American Front (27 page)

He shook his head. Lone wolves of the air didn’t last long these days. The British and Canadians had started formation flying, and U.S. pilots had to match them or else come out on the short end whenever a single plane met up with a flight. The kind of scout mission he’d flown in September would have been suicidally risky nowadays; the air was a nastier place than it had been.

Down below, a couple of U.S. soldiers took shots at him; he spied the upward-pointing muzzle flashes. “God damn you, stop that.” he shouted—uselessly, of course, for they could not hear him, but he knew he was nowhere near the enemy lines. Only fool luck would let a rifleman down an aeroplane, but the troopers down there were surely fools for shooting at machines on their own side, and they might have got lucky.

He flew as leader, with Baum on his right and McClintock off to his left. He wished Nelson had been able to get his engine to turn over, then shrugged. He’d made a lot of wishes that hadn’t come true. What was one more?

The flight buzzed along, inland from the northern shore of Lake Erie. After untold exertions and untold casualties, the U.S. Army had finally dislodged the limeys and Canucks from their grip on Port Dover. It did them a lot less good than it would have a couple of months before. For one thing, the Canadians had had plenty of time to build up new defensive lines behind the one that had fallen—the exhilarating hope of a charge to take the defenses at London in the rear remained just that, a hope.

And for another, the weather made movement so hard that the Canadians and British could probably have pulled half their men out of line without the Army’s being able to do much about it. The closest big U.S. town to the fighting was Buffalo, and Buffalo was notorious for frightful winters. Moving up into Canada didn’t do a thing to make the wind blow less or the snow not fall.

“The war was supposed to be over by now,” Moss muttered. Troops weren’t supposed to have to try to advance—hell, aeroplanes weren’t supposed to have to try to fly—in weather like this. Canada was supposed to have fallen like a ripe fruit, at which point the United States could turn the whole weight of their military muscle against the Confederates.

Oh, parts of the plan had gone well. Farther east, the Army hadn’t had any great trouble reaching the St. Lawrence. Crossing it, though, was turning out to be another question altogether, and the land on the other side was fortified to a fare-thee-well. They’d come ever so close to Winnipeg, too, though they probably wouldn’t get there till spring, which in those parts meant May at the earliest.

But not quite reaching Winnipeg meant trains full of wheat and oats and barley kept heading east from the Canadian prairie—and there was talk that the Canucks, weather be damned, were pushing another railroad line through north of the city. The grain’s getting through, in turn, meant the Canadian heartland, the country between Toronto and Quebec City, wouldn’t starve. Of course, it hadn’t been intended to starve Canada into submission, not at first—out-and-out conquest was the goal. But both the first plan and the alternative had failed, which left—what?

“Which leaves a whole lot of poor bastards down there dead in the mud,” Moss said. When things didn’t go the way the generals thought they would, soldiers were the ones who had to try to straighten them out—and who paid the price for doing it. The only thanks they got were mentions in TR’s speeches. It didn’t seem enough.

Clouds floated ahead, dark gray and lumpy. More of them were gathering, back toward the horizon: advance scouts for more bad weather ahead. Moss took his Super Hudson down below the bottom of the nearest clouds, wanting a good look at whatever the enemy had in the area.

His busy pencil traced trench lines, artillery positions, new rail road spurs. Some of the aeroplane squadrons were starting to get cameras, to let photographs take the place of sketches. Moss wasn’t enthusiastic about the idea of wrestling with photographic plates in the cockpit of an aeroplane, but if he got orders to do that, he knew he would.

He and his wingmen were only a couple of thousand feet above the ground. The Canucks and Englishmen down there opened up on them with everything they had.
Thrum! Thrum!
The noise of bullets tearing through tight-stretched fabric was not one Moss wanted to hear. One of those accidental rounds—or maybe not so accidental, not flying this low—could just as easily tear through him.

Climbing a little helped, for it put ragged streamers of clouds between the aeroplanes and the men on the ground. But those ragged streamers also meant Moss couldn’t see as much as he liked. After playing hide and seek for a minute or so, he came back down into plain sight so he could do his own job as it needed doing.

By then, he, Baum, and McClintock were past the front line. The fire from the ground was lighter here, and he descended another few hundred feet. Men down there swelled from ants to beetles.

And here came what looked like a procession of toy trucks and wagons, bringing supplies up from the railhead to the front. Jonathan Moss let out a whoop the slipstream blew away. He waved to catch his wingmen’s attention, and pointed first down to the supply column and then to the machine gun mounted in front of him. The limeys and Canucks—and even the Americans—had been taking potshots at them the whole flight long. Now they could get some of their own back.

He swooped down on the column like a red-tailed hawk on a pullet in a farmyard. Safely back of the lines, the wagons and trucks had no armed escort whatever. He squeezed the triggers to the machine gun and sprayed bullets up and down the length of it. As be pulled up and went around, he yelled with glee at the chaos he, Baum, and McClintock had created. Some horses were down. So were some drivers. Two trucks were burning. Two more had run into each other when their drivers jumped out and dove into a ditch rather than staying to be machine-gunned. A cloud of steam in the chilly air said one of them had a broken radiator.

The three pilots shot up the column twice more, starting fresh fires and knocking over more horses, and then, at Moss’ wave, flew eastward again, back toward the aerodrome. When he neared the front line this time, Moss was not ashamed to use the cover of clouds to avert antiaircraft fire. Getting information was important, but so was bringing it back to the people who could use it.

The bottom of the cloud deck was only a few hundred feet off the ground when the three Curtiss Super Hudsons landed. Moss had breathed a long sigh of relief on spotting the aerodrome; he’d worried that the clouds would turn into fog and force his comrades and him to set down wherever they could.

When his biplane bounced to a stop, he jumped out of it, an enormous grin on his face. Baum, a little skinny guy with a black beard, and McClintock, who, for reasons known only to himself, affected the waxed mustache and spikily pointed imperial of a Balkans nobleman, were also all teeth and excitement. “Wasn’t that bully!” they shouted. “Wasn’t it grand?”

“Just like the ducks in a shooting gallery,” Moss agreed, and then, quite suddenly, he sobered. Not long before, he’d been sick because he had to shoot down a Canadian aeroplane to save his own life. Now here he was celebrating the deaths of a whole raft of men who, unlike the aeroplane pilot and observer, hadn’t even been able to shoot back.

He’d always been glad he wasn’t an infantryman: if you were to mudfoot, war, and the death and maiming that went with war, were random and impersonal. What had he just been doing but dealing out random, impersonal death? He’d thought of himself as a knights in shining armor. What sorts of filthy things had knights done that never got into the pages of Malory and
Ivanhoe
? He didn’t know He didn’t want to find out, not really.

He looked down at himself. His imaginary suit of armor seemed to have a patch or two of rust on it. No matter who you were or what you did, you couldn’t stay immaculate, not in this war.

“Close to quitting time,” Jefferson Pinkard grunted as he and Bedford Cunningham secured a mold that would shape the steel just poured from the crucible into a metal pig a freight car could carry to whatever factory would turn it into weapons of war.

Before his friend could even begin to agree with him, that granddaddy of a steam whistle proclaimed to the whole Sloss Foundry that he’d been right. “Lived through another Monday,” Cunning ham said, not altogether facetiously.

Accidents were way up since the start of the war. Everybody was working flat out, with no slack time from the start of a shift to the end. A lot of the men were new because so many had gone into the Army, and the new fellows made more mistakes than the old hands they replaced. And, what with working like dogs every minute of every shift, new hands and old got drunk more often to ease the strain, which didn’t help—especially on Mondays.

No sooner had that thought crossed Pinkard’s mind than a horrible shriek rang out on the casting floor. “Oh, Christ!” he said breaking into a run. “That damn fool up there poured when they weren’t paying attention—probably talking about going off shift just like we was.”

There by the mold next to his lay Sid Williamson. He was’t quiet now, as he usually was. He writhed and shrieked. The stink of hot iron was everywhere. So was the stink of burnt meat. Jef looked at him and turned away, doing his best not to be sick to his stomach. He’d been burned plenty of times himself, but never like this—oh, God, never like this.

He shook his fist up at the kid handling the crucible, who was staring white-faced at what he’d done. Such things happened even with experienced men in that place, but that didn’t keep him from blaming the son of a bitch who’d made this one happen.
It could’ve been me
, he thought.
Jesus God, it could’ve been me
.

“Burn ointment—” Bedford Cunningham began.

Another steelworker was already slathering it on Williamson. It wouldn’t do any good. Jeff knew damn well it wouldn’t do any good. So did everybody else on the floor, including, no doubt, the burned man. A couple of his pals got a stretcher under him, which brought out fresh cries, and hustled him away. He might live—he was young and strong. Pinkard wouldn’t have bet on it, though. He’d never be back at the foundry again. Jeff would have bet anything he owned on that.

He wiped his sweaty, grimy face with a sweaty, grimy forearm. It was chilly and wet outside, but not in here. In here, it was always somewhere between August and hell, not that, in Birmingham, there was a whole lot of difference between one and the other. Even so, some of the sweat on his face was cold.

Still shaking, he and Cunningham turned together to let the fellows on the evening shift take over the work, which had to get done no matter what, no matter who. They both stopped with the turns a little more than half made. Pinkard watched Cunningham’s jaw drop. He felt his own doing the same thing. He needed a couple of tries before he could say, “Where’s Henry? Where’s Silas?”

The two Negroes in collarless shirts looked nervous. They were big, strong bucks—they looked plenty strong enough to be steelworkers. But that didn’t have anything to do with anything, and they knew it. So did Pinkard and Cunningham. One of the Negroes said, “They’s in the Army, suh. We is their replacements.”

“And who the hell are you?” Bedford Cunningham set his hands on his hips. Both black men were bigger than he was, and younger, too, but that didn’t have anything to do with anything, either. A black man who fought back against a white—his goose was cooked, anywhere in the CSA.

“I’m Lorenzo,” said the Negro who had answered before.

“My name’s Justinian,” the other one said.

“I don’t care if you’re Jesus Christ and the Holy Ghost,” Jeff Pinkard exploded, which won him a startled chuckle from Cunningham. “What the hell they doin’, puttin’ Negroes on the evenin’ shift? Nights was bad enough, but this here—”

“Suh, we been on nights since they let us,” Lorenzo said, which was true; Pinkard had seen him around for a while. “When these white folks you was expectin’, when they goed into the Army, the bosses, they look around, but they don’t find no other whites kin do the job—no ’
sperienced
whites, I should oughta say. And so here we is.”

“World’s goin’ to hell in a handbasket, Jeff, no two ways about it,” Bed Cunningham said mournfully. “We seen it comin’, an’ we was right. Next thing you know, a couple of coons’ll be doin’ our jobs, too.”

“Yeah, well, if that’s so, it’s on account of they put a rifle in my hands instead,” Pinkard answered. “And I’ll tell you something else, too: when I get out o’ the Army, I’m
still
gonna have that rifle in my hands. Any nigger who tries to keep my job when I want it back, he’s gonna be sorry. And any boss who tries to help him keep it, he’s gonna be sorrier yet.”

“Amen,” Cunningham said, as if he’d been preaching in the Baptist church of a Sunday morning. “We had ourselves two revolutions in this here country to make it like we want it. Reckon we can have us a third one to keep it that way.” He spat on the float “Shit, how do we even know these boys can do the work? Maybe we better watch and find out.” He folded his arms across his chest.

“Ought to find out if they’ve got the balls to do it, too,” Jeff said He pointed over to the other mold. “You boys know what happened to Sid just now?”

“Yes, suh,” Lorenzo answered quietly. “We seen that before workin’ nights. Hope he come through all right.”

It was a soft answer, not one Pinkard particularly wanted to hear just then. He was edgy, looking for trouble. Since he couldn’t find any, he scowled and said, “All right, get on with it, then.” If they couldn’t do the job, complaining to the foreman and maybe to the foundry manager would be worthwhile. Pinkard stepped aside “We’re gonna watch you.”

And, for the next half hour, he and Cunningham did nothing but watch. To his dismay, the Negroes had no troubles. They weren’t so smooth together as the two white men they were replacing, but they hadn’t worked together for years, either. They did know enough of what they were doing to do just about all of it right.

At last, Jeff stuck an elbow in Cunningham’s ribs. “Let’s go home,” he said. “Wives’ll be worryin’, thinkin’ we got hurt on somethin’.” He shivered. “Wasn’t us, but it might have been.”