American Front (16 page)

“They’ve had too damn many wake-up calls already,” he muttered. The wind in his face blew the words away.

The words were gone, but not the fact. For all the big talk in the United States about mopping the floor with the Dominion of Canada, reality, as reality has a way of doing, was proving harder. The damned Canucks and limeys had spent years fortifying the Niagara Peninsula, the part that ran west from Niagara Falls; every time they were blasted and bayoneted out of one position, they fell back to the next, just as tough as the one before. Forcing the crossing of the Welland Canal alone had put women by the thousands into mourning black.

But the canal had been crossed. Now the Canadians and British were moving back toward their last line, the one that ran from Hamilton on Lake Ontario through Caledonia to Port Dover on Lake Erie. When the United States broke through there, the country would widen out and numbers would count for more than they had yet.

As yet, the breakthrough hadn’t happened. And, indeed, though the enemy had been thrown back on Hamilton in the north, they were still holding part of the line of the Grand River south of Caledonia. Farther west, the assault from Michigan hadn’t been the walkover everyone—everyone south of the border, anyhow—had figured it would be. The line centered on London, Ontario, hadn’t cracked yet, either, and when it would was anybody’s guess.

Moss sighed. “We put too much money into Great Lakes battleships,” he told the unheeding sky. He’d told everybody the same, since the day the war started. A fat lot of good it did, too. Great Lakes battleships weren’t really battleships to rank with the great vessels in the Atlantic and Pacific Fleets: they were smaller and slower and didn’t mount so many guns. In navies like Holland’s or Sweden’s, they would have been called coast-defense battleships.

What people in the USA had called them was victory. Each Great Lake had its own flotilla of them, and the Canadians didn’t—couldn’t—build ships to match, in quality or numbers. When war came, they’d bombard enemy towns and positions with a weight of metal you couldn’t move by land.

The only problem being, it hadn’t worked out that way. The first thing the Canadians had done when war broke out was to sow the Great Lakes with mines as thickly as potato soup was sown with potatoes. The
Perry
and the
Farragut
, both steaming full tilt toward Toronto, had blown up and sunk within a couple of hours of each other, as had the
John Paul Jones
over on Lake Huron. Losing millions of dollars’ worth of ships and a couple of thousand trained sailors had made the flotillas less intrepid in a hurry.

As if that weren’t bad enough, the Canadians had submersibles, too. Nobody—nobody American, anyhow—knew how many, but they’d picked off a Great Lakes battleship and a couple of light cruisers, too, before scuttling back to their home ports. Put it all together and it meant the Army was advancing through the toughest part of the enemy’s defenses without a good bit of the fire support it had expected to have. And so the going was tough.

Jonathan Moss peered down at the Canadian and British guns. From a mile in the air, they looked like tiny lead toys, and the bare-chested men who served them like pink ants. He scribbled some more on the makeshift map. The enemy lines really did look like
lines
from up here: a zigzagging series of entrenchments that cut across the land. Even the entrenchments that ran back from the front-line positions zigzagged, to make a shell landing in one of them do as little damage as possible.

“Those bastards have been thinking about this for a long time,” Moss said, penciling squiggles over the page to represent the zigzag entrenchments.

The American positions facing the foe were less neat. For one thing, the U.S. forces had to form their lines in territory they’d taken away from the Canadians, and every inch of that territory had been fought over till it was nothing but a crumpled, battered landscape that reminded Moss of nothing so much as telescopic photographs of the craters of the moon. For another, the Americans hadn’t planned to conduct such a grinding campaign of attrition, and hadn’t yet worked out the doctrine for fighting in those conditions.

Even getting supplies forward to the troops at the sharp end of the wedge was anywhere from hard to impossible. The railroads had been chewed up along with everything else in the territory over which the Americans had advanced. Food and ammunition had to come forward by wagon or else on people’s backs.

By contrast, the rail network the defenders used was all but intact: Moss watched several trains chugging along toward the front, each one full of troops or munitions or food and fodder. He made a sour face. You could move more faster by train than with horses or people. That was what the second half of the nineteenth century had been about, if you looked at it the right way. It gave the defenders what struck him as an unfair advantage.

He was so busy noting the arriving trains, he didn’t spot the other aeroplane till it started shooting at him. The sound of Lewis-gun bullets drumming through the fabric of his wings—and whip-cracking past his head—got his attention in a hurry. He was banking to the left before he even looked up.

The Avro 504 ahead of him tried to turn with him, but his aircraft was more agile than the tractor machine. He swung away from the area the observer in the front cockpit could cover with his machine gun. The pilot in the rear cockpit blazed away at him with a pistol, but only fool luck would let you hit anything with a pistol when both you and your target were moving crazily and at high speed in different directions.

At high speed—The Avro was faster on the level than his Super Hudson, and could climb faster, too. That would nullify his ability to turn inside it if he didn’t do something in a hurry. He lined up the nose of his aircraft on the Canadian biplane’s tail and squeezed the triggers of his Maxim gun.

Brass cartridge cases streamed out of the breech, glittering in the sun as they fell away. In the Avro, the pilot threw up his hands and slumped forward against the fairing that helped deflect the slipstream. The Canadian aeroplane’s nose went down; it began to dive, and then to spin.

Maybe the observer hadn’t properly fastened his safety belt; maybe it gave way under the strain. However that was, the luckless fellow was thrown out of the Avro. As he plunged toward the earth, he looked like a man treading water. But the thin, thin air would not bear his weight. He fell, the fringed end of his red wool muffler flapping above him.

“Jesus!” Jonathan Moss shook like a man with the grippe. He’d never fired the Maxim gun in anger before. He’d never expected to have to fire it, despite reports of other aerial combats. He hadn’t even wanted it mounted on his aeroplane. But it had just saved his life.

The Avro 504 smashed into the ground and burst into flame a few hundred yards inside the enemy’s lines. Dutifully, Moss noted the position on his sketch map. The observer had undoubtedly smashed into the ground, too, but Moss could not see him.

“Jesus!” he said again, and licked his lips. With the wind blasting in his face, they would have been dry anyhow; some pilots smeared petroleum jelly on them before taking off. Moss’ lips were drier now. His stomach turned loops that had nothing to do with the acrobatic abilities of the Super Hudson.

He’d thought one of the nice things about being an aerial observer was not having to kill anybody personally. War down on the ground was a filthy, nasty business, filthier and nastier than anyone had expected when it broke out. Watching the slow advance across the Niagara Peninsula had shown Moss that. And he’d seen it from high in the air, as if he were looking down on a chess match where both players could move at the same time. An awful lot of poor damned pawns had been captured and removed from the board.

“I was above all that,” he muttered, meaning it both literally and metaphorically. Like a knight, he could jump over intervening space and appear where he was needed on the board. Now, abruptly, he realized that, like a knight, he also faced danger. He too could be sacrificed.

He’d killed, yes, but it was a fair fight. So he told himself, over and over. The fellows in the Avro had had just as much chance to send his aeroplane spinning down in ruins as he’d had to shoot down theirs. He wasn’t some conscript rifleman, reduced to a corpse by a machine gunner who wasn’t aiming at him or by an artilleryman back of the line who’d never seen him at all, merely pulled a lanyard and hoped for the best. Thousands of randomly killed men lay down there; sometimes the stink of them made him wish the Super Hudson would fly higher, to let him escape it.

A fair fight, single combat…Maybe that did make him a knight, not one from a chess set but a noble warrior from the days of chivalry, going forth into single combat as if into a joust. That was a better way to look at things, he decided: it shielded him from the blunt reality of having killed two men to keep them from killing him.

“A knight,” he said, and touched the Maxim gun as if it were the lance a knight in shining armor carried into battle with him. “A knight of the air.”

He carefully scanned the sky to make sure the Canadian aeroplane had been as alone up here as his own machine. He spied no other aircraft with red maple leaf inside white circle inside blue. Yes, it had been true single combat. If you were going to fight, that was the way to do it.

He had a sudden mental image of Teddy Roosevelt going into the gladiatorial arena against—would he fight Robert Borden or the Duke of Connaught, prime minister or governor general? Either way, Moss figured TR would quickly dispose of his foe. Then he could take on Woodrow Wilson. And, after he’d slain both enemy leaders, the United States would be declared winner of the war and could take whatever spoils it wanted from Canada and the Confederacy.

“That would be the easy way, the cheap way, to go about it,” he said. It was also a pipe dream, as he knew full well. Statesmen didn’t go out to fight for themselves; that had fallen out of fashion after the Crusades, he didn’t know exactly when. Statesmen sent young men out to do the killing—and the dying—for them.

“If you have to do it,” Moss muttered, feeling on the shaky side still as he turned back toward his aerodrome, “I suppose being a knight of the air is the way to go about it.”

The only trouble was, nobody had seen fit to issue him a suit of shining armor.

Jake Featherston yanked the lanyard of his three-inch field gun and hoped for the best. The piece belched flames. The other five men on the gun crew, working like steam-powered machinery even though two of them were raw replacements, reloaded the gun. Five seconds after the first round, another was on its way.

“
Hell
of a gun!” Featherston shouted appreciatively. “Them Frenchies, they knew what they were doin’ when they made the model.” He pulled the lanyard yet again.
Boom!
Another shell went on its way toward the Yankee positions just outside of Glen Rock, Pennsylvania. Thanks to the muzzle brake on the French-designed howitzer, its recoil was a lot less than that of U.S. guns of similar caliber, which meant corrections between rounds were also less, which meant a good gun crew could get off a dozen rounds a minute. Featherston had a damn good gun crew.

A horse-drawn wagon full of wooden crates stenciled with the Confederate battle flag came rattling up. Jake Featherston and his crew let out a cheer. “’Bout time we got more rounds,” shouted Jethro Bixler, the loader. “You didn’t show up soon, they was gonna give us Tredegars an’ stick us in the damn infantry.”

“Can’t have that,” the driver said, his grin exposing a missing front tooth. He glanced over to the colored servants who were standing by the team of horses that would move the field gun ahead as the Confederacy continued its conquest of southeastern Pennsylvania and Maryland. “
Git
your asses over here, you lazy damnfool niggers. Unload this bastard so’s I can go fill ’er up agin.”

Nero and Perseus came—at a faster clip than they’d used when the war first broke out. Then, they might have been picking cotton for a plantation owner they despised. They’d come to realize, though, that keeping their crew in shells was liable to mean keeping themselves alive. As with the soldiers they served, survival was a powerful incentive toward good performance.

Each crate held twelve shells. Counting the weight of the wood in the crate itself, the weight the blacks were hauling was up close to a couple of hundred pounds each go. Grunting with effort, they unloaded crates as the driver and the gun crew watched. Then, sweat running down their faces, they went back to the animals they’d been watching.

“Lazy,” the driver repeated. He flicked the reins. The horses strained in harness. The driver tipped his hat to the artillerymen and headed southwest down the dirt track called School Road toward the division supply dump.

Jethro Bixler attacked the tops of the ammunition crates with a pry bar. Nails squealed as the tops came up. Bixler flung each aside in turn. He would have made two of either Nero or Perseus; a big blond broad-shouldered fellow with the look of a blacksmith to him. When one of the ammunition crates wasn’t close enough to the howitzer to suit him, he picked it up singlehanded and set it where he wanted it. Then he struck a circus strongman pose, as if to proclaim to the world that that had been a deliberate demonstration of prowess, not a white man stooping to do nigger work.

Other wagons turned off from School Road for the rest of the guns in the battery. The Negroes attached to the artillery unit stopped what they were doing to unload the shells. Through the roar of guns that kept firing, Featherston listened to the artillerymen screaming at the blacks to hurry.

“Flip those lids over, Jethro,” Featherston said when Bixler was through opening up the new crates. “Don’t want anybody stepping on a nail. He’d miss all the fun.” He let out a wry chuckle.

“Right y’are, Sergeant,” Bixler said. “I tell you, I done had just about all the fun I can stand, thank you kindly. ’Fore we started, wasn’t nobody said it’d be like this here. The damnyankees, they’re tougher’n Paw an’ Granddad made ’em out to be.”