cape and splattered into the mud all around him. “What’s the
time?” he asked Corporal O’Halloran.
The Australian, Carter’s senior by quite a few years, squinted at
his wristwatch. “Half twelve.”
“Christ,” Carter said. He glanced over at Legionnaire Bonelli. “How
you feeling, kid?”
The Italian teenager’s head was deeply encased in the hood of his
raincoat, invisible to the world around him. “I wish the Germans
would kill me.”
 “Oh, it’s not that bad,” Carter said. Privately, he agreed that it
was. The first week of December, just a taste of the winter to come,
and still it was cold enough that every breath felt like inhaling
poison. Carter had grown up in the Rocky Mountains and had
fancied he could handle Europe’s childish notion of what constituted
“cold,” but he’d been spent too many years away: in the merchant
marine under the Caribbean sun, in his first spell in the Legion in
Morocco, in the sweltering heat of India. He’d acclimatised to a sort
of permanent summer along the Tropic of Cancer and already the
wet dank of France, even in autumn, had become a daily misery. It
was 1916, but Carter had come to the war late, and this would be
his first winter.
The rain pattered down on his hood, on the bark of the fallen
tree, on the mud all around them. Bonelli was from Calabria and had
never been north of Naples before joining the Legion; he was just as
miserable as Carter. O’Halloran, infuriatingly, was unfazed by it.
“I thought Australia was s’posed to be hot,” Carter said, teeth
chattering. “How come this don’t bother you none?”
“I’m from Tasmania,” O’Halloran said, crouched in the choicest
position beneath the log, which as the ranking man he considered
his due. “Little town called Strahan, on Macquarie Harbour. Rains
three hundred days of the year.” He pulled his cape tighter and
wiped rainwater from his eyes. “But fair enough, I wasn’t in the
habit of going out in the middle of the night and sitting in it.”
The legionnaires squatted under the fallen tree for a while longer,
hoping the worst of the rain band would soon pass by. Carter rolled
a few more ineffectual cigarettes, more to occupy his time than
because he thought he’d be able to light one. Bonelli hummed a little
Italian ditty under his breath. The needles of the pine trees above
them swayed in the rain-lashed wind.
After some time—it was now almost one o’clock, according to the
wristwatch O’Halloran had taken from a dead Prussian officer at
Verdun—the rain eased. “Let’s move,” the corporal said, and the
sodden soldiers unfolded their cramped legs and began trudging
through the forest again, boots squelching with every step. A brisk
wind soon cleared the skies, the ragged remaining clouds scudding
south towards Switzerland. Bright stars and a stark full moon shone
down on the forest.
It wasn’t really a forest. Perhaps three kilometres wide, four or
five kilometres long—just a small wood. Bonelli treated it like a
Cretaceous jungle, but Carter and O’Halloran, hailing from the wild
frontiers of their respective New Worlds, thought it rather quaint in a
typically European way. A copse of woodland between neat little
French farms. Or German farms, maybe. Kilometre Zero was one of
the few places in this war where France was occupying Germany,
rather than the other way round—though Carter’s superiors in the
Legion (the officer class was exclusively French-born) were very
insistent that all of Alsace was French, had always been French, and
that the First Army’s capture of this scant strip of land in the opening
months of the war had been a long-awaited liberation.
It was a tiresome way to run a society, Carter thought: everybody
segregated into race and nation and language, suspicious of their
neighbours and tussling over land that had probably changed hands
a hundred times over the past thousand years. But then, he was an
American. His blood was Irish and English and Dutch and Mexican.
He’d grown up around Indians and Chinese and blacks, had worked
under Cubans and Haitians. Had loved a Cajun girl, once upon a
time, back in New Orleans.
That was the New World versus the Old. Over here, everybody
was too obsessed with which language you spoke and which way
you worshipped God and who did what to whom back in the 15th
century. It was a silly continent, Carter thought.
That was the channel down which his thoughts tended to run
during patrol. Particularly when he was patrolling in frigid rain at an
ungodly hour of the night for dumb-as-shit reasons. They were a
good five or six kilometres from the front, trudging through a muddy
pine forest, on the lookout for what? Not Germans. There were
never any breakthroughs here, never any raiding parties, never any
scouts or spies, because there was never any action here
whatsoever. Not this close to Switzerland. Neither the French nor the
Germans wanted to antagonise their neutral neighbour with artillery
barrages and machine-gun fire. No: Carter’s patrol was hunting
deserters. There had been a battle in the Vosges Mountains a little
to the north, just yesterday, and a number of reported desertions.
There often were, when there’d been a fresh batch of conscripts
served up only to be plunged into an unexpectedly bloody action.
Most of them would slip back west, try to get home to their towns
and villages. Some of them—the smarter ones—realised they needed
to leave the country entirely if they didn’t want to face a firing squad
or spend years in prison, and so they headed south to Switzerland.
That brought them here, through Kilometre Zero.
It wasn’t that it was a wild goose chase. Deserters came through
all the time, whether there’d been a nearby battle or not. Six had
been caught in the past month alone, one of them by Carter and
O’Halloran; a twenty-year-old kid who’d been sick when they found
him shivering in a hunter’s blind in this same forest, trembling with
fever, his rifle and pack long since abandoned. There had been
deserters, and there would be deserters again. But Carter resented
trudging around in the mud and the rain to collar a bunch of
runaways who’d only be shot or imprisoned anyway—it wasn’t like
their defection was hurting the war effort, beyond the loss of any
weapons or kit they’d run off with. Unless you were of the officer
line of thinking, unless you felt that when people deserted you
needed to Set An Example, there was really no point in it. Carter
hated having to hunt them down.
In his private moments he often thought of the Swiss border
himself. But that was in his hypothetical future, the sort of thing that
ran through his head when he lay down in his flea-ridden bunk. Here
and now, in this soggy forest, his only thought was to complete the
task at hand and get back somewhere warm and dry.
It was Bonelli who spotted the tracks first—a line of messy
bootprints, heading south-west through the mud and leaf litter. The
legionnaires followed them for a few hundred feet. “Two men,”
Corporal O’Halloran said. “One’s leaning on the other. Injured,
maybe.”
Carter nodded. “Pristine. They came this way since the rain
stopped.”
 The corporal sighed. “Fan out, then.”
They spread out through the forest, O’Halloran taking point on
the tracks, Carter and Bonelli to his left and right. The rain and the
clouds had passed on, but every leaf and branch was still beaded
with moisture, the drops gleaming in bright moonlight. It had been a
long time since Carter had been on patrol with a full moon and clear
sky. He’d forgotten how shockingly bright it was, how good the
visibility. Not so nice if you were crawling about in no man’s land and
imagining the tingling sensation of a sniper’s scope on the back of
your neck. But very welcome when you were the hunter, not the
hunted.
Carter still felt rotten about it. He had a fundamental sympathy
for deserters—had been a deserter himself, in fact, a few years ago,
before he’d been reckless enough to get snatched up by the Legion
again. But he wasn’t stupid. Deserters knew they could face the
firing squad. Deserters still had their rifles. Deserters knew they had
nothing to lose—especially within breathing distance of the Swiss
border, out here in the dark forest with nobody else around. Carter
followed in O’Halloran’s wake with his finger on the trigger of his
Lebel.
They caught their quarry not long after finding the tracks, moving
into a low valley in the forest and spotting them under the clear
accusatory light of the full moon. One man was indeed injured,
limping along with a bandaged leg—a bullet or shrapnel wound,
probably—while his friend helped him along with an arm around his
shoulders. They weren’t moving very fast. Carter wondered how
many agonising kilometres they’d already covered like this.
O’Halloran nodded at Carter and Bonelli, and raised his rifle to his
shoulder. “Soldats!” he barked, his voice ringing out across the wet
forest. “Mains en l’air!”
The deserters staggered, turned—the wounded man crying out—
and his friend abandoned him in a heartbeat, dropping him in the
mud, dashing away. They’d be within their rights to shoot—Carter
tracked the man through his iron sights—but none of them wanted
to do that. “Bonelli, stay with him!” O’Halloran barked, stabbing a
finger at the injured man dropped in the mud like a sack of
potatoes. “Carter, come on!”
Carter slung his rifle over his shoulder and sprinted down the
slope after the corporal, both of them dashing past the crying,
moaning boy in the mud. His canteen and kit bags slapped against
his belt, the barely-healed blisters on his feet crying out inside his
chafing wet socks. O’Halloran reached the edge of the next rise
before him, scrambled over a fallen tree, slipped in a mud puddle.
Carter helped him stagger to his feet and they carried on, sprinting
through the trees, eyes darting across the gloom for any sign of
their prey. He wasn’t sure how long they ran—a kilometre, maybe—
before the burning stitch in his side and stabbing pain in his shins
forced him to stop, leaning against a tree, gasping for breath.
“O’Halloran!” he shouted when he’d got his breath back.
*“Corporal!* Hey!”
But the Australian had run further on. There was nothing but the
whispering of the wind in the pine needles, the dripping of the
rainwater…
And then, on the wind, the howl of a wolf.
Carter stood absolutely still, the breath caught in his throat. A few
seconds later he thought perhaps he’d imagined it. A primal howl,
long and deep, a sound every human instinctively knew at the
bottom of their gut.
But this was France. Or Germany. Whatever. It was Alsace, at any
rate. It wasn’t Colorado. There were no wolves in the Rhine Valley,
surely?
Oxygen slowly filtered back into Carter’s starved bloodstream. His
veins had stopped pounding in his ears. It had been his imagination,
he decided. Or maybe the whistling sound of a falling shell, from
somewhere further up the line, carried on the wind. That’s less likely
than a goddamn wolf, a voice in his head reprimanded him.
He frowned, still catching his breath. But no further howls came.
Just the wind in the leaves and the tap of rainwater falling from
branches into the autumnal leaf litter.
Carter took a deep breath. “Hey!” he bellowed again. “Corporal
O’Halloran!” He waited a moment, then breathed deeper. “Oi! Andy!”
 “Over here!” came a distant shout, a few hundred feet off into the
forest.
Carter trudged towards it, breath still ragged and stomach-
churning, because in the back of his mind he feared he might come
across a killed deserter lying at his superior’s feet. But O’Halloran
had been stumped just as much as Carter, and the American found
the Australian alone, leaning against a tree, struggling to get his
breath back. Clearly the deserter was lost and gone: off to the
south, on his way to Switzerland.
“No sign?” Carter asked.
“Still a trail,” the corporal said, nodding down at the ground. “But
I’m not running after him the rest of the night. I reckon he’s got us
beat. Good luck to him, I s’pose.” He lifted himself off the tree,
chambered a round into his rifle, and fired blindly up into the sky.
Carter blinked.
O’Halloran fired again, and again, and then nodded at Carter. “You
too.”
“What for?”
“Bonelli’s got the other one under arrest. And that one’ll say he
was with somebody. So we have to report the one that got away. We
show up back at barracks and report a runner, with every round of
ammunition we walked out with, we’re in trouble. Let a few go.
Come on, get on with it.”
Carter worked the bolt on his Lebel and fired a few rounds into
the starry sky, the pale white moon staring down at him. The noise
was shockingly loud on such a still night. “Hey—did you hear a wolf
before?” he asked, as they began trudging back to the place where
they’d left Bonelli and the injured deserter.
“Shit,” O’Halloran said. “You too? Thought I imagined it.”
Carter shivered, the adrenaline of the chase wearing off, back to
reality with soaking wet clothes. “Me too. Before I yelled out for you.
So it really happened?”
“Must’ve. Huh. How about that?”
“It couldn’t have, though.”
“How do you mean?”
 They trudged on through the muck, the wind picking up, droplets
of rainwater dislodged from the branches above to tap on the hoods
of their capes. “This is France. Or Germany. I don’t know—either
way, it’s Europe. No wolves here.”
“Of course there are,” the Australian scoffed. “This is where they
come from in the first place, isn’t it? They’re on flags and banners
and stuff. All that medieval crap. There’s one on the coat of arms in
Mezire.”
Carter hesitated for a moment, and tried to see the world through
the eyes of somebody from the other side of it. “Not… I mean, sure,
once upon a time. There would have been wolves here back when
there were knights and castles and all that. But now? 1916? They’re
long dead. These countries are all just farms now. Farmers ain’t
putting up with no wolves. Not in the modern day and age. You’d
have to go out to Russia before you’d see any wolves, I reckon.”
“Well, that howl says otherwise,” O’Halloran shrugged. And as if
on cue, the howl came again from somewhere ahead of them—a
long and clear dirge in the otherwise silent night.
“Christ,” O’Halloran said, once it had tapered off. Both men had
stopped in their tracks when they heard it. “I don’t mind being
proved right, but God, that gives me the willies.” He glanced over at
Carter. “You get wolves in America?”
“Out west, sure. They ain’t so tough. Shoot near ‘em and they’ll
run off.”
“They run in packs?”
“Yeah. But like I said, there shouldn’t even be one. Not here. Not
in France, in this day and age.”
“But if there were some…”
“Oh, hell, they don’t ever attack people. Not that I ever heard of.
Mountain lions is what you need to worry about back home. Wolves
—we got rifles, one shot’ll scare ‘em off.”
“Well, that’s a relief,” O’Halloran said. He didn’t look relieved.
“Come on. Let’s fetch Bonelli and the prisoner and get back to
barracks. Wolves is the last thing we need.”
Carter couldn’t argue with that. The two of them kept on,
following their own tracks back through the mud. No more howls
came; the night was still and quiet. And so neither of them were
prepared for what they saw when they crested the rise and beheld
the clearing where they had left Bonelli and the deserter.
It was a depression in the forest; a shallow bowl that might have
been part of a riverbed, hundreds of years ago. A crooked fallen pine
tree lay at one edge. Bonelli and the deserter were in the centre.
Carter and O’Halloran had crested the southern ridge.
Standing on the northern ridge was a wolf. It was three times the
size of any wolf Carter had ever seen. Its hulking back would have
put its shoulderblades level with his eyes. Its legs were pure muscle,
shifting and rippling like mercury. It ducked and shifted its head with
a strange sense of anticipation. The full moon glinted in its eyes.
Down below them, Legionnaire Bonelli stood above the injured
deserter—who was still sitting in the mud, shocked into silence—and
raised his rifle to his shoulder. He squeezed the trigger once,
intending not to shoot the beast but to scare it off. The bullet struck
a nearby pine tree and the ricochet whined off into the darkness.
The wolf didn’t flinch.
A moment later it bounded down the slope towards him.
“Shoot!” O’Halloran screamed. “Shoot!”
The Australian had already unshouldered his Lebel and fired a
round at the creature, and Carter hurried to do the same, working
the bolt, trying to remember whether he’d thumbed any new rounds
into the clip after firing off the phonies that were supposed to get
command off their back for letting a deserter run off. The idea of
worrying about what command might think about anything
whatsoever now seemed like a strange and distant dream, as he
watched this monster of liquid muscle flow down the muddy slope to
poor young Bonelli, who was fumbling with the bolt of his Lebel.
Carter’s shot missed, of course, thudding into the embankment
where the wolf had been a full three seconds ago. Carter worked the
bolt again—realised that O’Halloran wasn’t standing still, that he was
running down the slope into the basin himself—and raised the sight
to his eyes and fired again. Missed, again.
The wolf slammed into a screaming Bonelli with the power of a
steam train, knocked him down into the mud, clamped its muzzle
over the boy’s face—that was as far as Carter could watch before the
fear and the adrenaline overcame him and he started running. He
didn’t run stupidly. Carter never ran stupidly. He had a very highly-
developed instinct for self-preservation, always had, and six months
on the Western Front had only honed it. Rather than sprint off
screaming into the woods, to be easily outpaced by the wolf once it
was done with the others, he set his sights on a pine tree. He ran to
the fallen log at the edge of the basin, scrambled onto the dead
wood, flew up it to the trunk of the living tree against which it
rested. Now the lower branches were within reach. Carter shot up
into them like a squirrel, hands immediately sticky with sap,
expecting at every second for thick claws to plunge into his thighs
and drag him back down to earth.
No claws came. The air was still wracked with screams. Carter
shuffled and twisted on the branch he’d come to, dislodging a
shower of bark, trying to pull his rifle off his back. The scene down
below resolved itself immediately: Bonelli was dead, his head
virtually torn from his body. The wolf had bounded up the slope,
chasing after O’Halloran, who—after his brief surge of bravery—had
turned and run like Carter. Just as the wolf closed on O’Halloran,
Carter raised his rifle sights to his eye, prayed for a lucky shot to the
brain stem or spinal cord, and squeezed the trigger.
Click. He hadn’t replaced the rounds he’d fired off earlier after all.
And a split second later O’Halloran was shoved down into the mud
and the leaf litter at the edge of the clearing with a monstrous paw
pressed into his shoulderblades, his screams cut short as the wolf
opened its maw and crushed his skull between its jaws.
Carter stared in horror, only vaguely aware of a scrabbling noise
below him. He tore his eyes away from the wolf to see the French
deserter at the peak of the fallen log, trying to climb up into the
same tree. The boy’s injured leg meant he couldn’t jump and seize
the lowest branch like Carter had. Eyes bugged with bloodshot terror
stared up at him. “Hilfe!” the deserter begged. “Hilfe!”
Carter glanced over at the wolf, which had already turned around,
scraps of O’Halloran’s bloodied hair and skin stuck to its jaws. It
flicked its ears and trotted back down into the depression. A second
later, it was running.
Carter scrambled down the tree branches, almost falling, his coat
riding up and exposed skin scratching along the frozen bark. He got
a foot on the lowest branch, secured himself with his left hand on
another, and lowered his rifle with its dangling strap, even as he saw
the gargantuan wolf shooting across the clearing like a bolt of
lightning. The deserter seized the leather strap with both hands and
Carter, with a strength born of adrenaline, hauled him up by the
rifle, into the relative safety of the lower branches.
The wolf was already bounding up the fallen log, flying towards
them with a vicious snarl. The deserter’s adrenaline was fired up and
even as Carter grabbed his collar and his arm, he was kicking and
scrambling up the tree trunk, injured leg or no. The wolf’s forelimbs
scraped at the bark where the deserter had only just been, claws
sinking deep into the wood—but both he and Carter were already
scrabbling higher, breathless and exhilarated, clambering up into the
tree until they were a good thirty feet in the air.
They perched there for a moment, arms and legs hooked around
branches, winded from exertion and terror and the slow comedown
of adrenaline. Carter was vaguely aware of the wolf circling the tree
down below. He still had his rifle, which had dangled around his
elbow from its strap while he ascended the tree in a panicky
scramble. He shifted his grip against the branches carefully and
moved to stand with his back to the trunk and his arm around one of
the thicker branches. Like any pine tree, they felt alarmingly weak,
more so the higher you went. Climbing a tree made him feel oddly
like a boy again, but he wasn’t ten years old anymore, and he
certainly didn’t weigh seventy pounds anymore. Neither was he as
nimble or agile as a boy, he realised suddenly, as his foot slipped on
a branch and he only saved himself with a quick grab of another.
Calm down, he ordered himself, standing there with one foot
dangling over the abyss, both his hands seizing other branches in a
white-knuckled grip, his rifle still dangling from its strap on his right
wrist. You’re safe. You’re fine. Unless you mess up and fall. So calm
down, and do things one at a time.
 He probed around with his left foot for a safer purchase and
settled himself into a more comfortable and secure position.
He looked over at the French deserter—who was no longer over
from him at all, but up from him, having crawled even higher into
the tree, wounded leg and flimsier branches be damned. The kid
wouldn’t meet his gaze. He was staring down, at the forest floor, at
the wolf prowling around the base of the tree.
Carter did not look down. He kept his left hand firmly anchored to
a branch and raised his right arm, shucking his rifle strap down it.
He got the rifle over his raised knee, and let it rest there. He reached
for his belt and retrieved a strap of bullets, which he fed slowly, one
by one, into the hungry mouth of his Leber.
When he was done, he worked the bolt to feed a round into the
chamber.
He glanced up at the deserter. The kid was perhaps ten feet
further up in the tree, as high as he could climb, crouched into an
awkward semi-fetal position with one arm around the narrowing
trunk and another gripping a branch. His face was half-buried in his
upper arm, but Carter could still see his big, scared eyes. A worried
human owl, perched at the top of a pine tree.
Carter looked down.
The wolf had left the base of their tree. It had returned to the
bottom of the bowl in the forest floor, to where Legionnaire Bonelli
had died.
Not died. Been killed. Carter had seen plenty of people die, even
before the war. At least on the front, it was usually impersonal.
Horrible but impersonal. Shrapnel wounds, sniper bullets, collapsing
trenches, distant machine gun fire. Like the hand of God or a natural
disaster: smote from some distant and disinterested vantage point,
no human involvement really perceptible.
But Bonelli had been killed by this thing, right here, right below
him.
But it’s just an animal, part of Carter’s brain thought.
No, it isn’t, another part thought.
He tried very hard not to think about that. But it was unavoidable.
It reminded him very much of another night from his past, another
time in a freezing cold pine forest in Europe, another monstrous
creature that had emerged from the dark.
But he didn’t want to think about that—that was a horrible
nightmare from years gone by, something he’d half-convinced
himself he’d mostly imagined. And so he didn’t think about it. He
just raised his rifle, with his back and shoulders wedged against the
trunk and branches of the pine tree, and very carefully brought the
sights up to where the wolf was beginning to feed on Bonelli’s body.
And then he fired.
It was possible he’d missed. It was certainly possible. Even with
the light of the full moon, it was still the middle of the night and the
creature was a good sixty feet away. But he fired again, and again,
and again, until the clip was empty, and it never so much as
flinched.
When the firing stopped, the wolf turned, looked over its shoulder
at him; an oddly human motion. Its muzzle was wet with Bonelli’s
blood, its breath steaming in the cold December night.
Carter could have sworn it had a look of amusement.
And so the wolf ate Bonelli while Carter watched.
It ate his choicest parts, burrowing in through the uniform and
the ammunition belt and the rifle strap to ferret out the juiciest
organs that lurked beneath his skin, which until so recently had been
cycling blood through his capillaries and pumping sweat through his
pores. Now poor Claudio Bonelli was dead at just nineteen years of
age, just a ravaged hunk of meat, never to see his seaside village in
Calabria again, like so many other boys whose lives had been
snuffed out over the past two years.
After the wolf was done with Bonelli it paced over to eat its fill
from the Australian. Corporal O’Halloran’s mud-splattered face was
as blank and expressionless as a waxwork model while the wolf
ripped his mid-section apart.
When it had finished feeding, it vanished into the forest. Neither
Carter nor the deserter were about to consider that an invitation to
climb back down the tree.
Carter fired his rifle into the sky every ten minutes or so. He’d
been carrying sixty rounds. He didn’t think it was likely to draw
attention, but you could never tell. Kilometre Zero was a quiet sector.
He figured when he got down to the last nine bullets, he’d try to
work the reloading so that he could spell out an S-O-S pattern. Still
not likely to work, but at least it was something to think about.
It was clear to him, after what he’d just witnessed, that the
bullets certainly wouldn’t be good for anything else.
The patrol had been carrying a flare gun, like all patrols, in case
they’d run into serious trouble and needed to signal for help. But it
was on the belt of Corporal O’Halloran, which meant it may as well
be in Berlin.
They weren’t going to die. When Carter’s patrol failed to return at
dawn, people would be sent looking for them. It was just a question
of how long they were going to have to stay sitting up this tree,
cramped and wet and freezing.
A little while after the wolf had gone, Carter shuffled up to the
higher branches where the deserter was perched. “Are you all right?”
he asked.
The soldier made no response. He was in an odd half-crouching
position, curled up into a ball as best he could while still clinging to
the branches, boots braced against the bark and face buried in the
top of his knees. His sky-blue uniform was smeared with mud and
dried blood. He had no weapons. His helmet was long gone, and he
had a mess of blonde hair and a pimpled rash of early twenties
stubble around his lips. His sad, sullen blue eyes stared back at the
American.
“That wolf was something, huh?” Carter went on. After a
cumulative year-and-a-half in the Legion he was perfectly fluent in
French. “At least we made it. But I reckon it’ll come back in a bit. We
should stay put until daylight at least. Or until a patrol comes
looking.”
The deserter said nothing.
“You hungry?” Carter asked. “Thirsty?” He detached his water
canteen from his belt and took a swig. “Wish I’d thought to fill this
up when it was raining.” He passed it up to his companion.
The boy took it warily, had a few swigs, then handed it back to
Carter.
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 Section 8. Shipmasters shall file with the proper officers a
manifest, giving the name, nationality, last residence, and
destination of each alien passenger. Inspection is to be made by
inspection officers before landing, or a temporary landing may be
made at a specified place. The medical examination is to be made by
surgeons of the Marine Hospital Service. During the temporary
landing, aliens are to be properly fed and cared for. Right of appeal
granted. Landing, or allowing to land, alien passengers at any other
time or place than that specified by the inspectors is made an offense
punishable by a (maximum) fine of $1000, or imprisonment for one
year, or both. The Secretary of the Treasury is empowered to
prescribe rules for the inspection of immigrants along the borders of
Canada, British Columbia, and Mexico. The duties and powers
previously vested in the state boards are now to go to the regular
inspection officers of the United States.
Section 10. All aliens who unlawfully come to the United States
are to be immediately sent back on the vessel in which they came, all
expenses in the meantime to be borne by the shipowner.
Section 11. Any alien who comes into the United States in
violation of law may be deported within one year, and any alien who
becomes a public charge within one year after landing, from causes
existing prior to this landing, may be deported. The expenses of all
deportations are to be borne by the transportation agency
responsible for bringing in the immigrant, if that is possible, and if
not, by the United States.
The items in this act particularly worthy of notice are the
following: extension of the excluded classes; prohibition of
encouraging immigration by advertising or solicitation, an attempt to
cure two serious evils, the success of which we shall have occasion to
note later; relatives and personal friends in this country no longer
excepted from the contract labor clause (this exception had almost
vitiated the former law); requirement of manifests; the complete
assumption of the work of inspection by the federal government;
extension of the principle of deportation to public charges.
Act of March 3, 1893. Section 1. Manifests greatly enlarged in
detail.
 Section 2. Alien passengers are to be listed in convenient groups
of not more than thirty each, and given tickets corresponding to their
numbers on the manifests. The master of the vessel must certify that
he and the ship’s surgeon have made an examination of all the
immigrants before sailing, and believe none of them to belong to the
excluded classes.
Section 3. If the ship has no surgeon, examination must be made
by a competent surgeon hired by the transportation company.
Section 5. Immigrants who are not beyond any doubt entitled to
land are to be held for special inquiry by a board of not less than four
inspectors.
The noteworthy features in this law are examination at the expense
of the company at the port of embarkation, listing the immigrants in
groups of thirty, the institution of the boards of special inquiry.
August 18, 1894. Head tax is raised to $1.
March 2, 1895. The Superintendent of Immigration is hereafter to
be designated the Commissioner General of Immigration.
June 6, 1900. The Commissioner General of Immigration is made
responsible for the administration of the Chinese Exclusion Acts.
March 3, 1903. Section 1. The head tax is raised to $2, and is not to
apply to citizens of Canada, Cuba, or Mexico.
Section 2. The following are added to the debarred classes:
epileptics, persons who have been insane within five years previous,
persons who have had two or more attacks of insanity at any time
previously; professional beggars, anarchists, or persons who believe
in or advocate the overthrow by force or violence of the government
of the United States, or of all government or of all forms of law, or
the assassination of public officials; prostitutes, and persons who
procure or attempt to bring in prostitutes or women for the purpose
of prostitution; those who, within one year, have been deported
under the contract labor clause.
Section 3. The importation of prostitutes is forbidden under a
(maximum) penalty of five years’ imprisonment and a fine of $5000.
Section 9. The bringing in of any person afflicted with a
loathsome or a dangerous contagious disease by any person or
company, except railway lines, is forbidden. A fine of $100 is
attached if it appears that the disease might have been detected at
the time of embarkation.
Section 11. If a rejected alien is helpless from sickness, physical
disability, or infancy, and is accompanied by an alien whose
protection is required, both shall be returned in the usual way.
Section 20. The period of deportation for aliens who have come
into this country in violation of law, including those who have
become public charges within two years after landing, is raised to
two years.
Section 21. A similar provision for deportation within three years
is made for the above classes of aliens, with the exception of public
charges.
Section 24. The appointment of immigration inspectors and other
employees is put under the Civil Service rules.
Section 25. The boards of special inquiry are to consist of three
members. Either the alien or any dissenting member of the board
may appeal.
Section 39. Anarchists, etc., are not to be naturalized.
The important features of this act are the further extension of the
excluded classes; special attention and penalties with respect to
prostitutes; the period of deportation raised to two and three years.
Act of February 14, 1903. The Department of Commerce and Labor
is created, and the Commissioner General of Immigration is
transferred to it from the Treasury Department.
March 22, 1904. Newfoundland is added to the countries exempt
from the head tax.
June 29, 1906. The Bureau of Immigration is henceforth to be
called the Bureau of Immigration and Naturalization, and is to have
charge of the business of naturalization. A register is to be kept at
immigration stations, giving full information in regard to all aliens
arriving in the United States.
On February 20, 1907, there was passed an inclusive immigration
law, designed to include all of the previous laws, and repealing such
provisions of earlier laws as are not consistent with the present law.
The principal changes introduced by the new law are as follows:
 Section 1. The head tax is raised to $4. It is not to be levied on
aliens who have resided for at least one year immediately preceding,
in Canada, Newfoundland, Cuba, or Mexico, nor on aliens in transit
through the United States.
Section 2. To the excluded classes are added imbeciles, feeble-
minded persons, persons afflicted with tuberculosis, persons not
included in any of the specifically excluded classes who have a
mental or physical deficiency which may affect their ability to earn a
living, persons who admit having committed a crime involving moral
turpitude, persons who admit their belief in the practice of polygamy,
women or girls coming into the United States for the purpose of
prostitution, or for any other immoral purpose, or persons who
attempt to bring in such women or girls, and all children under the
age of sixteen unaccompanied by one or both of their parents, at the
discretion of the Secretary of Commerce and Labor. Persons whose
tickets are paid for with the money of another must show
affirmatively that they were not paid for by any corporation, society,
association, municipality, or foreign government, either directly or
indirectly. This is not to apply to aliens in continuous transit through
the United States to foreign contiguous territory.
Section 3. The harboring of immoral women and girls in houses of
prostitution, or any other place for purposes of prostitution, within a
period of three years after their arrival, is made an offense
punishable in the same manner as importing them. Such women are
liable to deportation within three years.
Section 9. A fine of $100 is imposed on any person bringing in
aliens subject to any of the following disabilities: idiots, imbeciles,
epileptics, or persons afflicted with tuberculosis (or with a loathsome
or dangerous contagious disease), if these existed and might have
been detected previous to embarkation.
Section 12. It is made the duty of shipmasters taking alien
passengers out of the United States to furnish a report, before
sailing, giving the name, age, sex, nationality, residence in the United
States, occupation, and time of last arrival in the United States of
each such alien passenger.
Section 20. All deportations may be within three years.[105]
 Section 25. Appeal from a decision of a board of special inquiry
may be made by the rejected alien or by any member of the board,
through the commissioner of the port and the Commissioner General
of Immigration to the Secretary of Commerce and Labor, except in
cases of tuberculosis, loathsome or dangerous contagious disease, or
mental or physical disability, as previously provided for, in which
case the decision of the board is final.
Section 26. Any alien who is not admissible because likely to
become a public charge, or because of physical disability other than
tuberculosis or loathsome or dangerous contagious disease, may be
admitted on a suitable bond against becoming a public charge.
Section 39. An Immigration Commission is to be appointed.
Section 40. The establishment of a Division of Information is
authorized. Its duty is to promote a beneficial distribution of aliens
admitted into the United States.
Section 42. Provisions regarding steerage accommodations.[106]
The especially noteworthy features of this act are the following:
further extension of the excluded classes; more stringent provisions
regarding immoral women, and their managers; the fine for bringing
in inadmissible aliens extended to other classes; the beginning of
statistics of departing aliens; appeal not allowed from the decision of
a board of special inquiry in case of mental or physical disability;
Immigration Commission authorized; Division of Information
established.
The only important addition to immigration legislation since this
act is the act of March 26, 1910, by which there were added to the
excluded and deportable classes “persons who are supported by or
receive in full or in part the proceeds of prostitution.” The three-year
limit for deportation was removed as regards sexually immoral
aliens. Closely connected with this phase of the immigration statutes
is a recent act prohibiting the importation from one state to another
of persons for the purpose of prostitution. In accordance with an act
just passed (1913) the business of immigration and naturalization
passes over to the newly created Department of Labor.
We have seen that up to 1882 practically all the federal acts
relating to immigration had to do with the regulation of steerage
conditions. Until the year 1907 these acts, which were encouraging in
tendency, were always considered as a separate body of legislation
from the real immigration laws, which were primarily restrictive in
character. In the act of that year, however, the control of the steerage
was included in the immigration law, where it logically belonged.
There had been one or two important pieces of steerage legislation
passed previous to this time which we have not as yet noticed.
The last important steerage act which has been noted was the act
of 1855. The principal law between that date and 1907 was the act of
1882. “Viewed from the standpoint of its predecessors the passenger
act of 1882 was an excellent measure. Its framers had profited by
observing the results of the legislative experiments of about sixty-two
years. This advantage, together with the marvelous development and
progress in the methods of passenger traffic, enabled the lawmakers
to draft an intelligent and comprehensive bill. By its provisions the
safety and comfort of emigrants were, theoretically at least, assured.
No deck less than 6 feet in height on any vessel was allowed to be
used for passengers. On the main deck and the deck next below 100
cubic feet of air space was allowed each passenger, and on the second
deck below the main deck 120 cubic feet was allowed each person.
Decks other than the three above mentioned were under no
circumstances to be used for passengers. With the development of
shipbuilding, however, other decks were added to ships, and this
provision soon became obsolete. Sufficient berths for all passengers
were to be provided, the dimensions of each berth to be not less than
2 feet in width and 6 feet in length, with suitable partitions dividing
them. The sexes were to be properly separated. The steerage was to
be amply supplied with fresh air by means of modern approved
ventilators. Three cooked meals, consisting of wholesome food, were
to be served regularly each day. Each ship was to have a fully
equipped modern hospital for the use of sick passengers. A
competent physician was to be in attendance and suitable medicines
were to be carried. The ship’s master was authorized to enforce such
rules and regulations as would promote habits of cleanliness and
good health. Dangerous articles, such as highly explosive substances
and powerful acids, were forbidden on board.”[107]
The above act remained in force until 1907, when it was
superseded by Section 42 of the immigration act of that year. By this
law the cubic air space system of the act of 1882 was abandoned in
favor of the superficial area system of preventing overcrowding.
Eighteen clear feet of deck space on the main deck or the deck next
below were to be provided for each passenger, and 20 feet on the
second deck below. If the height between the lower passenger deck
and the one next above was less than 7 feet, there must be 30 clear
feet of deck space per passenger. There was also provision for light
and ventilation. No passengers were to be carried on any other decks
than those mentioned.
This act was unsatisfactory, as there was much uncertainty as to
which was the main deck, inasmuch as ships with as many as eight
decks were carrying immigrants. The British law was superior in this
respect. It specified the lowest passenger deck as the one next below
the water line. All above this were denominated passenger decks.
This law required 18 clear superficial feet for each passenger carried
on the lowest passenger deck, and 15 feet for each passenger on
passenger decks. If the height of the lowest passenger deck was less
than 7 feet, or if it was not properly lighted and ventilated, there
must be 25 feet per passenger, and under similar conditions on
passenger decks, 18 feet. There must be 5 feet of superficial open
deck space for each passenger. In reckoning the space on the lowest
passenger deck and passenger decks the space occupied by the
baggage of passengers, public rooms, lavatories, and bathrooms used
exclusively by steerage passengers might be counted, provided the
actual sleeping space was not less than 15 feet on the lowest and 12
feet on the others. On December 19, 1908, the United States passed a
law making our steerage provisions correspond with the British act,
except that the last provisions are 18 feet and 15 feet respectively in
the United States law.
In the practical application of such a complicated set of laws as
these it is inevitable that many questions and uncertainties should
arise. For the guidance of immigration officials in the performance of
their duties, a long list of rules and regulations are prescribed by the
Commissioner General. A few of these, which have an immediate
bearing on the admission of aliens must be noted. Stowaways are
considered ipso facto inadmissible, and as a rule are not even
examined. Certain border ports are specified on the Canadian and
Mexican borders, and any alien entering at any other port is assumed
to have entered in violation of law. All aliens arriving in Canada,
destined to the United States, are inspected at one of the following
ports: Halifax, Nova Scotia; Quebec and Point Levi, Quebec; St.
John, New Brunswick; Vancouver and Victoria, British Columbia.
The United States maintains inspection stations at these points, and
aliens examined there are given a certificate stating that the alien has
been inspected and is admissible, accompanied by a personal
description for purposes of identification. Special boards of inquiry
are also established in other border cities for the examination of
aliens, originally destined for Canada, but who later desire to be
admitted to the United States within one year after their arrival in
Canada. Aliens entering the United States by Mexican border ports
are, in general, subject to the same inspection as if arriving by a
seaport.
Aliens in transit are examined in the same manner as if desiring to
remain in the United States, and if they are found to belong to the
debarred classes they are refused permission to land. The head tax is
charged on their account, as for other aliens, but it is refunded to the
transportation company if the latter furnishes satisfactory proof that
the alien has passed by a continuous journey through the territory of
the United States, within thirty days, such proof to be furnished
within sixty days after the arrival of the alien.
Throughout the development of this body of laws certain well-
marked tendencies can be traced. In the first place, the criteria of
admission have steadily increased in severity, until now the law
provides for the exclusion of practically every class of applicants who
might fairly be considered undesirable, with the exception, perhaps,
of illiterates. Secondly, we may note a tendency to concentrate all
business, connected with the admission of aliens into this country or
into membership in the nation, in the hands of a single branch of the
federal government, and the increasing power and importance of this
branch. Thirdly, there is manifest an increasing recognition of the
right of this country to protect itself against unwelcome additions to
its population, not only by refusing them admission, but by expelling
them from the country, if their subsequent conduct proves them
unworthy of retention.
 CHAPTER VII
VOLUME AND RACIAL COMPOSITION OF THE
IMMIGRATION STREAM

As regards the volume of the immigration current the modern

period has witnessed a continuation of the same general process
which has been going on since 1820. The same succession of crests
and depressions in the great wave has continued, the only difference
being that the apex reached a much higher point than ever before.
And, as in other periods, the great determining factor in the volume
of immigration has been the economic situation in this country.
Prosperity has always been attended by large immigration, hard
times by the reverse. As already remarked, the year 1882 was marked
by the largest annual immigration which had hitherto been recorded.
The next low-water mark was reached in the middle nineties,
following the depression of 1893. As the country recovered from this,
immigration began to increase again, and rose almost steadily until
in 1907 it reached the highest record which it has ever attained, a
grand total of 1,285,349 immigrants in one year.[108] The crisis of that
year interrupted the course of affairs, and immigration fell off
sharply, and has not since completely recovered.
There is one matter connected with the volume of immigration
which marks the last few years of the modern period and is of the
greatest importance. This is the provision for estimating the exact
net gain or loss in population each year through immigration
movements. Until very recently the only immigration figures which
were considered worth while were those of arriving aliens. It was
tacitly assumed that our immigrant traffic was a wholly one-sided
one. But gradually people began to realize that there was a large
countercurrent of departing aliens. In the Report of the
Commissioner General of Immigration for 1906 (p. 56) an effort is
made to supply as far as possible these data for the years 1890 to
1906. But in the absence of any legislation requiring shipmasters to
furnish lists of departing passengers, these figures are admittedly
incomplete, and no attempt is made to distinguish aliens from
citizens of the United States. The nearest approach that can be made
to ascertaining the number of departing aliens is to assume that all
the passengers other than cabin belonged to this class. This is
probably not very far from the truth, and taking these figures as a
guide, we can get some idea of how large the outward movement has
been at certain times, particularly during the period of commercial
depression which marked the middle nineties. Thus in 1895 while
there were 258,536 arrivals of immigrant aliens, there were 216,665
departures of the class mentioned, making a total gain of only 41,871;
in 1898 the net gain was only 98,442 against a total immigration of
229,299. Unfortunately, figures are not available for 1896–1897. The
importance of this phase of the subject eventually became so evident
that in the immigration law of 1907 a provision was included
requiring masters of departing vessels to file accurate and detailed
lists of their alien passengers, giving certain important facts
concerning them. Accordingly, in the fiscal year 1908 we have for the
first time complete and accurate data regarding departing aliens.
In that year another important distinction is made, that between
immigrant and nonimmigrant aliens on the inward passage, and
emigrant and nonemigrant aliens on the outward passage.
Immigrant aliens are those whose place of last permanent residence
was in some foreign country, and who are coming here with the
intention of residing permanently. Nonimmigrant aliens are of two
classes: those whose place of last permanent residence was the
United States, but who have been abroad for a short period of time,
and those whose place of last permanent residence was in a foreign
country, and who are coming to the United States without the
intention of residing permanently, including aliens in transit.
Departing aliens are classified in a corresponding way. Emigrant
aliens are those whose place of last permanent residence was the
United States, and who are going abroad with the intention of
residing there permanently. Nonemigrant aliens are of two classes:
those whose place of last permanent residence was the United States,
and who are going abroad for a short visit only, and those whose
place of last permanent residence was abroad, but who have been in
the United States for a short time, including aliens in transit. In all
cases the expressed intention of the alien is regarded as final
concerning residence, and an intended future residence of twelve
months is considered a permanent residence. The recent reports of
the Commissioner General contain tables almost as detailed for
departing as for arriving aliens.
Thus it is now possible to make an exact reckoning of the net gain
or loss in population each year through immigration movements.
The classes in which we are particularly interested are naturally the
immigrant and emigrant aliens, for they are the only participants in
true immigration movements, according to our definition. The others
are merely travelers. Yet they are important and interesting travelers,
and the modern problems of immigration cannot be thoroughly
understood without taking some consideration of them. As for the
aliens in transit, they can be quickly disposed of. They are counted as
nonimmigrant aliens on their arrival, and nonemigrant aliens at
their departure, which is supposed to occur within a period of thirty
days. Thus they cancel, and do not in any important way affect the
life of the United States. The other class of nonimmigrants and
nonemigrants is much more important, for they include a group of
aliens who have attracted considerable attention of late—the so-
called “birds of passage.” These are, in the strictest sense, aliens who
have chosen the United States as their place of permanent residence,
but who go back to the old country for brief sojourns on certain
occasions. In a broader sense, the birds of passage may also be taken
to include aliens whose permanent residence is abroad, but who
come to this country for a brief stay.[109]
As an illustration of the method of reckoning the gain or loss in
population, let us take the year 1910. In that year there were
1,041,570 immigrant aliens, and 156,467 nonimmigrant aliens
admitted, making a total of 1,198,037. There were 202,436
departures of emigrant aliens and 177,982 of nonemigrant aliens,
making a total of 380,418. Thus there was a net gain in the year of
817,619 aliens all together. But not all of these were permanent
residents. To get an idea of the actual increase of permanent
residents we need to add together two classes,—the immigrant aliens,
who come here for the first time with the intention of residing
permanently, and those nonimmigrant aliens who are such, not
because they do not expect to reside here permanently, but because
their permanent residence has already been established here and
who have been abroad for a brief period. Of the former class, the
immigrant aliens, there were 1,041,570; of the second class,
nonimmigrants whose places of last permanent residence and of
intended future residence were both the United States, there were
94,075. This makes a total of 1,135,645 permanent alien residents
who came into the United States in the year in question. The actual
decrease in permanent residents may be computed in a similar way.
In the year in question there were 202,436 emigrant aliens who
departed, and 89,754 nonemigrant aliens whose places of last
permanent residence and intended future residence were both the
United States,—that is, permanent residents of this country who left
for a brief period only. This makes a total of 292,190 permanent
residents of this country who left it in the year in question.
Subtracting this number from the total of permanent residents who
arrived, we have a remainder of 843,455. This represents the actual
gain in permanent alien residents during the year in question. This
figure, in the year in question, happens to come very near to the
gross gain estimated in the simplest way. But it is not necessarily so,
and in the year 1908 there was considerable difference between the
two figures. It is not always necessary to make this somewhat
involved calculation. In many cases, the mere comparison of the
figures for immigrant and emigrant aliens is sufficient for the
purpose. But there are many other instances in which accuracy and
consistency require this exact calculation to be made, and it is a
decided acquisition to the study of immigration to have these data
available.[110] Thus in the year 1909 the net gain in permanent alien
residents was 584,513, while in 1908 it was only 341,075; yet there
were more immigrant aliens admitted in 1908 than in 1909.
In respect to the composition of this great current, the period in
question has witnessed a profound and most significant change. We
have seen that prior to 1882 practically the entire body of
immigrants was made up of individuals from Germany, the United
Kingdom, and the Scandinavian countries. From that year on, these
have steadily decreased in importance, and their places have been
taken by contingents from Italy, Austria-Hungary, Russia, and other
south European countries. This change has been so pronounced as to
lead to a separation of immigrants into the “old immigration” and
the “new immigration,” a distinction which has become familiar to
every casual student of the subject. The Immigration Commission
has recently given its official sanction to this classification, and in its
reports follows this scheme: the old immigration includes those from
England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Belgium, Denmark, France,
Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, and Switzerland; the
new immigration, those from Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria, Greece,
Italy, Montenegro, Poland, Portugal, Roumania, Russia, Servia,
Spain, Syria, and Turkey. This schedule refers only to European
countries (with the exception of Syria and Turkey, which ethnically
belong to Europe), without reference to non-European sources. But
immigration to the United States is as yet almost wholly a European
movement, so that other countries may be neglected in any general
consideration. In so far as there are any immigrants from non-
European sources they would naturally be classed with the new
immigration. Roughly speaking, the old immigration came from the
north and west of Europe, the new immigration comes from the
south and east of that continent.
The sweeping nature of this change can be comprehended only
through the comparison of figures. The immigration from the United
Kingdom and Germany, which up to 1882 had made up so nearly all
of the total, never again reached the same figure, and gradually
dwindled, both relatively and positively, until in 1907 it amounted to
only 11.8 per cent of the total immigration for the year. On the other
hand the currents from Austria-Hungary, Italy, and Russia, all of
which, as we have seen, began to attain prominence approximately in
1882, grew steadily until in the year 1907 they amounted respectively
to 26.3 per cent, 22.2 per cent, and 20.1 per cent of the total. Putting
them together, we have a total for these three countries of 68.6 per
cent of the total immigration, and adding to them the immigration
from the other countries belonging to the new movement, we have a
total of 81 per cent of the European immigrants admitted to the
United States in 1907. In the years from 1819 to 1883 the old
immigration had furnished about 95 per cent of the total movement
from Europe to the United States. Comparing the two years 1882 and
1907, it appears that the old immigration made up 87.1 per cent of
the total immigration in the first year, and 19 per cent in the latter,
and the new immigration 12.9 per cent in the former and 81 per cent
in the latter.[111]
This is a most radical change, the importance of which can hardly
be overestimated. The old immigrants, as we have before observed,
were of a racial stock very closely related to the early settlers of the
country, and to the original type of the American people. Their
language was the same or similar, and their national traditions
wholly harmonious. Consequently assimilation was a comparatively
simple matter. It was practically a reforming, on American soil, of
the English race, from the same component elements which had
gone into it from the beginning in England. The new immigration is
made up from people of a very different racial stock, representing the
Slavic and Mediterranean branches of the Caucasian race rather than
the Teutonic. With the difference in race go differences in mental
characteristics, traditions, and habits of life. As a result, the problem
of assimilation in this country has taken on a completely different
aspect. Moreover, this change is a very recent one. It was not until
the year 1896 that the three currents from Austria-Hungary, Italy,
and Russia exceeded in volume the contributions of the United
Kingdom, Germany, and Scandinavia. The real dilution of the
original American stock is a matter of scarcely half a generation.
These facts will become clearer by glancing at the following table:
PER CENT OF TOTAL IMMIGRATION COMING FROM SPECIFIED COUNTRIES BY DECADES,
FROM 1861 TO 1910.
Country Years
1861–70 1871–80 1881–90 1891–00 1901–10
Austria-Hungary 0.33 2.6 6.7 16 24.4
German Empire 35 25.5 28 14 3.9
Italy, Sicily, and Sardinia 0.51 2 5.9 18 23.3
Russian Empire and Finland 0.2 1.9 4.4 14 18.2
United Kingdom: 38
England 15.6 12 6 4.4
Ireland 15.5 12 10 3.9
In seeking to determine the causes of this change it will be well to
note first certain general causes which have underlain the whole
movement, and then to consider the specific causes which have
operated to stimulate immigration in certain of the more important
countries.
Among the general causes may be mentioned first of all the great
development of transportation during the last thirty years. As has
been previously observed, emigration movements are very
dependent upon easy and cheap transportation facilities. One great
reason why there were so many more immigrants from the United
Kingdom, France, Germany, and the Scandinavian countries, during
the first three quarters of the nineteenth century, was that
communication between those countries and the United States was
so much easier than with southeastern Europe. The latter part of this
century saw the establishment of many direct steamship lines from
Mediterranean ports to the United States, which served to open up
this new territory. There was also a great improvement in internal
transportation in the more backward countries of Europe, which
completed the line of access from the United States to the more
remote interior districts of Europe.
With the establishment of these new lines of communication, it
followed inevitably that the transportation companies should put
forth every effort to attract as much business as possible to them. So
we find the activities of transportation and emigration agents
extending farther and farther into Europe, with the growth of lines
that demanded their services. The importance of these agents in
stimulating emigration will be discussed in another connection.
Along with these changes, and incident to the beginnings of
emigration from some of these new sources, there grew up in these
countries a better knowledge of the United States, its attractions, and
the means of getting there. This knowledge was very meager and
faulty at first, and willfully distorted by the agents, but it served to
awaken the people to the possibilities of emigration, and to stimulate
them to take the step. This influence was abetted by a growing sense
of independence and ambition on the part of the people of these
regions, which made it more possible for them to act on their own
initiative. They could never have emigrated under the conditions of
difficulty, uncertainty, and hardship which marked the earlier
movement, and which the more hardy, adventurous, and daring
northern races faced without hesitation.
 There are two further causes of this shifting of the sources of
immigration from northern to southern Europe, which are even
more significant than the foregoing. The first of these is that, with
the filling up of the United States, and the industrial improvements
of northern Europe, the economic situation in this country no longer
presents the same marked advantages over the older nations that it
did during most of the nineteenth century. The immigrant from
England, Ireland, Germany, or Sweden no longer finds his lot so
much easier here than at home. The United States has now its own
problems of congestion, pauperism, and competition of labor.
Consequently it is much less worth while for the northern immigrant
to come. But as compared with the more backward countries of
Europe, there is still a sufficient margin of advantage in the United
States to make it well worth while for the peasant to make the
change. The comparison of the conditions which exist, or which he
believes to exist, in the United States, with those in his own land has
still sufficient power to arouse those feelings of discontent which are
necessary to migration.
The second of these causes is that when the representatives of
more backward countries, representing a lower standard of living
and of industrial demands, have once begun to come, the members
of more advanced races cease coming. They are unwilling to take up
residence in a country where they must enter into competition with
their inferiors, and where all will be classed together by the natives.
Our immigration started from the most advanced nations of Europe.
Each inferior reservoir which we have successively tapped, and
allowed to drain freely into our nation, has tended to check the flow
from the earlier sources. This will continue to be true to the end.
Canada recognizes this fact frankly, and while making every effort to
attract immigrants from the United Kingdom and northwestern
Europe places serious obstacles in the way of immigrants from the
other half of the continent.[112]
In considering the specific causes of the rise of the new
immigration we will confine our attention primarily to the countries
of Austria-Hungary, Italy, and Russia, which send us the great bulk
of the immigrants, and in which conditions are sufficiently
representative to give a satisfactory idea of the nature of the new
movement in general. Let us first consider Austria-Hungary.
 The early immigration from Bohemia in the middle of the
nineteenth century belongs in every way rather to the old than to the
new immigration, and need not be considered here. As for the recent
immigration from Austria-Hungary, it may be said that the
underlying, fundamental factor is the racial diversity which
characterizes that country. Austria-Hungary is not in any sense a
nation, but a mixture of diverse and hostile races, held together
primarily by the outside pressure of Russia, Germany, Italy, and
Turkey. The attempt to get a clear and definite understanding of the
racial composition of the empire is baffling to one who has not had
the opportunity to make an exhaustive study of the situation at first
hand, and even the authorities do not wholly agree as to the racial
classification. The following sketch, taken from Professor Commons,
[113]
will give a sufficient idea of the complicated conditions which
exist. In the territory of Austria-Hungary may be found considerable
numbers of five important sections of the human family, as follows:
German.
Slav: Czechs or Bohemians, Moravians, Slovaks, Poles, and
Ruthenians in the northern part; Croatians, Servians, Dalmatians,
and Slovenians in the southern part.
Magyar.
Latin: Italians and Roumanians (Latinized Slavs).
Jewish.
From such a conglomeration of races it is impossible that political
and social entanglements and difficulties should not arise. In the
words of Miss Balch, “Politically, the dual monarchy is nothing short
of a monstrosity.”[114]
In general, the Germans and Magyars are the ruling element, and
the Slavs are held in subjection. The former races constitute the
nobility, and own the land; the latter are the peasants and laborers.
The management of public and private financial affairs has largely
been monopolized by the Jews, who have been more liberally treated
here than in any other country of modern Europe. Along with this
political inequality there has gone a pronounced economic
inequality, and while universal manhood suffrage has recently been
granted by the emperor, it yet remains to be seen whether it will
bring about an improvement of the economic conditions, which are
the great immediate stimulus to emigration.
One of the greatest blights of Austria-Hungary is the system of
landlordism, and the antiquated system of landholding and
agriculture, which still persists, and seriously handicaps the country
in competition with more advanced nations. These economic
disabilities are accompanied by various social and political
disturbances. Taxes are high and fall unequally upon different
classes of the population, exempting the great landowners from their
fair share of the burden. The terms of military service are severe. The
birth rate and death rate are both high, and the poverty, ignorance,
inequality, and helplessness of the people make the overpopulation
seem greater than it is. The emigration is almost wholly from the
peasant class, which does not, however, represent the lowest section
of the population. Below the peasant in the social scale are the
cottager, the laborer, and the farm servant.
We thus have, in the case of Austria-Hungary, an interesting
combination of economic, political, and social causes, all resting
upon racial heterogeneity.[115]
Turning to Italy, we find somewhat the same combination of
economic and political causes, without, however, a corresponding
basis of racial diversity. It is true that the population of Italy is
divided into two distinct groups, but these are also geographically
separated, and the result is a dual stream of immigration, rather than
a single outflow due to racial antagonism. The inhabitants of
northern Italy, the “north Italians” as they are called, are Teutonic in
blood and in appearance. Their home is in a relatively well-developed
manufacturing section, and a large proportion of the emigrants are
skilled artisans, and come from the cities. The southern Italians
belong to the Mediterranean branch of the Caucasian race, are
shorter in stature and more swarthy, and on the whole much inferior
in intelligence to their northern compatriots. The majority of the
emigrants are peasants from the great landed estates, accustomed to
wages about one third of those in the north. Naturally the conditions
which lead to emigration are somewhat different in the north and the
south, and it is in the latter region that we are particularly interested,
for, unfortunately from our point of view, the great majority of our
Italian immigrants belong to the southern branch. The distinction
between these two groups is so marked that for years the
immigration authorities of the United States have recognized it, and
have listed them separately in the statistics. In 1910 there were
192,673 south Italian immigrants to this country, and only 30,780
north Italians. The north Italians go to Argentina, Uruguay, and
Brazil in about the same numbers that the south Italians come to us.
In southern Italy and Sicily the power of the landlord, which as in
Austria-Hungary is one of the great curses of Italy, is greatest. The
land is divided up into large estates held by the nobility, and let out
to tenant farmers at enormously high rents. As much as $160 per
year per acre is paid for an orange garden. The leases are short. The
wages of all classes are very low. An agricultural laborer earns from 8
cents to 38 cents per day, an unskilled laborer from 25 cents to 50
cents, and a skilled laborer, such as a mason or carpenter, from 27
cents to $1.40.[116]
It is true that prices are lower than in the United States, so that
these wages are not so extremely inadequate as might at first appear.
Nevertheless, the difference between prices in this country and in
Italy is not nearly so great as the difference in wages, so that the
wage scale is in fact much lower there. Living expenses are seriously
increased by an exaggerated system of indirect taxes, which are so
severe in the case of food as to make food alone cost the peasants
about 85 per cent of their wages. These taxes are so arranged as to
fall with undue weight upon the poor and working classes, forcing
them to pay over one half of the entire amount of taxes. The amount
thus paid, exclusive of the tax on wine, amounts to from 10 to 20 per
cent of their wages. Moreover, this is an increasing burden. Since
1870 the wealth of the country has increased 17 per cent and taxes 30
per cent.
The army and navy are a tremendous drain upon the people, in
two ways. First, they vastly increase the national expenditures. The
money spent for this purpose amounts to one fourth more of the
national income than is spent by France or Germany, and nearly
three times as much as by the United States. Secondly, they interfere
with production, as every able-bodied peasant is required to serve in
the army for a term of two years.
Another, and more profound, cause of economic distress is found
in the rapid increase of population. This is both a cause and a result
of poverty, and the birth rate is highest in the poorest districts. While
this high birth rate is accompanied by a high death rate, there is still
difference enough between the two to bring about an extreme density
of population, exceeded only by the islands of Great Britain and
Japan, and the states of Rhode Island and Massachusetts, and the
little country of Belgium. In such a densely populated country, where
both the birth rate and death rate are high, we are almost always sure
to find economic pressure and distress.[117]
As a result of the foregoing conditions, the annual emigration from
Italy is very heavy. In addition to the true emigration, where there is
a permanent change of residence, there is a large amount of
temporary or periodic migration, in which case the individual leaves
his home only for a short space of time, with the fixed intention of
returning. Much of this temporary emigration is directed to France
and Germany, where work is obtainable during the summer season.
Some of it turns toward North America, and a large amount to South
America. Many Italians take advantage of the difference in seasons,
and put in two seasons of summer work in each year, one on each
side of the equator. It is estimated that about one third of the total
migration from Italy is of this temporary or periodic character.[118]
Of the total number of immigrants to the United States from
Russia, somewhat less than one tenth are Russians. The balance are
Poles, Lithuanians, Finns, Germans, and Jews. Agricultural, social,
and political conditions in Russia are sufficiently well understood to
make it no cause for wonder that almost any of its common citizens
should be glad to leave. The Russian peasant is said to be the most
oppressed in Europe, but he is also probably the most ignorant and
degraded, and as yet is only beginning to learn to emigrate. There is a
great reservoir there which will be ready to furnish us untold millions
when the current gets well started. But so far the great stream from
Russia is made up principally of other races. Of these, we are
particularly interested in the Jews, partly because they are the most
numerous, partly because they are a unique and striking people,
partly because the reasons for their coming are more definite and
easily comprehended.
We have seen that during the Middle Ages the Jews were expelled
from almost every country of Europe. Almost the only region where
they were allowed a settlement was in Poland, and hence they
gathered there in large numbers. Under Russian domination this has
been made the “Pale of Settlement” for the Jews, and now contains
about one third of the 11,000,000 people of that race in the world.
Life in any other part of the Empire is made practically impossible
for them, and it is far from easy there. Among the other restrictions
put upon the Jews during the Middle Ages was a prohibition of
engaging in agriculture. But they were allowed to take usury, which
was forbidden to Christians. The natural result was that they were
driven almost entirely into trade, and particularly into money
lending, so that those pursuits which seem to be so well adapted to
the natural proclivities of the Jews were in a sense thrust upon them.
As a result the Jews in Russia are engaged primarily in the two
businesses of lending money and selling liquor. When the Russian
serfs were liberated in 1861, and left in a most helpless state without
either capital or land, the Jews became their merchants, middlemen,
and usurers. It was perfectly natural that the ignorant peasant should
come to blame the money lender and the saloon keeper for evils
which were really due to the wretched political, social, and economic
organization, but of which they seemed to be the immediate agents.
There is reason to believe that the government encouraged this
popular antipathy toward an unpopular race for the sake of diverting
the indignation of the masses from itself. Certain it is that the
attitude of the government has been most hostile to the Jews. In 1881
this antagonism culminated in a series of terrible anti-Semitic riots,
and then began the exodus to America.
In the next year, 1882, were passed a set of laws, known as the May
Laws, which, with other subsequent ones of a similar nature, have
made existence for the Jews almost intolerable in the Russian
Empire. These laws, inspired largely by the Greek Orthodox Church,
have made it impossible for the Jew “to foreclose a mortgage or to
lease or purchase land; he cannot do business on Sundays or
Christian holidays; he cannot hold office; he cannot worship or
assemble without police permit; he must serve in the army, but
cannot become an officer; he is excluded from schools and
universities; he is fined for conducting manufactures and commerce;
he is almost prohibited from the learned professions.”[119] The press
is against them. Here in America we hear of only the climaxes of this
persecution, but the oppression is constant and untiring. Is it any
wonder that the Jews seek relief in flight?
It will become evident from time to time that our Jewish
immigration is in many respects unique, and stands as an exception
to many of the general principles which one might lay down
concerning immigration. So in respect to the causes of their
emigration it is not surprising to find a situation somewhat different
from other branches of the new immigration, or from any other
immigration, in fact. The Jews have always been a “peculiar people,”
and religion has played a larger part in their history than in the case
of probably any other modern people. The persecutions to which
they have been subjected from age to age have had religious diversity
as their ostensible and obvious, if not always their only, motive. And
in the modern emigration from Russia, while the oppression under
which they suffer touches almost every phase of their life, and
imposes numberless economic handicaps, it rests ultimately upon
religious grounds. Russia is the only modern country from which
numerous emigrants are driven by actual persecution, though it is
said that Roumania has within the last ten years passed anti-Jewish
laws more stringent than those of Russia.
Conditions in Austria-Hungary and Italy, and to a less extent in
Russia, may be taken as typical of the circumstances which prevail in
other countries of southern and eastern Europe, and Asia Minor,
from which our new immigrants come. In Bulgaria the following four
particular reasons have been assigned for emigration:
(1) Bulgaria is distinctively an agricultural country, and while a
large per cent of the people own their farms, the holdings are too
small to enable them to make a sufficient living, and the methods of
cultivation are poor.
(2) There is a great dearth of manufacturing industry. In 1907
there were only 166 factories of any size, with 6149 workers.
(3) Taxes are very heavy, amounting to one fifth, one fourth, or
even one third of the earnings of families.
(4) There is much dissatisfaction with the government among the
peasants on the grounds of expense, and of the very oppressive terms
of military service.[120]
 Summing up the facts regarding the volume and racial character of
immigration during this period, it appears that, as regards the
former, the series of waves has been continued, responding to the
economic conditions, but reaching a much higher culmination than
ever before. As regards the latter, there has been a most distinct and
profound change. The main source of the immigrant current has
shifted away from northern and western Europe, to the southern and
eastern portions of the continent, whose people are by no means so
closely related in physique or so similar in mental characteristics to
the people of the United States as the immigrants of earlier periods.
The causes of this change lie primarily in altered conditions in the
United States which make it less attractive to the residents of the
more advanced nations of Europe than formerly. In the more
backward countries the political and economic situation is still so
inferior to the United States that an ample motive for emigration
exists. All that was needed to start a large movement was a
knowledge of the possibilities across the Atlantic, and the means of
getting there. Both of these have been provided within the period in
question.
 CHAPTER VIII
THE CAUSES OF IMMIGRATION

There are two things which the student of sociological problems—

like every other scientist—wishes to know about the phenomena
which fall within his field. These are the causes and the effects.
Hitherto we have said a good deal about the causes of immigration
and very little about the effects. In truth, it is much simpler to
predicate causes of such a movement than effects. The causes lie in
the past; the effects are largely a matter of the future. It is possible to
state with a fair degree of certainty what are the causes of the
modern immigration to the United States. The reader will have
already formed a general idea from the examples of the new
immigration which we have given.
In general the causes of our recent and present immigration may
be divided into two classes, the natural and the artificial. Most of
what has been said thus far refers to the former; the latter has been
merely hinted at. Another distinction which is often helpful is that
between the permanent or predisposing causes, and the temporary
or immediate causes. It frequently happens that in a given country
there are conditions of long standing—perhaps inherent in the
character of the country itself—which make life hard and
disagreeable for the resident. Yet no immigration takes place until
some relatively trivial event, of a temporary nature, occurs, which
serves as the final impulse to emigration. To the superficial view this
temporary event appears as the cause of emigration, when in point of
fact its weight in the total amount of dissatisfactions is insignificant.
[121]
The natural causes of immigration at the present time lie
primarily in the superiority of the economic conditions in the United
States over those in the countries from which the immigrants come.
Modern immigration is essentially an economic phenomenon.
Religious and political causes have played the leading part in the
past, and still enter in as contributory factors in many cases. But the
one prevailing reason why the immigrant of to-day leaves his native
village is that he is dissatisfied with his economic lot, as compared
with what it might be in the new world. The European peasant comes
to America because he can—or believes he can—secure a greater
return in material welfare for the amount of labor expended in this
country than in his home land. This fact is recognized by practically
all careful students of the subject, and is frequently emphasized in
the recent report of the Immigration Commission. It is worthy of
notice, also, that the changes which affect the volume of the
immigration current, and cause those repeated fluctuations which we
have observed, are changes in the economic situation in this country,
rather than in the countries of source. A period of good times in this
country attracts large numbers of immigrants by promising large
rewards for labor; an industrial depression checks the incoming
current, and sends away many of those who are here. This is
probably accounted for by the fact that economic conditions in this
country are subject to greater oscillations than in European countries
which are relatively static, rather than dynamic. An example of the
opposite condition is furnished by the Irish emigration of the middle
of the nineteenth century, when a great economic disaster in the
country of source occasioned a large increase in emigration. This
relation between the economic situation in this country and the
volume of immigration has been worked out statistically by Professor
Commons, and is presented in graphic form in a table in his book,
Races and Immigrants in America (opposite page 64). In this table
he takes imports as an index of the prosperity of the United States
and shows how closely the curve representing immigration follows
the curve of imports per capita. If he could have taken account of the
departing aliens as well, the showing would probably have been still
more striking.
The search for the reasons for this economic superiority of the
United States involves an investigation too complicated and
extensive to be undertaken in the present connection. There are two
factors, however, which may be pointed out, which, at the beginning
of our national life, gave us an advantage possessed by no other
modern nation. The first of these was the small ratio between men
and land, which we have commented on before. The territory of the
United States was a vast, newly discovered region, with untold
natural resources and every advantage of climate and configuration,
inhabited by a mere handful of settlers, at a time when the nations of
Europe had long since struck a balance between population and land,
on the customary standard of living. The countries of Europe have
also profited, it is true, by the opening up of this great new world.
But their benefit has been transmitted and indirect, while the
American people have been the direct and immediate recipients of
this great advantage. The importance of this factor can hardly be
overestimated.
The second of these great factors is the character of the American
people themselves. We have seen that this was well formed and
distinctive at the time of the Revolution. The early settlers of the
North American continent were in many respects a picked body,
taken from the best of the populations of Europe. Their descendants
were also subjected to the stern selective processes of the struggle
with, and conquest of, the wilderness, and the establishment of their
own economic and political independence. As a result, the American
people at the beginning of our national life had certain qualities both
of physical and intellectual character,—hardihood, enterprise,
daring, independence, love of freedom, perseverance, etc.,—which
set them apart from any of their contemporaries.
It has been the combination of these two factors—a unique people
in a rich virgin land—which, more than anything else, has accounted
for the eminent position attained by the American nation in the
economic life of the world. Many other circumstances have doubtless
contributed to the result, but they would have been powerless to
accomplish the end, without these two essential prerequisites. With
the disappearance of these two distinguishing features the United
States will begin to lose her position of economic superiority.
The statement made in a previous paragraph, that the immigrant
comes to America because he can—or believes he can—better his
economic lot by so doing, suggested that great class of causes which
we have called the artificial. The advantages of the economic life in
the United States all too frequently exist, not in fact, but in the mind
of the prospective emigrant. And this belief is equally potent in
stirring up emigration, whether it is grounded on fact or not. There
are hosts of immigrants passing through the portals of Ellis Island
every year whose venture is based on a sad misconception. There are
also countless numbers who would never have engaged in the
undertaking had not the idea of doing so been forcibly and
persistently instilled into their minds by some outside agency. In
other words, a very large part of our present immigration is not
spontaneous and due to natural causes, but is artificial and
stimulated. This stimulation consists in creating the desire and
determination to migrate, by inducing dissatisfaction with existing
conditions as compared with what the new world has to offer. Its
source is in some interested person or agency whose motive may, or
may not, be selfish.
There are three principal sources from which this stimulation or
encouragement to immigration emanates—the transportation
companies, the labor agents, and the previous immigrants. The
motive of the first two is an economic and wholly selfish one; that of
the latter may or may not be selfish.
The carrying of immigrants from Europe to America is a very vast
and lucrative business. The customary charge for steerage passage
averages at least $30, and as the large immigrant ships carry 2000 or
more steerage passengers there is a possibility of receiving as much
as $60,000 from steerage passengers on a single voyage. It is,
furthermore, a business which can be almost indefinitely expanded
by vigorous pushing. A skillful agent can induce almost any number
of the simple and credulous peasants of a backward European
country to emigrate, who had scarcely had such an idea in their
heads before. Consequently it pays the transportation companies to
have an immense army of such agents, continually working over the
field, and opening up new territory. The motive is not so much
rivalry for a given amount of business between the different
companies; a mutual agreement between different lines or groups of
lines, dividing up the territory from which they shall draw their
steerage passengers, practically precludes this.[122] It is rather the
possibility of actually creating new business by energetic canvassing.
It is obvious that the activity of these agents may be of the most
pernicious nature. The welfare of the immigrant, or the benefit of
either country concerned, are of no concern to them. Their sole aim
is to get business. So long as the immigrant has the wherewithal to
pay his passage, it matters not to them where he got it, nor are they
deterred by any doubts as to the fitness of the immigrant for
American life, or of the probability of his success there. In fact, it is
claimed that the steamship companies prefer a class of immigrants
which is likely, eventually, to return to the old country, as this creates
a traffic going the other way. The only checks to their operations are
such as are imposed by their own scruples, and the possession of too
many of these does not help a man to qualify for the position of
agent.
The methods used by these agents to encourage emigration are
most ingenious and insidious. Every possible means is used to make
the peasant dissatisfied with his present lot, and to impress him with
the glories and joys of life in America. Many, perhaps the majority, of
the agents are themselves returned immigrants, who give glittering
accounts of their experiences in America, and display gold watches,
diamond pins, and various other proofs of their prosperity. The
methods of to-day are not quite so crude and bizarre as they used to
be. The stories of the richness of America and the ease of life there
which used to be current were so overdrawn as to undeceive any but
the most ignorant and gullible. Immigrants have left for America
expecting to be able to pick up unlimited dollars lying loose in the
streets, and stories are told of steerage passengers who threw away
the cooking utensils they had brought with them, as the vessel
neared New York, supposing that they could get a new lot for nothing
as soon as they landed. A better knowledge of actual conditions in
America, which now prevails in most European countries, has
precluded the continued circulation of such fictions as these. In fact,
if there were not real advantages in the United States, and many
cases of successful emigrants, the agents would not be able to operate
successfully for an indefinite time. But as yet there does exist a
sufficient difference between conditions in the new world and in the
old to give them a basis of truth, which they may embellish as
occasion demands. Many of these agents make a practice of
advancing money to the emigrants to pay for their passage, taking a
mortgage on their property for an amount far in advance of that
actually furnished. These debts are met with a strange faithfulness by
the immigrants, even when they have been woefully deceived and
cheated. In Greece it is asserted that the agents work through the
priests, and thus largely increase their influence.[123]
Immigration which is inspired by such stimulation as this is far
from being so desirable as that which is natural and spontaneous. It
follows no natural laws, and responds to no economic demand in this
country. It is likely to be of injury rather than of benefit to the United
States, and works untold injustice to the immigrants. It is regarded
as pernicious by all fair-minded observers, and the United States
government has made serious efforts to check it. This is the purpose
of the clause in the immigration law limiting the nature of
solicitation that may be done by transportation lines. The solicitation
of immigration is no new thing. Hale, in his Letters on Irish
Immigration, written in 1851–1852, said that competition between
the different lines of packets and different shipping houses had made
the means of emigration familiar in the remotest corners of Ireland,
and that advertising was fully utilized. Professor Mayo-Smith in 1892
wrote that the Inman Steamship Company had 3500 agents in
Europe and an equal number in the United States selling prepaid
tickets. In Switzerland in 1885 there were 400 licensed emigration
agents.[124] The laws passed since then have forced the agents to
proceed more cautiously, and conceal their activities. They have not
put a stop to their operations.
These emigration agents are by no means all accredited
representatives of the steamship lines over which they send their
recruits. There are, to be sure, plenty of official agents of the various
transportation companies, who are openly acknowledged as such.
The region around the harbor, in many of the Mediterranean
seaports, is thronged with steamship ticket offices, often flying the
American flag, and with emigration agencies, and the line between
the two is frequently very difficult to draw. But the traveling agents,
or “runners,” are often free lances as far as appearances go. It is very
hard to establish any connection between them and any
transportation company. Yet all who have investigated the subject
are convinced that there is a close understanding and coöperation
between the two, even if there is no official relation. It is contrary to
human nature, when so much money is to be made by such
canvassing, and there are plenty of people ready to do it, that the
transportation companies should neglect the opportunity. On this
subject the Immigration Commission says, “It does not appear that
the steamship lines as a rule openly direct the operations of these
agents, but the existence of the propaganda is a matter of common
knowledge in the emigrant-furnishing countries, and, it is fair to
assume, is acquiesced in, if not stimulated, by the steamship lines as
well.”[125]
The Commissioner General of Immigration is much more
emphatic in his statements. The report for 1909 contains the
following passages (p. 112): “The promoter is usually a steamship
ticket agent, employed on a commission basis, or a professional
money lender, or a combination of the two.... He is employed by the
steamship lines, large and small, without scruple, and to the
enormous profit of such lines.... To say that the steamship lines are
responsible, directly or indirectly, for this unnatural immigration is
not the statement of a theory, but of a fact, and of a fact that
sometimes becomes, indeed, if it is not always, a crying shame....
[Referring to Contract Labor Inspector John Gruenberg] He shows
quite clearly that all of the steamship lines engaged in bringing aliens
from Europe to this country have persistently and systematically
violated the law, both in its letter and spirit, by making use of every
possible means to encourage the peasants of Europe to purchase
tickets over their lines to this country. They have issued circulars and
advertisements, and made use of extensive correspondence, through
their own agents in this country and in Europe.”
The law referred to is Section 7 of the Act of 1907, repeating in
substance Section 4, Act of 1891 (p. 111). The ease and persistency
with which this provision, carefully worded as it is, is violated,
furnishes a striking example of the difficulty of passing statutes
which shall be capable of enforcement, especially in foreign
countries, to put a stop to practices which are universally conceded
to be undesirable.
The second great source of stimulation to emigration is the labor
agent. His operations are extensive and diversified, and always in
direct violation of the contract labor law. That section of the
immigration statutes, as previously pointed out, is so sweepingly
drawn as to make any immigrant, not in the excepted classes, who
has received the slightest intimation that there is work awaiting him
in this country, a violator of the law. But the economic advantage to